Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History

Hi there. Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your journey today. I am your host K-Town and you're listening to Mysterious Radio. For centuries, scientists have written off cannibalism as a bizarre phenomenon with little biological significance. Its presence in nature was dismissed as a desperate response to starvation or other life-threatening circumstances, and few ever took the time to study it. A taboo subject in our culture, the behavior was portrayed mostly through horror movies or tabloids sensationalizing the crimes of real-life flesh eaters. My special guest is Bill Shutt and he's written a book called Cannibalism, A Perfectly Natural History. Bill says that the true nature of cannibalism the role it plays in evolution as well as human history is even more intriguing and more normal than the misconceptions we've come to accept as fact. And you can get Bill's book, Cannibalism, A Perfectly Natural History, right now on Amazon and Kindle, audiobook, and hardcover. And now, here's my special guest, Bill Schutt. The End I just think that if you add food to the ultimate taboo, then that equals fascination. And that's what's been going on since the book came out. And I did a talk last night about my new book, Pump, A Natural History of the Heart. And the person that I was in conversation with from the Cleveland Museum of Natural History was saying that whenever she discussed, and she's a scientist as well, whenever she discussed diets, that cannibalism would come up, and it was one of the most popular topics. And so she said, oh, you're the cannibalism guy now, Bill. And I said, yeah, well, I don't mind it at this point as far as being able to get this information across. We have this knee-jerk reaction when you say that word, and I was interested in that, but I wasn't really interested in the sensationalism that surrounds that word. And I'm a zoologist, and so I think I took an approach to the topic that hadn't been taken before. So I had all of these interesting stories, but I didn't really have to depend on criminal cannibalism, which I really avoided that. I'm not a criminal psychologist. Oh, so you did avoid it on purpose. You avoided that on purpose. Gotcha. Yeah, I mean, I'm not a criminal psychologist, so I tried to stay away from that type of stuff. You have to mention it, of course. But, you know, I really wasn't into the whole sensationalized aspect of it, except maybe to try to hammer it into the ground like a tent peg when it did pop up. There was just so much garbage out there. And then on the other side, there was a lot of academic papers that you'd only be interested in if you were a scientist studying cannibalism in animals, for example, or in different cultures. And there was a hole in the middle there, and I just kind of stepped into it and wrote a popular science book. Didn't use a lot of jargon, which is what I do with my books. I'm interested in getting across interesting topics that might be complex or misunderstood and putting a zoological slant on them, just presenting them in a way that's interesting and entertaining. You've got to pick your spots when you're writing a book about cannibalism, but funny sometimes. Your book is Cannibalism, A Perfectly Natural History, of course. I think when you hear cannibalism, people automatically go to human cannibalism. They don't think about it in nature. But did you look at that? I mean, was that something that you looked at? Absolutely. Absolutely. And, you know, and the sort of common idea here that I found is that, you know, it's criminal cannibalism that you hear about, but there's a lot of cannibalism that took place that was cultural cannibalism. And so, you know, one of the themes that runs through this book is that culture is king, and it's we who decide what is right and what is wrong. And you have different ethnic groups, not so much anymore, that this is how they paid homage to their dead, was that they consumed them, or they consumed part of them. And they were just as appalled to learn that the Westerners were burying their dead as the Westerners. And these were early anthropologists and religious folks who went in and dealt with these indigenous groups. You know, the indigenous people were just as appalled to hear that we were burying our dead as the folks who went in were appalled to hear that these folks were eating their loved ones. So it's just a matter of, you know, it's a choice that we make. And in the West, you know, it's perhaps the ultimate taboo. And that stems from the ancient Greeks. And that was picked up by the Romans. And from there, you had William Shakespeare and the Brothers Grimm and Daniel Defoe and, you know, Sigmund Freud. And it just snowballed this idea that this is about the worst thing that you could do is to consume another person. Yeah, yeah, definitely. It is creepy, you know, the thought of it is creepy, even if it's done for, you said this, indigenous people did it for cultural reasons of, you know, it was just part of their culture, trying to pay homage to. Or medicinal reasons, you know. I was surprised as anybody that given the fact that this was such a huge taboo, that it was extremely prevalent in Europe throughout the Middle Ages right up into the beginning of the 20th century. You know, that was a real surprise. You know, body parts were consumed in various forms to treat just about every malady that you can think of. And as I said, you know, given the fact that this was such a taboo, That was a real surprise. And so I talked about that as well. And probably the last vestiges of that medicinal cannibalism are folks who consume their placentas after they give birth. Oh, wow. You got me on that one. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, it was a whole lot. Yeah, they got me on it, too. And so that turned out to be an adventure. I'd already finished this book, and I was sort of tying up loose ends. And someone put me in contact with a person who did this for a living. They go into hospitals, someone gives birth, they take their placenta and they prepare it in all these different ways. With the idea being that if you consume your placenta after you give birth, that you can restore the hormone imbalance, the sort of baby blues that are common after giving birth. and this is really to me the last vestiges of this idea of medicinal cannibalism, that consuming body parts is beneficial. So I experienced that firsthand and that was not something that I thought I was going to do. I just started my semester and thought I was going to do a phone interview and two days later I was in Plano, Texas and having a piece of placenta prepared for me. Did you eat it? Oh, yeah, I ate it. What did it taste like? Oh, I'm not telling him. You have to read it. I will tell you, it didn't taste like chicken. But that was, you know, I write fiction as well. I've written three novels. And if you just said, okay, Bill, make this up. You're going down to Dallas, Texas to sample someone's placenta, make up a story. I could not have been any stranger or as it turned out more wonderful. The people that I met were, were, were really, really cool. But let me ask you something, Bill. They're, they're eating other people's placentas. I mean, they're going in the hospital and saying. No, you're in theory, you're, you would consume your own. They're not eating other people's placentas. You would, she would prepare the placenta for a, for a client. So she's not eating. Yeah. And so she had just, so she, so I got done interviewing her over the phone and I thought that was it. And she says, you know, Bill, too bad you can't come down here because I just gave birth and I've got my placenta in the freezer. My husband is a chef. He could make it for you any way you want it, a taco or, you know, we can make it out so buco style. And I just sat there and I'm thinking to myself, first of all, did this woman just ask me to come down to her home to eat her placenta? And when I realized that she did, the next thing I thought was, you know, if it's 10 years from now and I've written a book about cannibalism and I had the chance to do this and I didn't do it, that I'd be kicking myself in the behind. And so I think I had a plane ticket like 15 minutes after I hung up the phone. And I took a couple of, I got my TAs to teach a couple of my lectures in a lab. And I was down there and went through this with this family. And it turned out to be extremely interesting. And that was a chapter in the book. That's amazing. That's a great story, actually. Thank you for sharing that really Bill I glad we got off on that one That was great Okay so we going to talk about the animal kingdom here And I tell you there something that surprised me about this And I love watching any kind of documentary style shows about like oceanography and animals in the ocean and things like that And then I saw that they were alarmed by recent videos of shark on shark cannibalism. And maybe they were just speculating. Maybe that's been happening for a long time and they're just seeing it, but they hadn't known about that before. I mean, have you seen any or heard of any recent reports of cannibalism among animals that wasn't known before? Yeah, cannibalism is, I mean, so here's the other big surprise in the book. The first surprise was how prevalent medicinal cannibalism was mostly in Europe from the Middle Ages up into the 20th century. And the other was just how prevalent cannibalism is in the animal kingdom. And I'm talking about across the entire animal kingdom for all these different reasons. You know, we hear about, you know, who are the cannibals in the animal kingdom? Black widow spiders and praying mantises. Well, it's way, way, way, way, way more than that. And it's not just for, you know, the reasons used to be, well, it's starvation or captive conditions. If you stick these animals out of their natural setting and you put them into a cage or a tank, then the stress is going to cause them to cannibalize each other, which is what happens with hamsters, by the way. But it happens for reasons that have nothing to do with a lack of food. Parental care as sort of a lifeboat strategy, as a hedge against unpredictable environmental conditions, as a reproductive strategy. If you want to, you know, if there's a female that has a baby and you want to, and it's not yours if you're the male who's running this, you know, running this group of animals, whether they're lions or bears, and you want to mate with that individual, then you terminate that maternal investment by consuming the cub. And then she comes into estrus quicker and then you can mate with her. So there are all of these different ways and reasons why cannibalism takes place in the animal kingdom. And among sharks, yes, common. Among animals that don't have backbones, incredibly common for all sorts of reasons. Or if you're looking at fish, so a codfish, for example, can lay five million eggs. And when those eggs are floating past, it's not thinking about, oh, that's Sally and that's Teddy over there. These are like raisins. So it's a safe food source. And so some of those eggs are going to be consumed and most of them won't. But when you're looking at fish, it's probably more prevalent than it is not. as you get into animals like mammals, it's less prevalent. And when you get into primates, it's more rare. But across the animal kingdom, and I try to pick out the most interesting examples of this, from insects to strange amphibians called Sicilians. And that was, you know, when my grandparents heard about that one, and they're Italian, they're like, Sicilians, what are you talking about, Billy? And I said, no, no, no, this is Sicilians with a C, Grandma. But these are strange creatures with some really weird cannibalistic habits that happen to tie into parental care. So yeah, across the animal kingdom, that's the short version. Why is it prevalent among animals with no backbone? Yeah, because they have a lot of, many times they have many, many, many young and many, many, many eggs. And so these are a nutritious, they're a source of nutrition that is not threatening. It's very easy to come by. And like I said, when you're laying hundreds or thousands of eggs, then it's not a problem if a couple of them are consumed. And in some instances, that's what's taking place. So, I mean, that's one of the key reasons why this takes place. It's just not threatening. You don't have to go out and search for it. There they are, and you eat them. And I know you mentioned it's less common among primates, but you have seen it among monkeys and apes. Yeah, it happens rarely. So, for example, in chimpanzees, it's been documented in chimps. Rare, but it happens. So if a female moves between groups and she has an infant with her, then occasionally, as the female is taken in by this other troop of chimps, they will get rid of that infant because it doesn't belong to their group. and then she becomes more receptive. She becomes receptive quicker to the males in her new group if she's not taking care of the baby. And that happens in bears. That happens in lions. And a number of, you know, the big cats are a place where you see that type of thing, but also in chimps. Is it always like babies and eggs and is it ever? Yeah, the smaller get eaten. And sometimes it's the male in sexual cannibalism. You know, everyone's heard about black widow spiders and the male is really tiny. And after he mates, he gets eaten sometimes. And that's because he's not going to be able to find many mates. And when he does, not only is he giving the female his genes, but he's also giving her a good meal to make her healthier. and less apt to mate with another spider, for example. So that's the type of thing that happens. But yes, it's usually smaller gets eaten. And in a lot of instances, that means the young, but also in instances where the female is much larger than the male, that can happen as well. So you haven't seen it where an animal or insect or something is like an adult. They die for some other reason, and they're consumed by other species of their same kind. Well, other species, I wouldn't call it cannibalism. You know, I'd call that foraging. But there are instances where young – there's a spider called the black laceweaver spider. And when it lays its eggs and those eggs hatch, the spiders go through – you know, they're kind of like crabs and lobsters. They've got their skin on the outside of their body. And, you know, excuse me, they've got their skeleton on the outside of their body. And in order for them to grow, they have to molt. They have to shed that outer skeleton, kind of like when you're looking at a soft-shell crab. And as they're growing, they run out of food initially. She actually lays some eggs that are never going to hatch, and the babies eat those eggs. Those are called trophic eggs. But when the trophic eggs run out, at a certain point, the mother just kind of thrums on her web with her legs, and the babies are all attracted to her, and they climb on top of her and they consume her. They literally drain her like they're drinking a big spider-flavored Slurpee. So that's an instance where the babies are consuming the mother. You know, she's giving, and then they go off by themselves and then, you know, they become, you know, they're off preying on other creatures. But initially their first big meal is their own mom. This happens. That's amazing. You know, not to that extent. There are other instances where those Sicilians that I mentioned before, they're kind of worm-shaped amphibians. And when the babies are hatched, they will peel their mother's skin like they're peeling a grape and eat it. That, to me, was one of the strangest examples of cannibalism in nature. Where are these, where are they at? Or where, where are they located? I mean, what part of the world are these? The Sicilians are located in South America and in Africa. You know, there are different types. And the ones that don't lay eggs, the ones that maintain their young inside, that they are even stranger because they will wind up consuming their mother's oviducts From the inside, the lining. And so, yeah, it's strange out there, but it's a whole lot more interesting and complex than just, well, you know, they're starved, so they're stressed, and that's why they're doing this. That's why they're cannibalizing. And that was the thing that was so interesting to me, was that there were just so many reasons why this occurs. And the specialists, you know, the scientists who worked on this stuff, they wrote their scientific papers, but nobody ever took all of these stories and put them in the form that didn't have jargon. And, you know, I'm not, this is not a textbook. It's not an encyclopedia of every animal that I came across. You know, these are stories that, you know, there's unique aspects to that behavior and really kind of interesting animals. And that's what I wanted to write about, you know, plus the history of it in humans and, you know, why that taboo took place, how Columbus used that word as a bludgeon to, you know, to conquer the indigenous people in the Caribbean. You know, when you say the word cannibalism, then you can treat people as not people. And that's just what happened, you know, with these flag planting explorers back then. You know when they were told by their kings and queens that if these are people that look like they can be converted into good Christians then that what you should do But if you find out that they cannibals then all bets are off And so this is what happened in the Caribbean. That's what happened in Mexico. It happened in Africa. If you could label somebody a cannibal, then they weren't a human. Yeah, yeah, that is interesting, really is. I want to, okay, so I want to go back. When I said different species, I meant, and let me just ask you that. Say like on your book here, on your cover of your book here, you got a frog. That's a great picture, by the way. Frog consuming another frog. Say, you know, you get a frog, a bullfrog consuming another, a different species of frog. Does that happen? Right. Not cannibalism. Okay, got you. Yeah. In order to be cannibalism. It's got to be the same species. I'm sorry. Cannibalism as consuming all or part of another individual of the same species. Gotcha. So if it's a different species, it's not cannibalism. You have to be eating the same species as you are. Gotcha. Yeah. Gotcha. Okay. And something else interesting, I'm going to go back to sharks for a moment, because I know that in certain types of sharks, before the babies are born, the young kind of fight for supremacy. and they get eaten before they're even born. Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's a shark, the Sand Tiger shark, which is local to the waters where I live off the coast of New York. And so here are sharks that they've got two oviducts, and the eggs develop inside the female. They're not laid and developed out of the environment. Hold on, let me stop you right there real quick. What is an oviduct? What is that? Okay, so this is the tube in which the eggs sit inside the female. And in some instances, if those eggs are laid, then the eggs pass out through the oviduct into the environment. But in these sharks, the eggs are maintained inside the oviducts. And there's one on the right side, and there's one on the left side. And so the eggs form at different times. so that there are some eggs that have been around longer than the newer formed eggs. And the older ones will hatch first, of course. And those that hatch first, the first thing that they start doing is consuming other eggs. So you've got this action taking place on the right side and the left side. Now, meanwhile, these sharks are getting larger and larger. And when the other eggs start to hatch into baby sharks, those larger sharks will eat them. And at the end, at birth, there are two sharks born, one on the right side, one on the left side. And they've already learned how to hunt. So they are sort of pre-adapted to going out there and finding a meal. And so this is, to me, this is what I term sibling cannibalism. where that very strange behavior that takes place in some sharks. I want to ask you about the environment. I mean, have you found any cases where the environment or society, us, we were a factor that was, you know, that started to change as far as seeing like cannibalism in certain species of animals? Yeah, the one that pops into mind is not necessarily environmental change that we're messing around with the environment. So there are these toads called spadefoot toads that live in the American West. And so I actually got a chance to go out and work with the folks who study these animals. And so they said, yeah, Bill, come on out. These toads lay their eggs in ponds. So, I mean, I grew up in New York. I've been upstate a lot. And when I think of a pond, I think of something that you can go fishing on it. You can put a boat on it. When they're talking about ponds in the middle of, you know, desert conditions in some instances, you know, they're looking at something like, you know, if you spin the wheels of a Jeep and then it rains and it fills up with water, they're calling that a pond. Some of them are larger, but some of them are really small. And in those environments, those ponds can dry up really quickly. Now, if you're a toad, what you have to do is you have to lay your eggs in water. And then the eggs attach into little tadpoles, and the tadpoles then eat, and then they sprout legs. And finally, they can climb out of the pond and water and hop off. But the problem is that those temporary ponds can evaporate really quickly. And if you're still a tadpole and you've got gills and you're swimming around, When that pond dries up, you're dead. And what has evolved is that in these spadefoot toads is that, so the eggs get laid in a big mass in the water. Some of those tadpoles, when they hatch, will, within a day or two, explode in size. And they'll be two, three, four times larger than most of the other tadpoles in that batch. And instead of consuming algae and little particles that are floating around in that pond, these tadpoles consume other tadpoles. So they get these big teeth, big jaw muscles, and as they're eating their brothers and sisters, they're growing really quickly. And so they're sprouting legs and getting out of the pond quicker. So this is really sort of a hedge against unpredictable environmental conditions, and that's why this evolved. You know, I found that incredibly fascinating. That is fascinating. And I was looking at the toads, too, while you were talking, the little spadefoot toads. Oh, sure. Are they poisonous? I didn't see that. Well, some are. I mean, they have these glands called parotid glands. You can usually in back of the eye if you see this big kind of warty thing, which means that if a dog puts it in its mouth, then these glands are going to secrete a toxin and the dog will drop, presumably drop the toad and not pick another one up. There are others who have toxins in their skin, the famous poison arrow frogs and things like that. Let's talk about some of your travels because I find your research just fascinating. So tell me, can you talk about some of the places where you were able to travel, like even your bat research? I'm wondering if that had anything to do with your cannibalism research. Yeah. So a bit of my background. When I went for my Ph.D. at Cornell, I started there in 1990 and pretty quickly decided that I wanted to work on bats. And, you know, there are 1,400 species of bats. And out of those 1,400 species, only three of them are vampires. And people who know me were not surprised that I decided to work on vampire bats. You know, I've always been into the macabre. Alfred Hitchcock is my hero. I've always had, you know, strange, you know, I was a kid that had a monkey and every kind of pet that you can think of. Thankfully, my parents were incredibly cool about that. but when I started to work on vampire bats I was lucky because there were three different types of vampires and most of what 99% of what had been known about them and written about them was about one vampire bat one type the common vampire bat and the other two were sort of open books and and and people told me ah vampire bat is a vampire bat is a vampire bat don't worry they're all kind of the same and I didn't think that would be the case um and and so got to go down to to Trinidad and I also went to Brazil and brought vampire bat, two of the three vampire bats back and maintained them at Cornell and found out, not surprising to other folks, that there were a slew of differences between them. And so that's really how I'm, you know, if I made a mark early on as a scientist, it was because I was able to come up with all these neat differences between the vampire bat species. The thing is, though, that when I went down to Trinidad, when I went to Brazil, the locals knew all about these differences, but they were not writing scientific papers about them. So they became my co-authors, and we got this information out. And now people realize that, you know, that a vampire bat is not a vampire bat, is not a vampire bat. There are major differences between these three. You know, two of them, for example, feed primarily on birds. Common vampire bat is the one that you see on all the shows. They're feeding on cows, and livestock that we bring in. And because of that, we've exploded their populations. So I've done a lot of traveling. Most of my research was done in Trinidad. I've worked in Malaysia. I've worked in New Zealand on a quadrupedal bat that runs around on all fours. And so I've been really, really lucky to be able to go around and do this type of research. Now it's primarily, you know, I just got back from a trip to Belize I was with 34, 35 other bat biologists, and we collected nearly 800 bats. 99% of them were released, but they take tissue samples, and they took blood samples, and there were all sorts of experiments that were being done and papers being written. And so I got to go down there with my wife and sort of get back in the field. I hadn't collected bats in probably 8, 10 years. So we were back out there in Mayan ruins setting up nets to catch bats, and it was incredible. We had almost a full eclipse this night that we were out there setting these nets up. So I'm very lucky, and I've always had a close tie with the American Museum of Natural History, and I've been a research associate there for a long time. So, yeah, I'm just, I've always been incredibly lucky about the people that I get to hang out with. I never really thought that I was like the smartest anything but that my knack was always to I don know just I always wound up with the best mentors and people who are really looking out for me and my career And so that what I tried to do when I became a teacher and just took an early retirement last year. So now I'm writing full-time. That's awesome. And it's really interesting that you're, you know, you focus on bats and you're the perfect person for me to ask about. I see all these like giant crowned, golden crowned, you know, bats. I don't know if they're photoshopped or what. I want to ask you, like, how big do those get? I mean, what's the largest of those that you've ever seen? Flying foxes are not, first of all, they're not foxes. Those are the largest animals. And, you know, if you're, none of them weigh more than a pound or two. So there's some of these pictures that have a force, you know, I see photographs and they have a force perspective where you can make anything look large depending on how you hold the camera. So you really have to take some of these things with a grain of salt. But the largest non-flying fox is a bat called Vampyram Spectrum. And we caught one of these. They're a handful. You want to hold them with heavy gloves, but they don't weigh a pound so they're very lightweight which makes sense because they fly but you've got to be careful when you're looking at these pictures with this guy and it's got the wings spread out on this thing and it looks like it weighs about 30 pounds there's just no such animal this is just pretty much bull I hate when they do that so let me ask you any instances or any species in bats that cannibalize each other? Bats are not really cannibals. I mean, any animal, if you really stress it out, will probably cannibalize. But there's nothing, you know, I would have written about that if I'd have found instances where bats were cannibalized. But no, nothing. And I think that has to do with the fact that the whole idea of consuming the young goes out the window When you think that bats have either one or maybe two offspring a year, these are not flying mice. They're more closely related to humans evolutionarily than they are to rodents. So they don't have dozens and dozens of offspring that you might be able to munch on one of them every now and then. And it's just not the case with bats. They produce far fewer young than a lot of other animals do. Now, tell me about a surprising species, like something that you didn't expect to find cannibalism happening. Is there one that caught you by surprise? Boy, oh, a surprising species. Maybe even a surprising method of how they cannibalize each other. Yeah, let's see. I'm trying to think of something really kind of neat. But one of the things that I found to be really interesting didn't take place in the wild. And it actually took place on farms back in the early part of the 20th century, in the 20s and 30s, when poultry farms got much larger. And when this occurred, there was a lot of overcrowding. So we didn't have the modern techniques to separate chickens, for example, that we do now. And so you had these overcrowded situations, and there's this thing called pecking order, which everybody's heard of. And that really boils down to who gets to eat first. And when you packed these birds too tightly, then the animals who didn't get to feed were sometimes pecked death. And when blood showed up, when chickens see blood, they would kind of go crazy. And so there was a lot of cannibalism in these overcrowded conditions. And so the way that poultry farmers got around this is that someone invented little tiny sunglasses. sunglasses and they were rose colored sunglasses that they installed on the on the beaks of these birds so that they were not you know that when they saw red they weren't going crazy because they pretty much saw red all of the time and and that became normal for them um and these little sunglasses prevented um the cannibalism from taking place you know so i had to order one so i I think the thing was made in like 1939. And they used to make thousands of these and sell them to poultry farmers who would put them, install them on their birds. But when the conditions changed and poultry farmers figured out how to alleviate these overcrowded situations, they really didn't need these anti-PEC specs, they were called. That's neat. Wow. I mean, are they still having to do that or no? Not really. I'm looking at a pair of them right now because I use these when I give talks. And if you use a chicken skull, it's too small. So I tape these to the nose of a fox skull, and you can see how they work. You know, when the animal looks down, the lenses pivot out of the way so that it can look at the ground and not see red. but no I don't believe that's used anymore no okay okay tell me about your do you have any other like really neat research trips planned or anything like that oh since I just got back no I have so I'm working on I'm actually working on three different projects two of them are are fiction and one of them is I'm in the middle of my next nonfiction book which is going to be about teeth. So, uh, and I just had a book come out called pump on a natural history of the heart. And so I've been doing a lot of, of, of, uh, media and talks related to that book, but mostly right now, I just tried to, now that I'm back from Belize, I just, I just submitted a, a novel this morning to my agent. And, um, and now I'm just gearing up to finish writing this tooth book, which is due in May. So no research trips planned at this point. And can I ask you about your tooth book? I mean, is it all about teeth and stuff like that or what? Yeah, I mean, it's very much, to me, it's very similar to cannibalism. It's very similar to where I go through and I look at really interesting examples in the animal kingdom. And then when you look at the history of dentistry, it's crazy. There's all sorts of weird stuff to go that went on. And then looking at modern medical techniques, that's what I did a lot of in Pump, the book that's out now on the heart, where I was always interested in sort of the cool aspects of animals. So for example, in Pump, it was, you know, who's got the neat circulatory system? But what I did in that book was the examples that I used, and these were things that range from invasive species like Burmese pythons to Antarctic ice fish. I tried to pick animals that not only had interesting circulatory systems, but were being used by researchers now. Researchers were studying them in order to advance cardiac medicine. And so that to me was kind of new. I like to have a dollar for every time somebody said, You study vampire bats for the last 30 years, but how does that make my grandma live longer? And so this was an instance where there was more relevance to the animals that I looked at because they were not only really neat and not only had cool circulatory systems, but they were being used to further our knowledge and keep people alive, basically. So that's what I'm doing with teeth as well. I'm looking at interesting aspects of dentition and how it ties into the human condition as well. But the historical stuff is nuts. Oh, yeah. You have to come back for that one. Oh, sure. I'd love to. You have to come back for that one. I know some of it. Some of it I've actually looked at and I thought, wow, this is just unbelievable. But yeah, please come back and talk to us about that one. Oh, certainly. I'd love to. Okay. So before we go, Bill, I want you to take a moment to tell my listeners where they can find out more information about you or any other projects you're working on. Sure. I'm pretty easy to find on the Internet. So if you want to look at my website, it's BillShutt, B-I-L-L-S-C-H-U-T-T dot com. I'm also pretty easy to find on Twitter and Facebook. My books, luckily, are available. They're all still available, whether it's cannibalism or my first book, Pump, which was about blood and vampirism in the animal kingdom. um um oh no well pump was pump is the new one on on the heart but um but dark banquet was was my book on on on vampirism in the animal kingdom see i'm getting confused here um but all of them are still available in in every format so they're they're pretty easy to get a hold of um you know anywhere that books are sold and whether you like audio books or or you want a paperback or or a hardcover. So I'm very lucky in that regard. Very good. The book is called Cannibalism, A Perfectly Natural History. Bill Shutt is my special guest. Bill, many blessings to you. I really appreciate your time. Thank you very much for having me on your show. Take care now. To find out more about our guest and all others, please visit our website at mysteriousradio.com.