This episode is sponsored by Endel, an app that creates personalized soundscapes to help you focus, relax, and sleep.

The first 100 people to click the link in the description will get a one week free trial. [♪ INTRO] While most lions can’t sing or stage a musical number, The Lion King movies weren’t completely wrong about one fact of lion life: they live in complex social groups. In these groups, individuals interact with others in many ways, and often they do so repeatedly.

With lions, several related female lions will live together with no specific leader or hierarchy. They hunt, defend their territory, and raise their young together. Meanwhile, male lions form long-term bonds with other, often unrelated male lions.

And when their territory is threatened by members of other groups, the resident lions will attack as long as they outnumber the invaders. That instinct of aggression is a great way to protect themselves, the pride, and the cubs from outside males in the wild, but it makes it a lot harder to introduce lions into sanctuaries. As African cities grow and expand into the grasslands, more and more lions are having to be moved into reserves.

This week, scientists from the University of Minnesota published a study in the journal iScience that might make introductions between lions of different groups a little easier in the future. They were interested in how the hormone oxytocin would affect the way that lions interact with both members of their group and with outsiders. Oxytocin has been called the love hormone, but it does a lot more than just surge when you are falling in love.

It also enhances bonding among group members and between parents and children. It can also increase interaction and decrease aggression between animals who are strangers. But in humans, it sometimes actually increases vigilance toward outgroup members. to figure out whether the hormone might help or hinder introductions between lions, researchers in this study lured over wild lions in a wildlife sanctuary in South Africa using food.

Once the lions got close to the fence, they got a puff up the nose with a nasal spray of oxytocin or a saline solution. After the group was hormone-spritzed, they were more tolerant of each other while playing with a pumpkin toy. Additionally, scientists observed that hormoned-up lions let their neighbor lions come about three and a half meters away, instead of keeping them seven meters away like unspritzed lions." And the lions with hormones were also less vigilan t and aggressive when researchers played recordings of the sounds of total stranger lions.

The researchers are hopeful that oxytocin might be helpful when lions meet each other for the first time after being relocated or rescued. Currently, keepers use drugs like tranquilizers and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors to ease lion introductions, but there’s some evidence that that can hurt the chances of bonding long-term. But the researchers also aren’t ready to say oxytocin is the perfect solution, because it seems to be super context-dependent.

Because while the hormoned-up lions let their friends get closer during pumpkin playtime, they did not let other lions get any closer while they were snacking on a frozen blood popsicle. Yum. It’s also possible that if they had heard an actual unknown lion roaring, instead of just a recording, the oxytocin wouldn’t have been as effective.

Obviously, the best solution would be for us humans to stop forcing lions to need to be relocated, but while we work on that problem, this could be a way to make integrations to new social groups a bit easier. Now from one predator to another, researchers in the US and Australia had questions about how boas can eat. There are literally thousands of species of snake that live in tons of different types of ecosystems and on every continent except Antarctica.

That’s way more diversity than any of their closest relatives. Some of this diversity is in how they hunt and eat, and scientists have hypothesized that the ability to constrict and eat huge prey has been a real evolutionary benefit for our noodly neighbors. Especially so when it comes to eating.

These critters can physically separate their lower jaw to increase the width of their mouth, and what they can put in it. But there’s one problem. Constricting, eating, and digesting prey that big are all going to limit how much room there is inside a boa constrictor for the lungs to expand and for them to breathe.

So, how is it possible that they don’t suffocate themselves while suffocating their prey? In the paper published last week in The Journal of Experimental Biology, researchers might have come up with an answer. They reported that boa constrictors can actually change which part of their rib cage they use to breathe.

So when part of the rib cage is occupied squeezing the life out of dinner, they can switch to using a different part to let air into their lungs. scientists attached metal markers to two of the boas’ ribs, one a third of the way down their body, and the other halfway down. Then, they used X-rays to see what those marked ribs were doing while they used a blood pressure cuff to constrict the constrictor. When the cuff was placed higher up on the boa’s body, its lower ribs would expand to let air into the lungs.

And when the cuff was placed lower down, it would breathe with its upper ribs. As the boa swallowed its prey, the part of the rib cage it used shifted as dinner moved down the digestive tract. The researchers suggest that boas couldn’t have evolved the ability to constrict prey or swallow things bigger than they are without first having evolved this way of breathing.

And because being able to eat such massive prey has been important to their ability to live in a bunch of different locations and ecosystems, it seems like this breathing trick might have been critical to the evolutionary diversity of snakes before they could develop their constricting abilities and impressive feats of eating. So the next time you stumble upon a boa in a place you weren’t expecting, just take a deep breath. After all, that’s how it got there in the first place.

Or you can tune to today’s sponsor Endel, they are an app that creates personalized soundscapes to help you relax, focus, and sleep. Sounds can calm your mind and help create feelings of comfort and safety or soothe you into a deep sleep. You can also use Endel after your study sessions to slow down your mind and prepare your body for rest.

They have a new soundscape called “Wind Down ” featuring music and vocals from James Blake, where he uses calming synth sounds to get you ready for bed. Plus, Endel’s app is also available on Apple TV if you’re looking to transform your living room into a sonic sanctuary. The first 100 people to download Endel using our link in the description will get a free week of audio experiences, including the Wind Down soundscape! [♪ OUTRO]