Maggots are disgusting, right? Lulu has a hard time even saying the word maggot. 

But in this episode, we’re asking you to join us in setting our “ick” aside. If you stick with us, we promise that you’ll go from thinking these bugs are the grossest things ever to actually kinda liking them. Maybe even loving them. 

ER doctor Avir Mitra leads us down a rabbit hole of scientific discovery, explaining how these revolting critters have a history - and future - of saving human limbs and lives. Plus, a musical lesson in wound treatment 101.

Tell us what creature you want a future show about! Submit suggestions on what animals we should do our next season on here!

Terrestrials was created by Lulu Miller with WNYC studios. This episode was produced by Alan Goffinski with sound design by Mira Burt-Wintonick. Our Executive Producer is Sarah Sandbach. Our team also includes Ana Gonzalez, Tanya Chawla and Joe Plourde. Factchecking was by Natalie Middleton.

Huge thank you to Dr Avir Mitra. If you liked his storytelling, listen to some more stories he did with Radiolab:

The Elixir of Life 

Dispatch 5: Don't Stop Believin'

The Dirty Drug and the Ice Cream Tub 

Our advisors for this show were Jamie Albright, kid advisor Kai, momma (fly) Maya, Ana Luz Porzecanski, Nicole Depalma and Carly Ciarrocchi.

Support for Terrestrials also comes from the Simons Foundation, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, and the John Templeton Foundation.

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In 1971, a red-headed, tree-loving astronaut named Stu ‘Smokey’ Roosa was asked to take something to the moon with him. Of all things, he chose to take a canister of 500 tree seeds. After orbiting the moon 34 times, the seeds made it back to Earth. NASA decided to plant the seeds all across the country and then… everyone forgot about them. Until one day, a third grader from Indiana stumbled on a tree with a strange plaque: "Moon Tree." This discovery set off a cascading search for all the trees that visited the moon across the United States. Science writer, and our very own factchecker, Natalie Middleton tells us the tale.

We’re holding a Moon Tree contest! Send us a drawing of what you imagine a Moon Tree to look like. Submit here.

If you happen to find a Moon Tree and visit it, email us pictures of you at [email protected]! We’d love to feature you on our social media @terrestrialspodcast. 

Check out Natalie’s map to find your nearest Apollo 14 moon tree on our show page!

Help us hunt for more moon trees. If you know of an undocumented moon tree, contact Natalie at nataliemiddleton.org. Check out Natalie’s essay on Moon Trees and Space Zinnias in Orion Magazine. 

Visit NASA’s official Moon Tree Page for a list of all the Apollo 14 Moon Trees in the world. 

To learn more about Stu Roosa or to learn more about acquiring your own half Moon Tree, check out the Moon Tree Foundation, spearheaded by Stu’s daughter, Rosemary Roosa.

Terrestrials was created by Lulu Miller with WNYC Studios. This episode was produced by Tanya Chawla and sound-designed by Joe Plourde. Our Executive Producer is Sarah Sandbach. Our team includes Alan Goffinski, Ana González and Mira Burt-Wintonick. Fact checking was by Diane Kelly. 

Special thanks to Sumanth Prabhaker from Orion magazine, retired NASA Scientist Dr. Dave Williams, Joan Goble, Tre Corely and NASA scientist Dr. Marie Henderson.

Our advisors for this show were Ana Luz Porzecanski, Nicole Depalma, Liza Demby and Carly Ciarrocchi.

Support for Terrestrials also comes from the Simons Foundation, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, and the John Templeton Foundation.

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Few mammals have a bigger positive impact on the planet than the beaver. With its bright orange buck teeth, the creature is an expert engineer that brings life wherever it waddles and even fights fires. Our story begins in the Bronx river, once known as the  “open sewer” of New York City. After some humans decide to clean it up, we meet one of the river’s residents - José the beaver. We learn about the US government parachuting beavers out of planes into the mountains. And finally head to California where we discover how one beaver family saved acres of land from burning. 

Special thanks to author Ben Goldfarb, Christian Murphy from the Bronx River Alliance and Dr. Emily Fairfax. 

Subscribe to our newsletter if you haven’t already, follow us on instagram @terrestrialspodcast, and leave us a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ rating and review on your podcast app - it helps curious listeners find us!

KEEP LEARNING!

Read Ben Goldfarb’s book Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter. 

Watch the US government drop beavers out of planes into mountains. 

Read Leila Philip’s Beaverland: How One Weird Rodent Made America.

Watch Leave It to Beavers, a documentary about beavers restoring rivers and wetlands.

Read about how reintroducing beavers can enhance ecological health.

Read about how beaver dams help wildfire-ravaged ecosystems recover.

Terrestrials was created by Lulu Miller with WNYC Studios. This episode was produced by Ana González and sound-designed by Mira Burt-Wintonick. Our team includes Alan Goffinski, Joe Plourde and Tanya Chawla. Fact checking was by Diane Kelly. 

Our advisors for this show were Ana Luz Porzecanski, Nicole Depalma, Liza Demby and Tovah Barocas.

Support for Terrestrials also comes from the Simons Foundation, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, and the John Templeton Foundation.

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Subscribe to our weekly newsletter for bite-sized essays, activities, and ways to connect with the show.
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Terrestrials is made possible in part by listeners like you. Support the show by joining Radiolab’s membership program, The Lab—and we’ll send you a special thank-you gift from our team!

Over a billion lightyears ago, in the darkness of outer space, a collision of black holes sent out a fleet of invisible waves that were headed right toward planet Earth. The waves were so powerful they could ripple spacetime but most people on Earth didn't believe the waves were real. SPOILER ALERT: The waves are called gravitational waves and…they are real! Astrophysicist Dr. Wanda Díaz Merced tells the story of what happened when they hit Earth in 2015 and how scientists came to learn to use senses beyond eyesight to detect the waves. We also learn from Dr. Stavros Katsanevas about the building of a giant gravitational wave catcher called “The Interferometer.” This episode also explores how to persist in the face of doubt as we learn Wanda's tale of going blind and learning how to listen to the stars.

Learn about the storytellers, listen to music, and dig deeper into the stories you hear on Terrestrials with activities you can do at home or in the classroom on our website, Terrestrialspodcast.org. 

Watch the interferometer come to life, disco style, and find even MORE original Terrestrials fun on our Youtube.

Badger us on Social Media: @radiolab and #TerrestrialsPodcast 

Support for Terrestrials is provided by Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

The Shovels: Dig Deeper

For each episode of Terrestrials, we provide a selection of activity sheets, drawing prompts, musical lessons, and more. We call them “shovels” because we hope they will help you (and your friends, family, students, neighbors, etc) dig more deeply into the world! You can do them at home, in the classroom, outside, or in the privacy of your own mind. We hope you enjoy!If you want to share what you’ve made, ask an adult share it on social media using #TerrestrialsPodcast and make sure to tag @Radiolab

Draw -  Use your ears to draw! In this very special drawing prompt, Wendy Mac and the DrawTogether team pull in an actual rockstar to play you various favorite sounds to draw. It's a feast for the mind, ears, and hands. Grab a pencil, pen, crayon, marker, anything, and check it out here!

Play 🎶 - Learn how to play the chords to the song “UNIMAGINABLE”

Do - Get crafty with a fun activity sheet!  

This week’s storyteller is Dr. Wanda Díaz Merced.

Want to keep learning? Check out these resources to learn about the time-bending power that is the gravitational wave:

Get to Wanda a little better; watch her TED talk!Take a tour of the world’s first interferometer! (Free monthly tours in person in Richland, WA)Train yourself to use sound for signal detection in astronomy. Learn more about asteroseismology with the wonderful Hank Green!Spooked by the idea of the infinite universe? Listen to John Green’s “Against Nihilism” (probably best for 13 and up)!

Terrestrials is a production of WNYC Studios, created by Lulu Miller. This episode is produced by Ana González, Alan Goffinski and Lulu Miller. Original Music by Alan Goffinski. Help from Suzie Lechtenberg, Sarah Sandbach, Natalia Ramirez, and Sarita Bhatt. Fact-check by Natalie Meade. Sound design by Phoebe Wang with additional engineering by Joe Plourde. Our storytellers this week are Dr. Wanda Díaz Merced and Dr. Stavros Katsanevas. Transcription by Caleb Codding.

Our advisors are Theanne Griffith, Aliyah Elijah, Dominique Shabazz, John Green, Liza Steinberg-Demby, Alice Wong, and Tara Welty.

Terrestrials is supported in part by Science Sandbox, an initiative of the Simons Foundation.

Have questions for us, badgers? Badger us away! Your parent/guardian should write to us along with you, so we know you have their permission, and for maybe even having your ideas mentioned on the show. Email [email protected]

HEY GROWN-UPS!
Love the show? Leave us a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ rating and review on your podcast app—it helps curious listeners find us!

We want to hear from you! Share your thoughts about Terrestrials with us.
Subscribe to our weekly newsletter for bite-sized essays, activities, and ways to connect with the show.
Follow us on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok for behind-the-scenes extras and more.
Listen to original music from Terrestrials on Spotify, Apple Music, or our music page.

Got a badgering question for the team? Email us at [email protected] or submit a voice memo with your name, age, and your question using this form!

Terrestrials is made possible in part by listeners like you. Support the show by joining Radiolab’s membership program, The Lab—and we’ll send you a special thank-you gift from our team!

Pizza is one of the world’s most beloved foods. But as much as we love the way it tastes, the secrets of its ingredients are even yummier to discover. We explore the surprising sounds tomatoes make when they’re stressed, how wheat became integral to human survival and how mold is sometimes... delicious?  This episode also features live tap-dancing, mind-melting cheese facts and what might be the Songbud’s catchiest song yet.

Special thanks to Little Island for having us. If you’re in NYC,  go check them out. It’s free to wander around, there are hidden musical instruments to see, gorgeous plants and so much more. Visit littleisland.org to learn more.

And huge thanks to our guest performers - tap dancer John Manzari,  who you can catch performing or teaching tap lessons around NYC, percussionist Caitlin Cawley from Mantra Percussion, Josh Windsor, the Associate Director of Caves at Murray's Cheese in New York City, a world-famous cheese shop with tons of cheeses, classes and fun family events, and WNYC’s very own David Gebel.

This episode was originally produced and developed in front of a live audience at Little Island with Producing Artistic Director Zack Winokur and Executive Director Laura Clement.

PLUS, TERRESTRIALS WILL BE BACK IN TWO WEEKS - STARTING SEPTEMBER 18TH – WITH BRAND NEW EPISODES DROPPING EVERY OTHER WEEK. Visit terrestrialspodcast.org to sign up for our newsletter and follow us on instagram @terrestrialspodcast for updates.

HEY GROWN-UPS!
Love the show? Leave us a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ rating and review on your podcast app—it helps curious listeners find us!

We want to hear from you! Share your thoughts about Terrestrials with us.
Subscribe to our weekly newsletter for bite-sized essays, activities, and ways to connect with the show.
Follow us on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok for behind-the-scenes extras and more.
Listen to original music from Terrestrials on Spotify, Apple Music, or our music page.

Got a badgering question for the team? Email us at [email protected] or submit a voice memo with your name, age, and your question using this form!

Terrestrials is made possible in part by listeners like you. Support the show by joining Radiolab’s membership program, The Lab—and we’ll send you a special thank-you gift from our team!

We’re back with an episode from the Radiolab archive. Horseshoe crabs have been around for a long time. They outlived the dinosaurs, survived all mass extinctions and witnessed the sprouting of the Earth’s first trees. The secret to their longevity? Their baby blue blood. Which has been saving both their lives and ours. 

Lulu and Radiolab co-host, Latif Nasser,  head to one of these bleeding facilities to learn how horseshoe crab blood became indispensable for modern medicine. And how this vampirish relationship humans have with the crabs might also be crucial to keeping them alive.  

Terrestrials will be back in September 2025 with all new episodes airing every other week! SIgn up for our newsletter here and follow us on Instagram @terrestrialspodcast for updates.

If you want to learn more about how miraculous horseshoe crabs are, check out:

Alexis Madrigal, "The Blood Harvest" in The Atlantic, and Sarah Zhang's recent follow up in The Atlantic, "The Last Days of the Blue Blood Harvest" 

Deborah Cramer, The Narrow Edge

Deborah Cramer, "Inside the Biomedical Revolution to Save Horseshoe Crabs" in Audubon Magazine 

Richard Fortey, Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms

Ian Frazier, "Blue Bloods"  in The New Yorker 

Lulu Miller's short story, "Me and Jane"  in Catapult Magazine

Jerry Gault, "The Most Noble Fishing There Is"  in Charles River's Eureka Magazine 

Glenn Gauvry's horseshoe crab research database

HEY GROWN-UPS!
Love the show? Leave us a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ rating and review on your podcast app—it helps curious listeners find us!

We want to hear from you! Share your thoughts about Terrestrials with us.
Subscribe to our weekly newsletter for bite-sized essays, activities, and ways to connect with the show.
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Listen to original music from Terrestrials on Spotify, Apple Music, or our music page.

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Terrestrials is made possible in part by listeners like you. Support the show by joining Radiolab’s membership program, The Lab—and we’ll send you a special thank-you gift from our team!

A color-changing creature many people assumed to be brainless outsmarts his human captors. SPOILER: The creature is an octopus! Author Sy Montgomery tells the story of one octopus named Inky who makes us question who we consider intelligent (and kissable) in the animal kingdom. 

Learn about the storytellers, listen to music, and dig deeper into the stories you hear on Terrestrials with activities you can do at home or in the classroom on our website, Terrestrialspodcast.org. 

Find MORE original Terrestrials fun on Youtube.

And badger us on Social Media: @radiolab and #TerrestrialsPodcast 

Terrestrials is a production of WNYC Studios, created by Lulu Miller. This episode is produced by Ana González, Alan Goffinski and Lulu Miller. Original Music by Alan Goffinski. Help from Suzie Lechtenberg, Sarah Sandbach, Natalia Ramirez, and Sarita Bhatt. Fact-check by Diane Kelley. Sound design by Mira Burt-Wintonick with additional engineering by Joe Plourde. Our storyteller this week is Sy Montgomery. Transcription by Caleb Codding. Our advisors are Theanne Griffith, Aliyah Elijah, Dominique Shabazz, John Green, Liza Steinberg-Demby, Tara Welty, and Alice Wong.

Terrestrials is supported in part by Science Sandbox, an initiative of the Simons Foundation.

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We want to hear from you! Share your thoughts about Terrestrials with us.
Subscribe to our weekly newsletter for bite-sized essays, activities, and ways to connect with the show.
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Terrestrials is made possible in part by listeners like you. Support the show by joining Radiolab’s membership program, The Lab—and we’ll send you a special thank-you gift from our team!

Today, we splash into the Hudson River Park with our Songbud to meet all kinds of crabs. With Siddartha and Carrie from  the Hudson River Park, Alan puts on waterproof rubber overalls, gets his hands dirty in the river and dives into the secret lives of Hudson crabs.

Plus, CRAB WEEK is going on right now in New York City! It’s an annual shell-ebration that highlights the crabs of the Hudson River. Scuttle by for crabtastic activities throughout the park all week long! You’ll have the opportunity to try your hand at some crabby crafts, learn crabtivating facts and get your claws on a copy of our limited-edition Crab Week poster. Check out their entire shell-dule.

And join us on August 6th + 7th in Little Island for our full-day takeover of the park. Join us at 10am for Wilderness Wonderland featuring scavenger hunts, live music, and more – including our friends from the Hudson River Park who will be on site with live critters! At 5pm, we will be performing a LIVE podcast taping  all about  PIZZA! The show’s free. There will be pizza. Join if you’re in NYC (or make this the reason you visit). Check out all of our other performances here.

HEY GROWN-UPS!
Love the show? Leave us a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ rating and review on your podcast app—it helps curious listeners find us!

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Terrestrials is made possible in part by listeners like you. Support the show by joining Radiolab’s membership program, The Lab—and we’ll send you a special thank-you gift from our team!

Today we’re bringing you a live episode we taped in Boston. It’s about clam chowder. We’re sharing it now because we’re doing ANOTHER LIVE SHOW at Little Island in NYC on August 6th + 7th - and that one’s about PIZZA! The show’s free. There will be pizza. Join if you’re in NYC (or make this the reason you visit). Check out all of our other performances here.

Lulu is a Bostonian who has never had clam chowder. Read that again. For some reason it always felt gross to her. So as an extreme challenge, we’re taking a closer look at clam chowder to see if it can become wondrous. Ana and Alan break down each ingredient - milk, potatoes, and finally clams - with a concoction of stories and guests. Then, if she’s convinced of clam chowder’s magic, Lulu will try clam chowder for the first time in her life. 

You can watch a full video taping of this episode here. Listen if you love clam chowder, but especially if you’re a chowda doubta. 

Special thanks to scientist Rachel Hutchison from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Sea Grant for all of her clam knowledge and WBUR’s CitySpace for hosting this event. Hope to see you in New York City!  

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Terrestrials is made possible in part by listeners like you. Support the show by joining Radiolab’s membership program, The Lab—and we’ll send you a special thank-you gift from our team!

The Greenland shark is ugly. Its eyes look cloudy and dead. Its snout and fins are stubby. Its meat is poisonous. And that may be part of why most people have overlooked these sharks for so long. But there was a rumor circulating among Greenland villagers that this deepsea dweller could survive for centuries. Scientist John Steffensen went on a hunt to see if this was true and discovered that the Greenland shark can live for more than 500 years, making it the longest living vertebrate on the planet. Biologist Steve Austad explains how the shark avoids death for so long and discovers that its secret to longevity comes at a cost. It seems that to live a longer life, it opts out of some of the best stuff life has to offer: adventure, friends and companionship.

Terrestrials was created by Lulu Miller with WNYC Studios. This episode was produced by Brenna Farrel, and Mira Burt-Wintonick, with help from Alan Goffinski, Ana González, Tanya Chawla, Sarah Sandbach, Valentina Powers, and Joe Plourde. Fact-checking by Natalie Middleton. 

Our advisors are Ana Luz Porzecanski, Andy J. Pizza, Anil Lewis, Dominique Shabazz, Liza Demby, Princess Daazhraii Johnson and Tara Welty.

Learn more about storytellers, listen to music, and dig deeper into the stories you hear on Terrestrials with activities you can do at home or in the classroom on our website, Terrestrialspodcast.org. Badger us on social media: @radiolab   and #TerrestrialsPodcast or by emailing us at [email protected].

HEY GROWN-UPS!
Love the show? Leave us a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ rating and review on your podcast app—it helps curious listeners find us!

We want to hear from you! Share your thoughts about Terrestrials with us.
Subscribe to our weekly newsletter for bite-sized essays, activities, and ways to connect with the show.
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Got a badgering question for the team? Email us at [email protected] or submit a voice memo with your name, age, and your question using this form!

Terrestrials is made possible in part by listeners like you. Support the show by joining Radiolab’s membership program, The Lab—and we’ll send you a special thank-you gift from our team!