Animal Migration: Where's that gnu gnoing?

When you think of animal migrations, you probably picture thousands of animals thundering across the savannah. But where are they going, and why? Josh and Chuck explain why and how animals migrate in this episode.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff you Should Know
from House Stuff Works dot com? Hey, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, right,

(00:22):
and this is Stuff you Should Know the podcast edition
of the podcast. But we should change the name of
the show to like stuff you might want to know
if you're you know, if you care about being an
enlightened individual. We need a colon in there. We've been
using colons alt l. Let's not change the name. We

(00:43):
should change the name to just try and find a pulse.
That's good, Thank you, Chuck. Yes, have you ever seen
him animal migrate? I see my dogs migrating to the
food bowl at five o'clock every day. Yeah, I guess
that is kind of migration. Yeah. Actually I see them

(01:06):
migrate to me at like four thirty and starts staring
at me like you know, you gotta Feti's right. Yeah,
we talked about that and can dogs perceived time? That's right? Um,
I have seen animals migrate on the YouTube's Oh it's gorgeous.
It is, I mean, it's unbelievable. It is, especially depending
like the monarch butterflies. To everyone's like, that's the money migration,

(01:29):
not to me. Have you seen the bats, the fruit
bats in Zambia. That's pretty amazing. It is amazing and
like horrific. If you don't like bats, I like the
mammalion ones, like the elk, thousands and thousands of them
steaming across the tundra. Uh. And the the yeah, caribou,
that's another one. Um. Will the beasts also called gnoos

(01:53):
no canoes is good gnoos? Gary, Did you know that?
I didn't know that the will the beast a k a.
The canoo is also known for its huge migration, and
that doesn't always go very well. Did you know that?
What with? Uh? What happened in a river in Kenya
in two thousand and seven ten thousand, Will the Beasts

(02:17):
drowned at this one spot in this river because one
of them went in and got swept away, and the
rest of whom were like, oh, we went in, Well,
I guess we all just crossed and that's really sad. Yeah.
One person of the population of the African will the
best population, died in that river that day. Quite a
mess too, I imagine. Yeah, I mean that would probably

(02:41):
damn up the river. I would think, I would think.
So ten thousand canoes will the beasts? I mean they're
about four and a half feet tall at the shoulder.
They're big, um and yeah, ten thousand of them, that's
a lot of biomass. It's like when a whale gets beached.
Do you remember the one in Oregon in the seventies
that they blew up with kin of mine? Yeah, so

(03:07):
that's migration, Chuck, you got anything else, listener, mail it
just blacked out, Josh. Migration if we should define it
for our foreign friends, exactly. It is a large scale
movement of an animal species, and typically it's because of
a few things like whether or mating, or food trying
to find resources. Yeah, so when you said that you

(03:28):
see your dogs migrate to their food bowl every day,
that does technically count its migration because most of the
reason things migrates food, and then the other ones are
generally secondary. Josh, what are the three types of migration?
There is irreversive migration, eruptive migration. I just made up

(03:48):
a word. Irreversive and not eruptive is in the volcano.
But I are are compeat. That's right, um, And that
doesn't follow a pattern. Uh. Usually it kind of the
basically the species is making it up as it goes along. Um.
The wilder beasts are known for eruptive uh migration because

(04:09):
they follow water and wherever the water is, they're going
to it and apparently drowning in. And they said to
in this article, which is crazy that they will. Their
migration patterns can be based on like thunderclouds. Well, yeah,
they hear thunder, go to the thunder because that's where
the rain is, meaning that's where the water is. It's
just so cool. How smart the stupid looking cannon is

(04:32):
means didn't carry you to wear a turtleneck and a jacket.
I think it was a dickey okay, uh josh. Another
one is complete and partial migration. Um. Obviously, complete is
when the entire species migrates. Um. Partial usually happens when
you have such a range in your species that some
of you live where it's nice and warm you don't

(04:52):
have to go anywhere, and some of you live where
it's cold. And the barn owl is a good example
of that one. Partial migration is basically just species showing
off how much range. It has like some of us
don't even need to migrate exactly. There's also um altitude
altitudinal migration, where you're a billy goat up in the

(05:13):
Alps and it starts to snow and get a little
cold for you, so you move a little further down
the mountain. Yeah, being banged boom migration done. And the
final one, actually I think I said three, this is
more like five. Uh, is the saddest one of all,
and that's removal migration. And that is when wherever you're living,
for one reason or another, whether it's deforestation or drain

(05:35):
swampland swampland or climate, is just not the place to
live anymore, and you just pack your bags as a
species and leave, never to come back. It is the
saddest migration. I think. So um, so chuck. That's the
types of migration, the three slash five types three to
five yeah. Um. And what we're finding is from the outside,

(06:00):
it looks like people who studied migration, before we studied migration,
it was just like I like, the animals are moving again. Um.
But people have given it a lot more um evaluation
over the last decades century. Year two right, um and
they're finding that there's pretty much well, like we said, food, breeding,

(06:22):
in mating, and um climate climate, those are the reasons
and they all equal survival. Yes, that's the whole point, right,
you said that um partial migration is based on range. Yeah,
what animals need is food. You gotta have food to survive,

(06:45):
and for the most part, that's why animals migrate is
for food. And what's interesting too, it's it's not always
a migration to like, oh, let's go find because there's
tons of food over here. Sometimes they're smart enough to
know we'll deplete all the food here if we don't
move around some and we want to survive as a species,
so we're not going to take all the food here.
We're gonna migrate over and kind of spread it around

(07:06):
so we can all live. Right, It's pretty cool. Water
also falls into that category of survival as well, like
the wilderbeeste which we were talking about, right, Um. And
then there's breeding and mating as reasons for migration. Whales
are very very famous for migration for both actually for
feeding and for breeding. Right, So they migrate to the

(07:31):
poles in the summertime thousands of miles. Yeah, Um, they
migrate to the poles in the summertime to go feast
on krill, but their calves when they're born don't have
enough lover to survive in the polar climate that's adorable,
so they go toward the equator the tropical climates to
um mate and and reproduce. Do you ever look at

(07:54):
animals and think they figured it all out and humans
are just messing it all up? Yes, frequently, I say
that all the time to myself. The chinook salmon josh
is one in relation to mating and breeding, and they
are famous for heading out to see as adults after
they're born in the river, and then later in life
they swim back upriver and they lay their eggs at

(08:15):
the same hospital where they were born, the same little
river spot, because they're going to be eaten in the
open sea, so they go back to where they're born
because it worked for them. Well, that's exactly why they
do it. That's amazing because they know that the spot
is because I'm alive, it's safe. I know this is
a safe spot for me. Plus I haven't been by

(08:37):
there for a while. I need to say hey to
the to the old neighborhood exactly see what's going on?
And check you're talking about removal migration. UM. There's a
pretty there's a good example of UM. What happens as
a result of removal migration UM in the whooping crane? Right,
this is the best story. Do you like this one?

(08:58):
It's really awesome. The being crane UH in the United
States went down to twenty birds in the wild for
a little while. That's not a good part, by the way,
that's the funny part. Here's the good part. UH. The
eastern population of the species was completely wiped out and
the western population was pretty much keeping the species alive.

(09:21):
So I guess to oppose removal migration, is it Rutgers?
I believe it was Rutgers ornithologists UM really started to
take a real shine to the whooping crane and and
wanted to get the population back up, and so they

(09:42):
started breeding them in captivity. The problem is the annual
migration of the whooping crane is about twelve miles. They
go from the north down to Florida. UM. They learned
that that's intergenerational knowledge, right, So the ones in the east,
they have no idea how get from there there where

(10:02):
they live during the summertime, down south in the winter.
They don't know the route because those people who used
to or those cranes that used to have that knowledge
died out right. I know, it's so sad, So tell
them what they're doing, Chuck, Well, this is the cool thing.
As sad as that is, and as down on humans
as I am, there are humans that do amazing things
like this. They basically dressed up and whooping crane costumes

(10:26):
from the time these little chickies were born to acclimate
them to to you know, the adults and uh, the
sound of an ultralight aircraft from the time they were
little ones. Stick got them used to that sound. Then
when the time came to my great Josh, the birds,
a guy got into an ultralight aircraft dressed dressed as

(10:47):
a whooping crane and flew from Wisconsin to Florida and
lead these birds and basically said, this is the way
to go, This is how you're going to survive. How
awesome is that? It's pretty awesome and it worked so far.
So far. They're what they're hoping is, obviously in generations
to come, that they have learned this and they'll be
able to pass it down. Yeah, exactly, Yeah, that's so awesome. UM.

(11:09):
That's pretty rare actually that we understand why or how
a species UM migrates for the most part, how and
when or how they how they know to migrate. It's
still relatively a mystery. UM. There's different ways that that
we think an animal species can say, Okay, it's time

(11:31):
to go to Florida um. And one of the one
of the big ones, is called the photo period based
on the Circadian rhythm or the Circulean rhythm. Sunlight