August 30, 2018 • 43 mins
You might think you know squirrels, but what do you REALLY know about these woodland tree rodents? In this special two-part episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick discuss their appetite for meat, their alleged acts of savagery and various other facts that will make you reconsider the skugg and respect its kingdom. In this episode, things get weird.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick,
and we're back for part two of our two part
exploration of the world of skugs. That's right, squirrels. Squirrels.
(00:23):
If you did not listen to our last episode, our
most recent episode about squirrels, go back and listen to it,
because it will. It will provide some necessary, horrific revelations
about the squirrel that you really need going into this episode.
And we should warn at the beginning that, uh, if
you didn't listen to the last episode you want to
(00:45):
listen to this one anyway, you should be forewarned. This
is going to be one of the most gruesome things
we've ever explored on the show. I think how squirrels,
I would say that the last episode, which largely dealt
with the fact that squirrels eat meat and do act
really stalk prey. Uh Like, that's an episode I would
listen to with my six year old son and I
(01:05):
wouldn't have any problem with it. I've talked about the
topics on that episode with him. This episode, I would
probably not listen to with nice year old son. Yeah,
I didn't think it would roll out this way. But
but our exploration of squirrels is one of the most
inappropriate for children of all things we've ever we've ever
explored here. Yes, but we're walking in deep truth tonight
(01:25):
at children, So so stick with us as we explore
more horrific facts about squirrel behavior. So again, last episode,
we talked about squirrels eating meat, squirrels stalking their prey,
squirrels messing around with snakes. Uh, squirrels, and their relationship
with Benjamin Franklin. This time now. In the last episode,
(01:46):
we talked about certain myths about Benjamin Franklin and the
reality of Benjamin Franklin having a pet squirrel named Mungo
who he wrote analogy for when it was killed by
a dog. Um. This time, I want to start off
with another possible myth, possible fact that that dwells in
that hazy middle world of rumor. I want to know, Robert,
(02:06):
if you've ever heard the same rumor I have. It's
a horrifying rumor. It's one I've heard for years, and
it's about the competition between squirrels and the rumor goes
something like this. When two adult male squirrels come into
conflict over food, over territory, over mating, or whatever. The
two squirrels fight with a horrible aim, and that aim
(02:27):
is to castrate the other by biting off its squirrel testicles.
I had never heard of this before. I would say
the closest thing i'd heard was, you know some details
about competition between chimpanzees. Yeah, by biting off Well, I
just know that genital attacks um have have have been
reported among chimpanzees. Uh, but I don't know with what
(02:49):
degree of frequency. But it's the kind of thing where
I heard about it in relation to chimpanzees, and now
makes me look at chimpanzee is a little uh well,
there's a lot with chimpanzees to be you know, a
little concerned about. But but I've never heard about this
with squirrels. Well, I I've heard about this for years.
I don't remember where I heard it first. It might
have been from some old, some good old Tennessee woodsman
(03:09):
somewhere who spoke wisdom of the forest into my ears.
But this is important for us to remind all of
our listeners, is that Joe and I both grew up
with with with with access to the Tennessee woodlands. Yes,
so there is a lot of I'm rather surprised that
I didn't hear this story from from from people who
(03:29):
wandered out of the out of the Tennessee of forests
with tales of the skug. Well, if you want to
hear about the horrors of skug castration from the lips
of the true speakers, you should go to YouTube, because
there will be many a video of some bearded hunter
standing there and Camo talking into his phone in the
middle of the forest saying, here's what happens when these
(03:51):
here squirrels buy it off each other's nuts. But it
turns out there are many variations on this base rumor.
So one is that you've got one squirrel species that
supplants another in an area by castrating all the males
of the other squirrel species. Sometimes this version goes, you've
got gray squirrels doing it to red squirrels. Sometimes they
(04:13):
say it's red squirrels doing it to gray squirrels. Sometimes
the fox squirrel is thrown in there somewhere. And so
what we want to look at is is there any
truth to this? Is it true or is this just
a horrible woodsman myth? My uh guess, of course would
be that it is a myth, because it just doesn't
sound like behavior one finds in animals, especially against another species.
(04:39):
You know, it is a certainly strange targeted behavior, one
thing that I wanted because because you don't have to
castrate another species to drive it off. We see plenty
of examples of one one species driving off another from resources,
competing for the same resources, or of course, uh, two
members of the same species competing for re sources or mates.
(05:01):
But you can drive they will drive each other off
through through fighting, through displays, much more conventional means. Yeah,
usually genital mutilation doesn't come up. Yeah, it doesn't seem
like a necessary step. But then again, well we'll we'll
come back to this, will weigh the pros and cons
later on. So one of the best things about this
(05:22):
myth is that it doesn't just come from the woodsman
and Camo talking into his phone by a forest stream.
There's a rather crazy back and forth about this in
several volumes of the Journal of the American Medical Association
in JAMMA for more than a century ago. So in
the year eight for some reason, Jamma got a little
(05:42):
bit obsessed with rampant squirrel castration. So it started when
the American surgeon Edmund Andrews wrote an article for the
Journal in eight about unux and about the physiological effects
of castration. And in this article Andrews puts together sort
of a round owned up of what he knew about
the natural effects of castration and many different animals, and
(06:05):
one of those animals was the squirrel. And he writes
quote naturalist state that the black or gray male squirrels
in fighting seek to castrate each other with their teeth,
so that many of those taken by hunters are thus mutilated.
As they do it only in adult life, it does
not materially change their general development. Because he was talking
(06:26):
about this in the context of, well, what happens if
a young animal is castrated? How does that change the
way it develops into an adult? Okay, so the the
the idea here is that it is it's reached material. Yeah.
Unfortunately Andrews does not say who these naturalists are, and
makes me wonder, especially given the time, is this is
this real empirical data or is he just repeating the
(06:47):
eight version of an urban legend? Or maybe a rural
legend just against somebody wandering out of the wood saying, yep,
squirrels in there. They're buying each other's nuts, and they're
they're they're buying the next year. That's good you called
to mind. In the last episode, we talked about some
rumors about squirrel attacks that seemed very unlikely to be
true about like in Borneo Hunters talking about squirrels taking
(07:09):
down deer and killing them seems hard to believe. But
so this first mention is just this one off in
in Andrew's article about eunux in general. And Andrews comes
back to this in another volume of Jamah with an
article called do adult squirrels cast rate each other? So
Andrews writes, in this article, remember we asked who that
(07:30):
naturalist was or the natural square that he got his
information from. He says he got the information about squirrels
from quote a distinguished naturalist, but he still doesn't say
who it is. Good good lessons, cite your sources with
possible folks. Apparently he got a contradictory response to this
claim from a doctor named Dr A. S Allen of
Mercy Hospital, Chicago, and Alan claims first of all, about
(07:53):
a third of wild squirrels captured by hunters are found
to be castrated. I assume he means one third of
may squirrels, but it doesn't say I hate to be
this low brow, but I'm I'm wondering if mistaking dead
female squirrels for dead male squirrels could be causing some
confusion among some hunters here. Perhaps perhaps, Alan says he
(08:14):
thinks that this castration is not done in fighting between
adult males, as Andrews did in his original article. He
writes quote. He says that a number of gray squirrels
lived protected in these trees above his former residence. A
female raised a litter of young in a tree close
to the house. One day, when the young were about
one quarter grown, he observed the male trying repeatedly to
(08:36):
enter the nest, but the female, which in that species
is the largest of the two, fought him off and
drove him away. This repeated several times, and the male
finally desisted. Sometime later, the female went away, apparently to
gather food. Before she returned, the male reappeared, entered the
nest and created a great disturbance there, so that the
(08:56):
doctor climbed the tree and examined the young. He found
four young quarter grown males and one or two females.
Three of the young males had been freshly castrated, the
old male squirrel having bitten their squrotum and testies cleanly
and smoothly off with his sharp incisors. That's terrifying, that
is gruesome. So Alan claims that he's had a career
(09:19):
of squirrel hunting, and he has found castrated adult males,
but never freshly castrated adult males. And so Andrews considers
that it would be difficult for an adult male squirrel
to hold another adult male still enough to bite off
his testicles, but this might be easier if the victim
is a juvenile. Thus, he seems to think that Dr
Allen's story is probably a better explanation for why hunters
(09:41):
report finding so many castrated squirrels. On the other hand,
he thinks this is very weird in light of natural selection,
since it quote would hardly tend to benefit or perpetuate
the species. Not to be condescending, but this indicates to
me a kind of poor understanding of the level at
which natural selection acts. Like members of a species are
constantly doing things that do not benefit other members of
(10:03):
that same species. Right, there is that there is a
great deal of selfishness. Again we talk about you know,
males that are competing with each other for mates, or
just members of the species in general that are competing
with other members of the species for resources. Right, but
that is not at all I think a good argument
that this is really going on. I'm not sure exactly
how to explain what Alan claims he observed in this
(10:25):
nest of assuming the story is true, but there are
a few other reports, so uh. In Spratling's follow up
again in the Journal of the American Medical Association, quote
how squirrels become unix. This is another volume of JAMA
and there is just a flurry of letters about squirrel castration.
The this really seemed to get the turn of the
(10:46):
century physician engines revving like they were like, oh, I've
got a squirrel castration story, and they wrote in one
is from Dr William Spratling of New York, and Spratling
writes that he spent a lot of years squirrel hunting
in eastern Alabama with an experienced squirrel hunter in his sixties,
and one day he shot a young male squirrel to
discover it had a fresh castration wound. His companion said
(11:08):
it must have been done by an older male and
that he had often found young male squirrels like that
sometimes still in the nest. Spratling asked him why the
older males did it. His companion replied that Spratling should
ask the squirrels. Okay, you have to kind of wonder
if he just shot the squirrel. Perhaps it could have
been injured in the shooting, but who knows. And of
(11:28):
course there are a number of different ways of squirrel
could be injured. You know, let's let's not limit the
ways that a squirrel can could lose its scrowed them
to mirror, you know, you know, hunting practices, or the
the teeth of a rival male. Sure, here's another one.
This one's a really choice. So this is from Dr. E. H.
Smith of Santa Clara, California. First, I should know this guy.
(11:51):
His whole writing style and everything. He sounds a little off.
So Smith writes that he observed plenty of squirrels in
southwestern Michigan, and he claims that the adult males do
indeed fight in order to castrate, looking for opportunities to
dive beneath one another and bite off the rival squrotum.
He says this is primarily the red squirrels that do this,
(12:12):
and they do it to other kinds of squirrels for heat.
For the red squirrel quote is the hardest fighter of
them all. And Smith says he tested this out by
putting a red squirrel and a ferret in a box
with each other, quote, expecting of course, that the ferret
would make short work of the squirrel. Instead, he said
that the squirrel went right for the ferrets testicles, and
(12:35):
it was only by Smith intervening to protect the ferret
with a stick that he avoided the doom chomp of
the red squirrel. And I just wonder, like, what is
worse if the guy made this up or if he's
telling the truth. Yeah, and I do not really like
this experiment that he claims to have performed. That is
not a good experiment, that is not rigorous, and it
is it's also not nice. I'm more comforted by the
(12:58):
fact that this guy, maybe this was just some fourteen
year old writing dajama making up a fake identity in
the story. One last letter from a doctor Samuel J.
Ford of Elliott City, Maryland, and Fort writes that he'd
been hunting squirrels for years and has never noticed any
castrated squirrels. That he admits he hasn't been on the
lookout for this in particular, and he doubts that the
(13:19):
biting off procedure could really be done cleanly in a
way that the victim usually survives, given the shape of
squirrel incisors, Like if you think about picturing them, they're
more like, you know, they are kind of chompy, but
they're narrow. Yeah, the survivability of the wound is something
that I in my mind keeps turning to because we're
talking about a pretty grievous injury, but one for for
(13:39):
enough males to survive. And then you know, so that
hunters could comment on them, they would need to not
die of either blood loss or or secondary infection. And yeah,
that's a very good point. And also think about this again,
we we mentioned this earlier, but why would there actually
be any incentive for an older male to do this?
Why not just kill the rivals? Like, if you're actually
(14:01):
fighting and there's some kind of serious competition, why not
just injury or kill? Why this very specific targeted type
of injury that's so sillacious and the kind of thing
that a hunter might repeat in in rumor to another.
But Ford gives a couple of rival explanations for the
discovery of neutered male squirrels. He says, quote, could it
not be congenital absence of the organs or failure of
(14:23):
the organs to descend into the scrotum. I think Fort's
maybe onto something there, and we can come back to
that later on when we discuss possible explanations for these stories.
But he also says, quote, the theory has been advanced
by many hunters I have met that during the absence
of the mother squirrel, the young utilize the male appendages
as teats, and in their in their kind effort to
(14:45):
produce something that is not there cause in time and
atrophy of the organs. I don't know if he is
he making a joke there. I can't maybe I'm not
reading through the writing style has been he has been
a victim of a hoax on this one. There are
somebody else's joke. I mean. One thing that that I
keep thinking too with each of these doctors is that, yes,
(15:06):
these appear to be medical doctors. Assuming their realfe assuming
they're real. But then also just because their medical doctors
do not mean that they are really they're not biologists
with any expertise in observing uh, squirrel behavior. This seems
very or it smacks very much of amateur biology. Yes,
(15:27):
they're even from someone who who should, by all rights,
you know, be familiar with the scientific method to to
a significant extent. These are people who practice human medicine
and human medicine in the eighteen nineties. These are not
not squirrel experts. They're not zoologists, they're not animal behaviorists. Um, yeah,
I don't know so though, on the other hand, we
(15:48):
do have to deal with Okay, well, at least people
are making these reports. What do these reports mean? That
they could certainly be mistaken, But we've got plenty of
reports of people who claim to have one heard stories
about squirrel castration from people who deal with a lot
of squirrels, seen lots of examples of castrated squirrels, both
young and old, and a few kinds of dubious seeming
(16:09):
claims of witnessing castration from adult squirrel fights. So despite
the claims of people to have witnessed it themselves, that
this really does have all the hallmarks of an urban legend.
To me, I believe people have found squirrels missing their genitals,
but I'm not sure I buy the causes people have proposed.
And I keep coming back to this idea, Why this
(16:30):
one particular gruesome kind of attack. Why not just a
general fighting attack, an attempt to injure or kill the
other squirrel? All right, Well, on that note, we're going
to take a quick break, and when we come back,
we will look for more answers concerning this myth. Thank you,
all right, we're back. Okay. So I found a book
by former National Wildlife Federation executive Warner Shed called Owls
(16:54):
Aren't Wise and Bats Aren't Blind and Naturalists Debunks our
favorite fallacies about wildlife, which addresses a version of this
claim about squirrel castration. So, first of all, Shed is
writing about this in the context of a chapter on
squirrel myths, specifically the myth that red squirrels drive out
gray squirrels from any area they inhabit, and Shed writes
(17:15):
that while it isn't necessarily true that red squirrels will
drive gray squirrels out of a forest, it is true
that red squirrels tend to be very territorial and if
any animal like a gray squirrel, gets too close to
the red squirrels hidden cash of nuts, the red squirrel
will sometimes get aggressive and try to chase the gray
squirrel off. And shed says that this territorial chasing tendency
(17:37):
might be somehow linked to the version of the castration
claim that says red squirrels castrate gray squirrels, which he
claims is simply the result of quote an overheated imagination
or quote a deliberate tall tale. And he argues that
it makes no sense for a squirrel to bite another
squirrels testicles off merely consider the facts. The gray squirrel
(17:57):
generally weighs from two to three times as much as
the little red. Even what are normally the most peaceable
of animals will fight savagely if necessary to protect themselves.
Nor could a red squirrel, with its little teeth neatly
snip off the testicles of the gray with one or
two bites. The notion that the much bigger gray would
allow its testicles to be gnawed off by this little
(18:19):
relative is preposterous. Long before that happened, the gray would
make squirrel hash out of the offending red, and that
has an exclamation point on it, by the way, that
is like, so he's really he's really driving it home.
He also adds that if in general Red's had a
successful strategy of sterilizing grays, grays would tend to disappear
(18:40):
in areas where reds existed, and he says this is
not the case. So it's Shed's judgment that that's his judgment.
But if he's correct, and squirrels do not castrate each other,
what should we make of all these reports in jama
and elsewhere of people finding squirrels with castration wounds all
over the place. Now, of course it's possible some of
these could be lies or hoaxes. And I think with
(19:01):
some of the even a couple of those letters into
jama you have kind of have to wonder. I mean,
these these supposedly are doctors writing in but I don't
know that's smith guy. Well, we've discussed time and time
again that even very educated individuals can either be the
perpetrators of hoax hoaxes or the victims of hoaxes. And
then also there's that interesting relationship between the the the
(19:26):
the what, the hoaxer and the hoaxe um Karl Sagan
talks about this in the demon Haunted World and points
whether it's like a magic trick, a magic trick, is
it is? It is something that exists because of a
silent pact between the magician and the audience. Yeah, people
don't want to admit they've been tricked. If they've been tricked,
even momentarily, they kind of don't want to admit that
(19:49):
they fell for it, and will fight to defend the
reality of the illusion. But then again, I don't think
I would explain all of these cases in terms of hoaxes,
deliberate hoaxes or tricks. I think in a lot of
cases you're probably going to be dealing with people who
were mistaken about what they saw or who were interpreting
misinterpreting something. So that brings us to the question of
(20:12):
what else could cause a squirrel to appear incorrectly to
have suffered this type of injury or attack. Now, there's
one hypothesis that's pretty far out there. It's not exactly
a perfect fit, but it is kind of worth a look.
And this is an explanation put forward by Ernest Thompson Seton,
who was an early influence on the formation and mythology
(20:32):
of the boy Scouts of America. Uh Seton noted that
there is a species of parasitic bot fly that is
an obligate of tree squirrels. Intends to lay eggs in
the squirrels groin, and these eggs hatch and the larva
erupt from the skin and it's gross, but the squirrel
can usually survive it. It doesn't really benefit the bot
(20:53):
fly to kill its host. And if this larva eruption
were to happen in the groin as it apparently, sometimes
US hunters seeing wounds of this kind might think that
the squirrels had had their groins violently attacked. And this
bot fly does exist, It's called coutarebra emasculator, or the
tree squirrel bot fly. And bot flies on their own
(21:14):
are fascinating subject we we we could return to them endlessly.
Oh yes. The bot fly also known as the heel fly,
the gad fly, or my favorite, and especially as it
relates to squirrels, is the warble fly. Now why is
that your favorite as it relates to squirrels, Because you
will sometimes see what is often described as a lumpy squirrel.
(21:35):
If you spend as much time looking at squirrels as
we have, and certainly any kind of like rural southern environment.
Then I bet you've either seen or heard of a
warble squarbled squirrel, a lumpy squirrel. It I remember seeing
one when I was young and find it found it
rather grotesque. Why is that squirrel lumpy? What is going
(21:57):
on with that squirrel? And you're saying a warble fly
is a good explanation, y Oh, yeah, I mean it is.
It's it's the explanation. So but again, there are a
lot of bot flies. They're like something like a hundred
and fifty species worldwide, and most of their larva are
obligant parasites of mammals. Their maggots grow in the flesh,
usually the skin of the animals, sometimes in the gut.
(22:19):
South America's human bot fly, or Dermatobia home menace, is
the only species that routinely grows it's young and human flesh.
And if you're a big time podcast listener, like a
lot of you are, I'm sure you've heard accounts of
these infections, particularly on w n y c's Radio Lab.
In particular, evolutionary biologists Jerry Coyne observed the growth of
(22:41):
a bot fly larva in his own scalp and uh,
and he remarked on how it was not just growing
inside of him, but out of him. The resulting creature was,
in a strange way, part of him. It was like
like his offspring. I actually read about this in a
fantastic book in one of my high school biology classes.
It was a book called Tropical Nature by Adrian Forsyth
(23:03):
and Kin Miata, and they had a chapter on this
incident called Jerry's Maggot. That's all about Jerry having the
bot fly growing out of it. I think it was
it was out of his head, right, yeah, his scalp um.
I remember that. That was an eye opening read when
I was like fourteen or whatever. But that's the human
bot fly. We should get back to this specific squirrel
(23:24):
a bot fly that we're talking about here, right, Kudeebra emasculadder,
the tree squirrel bot fly. So it's a parasite of
tree squirrels and chipmunks. It's found throughout eastern North America.
There are multiple species of kudarebraa bot fly which infect
different hosts and emasculator as you you can kind of
hear something going on in the name there It was
named by the entomologist Asa Fitch based on his mistaken
(23:46):
belief that the larvae of the species eight the testicles
of hosts squirrels, and the hypothesis about this being the
explanation for apparent squirrel castration is not as strong as
it once was. Maybe isn't as strong now as when
um Seaton proposed it, since scientists actually no longer believe
that the grubs of the bot fly eat the squirrels gonads.
(24:06):
I was reading more recent stuff about the spot fly,
and it looks like there's not any particular tendency or
attention of the spot fly to concentrate in the groin
or the genitals or anything. But then again, it need
not actually eat the gonads to be interpreted as such
by a like about an average like hunter or even
a medical doctor who just picks up a squirrel or
(24:28):
sees one trotting around on the defense. Right, right, so
maybe say, oh, that's a kind of a bloody scrotum.
I wonder what's going on there. The explanation must be, uh,
this weird squirrel scrotum attacking explanation, right, So maybe they
just see a bot fly some kind of weird growth
or protuberants that looks a nasty somewhere on the underside
of a squirrel, and they're like, Oh, what happened there?
(24:51):
But I don't know. So it's possible this could explain
some occasional observations of genital injuries and squirrels, but I
would say this doesn't really seem like a good general
explanation for all of the observations. Now, Joe, I do
have to return to the Tennessee and aspects of this
story for a second. Um. I worked for a small
(25:12):
Tennessee newspaper back in two thousand four, and I definitely
remember information pieces that we published covering this vital question.
Is it safe to skin and eat a lumpy squirrel?
That's some service journalism, it is. I mean, you've given
You've given the people what they need and what they
need to know. Um which I remember being horrified by
this because I'd seen a warrib old squirrel and my
(25:34):
first thought was, I wonder if I can eat that.
I would think I'm going to pass on the war
bold squirrel and maybe go with one of these non
warb old um squirrel specimens. Squirrel fritters are on the
menu tonight. And I'm I've got a hurt and for
some squirrel meat? Will this do in a pinch? Well?
So I looked into it a little bit to see
if I could find some more recent examples of this
(25:55):
same kind of of journalism, and I did run across
the one from two thousand seven in the Chattanoogan, Chattanooga, Tennessee.
And there's a quote in it in the peace from
wildlife biologist Alex Coley, Department of Natural Resources, Wildlife Resources Division,
and he says, quote, the good news is that the
(26:15):
lumps many hunters are observing are not tumors. In fact,
they are caused by warbles, which are bought fly larva
growing just under the squirrel skin. Robert, why are you
making me wait to find out if I can eat
it or not? All right, Well, hold on, Joe. The
Wildlife Resources Division or w r D here advises squirrel
hunters across the state. The consumption of affected squirrels is safe.
(26:37):
Once the squirrel is skinned. The parasites come off with
the hide. Because the larva are strictly on the skin
of the squirrel. The squirrel meat remains unaffected unless there
is a secondary infection. But do you trust yourself to
know if there's a secondary infection. I guess not, but
you know, I think that the other Another take come
here is that eating bot flies is an actually that crazy.
(27:01):
There's actually evidence from Paleolithic art that indicates that early
humans may have eaten reindeer bot flies rather routinely. Uh,
and the practice seems to have survived among Inuit people.
I was reading a book titled The Nature of Paleolithic
Art by our Dale Guthrie, and Guthrie writes there are
thousands of images that can give us a more rounded
(27:23):
view of Paleolithic people in their times, images that are
not customarily shown in coffee table volumes. Take, for example,
these little worm like creatures from Paleolithic art. Eskimo from
northern Alaska to light in eating the large spring maggots
or larvae of the reindeer warble fly. I suspect your
Asian people did the same in the Paleolithic. This is
(27:44):
one of the few insects eaten by the Northern people.
When the reindeer are killed, the highe is skin back
and the warbles are exposed on the underside, they are
fat and salty. A spring treat I have tried them
several times during this time of year. Many people in
the village have sore throats from the raspers of the
maggot sides. I'm struggling here because I make a strong
(28:07):
effort not to stigmatize what other people eat, but the
image of the raspers scraping the inside of the throat
is disturbing me. It is, it's a little it's a
little much to take, um. But I mean, I do
not have any issue with with eating insects. I think
eating insects has been a practice by human beings for
a very long time, and very sustainable, very sustainable. It will,
(28:29):
I think invariably become a part of increasingly a part
of our diet as as we continue to figure out
how to survive in this world of of exhaustible resources.
Uh So, it's a very good and clever thing to do.
I think I have an irrational bias against it, Yes,
But it's the raspers, yeah, and the throat that that
(28:50):
is a little, a little bit much to take. So yeah,
we kind of this has been kind of a detour
from the basic scuirrel castration um discussion, but I think
we needed a detour, even though this one was a
little bit gruesome in its own. Yeah, we needed to
depart from the nastiness of squirrels and discuss something refreshing
like bot fly consumption. So let's solve this mystery. What
(29:13):
is it? Okay, So we think that the the bot
fly on the squirrel's growing might explain some sightings, but
probably not all of them. Another thing that that occurred
to me as a possibility is you've got this thing
called squirrel parapox virus or squirrel pox, which can cause
swelling or the appearance of tumors or lesions around parts
of the squirrel's body, including the genital area. But this
(29:35):
disease has only been observed to exist in the past
few decades. It does not seem like a very good
explanation either. But then there is one explanation that is
head slapping lee simple and while it doesn't necessarily explain
all of the supposed observations people have claimed, if you
assume they're telling the truth about what they saw, it
does seem to explain a lot. It probably explains a lot.
(29:57):
And this is from Mammals of the Eastern Unite did
States by John O. Whittaker, William John, and William John
Hamilton's from Cornell University Press in this is their much
more mundane explanation quote. Many people think that red squirrels,
even though smaller, dominate gray squirrels and drive them out
of their territories, and even that they castrate them. The
(30:19):
latter story probably arose from someone's observing how often red
squirrels chase gray squirrels. This goes along with what shed
was saying about their territoriality, but picking up with the
quote then linking that observation with the apparent lack of
test ees in gray squirrels, which are abdominal in the
non breeding season, so testicular attraction. This is very smart
(30:43):
strategy for plenty of animals in the time when you
don't need them on the outside, they come up on
the inside. This would also make sense given the the
The idea that we've seen presented here is that the
testicles have not been freshly chewed off. No, they must
have been chewed off earlier and the animal has healed,
And so this does not seem to explain the direct
observation of wounds that a few of the authors here
(31:05):
have claimed to witness. If again, if we assume those
accounts are true, but this does seem like a really
good explanation for why hunters who don't necessarily know better
would find male squirrels without testicles. Uh, they only descend
into a temporary scrotum during the breeding season anyway, So
during the non breeding season, the organs were tracked up
into the abdomen. Hunter maybe shoots one, picks it up,
(31:28):
doesn't see anything, and it's like, WHOA, something weird happened
to the squirrel must be related to that gruesome rumor
I heard years ago. It's sort of like saying, what
is chewing the landing gear off of these airplanes? It
must be gremlins, because I don't see them at all,
So I think I don't know. I think that's a
pretty good explanation. I am fairly convinced by that one
(31:48):
that that probably explains most of what people have seen.
So maybe some combination of seeing squirrels with just naturally
occurring injuries, seeing squirrels with some kind of botful by
growth in the growing area, and then just lots of
hunters finding squirrels in the non breeding season without external
test ees. It seems like you put all those together
(32:11):
and you add in a little bit of whiskey in
the woods, and this turns into hunters telling a story
about gruesome castration rituals which do not exist. And it's
ultimately a story that that makes more sense in light
of what we know about little squirrel behavior, but just
also the general behavior of territorial animals. Now, as for
(32:33):
those first hand accounts in jama where they say, no,
I saw this happening firsthand, I saw them do it,
I don't know. Maybe some of these wounds could be
explained by random fighting having a weird kind of outcome,
but I don't know. As we said earlier, some of
those doctors writing in just sounded a little bit off,
Like I don't know if you should believe their stories.
I don't know if we really need to bother with E. H.
(32:54):
Smith and his his ferret and red squirrel in the
box experiment. I'm gonna I'm just gonna hope that he
made that up and it didn't really happen. I'm just
gonna assume that as well, Joe, that that it was
just just a fanciful story that he made. But anyway,
so if you had your vision of squirrels marred by
the discovery that they will sometimes eat carry in or
(33:15):
sometimes hunt prey. In the last episode, maybe you should
rest a little bit easier now if you'd previously heard
the castration myth and thinking it's probably not true. All Right,
we're gonna take one more break, and when we come back,
we have two more tidbits about the squirrel, neither of
which is violent. So stay tuned, thank you, thank you. Alright,
(33:35):
we're back now, I said, neither of the examples we're
gonna look at here violence. I guess one is by
some definition self violence. But we'll see, we'll see, we'll see.
So I do want to talk briefly about hibernation and
ground squirrel neuroplasticity. That sounds interesting now. In our recent episode, uh,
in our two thousand one of Space Odyssey episode, we
(33:55):
talked a little bit about this. Yeah, we were talking
about space hibernation and how this isn't really a post
ability for humans yet. We haven't discovered any kind of
technology that will allow us to hibernate for long space journeys.
But you talked about the idea of hot sleep and
how that relates to squirrel hot sleep. That being h
a some terminology from the science fiction of Worsen Scott
card the idea that you have the individuals in the
(34:18):
sci fi world and they're they're put into an artificial
UH slumber for long trips, but it's not pleasant. It's
it's like the sweating ordeal. And what we're gonna discuss
here actually reminds me a lot of that. So Arctic
ground squirrels have long been of interest to science for
their hibernation abilities, and we've mentioned them on the show before.
(34:39):
Back in Zoo physiologist Brian Barne of the University of Alaska,
he commented on how the hibernation of the Arctic ground
school is more like a months long bout of insomnia.
That sounds horrible. Yeah, it sounds like hot sleep to
make Yeah. He pointed out that they lowered their body
temperature below freezing, but they but they don't stay that way.
(35:00):
They undergo cyclical rewarmings once or twice a month. And
the rewarming must be important because it uses roughly eight
of the fat stores UH in order to do it,
So a lot of energy is expended to come out
of of of the freeze and then go back down
(35:20):
into it again. So we're not just talking about rewarming
at the end of hibernation. So Barnes theory at the
time was that they had to warm up to actually sleep,
that cold brains can't sleep, that the torper might stave
off sleep for days or weeks, but they'd eventually be
forced to warm up in order to get that vital slumber. Uh.
(35:42):
He's worked with the Institute of Artic Biology ever since
and has devoted a great deal of research to mammalian hibernation. Uh.
If if you look up like squirrel hibernation um on
the Internet and you look for for peer of your papers,
you will run across his work. He's taken the creature's temperatures,
he's measured their activity along their neural pathways as well,
(36:03):
and he's found that the creature's brain is quite resilient,
as you might expect from such a cheater of death
as the as the Arctic ground squirrel. During hibernation, the
neuron shrink and connection shrivel, but the creature's brain makes
up for this by undergoing growth spurts that multiplied neural
links back to previous levels and even beyond it. Oh weird.
(36:25):
So this is a very strange alternate version of the
neuro plasticity. Model. Yeah, yeah, that this is this is
kind of a wonder species for people who are researching
neuroplasticity in ways to potential potentially boost it in humans.
Now we know, like in humans, the neuroplasticity model you
often have is that children tend to make a whole
(36:45):
lot of connections in the brain, and then over time
those connections are sort of pruned back, limiting potential as
as time goes on and maturity develops in the body
and the child eventually becomes more neuro stable. But here
you're seeing a renewal of a type of infantile neuroplasticity
in the adult ground squirrel as hibernates. Yeah, I mean basically,
(37:05):
it boost neural plasticity in order to repair everything that
it loses during this hibernation process. So, no matter what
you think of other squirrels and your distrust of other squirrels,
the art at ground squirrel is is a very attractive
species to scientists for a number of reasons. Cracking the
inner workings of its hibernation adaptations could allow us to
(37:26):
engineer neuroplasticity treatments, to improve organ transplantation, and devise ways
to place human space travelers into some form of of
hot sleep for a prolonged space mission. Oh good, that
sounds great. Thanks, thanks squirrels. All right, we'll have one
more bit of squirrel data to share with everyone. Is
(37:46):
it going to be something shocking? I hope it's Lit's not.
I mean, I don't think there's anything left that can
truly shock us at this point in our squirrel exploration.
This one's more humorous. So cape ground squirrels have a
scrowed them that takes up of their body length, with
a penis twice as long as that in other it's
so it's another product of the the evolutionary mating arms race.
(38:10):
The males have been observed to engage in auto filatio
and consume the ejected reproductive murial material, which of course
only makes sense. We've discussed animal cannibalism in the same light.
It's energy. What what what do you? What do you? What?
What should do with it? Why just waste it? You
got to like put it back into the business. Right,
So that makes sense. But but ultimately people asked, well
(38:33):
why do they do that? Indeed, why does any species
engage in in masturbation? Well, there's the sexual outlet hypothesis
that arousal must be dismissed. Uh, and that makes sense, right,
You've just got this arowse squirrel. It's got to do
something with all this uh this, you know, this energy
that it has now and it might as well release
it so it can get on with nut collecting and
(38:54):
what have you. But then there's another idea that it
might be because they has to flush out the old
sperm so that the creature has fresher sperm that it
can utilize for mating. Is there an expiry date on that?
Essentially it would be like an innate knowledge of the
exploration data, I guess. But then uh. Biologist Jane Waterman
(39:14):
weighed in on the matter uh and uh, at least
as it concerns cape ground squirrels, and pointed out that
dominant males actually do this the most, the ones who
shouldn't have to masturbate if the sexual outlet view is correct.
They also did it more after sex than before, seemingly
a blow against the sperm quality hypothesis. She also dismissed
(39:34):
the ideas that it's done as as a as a
signal to potential mates or to competitors, because the pattern
wasn't there, so you just don't see them doing it
at the times where it would make sense if it
was about communicating to other squirrels. Well, so what is
Waterman's explanation. Her explanation or her her hypothesis here is
that they masturbate and in doing so reduce the odds
(39:58):
of catching an std. She points out that the human
males may urinate after sex sort of clean things out,
and that cape ground squirrels rarely urinate due to their
desert environment. So what's what's a squirrel to do if
it doesn't urinate frequently, what can it possibly do to
clean out that tract? Masturbation provides an answer that seems
(40:21):
like a reasonable explanation, though I truly did not know
we would end up in this place. Yes, I think
it's it's kind of a a happy ending for these
two episodes that we should end not with visions of
meat eating squirrels or scrowed them chewing squirrels, squirrels engaging
in mortal Kombat with snakes, but instead simply a masturbating
squirrel in the desert trying to stay healthy. Yeah, just
(40:44):
staying healthy sounds good to me. Now we do hope
these episodes have helped you look at squirrels in a
different way, to see them not just as you know
tree rats running around in your yard, but something that
is in its own right and evolutionary marvel, something that's
engaged in a struggle for survive of all and and
faces that struggle with a lot of alarming and surprising tools.
But we certainly do not hope that you will go
(41:06):
away from this with any kind of animus towards squirrels
or any desire to harm them. We don't want to
encourage that squirrels are part of the natural world too,
and they don't deserve any kind of vilification, even though
it might be kind of shocking to learn the truth
about them since we see them so often but usually
don't suspect these things, right, Yeah, don't go hurt any
squirrels on our account. But of course, if you were
(41:27):
already killing and eating squirrels, uh, let us know how
that goes for you. If what's your experience with squirrel
hunting and warbles and uh in in various bits of
you know, urban or rural legend about squirrels biting each other,
did you hear the squirrel castration urban legend. Where did
(41:48):
you hear it? And what variant on it? What sort
of explanation was presented to you. We would love to
hear about any of that. In the meantime, head on
over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's
where we'll find all the episodes of the pod casks,
going all the way back to the beginning. You'll find
links out to our various social media accounts where you
can follow us and keep up with what we're doing,
including Facebook where we have that fabulous Facebook group. The
(42:09):
discussion module that is a really great place if you
want to, uh, you know, get into conversations with other
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cover about unrelated things. Ask ask ask ask us questions.
Go check it out. That's the Stuff Table your Mind
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on that store button at the top of the website
(42:31):
because that's where you'll find all these cool T shirts
and stickers and coffee MUDs, any just about anything you
could put our new logo on. It is available to you. Yeah,
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that one's really really rad. I recommend it big. Thank
you as always to our wonderful audio producers Alex Williams
(42:51):
and Tarry Harrison. If you would like to get in
touch with us directly to let us know feedback on
this episode or any other, to let us know if
you've ever heard any squirrel Caster action, urban legends, or
anything like that, to suggest a topic for a future episode,
or just to say hi, you can email us at
blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com for
(43:18):
more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it
how stuff works dot com, lovegen
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick,
and we're back for part two of our two part
exploration of the world of skugs. That's right, squirrels. Squirrels.
(00:23):
If you did not listen to our last episode, our
most recent episode about squirrels, go back and listen to it,
because it will. It will provide some necessary, horrific revelations
about the squirrel that you really need going into this episode.
And we should warn at the beginning that, uh, if
you didn't listen to the last episode you want to
(00:45):
listen to this one anyway, you should be forewarned. This
is going to be one of the most gruesome things
we've ever explored on the show. I think how squirrels,
I would say that the last episode, which largely dealt
with the fact that squirrels eat meat and do act
really stalk prey. Uh Like, that's an episode I would
listen to with my six year old son and I
(01:05):
wouldn't have any problem with it. I've talked about the
topics on that episode with him. This episode, I would
probably not listen to with nice year old son. Yeah,
I didn't think it would roll out this way. But
but our exploration of squirrels is one of the most
inappropriate for children of all things we've ever we've ever
explored here. Yes, but we're walking in deep truth tonight
(01:25):
at children, So so stick with us as we explore
more horrific facts about squirrel behavior. So again, last episode,
we talked about squirrels eating meat, squirrels stalking their prey,
squirrels messing around with snakes. Uh, squirrels, and their relationship
with Benjamin Franklin. This time now. In the last episode,
(01:46):
we talked about certain myths about Benjamin Franklin and the
reality of Benjamin Franklin having a pet squirrel named Mungo
who he wrote analogy for when it was killed by
a dog. Um. This time, I want to start off
with another possible myth, possible fact that that dwells in
that hazy middle world of rumor. I want to know, Robert,
(02:06):
if you've ever heard the same rumor I have. It's
a horrifying rumor. It's one I've heard for years, and
it's about the competition between squirrels and the rumor goes
something like this. When two adult male squirrels come into
conflict over food, over territory, over mating, or whatever. The
two squirrels fight with a horrible aim, and that aim
(02:27):
is to castrate the other by biting off its squirrel testicles.
I had never heard of this before. I would say
the closest thing i'd heard was, you know some details
about competition between chimpanzees. Yeah, by biting off Well, I
just know that genital attacks um have have have been
reported among chimpanzees. Uh, but I don't know with what
(02:49):
degree of frequency. But it's the kind of thing where
I heard about it in relation to chimpanzees, and now
makes me look at chimpanzee is a little uh well,
there's a lot with chimpanzees to be you know, a
little concerned about. But but I've never heard about this
with squirrels. Well, I I've heard about this for years.
I don't remember where I heard it first. It might
have been from some old, some good old Tennessee woodsman
(03:09):
somewhere who spoke wisdom of the forest into my ears.
But this is important for us to remind all of
our listeners, is that Joe and I both grew up
with with with with access to the Tennessee woodlands. Yes,
so there is a lot of I'm rather surprised that
I didn't hear this story from from from people who
(03:29):
wandered out of the out of the Tennessee of forests
with tales of the skug. Well, if you want to
hear about the horrors of skug castration from the lips
of the true speakers, you should go to YouTube, because
there will be many a video of some bearded hunter
standing there and Camo talking into his phone in the
middle of the forest saying, here's what happens when these
(03:51):
here squirrels buy it off each other's nuts. But it
turns out there are many variations on this base rumor.
So one is that you've got one squirrel species that
supplants another in an area by castrating all the males
of the other squirrel species. Sometimes this version goes, you've
got gray squirrels doing it to red squirrels. Sometimes they
(04:13):
say it's red squirrels doing it to gray squirrels. Sometimes
the fox squirrel is thrown in there somewhere. And so
what we want to look at is is there any
truth to this? Is it true or is this just
a horrible woodsman myth? My uh guess, of course would
be that it is a myth, because it just doesn't
sound like behavior one finds in animals, especially against another species.
(04:39):
You know, it is a certainly strange targeted behavior, one
thing that I wanted because because you don't have to
castrate another species to drive it off. We see plenty
of examples of one one species driving off another from resources,
competing for the same resources, or of course, uh, two
members of the same species competing for re sources or mates.
(05:01):
But you can drive they will drive each other off
through through fighting, through displays, much more conventional means. Yeah,
usually genital mutilation doesn't come up. Yeah, it doesn't seem
like a necessary step. But then again, well we'll we'll
come back to this, will weigh the pros and cons
later on. So one of the best things about this
(05:22):
myth is that it doesn't just come from the woodsman
and Camo talking into his phone by a forest stream.
There's a rather crazy back and forth about this in
several volumes of the Journal of the American Medical Association
in JAMMA for more than a century ago. So in
the year eight for some reason, Jamma got a little
(05:42):
bit obsessed with rampant squirrel castration. So it started when
the American surgeon Edmund Andrews wrote an article for the
Journal in eight about unux and about the physiological effects
of castration. And in this article Andrews puts together sort
of a round owned up of what he knew about
the natural effects of castration and many different animals, and
(06:05):
one of those animals was the squirrel. And he writes
quote naturalist state that the black or gray male squirrels
in fighting seek to castrate each other with their teeth,
so that many of those taken by hunters are thus mutilated.
As they do it only in adult life, it does
not materially change their general development. Because he was talking
(06:26):
about this in the context of, well, what happens if
a young animal is castrated? How does that change the
way it develops into an adult? Okay, so the the
the idea here is that it is it's reached material. Yeah.
Unfortunately Andrews does not say who these naturalists are, and
makes me wonder, especially given the time, is this is
this real empirical data or is he just repeating the
(06:47):
eight version of an urban legend? Or maybe a rural
legend just against somebody wandering out of the wood saying, yep,
squirrels in there. They're buying each other's nuts, and they're
they're they're buying the next year. That's good you called
to mind. In the last episode, we talked about some
rumors about squirrel attacks that seemed very unlikely to be
true about like in Borneo Hunters talking about squirrels taking
(07:09):
down deer and killing them seems hard to believe. But
so this first mention is just this one off in
in Andrew's article about eunux in general. And Andrews comes
back to this in another volume of Jamah with an
article called do adult squirrels cast rate each other? So
Andrews writes, in this article, remember we asked who that
(07:30):
naturalist was or the natural square that he got his
information from. He says he got the information about squirrels
from quote a distinguished naturalist, but he still doesn't say
who it is. Good good lessons, cite your sources with
possible folks. Apparently he got a contradictory response to this
claim from a doctor named Dr A. S Allen of
Mercy Hospital, Chicago, and Alan claims first of all, about
(07:53):
a third of wild squirrels captured by hunters are found
to be castrated. I assume he means one third of
may squirrels, but it doesn't say I hate to be
this low brow, but I'm I'm wondering if mistaking dead
female squirrels for dead male squirrels could be causing some
confusion among some hunters here. Perhaps perhaps, Alan says he
(08:14):
thinks that this castration is not done in fighting between
adult males, as Andrews did in his original article. He
writes quote. He says that a number of gray squirrels
lived protected in these trees above his former residence. A
female raised a litter of young in a tree close
to the house. One day, when the young were about
one quarter grown, he observed the male trying repeatedly to
(08:36):
enter the nest, but the female, which in that species
is the largest of the two, fought him off and
drove him away. This repeated several times, and the male
finally desisted. Sometime later, the female went away, apparently to
gather food. Before she returned, the male reappeared, entered the
nest and created a great disturbance there, so that the
(08:56):
doctor climbed the tree and examined the young. He found
four young quarter grown males and one or two females.
Three of the young males had been freshly castrated, the
old male squirrel having bitten their squrotum and testies cleanly
and smoothly off with his sharp incisors. That's terrifying, that
is gruesome. So Alan claims that he's had a career
(09:19):
of squirrel hunting, and he has found castrated adult males,
but never freshly castrated adult males. And so Andrews considers
that it would be difficult for an adult male squirrel
to hold another adult male still enough to bite off
his testicles, but this might be easier if the victim
is a juvenile. Thus, he seems to think that Dr
Allen's story is probably a better explanation for why hunters
(09:41):
report finding so many castrated squirrels. On the other hand,
he thinks this is very weird in light of natural selection,
since it quote would hardly tend to benefit or perpetuate
the species. Not to be condescending, but this indicates to
me a kind of poor understanding of the level at
which natural selection acts. Like members of a species are
constantly doing things that do not benefit other members of
(10:03):
that same species. Right, there is that there is a
great deal of selfishness. Again we talk about you know,
males that are competing with each other for mates, or
just members of the species in general that are competing
with other members of the species for resources. Right, but
that is not at all I think a good argument
that this is really going on. I'm not sure exactly
how to explain what Alan claims he observed in this
(10:25):
nest of assuming the story is true, but there are
a few other reports, so uh. In Spratling's follow up
again in the Journal of the American Medical Association, quote
how squirrels become unix. This is another volume of JAMA
and there is just a flurry of letters about squirrel castration.
The this really seemed to get the turn of the
(10:46):
century physician engines revving like they were like, oh, I've
got a squirrel castration story, and they wrote in one
is from Dr William Spratling of New York, and Spratling
writes that he spent a lot of years squirrel hunting
in eastern Alabama with an experienced squirrel hunter in his sixties,
and one day he shot a young male squirrel to
discover it had a fresh castration wound. His companion said
(11:08):
it must have been done by an older male and
that he had often found young male squirrels like that
sometimes still in the nest. Spratling asked him why the
older males did it. His companion replied that Spratling should
ask the squirrels. Okay, you have to kind of wonder
if he just shot the squirrel. Perhaps it could have
been injured in the shooting, but who knows. And of
(11:28):
course there are a number of different ways of squirrel
could be injured. You know, let's let's not limit the
ways that a squirrel can could lose its scrowed them
to mirror, you know, you know, hunting practices, or the
the teeth of a rival male. Sure, here's another one.
This one's a really choice. So this is from Dr. E. H.
Smith of Santa Clara, California. First, I should know this guy.
(11:51):
His whole writing style and everything. He sounds a little off.
So Smith writes that he observed plenty of squirrels in
southwestern Michigan, and he claims that the adult males do
indeed fight in order to castrate, looking for opportunities to
dive beneath one another and bite off the rival squrotum.
He says this is primarily the red squirrels that do this,
(12:12):
and they do it to other kinds of squirrels for heat.
For the red squirrel quote is the hardest fighter of
them all. And Smith says he tested this out by
putting a red squirrel and a ferret in a box
with each other, quote, expecting of course, that the ferret
would make short work of the squirrel. Instead, he said
that the squirrel went right for the ferrets testicles, and
(12:35):
it was only by Smith intervening to protect the ferret
with a stick that he avoided the doom chomp of
the red squirrel. And I just wonder, like, what is
worse if the guy made this up or if he's
telling the truth. Yeah, and I do not really like
this experiment that he claims to have performed. That is
not a good experiment, that is not rigorous, and it
is it's also not nice. I'm more comforted by the
(12:58):
fact that this guy, maybe this was just some fourteen
year old writing dajama making up a fake identity in
the story. One last letter from a doctor Samuel J.
Ford of Elliott City, Maryland, and Fort writes that he'd
been hunting squirrels for years and has never noticed any
castrated squirrels. That he admits he hasn't been on the
lookout for this in particular, and he doubts that the
(13:19):
biting off procedure could really be done cleanly in a
way that the victim usually survives, given the shape of
squirrel incisors, Like if you think about picturing them, they're
more like, you know, they are kind of chompy, but
they're narrow. Yeah, the survivability of the wound is something
that I in my mind keeps turning to because we're
talking about a pretty grievous injury, but one for for
(13:39):
enough males to survive. And then you know, so that
hunters could comment on them, they would need to not
die of either blood loss or or secondary infection. And yeah,
that's a very good point. And also think about this again,
we we mentioned this earlier, but why would there actually
be any incentive for an older male to do this?
Why not just kill the rivals? Like, if you're actually
(14:01):
fighting and there's some kind of serious competition, why not
just injury or kill? Why this very specific targeted type
of injury that's so sillacious and the kind of thing
that a hunter might repeat in in rumor to another.
But Ford gives a couple of rival explanations for the
discovery of neutered male squirrels. He says, quote, could it
not be congenital absence of the organs or failure of
(14:23):
the organs to descend into the scrotum. I think Fort's
maybe onto something there, and we can come back to
that later on when we discuss possible explanations for these stories.
But he also says, quote, the theory has been advanced
by many hunters I have met that during the absence
of the mother squirrel, the young utilize the male appendages
as teats, and in their in their kind effort to
(14:45):
produce something that is not there cause in time and
atrophy of the organs. I don't know if he is
he making a joke there. I can't maybe I'm not
reading through the writing style has been he has been
a victim of a hoax on this one. There are
somebody else's joke. I mean. One thing that that I
keep thinking too with each of these doctors is that, yes,
(15:06):
these appear to be medical doctors. Assuming their realfe assuming
they're real. But then also just because their medical doctors
do not mean that they are really they're not biologists
with any expertise in observing uh, squirrel behavior. This seems
very or it smacks very much of amateur biology. Yes,
(15:27):
they're even from someone who who should, by all rights,
you know, be familiar with the scientific method to to
a significant extent. These are people who practice human medicine
and human medicine in the eighteen nineties. These are not
not squirrel experts. They're not zoologists, they're not animal behaviorists. Um, yeah,
I don't know so though, on the other hand, we
(15:48):
do have to deal with Okay, well, at least people
are making these reports. What do these reports mean? That
they could certainly be mistaken, But we've got plenty of
reports of people who claim to have one heard stories
about squirrel castration from people who deal with a lot
of squirrels, seen lots of examples of castrated squirrels, both
young and old, and a few kinds of dubious seeming
(16:09):
claims of witnessing castration from adult squirrel fights. So despite
the claims of people to have witnessed it themselves, that
this really does have all the hallmarks of an urban legend.
To me, I believe people have found squirrels missing their genitals,
but I'm not sure I buy the causes people have proposed.
And I keep coming back to this idea, Why this
(16:30):
one particular gruesome kind of attack. Why not just a
general fighting attack, an attempt to injure or kill the
other squirrel? All right, Well, on that note, we're going
to take a quick break, and when we come back,
we will look for more answers concerning this myth. Thank you,
all right, we're back. Okay. So I found a book
by former National Wildlife Federation executive Warner Shed called Owls
(16:54):
Aren't Wise and Bats Aren't Blind and Naturalists Debunks our
favorite fallacies about wildlife, which addresses a version of this
claim about squirrel castration. So, first of all, Shed is
writing about this in the context of a chapter on
squirrel myths, specifically the myth that red squirrels drive out
gray squirrels from any area they inhabit, and Shed writes
(17:15):
that while it isn't necessarily true that red squirrels will
drive gray squirrels out of a forest, it is true
that red squirrels tend to be very territorial and if
any animal like a gray squirrel, gets too close to
the red squirrels hidden cash of nuts, the red squirrel
will sometimes get aggressive and try to chase the gray
squirrel off. And shed says that this territorial chasing tendency
(17:37):
might be somehow linked to the version of the castration
claim that says red squirrels castrate gray squirrels, which he
claims is simply the result of quote an overheated imagination
or quote a deliberate tall tale. And he argues that
it makes no sense for a squirrel to bite another
squirrels testicles off merely consider the facts. The gray squirrel
(17:57):
generally weighs from two to three times as much as
the little red. Even what are normally the most peaceable
of animals will fight savagely if necessary to protect themselves.
Nor could a red squirrel, with its little teeth neatly
snip off the testicles of the gray with one or
two bites. The notion that the much bigger gray would
allow its testicles to be gnawed off by this little
(18:19):
relative is preposterous. Long before that happened, the gray would
make squirrel hash out of the offending red, and that
has an exclamation point on it, by the way, that
is like, so he's really he's really driving it home.
He also adds that if in general Red's had a
successful strategy of sterilizing grays, grays would tend to disappear
(18:40):
in areas where reds existed, and he says this is
not the case. So it's Shed's judgment that that's his judgment.
But if he's correct, and squirrels do not castrate each other,
what should we make of all these reports in jama
and elsewhere of people finding squirrels with castration wounds all
over the place. Now, of course it's possible some of
these could be lies or hoaxes. And I think with
(19:01):
some of the even a couple of those letters into
jama you have kind of have to wonder. I mean,
these these supposedly are doctors writing in but I don't
know that's smith guy. Well, we've discussed time and time
again that even very educated individuals can either be the
perpetrators of hoax hoaxes or the victims of hoaxes. And
then also there's that interesting relationship between the the the
(19:26):
the what, the hoaxer and the hoaxe um Karl Sagan
talks about this in the demon Haunted World and points
whether it's like a magic trick, a magic trick, is
it is? It is something that exists because of a
silent pact between the magician and the audience. Yeah, people
don't want to admit they've been tricked. If they've been tricked,
even momentarily, they kind of don't want to admit that
(19:49):
they fell for it, and will fight to defend the
reality of the illusion. But then again, I don't think
I would explain all of these cases in terms of hoaxes,
deliberate hoaxes or tricks. I think in a lot of
cases you're probably going to be dealing with people who
were mistaken about what they saw or who were interpreting
misinterpreting something. So that brings us to the question of
(20:12):
what else could cause a squirrel to appear incorrectly to
have suffered this type of injury or attack. Now, there's
one hypothesis that's pretty far out there. It's not exactly
a perfect fit, but it is kind of worth a look.
And this is an explanation put forward by Ernest Thompson Seton,
who was an early influence on the formation and mythology
(20:32):
of the boy Scouts of America. Uh Seton noted that
there is a species of parasitic bot fly that is
an obligate of tree squirrels. Intends to lay eggs in
the squirrels groin, and these eggs hatch and the larva
erupt from the skin and it's gross, but the squirrel
can usually survive it. It doesn't really benefit the bot
(20:53):
fly to kill its host. And if this larva eruption
were to happen in the groin as it apparently, sometimes
US hunters seeing wounds of this kind might think that
the squirrels had had their groins violently attacked. And this
bot fly does exist, It's called coutarebra emasculator, or the
tree squirrel bot fly. And bot flies on their own
(21:14):
are fascinating subject we we we could return to them endlessly.
Oh yes. The bot fly also known as the heel fly,
the gad fly, or my favorite, and especially as it
relates to squirrels, is the warble fly. Now why is
that your favorite as it relates to squirrels, Because you
will sometimes see what is often described as a lumpy squirrel.
(21:35):
If you spend as much time looking at squirrels as
we have, and certainly any kind of like rural southern environment.
Then I bet you've either seen or heard of a
warble squarbled squirrel, a lumpy squirrel. It I remember seeing
one when I was young and find it found it
rather grotesque. Why is that squirrel lumpy? What is going
(21:57):
on with that squirrel? And you're saying a warble fly
is a good explanation, y Oh, yeah, I mean it is.
It's it's the explanation. So but again, there are a
lot of bot flies. They're like something like a hundred
and fifty species worldwide, and most of their larva are
obligant parasites of mammals. Their maggots grow in the flesh,
usually the skin of the animals, sometimes in the gut.
(22:19):
South America's human bot fly, or Dermatobia home menace, is
the only species that routinely grows it's young and human flesh.
And if you're a big time podcast listener, like a
lot of you are, I'm sure you've heard accounts of
these infections, particularly on w n y c's Radio Lab.
In particular, evolutionary biologists Jerry Coyne observed the growth of
(22:41):
a bot fly larva in his own scalp and uh,
and he remarked on how it was not just growing
inside of him, but out of him. The resulting creature was,
in a strange way, part of him. It was like
like his offspring. I actually read about this in a
fantastic book in one of my high school biology classes.
It was a book called Tropical Nature by Adrian Forsyth
(23:03):
and Kin Miata, and they had a chapter on this
incident called Jerry's Maggot. That's all about Jerry having the
bot fly growing out of it. I think it was
it was out of his head, right, yeah, his scalp um.
I remember that. That was an eye opening read when
I was like fourteen or whatever. But that's the human
bot fly. We should get back to this specific squirrel
(23:24):
a bot fly that we're talking about here, right, Kudeebra emasculadder,
the tree squirrel bot fly. So it's a parasite of
tree squirrels and chipmunks. It's found throughout eastern North America.
There are multiple species of kudarebraa bot fly which infect
different hosts and emasculator as you you can kind of
hear something going on in the name there It was
named by the entomologist Asa Fitch based on his mistaken
(23:46):
belief that the larvae of the species eight the testicles
of hosts squirrels, and the hypothesis about this being the
explanation for apparent squirrel castration is not as strong as
it once was. Maybe isn't as strong now as when
um Seaton proposed it, since scientists actually no longer believe
that the grubs of the bot fly eat the squirrels gonads.
(24:06):
I was reading more recent stuff about the spot fly,
and it looks like there's not any particular tendency or
attention of the spot fly to concentrate in the groin
or the genitals or anything. But then again, it need
not actually eat the gonads to be interpreted as such
by a like about an average like hunter or even
a medical doctor who just picks up a squirrel or
(24:28):
sees one trotting around on the defense. Right, right, so
maybe say, oh, that's a kind of a bloody scrotum.
I wonder what's going on there. The explanation must be, uh,
this weird squirrel scrotum attacking explanation, right, So maybe they
just see a bot fly some kind of weird growth
or protuberants that looks a nasty somewhere on the underside
of a squirrel, and they're like, Oh, what happened there?
(24:51):
But I don't know. So it's possible this could explain
some occasional observations of genital injuries and squirrels, but I
would say this doesn't really seem like a good general
explanation for all of the observations. Now, Joe, I do
have to return to the Tennessee and aspects of this
story for a second. Um. I worked for a small
(25:12):
Tennessee newspaper back in two thousand four, and I definitely
remember information pieces that we published covering this vital question.
Is it safe to skin and eat a lumpy squirrel?
That's some service journalism, it is. I mean, you've given
You've given the people what they need and what they
need to know. Um which I remember being horrified by
this because I'd seen a warrib old squirrel and my
(25:34):
first thought was, I wonder if I can eat that.
I would think I'm going to pass on the war
bold squirrel and maybe go with one of these non
warb old um squirrel specimens. Squirrel fritters are on the
menu tonight. And I'm I've got a hurt and for
some squirrel meat? Will this do in a pinch? Well?
So I looked into it a little bit to see
if I could find some more recent examples of this
(25:55):
same kind of of journalism, and I did run across
the one from two thousand seven in the Chattanoogan, Chattanooga, Tennessee.
And there's a quote in it in the peace from
wildlife biologist Alex Coley, Department of Natural Resources, Wildlife Resources Division,
and he says, quote, the good news is that the
(26:15):
lumps many hunters are observing are not tumors. In fact,
they are caused by warbles, which are bought fly larva
growing just under the squirrel skin. Robert, why are you
making me wait to find out if I can eat
it or not? All right, Well, hold on, Joe. The
Wildlife Resources Division or w r D here advises squirrel
hunters across the state. The consumption of affected squirrels is safe.
(26:37):
Once the squirrel is skinned. The parasites come off with
the hide. Because the larva are strictly on the skin
of the squirrel. The squirrel meat remains unaffected unless there
is a secondary infection. But do you trust yourself to
know if there's a secondary infection. I guess not, but
you know, I think that the other Another take come
here is that eating bot flies is an actually that crazy.
(27:01):
There's actually evidence from Paleolithic art that indicates that early
humans may have eaten reindeer bot flies rather routinely. Uh,
and the practice seems to have survived among Inuit people.
I was reading a book titled The Nature of Paleolithic
Art by our Dale Guthrie, and Guthrie writes there are
thousands of images that can give us a more rounded
(27:23):
view of Paleolithic people in their times, images that are
not customarily shown in coffee table volumes. Take, for example,
these little worm like creatures from Paleolithic art. Eskimo from
northern Alaska to light in eating the large spring maggots
or larvae of the reindeer warble fly. I suspect your
Asian people did the same in the Paleolithic. This is
(27:44):
one of the few insects eaten by the Northern people.
When the reindeer are killed, the highe is skin back
and the warbles are exposed on the underside, they are
fat and salty. A spring treat I have tried them
several times during this time of year. Many people in
the village have sore throats from the raspers of the
maggot sides. I'm struggling here because I make a strong
(28:07):
effort not to stigmatize what other people eat, but the
image of the raspers scraping the inside of the throat
is disturbing me. It is, it's a little it's a
little much to take, um. But I mean, I do
not have any issue with with eating insects. I think
eating insects has been a practice by human beings for
a very long time, and very sustainable, very sustainable. It will,
(28:29):
I think invariably become a part of increasingly a part
of our diet as as we continue to figure out
how to survive in this world of of exhaustible resources.
Uh So, it's a very good and clever thing to do.
I think I have an irrational bias against it, Yes,
But it's the raspers, yeah, and the throat that that
(28:50):
is a little, a little bit much to take. So yeah,
we kind of this has been kind of a detour
from the basic scuirrel castration um discussion, but I think
we needed a detour, even though this one was a
little bit gruesome in its own. Yeah, we needed to
depart from the nastiness of squirrels and discuss something refreshing
like bot fly consumption. So let's solve this mystery. What
(29:13):
is it? Okay, So we think that the the bot
fly on the squirrel's growing might explain some sightings, but
probably not all of them. Another thing that that occurred
to me as a possibility is you've got this thing
called squirrel parapox virus or squirrel pox, which can cause
swelling or the appearance of tumors or lesions around parts
of the squirrel's body, including the genital area. But this
(29:35):
disease has only been observed to exist in the past
few decades. It does not seem like a very good
explanation either. But then there is one explanation that is
head slapping lee simple and while it doesn't necessarily explain
all of the supposed observations people have claimed, if you
assume they're telling the truth about what they saw, it
does seem to explain a lot. It probably explains a lot.
(29:57):
And this is from Mammals of the Eastern Unite did
States by John O. Whittaker, William John, and William John
Hamilton's from Cornell University Press in this is their much
more mundane explanation quote. Many people think that red squirrels,
even though smaller, dominate gray squirrels and drive them out
of their territories, and even that they castrate them. The
(30:19):
latter story probably arose from someone's observing how often red
squirrels chase gray squirrels. This goes along with what shed
was saying about their territoriality, but picking up with the
quote then linking that observation with the apparent lack of
test ees in gray squirrels, which are abdominal in the
non breeding season, so testicular attraction. This is very smart
(30:43):
strategy for plenty of animals in the time when you
don't need them on the outside, they come up on
the inside. This would also make sense given the the
The idea that we've seen presented here is that the
testicles have not been freshly chewed off. No, they must
have been chewed off earlier and the animal has healed,
And so this does not seem to explain the direct
observation of wounds that a few of the authors here
(31:05):
have claimed to witness. If again, if we assume those
accounts are true, but this does seem like a really
good explanation for why hunters who don't necessarily know better
would find male squirrels without testicles. Uh, they only descend
into a temporary scrotum during the breeding season anyway, So
during the non breeding season, the organs were tracked up
into the abdomen. Hunter maybe shoots one, picks it up,
(31:28):
doesn't see anything, and it's like, WHOA, something weird happened
to the squirrel must be related to that gruesome rumor
I heard years ago. It's sort of like saying, what
is chewing the landing gear off of these airplanes? It
must be gremlins, because I don't see them at all,
So I think I don't know. I think that's a
pretty good explanation. I am fairly convinced by that one
(31:48):
that that probably explains most of what people have seen.
So maybe some combination of seeing squirrels with just naturally
occurring injuries, seeing squirrels with some kind of botful by
growth in the growing area, and then just lots of
hunters finding squirrels in the non breeding season without external
test ees. It seems like you put all those together
(32:11):
and you add in a little bit of whiskey in
the woods, and this turns into hunters telling a story
about gruesome castration rituals which do not exist. And it's
ultimately a story that that makes more sense in light
of what we know about little squirrel behavior, but just
also the general behavior of territorial animals. Now, as for
(32:33):
those first hand accounts in jama where they say, no,
I saw this happening firsthand, I saw them do it,
I don't know. Maybe some of these wounds could be
explained by random fighting having a weird kind of outcome,
but I don't know. As we said earlier, some of
those doctors writing in just sounded a little bit off,
Like I don't know if you should believe their stories.
I don't know if we really need to bother with E. H.
(32:54):
Smith and his his ferret and red squirrel in the
box experiment. I'm gonna I'm just gonna hope that he
made that up and it didn't really happen. I'm just
gonna assume that as well, Joe, that that it was
just just a fanciful story that he made. But anyway,
so if you had your vision of squirrels marred by
the discovery that they will sometimes eat carry in or
(33:15):
sometimes hunt prey. In the last episode, maybe you should
rest a little bit easier now if you'd previously heard
the castration myth and thinking it's probably not true. All Right,
we're gonna take one more break, and when we come back,
we have two more tidbits about the squirrel, neither of
which is violent. So stay tuned, thank you, thank you. Alright,
(33:35):
we're back now, I said, neither of the examples we're
gonna look at here violence. I guess one is by
some definition self violence. But we'll see, we'll see, we'll see.
So I do want to talk briefly about hibernation and
ground squirrel neuroplasticity. That sounds interesting now. In our recent episode, uh,
in our two thousand one of Space Odyssey episode, we
(33:55):
talked a little bit about this. Yeah, we were talking
about space hibernation and how this isn't really a post
ability for humans yet. We haven't discovered any kind of
technology that will allow us to hibernate for long space journeys.
But you talked about the idea of hot sleep and
how that relates to squirrel hot sleep. That being h
a some terminology from the science fiction of Worsen Scott
card the idea that you have the individuals in the
(34:18):
sci fi world and they're they're put into an artificial
UH slumber for long trips, but it's not pleasant. It's
it's like the sweating ordeal. And what we're gonna discuss
here actually reminds me a lot of that. So Arctic
ground squirrels have long been of interest to science for
their hibernation abilities, and we've mentioned them on the show before.
(34:39):
Back in Zoo physiologist Brian Barne of the University of Alaska,
he commented on how the hibernation of the Arctic ground
school is more like a months long bout of insomnia.
That sounds horrible. Yeah, it sounds like hot sleep to
make Yeah. He pointed out that they lowered their body
temperature below freezing, but they but they don't stay that way.
(35:00):
They undergo cyclical rewarmings once or twice a month. And
the rewarming must be important because it uses roughly eight
of the fat stores UH in order to do it,
So a lot of energy is expended to come out
of of of the freeze and then go back down
(35:20):
into it again. So we're not just talking about rewarming
at the end of hibernation. So Barnes theory at the
time was that they had to warm up to actually sleep,
that cold brains can't sleep, that the torper might stave
off sleep for days or weeks, but they'd eventually be
forced to warm up in order to get that vital slumber. Uh.
(35:42):
He's worked with the Institute of Artic Biology ever since
and has devoted a great deal of research to mammalian hibernation. Uh.
If if you look up like squirrel hibernation um on
the Internet and you look for for peer of your papers,
you will run across his work. He's taken the creature's temperatures,
he's measured their activity along their neural pathways as well,
(36:03):
and he's found that the creature's brain is quite resilient,
as you might expect from such a cheater of death
as the as the Arctic ground squirrel. During hibernation, the
neuron shrink and connection shrivel, but the creature's brain makes
up for this by undergoing growth spurts that multiplied neural
links back to previous levels and even beyond it. Oh weird.
(36:25):
So this is a very strange alternate version of the
neuro plasticity. Model. Yeah, yeah, that this is this is
kind of a wonder species for people who are researching
neuroplasticity in ways to potential potentially boost it in humans.
Now we know, like in humans, the neuroplasticity model you
often have is that children tend to make a whole
(36:45):
lot of connections in the brain, and then over time
those connections are sort of pruned back, limiting potential as
as time goes on and maturity develops in the body
and the child eventually becomes more neuro stable. But here
you're seeing a renewal of a type of infantile neuroplasticity
in the adult ground squirrel as hibernates. Yeah, I mean basically,
(37:05):
it boost neural plasticity in order to repair everything that
it loses during this hibernation process. So, no matter what
you think of other squirrels and your distrust of other squirrels,
the art at ground squirrel is is a very attractive
species to scientists for a number of reasons. Cracking the
inner workings of its hibernation adaptations could allow us to
(37:26):
engineer neuroplasticity treatments, to improve organ transplantation, and devise ways
to place human space travelers into some form of of
hot sleep for a prolonged space mission. Oh good, that
sounds great. Thanks, thanks squirrels. All right, we'll have one
more bit of squirrel data to share with everyone. Is
(37:46):
it going to be something shocking? I hope it's Lit's not.
I mean, I don't think there's anything left that can
truly shock us at this point in our squirrel exploration.
This one's more humorous. So cape ground squirrels have a
scrowed them that takes up of their body length, with
a penis twice as long as that in other it's
so it's another product of the the evolutionary mating arms race.
(38:10):
The males have been observed to engage in auto filatio
and consume the ejected reproductive murial material, which of course
only makes sense. We've discussed animal cannibalism in the same light.
It's energy. What what what do you? What do you? What?
What should do with it? Why just waste it? You
got to like put it back into the business. Right,
So that makes sense. But but ultimately people asked, well
(38:33):
why do they do that? Indeed, why does any species
engage in in masturbation? Well, there's the sexual outlet hypothesis
that arousal must be dismissed. Uh, and that makes sense, right,
You've just got this arowse squirrel. It's got to do
something with all this uh this, you know, this energy
that it has now and it might as well release
it so it can get on with nut collecting and
(38:54):
what have you. But then there's another idea that it
might be because they has to flush out the old
sperm so that the creature has fresher sperm that it
can utilize for mating. Is there an expiry date on that?
Essentially it would be like an innate knowledge of the
exploration data, I guess. But then uh. Biologist Jane Waterman
(39:14):
weighed in on the matter uh and uh, at least
as it concerns cape ground squirrels, and pointed out that
dominant males actually do this the most, the ones who
shouldn't have to masturbate if the sexual outlet view is correct.
They also did it more after sex than before, seemingly
a blow against the sperm quality hypothesis. She also dismissed
(39:34):
the ideas that it's done as as a as a
signal to potential mates or to competitors, because the pattern
wasn't there, so you just don't see them doing it
at the times where it would make sense if it
was about communicating to other squirrels. Well, so what is
Waterman's explanation. Her explanation or her her hypothesis here is
that they masturbate and in doing so reduce the odds
(39:58):
of catching an std. She points out that the human
males may urinate after sex sort of clean things out,
and that cape ground squirrels rarely urinate due to their
desert environment. So what's what's a squirrel to do if
it doesn't urinate frequently, what can it possibly do to
clean out that tract? Masturbation provides an answer that seems
(40:21):
like a reasonable explanation, though I truly did not know
we would end up in this place. Yes, I think
it's it's kind of a a happy ending for these
two episodes that we should end not with visions of
meat eating squirrels or scrowed them chewing squirrels, squirrels engaging
in mortal Kombat with snakes, but instead simply a masturbating
squirrel in the desert trying to stay healthy. Yeah, just
(40:44):
staying healthy sounds good to me. Now we do hope
these episodes have helped you look at squirrels in a
different way, to see them not just as you know
tree rats running around in your yard, but something that
is in its own right and evolutionary marvel, something that's
engaged in a struggle for survive of all and and
faces that struggle with a lot of alarming and surprising tools.
But we certainly do not hope that you will go
(41:06):
away from this with any kind of animus towards squirrels
or any desire to harm them. We don't want to
encourage that squirrels are part of the natural world too,
and they don't deserve any kind of vilification, even though
it might be kind of shocking to learn the truth
about them since we see them so often but usually
don't suspect these things, right, Yeah, don't go hurt any
squirrels on our account. But of course, if you were
(41:27):
already killing and eating squirrels, uh, let us know how
that goes for you. If what's your experience with squirrel
hunting and warbles and uh in in various bits of
you know, urban or rural legend about squirrels biting each other,
did you hear the squirrel castration urban legend. Where did
(41:48):
you hear it? And what variant on it? What sort
of explanation was presented to you. We would love to
hear about any of that. In the meantime, head on
over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's
where we'll find all the episodes of the pod casks,
going all the way back to the beginning. You'll find
links out to our various social media accounts where you
can follow us and keep up with what we're doing,
including Facebook where we have that fabulous Facebook group. The
(42:09):
discussion module that is a really great place if you
want to, uh, you know, get into conversations with other
listeners about the topics we've covered, about topics we could
cover about unrelated things. Ask ask ask ask us questions.
Go check it out. That's the Stuff Table your Mind
discussion module. And hey, while you're at our website, click
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(42:31):
because that's where you'll find all these cool T shirts
and stickers and coffee MUDs, any just about anything you
could put our new logo on. It is available to you. Yeah,
merch up, get yourself a Sphere Catastrophe t shirt. Yeah,
that one's really really rad. I recommend it big. Thank
you as always to our wonderful audio producers Alex Williams
(42:51):
and Tarry Harrison. If you would like to get in
touch with us directly to let us know feedback on
this episode or any other, to let us know if
you've ever heard any squirrel Caster action, urban legends, or
anything like that, to suggest a topic for a future episode,
or just to say hi, you can email us at
blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com for
(43:18):
more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it
how stuff works dot com, lovegen
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