You're listening to Weird and Dead, the paleontology podcast
that tells evolutions most embarrassing and bizarre
stories. I'm Amy Atwater.
And I'm Megan Wetherill, and we're two living scientists who
are weirdly excited about dead things.
On this episode, we delve into all the magical and bizarre
things you didn't expect a butthole to do, like become a
house for fish. Or extend upward and outward to
spray poop like a chocolate fountain.
Or breathe. Obviously, this episode we'll be
discussing cloacas and feces, so choose your listening audience
appropriately and please pay attention to the content
warnings in the description. One of the things that happened
on TikTok after in season one, we talked all about the
beautiful resplendent sturgeon fossil that is stuck inside the
asshole of a Brachylophosaurus is that they pointed out that we
missed a joke. And I'm ashamed because it was a
pretty a pretty good one. It was a pretty goddamn good
one. It can't be everywhere all at
once, Megan. No, I no, I feel bad about it.
So as they pointed out, there is a pretty strong connection
between sturgeon and Pearl fish. And if you are not familiar with
Pearl fish, Pearl fish are a type of fish that are
specialized to live inside the buttholes of other animals.
They're most famous for sea cucumbers.
They don't just live in sea cucumbers.
Some of them live in crabs, some of them live in starfish.
Some species aren't picky, they'll live in a couple
different ones. Some species, they will only
live in a singular species of butthole for sea cucumbers, and
that's kind of, you know, the sturgeon was Pearl fishing the
Brachylophosaurus. Wow, so are Pearl fish really
small? I mean the animals you just
described are not like giants. I mean, is this a king crab that
they're in the butthole of? No.
These are very small fish, think like minnows, minnow sized fish,
and they're using them for shelter and in some cases they
are parasitizing. So there's only a couple of
species that are actually eating the butthole of their host.
A lot of them are just hiding in there.
And it's not just one. Sometimes researchers have
pulled sea cucumbers out of the ocean and placed them in buckets
and then looked back later and found 15 fish.
It's a dormitory. Yeah, it's a dormitory for
Pearl. Fish have fun at college this
year at that sea cucumber's butthole.
Yes. So obviously I, I feel like we
should draw that connection, but also there are so many other
fascinating bizarre things that animal buttholes can do.
So that's kind of the topic of today's episode is all the weird
things that you maybe didn't know that you could do with a
butthole or that other things could do with a butthole.
And I have been waiting for like 2 months now because you
mentioned a very specific butthole fact and then forbid me
from Googling it and I have been tortured like this is the most
self restraint I've had to have in years because I have not
looked up this term so oh please put me out of my misery.
And let me tell you, it's not just one term.
As I dug deeper, I found more and more and more and it's
beautiful. So I'm just going to give you a
low down on some of those. But yes, I'm currently
captivated by crinoid anal chimneys.
I can't stop thinking about them, and they're really
interesting and modern cryanoids.
But what's really spectacular is what fossil cryanoids did, and
the fact that we have just so many specimens of fossil
cryanoids with an anal chimney preserved.
But they're not all anal chimneys.
Let me tell you all the list of names I've come across.
What is an anal chimney? Oh, it's self-explanatory, is it
not? No.
Up on the rooftop. For Santa goes for delivering
chronic presence. Santa gets down this chimney, or
what reindeer is he uses to land upon them.
Pearl fish. So anal chimneys are in
cryanoids. We're going to talk about what a
cryanoid is, what a kind of derms are.
Sometimes people confuse them for plants, but they're actually
weird animals. Modern cryanoids to me look like
the birdie that you use when you play badminton.
That to me is kind of like what a cryanoid kind of looks like.
He's got these feathery structures that used to just
kind of free float through the air.
But fossil cryanoids actually had a stalk that were attached
to the sea floor. So these are marine animals.
And since there and we'll talk more about this, their butthole
and their mouth hole are in the same hole.
Generally, they need to get shit away from their mouth hole so
that they don't just re eat their own shit.
So they've evolved or they did evolve these insane structures
to essentially go go gadget butthole, if you will.
Two, it's a hygiene thing. It's it's fun.
So but they're not all just anal chimneys.
I also found anal tube, anal pyramid, anal cone, anal hose,
anal sack, and anal plates and they're all slightly different
and I'm. Excited to die and different.
It's not just synonyms when people didn't want to use
chimneys. It's true, it's true.
I think some of them are kind of, you can play around with
them as you will. Some of them are distinctly
different and I'm I'm excited to get into those.
But when I started, I was under the what I now think is a
misconception, but they really just had one hole, right?
Like that's kind of what started this conversation was like,
well, what about the animals? Like I always refer to my iPhone
as being like an early invertebrate because it has one
hole, you know, and you have to do everything through that.
But that's not entirely accurate either, right?
I think of it as, I mean, it's the one spot on the Organism.
But are they truly mouth hole, butt hole or what is going on
there? All right, so originally we were
going to entitle this episode one hole to ruin or to rule them
all, not ruin. That would be totally different.
I mean. Depending on, we have some
evidence that it might be that. Yeah, it might be that, but a
Amy doesn't understand the Lord of the Rings reference and B
technically it's not actually 1 hole.
So when we say butthole, we're saying that because it's a
funnier word to us, but we are largely referring to cloacas or
vents, which as far as exit goes, they have one exit.
A cloaca is when you put poop. You put piss, you put sperm.
Babies. Anything else goes, Yeah, eggs
all goes out through the exact same exit.
So it's one exit. But in almost all of the animals
we're going to talk about today, they do technically have a
different entrance. It's just that the proximity of
the entrance and the exit sometimes leads to catastrophes,
as you might expect, which evolution has provided some
extremely bizarre adaptations to getting around.
But they do technically have a single exit and a single
entrance. They just might use them in very
different fashions than humans use our exits, our holes.
So, for example, sea cucumbers. Not only do their anuses provide
homes for fish. So kind of them.
Yeah. And it's it's, it was weird to
me. I mean, everything about that is
weird to everybody. But I wondered initially why
they didn't go in the mouth because sea cucumbers are kind
of just like a big BLOB on the ocean floor.
So smashy. They're so smashy yes.
Apparently it's very difficult to study their movements by the
way, because if you try to do a capture recapture study, they.
Just go black inside out. That too, They do excrete their
insides to scare. They throw their stomachs at
predators. Like they throw up.
Their stomachs? No, I think it's their
respiratory systems. I don't.
Know I these are aliens in my opinion.
But they will also, regardless of which organs they're
throwing, some organs in your direction.
Maybe it's if you come from the front versus from the back.
Because the respiratory organs are not in the front.
They get rid of tags, like tags fall off of them because they're
kind of squishy. You can't tattoo them because
their skin will push out the ink.
So there's no way to tell if you have picked up that sea cucumber
before in the open option. I remembered you right.
Just such a bizarre problem to have for a biologist.
Why don't you just put a tracking device on one of the
many Pearl fish that's hanging out in its butthole?
Honestly, that probably would be a better strategy.
Not all sea cucumbers do have. The roomy enough butthole for
that. Like I'm also wondering how big
these anyway, you know? So the reason that they go for
the anus and not the mouth is not because like sea cucumbers
have like mouth teeth. They have like big tentacles.
They don't have a very big mouth opening, but their anus is where
they do all of their respiration.
So they are butt breathers. They have a special organ in
their butt hole that is called a respiratory tree and that is
what some of the Pearl fish are gnawing on, although the Pearl
fish will also go in deeper and eat gonads.
So that's super fun. The sea.
Cucumber wait for my godads. So what these Pearl fish will do
is because the sea cucumber has its respiratory organs in its
butt, it's not a like a passive diffusion thing.
They butthole breathe like they're cloaca opens, sucks in
water and then closes so that the water goes through the
respiratory organs and then pushes it back out.
So they have suction that will pull the fish in.
And so not only do Pearl fish live inside the butthole of
these sea cucumbers, some of them back in and then they poke
their little heads out of the exit because they can get sucked
up into the butthole of the sea. Cucumber not consensual for the
fishies to even go up there just being breathed in.
Well, maybe that was initially they want to be there.
That is, they they get near the butthole on purpose.
They arranged themselves. In the neighborhood.
They were already in the neighborhood and, well,
apparently this is symbiotic and not harmful for the sea
cucumbers from many different species of Pearl fish.
So they're fine with it. I don't know.
It gives them a friend, right? Yeah, right.
That children's story please. Sea cucumber and Pearl fish.
But some Pearl fish are not as nice of residents and they will
eat the gonads, they will eat the respiratory organs.
They are parasitic. So those species of sea cucumber
who have dealt with that problem because again, these are like
convergently like they have an arms race between sea cucumber
assholes and Pearl fish. I know.
And so the the species of sea cucumber that have to deal with
the parasitic Pearl fish, they don't have mouth teeth, they
have anal teeth up to 25. But do teeth have anything to do
with breathing, even if they're in your mouth?
No, no. But you know, you would assume
that teeth go in the mouth, right?
Like that's the just. Like I'd assume that you breathe
through your mouth and sea cucumbers are just going, you're
an idiot. No, you don't know me.
You don't know. I mean, they're also like a kind
of derms, which they're the weird.
Like I when I think of a kind of derms, they don't fit within
what you think about. Like they do still technically
have that pentoradial symmetry, but it's like longitudinal or
whatever. So it's not how you'd think of
like a sea star, which is probably the most well known.
So they're they're weird on every angle.
So of course some of them have up to 25 teeth ringing their
assholes so that when they close their sphincter, the fish gets
crushed if it's not all the way in.
So it's like a garage door? Yeah, without a sensor it wants
to. But if they do get crushed then
they just have a dead fish in their ass or.
You know they can breathe out, so they can do that.
However, those species are still parasitized by Pearl fish
because this is an arms race and those Pearl fish have just
gotten skinnier. We will get there.
I will get there. Wow, that's a mad respect for
sea cucumbers. I already thought they were
pretty cool. If I have any time I'm at a tide
pool experience. Like at an aquarium.
You will shove children out of the way so that I can touch that
sea cucumber you. Think she's joking, but that's
because you have not seen her go for a Junior Ranger badge.
It is a little frightening. Wow.
OK, so unknown. Unknown a kind of derm Facts.
I mean that's where I spent a lot of my time was akinoderms.
Like I now have such new found respect for akinoderms again.
So akinoderms are invertebrates. They are things like sea stars.
They're things like sea urchins, sand dollars.
No bones despite the fact that they have calcareous teeth and I
could not find this paper. But there I did find a paper
before that was just I'm pretty sure it was a grad student
arguing about how we can't call them teeth anymore and had like
I I get it, but like. Because they're not enamel.
They're not probably an enamel. Funniest paper concept of all
time? Let's just argue about whether
or not we can call the butt teeth butt teeth.
Butt teeth, Butt teeth, I guess you can call them whatever you
want to. It's like this.
I mean, they're pretty unique, so wow.
So we were going to talk about cryo.
We're gonna. Yeah.
And so, yeah, just go. I think it's like if you're not
a fan of a kind of terms yet, you're gonna be or you should
probably stop listening because it's not going to get any tamer.
We're going to continue to be. We will talk about vertebrates
because my God, there are a lot of that.
Breathe through their assholes. Which is goals, really.
You know, I was trying to get that manuscript published before
that. I just need to learn how to but.
Like, I just need to figure, I mean, do you have to be like
inverted? Anyway, I have questions.
We'll get to them. But let's talk some more about
cryonoids. Cryonoids are spectacular again.
So the living ones are really feathery.
They're called seed lilies a lot as well.
The cool ones, though, we had a greater diversity of cryonoids
back in the Paleozoic than what we see today.
And they, they were really prolific and they all had this
same problem that we're discussing, which is their
cloaca, which they call and crinoids, the Tegman.
So that's the name for the entire whole.
Beautiful. Baby name.
Oh, Tegman. Go Tegman.
I like it. So that's essentially what holds
both the mouth hole and the butt hole.
And the anal pyramid is actually kind of like a little calcareous
little like cover. That pyramid shaped.
Yeah, a lot of times, yes. Yes, sometimes.
They're also called an anal cone.
I really want to start this section on fossil crinoids to
say I found the most amazing blog.
It's called the Akino blog. It's professor.
I believe his name is Chris Ma. He's my hero.
I think we need to befriend him based on the beauty of his
writing. I'm also fairly certain I found
his blog too. So yes, I when you're
researching these topics, it's impossible not to, which is how
I was like, this is our friend and he referenced this book
called Fossil Crinoids. So I was like, oh, I'll just buy
it, you know, silly, naive Amy. And then I go search for it
online and it's like 300 freaking dollars.
So if someone wants to gift that to me, I'd be ever so grateful.
But what I did instead, millennial genius, is go on to
Google Books and find it. And you can't look at all of the
pages. So I just searched.
I just searched for the word anal.
Oh great. Better results on that book than
Google I'm assuming. Wow.
I didn't. Yeah.
I don't recommend it on Google. Don't do it on Google.
However, if you go to Google books, fossil crinoids and
search anal, you'll come up with all of these gems.
I think there were like 55 occurrences and I read every
single one of them. It's also my low key goal of
this episode to say anal so many times that we like.
Can ever sponsor? Yes, please.
And that we break a world record.
I don't think we will because there's some kinky podcasts out
there. I don't want to compete with
that. Maybe the most time said on a
science. Podcast, There we go.
There we got our. Goals low.
There are a lot of anal adaptations going on in fossil
crinoids, and the reason there's so many names is because they've
all evolved independently of each other.
Like they've all had to figure out different ways to get their
shit away from their face. And it seems like it's both.
Like what's fucking incredibly cool to me is you can actually
reconstruct paleo environment aspects from their different
anal adaptations because some of them are literally for, oh, I'm
in a very slow moving, no water, low energy environment, so I
have to go go gadget butthole to get my poop away from my mouth
so it doesn't just fall right back in.
And then other ones are in like higher energy environments and
they're go go. Gadget buttholes also work as an
anchor to help steer their feather arm to catch food.
So. No, Explain that.
So they so the anal too but seemed to be in higher energy
environments because it was literally also thought to be and
like to tether them as well to the ground.
Which means I have to get you to some of these images.
Yeah, you can understand. Are they flip flopping over?
Well, let's anchor them. Let's take a look.
All right, so let's go ahead and go to that document.
You can go ahead and Scroll down to this first page.
Here is you para cyanus Nashville.
Now the thing about crinoids are, is that their entire bodies
essentially are made out of calcium carbonate, which means
they fossilize really, really well because they're already
minerals to the point. So here you're seeing a very, I
mean again, if we Adam and Eve, talk to us.
When you look up the photos of this on our blog, you will very
much understand why. You're looking at like, I'm, I'm
sorry, but to me they're like ankylosaurs but for
invertebrates. Yeah, like this is an armored
dildo if I didn't know anything else.
It's not, though. It's a fucking fossil.
Cry noise. I don't understand any piece of
what I am looking at. So that's why there is an
illustration on the right that at least shows you which part is
the anal tube. It's missing the very tippity
top, which would have been its anal pyramid.
And then like at the, so we've got like kind of like the stalk,
right, going up to the base and then it flares into that kind of
weird diamond name. Important for Adam and Eve.
Yeah, We need a flared base. You have a flared base and then
you go up the, you go up the stock and it has those spiny
regions there midway up the anal structure.
What are the spines? Are the spines the tentacles?
That's where the feathers, those are where the arms would have
been. So here we don't have the arms
fossilized just like the core of it.
So the arms would have come out at that really spiny region and
then everything above it, which is a couple of inches.
It's a full blown anal tube. It's the rudder of its boat.
In a way OK, the rudder not. Not always an anchor.
Sorry, I don't understand boats very well.
I would. Not say I've seen some.
Reconstructions where they're like dragging on the sea floor
too, so I do think. That is a heavy thing to be
waving around in the water. That's what I'm saying.
What if your butt hole came out of your body like multiple
inches and was encrusted? Was like a massive like that
tube is like a third of the body size?
Yes. Is it retractable?
Others in others it is retractable.
I think it's some in Chris Ma. Hit us up.
Let's do a bonus, bonus, bonus or a deeper dive.
Or honestly. Just tell us.
We just want to know. So there are other ones like if
you Scroll down to the second image, I have been told this is
Macrocrinus. This is the one that I've been
trying to buy for you for a very long time.
This is the one that if I tattoo a crinoid on my body, I think
it's going to be this one. It's so beautiful.
It's got. A Unicorn horn.
It is, but that's its butthole. That Unicorn horn is where it
shits. It's magnificent.
It is spectacular. And you can see the feathers
here kind of enveloping around it.
Yeah. And it's coy.
No, it's like it's a like a negligee.
It's lingerie for it's freaking. Telling you with how large it's
butthole it's anal chimney is. So if you look up other
Macrochrinus specimens you will see that they don't all have an
anal chimney because they are not always there.
It is only when they are excreting their waste.
So they have them, it's just inside.
It's tucked away. It's tucked away and that's
where the go go gadget butthole comes in is it does actually
protrude out shit in the wind and then come on back down and
bite in the wind. I mean underwater.
Underwater, the water wind. So to see an even more
spectacular 1, go ahead and. This next.
One, though, is really spectacular.
Like gorgeous. Oh my God.
That's it's anal tube of Let's see.
What is the name of this one? I think I wrote it down.
It's Patero crinus. Paterio Crinus, you're.
Sure, that's not a tapeworm? Right.
I mean no, because Chris Ma and other experts on the Internet
told me this is an anal tube. Yeah, I mean, I guess I would
believe them. Yeah, and I again, I should have
reached out and maybe now we. Describe in case you were not
currently looking at the weird images that are on our website,
what we're looking at is a fan of feather like appendages
coming out of a stock. So kind of like a feather duster
and then it looks like a ribbon has just kind of coiled out of
it that is longer than any other portion of the cryanoid.
Yeah, no, exactly. And I.
Didn't even know how to describe the first one that we saw.
It's like a totem pole of nightmares.
I had to go into the fossil cryanoid book to read about it
because I was so confused and luckily as long as you search
anal you'll find it. Research tips from Amy Atwater
it's. A long book.
I wasn't interested in all of it.
I just wanted to know about its butthole.
And so anal was the secret word to get me there.
So I mean, I've been learning a lot about and before we check
out more images, let's talk more about these potential functions.
So I've been talking about it's really get that poop away from
my face, which makes a ton of sense.
You don't want to ingest your feces.
Most people are not. It's a smoke.
Sack for shit. It's not 2 crinoids 1 cup, you
know. You know that that is now aging
us, right? Like that is not something I
know. That's a millennial thing.
What a horrifying thing to have associated with our age group
anyways. Well, it could be worse.
You could be a 300 million old crinoid with your butthole
fossilized. Actually, I think that's
awesome. I wish we no, I don't wish this
moving on. Moving on.
OK, so again, like we talked about it, so it's it's a hygiene
thing. Get that poop away from my face.
And then there's also some that want to stabilize and direct the
crinoid like a rudder. And so with and it's talking
about get that poop away from my face.
Let's go Scroll down and look at the next one, the next image.
This is a plate. You can actually go to the page
below it too to see the interpretation and the
illustration from fossil crinoids.
Actually, if you look at the first image, I'd love for you to
tell me which one of those features you think is the
butthole. So what I'm looking at here is
it looks like, you know what it really looks like, Amy, and
we'll probably cut this. It looks like when I got my dog
Jelly Bean, and we named her Jelly because her belly was full
of Jelly. Turns out it was worms and so we
dewormed her and she pooped out something that looked like
translucent pine needles and that's that's what this looks
like. You're right.
Wow, you're right. These do look like pine needles.
And she also knows that it looks like that poop because it
definitely sent her a. Bit yeah, yeah.
And I've dewormed a cat before, yeah.
And I remember, yeah. And all of these, though, you
see the one that's like only going halfway up and then kind
of does a little boop in the image there.
Yeah, that one is the anal. Chimney Fern front, yeah.
The Fern front and if you Scroll down you can see a wonderful
image of it where it's the anal tube that is protecting and
those are they called them like anal half circles, like anal
armor. You took this picture and you
very clearly ripped it from Google books with the word anal
highlighted. I was waiting for you to notice
that as I was taking my screenshots, I was.
Like I'm not lying, it's a black and white screenshot but with
yellow highlighting on the word anal.
As if I'd miss it. It's how I got there and I
thought of that when I was great.
To know that Google Books has searchable images though, so it
was. I mean, it was the spectacular,
but here's how it also shows you why there's so many different
names associated with it. Because these are the anal tubes
that are kind of creating this long structure that looks like
one of the feathery arms, and it's protecting the anal SAC
that's kind of within it. And then at the very tip again
is the anal pyramid, which kind of opens up in the waist,
actually comes out of that, so. Dedicated a whole to tube than
pyramid that. What's the SAC for?
Oh, the anal SAC has a bunch of different functions depending on
which crinoid you're talking about.
Which leads me beautifully into the next.
It's like I knew where we were going so we can.
Scroll right down to this next one, and the top image here
shows you the fossil. It kind of looks like it's
flipping you off a little bit. That's the anal cone, the kind
of like wilted petals around and then we have like the wilted
petals underneath of it and then we have kind of the stock and
then. There's a Pokémon.
It does look like a Pokémon, but it's very anal.
You can tell that I took this as a screenshot because anal is
once again highlighted perfectly.
Yeah, this is Basidio Kinas Weather BI.
And so it is thought that it had like this anal cone on top and
then that kind of like parachute spinous structure around it.
That's its anal sack. Now, why would you have an anal
sack? That kind of looks like a
beautiful Pokémon flower. It looks like a lovely little
hat. It does look like a lovely
little hat. So it has been interpreted that
these big frilly anal sacks were so spinous and pokey and that
they were like a deterrent to predators, like it was an anti
predation thing. However, others think that this
big frilly sack was actually more like an offering to
predators and it was like a non lethal interaction outcome.
Like take my big pillowy anal sack.
So it's like a lizard tail? It's.
Exactly like a lizard tail, right?
Yes, and that they could lose that without the entire Organism
being lost and still survive. And I guess it could just
regrow. I mean, it does look like a
little hat. So anal sack take off the hat.
God, these are weird images. You're.
Welcome, I'm I. Know I'm so glad that I finally
get to know all about anal chimneys.
Oh, and then the next one. I don't really have anything to
say about it except for how funny it looks.
It too is missing its anal chimney at the very top of its
anal. Too thing about this one is that
it looks like a little like monk haircut.
Yeah. So it's like a crinoid where the
feathers just kind of like look like bangs, like a bowl cut
bang. And then there's just this
Unicorn horn of an anal chimney talking at the top.
Lovely. To just like tell you how much
I'm obsessed with the Akino blog.
I knew that we were meant to be best friends when I best friends
comma in Kynoderm division. I mean, he wrote this whole
amazing blog post about it, some other great images, and he was
like, Oh my gosh, there's so much more I could probably say.
I briefly touched on snails that parasites their anuses here, dot
dot dot, and I was like, Oh my God.
So just scroll on down to that final one.
And that's where we see. Please describe what you're
seeing here. It's like a nice kind of spider
webby structure that I'm assuming is the crinoid
tentacles and on top but also somehow seemingly embedded is a
very large snail. Yes.
So this is a platy serrated snail that apparently goes after
is a parasite. And we find them in this
relationship quite often and they are literally on top of the
cop, which is where the mouth is found surrounded by those
feeding arms and they're often found clamped over the anus.
So they were poop eaters, coprophagus, they were eating
the crinoid shit. And there are tons and tons and
tons of research being done or has been done on this.
And I'd love, you know, it's, it's tangential to this, but we
got to at some point go there. I mean, they're the Pearl fish
of crinoids. They're the Pearl fish of
crinoids. Except they're eating excrement.
They're eating shit, yes. Yep, they're eating crinoid
waste, which you got to wonder what's really in crinoid waste
when you're a filter feeding strange Organism, because they
kind of use their feathery arms to like sieve things down and
then there's like funnels and grooves towards the mouth hole.
And so they're sitting, though explicitly, on the butthole part
of the Tegman. They know what they.
Want they know what they want, they're there for a reason and
they're found this way over and over again.
And I just want to say that that wraps up most of my facts at
this point. But I will just say that I
worked really hard to try and buy us anal chimney specimens.
And I reached out to a couple different fossil sites and left
them the weirdest messages I've ever written.
And I offered them like, hey, I'll promote you on social media
and stuff. And I haven't had a reply on any
of them. I don't understand why people
don't want to have that promoted that they sell anal chimneys.
Yeah, and like, I also was asking for a discount, of
course, 'cause that's my Forte. And they, they maybe that's why
they weren't. And I was like, joke's on you
when we get Uber famous, so we follow.
Us on Patreon so we can buy anal chimney specimens.
Oh, actually, I do have more pictures for you because, OK,
sand dollars, I couldn't really figure it out.
Sea stars. So like they say that they have
like an anal cone, but I guess they eat like a lot of sediment.
And like a lot of it is because they're so buried in the
sediment all the time that they have to get rid of their
sediment. So that's what they protrude
through their anal cone. But technically that cone isn't
connected to their actual digestive system.
So my friend Chris Moss said that they don't technically
count as true buttholes. And then when I read more I read
that they kind of just diffuse poop through their tube, feet,
arms maybe? I'm still really confused about
how some crinoids take a shit. Is is really the conclusion?
And see cucumbers? I don't understand that.
And then he wrote that brittle stars actually don't have a true
anus quote. Got no anus and apparently food
goes in and out the same hole which is the mouth.
So in brittle stars I think it really is actually 1 hole and
that they like for some reason. But if you want to look at some,
some urchin urchins have some interesting.
So this first image is often times referred to as like the
eye of a sea urchin. Guess what?
Not an eye, the brown eye a. Big brown eye and then just
Scroll down to see some of these anal sacks full of sea urchin
poop. That is that sea urchin poop.
That's sea urchin poop. That is a weirdly beautiful
image. Isn't it gorgeous?
Yes. It's like, yes.
Yeah, it looks computer generated for sure, but it looks
like a pretty computer generated thing.
Just like a little pinata poop. Like hanging.
Oh, I wasn't. Even looking at the poop part I
was looking at like the radiating like sea urchin
spines. The sea urchin butthole is truly
a marvel. It, it's beautiful.
I mean, I think we're going to watch some videos after this too
and maybe post them, but I didn't want to say that I'm
really sorry that I couldn't buy you a crinoid.
Oh my God. So instead I printed you a
crinoid or a couple crinoid buttholes.
As a as. A poster.
So this is for you. This is for you with all of the
favorite buttholes we just talked about.
Amazing. And we'll post some pictures of
this. I love it.
I clearly will have to take some photos with that.
Yes I wish, I'm still working on it.
If you guys are out there and you have a fossil crinoid with
an anal chimney, shoot, poop hose, tube, anything, let me
know. We'll pay some money for it, but
I don't want to pay. We understand that they're
valuable, but we're also poor, so. 100 bucks and let me know
what I can get for 100 bucks. No, these other ones were like
$300.00. And I was like, man, I'm really
into this, but I don't think I'm that into this.
I'm not quite there yet. Yeah.
So that's like all I've been thinking about for for weeks.
So now I'm really curious to hear about other weird animal
like shock me beyond because this was already so fun.
So this is so fun and this is so good and I have some really
fucking weird facts to go through so.
I just also want to say that Megan and I are here recording
this together, which is really fun and different, and last
night was torturous because we're both giggling at our
computers and like we're doing our.
Final research. Yes, we're going to go back into
not pooping through an elaborate butthole, but using a butthole
to breathe because that was that was my whole thing.
And the weirdest part about this is that I had a Google links
that were already purple. Like I have looked this up
before just for myself. So now I get to share with
everybody else. You are a fucking weirdo.
I'm a. Fucking weirdo.
All right, so when we are talking about animals that
breathe through buttholes, I mean, there's like dragonfly
larvae. They have gills on the inside of
their abdomens, so they pull water in and then they shoot it
back out. That's also how they transport
themselves. And they pull it in through
their butt. Yes, through their butt.
That's what You OK? So they're also butt breathers,
but that's not nearly as funny. I mean, pause for that mental
right? So wait, they why are they?
It helps them move when they're in like a larval stage or as
their actual true. You know, flying around.
No, no, no, not as they're flying.
Around OK, OK, I was just like, they're propelling themselves
with butthole juice. They through the water, yeah.
Wow, the. Little jet think like, you know,
like squid. Right.
But through their butthole. Through your butthole.
God, yeah. God, we're so boring.
God. No, our anatomy is stupid.
All right, so the big animal that has been studied for many,
many years because of its butthole breathing is turtles.
Specifically freshwater turtles, because for a long time we
weren't sure why they were able to hold their breath for so long
underwater. So turtles, some species of
them, they're juveniles. It can stay underwater for
several days without coming back up for air, which is a long
time. That's a long.
Time. And yes, turtles are cold
blooded. They need sun warmth.
You don't imagine that they have a high metabolism.
That's still a very long time for an animal that seems to be
breathing air. And The thing is, yes, they do
breathe air. They have a second set of lungs.
So what? Yeah.
I mean, it's not a lung, but it's not not a lung.
And it is of course OK inside the butthole.
Well, duh. Where else would you store?
It and so this form of respiration is called cloacal
respiration. Love this anal adaptations.
And cloacal, cloacal respiration.
And they suck water up into their tissue and then they have
really elaborate kind of wrinkly buttholes that actually have two
in some species have, they're called, I never know if the word
is Bursa or Bursa. There's A at the end of it, but
whatever. They have these two kind of
wrinkly sacs that kind of go off and have like more surface
texture to do cutaneous respiration.
So cutaneous is through your skin.
And they are not the only ones that breathe through their skin.
Frogs breathe through their skin.
There's some salamanders that have gotten rid of their lungs
entirely. They just breathe through their
skin. So it makes sense that they are
breathing through their skin, but they're in a shell.
So they had to increase some surface tissue in, you know,
areas where it's convenient, which include the butthole.
So they found out that in some species of turtle, a freshwater
turtle, they can breathe so much air through their butthole that
they can get up to 70% of their oxygen through their butt.
Through their butt. Which is why they can dive for
so long, because they're not running out of air.
I want you to envision how they figured out that that's how
turtles breathe that much oxygen through their assholes.
Well I I can only imagine it's through literally trying to
drown turtles for a really long time.
I feel like that's the human answer.
Is like Nope it's not the 70s anymore, these papers were done
in the 20 tens. Someone was making out with a
turtle asshole and it like sneezed on that.
No. So initially they they found out
that these animals had Bursa or Bursa or whatever they are back
in like the 1700s. They started really describing
them in the 1800s. They didn't know at that point
if they were for respiration, if they were for carrying water
around for freshwater turtles when they lay eggs to drop water
and like soften up the ground. But turns out they just piss on
the ground. Duh, you already got.
Water. So when you're measuring
respiration, they put you in a tank of water in this particular
case, and they basically can measure, They have tools to
measure both the oxygen concentration in the air and the
oxygen concentration in the water.
So they can't always measure it in the turtle, but they can
measure the change between the water and the surface.
But in this study that I'm talking about, they wanted to
know if it was specifically water in the butt hole, so not
other skin because they have some wrinkly necks.
They wanted to know that it was specifically butthole breathing,
Yes. So to test it, they had to plug
the butthole. But they have really, oh, no, it
gets more. They have very wrinkly buttholes
and each one is unique. So in order to ensure that these
turtles were unable to butt breathe, they made custom
butthole molds. Oh.
My God. Into their butt for the duration
of the experiment. Well I mean as long as you got
the entrance, why would you need all the inner workings to also?
Because it's wrinkly and it's close to the entrance.
So they can still so you've. Really got to have like a like a
crinoid shaped structure. Wow.
Yeah. So someone's job was to cast and
mold buttholes of living turtles.
Turtle butt bugs. Basically in this paper they
also mention that the biggest turtle they had to exclude from
the statistical analysis because when they put it in the tank it
started to panic and they said it was because it was big so it
couldn't really turn around. But I just I can't imagine being
filled with a custom butt plug and placed in the tank and not
freaking out like that. Just seems.
Well, I'm like suffocating them. They are literally trying to in
a way to figure out if they are. They're not.
That they don't suffocate them but they're seeing how much oxy
they remove them from the tank once they established.
You know that if you plug the butt they go for the air right?
If you don't plug the butt then standard water.
Right. This with non consensual
animals, yes. Yeah it would be absolutely
terrible. These were also wild turtles
that. They oh gosh, So they're like,
we snatch them from their environments.
They're comfortable. This is alien abduction.
Yes and right. Yeah.
And then we probe. It's always about butts.
Yeah, yeah. How did that get funded?
Who wrote that grant proposal? I don't know but they're give me
tips. So that I can write better
proposals. Yeah.
Wow. OK.
So turtles. OK, So we're talking reptiles, I
mean, and they've been around for a long time.
Do you think that this is an adaptation that they've probably
had, like, deep time? Deep time.
So it's hard to tell because it's obviously not a Bony
structure. Yeah.
I wonder if this is an adaptive use of hemorrhoids.
Oh my God, She warned me that she was gonna get hemorrhoids in
here somehow, and she did it. She she gone done did it.
So let me I'm just gonna quickly copy paste this image into our
file. Perfect.
Wow.
OK, hemorrhoids. Yeah, and that's why it's hard
to cast and mold. It's really hard to cast them
on. I mean, that looks like a zoomed
in shot of a bunch of bacteria or something like that.
It does, yeah. Yeah.
It looks like I'm a really fibrous cleaning mat or
something like that. So they also they specifically
say they use Coltex dental lab putty.
Thank you for letting us know materials and methods or so.
Yeah, exactly, exactly. OK.
So if one animal is able to breathe out there derriere, I
mean, is this a trend? I mean, they can't be the only
ones. I'm sure they're not the only
ones, but turtles are really the ones where it has been.
And it's not tortoises, it's not sea turtles, it's freshwater
turtles, and it's a couple specific families.
I'm not sure if it's a I think it was convergently evolved in
several species of turtles, but I thought we maybe should finish
off this episode by talking about human but breathing.
Oh, good. Yes.
Oh. OK, so when we were coming up
with the idea for this podcast episode, in between laughing
hysterically, Amy mentioned that she had read a book this summer
about smoking cigarettes through your asshole.
And I'm going to go ahead and tell you, you can't fucking do
that, Amy, because your buckle cannot suck hard enough to get
air into it. But what you can do is give
yourself an enema of tobacco smoke.
So you can get it in, yeah. But you can, but you have to
blow it in. Oh.
You don't just put a cigarette up to your brown eye and take a
puff. You're all right.
I believe you until someone proves you wrong.
But what you can do is you can film yourself doing this as long
as you're just filming the tube process and telling people what
you're doing. And you can put that video on
Wikipedia and even though people have very clearly tried to take
that down many times, Wikipedia now has a little like notation
saying people have tried to take this down but we could not find
a good reason to do so. So there is a video if you would
like to see somebody putting smoke in the tube that is
theoretically going into their butt hole.
But. Even though that is a ridiculous
thing now, in the 1700s that was a big thing.
Tobacco smoke enemas were huge because of course 1700
physicians were psychotic and they were just trying.
Anything. Why were they doing?
It so they gave tobacco smoke enemas specifically to drowning
victims to resuscitate them. So they like give them a
stimulant in their. So the stimulant in the butt is
supposed to absorb into the blood, I'm assuming faster than
the mouth. Although realistically, it's
probably just that physicians were kind of butt obsessed.
And everyone was cigarette obsessed since everyone was
cigarette. Cigarettes are a cure all for
everything, yes. Wow, huh.
So with the tobacco smoke enemas, yeah, there was at one
point they were trying to prove that they worked.
Of course, you can't just drown somebody for the scientific
test. Even in the 1700s, that was
frowned upon. So they just offered monetary
awards to anybody who could prove that they had brought back
a drowning victim with tobacco. Which means that at one point
there is a story of a woman who drowned and her husband was
trying to resuscitate her and he took a pipe filled with burning
tobacco and shoved the stem in her butt.
And she did. She did come back, probably
because there was burning char in her butt.
Yes, right. How do we show that it's not the
burning and the surprise over the actual tobacco itself?
So humans are still unable to breathe out of their butts?
Well, I guess this fictitious novel I read was wrong.
Have you ever heard the term blowing smoke up your ass?
Yeah, of course, that's what this is from.
But that that means like, you're fucking around with someone,
right? Doesn't that be like, don't blow
smoke up my ass? Because it doesn't work.
Oh, I like, I was going to say, I'm not usually drowning when I
say that to people. No, all right, I'm going to.
I'm going to take us out on a poem that surgeons used to use
in the 1700s to remind people to take it anally.
And the word glister means enema, tobacco, glister, breathe
and bleed, keep warm and rub till you succeed, and spare no
pains, for what you do may one day be repaid to you.
Science. So many things you can do with a
butthole. It's just so fun.
I just like I'm glad I got into science, but I had no idea that
it was way cooler than I. Ever thought I could be give you
a tour of different sciences you can go into?
And even if they did, they probably wouldn't be.
Like your job could be making custom butt plugs for turtles or
studying poop eating snails, but I wish they did.
I wish they did.
And if you are a advisor? On a kyoderms well.
You know, they are our closest relative invertebrate relative
to us, so they are the closest impressions to the vertebrates.
She means they're just one degree closer, which is exciting
I feel. I feel closer to them.
Now they're like basically a Bony jellyfish.
So like that doesn't I know that it's not.
Real bone jellyfish are not a kyoderms.
No, that's what I mean. They're closer to us than.
Jellyfish pooping is also confusing.
Oh, that we should do a whole. Episode Yeah, jellyfish are
fucking Yeah, we have to do a Burgess Shale and then we can
definitely talk jellies then and some other fucked.
I mean, honestly, we could probably just put it in
anywhere. Yeah, yeah, it fits.
It goes. So I mean, this is first of many
journeys. I mean, no, it's not the first.
We've already done a lot of buttholes and we're not
stopping, so don't. Matter how many old men leave
comments on iTunes about how crude we are, Yeah, this is what
we are interested in. So.
It is, yeah. And if you are a PhD advisor out
there looking for a student to study butt holes and a kind of
terms, I might go back to school for that, Yeah.
Might be the only thing that'll get me to actually pursue that
fun one of these days. Thank you for listening.
If you liked the podcast, be sure to rate and review us on
your listening platform of choice.
We really appreciate it. If you'd like to hear more and
support the show, follow us on Patreon for some exclusive bits
or on our various social media platforms.
You can follow Amy on Instagram at Mary Anning's.
Revenge and Megan on Instagram and TikTok at Geo Pedal Fabric
or both of us at Weird and Dead on Instagram and TikTok.
This podcast is part of the Geology Podcasting Network.
Produced by the travelling geologist Chris.
Cover art provided by Chris Spencer and the host.
Our theme song is Unlocked Me by Praz Konal.
Editing services provided by the amazing Katie Bradley.
Hosted by and researched by us, Amy Atwater and Megan
Weatherall. Thanks for listening.
Thank you for joining us on this tour to Buttholes.