34: Anglerfish & Desert Kangaroo Rat

Ellen: Hi everybody! This is Ellen Weatherford.

Christian: And Christian Weatherford.

Ellen: And we're here with Just the Zoo of Us, your favorite animal review podcast.

Christian: Each animal on the show, we review and rate on a, out of 10 basis in three different categories of effectiveness, ingenuity and aesthetics.

Ellen: That's right. And even though Christian and I are not experts on animals, we do a lot of research for the show to make sure that we're giving you really good information from good sources.

Christian: You know what we are experts on?

Ellen: Oreos.

Christian: Dunking. That's weird. We had a motif. All right. Have any announcements before we jump in?

Ellen: Um, yeah. So if you remember back in December for Giving Tuesday, we gave our ad revenue to the Wildlife Conservation Network. We decided to again donate our ad revenue since that donation to the New South Wales Rural Fire Service in response to the bushfires going on in Australia. So we would really encourage everybody listening to look into ways that you can support the efforts to relieve Australia during these difficult times.

Christian: So this week I'm bringing our first ever social media poll-elected animal.

Ellen: This was our first democratically, democratically chosen animal.

Christian: Now that I think about it, I forgot to vote. Was I not supposed to vote?

Ellen: I don't think you were supposed to vote, no.

Christian: Okay. And that animal for this week is the humpback anglerfish, scientific name Melanocetus johnsonii.

Ellen: Nice.

Christian: Also known as the deep sea anglerfish. So like I said, this was chosen by our social media poll. Prior to that it was also submitted by Michael Solon, Kyle Rauch, Abigail Cornett, and @squirrelbeer23.

Ellen: Nice.

Christian: I'm getting my information for this animal from fishbase.se and oceana.org. Basic info on this species: their adult size, the males are about 2.9 centimeters long, that's about 1.1 inches, whereas the females are 18 centimeters long, or 7.1 inches.

Ellen: That is a huge difference!

Christian: Yes. So the females are about six times larger than males.

Ellen: That is some serious dimorphism.

Christian: Yep, and this is a common thing amongst all the anglerfish species where the females are much, much larger.

Ellen: Girl power.

Christian: Yeah. They can be found in the, what is known as the bathopelagic zone of the oceans. And this is the zone that is the depth of 1,000 to 4,000 meters deep. And those are in the tropical and temperate parts of the world's oceans. So they can be found pretty much all over the world. They're pretty much in all the world's oceans except for the very extreme cold areas near the poles, basically.

Ellen: Sure, sure sure.

Christian: But they're usually found at a depth of a hundred to 1,500 meters, or about 300 to 5,000 feet.

Ellen: Okay. So they're way down there.

Christian: They can be, yes. They belong to the taxonomic family Melanocetidae, or known as the black seadevils.

Ellen: That's a very intimidating name.

Christian: Yes. If you see a picture of these things, a lot of the times they're sleek black. I had a hard time trying to find out what they look like in the wild versus what they might look like in a specimen jar.

Ellen: That's true, cause with those deep sea critters there can be a big difference.

Christian: Yeah. But I'm pretty sure if caught wild they are like, a sleek black.

Ellen: Okay. I feel like black seadevil sounds like something that you would hear in a pirate movie, where like some old haggard seadevil- like, this old haggard sea pirate is like telling a story about, "we once came across the black seadevil," like doesn't that sound like something legendary and mythical?

Christian: Sure, but I'm going to need a smaller boat, cause these are little. Even you know, the females that are much larger, you're still only talking about like a foot and a half there.

Ellen: That's true. I guess they're not going to be taking down your ship anytime soon.

Christian: Speaking of taxonomic family, other evolutionary relatives are pretty much all anglerfish that belong to the Lophiiformes order. So I think a lot of our submissions were just the anglerfish in general.

Ellen: Yep.

Christian: The word "anglerfish" refers to an entire order, so this one is a specific species. Other members of their family include the Murray's abyssal anglerfish.

Ellen: Abyssal anglerfish.

Christian: Yes. It sounds like something right out of RuneScape.

Ellen: I love the word abyssal. It's so dramatic.

Christian: It is, and something like that to talk about that I hopefully will keep doing with my animals is the etymology of their names.

Ellen: Ooh, yes! I would like that.

Christian: Which I think I mispronounced that last time. I think I said entomology, which is something else.

Ellen: I think you did. Yeah, it's the study of like bugs, insects and stuff. But it's okay. I'm sure people got what you meant.

Christian: So talking about its scientific name, this species: Melanocetus comes from Greek. The melos- or, "melanos" means black and then "cetos" is a large sea creature, usually referring to a whale.

Ellen: Oh, like a cetacean.

Christian: Right.

Ellen: And I'm also seeing the same root as melanin.

Christian: Yes. Johnsonii comes- is just named after the last name of the first person that found it.

Ellen: Boring!

Christian: Whose last name was Johnson.

Ellen: BORING!

Christian: Yeah.

Ellen: Name it better.

Christian: That's a common one where part of the name is dedicated to the person that found it.

Ellen: Yeah, and it's a let down every single time.

Christian: Sure, sure, sure. So, I'm going to jump right in. Our first category is effectiveness. These are biological and anatomical adaptations to make it do well in its environment, or the things they tried to do.

Ellen: Good body stuff.

Christian: Yeah. I'm going to give the humpback anglerfish an 8 out of 10 for effectiveness.

Ellen: That's pretty good. It's decent.

Christian: So let's keep in mind this fish is found very deep and very low, if any light, and pretty sparse populated prey options there. So my first category, or I should say my first point for effectiveness I'm giving it is bioluminescence. So this is something that many anglerfish are known for. So this species of anglerfish has what one would call a lure. That's a little dangly bit that sits on its forehead, I guess you would call it. And that's also known as an esca, or illicium.

Ellen: Oh. I didn't know they were cool words for it.

Christian: Yeah.

Ellen: This is like in Finding Nemo.

Christian: Yeah. Well... Was that in Finding Nemo or Finding Dory?

Ellen: No, it was Finding Nemo, it was in in the first one I remember because it scared me very badly.

Christian: Yes, yes, yes. So that little lure has bacteria inside it and it reacts with the body of the fish to produce light.

Ellen: Oh, it's caused by a bacteria in there?

Christian: Yeah.

Ellen: Interesting. Does that bacteria grow there naturally or does the fish put it there?

Christian: You know, there's been a couple of thoughts on how it gets there. One thought is that the young get it from their parents in some way, because they've noticed among different species of anglerfish that species of bacteria is different.

Ellen: Oh!

Christian: Yeah. So there's, there's some thought around how they get it.

Ellen: They're like, cultivating their own special brand of glowy bits.

Christian: Something like that. And a lot of times they've noticed that the bacteria, when taken out of the fish, on their own cannot produce light. So it has to be interacting with the fish itself to do it.

Ellen: Whoa. That's very complicated.

Christian: Yeah. Yeah. So I'll talk more about what it uses this for later in my ingenuity area.

Ellen: Sure.

Christian: But just a note, only the females of this species have the lighted lure.

Ellen: Let's go girls.

Christian: My next point here is what I'm naming their big appetite. So first, let's talk about what these guys look like. This particular anglerfish has a mouth that is very large, and also looks like someone took it and rotated it upwards about 45 degrees.

Ellen: Oh, it's like... It's like angled upward?

Christian: Yeah. And this is a common trait among anglerfish too, is this style of mouth.

Ellen: So it always kind of looks like they're looking up a little bit.

Christian: Yeah. But yeah, this big, big mouth, long pointy teeth, which would imply they're trying to grab slippery prey, like other fish.

Ellen: Sure.

Christian: And their jaw and stomach can extend and allows to eat things that are bigger than they are.

Ellen: Ex... Extend? Like within- still inside the fish?

Christian: Yes. Yeah.

Ellen: Okay. You know, you never know with those deep sea critters, some of them just like expand their entire gut content, like out of their body or do some weird stuff.

Christian: So, so it comes from the scarcity of food in this area. So it wants to increase its chances of being able to actually eat something that it finds.

Ellen: Oh yeah.

Christian: Yeah.

Ellen: Cause you never know, like you gotta take what you can get. Right? It might be another six months before you come across some other living creature.

Christian: Right, right. So yeah, a lot of times they'll be found with something in its stomach that is bigger than they are.

Ellen: Oh my gosh.

Christian: And my final point for effectiveness is reproduction. So the males have special senses that allow them to find the females. It's thought to be pheromone-based because again, because of how sparse this species is that this depth, pretty much the male's main objective is to find females. That's it.

Ellen: He's a carrier for genetic data. And also there is no light where they live. Right?

Christian: Right. In the deeper part of that area, there's no light.

Ellen: So they can't exactly seek each other out.

Christian: In some species of anglerfish, the males will have big eyes and then others, they have anatomy that would suggest they're relying on smell.

Ellen: Oh.

Christian: So regardless, it seems to be the common theme among the anglerfish species is that the males have something to assist them in finding the females.

Ellen: Sure.

Christian: So something that is common among many anglerfish is this idea that males will latch on to the female and then will basically fuse into their body. And pretty much all they're there for is to... Hmmm.

Ellen: Is to what, Christian?

Christian: Trying to think how to word this for our rating.

Ellen: Deposit genetic information.

Christian: Yeah. They're basically just there to do that and that's it. Cause then they're getting nutrients from their hosts. This is kind of known as a parasitic type relationship. In this species, that is not the case.

Ellen: Oh! They've gone to couples therapy and they've learned better healthy relationship strategies.

Christian: Oddly enough, they'll still latch on, but they're doing an external fertilization of eggs.

Ellen: Okay.

Christian: And then when they're done with that, they release and go on to find another.

Ellen: Oh, so that's actually pretty good. Right? That's better. I think that's an improvement from other types of anglerfish where the male just latches on and dies.

Christian: Well, they don't die, they just fuse into them. And I mean, one could talk about what constitutes separate fish in that scenario, but that's more for the philosophers.

Ellen: What if the female just is like a Katamari where she's just swimming around and just collecting all of these male anglerfish and getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

Christian: Well, they don't get bigger. They just have little nodules that represent where the male was.

Ellen: Crafting an armor out of the corpses of her dead lovers.

Christian: So if our listeners want to go see this, I suggest it because it's not very cute, particularly.

Ellen: No. I wasn't thinking that it would be.

Christian: But anyway, so yeah, that that wraps up effectiveness. I'll move on to ingenuity. So this is where they're doing smart things. Could be hunting methods, could be tool use, that sort of thing. I'm giving the humpback anglerfish a 6 out of 10 for ingenuity.

Ellen: It's okay.

Christian: My first point is being an ambush predator. So again, going back to the scarcity of food, one of its goals is to conserve energy. So it's a sit and wait type of predator. So, earlier I mentioned it has a bioluminescent lure. So basically what it's doing there is it's using its lure to lure in prey, and it'll do this by kind of wiggling that lure to make it look like, I don't know, a smaller prey that it's prey would be interested in. And then once that thing is close enough to them, that's when they'll spring into action and gobbling them up. But other than that moment, they're usually not moving very much. Just kind of floating along, conserving energy.

Ellen: Stealthy. Stealthy and smart.

Christian: Yeah. Yeah.

Ellen: But I like how they like, wiggle the lure to be enticing to their prey. I think that is a little bit clever.

Christian: Yeah. Yeah. That's why I figured it should go into this category.

Ellen: Yeah, that's smart. Cause they're kind of using their body as a tool.

Christian: Yeah. And then, somewhat related. The way I worded it is "alluring" behavior...

Ellen: Oh my God, I should have known.

Christian: Because they also use this to attract mates.

Ellen: I should have known you were going to do this.

Christian: So in the same way that they're using it to attract prey, they'll also attract their mates for reproductive purposes, of course.

Ellen: Are the males attracted by larger lures in the females?

Christian: Who knows?

Ellen: I would really love to know the anglerfish's standards of beauty.

Christian: I mean, so they're already going to a female that is six times their size. So I'm wondering if they could even tell the difference at that scale.

Ellen: She's just a monolith either way.

Christian: Yeah. Yeah. They big. And then the final category, aesthetics. Pretty self explanatory. How cute they are. This species is not cute.

Ellen: No, it's none.

Christian: But I still give it a 4.

Ellen: What! You've been too kind to this fish! This is like the go-to ugly fish.

Christian: Yeah, it's a thing of nightmares a little bit. It doesn't have scales. Its skin is kinda smooth. It has these big teeth and a big mouth in it and a teeny squish like, eye area of its head. Its tail is not very impressive at all. It's- cause it goes like, big head and then the rest of its body kind of tapers into smaller, smaller, smaller.

Ellen: It's mostly mouth.

Christian: Yeah. Mostly mouth and stomach when it, when it eats something,

Ellen: You're not really making the case for any of the points that you gave it.

Christian: It's also like, sleek and black. It's kind of like Batman fish.

Ellen: Is it? Is it though? I don't think Batman would be caught dead with this fish. I don't think this fish is going to go on Batman's utility belt.

Christian: Could you imagine? Go! Bat anglerfish!

Ellen: And all it does is it just has a little light on it and he just uses it as like a little light source. They're like, "Batman, there was a much easier way for you to do this. You can just get a flashlight."

Christian: I think they look a little intimidating and cool a little bit, so that's why I gave it a 4.

Ellen: Okay. I guess. I GUESS.

Christian: And now, I know what's going to come up. I think people will compare this to the goblin shark, but it doesn't do the weird mouth extendo thing that...

Ellen: That was what I was imagining when you said that it's stomach expands. Like I was imagining that it like, *bleh*, like it shoots its stomach out of his mouth. I don't know why I thought that.

Christian: No, no no. It's just, its belly gets really, really big basically.

Ellen: Oh, cute.

Christian: Yeah.

Ellen: That's true. I can't really pick which one I find more unsettling, the anglerfish or the goblin shark, because they both have the creepy needle teeth. I don't know which one I prefer. They're both gross.

Christian: It's very unlikely we'll ever see one in person.

Ellen: That's true. And we have that to be thankful for.

Christian: Move on to a little bit of miscellaneous info, mostly around conservation. This species is at least concern on the IUCN list. So while they are rare to find because of how spread out they are and where they are, it's thought they're not threatened at all. Things that would threaten them would be pretty much anything that affects the deep ocean, pollution and such. And that wraps up the humpback anglerfish.

Ellen: Good feesh.

Christian: Yeah.

Ellen: Good job babe. This is a weird one, I think. I think that the anglerfish is what people usually immediately think of when they think of a deep sea fish. I think this is kind of the poster child for deep sea fish in general.

Christian: For sure. It's popular in visual media, I think. And also this was another species that the Oatmeal did a good, good deal of stuff on.

Ellen: Oh did they really?

Christian: Yeah. Well I don't know about this species in particular, but just anglerfish in general.

Ellen: Yeah, I think there's a lot to say about them. They're pretty cool. And I do, whenever I think of one, I do think of Finding Nemo when one scared me very badly.

Christian: Yeah. Yeah.

Ellen: I'm already given the heebie-jeebies by fish in general and deep sea fish especially so, but Finding Nemo was a little bit more traumatic than people like to admit that it was. Right? Cause it opens with a very brutal and harsh... Rough scene.

Christian: I mean it kinda gave justice to how rough life in the ocean can be.

Ellen: Yeah. It was brutally honest about that. So it starts off pretty rough and it gets worse from there. But the anglerfish scene from Finding Nemo was like when I- when I was a little kid and I had the Finding Nemo like, DVD, you remember how on DVDs you would be able to like, skip scenes...

Christian: Sure.

Ellen: ...With a button on your remote? I would skip the anglerfish scene every time. I was like, no thanks. I don't think I'll be doing that.

Christian: That's funny.

Ellen: Yeah.

Christian: That's it for the little... Little light nightmare.

Ellen: A lightmare. No. Does that work?

Christian: No. I'm just going to give up. So, what animal do you have for us this week, my love?

Ellen: This week I'm going to be talking about the desert kangaroo rat.

Christian: Interesting.

Ellen: Yeah. The scientific name is Dipodomys deserti, and this species was not elected via poll, but it was requested, and it was submitted via Twitter by this artist that I follow that goes by the handle Thornwolf at the handle @ThornwolfArt. And you can find some really beautiful illustrations there of a lot of animals. But Thornwolf uses a kangaroo rat as the profile picture.

Christian: Ooh!

Ellen: Yeah. So you could see a really cool drawing of the kangaroo rat. It's very beautiful. So thank you for submitting this animal. This was really cool. And I'm getting my information on the desert kangaroo rat from the University of Michigan's Animal Diversity Web, the United States National Park Service, and the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum.

Christian: Very good.

Ellen: Yes. That should give you a little bit of an idea of where this animal lives. So, if you don't know anything about the desert kangaroo rat, they are about the size of a mouse. So the total length is around a foot long, but half of that is tail. So they're mostly tail but have a little mouse-sized body. They look very similar to a gerbil.

Christian: Okay.

Ellen: And some notable features of it are it has a large ratio of head to body. Like I feel like they have a really big head and then a little tiny little body and they have really, really long hind legs that they actually hop on bipedally. So they don't crawl around on all fours like some other rodents do. They're actually bipedal, so they hop around on these two back legs that are very, very long. So this is where they get the name kangaroo rat.

Christian: Okay.

Ellen: They have those long back feet, like a kangaroo.

Christian: I think I've seen a picture of this, but I'm not sure.

Ellen: You can find these in the Southwestern United States, including the Mojave desert, the Sonoran desert and even Death Valley, which is known as one of the hottest places on Earth.

Christian: Awesome.

Ellen: It's a very hostile environment. They are from the taxonomic family Heteromyidae, which is a rodent family made up of 60 species of kangaroo rats and pocket mice. So although their appearance is very similar to gerbils, they're actually more closely related to gophers. So this is an example of convergent evolution with gerbils, where they're not actually very closely related, but they evolved some very similar features because they both evolved in desert conditions. So gerbils are from the other side of the world. They're from Northern Africa, the middle East, and some parts of Asia, and kangaroo rats are from America.

Christian: Interesting.

Ellen: It's an interesting example of convergent evolution. They're not necessarily closely related, but have some similar features. To get into my effectiveness rating for the kangaroo rat, I give the kangaroo rat a 10 out of 10.

Christian: Really!

Ellen: Yes!

Christian: Alright.

Christian: So I want you to think back to the Arabian camel episode and how I gave the Arabian camel a 10 out of 10 for being so specifically well-adapted to living where it lives. This is the same concept. So I gave them a 10 for how incredibly well-suited they are to live in a very unfriendly environment. Right?

Christian: Yeah.

Ellen: So first point for their effectiveness is what I'm considering their fuel efficiency. Yes. So kangaroo rats not only almost never need water, almost never, but their diet is mostly just dry seeds. So a lot of times with animals that live in these deserts, they'll get moisture from eating maybe succulent plants or some sort of live plant that stores moisture in it. Not the kangaroo rat. They eat seeds, which are mostly pretty dry.

Christian: Yeah.

Ellen: So that makes you think, how do they survive with such a moisture deficient diet? And to understand this, you have to zoom in on their kidneys. Yes. So the kidneys in your body are essentially your body's filtration system that filters blood before sending it back to the heart, and also passes waste through to capture water and nutrients out of the fluids in your body, and then excrete the rest as waste into your urine. So, the kidneys are made up of about a million of these structural units called nephrons. And then the nephrons are these really complicated systems of tubules. I'm not going to go too far into the structure of nephrons and kidneys, but what is important is one of these sections of tubules called the loop of Henle, which is a really, really narrow U-shaped tubule. And the purpose of this loop is to reabsorb water and salt from fluids in the body, which makes the urine more concentrated.

Christian: Yeah.

Ellen: So the kangaroo rat has a really, really insanely long loop of Henle, way longer than in humans or other animals.

Christian: So this structure is common among animals that have kidneys?

Ellen: Yeah, like we have it.

Christian: Okay.

Ellen: Yeah. It's not exclusive to the species. It's just in this species, it is much longer than it is in other species.

Christian: Okay.

Ellen: And what this means is that fluids that pass through the kidneys have a lot more water squeezed out of it. So there's more opportunity for water and nutrients to be metabolized out of fluids that are passing through the kidneys, which means that their urine gets extremely concentrated. It's like, almost solid. Yeah. So what this is letting them do is they're metabolizing the nutrients from the seeds into water and then they end up producing only a couple of drops of highly concentrated urine per day.

Christian: Huh.

Ellen: Yeah. So they are just squeezing every tiny little bit of water they can get out of their diet.

Christian: I guess their body's just really, really good at recycling water to where it's, it's not losing very much, so it doesn't need to take in very much.

Ellen: Yeah. So another thing that lets them conserve water in their body is that they have these really narrow nasal passages, and this traps water in the air that they're exhaling and lets them reabsorb it back into the body.

Christian: Oh, okay.

Ellen: So since they do eat those dry seeds, they can stash the seeds that they eat in cheek pouches. Yes. But unlike in other rodents like hamsters and squirrels, which just shove the food inside of their mouth and store them inside the mouth, these cheek pouches are external.

Christian: Whoa.

Ellen: Yeah. So... This took like a long time for me to really understand how these cheek pouches work. So the openings of the pouches are kind of like flaps of skin over the sides of the mouth, and the inside of the cheek pouches extend all the way to the back of the shoulders.

Christian: That's insane.

Ellen: Yes. So since these are external and they're not actually inside of the mouth, the pouches are lined with fur just like the rest of the skin on the body.

Ellen: It's very weird. Look up a picture of it. It's so weird. It's very creepy looking. These external cheek pouches let them carry around lots and lots of seeds without needing to make frequent trips back to their burrow to stash. Yeah. This is actually a difference. Gerbils don't have cheek pouches, but kangaroo rats do.

Christian: Interesting.

Ellen: Yeah. I gave them major effectiveness points, not just for survival from the elements, but also for having some pretty good predator evasion mechanics. So, uh, the first one being a big hop. So they have those big long hind legs. With those hind legs, they can jump up to nine feet, or 2.75 meters, in one jump.

Christian: That's... Really far.

Ellen: It's so far. That's, you know, I said like nine times the length of their entire body.

Christian: Bye bye.

Ellen: Goodbye! Boinggg! And they're very, very quick and they use their long tail as a counterbalance to keep them balanced when they're jumping around so they're not like, tumbling all over the place.

Christian: Sure.

Ellen: So, and their hind legs aren't just for mobility. So you can find a video online of a desert kangaroo rat escaping the strike of a rattlesnake by quickly twisting its body around and kicking the snake right in the teeth.

Christian: That's not where you want to kick it.

Ellen: Kicks him in the face! Just punts the snake and the snake drops the rat and the rat scurries away.

Christian: Bye!

Christian: It says goodbyeeee! I will not be eaten today.

Christian: So, now I'm seeing where the kangaroo moniker comes from.

Ellen: Yeah. They are not afraid to kick you square in the jaw and both literally and figuratively bounce. So also, when they're making aggressive displays at each other, they will stomp their feet on the ground and it makes it a little like, *thunk thunk thunk* sound.

Christian: Mad!

Ellen: Yeah! They pout and stomp their feet on the ground and it's cute to us. But to other kangaroo rats or even to potential predators it's a more aggressive display. So, sometimes it works. I saw a video that was Sir David Attenborough watching this kangaroo rat that was being harassed by a snake, and you see the little rat getting all mad and he stomped his little feet. So the kangaroo rat also has these huge ears, and the ears are really, really sensitive so it has really good hearing, and it can even hear owls approaching. And owls are known for being very silent flyers.

Christian: Right.

Ellen: So that's my 10 out of 10. I figured they had it all, right? They have good survival, good predator evasion. They're just, they're pretty well suited to doing what they're doing.

Christian: Yeah, for sure.

Ellen: This brings me to ingenuity for the desert kangaroo rat. I'm giving them an 8 out of 10. They're pretty clever. So kangaroo rats live in underground burrows that can have complex tunnel systems, but they do live by themselves. So there's not any sort of like... I dunno, colony structure, like there's no socialization. It's just the one, the one kangaroo rat. Other than when a female has babies and the babies will live in her burrow with her, but other than that it's just one. So when kangaroo rats have foraged extra seeds, they will stash the surplus in their underground burrow. And this actually, when the seeds are in storage underground, they're absorbing more moisture from the ground. This gives the kangaroo rat more water when they eat them. So I thought it was interesting. They're almost like cultivating their food to make it better for them.

Christian: Yeah.

Ellen: It's pretty neat. I thought that was pretty clever. And they will sometimes use sand as a tool. They hide their seeds by covering them up with sand. They will also kick sand over the entrances to their burrows to hide it from intruders, and when they encounter something unfamiliar, they kick sand at it.

Christian: What's that? Sh-sha!

Ellen: What they're kind of doing is they're testing it for a response. So trying to see if it's alive or not and if it's something they need to be worried about. But yeah, they will just kick sand at it.

Christian: So this is their version of "poke it with a stick"

Ellen: But they don't have a stick nearby, so just poke it with a bunch of sand. I consider that kind of a ranged attack almost, because you just kick sand at it. And this actually can be a defensive technique, so it could intimidate or even just annoy predators enough to get them to leave. So in that video I was talking about with David Attenborough where there's a kangaroo rat, the kangaroo rat escapes the snake by kicking sand at it and the snake just gets annoyed and leaves.

Christian: Snake's accuracy is lowered!

Ellen: Wild snake fled. It's like the snake is just like, "Oh gosh, I hate this," and it just turns and runs away. It's not worth it. So they also use the sand to keep their fur clean by rolling around in it, taking dust baths, which is adorable. It's really cute.

Christian: Kinda like the chinchilla?

Ellen: Yes. A lot like a chinchilla. And kangaroo rat moms will kick sand onto their babies to dry them off after they're born.

Christian: Oh, I thought it was a discipline thing, like, "Y'all be quiet."

Ellen: I'm sure they would if they were bothering her. Listen, they live on sand dunes, right? When sand is literally all you have around you, you're going to use it for everything. Right?

Christian: Tell that to Anakin Skywalker.

Ellen: So that's my 8 out of 10 for their ingenuity for the desert kangaroo rat, and that brings me to aesthetics. For aesthetics I also gave them an 8 out of 10.

Christian: Okay.

Ellen: They're very cute. They have cute big round eyes because they're nocturnal, and being a functional nocturnal animal, not like the koala that has a little tiny beady eyes, they have these big round eyes that let a lot of light in. They have pleasant sandy blonde colored fur, it's like a light.... It's the color of sand. Right? But it also has patches of white. I think it looks kind of like a dreamsicle color palette. Yeah, it's really cute. They also have that long, tufted tail and the long bunny rabbit legs and then they got big old chonky cheeks, which I'm really into. It's really cute.

Christian: Do you think they store sand in those pouches sometimes?.

Ellen: I don't see why they would.

Christian: Pocket sand.

Ellen: I doubt that they would do that. Oh yeah, because, you know, just in case they run out of sand. In case they're experiencing a shortage of sand and there's just not enough and they need more. No, I don't think they'd do that.

Christian: Okay.

Ellen: But yes, this is a cute friend. So I gave them an 8 out of 10 for aesthetics. So for miscellaneous information for the desert kangaroo rat, their conservation status is of least concern.

Christian: Good for them.

Ellen: They're doing pretty good. The kangaroo rats prefer to live in sandy dunes with little vegetation. So they're actually pretty hardy. They're not really bothered by, say there's like agricultural activity going on somewhere and the soil gets overturned or something. They're not bothered by that. They can still work with that.

Christian: Okay.

Ellen: Yeah. So they're pretty hardy. They're adaptable. Yeah. So their biggest known non-natural threat is actually just vehicle activity. They get hit by cars sometimes.

Christian: That makes sense.

Ellen: But not anything that's really a huge threat to their numbers. Just sometimes they get hit by cars. So I guess the best thing you can do for the kangaroo rat is keep your eyes out and drive carefully when driving through the desert.

Christian: I guess that kind of desert habitat would be least prone to being affected by invasive species.

Ellen: What kind of invasive species? I imagine a reptile would be having a field day out there, but... I can think of one invasive species that would not thrive in the Mojave desert.

Christian: What's that?

Ellen: The red lionfish! It's the only way they can be stopped.

Christian: We'll do the Patrick method where we could just take the lion fish out of the ocean...

Ellen: We'll put them in the desert where they can't- listen. There's no coral reefs for them to destroy out there. It's the only place that's safe.

Christian: Oh no, they developed legs and lungs!

Ellen: Oh no! This is evolution all over again. It's happening live. Well, that's it.

Christian: Thanks honey. It's a very interesting animal.

Ellen: I thought so too. I thought it was really cool. I love desert animals. It's such an unforgiving type of habitat, and seeing the way the animals evolve to thrive there is always really interesting. There's always something cool going on in the desert. And I was a little bit inspired to talk about a desert animal because our friend Julie, who lives in Phoenix, Arizona in the middle of a desert, visited us recently and gave my five-year-old a book titled, Guess Who's in the Desert? And it's all about animals that live in the desert. I don't think the kangaroo rat was in there specifically, but it definitely did have me thinking about, I had desert animals on the brain.

Christian: Did it list the aliens?

Ellen: You know what? It didn't because I bet if it did list the aliens in area 51, then the books would have all been pulled by the government because they don't want us to know about the aliens in area 51.

Christian: You know what I think of when I think of animals, or desert animals, is that movie Rango.

Ellen: Oh, I love that movie!

Christian: Yeah. Now we were talking about animals that would not do well if dropped into a desert. I think a chameleon would be one of them.

Ellen: You know, what drives me crazy is that Rango very much looks like a chameleon, and I think at some point in the movie he like, changes color to imply that he would be a chameleon. And a chameleon would pretty much instantly die. Right?

Christian: Well when he, when he's introduced to it, he does like a shrivel up and, like shed type thing.

Ellen: Yeah.

Christian: Oh, hot take. Hot take.

Ellen: Yeah.

Christian: That point in the movie forward is not real, cause he died.

Ellen: Mmmm. Okay. The worst type of fiction theory, the whole "main character was dead/asleep/in a coma all along" theory.

Christian: I'll take my check now.

Ellen: Okay. I think that's as off-topic as I'm okay with getting in this episode.

Christian: Okay!

Ellen: We're still talking about desert animals, so I guess we're okay. We're within bounds.

Christian: Yeah.

Ellen: Well that's it for us this week, so thank you so much for spending this time with us. We have made a lot of new friends, a lot of new people are joining the Just the Zoo of Us family and that's really exciting for us, so we really appreciate that and we would really love it if you could come hang out with us on social media. We're on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Come join our group and follow us on Twitter cause that's where the polls are going, where you can vote on what animal we talk about every week. If you have a species that you want to hear, you can submit those to us either on social media or at my email address, which is ellen@justthezooofus.com. A transcript of this episode and all of those proceeding it can be found at www.justthezooofus.com and to wrap up, we would like to thank Louie Zong for allowing us to use his song "Adventuring" from his album Bee Sides.

Christian: Yes, thank you so much!

Ellen: And thank you to you all who've been listening. We love you.

Christian: *kiss*

Ellen: Well now I'm jealous.

Christian: Bye!

Ellen: Byeeee!