Podcast appearances and mentions of Kate Shaw

Thanks to Jaxon for suggesting this week's topic, Coelurosauravus! Further reading: Coelurosauravus New Research Reveals Secrets of First-Ever Gliding Reptile The modern Draco lizard glides on "wings" made from extended rib bones: Coelurosauravus glided on wings that were completely different from any other wings known [art from the first link above]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we're going to learn about an extinct animal suggested by Jaxon. It's called Coelurosauravus and it lived around 255 million years ago in what is now Madagascar. Coelurosauravus was a member of the Weigeltisauridae family, reptiles whose fossils have been found not just in Madagascar but in parts of Europe, and maybe even North America (although we're not sure yet). They were gliding reptiles that probably lived in trees and ate insects and other small animals, sort of like modern gliding lizards. But while most gliding lizards are very small, Coelurosauravus grew over a foot long, or around 40 cm, and that's nowhere near the weirdest thing about it. To explain why Coelurosauravus was so very peculiar, we have to learn a little about other gliding reptiles. Back in episode 255 we learned about kuehneosaurids, and that's a good place to start. Kuehneosaurids lived around 225 million years ago in what is now England. This wasn't all that long after Coelurosauravus lived and not that far away from where some of its relations lived, but the two weren't related. Kuehneosaurus looked like a big lizard although this was before modern lizards evolved, but it was a reptile and it was even larger than Coelurosauravus. Kuehneosaurus grew about two feet long, or 70 cm, including a long tail, and probably lived in trees and ate insects. Kuehneosaurus glided on sail-like structures on its sides that were made from extended ribs with skin stretched over them. Its wings weren't all that big, although they were big enough that they could act as a parachute if the animal fell or jumped from a branch. Another gliding reptile, Kuehneosuchus, had wings that were much longer. In a study published in 2008, a team of scientists built models of kuehneosuchus and tested them in a wind tunnel used for aerospace engineering. It turned out to be quite stable in the air and could probably glide very well. We don't know a whole lot about the kuehneosaurids because we haven't found very many fossils. We're not even sure if the two species are closely related or not. We're not even sure they're not the same species. Individuals of both were uncovered in caves near Bristol in the 1950s, and some researchers speculate they were males and females of the same species. Despite the difference in wings, otherwise they're extremely similar in a lot of ways. Generally, researchers compare the kuehneosaurids to modern draco lizards, which we talked about in episode 237, even though they're not related. Draco lizards are much smaller, only about 8 inches long including the tail, or 20 cm, and live throughout much of southeastern Asia. Many gliding animals, like the flying squirrel, have gliding membranes called patagia that stretch from the front legs to the back legs, but the draco lizard is different. It has greatly elongated ribs that it can extend like wings, and the skin between the ribs acts as a patagium. This skin is usually yellow or brown so that the lizard looks like a falling leaf when it's gliding. Draco lizards can fold their wings down and extend them, which isn't something the kuehneosaurids appear to have been able to do. But now let's return to Coelurosauravus. It too had wing-like structures on its sides that consisted of skin stretched over bony struts. But in this case, the bones weren't elongated ribs. Coelurosauravus had about 30 pairs of long, flexible bones that extended from the sides of its belly, and it could open and close its wings like draco lizar...

Thanks to Ryder, Alexandria, and Simon for their suggestions this week! Let's learn about three remarkable wading birds. Two of them are pink! Bird sounds taken from the excellent website xeno-canto. The goliath heron is as tall as people [picture by Steve Garvie from Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland - Goliath Heron (Ardea goliath), CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12223810]: The roseate spoonbill has a bill shaped like a spoon, you may notice [picture by Photo Dante - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=42301356]: Flamingos really do look like those lawn ornaments [picture by Valdiney Pimenta - Flamingos, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6233369]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we're going to learn about three large birds with long legs that spend a lot of time wading through shallow water, suggested by Ryder, Alexandria, and Simon. Wading birds tend to share traits even if they're not closely related, because of convergent evolution. In order to wade in water deep enough to find food, a wading bird needs long legs. Then it also needs a long neck so it can reach its food more easily. A long beak helps to grab small animals too. Having big feet with long toes also helps it keep its footing in soft mud. Let's start with Ryder's suggestion, the goliath heron. It's the biggest heron alive today, standing up to 5 feet tall, or 1.5 meters. That's as tall as a person! It only weighs about 11 lbs at most, though, or 5 kg, but its wingspan is over 7 ½ feet across, or 2.3 meters. It's a big, elegant bird with a mostly gray and brown body, but a chestnut brown head and neck with black and white streaks on its throat and chest. The goliath heron lives throughout much of sub-Saharan Africa, meaning south of the Sahara Desert, anywhere it can find water. It's happy on the edge of a lake or river, in a swamp or other wetlands, around the edges of a water hole, or even along the coast of the ocean. It usually stands very still in the water, looking down. When a fish swims close enough, the heron stabs it with its bill, pulls it out of the water, and either holds it for a while until the bird is ready to swallow the fish, or sometimes it will even set the fish down on land or floating vegetation for a while. It's not usually in a big hurry to swallow its meal. Sometimes that means other birds steal the fish, especially eagles and pelicans, but the goliath heron is so big and its beak is so sharp that most of the time, other birds and animals leave it alone. The goliath heron will also eat frogs, lizards, and other small animals when it can, but it prefers nice big fish. It can catch much bigger fish than other wading birds, and eating big fish is naturally more energy efficient than eating small ones. If a goliath heron only catches two big fish a day, it's had enough to eat without having to expend a lot of energy hunting. This is what a goliath heron sounds like: [goliath heron call] Alexandria's suggestion, the roseate spoonbill, is also a big wading bird, but it's very different from the goliath heron. For one thing, it's pink and white and has a long bill that's flattened and spoon-shaped at the end. It's only about half the size of a goliath heron, with a wingspan over 4 feet across, or 1.3 meters, and a height of about 2 ½ feet, or 80 cm. That's still a big bird! It mostly lives in South America east of the Andes mountain range, but it's also found in coastal areas in Central America up through the most southern parts of North America. Unlike the goliath heron, which is solitary, the roseate spoonbill is social and spends time in small flocks as it hunts for food. It likes shallow coastal water, swamps, and other wetlands where it can find it preferred food. That isn't fish, although it will eat little fish like minnows when it catches...

This week we learn about the fossa and a few other animals of Madagascar, a suggestion by Pranav! Further reading: The stories people tell, and how they can contribute to our understanding of megafaunal decline and extinction in Madagascar The fossa! The votsotsa is a rodent, not a rabbit! [photo by Andrey Giljov - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=113271739]: The golden mantella frog is sometimes golden, but sometimes red: The nano-chameleon may be the smallest reptile in the world: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we have a very old Pranav suggestion, animals of Madagascar! The island country of Madagascar is off the southeastern coast of Africa. About 88 million years ago, it broke off from every other landmass in the world, specifically the supercontinent Gondwana. The continent we now call Africa separated from Gondwana even earlier, around 165 million years ago. Madagascar is the fourth largest island in the world and even though it's relatively close to Africa these days, many of its animals and plants are much different from those in Africa and other parts of the world because they've been evolving separately for 88 million years. But at various times in the past, some animals from Africa were able to reach Madagascar. We're still not completely sure how this happened. Madagascar is 250 miles away from Africa, or 400 kilometers, and these days the prevailing ocean currents push floating debris away from the island. In the past, though, the currents might have been different and some animals could have arrived on floating debris washed out to sea during storms. During times when the ocean levels were overall lower, islands that are underwater now might have been above the surface and allowed animals to travel from island to island until they reached Madagascar. We're not sure when the first humans visited Madagascar, but it was at least 2,500 years ago and possibly as much as 9,500 years ago or even earlier. It's likely that hunting parties would travel to Madagascar and stay there for a while, then return home with lots of food, but eventually people decided it would be a nice place to live. By 1,500 years ago people were definitely living on the island. Let's start with the fossa, an animal we've only talked about on the podcast once before, and then only in passing. It resembles a type of cat about the size of a cougar, although its legs are short in comparison to a similarly-sized cat. Its tail is almost as long as its body, and if you include its tail, it can grow around five feet long, or 1.5 meters. It's reddish-brown with a paler belly. Its head is small with a short muzzle, rounded ears, and big eyes. But the fossa isn't a felid. It resembles a really big mustelid in many ways, especially a mongoose, and some studies suggest it's most closely related to the mongoose. Really, though, it's not closely related to anything living today. It spends a lot of time in trees, where it uses its long tail to help it balance. It even has semi-retractable claws. It eats lemurs and other mammals, birds, insects, crabs, lizards, and even fruit. There used to be an even bigger fossa called the giant fossa, although we don't know much about it. We only know about it from some subfossil remains found in caves. We're not sure how big it was compared to the fossa living today, but it was definitely bigger and stronger and might have grown 7 feet long including its tail, or a little over 2 meters. There used to be much bigger lemurs living on Madagascar that have also gone extinct, so the giant fossa probably evolved to prey on them. Most scientists estimate that the giant fossa went extinct at least 700 years ago, but some think it might have survived in remote areas of Madagascar until much more recently. There are even modern sightings of unusually large fossas,

Thanks to Jayson for suggesting this week's topic, the new "dire wolf"! Also, possibly the same but maybe a different Jayson is the youngest member of the Cedar Springs Homeschool Science Olympiad Team, who are on their way to the Science Olympiad Nationals! They're almost to their funding goal if you can help out. Further reading: Dire wolves and woolly mammoths: Why scientists are worried about de-extinction The story of dire wolves goes beyond de-extinction These fluffy white wolves explain everything wrong with bringing back extinct animals Dire Wolves Split from Living Canids 5.7 Million Years Ago: Study This prehistoric monster is the largest dog that ever lived and was able to crush bone with its deadly teeth – but was wiped out by cats "Dire wolf" puppies: An artist's interpretation of the dire wolf (red coats) and grey wolves (grey coats) [taken from fourth link above]: The "mammoth fur" mice: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we have a suggestion from Jayson, who wants to learn about the so-called “new” dire wolf. Before we get started, a big shout-out to another Jayson, or maybe the same one I'm honestly not sure, who is the youngest member of the Cedar Springs Homeschool Science Olympiad Team. They've advanced to the nationals! There's a link in the show notes if you want to donate a little to help them with their travel expenses. This is a local team to me so I'm especially proud of them, and not to brag, but I've actually met Jayson and his sister and they're both smart, awesome kids. Now, let's find out about this new dire wolf that was announced last month. In early April 2025, a biotech company called Colossal Biosciences made the extraordinary claim that they had produced three dire wolf puppies. Since dire wolves went extinct around 13,000 years ago, this is a really big deal. Before we get into the details of Colossal's claim, let's refresh our memory about the dire wolf. We talked about it in episode 207, so I've taken a lot of my information from that episode. According to a 2021 study published in Nature, 5.7 million years ago, the shared ancestor of dire wolves and many other canids lived in Eurasia. Sea levels were low enough that the Bering land bridge, also called Beringia, connected the very eastern part of Asia to the very western part of North America. One population of this canid migrated into North America while the rest of the population stayed in Asia. The two populations evolved separately until the North American population developed into what we now call dire wolves. Meanwhile, the Eurasian population developed into many of the modern species we know today, and some of those eventually migrated into North America too. By the time the gray wolf and coyote populated North America, a little over one million years ago, the dire wolf was so distantly related to it that even when their territories overlapped, the species avoided each other and didn't interbreed. We've talked about canids in many previous episodes, including how readily they interbreed with each other, so for the dire wolf to remain genetically isolated, it was obviously not closely related at all to other canids at that point. The dire wolf looked a lot like a grey wolf, but researchers now think that was due more to convergent evolution than to its relationship with wolves. Both lived in the same habitats: plains, grasslands, and forests. The dire wolf was slightly taller on average than the modern grey wolf, which can grow a little over three feet tall at the shoulder, or 97 cm, but it was much heavier and more solidly built. It wouldn't have been able to run nearly as fast, but it could attack and kill larger animals. The dire wolf went extinct around 13,000 years ago, but Colossal now claims that they're no longer extinct. There are now exactly three dire wolves in the world, two males and a female,

In a very unusual one-on-one--make that one-on-two--Harry sits down with Penn law professor Kate Shaw and Pennsylvania congresswoman Mary Gay Scanlon to discuss the recent hearing in Congress at which Professor Shaw testified and Congresswoman Scanlon posed questions for the minority. The hearing was a tendentious and contrived set piece directed by Republican Congressman Jim Jordan with the clear goal of supporting the Trump administration's claim that federal judges such as Jeb Boasberg are improperly enjoining administration action. From their respective vantage points Professor Shaw and Congresswoman Scanlon explain the rules of the road about how to counter false claims about the constitution and the role of judges in it. Then with general discussion of ways in which the minority can be effective in the sharply constrained roles that the system forwards them.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week we examine two recent articles about coelacanth discoveries. Which one is real and which one is fake?! Further reading: Fake California Coelacanth First record of a living coelacanth from North Maluku, Indonesia A real coelacanth photo: A fake coelacanth photo (or at least the article is a fake) [photo taken from the first article linked above]: A real coelacanth photo [photo from the second article linked above]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. I had another episode planned for this week, but then I read an article by geologist Sharon Hill and decided the topic she researched was so important we need to cover it here. No, it's not the dire wolf—that's next week. It's the coelacanth. We talked about the coelocanth way back in episode two, with updates in a few later episodes. Because episode two is so old that it's dropped off the podcast feed, and to listen to it you have to actually go to the podcast's website, I'm going to quote from it extensively here. In December of 1938, a museum curator in South Africa named Marjorie Courtenay Lattimer got a message from a friend of hers, a fisherman named Hendrick Goosen, who had just arrived with a new catch. Lattimer was on the lookout for specimens for her tiny museum, and Goosen was happy to let her have anything interesting. Lattimer went down to the dock. Then she noticed THE FISH. It was five feet long, or 1.5 meters, blueish with shimmery silvery markings, with strange lobed fins and scales like armored plates. She described it as the most beautiful fish she had ever seen. She didn't know what it was, but she wanted it. She took the fish back to the museum in a taxi and went through her reference books to identify it. Imagine it. She's flipped through a couple of books but nothing looks even remotely like her fish. Then she turns a page and there's a picture of the fish--but it's extinct. It's been extinct for some 66 million years. But it's also a very recently alive fish resting on ice in the back of her museum. Lattimer sketched the fish and sent the drawing and a description to a professor at Rhodes University, J.L.B. Smith. But Smith was on Christmas break and didn't get her message until January 3rd. In the meantime, Lattimer's museum director told her the fish was a grouper and not worth the ice it was lying on. December is the middle of summer in South Africa, so to keep the fish from rotting away, she had it mounted. Then Smith sent her a near-hysterical cable that read, “MOST IMPORTANT PRESERVE SKELETON AND GILLS.” Oops. Smith got a little obsessed about finding another coelacanth. He offered huge rewards for a specimen. But it wasn't until December of 1952 that a pair of local fishermen on the island of Anjuan, about halfway between Tanzania and Madagascar, turned up with a fish they called the gombessa. It was a second coelacanth. Everyone was happy. The fishermen got a huge reward—a hundred British pounds—and Smith had an intact coelacanth. He actually cried when he saw it. Most people have heard of the coelacanth because its discovery is such a great story. But why is the fish such a big deal? The coelacanth isn't just a fish that was supposed to be extinct and was discovered alive and well, although that's pretty awesome. It's a strange fish, more closely related to mammals and reptiles than it is to ordinary ray-finned fish. The only living fish even slightly like it is the lungfish, which we talked about in episode 55. While the coelacanth is unique in a lot of ways, it's those lobed fins that are really exciting. It's not a stretch to say its paired fins look like nubby legs with frills instead of digits. Until DNA sequencing in 2013, many researchers thought the coelacanth was a sort of missing link between water-dwelling animals and those that first developed the ability to walk on land. As it happens, the lungfish turns out to be closer to that stage t...

Thanks to Katie, Torin, and Eilee for suggesting this week's topic, foxes! Further reading: Meet the Endangered Sierra Nevada Red Fox Long snouts protect foxes when diving headfirst in snow Black bears may play important role in protecting gray fox The red fox: A black and gold Sierra Nevada red fox [photo taken from the first link above]: The extremely fluffy Arctic fox: The gray fox [photo by VJAnderson - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=115382784]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we have an episode about foxes, a suggestion by Katie, and we'll talk about fox species suggested by Torin and Eilee. Foxes are omnivorous canids related to dogs and wolves, and just to be confusing, male foxes are sometimes called dogs. Female foxes are vixens and baby foxes are cubs or kits. But even though foxes are related to dogs and wolves, they're not so closely related that they can interbreed with those other canids. Plus, of course, not every animal that's called a fox is actually considered a fox scientifically. The largest species of fox is the red fox, which also happens to be the one most people are familiar with. It's common throughout much of North America, Eurasia, and the Middle East, and even parts of northern Africa. It's also been introduced in Australia, where it's an invasive species. It's a rusty-red in color with black legs and white markings, including a white tip to the tail. It has large pointed ears and a long narrow muzzle. There are lots of subspecies of red fox throughout its natural range, including one suggested by Eilee, the Sierra Nevada red fox. It lives in the Sierra Nevada and Oregon Cascades mountain ranges in the western United States, in parts of California, Nevada, and Oregon. It's smaller than the red fox and some individuals are red, some are black and gold, and some are a mix of red and gray-brown. Its paws are covered with long hair that protects the paw pads from snow, and its coat is thick. The Sierra Nevada red fox was first identified as a subspecies in 1937, but it took more than half a century until any scientists started studying it. It used to be common throughout the mountain ranges where it lives, but after more than a century of trapping for fur and shooting it for bounty, it's one of the rarest foxes in the world. Fewer than 100 adults are known to survive in the wild, maybe even fewer than 50. For a long time, scientists thought the Sierra Nevada red fox had been extirpated from California, and that it might even be completely extinct. Then a camera trap got pictures of one in 2010. It's fully protected now, so hopefully its numbers will grow. Torin suggested we learn about the Arctic fox, which lives in far northern areas like Greenland, Siberia, Alaska, and parts of northern Canada. The Arctic fox's muzzle is relatively short and its ears are rounded, and it also has a rounder body and shorter legs than other foxes. This helps keep it warm, since it has less surface area to lose body heat. During the summer, the Arctic fox is brown and gray, while in winter it's white to blend in with the snowy background. There are some individuals who are gray or brown-gray year-round, although it's rare. The Arctic fox's fur is thick and layered to keep it warm even in bitterly cold weather, and like the Sierra Nevada red fox, it has a lot of fur on its feet. The Arctic fox is omnivorous like other foxes, although in the winter it mostly eats meat. In summer it eats bird eggs, berries, and even seaweed along with fish and small animals like lemmings and mice. It also eats carrion from dead animals and what's left from a polar bear's meal. It has such a good sense of smell that it can smell a carcass from 25 miles away, or 40 km. Its hearing is good too, which allows it to find mice and other animals that are traveling under the snow. Like other foxes,

What does Kilmar Abrego Garcia's case tell us about the relationship between the Trump administration and the courts? NPR's A Martinez asks Kate Shaw, law professor at the University of Pennsylvania.Support NPR and hear every episode of Trump's Terms sponsor-free with NPR+. Sign up at plus.npr.org.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Thanks to Nora and BlueTheChicken for suggesting the inland taipan this week! The inland taipan in its summer colors [picture by AllenMcC. - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4442037]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we have a suggestion by Nora and BluetheChicken, who both wanted to learn about the inland taipan. Is it really the most venomous snake in the world? Let's find out, from a safe distance. The inland taipan is native to some parts of Australia, specifically in dry areas around the border of Queensland and South Australia. In the summer it's lighter in color, tan or yellowy-brown, and in winter it's dark brown or black with a lighter belly. Its head is usually darker in color than the rest of its body, and even in summer it usually has darker scales that make a zig-zaggy pattern on its back and sides. It can grow more than eight feet long, or 2.5 meters. It eats small animals, especially Dasyurids, which are members of the family Dasyuridae. Dasyurids are marsupials and include larger animals like the Tasmanian devil and the quoll, but those particular species don't live where the inland taipan does. The inland taipan mainly eats species that are often referred to as marsupial mice and marsupial rats, although they're not related to rodents at all. It also eats introduced placental mammals like actual rats and house mice. The inland taipan was described in 1879 from two specimens captured in northwestern Victoria. Then it wasn't seen again by scientists until 1972, when someone in Queensland sent a snake head to the herpetologist Jeanette Covacevich. Most people would consider that a threat, but she was delighted to get a mystery snake head in the mail. She grabbed a colleague and they hurried to Queensland to look for the snake. They found 13 of them, and to their utter delight, they turned out to be the long-lost inland taipan! Part of the reason it wasn't rediscovered sooner is that everyone thought it lived in Victoria, when it's actually still not been seen in that state since 1879. The inland taipan is often called the fierce snake because if it feels threatened, it will strike repeatedly and very fast. Its venom is incredibly toxic and takes effect incredibly quickly. It's a neurotoxin that can cause convulsions, paralysis, kidney failure, cerebral hemorrhage, heart failure, and lots more horrible symptoms. People have died from the venom, but unless you keep an inland taipan in captivity and handle it a lot, you don't have to worry about one biting you. It's very shy in the wild and will hide in rock crevices or cracks in dry soil rather than attack, plus it lives in remote areas of Australia that most people never visit. Even in captivity it's usually calm and not aggressive, which leads to reptile keepers and scientists not always taking the correct precautions for handling it. Luckily, with quick treatment and antivenin, most people recover from an inland taipan bite. So is it the most venomous snake in the world? The inland taipan's venom hasn't been fully studied yet, and scientists haven't fully studied the venom of many other snakes either, but as far as we know right now, yes. The inland taipan is the most venomous snake known, even compared to sea snakes. You may be wondering if anything would dare eat the inland taipan since it's so venomous. A big perentie monitor lizard, which we talked about in episode 384, will eat lots of different snakes, including the inland taipan. A snake called the mulga, also referred to as the king brown snake, will eat the inland taipan. The mulga usually only eats small snakes, but it's immune to the venom of most Australian snakes and can grow up to 11 feet long, or 3.3 meters. The mulga lives throughout most of Australia and is venomous itself. Even though its venom isn't all that toxic, it will bite repeatedly and even chew to inject even more venom.

Kate Shaw, professor at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, co-host of the Supreme Court podcast "Strict Scrutiny," and a contributing opinion Writer with The New York Times, offers legal analysis of how the Supreme Court is acting as a check on the president so far (or not), including the Court's recent decisions allowing the Trump administration to continue deporting Venezuelan migrants using a centuries-old law, and other related cases.

Further reading: Reconstructing fossil cephalopods: Endoceras Retro vs Modern #17: Ammonites Hammering Away at Hamites An endocerid [picture by Entelognathus - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=111981757]: An ammonite fossil: A hamite ammonoid that looks a lot like a paperclip [picture by Hectonichus - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34882102]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. When you think about cephalopods, if that's a word you know, you probably think of octopuses and squid, maybe cuttlefish. But those aren't the only cephalopods, and in particular in the past, there used to be even more cephalopods that are even weirder than the ones we have today. Cephalopods are in the family Mollusca along with snails and clams, and many other animals. The first ancestral cephalopods date back to the Cambrian, and naturally we don't know a whole lot about them since that was around 500 million years ago. We have fossilized shells that were only a few centimeters long at most, although none of the specimens we've found are complete. By about 475 million years ago, these early cephalopod ancestors had mostly died out but had given rise to some amazing animals called Endocerids. Endocerids had shells that were mostly cone-shaped, like one of those pointy-ended ice cream cones but mostly larger and not as tasty. Most were pretty small, usually only a few feet long, or less than a meter, but some were really big. The largest Endoceras giganteum fossil we have is just under 10 feet long, or 3 meters, and it isn't complete. Some scientists estimate that it might have been almost 19 feet long, or about 5.75 meters, when it was alive. But that's just the long, conical shell. What did the animal that lived in the shell look like? We don't know, but scientists speculate that it had a squid-like body. The head and arms were outside of the shell's opening, while the main part of the body was protected by the front part of the shell. We know it had arms because we have arm impressions in sections of fossilized sea floor that show ten arms that are all about the same length. We don't know if the arms had suckers the way many modern cephalopods do, and some scientists suggest it had ridges on the undersides of the arms that helped it grab prey, the way modern nautiluses do. It also had a hood-shaped structure on top of its head called an operculum, which is also seen in nautiluses. This probably allowed Endoceras giganteum to pull its head and arms into its shell and use the operculum to block the shell's entrance. We don't know what colors the shells were, but some specimens seem to show a mottled or spotted pattern. The interior of Endoceras giganteum's shell was made up of chambers, some of which were filled with calcium deposits that helped balance the body weight, so the animal didn't have trouble dragging it around. 3D models of the shells show that they could easily stick straight up in the water, but we also have trace fossils that show drag marks of the shell through sediment. Scientists think Endoceras was mainly an ambush predator, sitting quietly until a small animal got too close. Then it would grab it with its arms. It could also crawl around to find a better spot to hunt, and younger individuals that had smaller shells were probably a lot more active. We talked about ammonites way back in episode 86. Ammonites were really common in the fossil record for hundreds of millions of years, only going extinct at the same time as the dinosaurs. Some ammonites lived at the bottom of the ocean in shallow water, but many swam or floated throughout the ocean. Many ammonite fossils look like snail shells, but the shell contains sections inside called chambers. The largest chamber, at the end of the shell, was for the ammonite's body,

Thanks to Murilo, Alexandra, and Joel for their suggestions this week! The bird sounds in this episode come from xeno-canto, a great resource for lots of animal sounds! A cactus wren [picture by Mike & Chris - Cactus WrenUploaded by snowmanradio, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15876953]: The sultan tit [photo by By Dibyendu Ash - CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=72070998]: A female scarlet tanager [photo by Félix Uribe, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=81340425]. The male is red with black wings: The Northern cardinal: The yellow grosbeak [photo by Arjan Haverkamp - originally posted to Flickr as 2008-08-23-15h00m37.IMG_4747l, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9596644]: The purple martin isn't actually purple [photo by JJ Cadiz, Cajay - Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4255626]: The dusky thrush [photo by Jerry Gunner from Lincoln, UK Uploaded by snowmanradio, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20762838]: The European rose chafer, not a bird [photo by I, Chrumps, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2521547]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we're going to learn about a lot of little birds that deserve more attention, because they're cute and interesting. Thanks to Murilo, Alexandra, and Joel for their little bird suggestions! All the birds we'll talk about today are called passerines, because they belong to the order Passeriformes. They're also sometimes referred to as perching birds or songbirds, even though not all passerines sing. Passerines are common throughout the world, with more than 6,500 species identified. I've seen about 150 of those species, so clearly I need to work harder as a birdwatcher. Passerines are referred to as perching birds because of their feet. A passerine bird has three toes that point forward and another toe pointing backwards, which allows it to wrap its toes securely around a twig or branch to sit. Its legs are also adapted so that the toes automatically curl up tight when the leg is bent. That's why a sleeping bird doesn't fall off its branch. Let's start with one of Murilo's suggestions, the wren. Wrens are birds in the family Troglodytidae, and are usually very small with a short tail, a pointy bill that turns slightly downward at the tip, and brown plumage. It mainly eats insects and larvae that it finds in nooks and crannies of trees, and many species will investigate dark places like hollow logs, the openings to caves, or your apartment if you leave the back door open on a warm day. Many sing beautiful songs and have very loud voices for such little bitty birds. Most wrens are native to the Americas, including the canyon wren that's native to western North America in desert areas. It's cinnamon-brown with a white throat and an especially long bill, which it uses to find insects in rock crevices. It lives in canyons and has a more flattened skull than other wrens, which means it can get its head into crevices without hurting itself. No one has ever seen a canyon wren drink water, and scientists think it probably gets all the water it needs from the insects it eats. Where do the insects get the water they need? That's an episode for another day. This is what a canyon wren sounds like: [bird sound] Not every bird that's called a wren is actually in the family Troglodytidae. Some just resemble wrens, like an unusual bird that Murilo brought to my attention. It's called Lyall's wren but it's actually in the family Acanthisittidae, and it was once widespread throughout New Zealand. By the time it was scientifically identified and described in 1894, it was restricted to a single island in Cook Strait. Lyall's wren was flightless,

After a deep dive on the Trump administration's horrifying misuse of the Alien Enemies Act to deport people from the US without due process, Kate and Leah preview upcoming SCOTUS cases about the Voting Rights Act and the Environmental Protection Agency. Along the way, they also touch on the Trump administration's targeting of certain law firms and its continued attacks on DEI. Hosts' favorite things this week: Leah: Fight! Fight! Fight!, Rebecca Traister; AOC's Bluesky feed during the CR debates/debacle; The Hidden Motive Behind Trump's Attacks on Trans People, M. Gessen; This Election Will Be a Crucial Test of Musk's Power, Kate Shaw; Trump Has Gone From Unconstitutional to Anti-Constitutional, Jamelle BouieKate: The Feminist Law Professor Who Wants to Stop Arresting People for Domestic Violence, Sarah Lustbader; The Dangerous Document Behind Trump's Campus Purges, Daphna Renan & Jesse  Hoffnung-Garskof; The Cost of the Government's Attack on Columbia, Christopher L. Eisgruber Get tickets for STRICT SCRUTINY LIVE – The Bad Decisions Tour 2025! 5/31 – Washington DC6/12 – NYC10/4 – ChicagoLearn more: http://crooked.com/eventsPre-order your copy of Leah's forthcoming book, Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes (out May 13th)Follow us on Instagram, Threads, and Bluesky

Thanks to Alyx and Richard from NC for their suggestions this week! Let's learn about rabbits! Further reading: Why your pet rabbit is more docile than its wild relative FOUND: Small enigmatic rabbit with black tail lost to science for more than 120 years rediscovered hopping around mountain range in Mexico The Omiltemi cottontail rabbit, as caught on a camera trap [photo taken from second article linked above]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we're going to talk about bunnies, and also learn about how a wild animal differs from its domesticated counterpart. Thanks to Alyx for suggesting this excellent topic. Thanks also to Richard from NC who alerted me to a rediscovered rabbit we'll discuss too. Thanks for all the well wishes in the last few weeks about my surgery. It went just fine and all I have now is a cool-looking new scar, although I was seriously hoarse for about a week. It's pretty weather here in East Tennessee and officially it's spring in the northern hemisphere, so let's talk about some springtime bunnies! Collectively rabbits and hares are called leporids after their family, Leporidae. Leporids are famous for hopping instead of walking, and they're able to do so because their hind legs are longer than their front legs and have specialized ankle joints. Ancestors of leporids developed this ankle as much as 53 million years ago, but their legs were much shorter so they probably ran instead of hopped. Hares have longer legs than rabbits and can run faster as a result, but both rabbits and hares are known for their ability to bound at high speeds. When a rabbit or hare runs, it pushes off from the ground with the tips of its long hind toes, and its toes are connected with webbed skin so they can't spread apart. If the toes did spread apart, they would be more likely to get injured. Rabbits and hares also don't have paw pads like dogs and cats do. The bottom of its foot is covered with dense, coarse fur that protects the toes from injury. Its long claws help it get a good purchase on the ground so its feet won't slip. Leporids eat plants, including grass, weeds, twigs, and bark. Animals that eat grass and other tough plants have specialized digestive systems so they can extract as many nutrients from the plants as possible. Many animals swallow the plants, digest them for a while, then bring up cuds of plants and water to chew more thoroughly. Rabbits and hares don't chew their cud in that way, but they do have a system that allows them to twice-digest the plants they eat. After a leporid eats some plants, the plant pieces go into the stomach, naturally, and then travel into the first part of the large intestine, called the cecum. The cecum separates the softer parts of the plants from the harder, less digestible parts. The hard parts are compressed into hard pellets that the rabbit poops out. But the soft parts of the plants, which are most nutritious, develop into softer pellets. These are called cecotropes, and as soon as the rabbit poops out the cecotropes, it immediately eats them again. This allows the digestive system to get a second round to extract more nutrients from the plants. Hares aren't domesticated, but rabbits have probably been domesticated many times in different places over the last several thousand years, first for food and fur, and then as pets. The domesticated rabbit we have today is descended from the European rabbit, also called the cony. If other species of rabbit were ever domesticated, we don't have record of it. The rabbit has also been introduced into the wild in places it has no business to be, like Australia, where it's an invasive species. You know where else the European rabbit has been introduced? The British Isles. It's native to mainland Europe, not England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and smaller islands nearby. Historians think the rabbit was introduced to England soon after the year 1066,

Kate Shaw is a constitutional law professor at University of Pennsylvania Penn Carey Law School. Shaw joins Preet to discuss legal challenges to President Trump's executive orders and the constitutionality of Elon Musk's role in DOGE. They also discuss whether Justice Amy Coney Barrett is shifting away from the conservative majority and upcoming Supreme Court cases on birthright citizenship and transgender care.  Plus, in a special excerpt from the CAFE Insider podcast, Preet and Joyce Vance speak with First Amendment expert Erwin Chemerinksy about the constitutionality of Trump's attempt to deport Mahmoud Khalil based on his involvement in pro-Palestine protests at Columbia University. Visit cafe.com/insider to subscribe and hear the full conversation. For show notes and a transcript of the episode head to our website.  Have a question for Preet? Ask @PreetBhararaon Twitter or Bluesky with the hashtag #AskPreet. Email us at staytuned@cafe.com, or call 833-997-7338 to leave a voicemail. Stay Tuned with Preet is brought to you by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. Recently I read about a giant snake supposedly seen in Tennessee in 1908. The story seemed a little suspicious so I dug into it, and it got a lot more complicated than I expected. On July 25, 1908, the St. Louis (Missouri) Globe-Democrat ran an article about a giant snake in Loudon, Tennessee. Loudon is a town half an hour's drive away from Knoxville in East Tennessee, although it took longer to get there from Knoxville in 1908. According to the article, the snake was “at least twenty-five feet in length, eight inches in diameter and twenty-four inches in circumference.” The longest snake ever reliably measured is a reticulated python named Medusa, who was measured as 25 feet 2 inches long in 2011, or 7.67 meters. Medusa holds the world record for the longest snake in captivity. Reticulated pythons are constrictors, which are non-venomous snakes who kill their prey by squeezing them until blood flow is shut off to the organs, causing cardiac arrest and death. As a result, they're incredibly strong snakes. The reticulated python is native to southern Asia and not likely to be found running loose in East Tennessee even today, and certainly not in 1908. The famous Boa constrictor and other snakes in the genus Boa are all native to Central and South America, while the closely related anaconda is from tropical South America. These snakes are also constrictors. The anaconda is rumored to grow over 30 feet long, or 9 meters, although the longest specimen ever reliably measured was 17 feet long, or 5.2 meters. Since snake skin is stretchy, though, preserved skins of huge size are often provided as proof of snakes much longer than the known maximum. While the anaconda isn't as long as the reticulated python, it's much bulkier, so a 25-foot anaconda would be much heavier and larger around than a 25-foot reticulated python. The 1908 article claims that the snake “has been seen off and on for the last twenty-eight years, but not until this summer has it caused any serious alarm.” I don't know about you, but even as someone who likes animals and thinks snakes are neat, if I saw a 25-foot snake I would be a little bit alarmed even if it wasn't doing anything. The article then describes how the snake had knocked down a fence while climbing over it and that it had taken a lamb. One man even managed to shoot the snake, although only with “small shot,” and the article claims that the snake, “in a frenzy from the pain, tore up saplings in getting away.” The article finishes by reporting that women and children were barricaded in their homes while men organized a posse to hunt down the giant snake, which was rumored to live in a cave overlooking the river. The same article ran in various newspapers around the country for months, but there was no follow-up to let readers know if the snake had been found. But the story didn't appear in any Tennessee newspapers. The only 1908 article about a giant snake in Tennessee that appears in a Tennessee newspaper is from August 21. The Chattanooga, Tennessee Daily Times reported that a blacksnake “fully six feet long and two inches in diameter” had been spotted eating young pigeons above the Birmingham railway station. A police officer shot and killed it, but its body couldn't be recovered from the steep hillside above the tunnel. “Blacksnake” is a term used for two snakes that are common throughout the southern United States: the eastern black kingsnake and the North American racer. Both are black in color and can grow more than 6 feet long, or 1.8 meters. Both are non-venomous and eat small animals like mice, frogs, and lizards, while the kingsnake also sometimes eats other snakes. The longest snake found in Tennessee, which also lives throughout much of eastern North America, is the gray ratsnake, which is frequently 6 feet long and sometimes longer.

Further reading: Mouse filmed moving items in man's shed in Bristol The pack rat: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week I'm sharing a Patreon episode from last year because I have surgery scheduled. Don't worry, it's minor thyroid surgery and I'll be fine, but my doctor said that a side effect might be hoarseness while I recover. Rather than risk sounding like an old frog, and to allow myself lots of time to rest afterwards, I've scheduled Patreon episodes for this week and next week. At the beginning of this year, in early January 2024, you may have heard about a man in Wales who had an interesting visitor to his work shed. Rodney Holbrook is 75 years old and a retired postal worker, and at the end of 2023 he started noticing something weird. Things in his work shed kept being moved, and not in a way that suggested another person was getting in. Initially Rodney noticed that some bird food had been moved into an old pair of shoes. This wasn't just a one-time thing that would suggest an accident, like maybe Rodney had absent-mindedly decided to store the bird food in his shoes, or maybe it just fell there. The bird food kept ending up in the shoes. Other things kept getting moved too. Small items that Rodney had left out while making and repairing things at his work bench kept getting put into a box, like tools and nuts and bolts. It happened almost every night. Fortunately, Rodney is also a wildlife photographer, and he just happened to have a night vision camera. He set it up in the shed to find out what on earth was going on. A mouse was going on, that's what was going on. This actually wasn't a huge surprise to Rodney, because years before, in 2019, a friend of his had had the same thing happen. His friend was Steve Mckears who lived near Bristol, England. Steve kept crushed peanuts in a tub to use as bird food, but he started to notice other things mixed in with the peanuts. First it was just one screw, then it was lots more things that he'd left around his shed. He couldn't figure out a solution, because he always locked his shed at night. As Steve said at the time, “I was worried. I'm 72 and you hear of things going wrong with 72-year-old gentlemen in the mind.” Fortunately, Steve's friend Rodney set up a camera and proved that there was nothing wrong with Steve's mind or with the shed's lock. It was just a mouse who was tidying up. The question is why are these mice tidying up someone else's shed? Don't the mice have sheds of their own to clean up? It's probable that the mice are actually living in the sheds and are wondering why some humans keep barging in every day and making a mess. Rodents of all kinds do tend to tidy up as part of the foraging and nesting process. Sometimes that means moving debris so the animal can find important items more easily, sometimes it means bringing items back to its nest. House mice and rats will steal small items from humans to make nests, like socks and facecloths. Some rodents are attracted to shiny things and will stash them away or even bury them. One animal, the pack rat, is so famous for storing items that we call a person who likes to collect things a pack rat. The pack rat lives throughout much of North and Central America and is related to mice and rats. It's bigger than a mouse but smaller than most rats, and some species have furry tails like ground squirrels. It builds a den out of whatever materials are available where it lives, and its den is complex and usually well hidden. Desert species like to build under a cactus, while others live in cliffs or among rocks, in abandoned buildings or sometimes non-abandoned buildings, under bushes, in the tops of trees, or even in the entrances to caves. The den can be quite large and contains numerous rooms used for food storage, sleeping, and storing all the interesting things the pack rat finds while foraging.

Elon Musk's moves at DOGE have been legally dubious from the start. And the more we learn, the more questions we have about this not-an-agency helmed by Musk –– who is apparently both in charge, and also not in charge. That's why we wanted to talk with Kate Shaw, University of Pennsylvania law professor and co-host of the Strict Scrutiny podcast, about the very real constitutional issues raised by DOGE and Musk and his minions. Shaw spoke with Dahlia Lithwick about what is and isn't legal about DOGE, and the impossible bind that creates for government lawyers tasked with defending his devastation of the government.  Want more Amicus? Join Slate Plus to unlock weekly bonus episodes with exclusive legal analysis. Plus, you'll access ad-free listening across all your favorite Slate podcasts. You can subscribe directly from the Amicus show page on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Or, visit slate.com/amicusplus to get access wherever you listen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Elon Musk's moves at DOGE have been legally dubious from the start. And the more we learn, the more questions we have about this not-an-agency helmed by Musk –– who is apparently both in charge, and also not in charge. That's why we wanted to talk with Kate Shaw, University of Pennsylvania law professor and co-host of the Strict Scrutiny podcast, about the very real constitutional issues raised by DOGE and Musk and his minions. Shaw spoke with Dahlia Lithwick about what is and isn't legal about DOGE, and the impossible bind that creates for government lawyers tasked with defending his devastation of the government.  Want more Amicus? Join Slate Plus to unlock weekly bonus episodes with exclusive legal analysis. Plus, you'll access ad-free listening across all your favorite Slate podcasts. You can subscribe directly from the Amicus show page on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Or, visit slate.com/amicusplus to get access wherever you listen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Elon Musk's moves at DOGE have been legally dubious from the start. And the more we learn, the more questions we have about this not-an-agency helmed by Musk –– who is apparently both in charge, and also not in charge. That's why we wanted to talk with Kate Shaw, University of Pennsylvania law professor and co-host of the Strict Scrutiny podcast, about the very real constitutional issues raised by DOGE and Musk and his minions. Shaw spoke with Dahlia Lithwick about what is and isn't legal about DOGE, and the impossible bind that creates for government lawyers tasked with defending his devastation of the government.  Want more Amicus? Join Slate Plus to unlock weekly bonus episodes with exclusive legal analysis. Plus, you'll access ad-free listening across all your favorite Slate podcasts. You can subscribe directly from the Amicus show page on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Or, visit slate.com/amicusplus to get access wherever you listen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Congressman Al Green (D-TX) talks about challenging President Trump with “righteous incivility” while the courts are increasingly viewed as the last, best, clearest line of defense against presidential overreach.

The Author Events Series presents Chris Hayes | The Sirens' Call REGISTER  In Conversation with Kate Shaw We all feel it--the distraction, the loss of focus, the addictive focus on the wrong things for too long. We bump into the zombies on their phones in the street, and sometimes they're us. We stare in pity at the four people at the table in the restaurant, all on their phones, and then we feel the buzz in our pocket. Something has changed utterly: for most of human history, the boundary between public and private has been clear, at least in theory. Now, as Chris Hayes writes, "With the help of a few tech firms, we basically tore it down in about a decade." Hayes argues that we are in the midst of an epoch-defining transition whose only parallel is what happened to labor in the nineteenth century: attention has become a commodified resource extracted from us, and from which we are increasingly alienated. The Sirens' Call is the big-picture vision we urgently need to offer clarity and guidance. Because there is a breaking point. Sirens are designed to compel us, and now they are going off in our bedrooms and kitchens at all hours of the day and night, doing the bidding of vast empires, the most valuable companies in history, built on harvesting human attention. As Hayes writes, "Now our deepest neurological structures, human evolutionary inheritances, and social impulses are in a habitat designed to prey upon, to cultivate, distort, or destroy that which most fundamentally makes us human." The Sirens' Call is the book that snaps everything into a single holistic framework so that we can wrest back control of our lives, our politics, and our future. Chris Hayes is the Emmy Award-winning host of All In with Chris Hayes on MSNBC and the New York Times bestselling author of A Colony in a Nation and Twilight of the Elites. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and children. Kate Shaw is a Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, where she teaches and writes about the presidency, the law of democracy, the Supreme Court, and reproductive rights and justice. Her scholarly writing has appeared, among other places, in the Harvard Law Review, the Columbia Law Review, the Michigan Law Review, and the Northwestern University Law Review, and her popular writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Atlantic. She co-hosts the Supreme Court podcast Strict Scrutiny and is a Contributing Opinion Writer with the New York Times. The 2024/25 Author Events Series is presented by Comcast. Because you love Author Events, please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians. Extra copies of the books will be available for purchase at the library on event night. All tickets are non-refundable. (recorded 3/3/2025)

Thanks to Tim and Mia who suggested one of this week's animals! Further reading: Genomic insights into the evolutionary origin of Myxozoa within Cnidaria A tardigrade, photo taken with an electron microscope because these little guys are incredibly tiny: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we're going to talk about two microscopic or almost microscopic animals, one suggested by Mia and Tim, the other one I just learned about myself. We'll start with Mia and Tim's suggestion, the water bear, also known as the tardigrade. We've talked about it before but there's always more to learn about an animal. The water bear isn't a bear at all but a tiny eight-legged animal that barely ever grows larger than 1.5 millimeters. Some species are microscopic. There are about 1,300 known species of water bear and they all look pretty similar. It looks for all the world like a plump eight-legged stuffed animal made out of couch upholstery. It uses six of its fat little legs for walking and the hind two to cling to the moss and other plant material where it lives. Each leg has four to eight long hooked claws. It has a tubular mouth that looks a little like a pig's snout. An extremophile is an organism adapted to live in a particular environment that's considered extreme, like undersea volcanic vents or inside rocks deep below the ocean floor. Tardigrades aren't technically extremophiles, but they are incredibly tough. Researchers have found tardigrades in environments such as the gloppy ooze at the bottom of the ocean and the icy peaks of the Himalayas. It can survive massive amounts of radiation, dehydration for up to five years, pressures even more intense than at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, temperatures as low as -450 Fahrenheit, or -270 Celsius, heat up to 300 degrees Fahrenheit, or 150 Celsius, and even outer space. It's survived on Earth for at least half a billion years. Mostly, though, it just lives in moss. Not every tardigrade is able to do everything we just talked about. They're tough, but they're not invulnerable, and different species of tardigrade are good at withstanding different extreme environments. Many species can withstand incredible heat, but only for half an hour or less. Long-term temperature increases, even if only a little warmer than what it's used to, can cause the tardigrade to die. Most species of tardigrade eat plant material or bacteria, but a few eat smaller species of tardigrade. It has no lungs since it just absorbs air directly into its body by gas exchange. It has a teeny brain, teeny eyes, and teeny sensory bristles on its body. Its legs have no joints. Its tubular mouth contains tube-like structures called stylets that are secreted from glands on either side of the mouth. Every time the tardigrade molts its cuticle, or body covering, it loses the stylets too and has to regrow them. In some species, the only time the tardigrade poops is when it molts. The poop is left behind in the molted cuticle. The tardigrade's success is largely due to its ability to suspend its metabolism, during which time the water in its body is replaced with a type of protein that protects its cells from damage. It retracts its legs and rearranges its internal organs so it can curl up into a teeny barrel shape, at which point it's called a tun. It needs a moist environment, and if its environment dries out too much, the water bear will automatically go into this suspended state, called cryptobiosis. Tests in 2007 and 2011 that exposed tardigrades to outer space led to some speculation that tardigrades might actually be from outer space, and that they, or organisms that gave rise to them, might have hitched a ride on a comet or some other heavenly body and ended up on earth. But this isn't actually the case, since genetic studies show that tardigrades fit neatly into what we know of animal development and evolution. In other words,

Jamelle Bouie and David French of The New York Times, Sarah Isgur of The Dispatch, and Melissa Murray of NYU School of Law join Jeffrey Rosen to discuss the relationship between the Roberts Court and the Trump administration. They discuss how the Supreme Court might resolve open legal questions—including impoundment and the unitary executive theory—and debate the Court's role in maintaining the separation of powers.   This conversation was originally recorded on February 22, 2025, as part of the NCC's President's Council Retreat in Miami, Florida.  Resources Melissa Murray (with Leah Litman and Kate Shaw), “Yes, We're in a Constitutional Crisis” Strict Scrutiny podcast (Feb. 17, 2025)  Jamelle Bouie, Michelle Cottle, David French, and Carlos Lozada, “Opinion: Don't be Fooled, ‘Trump is a Weak President'” The New York Times (Feb. 14, 2025)  David French, “The Trump Crisis Deepens,” The New York Times (Feb. 6, 2025)  Sarah Isgur and David French, “Lawless or Unwise?” Advisory Opinions podcast (Feb. 14, 2025) Stay Connected and Learn More Questions or comments about the show? Email us at podcast@constitutioncenter.org Continue the conversation by following us on social media @ConstitutionCtr. Sign up to receive Constitution Weekly, our email roundup of constitutional news and debate. Subscribe, rate, and review wherever you listen. Join us for an upcoming live program or watch recordings on YouTube. Support our important work. Donate

Thanks to Nora, Holly, Stephen, and Aila for their suggestions this week! Further reading: How 'bin chickens' learnt to wash poisonous cane toads Monkeys in Australia? Revisiting a Forgotten Furry Mystery Down Under The Australian white ibis: The greater glider looks like a toy: The thorny devil is very pointy: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we're going to talk about some animals native to Australia, which is Nora's suggestion. We'll learn about animals suggested by Holly, Stephen, and Aila, along with a mystery animal reported in the 1930s in northern Australia. Australia isn't currently connected to any other landmass and hasn't been for about 50 million years. That means that most animals on the continent have been evolving separately for a very long time. While in other parts of the world placental mammals took over many ecological niches, marsupials are still the dominant mammal type in Australia. Most marsupial females give birth to tiny, helpless babies that then continue their development outside of her body, usually in a pouch. But let's start the episode not with a marsupial but with a bird. Stephen suggested the Australian white ibis, a beautiful bird that doesn't deserve its nickname of bin chicken. The white ibis is related to ibises from other parts of the world, but it's native to Australia, and is especially common in eastern, northern, and southwestern Australia. It's a large, social bird that likes to gather in flocks. Its body is mostly white with a short tail, long black legs, and a black head. Like other ibises, the adult bird's head is bare of feathers. It also has a long, down-curved black bill that it uses to dig in the mud for crayfish and other small animals. When the bird spreads its magnificent black-tipped wings, it displays a stripe of featherless skin that's bright red. The Australian white ibis prefers marshy areas where it can eat as many frogs, crayfish, mussels, and other animals as it can catch. But at some point around 50 years ago, the birds started moving into more urban areas. They discovered that humans throw out a lot of perfectly good food, and before long they started to become a nuisance to people who had never encountered raccoons and didn't know they should clamp those trash barrels closed really securely. But no matter how annoying the Australian white ibis can be to people, it's been really helpful in another way. In the 1930s, sugarcane plantation owners wanted to control beetles and other pests that eat sugarcane plants, so they released a bunch of cane toads in some of their fields in Queensland. But the cane toads didn't do any good eating the beetles. Instead, they ate native animals and spread like wildfire. Since the toads are toxic, nothing could stop them, and there are now an estimated two billion cane toads living in Australia. But the Australian white ibis eventually figured out how to deal with cane toads. The ibis will grab a cane toad, then whip it around and throw it into the air so that the toad secretes its toxins in hopes that the bird will leave it alone. Then the ibis will wash the toad in water or wipe it in wet grass, which washes away the toxins. Then the ibis eats the toad. Goodbye, toad! Our next Australian animal is one suggested by Holly, the greater glider. When I saw the picture Holly sent, I was convinced it wasn't a real animal but a toy plushie, but that's just what the greater glider looks like. It's incredibly cute! The greater glider lives in eastern Australia, and as you might guess from its name, it is the largest of the three glider species found in Australia, and it can glide from tree to tree on flaps of skin between its front and back legs. Until 2020 scientists thought there was only one species of glider with local variations in size and coat color, but it turns out those differences are significant enough that it...

Thanks to Sam for suggesting this week's topic, the sea bunny! My plush sea bunny, with one of my cats, Dracula, who does not like it: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we're going to revisit an animal we haven't talked about in a few years! Thanks to Sam for suggesting it, and for sending a whole list of questions after listening to episode 215. Episode 215 was about the cutest invertebrates, and we talked about a lot of them. This week it's all about the sea bunny. Before we answer Sam's questions, let's go over what we learned in episode 215, in case you haven't listened to it since it came out in March of 2021. The sea bunny, or sea rabbit, is a type of nudribranch [noodi-bronk] that lives along the coastline of the Indo-Pacific Ocean, especially in tropical waters. Nudibranchs are a type of mollusk that are sometimes called sea slugs. Many are brightly colored with beautiful patterns. Compared to some sea slugs, the sea bunny is a little on the plain side. It's usually orange or yellow, sometimes white or even green, with tiny brown or black speckles. It looks fuzzy because it's covered in little protuberances that it uses to sense the world around it, as well as longer, thinner fibers called spicules. It also has two larger black-tipped protuberances that look for all the world like little bunny ears, although they're actually chemoreceptors called rhinophores. It has a flower-shaped structure on its rear end that looks kind of like a bunny tail, but it's actually gills. It really is amazing how much the sea bunny actually resembles a little white bunny with dark speckles. Like other nudibranchs, the sea bunny is a hermaphrodite, which means it produces both eggs and sperm, although it can't fertilize its own eggs. When it finds a potential mate, they both perform a little courtship dance to decide if they like each other. After mating, both lay strings of eggs in a spiral pattern. The eggs hatch into larvae that are free-swimming, although the adults crawl along the ocean floor looking for food. Some nudibranch larvae have small coiled shells like snails, which they shed when they metamorphose into an adult, but the sea bunny hatches into a teeny-tiny miniature sea bunny. One of Sam's questions was what the sea bunny eats. It mainly eats sea sponges. The toxins present in many sponges don't bother the sea bunny. Instead, the sea bunny absorbs the sponge's toxins and keeps them in its body. I don't usually bother with Reddit posts while researching episodes, but I saw one where people were discussing how toxic the sea bunny is. Someone pointed out that small as they are, it's not a good idea to pick up a sea bunny because they are so toxic, and someone replied, “That's good for them, because I'm going to assume they taste like Marshmallows.” That brings us to Sam's next question, does anything eat the sea bunny? That's mainly a no, because they are so incredibly toxic. An animal the size of a big shark or something like that probably wouldn't be affected by the sea bunny's toxins, but it also wouldn't bother with such a tiny snack. A fish or other animal small enough for the sea bunny to seem like a meal probably wouldn't survive its toxins. Sam also wants to know if the sea bunny travels in groups, and that doesn't seem to be the case. It's a mostly solitary animal most of the time. If it did gather in a group, say if a bunch of sea bunnies were munching on the same sponge at the same time, maybe we could call it a fluffle of sea bunnies, or a school of sea bunnies. Sam also wants a better idea of how small the sea bunny is. It's easy enough to say, oh, it's a little less than an inch, or around 2 ½ cm, but most of us have a hard time picturing that. So here's a comparison that will help you visualize it. If you have an ordinary paperclip, not one of the jumbo ones, it's usually around 2.5 cm long,

Kate Shaw, professor at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, co-host of the Supreme Court podcast Strict Scrutiny, and a contributing opinion Writer with the New York Times, talks about the constitutional issues at stake with some of the actions taken by the White House.

In this special live episode recorded atSCOPE, hostLeanne Woehlke sits down withKate Shaw, CEO ofInnovative Trials, to explore the evolving landscape of patient recruitment and retention in clinical research. We discuss some of the age old issues in the industry and share insights on the biggest challenges sites and sponsors face today.Whether you're a clinical research professional, a site leader, or simply passionate about advancing patient-centric trials, this episode is packed with expert insights and actionable takeaways.

Thanks to Charlotte, Clay, and Richard from NC for their suggestions this week! Further reading: Seal whiskers, the secret weapon for hunting Elephant seals drift off to sleep while diving far below the ocean surface Scientists Discover Remains of Antarctic Elephant Seal in Indiana River The elephant seal and its proboscis: The bunyip carving: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we have an animal suggested by three different listeners, Charlotte, Clay, and Richard from NC. So, by popular demand, let's learn about the elephant seal, including some elephant seal mysteries. The elephant seal gets its name because it's big, grayish-brown, and wrinkled. Adult male elephant seals even have a proboscis, although it's not anywhere near as long as an elephant's trunk. It's basically an enlarged and elongated nose that allows the animal to make loud roaring noises to intimidate other males. This is what that sounds like: [elephant seal roars] There are two species of elephant seal, the northern and southern. The southern elephant seal is larger on average while the northern male has a larger proboscis on average. We talked about elephant seals briefly in episode 155, about sexual dimorphism, because males and females are much different in size. A big male southern elephant seal can grow up to 20 feet long, or 6 meters, and can weigh about 9,000 lbs, or 4,000 kg. Females are about half that length and much lighter in weight. A big male northern elephant seal can grow up to 16 feet long, or almost 5 meters, and weigh around 5,500 lbs, or 2,500 kg, while females are much smaller. There are many reasons why male elephant seals are bigger than females, but it's mainly because the males spend a lot of energy fighting each other. The bigger and stronger a male is, the more likely he is to win a fight and the more likely it is that other males won't bother to challenge him. Meanwhile, females are smaller so they need less food. The elephant seal has thick fur that helps keep it warm, but it also has a layer of blubber like whales do. The blubber also helps make the seal streamlined so it can swim faster. Since the elephant seal spends most of its life in the water, and it does a lot of diving, it needs to be as streamlined as possible. It eats animals like fish, squid, and octopuses, but it especially likes sharks and rays. Since a lot of the elephant seal's favorite prey lives on or near the ocean floor, it has to dive to find it. The deepest recorded dive of an elephant seal was almost 5,700 feet, or about 1,700 meters. That's just over a mile deep, the deepest dive made by a mammal that isn't a whale. The elephant seal can hold its breath for well over an hour and a half. To conserve energy and maximize its time, quite often an elephant seal will actually sleep while it's swimming downward, since a really deep dive can take a long time to descend. It might only wake up when it bumps into the sea floor, but sometimes it's sleeping so soundly that it will just lie there at the bottom of the ocean and continue to sleep. I guess that's why the sea floor is sometimes called the seabed. Because the elephant seal hunts for food where there's not much light, it often can't rely on its vision to find its prey. Instead, it has really good hearing underwater, and it has whiskers on its upper lip that are extremely sensitive, with more nerve fibers in each whisker than in any other mammal studied. Its whiskers can sense tiny movements of water that indicate an animal moving around nearby. Once a year, the elephant seal molts and new fur grows in, but unlike most mammals it doesn't just lose its fur. The outer layer of its skin peels off too. It takes a lot longer for its fur to regrow because blubber doesn't contain any blood vessels. New blood vessels have to grow around the blubber to supply the skin with extra nutrients,

This week we take a look at some of the many animals that were discovered last year! Further reading: ‘Blob-Headed' Catfish among New Species Discovered in Peru New Species of Dwarf Deer Discovered in Peru Hylomys macarong, the vampire hedgehog Hairy giant tarantula: The monster among mini tarantulas with 'feather duster' legs Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and partners discover new ocean predator in the Atacama Trench Never-before-seen vampire squid species discovered in twilight zone of South China The blob headed catfish [photo by Robinson Olivera/Conservation International]: A new mini tarantula [photo by David Ortiz]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week is the 8th year anniversary of this podcast, so thanks for listening! It's also our annual discoveries episode, where we'll learn about a few animals that were discovered last year--in this case, in 2024. Let's start in Peru, a country in western South America. A 2022 survey of organisms living in the Alto Mayo region was published at the very end of 2024, revealing at least 27 new species and potentially more that are still being studied. One of those new species is a fish called the blob headed catfish. The new fish has been placed in the bristlemouth armored catfish genus, but as you can probably guess from its name, it has a big blobby head and face. Scientists have no idea why it has a blob head. It lives in mountain streams and that's about all we know about it right now. Another animal found in the same survey is a new mouse. It lives in swampy forests and is semi-aquatic, including having webbed toes. It's dark gray in color and is probably closely related to the Peruvian fish-eating rat, which is mostly brown in color and was only described in 2020. Another new species from Peru is a type of small deer, called a pudu, that has been named Pudella carlae. It's one of those “hidden in plain sight” discoveries, because until 2024 it was thought to be the same as the northern pudu that also lives in Ecuador and Colombia. The new deer is only 15 inches tall, or 38 cm, and is dark brownish-orange in color with black legs and face. It only lives in Peru, mostly in high elevations. It's also the first deer species discovered in the 21st century, although hopefully not the last. While we're talking about mammal discoveries, we have to talk about the vampire hedgehog just because of its name. It was actually described at the very end of 2023, but it's such an interesting animal that we'll say it's a 2024 discovery. The vampire hedgehog was actually discovered a whole lot earlier than 2023, but no one noticed it was new to science for a long time. A small team of researchers studying soft-furred hedgehogs decided to collect DNA samples from all the museum specimens they could find. One of the specimens was in the archives of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, collected in 1961 but never studied. When the scientists compared its DNA to the other specimens they'd found, it didn't match up. Not only that, a closer look showed that it had fangs. Naturally, they named it the vampire hedgehog and went searching for living ones. The vampire hedgehog lives in parts of Vietnam and is a member of the soft-furred hedgehogs, also called gymnures, hairy hedgehogs, or moonrats. Instead of spines, moonrats have bristly fur and long noses that make them look like shrews, but hairless tails that make them look like rats. They're not rodents but are closely related to other hedgehogs. They eat pretty much anything but especially like to eat meat. This includes mice and frogs, along with various invertebrates. As for the vampire hedgehog's fangs, both males and females have them, but males have bigger fangs. Scientists don't know yet what the hedgehogs use their fangs for. It could be they help the animals keep a better hold on wiggly prey,

The White House budget office ordered a pause on federal loans and grants, only to issue a reversal days later. Kate Shaw, professor at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, co-host of the Supreme Court podcast Strict Scrutiny and a contributing opinion writer with The New York Times, offers legal analysis of the move — and the Trump administration's attempts to expand executive power in general.

Each weekend on Best Of The Gist, we listen back to an archival Gist segment from the past, then we replay something from the past week. This weekend, we listen back to Mike's 2022 interview with Kate Shaw, ABC Legal Analyst and co-host of the Strict Scrutiny podcast. It's an extended interview about the Equal Rights Amendment, which, many of its backers claim, actually passed and should be the law of the land. Then we listen back to Mike's Tuesday Spiel about the pardoned January 6th attackers.    SUBSCRIBE  We offer premium subscriptions, including an AD-FREE version of the show and options for bonus content.    The Gist is produced by Joel Patterson and Corey Wara    Email us at thegist@mikepesca.com  Subscribe to The Gist's YouTube Page  Follow Mike's Substack > Pesca Profundities  To advertise on the show, click here  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thanks to Siya, Sutton, Owen, and Aksel for suggesting this week's topic, the Goliath birdeater tarantula and the fire ant! Further listening: The TEETH Podcast Further reading: Tropical fire ants traveled the world on 16th century ships The Goliath birdeater tarantula, bigger than some kittens: Fire ants: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we're going to talk about two invertebrates, a spider and an insect. Thanks to Siya, Sutton, Owen, and Aksel for suggesting them! We'll start with the spider, which Siya and Sutton both suggested. It's the goliath tarantula, also called the goliath birdeater. You know it has to be a big spider if it's called a birdeater. We've talked about it before, but not in a long time. The goliath birdeater is the heaviest spider in the world. If you think of the usual spider, even a big one, it's still pretty lightweight. Let's use a wolf spider as an example, which is found just about everywhere in the world. It's a hunting spider that doesn't spin a web, and while different species vary in size, the biggest is the Carolina wolf spider found in many parts of North America. A big female can have a legspan of four inches across, or 10 cm, with a body up to an inch and a half long, or 35 mm—but it weighs less than an ounce. That's barely 28 grams, or just a little heavier than five sheets of printer paper. In comparison, the goliath birdeater tarantula can weigh over 6 ounces, or 175 grams. That's heavier than a baseball, or two packs of cards. Its legspan can be as much as 12 inches across, or 30 cm with a body length of about 5 inches, or 13 cm. It's brown or golden in color and lives in South America, especially in swampy parts of the Amazon rainforest. It's nocturnal and mostly eats worms, large insects, other spiders, amphibians like frogs and toads, and occasionally other small animals like lizards or even snakes. And yes, every so often it will catch and eat a bird, but that's rare. Birds are a lot harder to catch than worms, especially since the Goliath birdeater lives on the ground, not in trees. Because it's so large, the goliath looks like it would be incredibly dangerous to humans. It does have fangs and can inflict a venomous bite, but it's not very strong venom. The danger comes from a very different source, because the goliath birdeater is famous for its urticating spines. Many species of tarantula have special setae, hairlike structures called urticating spines, that can be dislodged from the body easily. If a tarantula feels threatened, it will rub a leg against its abdomen, dislodging the urticating spines. The spines are fine and light so they float upward away from the spider on the tiny air currents made by the tarantula's legs, and right into the face of whatever animal is threatening it. The spines are covered with microscopic barbs that latch onto whatever they touch. If that's your face or hands, they are going to make your skin itch painfully, and if it happens to be your eyeball you might end up having to go to the eye doctor for an injured cornea. Scientists who study tarantulas usually wear eye protection. The goliath birdeater tarantula is considered a delicacy in northeastern South America. People eat it roasted. Apparently it tastes kind of like shrimp. Next, Owen and Aksel wanted to learn about fire ants. I couldn't believe that we've never talked about fire ants before! Fire ant is the name for any of the more than 200 species in the genus Solenopsis, but it's typically used to refer to the species Solenopsis invicta. It's native to tropical South America but has been introduced to parts of North America, Australia, China, Taiwan, India, Africa, and many other places where the climate is tropical or sub-tropical. The fire ant initially became so invasive due to Spanish galleons in the 16th century, which carried trade goods around the world.

This week we're going to learn about some animals that seem to have individual names! Further reading: Bottlenose dolphins can use learned vocal labels to address each other How Do Dolphins Choose Their Name? Vertical transmission of learned signatures in a wild parrot Baby Parrots Learn Their Names from Their Parents Study: African Elephants Address Each Other With Name-Like Calls Marmoset Monkeys Use Names to Communicate with Each Other The green-rumped parrotlet (photo by Rick Robinson, taken from this site): Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we're going to learn about some animals that seem to be using names to refer to other individuals or themselves. Let's start with bottlenose dolphins, because they're well-studied and scientists have known about this particular aspect of their society for over a decade. Every bottlenose dolphin has a signature whistle that identifies it to other dolphins. The signature whistles can be complex and the dolphin may add or change details to indicate its mood or other information. It's not precisely a name in the way humans would think of it, but it is an identifier. The dolphin creates its own signature whistle when it's young. Some dolphins pattern their whistles on their mother's signature whistle, while others mimic their siblings or friends. Some seem to pattern theirs on a distant acquaintance, which sounds to me like they just like something about an unusual whistle and decide to incorporate it into their own whistle. As dolphins grow up, females typically don't change their whistles, but males often do. Male dolphins often pair up together and remain bonded, and a pair may change their signature whistles to be similar. When a dolphin is trying to find a friend it can't see, it will mimic that friend's signature whistle. If a mother can't see her calf and is worried, she'll do the same, and her calf will answer by repeating its signature whistle. A lost calf will imitate its mother's whistle. But it's even more complicated than it sounds, because a group of dolphins who get together to forage may choose a shared whistle that the whole group uses. This helps them coordinate their behaviors to work together. Each member of the group uses a slightly different version of the group whistle, which means that each member can identify who's speaking. Other cetaceans seem to use a similar kind of name. Sperm whales, for instance, have a unique click sequence that they use to announce themselves when approaching other whales. The signature clicks always appear at the beginning of a sequence and don't vary. Bottlenose dolphins and many other cetaceans are extremely social animals. So are parrots. Studies of parrot calls indicate that parrots appear to have signature calls that they use the same way as dolphins do, to identify themselves to other parrots and as a way for other parrots to call for them. A study of wild green-rumped parrotlets in Venezuela discovered that the birds give a unique signature call to each baby while it's still in the nest, and the baby continues to use its call its whole life, often with small changes. The study set up video cameras to monitor 16 nests of a large wild population of the parrots. The population has been well studied and is used to using nesting tubes that scientists have set up for them. This makes it easier for the scientists to monitor nesting behaviors. In this case, to test whether the names had something to do with genetics or not, the scientists sneakily moved half of the eggs from one nest to another, so that half the parents unknowingly raised some chicks that weren't actually related to them. Despite the egg switcharoo, all the chicks were given names that were similar to the parents' signature calls. The parents started using a specific signature call soon after the eggs hatched, and the babies started imitating it.

Thanks to Eilee and Alexis for their suggestions this week, two amazing frogs! Further reading: Paradoxical frog: The giant tadpole that turns into a little frog Fungus is wiping out frogs. These tiny saunas could save them. How to build a frog sauna The paradoxical frog [photo by Mauricio Rivera Correa - http://calphotos.berkeley.edu, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6703905]: The Vietnamese mossy frog [photo by H. Zell - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=81804225]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. Let's start 2025 off right with an episode about frogs! Thanks to Alexis and Eilee for their suggestions. Let's start with Eilee's suggestion, the paradoxical frog. The paradoxical frog is a type of tree frog that lives in South America. Like other frogs, it likes ponds and shallow lakes. Some individuals are green and some are brown, and a frog may have darker stripes or splotches, or might just be plain. The tadpoles eat algae and other tiny food, while the adults eat insects. As with most frogs, the paradoxical frog hatches into a larval stage called a tadpole or pollywog, which is fully aquatic. It later metamorphoses into its adult form as a frog. Most tadpoles start out very small and grow larger, then metamorphose into a juvenile frog which then grows to fully adult size. But while the paradoxical frog's tadpole starts out small, it can grow to as much as 11 inches long, or 28 centimeters! It's the largest tadpole in the world as far as we know. So how big is the adult frog if the tadpole is so enormous? About 3 inches long, or 7.5 cm, from snout to vent. That's why it's called the paradoxical frog, because a paradox is something that seems contradictory to expectations. Instead of the ordinary way of things, where a small tadpole grows into a bigger frog, in this case a big tadpole grows into a smaller frog. It's sometimes called the shrinking frog. One interesting detail is that not all of the tadpoles are that big. If a female lays her eggs in a small body of water that's likely to dry up, or that doesn't have a lot of food available, or if there are a lot of predators in the water, the tadpole metamorphoses quickly and doesn't grow very big. But if the tadpole is in a better location it matures much more slowly, which allows it to reach much larger size before metamorphosing. I should also mention that the 11-inch-long tadpole that is the largest ever measured was actually raised in captivity. In the wild, the largest paradoxical frog tadpole ever measured was 6 ½ inches long, or almost 17 cm. That's still really big, but not that ridiculously big. But the confusing thing is that the tadpole is big and bulky, up to four times the size of the adult frog. Where does all that mass go after it transforms? Early scientists who learned about the paradoxical frog wondered the same thing. They were so confused that they suggested that the frog actually came first and later metamorphosed into the tadpole, which then metamorphosed into a fish. But the main reason the tadpole is so long is its tail. When it metamorphoses into a frog, it absorbs the tail and therefore appears to shrink. The bulkiness of the tadpole's body matches the bulkiness of the frog's body. And unlike most frogs, which metamorphose into juvenile frogs that still have some growing to do, the paradoxical frog metamorphoses into a completely adult frog. It's as big as it will ever get and fully mature, ready to mate and lay eggs. Next, Alexis wanted to learn about the Vietnamese mossy frog. It lives in parts of Vietnam, Laos, and other nearby areas. It prefers mountainous rainforests and the female often chooses to lay her eggs in a tree hollow or even a rock cavity where water has collected. Instead of laying her eggs in the actual water, though, she lays them on rocks or branches above the water.

Thanks to Pranav for suggesting this week's massive topic! Further reading: When did the Isthmus of Panama form between North and South America? Florida fossil porcupine solves a prickly dilemma 10-million years in the making Evidence for butchery of giant armadillo-like mammals in Argentina 21,000 years ago Glyptodonts were big armored mammals: The porcupine, our big pointy friend: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week, at long last, we're going to learn about the great American interchange, also called the great American biotic interchange. Pranav suggested this topic ages ago, and I've been wanting to cover it ever since but never have gotten around to it until now. While this episode finishes off 2024 for us, it's the start of a new series I have planned for 2025, where every so often we'll learn about the animals of a particular place, either a modern country or a particular time in history for a whole continent. These days, North and South America are linked by a narrow landmass generally referred to as Central America. At its narrowest point, Central America is only about 51 miles wide, or 82 km. That's where the Panama Canal was built so that ships could get from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific and vice versa without having to go all around South America. It wasn't all that long ago, geologically speaking, that North and South America were completely separated, and they had been separated for millions of years. South America was part of the supercontinent Gondwana, while North America was part of the supercontinent Laurasia. We've talked about continental drift before, which basically means that the land we know and love on the earth today moves very, very slowly over the years. The earth's crust, whether it's underwater or above water, is separated into what are called continental plates, or tectonic plates. You can think of them as gigantic pieces of a broken slab of rock, all of the pieces resting on a big pile of really dense jelly. The jelly in this case is molten rock that's moving because of its own heat and the rotation of the earth and lots of other forces. Sometimes two pieces of the slab meet and crunch together, which forms mountains as the land is forced upward, while sometimes two pieces tear apart, which forms deep rift lakes and eventually oceans. All this movement happens incredibly slowly from a human's point of view--like, your fingernails grow faster than most continental plates move. But even if a plate only moves 5 millimeters a year, after a million years it's traveled 5 kilometers. Anyway, the supercontinent Gondwana was made up of plates that are now South America, Africa, Australia, Antarctica, and a few others. You can see how the east coast of South America fits up against the west coast of Africa like two puzzle pieces. Gondwana actually formed around 800 million years ago, then became part of the even bigger supercontinent Pangaea, and when Pangaea broke apart around 200 million years ago, Gondwana and Laurasia were completely separate. North America was part of Laurasia. But Gondwana continued to break apart. Africa and Australia traveled far away from South America as molten lava filled the rift areas and helped push the plates apart, forming the South Atlantic Ocean. Antarctica settled onto the south pole and India traveled past Africa until it crashed into Eurasia. By about 30 million years ago, South America was a gigantic island. It's easy to think that all this happened just like taking puzzle pieces apart, but it was an incredibly long, complicated process that we don't fully understand. To explain just how complicated it is, let's talk for a moment about marsupials. Marsupials are mammals that are born very early and finish developing outside of the mother's womb, usually in a special pouch. Kangaroos, wallabies, koalas, wombats, and Tasmanian devils are all marsupials, and all from Australia.

Thanks to Elizabeth, Alexandra, Kimberly, Ezra, Eilee, Leon, and Simon for their suggestions this week! Further reading: New population of blue whales discovered in the western Indian Ocean An Endangered Dolphin Finds an Unlikely Savior--Fisherfolk The humpback whale: The gigantic blue whale: The tiny vaquita: The Indus river dolphin: The false killer whale: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we're going to have a big episode about various dolphins and whales! We've had lots of requests for these animals lately, so let's talk about a bunch of them. Thanks to Elizabeth, Alexandra, Kimberly, Ezra, Eilee, Leon, and Simon for their suggestions. We'll start with a quick overview about dolphins, porpoises, and whales, which are called cetaceans. All cetaceans alive today are carnivorous, meaning they eat other animals instead of plants. This includes the big baleen whales that filter feed, even though the animals they eat are tiny. Cetaceans are mammals that are fully aquatic, meaning they spend their entire lives in the water, and they have adaptations to life in the water that are simply astounding. All cetaceans alive today belong to either the baleen whale group, which filter feed, or the toothed whale group, which includes dolphins and porpoises. The two groups started evolving separately about 34 million years ago and are actually very different. Toothed whales are the ones that echolocate, while baleen whales are the ones that have extremely loud, often beautiful songs that they use to communicate with each other over long distances. It's possible that baleen whales also use a limited type of echolocation to navigate, but we don't know for sure. There's still a lot we don't know about cetaceans. Now let's talk about some specific whales. Ezra wanted to learn more about humpback and blue whales, so we'll start with those. Both are baleen whales, specifically rorquals. Rorquals are long, slender whales with throat pleats that allow them to expand their mouths when they gulp water in. After the whale fills its mouth with water, it closes its jaws, pushing its enormous tongue up, and forces all that water out through the baleen. Any tiny animals like krill, copepods, small squid, small fish, and so on, get trapped in the baleen. It can then swallow all that food and open its mouth to do it again. The humpback mostly eats tiny crustaceans called krill, and little fish. The humpback grows up to 56 feet long, or 17 meters, with females being a little larger than males on average. It's mostly black in color, with mottled white or gray markings underneath and on its flippers. Its flippers are long and narrow, which allows it to make sharp turns. The humpback is closely related to the blue whale, which is the largest animal ever known to have lived. It can grow up to 98 feet long, or 30 meters, and it's probable that individuals can grow even longer. It can weigh around 200 tons, and by comparison a really big male African elephant can weigh as much as 7 tons. Estimates of the weight of various of the largest sauropod dinosaurs, the largest land animal ever known to have lived, is only about 80 tons. So the blue whale is extremely large. The blue whale only eats krill and lots of it. To give you an example of how much water it can engulf in its enormous mouth in order to get enough krill to keep its massive body going, this is how the blue whale feeds. When it finds an area with a lot of krill floating around, it swims fast toward the krill and opens its giant mouth extremely wide. When its mouth is completely full, its weight—body and water together—has more than doubled. Its mouth can hold up to 220 tons of water. Since the whale is in the water, it doesn't feel the weight of the water in its mouth. Blue whales live throughout the world's oceans, but a few years ago scientists analyzing recordings of whale song from the we...

Donald Trump will enter office at a time when presidential power has significantly expanded, because of a string of Supreme Court decisions in recent years. These decisions can be understood to have two functions: They give presidents a “sword” to act more decisively and unilaterally, and a “shield” that protects them from prosecution against actions taken in their official capacity. What will these capacities mean for Trump's second term — especially as he has promised to radically transform the federal government?Gillian Metzger is a professor at Columbia Law School who has studied the presidency, the administrative state and the Supreme Court's relationship to both. In this conversation, guest-hosted by Kate Shaw, a New York Times Opinion contributing writer and law professor, Metzger discusses two key Supreme Court cases — the Trump immunity case, which gave presidents broad protections from prosecution, and the Loper Bright Enterprises case, which overturned the Chevron doctrine, expanding judicial power. Shaw and Metzger also cover how much leeway Trump actually has to take some of the bolder executive actions he's floated, including ending birthright citizenship; what still remains uncertain about the federal government's regulatory powers in the post-Chevron regime; and more.“The Demise of Deference — And the Rise of Delegation to Interpret?” by Thomas W. Merrill“The DOGE Plan to Reform Government” by Elon Musk and Vivek RamaswamyBook recommendationsCreating the Administrative Constitution by Jerry L. MashawThe Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy by Daniel Carpenter“Curation, Narration, Erasure” by Karen M. TaniThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Elias Isquith. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Mary Marge Locker. Mixing by Isaac Jones, with Efim Shapiro and Aman Sahota. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin and Jack McCordick. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Thanks to David and Jayson for their suggestions this week! Further reading: Unveiling the lionfish invasion in the Mediterranean Sea DeepCCZ: The Weird and Wonderful Megafauna of the Abyssal CCZ The red lionfish is beautiful but does not look like a lion [photo by Alexander Vasenin - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25523559]: The sea squirrel is yellow above and red underneath (pictures from article linked above): Under side of a gummy squirrel photographed on shipboard showing its bright red feeding palps (flower-like structure) and underbelly. Gummy squirrel (“Psychropotes longicauda”) at 5100 m depth on abyssal sediments in the western CCZ. This animal is ~60 cm long (including tail), with red feeding palps (or “lips”) visibly extended from its anterior end (right). Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we're going to learn about two interesting marine animals suggested by Jayson and David. Let's start with David's suggestion, the lionfish. The lionfish doesn't actually look like a lion although it is a fish. It lives in shallow tropical water in the Indian Ocean and western Pacific, especially around coral reefs. There are twelve species of lionfish known, but they're mostly fairly similar. The lionfish is brown or dark red in color with white stripes, fan-like fins, and lots of long spines, all of which are striped black and white or red and white to make them more visible. When a fish or other animal has markings that make it stand out against the background, you can be pretty sure that it's dangerous, and that's the case for the lionfish. The lionfish's spines are venomous, especially the spines on the dorsal fin. If it feels threatened, it will point the dorsal fin at the predator and keep it pointed at it no matter which direction the predator moves. If the predator swims below the lionfish, the lionfish will turn upside-down in the water to keep the dorsal fin pointed at it. Most predators back off at that point, and I don't blame them because that sounds really scary. People have died from lionfish venom, but it's rare. Mostly it's just extremely painful and makes the person feel really sick for a day or two. Divers have to be careful when they're around lionfish, because lionfish can be aggressive and will point that dorsal fin at the diver as a warning. You don't want a lionfish to point at you. The lionfish eats smaller fish, including smaller lionfish, invertebrates, and other small animals. It confuses other fish by blowing water at them. The little fish turns to face into what it thinks is a weird water current, and suddenly, there's a lionfish that just gulps it down. As David points out, even though the lionfish is dangerous, it's definitely beautiful. Some people keep lionfish in saltwater aquariums, although they're hard to care for in captivity, and unfortunately sometimes the fish escape into the wild or are released. The red lionfish is especially invasive in the Caribbean Sea, the Gulf Coast, and off the southeastern coast of the United States. Lionfish have also been introduced to parts of the Mediterranean Sea, where they're becoming more and more invasive. Because invasive lionfish eat so many native fish, and because it's spreading rapidly and becoming extremely common, people have been trying to find ways to reduce the invasive population. It turns out that lionfish are good to eat if you're careful when handling the spines during cleaning, so people in areas where it's invasive are encouraged to catch lionfish to eat. Invasive lionfish are even served in fancy restaurants. Since the red lionfish can grow around 18 inches long, or 47 cm, there's lot a of meat on one. No one's sure why it's called a lionfish. It doesn't look remotely like a lion. It's also called the zebrafish because of its stripes. Next,

Thanks to Cosmo for suggesting this week's animal, the electric catfish! Further reading: The shocking truth about electric fish Efficient high-voltage protection in the electric catfish Gimme kiss [electric catfish photo from this site]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we're finally going to talk about a fish Cosmo wanted us to learn about, the electric catfish! Catfish are really common fish that live throughout the world, except for Antarctica. We've talked about various types of catfish in lots of different episodes, since there are well over 3,000 known species and they're incredibly diverse. The electric catfish lives in freshwater in tropical areas in western and central Africa, as far north as the Nile River. All animals generate electric fields in their nerves and the contracting of muscles. Animals that can sense these fields are called electroreceptive. An electroreceptive animal can find hidden prey without using its other senses. Many electroreceptive animals can also generate weak electrical fields, usually less than a single volt—small electrical pulses or a sort of wave, depending on the species, that can give them information about their environment. Like a dolphin using echolocation, a fish using electro-location can sense where potential prey is, where predators, plants, and rocks are, and can even communicate with other fish of its same species. Of course, those same electric pulses can also attract electroreceptive predators. Some fish can generate an electric shock so strong it can stun or kill other animals. The most famous is the electric eel, which we talked about way back in episode 10, but the electric catfish falls in this category too. The electric catfish isn't a single species but several in the family Malapteruridae. Some are very small, but one grows as much as four feet long, or 1.2 meters, and can weigh over 50 lbs, or 23 kg. That's Malapterurus electricus, THE electric catfish. The electric catfish is grayish-brown mottled with black spots. Like a lot of catfish, it's a cylinder-shaped chonk, and has three pairs of barbels around its broad mouth. Barbels are the feelers that give the catfish its name, because they look sort of like a cat's whiskers. Sort of. Not actually very much like a cat's whiskers. The electric catfish also has what look like surprisingly kissy lips, which are often pale in color so they stand out, especially when the mouth is open, which is frankly hilarious. It doesn't have a dorsal fin and it's not a fast swimmer. It spends most of its time lurking in rocky areas in muddy, slow-moving water. It's also nocturnal. The electric catfish eats other fish, although it will also eat pretty much anything it can swallow. It likes muddy water because it doesn't want potential prey to see it, and of course it doesn't want any potential predators to see it either. That includes humans, who consider it a delicacy. Humans also sometimes keep electric catfish as aquarium fish, which is sort of the opposite of being killed and eaten. Contracting a muscle causes a tiny, tiny electrical impulse, as I mentioned earlier, but in electric fish certain muscles have developed the ability to generate much stronger electrical impulses. Instead of muscles, they're called electric organs. The interesting thing is that this is only found in fish, but that the ability evolved separately at least six times in different lineages of fish. The electric catfish uses its ability to generate electric shocks as a defense when it needs to, but mainly it uses it to stun or outright kill other fish, which it then gulps down. It can discharge up to 300 volts of electricity in pulses that last only a few milliseconds, but since it can generate up to 500 pulses in waves, that's a lot of electricity. That's not enough to kill a person, but you'd definitely feel it and try to get away. But,

On Wednesday, Supreme Court Justices heard arguments in a case about gender-affirming care for minors. Kate Shaw, professor at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, co-host of the Supreme Court podcast Strict Scrutiny, a contributor with ABC News and a contributing opinion Writer with the New York Times, explains why the court is considering a challenge to a Tennessee law that bars the use of puberty blockers and hormone therapy.

Thanks to Mary, Mila, and Riley for their suggestions this week! Further reading: Comfortable and dermatological effects of hot spring bathing provide demonstrative insight into improvement in the rough skin of Capybaras Comfort of capybaras determined by SCIENCE: An especially attractive guinea pig: Guinea pigs come in lots of colors, patterns, and fur types [picture taken from this excellent site]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we're going to learn about two rodents, one small and one big. Thanks to Mary and Mila who both suggested the guinea pig, and thanks to Riley who suggested the capybara. This episode is a bit unusual because part of it comes from a Patreon episode from 2023. Like, literally a big chunk of this episode is the original audio from that one, and you'll be able to tell the difference in audio and know just how lazy I was this week. The episode actually came together in an unusual way too. Riley's parent emailed me last week with some new suggestions, including capybaras, but wasn't sure if we had already covered the topic. I thought we had, but of course there's always more to learn about an animal. Well, since this is the beginning of a new month I was on the Patreon page to upload the December episode, and while I was there I did a quick search for capybaras and discovered the episode I was thinking of. I decided to add some more information about guinea pigs to it since I already mention guinea pigs a lot in that episode, and here is the result! The capybara is a rodent, and a very big one. It is, in fact, the biggest rodent alive today. To figure out just how big the capybara is, picture a guinea pig. The guinea pig is also a rodent, native to the Andes Mountains in South America. No one's sure why the guinea pig is called that in English, since it doesn't come from Guinea and doesn't have anything to do with anything else called guinea, but as someone who had two pet guinea pigs when I was a kid, I know exactly why they're called guinea pigs. This is what an actual pig sounds like: [pig squealing] And this is what a guinea pig sounds like: [guinea pig squealing] Also, it's sort of shaped like a pig. The guinea pig is a chonky little animal with short legs, only a little stub of a tail, and little round ears. Its face is sort of blocky in shape and it has a big rounded rump, similar to that of a capybara. The guinea pig is actually closely related to the capybara, and is a pretty good-sized rodent in its own right. It grows about 10 inches long, or 25 cm, on average, and roughly half that size tall. The guinea pig has been domesticated for at least 7000 years, but it wasn't domesticated for people to keep it as a pet. In South America and many other places now, it's a very small farm animal raised for its meat. Guinea pig has been an important source of protein for all that time, so important that it was considered sacred in many cultures. In the early 16th century when Europeans started arriving in South America, sailors took guinea pigs with them on ships so they'd have fresh meat on the voyage. But when the cute little animals arrived in Europe, people started buying them as pets. Guinea pigs eat plants, mostly grass, and are social animals. If you want a pet guinea pig, make sure to get at least two. Like rabbits and some other animals, including the capybara, the guinea pig excretes special pellets that aren't poop, but are semi-digested pellets of food. The guinea pig eats the pellets so they can pass through the digestive system again and the body can extract as many nutrients as possible from it. What's left is then excreted as a regular poop pellet. Even in places where the guinea pig is routinely kept as livestock and eaten, people breed guinea pigs as pets too. The pet variety is smaller than the meat variety and has different markings and different colors.

Following the Lord's call can be heavy yet heartwarming. Hear it from Kate Shaw, of our Jackson, Mississippi community, whose foster care journey butted up against a busy schedule and desire to plan. Still, Kate saw each fostering up-and-down as another opportunity to glorify God.   From challenging her Type A personality to training her to be “interruptible”, fostering children, Kate says, taught her family to be compassionate and empathetic. And when she prayed for direction, the Lord made his plans abundantly clear.   In this episode, you will learn:   – When you seek the Lord's will for your life, you can rest in His purposes.   – The Lord may call you to obedience—even when your plate is already full.   – He will equip and sustain you as He carries out His plans for your life, because He is faithful. Links:   Listen to a similar story~ Laura Rowe- Ep. 27: “Love is a Verb: A Foster Care Story” Give to StoryTellers Live in honor of Kate. Become a Patreon Insider to access bonus content. Shop for our When God Shows Up Bible study series, including the newly released Discovering God in Stories of Faith!   Sign up to receive StoryTellers Live's weekly newsletter for updates~ including information on our soon-to-be released workshop Finding God in the Details!

Thanks to Lydia and "warblrwatchr" for this week's suggestions! Further reading: Sweet tooth: Ethiopian wolves seen feeding on nectar The African wild dog is not actually a dog and eats lots of things: The aardwolf is not a dog at all and eats insects: The Ethiopian wolf is not a dog (or a wolf or a fox) and eats rodents and nectar [photo by Adrien Lesaffre and taken from this page]: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we're going to talk about three dog-like animals from Africa, suggested by Lydia and “warblrwatchr,” even though none of the three animals are dogs. We'll start with one of Lydia's suggestions, the African wild dog, also called the painted dog or painted wolf. Despite those names, it's not very closely related to dogs and wolves. It's the only species in its own genus, although it is a member of the family Canidae. Colonizers from Europe thought the animal was just a feral dog, not anything special that should be protected, and they also brought domestic dogs with them to Africa. Domestic dogs mean diseases that other canids can catch. Between introduced diseases, farmers killing the animals to keep them away from livestock, and habitat loss, the African wild dog is endangered. Luckily, these days conservation groups have been working to protect the animal, and its numbers are increasing slowly in Kenya's national parks in particular. The African wild dog is a tall, strong canid with great big ears and no dewclaws. It has a yellowish coat with black blotches and some white spots, including a white tail tip, although some subspecies have darker coats. Unlike most canids, its fur is bristly and doesn't have a soft undercoat, and as the dog ages, it loses its fur until old dogs are nearly bald. It's very social, as canids almost always are, and its varied coat pattern helps individuals recognize friends and pack-mates at a distance. The African wild dog prefers savannas and other open areas. It hunts in packs and mostly preys on antelopes, although it will also kill zebras and other large animals, and individual dogs will sometimes catch small animals like hares and rodents. The African wild dog pack isn't especially hierarchical. The males of the pack are mainly led by the dominant male, while the females are mainly led by the oldest female, who is usually the most dominant. The dominant pair is usually the only pair that has babies. A mother dog has up to 16 pups at a time but only one litter a year. In a lot of animals, as the babies grow up, the males are usually the ones who are driven out of the pack or leave on their own to find a new pack. In the African wild dog, females are the ones who leave as they grow up. Sometimes the females join a different pack and sometimes they start their own. Either way, it stops a pack from becoming inbred. The African wild dog is extremely vocal, making lots of different sounds to communicate with its pack-mates. It sounds a lot more like a bird than a dog. This is what African wild dogs sound like: [doggo sounds] Next, Lydia and warblrwatchr wanted to learn about the aardwolf, which lives in eastern and southern Africa. Unlike the African wild dog, which is mostly active during the day, the aardwolf is nocturnal. It spends most of the day in a burrow, sometimes one it digs itself, but more often one that another animal dug and abandoned at some point. The aardwolf has black stripes on a yellowish or reddish coat, a mane of long hair down its neck and back, large ears, and a bushy tail. It's about the size of a big dog, about 20 inches tall at the shoulders, or 50 cm, but it looks like a small, slender hyena. That's because it is actually a type of hyena, although it's not closely related to other hyenas. Hyenas look dog-like but they aren't canids at all. In fact, they're more closely related to cats than to dogs,

Thanks to Alyx for this week's suggestion, the cookie cutter shark! Further reading: If You Give a Shark a Cookie The business end of the cookie cutter shark: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we're going to learn about a little shark suggested by Alyx, but first let's learn about something else that might be related to the shark. In the 1970s, the U.S. Navy started having trouble with the navigation of their submarines. The Ohio-class submarine had what was called a sonar dome that was filled with oil, and the oil helped transmit sound. But repeatedly the subs would lose navigation abilities, and investigations turned up strange chunks removed from the electric cables, the oil lines, the sound probes, and the sonar dome itself—anywhere made of rubber that was soft enough for what looked like a hole saw to damage. The Navy thought they were dealing with a state-of-the-art weapon. The United States and the former Soviet Union were bitter enemies, so the Navy thought the USSR had invented a technologically sophisticated underwater stealth drone of some kind that could damage the subs and leave no trace—nothing but circular chunks removed from the sonar dome and its components. Thirty submarines were damaged before the Navy figured out the cause. It wasn't a super-secret weapon at all. It was just a little fish called the cookie-cutter shark. The cookie cutter shark doesn't look very scary. It only grows 22 inches long at most, or 56 cm, and is brown in color. It has lots of very sharp evenly spaced teeth on its lower jaw, but compared to a great white shark, it's nothing to worry about. But somehow it was able to disable 30 of the world's most advanced submarines at the time. That's because of how the cookie cutter shark eats, which is also how it gets its name. It picks a target fish or some other animal, such as a whale or a seal, or possibly the sonar dome of an Ohio-class submarine, and sneaks up to it. It's just a little fish and its coloration helps it blend in with its surroundings, so most animals barely notice it. It has lips that act like a suction cup, so quick as a wink it sticks itself to the animal, bites down, and spins around. In moments it's cut a circular chunk out of the animal's side like a horrible cookie, which it swallows, and by the time the animal even realizes it's hurt, the cookie cutter shark is long gone. The shark used to be called the cigar shark because of its shape. It wasn't until 1971 that experts realized how the cookie cutter shark eats. Until then the circular wounds on fish and whales and other animals were thought to be from lamprey bites or from some kind of parasite. The cookie cutter shark does have teeth in its upper jaw but they're much smaller than the lower teeth. When it sheds its lower teeth to replace them, instead of shedding just one tooth, it sheds them all at once. Like most sharks, it swallows its old teeth so it can reuse the calcium to grow new teeth. The shark also has photophores on the underside of its body that glow greenish, which is a common way that some fish escape predators from below. A big fish looking up toward the surface of the water high above it sees a lot of light shining down from the sun, so a fish with a glowing underside just blends in. But in the case of the cookie cutter shark, it has a strip of skin on its underside without photophores, and from below that strip shows up. It's a sort of collar that's actually darker brown than the rest of the fish. It looks, in fact, like a tiny fish silhouetted against the surface. The would-be predator fish approaches, expecting an easy meal. Instead, the cookie cutter shark darts around and takes a big bite out of the fish, then takes off. It's a remarkably fast swimmer, but most of the time it hangs almost motionless in the water waiting for another animal to approach.

In this year's election, abortion protection measures were on the ballot in ten different states. While they succeeded in seven, they failed in three. So where does that leave the future of abortion access? This week, Preet speaks with University of Pennsylvania constitutional law professor and co-host of Strict Scrutiny Kate Shaw. They break down the most notable ballot measures and what abortion rights may look like under a second Trump presidency. Stay Tuned in Brief is presented by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Please write to us with your thoughts and questions at letters@cafe.com, or leave a voicemail at 669-247-7338. For analysis of recent legal news, join the CAFE Insider community. Head to cafe.com/insider to join for just $1 for the first month. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We're thrilled to share a mashup of our MSNBC Live: Democracy 2024 event that we recently held at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The whole day was a celebration of you, our viewers and listeners. It was the first of its kind in-person, interactive experience. We so enjoyed meeting so many of you. But if you couldn't join us in person, you're in luck – we're sharing key conversations in this episode. For more, be sure to check out our TV special airing Saturday, September 14th at 9 p.m. ET. For your reference, here are timecodes for the sessions included here:Claire McCaskill, Jen Psaki, and Andrea Mitchell 0:01:30-0:31:23Chris Hayes & Kate Shaw 0:31:36-0:51:20Andrew Weissmann & Ari Melber 0:51:25-1:12:53Rachel Maddow & Lawrence O'Donnell 1:13:13-1:45:45

The Destiny's Child of constitutional law (aka Strict Scrutiny) is back on Getting Curious to help us digest and dissect all the wack-a-doodle nonsense that is: Project 2025. Leah Litman & Kate Shaw from the hit podcast Strict Scrutiny sat down with JVN to really parse out the MAGA manifesto. We're talking all about Project 2025's hallmark proposals, the key players involved, as well as tossing in some Supreme Court, Alito/Thomas Updates for good measure. Leah Litman is an assistant professor of law at the University of Michigan Law School. She clerked for Judge Sutton on the Sixth Circuit and Justice Kennedy on the Supreme Court. Leah researches and writes about constitutional law and federal courts. She also maintains an active pro bono practice (and she loves reality television). Kate Shaw is a Professor of Law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in NYC. She teaches Constitutional Law, Legislation, Administrative Law, and a seminar on the Supreme Court, and writes about executive power, the law of democracy, and reproductive rights and justice. Before becoming a law professor she worked in the Obama White House Counsel's Office, and before that was a clerk to Justice Stevens and Judge Posner. You can follow Strict Scrutiny on Twitter @StrictScrutiny_ and on Instagram @strictscrutinypodcast. For more information, check out crooked.com. Leah is on Twitter @LeahLitman and Instagram @profleahlitman. Kate is on Twitter @Kateashaw1 and Instagram @kateashaw. Follow us on Instagram @CuriousWithJVN to join the conversation. Jonathan is on Instagram @JVN. Our senior producer is Chris McClure. Our editor & engineer is Nathanael McClure. Production support from Julie Carrillo, Anne Currie, and Chad Hall. Our theme music is “Freak” by QUIÑ; for more, head to TheQuinCat.com. Curious about bringing your brand to life on the show? Email podcastadsales@sonymusic.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We're thrilled to share a mashup of our MSNBC Live: Democracy 2024 event that we recently held at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The whole day was a celebration of you, our viewers and listeners. It was the first of its kind in-person, interactive experience. We so enjoyed meeting so many of you. But if you couldn't join us in person, you're in luck – we're sharing key conversations in this episode. For more, be sure to check out our TV special airing Saturday, September 14th at 9 p.m. ET. For your reference, here are timecodes for the sessions included here:Claire McCaskill, Jen Psaki, and Andrea Mitchell 0:01:30-0:31:23Chris Hayes & Kate Shaw 0:31:36-0:51:20Andrew Weissmann & Ari Melber 0:51:25-1:12:53Rachel Maddow & Lawrence O'Donnell 1:13:13-1:45:45 

We're thrilled to share a mashup of our MSNBC Live: Democracy 2024 event that we recently held at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The whole day was a celebration of you, our viewers and listeners. It was the first of its kind in-person, interactive experience. We so enjoyed meeting so many of you. But if you couldn't join us in person, you're in luck – we're sharing key conversations in this episode. For more, be sure to check out our TV special airing Saturday, September 14th at 9 p.m. ET. For your reference, here are timecodes for the sessions included here:Claire McCaskill, Jen Psaki, and Andrea Mitchell 0:01:30-0:31:23Chris Hayes & Kate Shaw 0:31:36-0:51:20Andrew Weissmann & Ari Melber 0:51:25-1:12:53Rachel Maddow & Lawrence O'Donnell 1:13:13-1:45:45