The Monstrefact: The Ohmu of “Nausicaä”
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Get the Colgate Total Active Prevention System today so you can be dentist ready. Shop now by visiting shop.colgate.com slash total. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio. Hi, my name is Robert Lamb and this is The Monster Fact, a short form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind focusing on mythical creatures, ideas, and monsters in time.

This week I finally began assembling the plastic Omu model kit that I purchased last year at Japan's Ghibli Park. I'll admit that the sheer number of legs in the kit scared me away from the task for almost exactly a year, but they are now glued in place. And with this fantastic creature on my mind, I thought, what better time than now to discuss its biology on The Monster Fact.

If you've ever watched Hayao Miyazaki's 1984 masterpiece Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, and perhaps even listened to our Weird House Cinema episode about the film, then you already know a great deal about these fantastic creatures. The omu, whose name suggests the Japanese for king of insects, are indeed gigantic, multi-legged arthropods, protected by a thick exoskeleton and prone to destructive stampedes.

Yet they also have a gentle side and are able to extend glowing tendrils that can heal wounds and enable telepathic communication with other organisms. They also benefit from a hive mind. They are a vital part of the post-apocalyptic ecosystem of the Nausicaa world, thriving in the toxic jungle or sea of decay and spreading its boundaries via spores when they die.

Their form, behavior, and fraught relationship with human beings brings to mind such organisms as marine whales and terrestrial bison, with conflict between humans and amu operating as a self-reinforcing cycle of violence. Their insect world inspirations clearly include various beetles, caterpillars, and perhaps the larva of cicadas, but their creator, Hayao Miyazaki, has long credited the common pill bug as the key inspiration.

Pill bugs have many common names, including the roly poly. That's what I grew up calling them.

and they have long been a point of fascination for children around the world. In Japan, they are often called Dengomushi, or "ball bugs," and this too, of course, refers to their famous ability to roll their bodies up so that their exoskeletal plates encase them like a ball or wheel. Giant pill bugs often factor into fantastic wheeled vehicles in various franchises, including the worlds of both Dungeons & Dragons and The Dark Crystal.

The process of rolling into a ball is called conglobation, and it's not actually for rolling away from danger. Rather, it's protective. It helps conserve moisture and, in other organisms, serve a thermoregulatory purpose as well. There are many species of pill bugs, and they're not actually insects. They are isopod woodlice of the Armadillidae family, making them terrestrial crustaceans.

They generally feed on decaying plant materials, but can serve as pests for human agriculture under certain environmental conditions.

While they don't benefit from a hive mind or swarm intelligence, Japanese researcher Toru Moriyama has published multiple papers examining their apparent capacity for problem-solving and autonomous behavior, studied for potential applications in machine learning. As is often the case with non-human animals, the mental abilities of the common pill bug should perhaps not be completely dismissed.

Tune in for additional episodes of The Monster Fact, The Artifact, or Animalia Stupendium each week. As always, you can email us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Colgate Total may make your favorite toothpaste, but it's also a science innovator committed to oral health. For instance, the Colgate Total Active Prevention System, with

With a cutting-edge toothbrush, refreshing antibacterial mouthwash, and a reformulated toothpaste, with a technology so innovative it won the 2024 Edison Patent Award, the Colgate Total Active Prevention System is 15 times more effective at reducing bacteria buildup to fight the root cause of oral health problems in six weeks, starting from week one, compared to a non-antibacterial fluoride toothpaste and flat-trimmed toothbrush. Talk about science.

Get the Colgate Total Active Prevention System today so you can be dentist ready. Shop now by visiting shop.colgate.com slash total. This is an iHeart Podcast.