Hey, this is Outside In, a show where curiosity in the natural world collide. I am your host, Nate Hedgie, here with producer Marina Henke. Hey, Marina. Nate, I wanna tell you a fact that I recently learned. Do you know that multiple states can claim the same official state bird? Really? The same state bird? I feel like they're just not being very creative. I mean, I imagine it a lot like NFL draft, right? Each state, they come with their picks, their MVP, Oklahoma, once the roughed grouse, I don't know. No, many states, they can and they do have the same bird mascot. What do you think is the most popular state bird? Listen, I am gonna say that they are Reppin, Ben Franklin, the original American mascot bird, the turkey. Okay, you're never gonna hear me knock a good guess, but it's not that, it is the Northern Cardinal. Ooh, great choice. I mean, we've got Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia, and West Virginia. Also, lest we forget, very popular sports mascot. Yep. The Cardinals are world champs. The Saddlewes Cardinals are headed back to the World Series. What do you think makes the Cardinal so popular? Oh, it's gotta be the color, they pop. Yes, so this was also my guess and turns out we are following in suit with our species. So humans tend to have a naturally heightened reaction to seeing red. This has sometimes been called the red romance effect, even the red dress effect. There's even been some experiments that show that people playing with red poker chips perform better, and wrestlers wearing red bibs are more likely to win. Presidents wearing long red ties, AKA Donald Trump winning all the time. Here I was thinking you were gonna go like, you know, you asked women's hockey team, just won a big medal. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, Canada wears red, Canada lost twice, I am Canadian, I just don't wanna talk about it. We're recording this right after the Olympics, by the way. Well, this is where Cardinals and humans are actually not all that different because Cardinals in a way are red for the same reason. The shock of color that all male Cardinals have, it's saying, hey, look at me, I'm gonna make a good mate. Ooh, I like that, so it's like wearing a nice suit. Yeah, it's like, what's up, Lady Cardinal? Nate, do you know what makes Cardinals red? They're embarrassed all the time. Super sheepish. No, so they get that color from the food that they eat, specifically something called a carotenoid. Carotenoids, okay. These are pigments that show up in berries and in seeds. Now, I feel like you're gonna ask me, you're gonna say, Marina, but tons of birds are eating berries and seeds. You know, why don't I see way more red birds? You read my mind. Yeah, so lots of birds can attribute their red eyes to carotenoids, but Cardinals take it a step further. So male Cardinals have a very special gene, Ketchelates is gonna roll right off my tongue. It's called CYP2J19. Now that activates those carotenoids in their feathers. Okay, interesting, so that's how they become red. But every now and then, that gene does not fire and you get. And going viral on social media tonight, this photo capturing a rare yellow Cardinal, a woman spotted the bird right outside of a window. But we're not here to talk about yellow, Nate Hedgie. No, we are not. Any guesses what we're here to talk about? We're here to talk about red. Today we are opening up the outside inbox to all you listeners who called in with some pretty fantastic red related questions. In fact, quick shout out to our outside inbox hall of famer, Jeanne Bartlett, who called in with a question about carotenoids. That's prompting my Cardinal rabbit hole. Thank you, Jeanne. All right, we got a lot of good stuff ahead of us, so let's get into it. Up next, it's Red Flare and his new band. Oh my God, I'm back again. On that magazine, oh, everybody's spin. Gonna bring new games, gonna show you now. New game party, find new games. Dropping hits every week. Find the new slots. I'm back, back in the scene of tonight. 18 plus be gamblerware at all. That's right. When life gets hectic, energy ups and downs are all you need. If you're seeking energy reassurance, Eonnext can help. From smart tech that helps you take control of your energy future to always staying below the price cap with Nex Pledge. We're here for whatevils next. Just one of the reasons why we're rated excellent on TrustPilot by our customers. Find out more at eonnext.com. Next pledge variable rates are always below the option price cap. 25 pounds exit fee per fuel applies. Eligibility and season fees apply. TrustPilot February 2026. Hey, I'm Nate Hedgie and this is Outside In, a show where curiosity and the natural world collide and we are back to answer your questions about all things Red. Yeah, I think we should just dive straight into it. This question that we got from Liz in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Stay bird by the way. Rough grass. Hi, Outside In team. This is Liz calling from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. My Red-inspired question is, why do albino animals have red eyes? Looking forward to your response. Thanks for all you do. Our producer Felix Poon looked into this. Do you get it? Looked into it. Okay, all right. Various. Albino animals tend to attract a lot of attention. In 2024, the Lakota held a special ceremony for the birth of an albino bison. There are lots of states that outlaw the hunting of albino deer. And when a white gorilla named Snowflake was born at the Barcelona Zoo, people visited in hordes. Part of the fascination is that there just aren't a lot of albino animals out there. Albino animals in nature are rare. The same way maybe an animal that is missing a front leg is rare. It has negative consequences for the survival of animals in the wild. This is Alex Funk. He's a PhD student at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, where he studies cane toads, more recently, albino cane toads. Albinism is a genetic condition that reduces the amount of melanin in the skin, hair, and eyes. The condition can also occur in humans. But since we're going to be talking about evolutionary fitness in the wild, we're just sticking with animals today. For a long time, researchers assumed albino animals are rare because they can't camouflage. After all, being seen in the wild often means being eaten. But Alex thought there might be more to it than that. So he designed a study where he created a bunch of albino toads using genetic modification. And when he measured their growth and survival rates, things looked pretty good. But when he raised those albino toads in the same cage as non-albino toads, or what he calls the wild types, the albinos barely grow, and the wild types grow like gangbusters. This was surprising because these toads were raised in captivity, no predators around. So what gives? It didn't take long for Alex to figure it out. All he had to do was watch them eat their daily meal of termites. The wild type toads were able to catch the termites with their tongues most of the time. But the albino toads. The albino toads would kind of just be wildly striking and missing and falling over and all sorts of comical stuff. So it turns out that albino toads don't have very good vision. And we'll get to why in just a minute. But first, this brings us back to our listeners' question. Why do albino animals have red eyes? That red is just the reflection of the blood vessels in your eye and the tissue in your eye. Of course, other animals' eyes have blood vessels in tissue. But they also have melanin, which gives them color. Without that melanin, those blood-filled capillaries are plain as day. And unfortunately for Alex's toads, that lack of melanin doesn't just translate to red eyes. It also translates to bad eyesight. Now, I won't get into the science of why, other than to say that a lack of melanin in the eyes affects something called stereopsis. That's the ability to see in three dimensions. That's why you see in my experiment, the toads striking and missing constantly because they can't really see very well in 3D. And the problems for albino animals' eyesight don't just end there. Just like melanin protects the skin from UV radiation, it also protects the eyes. Without that protection, an albino individual's vision can decline faster than non-albinos. All of this is why it can be tough to be an albino animal in the wild and why humans sometimes get involved trying to protect them. Just ask the albino squirrels of only Illinois where they're kind of the town's unofficial mascot. They even have legal right of way on local streets and sidewalks. ["Local Street"] Nate, can you imagine stopping for the night on a road trip? You open your car door, you look down. What are you looking at, eye to eye, an albino squirrel? Marina, I often road trip with three dogs, so I would just be dealing with a lot of barking and a lot of dogs trying to eat squirrels. I mean, I'd be terrified to drive. I mean, I don't want to get like a ticket for not giving them legal right of way. Exactly, I don't want my dogs to go to jail if they eat one. So in fact, it is the opposite. It only actually draws a lot of attention, a lot of tourism from these albino squirrels. Get this, the town has passed an ordinance banning free roaming cats to protect their cherished mascot. I mean, that probably helps with songbirds and everything else like that too. Okay, moving on. Our next question comes from Tyler in South Carolina, Statebird Carolina Ren. ["Lighthouse"] Our question for you is, what is the significance of the color red being used with lighthouses all over? I'm very curious, thank you. Marina, you answer this one, right? Yeah, so I mean, I live in Maine, so I think I'm actually contractually obligated to tackle any lighthouse related question that we get. All right, take it away. ["Lighthouse"] It may be tempting to think of lighthouses as standalone tourist attractions, perched on rocky outcrops, maybe flashing a lone light across the water. But 100 years ago, the Federal US Lighthouse Service maintained nearly 1,000 functioning lighthouses across the country. They built enough lighthouses eventually so you were never out of sight of a lighthouse. Jeremy Dantremont is a historian for the US Lighthouse Society. And during this heyday of lighthouse navigation, he described the resulting effect as a light network strung along the coast. Like our listener noted, it was a network with a whole lot of red. Sankity headlight on Nantucket, white-shole light in Michigan, on Cape Cod, Nosset light is kind of an iconic lighthouse. Beyond making for dash and gift shop keychains, the answer for this popular cue is two-fold. First is that the color red often helps lighthouses stay visible. To be seen after all is the primary purpose of a lighthouse. I always tell people there's kind of like signposts on the sea basically or on our waterways. But these signposts of the sea are only useful if sailors can spot them. At night, a lighthouse's beam does the trick, but during the day, that flash of a bulb can be pretty hard to spot, which means a lighthouse's paint job actually matters a lot. Should point out that in New England, most of our lighthouses are very simple white with black iron lanterns. Against the dull browns and grays of a New England coastline, white stands out, but not always. Just like an outfit, sometimes a lighthouse benefits from a pop of red. For instance, in Maine, West Quattie headlight at the easternmost point of the United States has red and white stripes. There's a pretty fair amount of snow up there. So the red shows up really well against the snow background. Red, it turns out, is a highly employed color in the nautical world. That's because our eyes pick it up extraordinarily well. Yes, against snow, but also water. The second reason for red's popularity comes from a lighthouse's need to be unique. With so many white lighthouses along the coast, sailors found that the structures could be hard to tell apart. So they decided to give some lighthouses distinct paint schemes or daymarks, as they're known. These daymarks are the reason for the delightful variety in lighthouse patterns that exist today. Red checkers, red diamonds, black stripes. All these variations leave most lighthouses with their own unique fingerprint. They're cataloged in a yearly report that the Coast Guard puts out called the US Light List. Today, lighthouses are often a backup to more high-tech instruments. But it doesn't mean these structures are without a purpose. After all, sometimes tech fails. You know, people tell me all the time they still like seeing that lighthouse, that actual physical confirmation of where they are. And that goes for the lights at night and seeing the lighthouse tower during the day. Whether it's the stripes of West Quadi or the thick band of Nosset Light, there's a sailor out there who knows that red marking, means they're coming home. MUSIC You know, this is something I've been thinking of, Marina. I live in Southeast Alaska. It's fishing season's begun. And I'm seeing like tons of orange buoys. And I'm like, when did orange replace red? Because I feel like everything is orange these days. There is something that feels like somehow more modern when I think of orange. Like, I feel like I'm not imagining like 1700s fishermen, you know, wrapping a bunch of orange beanies. Yeah, exactly. Like, it's just like, it is the now go-to bright color, that neon. OK, I'm wondering, sort of a cardinal throwback. But if this could have something to do with like pigment history, like at what point did we have the technology to make neon orange in mass production? I don't know. I think this would be a great outside inbox question. I'm going to put a pin in it. Somebody tell us the truth. Out there listening now. Let us know. Nate, OK, I know you have in-laws in Boston. Have you heard of Minot's Ledge Light? No, I have not. OK, picture this. We have a lighthouse that is just south of Boston's harbor. In 1894, this is exactly when the US Lighthouse Service is starting to realize, like, OK, we need to differentiate these lighthouses from each other. What did they decide to do? They decide they're going to give each lighthouse an individual flash pattern. They choose Minot's Ledge as the first experiment of this kind, and they give it a 1, 4, 3 flash pattern. So what that was, you know, it's flash, pause, flash, flash, flash, pause, flash, flash, flash. What do you think that was a signal for? I love you. You got that? Yes, I know. I just watched this movie where that was like a whole plot device, was like 1, 4, 3, these taps, and it meant I love you. Wow, total sleuth, Nate Hetchie. So yeah, it picked up the nickname of Lovers Light from this. People wrote poems about it. They played songs all about this very quintessentially romantic lighthouse. And evidently, a movie ripped the whole thing off. The IP that just keeps on giving, you know? So OK, this is clearly a great anecdote. Also helping me with perhaps a not so subtle pivot to our next batch of red questions. Nice. So up next, we are going to embody red as the color of infatuation, desire, and all things love. Ha, ha, ha. That is going to be right after a quick break. But before we go, we are opening our inbox to more questions. We've had a lot of fun lately getting some really random submissions. So this time, our only ask is, give us your weirdest, nichest, most unhinged questions you can think of. Yeah, I'm thinking like Nate's fluorescent, outdoor gear question. Yeah, exactly. Give us questions like that, or weirder ones. As always, you can do that by calling our hotline at 1-844-GO-AUTER, or even better, sending us a voice memo to outsideinradio.org. And you know what, little least drag for me, throwing your state bird. Ha, ha, ha. More questions to come after a quick break. So I started playing music again. I actually just played this folk festival recently. And now that I'm playing music, I need to look a lot sharper than my typical athleisure sweat pants working from home outfit, right? So I picked up this blue chorecoat from Quince that I absolutely adore. It's durable. It fits great. It looks cool. And it costs less than $100. 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This is Outside In, a show where curiosity and the natural world collide. I'm Nate Hedgie. And I'm Marina Henke. And we are tearing our way through an Outside In roundup all about the color red. We've just shifted the tenor of our questions to the theme of love. To kick things off, a couple of listeners asked us questions about pets and love. I have a very important question for our three dog owning host. Nate, do you think your dogs love you? I think that one does. I think Gilly, my three-legged rescue, knows. The other two, the boys, are just like, whatever, I'll take you or leave you. But Gilly, she loves me. And do you think that Gilly knows that because she is such a problem-causer? Yeah, exactly. She costs me like thousands of dollars in vet bills every year because she's constantly getting into trouble. So she owes me a little bit of love. But OK, actually, researching this question, I came across a line from a science journalist writing about his own conviction of dog love that just felt so accurate. He wrote, it wasn't the strength of a single study that convinced me of this, it was the breath. Dog breath? OK, all right. Well, OK, I mean, OK. Look, dogs' brains, they light up just like ours when they get reunited with family after time away. Their blood pressure drops when we pet them, just like how our own blood pressure drops. And their oxytocin, that's the love hormone. Surges, when they're with people. That's really sweet. So maybe they do actually love me. Oh, they totally do. Well, I say we just keep the good times rolling and here our next question. This is coming from Monica down in Hartford, Connecticut. State bird, American Robin. Hi, outside in. I was wondering if there's any examples of same sex animal relationships and raising their young. Thanks. Nate, you looked into this, right? I did, yep. A few years ago, the children's show Peppa Pig released an episode that was all about families. So Susie Sheep lived with her mummy, Mandy Mouse lived with her mummy and daddy, and Penny Polar Bear. I live with my mummy and my other mummy. My mummy is a doctor and my mummy cooks spaghetti. The episode garnered the usual controversy. An Italian far right politician tried to ban it. A Christian fundamentalist organization in the US demanded Penny and her family be written off the show. But here is the thing, Peppa Pig was accurate. Over 1,500 species, including polar bears, have been known to couple up with a partner of the same sex. We are talking swans, giraffes, monkeys, sheep, penguins. There's a lot of examples in zoos where male penguins will, for lack of a better word, sort of kidnap an egg and then raise that egg together. This is Karen Anderson. She's a primate behavioral ecologist at the University of Toronto. She studies same sex relationships in the animal kingdom. And she says, first off, there are probably way more than just 1,500 species that have this behavior. But it's been underreported by researchers. In fact, In almost every animal where we are interested in researching same sex and actual behavior, we find it. When researchers are trying to figure out whether, say, two chimps are more than just friends, they aren't only looking for sex. Just like in humans, attraction can take many forms. If we're talking about monkeys, usually we define their relationships a lot by how much they groom each other. That's not always the case. Sometimes some animals, they only really pair up to have sex and that's it. But in other species, there is this long-term bonding going on. As for same sex animals, raising their young. Most of the species that do that are birds. Black swans in Australia have been documented rearing chicks. And in one albatross colony in Hawaii, researchers found that up to 30% of the parents were actually two unrelated females. These gals would often take turns laying eggs after mating with males who were already coupled up. So yeah, a little bit of a swinger vibe, but you know, I'm not gonna kink shame. Now, in this case, scientists believe this was happening because of a sex ratio skew in the colony. There were way more female birds than male birds. But in other cases, it may have to do with genetic or even environmental factors. Some primates, for instance, will couple up with the same sex when their world is more stressful. So too many predators and not enough food or water. Usually when this happens, these animals are having less reproductive sex. Karen thinks this could be a strategic choice. Why have babies when conditions are bad? But even then, same sex chimps and gorillas are still Netflix and chilling if you catch my drift. So it might sort of point us to an idea that even in stressful times, or perhaps especially in stressful times, same sex sexual behavior is really important for animals as a way of maintaining these important social bonds. Sex can be a means for reproduction, but it can also be a way to strengthen a bond or show some affection. Just ask Penny the polar bear's parents. ["Pepa Pig"] Look, I'm not a parent, but I've had not two, but three parents tell me how much they hate Peppa the pig. I will say that both me and you got that clip of Peppa Pig stuck in our head the entire time we were writing and editing this. My mommy cooked spaghetti. My mommy cooked spaghetti. All right, this next and final question is also about love and mating in the natural world, specifically about species that pair up, which scientists often call pair bonding. This question comes from the state who's state bird is the black-capped chickadee. ["Pepa Pig"] Hi, outside in. My name is Lira. I live on Nantucket Island in Massachusetts. And my question is, how do environmental changes affect pair bonding? Thanks. Hey, Marina, you looked into this one? I did. All right, hit it. I am a hopeless romantic. Put a rom-com in front of me, and at some point I will quite earnestly begin to weep. Love, actually. That will be nice. Nodding hill. I'm also just a girl standing in front of a boy asking you to love her. I mean, come on. But when asked to look into pair bonding among animals, I had to face some hard facts. How animals choose to mate can be pretty practical. For the most part, animals mate to reproduce, and they want to do that as easily and successfully as possible, which, look, as someone who wants kids one day, I get. So how animals do this comes down to all kinds of factors, their reproductive window, their population density, and their environment. Like, when temperatures get hotter, you're more likely to see multi-queen ant colonies. Or during years of harsher weather, some rodents will band together to raise their young in groups. But then there's a species who just want one partner. Take the albatross, a bird that mates for life. For them, harsher climates lead to something that's incredibly human-sounding, increased divorce rates. When you think about changes in environmental conditions, you don't immediately think about divorce being a consequence. That's Francesco Ventura, a biologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution who studies albatrosses. Unlike the more common effects of climate change seen in animals, lower birth rates, habitat migration, bad health outcomes, Francesco found that following warmer years, these massive birds were sometimes getting divorced at almost twice the normal rate. His first hypothesis for these broken marriages was pretty straightforward. When the conditions are tough, birds may return later to the breeding colony or in a poorer physiological conditions. If that happens, breeding between these lovebirds may not be successful, which is a big time trigger for divorce. But after analyzing the data, Francesco has another theory. It's called the partner-bleaming hypothesis. Here's how it works. In harsh seasons, birds get stressed. And turns out, female albatrosses do not like stress. So... It may be possible that harsher conditions trigger in this higher level of circulating stress hormones may be kind of misinterpreted or misread by the female as a poor performance by the mate. Did you catch the logic mistake there? Even if a pair of albatrosses successfully bred the year before, if that male shows up to mate, stressed out, well, cue the proverbial divorce papers. Now, before you start worrying about an albatross loneliness epidemic, Francesco explained to me he does not lose sleep over this. So I just got back from a breeding colony with over 200,000 breeding pairs. So in this sense, it's not an immediate concern for conservation. But for other monogamous animals, with smaller breeding selection and range, a spike in divorces could make for less reproduction overall. Either way, scientists like Francesco think it's important to look at these ripple effects of climate change, even if it's a bit less flashy. When you think about rough environmental conditions, you think about extreme events that wash out the nest and kill hundreds of adult individuals. Yes, that can happen. But also, it can tweak and it can modulate the breeding processes that regulates the life of these ocean voyagers. I mean, isn't that like the most human-sounding behavior you have ever heard? Oh my gosh, yeah. A stressful situation, you take it out on your partner, eventually it leads to divorce? Yeah, that's like what divorce is. Yeah, I mean, I try so hard on this work not to anthropomorphize. But I met with this study where I'm reading it and I'm like, well, that sounds like one of my relationships. Exactly, exactly. By the way, I think this is the fourth time you and I have talked about albatrosses on the air in the past 12 months. I am declaring it here now, albatross moratorium for the show. Okay, but before you do, I have to ask you, any states have the albatrosses they're state bird? I don't think so. They should. Maybe Antarctica's got it. I don't know. Alrighty, that is a wrap for today, but I'm going to say it one more time, our outside inbox is open for your questions. I'm going to ask one time at one time only, please somebody, can fish get seasick? I hope not. Let me very disadvantageous for a fish. Again, you can call our hotline to do that. It is 1844 go order or send us a voice memo at outside in radio at NHPR.org. This episode was recorded, produced and mixed by Marina Hanky, Felix Poon and me, Nate Hedgie, your host. It was edited by our executive producer, Taylor Quimby. Our staff also includes Justine Paradis and Jessica Hunt. Rebecca LaVoy is NHPR's director of On Demand Audio. Music is from Blue Dot Sessions, Matt Large, Ryan James Carr and Oi. Outside in is a production of NHPR. Our colors, by the way, red. We all need advice, but it's not always clear who to ask, even in 2026, enter how to. The long standing advice show and ambi-award nominated best personal growth podcast that's back with new episodes and a new host who me, Mike Peska. Each week I tackle a listener question ranging from travel to finance to relationships and beyond, with help from a world-class expert, you know, someone who actually very much knows what they're talking about. Think of it as eavesdropping on someone else's therapy session without the copay or awkward silences. You've got questions, we'll find the experts and the answers. So follow How To with Mike Peska wherever you get podcasts. Have you ever asked yourself, can the president really do that? Or wondered if there's too much money in political campaigns? 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