(Intro)

Stefan: Hello and welcome to the SciShow Quiz Show.  I'm Stefan Chin, and I'll be filling in for Michael Aranda today.  Instead of telling you what prizes the contestants are gonna be taking home, I'm gonna be asking the questions that determine who gets them.  

Hank: That's right.  You're gonna get us.

S: I'm gonna get something.

H: You've got--mm.  You've got some serious sticklers.  Are we gonna be wrong all the time?  

S: I hope so.  

H: You didn't write the script.

S: I didn't write it, but I read it, so, just as good, I think.

H: I think that's how Alex Trebek--Alex Trebek doesn't write all the Jeopardy questions, right?  Right?  

S: Ohh, I bet he does.  

H: Tot--you're right.  He does.

S: If anyone does, it's Alex Trebek.

H: Why else would they pay him so much money?

S: Yeah, exactly.

H: Who writes the Jeopardy questions?  I never thought about that.

S: And so, today we have the host vs. host showdown, hosted by another host of SciShow.  On the left, we have the one, the only, the best author with the last name of Green.

H: Oh.

S: Hank Green.

H: Wow.  There's--first of all, John is my brother.

S: Yes.

H: He's also--but there's also lots of other Greens.  

S: Oh.

H: I feel bad.  I wouldn't wanna take that from all those other--I don't know who they are.  

S: We'll take it.  We're claiming it.

H: Okay.

S: Okay, Hank Green.  He also has a great new podcast where he reviews his own Twitter feed.  

H: I do!

S: With his wife.

H: It's called Delete This.

S: Delete This.  Great podcast.

H: Thanks for shouting out my podcast.

S: Oh yeah.  Yeah.  

H: It gets like 5,000 downloads.  

S: And then on the actual left, we have Olivia Gordon, host of SciShow and taxidermy expert.  

Olivia: That's a stretch.

S: Last time you were on the show, you beat Hank 1700 to 0.  

O: Oh man.

S: And that's where we're setting the scores to start the show today.

H: Really, I get 1700 points?

S: No, I'm just kidding.  No, you would get 0 points.

H: I thought I was gonna get a handicap.

S: No.  Everyone gets 1000 SciShow bucks, points, currency unit things.  If you get things right, they go up.

If you get 'em wrong, they go down.

H: By how much?  The world will never known.

S: Nobody knows.  200 for correct answers, -100 for incorrect answers.

H: Okay.  Stefan actually keeps score sometimes, so he actually knows how it works.

S: I pretend to keep score and then I like, when the actual person says the score, I'm like, ooh, good thing I wasn't the one who was responsible for this, but as a special thanks to our Patrons on Patreon, we've randomly selected two Patrons for you guys to play for today.  Olivia's going to be playing for Michael Schreiber.

O: Ooh, Michael.  

S: And Hank's gonna be playing for Amy McDonald.  

H: Hey, Amy, thanks for supporting us on Patreon.

S: And for the very first time on the SciShow Quiz Show, we're bringing down Caitlin Hofmeister from the upstairs and we're gonna have her tell you what our contestants are going to be taking home today.

Caitlin: Stefan, today, Olivia and Hank are vying for the chance to win their Patreon Patron the most coveted, amazing prize on all of the internet.  It is the SciShow Quiz Show pin that says you either won or lost.  The 'I Lost SciShow Quiz Show' pin is more of a conversation starter, so I hope one of you gets one, and I also hope that one of you gets the 'I Won SciShow Quiz Show' pin because it feels good to win things.  Olivia and Hank and Stefan, you will also be signing the script and wager cards from this episode, which our contestants will take home with them tonight.  Back to you.

S: Thanks, Caitlin.  Alright.  Are we all ready for this?

H: I guess.

O: Oh yeah.  

S: Our first round--

H: I came to work.

S: Oh.  You're here.

H: So I better do it.  

S: We're present.  First round is about rats and bats.  Question number one.

H: This feels like your expertise.  

O: I don't--have no idea.  

H: Have you ever stuffed a rat or a bat?

O: I've stuffed both, actually.

H: See?  She knows--she's been on the inside.

S: It's rigged.  It's rigged.  Humans have a lot in common with other primates.  We've got opposable thumbs, big brains, complex social structures.  If you think about an animal that's similar to primates, though, you're probably not thinking about a rat, but there is one unusual behavior that we share with rats.

What is this behavior?  Is it they laugh when tickled, they cry from pain, they sweat through their fur, or they pee when it's cold?  

H: I'm gonna go ahead and say that they laugh when tickled.  That can't be right.

S: That is correct.

H: It is right!

O: Whoa.  

S: It's pretty cute.

H: I feel like I've tickled a rat and it giggled, but like, I didn't--I thought that maybe that wasn't technically laughter.

S: Yeah, yeah.  Most of the giggling, though, is like, supersonic.  It's real high frequencies.  It's kinda creepy.

O: Fascinating.

H: Supersonic giggles.  That's a good band name.

S: Yeah, let's do it.  The Supersonic Giggles.

H: We could rock out right now.  Do you play any instruments?

O: Ooh, uh.  The oboe?  

H: The oboe.  Yes!  What do you play?  You play drums.

S: I play things.  Tambourine.  

H: And piano.

S: Sure.  

H: Keys.

S: Yeah, I can hit some keys.

H: I can play chords on the guitar, so we've got it.

S: But we're gonna pitch everything up so no one can hear any and it's all just supersonic.  

H: Yeah.

S: It's perfect.

H: It's great.  That way, no one will know if we suck.

O: Which we will.

S: No, no.

M: The answer is A, rats laugh when you tickle them.  Lots of animals will react in some way when you tickle them, but when you tickle rats, they laugh.  Plenty of other animals can laugh, including dogs, although it sounds more like panting to us, and there might be other non-primates that laugh when you tickle them, but so far, we've only seen that behavior in rats.  We can't hear them laugh because the sounds they make when they're happy, including laughter, are too high pitched, but in a study published in 2016 in the journal Science, researchers tickled rats while monitoring their brain activity and recording any sounds they made.  They shifted the frequency of the sounds to a lower pitch and you can hear the rats making those happy noises in a pattern that corresponds to laughter.  The rats even started chasing after the researcher's hand when it stopped tickling it.  Now that's just adorable.

S: Alright, we've dealt with rats and now on--

H: Sorry, I was just thinking like, what oboe music would we need to be higher pitched?

O: Right, exactly.

H: Sorry.

S: Okay, alright.  We've dealt with rats and now we're moving on to bats.  Question number two is about a behavior that's a little bit less cute than tickling but it is pretty weird.  Bats, like a lot of other animals, have their very own parasites.  There are two whole taxonomic families of these so-called bat flies, which only infest bats.  They live their whole lives attached to their hosts, biting them every so often to suck a little blood.  

H: As they do.

S: For the most part, this doesn't seem to hurt the bats, but it's a dangerous life for a baby bat that could get swatted away. 

H: A baby bat?

S: Er, a baby bat fly, excuse me.  Thank you.  So the flies have a protective adaptation that's pretty unique among insects.  It's only found in a couple other types.  Do they lay their eggs under the bat's skin, hide their eggs under piles of guano (that's bat poop), do they lay their eggs on baby bats so the animals grow up together, or do they lay live pupae instead of eggs?  

O: D?  

S: Yes, that is correct.  Nice.

H: Ohhh!  What is that called?  Viviparous or something?

S: I have no idea.  

H: Instead of oviparous?  Basically, they're getting live birth.

S: Yeah.

H: Like a mammal.  That's gross.  I don't like the--I don't like that idea.  I guess I don't like the idea of anything coming out of a fly, but a live maggot is worse than an egg to me.

S: For sure.  Let's find out more about that right now.

M: The answer is D, they lay live pupae instead of eggs.  Bat flies do start out as eggs, just like other insects, but they hatch into larvae while still inside the female fly's uterus.  They go through all three larva life stages there, feeding on a special form of food produced by glands in the uterus, basically insect milk.  Eventually, the female fly gives birth to what's known as a pre-pupa, when the larva is about to become a pupa, which is the stage where it'll transform into an adult fly.

Staying inside its mother for so long gives the fly a much better chance of surviving, since it doesn't need to spend much time exposed during the vulnerable early stages of its life.  Plus, it has a consistent source  of food.  The mother also briefly leaves the host bat to lay the pupa either in the bat's nest or on a nearby wall, depending on the species.  That way, the bat doesn't just swat it away.  Once it's done with its metamorphosis, the new adult fly goes and finds a host of its own.  There are a few other types of insects that give birth to live larva, but it's much more unusual for the larva to grow up inside its mother until it's ready to become a pupa.  Besides bat flies, the only other types of insects that do this are (?~8:37) flies and (?~8:38) flies, which are also parasitic.

S: Last question of the round, and this time, it's really about bats, not about bat parasites.  So the (?~8:44) disc-winged bat is very small, only weighing about four grams.  They're so small that instead of roosting in a cave or on a tree branch, they hang out inside of rolled up leaves.

O: Oh, cute.

S: Multiple bats will even share a leaf.

H: I'm worried.  Are people gonna accidentally smoke them?  Is that where we're going?

S: I am not aware of this danger.

H: Okay.  That's great news.  I don't know, like, just a bat cigar is what is, that's what it looked like in my head.  I was like, aw, look at that cute bat cigar and then I was like, nooo!  Stop!

S: I mean, that's probably not gonna get you high.  

O: I don't think you usually just find cigars on trees either and smoke them.  

S: Also that.  

O: I don't know.

S: A much better response to this.

H: I don't know how it works.

S: The leaves are more than just a way to hide from predators though.  In 2013, researchers discovered that the bats have a more creative use for them, so the question is, what are the leaves used for?  Do they use them as a shield against parasites, as shade against sunlight, a hearing aid to amplify sound, or as a dinner plate?  

H: I'm gonna go with the sun protection.

S: Ooh, incorrect.  

H: I was wrong.

S: Do you want to make a guess?

H: You have to go.  You can't not.

O: Sure.  

S: You can't not.  

O: Wait, so it was hearing, dinner plate, or protection from parasites?

S: Shield against parasites, yeah.

O: Oh boy.  A dinner plate seems the weirdest.

H: A dinner plate?

S: Nope.  That is incorrect.

H: Yaaay, we're tied again.  

S: It was as a hearing aid.  

H&O: What?!

H: Why do they even hear anything?

O: You'd think--yeah.  

H: They're stuck in a leaf.

M: The answer is C, they use their home leaf to amplify sounds.  Disc-winged bats tend to stick together in groups of five or six bats.  The group will stay together for years, but they have to find a new leaf every day.  That's because leaves only form that rolled up tube shape as they open for the first time.  After about a day, they flatten into a regular leaf, and it's time for the group to find a new one.  You'd think it would be important for the bats to be able to recognize the calls of other bats in their group, since they're moving around all the time, but they aren't actually very good at it, at least, not when they're inside the leaf, because the sounds from outside get distorted by the leaf's shape.  The sounds do get amplified though by about 10 decibels.  The bats may not be able to tell who's flying past the leaf, but they'll definitely hear the flying bats' calls.  So they respond to the calls of all bats and it's up to the flying bat to recognize which response is coming from its own group.  Then, it can find its way home.

S: Alright, it's time for round two.  Since we've been talking so much about weird adaptations, let's move to a place with a lot of well-known evolutionary adaptations, the Galapagos Islands. 

H&O: Oooh.  

S: Charles Darwin is famous for his studies of the unusual species in the Galapagos.  He was especially captivated by the giant tortoises, the largest in the world, some reaching almost 2 meters in length and weighing in at more than 400 kilograms.  In his journals, Darwin writes about how to pick out a tortoise that would taste good and how to turn the animal's fat into oil, but he also wondered if there might be another use for them that we'd normally associate with other types of animals.  What did Darwin try?  Riding them like horses, training them like seals, turning their shells into ivory, or turning their skin into leather like crocodiles?

H: I'm gonna say riding them like horses, 'cause Darwin was always riding stuff.

S: That is correct, yee-haw!

H: He loved to ride things.

S: Did he?

H: Yeah.  

S: Was that a thing that was known about Darwin?  

H: I have read--I've read some Darwin stuff.

He's a good writer.  His stuff is pretty compelling if you actually just sit down and like, read Voyage of the Beagle.  It's readable.

S: Wait, did you mean he's a good writer or a good rider?

H: He's both.

S: Oh!

H: He's always riding things. 

S: And writing about the.

H: He's also always writing things.  

S: Glorious.

H: I thought, for a second, that they were gonna, like, harness a chariot to them and be like, go, like Ben Hur with the tortoises.  Real slow.

O: I don't think you'd be going that fast.

H: Really slow.  Just be like, huhh, a rock!  

S: We'll find out how he rode them right now.

M: The answer is A, he rode the Galapagos tortoises.  Darwin experimented with the tortoises in all kinds of ways as he tried to learn more about them.  He noticed that they didn't seem to have sensitive hearing, and he writes about how amusing it was to sneak up on a tortoise until it would suddenly notice him and immediately pop into its shell, but once the tortoise was in its shell, he also tried climbing onto its back.  Apparently, he'd knock on the shell a couple times and the tortoise would poke its head out again, stand up, and start to walk away.  The problem was, in Darwin's words, that it was "very difficult to keep his balance."  Yep, that's the only reason riding a tortoise would be incovenient.

S: Animals are not the only thing that make the Galapagos special.  If you've seen our video about how white sand beaches are made of parrotfish poop, you would know that not all sand is the same color or made of the same stuff, but there are a few places in the world where beaches are made of green sand, most famously in the Galapagos and Hawaii.  What's in the sand that makes it green?  Is it crystals from volcanic rock, algae, limestone, or coral?  

H: I'll let you answer that.

O: Ooh, I mean, I--thank you.  Algae?

S: That is incorrect.

H: That's what I would have said, so thanks for saving me.

S: But now you must take a guess.

H: I must.

S: And risk your points.

H: What was the first one again?

S: Crystals from volcanic rock.

H: Sure.  I know that the Galapagos are volcanic.

S: That is correct.

H: Yay!  

O: Nice.

H: I got lucky.

S: Yeah.

H: Thanks, Olivia, for taking that one for me.

O: No problem.

M: The answer is A, it contains crystals from volcanic rock.

More specifically, the sand on these beaches contains olivine, a mineral found in igneous rock.  You might also know the translucent version of this as peridot, a gemstone.  You can probably guess where the mineral gets its name.  It's an olive green color, thanks to traces of nickel in the crystals.  Both Hawaii and the Galapagos formed from volcanic eruptions and when you combine an eruption of olivine-rich lava with the ocean, you eventually get a bunch of green sand.  Some white sand beaches, meanwhile, get their color from ground up coral and there's a white sand beach in Italy that gets its color from the waste of a nearby industrial plant, which contains some limestone among other things. 

S: It's time for our last round, which means it's time to place your bets.

H: Ahh, what's the category, Stefan?

S: All I can tell you is that this category is about fire, so place your bets, and we're gonna take a little commercial break.  I'll see you when we get back.  And we're back, welcome to the last question.  Fire extinguishers haven't always been as advanced as they are now.  In fact, until the mid-20th century, a common fire suppression system didn't involve extinguishers at all.  Instead, people used fire grenades.  

H: This doesn't sound like it would help.  

S: Let me tell you about how they would.  Until the late 19th century, these little glass containers were filled with saltwater and you threw them at the fire to put them out.  By the early 20th century, though, people started filling them as well as some of the first simple fire extinguishers with a chemical that was much better at putting out fires, tetrochloromethane.  It's a simple compound, just a single carbon atom bonded to four chlorine atoms. It interfered with the chemical reactions involved in combustion, which makes it great for extinguishing fires, but we eventually stopped using it partially because it's super toxic, but there was another reason.  With enough heat, tetrochloromethane turns into gunpowder, carbon monoxide, methane, or phosgene gas?  

H: I don't know what phosgene gas is.

S: Am I allowed to give a hint?

H: I mean.  It's your show.  

S: The hint about phosgene gas is that it's a chemical weapon.

H: Okay.  Okay, so that's--it's bad.  Uh, give me those again, Stefan.

O: Yeah, please.

S: Gunpowder, carbon monoxide, methane, or phosgene gas.  

H: I got--I know that it's one of three.

S: You've got two seconds.

H: Okay.  

O: I'm just--

S: Alright.

H: That was not very many pen strokes.  You wrote that very quickly.

O: That's right.

H: Alright.

S: Show your answers.

H: Oh, it's D.  It's just the letter D.  You said phosgene gas.  I said methane.  

S: Olivia is correct.

H: Aaaah.  I lose.  I lose.

O: I was a total guess.

S: Yeah.  You lose again.  You suck.

M: The answer is D.  When exposed to heat, tetrachloromethane turns into phosgene gas.  Yep, we were putting out fires with stuff that literally turned into a chemical weapon.  Tetrachloromethane is plenty deadly on its own, more than 15 minutes of exposure and it starts to get really dangerous, but when you expose it to heat, it breaks down into phosgene, which, as a gas that was widely used to kill people during World War I, is much worse.  We just didn't really know of less deadly options.  In the 1940s, chemists came up with a slightly better alternative, chlorobromomethane.  It was still toxic, but it wasn't as toxic and it didn't turn into phosgene.  Meanwhile, carbon dioxide fire extinguishers became more popular and practical in the 40s and 50s, and people mostly stopped using fire grenades at all.  They're still sometimes used in certain situations like in buildings and (?~17:25) sprinkler system, but the chemicals inside will not kill you, which seems like a big plus.

S: Alright, so, good job, Olivia, and congratulations--

H: To Michael.

S: To Mike.

O: Yeah, Michael Schraeber.

H: And Amy, I apologize.  Thank you for your support, nonetheless.  

S: You did better this time, though.  You closed the gap a little.

H: Yeah, working my way up.  It's a linear progression.  You're also going up though.

O: You'll get there.  

S: Try those logarithms, bro.  Is that the right thing?

H: For some reason, everything you say today seems very suggestive to me.

S: Oh.  Try those logarithms, bro.

H: I don't know.  

S: Even I can't turn that one dirty.

H: Just don't smoke any bat cigars.

S: Noted.  Thanks for joining us for this episode of SciShow Quiz Show.  It was an interesting one, I'm sure.  If you want to see the three of us in action, you can check out more videos on this channel, and if you want to hear Hank and his wife review his Twitter feed, go check out Delete This, the new hit podcast.

H: Oh, thanks.  I love that we're pushing my podcast.  It's really fun.  We talk about the week, we get to do a week in review, and then Katherine gets to tell me how I need to interface with the world in healthy ways.

S: Yeah.  Yeah.  I enjoy that.  And of course, don't forget to go to YouTube.com/SciShow and subscribe.  

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