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Chapter 1: What are the different animal defenses discussed in this episode?
Oh, hey, it's your mom's friend who's always vaping into his sweatshirt, Allie Ward. In this episode, it's about putting your dukes up or curling into a ball so that you don't die, either or sometimes both. Let's talk to an ologist I've known for years, an LA area animal icon who invited me to the lab down at California State Long Beach where they're a professor.
for a visit, a tour, and a chat about armadillos, skunks, pangolins, spikes, spurs, stripes, spots, and the will to keep living. So we'll chat in a sec, but first, thank you to all the patrons who support the show for as little as a dollar a month at patreon.com slash ologies. We also have brand new merch about revolutions and protests.
It's up at ologiesmerch.com, designed by Andy Diaz, with proceeds benefiting the National Immigration Law Center. That's brand new. Again, ologiesmerch.com. And for $0, thank you for helping boost the show by leaving reviews such as this very recent one from Jordan D. Friend who wrote, five stars. It's great, but, and it's a big but, they write, it's too damn interesting.
They say, I listen to the podcast as I fall asleep and suddenly it's two hours later, I'm still awake and I'm like, damn girl, beavers are interesting. Jordan D. Friend, thank you for that. I hope it's your real name because friend indeed. Also, thank you to sponsors of the show who let us donate to a cause of eachologist choosing every week.
Okay, this absolute gem studied biological sciences at Cornell, then got a master's and a PhD in animal behavior from Davis, and has taught at UMass Amherst, University of Mississippi, and Harvard, and has been a Darwin postdoc fellow. But above all that, if you know an animal biologist in LA, they know this guy, everyone loves him.
Also, kind enough to help coin a term for this ology, since it's so specific. So, zoo-hoplology it is. It combines zoo, animal, with the Greek root haplon, which means arms or armor. So animal armor and defense. The visit was also a visual feast as I walked past skunk pelts and tiger cutouts and sat under a whale skeleton.
This is our new 3D printed whale. What kind of whale is that? It's a humpback whale. It's one quarter size. Every bone's been individually 3D printed. We just finished it like a month ago.
No. Aren't those leggies or hips?
That's the pelvis.
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Chapter 2: How do animals like armadillos and skunks use their defenses?
Oh, it scares little kids. Like they are running and hiding behind, like some kids love it and want to play with it. Others are truly terrified of this thing.
Yeah, it is scary. I also left with swag. I got a t-shirt and this handy fridge magnet with advice on a skunk spray first aid because when you need it, you need it. More on that later. So let's get right into it. The things that keep critters, including yourself, safe.
From quills to barbs to plates to rotting flesh smells to hair dye to impeccable acting, commendable drama, shrieks, spikes, stinks, and fashion. With animal behaviorist, evolutionary biologist, professor, defense mechanism expert, and thus your favorite, zoo-hoplologist, Dr. Ted Stankiewicz.
My name is Dr. Ted Stankiewicz, and I'm a he-him.
Stankiewicz?
Stankiewicz. So kind of a W for the V. There's no V in it. It's just how it's spelled.
I always put a V there.
It used to be Stankiewicz in Russian. And then when my grandfather was here and he was a little boy in school, they mistranslated it. And so it became Stankiewicz.
Oh, there you go.
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Chapter 3: What role does camouflage play in animal survival?
So that time was sort of very formative to see nature and really get that experience. And you sort of fall in love with the experience of that. So if you ever get a chance to drive across the country and see just national parks and amazing landscapes that are out there, it's really a great experience. Especially you can take your kids.
It's just a transformative type of thing that they'll experience. So, yeah.
Which states haven't you been to?
Hawaii.
Okay.
And South Carolina. Yeah, yeah.
I've been to 48. No New Mexico and no West Virginia.
Okay.
If anyone's listening to this, if there are talks in South Carolina or Hawaii.
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Chapter 4: How do evolutionary traits influence animal defense mechanisms?
If you live in a sort of exposed area and are like intermediate in body size, that's where you're at the greatest amount of risk.
Well, okay.
Male deer, bucks. Yes. Horns of, you know, eight point deer has like eight shivs coming out of its face, but a doe doesn't, but they're still vulnerable to like pumas, let's say. Are the horns used for defense or is that purely just mating? I would be inclined to say just mating, but can you ever stab back?
Absolutely. So deer have antlers and bovids have horns. So they're two different structures entirely. Right. Thank you. So deer have antlers, which are bony. There's no keratin sheath on top. They are shed every year. The only species where the female has them are reindeer and caribou.
And then in bovids, so your antelope, your goats, your cows, gazelles, that sort of thing, all males have horns and some females, females of some species have horns. But to answer your question, absolutely, yes, it's a great weapon to have for when you're fighting over mates, which is what the males primarily use them for.
But it's also useful if you have a predator around, you're swinging those around and trying to stab them too. In fact, we did a study in 2009, and we're following it up now, where we looked at why do female bovids have horns? Why do some species have them and others don't? So females can battle over territory themselves, which is not that common.
Or they are found in larger, more exposed species where they are more at risk of being cornered by a predator. So females can definitely use their horns to defend themselves for sure. They're usually smaller, straighter, more dagger-like compared to the males. But they are definitely useful as a defensive weapon.
Stay back.
Run me down a menu. Let's say that you are a critter, you need defense, and you have a menu of options.
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Chapter 5: What unique defense strategies do horned lizards employ?
When it comes to your PhD, you showed me that you had huge life-size cutouts of tigers and a cougar. What did you study when it came to getting your PhD? Could you tell me a little about that?
Sure. I basically scared deer for six years. It was really a great experience. So part of my PhD was walking towards or running towards deer to look at their escape behavior with speed, directness of approach, if I was holding a fake rifle or not, and looking at how they chose when to flee and how they chose where to flee. So escape decisions were a big part of it.
I was studying black-tailed deer up on the northern coast of California. And their only current large cat predator is a mountain lion. But historically, 600,000 years ago, they would have seen spotted cats, spotted jaguars. And now jaguars only come as far north as Arizona and New Mexico.
You need a big cats episode. I know that. And a few days ago, I recorded Megafelinology with Dr. Imogen Cancellari. But you got to be patient, my babies. It'll be up in a few weeks, I think. But until then, we have Ted's fieldwork hijinks with kind of like cardboard wooden cutouts, which I'm sorry, is very funny. Science is extremely funny.
So we exposed them to pop-up two-dimensional life-size models of a mountain lion, a spotted cat, a tiger, and a cat. and another mule deer as a control. Essentially, I would have a student drive a car, and I would hide behind the car. We would drive past a group of deer, and I'd duck behind the bush. The student would go drive away and put a camera up to start to film.
Then I'd pop the model up over the bush from about 20 meters away, and we'd record their responses. And sometimes they got really, really scared. Other times they just stared at it like it was not there at all. And so we were looking at how the coloration affected it.
And essentially what we found was that, not surprisingly, the mountain lion evoked the strongest response in terms of snorting, stamping, never running away, because those cats need to be about six to 10 meters away before they can really have a chance of capturing a deer. So they just were saying, I'm here, I see you here, don't come around, there's something over there.
So apparently the vertical stripes did not camouflage the big cat shape in that coastal California environment. So they treated the tiger just the same as they did a mountain lion. And the deer, they didn't respond to at all. In fact, I had some males try to approach me with a very interested look on their face. It was a female deer at during model. Had to abort those trials pretty quickly.
It sounds like a Halloween haunted house, like pop up and does a zombie scare you? Does a vampire scare you? Does a guy with a chainsaw?
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Chapter 6: How do mammals like deer and coyotes use physical defenses?
But yeah, I think as you progress in your career, you expand your horizons. So as a PhD student, I was all about deer and escape behavior and anti-predator recognition. And then I started to get more into evolutionary work with bold coloration. We did a lot of work with Tim Caro, who is a well-known mammalian coloration biologist. We've published a bunch of papers now together.
And then I got interested in skunks. And the great thing was no one works on skunks. It's very uncommon to have anyone work on skunks. And those who do usually are just doing coloring and tracking their movements. They aren't doing behavior. I'm a behaviorist at heart.
And so I really honed in on the idea of looking at predator-prey relationships with a defended animal that advertises its defense, the black and white stripes, and their common predator, a coyote. So a lot of what we do is looking at how do skunks perceive fear? How do they respond to predators? And how do predators learn about those types of prey?
Well, you know, that's prevalent too in poisonous insects. Like if you see, you know, a really brightly colored insect or a frog, it's likely that they're either poisonous or they're a mimic of one that is, right? Is that something that a predator learns from the first time or is that innate?
It's a great question. And a lot of work has been done on that very question. And it varies depending on the type of animal you're talking about. We did a project where we trained coyotes to not attack skunks using skunk models. This was a captive colony in Utah. We sort of conditioned them to eat off of brown furry plates, take their normal food off of a brown furry plate.
Then we gave them a skunk model. with their food on it. And the vast majority had a really strong hesitation of, what is that? Like, that is something new. That's bold. That's striped. What is that? Some never even ate the food off those plates. Others, those models had a sprayer so we could spray them in the face with skunk oil when they attacked the plates.
And some got sprayed one time in the face by skunk oil and never again went back. Yeah. Some got sprayed nine times and kept going back for food. So there's lots of variation in willingness to attack boldly colored animals. And so... I think the answer to your question is there's both an innate aspect to it and a learned aspect to it.
Mercedes, our lead editor, told me about a dog they had up in Canada that went back and tried to chew on a dead porcupine numerous times. Numerous times getting just stabbed in the face. They were like, come on, man. But like, is it similar for spikes?
Yes. If you notice spikes or spines, if they are strong, dangerous spines, they tend to be black and white. So porcupine quills tend to be striated black and white. Those are warning signals. You're telling the predator not to do that. And most wild predators will not attack black and white spiky animals because they know. Your dogs are not quite as intelligent as wild predators are.
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Chapter 7: What psychological factors influence animal behavior in defense?
Plus, my thought is that dogs are, they're artificially selected, and different breeds are selected to have what we call hypertrophied aspects of their attack sequence. So some breeds just love to chase and grab and bite, and that's just what they're bred to do, because that's what we want them to do as part of whatever their job had been. And they get so much pleasure
and internal hormonal rewards from doing that that no spike is ever going to overcome that initial drive to want to do that thing so i think that some dogs can learn better than others based on sort of what their background is but some just can't help themselves i think is the answer to that question so The people who buy skunk chew toys for their dogs, I don't know why you would do that.
I see those in the stores and say, don't do that. Why would you ever buy, you're training your dog to go after a skunk, you know? Oh my God. Or a hedgehog if you live in Europe or, you know. So just be mindful of what toys you're giving your dog and how you're training them to chew.
When I first got here, one of my very first grad students, her name was Holly Schiefelbein, very, very first grad student, her project was going to be We made some robotic skunk models. You could drive these little animals around. There was a spraying mechanism in them that could spray, not skunk spray, but citronella spray, which is aversive, just the same.
And the goal was to expose them to dogs and see how different breeds of dogs respond to skunks in different ways. And no one would let us work with their dogs, especially the purebreds. We wanted purebred dogs. We wanted to look at breed differences. And we couldn't find people who would let us use their dogs for it. And we couldn't find a park that would allow us to do that project in it.
So now what we do is we put out static prey models with our trail cameras, our wildlife cameras, and just see how opportunistically we get coyotes in that come and interact with the models or if they contact or if they stay away and varying the coloration or the pattern types or the poses or the type of animal it is. You can do a lot in that respect.
I can't believe I haven't asked this yet, but you work with skunk oil. You have some in a fridge. Your last name does have the word stank in it. How often does that come up in emails, in classes? I mean, it's... Perfect.
Very rarely. Really? I did not even realize it until I was well into working with skunks. In fact, I remember when you actually called me out on your aptonym episode, I think you mentioned me not working with skunks. I had never even realized it up until very late. And so there was no preconceived idea of it. And it's just a coincidence that I don't tend to draw attention to it. But it's so good.
But, you know, it happens. It's important to note that I don't, I'm not a stinky person. No. Just what we work on is stinky. Yes. Okay.
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Chapter 8: How do humans compare to animals in terms of defense mechanisms?
And she's like, I've never thought about it.
Which is, I absolutely love that. I feel like that's a total spinoff podcast.
So we just discussed this in the Acenology episode with donkey expert Dr. Faith Burden, who, yeah, studies beasts of burden. And she noted that taking on a job that's a pun, there's a name for that. It's nominative determinism. And also, if you want to hear Raquel Nuno, a.k.a. Rocky, talk about planetary geology, you can see her selenology episode on the moon.
And also, Dr. Drinkwater, I just emailed his office yet again. I've tried so many times over the years. So cross your fingers. If anyone personally knows Dr. Andrew Drinkwater, a hydrologist, please message me, send a pigeon, whatever it takes. But back to the utterly charming and warm Dr. Stankiewicz.
When it comes to things like spikes versus scales, is there a different level of efficacy in terms of what is a better predator deterrent, or does it totally depend on your environment?
So I often get this question of why do some species evolve spikes, others evolve smells, others evolve armor. I don't think we can really assign a rhyme or a reason to it. I think it's just what you have available as your building blocks. So you think of the carnivores that all use stinky sprays or old odors, your skunks, your polecats, mustelids, weasels, civets, you know, those types of things.
Their ancestors had anal glands. And all carnivores have anal glands that they use for communication purposes. And so they had access to sort of stinky sulfur-based chemicals that they were using for communication that they co-opted. in different ways and to different degrees to use for defense. So they had something, a building block already there.
They were already emitting kind of stinky stuff already in communication. You think about armadillos, there's evidence, fossil evidence that osteoderms, the bony plates that make up an armadillo's carapace, we can find bony osteoderms, individual ones, in the skins of fossil giant ground sloths. What? So the ancestors of the sloths and armadillos are in the same super order. That's nuts.
I didn't know that. There was probably a building block there that got enhanced in some way.
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