Hank: Good morning, John. It's your brother Hank, and I'm here with famed zoologist Lindsay Nikole! I love the stuff that she makes and I wanted to ask her what her favorite fact is.

Lindsay: I have this one ready to go. 25% of all discovered animal species are beetles.

Hank: I've heard this before, but not as animals, only as insects, that it's, like, a huge percentage of insects. But now you're telling me animals.

Lindsay: Animal species, 25%. It's 350,000 species of beetles. That's a lot of beetles.

Hank: How do they...know?

Lindsay: I mean, maybe they're counting a couple a few times, yeah.

Hank: Well, also, you know, there's a bunch they haven't found.

Lindsay: Yes. They estimate there's, what, like, 10 million insect species alone?

Hank: Uh-huh. Okay.

Lindsay: And they've found 1.5 million.

Hank: There are things, like, uh, cichlids, is that what they're called? The fish that are like this, where there's just, like, a form evolved and it was just, like, so good at being the thing that it is that suddenly there was just like, oh, we're going to do that in every, in, like, a billion different ways. But like, what is the force that made beetles so good at being animals?

Lindsay: That's a good question. I mean, weevils. Weevils are beetles.

Hank: Weevils are beetles.

Lindsay: And they are the biggest group of beetles.

Hank: Do you have a favorite beetle form?

Lindsay: The weevil.

Hank: Weevil is your favorite?

Lindsay: Acorn weevil.

Hank: I've seen weevils. They have, like, little noses.

Lindsay: Yeah. They look like they live in, like, a fairy tale.

Hank: Okay.

Lindsay: And wear wizard hats and sell you potions and things.

Hank: I hadn't thought of that when I saw a weevil. A quarter of all animals–?

Lindsay: Of all animals are beetles. Yes.

Hank: And four quarters of all of the Beatles–

Lindsay: Yes.

Hank: Are Beatles.

Lindsay: That's an even more impressive statistic. They look very crunchy and so I feel like that gives them a leg up in general.

Hank: Yeah. They got a–they got good protection. But then they also have wings.

Lindsay: Yes.

Hank: But the wings hide.

Lindsay: Yes, they're very solid.

Hank: I–probably the first flying insect that was like, what if I could hide my wings? It was like, oh, that's a big unlock.

Lindsay: It's got to be the beetles that did that first, I bet.

Hank: I bet that was what did it for beetles.

Lindsay: Yeah.

Hank: They were like, oh, we're gonna take over this whole thing. I have one I wanna run by you. I've been working on this and I'm not–it's not as much of a fact as it is an argument. I think you're the right person for me to he–you're the first person.

Lindsay: Okay. Which means I'm the right person.

Hank: Right.

Lindsay: Yes.

Hank: You better be. The fact is, whales are fish.

Lindsay: Yes! WE are fish.

Hank: Right, but we're not really fish. Taxonomically, we're fish, but morphologically, we're not.

Lindsay: Whales would fall under the same category.

Hank: But what makes a fish? So, in what way is a whale not morphologically a fish?

Lindsay: The undulations are different.

Hank: There's all kinds of fish who do it all kinds of ways.

Lindsay: They don't have gills.

Hank: They don't have gills. That's true.

Lindsay: Yeah.

Hank: But they're fish-shaped!

Lindsay: A lot of things are fish-shaped. Manatees are fish-shaped.

Hank: Uh-huh, uh-huh. Also fish.

Lindsay: Walruses are also fish.

Hank: Walruses are fish-shaped. Well, I think you have to live in the water to be a fish. I guess mudskippers don't always live in the water. Bony fish and a cartilaginous fish, which are extraordinarily distantly related, much further distant than I am to a bony fish. If we call both of them fish, then like, what's the thing that makes them fish? But I guess it isn't just  that they're fish-shaped.

Lindsay: Everything's a fish.

Hank: All of the bony animals are fish.

Lindsay: Lizards are fish.

Hank: Bugs.

Lindsay: Platypuses are fish.

Hank: Yes, but not beetles.

Lindsay: Not beetles, but rats are fish.

Hank: Rats are fish. All the, all the vertebrates on land, what we– what do we call those?

Lindsay: Tetrapods.

Hank: That's it.

Lindsay: Tetrapods. Tiktaalik.

Hank: Tiktaalik?

Lindsay: Yeah, that fossil.

Hank: Oh, is it?

Lindsay: Our great-great-great-great- great-great-grandpa. The reason for our taxes.

Hank: The reason for our taxes. The reason you have to pay rent is that–

Lindsay: Piece of junk.

Hank: –decided to crawl out of the water.

Lindsay: Yeah.

Hank: Now I have a staff meeting. So whales are fish, but only in the 
same way that we are.

Lindsay: Yeah.

Hank: Lindsay, thank you for making a video with me.

Lindsay: Thank you for having me, Hank.

Hank: John, I'll see you on Tuesday.

Lindsay: Bye, John. Lindsay was here in town filming a SciShow Deep Dive, a long-form SciShow episode on the Chimpanzee War and you should watch it because it is very good. You can also check out her channel, it's at the link in the description. Also, I had to cut so much out of our conversation, so I'll give you a little bit, just a little bit of the end of that that I actually ended up cutting out, which had nothing to do with either of our facts, but it's still quite good. But then after that, you should go check out the SciShow Deep Dive because it is fascinating.

Hank: Do you think we could ever get back? I mean, obviously we could. And become a water animal?

Lindsay: I hope so.

Hank: Oh, for sure.

Lindsay: Yeah.

Hank: Water apes.

Lindsay: Mermaids! I’ve spent so much time on weird, you know worms, I own a lot of worms.

Hank: I love worms! They're like fish in that they're not related to each other, but, like, on steroids.

Lindsay: Yes. There's so many worms. There's, like, seven different phyla of worms.

Hank: Most animals on Earth, I think, are worms because of nematodes.

Lindsay: Nematodes, yeah. I love a good annelid worm. A good hammerhead worm.

Hank: I recently made a video about how earthworms procreate, which blew my mind.

Lindsay: The clitellum.

Hank: The clitellum. I didn't know how to pronounce it, but thank you.

Lindsay: I heard it in college. It was just horrific.

Hank: Wait, you're telling me that they have what now?

Lindsay: Yeah. My invertebrate biology class was just a hellscape.

Hank: Yeah.

Lindsay: A complete hellscape, in the best way possible.

Hank: I mean, I really, really want to someday write a book about all the different ways that animals make the next generation of animals, because it is really a testament to how life is just whatever works. If it worked, that's how it works.

Lindsay: And it's heinous. It's really heinous.

Hank: In many moments, yes.

Lindsay: In many ways, yes.

Hank: I watched earthworms having sex for that video and I was really astounded the extent to which it looked like sex. Like most, like, invertebrates, when they have sex, it's just sort of like…

Lindsay: Tossing things out.

Hank: Yeah.

Lindsay: Yes.

Hank: So earthworms are just like, get in there and ooze on each other.

Lindsay: Yeah, it's pretty nasty. Like, leopard slugs. Have you seen that?

Hank: Oh, yeah.

Lindsay: What a direction we've gone in.

Hank: Yeah, well, this will get edited heavily.