Hi, I'm Willow Belden, and you're listening to Out There.

This is a podcast about the outdoors, from your window box and garden, to the fields on the edge of town, to the forests, prairies, seashores, and wilderness.

On the show, we explore our relationship with nature, through stories, interviews, essays, and even some fiction. We travel around the U.S. and the world with tales of love and heartbreak of guns and bombs and swords, things we create, military instruments.

But humans aren't the only ones who use weapons. My guest today is a biologist at the

University of Montana named Doug Emlin. He studies beetles, and he's interested in the weapons

that animals use, things like horns and tusks and claws.

On the surface, it might not seem like the horns on a beetle would have anything to do with the weapons that people use.

But in his book Animal Weapons, Doug combines science and military history to show just how much we can learn about our own wars and arms

races by understanding the way animals fight.

The kinds of weapons that I tend to study and focus on and think about are big weapons.

I'm just fascinated by structures on animals that are so grotesquely large or bizarre or extreme

that they look like they shouldn't work.

So Doug actually brought an example of an animal with an extreme weapon into the studio for

our interview.

It's a little critter called a stag beetle.

So stag beetles are sort of notorious, and they're called stag beetles.

They look like a stag with antlers.

But in this case, it's the mouth parts.

It's their mandibles.

The mandibles on these guys are literally longer than the rest of the body of the male.

So he's carrying weapons that more than double his length.

And he's looking really irritated with me right now.

...