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Hey, everybody out there in the Pacific Northwest or with access to an airport or a car rental place that can get you to the Pacific Northwest specifically at the end of January, we'll see you in Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco.

That's right. To our new live show for 2024, Seattle, Washington, January 24th at the Paramount Theater, then Portland at our homeway from home at Revolution Hall on the 25th, and then winding it all up at Sketchfest on the 26th at the Sydney-Golstein Theater.

Very nice. If you want tickets, if you want information, if you want tickets, you can go to a couple of places. You can go to our Linktree at linktree/sysk, and you can go to our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow. Com, click on the tour button, and it'll take you to all of the beautiful places you can go to buy your tickets. We'll see you guys in January.

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.

Hey, and welcome to The Slowcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. We're just inching along doing things our own way, our own speed, our own time, leaving a trail of mucus behind us as we do.

Wow. Inching along, 0.5 inches per second.

Yeah, it's like that one guy said, Life is a highway, right? I want to ride it all night long covering only an inch.

Was that the parental of that title? Yeah.

You had to read between the lines.

Yeah, exactly.

What a great song.

Or play it backwards. That song, do you think is great?

Yeah, I do. If you take away all the... It's actually a great song. It's very upbeat and enthusiastic and very... It's just a good song.

Who was that?

I don't remember. I think that might have been his only song. Although now that I've said that, I'm sure he's a huge sensation in Canada or something, and now everybody's going to be mad at us.

Yeah, that.

Happens a lot. We'll find out. But anyway, whoever you are out there who made that song, if you're listening, Breyton Cap off to you.

That's right.

Chuck, I picked this one.

He is Canadian, by the way.

I knew it, dude. I knew it. How does that always happen? I don't know. I don't know. What's his name?

Tom.

Cochran. I wanted to say Tom, but I wanted to say Tom Brokaw, and I was like, I'm not even going to bring that up.

You know what? He's in the Canadian Music Hall of Fame.

Oh, my God.

Sorry, Tom. All right, so much for that.

Okay. At any rate, heads off, Tom Cochran, I think, is what I was trying to say, right?

Mm-hmm.

We're doing an episode on Snales, which I'm psyched about. Our new good friend, Allison, helped us with this one. I believe this is her second one, and she's doing great.

Yeah. Was this a listener recommendation?

No, this was a Josh recommendation.

Okay, I didn't know if this was... We did some stuff recently with kids in the classroom, like little virtual appearances for our book, Stuff Kids Should Know. I know we got a lot of ideas, and just for some reason, I thought, Snails might.

Have been one of those. Not a single one of those kids came up with the idea of snails. It was really sad.

Kids these days, they don't even know what are.

Snales, that was my pick, and I'm not sure where it came from. I think I just pulled it out of my head. But I'm glad I did because this is one of those things where... I mean, snales are everywhere. Everyone knows what a snale is. It's just a part of living on earth. You know about snails. And yet what Allison turned up, and I wasn't aware of when I selected this, there's actually a bit of a dearth of information, academic information on snails specifically. And then a lot of what we think we know about them is actually just old yarns that gardeners have come up with over the years. I love topics like that. Actually, from researching this, I've come to actually really appreciate snails. I actually think they're cute now just from watching them in some videos.

Well, I looked at the picture of the, and we'll talk about these in a little more detail later, but that giant African snare.

There.

Was one picture of a woman holding one of these things. I swear it looked like a Bunny rabbit with a turtle shell.

Weird. I have not seen that picture.

It looked like a Bunny. I mean, it's a snare, clearly. It didn't look that much like a Bunny. I wasn't like, What in the world?

Maybe it was eating a Bunny. Is that what it was?

I don't think so. But you were right, Allison was keen to point out that malicology, which is someone who studies molusts, I guess there's just not a ton of those people out there. There just tend to be more people studying, a furrier, cuter things than snails, I guess.

Right, exactly. Even if you do have a lot of malecologists, they're studying mollucks, and snails just make up part of one class of a larger phylum of molusc. They're part of gastropota. And it's not just snails and gastropota, we're talking slugs, sea slugs, corks, conks, welks, limpets. Basically, all snare-like creatures are in the gastropota class.

So they're gastropodes?

Yeah, or gastropods.

Okay, I didn't know how it was pronounced, though.

It's got to be gastropod, right?

I mean, I think it's gastropod, but would it be gastropota? No. Or is it one of those weird things that just flips when you shorten it?

It's that second thing.

Okay, great.

I said also, Chuck, just living on Earth, you're aware of snails, and there's a reason for that. They've been around for a really, really long time. They are everywhere. And even if you're walking around Antarctica and you look down on the ground, you might see a snare waving up to you, wearing a parca.

Yeah. And even if, snails, as we will find out, love moisture, even if you're in the desert, even if you're in Arizona, living there in Phoenix, you might see a snale because there's still random water here and there.

Yeah, plus also some of them have evolved to really hang on to their water better than other times so they can survive in the desert. It's just nuts. They're everywhere. As a matter of fact, they think that there's about 150,000 gastropod species in total. Remember, that includes slugs and all that stuff. But they think the male species are between 30,000 and 35,000. We think of snails as typically the little garden male, maybe the Escar-goat male, I think that's the Roman male, if I'm not mistaken. But there are all sorts of snails. Do you mentioned the giant African land snail, those things get... I saw that they get to be about the size of a human fist or bigger. That's a big snare. But on the other end, there's another type of snare that they recently discovered in, I think, Vietnam and Cambodia, on the walls of caves, and they can fit inside a grain of sand. They're that small. But if you look at them under a microscope, they are very clearly snails.

Yeah, I saw about 500 native species to North America. And we're generally going to be talking about your average land male, but there are snails that live exclusively in the water under the sea. There's just no way we could talk about all the snails. So we're going to mainly concentrate on the kind that leave that mucusy trail on the sidewalk.

Right. We could probably get through 34,000 species today, but definitely not 35,000.

That's right. So we're not getting to try.

Okay, so the other thing that's a bummer about snare species is that as long as we've been scientifically paying attention to snails, we've recorded more than 400 extinctions of snare species. And there's an Atlantic short documentary, I think it's like 12 minutes long. I think it's called Goodbye Snails. And it's set in Hawaii, where they're experiencing this crazy mass extinction of their native male species that exists nowhere else in the world. It's a really tense little documentary, but the people who are trying to rescue these male species and prevent them from extinction are and really doing some amazing work over there.

Yeah, there's about 1,000 of them that are land snails alone that are endangered right now. That's a lot of species to be in trouble. That's no good because as we will see, there can be invasive snails and they can do some harm to the garden, but they also do a lot of great things for your garden and for the world.

Yeah, leave the snails alone.

You ever eat them?

I have once or twice. I'm not crazy about them. No, I'm not an S-cargo fan. I'm a fan of that S-cargo joke, though.

Right, which is, Look at that S-cargo.

Is that what it was? A snake painted an S on the side of his car.

That's right. That's a great elementary school kid joke.

Yep, that's wonderful.

I was trying to remember if I've ever... I feel like I might have tried it one time many years ago because I do remember seeing snails floating in a buttery solution on a plate. I think there was a little tiny tong involved.

Yeah, that sounds true.

But I really have a very faint memory. So if I did try it. I don't know under what circumstance it was, but it was a long time ago, and it's not something I'd really be into now.

They even have a specialized plate for serving them. And it basically doubles as a deviled egg serving plate, too. It's like got a bunch of depressions in it that the snails sit in. Right.

I'd rather have a deviled egg. You can also eat snare eggs. They call it white caviar. Oh, yeah? Yeah, it's a thing. I think it's like $130 for about 1.75 ounces.

Wow. Well, it's a lot of snare eggs now that I think about it.

Yeah, it seems like it. I mean, it looks like it comes with a little tin-like caviar. But although I do love caviar now, I don't think I would try snale caviar.

Okay. I'll accept that answer.

I know I talked about I'm newish to caviar just the past couple of years, so it wasn't something I ever had until semi-recently.

But now you have it at dinner every night.

You've heard of avocado toast? Every morning I just have caviar toast. Put it all over the biggest piece of sourdough I can.

With gold flakes on top.

All right, should we talk about the body of a snake?

Yeah, I feel like we have to because there's a lot of misconceptions people have about snails, including me, as far as their body goes.

Yeah. I mean, we can talk about their shell for a little bit. They have that... Well, we'll talk about the shell throughout. It's obviously a protective device. A snake can pull themselves back into that shell, and they can actually put a little, I think it's called an epigram. It's like a front door, basically. It's a temporary front door that they can put on the whole of that shell. So if you ever pick up a snare shell and it's covered with something, that is a temporary front door that a snake uses to keep people like you from poking around into that snale shell.

Yeah, and I saw that some of them have denticles on there, sharp tooth-like projections, so that if a predator tries to come in there after them, they'll get all torn up.

Oh, on the epigram?

Yeah, it's like those reverse tire damage things at a car rental parking lot. It's like that from what I understand.

That's pretty cool. It also keeps them moist because what a snake does not want to do is dry out because once again, a snake is basically a slug with a helmet on.

Right. I'd like to talk a little bit about the misconceptions of how the snale body is arranged if we can.

Let's do it.

Inside that shell is the actual body of the snale. What we see as the head and the tail is actually the head, true, but what looks like the tail is actually like the heel of its foot. That's what it's moving around on, is its foot, right? A single foot. Exactly. And so above on top of that foot is the whole body, and all that is encased in the shell. And what's weird is there's one opening that the... What did you say covers the opening?

I think it's called an epigram.

I'm.

Sorry, I've been saying epigram. Epifram. Epifram.

Okay, got you. So what the epifram covers is called the aperture. And on land snails, there's one aperture. There's one way in, one way out. And because all of their body is tucked up in the shell, they still got to poop, they still got to breathe, they still have to do all the stuff that requires the outside atmosphere. And so what they've done is they've figured out how to double their bodies around so that their head and their tail, including their anus, are basically right next to one another at the aperture, at the opening of their shell.

Yeah, on top of their head. This is something called torsion, which means to twist. If you've heard of something, you've heard of torsion before, probably.

Yeah, Chubby Checker was going to call his dance The Torsion. He's like, He just doesn't have the right ring. Let's do the torsion. Right. A traveler from the future came back in time and told him, No, we should call this The Twist, rocked out the high school dance, and that was history.

That's pretty good. Did you think of that one beforehand?

No, no.

Oh, okay.

No, I didn't. I've just gotten that good this late in the year.

I love it. So, yeah, that body basically doubles back 180 degrees on top of itself. There's a lot of debate. I mean, should we get into that? The great torsion debate?

Yeah, we can at least touch on it, sure. It's almost impenetrable if you're not a malecologist.

Yeah, I would say so. So as far as when tortion emerged, they're not exactly sure because you can't tell from a fossil whether or not... You can find a fossil of a shell, but the torsion is happening within the shell, so you can't really tell if it's been tortured? Is that even a verb?

I don't know. Or torted? I was going to say torted. I didn't look it up, though. I think torted, right? Let's say torted.

Yeah, I think it's torted. You can't really tell if it's been torted by looking at a fossil. There's just been a lot of debate. Obviously, this happened for a reason. No one knows exactly what that was. Like you mentioned at the beginning, some of the old farmer's tales, one of those is you might hear some gardening people say, Oh, well, well, actually, their asymmetry inside that shell provides balance, and that's just not true.

No, that's definitely not. There's also one that back in the day when they were all marine animals, because land snails evolved from marine aquatic snails, that it was a way to keep their hindquarters, their tails, all that stuff from being bitten by a predator. That one makes sense. It does make sense, it's probably not it. What the two biggest competing hypotheses are, the rotation hypothesis and the asymmetric hypothesis. The rotational hypothesis, the one that's been around since 1929, and it basically says that at some point in the past, some snare mutant came along and twisted around during its development, and it became naturally selective because it was advantageous because it allowed the snare to retract its head faster. Whereas before it would have had to retract the tail and then the head. Now it could retract the head because that's all it had to retract.

Yeah, but that was just like a spontaneous thing, right?

That's what they think. But it's just such a bizarre thing to have happen, especially in a single mutation. Because, again, what we're talking about is during the larval development, a snare's body, it moves counterclockwise to 180 degrees. And so its circulatory and nervous system forms a figure eight inside the shell. It's not all just packed in there straight, it's all over the place. And because of that weird torsion thing, the entire right side of its anatomy, including its organs, are just not there. It's all left side organ stuff. It all just got moved over toward the inside of the shell because the right side is pressed up against the shell itself. And it's all because of torsion, and they just cannot figure out why that would have happened in the past. And clearly, it could have happened as a mutation that obviously did. But why would it have been naturally selected for hundreds of millions of years? Which strongly implies that it was like an advantageous mutation?

Yeah, I would think so, right?

Yeah. That's this debate that's going on that... I mean, you really have to understand snake anatomy and evolutionary history to go much further in understanding that debate. That's pretty much what I could glean from the whole thing.

Yeah, and I would say, hesitate even getting into that debate. If you've had a couple of drinks at the bar and you're feeling a little squirrely and you want to dive into this hot conversation-.

Yeah, I would stare clear.

Just take a break, have another drink, and just relax.

Yeah, or maybe it's time for you to go home.

Right. Yeah, get a car to take you home, or walk, or whatever. Yeah.

So that's the thing. Just be very careful. That's the thing. Snales tort, and we're not sure exactly why, but what we do know, the upshot of it is that their body is double back on itself, and their anus and their head are essentially right next to each other.

Yes, exactly. They also have a mouth, and inside that mouth is something called a radula. It has teeth on it, and it's like a tongue. And if you look at a male and they turn those two little tentacles to look back at you, that's because they have eyes mounted on either one or two pairs of tentacles, and they can look at you. They can't hear you. They don't have ears. From what I saw, snails are basically deaf, but they can see you.

They can see you. And depending on the species, there's different types of eyes. Some have very simple eyes where they can detect changes in light and dark or maybe movement. But there's some kinds, I think, that have the ability to see you, to focus on you. And because they're on the ends of those stalks, they can retract the eyes themselves in the stalk and then the stalk into the head and then the head into the shell. And then when they want to see if danger is gone, they can peek one of those stalks out from the shell and look around. -that's awesome. -isn't that cool?

That's pretty cool. -yeah. -i love it. There's also the mantle, and the mantle will come up quite a bit. The best I could figure is that mantle is that area around the rim of the shell that connects the foot and the head to the shell itself, right?

Yeah, and it's also whatever holds all of our organs and guts in place, that membrane is very analogous to the mantle tissue of the male because it holds all the organs in place, but it also does something really important. It secretes all of the stuff that eventually is built into the shell itself.

That's right.

Are we at the shell part, do you think?

You know what? This is a good... We're 20 minutes in. I think we should take a break because that shell formation is quite a cliffhanger. Okay. We'll be right back after this.

When Walter Isaacson set out to write his biography of Elon Musk, he believed he was taking on a.

World-changing figure. That night, he was deciding whether or not to allow Starlink to be enabled to allow a sneak attack on Crimea.

What he got was a subject who also sowed chaos and conspiracy.

I'm thinking it's idiotic to buy Twitter because he doesn't have a fingertips feel for social, emotional networks.

And when I sat down with Isaacson five weeks ago, he told me how he captured it all.

They have cans of spray paint, and they're just putting big X's on machines. And it's almost like kids playing on the playground. Just chews them up left, right and center. And then like, Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde, he doesn't even remember it. Getting to bars doesn't excuse being a total, but I want the reader to see it in action.

My name is Evan Ratliff, and this is on Musk with Walter Isaacson. Join us in this four-part series as Isaacson breaks down how he captured a vivid portrait of a polarizing genius. Listen to Ayn Musk on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Cheryl McCleom, host of the Cold Case Podcast, Zone 7. Join us every Wednesday to hear cases like the Long Island serial killer. Here, Kari Lawson, daughter of the notorious serial killer, BTK, weigh in on the accused Long Island serial killers children.

You show genuine interest, and you can't fake it, but these guys can see right through to your soul. You have to be walled off, prepared. And if you don't know your stuff, they're going to just call you out and they're going to be like, Nope, I'm talking to somebody else. I'm not talking to you.

Here, great insight from one of New York City's finest, Detective Joe Jackalone, a cold case expert.

You know, as well as I do, cops weren't even aware of it back then, so they're going to have some difficulty putting those cases together unless, of course.

He confesses. Listen to his own seven with Cheryl McCleom on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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All right, so we promised to talk to you a little bit about the shell. A snare shell is beautiful. You should never, ever, ever smash a snake shell or a snake because that's animal cruelty, and it's a terrible thing to do, so just don't do it. But it is basically, there's a little bit of protein in there, but it's mainly something called calcium carbonate. And it is, like you said earlier, secreted by that mantle tissue, and it builds up over time. If you look at the center part of that shell, that's the oldest part of the shell. You can tell a snake's age by how big that shell is, and that's also the hardest part of the shell because it's been around longer. So they just keep adding material along that outer edge little by little as it expands outward. And that is why the outer edge of a snare shell will be much more breakable than the inside harder part.

That makes sense. The oldest part is the closest to the center. Apparently also, I didn't realize this, they're born with a tiny shell already attached. They just grow it over time by secreting. Starter shell? Exactly. Isn't that cute? They're born like little tiny baby snails, like that pre-formationism theory from our things we used to believe before the scientific method episode.

That's right.

I also said, Chuck, the mantle tissue holds all the important guts and stuff like that in place. The way that snails breathe is through the mantle cavity. They have blood vessels in there, but they breathe using a primitive, I don't want to say lung, I think that's a stretch, but basically they have an opening.

It's called a lung. I've seen it called a lung in diagrams.

Okay, so I've also seen it called a pneumostome. It's essentially a breathing port that they can open and close using their muscles that takes in air and exhales air. But it's pretty neat and it's right there next to their head, right there at the aperture where everything else that needs to be outside is.

Yeah, and if we're talking about sea snails, like I said, we're not going to get too into them, but they can have similar body parts in terms of breathing, or they can also have gills upfront as well. Yeah.

One of the things snails are most famous for is their mucus, right? Yeah.

That.

Is apparently secreted by the foot. And as the foot moves along, it's just a series of muscles that just propel as they ripple, propel the snare along. But they lay down a trail of mucus that does a lot of different things. For one, it allows the snare to do some Spiderman-esque moves, like just crawl right up the side of a building because it's very strong.

It's glue-like. Yeah. It's funny because it can be glue-like or act as a lubricant.

Exactly. Which is.

Pretty.

Remarkable. Yeah, so yeah, it also separates the snare from the rest of the world that it's running over. It's strong like glue, but it also allows the snare to move smoothly, and it also protects the snare' body from sharp things that it might be crawling over, slowly crawling over. And it also keeps the moisture locked inside, so much so that snare mucin, as we'll has been used for millennia as a skin thing. If you have very dry skin and you can get your hands on snare mucin or mucus, it will cure your dry skin.

Yeah, I mean, that's what keeps theI mean, that and other things is what keeps that snare moist. So if it's keeping the snare alive, then imagine what it can do for your.

Crow's feet. Exactly.

I don't think we said what it was actually made of. It's enzymes, peptides, proteins, trace minerals, and it's pretty remarkable stuff. It's the tell-tale sign is when you see that stuff on the sidewalk, and just the term, snail trail itself, that snotty, glistening, shiny, snail trail has become part of the lexicon as a stand-in for other things at times.

Yeah, for sure. One of the other things that the snail trail, the mucus trail does is it says, Hey, sailor, come this way. Because it's one way that snails find one another in a mate, which is surprising that they mate because they're hermaphroditic. But all snails, or most species of land snails, are equipped with both male and female sex organs. When they come together to mate, there's no telling who's who or who's doing what, because in the end, both of them often come away with fertilized eggs. Yeah.

I mean, to me, this section is the most remarkable stuff about snails. How they reproduce is just amazing. They are hemaphrodetic because, and it just makes sense, if you're moving 0.5 inches per second, you would die out as a species if a male had to search for a female or the other way around. So they basically just double their chances of finding somebody within 10 or so that they're wandering around. I mean, they move more than that within a lifetime, obviously. But if it's that time of year, which is what, like autumn?

Sure, autumn and spring.

Autumn and spring. They're going to wander around. They're going to find another snare. They're going to dance around each other. And that just means very slowly circle each other for, I saw 4-6 hours. I saw the whole thing can take up to 12 hours. It's a very, obviously, as you would imagine, a very slow process.

It is slow, but it's really involved. They are really into it while they're going at it.

Yeah, and this is before they're going at it. This is when they're just sizing each other up.

They're.

Getting steamed. They're touching tentacles. They're biting each other's lips. Things are getting really pretty hot and heavy in there. And then they have something that is amazing. I don't know of any other animal that has something like this. They have something called what they call a love dart. A love dart only forms after the first mating, so you have to have at least a little bit of sexual experience to even form a love dart. They take about a week to form, and you don't always have to have one to mate, because if you've used up your Love dart and then within the week you want to go at it again, you can still do that. It's not necessary for reproductive production, but it helps in reproduction. They form in the dart sack and is stored in a dart sack. And if you look at it, it is a little dart. It's got this little sharp harpoon-like tip, and it says they shoot it, but it doesn't fly through the air. It's more like they stab one.

Another with it. Oh, I imagine it like and then just hailing a couple of feet and then sproying.

That would be great. It's more like a stabbing, but apparently it's very imprecise. This hydraulic pressure builds up as they circle and bite each other's lips, and then they shoot this thing out at each other. I think about a third of the time, it doesn't even do what it's intended to do, which we'll get to in a sec, but it can pierce organs. It can go all the way through the head and out the other side. So it's really crazy. It's a weird adaptation.

Yeah, I know it's super weird. I think what's most weird about it to me is there's other animals that do that to deliver sperm, that's not what the snails are doing. These love darts deliver other hormones that help protect the sperm as it makes its way to the eggs to fertilize. It's like a really clumsy, superfluous, extra step that, like you said, doesn't even... They miss a lot of the time. They still manage to fertilize eggs. It's just a very strange thing that they do. But it's part of this really long, really slimy, courtship mating process that they get involved in. Then the sex itself is like just one rubs its foot against the other foot, and there you go.

They say, Who's pregnant? Which and they go, I don't know, maybe.

Both of us. Yeah, both of us.

Actually, can it be both?

Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Both can walk away with fertilized eggs after this.

Yeah, and I think they can hatch up to 450 eggs per year. That doesn't take very long, actually, right? In the gestation period, it can be really short, right?

For some species, especially in captivity, it can be 24 hours. Others, it seems like the outside is four weeks, and usually in the wild, it's like two to four weeks for gestation.

Yeah. Once those little guys are born, they may immediately start eating the rest of the eggs as their first meal.

Yeah, it's a bummer, especially because leading up to it, it's so cute. This little tiny snare with its little tiny shells is inside its egg, and it starts tapping its way out until it cracks through the egg, and then it gruesomely eats its siblings very quickly. Sometimes it'll eat smaller siblings that have already hatched, not just the eggs. What I didn't realize, though, is that some, and that's actually not all snare species, that's ones that will eat eggs, but for the most part, they'll eat just vegetation.

The.

Snare parent will often stay nearby to provide protection for the young snale hatchlings for a.

Little while. Yeah, they hang out for.

A while, right? Yeah. I did not realize that was I thought it was pretty cool.

Yeah, they can hang out for up to three months together while the parents are protecting them. Like you said, they're born with that little baby shell and just gets bigger and bigger. Did we talk about how long they can live?

No, we didn't. It's pretty spectacular.

Yeah, I mean, in the wild, they can live up to five years, which that shocked me, quite frankly.

Yeah, it really makes you feel bad for all those snails you've accidentally stepped on after a rainy evening. I know.

You hope at least they.

Were old. Yeah, exactly. They had their time.

Yeah. Five years is a pretty long time in the wild, I think. But in captivity, they can live up to 25 years, which is astounding.

Yeah. There's a really great little short documentary called The Strange and Wonderful World of the Snale Wrangler. It's on YouTube. It's about this woman who takes photos of her male friends in little miniature settings, human settings. It's really cute. She talks about one of her male companions that she's been with for 10 years. When you think of it like that, snails are just so… They're off doing their own thing. They live in a world far different from ours. Even though we share the same geography, it's just a different world. When you cross paths with one, you're like, Hey, alien, and they're probably like, Hey, giant alien, and that's it. The idea that they're there in that same patch, as long as you are in some cases, if you live at a house for 10 years, a snare might have lived there just as long as you did for the same time. You shared that with them that whole time. They're not just these anonymous, generic animals running around. Anything that lives that long, there's just something more substantial to it than you would think initially.

Are you saying a snake has a soul?

I think it's pretty clear, yes.

All right, so snails are doing their things. I love this account that Allison found that was a scientist from Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum of Natural History that said, Snails are leaky bags of water that survive on dry land. And it almost sounds like they're saying they happen to survive. Because it doesn't seem like a snake was really made for that environment, but they survived anyway, because snails really need to stay moist. A snake drying out just like a slug means certain death. So even though there are snails in the desert, you're mainly going to find snails in more moist areas. We're going to say that word quite a bit, I apologize.

Yeah, I was going to say, unlike humans, moist is a snake's favorite word.

It really is. They do live on the ground mainly if they're terrestrial snails, but they can live in trees. But they really like it down there on the ground in that moist outer layer of decaying plant matter. They're pretty active at night because things can get wetter overnight, as we know, when you wake up with morning Dew and stuff like that. So they're just down there on the ground, sometimes eating meat and other snails and other eggs. But generally, what they're doing is eating and munching down on that either decaying plant matter or if you have a garden, they will also munch down on your nice new.

Fresh plants. Yeah, and as we'll see that they run afoul of gardeners for that reason. But just hold your horses, gardeners, put your rubber mallets away for a second until we get to that part and talk you out of it. But in that leaf litter layer, they do a lot of really important stuff. They are in charge of recycling plant matter, decaying stuff. They love decaying everything. In addition to live plants, too, they love dead plants. When they're doing that, they're like recycling nutrients. They eat that stuff, they break it down and they poop it out. That means it's bio-available in the soil for plants to use, for other animals to come along, and to lick the dirt, that thing. They also are really important in the food web because calcium is not really easy necessarily to come by in food. At least if you're like an invertivrate or a mammal or something like that, if you eat a snale shell, you get a burst of calcium. So that snale shell is really important. And then they're also chock-full of protein themselves. So they're like a really important part of any food web in the ecosystem that they live in.

Yeah, they're also moving stuff around down there. I mean, plant matter and that outer layer that just sits and sits isn't great, but if you've got thousands of snails moving around through it, it's going to help drainage out, it's going to help keep distributing those nutrients. It can help move dirt and clay even. That's very important. All that stuff is great. And they can actually help pollinate, too. Some of them are nighttime pollinators. They get in there with that plant nectar, they eat that stuff, and then they poop that out as well.

Yeah, pretty crazy. I had no idea that they were pollinators. It just makes them even more important. You know what I mean?

Totally.

So I think, Chuck, we take a break, and then we come back and talk about why you should leave the snails alone. How about that?

Let's do it.

When.

Walter Isaacson set out to write his biography of Elon Musk, he believed he was taking on a.

World-changing figure. That night, he was deciding whether or not to allow Starlink to be enabled to allow a sneak attack on Crimea.

But what he got was a subject who also sowed chaos and conspiracy.

I'm thinking it's idiotic to buy Twitter because he doesn't have a fingertips feel for social, emotional networks.

And when I sat down with Isaacson five weeks ago, he told me how he captured it all.

They have cans of spray paint, and they're just putting big X's on machines. And it's almost like kids playing on the playground. Just chews them up left, right, and center. And then like, Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde, he doesn't even remember it. Getting the bars doesn't excuse being a total. But I want the reader to see it in action.

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You know, as well as I do, cops weren't even aware of it back then.

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One thing that we said earlier, Chuck, was that snails run afoul of gardeners. The reason why is because they will eat a lot of plants. The burgundy male, also known as the Roman snale, the one that's mostly used for Escargo these days. They weigh 20 grams-ish as an adult, but they'll eat six grams of plant matter in a day. You have a bunch of burgeony snails running around your garden, they're going to eat your hostas, they're going to eat your seedlings, they're going to tick you off. There's a lot of animosity that gardeners have toward snails and slugs, too. People have been trying things to get rid of snales for a very long time. The problem is, number one, you don't actually want to get rid of snales, especially native snales or common garden snales. Number two, the methods typically used are chemical and they can harm other life as well. So you basically want to leave the snails alone as much as possible.

Yeah, there is some information here that Allison got from the Royal Horticultural Society in Britain, and they say, Don't use chemical pesticides, please. If you want to get rid of your snails, you can try and do so naturally by introducing predators. I guess you could throw a bunch of garden beetles out there and see what happens. Just say whoever walks out of here alive deserves to live. It's like the Thunder Dome. Exactly. Two enter, one leaves.

As a matter of fact, if you're bored, just go ahead and build a small scale replica of the Thunder Dome and put the snare and the beatle in.

You sicko. That's right. But then you have to act like Tina Turner and use that voice when, Hello, raggedy snare. That's what you would have to.

Call it. Okay. That was a great impression, by the way, Chuck. Thank you. In addition to putting them in a death match against Beatles, you can go pick them out yourself. If you go out at night with the flashlight, you can pick up plenty of snails. The thing is-.

Put them in your.

Neighbor's garden? Yeah, exactly. Especially if they're a jerk, hosta grower, they'll really drive them crazy. Now, what you want to do is put them on your compost pile because, again, they like decaying stuff and they're really useful, so they'll be pretty happy there. Yeah. You can also trap them by carving out melons or grapefruit or something like that, and they'll be attracted to that. It's just basically acts as a trap. You just throw it back on your compost pile the next day and there you go.

All.

Right. Some people do say... Some people still use pesticides. Of course. If you're organic, you use ferric phosphate, which interrupts their ability to digest. They die of starvation in a few days. There's another one called metaldehyde. That is hardcore stuff. It desiccates them. They end up dehydrating to death. It's banned in the EU because they consider it acceptably harmful to birds and mammals. Of course, it is. Here in the US, you can use it as much as you like. Of course, you can. And they use it for the giant African landsnail in particular because, again, metaldehyde is hardcore stuff. It turns out that the giant African landsnail is a hardcore snare.

Yeah, it's a hardcore snare. Obviously, it would be an invasive species here in North America. These are the big ones, the one that look like a Bunny, I thought. They can be eight inches long. They eat more than 500 species of plant. They will eat everything in their paths, including in Florida. They're a real problem in Florida, apparently. They will eat the stucco off your house to get more calcium, and they pass disease along to people and animals.

Yeah, rat, lung worm.

Yeah, meningitis. I see that they can carry a host of parasites or they can host a host of parasites, some of which is good for the snare because it keeps animals from eating them. So it's like a defense mechanism. But that can be harmful to people at times as well.

Yeah, you don't want rat, long worm. Like you said, it can create meningitis in humans. So it's best to not really handle snails with your bare hands, and especially don't eat the snare alive from your garden. That's a really bad idea.

Yeah, but people actually collect, and I'm not sure if that's how they got here, but people collect these, as an illegal pet, these giant African.

Land snails. That's my understanding that they were imported as illegal pets, at least to South Florida.

What in.

The world.

Are people doing?

I don't know. But they also have shown up in some other places, including Hawaii and Polynesia. And somehow they got from Florida to these places, probably through the illegal pet trade. And so in just typical human fashion in the '50s, people said, Well, wait, there's this male called a rosy wolf male, and it's a predator. It's a literal male predator. Let's just import a bunch of them to take care of this giant African land male because I'm sure nothing will possibly go wrong because of this plant. It's foolproof, and that's what they did. As a result, Hawaii has lost almost all of its native male species in the wild because the rosy wolf male was like, I'd just rather eat these other kinds of snails and leave the giant African male alone.

Yeah, these things are pretty creepy, though. I imagine there's got to be some Nat Geo video of the wolf male, likefollowing its prey, because for a snare, they're moving pretty fast. When they're tracking something, they go double to triple their normal speed. They will go up a tree after something. They will go underwater after something for a little while until they need to come up. It seems like they're just tenacious little fellows, and they will go after something until they catch it.

Yeah, and they like to swallow other snails whole, including their shell. There's a malcologist named Harry G. Lee who dissected a rosy wolf male and found 13 other snails' shells in its gut.

Yeah, that's a lot. It's like in a Louisiana state license plate.

Yeah, exactly. You don't want these things on your beautiful, pristine island, and once you bring them in, they're going to cause all sorts of problems. That's what that Goodbye Snale video was about. It's definitely worth watching. But the rosy wolf male is definitely considered invasive. What I didn't know, Chuck, is the common garden snale, the one we're so familiar with, is considered invasive in the United States. Cornu aspersom. That is the common garden snale. It was originally imported because it was the one that used to be S-cargo. Some of them escaped from farms and set up shop in the wild. Now it's called the common garden snale because it became so prolific.

Yeah, and they don't know when people started eating Escargo. I think Escargo is the French name for that edible snale and also doubles as the name of the dish.

Right. Yeah, I think you're right. Like French fries. I think it's both.

But people like this stuff. Growing up, you always heard about S Cargo was like this, as a kid, the first fancy, weird food you'd heard of, probably.

Like do the wealthy have no bounds thing? Right.

Yeah, exactly. Then we've got all signs. Should we finish up with just a bunch of cool factoids?

Yeah, for sure.

Well, jewelry, snare shells have always or have long been used as jewelry for humans as some of the oldest-known human jewelry. They found this stuff, like necklaces and stuff, made of sea snare shells that date back at least 120,000 years.

That's nuts, man.

Yeah? What else?

The author, Patricia Highsmith, who was a very interesting person in her own right. She wrote The Strangers on a Train and the talented Mr. Ripley novels. She was a snare pal like the Snale Wrangler in that video that I talked about. And like the snare wrangler in that video that I talked about, she would go out in public with her snails as companions. There's a story of Patricia Highsmith at a party who was revealed to have dozens of snails in her purse who she brought so she'd have someone to talk to, her snare friends.

Yeah. How about that?

How about that? That's what snare people do, is that thing? Yeah.

This is really interesting, is they've been studying how snails might help us figure out Alzheimer's disease. From what I found is we've talked about Alzheimer's before, which is when you have these amyloid plaque buildup or plaques, I guess, that build up on the brain tissue. And they don't exactly know how it causes memory loss, but this is what they're trying to figure out with the snails. These plaques are formed from a protein called amyloid beta, which we've talked about, or a beta. And they have taken a beta and put it on otherwise very healthy pond snails. I have no idea why they chose, why they thought the pond snare was a good candidate to begin with.

They have a terrible lobbying group.

Maybe that's what it is. But they put this abeta on these healthy pond snails, and within 24 hours, they show evidence that they have harmed their memory, basically. But the finding is that they haven't found any damage to the brain tissue, no cell loss, no brain tissue damage at all. So basically what they have... The result of all that is that a beta by itself can trigger the memory loss, and it's not from damage to the brain or a deterioration of the brain.

Or the plaque buildup, right?

Yeah, exactly. They think it's a specific pathway for memory that's being damaged and not the brain itself.

Thank you, pond snails.

I know, it's amazing.

I also saw it goes the other way, too. The common garden snails mucus has been found to be bioactive as an anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, and antiepoptic, which means it prevents cell death.

Oh, wow.

They think that they're figuring out how to turn that into a drug to treat Alzheimer's, too. So snails are just coming at us with the one, two, punch to battle Alzheimer's disease.

Yeah.

God bless them.

I love it.

Speaking of God bless them, if you're subscribed to the West African Yoruba religion, you would say God bless the snare because they're associated with Obatala, the Sky Father, as well as the Orishas, collective deities to whom the land male, the giant African land male in particular, is sacred.

I got to read this last thing. This is the only last thing I got.

Okay.

This Nigerian snare recipe?

Yeah.

I'm not into eating snails. They call this Congo meat. It's got red pepper, javanieros, garlic, onion.

And.

Then it's seasoned with bayenne and ground crayfish.

Yeah, you're trying to tell me at javaniero, but it does sound extremely interesting. I would try it. I'd just be like, Can you leave the javaniero out?

Too hot.

Too hot. Yeah, too.

Hot for the hot tub?

Yeah, too hot for TV. I've got one more thing, Chuck.

Let's hear it.

There is a weird thing that started popping up at the end of the 13th century in Northern France. If you look through illuminated manuscripts, meaning manuscripts that have the doodles in the margins and all that, like a mad magazine.

You.

Will start to notice there are pictures of knights battling giant snails. Oh, yeah, that's so interesting. It lasted for 100 or so years as a trend. It actually came back again for a little while in the 15th century, and no one has any idea what they were trying to say. One of the theories is that it was just hilarious that it was meant to be a comic relief while you're reading this heavy text or whatever. You just look over and you're like, That's a knight battling a snare.

Right.

Yeah. Other people say that the snails symbolize something like superhuman strength because they carry their house on their back. I poopoo that one. I like this, the comic relief one.

People were just like, Hey, this is funny. Look at this. This knight's fighting a snake.

Yeah, this will be good for a laugh, said the medieval monk.

Very interesting.

I say so too. If you want to know more about snales, everybody, go forth, research them. You could do worse than watching the strange and wonderful world of the Snale Wrangler and Goodbye, Snales. If you see a snake in your garden, and especially if it's not doing anything to harm things, you just tip your hat to it and say, Good day, snare. You could be as much as 5-10 years old.

That's.

Right. Chuck said that's right. That means it's time for listener mail.

Yeah, we're going to do a correction. I wish we could get this one out sooner because we're going to continue to get emails about the great isotope ion.

My.

Goodness. -issue, which I didn't know was an issue. We got a lot of them, but this is from nick Lufty, a PhD student at UC Irvine. Nick is getting a PhD in quantum chemistry.

Oh, wow! Man, I want to hang out with you, nick.

nick listens with his wife, Dina?

Hey, Dina.

And said, Can't wait till we're in town for a show, but if you're at Irvine, I mean, Irvine, how far is that from San Francisco? I have no idea. I mean, it's in the state of California, so it's got to just be like an hour.

Away, right? Exactly, yeah. Everything in California is an hour away.

Come see us. Hey, guys, wanted to offer a slight correction about the periodic table. Don't hate me. When you mentioned the different weighted averages being a result of different isotopes, you mentioned that it is the loss or gain of an electron that constitutes the different isotopes. This is actually incorrect. What you've defined is an ion, not an isotope. It is the varying number of neutrons that makes up the different flavors of isotopes. This is the thing that makes carbon dating possible. I love that episode, by the way. Last thing, guys, chemistry as a whole is a very inaccessible branch of Stem. I hated it. I failed my first chemistry class, and one day, our professor was out sick and the chair of the chem department came to sub in and she implored us to get a PhD in chemistry. I said to myself, She must be nuts. Here I am 10 years later, and I am clearly the one who is nuts. The long and short of this last bit is to never give up on science. Nice. That, again, is from nick, I think it said, Lufty, but it's actually, Latfi.

Okay, like Chipotle or Chipote.

Yeah, that's right.

Thanks a lot, nick. We'll call him nick L. From now on. Yeah. That was a great one. Everybody who wrote in to let us know, we appreciate you for doing that because we like to get things right. That was definitely a slip up and it is something that we needed to correct for sure. Good job, Chuck, picking that one.

Yeah.

Well, if you want to get in touch with us and let us know we got something wrong or we got something right or tell us something about yourself or your dog or pet goat, doesn't matter. You can send it via email to stuffpodcast@iheartradio. Com.

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Walter Isaacson set out to write about a world-changing genius in Elon Musk and found a man addicted to chaos and conspiracy.

I'm thinking it's idiotic to buy Twitter because he doesn't have a fingertips feel for social, emotional networks.

The book launched a thousand hot takes, so I sat down with Isaacson to try to get past the noise.

I like the fact that people who say I'm not as tough on Musk as I should be are always using anecdotes from my book to show why we should be tough on Musk.

Join me, Evan Ratliff, for On Musk with Walter Isaacson. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Cheryl McClellum, host of the Cold Case podcast, Zone 7. Join us every Wednesday to hear cases like the Long Island serial killer.

You show genuine interest and you can't fake it, but these guys can see right through to your soul. You have to be prepared. If you don't know your stuff, they're going to just call.

You out. Listen to Zone 7 with Cheryl McClellum on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Get ready, because Aaron and Carissa from Calmdown have got something special coming up at State Farm Park in iHeartLand, a reading of Twists in Night Before Christmas. They'll infuse it with stories and memories tying into the holiday spirit. Don't miss this special event. Starting Thursday, December seventh at 7:00 PM Eastern at State Farm Park in iHeartLand and Fortnite. Available all weekend long. Afterwards, stick around and check out all the exciting things State Farm has to offer. Say hi to Jake from State Farm on the big screen and try to beat Jake's score at the parkour mini game. Visit iheartradio. Com/iheartland to start playing today.