Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Narwhals

Episode Date: June 12, 2023

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why narwhals are secretly incredibly fascinating.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the new SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5

Narwhals. Known for being pointy. Famous for being unicorn-y. Nobody thinks much about them, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why narwhals are secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt, and I'm not alone. I'm joined by my co-host, Katie Golden. Katie, perhaps this is too big of a question starting out, but what is your relationship to or opinion of narwhals? Wow, narwhals. They are my personal unicorn. I love them. They are fascinating animals. I mean, I love all cetaceans, all whales, all dolphins. I think they are really, really interesting. But narwhals, both narwhals and belugas have a special place in my heart for

sort of the weirdos of the whale world. I just love how funky and fun they get with it. And narwhals in particular, of course, we know about the narwhal tusk. Everybody loves them for it. But then when you delve into that tusk, it's so much more weird and fascinating and mysterious than you'd even think with basically the real life unicorn. Like, is that tusk magic? Maybe. I'm sure we're going to talk about it. I also really love their connection to sort of the cryptozoology thing of mythical beasts and how people would see this tusk or see this whale and think of unicorns, think of fantastical beasts. And I think that just they are they are really, really cool. And yeah, I'm so excited to talk about it because I know some stuff about narwhals. But, you know, I feel like there is a lot of room for me to learn more.

This was such an interesting thing to research. And there is so much to know about them. Yeah. And thank you very much to Dakoop Bear on the Discord and other people who voted for it. This is yet another topic chosen by supporters of the show, listeners of the show. Yeah, I'm really glad they picked it because oddly, I was relatively neutral about narwhals before researching. I thought they were kind of an internet thing, like how the internet was all about bacon

or whatever. Oh, right. I was like, okay, sure. Oh, yeah. But now researching them, I get it. They're amazing. I was like, okay, sure. But now researching them, I get it.

They're amazing. There was this period of time in internet culture where we would just pick a thing like a banana or bacon or a narwhal and just, it would become a joke just to mention that thing. Yeah. And I don't know, I think we were a little too high off our own supply at that time. I'm sure Zoomers think that's incredibly silly and cringy that millennials were like that. But yeah, like you would be on the Internet and just be like, ha ha, a narwhal. And then, you know, people would be saying, rolling on the floor, laughing my ass off about this narwhal just because it's i don't know uh it was a dark time the other animal one was that shiba inu that became dogecoin like people would just post that shiba inu and it was like haha hilarious and i was like i it is a somewhat funny dog it's a dog but it turns out narwhals are scientifically amazing and really cool so that's great man that poor that shiba in, like, they are a very cute dog breed.

But now whenever I see that thing, I just get sort of full body yuck because of the association with like Dogecoin and Elon Musk. I can't, like, I hate, I feel like I hate that dog now and I feel bad about it because it's not the dog's fault. Yeah, not at all. He's just a little guy. He didn't do anything. He didn't ask to be the face of the dumbest currency in the world.

We're talking about narwhals. Narwhals. On every episode, as you know, our first fascinating thing about the topic is a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. This week, that's very purpose-built. It's in a segment called... Because maybe it's gonna be so fascinating. And after all, it's Stats on Narwhals. Oh my god, I was so hoping that Wonderwall would get turned into Narwhal. Yes. I'm so proud of you.

He's all grown up making Narwhal puns. I'm so proud. Hey, I'm just a vessel. I'm a vessel for Johnny Davis's great idea. And it was great. We have a new name for this segment every week. Please make him as silly and wacky and bad as possible. Submit yours to Discord or to ZipPod at gmail.com.

I am brimming to excitement to find out the number, the first number associated with the narwhal. Is it infinity? Because that's how much I love narwhals. We're going to have a takeaway right away in the numbers, but it's very numerical. And its first number is up to 2.5 meters long, which is more than eight feet. Up to 2.5 meters long is the approximate length limit of a narwhal tusk.

Yeah. The big horn, so to speak. But, you know, that's pretty big. I'm going to say that's pretty big. You lie down next to one of those suckers and it's still going to be taller than you. Unless you're like, there's like maybe one person who's ever been that tall. Eight feet? Yeah, more than eight feet. Yeah, more than eight feet. There's been only a handful of human beings to get that tall.

I think his name was Robert Wadlow. They measured him at Ripley's Believe It or Not and stuff. Yeah, that's about it. And it's part of this immediate first takeaway about the thing probably everybody wants to know about. Takeaway number one. The narwhal's horn is actually a giant specialized record keeping tooth. Yes. It's a big tooth or tusk. This is the thing that I, this is the fact I love the most about the narwhal tusk.

It's not a horn and it's very weird because it's like, it's an adapted, I think, molar, right? But the thing is like, you might be wondering like, okay, it's a tooth. Well, why is there only one of them? And that's a really good question because it's weird. Yeah, this takeaway is big. There are a lot of things to discover about, again, it's a giant specialized record keeping tooth. People call it a horn. We might call it a horn from time to time, but it's really a tusk. Animal tusks are large teeth that go out of their mouths, and it's a big tooth. It also turns out the next number here is two, because that is the total number of teeth a narwhal has, including the tusk.

And it's really strange evolutionarily, apparently. They have two teeth. They're classified as a toothed whale, and their close relative is the beluga, which is another toothed whale. But the teeth are apparently vestigial. They don't really chew or bite their food. And then they still have these two teeth. One of them grows into a gigantic tusk, mainly in male narwhals. mainly in male narwhals. And then also there's a thing where in some male narwhals, the other tooth also becomes a tusk, and then they have two tusks. So that's going on with a few of them. Very rare, but yeah, it does happen.

But usually it's asymmetrical. Only one of them grows. Yeah. And yeah, you mentioned male narwhals, because I think that even though some females grow them, it's not that many. Apparently, it's about 3% of females. So if you see what we all mental internet picture a narwhal, if you see that it's probably male, and there's a chance it's female, National Geographic says even then the female big tusk is usually smaller than this male tusk. It's this adaptation that is a lot more specific than I realized.

And everyone calling it a horn, I just assumed it's like the myth of the unicorn. Like it's just a thing coming out of the skull, like deer antlers or something. But no, it's a tooth that around age one starts growing and then pokes through their face and out. Yeah, it's sort of like a walrus tusk, if that, instead of growing sort of down and out of its mouth, grew sort of more horizontal and then sort of pierced through its like face skin. Yeah, which is the X-Man Wolverine to me. It's very neat. And yet I had never really thought about tusks at all, even though I'm a big fan of elephants. I think boars are cool, even though the show Some More News on YouTube warns me about them. You know, there's a lot of tusks in the animal kingdom. And this is another tusk going on. It's a it's an enlarged tooth that sticks out. Yes. Yeah. And yeah, it's very interesting because it's like kind of got that weird sort of like twisty, spirally design.

It's not just sort of like a smooth, you know, big tooth. It really looks kind of like this weird, like mystical horn, even though, yes, it is technically just an overgrown tooth. Just really big. And that's right. It spirals. Apparently, it is technically just an overgrown tooth. Just really big. And that's right, it spirals. Apparently, it's usually a counterclockwise spiral. And one key source this week is the book The Golden Mole and Other Living Treasure. That's a book about animals by nonfiction writer Catherine Rundell. And she says that males usually grow their tusk around age one, and it gets longer and bigger for about 10 years is another number. And then I guess we have the number infinity too, because they also

keep growing that tusk for their whole life. It keeps replacing itself, getting a little bit bigger. Yeah, that's really interesting. Now you did mention, so they have this other tooth, and what's that doing? Is that just kind of sitting in its mouth in the narwhals where it doesn't really grow? Cause like we mentioned, there was some percent, very small percent of narwhals where both the teeth grow into tusks, these long tusks, but for the ones where it doesn't, is that tooth just kind of hanging out and relaxing and not doing anything? Apparently this is the biggest difference between narwhals and belugas. Belugas have about 40 teeth and more or less chew or bite their food. It's not precisely like humans, but they're using their teeth for stuff.

Narwhals, it is pretty much vestigial teeth. The analog I'm thinking of is a human tailbone. Like, it is for stuff, but we don't have tails. You know what I mean? Yeah, the tailbone is for bruising when you fall down. Yeah. That's its function. I think I could share this. Our buddy, Adam Todd Brown, one time injured his tailbone

and our buddy, Brett Rader, described it as a podcaster's ACL tear or other crucial injury because he got a sip for the podcasting, you know, it's real, it's real critical. Gotta ensure my tailbone, you know, cause like I get the most use out of it sitting all the time. Yeah. That on the mouth. That's, those are the moneymakers, the mouth and the tailbone. But, uh, but these narwhal teeth are not really there for anything anymore.

What narwhals do when they eat is they do not bite it or chew it. They powerfully suck food into their mouth in a way I am imagining like the video game character Kirby. They just get close enough to food and then suck it down into their bodies. Vacuum. That's really cool. into their bodies. Vacuum. That's really cool. That's a technique that there are a good number of aquatic animals, both sort of fish as well as, you know, like mammals that kind of use that suction. I think even belugas, even though they do have teeth, they are able to do some suction with food and then they also can chew it, but they can also use some suction. But yeah, that's interesting that they have completely gone past the need for teeth because they can just, they are such just, they are such powerful vacuums that they can

Dyson up their, their food as much as they want. And like, what, what is their diet? Is it small fish? Is it even smaller animals? It's a lot of meat. And it's a lot of especially what I would call bottom feeder kind of stuff. It's a lot of things from low depths of the ocean or the floor of the ocean around them. And they particularly like to be under parts of the ocean that have a layer of ice over it. So they spend a lot of time in the darkness, in low areas, sucking up a lot of fish and a lot of little squids and wiggly stuff. So they don't use their tusk as a skewer to kind of like make a kebab of fish and then feed their friends with that, their own tusk

kebab, as I had imagined they might eat. Yeah, because this takeaway we're talking about, also, it's a mysterious tooth. The purpose is theorized, but not definitely for sure known. And one myth that we know is not true is that skewer idea. I felt very silly needing to find out why, but scientists have thought about it. And if they're out here skewering food with their tusk, then they can't bring it down into their mouths. They don't have hands or whatever. So that is one reason they don't use this seemingly very spear-like tusk as a stabbing implement for kebabs.

That's why an elephant trunk is flexible because they can grab food and then bend it and put it in their mouth. Whereas the tusk, they really can't do that. It's, you know, that like analogy thing where it's like heaven. Sorry, no. Hell is where you're seated around the table and you all have really long spoons and the spoons are too long to eat your soup. And then heaven is the same room. But then everyone's nice and feeds each other. I guess narwhal hell is where they are all trying to use their tusks as skewers and they can't feed themselves.

But narwhal heaven is where they feed each other with their tusk kebabs. Except that none of that is scientific. So, yeah. It's too bad, though. I got to gotta tell you that's a very good analogy and i've never heard it in my life i it's there's a lot there wow that's cool i feel like that's something that's like one of those things that i heard at camp or or it's just very like corny kind of thing like yeah it's like hey you know and I'm I remember when I first heard this kind of thing it's like wait hell is just they give you long spoons why don't you hold the spoon closer to the you know you can just choke up on the spoon like you would a baseball

but I don't know like I guess hell is also for people who don't understand how spoons work I don't know anyways this proves all baseball fans go to heaven, I think. They understand choking up on the bat. Yeah. What you were saying earlier, I do love that their use of the tusk, right? We know it's not for like spearing food. I think that the evidence in terms of it being used for like combat that's that's not really well established either it's a there there are like these proposed theories but they're all kind of

mysterious which is wild to think about with such a huge common animal i mean it's like an animal we all maybe not common but an animal we all know about it's not some it's not like the binturong where it's like, wait, what's that? It's like every kid knows what an arwal is. And yet the purpose of its tusk, its most defining characteristic, we're still not exactly sure of. But Alex, what are some of the theories about what this tusk is used for? There's one pretty likely theory, and then there's one less likely, but not unproven, still plausible theory. Marshmallow roasting. It's s'mores and then regular marshmallows on their own. We don't know their taste,

you know? It could be either one. Right. We'll talk about other myths later, but the most plausible theory, the one that probably has the most people behind it, such as Professor Kristen Lydray of the University of Washington, it's a theory that the narwhal tusk is a sexual trait. Professor Lydray compares it to the antlers of a stag, the mane of a lion, or the feathers of a peacock. The idea is that this tusk is a large male body part to signal to other narwhals, hey, I am a sexually active and interesting narwhal. Right. It's like, as with a lot of these sexual characteristics, it's sort of an ornamentation. Birds have a lot of ornamentation, long tails, little doodly things on their heads, colorful things. And so under this theory, this would be sort of the whale version of that. You have this really long tooth, and it's flashy, it's showy.

Sometimes these theories are that, well, if you have such a big tooth, it means that you are physically fit. If you have such a big tooth, it means that you are physically fit. Sometimes the theory is just like, eh, you know, like the females noticed this trait when it was sort of a bigger tooth and they're like, oh, that's interesting. And then the more females select for it, the more sort of wildly large and ungainly it becomes because it's like this runaway selection. So there's a few ways that you can get to this place of having like a very weird and bold physical characteristic. But it's interesting because there are some female narwhals

that do have the tusks. But then again, you also see that in other species. So like with lions, there are maned female lions. So female lions who have a lion's mane, which is usually something that only the males have because, you know, nature is not these strict binary categories that are never different. Like, you know, nature can be more flexible, even though sometimes people don't see it that way, it's definitely true. That's incredible. And there's a lot of other ways this theory makes sense, too. It would explain why this tusk is primarily just in one gender of narwhal, because if it was for

some necessary survival application, you would think most narwhals or all narwhals would have it. And another thing they've observed is that in general, female narwhals have longer lifespans than males by a little bit. So if the tusk was keeping them alive, you would think the ones with tusks would live longer, but that's not what's going on. It's because the female narwhals drive better. I'm sorry. I'm a narwhal misandrist, but it's true. They ask for directions and they go the speed limit. I just had the most, the fireside mental picture of a narwhal in a car with the horn going straight through the windshield again.

Like, oh, I'm nuts. You know? Another thing they've observed in one very specific study is that male narwhal tusk length correlates positively with narwhal testicle size. It tends to match up if you have a bigger tusk, you have bigger testicles. And so that would also match signaling sexual readiness. That's really interesting because sometimes the inverse can be true in some species. So like there are in some cases, the males are like compensating for having, you know, smaller testicle size or actually the opposite where it's like you invest more in testicle size versus like, say, weapon size. Like this is the case in types of beetles that will have these like ornamentations that are like big horns or something that are actually sometimes for combat with other males.

Sometimes you'll see this inversely inverse relationship between the size of the weapon and testicle size. So, so the opposite can be true sometimes, but yeah, it's, it's interesting for it to be kind of correlated with this potential sign of like fecundity where it's like, okay, I have a bigger tusk. I have, you know, more storage capacity for my genetic material, which is to say big balls.

And so I, and so, hey, you know, ladies, what you think about that? And yeah, I mean, that's really interesting. We should fire up the old CifPod store at CifPod.store and make a bumper sticker for big vehicles of I have more storage capacity for my genetic material. You just get that on your any large vehicle can make it happen. I grant you permission for that bumper sticker. Let's make it happen. I grant you permission for that bumper sticker. Let's make it happen. Yeah. And this theory that's out there, there's also a stranger theory that primarily comes from a dentist at Harvard, you know, because it is a giant tooth. And this less plausible, but possible theory is that the tusk is a sensor for ocean conditions,

especially whether the water they're in is liable to freeze in a way they would like. Right, like the salinity of the water, which is correlated with like how likely it is to freeze. Exactly. Yeah, because isn't that based on the fact that this tusk is sort of like our typical tooth has this like hard outer layer of like enamel. And then as you go deeper in the tooth, it this sensory pulp uh which is why if you have a cavity or someone drills into your tooth without any pain control it hurts a lot because that's like you have this pulp of like sensory nerves um whereas so with the narwhal tusk the actually outside like it doesn't have that like outer enamel. It's actually kind of got a lot of holes in it, right? Exactly. And I said this takeaway is rich in numbers. The next

number is 10 million because one adult narwhal's tusk has 10 million nerve endings and they're all pretty much on the outside. According to this Maine Harvard dentist, he's Harvard dental school lecturer Martin Nui, the narwhal tusk is structured sort of like a human tooth turned inside out. I hate that. Exactly like Katie described. I hate putting it that way. When we think of a unicorn horn, we think it's hard. But no, it's like the most sensitive tooth you can imagine. I, I hate that so much, Alex, that you gave me the idea of like a human tooth

turned inside out. I'm, I'm angry that that sentence exists. Um, that sounds horrible. These poor narwhals. I mean, I guess, you know, like we think about that, but I guess, you know, they're probably the sensitivity in their brains and the way like how they interpret the signals coming from this tooth. the most sensitive tooth all the time because otherwise it's all all time it's narwhal hell like not even without the not even with the long spoons like they're just living in constant narwhal narwhal tooth hell that was hard to say narwhal tooth hell yeah that's like a warming up for stage theater tongue twister narwhal tooth hell hell. Narwhal tooth hell. Yellow baby Narwhal. Yeah, exactly right. This is one of those cases where it's very good that animals do not think and feel exactly the way we do.

Because this definitely, Narwhals definitely would not have continuously involved a horrendously painful tusk experience. That just doesn't make sense i would hope not if if there's any mercy in the universe that would not be the case i doubt it like they wouldn't be able to function they just yeah but yeah that's interesting because yeah so it seems like it could be this sensory organ right you have all of the, like, why would it be so vulnerable if you're not getting any sensory information there? Yeah, because even if this theory is not right about

a seawater sensing purpose, there are things we know that point to that. One is that the tusk, it's not just full of nerve endings and sensitive. It has channels in it for their tiny channels that seawater can enter. So theoretically, that gives extra ability to get nerves onto that seawater and sense stuff. And then also narwhals have been observed doing a behavior where they touch their tusks together. And visually, that looks like sword fighting fighting but it's not combat it's a non-aggressive rubbing tusks together it's just two bros rubbing tusks together right fellas is it gay if it's not it's just narwhal stuff sometimes you gotta bro down by rubbing tusks together no judgment see masculinity is funny and a narwhal tusk is funny and so you know here we are that's how it No judgment. then they can feel each other's tusk and the state of it, hardness, softness of it tells

you what the water was like, where that narwhal was previously, right? Like it's changing its state a little bit based on the water it was in. And so then that would be narwhals trading information about where they were just swimming and how icy or not icy it's going to be. It's kind of a stretch. And Professor Lydre at Washington specifically says this whole water sensor theory has no evidence behind it. Right. But it also could be a thing. And also both theories could be true. This could be

a sexual signal and a water sensor all at once. Apparently also it can bend about one US foot or more than 30 centimeters without breaking. It's got a solid core, but it's flexible, you know? And so based on that range of features, it's probably not for combat, probably not for digging for food or stabbing food. There's been one observation of narwhals bonking fish with it to like stun them to suck them up but that might just be a creativity that's probably not the evolutionary purpose of of this item i think that's just fun i think that's just playing with their food because if you had a tusk why don't you bonk a fish i mean come on who amongst us wouldn't sure it's just amazing that we aren't sure right yeah like we know a lot of things this tusk can do. We know a

lot of things about it. They are all even more amazing than I expected. I basically expected a tough unicorn horn, but there's so much more going on. And so it's a, it's a feature that science continues examining because there's so much there. And then last tusk feature to talk about is that there is recent chemical analysis of tusks that lets us discover more about how the ocean is doing in general. Wired Magazine covered a study in Current Biology, published 2021, where an international team studied 10 narwhal tusks from Greenlands. And they were able to use the composition of the tusks to measure an increase in mercury in the ocean, and also measure a change in the diet of the narwhals, probably based on ice melt. They were able to measure the stable isotopes of carbon and nitrogen

that were residually in the tusks from the narwhals' diet. And from there, they sketched out the habitat and trophic level of the prey narwhals ate in those years. And they found that starting around 1990, the narwhals switched from deep sea under the ice food to more open ocean food, which would fit with an increase in ice melt around 1990. It's so wild when we find like, hey, we can use this animal's random body part or excretion. And just it's like a history book of that animal's life and environment. I think the same is true of it's either sperm or blue whale earwax. So you have like layers. Yeah, no, which, and it's like,

basically their earwax just keeps growing and growing and it doesn't really fall out their ears. So they just get these big logs of earwax that they accrue over their lives. And you can like, like a log, sort of look at the rings of the earwax and be able to tell information about the whale such as its lifespan also like its diet so like the earwax color will be able to tell the researcher like how good its diet is what kind of like sort of nutrition it was getting really gross but, but really awesome use of animal stuff.

So it sounds like the narwhal tusk is similar where it's just like, hey, we're able to read this thing like a weird pointy book. Yeah, exactly. They haven't gone forward and done this, but they think if we wanted to, we could look at narwhal tusks in museums and in collections of antique stuff to get ocean information from many decades ago. This study was on relatively recent narwhal lives. And I feel like we've got a lot of narwhal tusks lying around in museums and collections because especially back in the day, we were like wild about collecting narwhal tusks.

We thought they were magical. We thought they were magical. We thought they were basically from unicorns. I'm sure we might go into sort of the human history a little more. Yeah, especially in the bonus, because it turns out multiple European monarchs had narwhal tusks in their castles or palaces that were just like labeled as unicorn horns. Yeah. Because somebody brought it back and they were some kind of weird sea pirate who said, I found a unicorn horn. And people from Ivan the Terrible

to Queen Elizabeth I said, yep, unicorn. Great. Makes sense. Yeah. Those are real. Yeah. Yeah. They really thought they were kind of

some kind of mystical horn. And the people that would like trade these narwhal tusks, like, no, you know, the queens and kings aren't going up to the Arctic to get these narwhals. Wait, is it Arctic or Antarctic? Arctic. Yeah, I could have said sooner, probably. They live in the Arctic regions of the world, especially the Atlantic section of the Arctic Ocean.

I see. Okay. Yeah. Well, regardless, monarchs aren't going up there to collect the horns themselves. So, you know, easy to deceive. But yeah, so it's a similar, not to keep talking about earwax. Well, actually, definitely to keep talking about earwax. I think it's a similar story with whale earwax.

People chanting at home, more earwax, more earwax. I think it's a similar story with whale earwax. People chanting at home, more earwax, more earwax. Yeah, because like these like hardened logs of whale earwax, they're not like, it's not like sort of soft and gooey. Like these are, it's like kind of like hard, like a rock almost. And so like museums will just have them and don't know what to do with them, but they don't really want to throw them out. And then so researchers are like, hey, actually, we've figured out how to read these chunks of earwax. Can we have your earwax? Give us all your earwax. And yeah, I just love that when that happens where it's like, hey, so, so you know all those narwhal tusks you just have lying about your museum, tripping people up, you know, cluttered in the corner.

They're on the floor like a tripwire. Yeah. Taking up space in like the umbrella holder or something, you know, just give us one of those so we can see what whale diets were back in the 1800s. I don't know. I like making museum guests fall down. I think we need to keep it here. It's how you booby trap a museum after hours. You have like walls that just shoot

tusks at you if you hit a trip wire. Right, because an Indiana Jones figure with the opposite priorities thinks stuff belongs outside of the museum. So they're raiding the museum and you need traps. Yeah, he's out Deanna Jones and he wants to get stuff out of the museums. I'm going to just think about out Deanna Jones for a long time and we're going to take a short break so I can do that. And when we're back, all sorts of other narwhal things, because this is

that amazing of an animal. He uses the opposite of a whip, which I think is a lasso. What is that? Yeah. What is the opposite of a whip? I feel like it would be, What is the opposite of a whip? I feel like it would be... Let's see. It's rigid and... It's a narwhal tusk. Oh, shoot. Folks, I want to tell you about a game and a story and an adventure all in one.

It's from the company Upper Story. It's the game Spintronics. And they are here supporting this show because they want to reach folks like you. Folks who are inquisitive. Folks who are curious. Folks who like to know the amazing fundamentals and inner workings of how things are put together. With Spintronics, you get to build mechanical circuits, you get to feel the pull of voltage, see the flow of current. It is the first mechanical equivalent of electronics ever built. Instead of wires,

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afterlife. I think I'm going to roam in a few places. Yes, I'm going to manifest and roam. All that and more on the next Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR. Hello, teachers and faculty. This is Janet Varney. I'm here to remind you that listening to my podcast, The JV Club with Janet Varney, is part of the curriculum for the school year. Learning about the teenage years of such guests as Alison Brie, Vicki Peterson, John Hodgman, and so many more is a valuable and enriching experience,

one you have no choice but to embrace, because, yes, listening is mandatory. The JV Club with Janet Varney is available every Thursday on Maximum Fun or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. And remember, no running in the halls. Folks, there is so much narwhal stuff and the next takeaway here also has more numbers baked into it. Takeaway number two. A lot of humanity's knowledge about narwhals comes from long-running Native American observations. thing to note with a lot of, I guess, modern biology is that there, for a long time, we kind of like did not necessarily respect or listen to native populations who would record the behaviors

of animals or the other biological properties of animals. And then people who were quote unquote explorers or colonizers or something would come in and be like, no, no, no. I'm going to come up with all this. I discovered this animal and I'm not going to necessarily listen to animals that were observations from people for many, many thousands of years. Yeah, and we're lucky, especially Inuit people have done a good job recording what they've found. Because as you say, with tons of animals, these kinds of observations are useful. observations are useful. And then the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History has an amazing rundown of particularly helpful Inuit learnings about narwhals, because narwhals are also a particularly elusive animal in terms of a lot of like modern scientific observational style.

For one thing, another number here is zero, because there are zero narwhals in captivity right now that we know of. It would have to be some kind of weird illegal aquarium. But they super do not accept captivity and die pretty quickly if we try to keep them captive. Not to mention just breaking the glass, just, you know, running into it with their tusks. No, I mean, yeah, it is interesting because a lot of whales are very elusive because they just, it's hard to observe them. So even the biggest whale out there, right, like the blue whale, we can't really observe them easily. They're in the middle of the freaking ocean. People aren't there. We're just not over there. so we so they're actually even though they're the

largest animal in the world uh there is not as much known about them as one might think and so that's true of a lot of whale species that we don't have easy access to and so yeah if your society is near where these narwhals live you are going to be the most set up to have the most observations of that animal. Exactly. And the other big limitation on modern observation with stuff like planes is that narwhals just dive very deep in the ocean. A number here is more than 1,800 meters, which is a little over a mile.

That is the known maximum depth of narwhal diving and swimming. And the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute says the pressure of the ocean at that depth is more than the weight of a car. But they're built to withstand it. They spend most of their time about half that deep, but they can go deeper and they can only hold their breath for about 25 minutes and then they need to come up again. But they also spend a lot of time down there. And so we just aren't seeing them down there. Probably like if we go down there, bad stuff happens to like our our our meat bodies.

But yeah, I mean. Yeah. And our minds. Ocean madness. You know, forget it. Ocean madness. Sea madness. Yeah. No, I would. I mean, like, I'd hate it. It's also this odd thing where they surface a lot and there are very huntable, findable. Apparently, a lot of Inuit observations have begun with hunting and with living off of eating narwhals.

gun with hunting and with living off of eating narwhals. They are also legally still allowed to do that by most governments that native people who have hunted narwhals traditionally get to continue doing that. In particular for Inuit people, the inner skin and outer blubber of a narwhal that's called the maktak, that's not only a delicacy, but it also provides essential vitamins and nutrients, in particular vitamin C. Yeah. Mental Floss claims there's roughly as much vitamin C in one ounce of narwhal skin as there is in one ounce of oranges. Yeah. And you're not going to be growing oranges in the Arctic. I think this is a really important thing. Like, I know there's a lot of like, there's a lot of anger, I think, sometimes because people will be really upset by hunting whales.

They'll be really upset by also hunting like Harper seals. And I understand that to a certain extent, of course, like I think hunting when we do not need their meat for sustenance. It really does bother me. But in this circumstance, like you're asking people who have lived there for thousands of years to basically not be able to live there and get, you know, basically have their, their dietary needs met in the traditional way, which I think is, it just feels wrong for us to like come in and say, like, you can't you can't live this way anymore.

Exactly. Yeah. And so in the process of excitedly eating this animal and also having lore about it that we'll talk about in a little bit, Inuit people have provided a lot of concrete scientific insights about narwhals. One of them is just population counts. Apparently, there was a project to measure the narwhal population in the Davis Strait. The Davis Strait is the water between Greenland and Baffin Island in northern Canada. And plain spotters claimed an estimate of about 80,000 narwhals. But in conversation with Inuit people, they learned that only a fraction of a narwhal pod is near the surface at any time, the rest are

below. And so taking that information into account, they think it was more than double that amount of narwhals in that area. It's an important thing to like combine sort of modern science with sort of the traditional methods of animal observations. It's actually really fortunate that we have human populations, you know, that are able to kind of live in such close proximity to the whale in terms of understanding more about them. Cause that's, that's not something that we get to do with, like say blue whales. It's just, they're, they're too, we don't, we don't have sort of a human floating Island in the middle of the ocean where they, uh, or, or a deep sea. Um, what am I trying to say? Atlantis? We don't have Atlantis. It all comes back to our need to build Atlantis. We talk about it every week, folks.

We do. When's the project going to get going? Yeah. I want gills. When's Joe Brandon going to build Atlantis? Like, I want, you know? I want gills. I want webbed stuff everywhere.

Webbed feet. Webbed face. Let's get down there, folks. Let's do it on our terms. Yeah. A couple more amazing observations here. Inuit people helped clarify Narwhal social structures, because it's been known that Narwhals are very social and also live and travel in pods based on sex.

There's pods of females and the young, and then there's pods of the males kind of moving separately. Also, Inuit stories confirmed by further observation found that in the male pods, there are a bunch of different designated roles for different individuals. And the Kirnajiktat are the black ones, which are male narwhals that have black coloring at one stage of their life and above average body size and extra long tusk. And based on those stories, we were able to learn that like the adult males lead the migrations, older males follow, young males swim at the periphery and act as scouts. There's a lot of different jobs in a narwhal community. That is really cool. I mean, it's amazing that we're, you know, we have that kind of understanding of their social structure, which is, it's actually pretty rare to be able to know what is happening with a lot of species of whales in terms of like, how, what is their social life like? Like we, we understand dolphins to a certain extent just because they're you know much more accessible uh but yeah for a lot of whales it's yeah and orcas too like we do understand something of their social structure but for many other whales it's very difficult to learn that information even if we could somehow keep

a narwhal in captivity without immediately killing it like I do to plants, you know, I don't even know if we would learn anything relevant to their life in the wild, whereas like being able to observe them by living next to them is really incredible. One last Inuit observation here. Inuit people are the only people with recorded observations of narwhals molting. Whoa. Apparently narwhals molt their outer layer of skin in an annual way in the summer. And it's such a rare event that only three out of 63 Inuit hunters interviewed in a big survey had ever observed it. Three of them had seen it and recounted it, but the other 60 had not. Scientists have observed molting in beluga whales, which makes us think this story is true. They're so closely related, it's probably going on.

But Inuit stories are our only record of this. Nobody has ever been able to observe or document it otherwise. And so we're just totally getting that knowledge about narwhals from these people. It's also given that narwhals and belugas are mammals, I'm sort of used to molting in non-mammalian animals or mammals that have fur, you know, animals shedding their winter coat or something or insects molting or reptiles molting, even like birds sort of molting their feathers. But like shedding your shedding your skin at a scheduled time blows my mind because, you know. Yeah. Can you imagine if it's like just like mostly you don't shed your skin, but just like once a year, it's like as if you've just had a really bad sunburn and you just start peeling everywhere. Right. Because I know you just lose the outer layer, but I'm also imagining that

anatomy books thing where I'm suddenly muscles and bones, you know, but it's just the outer layer. It's relatively chill and would be weird to imagine for us. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, in a gross way, I feel like it would be satisfying to kind of go through a molting period. Cause I know that like after you get a really bad sunburn and you start peeling, there is a certain satisfaction of like getting off the dead skin. And it's like, I feel fresh and new now. Yeah. Or is that just me? Am I, am I gross? You're anti-skin. You're on record now. Pro-Atlantis anti-skin. That's the positions.

Scales, scales, scales. Well, and there's one last takeaway, and it's pretty quick for the main show here. Takeaway number three. In Inuit culture and in Norse culture, they each have an amazing piece of death-focused narwhal lore.

Oh, interesting. Each of these cultures have brought what I think is an awesomely grim story into our cultural understanding of the narwhal. And the sources here, the Smithsonian and also that book, The Golden Mole by Catherine Rundatherine rendell starting with the norse they coined the name narwhal and they named it after the phenomenon of a human corpse bobbing up to the surface of the water after being kind of dead and rotting in the water for a while that's what it's named after. Gross. Gross. You know why human bodies do that? I guess I would like to know. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, it's as you decompose, there's a lot of gases that get released and into the body.

And so, you know, this is why like the mafia or something would weigh people down with like cement shoes because otherwise, like, yes, a body might not immediately float, especially if it's like waterlogged. But as as decomposition happens and these chemical processes happen, the gases build up inside the body and actually cause the body to become buoyant and float and resurface. Gross, but, you know. and actually cause the body to become buoyant and float and resurface. Gross, but, you know. And that fits kind of the bulbous shape of a narwhal. Yeah. Like, you know, they're kind of rounded, maybe a gassy human body. And that's what Norse people said. The word narwhal comes from two old Norse words.

The word nar meaning corpse. Oh. Just corpse. And then valr meaning whale. So the name means corpse whale in Old Norse. That's metal as heck. I love it. That's the whole vibe of this takeaway here.

And it's also based on how narwhals have a mottled gray color usually on their skin. So dead body vibe right it's it's a very uh scandinavian people wearing all black clothing kind of kind of vibe to this name interesting for me the the mottled skin always made me think of like a dappled pony uh but sure dead body if that's what the norse want to compare it to. That's up to them. That is also true. I just like how opposite it is. Great.

You would not fit in on that Viking longship, I don't think. I think they would be like, this girl's too stoked about stuff. I guess I got to start calling them corpse ponies now. And then there's an Inuit story here collected by ethnographers in the late 19th century and the early 20th century, where it's the origin story of narwhals in Inuit culture. Like, where did narwhals come from mythologically? And it's basically true crime. The story is that there was a woman with long hair that she twisted and plaited into a long braid, you know, vaguely resembling a tusk in the end of the story. But there was this woman and then she had a blind son. And one day this mother tricked her blind son to steal his share of their bear meat that they were going to eat, leaving him very desperately hungry. That's not being a good mom. Maybe I don't know that much about being a parent, but I wouldn't steal my kid's bear meat.

Right. All parents face this dilemma. Do I steal my child's meat from a bear? I mean, it's kind of like the Halloween candy thing. Like, do you sneak one of their Snickers away? Will they notice? I feel like if your Snickers is the size of a bear shank, they're going to notice. Yeah. And so this happens, and then the son is upset. He somehow is either hungry or finds out it happened.

And then the son is upset. He somehow is either hungry or finds out it happened. And so later, the two of them go out to harvest passing white whales, is what the story says. So maybe belugas. I'm not sure. Yeah, that makes sense. What happens is the son takes revenge. He binds his mother with ropes to one of the passing whales.

It drags her into the sea. She does not come back. And instead of dying, is transformed into a narwhal and becomes the mother of all the narwhal species. But yeah, I mean, it's like, you know, there's no heroes in that story because like stealing food from your blind child, not a cool move. Bad vibes. But also, you know, I don't think you deserve to be murdered into a narwhal, like killed so bad you turn into a narwhal. That's right. Yeah. no heroes i think narwhals are innocent little sea ponies watery corpse ponies the unicorns of the sea that may or may not look like a dead body i do like that both the uh both cultures they seem to like associate it with sort of like a dead body i mean i'm sure this was based on observe like similar observations like

both are very like sea adjacent cultures so they've probably seen their fair share of dead people in the water and then they've seen their fair share of narwhals. They're like, hey, this floaty Bobby thing looks like this other floaty Bobby thing. And then kind of, you know, based their language or their stories around that. That's really it's really interesting. Yeah. And yeah, if you're a coastal culture in a frozen place, yeah, you see a lot of frozen dead bodies in the water. And so at the same time, you have these lovely, friendly dappled ponies of the sea that, like we said, like to dive deep, but also come up a lot. They're around and you hunt them. And so you think about them a lot. And this results in all these names and culture in a couple different places. Yeah. I wonder what narwhals call us, like land murderers or like, I don't know.

What if their creation stories about humans are like, well, once there was an innocent narwhal and then he got murdered by his narwhal friend and he turned into that horrible thing that we see, you know, waddling around. This thing, turnabout is fair play. We slander the narwhals. They might slander us right back. I'm imagining humans building spears to hunt narwhals and then a narwhal sees the spear and thinks, jealous, they're jealous of my sweet tusk

they wish baby keep building spears look stupid my tusk is cool out deanna jones is a narwhal oh Hey folks, that's the main episode for this week. Welcome to the outro with fun features for you, such as help remembering this episode with a run back through the big takeaways. takeaways. Takeaway number one, the narwhal's horn is actually a tooth or a tusk, and it's a giant specialized record-keeping tooth that we are still beginning to understand. Takeaway number two, a lot of humanity's knowledge about narwhals comes from long-running Native American observations. Narwhals comes from long-running Native American observations. And takeaway number three, in Inuit culture and in Norse culture, there is a specific, amazing, death-focused piece of narwhal lore.

Those are the takeaways. Also, I said that's the main episode, because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now. If you support this show at MaximumFun.org. Members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is the Narluga. Can you guess what that is? Visit SIFPot.fun for that bonus show, for a library of more than 12 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows, and a catalog of all sorts of MaxFun bonus shows. It's special audio. It's just for members. Thank you so much for being somebody who backs this podcast operation.

Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at MaximumFun.org. Key sources this week include research from Professor Kristen Lydray of the University of Washington, digital material from National Geographic, BBC Wildlife Magazine, The Smithsonian, and also the book The Golden Mole and Other Living Treasure by nonfiction writer Catherine Rundell. Golden Mole and Other Living Treasure by nonfiction writer Catherine Rundell. That page also features resources such as native-land.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this on the traditional land of the Canarsie and Lenape peoples. Also, Katie taped this in the country of Italy. And I want to acknowledge that in my location, in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere. Native people are very much still

here. One prime example, Inuit people. That Inuit term is an umbrella term for a lot of people speaking languages like Yupik, and they continue to live in Arctic regions of the world and live elsewhere too. That feels worth doing on each episode, and join the free SIF Discord, where we're sharing stories and resources about Native people and life. There's a link in this episode's description to join that Discord. We're also talking about this episode on the Discord. And hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Because each week I'm finding you something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode six. Episode six is about the topic of going to the beach. Whole episode about that

activity, going to the beach. It's perfect for summer. Good job, random number generator. Maybe you are AI and I don't know it. Either way, I recommend that episode. I also recommend my co-host Katie Golden's weekly podcast, Creature Feature, about animals, science, and more. If you like this episode, you of course will like Creature Feature. Check it out. Our theme music is Unbroken Unshaven by the Budos Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Extra, extra special thanks go to our members, and thank you to all our listeners. I'm thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating So how about that? Talk to you then. MaximumFun.org

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