From away to garden.com and Robinhood Radio.com, this is Away to Garden with Margaret Roach. You're a weekly invitation to dig in and grow. I'm privileged to observe a fascinating diversity of animals outside where I live, but the term outside your animals was new to me, and it's the title of a recent book by today's guest, Marlene Zuck, a leading expert in behavioral evolution and professor at the University of Minnesota. The book's subtitle is How the Creatures at the Margins of our Lives have the most to teach us, and a Munger subjects are ones that many gardeners may know, or think they know, like raccoons, cabbage white butterflies, cowbirds and snakes. All these animals have one thing in common, she writes, when we see them we ask what are you doing here? Outside our animals are our topic today, so more in a moment but first these messages. Underwriting support for a way to garden provided by color blends wholesale flower bulbs, a third-generation bulb company offering top-sized flower bulbs directly to landscape professionals and ambitious residential gardeners on the web, Colorblends.com. And by High Moeng Seeds, Wolcott Vermont Professional Quality Vegetable Flower and Urbal Seeds that are 100% organic and non-GMO project verified. On the web, highmoingseeds.com and by Whiteflower Farm offering a wide range of carefully selected and expertly grown garden plants. On the web, whiteflowerfarm.com. Marlene Suk is a Regents Professor of Ecology, Evolution, and behavior at the University of Minnesota and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Her latest book is outsider animals, our subject today, and I'm glad to welcome her to the program. How are you Marlene? I am fine. I'm delighted to be here. Good, and I should say before we get started that we'll have a book give away with the transcript of this show over on a way to garden.com. But I should start, you know, beyond what I said in the introduction, I guess we should start by explaining what outsider animals are. I said that they're the ones, when you say that they're the ones, when we see them, we say, what are you doing here? Can you define it beyond that a little more fully for us? Sure. So to back up, I'm a scientist who studies animals, and I'm interested in all kinds of animals. And just recently, I've gotten intrigued by the animals that we tend to see whether we want to or not, that there are animals that impinge on our lives, whether or not we have them as pets or we use them in farms or we want to go see them in nature documentaries or at the zoo. And we often encounter those animals when we don't want to or when we're surprised by them. And so I really wanted to explore their lives a little bit more. And as you say, their raccoons and snakes. And I also have a chapter on goals that might go after your sandwich at a picnic. And I think we often have a lot of opinions about those animals. And I wanted to look into their lives a little more. Yes. And we do. We have opinions and we tend to anthropomorphize, of course. And you can call me guilty on that score. I can't seem to help myself. And we characterize animals, don't we? We say crows and octopus and chimps. We think they have big brains, are so smart. And I think as you write about in the book, we're inclined to rank them. Like, who's the smartest and so forth? And I love what you say about that. You say, asking if one animal species is smarter than another is like asking if a hammer is a better tool than a screwdriver. That one's actually, I have to say, it's not original to me. Brian Hare, who's an expert on dogs, actually came up with it. And yeah'm really interested in how people do this. They automatically want to know, oh, which is smarter. You can Google animal IQ tests, and you will get a lot of responses, which kind of blows me away. That people really, it's not enough that we can give IQ tests to people. They want to give IQ test to like fish. Where are we going with all this? And I'm particularly interested in how we come up with these ideas about animals that are very familiar to us like raccoons or rats or cabbage white butterflies. Yeah. Well, speaking of raccoons, I mean, that's one where, you know, well, there's a raccoon on the cover of the book. They're adorable. Their faces are adorable. Yes. With a little mask. And they have those four applause, those, those quote, hands, you know. So they have dexterity and I was fascinated in the book you gives a little bit of history about them and the research into them and so forth and you talk about how years ago some researchers wanted to use them as lab animals and I was like I was like hurting cat speaking of stereotyping animal. I was like, I was like, hurting cats, speaking of stereotyping an animal. I was like, because I've had the experience, having been the host on my front porch, on the deck of my front porch, to a scatletree in a K.A. a bathroom that was established and used one summer every night by 13 raccoons. 13. So much for them being solitary animals. As it says in all of the books that I've read.

And all they did was that chittering noise. It was hysterical. It was like there was a wild party going on. Everyone was pooping and peeing on the front porch. Well, anyway. So when I said lab animals, I thought, oh my goodness. Well, yeah, that was one of the many amazing things that I got to uncover when I was doing the research for the book because I mean I work on animals but I certainly was not an expert on all the species in them and and the raccoon thing was hilarious that at the beginning and and what I liked about finding all this out is that it gives you a real insight into how science operates because you know, okay, how do you want to pick an animal that's going to help you learn about basic principles in life? And in this case, it was two psychologists at two different universities who both came up with the idea. They were interested in how we understand learning. How do we understand not just how people learn, but how animals learn? And that was a big topic at the beginning of the 20th century,

the early 1900s.

And these two different people both said, you know,

people were much more rural than,

and so pretty much everybody had encountered raccoons.

And raccoons are, as you say, they're so interesting

in how they'll manipulate objects.

They seem like they can figure things out.

And they thought, okay, this would work. We could do experiments with them. Plus, you can tame them. They don't make very good pets, as I point out in the book. So they thought, all right, well, let's try and do this. And for quite a few years, they were championing this. And again, with the benefit of hindsight, you think, oh gosh, what were they thinking? Because imagine if instead of cages of rats in all the psychology laboratories or the medical schools even of the country, we had to have cages of raccoons. And anyway, like first of all, I'd have to be so much bigger. And second of all, well, like they'd have to have really good locks on them because raccoons can get out of almost anything. And so you can imagine that the researchers coming in every morning and finding disaster in chaos with all the raccoons having broken out. And then they'd have to make new ones. And how would, anyway, the mind really just boggles. And both of the people eventually backed off of this. And as you know, obviously, we do have a world in which raccoons were the model system. The way rats or pigeons or mice are for a lot of our experimentation. And so it's always tempting to me to think about one of those alternative histories where you know how like they write books about what would have happened if the South would have won the Civil War or something like that. Well imagine writing a whole book on what

would have happened if you know they'd been successful and then what would the world have looked

like? What would we have learned if we'd used raccoons for this? What would our cities in

any way? Yeah. Well, you point out a trait they have that's unusual. Neo-philia, would that be

how to say it? I don't know. Yeah, Neo-phia. Phileal always means love of or liking for and neophyllia is new. Many, many animals are what's called neophyllia. They're afraid of new things. Raccoons are neophyllic. They like new things and they'll come and mess around with new things and explore. One of the most interesting things that people have learned in doing research on them is how that tendency to explore affects their ability to solve problems, their ability to learn, and you know, very so the thing. So I think there is a lot that records can teach us. But I'm really kind of glad that we didn't seize on them as the main model system in science. Yeah, no. So speaking of sort of exploring and female cow birds, you talk about, you write about cow birds and it was funny I saw cow birds. What are cow birds doing in this book? And then, the bird that everybody loves to hate I guess. But the female cowbirds are pretty impressive in the sense that they not explore exactly, but they have sort of, I think you like it, show us like an inner GPS of the book, you know, they have to find where they can deposit their brewed parasites after they have to to find where they can deposit their egg and time it to be an appropriate moment. Right, yeah. And I have to remember where they left, where they're basically scoping out. So I suppose, do we want to backtrack and just briefly explain what a care out we know, what brewed parasite, I never know whether people know. So cow birds are interesting for a whole bunch of reasons. And as you know, you got it exactly right. The part of why I wanted to include them in the book is that there are animals that even animal lovers will make a thing about hating cow birds. And they kind of hate them for two reasons. One is that they are bird parasites, which means that the female cow bird, rather than laying eggs in her own nest and rearing the chicks, either with or without her mate, the female cow bird will deposit her eggs in the nest of another bird species, maybe a warbler or, you know, something else. And then she leaves and that, what's called the host species, raises her chick for her. And sometimes the cowbirds will destroy the chicks in the nest where they are or the eggs. And so they can actually have a really detrimental effect on the host species. And so first of all, people just kind of think, you, because they think it's just kind of a nasty lifestyle. Baby murderers, right? Yes, exactly. And then also because they are in the nests of, they are native themselves. So cowards are native to the Americas. But also because of that, they can have a detrimental effect on native species and in some areas like the Curtlyn's Warblers in Michigan and some varios out in the west and several other iconic species. They can have, you know, bad effects on the native populations and so they've been vilified because of that. And so I guess I wanted to push back on both of those. The brewed parasite thing is, I really think people should stop having value judgments about the way animals' lifestyles are. I mean, people are also kind of negative about predators. And I, you know, like everybody's got to eat. Yes. Yeah, and so with the brewed parasites, one of the things I to do was help people see how extraordinary they are, which gets back to your issue about female cow birds. So okay, imagine that you're a bird and you're going to, you're not going to build a nest. You need to find somebody else's nest. And you need to find somebody else's nest that is at exactly the right stage where you can rush in, lay your egg, and rush out so that your egg will develop with the care of the host parent, and that you can do it undetected. Well doing that is a really hard thing to do, and female cow birds will go around from place to place, looking for nest. And so I'm just going to pause here. And I know a lot of gardeners. I love looking for, if I find a bird nest, I feel like it's an extraordinary thing. Like, oh, look, we found a Robin Nest, or we found a Wurbler Nest, or we've a ran nest and I know a lot of gardeners want to put nest boxes in their yard so they can encourage that. Well, imagine that, you know, cowards are having to find all these nests. It's hard. And what they have to do is remember where the nest was because they can only come back at the appropriate time to lay an egg and then they have to lay the egg incredibly quickly so that the mother bird doesn't find them and chase them away. And that requires, as I refer to it in the book, it's sort of an internal GPS. So they have to remember all those directions of, you know, turn left at the cedar or, you know, go two miles down the riverbank or whatever they need to know, and then they're going to find the nest. So they not only need to find it once, they need to find it again. And it's just an extraordinary accomplishment, and their brains actually have an enlarged structure. It's called the hippocampus that is used in direction finding. It's also used in direction finding in people. And they have amazing brains that know, brains that allow them to do that. And the males don't have that because the males don't need to find the nests. Right. Well, and the other thing that I love the question that you asked in the book, how in the world does a baby cow bird that hatches in this nest that is not of its species? is the, the parent is not of its species. How do they know kind of who they are so to speak? Exactly. How do they learn the characteristics of their species if they're raised by another? Yes. You know, like, you know, young males typically listen to the adult males of their species, you know, and learn the songs and, you know, whatever. Well, how does that happen? You know, how do you learn who you are when you're in that kind of a place? And amazing. Yeah, and scientists have studied it a bunch and they don't have the complete answer. One of my good friends, Mark Halber, who's with the CUNY system in New York, has worked on this for many years and found that the young juvenile cowbirds will gather in groups of other juvenile cowbirds and they'll kind of learn from each other. And the way they do that is it's called sort of self-referential learning or sometimes people refer to it as kind of the armpit effect where that came from someone who was studying mammals where you know, and so if you wanted to know what you smelled like, you could smell your armpit. Well, what cowbirds do is they look and they didn't mark in his colleagues did this great experiment where they made the feathers of the cowbird darker and that changed how the cowbirds responded to each other. So it's like they're looking at their own plumage and the plumage of others,

and they're getting information about who they are from that. I mean, it's more complicated than that, but that's at least a stab at the answer. Because again, for years, I would read that people said, oh, well, they just are born knowing that they're cowbirds. And that's a very unsatisfactory answer because that's like saying, well, They know their cowards because they know their cowards and it's like, oh, come on.

Right. Right. right, right. So, right. Yeah. Well, it is a super interesting question. And I think that it does illustrate how common animals that we don't necessarily think about can open up very basic major questions about, nature of behavior and the nature of the abilities of organisms to find their way around and to recognize others and all kinds of big questions. Yeah. So I want to spend a teeny bit of time on the cabbage white butterfly, the teeny butterfly. A non-native species looks more like a moth to many people. It's familiar to vegetable garden

terms everywhere who've tried to grow brassicas. This was one that struck me as an odd ball. I was like, well, how did that get in the book? Before we move on to snakes, one of my favorite subjects. You know, I wanted to just know a little bit about the cabbage white. I mean, how the heck did it get in there? So I wanted, well, actually several reasons, one of which is a little bit silly, which is that I've studied insects myself. I've mostly done, so I'm kind of a bug person anyway. And until I decided to include the cabbage whites, I only had cockroaches in there. And although I do deeply love cockroaches and we could talk about cockroaches, I really wanted another insect. And cabbage whites are great because, first of all, they are introduced. And yet people don't rage about cabbage whites the way they do about maybe starlings or house sparrows or many of the, of course, introduced plants that are invasive plants that we're worried about. And so cabbage whites are a really kind of, they seem like such an innocuous invasive species. And they kind of are in kind of aren't invasive. They are pests, of course. They're definitely major pests, as you say, of Breast and KC. Yet people don't ever think about how useful they have been both in understanding how organisms spread in the environment, how they depend on different kinds of plants, and again, how they learn what's a good plant and what's not. Another colleague of mine here at the University of Minnesota, Emily Snellrude, is working on how cabbage whites can or can't tolerate human pollution. And so they turn out to be great subjects for understanding what we're doing to the environment and which kinds of wildlife can withstand that and which ones can't. Sometimes the answer is surprised, they certainly surprised me, so that road salt, for instance, which is a major issue in Minnesota where I live and in many other parts of the country, gets into the water and then is brought by plants and then of course affects the animals

that eat those plants and turns out that road salt doesn't have nearly as bad an effect on cabbage whites at least as a lot of people had thought which in turn influences what kinds of plants and what kinds of places we want to put host plants for butterflies like the way medians and road sides and places like that.

So this very unassuming little butterfly can help us do a lot for conservation and nature preserves. Yes. We wouldn't have thought possible otherwise. And so again, what I like is drawing these threads where you say, oh, but this is just a common trash animal and then it's like, no, this animal has taught us about the whole world. Yeah. So I want to take our last like five minutes on snakes. Now everybody's freaking out. And the other thing before we do finish, I always want to try and remember this part that that I'm always curious to have people tell me and they can do that in the comments or whatever they want or you can do that like so so what animal did I leave out you know what's your outside animal that that you think I should have included and you know who knows maybe they'll be a volume two or but at any rate, I love hearing people's thoughts about their own outside animal. So, so I wanna talk snakes for the last few minutes. So, no other animal stirs me so, and I mean that like viscerally, you know, and I say that also living in one of the areas in the Northeast that, you know, I live among Eastern Timberrall am a Ophidiofo Biac, I am afraid of snakes. Since I've lived here full time in less 20 years or whatever, I've gotten to be more snake-friendly. But it's a visceral primitive reaction. And indeed, as you explained in the book, I think the quote is, snakes may have shaped the evolution of the primate brain, the only outside or animal to do so. So briefly kind of tell us a little bit about that history. My goodness. So snakes of course evolved with humans in Africa. Would there are there some of the oldest companions if you want to call them that of early humans. And there have been some scientists that have postulated that part of why we are all so aware of snakes. So I'm not afraid of snakes, but I certainly know lots of people who are. But we are all very aware of snakes. And part of that may have been that human beings evolved a visual system that's particularly sensitive to snakes in the environment. And there are scientists who've worked on this and who postulate that they're parts of our brain that see snakes before we would see other things. And you can do these experiments where you show people slides. And they will respond, as you say viscerally, that's exactly right, to snakes in a slide when they will say they didn't see one, but their body reactions will react to one. And snakes certainly are dangerous. They're not dangerous to urban or sub-urban or even rural. I mean, you're not going to usually run into a snake in North America living in a city or even living in the country. But you know, there's something that we evolved with as part of a threat. And again, you can look at how our visual systems seem to have evolved. There is some controversy about this, but I was just intrigued and I certainly think, I agree that I used to teach vertebrate biology and there is just nothing that will get the students attention for the entire rest of the day than finding a snake. You can find a rare bird, they're like, oh that's okay, but you can find frogs, you can find lizards, they like them all, but you find a snake and everybody is alert for the entire rest of the day. Right. Right. Well, and they're very different. I mean, they're limitless. You know, they sort of slither. I mean, they're very different. They're very different. And so it is, yeah, they're fascinating. I mean, I think they're amazing. And what I don't buy is this idea that people have an innate fear of snakes because I don't think I don't think we do and I think our fears are shaped in such a complex way by both. Of course there's genetic influences on things, there's genetic influences on lots of things. But I think our environment also really makes a difference and I think people who say, oh yes, I've always been afraid of snakes and you say, oh well, you know, how do you know you always have been? It's like well because my parents were always afraid of snakes and so they've

been every time you know, it's like, so you don't think that maybe how you were raised in

fluency. Okay. Right. So, so it just the last minute now or something, you know, at the end of the book you suggest, you know, that even though in a sense we invented who the outsiders are, you know,

that we might at least look at them as the extraordinary creatures they are. That would be one thing you'd hope that we do by reading this. And what other, what a little bit of other advice, you know, for sort of, okay, the next time, you know, I've had about the last four or five weeks every night of black bear visits and the opus runs around

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