 Because do you know what time it is? What time is it? It's time for Blair's Animal. She's your girl, except for giant pandas, what you got Blair? I have some scientists doing some really, really important research. That's cool. Exactly how stabby is a puff adder. Exactly how stabby is a woodpecker. Exactly how stabby is a mantis shrimp. I want to know. Please tell me there's a high-powered air gun involved. So this is something I think the stabbiness we're thinking of. This is something I've often wondered about when hummingbirds are fighting each other. Is it ever jousting and they just burst? I think so. Oh, this is a great question. So Philip Anderson from the University of Illinois teamed up with Jeffrey LaCosse of Charles E. Jordan High School in Durham, North Carolina and Mark Pankow of North Carolina State University Rally to measure really stabbiness is the best way to describe it. It's how animals puncture things and what animals are the best have the most force for puncturing things. So they did this first by trying to figure out what parameters you use to measure how things pierce things. So they started by using an arrow shot from a crossbow into ballistics gel. And ballistics gel is usually used to simulate human flesh. It's usually used on myth fosters. This is where you've seen it. Right, yes, this is where I've seen it most. It was on myth fosters, exactly. But so it's a replacement for human flesh, right? So the way things are punctured is actually, it turns out, very complex, which they figured out by using high-speed video on these arrows going into ballistics gel. So first, the object, let's say the arrow, hits the target with enough energy to initiate a crack in the target's surface. This is where our body would get a cut, right? That impact creates stress waves, which moves through the target material like sound waves. And these waves interact with the edges of the target, creating deformation or a wound, right? After the initial impact, the arrow must open up new surface area inside its target, deepening the wound, breaking molecular bonds and overcoming friction to penetrate more deeply. And the target material builds up elastic energy as it deforms. At a certain point, the elastic energy in the material causes it to push back against the arrow. And if the elastic energy is large enough, it can eject the arrow, or this is where the arrow stops. So the arrow's shape, its mass, and its speed also all play a role as the composition of the target, as does the composition of the target. So knowing all of this, this team figured out the best way to measure what I will continue to call stabbiness is by kinetic energy. That was to figure out. I think you should call it their keekiness. Yep. So they were more keeky if they had higher kinetic energy. And all of us physics buffs out there know that kinetic energy equals, anyone, anyone, half of the mass times velocity squared, half mass velocity squared. So the object's mass is related to kinetic energy, but velocity, speed, is always squared in this equation. So velocity is super important in the kinetic energy question here. So looking at animals like, for example, as it loads, the trap jaw ant, the Portuguese man of war, the woodpecker, the mantis shrimp, the puff adder, these guys have a huge difference between all of them in mass. So what they found was that velocity, how quick you're stabbing somebody, has a big effect on the kinetic energy and how effective of a poke it would be. And so just as they expected, the velocity increased as size decreased. So the speed at which they attack varies with size. For an example, the trap jaw ant shuts their jaws at 60 meters per second. Wow, that sounds very fast. It's very fast. But the puff adder only does it at about 2.6 meters per second. Now, see, this is already. Isn't the puff adder, though? Isn't it a defense? For the puff adder? No, the puff adder is a viper. Oh, I'm picturing a puffy. Why am I thinking of a puffy fish with spiked? Oh, a puffer fish? No. The puff adder is a venomous snake. Oh, an adder. I got it. Yeah, a puff adder. So this is their fangs. Because I'm like, what if they depend on the speed of the fish attacking? But that has nothing. They need to be stabby so that they can get their fangs deep enough into their prey's tissue to inject venom. So it's very important that they're stabby. The mantis shrimp was only about three meters per second. So remember, we have the mantis shrimps with the clubs. Those are usually the ones I talk about on the show. But they're also the ones with the spears. And so they go three meters per second. The woodpecker, 7.5 meters per second. The hydra, or the Portuguese man of war, is 37 meters per second. So that's the little nematocyst, the little stinging cells, like on a jellyfish. That's really fast. And then even faster. Again, trap jaw amp, 60 meters per second. That's about 130 miles an hour. Wow. Yeah. That's pretty fast. So the smaller they are, the more stabby they are, which is probably really important, because they need to impart greater force to have more of an effect. Yes, exactly. So it's all about the kinetic energy. And so if you're tiny, you need to be faster in order to still penetrate a surface. To maintain your stabbiness, you need to be faster. You got to be fast. Yeah. And stabby. Stabby. You got to have, if you're little, you have to be more like Kiki. Yes, exactly. And so Ed in the chat room is talking about orca jaws. But remember, an orca is huge. So because he has all these muscles, orcas have all these muscles and they're huge in themselves, that their teeth don't actually need to be as sharp. And they don't need to close their mouth as fast. Yeah, they could slow to you. Yes, but because of mass and also muscle, we did not include muscle in any of this. So when you're talking about a jaw closing and biting power, that's very different from stabby power. Because stabby, you're not occluding things. It's not like two teeth that are going up against each other. You're just poking. It's very different. So there you go, the science of stabbiness. You would need a narwhale running into something to measure stabbiness. Now, would you rather be stabbed or eat deadly night shade? Probably be stabbed because my chances of survival would be higher unless I have some antidote to the deadly night shade closing in. How deadly, where might they stand? Or maybe I've been microdosing myself with deadly night shade for a long time before having the night shade. Like Iocane powder. Like Iocane powder, exactly. Yeah, so deadly night shade, deadly, deadly night shade, so-called and used in stories all the time. Because this is a very famous poisonous plant. And it's a poisonous plant that makes berries that look very alluring. And so back in the, let's call them the Dark Ages, children would wander off and eat berries. And that was because the deadly night shade was protecting itself with poison. So the idea was that if animals that try to eat the night shade die, then maybe someone else will see that and stay away from the night shade. And night shade, once you know what it looks like, is pretty different looking from other plants. So this means that in theory, because it looks distinct, that means that if you know that that plant is dangerous, you won't ever try to eat that plant. So there's that side of things. But there are other animals that have figured out how to eat deadly night shade. In particular, there are some invertebrates that can eat night shade. And night shade has been found to have a pretty interesting response to herbivory. And it's something that we haven't really seen before. So researchers from institutions in Germany and the Netherlands have found that night shade make a special nectar-like liquid that attracts ants. Yes. So why? Yeah, great question. What is going on there? So the night shade, when something starts to bite away at it, then they exude this nectar-like liquid, which turns out to be essentially just sugar water. It's even way more simplistic than any sap you've ever seen. And it's essentially just water and sucrose. And this is specifically made by the night shade to attract ants. The plants that had sucrose on their leaves attracted more ants than any of the other plants. And the researchers also did this with night shade plants that hadn't been chewed on yet. They sprayed them with normal water or they sprayed them with sucrose water. And indeed, ants showed up to the night shade plants that had the sucrose water on it. And they found that when there were ants on the night shade plants, it greatly reduced predation by slugs. The other main predator that this night shade has is flea beetles. And they caused the most damage. The ants couldn't drive away the flea beetles, but they did remove beetle larvae from stems where they had buried themselves after calling up and out of the dirt when they had been hatched. So the ants do protect the plant against beetles in future generations. That's brilliant. Yeah. So I wonder if by removing them, if they're just removing them out of the goodness of their heart, saying, this little thing's in the way. I want to have a nice, smooth stem. Or if the ants are taking them home and using them as a proteinaceous food source. But it also could be a deal that has been worked out over many, many, many, many years. An evolutionary handshake, so to speak. Exactly. So that's the question, which came first, the sucrose or the ants? So as far as we know, this is the first instance of a plant exuding material from a wound for the purpose of protection. Right, because we hear a lot about other compounds that are used to keep predators away. So just lots of bitter compounds, lots of not sweet stuff, but all the stuff that is either poisonous or bitter or is somehow communicating that animals need to stay away. Right, and we've also done a lot of stories talking about plants releasing chemicals or some sort of signal to warn other plants. Exactly. But this is the first time we've seen a plant exuding something from a wound to attract another animal to protect them. That is definitely new. Oh, this web of ecology. I love it. So the deadly plant is now covered in sugar water. Resist it if you can, kids.