This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. Over the last couple years, didn't we learn that the folding chair was invented by black people because of what happened in Alabama? This Black History Month, the podcast Selective Ignorance with Mandy B unpacks black history and culture with comedy, clarity, and conversations that shake the status quo. The Crown Act in New York was signed in July of 2019, and that is a bill that was passed to prohibit discrimination based on hairstyles associated with race. To hear this and more, listen to Selective Ignorance with Mandy B from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio. Hi, my name is Robert Lamb, and this is The Monster Fact, a short-form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind focusing on mythical creatures, ideas, and monsters in time. Given that video versions of our episodes are now being published to Netflix, I thought it fitting to cover a Netflix monster. And they have quite a few to choose from. In fact, we've previously discussed on Stuff to Blow Your Mind, everything from Black Mirror's Bandersnatch to the creature from Panos Kosmotos' The Viewing. Today, though, I want to take you back to a 2022 episode of the third season of the animated series Love, Death, and Robots titled Bad Traveling. Now, this episode was directed by David Fincher with Frank Balson, Jerome Dengene, and Jennifer Yu Nelson and adapted from the Neil Asher short story by none other than Andrew Kevin Walker. The setting is a fantasy twist on the age of sails with a crew of sailors who brave alien oceans on the hunt for javel sharks, which are harvested for their oil. The ship in our story encounters a terrible storm and is boarded by a monstrous crab called a thanopod, which takes up residence below deck. Lots have been drawn among the crew to see who has to go down to deal with the monster, and our protagonist, Torrin, winds up with the duty. Now, this is where the plot gets clever. The thanopod, we learn, can use the bodies of the dead to talk. It can puppet them. It's a nice twist that also seems to channel some of that attack of the crab monster energy The thanopod lays out what it wants to reach the populated island of Faden Torrin strikes a deal with the monster He will give it what he wants in exchange for his own life and a key from the captain body The captain's body was previously eaten by the Thanopod. So we then follow Torrin as he employs this key to unlock the captain's pistol and uses this pistol to claim control of the ship. and he puts the matter of fate and island to a vote. Should we bring the creature to the densely populated island or drop it off on a nearby deserted island and just tell the giant crab that this is where you want it to go? There's a great deal of turmoil over this. Some crew members, maybe more than a few, simply want to give the monster what it wants, like whatever it takes. Meanwhile, it becomes clear that the monster is a parent and now the depths of the ship are crawling with its young. It's a fun action horror ride, and the central monster, the Thanapod, is just a real grotesque treat. Lots of excellent crab vibes to it as well. Wonderful monster design. So bad traveling concerns a monstrous, invasive, ship-borne organism, but it serves as a fantastic exaggeration of the very real history and present reality of ship-borne invasive species. Now, there are multiple avenues by which invasive species, plant or animal, have been and are still being spread through human activities. These, as outlined in 2018's Animals and Human Society by Skains and Toksadi, include species introduced just for aesthetics or as a game species, for biological control, which often doesn't go well, or for fur, as well as populations of feral domestic animals, pets thoughtlessly released into the wild, and of course animal stowaways, much like our thanapod. And these occur not only via boat, they can also occur via airplane. One example of this is the brown tree snake. This particular snake is native to eastern and northern coastal Australia, eastern Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, and many islands in northwestern Melanesia. The brown tree snake is only mildly venomous to humans, but its venom packs quite a punch when it comes to birds. And according to biologist Brian Fry of the University of Queensland, you know, that can pose quite a problem The brown snake has been particularly rough on the bird population of Guam which apparently reached aboard Australian troop transports during the Second World War And Fry also points out that the U was still flying military planes from Guam to Hawaii at the time of the writing, and brown snakes have been intercepted at Hawaiian airports in the past. So the potential is there for plane-based introduction of the species to the Hawaiian islands as well. And as for why this particular snake is so adept at hitching rides on planes, well, one reason seems to be their lasso locomotion, which allows them to climb large, smooth cylinders. But when talking about animal stowaways, especially ships play a huge role, with rats and mice standing as one of the best examples of creatures that have spread to every continent except Antarctica, where I believe the only invasive species is a variety of muscle, and these likely traveled by ship as well. But stowaways include far more than rodents and monster crabs. According to Grasping at the Routes of Biological Invasions by Hume et al., Journal of Applied Ecology 2008, stowaways include organisms that foul the hulls of ships, are transported as seeds or resting stages in soil attached to vehicles, and in ballast water as well as in shipping containers, cargo, and air freight. So, for instance, as the authors point out, brown seaweed, Sargasm amuticum, is a great example of a stowaway species thought to have spread from its native Japan to northern France, the English south coast, and to the Netherlands via contamination of commercial oysters and then via drifting plants. The authors share that vessels provide numerous interior and exterior possibilities for species to spread, but one of the most pervasive is just the hull of the ship itself. So species don't need a climb inside the hull to use it as a means of traveling from one far-flung island to another. They need only affixed to the outside of this vessel, this artificial island, that will then drift from one place to another. There are other examples that we can point to. Arboreal monkeys have also spread to various places as invasive species. And there are accounts of monkeys taking up residence in a ship's rigging It seems like most of these introductions though were via monkeys that were kept as pets, but still there have been accounts from this century of monkeys stowing away on vessels such as I believe a 2014 report of monkeys who boarded in Malaysia and arrived in the Netherlands I think in this case the monkeys were caught and caged in transit and then handed over in the Netherlands upon arrival. One of the challenges of stowing away is, of course, being able to survive a lengthy sea voyage without detection and being able to just survive with some sort of dependable food source. mice and rats remain the best example of note because of course they're highly skilled at living in humanity's shadow eating what we eat or cast aside and so forth there are other interesting examples of animal stowaways invasive earthworms are a great example spreading via transported soils and plants birds can also stow away the house sparrow is thought to have spread aboard roman ships and this is how they reached great britain so while we don't see anything as singular and gigantic as the thanapod in our own invasive ship-borne species, it still works nicely as a fantastic symbol of it all. None of our real-world stowaways are actually aiming to reach specific destinations that they have heard about or inquired of with their puppeted corpses, but they are still ultimately following their genetic mission and taking full advantage of new environments they might never have reached otherwise. Tune in for additional episodes of The Monster Fact, The Artifact, or Animalia Stipendium each week. As always, you can email us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Over the last couple years, didn't we learn that the folding chair was invented by black people because of what happened in Alabama? This Black History Month, the podcast Selective Ignorance with Mandy B unpacks black history and culture with comedy, clarity, and conversations that shake the status quo. The Crown Act in New York was signed in July of 2019, and that is a bill that was passed to prohibit discrimination based on hairstyles associated with race. To hear this and more, listen to Selective Ignorance with Mandy B from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.
