Gather around everyone! Sharing the glow of our zoologist campfire today is Matthew P.
Rowe, professor of biology at the University of Oklahoma. Matt works in behavioral ecology,
particularly predator-prey interactions, and he seems to really have a knack for finding super
interesting systems such as owls that pretend to be snakes by hissing and squirrels that make
themselves smell like rattlesnakes. Matt got on my radar due to his work on scorpions, bark
scorpions, and those are in an arms race with their co-evolving predator the grasshopper mouse.
Matt and his wife Ashley have studied this particular case of an evolutionary arms race
in great detail and their work has always presented something of an aspirational dot on the
horizon for my own scientific pursuits. And since it's my decision who comes on this podcast,
Matt, welcome to the podcast. All right, thank you very much. It's indeed an honor
to be invited to your podcast. I hope my stories are half as interesting as the other esteemed
guests that you've already had share their stories around this campfire. I'm sure they will be. But
before we get started, I wondered, I mean, as a fellow scorpion researcher, now grasshopper mice,
this is a fantastic system that you've studied, and they change their receptors so that when they
get stung, the venom doesn't act as something painful, but actually as analgesic, and they feel
actually less pain after a few seconds. But for us, the same venom causes pain. But have you ever
experienced that pain yourself? Have you been stung by a bark scorpion? Yeah, I have been. And
it was a glancing blow. I was being careless. And yeah, always. Right. It's that intermediate
level mistake when you're working with venomous animals. When you first start, you're scared to
death, you're always very attentive. And once you've been bitten or stung, you get attentive again.
But when you get a little bit familiar with them, you get too casual. And I was putting them,
we were in a Florida Canyon in Arizona, in the Santa Rita mountains. And it was just Ashley and
I. And we were collecting scorpions and putting them in bark scorpions, Arizona bark scorpions,
and putting them in a plastic bag. And I got careless. And I was holding the bag with my left
hand and I was placing the scorpion in with my right hand. And it stung me only in the cuticle
of my finger, which there are no really very few pain receptors there. So I didn't feel that. I can
share from colleagues who have been stung what they say a sting feels like. For me, there was no pain.
But my arm went to sleep and it slowly moved up all the way to my elbow.
Ashley wasn't very sympathetic. She's, you know, we're still collect trying to collect and I was
feeling this, that sensation and I turned to her and I asked her, if this gets to my heart, am I
going to die? Because she's the toxinologist and it never got past my elbow, thankfully. But
we have had, of course, you know, we know people who have been stung. We try to tease out their
experiences. And as you know, pain is a variable thing and it depends on how much venom you get.
But a bad sting from an Arizona bark scorpion has been described, the pain of it has been described
as burning yourself with a cigarette and then driving a 16 penny nail through that burn.
And it can last, it can last for days, you know, 48 hours. So it's pretty intense. So
that's my only experience with bark scorpions. Very lucky.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it could have stung me on my fingernail and I wouldn't have had to worry about
that anyway. That's my only close.
Okay. That's not too bad. That's not too bad. I've been way more careless, I think.
Well, I've done other careless silly things. In my youth, I try not to do that as much anymore.
Yeah. Well, and if you work with things like rattlesnakes, like you have,
you better not be careless. Yeah. No, I know. Yep. Absolutely.
So you thought of a few good stories for us today. I'm really looking forward to
hearing some. As I said in the introduction, you've worked with so many different animals,
so many different places. So where would you like to take us first? And when?
Oh my gosh. Well,
I'll start with an early experience I had, and then I'll move into more recent stuff.
But in speaking of rattlesnakes, Ashley and I, of course, have had, I studied the interactions
between rattlesnakes and rock squirrels and California ground squirrels for a number of years.
And when we're out collecting scorpions now working on the grasshopper mouse scorpion system,
of course, rattlesnakes are quite abundant in the habitats that we work. So we have any number of
occasions where we've interacted with rattlesnakes. And one of the first things for your audience to
know is that they really do not want to strike. In fact, some of the research that I did early on in
my career demonstrates that they only escalate to striking primarily if they are touched. So if you
reach down and grab a rattlesnake, the most bites in the entire body are in the
most bites in the United States are what are called illegitimate bites. They're typically
delivered to young males between the ages of 15 and 30 who do something with a rattlesnake that
they shouldn't do. Like, hey, I'll watch this. There was one occasion we were working in
in the Santa Rita experimental range research station run by the University of Arizona, South
of Tucson. And this just epitomizes how unlikely it is that you get bitten. Now, we were careful
because at night when you're collecting scorpions, you're using black lights. And you're working in
environments with jumping cholla, all kinds of nasty, just bushes that want to leap out and
sting you. So we would wear snake chaps because rattlesnakes don't glow under black light. So
there was this one time we weren't wearing snake chaps. We were going out to bait our
trap lines for catching grasshopper mice. And Ashley said, Matt, there's a rattlesnake. And I
said, really, how close is it? And she said, well, it's licking my boot.
Perfectly in a resting coil. A Mojave rattlesnake, which is one of the neurotoxic species.
And it was tongue flicking. It wasn't tongue flicking aggressively, you know, when they're
really upset to do this. It was just doing its and literally the its tongue tips were touching
Ashley's boots. She's very she's tough. She just very calmly backed off. The snake never rattled,
never attempted to strike. So the story I was going to share isn't isn't it was scarier, but
for a very innocent reason. I had was when I was an undergraduate, and I borrowed my this is a
very, very long time ago. Okay, no. Yeah, good. Like 50 years ago. So some of your some of your
audience won't won't be familiar with how the safety systems in cars have changed. We all now
have that three point buckle up system, right? You know, Ralph Nader, bless his heart, worked
long and hard to get those safety measures required for new cars. And I think that's
the most important thing. And so we now all get in and we have this shoulder belt and this lap belt
and the very conveniently spring loaded and well back in the day when the shoulder harnesses first
came out, they weren't spring loaded and they weren't attached to your lap belt. They in a
harness above the passenger window for the passenger and the right the driver's window for
the driver. And as an undergraduate, I was working on rattlesnakes and in how
what their rattling meant to California groundswells right then the scrolls say oh this
is venomous I'm gonna back off. And I had gone up to a field station in the foothills of this here
in Nevada is to pick up a rattlesnake that they had. Okay, so that we can bring it back to the
to the university. And I picked it up. And of course, it was rattling and I had to go to
the university and I was rattling and I put it in an army ammo container because
it was rattling and my friends my roommates car was actually kind of a kind of what in the states
they would call a muscle car. Big engine and big engine. Yeah, dukes a hazard kind of thing.
I'm not here to anybody any of your audience. And the snake was rattling. I was coming back
was about a two hour drive down the freeway and it was rattling, rattling, rattling and then
I just got lost in driving. And all of a sudden, I felt this pop on my shoulder. Oh, and the snake
wasn't rattling. Oh, my brain immediately to it got out. And I have bitten on the back of my back
on my left shoulder. It was the it was the it was a shoulder harness it slipped out of his harness.
All right, I don't know how but I I swear I checked every inch of that car driving 70 miles
an hour down the freeway losing control. That's the closest you could have died of a heart attack.
Driven off the road, you know, so anyway, but one of the things, especially for the maybe for the
people in your audience are just getting started. I would love to share a couple of quotes
that I think back on a lot because they were shared with me, I was an undergraduate. And
for me, they encapsulate the joy of what we do, right? Those, those what are those aha moments?
I've got, I've got a number of those having done this for 40 years longer, if you count my
graduate work and undergraduate research, that they're so meaningful to us, right? That the
things make us go aha, that's just and the two quotes, one is from eyes and I don't I can't
compare myself to either of these scientists. One is Isaac Asimov. Right? Yeah, not just a great
scientist, but man, a wonderful science fiction writer. Yes. And he he once said, he said,
he said, the nicest phrase, the most exciting phrase you can ever hear in science,
one that Harold's new discoveries isn't Eureka, I've discovered it. But that's weird.
Why is that animal doing that? That's funny. Yes. Yeah, exactly. The other is Louis Pasteur,
you know, who's worked on, you know, again, just he it's said, and it's related to Asimov's chance
favors the prepared mind. And what he meant by that was so much of what we do.
So much of what we discover is often based on serendipity. Yes. Right. It just happened to be
in the right place at the right time to see something, some animal, and you think that's really,
really strange. But the trick is to is to be knowledgeable enough that recognize that it's
strange that it is that how you got to those great systems that you found it did you ever
serendipitously stumble on one of these? Yeah, I'm the luckiest guy alive. I mean, seriously,
no Ari, there's there that's Yes, there are three of them in particular, that just epitomize those
two quotes. Okay, well, I'd love to hear that. Okay, so man. Oh, gosh. So the most productive one
of those is the is what got Ashley and I interested in the grasshopper mouse scorpion.
Yeah, it's great. Yeah. And it's the one that has held our attention for the last,
you know, decade and a half, almost two decades. And it all that all started. Ashley had done a
master's looking at the population genetics of bark scorpions throughout the southwest of the
United States. I was of course, working on rattlesnakes and cloning around squirrels,
but also working on other projects with my students. And Ashley, after her master's,
started teaching high school. She Yeah, she did that for a couple of years. And then she got
she just basically got she just basically said, you go off every summer and have all this fun out
in the field. So she went back later in her life. She was in her in her mid 30s, late 30s, and she
went back and got her PhD. Wow. Yeah. And so in thinking about what she wanted to do, it was one
of those aha moments where she had gotten interested in scorpion venom. Okay. As you well know,
scorpion toxins are a cocktail of literally hundreds of peptides, maybe in a bark scorpion.
And as you well know, with your elegant work on on scorpions, which is phenomenal. No, it really
is. It's just it's the primary prey of scorpions are of course, arthropods and many of those toxins
are specific to their prey. But it had been fairly well known based upon some research that come out
of Mexico that bark scorpions also had peptides in their venom that were potentially lethal to
small mammals. Yeah. And we were just talking one evening or out walking and, and probably actually
said, Well, you know, why? Why? Why do bark scorpions have mammal specific lethal toxins?
No, they don't eat. So you know, having worked with ground squirrels and rattlesnakes and knowing
that whole story about, you know, how the squirrels are resistant rattlesnake venomous, well,
obviously, they're probably being preyed on by some mammal. And Ashley asked, Well, what mammal
do you think I should start with? And I said, grasshopper mice. Okay, as in certain parts of
the US, and this has actually been published, some work had been done showing that grasshopper mice
do eat scorpions, but all of that work had been done with scorpions that were not neurotoxic.
Right. And in certain parts of the US grasshopper mice, which for your audience, are tiny little
mice with short study tails, they're only about 30 grams. And they're not typical mice, they're top
level carnivores. And they eat all kinds of nasty stuff. Mostly other art mostly arthropods. You
know, they they pinacotti beetles and have these really noxious sprays, the tarantulas, they these
giant centipedes. And in regions of the US, their their common name was called scorpion mice.
Okay, well, so we thought, well, this is the first animal we should see.
And the mnemonologists we talked to said, oh, grasshopper mice will not eat bark scorpions,
really avoid them. Okay, of course, we had to test that. And sure enough,
they do eat those. And they're not adept at not getting stung. And stung. And the research over
the last decade and a half has demonstrated that the mice are almost completely immune to
bark scorpion. And the research over the last decade and a half has demonstrated that the mice
are almost completely resistant. Well, they're completely resistant at a functional level,
to the peptides and bark scorpion toxins that are lethal to small mammals. In fact,
they can eat one of the more lethal members of the Centurion family, Mexico, who sting is lethal
to small mammals. And they eat them like popcorn. We understand how they do that. It's a mutation in
one of the ion channels that is actually a couple of them that are the targets of the scorpion
toxins that cause your diaphragm to shut down. No more breathing. Yeah. No more breathing.
But the other thing, and this is really fun and exciting, is we discovered that the mice are also
resistant, not completely, also resistant to the toxins that cause pain. And as you know,
venom has kind of two main functions in the critters that possess venom. They can use it to
capture prey. They can also use it to deter potential enemies. And one of the things that
distinguishes those two broad categories is that you don't need to have a painful venom to capture
your prey. You just need to slow it down. So those venoms tend to be paralytic. You only need a pain
component if you're using your venom to deter a potential predator. And so most defensive venoms
are both, they have some component of tissue damage or neurological dysfunction, and it's paired
with an immediate sensation of intense pain. Pain is the advertisement, right?
It is. It's exactly what it is. And people have wondered, well, are both necessary? Could you have
a defensive venom that wasn't painful but was toxic? Or could you have one that was only painful but
not toxic? And the grasshopper mice, this is another one of those little aha moments,
presented us with an opportunity to disentangle those two components.
Which is a super rare opportunity and really important for the evolution of venoms.
Yeah, because the mice are resistant to the toxins that kill, it's only the pain components
that are driving their decisions, their choice of whether or not to eat a bark scorpion. So
we did those experiments, and long story short, pain is necessary because it gets the scorpion
dropped, but it's not sufficient because even though a grasshopper mouse, which feels a tiny
fleeting bit of pain, and I can share with your audience why that is, a bark scorpion sting,
as I've mentioned before, can cause, in us, unbearable pain for two days. For a bark
scorpion, for a grasshopper mice, it's tiny, it lasts about three seconds, they might drop the
scorpion, the pain is gone, in fact, they're co-opting the pain component, turning it into
an analgesic, so now they don't feel the pain and they go right back and they eat the scorpion.
So pain, as you correctly identified, is the signal, but it's got to be for a long-term
strategy, right? It's got to be paired with some kind of debilitation.
Yeah, it actually has to have a real threat attached to it. It's amazing to hear the
background of this system that I know so well, and I read all your papers, of course, about it,
and so the prepared mind in this case was you knowing that these grasshopper mice eat
scorpions. Yeah.
And how did you happen to know that?
Well, literature, yeah, so I was familiar with the publications and with their common name,
scorpion mice in certain parts of the US. I don't even know where I ran into this.
But I was familiar with some of the reports that they would eat things like giant desert
hairy scorpions, which are not neurotoxic. Which are probably bigger than the mice themselves.
Oh, they are. Yeah. Ari, these mice, we joked that if they were the size of a honey badger,
honey badgers would be afraid. Elephants would be afraid, yeah.
Yeah, elephants, they might be. Yeah, so true. So that was one of the aha moments. And I have a
couple other I could share. But I also have anecdotes about various animals that now,
when I'm sitting around at night, maybe drinking a glass of wine, it just brings a smile to my face
remembering these interactions. Those are fantastic. A small moment alone with an animal that you
can remember forever, probably. Yeah, absolutely. So I'll share two if I don't get too long winded.
Oh, please. One was when I was in Africa studying baboons in the middle of the Yokobongo.
Oh, baboons, right. Yeah, many this almost seems like a lifetime ago.
So when is this more or less, which year? This was during graduate school and was hoping to
use, look at the anti-predator behavior of baboons for my doctoral project. It did not work out for
a couple of reasons. And that's when I came back and I got interested in, found out, I can tell you
about the brewing, that became part of my dissertation. But I got over to Africa,
the Morimi Wildlife Reserve and the Yokobongo Delta, which is a very remote, very, it was then,
I hope it still is now, pristine ecosystem with all of the top level predators, leopards and lions
and black, all of that. It must be gorgeous. I've only seen it in documentaries, I'm afraid.
Oh, all right. It must be great to be there. Yeah, it was. So I was there twice, five months in 1980,
four months at the end of my PhD, 1984. And both times I was looking at baboons. And
I had hoped, like I said, to study the interactions between baboons and in particular
leopards, because there were reports from Herb Dvor that didn't make a lot of biological sense,
that baboon troops had a very interesting geometry, where they would forage through the
environment and subadult males would be on the perimeter and adult males with the young would be
in the center. And the adult males were protecting the phalanx of subadult males are out there to
defend the entire troop. And of course, it didn't make any sense based upon what we know about
selfish genes and natural selection, right? Yeah. So I was going to test that model.
And as it turns out, it wasn't testable because baboons, at least in the Morame, don't forage as
a tight-knit group. They are just strung out along a long line. And the predators, like leopards and
lions, typically wouldn't show themselves to the part of the troop that... And we had to walk with
these baboons on foot. Yeah, you couldn't drive. It's a delta. It's almost quite swampy, I imagine,
and very hard to get to any part in that area. Yeah. And in fact, the Borough River comes down
out of the Angola Highlands. And the highlands get their rain in January and February. And then the
high water slowly works down to the delta, which is a big Okavango delta, a big England sink.
And basically, there's no exit to the sea. It just all evaporates. And so during the low water season,
the baboons make some water crossings, but not many. I'm actually jumping stories here,
but I'll come back to the other one. But then as the water level rises up,
it becomes a gigantic swamp with long open stretches of water and
pockmarked by these little islands. And so the baboons have to traverse these water crossings.
And yeah, I've switched gears here. So maybe you can edit this so it makes the transition
a little less choppy. But the baboons were just deathly afraid of crossing water. Okay.
There was something into water that scared them. Yes. And they would come to a water crossing,
and they would sit there for an hour up in trees, scanning the water, alarm barking, looking out,
general sense of agitation on the part of the troop. And then eventually, they would start to
move across the water crossing. And they were adept at choosing the path that was shallowest
from one island where they were foraging to another. But the reason they were so agitated,
and but they the reason they were so agitated was because of crocodiles.
All right. And so in fact, the baboons are so afraid of crocodiles that they wouldn't drink
at a water crossing. The little camp we had in the Morame, we just, we had a pump and we'd pump
water directly out of the Borough River and drink it and it was, you know, it was perfect. It was
clean. Yeah. But the baboons would never drink at these water crossings. Instead, they would drink
in the middle of an island in a rain puddle. Really? Yes. What to us to be not a safe place
to drink if parasites were what you're most afraid of, but they were justifiably afraid of crocodiles.
Mm hmm. And so when I was there in 80 and again in 84, especially in 84,
there were only two researchers in camp and one of them had finished their data collection. So I was
out walking around with the baboon troops by myself. And I always felt fairly safe.
Okay. I made a water crossing. Some of these could be 50 meters long.
Okay. That's quite a ways up. Way deep. And some of the wild tour guides that we became friends
with in the town of Mounds said they would never make a water crossing that was more than knee deep.
Okay. All right. But when I was with the, we studied two different troops, one of which
roosted in camp and when I was studying camp troop and they would go out and they would make
these water crossings and come back, I at least felt safe safety in numbers because I was one of
70. Right? Yes. You know, my chances it's the selfish herd phenomenon,
but sometimes they would make a decision to roost on a different island. And I'd have to
make these water crossings back to camp by myself. Probably at the end of the day.
At the end of the day, you can't not go home. Yeah. And I wasn't good at climbing palm trees.
So I'd make these water crossings and I was smiling. And imagine those are Nile crocodiles.
Those are not little tame. They're big. They're huge. Yeah. There was actually,
we had friends studying Brown hyenas and lions in the Kalahari. They were funded by
the Guggenheim foundation and one of the Guggenheim people came out to visit them,
looked at their, you know, and then went up to the Okavango and was bathing and got eaten by a
croc. So, you know, okay. Yeah. So it's the threat is real. Yes. So I was smiling when I was listening
to Rodrigo Dillamarts story about the grizzly bear and one of his grad students, you know,
pulled out there. All of us carry the Swiss army knife, the little red, right? So when I was making
these water crossings by myself, I'd pull out my little Swiss army knife and then open up the
biggest blade and walk with it. And the only thought going through my head is, you know, you
can't, crocodile skull, you know, I might as well just take that knife if I get jumped by a crocodile.
Anyway, those were, that's probably the greatest risk that I've taken over my career. But I got
started on that because one of my drinking wine, looking back and thinking about animals,
wild animals I have known to see a lot, Ernest Thompson Seaton,
was a little baboon called Wimpy. Now, Wimpy, he was about a year and a half old, 18 months,
which puts him kind of developmentally into that middle school age for people, you know, kind of a
sixth grade little boy. And he was, he was just mischievous as heck. Anybody that doesn't believe
in evolution, just go study a primate anywhere. Spend some time with them and you're going to
recognize they lie, they cheat, they have friends, they grieve, they, you know, they have fun. It's
all of the emotions that anyway. So Wimpy discovered we had a, we had an outhouse.
It had half of a, half of a toilet seat, the bottom half. Okay. So we only had, because this
is a remote part of Africa, it's very difficult to buy something. So we had half of a, half of a
toilet seat. And toilet paper was really, really hard to, you know, that was just a precious
commodity. Well, Wimpy discovered that he could get our attention if he ran into the, to the
outhouse, grabbed the tail end of the toilet paper and ran through the pan. And because this is so
precious to us, we were running after Wimpy, took out all his toilet paper and he would start to
scream and that would attract the attention of the big males. Oh, oh yeah. And, and, and male,
the canines on a male baboon are bigger than on a leopard. And you know, oh my gosh. So,
but that wasn't his coup de grace, coup de grace. But we, we did try to have a land rover for a
while and it just wasn't functional. So we buried it, but we cannibalized the top. Okay. And turned
into a solar water collector. But it's prior to that to take a warm shower, you heated up a five
gallon bucket of water over the fire. You poured it into another five gallon bucket that had a,
a spigot attached to the bottom. You pressed it right. And then he, and it was great. But
one of the, one of the other grad students who was there when I was there in 1980, whose father
was an architect, designed this thing. So we had this, this roof of a land rover,
and we had some corrugated tin and we, we got some hose, some garden hose and we sprayed the whole
thing black. And we turned it into a solar panel. Right. And we had a solar panel. And we had a
solar panel. Right. That'll work. Yeah, it did. It worked great. And of course you had to cover it,
the roof with the instant one plastic. Yes. Yeah. That's even harder to get than toilet paper.
So you can see where this is going. Yeah.
Withy discovered he could run in, he could grip the plastic off of our solar collector
and, you know, even got a bigger reaction from us. And we had to, and it still didn't work.
We had to pile all of these acacia branches around the solar panel to try to keep Wimpy
from wreaking havoc. There's, there's one little mechanic of Wimpy, and this is the reason I smile
when I think of him. One, I, I don't know, I don't think I was that mischievous when I was in,
in middle school, but he, he had, he had something to him. There was one day, and this is,
this is always been special to me, where typically in the morning, if the troop roosted in camp,
they'd get out slowly, you know, which is kind of nice. And you'd get out and make some coffee and
toast some bread or something. And then you'd be taking a census, the morning census, when the
baboons are all out ventral basking in the sun and they're not, because then they're quiet and you
can, and I was doing that one morning and lost in thought and recording who was where, as leopards
would sometimes come in and, you know, you couldn't always be guaranteed that the, the baboons who went
up in the trees at night would still be there in the morning. Wow. Okay. And, and I was taking a
census and, and all we wore was shorts and flip flops because especially in high water season,
you couldn't wear shoes because you'd get foot rot from, you'd get a fungal infection.
And it was warm enough. You really didn't need anything other than a pair of shorts. So I was
taking notes and I felt, felt a little pressure on both knee at the same time.
Okay. Not scary, just, just gentle. And I looked down, there's Wimpy. And he was standing on his
hind legs. And this is one of those moments where you feel that connection. And he had a hand on
each one of my knees and he looked up and I looked down, you know, and it was just, it was a,
aw, community moment. Yeah. So that's one, you know, if you've been at it as long as I have,
that's one that, of many, many of those special moments, which is in part why we do what we do.
When a real wild animal like that sees you and interacts with you, it's a, it's a special thing.
Yeah. Yeah. How long had you been there before you got that connection with Wimpy?
The eight. So, um, they, yeah, they, so the, the, the camp troop, which was the one that was studied
the most often, um, there were other researchers, other grad students that had been there before me
and they, um, so they were habituated to, this is going to sound terrible.
They were habituated to Caucasians. Right. Come in and study them. Yeah. If a novel Caucasian came in,
they would be very wary of them for two weeks, a week or two. So you would,
you would have to be off on the edges and then actually, um, if, if one of the, the local people
came and wanted to work with the baboons, we didn't have anyone to work with baboons and that's our
fault for not better involving the Botswannans in that research, in my opinion. Um, they, the baboons
would, would take a lot longer to habituate. Right. They were, they were, they were very adept
at recognizing faces. Um, but yeah, because, because of the previous researchers there,
it wasn't, it didn't take months for me. Now when, when in that process did Wimpy come up and put
his little, probably, probably much later than that. He really had to gain his trust over a long
period of time. Yeah. Even though we chased him all the time, you know, he was, he was, he was
a great, great guy. Yeah. Even though we chased him all the time, you know, well,
chased, followed with a notebook, I imagine. Yeah. We never, we never caught him. And of course he,
I think he took great fun in watching this tower to the big males that he would have tried. Thank
you. They, they could have really, uh, that could have been, but, but as you, as, as you said about
the rattlesnakes, I don't really want to bite for every predator or a defensive animal that has a
great weapon. There's also a risk. That's so true because rattlesnake still has to put his head
quite close to you and can break off his teeth or can be smashed in the head. They have a very
fragile skull. And I guess for baboons, there's also a risk in attacking a human. I mean,
yeah, we can do very much, but we can do something. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So
nobody wants to attack. Nobody wants to be, no, for, for the, you know, in terms of the systems
that you and I have studied, there's even a cost of venom production, right? So, you know, to,
um, for, for, for animals like rattlesnakes and scorpions that use their venom, both to capture
prey and, um, to deter predators, you know, if you can get a predator potential enemy to back off
with injecting them, then better say, so you can eat the next day. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. I
noticed when, when reading again through your, uh, CV that, um, that you work with Bill Hayes,
uh, who's also studied. Yeah. Yeah. I've worked with Bill. Yeah. Yeah. He also studied the
expenditure of, uh, of, of scorpion venom, right? He did a lot of that work on venom. Yeah. He
sure did. With Zia Nisani, his, his grad student. And I know him because I stayed at this place when
I was looking at scorpions in the U S so, yeah, it's a small world. It is. So, you know, I have,
I have other anecdotes about animals. Um, I've got other aha moments. Uh, so you've worked with
so many animals. Is there one group that's your favorite? Cause, uh, most biologists have a
favorite group, right? I mean, we don't, we shouldn't say it, but we do. Oh, Ari. Ari, Ari,
Ari. That's so tough. So I know, I, I know, I know when I'm going through my collection of
scorpions in the lab with my grad student, it says every second species, you say, this is your
favorite species. Well, I guess at that moment it is. That's true. That's true. Yeah. I mean, so,
so obviously grasshopper mice, because they are so, so amazing and they eat so many. I mean, one of
the projects we're working on now is how is it that they can eat these there? Some people call
them bombard your beetles, but that's an in label. They're darkling beetles or pinacati beetles.
And nothing is darkling beetles. Almost nothing. I mean, some spiders are specialized in darkling
beetles, but that's upper mice again, eat them like popcorn. Yeah. And the Tom Eisner, which is
a name you probably familiar with the original, uh, evolutionary biochemists, right? Uh, ecological
chemistry, uh, documented, he thought that grasshopper mice ate darkling beetles by grabbing them,
sticking their butts in the ground. So the spray, this noxious, you know, um, benzoquinone spray
that can really damage your eyes would be dispersed harmlessly in the sand.
Okay. And so we tested that. And as it turns out, grasshopper mice get better at feeding on
darkling beetles, but they get sprayed a lot. Okay. But, um, but they, it's kind of like the
scorpion thing. They will come back after getting sprayed until the beetle runs out of spray. And
at that time, the grasshopper mice eats them. And you can find, you can be out in the field and you
can see a carapace of a darkling beetle that a grasshopper mouse has eaten because innards,
right? Right. Yeah. But, um, anyway, so grasshopper mice, but, oh my gosh, I've studied
burrowing owls. I've studied sawed owls. There's a, one of those anecdotes about cute animals that,
you know, wild animals I have known. I was working with a graduate student looking at the, uh,
impact of urbanization on burrowing owls in Florida a long time ago. And burrowing owls-
They're these very small, cute owls, right? They're small, cute. They are fosorial in the sense that they
will use abandoned prairie dog or ground squirrel burrows, uh, to, to raise their young, you know,
that's where they nest. It's the refugium. And when it rains or when a predator comes along.
And, uh, I got interested in burrowing owls because of this report that they had a, um, uh,
hiss, it sounded like a rattle of a rattlesnake. And anyway, that was one of those aha moments,
but the anecdote I was going to share when a graduate student, my first graduate student,
and I were looking at the impact of burrowing owls, urbanization on burrowing owls in Florida,
Cape Coral, Florida. Um, they have these big clutches and they, they have lots of little, um,
owlets and the owlets are staggered in size because they're asynchronous hatchers. So you have eight
of them. Wow. And the burrow mound gets bigger, you know, and, uh, there was one time and we were
and we were documenting cause the impact of urbanization on, on burrowing owl colony down
there. And, um, the little ones oftentimes stand close together waiting for mom or pop
to bring in food. And they're so funny because they'll stand there and they'll try to take your
bearing by tilting their head. I can't tilt my head nearly as far. They can tilt their heads this
far. And it was one time Ari, we were, my graduate student and I were watching this group of burrowing
owl owlets and they were lined up in a line in perfect descending height. Always the next,
always the next, always to the young one. And we were, we used our car as a blind because it was
an urban area and it worked pretty well, but they were doing this and it was synchronous. They were
doing this back and forth, tilt their hill, tilting their head. And the lowest one on the very end,
tilting his head so far, he fell over. Oh, that's very cute. We were laughing so hard.
It's in our field notes. You know, I was writing the rain notebooks. It was anyway, it was, uh,
yeah. So what are my favorites? I've been very lucky, uh, very blessed to have
spent a lot of time in the field studying a lot of interesting critters. Um, and I, you know,
I wish I had another lifetime to do it, um, because it's just, it's magical. It's just such a joy.
It is. I'm just imagining the owlet. Were you able to attribute that to urbanization or?
I guarantee you he'd lead to us anthropomorphizing. He seemed so embarrassed by it. He got,
shook himself off and kind of looked around, but nobody saw.
You know, we shouldn't attribute human emotions to our, to our study animals, but
sure. Look that way. Um, yeah. And I don't know if, if, if we're running out of time, but one of the
other aha moments relates to burrowing owls. Um, and that suggestion that they might have a hiss
that sounds like a rattlesnake's rattle. This had been first documented back in the late 1880s by, uh,
uh, early naturalist named, um, Samuel Garmin. And he wrote a paper in, in 1888 that, um, it was an
anecdote, which he was out in the great Plains and they had seen a burrowing owl because burrowing
owls use abandoned prairie dog grounds for burrows, except in Florida, where they have learned to dig
their own, I guess, cause the soil is so sandy, but the West, they use abandoned, uh, colonial
saguare burrows. And so you oftentimes get ground squirrels or burrowing, uh, uh, prairie dogs and
burrowing owls and even rattlesnakes in the same area. In fact, Ernest Thompson Seaton calls it
the happy family, right? Where the owl stands guard, the rattlesnake provides safety, uh, for
the prairie dog or squirrel pups that are in the burrow. And that myth got started maybe in part
because of Garmin's report. They were out in the great Plains and they saw a burrowing owl run down
into a prairie dog burrow. And as an early naturalist, they wanted to go collect it. So
they were digging the burrowing owl out of the prairie dog hole and they heard a hiss. They heard
a rattle actually. They described it as a rattling sound of a rattlesnake. And it turned out to be a
burrowing owl. So that was the first, the earliest report that I could find of burrowing owls
mimicking rattlesnakes. Now I didn't, I didn't actually believe that. I thought, well, that's
pretty far-fetched, you know, but, um, totally different project that was looking at this
comparative project examining again, the anti-predator behavior of two closely related species of black
birds, red-winged black birds that are territorial and tricolored black birds look almost identical
to them that nest in mass and they both nest. And the tricolored, the colonies can be 30,000 birds,
you know, and yeah, close, close, close, close. And so I was, um, I was, um,
looking at how they responded to potential avian predators. I was using birds at the
university of California Davis, rapidly a patient center that couldn't be released. Right.
And, uh, uh, uh, Cooper's hawks, which are unknown bird predators and magpies. And I was tethering
them either next to a black bird, you know, territory or a tricolored black bird, you know,
or a tricolored black bird, Mars. Right. And, um, I had taken a great hordal out from the
Raptor center and had done my presentations and got those recorded. And it was, I brought the
great hordal back to the Raptor rehabilitation center and the director of the center to Matt,
come take a look at this guy is really cute. And he had a, he had a cardboard pet carrying box.
Right. You know, the old ones and, and, and he opened it up just a couple of inches.
And so I came over and I put my head down right on top of this before my eyes could become adjusted
to the darkness at the bottom of this box. I heard a rattlesnake rattle and I jumped back
and I probably swore director anyway, it turned out to be a, it turned out to be a burrowing album.
Wow. And I had, I had spent a couple of years studying rattlesnake rattling and I was, well,
of course, at that point I was condensed. So that led to the whole study where we demonstrated that
the hiss is indeed effective at mimicking the rattlesnake's rattle. And it's even effective
against ground squirrels from populations of squirrels that are knowledgeable about rattlesnakes
who can, from the rattlesnake's rattling sounds, tell whether the snake is big,
and warm or small and cold. So these are sophisticated dupes, right? If anybody...
Yeah, it depends on it, on recognizing these things.
Yeah. So even they were duped.
Wow. So, and it's, that's amazing because it, when we think about mimicry,
people always think about color patterns and bright colors and, and, but never about sounds
or smells. And I really like that of your research that you find mimicry in the
research that you find mimicry in all these, these modalities of sensory modalities.
Yeah.
Yeah. Really cool.
It smells a tough one to crack, but it's gotta be, it's gotta be pretty common.
It's gotta be. Once we get better sensors for smells, I think we will find so much more
in that area. Yeah. Very unexplored area of biology.
Yeah. Wow. That's amazing. It's cool. And then to think that it fooled the squirrels that are,
well, their life depends on it, on recognizing a rattlesnake. So...
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Yeah. I wasn't, you know, when you're younger,
you do things that you think back on and you think, well, maybe I really shouldn't have done that. So
my last day in the Okavango swamps in 1984, and I had, I had interviewed at Appalachian State
University before going out. They offered me the job when I was still out there. So, you know,
back then it was, and it's still not easy to get jobs in academia.
Oh, tell me about it.
Especially at the field biologist, as you well know, as you know. So,
so I jumped at the chance for a tenure track position at Appalachian State University
and had, had funding to stay longer in Africa, but I couldn't afford not to. And so it was my
last night and there was one other researcher in camp and we had this little zodiac that we used
to get around, because what we'd have to do to get in and out of our camp, which is called Babam
camp, which is called Babam camp, you had to go down river to a tourist camp that was a few miles
down river where they had a dirt airstrip and you could fly to the nearest town, which was called
Mount. And we knew a researcher up river who was part of a British team trying to figure out,
and I hope they haven't succeeded, but maybe they have and followed up on it,
how to get rid of setsy flies from the Okavango.
Oh, wow.
Yeah. And setsy flies carry, as you probably know, a couple of different kinds of trypanosome.
One causes human sleeping sickness. The other causes cattle sleeping sickness called nougana
and areas in Africa that still have good wildlife populations, not coincidentally, oftentimes have
setsy flies because it keeps cattle out. It prevents pastoralists from coming in. So I don't
know the status of that program, but we went up to visit with him and have a couple of beers. And so
we went up and we were visiting and he was sitting on the edge of his boat, which was an aluminum,
just a little aluminum boat. And we were sitting on the edge of our little zodiac, tiny zodiac,
with our legs dangling in the water. Okay.
Yeah. I mean, come on. I should have known better. It could easily have ended in a non-humorous fashion.
Yes.
Right?
Crocodiles. Yes.
But luckily it didn't. So the guy that was studying setsy flies, how to eradicate them,
got up to go get us a couple more beers.
Okay.
Okay. Because we were young and he got out. And of course we're just in short cut-off, right?
Got out and his legs were covered in leeches. He must have had 10, he must have had a dozen or more
on each leg. It was like a Christmas tree, a white Christmas tree with long black ornaments, right?
Oh, yeah. They can be big, right? I mean,
these guys are a couple inches. The guy I was with, I won't share his name. We started laughing.
We were laughing so hard. Because what you do is you're supposed to just slap them off, right?
And he was doing that. And of course, everyone he slapped off, there'd be this train of blood going
down his leg.
Yeah, because they have an anticoagulant and it keeps bleeding these little wounds.
It keeps bleeding. And then it hit my coworker exactly the same time.
Wait a minute.
And of course we had to do the slap dance.
So that, yeah, anyway, be careful at who and what you laugh at, right?
But yeah, fine memories.
Everybody covered with leeches. Yeah. And you don't feel them because they have an analgesic
in their saliva.
Completely anal.
Yeah. I had the same experience walking with these terrestrial leeches. You think, oh,
these things are slow. They're never going to catch me. They're already in your shoes.
You just don't feel them.
Where were you? Which part? Where were you on this one?
Oh, that was Malaysia.
Malaysia.
A long time ago. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Many of my experiences are a long time ago. For you, they weren't that long ago.
Well, that's true. Well, we will have to have you back on for more experiences from a very long
career.
It's very, it's been a pleasure being able to share these with your audience. It's been a joy
to reminisce about the many of these experiences. And I would hope that for your audience, they get
some joy from them and even better yet, go out and experience some of them themselves.
Absolutely.
And as you know, you don't have to go to Africa. You don't have to go to Malaysia to study
organisms that are understudied.
No, no.
They can be in your backyard.
Absolutely.
Absolutely. Absolutely.
So little we know about bark scorpions.
One of the most common animals in the desert southwest.
It was fantastic to hear, especially for me personally, but I think for everybody,
the stories about animals in the wild and the background of all that research, because
there's a lot of research going on and published, but these fun parts, we don't hear about enough.
That's why I started the podcast. And yeah, these are definitely fantastic stories.
This is exactly why we're doing this. So thank you very much.
If people want to know more about your research, where can we find it?
The lab website is so I'm retired now from the University of Oklahoma,
but actually I maintain a website.
I'll put it on the screen so people can put it in the description under this.
I still occasionally log back on to ResearchGate.
All right.
Provide an update.
But yeah, especially if they want to keep abreast of the grasshopper mouse system.
I will put all that information in with this podcast and I hope to have you on again sometime
soon if you can think of more stories. But for now, thank you very much.
It was very entertaining.
All right. Thank you so much for having me.
It's been a joy, truly.