Animal Enigmas

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0:55I'm Anoush Zomorodi and we're going to start today's show by going back in time to meet a girl named Mary Anning. Where do I begin with Mary Anning? Let me tell you. So Mary Anning, this is way back in 1811, 1812. This is Dean Lomax. She was just 11, 12 years old and walking on the beach with her older brother, Joseph, at a seaside town called Lime Regis here in the UK. Lime Regis is known for its harbor, its fishing, its shipbuilding, and its craggy beachside cliffs. And that is where Mary grew up. You imagine these really tall, what today we would consider Jurassic cliffs that were just constantly crumbling away, being eroded and smashed by the waves.

1:48And as a result of that constant erosion, you'd have rocks falling down that would contain fossils. And not only would you have the fossils preserved in the cliff face itself, you'd get them on the foreshore. So you'd have young Mary Arning and her family looking for these things. Often they'd find the remains of shellfish-like animals, like ammonites and bullet-shaped bellumites. And it kind of was a case, it was kind of come rain or shine, whatever the weather, they would be out there collecting these things. It became, for the family, it became massively important for their survival. Important because their father, Richard, had recently died.

2:28They were already quite a poverty-stricken family, but the fact that Richard passed away when she was so young and left them in so much debt, they had to find another way to survive. And so to make ends meet, Mary and her brother would dig out, carefully clean, and sell fossils to gentlemen scientists visiting the coast. Because at this time, paleontology was really in its infancy. And people had began to question kind of what came before, you know, question the story of the Bible and things like that. And people had began to try to work out if animals were on the planet before, you know, was the age of the earth a lot older than they thought.

3:12And one day... Mary and her older brother Joseph, they made a remarkable discovery that would change the world of paleontology and to a large extent the world as we know it today. They found the remains, they found this gigantic skull over a meter long with a massive what we call sclerotic ring, this giant ring of bone inside the eye socket of this animal, which we call an ichthyosaur. Ichthyosaur, Greek for fish lizard. Now, ichthyosaurs are a curious group of animals. For one thing, they look somewhere between a dolphin and a shark, but kind of reptilian. Some of them were the top of the food chain predators in the oceans.

3:55They had these giant jaws, massive teeth easily, some of them up to about 8 centimeters, 10 centimeters long. They're often misidentified as swimming dinosaurs, but they're not dinosaurs. They're an entirely different group. They lived entirely in the ocean whilst the dinosaurs were walking on land. Prior to this discovery, people didn't know what ichthyosaurs were. There wasn't even an official name for them yet, which is what made Mary's findings so important. That skull, four feet long, was attached to a much, much longer skeleton that Mary discovered months later. It was the very first complete ichthyosaur skeleton ever unearthed.

4:39This discovery was that important and that complete and so different to anything else that it caught the attention of the gentlemanly scientists of the day who were really eager to study this fossil. Mary Anning spent the rest of her life uncovering fossils. She discovered the first ever plesiosaur remains, the first pterosaur fossil found in England. She even pioneered the study of coprolites, basically fossilized poop. You know, today she's considered the mother of paleontology. And, you know, it's quite amazing because in her lifetime, often many people, usually men, would never give her the credit, you know, for what she discovered and the science that she was doing at the time.

5:28You know, she really was a scientist. People traveled from far and wide to come and see her. and her little, as one person put it, her little dirty shop in Lyme Regis filled with fossils. Centuries later, there are still so many biological mysteries yet to be solved. From better understanding those ancient reptiles that swam in prehistoric seas, to the anatomy of bugs living in our own backyards right now. So on this episode, animal enigmas, the chance findings, near-death experiences, and long hours of observation that it takes to piece together nature's puzzles. For paleontologist Dean Lomax, Mary's discoveries had an especially significant impact.

6:18So Mary Anning was my real childhood hero growing up. I remember quoting that she'd found the ichthyosaurs and the plesiosaurs and really sparked the imagination of so many people at the time. And that's really what it did for me. Today, Dean is maybe the go-to ichthyosaur expert, sometimes studying the very fossils that Mary Anning first unearthed. And in 2021, Dean had his own big discovery. But it didn't happen in a museum or while walking on the beach. It started with an email. All right, Dean, so what was so special about this email? Yeah, so in 2021, I was sitting at my desk typing away and I thought, oh, what could this be?

7:03Because, you know, I got to be honest, Manoush, I get lots of emails and messages on social media from people who say, hey, we found this dinosaur. We found this fossil. And often it just turns out to be an odd shaped rock. And so I was like, OK, I had a quick read of this email. I was like, OK, interesting. And then scrolled down. And then I was like, oh, OK, this changes things. So in the attachment was a couple of images of some fairly large sort of dinner plate sized vertebrae. So parts of the spine of what I immediately recognized as as ichthyosaur vertebrae. Dean Lomax continues his story from the TED stage.

7:42After speaking to fellow marine reptile expert, Dr. Mark Evans, we decided to visit the site in February, where the ground was literally frozen right beneath our feet. After spending so much time meticulously removing the Jurassic clay from around the skeleton, we were blown away because we revealed what appeared to be a gigantic skeleton, unlike anything ever found in Britain before. Clearly, this was a big deal. But we had to be very quick to contain our excitement, because due to the damp, wintry conditions and the fact that this was a super fragile skeleton, it meant it wasn't the right time to collect this ichthyosaur.

8:24So unfortunately, it might seem a little bit counterintuitive, but we had to rebury the ichthyosaur. And then waiting for what felt like millions of years, in six months, we were back on site, but this time with a superb team of paleontologists. We spent 14 and a half days all together, and this was also working very long hours from sunrise to sunset to remove the skeleton out of the ground. Oh my gosh, waiting for six months, then digging for two weeks. After all that, what did you and your team uncover? What did this ichthyosaur look like? Well, what we managed to do at this point was reveal the entire thing.

9:13We have pretty much 90, probably 98, 99%, maybe even 100 % when we can analyze it fully of the entire skeleton. And this animal is, you're talking 10 meters long. So over 30 foot. It represents the largest, most complete skeleton of any prehistoric reptile ever found here in the UK. Of course now, fully uncovered, it's time to literally get this Jurassic giant out of the ground. Much easier said than done when you're dealing with such a complete and very heavy fossil weighing several tons. The first port of call was to create a trench all the way around the skeleton. And the reason for that is that we needed to get right on underneath the skeleton so that we could begin the process of plaster jacketing.

10:01We use these protective plaster jackets that essentially care for and secure the bones and the surrounding matrix so that we can take them out of the field and into the lab so that we can analyze the fossil and the matrix and work out what's going on. After various challenges on site, we finally managed to remove the entire skeleton after dissecting it into several more manageable blocks. And this was an interesting moment for the team because it's quite an emotional moment because we'd spent and invested so much time and energy into this ichthyosaur excavation that this moment captured that final piece where we're removing this from its final resting place 180 million years ago.

10:41So what happens next? What do you do with a fossil like this? But once you got it out of the ground, the next thing then was for the entire skeleton to go to our colleague, Nigel Lark, into his lab. He'll be the person who will be cleaning the entire skeleton now. But what he'll have to do is flip the entire thing over and then we'll see the underside because the underside should be, in theory, the best preserved side because that's what was laying down in the seabed. So no animals could scavenge that, you know? And I really hope we're going to have an impressive, beautiful set of teeth with maybe a big eye sitting there staring back at us.

11:20I can't wait for that moment. Yeah, when is that going to happen? We're hoping that the cleaning phase should be completed in somewhere between 18 to 24 months. So once it's fully cleaned, it'll allow me and my team to do all the, if you like, the CSI of this animal. Why did it die? How old was it? Do we have something in there in the stomach contents? Is there its last meal? Is there any embryos in there? And things like that is what we're trying to work out. But above all, once it's fully cleaned, it's all been agreed that it will return to Rutland. And we should say Rutland is nowhere near the coast.

11:58It is in the middle of England. Right, exactly. We know 100%, not only because of our giant Rutland sea dragon, but we also have the remains of shellfish-like animals called ammonites and bits of corals and sea creatures called crinoids. All these types of animals, we know that we're living in a marine environment. And so this indicates that roughly 180 million years ago, this area was deep underwater. What do you think Mary Anning would have made of this incredible find? I think Mary would have been quite thrilled to have seen that a discovery of these creatures that she'd been collecting for so long had been made in somewhere quite unusual for Jurassic fossils like this in landlocked Rutland.

12:47For Mary, knowing full well that her kind of legacy that's so intertwined with ichthyosaurs continues right to this day and we still can make such remarkable discovery, she would be overwhelmed with that. That's Dean Lomax. He's a paleontologist and visiting scientist at the University of Manchester. You can see his full talk at ted.com. On the show today, animal enigmas. I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us.

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14:49wherever you listen. Friends, before we get back to the show, I want to let you know about TED Radio Hour Plus. When you become a Plus listener, you get bonus episodes made just for you with more ideas from TED speakers and you'll go behind the scenes with our producers. What you won't get, though, are those sponsor messages interrupting the show. And that's because you are directly supporting our work at NPR. So if you'd like to show your support, Learn more and subscribe at plus.npr.org slash TED or write in the Apple Podcasts app. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. And on the show today, animal enigmas, the quest to solve some of today's biological mysteries, including how insects pee.

15:47I have a beautiful backyard. You know, we could finally have like a nice house with a backyard for the kids and the dogs to play. And of course, the southeast, because of its nice weather, has so many, so many different types of bugs basically all year around. Saad Bamla is a professor at Georgia Tech, and he researches all kinds of insects, including those in his backyard. We have an old water fountain feature. And every day as I walk out, my three-year-old son and I will kind of peek into it. We'll see tiny flies that are both flying in the air, but then they land on the water surface and skim and glide.

16:32We walk amongst the grass and see lots and lots of tiny insects that are hopping. and now it's spring, so we'll observe these carpenter bees. And you can see these fine shavings of wood as these bees are digging in. I don't know, it just goes on and on. We should point out, Saad is not your typical bug and animal researcher. Yeah, I'm trained as a chemical engineer on paper. All my degrees are in chemical engineering. I didn't even know I loved bugs until my young adult life. And I slowly started to look at them through this lens of physics and mathematics and engineering. I just realized there are so many puzzles.

17:17It sounds like you see the world very differently than most of us who would be worried about finding a tick between our toes or swatting at mosquitoes. It's a wonderland. It's a lab for you just waiting for experimentation. Just what you said, I feel so lucky because I had like wool in front of my eyes. And one day it struck me that the entire world is your lab. Like the Amazon rainforest is your lab. The backyard is a lab. That's where science happens. And all you need is this perspective. And it changes everything. And you can do science 24-7. Saad Bamla continues from the TED stage. I love bugs.

18:02I think of them as nature's tiny engineers because they come up with the most extraordinary and incredible solutions to life's problems. And I just love observing them because they're so full of surprises and curiosities. Today, I'm going to tell you a story about one of nature's most extraordinary engineers that pushes the limits of fluid mechanics and bioengineering and arguably solves their number one problem. How insects pee. Sit back and relax. You're in for a treat.

18:43A few years ago, my student, Elio Chilita, and I observed this tiny insect having a private moment in our own backyards in Atlanta. And we couldn't believe our eyes. This insect was peeing for hours, and we were blown away. We had never seen anything like this. So I observed this bug and it was, you know, flicking droplets. It was very far, so you could hardly see it. But you could feel it on your hands and it would make you kind of question yourself whether it was just raining under a tree, if that makes sense. So you were standing there in your yard looking at a tree and you could see, like even though it was really quick and really small, you could see it flicking something.

19:27Right, because we all carry a beautiful scientific instrument in our pockets. So I just had pulled up my iPhone and you can do two great things. I can buy a$5 magnifying lens and put it in front of my camera. And so now you've got essentially a pretty decent microscope, especially for bugs. And the second feature is you can switch to slow motion. And this is remarkable, right? So I recorded a video and I was like, hey, there's something happening. There's a droplet at its butt and it's flicking it. And, you know, I was like, all right, challenge accepted, Bug. Saad needed to figure out how the insect peed.

20:09Right. So this was a glassy winged sharpshooter, Homolodisca vitropanis. And these are sap feeders. And it's, you know, a system you have to think about feeding and excretion. What goes in must come out. Hence the pea, which of course plenty of insects do. Lots of insects pee and they do it in so many different forms and they do it on the fly. They do it while sitting. And most of them pee more or less like us, you know, in streams. Yeah, it's amazing. But the glassy-winged sharpshooter is the only one that flings little pea missiles. And Saad had a hunch that complex physics were involved. So he and his student Elio brought these sharpshooters into the lab.

20:55So we take our high-speed cameras and we measure them. And then I tell Elio, just to ask a simple question, is how fast are these droplets moving? We realize that this insect forms a droplet of P, and then it flings them at extreme accelerations of 40 G forces. That's 40 times faster than the sprint of a cheetah. These insects are really packing a punch from their butts. And we wanted to take a closer look at this flicker, so we took a look under a microscope at its business end, and this beautiful structure has a scientific name. It's called a butt flicker. And this is what we discovered. We realized that this insect had evolved springs and latches, just like a catapult, so that it could efficiently hurl its droplets of pee repeatedly at these high accelerations.

21:47Now, we wanted to measure the speed at which this flicker was moving and the droplets, so we measured the speed of both the droplets and the flicker. And this is where we made a puzzling observation. The speed of the droplets in air was faster than the flicker. So if you take a ratio of that, we were expecting it to be 100%, but it turns out that the speed of the droplets are about 150 to 200 % faster than the flicker itself. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Why didn't it make any sense? What was puzzling you? Like, personally, I would have said, wow, he has a butt flicker, as you call it, on his body.

22:27That's amazing enough. But then what was it that made you think like, huh, there is a mystery to be solved here? Right. So as a scientist, we're greedy because the butt flicker was great. Okay, so we know something about the anatomy. And it's flicking it. Okay, that's great. But wouldn't it be amazing if we could unravel much more interesting physics? And so the speed mismatch was bothering us because if a Yankees pitcher throws a baseball and they'll say, oh, it's going at 100 miles an hour, at some point the pitcher's fingers had to be traveling at 100 miles an hour. because if I throw a baseball at, say, 30 or 40 miles an hour, and in midair, this baseball is now moving at 100 miles an hour, faster than my fingers or arm, that doesn't make sense because where does that extra energy come from?

23:24And we expect that energy balance to match. Things cannot move faster than the object that propels them. Unless, like it would say, has an extra bit of force added. Precisely. or some storage of energy somewhere in that process that was unclear to the eye at first glance. So to solve this puzzle, we went back and looked at our videos. And we realized that unlike a baseball that's rigid, these tiny droplets are squishy. And we had an aha moment. We were wondering if this insect is storing energy due to the surface tension just before launch. And to test this, we did naturally what any of us would do.

24:04We converted our kitchen tables into a lab So now we're going to place droplets on a speaker to squish them at high speeds. And this is what we discovered. We realized that water that flows in our faucets, like a liquid, at these tiny scales, due to surface tension, with the right timing, can get a kick, store energy. And if you time it just right, you can launch these off at extremely high speeds, just like a child on a trampoline. Okay, so kids on a trampoline and they're jumping. And if they get their timing just so, they can catch a bigger bounce. And so with your analogy, the butt flicker is like a trampoline and the kid is like the droplet of pee getting a turbo charge.

24:53Right. And so the droplets were actually acting like a liquid spring. And so maximizing this can allow us to really fly far off. So explain how that's happening here, Saad. I think you need to walk us through the butt flick, as it were. Sure. So the droplet is rested and cradled in this gorgeous butt flicker. It's about 100 microns in diameter. It's the most beautiful bee you've seen, right? It's this gorgeous drop, perfectly spherical. and then it cocks its butt flicker because it's got this tiny, resonant spring and like a catapult, maybe by 10 or 15 degrees more it'll cock it and then it starts to rotate.

25:37And as it rotates, you can observe the droplets squish because of surface tension and the flicker will reach the end of its trajectory and then the droplet takes off just like a tiny, tiny spherical elastic rocket. and this whole thing happens in 100 milliseconds. Oh, wow. Your blink of an eye is like maybe 200 milliseconds, so it's faster than the blink of an eye. The fact that it's doing all of this is baffling. Yeah, but you solved the mystery. I guess the question is, though, what does this tell you about the evolution of this bug? That nature has had far more time to tinker than us? Oh, goodness.

26:22But there are two reasons. So these are xylem sap feeders. You know, that's what this particular sharpshooter feeds on. And xylem is just 95 % water. It just has a few minerals. So they have to glug, you know, 300 times their body weight. So the reason they're drinking so much is because they need energy, right? But they have to come up with an energy efficient way to excrete this. And if they made jets, it would be four to eight times more expensive energetically. And because they're living on this frugal diet, every part of their energy extraction way is trying to minimize how much energy they waste.

27:05These things are tiny. They're smaller than my pinky. In fact, surface tension that enables them to store energy in these droplets to launch is actually an impediment because gravity doesn't matter. and surface engines stick these droplets to their bodies. So they actually have to flick these droplets away. It's actually very difficult for these tiny bugs to pee. And that's why I just love studying bugs. This tiny engineer has figured out to survive on barely just water through the xylem fluid. And it's figured out to do so, it has to drink a lot and pee a lot. In that sense, it's not so different from other engineers I know on a Friday night at a bar.

27:46But to do so, it's figured out it has to evolve this catapulting structure and fling these droplets at high speeds. I'm just trying to get in the head of the listener here, Saad. But there will be people who think, that's so great, Saad. Thank you so much for this illumination of how these bugs pee. But really, in the grand scheme of things, why should we care? Yeah, why should we care? So this is how I live my life, and maybe I'll change it in the future. But I have two halves to my life, and one is all about organisms. And the other half, I actually put on my engineer's hat and we built$1 hearing aids.

28:30We built a 20-cent paper centrifuge for malaria diagnostics. We've just spun out a company using barbecue lighters for mRNA vaccine delivery to make it accessible to 4 billion people who still don't have access to it. And that's the engineering part. I love it too, right? I think it's important and I use taxpayer money and try to do good and we train students how to do frugal science. But there is a joy in the other half where we just study bugs and the application there is it just makes, it's the joy of discovering things. The application is making other people be able to appreciate nature. You know, holy smokes, you can look at insects and study fluid dynamics.

29:14to me, we need more of that. That's a good enough application for me because if you solve a puzzle, it's just such a great advance for humanity. That's Saad Bamla. He's an assistant professor of biomolecular engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His student, Elio Chalita, just officially got his PhD on the sharpshooter. To watch Saad's full talk, go to TED.com. On the show today, animal enigmas. Stories about elusive, mysterious, and even dangerous species. Like the king cobra. I've caught king cobras from the roof. You know, I climbed up the roof. I've carried like two meters, three meters king cobra.