Hello, my friends, and welcome to episode 121 of Just the Zoo of Us. On this week's episode, I had the

pleasure speaking with a guest expert who brings along a wealth of knowledge and insight into the

uniquely charming nine-banded armadillo. You were going to learn about stuff like whether or not

you should be afraid of getting leprosy from an armadillo, what pancaking is and why they do it, and little tiny clone parades

scuttling through the underbrush. Our guest's specialty may be disease ecology, but the most

infectious thing you'll find here today is a genuine love and enthusiasm for our scaly pig snouted friends.

Just the Zoo of Us presents nine banded armadillos with Carly Haywood.

Music Hey everybody. This is Ellen Weatherford. I'm here with Just the Zoo of Us. This is your favorite animal review podcast. And this week, I'm really excited to speak to a brand new friend. This is Carly Haywood. Say hi, Carly. Hello. I'm so excited to be here. I am so excited to talk to you. This is going to be really fun because today we're talking about an animal that I'm actually surprisingly familiar with. They live in our neck of the woods. So like I have a little bit of a personal connection to this animal. We're talking about nine banded armadillos today. But before we talk about armadillos, let's talk about Carly. Can you give our friends that are listening maybe a little

bit of an introduction to how you got involved with this work in armadillos? What does that

a journey look like for you? Yeah. So I pretty much always knew that I wanted to do something with animals, but I wasn't really sure exactly what.

Like when I was a kid, I always told people that I wanted to be a girl who babysits pets.

And then it's like, okay, well, we'll move on to something else.

Like maybe a bet that that didn't really seem right either. But then when I

got into college, I was like, oh, there's actually a thing where you can just go and study zoology

as a whole. So I went and did that. And then while I was in my undergrad, I was kind of trying to

figure out where I could get basically

any form of research experience. So I was contacting a bunch of faculty like, hey, do you need help

in your lab? And then I ended up being put on part time in the parasitology lab, so a lab that studies

parasites. So for my undergrad, I was in there,

working part-time, like doing a little bit of my own research on parasites. Then I graduated.

I ended up getting a job in Idaho studying ground squirrels. And that was so much fun helping out with that research. Yes, but while I was there,

I emailed my advisor from SIEU because he was one of my references and I was like, you know,

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