Listener Questions #27

00:00:07
Speaker 1: One mom gives birth to two species. Hit the news today, Evolution, You're crazy. That's all I have to say.

00:00:16
Speaker 2: Do physicists see the universe in their mind's eye or is it easier to understand it if they're mentally blind.

00:00:25
Speaker 1: Might's live on your face and make there at night? Why would evolution do that? It's just not right.

00:00:31
Speaker 2: Whatever questions keep you up at night, Daniel and Kelly's answers will make it all right.

00:00:38
Speaker 1: Or it'll creepy out even more. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe.

00:00:55
Speaker 2: Hi. I'm Daniel, I'm a particle physicist, and I think the universe is beautiful and creepy.

00:01:01
Speaker 1: Hi. I'm Kelly Winnersmith. I study parasites and space, and I think the universe is also beautiful and creepy. And sometimes creepy is beautiful and it's all complicated.

00:01:13
Speaker 2: Have you met a parasite, Kelly where you're like, hmm, that's too gross. I wish this didn't exist in the universe. Or can you find some beauty in every single riggly, crawling, disgusting thing.

00:01:25
Speaker 1: I can find some beauty in everything, but I would rather not be in the room with ascris lumbricoids. It's a really long, really thick nematod. It really grosses me out. And when we talked about screwworm a couple of weeks back, maybe come a month's back now.

00:01:43
Speaker 2: I'm still scarred from that conversation.

00:01:45
Speaker 1: Yes, well, I looked at the photos and that.

00:01:48
Speaker 2: Was don't do that, people, no nobody else do that.

00:01:50
Speaker 1: We actually had a listener writers to say they did that, and they were like, I should have listened to you when you told me not to.

00:01:56
Speaker 2: I have not googled screwworm, and I think I've protected my men health for that reason.

00:02:01
Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, do not google screwworm. It is super gross. So, yeah, there's some parasites that I don't want to be in the room with. I once watched a presentation. I was studying a parasite that lives on the brains of California, killyfish, and so I spent like literally all day working with brains. But then I was watching an anthropology talk and they went to a country that was like selling monkey brains, and there was a table filled with monkey brains and I was looking at just the picture and the room started to spin. WHOA, and I was like, I'm gonna throw up, and I was like, but I can't have everybody see me throwing up over brains. I work on brains, and anyway, I like just kind of looked down and hoped nobody could see me, and I managed to get through it. But it's weird the things that set us off.

00:02:43
Speaker 2: The universe certainly sets us off, and I have the same kind of reaction to, you know, astrophysical stuff. On one hand, a supernova is amazing. On the other hand, it could like sterilize a whole portion of the galaxy with incredible radiation. Right, it's terrifying. The universe is beautiful and incredible, but also violent and destructive and crazy. So it is an extraordinary universe we live in, isn't it.

00:03:08
Speaker 1: It is? And it's also, i gotta say, a confusing universe we live in. And that kind of brings us to our first question, which was really hard to unpack. This question was an amazing question from a listener, Jamie, who often writes us and sends us articles to be like does this make any sense? And it's always fun to dig in and this paper was particularly fun. So the headline is one mother for two species via obligate cross species cloning in ants.

00:03:43
Speaker 2: Well, one mom keeping birth to two different species. Thought that was impossible. Anyway, let's hear Jamie's question and then dig in.

00:03:52
Speaker 3: Hello, professors, this is Jamie Feffer from Westfield, New Jersey. I would be grateful for your help understanding an article that I read in the New York Time. It reports on a study in Nature where scientists said that queens from one species of ant produced male offspring of a different species.

00:04:10
Speaker 4: The scientist then said that it's like a human having chimp.

00:04:14
Speaker 3: Babies and then using the babies as a source of sperm, for giving birth to human chimp hybrids as a source of labor.

00:04:22
Speaker 4: What on earth is going on here? Please? It sounds like a chapter from one of professor Kelly's books. Thank you very much.

00:04:29
Speaker 2: All right, Kelly, so set us up for why this is a fascinating question. My understanding of what a species means is that individuals can mate and give birth to like live offspring that isn't sterile. And so how can you give birth to two different species? How's that possible?

00:04:46
Speaker 1: Yeah? It's crazy, right, So okay, so you can get like a donkey and a horse, they can mate together and make a mule, and the mule is sterile. And so you can get like pretty distantly related species that mate and produce something different, like for.

00:05:01
Speaker 2: Example, my dog has Chihuahua and German shepherd ancestry, and nobody knows how that happened. And I also won't suggest googling that, but you know it did happen and he exists.

00:05:12
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, right, don't think too hard about it. But so those are different breeds, not different species, and so that the equivalent here would be like you know, so I gave birth to two human children, it would be like I gave birth to one human children and then the next one was a chimpanzee. And and that's confusing and unexpected.

00:05:34
Speaker 2: I mean, you always expect every child is going to be different, but not that different, that's.

00:05:37
Speaker 1: Right, that's right, that's pretty different. And the species, so we're talking about ants in this example, and species one, this is the species that gives birth to two species. She the queens not only give birth to their own species, as you would expect, but they're also able to give birth to males of a different species that they've been separated from for five million years.

00:06:02
Speaker 2: Wow. All right, so this is like dogs give birth to dogs and occasionally a cat.

00:06:07
Speaker 1: Yes, right, I mean I don't know how long dogs and cats diverge. That's probably more than five million years. But yes, your point stands, and so okay, so here's what's happening. So first, aunt mating systems are crazy, right, and we're not going to go into loads of detail because it's super complicated. But what you need to know is that females are diploids. So what that means is that they have two sets of chromosomes, just like humans. We have two sets of chromosomes, right, But to make males, they only have one set of chromosomes. So a female doesn't have to mate with another male. If she wants to lay dude eggs, she just takes one set of her chromosomes, sticks them in the egg, and now you've got males. So she doesn't have to mate. She can make males on her own.

00:06:54
Speaker 2: But to make a female she needs a contribution from another member of her species.

00:06:58
Speaker 1: That's right, So to make a female worker, she needs to mate with another male.

00:07:02
Speaker 2: But having these complicated relationships between the parents and the kids, doesn't that mean that like the siblings relationships are complicated, and like your evolutionary interests are intermingled in complicated ways. If I remember, like aunts have really complicated sibling math.

00:07:17
Speaker 1: Yeah they do, Okay, So the bottom line is that the sisters share about seventy five percent of their genetic material with each other, whereas usually sisters share about fifty percent.

00:07:27
Speaker 2: So like human sisters share fifty percent, you're saying.

00:07:29
Speaker 1: That's right, yeah, and aunt sisters share seventy five percent. And we think that this plays a role and why ant colonies work so well together. So you can think of aunt colonies as like a super organism. You've got the queen who's laying a bunch of eggs, and then all of the females work to support the queen, and you would maybe not expect such selfless behavior unless individuals were super closely related to each other, which means that when the queen is making a lot more babies, they're essentially making individuals who are very genetically similar to you. And so from a genetic standpoint and from an evolutionary standpoint, this is great news. So maybe you're willing to not mate because your mom is making so many super genetically related sisters and it's awesome. Does that kind of make sense?

00:08:13
Speaker 2: Mm hmmm, that makes sense. Yeah, Okay, so that explains like how the siblings are related to each other. Why don't we need to understand that to understand how you can give birth to another kind of species?

00:08:22
Speaker 1: Okay, So the thing that you want to know is that this ant that was all over the news recently, when she's giving birth to a new species, she's giving birth to sons in particular. Okay, And so here's what happened. If you're in Europe and in Asia, you will find these two species of ants. One of them is called Mezsor ibericus, and one is Mesor structor. But we're never going to keep those straight, so I'm going to call them species one that's Ibericus and species two structor. All right, In part of their range they overlap, and in part of their range they don't. So there's some areas where you just find species one, some areas where you just find species two, and some areas where you find colonies of species one and species two. In addition to all of the ant reproductive weirdness with the females being diploid and the males being haploid, this system has another weird trait, which is called sperm parasitism. So here's what happens. The workers in the nest are females, but instead of mom mating with a male of her species, mom mates with a male of a different species. Right, so they're closely related enough that they can still mate with each other, but they produce I believe, infertile offspring that become workers. And so why would that evolve. The reason we think that that evolved is because, yes, it's nice that all the sisters are seventy five percent related to each other. But every once in a while, one of the workers will get it in their head and I'm being super anthromorphic here, but they'll get it in their heads that maybe it would be better if they just laid their own eggs. And now you've got a competitor with the queen. But if all of your workers are these hybrids that are sterile, they can't make their own eggs anymore. And so the queen essentially has this extra layer of control over her colony because none of her workers are even able to compete with her. It's just not even a question. Yeah, And so there are you know, a handful of different ant species we know of that do this thing called sperm parasitism, where they make these hybrid sterile workers by mating with males of a different species.

00:10:40
Speaker 2: And why exactly is it called parasitism?

00:10:43
Speaker 1: I think the idea is that so for species two, the males that are impregnating the queen, they're essentially wasting their sperm, so they impregnate the queen of species one, and all of those offspring are sterile, so they don't go anywhere. So the males of species two have made this sperm, paid the cost to make it, and it's genetically evolutionarily not going to end up, you know, contributing to more offspring for them.

00:11:09
Speaker 2: And when Jamie asked you this question, do you think he knew there was a parasite angle on it or is that just like a happy bonus for everybody.

00:11:15
Speaker 1: I don't know. It might have just been a happy bonus, but I'm excited either way. Jamie knows us pretty well, so maybe this was a gift for me.

00:11:22
Speaker 2: I didn't realize that even sperms can be parasites. That's incredible.

00:11:25
Speaker 1: Oh no, no, no, the sperm is being parasitized. Oh right, yeah, yeah, So the queen is essentially like extracting the sperm for her own purposes. Wow, but not benefiting species too?

00:11:37
Speaker 2: Is there an evil cackle that happens along the way? You think.

00:11:43
Speaker 1: I won't, but there's little ants, So it's gotta be a little high pitched voice. Try that, Daniel.

00:11:48
Speaker 2: I can't do that. I can't do that.

00:11:53
Speaker 1: Okay, Well, all right, so that was amazing. That's already weird. Okay. But so for species one, it has now actually become a requirement that the queen mates with another species. She can't produce these workers anymore unless she finds species two males.

00:12:11
Speaker 2: The thing you thought you were going to do just once turns out to be a habit, and then now you can't live without it.

00:12:16
Speaker 1: I know that's right. We've all been there, and so for me it's coffee, But.

00:12:22
Speaker 2: So for other people it's sperm paraticism.

00:12:24
Speaker 1: That's right. That's right to each their own right. So okay, so you might remember that I told you that there are areas where you only find species one or you only find species two. Right, So if species one has to mate with species two, how does species one manage to persist far away from species two? And there's one spot where it's known that there's one thousand kilometers between the nearest Species one and Species two nests. All right, so there's no queens of species two in the area. But if you find a Species one nest and you dig it up, you'll find that there are still hybrid individuals in there. So there's still the hybrid workers. And so the question is how the heck is she managing to produce these hybrids when there's no males of species two around. Yeah, the answer is going to be that she makes species two males, which is crazy. Right, So let's go through the process that the scientists went through to sort of study this. So first they opened up species one nests and they looked very carefully at everybody who was in there in an area where you shouldn't find any Species two, and they did find some Species two males in the nest, and they were like, okay, that's really weird. And so then they looked at the genetic information inside of species two and they found that Species two had mitochondria from species one. And if you know anything about mitochondria, you might remember that mitochondria are only inherited from mom. So that means that these species two males must have come from a mom of species one because they've got her mitochondria. And they went over to areas where you find species two normally like in their own sort of colony, and they confirmed species two males usually have mitochondria from species two moms. And so this was weird.

00:14:23
Speaker 2: So you can tell the difference between species two males that come from species one or species two by their mitochondria.

00:14:30
Speaker 1: Yes, wow, yeah, very cool. But they wanted to make one hundred percent sure that the queens were the ones who were laying the eggs that had the males, and so they took queens and workers and they brought them into the lab, and some of the workers that they brought into the lab these were from species one. They went ahead and they did lay some of their own eggs, and what they found was that nine percent of the eggs made by queens of species one produced males of species two. Amazing, right, were weird. And when the workers of species one made some eggs, none of them were species two. It's just the queen who's doing this, Okay. So then they monitored a colony that they brought into the lab for a year and a half, and they found that the mom produced Species one and Species two males. They both survived to reproductive age, and they looked genetically and they confirmed, Okay, one queen is definitely making species one and Species two males. How is she doing that? So one possibility here is that a lot of invertebrates are able to store sperm, so you can mate with a male, and a couple months later you can be like, oh, I'm gonna take that sperm that I was storing, and now I'm gonna fertilize my eggs, and even though there's no males around, I can go ahead and have some extra babies.

00:15:51
Speaker 2: I didn't know it lasted that long. I thought I had a short life span, like twenty four hours or forty eight hours or something.

00:15:56
Speaker 1: I don't know exactly how long it is, but it's more than twenty four or forty eight hours. But by having them in the lab for eighteen months, they were able to, like pretty conclusively say, Okay, the females probably aren't like flying one thousand kilometers to go find a Species two male, mating with him and then coming back like she's been in the lab the whole.

00:16:14
Speaker 2: Time, or maybe they're like actually aliens and have wormhole technology and they're like teleporting over there. That's right, not a hypothesis they considered.

00:16:22
Speaker 1: No, you know, they didn't have a physicist on the team, probably, and I.

00:16:26
Speaker 2: Know that you always need a physicist, right, maybe maybe maybe Are you not even going to agree with me on that one?

00:16:33
Speaker 1: Yeah?

00:16:33
Speaker 2: Heads your bed on that one, all right?

00:16:35
Speaker 1: Probably almost certainly.

00:16:36
Speaker 2: At least we should consider having a physicist on every project.

00:16:39
Speaker 1: Sure, right, And are you going to consider having a biologist on every project to make sure you all stay down to Earth?

00:16:44
Speaker 2: I already do? Oh, I already do, of course, okay, okay, all right. So they saw this essentially happened in the lab and controlled conditions, so they knew that she was actually generating species to herself.

00:16:57
Speaker 1: Yes, right. They also looked at like genetic diverse of species two males in their native range and in these species one nests, and they were very low diversity, which you would expect, you know, if there was something weird happening, and the males were just like a very small subset of their genes were being passed through species one over time. So here is what they think is happening. Females are somehow cloning males and all cloning means. And you might remember this from a past conversation where we talked about cloning, like in our episode about the dire wolf that was made by Colossal. So essentially, what you do is you take an egg and you like extract the genetic information from the egg, except you can leave the mitochondria in there, and then you put new genetic information into that egg, and then what hatches is the species or the individual associated with the new genetic information. Does that make sense? So somehow the females seem to be taking genetic information from species two, plopping it into their own eggs, and producing species two males. They don't know exactly how that's happening, but the way that it could work in theory is that you've got a queen from species one in an area where the species overlap, She mates with the male from species two and stores that sperm. She migrates away from the area where the species overlap and goes and starts her new colonies somewhere completely different. She uses that sperm to make males, and then she mates with those males to get her hybrid workers.

00:18:32
Speaker 2: That's pretty ikey though, she's like meeting with her own sons.

00:18:35
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, I mean nature. Yeah, has a lot of uncomfortable stuff happening.

00:18:40
Speaker 2: I'm sure we can find some beauty in that. Also.

00:18:42
Speaker 1: Nope, and so moving on and so hard. No so uh okay. So she's got she can mate with these males that she made, and now she's got her hybrid workers. But when it's time to make a queen a new queen, she can mate with the other male that are of her species, and then those queens can mate with the males of species two that are already in the colony with them. They can acquire that sperm, and then they can bring that sperm with them even farther away from the initial area that they live, so even farther away from where you usually find species two.

00:19:20
Speaker 2: So this is a mechanism for extending your colonies beyond the boundaries of species too. They like need species too, but it's not always available, so they evolve this mechanism to basically cut them out of the loop and make them themselves right.

00:19:34
Speaker 1: Yes, and then they also have this amazing ability to like, instead of combining genetic information, they just take the male's genetic information and like and clone them, which is totally crazy. And to be honest, the authors were very clear, we do not know the mechanism to explain what's happening here, and so this is just like a hypothetical. But they compared it to domestication. It's kind of like domesticating species two and sort of taking it with you for your own purposes. And I'm not quite sure that I buy the comparison, but it's an interesting way to think about it.

00:20:03
Speaker 2: Yeah, that is fascinating. They're sort of raising it and co opting it for their own purposes in that sense. But when we domesticate cats, there's no like interbreeding. Yeah, I mean not usually that I'm aware of.

00:20:16
Speaker 1: Oh oh more, absolutely not.

00:20:18
Speaker 2: Okay, I mean when people say cat lady, I don't think that's what they mean.

00:20:21
Speaker 1: Right, Oh goshh not safe for work. So the authors propose a new word, changing the subject. The new word is xenoparis, meaning they quote need to produce individuals of another species as part of their life cycle.

00:20:36
Speaker 2: Wow.

00:20:36
Speaker 1: Zeno means like strange or different, and parody means like to give birth, so anyway giving birth to something different.

00:20:42
Speaker 2: So does this mean we should again broaden our concept of what a species is. That the lines are even fuzzier than we thought before. The biology is amazing us and how messy it is again.

00:20:53
Speaker 1: So you let's hold that answer because I am working on a whole episode on how do you define species? And all of the weird things evolution does that makes our job really difficult. It's going to be like a philosophical discussion, which I think will be right up your alley. Yep, yeah, yes, So tune in for the answer in a future episode, and let's see if Jamie feels like I managed to figure this paper out.

00:21:19
Speaker 2: Wow, all right, let's hear from Jamie.

00:21:21
Speaker 3: Thanks Jamie, thank you very much for explaining the article. I'm glad there was at least some form of parasitism in there. For Professor Kelly, I look forward to your episode on defining a species.

00:21:34
Speaker 4: A story like this makes me wonder if maybe our.

00:21:36
Speaker 3: Categories are too rigid, or perhaps they don't apply to all creatures equally. Thanks, though, I'm really grateful for the explanation.

00:22:03
Speaker 1: All right, So from ants to ant Fantasia, which I you know, reliably produced incorrectly. I'm sure.

00:22:12
Speaker 2: Me ouch on that one there, Kelly, all right, so we are answering questions today. We love getting questions from listeners. If you have a question about the nature of the universe, or really anything about this beautiful, incredible, disgusting cosmic violence that we have and that we live in, please write to us to questions at to Daniel and Kelly dot org. We will get back to you. And here's a question about visual imagery in the mind and how it enables or disables people to do physics.

00:22:41
Speaker 5: Hi, Daniel and Kelly. I recently found out that I have a trait called a fantasia, which is the inability to consciously pull up visual imagery in my mind. I do dream, though, but finding out others can picture an apple in their head with their eyes open or closed was mind blowing. And I've gone most of my adult life without even knowing this. Imagine my continued surprise when I discovered that it's not limited to visual information, but can also include auditory smell, and even taste. I enjoy reading sci fi and fantasy, but my experience in your experience must be worlds apart. And that leads me to my question, as a physicist, how do you use imagery on a day to day basis, are you writing equations on a chalkboard? And if so, are you holding the chalk?

00:23:34
Speaker 1: Thanks so much, Oh my gosh, this is such a fascinating question. And this question reminded me of Temple grand And so when we got our son's autism diagnosis, I read every biography I could find written or autobiography written by someone who's autistic, so that I could try to understand what his life would be like. And I guess Temple Grandon has this amazing ability to sort of imagine what it's like to be So she works with livestock and tries to create ways to make their lives better and have more humane practices. And she's amazingly good at like envisioning what it must be like to be a cow and what it is that they're seeing. And she clearly can imagine things way better than I can. And it sounds like this listener is on the other side where they're able to envision even less than I can. And I think this spectrum is totally fascinating.

00:24:25
Speaker 2: It is really amazing, and it's something we only understood like in the last you know, ten or fifteen years, that there is a variation between people and their mental imagery. Essentially, we've been communicating with each other about this kind of stuff for thousands of years and not realizing that we're having very different experiences internally. And I read this excellent article in The New Yorker very recently about a fantasia from late October. Really recommend it, and it begins with the story of a physicist who, in his late thirties or early forties, finally realizes that when everybody else is talking about having images in their minds, they're being literal about it. He thought forever that everyone was just sort of like using metaphors like I mean, you say you're thinking about that, you're seeing that in your mind, but you're not literally like seeing it, right, And it was only like recently the dude is like totally grown up when he realized people are being literal, that some people can close their eyes and imagine an apple from yesterday and like see it'd be green and shimmery, and you know, really visualize these things. He thought everybody was being figurative.

00:25:32
Speaker 1: What do you think it would be like to realize that as an adult? I mean, I think animal behaviors think about this kind of stuff. All the time, like you know, that animal could do something I can't, But it must have been a crazy moment to realize.

00:25:44
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I think everybody is a little different. And as you're growing up, you discover like, wow, everybody thinks that swimming is fun and I hate the beach, Or everybody else loves chocolate but I think it's gross. Or watermelon tastes like cilantro. So it's not unusual to find something that makes you different. But it is amazing how such fundamental parts of what we think about the human experience can be different from person to person. And you know, this is a question like philosophers have been debating for thousands of years, like what is it like to be a bat? Do we see the same color red? And so sort of incredible that it's only recently people have been studying this in detail. And this article goes into the history of the study of it, which is only about one hundred and fifty years old. Does a guy Francis Galton, who's also sort of a famous eugenicist, Yeah, did some early research and found a bunch of examples of scientists who he says, quote, have feeble powers of visual representation, so scientists in particular tend to not be able to imagine things in their minds, which I think is, you know, the impetus for today's question. And that's surprising because it feels like visual imagery is so important to physics. Like think of the story of Einstein coming up with relativity. He says that he was imagining, or trying to imagine, pulling up alongside a photon, and in realizing that that was impossible, he understood how photons have no reference frame. And Einstein's work is filled with these examples of trains and passing each other in light, and clearly he's imagining visual situations right. And in chemistry there's lots of examples like how did somebody figure out the structure of benzene? They had like a dream of a snake biting its own tail. It's like very vivid visual imagery. So it's easy to imagine that having vivid mental imagery would be essential for doing science. Right.

00:27:33
Speaker 1: Yeah, but Galton was wrong about a lot of things. Was a lot of things, a lot of important things. Was he wrong about this too?

00:27:42
Speaker 2: So we don't have enough data to know and the fields has really gone back and forth, like in the early nineteen hundreds, the widespread belief among psychologists was that mental imagery didn't exist. There's a movement of behaviorism led by a guy named JB. Watson who says, quote, what does a person mean when he closes his eyes or ears and says, I see the house where I was born? Touching, of course, but sheer bunk. We are merely dramatizing. The behaviorist finds no proof of imagery in all of this. So psychiatrists felt like, no, you're not really feeling these things. You're not really seeing these things, which is bizarre because some of them must have been experiencing it, right. But you know, that was just the movement. It's science is weird that way. It follows these trends and these fads, and eventually it zigzags towards the truth. But it can go down some weird rabbit.

00:28:33
Speaker 1: Holes, yeah, and it can get stuck in them for a while.

00:28:35
Speaker 2: Yeah. And so it was only the early two thousands when a Scotsman had a cardiac procedure and after that discovered he could no longer picture anything like he used to be able to. And then he had this procedure done and all of a sudden, he like couldn't have a mental image of you know, his wife's face when she wasn't there. He like lost this ability.

00:28:57
Speaker 1: What was the tie in with the cardiac procedure. Did part of his brain not get enough oxygen as part of the procedure.

00:29:03
Speaker 2: Yeah, So he went to a neurologist, and this neurologist had always been interested in this kind of stuff anyway, and did a study and showed that part of this guy's brain had been like weakened, probably because of this cardiac event, and he was trying to call these mental images up, but that part of his brain was not activating. So he found the part of the brain that was like activating when other people were making mental images, and in this guy was now failing. Wow, And so he wrote an article about it. It is like a new discovery. And then a bunch of people wrote in and they were like, oh, my gosh, that describes my experience. And so it turned out this wasn't just like one random scotsman who had an injury, but it was fairly common, and so he decided to call this afhantasia. Fantasia was defined by Aristotle as the ability to conjure an image in your imagination, so a fantasia meaning you can't do it. And Carl Zimmer wrote an article about this in Discover magazine which got a lot more attention, and that a lot more people wrote in and they were like, wow, this is actually quite widespread.

00:30:05
Speaker 1: Huge Curl Zimmer fan.

00:30:06
Speaker 2: Let me just say, I know, and I love when science journalism helps propel the science right gets the right attention to it. People were like, hey, everybody should know about this. This is kind of a thing. And a lot of people, it turns out, discover that they have this condition only when reading about it or hearing about it described on the radio. Like their whole lives. They had heard people talk about picturing things or imagining things, or visualizing beaches or whatever, and they just assumed that these were idioms, that they were like kind of being a hyperbologic they were exaggerating, really that they weren't really seeing it. And only when hearing this described that this was a condition that you could have, that they'd been deeply and profoundly misunderstanding everybody else's experience.

00:30:51
Speaker 1: I wonder if they're more likely to doodle, because if I'm trying to keep track of things in my head. But I couldn't do that. I feel like I'd want to doodle it out on paper to keep. And anyway, I'm getting this. This is amazing, No.

00:31:00
Speaker 2: It's fascinating. And in the article they interview some artists, and there are some artists who have a fantasia, and they hear other artists say like, the picture didn't come out as crisply as it does in my mind. And these artists with a fantastic are like, what are you talking about? And there's the opposite condition called hyper fantasia, where you have exceptionally detailed mental images, which sounds awesome, but some people describe it as like graphic and inescapable, you know where you like, if you watch a horror movie, you just like can't escape having those terrible scenes in your mind. You know, we don't fade the same way we do for others.

00:31:37
Speaker 1: I can totally imagine that not being good. Like those pictures of Screwworm that I looked at, I've kind of forgotten them. It would be awful if I could still see them right now.

00:31:45
Speaker 2: Yeah, somebody with hyperfantagia said that. For example, if somebody just like mentions skateboarding. Then he gets like an avalanche of vivid memories of every skateboarding experience he's ever had, being like stuck in virtual reality and having like a three sixty degree video of a thousand skateboarding experiences forced on you. So they're sort of at the mercy of what people say because his brain is so visual.

00:32:09
Speaker 1: That feels like two problems though, like being able to really visualize something and having too many memories coming in. That seems like two things.

00:32:18
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, So this is something we're still understanding. It's like, it's the brain, so it's complicated. But it's amazing to me that it's only recently we've even recognized that this is an issue, that there really is a difference. And there's this meme that's going around now online. You've probably seen it, which shows like a person with like a crisp image of an apple in their mind and then gradations all the way down to a person with no image at all. And you should look at that and you should ask yourself, like what do I see in my mind's eye? And there really is a huge spectrum. There are people who just cannot visualize stuff in their brains, and people can have like exceptionally crisp photo quality images in their minds, which might feel weird to you as well. And I thought about this myself, and I'm a very visual person. I can really imagine a crisp apple, not quite photorealistic, but with a lot of detail. How about you, Kelly, what kind of images do you see in your mind?

00:33:05
Speaker 1: I think of somewhere in between. Definitely not photorealistic, but I can see stuff.

00:33:09
Speaker 2: And this is fascinatingly connected to thinking about science, because we talked earlier about how it might be really important to have these visuals in your mind to do science. But Oliver Sacks did this fascinating experience which you'd love, Kelly, because it involved self experimentation. He had almost no mental imagery, but then he decided to take heroic quantities of anphetamines, and while he was doing this, he could see images in his mind. It like activated this part of his brain so he could do it, But then he could no longer think about abstract stuff, so it was sort of trade off. So it might be the people who are exceptionally visual can't think as abstractly, and people who think better abstractly can't think as visually, and so to the question like what's crucial for doing physics, it might be that not being construed by visual imagery makes you better thinking about complex things like eleven dimensional manifolds that you need to solve string theory. Right, Maybe being unshackled from the reality of our intuition for the dominance of our physical world and its implied limitations makes it easier to think about complex numbers and all sorts of crazy things, which a lot of us find counterintuitive because we don't see them reflected in our reality. And so I think the answer to the question is that there's a whole spectrum of experience, and there's different kinds of physicists. Like for me, when I think about physics, I think very geometrically, even if we're talking about like weird abstract math, I like see it in my mind as shapes, like fitting together or not fitting together, or clicking or pulling on each other. Like when I think about quantum fields, it's very visual and geometric. And I always struggled with equations, Like I can do the math, obviously, I know how to manipulate equations, but I don't think in terms of equations. I don't look at an equation and understand intuitively, have to translate it in to sort of geometric concepts in order to understand how the pieces are pulling on each other and how they interplay with each other. So I think this is probably a whole different spectrum, and different kinds of brains are good at different kinds of things. And I'm glad that we have a diversity of brains in physics and in biology and in the world.

00:35:17
Speaker 1: Absolutely, But now you've got me wanting a survey of different fields and having them do that that like right gradient of photorealistic apple to like hazy apple, and seeing if different kinds of fields have different average scores on that test.

00:35:31
Speaker 2: Yeah, all right, it would be fascinating exactly. But it's good that we have all these different kinds of brains. I wonder how hereditary it is, you know, I like, yeah, if you have apple pictures as parents, does that mean you can picture apples? And if not? And how random it is? Anyway, It's amazing the way the world is and the way we image it, and how bad we are at understanding other people's internal experience and what else are we not understanding because we're using these clumsy.

00:35:59
Speaker 1: Words within our own species, right, and then you try to figure out what's happening with another species, and it's amazing we understand anything at all.

00:36:06
Speaker 2: Yeah, Okay, we're back and we're answering questions from you, from listeners just like you, who had a moment of curiosity that they couldn't scratch themselves, and so they wrote to us, and we are here to scratch that itch.

00:36:38
Speaker 1: Well, speaking of scratching, we're going to talk about little mites that live on your face.

00:36:42
Speaker 2: Oh boy?

00:36:44
Speaker 1: All right, So Luner on Discord had this question for us.

00:36:49
Speaker 6: Good morning, Daniel and Kelly.

00:36:51
Speaker 2: How are you?

00:36:51
Speaker 6: This is a Lunar from Discord. So my question is pretty simple. Why does a thing like demo dex folliculorum actually exist? I understand nature is strange and life is beautiful, but why do these things exist? Why do I now know that there are ity bitty little mites living on my face and getting jiggy with it all through the night. It kind of sort of makes me want to bathe in pesticide. So can someone put my mind at ease and just let me know, let us know, let the people know that these things aren't causing us any harm, and they might just very well be living out their best life. So what's up with these little face invaders? Thanks?

00:37:36
Speaker 2: You know, I'm a big believer in scientific education and knowing stuff, but wow, I'm not sure I really want to know about all the growth stuff that lives on my face.

00:37:44
Speaker 1: Too bad? Here it comes, okay. So, Demodex is a genus of mites, and mites are related to erechnids, so they're related to spiders and takes, but like they're their own sort of thing, and they live on our faces. There are two species that you tell to find on your face, Demodex follicularum and Demodex brevis follicularum. Lives in like our smaller hair follicles and like your eyelashes and stuff, and so your hair follicles are like you know, the holes where the hair shaft sort of goes in there. They live inside of them. There're a social species, and they eat skin cells that they find in there. The other species usually lives near oil glands and stuff in hair follicles also, and they're eating like the greasy stuff that are oil glands make.

00:38:31
Speaker 2: So that mean that they're really small. They're like smaller than the width of a hair, so they can like crawl into these follicles and have a snack.

00:38:37
Speaker 1: Super tiny, you can't see them. They're less than half a millimeter. The brevist one is particularly small, so without a microscope you can't see them. You can't feel them.

00:38:47
Speaker 2: But if you have clear visual imagery, now you're thinking about them and you're imagining them crawling all over your face.

00:38:53
Speaker 1: Oh but they save the crawling over your face for nighttime. So right now they are in your pores eating their dead skin buffet and their greas buffet.

00:39:04
Speaker 2: All you can eat dead skin buffet.

00:39:07
Speaker 1: Whoo. But when you fall asleep, they come out of your pores and your follicles and they made on your face.

00:39:17
Speaker 2: They made on your face.

00:39:19
Speaker 1: Wow, on your face.

00:39:21
Speaker 2: I guess for some people that's good news, you know, to eat your own. I don't know. There are so many jokes we could make here, but we're not going to because you're already imagining them, so we don't have to.

00:39:31
Speaker 1: That's right, that's right. Okay, So we had a listener ask us in the past, how do pinworms know it's nighttime? How do face mites know it's nighttime? I looked this up, and first of all, it turns out they can detect lights, so probably even from inside your hair follicles, they can tell if the lights are on or the lights are off, so.

00:39:49
Speaker 2: They can just like notice it's getting dark, and they're like, ooh, it's time for some romance.

00:39:54
Speaker 1: That's right, that's right.

00:39:55
Speaker 2: Somebody's turned down the lights, putting on the insect, putting on the algorithms.

00:39:59
Speaker 1: Right, try, I'll stop.

00:40:01
Speaker 2: So we are keeping that, Matt, that's gold.

00:40:05
Speaker 1: Oh no, all right, okay, So it could be the light. But they also and this is sort of interesting. A couple episodes back, many episodes back, now, maybe we talked about circadian rhythms, and we talked about how circadian rhythms are this like interplay between proteins that are made by your genes, and some of them are made more at night, and some of them are made more during the day, and they help you keep these twenty four hour cycles. Somebody looked a group of researchers looked at the genome of demodecs that live on our face, and they're missing a lot of the genes that you'd need to make the proteins that make circadian clocks, and so they think that actually the mites are sort of bathed in the melatonin that we make, and so instead of trying to do their own circadian clocks, they're like, oh, the human is oozing melatonin. Time for them to go to bed, time for me to get it on, and so they don't need to do it on their own anyway. That's just a hypothesis. But there are other parasites that sort of queue into what host hormones are doing and use that information for their own purposes.

00:41:05
Speaker 2: So they don't have their own internal clock, but they have all these external triggers that tell them like when it's algreen.

00:41:11
Speaker 1: Time exactly exactly, can't.

00:41:16
Speaker 2: Get enough of your face baby?

00:41:19
Speaker 1: Oh got all right, that's enough, that's enough. Okay. So so where do your mites come from? This is an interesting question. So actually most people, by the time their adults have mites, right, and a lot of kids have mites too, And so somebody did a study to try to figure out So imagine that you have a family living together. You have two moms and two kids. The two kids, if they were breastfed by one of the moms, they are much more likely to have her mites than the mites from the other mom, because another place where you find these mites is on nipples, and so the mites, you know, probably like jump off the nipples and onto your face, and so you get your face mites from your mom. And if you were to look at the other mom in that couple, her face mites probably are more like her mom's face mites. Does that all make sense? Yes, something else you can thank your mom for.

00:42:14
Speaker 2: And are these bad in any way or are they good or are they just totally neutral?

00:42:18
Speaker 1: Yeah? Good question. So other species have demodex mites too, some of them can be sort of parasite like, but it looks like our mites are usually not a problem, and maybe they're sort of evolving in a trajectory away from parasitism. But for most of us, we've got these mites on our face will never notice it. But if you end up being immuno compromised, sometimes you will start having problems with these mites. If you're immunocompromised, it seems like they're able to reproduce even more, and if you have roseaesia, they can make your skin feel even more uncomfortable. They don't cause the roseasia. But if you already have like a problem with your skin getting irritated, having a bunch of mites on your face is probably not going to help any thing. They also contribute to what I think is called here's here's another opportunity for me to mispronounce something. Love it bleferitis. Have you heard of bleferitis?

00:43:11
Speaker 2: Daniel, never heard of it? Or maybe it's not pronounced that way, but it doesn't ring a bell.

00:43:16
Speaker 1: Okay, it's probably not pronounced that way. But so it's essentially like, you get this like crusty stuff on your eyelids, and they think that the mites living in your eyelashes could be contributing to that. And this tends to particularly be a problem in elderly folks, and so you know, this also could maybe be an immuneo compromise sort of situation contributing to it. But for most of us, the mites aren't bad.

00:43:38
Speaker 2: It's amazing you're gonna have this whole ecosystem living on your face and snacking on your skin and not really hurting you at all. They're just like friendly neighbors. Yeah, are they benefit to help clean stuff up? Like all this dead skin? Would it be bad? If you didn't have somebody munching on it.

00:43:52
Speaker 1: No, I don't think so. I didn't. I didn't come across anything saying that the mites are helpful. And you know, especially these days were we've got like soaps to wash our face, we've got ways to exfoliate. I don't think we really they're not really contributing to the cleanliness of our faces. And you see similar things happening in dogs. So dog species have their own demodex mites. And sometimes you'll get bold patches on puppies because their immune systems aren't good yet, they're just developing, and those bold patches will be areas where the mites are sort of getting out of control. But if you just wait long enough, in a lot of cases, it'll clear up because the puppies immune system will mature and they'll get those mite populations back under control and that patch will sort of grow back in again.

00:44:33
Speaker 2: Wow.

00:44:34
Speaker 1: But Daniel, I bet you are wondering does demodex poop?

00:44:42
Speaker 2: I was wondering if we could complete the dk EU bingo and have either poop or cannibalism. So which way are we going?

00:44:50
Speaker 1: We're going poop?

00:44:50
Speaker 2: All right?

00:44:51
Speaker 1: I didn't find any evidence that they eat each other. And so for a long time, the going knowledge was that demodexs do don't poop. They store up all of the waste that they make. They only live about three weeks. And so actually, if you live to be about seventy three years old and your demodex each live three weeks, you're probably host to something like twelve hundred generations of mites wow, throughout your life, which is just crazy.

00:45:18
Speaker 2: But I have an input output question. They have inputs, Yeah, they have no outputs. Are they just getting bigger and bigger and bigger or what's going on?

00:45:26
Speaker 1: Well, so the idea was, you know, three weeks is not a long time. They just they store it. They do get a little bit bigger, and then when they die, they just kind of like you know, release everything.

00:45:36
Speaker 2: So they just like die in the big poopy corpse in your face.

00:45:39
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's right, that's right. But actually, some very good slew thing in twenty twenty two with some great photos found an anus. Yay, this is why you fund basic science people.

00:45:54
Speaker 2: I want to use very powerful telescopes to look for tiny anuses.

00:45:58
Speaker 1: Well, tiny anuses have been found. They also found a tiny penis on their head, so that's where the males have their their wieners. So anyway, all kinds of important information, but we haven't actually answered the listener's question yet, which is.

00:46:13
Speaker 2: Oh, yeah, I have lust track. What was the question again?

00:46:16
Speaker 1: Why why would you have this horrible thing? And I actually I feel like it's obvious, like we are a super abundant species. We are very close to our offspring, you know, sometimes they sleep next to us, we breastfeed them. It is very easy to imagine transmitting this, you know, parasite or symbiant if it's not bad for us, like this this critter from one organism to another. We are a super abundant species. And you know, they're so tiny that we don't even know they're there, so we're not attacking them or anything like that. I mean, it seems to me like we are a great ecosystem for a little critter like.

00:46:55
Speaker 2: This, And so you know, so you're why not basically.

00:46:58
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Evolution and fills any niche that it can find that it's got a path to, and our faces were one of those paths.

00:47:07
Speaker 2: And is there like a whole ecosystem, there are there predators that gobble these things or do they live a predator freed lifestyle.

00:47:14
Speaker 1: I don't know, that's a question.

00:47:16
Speaker 2: Because they sound delicious.

00:47:19
Speaker 1: Sure, I feel like they probably have parasites also that infect them.

00:47:24
Speaker 2: Or something might exactly, maybe they have face mites.

00:47:27
Speaker 1: Maybe they do have face mites.

00:47:29
Speaker 2: It's face mites all the way down, isn't it.

00:47:31
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh, we figured it out. Yeah. So I didn't find any stories about them having parasites or predators, but I would love to know. And you know, we are probably their biggest problem when we wash and exfoliate our faces, but they hang in there inside our pores.

00:47:49
Speaker 2: Well, we have brought you up to speed to the forefront of human knowledge on face mites. Let's check in with our listener and see if we have scratched the lunars itch.

00:47:59
Speaker 6: All right, hey, thank you very much for that excellent answer, Kelly, and I greatly appreciate knowing that these little creatures are just simply getting by. It's still a little bit weird to know that they get up some interesting nocturnal activity. At least someone's having fun. And thank you very much, Daniel. I will never listen to Berry White the same way again without having this certain mental image of little nights and their heads having fun on my face. Thanks a lot, guys, I appreciate it. Keep up the good works, you guys rock.

00:48:36
Speaker 1: Thank you so much everybody for your questions. We appreciate them so much. There are so many topics that I would love to have the time to dig into, and when you ask about them, I get to I appreciate you all so much.

00:48:48
Speaker 2: We do. We love hearing from you. I love opening my email in the morning and seeing all the incredible diversity of curiosity and questions and wondering and joy. We love hearing from you. That makes this podcast conversation between us and you, not just between me and Kelly. So thanks everyone for joining in.

00:49:06
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