Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of I Heart Radio.

Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.

My name is Robert Lam.

And I'm Joe McCormick, and today we're going to be kicking off a series of episodes

about examples of throwing in non-human animals.

You may also talk about the evolution of throwing in humans as well.

But this is a subject I recently became interested in, specifically because of a paper that was

published in November 2022.

Some of you might have seen science headlines going around about this.

There was a publication in the journal PLOS-1 about octopuses throwing objects, or at least

potentially throwing objects, whether or not it should count as debatable, and we'll

talk about some of the arguments for and against.

But octopuses, at least allegedly throwing objects, potentially deliberately and potentially

deliberately aiming those objects at other octopuses.

Of course, the exact nature of their motivations is somewhat mysterious.

It's hard to suss out exactly.

And I thought it would be good to start off our series by looking at this example that

first got me interested in this.

And then maybe we can branch out to other examples of throwing in the animal world in subsequent

episodes.

Interesting.

I just assumed that your interest in this topic was because you had become a father,

...