What is the strangest thing you learned this week? Either way, we promise you’ll get an even weirder answer if you listen Descriptionis the hit podcast.
The strangest thing I learned this week comes to Apple, Spotify, YouTube and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the weirdest facts, figures, and science spirals, the editors of Popular science can gather. If you like the stories in this article, we guarantee you will love the series.
FACT: Male ratfish have retractable teeth that grow from their foreheads.
By Rachel Feltman
Ghost sharks (also called chimaeras) are already weird. They have special electrical-sensing pores for navigating the deep sea, and one species literally looks like Zero from The Nightmare Before Christmas. But the spotted ratfish takes things to another level with its frontal sexual appendage.
Male ratfish have a structure called a tenaculum, which is essentially a retractable stalk topped with a chandelier of teeth that sprouts from their foreheads to grasp females during mating. Both male and female ratfish develop this structure as juveniles, but in females it simply remains as a small pimple-like knob and never fully develops. Scientists wanted to know what type of teeth they were. Given their placement outside the mouth, it would make sense that they would resemble the sandpaper dermal denticles covering real sharks.
After analyzing the tissues, the researchers discovered that they were real mouth teeth pushing out of the forehead. They discovered the dental lamina (the structure that sprouts new teeth in the jaw) and confirmed that oral teeth genes were active in forehead tissues. They also found evidence of similar structures in the fossil record from more than 300 million years ago, suggesting that this strange evolutionary adaptation was useful enough to persist for hundreds of millions of years. The fact that females have vestigial versions suggests that it was originally for something other than mating, but we may never know what. Listen to find out why ratfish deserve better publicity photos and what other mysteries of mouths and teeth might be hiding in the deep sea.
FACT: Giant chubby-cheeked rats detect landmines and are true heroes.
By Carly-Anne York
This week’s episode features special guest Carly Anne York, an animal behaviorist and physiologist who studies how animals interact with their environments. She is also the author of several science books, including the recently published “The Salmon Cannon and the Levitating Frog (And Other Serious Discoveries of Silly Science).”
For her Weirdest Thing segment, she introduced us to some of her favorite silly science heroes: giant African pouch rats. These rodents are approximately three feet long, equipped with cheek pouches for snacks, and blessed with an incredible sense of smell. They also saved hundreds of thousands of human lives.
These “hero rats” are trained by an organization called APOPO to detect landmines by smell, then give a small claw to alert their owners. They are light enough not to trigger the mines themselves, making them perfect for this dangerous job. (Although they undergo weekly weigh-ins to ensure they stay below the detonation threshold while enjoying plenty of treats.)
To date, these rats have collectively detected approximately 160,000 landmines. A hero rat named Magawa cleared more than 1.5 million square feet of land, sniffed out more than 100 explosives and became the first rat to receive a small gold medal equivalent to Britain’s highest honor for human bravery. A newcomer named Ronin has just broken Magawa’s record at just five years old by discovering 109 landmines.
To learn more about these adorable heroes, who are also trained to detect tuberculosis in humans, watch this week’s episode.
FACT: Wild chimpanzees essentially drink a few cocktails every day.
By Sarah Kiley Watson
About 10 million years ago, our common ancestor with chimpanzees and gorillas developed an enzyme to break down alcohol. This makes sense when you consider that fermentation occurs regularly in nature. When yeast and sugar mix in overripe fruit, alcohol production is a given. Enter the “drunken monkey hypothesis,” which suggests that fruit-eating animals regularly get a little buzz.
Scientists recently followed wild chimpanzees in Uganda and the Ivory Coast, picking up the freshly fallen fruits they liked to snack on and testing their alcohol content. They found that over the course of a day, chimpanzees consume about 14 grams of pure ethanol, roughly the equivalent of one or two standard drinks for humans, when adjusted for body size.
Before you imagine drunk chimps swinging in trees, keep in mind that they eat 10 pounds of fruit a day to get that much sauce. This means that they essentially drink a few glasses spread out over an entire day while Also eat a massive amount of fiber. In other words, no one gets lost in the jungle (at least not regularly). Scientists are now collecting chimpanzee urine to see if the primates actually metabolize alcohol. Listen to find out why captive chimpanzees might be lacking essential fermented nutrients.
