Good morning, John.

Welcome back to Bizarre

Beasts: Season Zero. Hank and I are trading off hosting duties on  our year-long journey to remaster the original   Bizarre Beasts episodes from vlogbrothers  with corrections, updates, and new facts. [♪INTRO♪] After college, I got a job working all by myself  in a fungicide quality control laboratory. I know, it sounds super exciting. It was actually pretty exciting, though,   'cause I was the only person there and  so I managed the lab all by myself.

I ordered things, I designed SOPs, I did all  the tests, I listened to lots of punk rock, but also it was awful because I  would go to work and I would work   all day and I would not see a single  living thing that wasn't a mold. It was extremely boring and  lonely as evidenced by these   pictures of me wearing produce bags on my head. I had just gotten my first digital camera  and I was out to make some content!

But then, some days I did see other living  things that weren't mold because it was   Florida and I might see a black racer or  a frog or get stung by a yellowjacket, and then one day, I saw outside of my window this  little group of armadillos, looking real cute and   I thought, I'll take my new digital camera  and I'll take a bunch of pictures of them. Now, we are aware these days  that you can get diseases from   animals and you can get leprosy from armadillos. The official advice is do not handle them  unnecessarily and I did not, but if I wore   my headphones and listened to punk rock, they  would come over and they would snuffle my head,   I think because they thought maybe The Used or Seven Seconds was actually like   a little bug crawling around as they do use  their rabbit-like ears to listen for prey.

Good fact, actually, the Aztec word for  armadillo translates to 'turtle rabbit'. I did not get leprosy from these armadillos,   but even if I had, it's fairly  treatable now, so that's good. Also, sometimes diseases cross from animals  to humans and we hear a lot about that,   but leprosy actually jumped from humans to armadillos, so this is not their fault.

One possible reason that Hank didn’t get leprosy  from these armadillos is that, according to a 2011 study, most people are naturally immune to getting  infected by the bacterium that causes leprosy. There are a bunch of genes involved  in leprosy susceptibility and since you probably don’t know  what variants of them you have,   it’s still better to just not handle  wild animals, armadillos included. And like Hank said, we’re pretty sure  we gave leprosy to armadillos in the   first place and we have a couple  of reasons for thinking this.

First, there’s no evidence of leprosy in  the Americas before Columbus showed up. Leprosy is a disease that leaves  behind characteristic traces on   the human skeleton, so we’d likely have seen it  in archaeological remains if it had been here. Second, geneticists have used the  relationships between different   strains of leprosy to trace their  origins and spread back to either   the Near East or Eastern Africa,  sometime around 100,000 years ago.

And while that seems like plenty of  time for it to have made it to the   Americas and gotten into armadillos,  the way the family tree of leprosy   comes together points toward it being  a recent introduction to the Americas… Like, sometime in the last few hundred years,   with the armadillos having either  European or North African strains. So, colonization and the Transatlantic  trade of enslaved people seems to be   responsible for giving armadillos leprosy. And yes, that is pretty weird, because leprosy is  also a famously wimpy pathogen among researchers.

It’s hard to grow it in the lab,  which makes it hard to study,   but armadillos are kind of great hosts for it. And that might be because they have  relatively low body temperatures for mammals. They run at a cool 32-35 degrees Celsius (89.6-95 F ahrenheit)  which the leprosy bacterium seems to like.

I took so many pictures of these armadillos. Oh my God. I had dad shoes even back then!

Armadillos are most closely related  to anteaters and there have been and   are lots of species of armadillos. Pink fairy armadillos, three-banded, nine-banded,  giant armadillos, and then of course,   in the past, there were the Glyptodons, now  extinct, probably because of… guess who? Us!

But this video is about the nine-banded  armadillo, the only armadillo native to the US and this species also lives other  places in North, Central, and South America,   but the subspecies that lives in the US,  interestingly, are all very genetically similar,   suggesting that only a few made it this  far north before establishing a population. These armadillos also always have litters  of identical quadruplets so that roll I was   hanging out with, and yes, roll is  the collective noun for armadillos,   were probably brothers or sisters  all genetically identical. Other awesome things about armadillos: They live in places where there's  a lot of water, so they have two   different ways of getting across water  and they can choose which one they do.

They can either walk under the water,  because their keratin plates make them   so heavy that they sink, or they  can inflate their digestive systems   and swim on top of the water. And they  have lots of choices in their lives. For example, mommy armadillos can decide after   mating whether she wants to have  those babies now or postpone it.

If she's stressed out, she  can push it for up to two years before she starts developing the embryos. Also, when they're threatened, they  jump really high up in the air,   which is a cool strategy to scare away a predator. It's not great at scaring away cars, which  is why you might see lots of armadillos   on the side of the road  that have had bad outcomes, and that is sad, but the good news is that  nine-banded armadillos are great at surviving   in the human created landscape, even of an  office park outside of Orlando, Florida.

They are abundant. As a species, they are doing very well,   and I love them and I loved going back and  looking through my old pictures from 2003. If you missed this critter the first time  around, our Season Zero pin set is now available!

This set includes all 12 of the animals we began   this Bizarre Beasts journey with on  Vlogbrothers, including the armadillo! And this version has little gems on it! To get the Season Zero Pin set,  visit bizarrebeastsshow.com! [♪OUTRO♪] In this episode, Hank talks a lot about being from Florida.

Well, I am from Texas. So, here is my armadillo purse, and my armadillo t-shirt, and all my armadillo pins, and my armadillo earrings! It's armadillo all the time!