26: Black Widow & Vampire Squid
Ellen: Hey everybody, this is Ellen Weatherford.
Christian: And this is Christian- (and then that's where it will interrupt with spooky music). That's right y'all. It's just the Boo of Us, Halloween edition.
Ellen: It's time to get spooky.
Christian: We here for it. Hope you are too. Otherwise... You're here anyway.
Ellen: We're not stuck in here with you. You're stuck in here with us.
Christian: Each animal we review on the show, we will rate out of 10 based on three spooky categories.
Ellen: You can't just say spooky in front of everything.
Christian: Okay, fine. Three categories: effectiveness, ingenuity and aesthetics. Bonus category: spookiness.
Ellen: It- Okay. I didn't build that into my notes, but it's okay. We'll do it on the fly.
Christian: Me neither, but we're doing it. We are not zoological experts. We do a lot of research and try our best to make sure we're presenting information from trustworthy resources. Who's first this week, hun?
Ellen: You.
Christian: Me? Okay.
Ellen: Yes.
Christian: What I bring this week to our...
Ellen: Chambers! To our dungeon!!!
Christian: Is the Southern black widow spider.
Ellen: Love her.
Christian: Scientific name: Latrodectus mactans. I chose this particular species just because it's near and dear to us, in our geographical area.
Ellen: In our garage.
Christian: Yeah. Many people are familiar with the term black widow spider, but that actually refers to about 30 some odd different species.
Ellen: Oh wow.
Christian: Yes. This species was submitted to us by What Are You podcast.
Ellen: Yay! That's with Megan and Dylan.
Christian: Hi Megan. Hi Dylan. And my information is coming from UF Entomology and Nematology website, entnemdept.ufl.edu.
Ellen: That was so many dots.
Christian: Lots of dots.
Ellen: They got a Morse code URL.
Christian: Also, Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services found at FDACS.gov, and finally, Animal Diversity Web, found at animaldiversity.org.
Ellen: Represent.
Christian: Yup. So, let's get into it.
Ellen: Yeah. Introduce me to the spidder.
Christian: So for those that have not seen this spider, or maybe you haven't even seen a picture of this spider, a basic description is a shiny black spider with a distinctive red hourglass on the abdomen.
Ellen: It's very ominous and they're very pointy.
Christian: Yeah. Their legs are very, uh, spindly almost. Well, I dunno...
Ellen: Slender.
Christian: Sharp is how I would describe them. Although they're not actually sharp.
Ellen: They look like it though.
Christian: Yeah. So that's the basic description.
Ellen: This is like the iconic spooky spider.
Christian: Yeah, for sure. Let's talk about how big they are. So this is another animal where the size is different based on their sex. So for females they are 3.75 to 5 centimeters long, including their legs, and in imperial that is 1.5 to 2 inches. The bodies themselves are about 1.25 centimeters, or half an inch. Now with males, their bodies are only 0.6 centimeters long, or a quarter inch. So the females are a good double the size of the males.
Ellen: Jeez, she sure is. Big mama.
Christian: This particular species in the US is found in the Southeastern region. The range overlaps with the Northern black widow. Outdoors, this species can be found in wood and rock piles, rodent burrows and hollow tree stumps. Indoors, they can be found in places like outhouses, garages...
Ellen: Mmhmm.
Christian: Yeah, sheds and basements, usually low lying areas. Specifically, in our garage, near the ground, against the wall.
Ellen: Near our lawn mower.
Christian: Mmhmm. They belong to the taxonomic family- and I find this pretty funny about how this is pronounced, I think- Theridiidae.
Ellen: Oh my gosh. It's like, okay, so when I talked about the roly poly, the family name was Armadillidiidae. So this is very similar to that.
Christian: Yeah. They're also known as the tangle web spiders, and it includes over 3000 different species.
Ellen: Woof.
Christian: Let's jump into our first category: effectiveness. These are physical attributes. How good are they at what they do? For the Southern black widow, I'm giving a 7 out of 10. So first up, venom. It contains the neurotoxin alpha latrotoxin. It is said to be 15 times more toxic than a rattlesnake's venom.
Ellen: Whoa.
Christian: Yes. In humans, the symptoms of a bite starts one to three hours after the bite, and include: intense pain, rigid abdominal muscles, muscle cramping, malaise- which, this is a new word, I didn't know this word before, it means general discomfort whose source is hard to identify...
Ellen: It comes from the French word.
Christian: Oh yeah? What's the French word?
Ellen: It means, like, sickness.
Christian: Oh, okay. Sweating, nausea, vomiting and hypertension. And for those that aren't familiar, hypertension means an increase in blood pressure. Left untreated, those symptoms last three to five days. But, if you were to go to a hospital for this and you were having a severe enough reaction, calcium gluconate and/or antivenom may relieve or counteract those symptoms within 24 hours.
Ellen: Oh, okay. So this is very treatable, it sounds like.
Christian: Yes. My next point, human fatalities are very rare. One study says that between 2000 and 2006, a total of 23,409 bites from black widow species were reported in 47 States in the United States. So of all those bites, none were fatalities.
Ellen: Wow!
Christian: None.
Ellen: Okay, so they're maybe not as deadly as they're painted out to be. For humans, at least.
Christian: Well, especially not nowadays. So, first of all, the title of that study was "A US Perspective of Symptomatic Latrodectus [species pluralis] (meaning the Latrodectus, all of it species, so that's all the black widows) Envenomation and Treatment: A National Poison Data System Review," the author of that is Andrew A. Monte, MD, Becki Bucher-Bartelson, PhD, and Kennon J Heard, MD. That was published in 2011, and they got their data from the National Poison Data System.
Ellen: Good robust information.
Christian: Yes. So from a medical perspective, it's mostly small children, those with other immunity problems going on, that kind of thing that are most at risk of having a fatal reaction to to this bite.
Ellen: That makes sense.
Christian: Yep.
Ellen: And also they are kind of a metropolitan animal, right? Like they're okay with living in like, populated areas.
Christian: Yeah.
Ellen: So even if they do bite somebody, it's likely that you're not going to be like, a hundred miles away from the nearest hospital or something. Right? Like if you do develop symptoms, treatment is accessible.
Christian: Yup. And it seems like using antivenom is a pretty rare thing that is needed. It's usually only done when there's a very severe reaction.
Ellen: Do they use this venom as self-defense? Do they use it to kill their prey? Like, what is it- what is the venom for?
Christian: It's used to kill their prey.
Ellen: Oh, okay.
Christian: Yes. And then I'll talk about more in the ingenuity part as to why it becomes used on things like humans. So, the next thing on my effectiveness score is on the silk. I just think spider silk in general is very interesting.
Ellen: I'm just now realizing this is the first spider we've talked about.
Christian: Yep. So lots of spiders have silk, what they make their webs out of. I just think that's an interesting characteristic of spiders in general. You know, they use it to catch prey, to suspend egg sacks, that sort of thing. And speaking of egg sacks, my final thing for effectiveness is they have so many babies. Around 220 eggs in a single egg sack.
Ellen: That's so many.
Christian: It's a lot.
Ellen: That's a lot of babies. So are these like the type of spiders that carry their babies on their backs?
Christian: No.
Ellen: Okay, good. Thank God.
Christian: So they create an egg sack, put their eggs in there, and then they'll suspend it in their web usually.
Ellen: Okay.
Christian: I'm betting we might see one of those if we go into our garage.
Ellen: It's probably out there right now, yeah.
Christian: So yeah, that's what it does there. I mean obviously, it's one of those have as many babies as you can cause it's not very likely many of them will survive.
Ellen: I know, they're just little spiders.
Christian: And part of that is because of cannibalism, but...
Ellen: Oh, all right. We're back in praying mantis territory.
Christian: I think this is a common thing amongst bugs, insects and arachnids.
Ellen: Is this another femme fatale situation where the females eat the males after they mate?.
Christian: So that has to do with its namesake. I'm going to save that for the end.
Ellen: Okay.
Christian: That's my 7 out of 10 for effectiveness. I'm moving on to ingenuity. So this is where they do smart things, maybe hunting methods or tool use, that sort of thing. Being a spider, I'm going to give it a 4 out of 10 for ingenuity.
Ellen: Yeah...
Christian: This species of black widow, they make their webs without any kind of pattern. So a lot of the times when you think of a spiderweb, you think of kind of like a concentric circle type thing.
Ellen: Yeah. It's like radiating out from a point.
Christian: Yes. So lots of spiders do that. Black widows do not.
Ellen: Oh, is this where they get the name tangle web? Is that where the family "tangle web" comes from?
Christian: Yeah. Yeah. So, if you were to look at it overall, it would almost look like a, almost like a funnel type of shape, but it doesn't have any kind of distinguishable pattern. However, studies show that specimens with limited food resources will build more effective webs than spiders with at abundant food supply.
Ellen: What does that mean?
Christian: That means they're like, "Aw man, I'm not getting enough food. I better make a better web."
Ellen: Oh, interesting.
Christian: Right?
Ellen: They're kind of optimizing. They're like, well- that's really funny to me because that means that like, when they have access to a lot of food, they're like, "this is fine. Just just throw some silk up there. It's not that big a deal."
Christian: I mean, don't fix what's not broke, right?
Ellen: They're like, "I don't have to put that much effort into this." They're like the underachiever spider.
Christian: Yeah, yeah. So, and then my next and final thing for ingenuity is they actually have a very timid nature.
Ellen: Really?
Christian: Yeah. They will usually run away when confronted with something. They usually only bite something the size of a person if they're trapped between it and something else. So that could mean being sat on, being like- the person is grabbing something and there is a spider there...
Ellen: That doesn't make me feel good, because of this one time...
Christian: Okay.
Ellen: I used to work at PetSmart. I worked there for like two years, and one time it was the end of my shift, I had been on like a 10 hour shift and an important part of the job that I did very frequently was scooping crickets out of the cricket bin. If you've ever been in like, a PetSmart or a similar pet store where they sell crickets, they have them in a huge bin that's usually full of like egg crates and stuff for the crickets to hide in and stuff. So all day long I'd been reaching in there and scooping up crickets and bagging them up for people, and this is not something that you do with gloves on. You just do it because it's just, if you had to be like putting on gloves every single time you did this, you'd be wasting a lot of time and it would get really annoying. So you don't do this with gloves on, you just reach right in and grab it. Well, it was the end of my shift, it was probably like 8:30 at night and I had been doing this all day long and this customer saw me reaching in there and was like, "Whoa, hold on!" And I was like, "what?" And he was like, "that's a black widow, right there in the bin." And I looked and sure enough, it had the red hourglass on its back and it was sitting right on top of the crickets and I had been reaching in that bin all day long.
Christian: Wow!
Ellen: Yeah. And so he was like, "there's a black widow in there." And I freaked out and I, and like I didn't know what to do, so I went and got the manager. I think the manager just like got the spider out and sent it away. But I just felt so like, panicked that I had been reaching in there all day long with bare hands, inches away from a black widow.
Christian: Yeah. I mean, that was probably a big buffet for that spider.
Ellen: Yeah. So apparently that's actually really common. It's really common for spiders to get stuck in shipments of crickets, but the black widow just happened to be the one that was in there.
Christian: Wow.
Ellen: It freaked me out so bad. Happy Halloween!
Christian: So, one of the reasons that spider bites by the black widow have decreased over the decades is with the invention of indoor plumbing. I say this because one of the popular places for people to get bit by a black widow was in outhouses.
Ellen: ...Oh no!
Christian: Yes.
Ellen: Oh, gross.
Christian: Because they would hang out around the seat part of it...
Ellen: [gasp]
Christian: Yeah... Yeah.
Ellen: That is the worst scary story. This is our campfire scary story. I'm terrified right now.
Christian: But maybe check under your indoor toilet too.
Ellen: Stop it! You're the worst!
Christian: So moving onto aesthetics, how pretty is it? Or you know, aesthetically pleasing.
Ellen: Yes.
Christian: I'm giving a 9 out of 10.
Ellen: It's a beautiful spider.
Christian: Yes. So first of all, the glossy black look.
Ellen: Excellent.
Christian: Yeah, it's pretty interesting. It's kinda almost alien-like, to me. Interesting little thing to go back to how they differ between the sexes, so males actually lack the hourglass but may still have small red dots on the top or bottom of their abdomen.
Ellen: Are the males venomous as well?
Christian: Yes.
Ellen: Oh, that's not great. I don't like that you can't tell that they're black widows as easily, but they will still mess you up.
Christian: What I do is I just assume all spiders are potentially harmful
Ellen: Which is not to say- don't just kill every spider you see. Just like, scoop it up into a cup and put it outside, but also don't touch it.
Christian: Don't like, cuddle it with your face or anything. Um, spiderlings, which is what they call a little- the little spider...
Ellen: I never knew that! A spiderling!
Christian: The spiderlings are initially white, without the hourglass or spots. They progressively gain coloration and patterns with every molt.
Ellen: All right, thanks for the new gamer tag. Spiderling. I like that. That's so adorable.
Christian: Yeah, so 9 out of 10 aesthetics.
Ellen: Very good.
Christian: Spooky rating: uhhhh, probably 10 on 10. Funny story that I'm just now remembering, back when I was working on my bachelor's for computer science, I had this one class where we were learning how to program things for mobile devices. There was this one unit where I think it was an iPhone application, we were just learning how to do some things and it involved having like, a character you could drag with your finger and then when it runs into a different character or something happens. So what I did, I made that first character a big black widow spider, and then the second one, like a bird or something, and then when you drag the black widow spider to the bird, the bird disappears.
Ellen: What!
Christian: I don't know why I chose those things.
Ellen: That doesn't make a lot of sense.
Christian: It doesn't, but I learned... Something, I think.
Ellen: was the implication in your mind that the spider bit the bird and the bird died of the venom?
Christian: Well, also the scale was such that the spider was bigger than the bird.
Ellen: Here's my thought for our next D&D session: giant black widow spider. End of prompt.
Christian: Okay. So yeah, spook, 10 out of 10. Miscellaneous info about the black widow. So, their conservation status is no special status.
Ellen: Sure.
Christian: Makes sense. I don't think they're in any kind of trouble. Their namesake came from the belief that females kill and eat males after mating.
Ellen: Is this an accurate belief?
Christian: Not entirely. So that particular behavior was mostly observed in lab conditions with crowded enclosures. So it's thought that that act had more to do with the males not being able to get away than the desire of the black widow female to eat the males.
Ellen: Oh. So it was just kind of an opportunity thing. She just kind of saw the chance and she took it. You go, girl,
Christian: So it's thought in the wild, you know, the male would be able to get away. So that's the Southern black widow spider.
Ellen: Awesome. What a good spider. I have a new appreciation for our little roomy. For our little roommate in the garage.
Christian: Also side note, you know, they're beneficial because of all the bugs they eat.
Ellen: That is so true, and the reason why we have decided to make peace with the black widow that lives in our garage.
Christian: Yeah!
Ellen: So we came home and gosh, when was it that we saw that spider? We had like, I think we had just come home from our trip to Atlanta, and I was upstairs doing something and you were downstairs, I think you'd just come in from like, mowing the yard or something and you sent me a picture from the garage of this black widow spider and I could tell that it was inside of our garage and I was like, well, I didn't want to see that. I didn't want to know about that. But now I do, and I just have to be aware of that.
Christian: Yeah.
Ellen: But I mean, it seems like she stays in the garage and doesn't really bother anybody.
Christian: It's true. She hangs out by the garbage cans.
Ellen: Yeah. She's just kind of minding her own business and we leave her alone. She leaves us alone, and so that seems to be working out well for us so far. More than I can say for that wolf spider that got in our house. Do you remember that?
Christian: Yeah.
Ellen: This wolf spider got in and I saw it while I was- I was taking a shower!
Christian: Just like a movie.
Ellen: And I saw the spider up on the window inside the shower and I was like, "you know what, you kill bugs. I think I'm going to let you stay, but you're on thin ice, pal." And like we kind of had a little treaty. We had a peaceful truce where I just was like, okay, you do your thing, you keep the bugs in check, I'll let you live in my house. That's no big deal. And then like probably six hours later I was brushing my teeth, I think, in the bathroom and then I felt something that felt like a piece of hair on my arm because I shed a lot, and I went to go brush it off and it was that exact spider on my arm and I was like, you have betrayed me. You have betrayed my trust. How dare you. And then I had to come get you to help me put him outside.
Christian: Yeah.
Ellen: Black widow spider? She's okay. She can hang out. She can hang. We're okay with her.
Christian: As long as she stays there.
Ellen: She stays in the garage, and that's kind of her house. The garage belongs to her now. Um, before we move on to my segment, real quick shout out to our Patreon. We have some cool stuff on there, feed of the show with no ads. Cool stuff. Go check it out if you want to help us grow, for this week, thank you to our patrons, Briana Feinberg, Krystina Sanders, and the Jungle Gym Queen. Thanks y'all.
Christian: Thank you!
Christian: So Ellen, what do you have for us this spooky evening? (It's like 11 in the morning.)
Ellen: Well for this week, I have a very festively named friend. This is the vampire squid.
Christian: Ooooh!
Ellen: [poorly imitates sound of thunder] That's thunder crashing in the background, and imagine that there's a storm and lightning and stuff. Now, the vampire squid, scientific name Vampyroteuthis infernalis. This species was submitted by our buddies over at Spooky Spouses, which is a very delightful and perfect for the season little podcast done by Jordan and Lindsey Reed, it's really great, go check them out. They requested the vampire squid.
Christian: Thanks y'all.
Ellen: And also the jungle gym queen who is our buddy.
Christian: Thank you, thank you.
Ellen: Yes. Thank you to all of you who suggested this awesome animal. I'm getting all of my information on this animal from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute.
Christian: Ooh!
Ellen: Yes. They have kind of been the champions of vampire squid research. They have done like pretty much all of the research on this animal. They have done remote-operated vehicle dives, like where they've sent basically little like exploring robots into the ocean down into where the vampire squid lives. They had over 24 hours of footage from over 200 vampire squid encounters.
Christian: Wow!
Ellen: Yeah. Which is really something considering where they live. So to introduce you to the vampire squid, this is actually not a very big squid. Its total size of the whole body is about a foot long, or 30 centimeters. It's about the size and also the shape of a football. It's not that big. Also, males are smaller than the females.
Christian: Okay.
Ellen: Yeah. Just like the black widow.
Christian: A theme.
Ellen: So if you've never seen this squid, please look it up. It's so... Delightful. It looks like a squid with a sort of conical, tapered mantle at one end. The mantle being the part of the squid where all of the internal organs are. So if you're thinking of a squid in two parts, there's the arms on one end and the mantle on the other.
Christian: Yeah.
Ellen: So the arms are coming out of the mantle. So it has a conical tapered mantle at one end and then eight arms sticking out of the bottom. But the arms are webbed.
Christian: Yeah...
Ellen: So there's webbing in between the arms, which is not the way most other squids look. This gives it a look that is similar to a cloak or a bat's wing, which is where they get the name vampire from.
Christian: Gotcha.
Ellen: I feel like the webbing around the body makes it kind of look like it's wearing a skirt. That's what I think. Cause it's all the way around. Right? It's not just like, partial.
Christian: Sure, sure.
Ellen: So I think it looks like a skirt. It also has huge round eyes and two flappy fins above its eyes that look kinda like big giant Dumbo ears.
Christian: Aww!
Ellen: Yeah. You will find these all over the world in deep water between 300 and 4000 feet.
Christian: That's quite the range.
Ellen: Yeah. But typically the deeper the better. That is also between 90 and 1200 meters. You'll usually find them very, very deep though. Their taxonomic order is called Vampyromorphida. The vampire squid is not actually a squid. I'm sorry.
Christian: Whaaaat?
Ellen: It's not a squid. It is a cephalopod...
Christian: Okay...
Ellen: But it is not technically a squid. This species, the vampire squid is the only surviving member of not just its genus, not just its family, but its order.
Christian: Wow.
Ellen: The only one. Squids and cuttlefish are also cephalopods.
Christian: Okay.
Ellen: This species first appeared around 300 million years ago, and it has changed very little since then.
Christian: I guess, again with that, if it's not broke.
Ellen: Yeah. So this is why you'll see a lot of people refer to them as a living fossil.
Christian: Okay.
Ellen: Uh, for effectiveness, I'm giving the vampire squid a full 10 out of 10.
Christian: Wow!
Ellen: Yes. So I want you to think back to our episode on the Arabian camel. For the Arabian camel, I also gave them a 10 out of 10 for the adaptations that they had that allowed it to survive in extremely hostile environments. This is that. That was my reasoning for this full 10 out of 10. The vampire squid is extremely well suited to live in a very uninviting part of the world. So to explain that, first I'm going to explain how and what it eats.
Christian: Okay.
Ellen: So the vampire squid looks like a predator, and in fact the other squids and octopuses and stuff like that, they are predators. But the vampire squid is a detritovore. The way that they eat is they drift passively through the water. They kind of flutter their little fins a little bit, but for the most part they're just drifting. They're not really swimming actively. So they passively drift through the open water with their arms spread out like a net and they drag behind them a very, very long, very, very thin curly filament. So it looks like a giant piece of string trailing out behind them. They just kind of let it trail behind them as they swim around. Now this filament is covered in these tiny little microscopic hairs, and it also has sensory nerves in it. So the hairs gather these little bits of what's called "marine snow." Marine snow is just bits of debris floating through the water that consist of waste and remains of other sea life. So they're not actually eating animals, they're eating the remains and waste of other animals.
Christian: Huh.
Ellen: So they're basically just the little trash collectors of the ocean. Yeah, so once the filament has gathered enough little tasty snacks, the vampire squid closes up its arms and reels in the filament and pulls it back in and it pulls it between the arms and the arms scrape off the little yummy bits that it's collected on the filament. And then once it's scraped them all off of the filament, it deposits them into its mouth.
Christian: Wow.
Ellen: So on the inside of those arms, so from the outside it looks kind of like an umbrella, but on the inside all eight arms are lined with what looked like spikes. Pointy spikes.
Christian: Right.
Ellen: And they look very menacing. They look like very sharp teeth, but those are actually soft and fleshy structures that are called cirri. I think that they're very similar in structure and texture to the spiky silicone jewelry that was very popular in the late nineties and early aughts.
Christian: Okay...
Ellen: Do you know what I'm talking about?
Christian: I think so?
Ellen: It was like, every like preteen girl had these little earrings that was like a ball with these soft silicone spikes on it. Do you remember this?
Christian: I think so.
Ellen: This is what it makes me think of when I see their little cirri on the insides of their arms. It's very much like that. So the cirri are actually what the vampire squid uses to pull the food into its mouth. So they actually have two filaments.
Christian: Okay.
Ellen: And they have one extended at a time, and there's a pouch on the inside of the arms that stores the filament.
Christian: Huh.
Ellen: Yeah. So the cirri pull the food inside the mouth.
Christian: Okay.
Ellen: Now all of this, the diet of the vampire squid, was only known after observations in the wild by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in 2012.
Christian: Wow.
Ellen: Before 2012, everybody thought that they just ate like, little shrimp and stuff like every other squid. Not so. It wasn't until just a few years ago that they found out what they actually eat.
Christian: Hmm. Crazy.
Ellen: Yeah. I know! This goes back to that thing that we talked about how we know more about the moon than about the deep sea.
Christian: Yeah.
Ellen: We're like, still learning about stuff that- animals that we've known about for like, a hundred years, and we just had no idea of what they ate.
Christian: Huh.
Ellen: Yeah. I thought that was really cool. So to tie that back into their effectiveness score, that very passive lifestyle of just drifting slowly through the water, that requires very little energy output. This is due to the fact that their bodies are actually neutrally buoyant like we talked about with the blobfish.
Christian: Yeah!
Ellen: So they don't have to spend any energy to drift through the water like that. They're just chilling, like letting the food come to them. They have this really, really slow metabolism and that combined with a very large gill surface area, and also a specialized type of blood. They have this specialized protein in their blood called hemocyanin. Hemocyanin is kind of analogous to hemoglobin that we have in our blood, except hemocyanin is based on copper instead of iron and it is blue instead of red. All you really need to know for this purpose is that it binds to oxygen much better at lower temperatures than hemoglobin, I won't go any further into the chemistry of all this because it's very complicated and confusing. Basically what you need to know is that they have this blue blood that makes them really, really good at passing oxygen through their body in low temperatures. So all of these adaptations allow them to survive in a part of the ocean called the oxygen minimal layer, and this is a part of the ocean that is so deep that there is as little as 5% or less oxygen saturation in the water. Little to no light, and there's also very, very, very little oxygen and they can live there just fine because they have all of these crazy adaptations that let them live on basically nothing.
Christian: That's awesome.
Ellen: It's so crazy isn't it? This part of the ocean is so cold and so low in oxygen that very few other animals are able to survive there, especially not anything that would be big enough to eat the vampire squid.
Christian: Ah.
Ellen: So like the things that do live down there are so tiny, right? They're like little microscopic like plankton and stuff. Nothing that lives there is going to be able to eat- not nothing, but like, so little that lives there is going to actually be able to eat the vampire squid, so they don't actually have to worry about predators at those depths.
Christian: Wow.
Ellen: So this was what I talked about with the camel. Right? They don't have to defend themselves because nothing's hunting them where they live. They just live where nothing else can survive, and they don't have to worry about fighting predators or anything.
Christian: Solid strat.
Ellen: Yes. It's very good. That being said, there's also very little prey found at these depths, like you know, yeah there's no predators but there is no prey either. But that's okay because they don't need prey! They eat detritus, they eat debris that falls from, you know, up the water column. Like, stuff from up above them falls down to where they are and it's okay. They don't need prey. They just swim around down at the bottom of the ocean and eat what falls down there. And they don't have to worry about anything.
Christian: Yeah.
Ellen: Yeah. I thought that was really cool. Now that's not to say that they don't have any defense mechanisms, because they do. They can defend themselves. They can. One of the standard like, defense strategies of other cephalopods like squids and octopus and stuff like that is two things: they will like, rapidly change their colors either to camouflage themselves or to start all the enemy, or they will shoot out an ink blob. You know, like an ink cloud to obscure themselves and then they'll get away. Now since this is a deep sea environment with little to no light, so you can't see anything, the vampire squid kind of skipped those things because they're not going to help them at all.
Christian: Sure.
Ellen: Like if you're in the bottom of the ocean where there's no light changing, your color isn't going to help because nobody can see you anyway, and shooting out a black cloud isn't gonna help cause everything's black. Like that's not going to obscure you at all. It's not going to help. So, what the vampire squid has instead is bioluminescence.
Christian: Really!
Ellen: Yes, they have some firework... They have some fireworks at their disposal instead. So the vampire squid's arms and mantle are equipped with light-producing organs, especially in the tips of the arms. And these organs allow the vampire squid to glow, as well as fire off clouds of glowing particles.
Christian: Woah!
Ellen: Yes. From the tips of its arms where it will actually like expel bioluminescence into the air and make this kind of fireworks display.
Christian: That's crazy.
Ellen: It is! It's very, very cool. The last thing I gave it for effectiveness was the fact that they have these really, really big round eyes that allow it to absorb as much light as possible down in the deep sea. This is like a common thing for deep sea creatures. I saw some sources say that that in proportion to the rest of its body, the vampire squid has the largest eyes in the animal kingdom, but then I saw some other sources say that there are like some tiny microscopic creatures whose eyes make up like a third of their body. And this is clearly not that. So, I don't know if it's like the largest in the animal kingdom, but they're definitely up there.
Christian: Okay.
Ellen: Very, very big eyes considering the size of their body. So that's my 10 out of 10 for effectiveness. This is like a hyper specialized animal.
Christian: Sure.
Ellen: So for ingenuity, I'm giving it a 6 out of 10. Okay.... It's okay. So, going back to its sort of escape strategy of using bioluminescence, they have this other thing that they do when they're threatened that they're known for. So they pull their arms up over the top of their head and they flip their body inside out. So they're exposing those spiky cirri outward. And this is called the pineapple posture, cause they look like a pineapple floating through the water.
Christian: I like that.
Ellen: It can look very scary! Like, it protects their mantle because they're shielding it with their web, but also it looks spooky.
Christian: Sure.
Ellen: It looks very, very scary. So it can look very intimidating and it can cause some predators to be like, "Oh my God, what is that?" And then they leave it alone. They will pineapple posture, it looks very scary and intimidating, but what they will also do when they're intimidated is they can flash their arms, they can do like pulsing displays of light, and then they shoot out their glowing cloud and then they use jet propulsion to swim away very quickly.
Christian: Okay. So they do have the ability to swim quickly, then.
Ellen: They can swim very quickly in very small amounts.
Christian: Right.
Ellen: In very small bursts. They can shoot a jet of water out of their mantle and it'll get them as far as they need to get. They can't do it for very long, but they can in very small bursts. It takes a lot of energy to do that, so they don't, they try to only do it when they really have to.
Christian: Sure.
Ellen: But they can. They have it. They have the capacity for it. So yeah, the vampire squid can control its luminosity, producing dimmer or brighter lights depending on the intensity of the threat. So they showed videos that the researchers took of like, them handling the squid in different amounts, and they found that the more the handled it, the more intensely they handled it, the brighter it would glow.
Christian: Ah.
Ellen: So it can actually control the intensity of its light. This actually is a major plot point of an episode of the Octonauts.
Christian: Really?
Ellen: For parents or, I suppose, just cartoon appreciators out there, there is a delightful cartoon on Netflix. I'm sure you can find it elsewhere, but we watch it on Netflix. It's called the Octonauts, and it's about this little crew of animals that just explore the ocean and help animals in the ocean- not just the ocean, but they help aquatic animals, like they rescue them and solve problems for them and stuff. And in one episode they find a vampire squid, and the vampire squid I guess like... Is injured and they have to help it, but then when they come up to it it gets scared and it like shoots off its glowing cloud and swims away. So, Octonauts is a very good show. You can learn a lot about like, aquatic life from that show. But as just like the quickest aside I can possibly make: a mistake in this episode has been listed on the IMDB page stating, "in the first few shots of Peso," which is I think the penguin, I think Peso's the penguin on the show, "he is in his deep sea suit, but in one shot he doesn't have his deep sea suit on. For the rest of the episode he is wearing his deep suit." And I saw that because I was looking up this episode on IMDB and I saw that this mistake was listed on there and it just... I was so filled with the light that there's somebody out there calling out the Octonauts on their continuity errors. It was like, first of all, who cares that much? First of all, who noticed it, and second of all, who felt so strongly about it that they had to take to the IMDB page of Octonauts and like publicly call out this episode for their inattention to detail? I don't know. I just really thought that was funny.
Christian: That's funny.
Ellen: So I took off some deductions for their ingenuity. The first deduction I took off was that since they are, like detritivores and they're literally just drifting through the water and the food is just coming to them, they're not hunting or foraging or anything, right? They're not like figuring things out.
Christian: Sure.
Ellen: They're literally just, it's kinda like they're just swimming through the water with their mouth wide open and hoping food lands in it. Right? That that doesn't take a lot of smarts. And I also took off a deduction because vampire squids don't guard their eggs or their young in any way. They just fire the eggs off into the open water and set them adrift.
Christian: Good luck! Byeee!
Ellen: That's literally what it is. Like, hope this works out for ya! See you later. And the young are just kind of left to fend for themselves. I guess where they live, there's not so many predators, so I guess that's okay, I guess? But still.
Christian: Yeah... I mean, unless maybe they are able to float to a different level of the ocean?
Ellen: They're not, they just float. They just drift.
Christian: What if other vampire squids accidentally eat them?
Ellen: Yeah. So they're bad parents. They're very, very bad parents. Only slightly better than the quokka, because they don't actively murder their children. So that's the end of my 6 out of 10 for ingenuity. Moving on to aesthetics for the vampire squid, I give them an 8 out of 10. I find them a little bit cartoonish. They have those big Dumbo ears like I mentioned earlier, those big round eyes, and what is essentially a giant hoop skirt. I think they're cute. Oh, and so the, the scientific name Vampyroteuthis infernalis literally translates to "vampire squid from hell," and I feel like that's completely unwarranted. Like I get that, like when they're turned inside out and they have all the spikes, if you think those are like spiky teeth, then yeah, that can look really terrifying. But I don't get it, at all. I don't, I don't get why they got such a menacing name.
Christian: I mean, I guess the first person that saw it might not have had a chance to actually feel the spikes.
Ellen: True. They may have just thought, "Oh my God, it's full of teeth." Like, get me out of here.
Christian: Did you happen to note when this was discovered?
Ellen: It was about a hundred years ago. I don't have an exact date, but it was about a hundred years ago.
Christian: Huh.
Ellen: So yeah, I guess if we're giving them spooky ratings, I'm actually going to give the vampire squid like a 3 out of 10 spooky. It's not spooky at all!
Christian: Okay, but if I were in the deep, deep ocean, and I came across this thing in pineapple mode...
Ellen: If we're- okay, if we're comparing it to other deep sea creatures, 0 out of 10. This is like the least spooky thing you could encounter deep in the ocean.
Christian: Okay, fine.
Ellen: There's- okay. Soft boi. Very soft. They have like almost like a jellyfish-like texture to their body, right? So, soft boi, a gentle glow to them, big dumbo ears... They won't do anything! They're completely harmless. They don't even have teeth. Way up inside of their mantle, like in the middle of, like hidden by all their arms and stuff. They have a little beak, but it's like interior. They cannot do anything to you! Like if I was at the bottom of the ocean and I came across a vampire squid, it would be a real breath of fresh air. I would be delighted to see one.
Christian: But because you know what it does and is, I feel like if you didn't know what it was, you would probably safely assume... nah.
Ellen: Yeah, that's true. I guess if I had never seen one before and this was my complete like, flying blind and I saw one of these, it would probably be a little terrifying, but...
Christian: You would think, "that thing wants all of my blood."
Ellen: Hence the name vampire squid. Yeah, but knowing what I know about it, I give a... What did I say before? Did I say 3?
Ellen: You said 3, and then 0.
Ellen: I'll split the difference. I'll say like a 2 out of 10. It's a 2 out of 10 spooky. This is not spooky at all. So wrapping up with some miscellaneous information, their conservation status is not evaluated. Like other deep sea creatures, they are threatened by changes in ocean temperatures and also acidity and declining oxygen levels. So all of those things naturally affect everything in the ocean, including vampire squids, even though their population numbers haven't been observed well enough to have a good idea where they're at as a species. And my last note that I want to include is that the only vampire squid to have ever been displayed in captivity was at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in May of 2014. They had a vampire squid on exhibit.
Christian: What happened to it?
Ellen: Not good. So they had it in May of 2014, it went out on exhibit, they, you know, said publicly that it was a rotating exhibit and they also said in their press release like... Like all deep sea creatures, they're very fragile and it, they basically were like, "Hey, it's not going to be here for long. Come check it out while you can." And they had it on an exhibit briefly, it wasn't doing very well so they took it off exhibit, and then I saw another thing from them saying that they put it back out for display again in August of 2014 which was a few months later. But then that was, that was it. I couldn't find anything else about it. I dug in to see if I could find anything about like, any updates on what happened to it, but I'm assuming it just died.
Christian: And now it haunts Monterey Bay Aquarium...
Ellen: The ghost of the vampire squid!
Christian: Just kind of ghosting around like, "Hey! You gonna eat that trash?"
Ellen: DON'T TOUCH MY TRASH! That's kind of the way it goes for any sort of deep sea creature. I feel like deep sea creatures, especially since the part of the ocean where the vampire squid lives is so low in oxygen, it's gotta be really hard to maintain an accurate simulation of that environment. So it's probably just not very good for them to be in captivity at all.
Christian: Yeah.
Ellen: But I mean they've got a lot, they've done a lot of really cool research on them and that was just the only time that one has ever been displayed in captivity. I wish I had had the chance to see it while it was there. But this is, this goes back to like, the great white shark. How like nobody's ever been able to like maintain one in captivity. It's probably best we just leave them alone, really.
Christian: Yeah. And people have tried, but you know it doesn't last very long.
Ellen: Yeah. Should probably just leave them alone then. Right? Like, maybe we can just let them do their thing. So yeah, that's the vampire squid. My new not-so-spooky friend.
Christian: Well thank you. I still maintain, though, that if one that would run into one of these and didn't know what it was or does, would probably be thoroughly spooked. All right, listeners, we've got a trick-or-treat special for you.
Ellen: This is both a trick and a treat.
Christian: Yes. So recently in the comments on a post in the Facebook group...
Ellen: Plug it.
Christian: Just the Zoo of Us... Special Friends...
Ellen: Nope.
Ellen: And more...
Ellen: Nope.
Christian: Just the Zoo of Us: Official Friend Squad.
Ellen: Thank you.
Christian: So in those comments, I volunteered to write a poem about the botfly. Not only was this not asked for, it was stated it was not wanted, specifically. I did it anyway, and it seemed to be well-received. It goes like this:
Eggs on a mosquito,
A bite on the arm
Larvae so snug
Prepare for alarm
You have a new pet
It lies mostly still
Say hello to the bot fly
Your very own flesh drill.
Ellen: Happy Halloweeeeeeen! Well, happy Halloween everybody, and thank you so much for spending this time with us.
Christian: Yes, thank you.
Ellen: We love y'all, and thank you especially to people who have been recommending us to your friends and giving us reviews on all of the various podcast resources out there. We really appreciate that. That means a lot to us. It's very cool of you.
Christian: Yes. Thank you so much.
Ellen: Very punk rock. Thank you. You can connect with us on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram by searching the title of the show. Hey! Do that right now because we're having a giveaway, like right now. If you're listening to this before Saturday, November 2nd of 2019, head over to our social media because we're giving away a Final Straw, which is a metal collapsible reusable straw, and it is in rainbow, and also 2 decomposition books, which are spiral bound notebooks that are made out of recycled material and they have really, really cool designs on the covers. One of them is a jaguar and the other one is the Florida Everglades. So we're giving those away right now, so go check out our social media if you have not done that already, they're very cool. If you have an animal species that you want to hear us review, you can submit those to us at ellen@justthezooofus.com, or just kind of scream them into the void. I'm sure we'll get them. A transcript of this episode and others will be found at justthezooofus.com, and last note before we fade into the abyss is thank you to Louie Zong for the use of his song "Adventuring" from his album, Bee Sides.
Christian: Yes. Thank you. Should we use a spooky song instead this time?
Ellen: Well, I've already credited it, so no. But you know what we can do is we can just make ghosts sounds as we fade into the background. Wooooo~
Christian: ~Give me your traaash~.
Ellen: Bye!
Christian: Bye y'all.