Hey, there tumble fans.
It's lindsey and marshall and we are on winter break right now, so we are so excited to share with you one of our favorite old episodes.
This one is a classic from all the way back in season four.
It's called The Science of Whiskers, and it involves one of the cuter experiments.
I mean, we've actually had a lot of cute experiments on our show, but this is one of the cuter.
Top five.
Top five cuteness experiments.
So get ready to hear about The Science of Whiskers, and we hope you are having a wonderful holiday break.
We will be back with new episodes on January 23rd, But in the meantime, here's the science of whiskers.
Hi, I'm Lindsay.
And I'm Marshall.
Welcome to Tumble, the show where we explore stories of science discovery.
Today we're talking about the science of whiskers.
Surprisingly, animals just don't put them on in order to look cute and pose for videos.
Those long facial hairs are like an animal's sixth sense.
From seals to mice, we're off to explore the wonderful world of whiskers.
My name is Kara.
I am six years old.
I'm from Baltimore, Maryland.
My question is, why do seals have whiskers?
I mean, it's obviously so they can join the whisker club.
We all want to be in the whisker club.
That's the only reason men grow mustaches.
Everybody just wants to belong.
Listeners, what do you think is the answer to Cara's question?
And how would scientists study whiskers?
Think about it.
Before we got Cara's question, I had no idea that people study whiskers just on their own.
But that all changed when I found Dr. Robin Grant.
Yeah, so I'm Dr. Robin Grant.
I'm a senior lecturer in comparative animal behavior and physiology.
That's a fancy way to say whisker scientist, which means she studies and compares how different whiskers work, including seals.
So I look at all different mammals.
So that's a fluffy animal.
So just like she spends all her days looking at adorable animals.
Yeah, which, you know, a lot of us do.
That's true.
But whiskers are more than cute facial features.
They're actually a big part of an important sense for many mammals, touch.
So, even though I might be like a whisker biologist, if you like, what I am doing is studying the sense of touch in animals.
And it just so happens that for most animals, that happens to be their whiskers.
Wait, so she's saying that whiskers are like facial hair that feels?
Yes.
That's crazy.
Actually, it totally blew my mind.
And Cara's question of why seals have whiskers is a great way to explain how they work.
Think about where a seal lives, mostly underwater off the coast.
You can imagine it being quite sandy and murky and a little bit mucky.
So they can't rely on their eyes very much.
When they dive under the water, their nostrils close together.
They don't rely on their sense of smell.
So what they're doing is relying on their sense of touch using their whiskers.
So seals are most of the time swimming blind, except for their whiskers.
Yeah, and they have incredible whiskers.
So they have about 30 to 35 whiskers on each side of their face.
Whiskers are big, thick hairs.
And in fact, they're so thick in seals, they almost look kind of plasticky.
They're really really thick, much thicker than the hairs on our head, much thicker than your cat's whiskers as well.
Seals' whiskers aren't smooth like hair either.
So they have these kind of bumpy in and outs that go all along all of their whiskers.
And what this is for is to make them really stable in the water.
And even more amazingly, they help them find food.
And also they're so sensitive that they're able to detect the tiny movement that fish make as they swim through the water.
What?
These whiskers are so sensitive they can feel the wake of a fish?
Like we can see the wake of a boat?
Yes, exactly.
And if a fish swims in a wiggly line, the sail will follow it exactly.
Man, that's some ninja-level stalking ability.
I know.
Wait, but how do we know that that's what the whiskers are doing?
Like, I'm assuming seals aren't just telling scientists their stalking secrets outright.
No, the scientists have to offer bribes.
They're like dogs, so all they want to do is have lots and lots of fish.
Robin told me about an extremely fun-sounding experiment she did with seal whiskers.
So what we can do is actually train seals to do different tasks and see how they use their whiskers.
So for example, I did a task that was training a seal to detect different sizes of discs.
A disc?
So like something like a frisbee?
Yeah, basically.
And these different sized discs are a stand-in to find out.
How do seals know whether something in their environment is big or small?
And that helps us learn about the many ways seals use their whiskers.
Right.
So in her experiment, Robin worked with a seal named Moe.
And so what would happen is Moe lived with all his friends in the pool.
And then I'd come along and I'd call him out and say, come on, Moe.
And he'll hop out the water and come over to me.
Is there a scientific prize for most adorable study method?
This would win.
And then in front of me, I have a setup.
And there's a little ball that he pops his nose on in the middle.
And then on either side, I put two different objects.
And one will be a big disc and one will be a small disc.
And what I'll do is I'll pop headphones on him so he can't hear what we're doing.
And I'll pop a blindfold on him so he can't see.
So he's only using his whiskers.
Right, so the seal's wearing headphones and a blindfold.
Hopefully we have pictures of that.
I hope.
There's video.
And then I'll tell him to go.
And then what he'll do is he'll explore on one side, touch the big disc, and then he'll explore on the other side and touch the small one.
And then he'll go back and really kind of push over the big one and say, it's this one.
This is the big disc that I found.
And then you give him lots of fish and lots of praise.
And then you swap them all over and you try it again.
Robin filmed every single one of these trials with Moe.
And after enough trials, Mo went back to his friends in the pool and Robin went to review all the video with her colleagues.
And then, when I looked through all the videos, which was like hundreds and hundreds of videos, we found that when they touch something, they orient, so they always move right to the middle by their nose.
So when Mo was exploring the disk underwater, he was really touching it with his nose?
Why?
Now the bit near their nose has loads of whiskers in.
It's really, really densely packed, full of little short whiskers.
And what they do is they stick all these whiskers onto the object and then they count how many whiskers contact the object.
The more whiskers that touch the object, the bigger it is.
Whoa, so are they actually counting?
Like one whisker, two whiskers, three whiskers four, five whiskers, six whiskers, seven whiskers, more whiskers numbers in their head.
It's kind of an intuitive way of putting together a picture of their murky world, just like we use our senses to navigate our world.
We have amazing brains which take new information from our eyes and our nose and our ears and our hands and seals are the same.
They just get to use whiskers to help build a picture in their minds.
Right, and it helps them make decisions about things like where to haul out on rocks or how big a fish might be.
Man, that's so cool.
So why doesn't my beard work that way?
So human facial hair doesn't really count as whiskers, even though we totally call it that.
But our ancestors were truly whiskered.
Probably the first mammals, the mammals that weren't even around anymore, They had whiskers.
Each whisker has a muscle that controls its twitching and movement.
And even though we lost our whiskers over the course of evolution, we got to keep the muscles.
So humans have remnants of these whisker muscles in our faces.
If I grew a beard, could I train it to feel things?
Like, oh, winds blowing from the east.
You can do that with your face anyway.
And I think a bus is passing a mile away.
Very, very long.
All right.
Well, just as evolution did away with whiskers for humans, different animals evolved different kinds of whiskers.
If at home you've got a guinea pig, you can see that they have quite a lot of whiskers.
But actually, they're quite small compared to their body.
Whereas if you have something like a mouse or a rat or a hamster, they actually have enormous whiskers compared to the size of them.
You may have noticed if you've stared into the face of a cat.
It looks like their whiskers are laid out on a grid system.
And it seems like the best whiskered animals.
So the ones with the longest whiskers and the most whiskers usually have this very regular organization of whiskers, which is weird as well.
I will agree that cats are weird, and I'll add their whiskers to the list of reasons why.
Right, but compare that to dog whiskers.
Dogs' whiskers are kind of randomly laid out and pretty short.
That's because dogs don't use their whiskers.
Their sense of smell is much, much more powerful than their sense of whisker touch.
It's a good thing.
They don't actually need to touch the poop they're sniffing with part of their faces.
Though based on most dogs I've known, they probably wouldn't mind.
So you can start to look and think about how long they are, how many they are and how organized they are.
I guess that seems like something we could do just by looking at adorable photos of whiskers on the internet.
I know I'll be doing that.
So is that how Robin studies other types of whiskers?
Well, she's looking at tiny movements with special whisker technology.
And what we're interested in is the movement of the whiskers.
So whiskers can move backwards and forwards in a process that is called whisking.
Whisking?
Even the technical terms are cute.
I know.
I'm literally never going to be over this.
A doormouth, for instance, can move their whiskers up to about 10 times per second.
That's like a lot of whisks.
So to slow down the whisking and figure out how animals are actually using their whiskers, Robin uses a fancy high-speed camera, along with special lighting, to film in the dark, when many of the best whiskered animals are most active.
The high-speed camera basically makes sure that we can see everything really nice and crispy clean.
So, coupling these amazing cameras and the special lighting, we're able to capture them doing all sorts of cool things.
Robin actually builds special mini arenas for the animals to demonstrate different whisking skills.
Sometimes we just film them in a kind of open arena and see them exploring.
Sometimes we build special climbing arenas to look at how they use their whiskers when they climb.
That's so great!
So she's really studying all types of whiskers in all kinds of situations.
Yeah, but she told me seal whiskers are her favorite type of whisker.
That's pretty high praise coming from a whisker scientist.
So let's ask our listeners, what's your favorite type of whisker?
And now that you know how whisker scientists look at whiskers, can you find well-whiskered animals?
Remember, well-whiskered means that they have many long, organized whiskers.
Can you start your own whisker rating system based on the animal that you see?
10 out of 10 would whisk again.
Thanks to Dr Robin Grant, Senior Lecturer in Comparative Animal Behavior and Physiology at Manchester Metropolitan University.
And thanks to Cara for sending in her awesome question.
We'll have more from Lindsay's interview with Robin on our Patreon and CastBox Premium podcast feeds.
It's just $1 a month to learn so much more from every Tumble episode.
Have you ever wondered what it would be like if people had whiskers?
I think it'd be fantastic, wouldn't it?
We'll also have more about whisker science on our blog, including a video of Robin's experiment with a blindfolded headphone-wearing seal named Mo.
That's on sciencepodcastforkids.com.
I'm Lindsay Patterson, and I wrote and produced this show.
And I'm Marshall Escamilla, and I make all of the music.
Thanks for listening, and stay tuned for more stories of science discovery.
All right, everybody, here we are at the end of the episode.
And I think we all know at this point what that means.
It means it's time for the birthday shout outs to go to our supporters on Patreon.
But before we get to that, we need to give a call out to our newest Patreon supporter, Emily.
Thanks so much for the support, Emily.
It really means a lot.
And now here are some birthdays.
Dear Ava June, happy birthday on December 27th.
Never stop asking questions.
You could make the next big discovery.
Ryder, mom and dad love you so much.
They can't wait to see what you discover and have a very happy birthday on December 28th.
And a very happy birthday also on December 28th to Alice.
Mom and Dad are so proud of who you are.
Stay curious and keep learning forever.
A happy birthday on January 3rd to John, who's turning 8 years old this year.
A happy 11th birthday to Jasper on January 5th with love from Mommy, Mama Kai Noonie Rosa, Fiona and Uwe.
To Veronica your family loves your curiosity and scientific mind and wishes you a very happy January 8th birthday.
With love from Mama, Dad, Max, and Cal.
Thanks so much to all of you and to everyone who supports Tumble on Patreon.
We appreciate it so, so much.
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