Beaver Skull Obsession, Aussie Widowmakers, Koalas Eating $#!%

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Right now, our listeners get an additional 15% off any annual membership at masterclass.com slash weirdest. That's 15% off at masterclass.com slash weirdest. Masterclass.com slash weirdest. At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and tech stories every week. And while a lot of the fun facts we stumble across make it into our articles, there are lots of other weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured, why not share those with you? Welcome to The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week from the editors at Popular Science. I'm Jess. I'm Maddie. And I'm Ricky. Woo! Yeah! Welcome to the show! Yeah! Are you guys excited? Oh, yeah. Thank you. Yes. It sounded like such a canned video game celebration. I didn't want to interrupt it. All right. Yeah. Woo. Uh-huh. Well, okay. Tell us about who you are and the stuff you make. My name is Maddie. Maddie is talking on everything. uh i kind of almost exactly like jess podcast producer uh video essay maker uh fan of information um yeah i've done a lot of stuff i do a lot of things but uh yeah i think that's it that sounds like you ricky what about you um i'm ricky ricky peacock it's my real name and it's also my name on everything um i also much like jess uh went to the same school went to the same middle school as her went to the same high school as her hung out with her mom a lot growing up and you have to explain that you have to explain that oh you can't just say that well i mean she's a teacher and she taught okay thank you thank you she's a teacher and she taught me she taught me and i jess's mom was my teacher growing up and then sparked and instilled in a show all about learning things. True. She instilled a love of learning things in me. And so you and I'm kind of helping you flesh out your sort of bona fides as the host of this show eight years in. Oh, I suppose you're correct. Just so you know, Jess has a mom who loves to teach people to like learning things. And also I'm a Twitch streamer. That's that's the other thing. I stream on Twitch. Twitch.tv. anyway yeah and all the links will all be in the description as as usual and click everyone click everyone yeah click click them click them and and okay so you might notice rachel is absent and that is because she is still uh on her maternity leave taking care of a human child so congratulations rachel yeah it's it's really exciting but yeah if you got the end of last season you'll know she gave she gave the full spiel but i'll be holding down the fort for the next couple episodes next couple months but she'll be back uh and we'll be sprinkling in some of me and rachel's favorite retro episodes too to pass the time like from seasons like one and two because we're we're now in season 10 this is season 10 episode one man which is insane kicking off we're kicking off season 10 that's crazy yeah wow wow we gotta do so one of the one of our one of the beloved characters needs to have a big life-changing moment oh wait it's it's happening the host is having a baby this is such season 10 behavior it really is so yeah everything's fine everything's good you'll still get your bi-weekly dose of weird facts i'm freaking out personally whenever anybody goes everything's fine it's very cold i'm constantly telling myself that everything's fine and it works out. So, you know, everything is fine. Jess, you're kind of like the duck paddling on water. What does that mean? You seem so cool and collected, but underneath, a lot of effort. A flurry of action. Somebody on the British Traders just made that analogy and I thought she invented it. Are you kidding? No. I was like, that's the smartest thing I've ever heard somebody say. And now you know it's not. Now I know she's just repeating some crap she heard. She heard it from me. On this episode of the podcast? That can't be possible. Season 10 is really starting out crazy. There's a time travel arc. Just regretting this. I should have asked someone else. Are we doing good? Oh, brother. okay let's let's get into the facts so this is the the normal thing rachel says which is on the weirdest thing i learned this week we start by each offering up a fact or story about something that we learned over the course of reading writing youtube videos gaming i edited this having too many tabs open just being on the computer etc and then deciding which one of us goes first then after we all have a chance to spin our little science yarns we decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was and that's what rachel says when she hosts but we don't decide that there is a winner anymore and we haven't done that for seasons at this point but we're too stubborn to change the intro i love that because we all we all win exactly we all get a participation trophy typical and knowledge is the greatest trophy there is i would say that we this this is a trio of millennials there's a lot of them crawling around these days man what like it or not you know millennial trios that have podcaster setups are a virus this is technically a streaming setup but technically technically so to start we can each as i just mentioned give a little overview one sentence tease about each of our facts uh i'll go first my tease is i'm going to talk about the tree that is actually a bomb whoa yeah scary yep uh maddie what are you going to talk about beavers are essentially combating every bad climate thing humans are doing and uh yo i think it's fascinating actually climate heroes actually beavers are actually climate heroes you're welcome this this beaver is actually a climate hero humans hate this beaver for this one trick um ricky what's your tease i haven't presented a okay my tease this is the the dumbest animal on planet earth i don't know if that's true or not i should maybe not make such paint with such broad strokes i think if you believe it it should it you should stand by that's how this show works oh okay uh okay i think i want to hear about the the climate the beaver superhero the beavers are climate heroes um what um yeah absolutely i'd happily talk about beavers they're one of my favorite animals and honestly a lot of this information that i learned i've learned in the last two weeks uh because i have always loved them and appreciated them and in the back of my mind i've always had this fact uh that second to humans beavers affect their environment more than any other creature. Yeah. That's a fact. And that's like from the dams and stuff? That makes sense. I don't want to spoil it, but yeah. Okay, sorry. Really putting the law before the horse. And wait a second. I thought you said you believe cuss words. Oh. Thank you. I wanted to get in there before someone else goes. Oh. The guests are fighting back. um no i i uh i found them so fascinating and uh so what happened was i was like the rest of the world apparently according to box office numbers i saw zootopia 2 and without spoiling anything other than the thing i'm about to spoil it has beavers in it uh-huh which i thought well what What would you rate it out of 10? The movie? I don't do ratings anymore. What do you mean you don't do ratings anymore? I get scared. I don't want like... Of what? I don't want to... You know what? When I was a kid, I saw the movie Hugo. I saw the movie Hugo at the River East 21 in Chicago, Illinois. And I gave Hugo... It was like a preview screening and I gave Hugo four stars. and I was sitting right behind Thelma Shoemaker or Schumacher, I don't know. Put it in the comments. That's called engagement farming. And I rated it four out of five stars. It's directed by Martin Scorsese. Yeah. As the theater was filling, or like what's the opposite of filling out? Emptying. Emptying out. Filling in. Filling in and emptying out. But I was pulled to the side and someone said, hey, any of you give the movie four stars? And I said, yeah. And they were like, oh, that's great. Our client really wants to speak to someone who gave it four stars. What? And so I start chewing gum because I'm like, I'm about to tell Martin Scorsese what I thought was wrong with this movie. and the anxiety almost popped my head like a grape and I really regretted giving it four stars or at least telling anybody but there was a reprieve because they said actually he's gotta go and they left they just threatened you never again do I want to face someone in their hardware and it's just it takes so much effort to get anything made I just don't like rating things anyway Zootopia 5 out of 10 in my opinion it's fine it's fine i've never really uh a big zootopia guy anyway this one was great because of the beaver they put beavers in it uh there's a lot of fun you know they're not the movies are not made for me they're made for kids i do like the animal puns in the first one you like the animal excuse me the puns like the sloths being slow at the dmv yes now that is funny that's zootopia or zootropolis in the rest of the world uh yeah there there was a couple funny jokes like there's a there was a really weird joke where like a lizard was in because they go they go to like a lizard water world and now i am spoiling something um lizard water world the lizards are not allowed in zootopia All right, man. I can't. Is it a classist story? It is a classist story. Oh, boy. Oh, yeah. I guess in Zootopia 1, there are no reptiles. But also beavers. So there's kind of this area where it's like beavers and water mammals live with lizards in like some sort of swamp bayou area. And so the beavers are there. and I was really I just kind of locked in on the fact that they obviously animate the big two front teeth or the big four front teeth but you really only see the two because they're kind of outside you know the larger ones are on the top and the smaller ones on the bottom those are called incisors right and then it got me really fixated on the teeth of the beaver and I was like huh and it's nothing against the movie but I could not think about anything but oh wait I didn't I didn't say my this is all over the place sorry this is me but there's a joke this is me take it or leave it I'm doing great I did 110 episodes of podcasts where this was essentially this there's a joke about one of the lizards drop its tail and then someone freaks out and they go oh and then lizard goes you can keep it which i got a real laugh out of me i got a real that's awesome i saw a video of a guy in their two guys in their garage this was on instagram reels you guys should check it out sometime um a lot of good stuff on there it was an instagram reel of two guys in a garage and on their on the shelves um there was like a iguana or some sort of lizard or something that had made its way into these people's garages into this people's garage with on the shelves or or whatever and the one guy goes look he's right there get him and the other guy walks up and grabs the tail and they have a little bit of a scuffle for a second and then the the lizard pops his little tail off and scurries away and the guys are freaking out because the the he throws the he throws the tail and it lands on the the hood of the car where the hood and the windshield meet and it's just kind of flopping around next to the uh next to the windshield wipers and they're freaking out and guys like oh my god oh my god oh my god and then in the comments somebody commented i read about this in books but i never seen it happen before and i was like wow you know me either i guess but so it was kind of an educational video as well it's a it's a really uh it's a real thing i don't know if iguan i mean i assume iguanas grow their tail back they really need the tail they must my wife uh had some crested a tail oh no but that would be her business not yours but they the crested geckos lose their tails but they don't grow back oh and they call them oh i didn't know there were lizards that didn't grow them back there are huh yeah and that might be the weirdest thing you find out this week that's not that what am i that's i mean that's got to be so much anxiety talk about like getting anxiety about when they use your consumables you know it's like is this the one time i'm gonna i'm gonna pop my tail off or or should i save it for an even more dangerous predator you know it's it's like your master ball yeah i guess they don't inherently know that the tail's gonna grow back but they just do it out of fear and then it does grow interesting i had never even considered the fact that the iguana maybe doesn't even know that his tail that is going to grow back a crazy thought but it is it's actually like almost electronic the way that the tail comes off in like right it's like more mechanical than anything yeah because you can kind of see the port for the tail versus the the like Like literally the male part of the tail and the female part of the, you know, hindu where the tail goes in. So, or comes out. It's really fascinating. But yeah, I think if I lost my tail the first time, I'd be so stressed out. And then when it grew back, I'd be like, oh, thank God. And then the second time I did it, I'd be a little bit less stressed out. And the third time, probably the same as the fourth, fifth, sixth. I'm like, whatever. This thing's coming back. Anyway, we're not here to talk about lizard tails. Not even here to talk about beaver tails. That's not even in my stuff, but it's a fascinating element. Sorry, spoiler alert, no beaver tail talk. But, anyway, so I'm watching Zootopia, putting you back in the line. Oh my god, we're still getting the framework. I haven't even got, I still have six pages of this stuff. Oh god! It's not that much. but I'm watching Zootopia I'm thinking about the beaver teeth, the incisors I'm going, what's going on in the back? They have the big two four front teeth, what goes on in the back? Do you all know? I know that you've had some of you have had rodents before My guess is nothing That was my guess Is it like molar kind of stuff back there? It's molar kind of stuff back there is what I have Yeah they just have normal regular molar teeth back there and then the big front incisors i thought that was fascinating so i leave zootopia in the middle of zootopia i go to the restroom and i google beaver skull and i am just looking at photos of beaver skull some craven pervert in the in the bathroom of the movie theater gets out of zootopia and immediately Googling beaver skull. I was just consumed by curiosity. And I found it incredible. And so obviously the teeth are prominently depicted in the film. That's the thing you know about them. They chew wood, take down trees, and then you have the big teeth. Anyway, but yes, they have the molars in the background that grind up vegetation because they're vegetarians or that's not what you call animals. Herbivores. Herbivores. herbivores or herbivores but anyway um and i remember about the two front teeth that they grow forever that did you know that i had heard that they grow forever and i remember it very distinctly an episode of the angry beavers television show on nickelodeon where um i loves beavers or cartoons cartoons this guy loves cartoon all of all of his animal knowledge comes from cartoons But you know what's funny is that they're pretty good about it. I was going to say, honestly, not a bad jumping off point. Yes, exactly. And in an episode of the Angry Beavers, I think there's Dag and Norbert. Dag sees a PSA about how the beaver incisors can grow forever if they're not worn down by chewing on trees. And if they do grow forever, they can, and this is real, grow back into the skull of the beaver, which happens a lot with ram horns as well. They got to bang it on something to wear it down. That's right, because then they'll go into their head. Yeah, and there have been documented cases of beavers, whether they can't use the teeth or something for some other reason, but the teeth are growing back in a loop-de-loop. that's got to be so stressful to just literally have a thing that if you don't take care like i have a chore each day that if you don't care of it it's going to pierce your brain i cannot imagine the anxiety they probably don't think about it but they got to be like well this this tooth is getting a little close to my eyeball yeah um anyway i have a confession to make what i guess it's more of a question but but it's it is it feels deeply embarrassing okay did they eat the wood that's a good question they eat the wood or do they just chew the wood for their house they just chew the wood for their house they don't eat the wood so what do they eat vegetation so there's plants and vegetables non-woody vegetation you're telling me they eat it they chew it and they don't even get a little bit in there I'm sure they're eating a little bit of wood so they're eating a little bit of the wood but not all of it they're not intentionally eating the wood. Okay. Okay. May I move on? Sure. Okay. Sorry, I thought this was a show about curiosity. I don't have any more information. They don't eat the wood. Your curious spirit died when you Googled beaver skull. I don't have enough information on whether they eat the wood or not. It's giving me anxiety. So just accept the fact that they don't eat the wood. I'm not an expert. I'm just fascinated by this. Okay? Okay. Fine. It is a fact that humans, second to humans, beavers change their habitat more than any other creature. They obviously cut down trees, but they can create wetlands, and they can change the direction of rivers. Now, that is fascinating. That's like a... Wouldn't you agree? I would agree. Because of this, they have been dubbed ecosystem engineers and are called a keystone species, which is also a thing I learned, which is a species that have a disproportionately profound impact on their environment relative to their numbers. Now, I would posit, not a scientist, but I would posit that they are not second to humans in the disproportionate changing of their climate. Oh, sure, because there's so many of us. Because, yeah, there's only like 60 million of them or something like that. Max. So we have, what are we at, 8 billion? I mean, yes, we're doing a number on the earth. Yeah, I think we could do way more environmental destruction. I think we need to get those numbers up. They're pathetic compared to the beavers. I'm sure that we are working on it, unfortunately. But, okay, so this would then become no surprise that they are also climate allies. Because everything they do is natural. Unlike humans, which is mostly unnatural stuff, right? Right. We're so unnatural. When you think of the beaver, you think of what? You've already mentioned it. Damn. The damn. Anal gland. Anal gland. Okay, okay. They do. I didn't actually have anything about the anal glands in my research. I did think about it, but I thought. That was one of the first facts on this show in season one. Whoa, I'm a bit of a historian of this show. Oh, yeah, you're a real expert. Beaver dams are also incredibly cool, which I didn't know this about beaver dams. So they knock down all the trees, they chew on the trees, They fall and then they drag them to make the dam, which makes these little ponds. Now, this is all stuff we know. I'm not teaching anybody anything here. But I could stop right there because I think that's fascinating enough. But more interesting is what happens after they make the ponds. The dams create big, deep pools of cold water. In this, they build the beaver den. and the dens are basically beaver-made islands in the middle of the ponds or sometimes along the banks that are only accessible via underground tunnels. You must not be an actual Angry Beavers fan because that's what their house was in the show. I didn't watch it. I haven't watched it in like 20 years. That explains why you didn't know that his name was Daggett instead of Dag, which you so embarrassingly called him. anyway that's really awesome Matty I can't wait for you and your no research I'm gonna go crazy here's a fact that I speaking of media properties about beavers here's a fact that I learned from the film hundreds of beavers they're really susceptible to Looney Tunes style traps you can make a whole different But you can make a bunch of different kinds of traps and that various beavers will. You can have one that throws them. You put them in a can, shoot them out of a cannon. But actually, some of the beavers are really smart where they actually didn't get caught by the traps. And they had the guy get caught in the trap that he tried to build for the beaver. So I guess that I guess beavers contain multitudes is what I'm learning. This film has been recommended to me by a lot of friends. You got to see it. You would love it. Is it? I would love it. OK. And as a guy who appreciates as a guy who appreciates who just said how hard it is to make something. you would watch this and go damn does it pun intended that was good against animals does it have no well if you include the guy like in peril he like you know shoots a gun and a big it says like bam and then a big smoke and then a guy in a beaver costume falls over you know it's like it's okay it's as stupid as it can possibly be but it's very good i'll give it i'll give it what is it It's called Hundreds of Beavers made by a Chicago native, in fact. And he has another another movie called something to the effect of like the Lake Michigan monster or something that I really want to watch as well. It's really, really good. It's like it's like a live action Looney Tunes with that. Doesn't it like it's like conforming the real world into Looney Tunes logic rather than what happens in like Space Jam where they're conforming Looney Tunes into real world logic. you know i like that um it's really good also another cartoon beaver maddie have you seen the or maddie or jess have you seen the wild robot no but i've heard of it okay and i i didn't watch the wild robot for the same reason i didn't watch flow it's because animals in peril really i don't like animals in peril either flow made me a little sad a little bit too frequently but the wild robot yeah the wild robot is pretty good because it is in my opinion mostly emotionless and mostly feels like it was made by chat GPT. So you don't have to worry about feeling too strongly about it. But there is a beaver in that, in that movie. And in, you know, the robot is in this community of animals. The robot, like it's sent by some big company and then gets abandoned in the woods and then becomes friends with all the animals. Right. And in this animal community, the Fox, by the way, voiced by Pedro Pascal, who is, who's zaddy. Am I right, guys? There's a beaver in this community. and he's like the wily old coot, you know, as they tend to be. Can you say wily old coot on this show? Is that fine? Well, you've done it twice now. His whole thing is he is trying to cut down this tree that's like the size of a skyscraper. It's like a mile wide. Okay, probably not a mile, but it's like hundreds of feet wide. And when we meet him, he's like chewing through this tree and everybody's like, oh, you're still trying to chew through that big tree? And he's like, you'll see, you'll all see. And then at the end of the movie, he chews through the tree. Not the huge spoiler. You kind of figure it's kind of Chekhov's tree, you know, when they set it up in the first act. He chews through the tree. And then all of the animals are like, yeah, they're all celebrating. And that was genuinely the most, I almost cried. That was the most emotional part of the whole movie was him. He did it. It was his life's work. He tried to chew through the whole tree and he chewed through the whole tree. And then all of his friends who doubted him the whole time, by the way, they all celebrated for him, which is like, I hope you guys never switch up on me like that. If you're fucking doubting me, like, I hope I can at least trust you to to be there by my side when I'm like, you know, going on a life changing undertaking. You know, basically, if you know, you love me at my worst, you take me at my best, et cetera. So, Jess, what do you got going on? I'm not a fan. I looked up a picture of Paddler And now I kind of want to watch the film Is that the guy? I think so Voiced by Matt Barry? Beaver? Is he voiced by Matt Barry? Yes, he is I'm going to chop this tree now I'm going to chop this tree He does I mean, he really does just sound like that It was a good movie I shouldn't have said the chat GPT thing It was pretty good He takes it back I redact my statement Following spoilers for The wild robot So the interesting thing about the dam That I did not know I thought they were just making houses Right But the dam in turn Completely alters the ecosystem around them Obviously if you think about it one step further They're stopping water flow Right So it can cause floods That make the dry land around them wet of course and the cold water is great for the salmon populations that otherwise get either washed down a stream and out to sea or just simply die in waters that are too warm and it offers salmon baby salmon uh places to hide from predators so they're kind of like best buds in that way that's very sweet that's really awesome yeah any uh any question or sorry any questions i don't have the answers so any guesses on how long the long the largest beaver dam in the world is like length sure and and i think it's lengthen in circumference as well so oh take a take a stab at a hundred a hundred yards yeah football field The largest beaver dam was discovered in 2007 via satellite images on Google Earth and is 2,790 feet long. That's about 850 meters and is seven times longer than the Hoover Dam. Damn. Oh, my God. I did it again. You did it again. Damn. The wet vegetation that grows as a result of the dams also acts as natural wildfire breaks, which prevent the spread of wildfires. Obviously, scientists have actually been able to attribute lower wildfires in areas to the work of beavers. So if there are beavers around, wildfires are harder to be found. That's sick. I think I just made that up. Not the fact, but the rhyme. The limerick, yeah. Uh-huh. The limerick. Um, here's a little bit of actually, sorry. I really sometimes wonder if Jess is regretting this or not. I'm just, I'm just sitting here letting you two just go to town. Um, Alexa Whipple. Restoration. That was laughing at me trying to get back on track. Um, and not the name Whipple. Alexa Whipple, a restoration ecologist with the Methow Beaver Project, also found that following a wildfire, the areas with more beavers had more regular pH levels in the years following fires. Alexa attributed this to beaver dams And resulting vegetation trapping and settling sediment And ash quicker than the areas without Obviously the wetter the area The faster ash will settle And the less it's floating all over the place So they're essentially Every bad thing that we're doing as people In destroying the climate They are completely undoing And that's kind of why And I think as chronicled in Hundreds of beavers man and beaver have often been at odds oh beavers used to be everywhere and the fur trade along with the perception of beavers being nuisances who cut down desired trees and un and cause unwanted flooding has resulted in them being hunted to near extinction in the 1800s it's not right it's not right but don't freak out because with conservation efforts uh they are not only at the numbers they once were but have bounced back significantly and are not endangered and on the conference on the conservation concern list they are marked as the least concern so beavers are back in a big way good yeah thank god yes um and there and there may even be more hope is what i have to say about this in a sentence that i wrote and have read before obviously as humans have done nearly everything they can to kill the earth they are now realizing how valuable the beaver is especially in drought times an animal that just wants to make dry lands wet yes please i wrote that part another little bonus fact about the beavers is that they tend to form monogamous relationships and mate for life and for i know isn't that sweet yeah and form strong familial bonds. A beaver family can be a mixture of two or three generations of parents or kids. That's cute. That's not the main fact. I'm past the main facts. These are all bonuses. I like the bonuses. Thank you. Just thank you so much. Yeah. Did you need that little crumb of validation? Not really. But I appreciated you giving it to me. I'm happy to offer it. I'm just snoring Ricky. And they are so close with the other beavers that thankfully conservationists have realized this. And if a beaver family is encroaching on like a farmer's property or becoming a nuisance, the entire family will be removed and relocated. And they are kept in holding facilities until they can catch all of the others in the family. Oh, man. So that they are then reunited and moved together like it's the witness protection program. That's awesome. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's awesome. You gotta hope they're not making the holding facilities out of wood. That's a beaver joke for you. That's a really great point. And it was that truly Ricky was one of those so funny. I didn't forget to laugh, but I just respected it so much. I didn't feel that funny. I'll be honest. I appreciate the props. And that my that my and thank you for coming to my TED talk about beavers that was awesome they seem to exist in direct competition with humans who want to seemingly destroy the earth that's the last thing I wrote maybe beavers are the only thing keeping the earth alive you know honestly beavers and bees go off go off okay we're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with more facts car shopping shouldn't be a game of 20 questions is this the right price am i making the right choice with car gurus you don't have to question yourself car gurus has the most inventory transparent deal ratings and real-time price drop alerts plus with car gurus app you can access dealership mode which gives you everything you need to navigate the dealership with confidence What is dealership mode, you might ask? 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Now available in Canada too. that's q u i n c e dot com slash weirdest to get free shipping and 365 day returns quince.com slash weirdest okay we're back and i'm going to talk about the trees um so the beavers start to freak out sorry yeah all of our facts are kind of like interconnected this week actually that's exciting Um, yeah, we're all aligned. Um, but as you two know, as the listeners probably don't know, I've been in Australia for the last month or so. Uh, Ricky was also here semi recently. I was. Um, and the thing I was most excited about coming here was like all of the new plants and animals that I had never seen before, because like shit is wildly different here. Like there is stuff here that is not anywhere else. Um, like I found one statistic that says seven to 10% of all species on earth are native to Australia. Um, just across like every, every order. Uh, so it's, it's very diverse. And then of that seven to 10% of all species being native to here, of that diversity, 80% of all plants and mammals here are not found anywhere else. So that's crazy. Yeah. there's just like a lot of stuff here that doesn't leave and it's because it's so isolated um and i've seen a lot of that stuff like i went to the zoo and i saw like platypuses and echidnas and bilbies and wombats and kangaroos and emus and uh i saw like kookaburras those those birds up in the trees they live in the old gum trees yep yep which is the topic of conversation actually the Gumtree? Perhaps, yes. Whoa. Indeed. So speaking of, I think the biggest spectacle of Australian wilderness that I've seen is when I went to the Blue Mountains, which is this huge, huge, huge, huge mountain range, like two hours west of Sydney. And huge as in like it's wider than the Grand Canyon. So it's like 4,400 square miles of mountain. And they're 470 million years old. so that's 10 times older than the Grand Canyon as well. So kind of a grander canyon, but, you know, just saying. Really firing a broadside shot at the Grand Canyon. That's kind of all we've got in America. You know that, right? Listen, I'm in Australia for three weeks, so things have changed, okay? You know if you come back, the Grand Canyon's going to be ready to rock. Is that a pun? Sure. And so when I went in the Grander Canyon, there were a lot of weird plants and animals that were really cool. I saw big-ass colorful birds. I saw a little reptile skink lizard. Cockatoos were everywhere. They were super loud and weird and funny. Are they just making noise? Is it just always noise? Yes. Wow. Yes. That sounds nice. it was it the cockatoos are like like they are like not nice chirping i owned a cockatoo when i was a kid you did might have been a cockatiel i don't know the cockatoos are like the really like big commenters tell me which one i own more than like in the mid-atlantic region when i was he's a damn professional oh this man this man uh but uh i think i think the the you know the most notable thing about the the blue mountains as far as flora and fauna go are the expansive eucalyptus forests uh because the vast majority of the blue mountains which are made of sandstone by the way uh all of all of these mountains are pretty much like all covered in trees and for the most part those trees are eucalyptus trees uh and we did like walk by one and grab the leaves and like smell the leaves and i was like oh it's eucalyptus um and the eucalyptus forests what did you say confirmed yep that's eucalyptus yes confirmed so so the eucalyptus forests are why the blue mountains are blue because if you look off in the distance at the mountains, they have like a blue haze. And that's obviously why they're called that. And it's because there are like these oil droplets, the eucalyptus oil droplets that are kind of like emitted from the trees. And so the sunlight like scatters differently through those droplets and like through dust and other stuff in the air, and it makes it look blue. And that's like not dissimilar to why our sky is blue basically like the shorter blue wavelengths of light are scattered more easily through all that junk in the air uh in the sky and then also like in the blue mountain haze so and like longer red orange wavelengths are not scattered so kind of neat i didn't know that that's really i learned that while i was there and that's extremely cool it's a really cool thing yeah um save you all a trip if you haven't been to Australia. Now you know. Don't go to the Blue Mountains. You don't have to go learn that. Blue Mountains are blue. Next. And the smog is why the sun sets up so pretty. It's a little LA joke for you. LA is in my fact as well, actually. I can't wait. Stay tuned. So yeah, as we were like Googling all this Blue Mountain stuff, me and my partner were Googling this over a delicious bowl of pho and drinking a Vietnamese coffee. uh because day one we got there it was like 100 degrees hot day two 50 degrees and foggy insane it was crazy i'm glad we did our hike the first day because you couldn't see yeah take two but so yeah we got soup on day two we were googling stuff uh and that's how we learned about the blue the blue haze and the eucalyptus and my partner goes didn't americans try to plant a bunch of eucalyptus trees in america back in the day and it all went to and the branches fell off randomly and then they exploded and i was like huh whoa are you gonna tell us that did happen and i i googled it and he is correct wow yeah yeah my and my partner is australian so he apparently just learned about the stupid americans planting their australian trees and you know yep so back in the mid 1800s california california here it comes was facing a timber shortage and they wanted to build sorry okay yep uh they wanted to build like railroads and stuff right and they didn't have enough trees to like and forests to like farm lumber so they heard about the the giant strong eucalyptus trees in australia uh it was being colonized at the time they were like yo let's uh let's get some of those so they planted the first seed in california in 1853 by the 1870s there was eucalyptus craze people were like obsessed with planting eucalyptus trees they were convinced it was the solution to their problems there were there were these people called forest tycoons that were like trying to make their fortune by planting forests and farming them for lumber. So yeah. And they were great. The trees were great because they would grow in really dry soil that was previously unable to like hold onto any vegetation. So instead of like dry grasses, all of a sudden people had like 20, 30, 50 foot trees with like shade and shelter and windbreaks and stuff like that. And that goes a long way when you have a hot Californian summer. And aside from that too, like their strong root systems improved soil quality for other kinds of like farms and stuff and they drained swampy areas too so like less stagnant water malaria rates dropped because fewer mosquitoes stuff like that wow and because eucalyptus didn't naturally grow in the u.s they had no natural pests or diseases so it was like everything coming up eucalyptus yeah and that's where it ends and it worked out yep and uh the credits the credits roll and everyone lived happily ever after. And I'm looking at a eucalyptus tree right now outside my apartment. Yep. But then. But then. They tried to start cutting on the trees and use them for railroad cable ties. And when they would try to dry the wood, it wouldn't dry all perfect and nice like it did in Australia. It would twist and warp and then it would get really dense and hard. So you couldn't, It was like impossible to even nail a spike through it, like a railroad spike. Wow. And it did the same thing when they would like try to use it for framing and fence posts and everything. And why? It's because they were trying to do things the American way and fast track it. Classic. Yep. And eucalyptus doesn't really become usable as a timber until it's like really, really, really old. Like hundreds of years old, basically. So it's not like worth using as like a farmable timber. uh but uh it was already everywhere and they had already planted a bazillion eucalyptus trees and oops uh and yeah sure there were like some positive benefits like the ones i mentioned but they're still kind of an invasive species and sure there are still many eucalyptus trees in california everywhere and they look and smell delightful uh but they do randomly drop their branches seemingly out of nowhere and it's kind of it's very funny it's like an emotional response uh like they do it if they're stressed from heat like lizards or whatever yeah it is like lizards it straight up is like lizards or they'll do it if like they're aging and they like just want to drop a branch and these are huge trees like i just looked them up because i was like have i ever seen one of these before i don't know you must have sure you must have they're all over la past them yeah i'm sure if you know what to look for you'll see them um and uh so in in australia these trees are known as widow makers because the falling branches have killed people dang like even just last year and the year before like a handful of people were killed by what branches i had not that's that's hey that's a badass name for a tree man i don't know if they get more badass than that that kind of sounds a lot like i mean it must have been the same exact time because california is very young as a place uh in terms of like yeah you know people kind of building amount of cities but they also did the same thing with palm trees and like yeah not native here yes you know they seem like they offer less than you to be quite honest yes so so but like that's that's part of it right is like they have these two invasive trees that are also very flammable like very easy to light on fire um and that is like perhaps the most troubling thing about at least eucalyptus i don't really know much about the palms and how they were introduced well the The palms are also in a very, very similar way. They're just not from here. They planted them here because they like the look of them. They don't offer any shade because they're like 100 feet tall and they have four leaves. And the leaves are massive. And they do also, much like you could let this fall in the street. Right. I don't think they're making widows, but they're certainly causing car accidents. Yes. At least inconveniencing people. Yes, exactly. Uh, so, so yeah, the eucalyptus similar and also saturated with that very flammable eucalyptus oil. Uh, the stuff that makes the blue mountains blue. It also fuels forest fires in Australia and in the U S for instance, the 1991 quote unquote Oakland firestorm. That's what they literally, they literally call it that, uh, burned for five days, largely fueled by eucalyptus trees. So killed, killed 25 people, injured 250, destroyed 1,500 acres of land, which included 2,843 single family homes, 437 apartments. And in today's money, it's an economic loss of over $3 billion. Holy smokes. That was another one. That one was in bad taste. That was completely unintentional. I almost. Really stepping in. I almost didn't catch it. i mean it's not intentional i promise and one of the people who lost their house in this disaster uh was will wright the guy who made the sims oh i was i was i literally was like are you talking about the sims are you talking about spore yes he lost his house the spore aren't there spores on the eucalyptus tree or no i was trying to make a connection well there is a connection there's a connection because when he made sim city 2000 he added a scenario about like the city's recovery from the fire wow look at that yep healing uh and obviously this does like bring to mind the la fires from a year ago uh which were not mainly kicked off by or like even mainly fueled by eucalyptus but they did undoubtedly play a part you know like they're everywhere they probably burned in some capacity uh some legislators have pushed for cutting down eucalyptus and flammable trees that like you know fuel fires like this but that's not really a full solution either like a full landscape of native plants wouldn't have stopped the fires in their tracks you know what i mean it's more about building fire safe buildings establishing better fire and water protocols having beavers perhaps having beavers we were all getting there the exact same moment we want the beavers yeah uh and you know like clearing out brush and and stuff like that so it's not like a one one-stop shop solution but anyway uh shout out to australia's blue mountains and its eucalyptus trees uh without which we wouldn't have a random city fire recovery scenario in sim city 2000 uh or something you know wow look at that and thank you for that yep all right we're gonna take one more quick break and then we'll be back with more facts now that the holidays are over you might be feeling like you've got a big spending hangover you know the drinks the holiday food travel gifts it all adds up luckily mint mobile is here to help you cut back on overspending on wireless this January with 50% off unlimited premium wireless. 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Okay, but seriously, this time I actually kind of mean it. I've been starting some of my mornings off with Masterclass and I actually feel like it's helping me work towards my 2026 goals in a big way. I've been really wanting to sharpen my writing, especially when it comes to weirdest things segments and my YouTube video essays. So on Masterclass, I've been taking the storytelling and humor class with David Sedaris. It's been helping me bring funny and meaningful moments from my real life into my writing more seamlessly and purposefully. And it's not just writing. With Masterclass, you get thousands of bite-sized lessons across 13 categories that can fit into even the busiest of schedules. With plans starting at $10 a month, billed annually, you get unlimited access to over 200 classes taught by the world's best business leaders, writers, chefs, and more. You can also turn your commute or workout into a classroom. With audio mode, you can listen to Masterclass lessons anytime, anywhere. And classes really make a difference. 88% of surveyed members feel that Masterclass has made a positive impact on their lives. Right now, our listeners get an additional 15% off any annual membership at masterclass.com slash weirdest. That's 15% off at masterclass.com slash weirdest. Masterclass.com slash weirdest. Okay, we're back. Ricky, tell us about the animal. Jess, you're not going to believe this. You're not going to freaking believe this. Okay, okay. But your facts were all about the eucalyptus tree. Guess what? My big thing is all about the dang koala. The koala, the guy himself. Basically, the animal that you could potentially consider to be in a symbiotic, well, maybe even parasitic relationship with the eucalyptus tree there they have the they have formed a sort of bond with each other in many ways the koala potentially the dumbest animal um on earth it's hard i mean obviously how do you i like that you've you've amended your statement to potentially potentially i don't want to paint you know i don't i don't want to you know make any sort of broad claims that i can't back up um with the hard science like maddie had of i watched a movie um i did watch a movie though I watched a documentary about koala. There was a life of a koala. It was really good. I had never seen a koala running at full speed until this documentary. And man, I've seen that looks so funny. Okay. So there's all, I didn't have really one fact about a koala, but like just in general, they are so interesting. First of all, they're totally useless. I mean, everybody kind of, if there's, there's, they're completely useless, right? They sleep for like 20 hours a day. Most people know that. The reason they sleep for 20 hours a day, why, of course, it's because they refuse to eat anything but eucalyptus leaves. And those leaves provide them with essentially zero nutrition. The other thing about the koala is they spend the majority of their life up in a eucalyptus tree. They basically, they pick a tree. First of all, another thing, there's like 700 different varieties of eucalyptus tree. The average koala will prefer less than 50, around 30 of them. So not only do they only eat eucalyptus trees, they're also picky eaters when it comes to eucalyptus trees. And you're asking yourself, well, Ricky, how do they determine which eucalyptus trees they like? Well, it's about to get a little yucky, folks. as we all know koalas are marsupials they are born after i think like seven weeks they're the size of a jelly bean and then i heard the the statistic that i think that they used on the documentary i watched was that a koala goes from its jelly bean size to 25 it grows 25 000 times its size from the course of the moment of its birth to adulthood so they're about 25 000 jelly beans big um like smurfs like smurfs um so they come out of the they come out they come out of the three they're three apples taller with two apples two apples oh whatever um i'm not up on my smurf floor yeah maddie knows all the smurf he's the smurf floor guy of the group every first thing they say or guy yeah it's one of the first things they say so these these little these little seven week old jelly beans crawl out of the birth canal weird to think about this it's got it's got no eyes and stuff like that yes they literally it's just a little jelly bean that uses its four limbs to crawl out of the birth canal and it crawls up into the pouch of the koala which does open downward i learned which seems like why would you evolve to have your pouch open downward when you spend your whole life in a tree i don't know yeah the koala climbs in right and it latches on to the nipple inside of the pocket. Okay. And then it drinks the milk of the mom for a long time and it grows big and strong. Right. But you're thinking to yourself, okay, it goes from drinking milk to just eating leaves. No, no, no. There, there's kind of an intermediary dietary plan that they get put on, which is they eat a by-product of their mother's digestive process called fecal pap, which is more or less what it sounds like. It's just kind of an advanced version of Dookie, basically. And essentially, what this does is that it sort of trains the baby's digestive tract to be able to eat these eucalyptus leaves, right? Because as you might know, I don't know if you actually discussed this or not, but the eucalyptus leaves are poisonous. Yeah, I don't think I said this. To almost every animal in the world, these eucalyptus leaves are poisonous. There's a few animals that eat them, very few. The koalas are the only ones where they exclusively eat eucalyptus leaves. They have a special digestive, they have a special part of their digestive tract that's basically like the appendix that lets them ferment the eucalyptus leaves inside of their body and neutralize the toxins, okay? so basically these koalas they they have these limited limited varietals of eucalyptus trees that they have eaten ever since they were sucking on their mama's dookie um that's gotta be a first for uh weirdest thing i learned right listen we get pretty gross on here i can only imagine so so that's you know they have these varietals imprinted in their in their like you know right down to their core, you know, and they they find a tree that they like. They crawl up it and they just sit there every day. They just they basically, you know, it's like that's like their house. They're just like, this is where I live now. If there's already a koala in said tree, they'll move on. It is literally I kind of had the realization because I've also been in a big Lord of the Rings mood lately, but they're kind of like the hobbits of the animal kingdom. They don't do a whole lot. They love a leaf substance that gets them mildly f***ed up. They love to chill in the house. They don't really want to go on any big adventures. They're kind of the home bodies of the animal kingdom, which I really like about them. What else? Oh, and then the reason why they are so dumb is often touted that the more wrinkles you have on your brain, the smarter you are. A koala's brain is completely smooth. It looks like a big apple made out of meat, basically. It's really crazy. They are very stupid. But if there's one thing that they have done correct over their long evolutionary life span, so going back millions and millions of years, they have evolved to be the most adorable by human standards. And I think that's a really valuable trait to have if you're an animal. They've got big fluffy ears, huge honkable nose. They're about toddler sized. You can pick them up and they kind of just grab onto you like a toddler. And they don't move really quick. I think when an animal moves too fast, we get too scared. We like somebody that's moving at a really reasonable pace. But yeah, they're really interesting. I think it's such – like they're similar to pandas in that they have evolved to completely rely on a diet that barely keeps them alive. And I find that to be so interesting. It is. What's with that? That is, yeah. I don't know. What do they even do for anybody? They don't do anything for anybody. They don't even do anything for the eucalyptus trees that they rely on. They don't really give much back to them. They just eat the leaves, and then once there's not many leaves left in the tree, they move on to a new tree. and that's basically it um it's not even like they're like spreading like seeds or anything for them because a lot of eucalyptus trees like reproduce by fire like they need fire yeah to release their yes and koalas famously do very poorly in the fire seasons unfortunately they really do not know how to handle it because again they've got their little neighborhoods you know they've got their little forest that they live in and they basically stay there their whole lives so when the forest burns a kangaroo for example will move on to a new place but the koalas they don't really know how to move that you know they don't have the capability to move that far so there's lots of organizations that help koalas relocate unlike the beavers they don't have any familial ties they're koalas are a society of single mothers um they raise their baby for almost exactly 12 months almost exactly a year and then as soon as the mom is ready to mate again she basically says all right kid you're on your own it's time to have another baby and uh and the cycle begins again oh wow i didn't realize that yeah they're really they're really special creatures um i i over the course of watching this documentary that i found on youtube i i learned to love them even more um but you know they're pretty much helpless and completely stupid the only reason that they exist is because they have essentially no natural predators that can get up the tree that they're in which right frankly you know that's a pretty good evolutionary adaptation to just climb the tree you know yes yeah they're just up there they're just up there and and you know a komodo dragon or whatever can't catch them or a monitor lizard or whatever's out there on the epic really offensive i thought we had i thought we had paul hogan in here anyway i don't know if i have much more koalas other than that it's it's there's just a lot of interesting eccentricities about koalas that the more you dive in you're like huh really and you guys are still around damn okay oh my last my last fact about koalas and this is maybe less of a fact and this is more editorializing if there's one thing that a koala can be known for besides all the crap that i just said that they're cute right you know giraffe got a long neck horses got weird knees koalas they're cute that's like their one trait yeah however i don't are they not the one weird knees well that's that's not that's neither here nor there we're not talking about horses we're talking about koalas yes maddie are they the ones or is it sloths that are the connected to chlamydia that's what i was gonna bring up so that's yeah there is also the chlamydia thing the koalas do get chlamydia there's a scene in the documentary i watched i think of it was they were implying that's in zootopia no no no no no no that was in zootopia 2.5 you gotta get the bonus features uh there was a scene in the documentary i watched where they were implying that they were showing a koala who was dying of chlamydia at the foot of a tree and it was insanely depressing if you must if you really must know but yes for some reason koalas are susceptible to getting chlamydia as well that's um interesting my my fun fact that it's more more of an opinion the koala potentially the the number one animal on earth known for being cute uh the babies are less cute than the adults i was going so i looked them up while you were talking about this because one of the things that I didn't mention about the beavers is that the beaver kits are probably one of the cutest things I've ever seen they're like they're like less filled out beavers but the yeah you the koalas are one of the distinguishing like the just like distinguished for the fact that the adults are way cuter than the babies I think sometimes I think it's more of like the toddlers look a little strange what it is is that they don't get their big round faces. The babies have like a little bit of a weird like horse jaw at some point in their life where their head kind of looks like they look top heavy. But you know when they get all when they get sort of filled out with their fur they obviously are extremely cute. I mean they're cute no matter what. I'm really you know I'm splitting hairs here but I'm just saying you know the guys are all cute but the babies you know they got some weird cranial stuff going on. Ricky hates baby animals. Oh no I love them anyway that's it ricky kind of went on a hit piece about koalas i would encourage everybody to look up beaver kits at some point during their day they are very cute because they're extremely adorable um yeah that's fascinating i was going to mention now that you've brought it up a second time a movie if you were talking about the most depressing movie in terms of animals i've ever seen was a documentary called tardis de soledad adventures of solitude which is this incredible electric magnetic documentary that follows a bullfighter over the course of several fights. There's no narration. It's just footage. It's incredible to watch. The first 30 minutes, it shows one bullfight, and I turned it off and cried. Oh, my God. Sounds like a huge bummer. It really was. It really was, and I don't know why. Ricky and I often talk about how we're kind of little babies when it comes to animal peril. I'm the same way. It's difficult. It's awful to watch, and I don't know what made me do it, but I tried, and I still recommend it. It's a fascinating documentary. I mean, you know. Yeah. I think everybody should be watching it. Yeah, I think. The non-meat eater in me was watching it, and I was like, I shouldn't have to watch this. This is for me. but uh that's my shout as we get down to the good shout Zootopia 2 the the sad bullfighting documentary Zootropolis 2 and the Looney Tunes beavers hundreds of beavers really good what a trio I've learned so much I really have I'm I'm so glad me too they should do more seasons of this show succeeding you know they should I agree It's really fascinating stuff here. Well, thanks for coming on, both of you. Remind the listeners who you are, what you make, where people can find your stuff, et cetera. Yes, yes. My name is Matt Riel. Matty is talking on everything. I also Twitch stream, much like the two other people in the call here. I work for a company called Watcher. We just wrapped up 110 episodes of the podcast Get Scared. and um i guess i can say we're working on another one uh oh so we're working on another one uh that that should be coming soon so that's exciting well that's cool um my name is i'm ricky twitch.tv slash ricky peacock it's my damn real name if you can believe it um i'm working on um playing some video games over there. I like to do a lot of things. I like to think of myself as a patron of the arts. I'm really, I'm leading. I've got two feet in the door of this sentence that I'm trying to get through and I'm really ready to back out. Nevermind. Just follow my Twitch channel if that's the kind of thing that you'd like to be watching. The weirdest thing I learned this week is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Faltman, along with Jess Bodie, who also serves as our audio engineer and editor extraordinaire. Our theme music is by Billy Cadden. Our logo is by Katie Beloff. If you have questions, suggestions, or weird stories to share, tweet us at weirdest underscore thing. Thanks for listening, weirdos.