Individuals
30:16 Share

A long time ago, my sweet, happy-go-lucky little sister Isha turned into a punk rocker. I don't have anything against punk rock, although I was more of an emo, with straightened hair across my face and ripped baggy jeans with chains hanging off them. But what was so surprising about Isha's change of style was that it was sudden and so dramatic.

She always loved dancing and Taylor Swift, and she dressed in bright colors and smiled her way through life. Until one day, she swapped the country melodies of Taylor Swift for the heavy rock sounds of Pierce the Veil and Sleeping with Sirens.

The change was fast. She shaved her head, she wore the piercings and half gloves, and turned up the scream core loud. I mean, you could hear it coming from her room, now painted partially black, and you could hear her screaming along with it. And it took a little getting used to, but we were there for it. No one could ever accuse her of being boring or not being a true individual, but she was still one of us.

My family is the Wazzara family, and since I can remember, we called ourselves the Wazzara Eight. We did everything together. We were always a team. We each had our own strengths and personalities, but when we were together, all those things combined to make us something stronger than the sum of our parts. Soon, my sister moved on from her punk rock phase, but she is no less interesting and full of character today.

She still rocks the shaved head, plus bleached eyebrows, but now she has a psychology degree and works as a mental health support worker. My sister is the most incredible, amazing, funny, affectionate person, and she'll always be part of the Wazara Eight. But ever since the day she became a punk rocker, there's no question that she, just like all of us, is a true individual. ♪

I'm Rutendo Shackleton. And I'm Sebastian Echeverry. And this is the BBC Earth Podcast. Hey, I'm Ryan Reynolds. At Mint Mobile, we like to do the opposite of what Big Wireless does. They charge you a lot, we charge you a little. So naturally, when they announced they'd be raising their prices due to inflation, we decided to deflate our prices due to not hating you.

That's right. We're cutting the price of Mint Unlimited from $30 a month to just $15 a month. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. $45 upfront payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three-month plan only. Taxes and fees extra. Speeds lower above 40 gigabytes. See details. In this episode, we're asking the question, what is an individual?

We take a dive with one of the ocean's weirdest creatures. We get a rare chance to listen to the inside of a beehive. And we hear from climate-conscious Australian band King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard.

Okay, I gotta say, Rotendo, the Wazara 8 sounds like a ridiculously cool team name of either superheroes or maybe some very cool criminals. I'm thinking like Ocean's Eleven style stuff. It's got a really nice ring to it. I would love to have been superhero family or like super spies. Have you pulled off any heists?

I will go on record and say, no, we have not. I think my parents were trying to go for more of like a sports team sort of vibe with a couple of substitutes. Or the Von Trapp family. That's what they're going for. As a only child, there's a part of me of like, it's a world that I glimpse but do not fully understand and it's fascinating. Yeah.

And all this is leading up to the question we're asking this episode, right? What does it mean to be an individual? What makes us stand out from each other? Why do we sometimes do things to be very different from the rest of the Wazara 8 like your sister did? And is that something that other animals do? Yeah, that's a really good question, Sebastian.

especially when you look at animals that live in big groups and they look the same. It's quite difficult to be able to tell individuals apart, but it's not impossible.

Did you know that elephants actually have a preferred tusk that they'll use? Almost like the handedness that we find in a person right-handed or left-handed, elephants will have a preferred tusk that they will use as a tool for, you know, like scraping bark off a tree or turning the earth. And you could actually see where one tusk is worn down more than the other.

And you also find markings can be a sign of individuality. So a zebra's stripes or a leopard's spots are actually as unique as a fingerprint. But there are some cases where we can make that question a little harder to answer because we've been talking about, you know, things that are living in small groups like packs or herds. What about animals that live in a herd?

tight-knit social colony where they survive and reproduce kind of as a unit. I'm thinking like an ant nest where there's a queen that is

The real lineage of the group follows her, and everyone else is kind of part of that? Yeah. Are they really individuals if their entire life is spent working in the service of a group? Right. Scientists and philosophers have been thinking about this one for a while, and it's fun to get into. Yeah. And I can't think of a better example of an animal that blurs the boundaries between the individuals and the group than Siphonophores.

These crazy-looking underwater animals are actually a colony of individuals. Little sections called zooids stuck together into a long UFO-like spiral. As a colony, they look like and also act like a predatory jellyfish, stinging and catching prey.

The largest one on record was recently discovered by a team of scientists exploring the deep sea canyons at Ningaloo in the Indian Ocean. Its length hasn't yet been officially recorded, but it is much longer than a blue whale, making it the longest animal ever found. Lisa Kirkendale was part of that team. We were putting the sub over the side of the ship.

We'd explore and map the bottom, and then we'd basically come back up. The transit down, which took hours, was through the clear blue water. And this blue water zone was beautiful, but, you know, a bit empty. And then it wasn't so empty. On multiple screens positioned all over the ship, this enormous white floating multi-spiral halo emerged out of the blue water.

Totally surreal, completely otherworldly. Very quickly we knew it was something special and something enormous, but also incredibly fragile. It's like the most elaborate living feather boy you've ever seen. The robot had to really carefully move back and kind of move around the Siphonophore and measured its length as approximately 46 meters.

Across. So not even the actual length of the animal, but just the diameter that it made. Yes. The biggest and outer ring. But there was another estimate of 123 meters from end to end. Wow. It's incredible. It's like a record-breaking size. This was something really special, really unique. For the people that have never been on an expedition before and the people that had been on many, it was mind-blowing.

How's that happening? How does that work? So you weren't looking for siphonophores? No! We were not looking at open ocean or midwater at all. It was kind of just the transit area down to the deep. The commute. It's the commute. It was the commute! As a type of animal, what are they like? How do their bodies work? What does it mean to be a siphonophore? So their bodies work quite uniquely compared to other species we typically think of as animals.

So they appear like a singular multicellular animal, but they're not. So each Siphonophore starts from a little starting point, like a little tiny embryo like you and I, and then it gives rise to identical parts called zoids.

It's like taking a human that then just kind of just buds off twins. You know, identical, genetically identical, just budding off clones or twins, but they don't leave the body, the main body. So they retain a connection. They share the ability to share nutrients and pass those around the colony.

And so they're connected and integrated, but also highly specialized at the same time. So each Zoid set is tasked with separate functions, including capturing prey, locomotion, feeding, defense, reproduction. We've got these clones that are fused together, and you said that different clones do different things.

So there's specialized zoids that help the Sophanophores stay afloat. And they're towards the surface of the colony. And then there's this thing called a nectosome that are kind of bell-shaped. And they're specialized for swimming. And they swim in a coordinated fashion, taking them to places that are more favorable. They're stinging animals.

And so they capture prey using tentacles. So one of the specialized zoids is a gastro. So that's the eating. That's the eating zoid. There's the defense zoid, the dactyla zoid, focused on keeping predators away or that sort of thing. So it's just this division of labor. It's this incredible division of labor.

When I see an animal, I can usually say, "Okay, where that animal's body ends, that's the end of the individual of that animal." And it's moving around, it's making decisions by itself. But with something like a colonial animal, there is that second layer, right? It's almost like a meta-animal. It's an animal made of animals. Absolutely. Who is the individual? Our choices are: Is the zoid the individual? Are the zoid sets the individual? Or is the entire colony the individual?

So where I went with it after that was, you know, the ability to live as a distinct entity. You can't just feed on your own. You're totally dependent. All of a sudden the structure becomes really important. That physical connection and shared nutrition.

You think about that when you think about corals as well. They have a heavy skeleton and on it are these individual polyps. And so this colonial organism is made up of all these individual polyps. It's a design that works in the habitat that it is found. It's like an elegantly adapted life or strategy for life in a watery mid-ocean realm.

Okay, Sebastian, have you ever googled what a siphonophore looks like? Because it is pretty accurate to the description of being a feather boa. In the middle of that interview, I'm pulling up another window and I'm googling the siphonophore photo. Because this thing is, like, honestly otherworldly is the kind of, maybe the best adjective I can come up with.

Like, even in the photos, it's hard to tell because it's floating in this huge open void of, like, that mid-ocean. But 46 meters is really big. Yeah. Like, several buses end-to-end big. Mm-hmm.

And then, of course, there are kind of more familiar examples of a similar idea. Animals that may not be fused together, but have individuals, maybe, that live and survive as a group with different members specialized for different roles in their society. Right.

So you've got things like ants, of course. You've got termites, which are a type of cockroach. No, they're not. Wait, what? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So termites are a group of cockroaches that evolved to live in this really specialized group living situation. Wow. It's only a pretty recent discovery. It's one of my favorite termite facts and also one of my favorite cockroach facts. Ha ha ha!

Another famous example of animals that live in a colony is, of course, bees. Oh, right. Definitely. Plenty of bee species are solitary, but there are lots of bees that live as a colony in a hive. And the hive kind of acts as one organism, with different bees performing different roles, all in service to the whole. It's a bit like the Siphonophore zoids. They become greater than the sum of their parts.

And we can actually hear this in action. Richard Ewell is a beekeeper and sound recordist who managed to capture an award-winning recording of one of nature's most magical sounds.

My dad works in B2B marketing. He came by my school for career day and said he was a big ROAS man. Then he told everyone how much he loved calculating his return on ad spend. My friend's still laughing me to this day. Not everyone gets B2B, but with LinkedIn, you'll be able to reach people who do. Get $100 credit on your next ad campaign. Go to linkedin.com slash results to claim your credit. That's linkedin.com slash results. Terms and conditions apply. LinkedIn.com slash results.

LinkedIn, the place to be, to be. Hey, I'm Ryan Reynolds. At Mint Mobile, we like to do the opposite of what big wireless does. They charge you a lot, we charge you a little. So naturally, when they announced they'd be raising their prices due to inflation, we decided to deflate our prices due to not hating you.

That's right. We're cutting the price of Mint Unlimited from $30 a month to just $15 a month. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. $45 upfront payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three-month plan only. Taxes and fees extra. Speeds lower above 40 gigabytes. See details. I really get a lot from my beekeeping. It's a real connection for me with the natural world. The bees, I've learned so much from them.

It gets me outdoors, it gets me in touch with the seasons and the weather. And of course there's honey as well. I've always been interested in sound. I've been a field sound recorder since I was sort of a young boy with a cassette recorder. And one of the things that I was really fascinated in when I first got the bees was the sound that they make.

There is one sound from a beehive which I was completely struck by and that is the sound a queen bee makes on the day that she emerges from her cell, that she's born if you like. I can remember being at the bottom of the garden going through a hive and I heard this very strange noise, an amazing noise.

I was later told what it was and it was the sound of a queen bee piping. A queen bee might live a few years, three or four years and only makes this sound on the day that she emerges and might make that piping noise for an hour or so. So often it goes unheard, it's a very rare sound and it had never been well recorded.

Talking to other beekeepers, it turns out that there are beekeepers who've been beekeeping for decades that have never heard it. And so I thought, yes, that's the project for me. It brings together the expertise and knowledge I've got about beekeeping and the knowledge I've got about sound recording. So I decided to make a recording of Queen Bee's piping.

Bees don't like foreign objects in their hive and they tend to gum them up with wax. So if you just pop a microphone into a hive, you find within, usually within a few days, but certainly within a week, that it's sort of not functioning as a microphone anymore.

So I decided to use a contact microphone to become part of the comb within the bee's hive so that it would amplify the sound of the queen bee piping. So the queen bee sort of holds on to the comb with her legs and vibrates and makes this noise and if I was able to pick up the vibration of that through the comb as well as it through the air I would get a much better recording.

So within a few days, they'd started to build their honeycomb, their wax honeycomb, around my contact mic. And I was able to recall them actually doing this, actually manufacturing the wax, which comes out of holostars.

in their abdomen and then they chew this wax a little bit and then sort of stick it together to make that amazing hexagonal honeycomb shape and I was able to record that as it happened the bees actually building their own honeycomb

So I spent several hours down at the Beehive with my headphones on, listening to them chewing the wax and sticking it all together in these hexagonal shapes. And it was a very sort of dry, sticky, chewy sound. It was just a joy to listen to.

Once the bees have built a large enough section of honeycomb, they will invite the queen bee to come and lay eggs in it. One egg in each of the hexagonal cells. And then after three days, these eggs hatch and the bees feed them. So they feed them a mixture of pollen, which is their protein source, and nectar, which is their carbohydrate source.

If they're making a queen bee, they feed them some royal jelly as well and that's where queen bees come from. But I was able to record the sound of the nurse bees, as they're called, and again that was an amazing sound, a very wet, splushy sound of little bee larvae, which are like tiny little maggots being fed the nectar and pollen.

Well I decided I was going to take that whole day off work so I block booked that day off and decided that I was going to spend the day sat at the bottom of the garden with my headphones on and and hopefully hear live and record that elusive sound that I was after of the Queen Bee piping.

So part of the reason why they pipe, it's one to let the colony know, to announce to the colony that it's time to celebrate, a new queen is about to emerge. But the other reason they pipe is to signal to any other queens that might be about to emerge that there's about to be a fight to the death, basically, because you can only have one queen in a colony. MUSIC

So as soon as this first queen bee had started piping, another two started to pipe. So there were three queens in my colony and over a period of an hour or so, I mean I couldn't see what was going on but I could detect by the volume and a little bit by the configuration of the microphone some geography, where they were moving around.

that all three queens emerged and were piping to each other, all on the frame with my microphone in, so it was an amazing recording of these three queens. And then there were only two, and within a few minutes after that, there was just one queen, and then all the piping stopped, and then that was it. It was all over, and I'd bagged an amazing recording, which was what I wanted to do.

Can you imagine how lucky Richard must have felt to capture those incredible sounds from the bees? It also gives us insight into what life is like as part of a bee colony. We heard that there were three queens piping, and then there were two, and then there was one.

That is drama at its highest level. And, you know, just like any human city, yes, there's order and peace to things, but there's also plenty of fights and winners and losers, too.

Those queens were kind of at war, like a succession battle in Game of Thrones or like another fantasy medieval novel. There are multiple queens rallying their supporters by piping and saying, I am the true heir. And then the battle unfolds.

and in the end, only one remains. I feel like what we're heading towards when we ask the question, what is an individual, is that it's complicated, right? There's no easy answer to that. But that's totally okay by me. I think easy answers would make everything too boring. I want the complicated stuff. I want the messiness. That's where all the good, weird stuff is, and that's where I want to be. I totally agree. The

The complexity is what makes biology so interesting. And yes, this idea of individuality does become messy when you look across the animal kingdom to siphonophores, beehives, and other creatures that live collectively in one way or another.

But that brings me back to us, Sebastian. Humans are famously social animals. We wouldn't be here making a podcast if it wasn't for the collective efforts of loads of different people. Humanity wouldn't be so advanced if it weren't for working together. So in some way, we are more than just 7 billion individuals.

And I think that's also an important point to remember when it comes to tackling the biggest challenges we face as a society, like climate change. Yeah, that's absolutely true. If we're going to survive this climate crisis, we need to make a collective effort. And that is an idea that our next guest really believes in.

Stu McKenzie is the lead singer of the Australian rock band King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard. That's easy for you to say.

Okay, maybe I had to practice a few times. And maybe I got a bit of an edge because one of my D&D characters is named Lizard Wizard after the band. But that aside, Stu and his band, they realized that all the touring they were doing was having a negative impact on the planet. And they decided to do something about it. So as we leave you with Stu and a little of the band's music, let's remember that we are all amazingly individual.

Just like my punk rocker sister, or even a spider enthusiast. Thank you for that. And great things happen when we work together. I wouldn't think of myself as an activist. It's never been a thing where, oh, I'm going to write this song, I'm going to change the world. Like, more or less, what ends up on the page is kind of just like what we all are thinking about or what we're talking about or what we're, you know, the conversations that we have with friends or with family around the din table at the pub. Each is our own.

I think about the effects of being a touring musician constantly. It's really tricky to mitigate the guilt of just being on the road all the time. Every car you're in, every plane you catch, it's just so much.

so yeah it has been on my mind i want to say like daily for like a very long amount of years and maybe that's why it wasn't so much in our earlier first few records there isn't so much of this sort of thing because we weren't really touring and then yeah maybe it was when we started touring a lot it was just like jesus taking a few planes aren't we you know like it it just becomes an extremely large carbon footprint

I try to justify it by making progress. We don't live in a utopia. Like, it's hard to just step right into one. But if I feel like we're kind of making progress year to year, perhaps, I think that's how I justify it. We've been sort of like...

carbon offsetting our flights for quite a few years and with the physical production of merch as well we started just doing all organic cotton only organic cotton t-shirts recently as well we've been doing no shrink wrap on our lps for several years too they come in a brown bag but you know the disc the the lp disc is still a big chunk of plastic it's it's tough i think one thing that

I have gotten out of touring is that I do have like a nicer sense of humanity in a way. I think even just going to, you know, all the venues that we play at, the people that you meet, everyone's kind of the same. You know, the things that we want deep down are all pretty much the same. That's been a really lovely and nice thing to see. So, you know, I do think that we do have this opportunity to kind of like work together and fix a lot of

and especially younger people who are on board with this, you know, I think that there's an opportunity to actually get some stuff done. The BBC Earth podcast was hosted by me, Rotundo Shackleton. And me, Sebastian Echeverry. Our interviewees were Lisa Kirkendale, Richard Ewell, and Stu McKenzie. Special thanks goes to King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard for permission to use their music.

and also retroactive permission for letting me name one of my D&D characters after them that I did not ask them for, but this counts. Our producers are Jeff Marsh and Rachel Byrne. The researcher is Seb Masters. The podcast theme music was written by Axel Cucutie. Mixing and additional sound design was done by Perigran Andrews. The production manager is Catherine Stringer, and the production coordinator is Gemma Woodson.

The associate producer is Kristen Kane and the executive producer is Debra Dudgeon. The BBC Earth podcast is a BBC Studios production for BBC Earth. My dad works in B2B marketing. He came by my school for career day and said he was a big ROAS man. Then he told everyone how much he loved calculating his return on ad spend.

My friend's still laughing at me to this day. Not everyone gets B2B, but with LinkedIn, you'll be able to reach people who do. Get $100 credit on your next ad campaign. Go to linkedin.com slash results to claim your credit. That's linkedin.com slash results. Terms and conditions apply. LinkedIn, the place to be, to be.