animals

African grey parrots are internet stars. It’s easy to see why—the charismatic birds sing, tell jokes, and sling profanities. But how do the endangered birds get from African forests to your feed? 

Wildlife crime reporter Rene Ebersole joins Host Flora Lichtman to describe her investigation into the global parrot trade, and the black market for wild African greys that is threatening their existence.

Guest: Rene Ebersole is Editor In Chief at Wildlife Investigative Reporters and Editors (WIRE).

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Some animals have a very different relationship to aging than we do: They don’t get cancer, they never go through menopause, and they live absurdly long lives. 

For instance, one bat species can live for more than 40 years, which may not sound like very long but that’s about nine times longer than expected based on its size. For comparison, if we aged on that scale, we’d live for hundreds of years. These bats aren’t the only animal super-agers—there’s a whole menagerie of them.

So what’s their secret? And can we learn anything from them that might help us live longer, healthier lives? Host Flora Lichtman talks with longevity researchers Vera Gorbunova and Juan Manuel Vazquez about what animals are teaching us.

Guests:Dr. Vera Gorbunova is a biologist and professor at the University of Rochester, and a co-director of the Rochester Aging Research Center.Dr. Juan Manuel Vazquez is a biologist and assistant professor at Pennsylvania State University studying the evolution of aging.

Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com.

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If you’ve heard the hammering of a woodpecker in the woods, you might have wondered how the birds can be so forceful. What does it take to whack your head against a tree repeatedly, hard enough to drill a hole? A team of researchers wondered that too and set out to investigate, by putting tiny muscle monitors on eight downy woodpeckers and recording them with high-speed video as they pecked away in the lab.

Integrative organismal biologist Nick Antonson, co-author of a report on the work, joins Host Flora Lichtmen to peck away at the mystery.

Plus, you can take two ant eggs with the exact same genes, and one can grow up to be a queen, the other a worker. Neuroscientist and evolutionary biologist Daniel Kronauer joins Flora to share recent research into how an ant becomes a queen.

Guests: Dr. Nick Antonson is an NSF postdoctoral research fellow in the department of ecology, evolution, and organismal biology at Brown University.Dr. Daniel Kronauer is the Stanley S. and Sydney R. Shuman Professor in the Laboratory of Social Evolution and Behavior at The Rockefeller University in New York.

Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com.

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For Halloween, we bring you an ode to three quintessentially creepy creatures: bats, arachnids, and snakes. First, bat researcher Elena Tena joins Host Flora Lichtman to describe tracking the greater noctule bat in flight and learning that it can feed on migratory birds. Then, arachnologist Paula Cushing describes the camel spider, which is neither a camel nor a spider. And herpetologist Sara Ruane highlights one of her favorite snakes, the tiger keelback, which is both venomous and poisonous. 

Plus, what makes a lake spooky? A pond possessed? Flora talks with Geo Rutherford, creator of the Spooky Lake Month series on TikTok and Instagram, to learn about some of the spookiest, most mysterious lakes on the planet. 

Guests:

Dr. Elena Tena is the national coordinator for the Spanish Bat Atlas project.Dr. Paula Cushing is senior curator of invertebrate zoology at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science in Denver, Colorado. Dr. Sara Ruane is curator of herpetology at the Field Museum in Chicago, Illinois. Geo Rutherford is the author of Spooky Lakes: 25 Strange and Mysterious Lakes That Dot Our Planet and the creator of Spooky Lake content TiKTok and Instagram. You can find her @geodesaurus. 

Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com.

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Throughout this membership drive we are talking about the animals we love and care for in our homes -- our pets. Today, Amy Sedaris, actress, comedian, author, producer, crafter, rabbit enthusiast and host of the To the Rescue! gala, benefiting Humane World for Animals on November 7 talks about why she loves rabbits and offers advice to help them thrive. 

We’re taking a polar plunge into the science of sea unicorns, also known as narwhals!

Narwhals are mysterious arctic whales with long, twirly tusks protruding from their foreheads, like a creature out of a fairy tale. And it turns out that we don’t know too much about them, partly because they live so far north in the remote Arctic.

An international team of researchers used drones to observe narwhals in the wild and learned new things about their behavior, including how they use their tusks to hunt and play.

Host Flora Lichtman gets on the horn with Dr. Gregory O’Corry-Crowe, research professor and biologist at Florida Atlantic University, who was an author on the new narwhal study, published last month in Frontiers in Marine Science.

Guest: Dr. Greg O’Corry-Crowe is a research professor at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida.

Transcripts for each episode are available at sciencefriday.com.

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Throughout this membership drive we are talking about the animals we love and care for in our homes -- our pets.  Today, Anne Levin, executive director of the Brooklyn Bridge Animal Welfare Coalition and co-founder of the Brooklyn Cat Cafe, talks about rats and other small furry creatures as pets.

October is National Adopt a Shelter Dog Month, and to mark the occasion, Aurora Velasquez, Eastern regional director of the Best Friends Animal Society talks about the importance of adopting shelter pets. Plus, listeners call in to shout out what their rescue animals mean to them.

If you’re a moth trying to stay uneaten, there are competing strategies. Some moths rely on camouflage, trying to blend in. Other moths take the opposite approach: They’re bold and bright, with colors that say “don’t eat me, I’m poison.” Biologist Iliana Medina joins Host Flora Lichtman to describe a study that placed some 15,000 origami moths in forests around the world to investigate which strategy might work best. Then, mammologist Anderson Feijó and evolutionary biologist Rafaela Missagia join Flora to dive into another evolutionary conundrum: why so many rodents have thumbnails. 

Guests: Dr. Iliana Medina Guzman is a Senior Lecturer in the School of BioSciences at the University of Melbourne in Australia.Dr. Anderson Feijó is a mammal curator at the Field Museum in Chicago. Dr. Rafaela Missagia is an assistant professor at the University of São Paulo in Brazil.

Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com.

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Jane Goodall, renowned primatologist, conservationist, and humanitarian, died on October 1 at the age of 91. Goodall was born in London in 1934, and her curiosity about the natural world led her to the forests of Gombe, Tanzania, where she made groundbreaking observations of chimpanzee behavior, including tool use. Her research challenged the accepted scientific perceptions of our closest relatives.

Host Ira Flatow shares his memories of Dr. Goodall, including an interview from 2002 in which she discussed her life and work.

Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com.

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