113: Rediscovered Organs & Bird Watching

Welcome to Let's Learn Everything

0:00My brother gave this to me because it was too weird for him to have, so now I have it. Uh-oh. It's a little deer foot. Oh, that's so cool. Isn't that so cool? Oh, yeah, that is a deer foot in a jar. It's still got some of the hair on it. It's so cool. Jesus Christ. How are you feeling, Tom? Good.

0:22Good and normal. I was re-listening to our first Q&A last night when I got really drunk. That's so cute. I was like, aw. We have such different responses to alcohol. Yours is You Find a Deerfoot. Hello, and welcome to Let's Learn Everything, the show where we learn anything and everything

0:57interesting. Today, we're going to be learning about a science topic and a miscellaneous topic as well. My name is Tom, and today I will be joining our listeners as being the student of the episode, just here to learn and to get some AP credit. My name is Caroline, and this episode's science topic is discovering organs. Huh? Huh? Huh? Huh? I guess they did have to be. We did have to find all of those and then label them and then describe them.

1:31Oh, we had to find all of them, right? Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Huh?

1:39It's going to be a bit of a fly through, like, the history and modern day organ discovery because we are still finding them as well. So I'm very excited to tell you all that.

1:54My name's Ella, and today's miscellaneous topic is birdwatching. Oh, that's wonderful. Wait, Tom's run off. I also have to run off. I have my binoculars. I have a little book down here. This is one of my little birdwatching books, and it has, like, all of the different birds that you can find in it. I think it's very funny that Caroline's into birding is, like, pamphlets and information,

2:26and mine was, I think binoculars are cool. Yeah. I like the tech side of it. We can talk about your experiences with birdwatching when we get to the topic. But yeah. I feel like this is, like, a long-awaited miscellaneous topic. This is great. We're so up our alleys, Zipper baby. We are all one hyper-fixated friend away from becoming birders. Yeah. That's so true. That's so true. I'm so excited for this. I have so many questions that I want to ask you as well that I'm, like, actively being, like, no, hold it in for the appropriate time in this podcast when you're allowed. I have to do a topic. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

2:57We have a whole topic to talk about this. Don't you worry. Oh, thank you.

Corrections corner

3:00Yay. Wonderful. I do have a corrections corner. I have two corrections from my last topic on life in exclusion zones. Both pronunciation slash word choices. So a lovely listener called Mika emailed in to express that we should make a point not to call them Shavalski's horses and call them, probably by their Mongolian name, Takis, because Shavalski was a Russian imperialist and contributed to the oppression of native groups

3:31in Russia and also introduced them to the Western world where they were, you know, then driven to extinction. So I'm certainly not against this. Although as a side note, as most of the world refers to them as Shavalski's horse, you'll still need to use that to look them up, probably. Although places around Mongolia will refer to them as Takis anyway. Mika was also kind enough to share some conservation efforts of Takis that are more local to the region. No fucking way. So they shared the International Takis group, which is funded by donations and the Mongolian

4:05government. And they're focused on the protection of the Great Gobi Bean Nature Reserve, which is in the southwestern part of Mongolia at the border with China. And the Takis are doing really well there. Mika's local zoo was also involved in reintroducing Takis into the wild, which was really awesome. We also had another email from Maya who pointed out that we should probably be pronouncing Chernobyl as Chernobyl, which is closer to the Ukrainian way. I appreciate this a lot. I've worked on replacing, you know, the phrase like the Ukraine with just Ukraine and Kiev with

4:40Kiev and to better reflect Ukrainian, which was repressed and like Russified during USSR occupation. So yeah, Chernobyl. Chernobyl. Thank you to both of those listeners for emailing in. Brilliant. We have the best. We have the best listeners.

History of organ discovery

4:58I wanted to do this topic because I was doom scrolling, as I often am. And I came across a few videos covering a similar topic to each other, the rediscovery of the reti ovary or the reti ovary, depending on your pronunciation. And I was fascinated by this. I was like, what do you mean an organ that has been rediscovered? That's great. We drove the organ to extinction and then we... I will talk about this so-called rediscovery at the end of this topic, but it did make me

5:29think about how often we are discovering human organs still. Oh. Oh, go on. No, I literally just literally a few days ago, a friend was telling me that their friend's dad found out that they had what's known as a horseshoe kidney, which is a thing that can happen. Yeah. Or like they're conjoined as one. Oh, that's so cool. And they only found it because like they were doing some other x-ray or something. And the doctor was like, hey, by the way, here's a fun fact about you. And then he was just like, it's just one of those things where it's like, I guess like technically if nothing's wrong, and it's just like a totally normal thing that can happen.

6:01But it's just one of those things where it's like, I would kind of like to know what's up inside of the me at all times. I would like to know a little bit more about the one body I have on this earth. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's very much the vibe. We're going to talk about recent organs that have been discovered, potentially discovered at the very end. But that is an ongoing theme for organ discovery. It's just like, huh, would you look at that? Again, Caroline, it sounds like you're talking about like, potential exoplanets where you're like, there's some, we have some theory. We got to send a satellite out to confirm it.

6:33I mean, a horseshoe kidney is a twist, an unexpected twist on an existing organ. If you were, but not a new organ. Like some people have three kidneys, for example. And you know, that's weird, but like, it's not a new organ. It's not a brand new thing. Oh, yay. We got to jump to the end, but we get to ask our listeners what weird, what weird twist they have to their bodies.

6:59Before we get there, I want to ask what the definition of an organ is. Fuck you. Yeah. That's how I feel. An organ is, oh, it's like a large organelle.

7:14It is, it is, it is. Oh, God. It's a self-contained unit that performs a specific function in the body. I don't know. That's what I got. That's very close. Pretty good. Yeah. Ella, what do you think? I mean, I studied biomedical science. This is like, literally, it's just like a group of cells or tissues that like are joined together in a structure to, as Tom says, perform a specific shared function.

7:44Spot on. That is exactly the definition that I was looking for. A collection of tissues, specifically, that structurally form a functional unit specialized to perform a particular function. That is what an organ is, which is also quite a broad definition, which is really fun later on for us, basically. Is tissue just like an organized group of cells? Yeah. So it goes like cell, tissue, organ? Yeah. That's the hierarchy. And so for it to be an organ, it has to have multiple tissues going on in it, basically.

8:16Oh, because then it's just tissue. Okay, that makes sense. Because then it's just tissue. Because then it's just tissue. Yeah. A group of tissue is organ. Before we go any further as well, do you know how many organs we have?

8:29I'm going to go with a hundred. Ooh. I was going to go whaler. I was going to go like 35. But now that feels dumb. No, it's not dumb. The official list that we have is 78. So in the middle of where you two were. It was in the middle. It was closer to me. Well, Ella, I will give you more points as well for the muscle question, because that's 78 distinct organs, not breaking down individual muscles, which do count as organs as well.

9:00How many muscles do we have whilst we're there? This is later on in my script, but we can talk about it now. Oh, when I did biomedical science, we did it. I did anatomy, a hetero, in the name of every single muscle. Jesus Christ. Oh my God. I'm going to say 500. Between 600 and 800, depending on your definition of an individual muscle. The hands and stuff. Like, there's so many, like, small muscles in this area. And, like, around your feet. And also your tongue is a muscle, right? Yeah, absolutely. Your heart. Oh, your heart. Yeah, totally. But also an organ. Also, it's my own organ. That becomes relevant in a second, actually.

9:32Oh, no. So, before we get into modern day organ discovery, I want to do a quick whiz through the history of organ discovery. It's really a history of anatomy research. Ancient Egypt. You are right. Places like ancient Egypt are absolutely where this sort of story begins. I just know because they took them out and they were like, let's put them in different jars. Yeah, they took them out and put them into little jars and stuff like that. Yeah, 100%. But I want to start off with ancient Mesopotamia. They practiced organ divination.

10:02Yeah. Yeah. And really, that is priests studying the anatomy of the human body and organs. And they were trying to find the seat of the human soul, basically, when they were doing divination. So, this would have given them a basic understanding of anatomy. So, all the way back then, we know that humans had a basic understanding of anatomy and that they could differentiate different organs from each other as well. This is really highlighted, actually, in Babylonia, where the liver was considered the main organ.

10:35It was the seat of the soul, emotional center, mental activity happened in the liver. And that meant that livers, especially sheep livers, were actively sought after for divination practices, which is really cool, right? So, not only do we know that there are different organs, but we are trying to assign function to them as well. We can figure them out both in humans and in other animals as well. We can say, that's a liver in us. And that's a liver in a sheep. They're thinking from that. They didn't do quite so well.

11:06Delicious, delicious slots. Yeah. I loved this so much because it felt so modern. Priests would actually make clay models of sheep livers to act as a learning tool for students so that they could learn how to interpret the liver. And they actually have a little picture of one of these clay models for you. No fucking way. Were we doing liver phrenology?

11:32Oh, this is fucking beautiful, Caroline. It's so cool, isn't it? It's absolutely stunning. And listeners, you can take a look at this image by going to let'slearneverything.com slash 113, the episode number. Nice. It is. It's the backside of a liver. You can see the bile dirt coming down. So, you can see actually the... Holy shit, Ella. ...like proper, like, shapes in there, which is really cool. But then it's been separated out into lots of smaller squares. And then on each one, there's cuneiform writing, which I guess tells you what each of those

12:04parts does. That's exactly it, is what that specific section is telling you. Specifically around divination, I should add, not necessarily around the function of the liver. No, not the function, certainly. But this is what they thought the function of the liver was, to be fair. So... It really kind of is liver phrenology. Yeah. Oh my God, Caroline. It's an anatomical study of the liver. But, you know, divination. Yeah, yeah. This is... How have I never seen... This is a, like... It's great, right? It looks so cool. I'd like a model of this.

12:34Yes. Everyone needs to talk about this. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry. Everybody should be talking about this liver.

12:44Me starting a TikTok. Um, guys, why are we not talking about this cuneiform liver more? It's just so much here. And also, I need to clarify to people who aren't looking at the image. Ella is seeing many beautiful things. To me, this is just like a block of clay that's got some shapes in it. It looks like a liver, you know? Yeah, it really does. If it looks like that to you, then it passes. This is unbelievable, Caroline. On the ancient Egypt front again, Tom, not only were we, as you mentioned earlier, separating our organs into different jars and things like that,

13:16but we were also recording different organs through trying to understand wound management. There is something called the Edwin Smith Papyrus, which is dated to like 1600 BC, but is more likely to be from like 3000 BC. And this is one of the first written texts to describe the brain. Holy shit. 3000 BC, first description of the brain. Nice. Specifically around wound, like trying to protect it and trying to heal it after a damage has happened. Nuts, man.

13:46Our understanding of organs really starts to develop in places like ancient Greece. And I do want to touch on somebody that we have talked about previously on this podcast, who... Pliny? It's Galen. Ella, do you remember talking about Galen in blood? Oh, about... Was this about the heart? About the soul? This is talking about how the heart has the soul and it's passing it around, but also a lot of misconceptions around what the heart was doing, like pumping blood out and then the blood pumping back through the same vein in the opposite direction,

14:20back into the heart again, or the blood pumping into an organ and then being absorbed by that organ and things like that. So Galen's work, some of it was batshit crazy. Massively influential in the world of anatomy as well. He did a lot of things like describing the organs and their location in the body, categorizing the organs into three distinct categories. He said that we had psychic moving organs, which are muscles. We have natural moving organs, which is the stomach and the heart,

14:52and the natural and mobile organs, which is the liver and kidneys. So... Okay, he's not wrong. I mean, no, yeah, I was gonna say... Absolutely psychic moving, as in like, you consciously move it. Your brain is doing it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then he's saying, what, automatically moving? So your stomach, yeah. Your heart's automatic as well. And then things that just sit there. I mean, they don't, but yeah. So yeah, you can totally see some of the proper science and the proper observation that Galen was doing. I... That is such a whiz through what Galen did.

15:23I want to reiterate that he was massively influential. He collated a lot of work from previous thinkers like Aristotle. He wrote a lot of stuff about human blood and organs and anatomy that would go unchallenged from when he was alive, so like 200 AD through to like the 16th century, basically. So that includes all of the stuff about the four humors, the soul, all of that jazz. Everybody was like, yeah, that's correct. Thank you. And we don't need to investigate that anymore. Lovely. The thing that I really want to highlight here, though,

15:54is that he did all of this without carrying out any human dissections to learn about any of this. Huh? How did he get... How did he... What? Is it animals? Or is he just... Oh, okay. So he was a physician. He was working specifically with gladiators. So he did see wounded people and did get to learn about human anatomy through that. Sorry. I'm just so excited to edit this and hear both me and Ella's opposite reactions at the exact same time, which is, oh, heavens and hell yeah.

16:30Sorry, continue. He made a lot of assumptions based on pig and ape dissections and just applied that information to humans, which, yes, fine. You can learn so much about the anatomy of humans through a model species. I remember doing pig eye dissections at school to learn about like the cornea and stuff like that. So, yeah, sure, sometimes not so relevant. And this does come on later down the road, particularly unfortunate since his stuff did go pretty much unquestioned for 1,500 years.

17:031,500? Yeah. Insane. Yeah, 1,500 years. No, no, I believe you. I'm just like, what? No one thought, let's look in a person. Yeah, I know. It is fucked up. From here until like 1600s, not a whole lot happens. We don't make a whole lot of progress in human anatomy, understanding organs, things like that. We know that organs are there. We're not learning that much more about their function. And I want to add a little bit of nuance to that, that there is this whole world of the Islamic golden age

17:36of understanding medicine and human anatomy. People like Abibakra Al-Razi, who was a Persian physician, who is referred to as one of the most important figures in the history of medicine. He wrote books on ethics in medicine, did his own work on human anatomy, actually did do human dissections. He had doubts about Galen's work, which was summarized into his book, Doubts About Galen. Are you fucking kidding me? I love that. I love that. Fucking rules. It's so good. And also Ellen was like, did no one question this?

18:07And then the guy was like, hi, I published a book called I'm Questioning Me. And it really echoes the book I'm currently writing, Doubts About Tom Lum.

18:19The thing is though, Ella, is that hopefully, not like your book, but Al-Razi's book, it was very, very influential in the area. However, when it came to learning about the human body, like in that middle bit, Galen really was the person who people looked to for that. Anatomy understanding rather than these other sources, largely because of things like religious alignment, all of that stuff going on there. So basically a lot of this stuff goes largely ignored, especially in the Western world. So I just wanted to add that little tangent in there

18:50because I think it is a bit of history that does get a bit ignored sometimes, basically. But the reason why progress wasn't necessarily made on a larger scale is because no one was uptaking this kind of knowledge from the Middle East. Well, yeah. And then on top of that, during the Medieval Ages, things like dissection and further learning were thought to be unnecessary. The Middle Ages in Europe were so like, a halt on all science and learning. A temporary moratorium on progress. Yeah. On anything.

19:20Genuinely. All of it. It's like a dire, dire time. Yeah. Everybody was like, Galen's done it all. We don't need to do it now. We're not doing any more of it, basically, is what happened. It's funny because when we cover history of like any kind of topic like this, I feel like we always have this, here's this massive jump in progress. Yeah, yeah. And it's very similar for every single reason. And I always feel like we, I personally always am like, I feel like I have to explain why I'm suddenly jumping forward so much. And it's always the same reason. Nothing was happening.

19:51We should have like a phrase that we use. Oh, yeah. That we just like say, look, this is what happened. And it means that progress was halted by extreme religion and just like poverty in the West and also the ignorance of the progress that was happening in the Middle East. There should be a catchphrase for that. Is there some like German compound word that expresses that specific feeling? It's like the great progress skip or something. The great progress time jump occurred. Yeah. The great ignorance.

20:22The great ignorance, yeah. And we skip forward to the 1600s. One of the reasons why human anatomy specifically started to get researched a bit more was that Frederick II, who was the Holy Roman Emperor at the time, said, okay, okay, you can have your human dissections. Not too many. No, no, no. But you can have a few. You're allowed to have a few. As a treat. Yeah, as a little treat. And I think this is also really interesting because you start to then get records of lecture style dissections, basically, where somebody would be carrying out a dissection

20:54under the instruction of a teacher who was giving instructions based on Galen's work at this point. And if you couldn't find the organ that Galen was describing, or if you couldn't find it in the right place, it was often the human cadaver that was wrong, not Galen. Oh, my God. That's amazing. Fascinating. This is like the, like, I want to be good at therapy, a thing that is reasonable and possible to do, is I want to be a good dead body, which is a thing that is reasonable and possible to do. The idea of, yeah,

21:24the final injustice is like, God, this body fucking sucks. Oh, man. As wrong as it is, it is the beginning of this sort of, like, teaching through dissection. This is, actually, that's such a nice way to put it, yeah. This is all leading to actually getting cadavers into the classroom for students, basically, which is still, at the point that we're at now, they get one between, like, 50 people. They're still not quite there yet. I mean, even when I was at university, because I don't know, I'm sure I've talked about this before, where I got to handle a cadaver in a classroom

21:56when learning about human digestion, which was really interesting. Maybe I'll talk about that in a little bit later. It's, yeah. I did human dissection as part of my course, but we had, it was one to four students. We had a similar ratio for us as well. I'm glad I can be the squeamish proxy for any listeners who are a little squeamish. Yeah. Oh, man. We do get teachers like Andreas Vesalius, who was, again, around 15, 1600s, who gave, again, public demonstrations.

22:27He specifically did things like give demonstrations on the inaccuracies of Galen, and there are some studies where he had to literally get a human skeleton and a macaque skeleton side by side and be like, look. Oh, my God. The macaque stuff is correct. The human stuff is wrong. This is what Galen did. He looked at a macaque and not at a human being, basically. And that was sort of the extent that he had to go to to get people to believe him with this stuff. It even goes further than that. It really was the invention of the printing press

22:58that sort of brought on the downfall of Galen. More of his work got circulated in print, which then consequently got criticised a lot more, basically. Wow. So this really set off... I want... I've referred to this as a fad of human dissections, and I think that that is still accurate. Both for teaching tools and for public entertainment, you really start to see an inverse like entertainment. Ah, okay. Entertainment. Do you see where I'm coming from with the use of that word?

23:28People were doing human dissections much more regularly. We're starting to hit the 1700s now, not just for medical teaching, but also for public entertainment to the point where rooms would get filled of people and they were meant to be people who were learning about, you know, the body for medical purposes and it would just be swarmed with people who were there for entertainment purposes only. So, you know, human bodies, selling tickets. Yay. In 1752, the Murder Act was passed in England. We got outlawed murder.

23:58Murder was made illegal. Finally. Wait a second.

24:05Now, this passed a law that allowed medical schools to legally dissect bodies of executed murderers, specifically for anatomical education and research. So, how does that make you feel? Not good. No. Are we going to get into, like, Burke and Hare territory here? We, I touched on it very briefly. Very briefly. You don't know what that is? How exciting. Well, my thing was just going to be, like, I feel like the moment you pass that law,

24:36we're going to retroactively discover a lot more murderers. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Tom, you're so right, because at this point, I didn't include this in my script in the end, but still not enough cadavers for the people who were doing the research. So then the government start also increasing the number of crimes that were punishable by death, basically. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. Yeah. Let that sit in for a second. See, it's genuinely awful. That's shocking. And it's still not enough as well as the other thing.

25:07So medical schools are having a real increase in the number of students that they're taking on, but they're not having an increase in cadavers that they're getting. And this is where things like body snatching and even anatomy murder were practiced to obtain cadavers. Ella, do you want to talk about what body snatching is very quickly? Because you immediately were like... Burke and Hare were a very famous, infamous duo of body snatchers who would go into graveyards and dig up bodies and then sell them to universities and doctors

25:38and stuff for anatomical purposes. I just didn't know them on a first name basis. Oh, okay. Well, that's their surnames. Oh, okay. But that's like very, very infamous in the UK. They are very, very infamous. And I did a very quick search into this and was like, how common actually was this? Actually very common for a while. It wasn't technically illegal to remove a corpse from a grave in this way either. It was illegal to dissect the corpse and it was illegal to take anything

26:09that had been buried with the corpse. But you could illegally remove the corpse. That was until the Anatomy Act of 1832 in Britain. 1832 is two Asian. But that's fascinating. One thing that the Murder Act and all of the ensuing stuff did allow for was far greater understanding of how our bodies work and the function of many, many organs. So things like we understood that digestion was a chemical process and that food wasn't mechanically

26:41ground in the stomach, which is what we thought was happening beforehand. Although there is some mechanical. There is some mechanical stuff. It's not solely mechanical. It's what we found out. Yeah. We did things like mapping the lymphatic system. We linked organs to various diseases. We understood that electricity causes muscles to contract. Once the microscope was developed, we understood the distinction between organs and individual tissues as well. So really important for defining what an organ actually is. And we also start to describe things

27:11like vestigial organs too, which is that term that you've heard of before? Yeah. So organs that are in theory functionless, as some people will refer to it. Some evolutionary remnant of a thing that we no longer like. This is like the appendix, but then more recent research has been like, actually the appendix is doing something. But when I was growing up, I was told the appendix was not doing anything, but I don't believe that's the case. Yeah, you're absolutely right with the appendix.

27:43That is included at this point. So we're in the 1800s now and we are labeling things like the appendix as not only vestigial, but almost actively harmful to still have in your body because of the risk of rupturing that it posed. Right. So this is where like people became quite happy to remove appendices before they needed to basically. Fashionable appendix removal. Yeah, let's go. Editor Tom here to let you know that there is some research that shows that the appendix may be a very useful storehouse of healthy gut bacteria.

28:14It's not essential to your body, but it may be useful. It is fascinating. It just really shows how much of a shift we have gone from like, I'm sure earlier thinkers being like every single thing is efficient to God's creation to now being like, what the fuck is this doing in here? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It's really cool. So we get to 1893 and somebody called Robert Vidersheim published The Structure of Man, which is a book on human anatomy. And this book contains a list of 86 human structures

28:45that he considered to be vestigial. So he referred to them as- Oh, sorry, that we're vestigial. Sorry. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I thought you meant that we're essential. You meant that are not- Useless. Wholly or in part functionless is how he referred to them as. Uh-oh. So this included things like the appendix, which we've just discussed. Oh, no. Nipples for men. Oh. Vestigial. Sorry, nipples for men is such a funny- Yeah, I know. It sounds like a boardroom pitch. Don Draper being- We present to you

29:16nipples for men. For men. I like this guy's idea. Let's- And then there were other things like the pineal gland. Oh, no. Yeah, yeah. Sorry. Isn't that, like, essential for hormones? Yeah, your sleep-wake cycle, baby. Oh, that one, yeah. Oh, God. It gets worse. You want to be skinny? We'll remove 84 vestigial organs. Yeah, I'm just trying to think of their minimum viable person

29:47just being like, Hey, guys! It's fine! I don't need to sleep! How do you think you'll get on without your pituitary gland as well, you guys? Bad! So good. Poorly, Caroline! Real bad. According to Robert, vestigial, wholly or in part functionless. To be fair to them, a lot of these organs have a lot of involvement with hormones. So either hormone signaling or releasing hormones and things like that. And we just didn't know that hormones were a thing yet, basically. Yeah, but did they, like,

30:17find people without them that were living normal lives? Did they remove them from people and then say, Well, this person seems fine. This person's fine! I don't think you can remove a pituitary gland while somebody's still alive at that point, could you? Research like that wasn't happening. This is very much based on cadaver research, basically. So looking at a dead person. I just don't... It's like, it's fine to just say we don't know yet rather than being like, Well, I don't know, so therefore it doesn't do something. I actually did write that exact thing of...

30:48So a lot of organs that had some sort of link to hormones were labelled as not doing anything rather than we don't know what they do yet, which is a fascinating distinction. Ella, plucked from my script. Wow. Yeah, I mean, it's crazy. The arrogance of the Victorian surgeon astounds me. Yeah, honestly. And then, of course, the other thing that I want to touch on is that we are having all of these discoveries happening during quite a short period of time. How do we name them all? Because there's no uniformity

31:19in the naming. There are thousands of new names being added. Is it a land grab of people just being like... It is. So to be fair, a lot of them were getting Latin names. Britannica says that people sort of followed their own fancies, which is a lovely way of describing it.

31:39There's a great 2017 paper that lists out some examples of people using their own names in the naming of organs. I'm not going to read it out, but if you want to read that, that is there for you. Oh, God. The paper did have the following thing to say about this practice, though. Sadly, these names are now being discarded in modern texts and also often considered to be a nuisance by young medical students, which I love that. Medical students are like, fuck this guy for naming this after him. This is so complicated.

32:10Just give me something in Latin. I mean, the biggest mistake is naming an organ after someone that you've only been dating for a little bit and then they become an ex and you're like, well, now it's fucked for forever. God damn it. It's worse than getting a tattoo. It's the jumper theory, but for organs. Everyone has a Rachel next to their thymus and it's like, oh, man.

32:30Obviously, I studied diabetes as part of my PhD and the clusters of cells that contain beta cells, which produce insulin, and they're called Islets of Langerhans. They're named after like a German physician who discovered them in the 1800s and that always pissed me off.

32:50By the end of the 19th century, there's a lot of confusion happening as well because medical dictionaries are having to use up to 20 synonyms per... Oh my God, that's so funny. Wow. Yeah. There were more than 50,000 names being used throughout Europe to describe human anatomy. God, that's so interesting. It's actually crazy. In 1887, the German Anatomical Society, with the help of a lot of other anatomical societies across Europe, tried to standardize

33:21organ and anatomy naming. It only took them eight years to whittle the names down from 50,000 to 5,528. This is so fucking interesting. I want to... It's so good, right? If there's like a part I want to deep dive on is I would kill to be in that room. It's just so interesting, yeah. Oh yeah, absolutely. This list was called the Basal Nomina Anatomica. Oh, that sounds nice. It sounds like the Necronomicon. And you know, most of the years was spent naming the group was naming that part and then we're like,

33:52oh shit, all right. Long's heart. Fuck, fuck. It is one of those things where it's like you got... If you're a group that names things, you gotta have a good name or else I'm not supposed to trust you. You gotta have a name. You gotta have a name.

34:06So yeah, this did become the international or they tried to make it become the international standard. Places like America did take it up and Germany. But places like the UK and France were less keen on adopting this list. Sure. We do get to the point where people are adopting a universal list though. In 1955, there was the 6th International Anatomical Congress at Paris which approved a major revision of this list basically which became published as the Paris

34:36Nomina Anatomica. All you had to do was put this into computer science terms and like naming terms to get me hooked, Caroline. I'm so hooked. Yeah, I knew you'd like this bit. I knew you'd like this bit, Tom. Also, I just want to say this so tracks that people started being happy with it or rather France started being happy with it as soon as Paris was given. As soon as Paris was involved. Well, you know what it is? It's because they're riding the laurels of like the meter for the rest of time. Like they did do some good measurement stuff.

35:07Ella, you'll be happy to hear that the Paris did get dropped eventually. This was in 1998 where basically a further revision happened. Wait, wait, wait. What year? 1998. So the year that I was born. Don't say that and so I'm going to cut that out. I don't like that. Wait, wait, what? This is how recent some of this stuff is happening. So yeah, 1998 we get to the terminology anatomica. So this is sort of like how I was talking about

35:37in units of measurement that like it's like these incremental things that's not like they're fully... Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Okay, okay. And I mean like so they published this. This has 7,500 terms in it. This was produced by the International Federation of Associations of Anatomists and the Federative Committee of Anatomical Terminology. Again. Later known as the Federative International Programme on Anatomical Terminologies. So this is now what we use as the international standard for human anatomical naming.

36:09Cool. It's also available online. Has been since 2011. Yay. I tried to navigate the online resource and it's fucking disgusting. Jesus Christ. Is it like an old website? Can I see it? Yeah, please. Oh, I'd love to see it. Yeah, I have got it. Hang on. It's really awful. I'll put a link to this in the new image thing. Let's learn everything.com slash 113. This might not look like the official one. It is. I had to troll through the internet to find it. Thank you to BearBot Programs

36:39for helping me find the official page. There you go. No, no. No, this sucks again.

36:45We're looking at one of the most basic looking webpages I've ever seen that just has this like nested list of just the names of organs and body parts and not much else. For me, this is like the equivalent of like walking into Adam Savage's workshop and you like find a tool that like is like a spiral what's it called and you're like, I just love that this exists for someone. Yes. Yeah, absolutely. Also, it has the children so you can click on the children of the heart. And see what's like terms related to the heart

37:16and that are like within that single structure. Okay, Ella's. There we go. Myocardium. Ella's really into it. Yeah. Which is one of the muscles in the heart. I feel like I've managed to reel you both in with this. Tom with naming and Ella with this. I was so surprised that it was this. Okay, I understand. You happy? Because if you go under corpus humanum, that just means human body and then you just kind of like divide that into different parts. So systema nervosum. Hi listeners. As we're fading Ella out,

37:47I just want you all to know that we respect your time. So we're going to cut this down a little bit.

37:54Encephalon. The brain. And so, okay, right? Actually, I really like this. Cerebellum. Cerebrum. I feel like, yeah, this is the equivalent of like now you have to confiscate the fidget toy from Ella to focus on the rest of the... It's kind of fun to click through the children to see like how the things relate to each other. Sorry, okay, you can carry on. No, it's beautiful. It's great. I'm so happy for you right now. I really am. It's so funny. Because I took one look at this and was like, no. That's so funny. And it's kind of interesting

38:24because a lot of medical diseases or disorders obviously have Latin names and that's how they're mostly referred to. So it's kind of nice to see the Latin name of organs and parts of organs and then you'd be like, oh, that's how this relates to this disorder. Although you should probably already know that, but it's kind of like interesting. Anyway. Yeah, it's like these kinds of dictionaries have to exist. Yeah. And can be useful. Yeah. Oh yeah, absolutely. So this takes us neatly to where we are today with organs.

38:55One last thing. How many organs? Sorry, just really one last thing. One last thing. It tells you on what pages in Grey's Anatomy the book. That's good. You can find them. Oh, that's good. That's good. Which is really nice. I have a really nice, beautiful copy, beautiful copy of Grey's Anatomy. Do you? Yeah. Ooh. Bit gel. Anyway, can you guys remember how many organs we are thought to have today? 78. 78. 78. Well done, Ella. Well done, Tom. You got there in the end. Thanks. So yeah, 78 or 80 or 82, maybe.

39:30Maybe. We'll get to that in a second. Wiki does list 93 individual organs, but as we talked about earlier, they do better at breaking things down like your nerves, your sensory organs, your muscles and your skeletons. If we wanted to say how many individual organs that we have, like as in like including duplicates and all of your muscles and stuff like that, we'd be getting into the thousands basically. So there are, there's a lot going on there. Right, right, right. Okay, sure. But we are there.

40:00We are now trying to understand more things about like successful transplants, understanding injury and organ repair better, getting on a cellular level to look at human anatomy, finally learning what the clitoris is. Yay! That only took until 2005. Is the clitoris an organ? Yeah, it's a sexual organ, technically. Ah! I should have known that. Oh, I laughed, but I learned. Yeah! So that's it. 5,000 years of study and there is nothing else to find. We have found everything.

40:31On to burning! Yay!

Modern day organ discoveries

40:33And then in the last decade, we found like three or four more organs. Oh, yay! I don't know when. Yeah, yeah. So let's chat about modern day organ discovery. I've got a couple of examples. I'm not going to go into all four of them today, but there are a few more than what I'm talking about, basically. Oh my gosh, okay. So, how much do you guys know about your saliva glands? A little bit. A little bit. Ella, take the floor. I know that when you yawn and your saliva squirts out,

41:05it's called gleeking. Yeah, I did know that. I didn't know it had a name. That's great. Thank you for that. I know that they're like under your tongue. There's some up here around your cheek area. Yeah. And there's another set. Weird. There's like three sets, I think. What? There are three sets. Ella, spot on. There's your parotid gland, which, as Ella said, is that one in your cheek. There's your submandibular gland, which is underneath your mandible. Perfectly named.

41:36And then there's one that's your sublingual gland. I say one, these are all in pairs. So that's underneath your tongue. Yeah. Interesting. So those are your major saliva glands. There are also hundreds of minor saliva glands, like in your lips and in your tongue and in your palate and things like that. I've never thought more about saliva. And you're about to think about it so much more as well because in 2020, we found a new pair. I love your excitement. Okay, that is crazy though. It's so crazy. And the way that we discovered it is genuinely really cool.

42:07So I want to talk about it very quickly. Weirdly the same way we discovered some of the Clitoris stuff.

42:13The way that we discovered it was purely by accident. No, no. I was just about to make such an inappropriate joke and I'm slurping it back in. You have to make it now. Oh, boy. Ella. Caroline. Being a real teacher, Caroline's now read your joke in front of the whole class. Right, now come and stand up here, pass me your note, read it out loud. Okay, look, Tom, I need you to say what you said before again. I mean, they probably discovered it when they were discovering some of that Clitoris stuff, right, Caroline? The same way they discovered that Clitoris stuff. Oh, you mean Tom

42:44groping around in the dark.

42:53Tom's gone.

43:05Hi, Dad, and Ella's mom. I hope all's well. I hope everyone's doing well. Oh, I love this show. Also, hi, TikTok. Hi, Instagram Reels. Anyway, the way that we discovered our fourth pair of saliva glands was very cool and very accidental. It was less groping around in the dark and more radioactive markers

43:36in a CT scan. Shut the fuck up. These are researchers at the Netherlands Cancer Institute and they were using a specialised imaging technique called PSMA PET CT scanning. That PSMA stands for Prostate Specific Membrane Antigen and they were specifically looking at prostate cancer patients. So the way that this works is that your prostate specific membrane antigen is often found in quite high amounts on your prostate cells, basically. So if you've got prostate cancer, you're going to have quite a lot of this antigen

44:07basically on those cells. What you can do is get a little radioactive tracer that will bind to that antigen. You'll inject a person with it and then in theory when you do a PET CT scan on them, those sections will glow up. Literally will glow up in the imaging, basically. The thing is, is that your salivary glands also like to hold on to the tracers. This is an accident. This is really an accident. They were looking at the complete opposite side of the fucking body. Yeah, literally. So researchers knew this information

44:37when they were doing full body scans. They knew what to expect. They knew that they were going to see the three major groups of glands light up, basically. So when they did the imaging and they found... They were all deceived for there was a fourth gland. There was a fourth pair there. They were really surprised by this. I do have an image of what the scan looked like, but I will talk through it very briefly because it only looks like there's three sections, but there are four there. This is so exciting for me because it's like an update on my degree.

45:07Yeah, oh my god. So it's kind of like in the nasal... behind the nasal cavity. That's exactly it. It looks like a handlebar mustache. Yeah, but a bit higher up. Yeah, but very tiny. The team did then do human cadaver dissections as well to confirm that this structure was there and they did find it as well, which is great. And we now know that these glands are really, really important for things like facilitating swallowing, reducing friction when talking, helping maintain pH.

45:39They play a part in your immune response. They actually do quite a lot and quite cool to know about them. Ella, go for it. I just, I don't understand why we wouldn't have seen these in anatomical dissection before. It's a really great question. You're answering that question? No way. I will in a second. Yeah. Hell yeah. Put a pin in that one for now. So quite cool to know about, just, you know, out of general interest of how our body works and things like that. But there's also another good reason for why it's good to know

46:10that these glands are there. And it's actually linked to how they were discovered, which is through cancer treatment. So I'm not saying that they help with cancer treatment, but knowing that they're there can help us treat cancers without damaging these glands, basically. So on patients with head and neck cancer, one of the lead researchers for the paper that declared the discovery said that radiation therapy can damage the salivary glands, which may lead to complications. Patients may have trouble eating, swallowing, or speaking, which can be a real burden. For patients, it should technically be possible

46:40to avoid delivering radiation to this newly discovered location of the salivary gland system in the same way we try to spare known glands. That's huge. Really, really cool, right? Really, really important. Practical, like, holy shit. We're going to put a pin in these salivary glands for a second, but we will come back to them and we will answer Ella's question in a second. But I want to talk about another example of organs that were recently discovered, which is an organ that you might have heard of. It's called the interstitium. Have either of you heard of this before?

47:12Yes. No? Ella, you have. Do you know anything about it? Was it recently discovered or was it given the label of organ? Oh, it got reverse Pluto'd. Because I definitely learned about this during my undergrad and I didn't remember it being an organ, but I remember learning about it, which is... What the fuck? Sorry, it's... Ella. We're so lucky to have... It's like the space around cells, right? Yes, that's exactly it. Yeah, so... Oh.

47:43These are... Oh, sorry, yeah. These are fluid-filled spaces that were discovered in connective tissue all over the body, including below the skin surface, in the lining of the digestive tract, in lungs, in urinary systems, surrounding muscles, etc. It's everywhere. In that way, interstitium is a great name for that because it's sort of just like the... Interstitium's a lovely name, right? Like the interstitial between things. Yeah. The liminal space of the body. The researchers said that these fluid-filled spaces had been missed for decades, basically, because they didn't show up

48:14on standard macroscopic slides. Much like with blood vessels and the issues that they had of like thinking that blood vessels circulated air during like ancient Greece and things like that. These interstitial spaces were only being observed once the tissue had been processed for observation, by which point they had drained. Same issue that we had with blood vessels. They'd already drained, so we thought that air was being circulated through them, which wasn't true. Once again, the limitations of dissection, right? Exactly, yeah. So the way that we got around this was just updating our imaging.

48:45Imaging that allowed researchers to observe tissues whilst they were still alive showed that the interstitial did have fluid in them, basically. When was this? Because I remember learning about... This was 2018 that we formally knew more about the interstitial, basically. Definitely knew there was interstitial fluid when I was doing my degree. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So maybe it's just like the level that we knew about it. No, I think that's absolutely right. In 2018, a study was released that basically elevated the importance of the interstitium

49:16and talked about how it was really important for removing waste from cells and for nutrient movement and stuff like that, basically. So that's what happened in 2018. It wasn't just all in the blood that was removing waste and stuff. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Now, Ella, you have been hinting at some of my anatomist beef that has been brewing in the background for these two examples. For the tuberial salivary glands, which were the first thing that I talked about, there was a group of researchers at the Institute of Medical Education

49:47and Research in India, as well as the Indian Institute of Technology, who had what I would call scathing remarks about labelling this as new or an organ, basically. So this is talking about the salivary glands again. They released an article titled Observations Against the Recent Discovery of a Pair of New Salivary Glands in Humans. They said things like, our fundamental objections were that the structure and function of the glandular conglomerates are not entirely unknown, as were claimed

50:17in defending a discovery. So they were basically saying, actually, we did know about this before your discovery. Wow. It wasn't an unknown thing, and you claiming that it's new is not accurate. I feel like that's fair, probably going to be fair, because it's like, we have hit a point now where we have very good tools and the idea that no one would have seen this by 2020 does, I find. They go on to say that the existing literature considers them as part of the respiratory tract and an integral component of auditory tubes instead.

50:49Auditory? So because of how high up it is, basically, and how it's linked to the nasal cavity, they are instead making the argument of, actually, this has been described in literature as being part of different systems to the salivary system. Oh, okay, interesting. This is extremely interesting, Caroline, and I'm sure this is where we're going to go, but it's finally really clicking where it's like, oh, when you describe it as an organ, you're almost prescribing a sole purpose for it rather than considering the fact that the body isn't purposeful. It's just kind of

51:19a mess of cells. And to be fair, there are, you know, I'm not saying that organs don't exist. I'm not like that radical, but like... It's just trying to define something as an organ is so difficult. Yeah. What I'm saying is like, I think, you know, it can be help. The reason we label organs is to make things easier in medical... That's also a good point. For medical purposes, to understand how things work together, to diagnose things. And so there is, it is very useful to have a unified

51:50kind of global feeling about that so people can learn and understand more. But I guess you're kind of right, Tom. It's like, these things are all interconnected. They are all doing lots of different things. And it's like, yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. Really interesting. They do go on to say, further, these glandular conglomerates don't present an isolated mass and don't have the independent blood supply, innovation, or lymphatic drainage that characterizes an organ. So not only are they saying, we found this before, it doesn't do the thing

52:20that you're saying that it does. Actually, we don't think it's an organ either. Damn. So yeah, to date, anatomical categorization of these salivary glands is not comprehensive as one paper put it. So the jury is very much still out on what these glands are. Regarding the interstitium, one paper said that although the anatomical entity is important in the functioning of the body, it doesn't satisfy the requirements that an organ can be composed of two or more tissues and perform

52:51a special function. Alas, it appears much ado about nothing. Damn. All right. I was surprised to hear the interstitium because this is everywhere in the body. It's not like... Yeah, yeah. It would be like, you know, in my head, like calling the fluid around your organs in your abdomen like an organ. Yeah, yeah. I'm not here to argue for or against the interstitium being an organ. I don't have interstitium in the game. Yeah. Nice. And you know what? Oh, wait.

53:21This is another one. This is nearly... This is another one that, like, nearly a decade on, we still can't decide how to label this. The BBC actually did an article on this debate earlier this year talking about this. So this is still something that's very relevant. Interesting. So that's several newly found organs which I really want to highlight that in the press they were labelled as newly found of orcs. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. Which is why I've included them in this list. It was newly found organ in the salivary glands

53:52and newly found organ in the interstitium. What is this? Ooh, la, la. And then as soon as you actually get into the nitty gritty of it, even the researchers aren't necessarily claiming that it's a brand new organ. Of course not. Yeah, of course not. Yeah. So, what about our newly discovered or rediscovered reti ovary that I was seeing all over my feed? This is like a lateral thing where you've mentioned at the start and I've forgotten about it in between and now I have to like it's full.

54:25First off, I'll tell you some headlines that I saw about this potential rediscovered organ. Headlines like scientists rediscover a lost piece of female anatomy that may play a crucial role in fertility. Why did male doctors remove this female organ from history? I'm familiar with this voice. This is the alien pyramid voice.

54:48And I can't stress enough how many videos I've seen of this. Half an hour before we started recording, a new video popped up on my feed talking about this rediscovered organ and it was winding me up now. So, what's actually going on here? This fully pulls into all of the stuff that we have talked about. It was first described 100 years ago in 1870 by a German anatomist called Heinrich Waldea. We didn't understand what it was for because it's largely around hormones so it was labelled as a vestigial organ.

55:20It was mentioned in some textbooks at the time but by the time we get to things like the Paris Nomina Anatomica it's not being mentioned anymore. Which to be fair, other hormonal glands are starting to be talked about here so this is getting a bit snubbed, a bit forgotten about. Research is happening on it in times like the 1980s and we're starting to get case studies about having cysts on this organ, all of this sort of stuff but it is getting ignored. It is a part of the female anatomy that has not had

55:50research done on it until about 2025 when a peer-reviewed paper was published which started to elaborate on the function of the reti-ovari in a paper titled Rediscovering the Reti-ovari is secreting auxiliary structure to the ovary which basically found that it might be an important sensing and responding organ for hormones basically. So responding to and sensing hormones like progesterone basically and then it's supporting the ovaries. Where is it located

56:21again? It's right next to your ovaries. Hey folks, quick point of clarification here. The word we are saying isn't ovary, O-V-A-R-Y. It's O-V-A-R-I-I. I've seen some places pronounce it ovary, I've seen some pronounce it ovary, some pronounce it ovarii, but I just wanted to clarify that. What we are talking about with the reti-ovari are these sort of like small stringy structures on top of the ovaries. They are not an entirely new ovary

56:51that was also found. A preprint of this paper was available in 2024, which is when the news first broke about this. But social media has really clung on to this story in the last couple of weeks. And I totally understand why people are more aware of things like medical misogyny now than they ever have been before. The history of us understanding women's bodies and like them not being taken seriously is absolutely something that has been happening. We thought the womb wandered around our body for far too

57:22long. We didn't know what the clitoris was for until 2005. So all of this stuff I completely understand. And yet, do I think that this is a click-baity thing? Also, yes, basically, based on all of the stuff that we've spoken about before. I don't know, I kind of like don't mind, I mean, it's obviously not an organ, it sounds like it's just like a, yeah, it's a structure attached to the ovary that does important functions for the ovary. I think it's probably, yeah, you shouldn't be calling it an organ, but also, do I kind of like agree with clickbait headlines

57:53that like, yes, as you say, Caroline, female anatomy has been massively overlooked. There's this like whole stretch here that we're learning about recently that we don't know fully what it does now or haven't been studying properly that might have big implications for like lots of things to do with your fertility or periods or anything. Would I like for the headlines to be more scientifically accurate and balanced? Sure, but do I think this is the worst thing in the world? Not really. You know what, Ella, I think that's such a wonderfully balanced

58:24way of looking at it. Actually, both of you are absolutely right. I've seen so much clickbait and actually for like the whole of human history, basically, I now view anatomy research as one fad after another, be that like the ancient Greeks and their like obsession with the prestige of being an anatomist and trying to figure out what's going on with the body to then the 17 and 1800s where we're pulling cadavers out of the ground because there's not enough of them to research bodies and that they're being used to sell tickets to now where organ

58:55discovery is a clickbaity headline. I'm frustrated at it all and yet really important research is happening that we've talked about today. I feel like isn't getting accurately represented in the media because of because it is so cool. Yeah, you're you're so fucking right Caroline because it's like the coolest parts of the things you've been saying hasn't been like this is discovered it's been now we can use this to do X, Y, or Z. That's when me and Ella go like holy shit is when it's like oh this can teach us about this or this can be used

59:26to affect treatment that I think is the more cool stuff rather than just saying we have a name, right? Yeah, yeah. And I want to add that like scientific research particularly biological like anatomical human research is faddy and always has been because funding because as much as people don't want to say it, funding follows fad and so like when I was doing my PhD it was in stem cell biology there was a lot of money when I was doing my PhD in this area particularly induced pluripotent stem cells and also

59:57something I did called single cell RNA seek which is a way of separating out lots of cells and studying them genetically. Huge faddy area at the time and people got funding to do that because it was really new and interesting so yes but fads drive scientific research it's not always good but stunning but it's just the truth of it. You just gotta recognise. So maybe when I'm saying like I don't mind the clickbaity articles around like female organ, ovary organ it's like maybe it being clickbaity will encourage more fad than

1:00:27that shouldn't be the way it is. Yeah. That's exactly it. But we have to live in this world. Well we live in a society. We are in this world.

1:00:37There we go. Thanks so much guys for chatting to me about it. That was great. Unbelievable Caroline. Great conversation all the way through that as well. Yeah. So much stuff I didn't know. Really stimulating. Thank you.

The atom and sponsor break

1:00:53So today's science topic is the atom. Ooh I'm really curious to see where you take this Tom. Yeah because I feel like this is something I already know about you know. And see that's what I thought too but yeah okay I'm just gonna get into it. You'll see. You'll see. Okay cool. Okay I'm excited. I'm ready for this. Okay cool. Obviously gotta start with the basics. The atom is of course comprised of negatively charged electrons, positively charged VPNs and neutral neutrons which gotta say love when the name is is so clear. I'm sorry. Wait what? Sorry.

1:01:24Sorry. I'm using jargon because I've been so deep in the weeds on this. So VPN stands for virtual private network. Tom I think you may have I think you may have researched the wrong. Did you write your topic on Proton VPN? No no it um I think I um. Wait do you have a section in your script about how VPNs let you access and browse the open internet freely like everyone should be able to? And did you manage to tie it all in a neat bow with an overly sound.

1:01:54Wow you're really calling yourself out here. Did you manage to tie it all in a neat bow with an overly saccharine message at the end? In many ways our online friendship is like a virtual private network. Oh Tom. No no this is fine maybe we can salvage this and turn it into an ad route instead. No the topic's an hour and a half long. Oh fuck of course it is. Jesus. Right just give us your favorite bits then. Okay um cut that cut that. Uh well I didn't know this um Proton VPN comes from the folks who brought you the privacy first Proton

1:02:25mail. Oh I actually didn't know that. I have a Proton mail account still to this day that I use to fill in forms for things that I don't want them to have my real email address. Nice. 100% and because of that obviously they are simple secure and fast as you would expect. Um I also didn't know this Proton VPN is one of the only VPNs that also offers a free version of their services. It's slower and you know has less features but they are just that confident in their product and their dedication to security

1:02:56and of course if you want to level up your VPN and get access to faster speeds advanced security features and better support for streaming platforms which is really cool you can you can use Proton VPN and much like the adventures in life that we go on that push humanity ever forwards to the great unknown it's easy to get started right now. Proton VPN is offering our listeners 70% off a two-year plan when you go to ProtonVPN.com slash learn. That's Proton P-R-O-T-O-N VPN dot com slash learn

1:03:26for 70% off your two-year plan. That's ProtonVPN dot com slash learn. Wow. Banger. What a banger. Wow. All right. I guess I guess we can just keep it a two-topic episode. That's fine.

1:03:40Sorry. Didn't you write an ad read that was about organs? What if we just like switch it around Caroline? Oh it was a bit over. Yeah. Cool. Uh-huh. Friends it's your captains Janet Varney and John Hodgman. As we come in for a landing on season three we want you to know that all episodes of this season of E. Pluribus Motto are available now. Be ready to binge hours devoted to the yellow hammers of Alabama. The tree octopi or octopuses of Washington or Washington.

1:04:11And mottos official unofficial Latin and otherwise from states like Nebraska Florida and more. Once again all E. Pluribus Motto episodes are available now on MaximumFun.org or wherever you get your podcasts. We hope you've enjoyed your journey with us and we look forward to traveling with you again soon. Please stay seated until the podcast comes to a complete stop.

1:04:34Hey Alexis. Hey Ella. What animal has the most teeth? I would guess a shark. A snail. No snails don't have teeth. They have thousands and they are freaky looking. No I don't want that to be true. Okay. Did you know that the hippocampus in your brain is named after the half horse half fish sea creature found in Greek mythology? I didn't know that but we're meant to be doing animal trivia and hippocampus isn't a real animal. Well that doesn't matter on Comfort Creatures. You're right it doesn't matter at all. Comfort Creatures is a

1:05:04cozy show for lovers of animals of all shapes and sizes real and unreal. If that sounds like your cup of tea then join us every Thursday for new episodes on MaximumFun.org. Today's miscellaneous

Introduction to birdwatching

1:05:19topic is bird watching. Yay!

1:05:24Y'all see any good birds lately? I have. Go on tell me. I was at Storm King in New York which is a big sculpture garden area and there was this yellow hold on I Merlin'd it so I can check. Nice! I was gonna ask if everybody's got Merlin on their phones. Ooh ooh! When I was in San Francisco some of my friends brought me to this area near Google where some egrets nest. Nice! Saw a real good heron the other day. Very excited about it. Sorry Kingfisher.

1:05:54That was great. Oh man I love Kingfisher's They're so pretty. I also I want to clarify my context going into this. I do not consider myself a birder like this has just been something I've heard a lot of. Yeah. I actually got the binoculars originally not to go birding but there was this museum exhibit that was like a miniature city in New York and so I got binoculars because I wanted to like tickly do that. Oh that's so much merdier. Wow. Yeah. I know it was for architecture. Uh oh. The easiest kind of birding where it doesn't move.

1:06:25But it's always been a fascination and I've always been like oh this could be something that is this but but but I also say parts of it didn't really click for me. Interesting. Maybe we'll get into this Ella like when I learned that like people were just like is it like a life list or something like that when I when I learned that people were just like you just perceive it and then you you say that you saw it and like that's how you were like the the computer science brain in me was like. How do you prove it? How do you? Yeah. Yeah. That's not the point and I have to move past that but

1:06:56like you know like there's little things like this where I'm just like I don't maybe this isn't but but I'll just say I'm so interested in what we're going to learn today because I've always been curious for a long time. I've got to I've got to echo that Tom because I used to work for the RSPB in the UK. Oh I totally forgot. Jesus Christ. But I never necessarily worked with the birdie side of it that much. I was working much more with nature conservation, heritage conservation side of things. So like twitching or bird watching has always been this thing that I've sort of like

1:07:27Twitching. Yeah twitching. We'll get into that. Yay! Always used to be and like when I worked as a ranger in down south you used to get these people come to do their bird watching basically and they were used to like hop fences and stuff like that. So my perception of bird watchers up until quite recently has been bloody twitchers and the bird watchers just like jumping fences and walking through the section that I've just beautifully mulched to prep for planting. Are these motherfuckers?

1:07:57And now I'm like oh wait no like it's becoming a thing. So I'm very excited to hear about it becoming a thing basically. What about you Ella? So I'll tell you the story. About a year ago I bought a pair of binoculars which we were looking at at the start and I downloaded a bird app. Lots of them out there now and I took to my local parks to recreationally listen to and observe the local avian wildlife. I thought that this was just an incurable symptom of turning 30.

1:08:28Yeah. Yeah. But it turns out that I'm not alone. Obviously you guys are here with me but the RSPB or the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds which is a charity here in the UK conducted a survey just a few months ago. It asked around 24,000 people about their hobbies and the survey found that there was a 47% rise in birdwatching among people of all ages in the UK with an estimated 4 million birdwatchers here. Wow. And for Gen Z who are around

1:08:5914 to 29 years old it is apparently the second fastest growing hobby in the UK. Why? Oh. I like I understand. Because you don't have to pay for much. Is that it? And you get to be out. The people yearn to. Get to be outside. Touch some grass. Grass. I mean yes. So first of all any guesses on the first fastest growing hobby in the UK? Warhammer? No. That would be nice. Dungeons and Dragons? No. No. Okay. It's jewellery making. I was never going to guess that. No. But that is a lovely.

1:09:30That's more expensive. Surely. Anyway carry on. We're not here to talk about that. We're here to talk about birdwatching. So according to the RSPB there has been more than a tenfold increase in Gen Z birdwatchers. Wow. No longer is this the dominion of retirees but it's a trendy youthful pastime. I have some quotes from young birdwatchers on why they enjoy this hobby. This is from a BBC article. It doesn't require the use of a lot of expensive equipment. You don't necessarily need to have any equipment to start off with at all.

1:10:01I think we are just trying to connect to the outside world and Gen Zs are generally very caring about the environment. When I'm watching birds I'm not thinking about anything else. It's a moment of peace and a way to reconnect with nature and with myself. And it's something that everyone can do no matter how much or how little they know about birds. It'll inspire you to get outside and discover beautiful green spaces, exercise and generally slow down which everyone can benefit from. It's exactly what you guys said. Damn. Wow. So I don't think any of these things are particularly surprising to hear.

1:10:32Yeah. I mean maybe so eloquently from Gen Z. Yeah. Well done to them. You know the modern world is like absolutely exhausting for everyone including young people. Yeah. Which I sometimes count myself among. And bird watching is like it's reprieve from the job hunt and rising costs and the 24 hour bad news cycle. It's lovely. But I wanted to learn more about this hobby and to tell you guys more about it. So when I was trying to think of my next miscellaneous topic, my

1:11:03husband Yono challenged me to do a topic without including the history of that topic. Ooh. Huh. Fun. He said we always do history and Caroline's just done history. Yeah. It's true. We always do history. Uh huh. Well Yono, the ancient Greeks. Fuck you. Of course I'm doing history. Yeah. I was so worried. I was like what do you mean you're not doing the history of bird watching? I want to know the history of bird watching so badly right now.

1:11:35Of course I'm doing history. It's interesting.

1:11:40It's so interesting. Eat our collective shit Yono. Fuck off. But it actually it won't be as long a history as you might expect. Look birds have, you know, they've been on this planet longer than.

1:11:56Sorry. I just love that. Birds have been around for thousands of years. The ancient Egyptians had birds. I'm literally, they've been on this planet as longer than we have.

1:12:05So, you know, okay, you are right. That's that. You're so right. I mean, the dinosaurs. Dinosaurs have been around. We have always, as humans, we have always interacted with birds. There's no way I can like talk about every single way we have interacted with birds. Yeah. Ooh. Is paleontology burning if you're looking at Sauritia? Oh. So, I was serious about the ancient Greeks. They practiced something called ornithomancy. Oh. Yeah. It's the reading of omens from

1:12:37the actions of birds. Oh, right. Oh my gosh. This is like the second time that omen reading has come up today and completely different spheres. That's great. To make it like semi-topical, we see this in the Odyssey. So you see like an eagle appearing several times and it signifies like Odysseus' return. The ancient Romans practiced augury, meaning they interpreted the flight patterns, calls, and feeding habits of wild birds as omens or messages from the gods. So they are watching birds in a way.

1:13:07And then globally for millennia, farmers have watched migration and arrival times of birds to time planting, harvesting, and seasonal changes. That's so genius. That makes so much sense. Yeah. Very practical. Because it does. Wow. In the UK, the arrival of red-chested cuckoos in mid-April, after they migrated from Africa to breed, their song was a sign for farmers to sow their potatoes. And it's still like very much a signal of this kind of time of year, the potato-sowing season. You know, changes in bird song and

1:13:38flight behavior and flocking, they've always been, and in some places are still used to predict everything. Incoming weather, storms, rain, harsh winters. Yeah. So where there have been birds, we have watched birds. Nice. Yeah. Yeah. But bird watching as a hobby, rather than as something functional, is relatively new in the course of human

History of birdwatching

1:14:01history. Ah, okay. So not that long ago, in episode 105, where my miscellaneous topic was collecting, I talked about the Renaissance obsession with the Wunderkamer, or cabinet of curiosities. Yes. Oh. And many of these featured birds. Mm-hmm. Right. Their eggs, their feathers, skeletons, their stuffed birds from all over the world. This is kind of like the birth of the early scientific study of birds, or

1:14:32ornithology. Eventually, people moved away from general cabinets of curiosities to drawers full of only birds, which they could then study and refer back to. Specifically, birds were killed and made into study skins, which is where a bird's skeleton is, like, removed, and it's stuffed and sewn up in such a way that it can neatly fit in a drawer. I mean, really cool. Study skins. But also kind of weird. I can't, I can't possibly get away with saying that. I've got so many dead things behind me right now. No, you have no, you have zero like

1:15:03to say, what? I'm like 90% sure the cold open is going to be something fucked up, Caroline. I don't know what you said. Many museums and universities will have drawers full of birds that are like hundreds of years old, but study skins are still a way birds are prepared for ornithology collections. Oh, can I Google what these look like? Yeah, go for it. Literally, not, we were studying it so much we needed like a portable dead bird skin. Like. A really good way of storing your dead bird

1:15:33skins to study them, right? That's so funny. Wow. Oh my God. Wow. That's so fucking funny. Sorry. They're literally, they're like, they're like. Oh my God. Wow. They are so neatly organized in there. Wow. It's like if you took a bird and you put it through like a tube so it like stretched out long ways. Much like with jewelry making where you try to lengthen your metal. Great. When you put them in the drawer, it's like, it's like they're a bunch of spoons that you've nicely laid out. It is. It's like having a spoon collection,

1:16:04but it's kind of pointy birds. This is so funny. Wow. I didn't expect you guys to be that fascinated by study skins. Well, there you go. So these are still a way birds are prepared for ornithology collections. But importantly, it is not the only way we study birds because now we like to look at them when they're alive. Wow. What a concept. It sounds really obvious that you'd want to see like the natural habitats and behaviors

1:16:35of the creature you're studying. But as a field of formalized scientific study, this just was not done in ornithology until quite late in the game. Sure. Sometimes scientists. I mean, I'm sure there's like a hubris to it, I'm sure, where it's just like, they're just fucking birds. What do they do? They flap around and fly. This is thematically very similar to Galen, right? Kind of like, we know from what we have already. You think a bird's smarter than me? I'm smart. I know what they do. So basically a man called Edmund Sellis comes along

1:17:07and in 1889, Edmund was watching a pair of European night jars that I believe he was hunting because this was what ornithologists did when he noticed that they were incubating eggs. And it was then he realized, oh, we don't have to kill them to study them. Oh, wow. Scientists discovered mercy.

1:17:33Although, Tom, I do wonder if killing the birds and adding them to your collection would make the little computer scientist part of your brain happier with bird watching. You know, like you can prove that you saw it because you have it now. Caroline is making a good point. I'm sorry. I was more interested in study skins. No, no. So Edmund, you know, he probably wasn't the first to think this, but he was the first to write it down and spread it to the Western world. So in 1901, we're in the 1900s,

1:18:05he wrote a book and in it he wrote this. For myself, I must confess that I once belonged to this great poor army of killers, though happily a bad shot, a most fatigable collector and a poor half-hearted bungler generally. But now that I have watched birds closely, the killing of them seems to me as something monstrous and horrible. And for everyone that I have shot or even only shot at and missed, I hate myself with an increasing hatred. Let anyone who has an eye and a brain, but especially the latter, lay down the gun and take up the glasses for a week,

1:18:38a day, even for an hour, if he is lucky and he will never wish to change back again. Wow. What a... I've got like... He's not just discovered mercy, he's discovered beauty and poetry. Oh my God. Wow. That's amazing. Wow. My goodness. Oh, my heart. I'm kind of like whiplash from that flip there. Wow. So this is from Edmund Seles' book called Birdwatching. Oh my God. It is the first... He is the first known person

1:19:09to use the term in this way. No fucking way. And he basically made birdwatching a respectable way of studying birds. Over the following decades, watching birds would gradually gain popularity, overshooting them, both for ornithology and as a hobby, particularly as better binoculars became available in the early 1900s. Interestingly, the Second World War saw a particular uptick in hobbyist birdwatchers as soldiers would do it

1:19:40during the long intervals between combat. That makes a lot of sense. Oh my God. Yeah. So there was one story I came across of a British soldier called John Buxton who was taken as a prisoner of war during World War II and he would teach other inmates in POW camps about birds and how to watch them and study them and together they accumulated enough notes to publish a long form written study focusing on a bird called the Common Red Star which was published after the war which I just thought was a lovely story. Oh God, there's so much.

1:20:12There's a lot for my heart to unpack there, man. Yeah. Yeah. John Buxton would later become the warden of Skoma Island which is an island off the coast of Wales and I've been and it's wonderful. There are like thousands of breeding pairs of like Manxshire waters and ghillimots and puffins. I would recommend. Gorgeous island. We should go, Caroline. We should go. Anyway.

1:20:36After the Second World War bird watching began to move from quote a comparatively rare eccentricity into a national pastime. More people were watching birds for fun although not everyone was happy about the fact that it wasn't just being done for science. People are ridiculous. Like Caroline earlier in the topic. So this is a quote from a National Geographic article on the history of bird watching where I got a lot of the info on the history for this section.

1:21:08Quote, this emerging ornithological watershed generated some strong feelings exemplified by the Reverend Peter Hartley, a professional ornithologist who in 1954 declared that non-scientific bird watching is simply lazy, incompetent and slovenly bird watching. What? Slovenly. I would love to find a good use of I feel like slovenly is one of the words that only gets when you say it you're the bad I've literally written in my script that I'm obsessed

1:21:39with the insane use of this word. I know. In the year of our in 1950 something, right? 1954. Slovenly. Jesus. Bird watching. Slovenly. But anyway, it continues like this. In response, Dennis Summersmith, an amateur who eventually became Britain's leading expert on sparrow research, countered by saying that bird watching is no more slovenly than going to a concert without a score. He added, many are not suited to carry out scientific study or read scores should we criticise them

1:22:10for the pleasure they get from birds or music. What a beautiful metaphor. That's a great comeback. Bird watching beef. Who'd have thunk it? I never. The idea of being like, you shouldn't do it because you're not doing it in a scientific capacity is so ridiculous. It's very strange. Well, whatever the Reverend Peter Hartley might have wanted, eventually, as many hobbies and pastimes we speak about on this podcast do, bird watching moved from something mostly upper class people did

1:22:42to something most people can do as the working classes, you know, they had more leisure time and more disposable income. This particular style of bird watching by which I mean, you know, sitting in a dugout for hours on end with binoculars and a flask and making note of which birds you spot was very Western and particularly very British for a long time, but it has long since spread to the world, right? The National Geographic article I told you about makes the point that because there is no precise definition

1:23:12of what a bird watcher is, there's no precise figures for how many there are. But in the UK, the RSPB has, we understand, the stat is that the RSPB has more members than all political parties combined.

1:23:32So that speaks to its popularity. That's great. Or to the dismal state of our politics.

Birdwatching apps and Pokemon

1:23:38But by the way, I do really like this idea that bird watching is a hobby with no proper definition. You know, you can do it as you please. I am a birder. Yeah, you are. And as we heard at the start, Gen Z are the latest to come into the birding fold. And one of the big reasons for this is bird watching apps. Yeah. Have you guys used bird watching apps? Yeah. I have Merlin downloaded on my phone. I also have Merlin. There are simply

1:24:09too many birding apps to go through. Yeah. But I've picked a few interesting and kind of popular ones to highlight. So for example, OBS Identify, it's from a non-profit foundation based in the Netherlands. It lets you upload photos you've taken of birds and it tells you what it thinks it is along with like a percentage accuracy rating. There are a few picture ID ones like this. The one I've used most is Birder, which is UK specific. eBird is very popular and it's one of the apps from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

1:24:41You can upload photos, but it's more about just logging your sightings and tracking where birds are. And this kind of data is like incredibly useful as a citizen science tool. Oh, right. There was that one app that they, it's not on the app store anymore, but it was pretty good. It was called Twitter. That was, that was kind of good. Boo! Boo! Boo! Boo! Boo! You fools, that only makes me stronger. Continue.

1:25:05So yeah, it's really useful because it tells ornithologists things like bird nesting sites and migration patterns. And a lot of the apps that people use casually are used as citizen science tools. I won't be getting into that aspect in particular today, but it's just something to be aware of. Rare Bird Alert here in the UK gives real-time alerts about sightings of rare birds I have heard of this one too. Yeah. Which I understand is very exciting for the experienced birder, but probably, as you guys have both mentioned already, the most popular birdwatching app

1:25:35right now is the other one from the Cornell Lab of Lawn Authology, Merlin Bird ID. It listens to the bird sound around you to tell you what bird it thinks it is. It's pretty simple. I've mostly used Merlin and Birder. I prefer Merlin, but I want to tell you about something in particular and that's Birder's Interface. Okay. So when you open it, you can see, the first thing it tells you is how many species there are in your area, 291. Local birds in your area?

1:26:06Yeah, and how many of these you have logged. So I've only, I've logged 23 in this area. Not great. Oh my God. When you log a sighting of a bird you've never seen before, it says, congratulations. You've got a lifer. You mentioned this before, this is a birding term, meaning the very first time you see or hear a particular bird species in your lifetime. When you log 10 or 25 lifers, you get a new badge marking the achievement. Uh-oh. Uh-oh. I fear this would get me. Uh-oh. Your first black and white bird,

1:26:37you get the badger badge, which I think is really cute. That's really cute. And there are also badges for getting a certain number of shorebirds and raptors and woodpeckers and waterfowl. It's kind of like... We turned it into Pokemon. Yeah. Tom, please. You're so... You're so... Like, you know what's coming. Give it to me. No, I didn't know that. Sorry.

1:27:00It's kind of like getting an achievement in a game. It's kind of like... Who's that? Bird.

1:27:12Pigeon. It's feral pigeon. That's feral pigeon. Yeah, brilliant. This is wonderful. I... Oh my god.

1:27:24Well done! Yay! Well done, Caroline. Thank you. So, many, many people have made the observation that using these bird watching apps is like playing Pokemon. Like you said, Tom. Or more specifically, like playing Pokemon Go. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I found a post on rbirdwatching on Reddit where someone asks, why is Gen Z suddenly so obsessed with bird watching? And lots of comments bring up Pokemon. One user says,

1:27:55Pokemon IRL with tons of regionals and events, but they're real. Regionals! Wow, yeah, you're right! Oh my god, yeah. Another says, I was psychologically trained to love collecting animals on an electronic list in my youth. Merlin is my Pokedex. Birding scratches the itch that the idea of Pokemon only alludes to. Yeah, yeah. And it's fun. I think, I don't know if this is going to come up, one of the inspirations of Pokemon is some of the developers collecting bugs in their youth in Japan.

1:28:25Oh. And so it is kind of an interesting full circle to inspire animal observation back again, yeah. Yeah, no, I didn't know that actually. That's really cool. And it makes sense though, I mean, you've got this, it naturally goes into this next stage. But yeah, so you have, there you go, you have both pubbies require exploring outdoor areas. They like tracking rare regional spawns, you know, you build a collection. Making them fight each other. Oh my god, I actually cannot do this anymore. Did I?

1:28:56I'm just going to carry on. Okay, you build a collection log aka Pokédex or a Birdwatcher's life list and trying to complete your set. All that's missing is letting me battle birds against one another but I'm sure Cornell are working on that. I don't know why I put jokes into my script because Tom's just going to say them before I get to them. I'm so... This is... God, that's... This is how you know we've been doing this too long together. Oh dear, okay. I'm so sorry. That's so... I'm just that excited about this, Ella. I'm so sorry.

1:29:26That's so funny. Jesus Christ. Caroline, you mentioned the gamification. Yeah. I know some people really like... They'll bemoan the gamification of a hobby like this but if that is what is bringing young people into nature to appreciate wildlife I'm kind of... I'm here for it personally. I'm so total with that. Yeah, absolutely. But I do want to put a quick caveat on the use of bird identification apps. They are not perfect. I'll focus on Merlin as it's one of the most popular right now. So Merlin is not great at identifying birds

1:29:56with very similar sounds to one another unless it has a lot of data on that bird already which outside of the US is less likely. Right, okay. Europe's quite good as well but outside of the US and Europe, not great. If there is like strong wind or multiple birds it can really struggle picking sounds out. It can also glitch and say it heard a bird which is... It's just no possibility that it could be near you. My own experience with Merlin has generally been very good but I have seen it make mistakes. So just last month

1:30:26I spotted a small flock of ring-necked parakeets in a park near my house. Yay. I know what these birds sound like because they make very, very distinctive sound and I definitely know what they look like because I have a tattoo of one on my shoulder. Right, yeah. When I tried to identify that it was a ring-necked parakeet with the app it really struggled the first time. There were other birds in the area which may have made it harder but I also think this was probably because of my location.

1:30:56So ring-necked parakeets are invasive to the UK and because they tend to stay where it's warmer like their subtropical kind of origins they're mostly settled in the south of England and this is the data that the app has. So trying a week or so later when it was just the sound of that bird the app did manage to ID it. Right, yeah. They also told me that it was unlikely to be in Cardiff. Wow. But Cardiff was very warm at the time and is generally getting warmer so it makes sense that parakeets would be coming up that far. So maybe also it's just useful data

1:31:27for that app in the future. Yeah, interesting. So the British Trust for Ornithology says quote you should not solely rely on the Merlin bird ID app for submitting data to our surveys. Use the app for identification and then confirm the bird's identity by sight or sound in the field before recording it in your survey data. Great advice. Yeah. The general consensus around Merlin or any AI identifying app is that, you know, it's a great gateway for beginners to learn but to use it with caution as the sole means

1:31:58of identifying birds.

Competitive birding and big years

1:32:00But enough of that. Enough of the apps. Enough of Gen Z and beginners. Ooh. Let's get fucking serious with this. Okay. Okay. Because bird watching is not just some quaint Sunday afternoon hobby. Oh, dude. It gets very, very serious. Oh, dude. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. We've used the term birder now a few times, right? Tom's used it a lot. It's just a term for a bird watcher who does it for fun. But in the UK, we have another term

1:32:30that Caroline used at the start, twitcher. Yeah. I'm scared of twitchers. All twitchers are birders but not all birders are twitchers. Mm-hmm. Twitchers are intense. They will travel long distances to chase species to add to their personal lists. A twitcher may even compete. Ooh. We should have known, Caroline. Let's talk about the world of competitive bird watching. Shut up. This is... Oh, yeah, baby. Yeah, baby. Oh, brilliant.

1:33:01So there are a number of bird watching competitions around the world. For example, the New Jersey Audubon Society hosts the annual World Series of birding. So funny calling it World Series because it's just in America. Classic American thing. Classic. Basically, the teams that join have 24 hours to log as many birds by sight or sound as they can. Oh! It sounds really fun. It's been going since 1984 and the real focus... Wow. It really isn't on winning. It's like, it's participating, it's raising awareness for protecting birds

1:33:32and also fundraising for conservation organizations. Awesome. Awesome. But the competition most serious birders will be familiar with is a big year. Have you heard this term before? No. What? I almost grammatically didn't understand what you said. Yeah, yeah. A big year. Big year. It's simple. How many species of birds can you log within a single calendar year? Oh, wow. That's a commitment. Wow. Yeah, it's an informal competition.

1:34:04There are no prizes but glory. But that doesn't stop people from taking it to like a crazy extreme. So technically you can do a big year anywhere in the world. We have a British big year but the real fight for birding supremacy is in America. If you want to see just how seriously people take big year in America, I would totally recommend the short documentary Listers, a glimpse into extreme bird watching. It's a free-to-watch documentary on YouTube.

1:34:35It's basically two brothers who take part in their first big year and they put themselves through some absolute misery to see as many birds as possible. They also interview others in the community doing a big year and see just how seriously they take it. It includes controversy like people potentially logging things when they haven't seen it or using artificial bird calls to attract birds. Yeah, it's a beautifully made documentary. I really recommend it. Who is that? Oh my god.

1:35:06Come on, come on.

1:35:10Seagull, buzz, seagull.

1:35:15Herring gull. Nice. Okay, you're both wrong. There's no such thing as a seagull. Oh, for fuck's sake. Seagulls are just gulls by the sea. That was a herring gull. A real red herring gull. I knew that as well and I still... Wow.

1:35:32The worst was the sucker punch of us being really sentimental about the beauty of this sport and then getting blasted with that mp3 file. I want to add that it's so very American to take this like calm, slightly oddball British hobby and turn it into an extreme competition. Yeah, you're so right. But I do... I want to say I love that though. I love it and I'm going to tell you guys all about it. Okay. It's like the beauty of state fairs. At a certain point it looped back around to being beautiful again. Yeah.

1:36:03So like I said, big gear is not an official thing. No one has ever said like, hey, let's all do this. Like, let's... It just kind of started. So there was an American conservationist called Roger Torrey Peterson and he published a book called A Field Guide to Birds in 1934. I have an image of one of the pages of the first edition of this book to show you. What stands out to you? Tell me what's on the page. So we've got a bunch of birds,

1:36:33a bunch of waterfowl specifically. Mm-hmm. You've got your Canada goose at the top, you've got your swans at the bottom. Oh, they're all facing left. I mean, you're making a joke, Tom, but they are all in the same position, aren't they? Yeah, they are. This page is really simple. Yeah. It's really simple. The birds depicted here, as you say, they're all waterfowl, they're in their most commonly found position that you might see them. They are grouped by similar classes.

1:37:03Sometimes you would have like arrows pointing out key features. There would be text in this book, but it's also kept very simple. It's very accessible, isn't it? If you're like getting into birding, having a resource like this, I would imagine. It's accessible. And of the other text, importantly, it described only what you would see from a distance. Ooh, that's so helpful. This book was designed to help people watch birds, and that wasn't a thing before.

1:37:34Oh! So you would have textbooks of birds, but they were for scientific study. Oh my God. Wow. So this really, in America in particular, helped people start watching birds, and gosh darn it, people started watching birds. Oh my God. You're right. Wow. Like in these, these pictures are so, every eye is like a dot, which to be fair, makes sense, because when you're looking at them, they are going to be just like a dot. You're not going to get any closer than that. Oh my God. They're not like hyper-realistic.

1:38:04They're not hyper-textured, because you're not going to see that if you're looking at them from a distance through binoculars. So armed with this kind of new textbook and riding this new wave of birding enthusiasm, in the 1930s and 40s, a travelling businessman, an avid birder called Guy Emerson, decided to coincide his business trips with birding seasons across North America. Aww. Wow. In 1939, he recorded seeing 497 species of birds. Wow.

1:38:35And this is thought to be the earliest big year. Aww. And it's just some guy. He wrote down how many birds he saw that year and he told people about it.

1:38:46That's great. It wasn't known as a big year at this point, but more and more people started doing this over the following decades. There were some really heavyweight record holders among them who already were or who became prominent conservationists or ornithologists, but largely the people holding records for the most birds seen in a year were largely just normal, very passionate people. I won't go step by step through the history of big year because it's essentially just a list of people

1:39:17topping each other for how many birds they've recorded. I will say there are some rules actually to a big year if you want an official record, which there are now, and they're set by the American Birding Association who also keep track of the records. And the main thing to note is that they have an established area, which is North America north of Mexico, including Canada, the contiguous United States, Alaska, the French islands of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, and Hawaii,

1:39:47which was only added in 2016. The current North American big year ABA record holder, including Hawaii, is a man called John Weigel, who recorded 840 species in 2019. He is not an ornithologist. From what I can tell, he is the director of the Australian Reptile Park in Sydney and founder of a breeding program for Tasmanian devils. So to record a number of birds anywhere near like what John has done,

1:40:17so to win a big year, which doesn't mean breaking a record, it just means having the most in that year, you're not talking evenings and weekends, you are talking serious planning for months or years beforehand and then a year of intense traveling, typically traveling almost 300,000 miles over the course of the year and being away from home for over two-thirds of the year. Can you say his number one more time? About 840 species is what he got. 840 divided by 365. That's where my brain went.

1:40:48How many a day? 2.3 birds per day. Wow. New species. Yeah, you're on it. So an article from the Audubon Society said, quote, the winner must be ruthless, not to mention have a photographic memory, a supersonic ear and the fortitude to brave blizzards and garbage dumps. It also helps to live near an airport.

1:41:08Wow. So one birder, Carl Howard, who is an attorney for the Environmental Protection Agency, said in the same article, the rest of your life, your wife, your kids is on hold. It's all about ego and selfishness. But oh, what fun. Yeah, and it's one of those things where if it's like, if we have to do this versus like Everest, I would much rather this. Like, if you're going to have an unnecessary ego, like. Uh-huh. So nothing encapsulates this spirit

1:41:38quite as well as the famous bird-watching, but the, sorry, the bird-watching famous 1998 rivalry. So basically three birders began a fierce and obsessive quest to one-up each other and set a new big year record. The winner, if you want to call him that, and also the previous record holder, Sandy Kamito, recorded 745 species by the end of the year. He later wrote a book

1:42:08called I Came, I Saw, I Counted, where he talks about one of the most intense parts of the big year, which is going to Attu Island in Alaska. Oh my God. There is a huge migration of birds from Asia. Oh, sorry, I didn't even think about how you get migratory birds from other, like, continents. Oh, that's so fucking cool. So I remember in the documentary listers, they'll spend quite a lot of time by the border of Mexico in the hopes of getting us birds from South

1:42:38America migrating up. But I want to read you a condensed extract from Sandy's book because it's really fascinating. So this is him going to Attu. I'm physically and psychologically ready for the next 29 days which will be spent on Attu Island. The Attu Island portion of the trip can make or break the big year. Most of the island is introversible with steep mountains rising above 3,000 feet and snow covered most of the year. The ground is covered with a soft layer of tundra grass into which one sinks with each step.

1:43:09The conditions are less than ideal for comfortable living or travel. Many mornings, we have no water for washing because our water lines freeze during the night. Sleeping areas are small and cramped. What is Attu really like? It has cold winter-like conditions, strong winds, nearly daily precipitation, cramped housing, upper respiratory infections that spread like wildfire through the compound, aching muscles as we pedal from place to place over soft sand, rocks, mud, potholes filled with water and the ever-present headwinds. So why would anyone voluntarily come here

1:43:40and pay thousands of dollars for the privilege? In a sentence, it's for the birds. Birds with exotic names like Siberian ruby throat, far eastern curlew and Mongolian plover. Our thoughts are filled with hopes and dreams that we too can see them and add another exciting name to our lists. Maybe I would rather do Everest actually. I was just going to say, so the Everest comparison, maybe I made that comparison a little too early. Maybe two minutes too early. This is the kind of thing that they're putting them through. That's intense. But I love the passion,

1:44:11the willingness to go through this. It's so fascinating. And there is something really beautiful because there is still a reverence for the birds first and foremost, which I find really beautiful. I know it's like I saw the birds, but it's also the birds are part of it, which I think is really interesting. That's an interesting take. Yeah. So a book was actually written about the 1998 bird rivalry called The Big Year, which was also adapted into a film that was released in 2011. I read an article

1:44:42about the birders who watched The Big Year and generally they seemed to like it, saying it was respectful to the goals and the culture of competitive birders. They loved that the characters used rare bird alert hotlines where you could call up and hear about where birds were for latest sightings. Because that communication network is a really big part of competitive birding. Like, even though you are competing against each other, you're all communicating with each other all the time. So, you know, there's this kind of mutual respect for each other and finding things. Yeah, yeah.

1:45:13But what they didn't like tickled me so much. So, for example, they didn't like that one of the characters wore a bright pink t-shirt and lime green pants because it wouldn't be good for bird watching. You wouldn't be blending in. Oh, right. Yes. Oh, sorry. This is the fictionalized version of this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's hilarious. They didn't like that the film showed a great grey owl in the George Washington National Forest in Virginia because there's never been a great grey owl recorded in that state. Oh, that's so good.

1:45:44Would that we all get to be the pedantic person for some interest in our lives? There was just all these little things about, like, sounds and stuff. They really did seem to like it but there's just these little things they pointed out. And my favorite part that they mentioned is that as the credits of the film rolled, it basically it quickly flashes photos of the birds alongside the credits and they said that real birders are looking at every single one of those images. That's what they're there for. That's what they're focused on. These people

1:46:14really, really care. There's kind of like this singular obsessiveness to them that I find just fascinating. Brilliant. It's like at one end of the hobby you've got people like me and these like new Gen Z birders you know, you have binoculars you have an app you're wandering the local park and you're feeling that connection to nature you're feeling calm love that. At the other end you've got a grown man hundreds of miles from his wife and kids

1:46:44chasing a rare bird in Alaska that he might not he might not even see. But if he does oh, imagine the feeling imagine the reward. Yeah. You know, it's funny they are the same hobby but they seem like so far apart from each other to me. And that's fine to be clear. I said earlier there's no proper definition for bird watching. You can just go and do it however you like. But I do wonder what drives this second kind of person because Carl Howard has basically told us before it's ego it's selfishness

1:47:15your whole life goes on hold but oh what fun.

Conclusion and final thoughts

1:47:19Yeah. You know what's interesting you're Tom saying you can tell they really love birds. I wonder is this a love of birds really? Do you have to love something to give up a year of your marriage and your comfort for it? I don't know because maybe it's obsession maybe it's like what love maybe it's love but it's like curdled a little bit you know it stops being like a quiet moment to yourself and it's more like a thing you need that you need to chase. Yeah. It's like the phrase a man who writes you one love poem

1:47:49loves you a man who writes 20 just likes writing poems. Yes. It's like at what point does it? Although I want to say I don't doubt that these people love what they're doing like whether or not you know whether it's for the birds or themselves you don't do this unless you really are really really into it and I'm not judging them either. No. Yeah. And it just it just scratches a fucking you know species long existential itch of why do we do anything at all and we've come here from birding which is so funny. Yeah. I mean ultimately

1:48:20what I love about this whole topic isn't really the birds although I do love birds but man do I love humans. Oh Ella. Oh. I love that. Which we say all the time you know we have this kind of wonderful ability to find the smallest strangest thing and go all in and build like an entire identity around it. Yeah. You know what I've been thinking this whole time the term lifer is really beautiful to me because it's about in your life this is the first time

1:48:50you You're so right. This is what you've done. I love it because it's something every birder can use right like it's about your experience as a birder like like just because someone can catalogue so many birds in a year doesn't take away from the fact that you've just found a new lifer and that's That's what I mean about this idea that like you really can do this hobby however you want and you can get whatever you want from it and from the most seasoned kind of twitcher to the newest birder you can find a lifer still so in the end

1:49:21this topic is like a minor case for birds but it's a major case for us and there's just one last thing to do Who's that bird?

1:49:39What the fuck was that? No sorry that was that was an electric ball and paddle that you played for us I mean I guess a cuckoo that can like imitate weird sounds maybe Was it a crow maybe? A raven something like that I'd say a mocking bird of some kind Superb Liar Bird Oh I actually might have been able to guess Liar Bird Yeah Yeah naturally I can't believe I didn't get that That's it Thanks guys What's that?

1:50:18Oh my god Wow Ella's looking through binoculars What is that? Oh It's the Superb Review Corner Bird Lifer Wait We call it on your Merlin app Yeah play the Merlin app as I read this review and see if it comes up This review comes from Sasha She they And they say Gay funny science Nice I've been listening to this pod since the Patreon days Wow Wow And have always enjoyed

1:50:49the mix of science and humorous banter But what I didn't realize until recently is that it's the queer representation and allyship that has made it feel like home and kept me coming back Keep up the work guys Hell yeah That's so sweet Oh I apologize They do smiley face frog pride flag emoji Nice At the very end Hell yeah Yeah If you want to leave a review you can do that on Apple Podcasts and then maybe maybe we'll read it too Anyone got any plugs or shoutouts? Oh My whole series that I made for the

1:51:20BBC World Service Women Not Included is on the BBC It's all come out but you can listen to it Yay If you search Women Not Included BBC World Service you should be able to listen to it I'm not It's just like the way the world is not designed around women Yeah Give it a go if that sounds like something interesting to you Woo Wow I really sold that didn't I? Yeah With enthusiasm and passion right there No it was the weird people who were like and it's so exciting that all these women

1:51:50No So cool Very cool It's great to hear you crushing it I'll shout out all of us You can find all of our socials at let'slearneverything.com You can find the link to our discord and what do we want to hear in the Oh we're gonna see so many amazing bird pictures in the discord Yes Tell me your favorite useless organ as well And then yeah all bird stories photos tips Give me a best lifer Yeah Give me a best lifer baby

1:52:21Fantastic So today we have learned about organs defining and counting them We've learned about Mesopotamian liver phrenology We've learned about Galen's charts that we really shouldn't have kept using but we sure did We have learned about the fads of dissection to the fad of vestigial organs So the process of actually naming these motherfuckers into the modern age we've learned about the debates and different uses of organ definitions

1:52:52and the nuances of new organs but regardless of the headlines we've learned how much incredible science is going into continue to learn about how weird our own freaking bodies are We've also learned about birding from ornithomancy and study skins to the invention of bird watching with the discovery of something called mercy and having a heart We've learned about the slovenly amateurs of the hobby as well as

1:53:22the twitchers and competitive birders the apps that turn it into modern day pokemon and the sagas of big years and the beautiful people that are behind the glass and that can be you and I and anyone else and you can join us next time where we will learn about everything Let's Learn Everything is a Maximum Fun podcast hosted and produced by Ella Hubber Tom Lum

1:53:53and Caroline Roper with editing and music by the wonderful and talented Tom Lum Do I think that this is a clickbaity thing also yes basically based on all of the stuff that we've spoken about before go on Tom I said clickbaity clickbaity wow yeah we heard anyway continue that's what I'm doing when I'm fumbling in the dark anyway continue Maximum Fun a worker-owned network

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