Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. What was that we were just hearing? Pour your body through a tiny opening? What are they talking about? Well, that's a tiny excerpt from a new series called Terrestrials from WNYC's Radiolab podcast that has been called Radiolab for kids. It's a five-part series. The last episode just came out this morning on various interesting creatures with whom we share the earth, hence, terrestrials, and it's also a musical. Here's a little bit of the opening theme.

Allen: There's so much to discover when you dive down deep, terrestrials, terrestrials. So come on and plunge into the sea, terrestrials, terrestrials.

Lulu Miller: Good voice is not required. I am your host Lulu Miller joined as always by my song bud, Allen.

Allen: Hello, everybody.

Lulu Miller: [chuckles] Today we are joined by special guest Sy Montgomery, who is going to tell us a story about a devious little octopus who outsmarted his human captors.

Brian Lehrer: With me now, live on the air is Lulu Miller, who is co-host of the regular radio lab for grownups, and also the host of Terrestrials, also known as Radiolab for kids. Just don't tell the kids how much their parents are also enjoying the shows. Hi, Lulu. Thanks for coming on the live radio site for a few minutes today.

Lulu Miller: Oh, Brian, thank you so much for having me. I think a lot of New Yorkers were temporarily very disoriented. They were like I am in the wrong place, why am I--? Thanks so much. It's really exciting to be here.

Brian Lehrer: I see you sometimes refer to the series as A Good Family Car Show. What does that mean?

Lulu Miller: I think we tried to make this thing to be something that would speak to kids and really draw them in, not just fun facts. Really have a story, but we also wanted to make the parents and maybe the older kids in the car, maybe at first reluctantly. The baseline was, let's make it tolerable, and I don't know if we succeeded, but we tried. Our hope was just that all ages could enjoy it, and it wouldn't be too scary or confusing for the really little one. That thought the parents might actually find themselves in gross too, and that it might spark conversation and just be the nice thing everyone could enjoy on a long car ride.

Brian Lehrer: Those who are always the most creative and sophisticated kid shows on TV too. I won't go through a list, but ones that the parents were able to get it on another level than the kids, perhaps, and so it was really for everybody Rocky and Bullwinkle.

Lulu Miller: Oh gosh, Rocky and Bullwinkle. I haven't thought about that show in so long. I adored it. I would watch it on Nick at Nite with my dad.

Brian Lehrer: There we go.

Lulu Miller: I don't know if we hit the mastery of something like that, but we thought about attempting. It's all nonfiction, but the thought there was like, I don't think we could hit this level, but kind of like Pixar for the years. I've watched Juana so many times with my kids and it doesn't get old for me. There's good storytelling in there.

Brian Lehrer: It is Pixar for the years, and each episode is about a creature, but listeners, they also deal with different concepts through the creatures. Let me share with everyone a one-minute clip, Lulu, from your episode about octopuses, that deals with intelligence because you reveal that there have been videos made of octopuses doing things we only thought humans were capable of thinking of.

Lulu Miller: Yes, absolutely. I think what you're about to hear, part of this has been such a new discovery because so many people are walking around with little good enough cameras that we've been able to get new data on even what something like an octopus is doing.

As more and more videos of behavior like this have been captured around the world--

Male Speaker 1: That's pretty good [unintelligible 00:04:09].

Lulu Miller: Octopuses making tools or unlocking locks or catching eagles.

Male Speaker 1: Last night was best.

Lulu Miller: Videos sometimes filmed by kids, just looking out at the water. Scientists have come together and scratched their fancy scientists' chins, and largely agree that they can't deny it anymore. Octopuses are--

Female Interviewee 2: Intelligent. It turns out that their intelligence is quite like ours, in a way that their bodies are not. That is surprising and delightful that somebody who looks so unlike you and has senses so unlike yours--

Lulu Miller: Can solve such similar problems.

Female Interviewee 2: That is mind-blowing.

Brian Lehrer: Do you want to expand on that a little, Lulu, both on the particular talents of octopuses and how it connects to the larger story that the series Terrestrials is trying to tell?

Lulu Miller: Yes. In the case of octopuses, they're mollusks. They're in the same family as things like clams. Traditionally, people thought that mollusks weren't that brainy, weren't that intelligent because they don't have brains, most of them and they obviously look so differently. One of the theories about why octopuses were able to evolve and be able to do things that were in certain ways, similar to our kinds of intelligence is they can pick locks, they can escape out of-- the story we tell is about an octopus that escaped out of an aquarium, out of its tank, and went down the drain and went back into the ocean. It's a real story, it's been confirmed, it's a wonderful story.

The real surprise that shows that this octopus wasn't really a fluke, these incredible, they make bad pets, because they escape all the time, and there's all these stories of escapes. They are able to solve similar problems to us in such impressive way that scientists really across the board are more and more calling it intelligence. The story, I think that we're trying to tell in every episode, this is a nature show, we want to tell stories about non-human life and take that seriously and show really cool narratives that actually happened. But we're also trying to show how nature doesn't always work the way you think.

Internally, we called this series, we wanted everything to be a rule breaker. At some moment in every show, there's something happens that you didn't think could happen in nature. So far in the octopus one, it's these kind of "lowly creatures" that overlooked actually, has a kind of intelligence.

Brian Lehrer: The episode you released today about mules and one mule, in particular, has that less-- we have a little clip of it that you got. Do you want to set this up?

Lulu Miller: Yes. Quick refresher, mules are actually a hybrid. They are a mix between species, a horse and a donkey. For a long time, the traditional scientific knowledge and wisdom said that species can't really mix. Of course, mules have been around for thousands of years, they were in ancient Egypt, but the thing is, every single mule is supposed to be sterile, it's a one-off, it's not going to have babies. The theory goes there that one of the things that makes a species a species is that it can't mix with another species.

Humans might be able to engineer a hybrid by making them mate, by making a horse and a donkey mate and creating this super strong animal that actually is smaller, so it eats less, so it's economically a great thing. That's the whole thing about mules, but it's not going to have babies and that's one of the most sacred laws of nature. For so long it was believed that.

In 2018, a little mule named Peanut on a farm in Kentucky had a baby, totally shattering that law. I think that's the moment you're about to play.

Brian Lehrer: Here it is.

Lulu Miller: Even though no one saw the birth--

Male Speaker 3: You just knew.

Female Speaker 4: We just knew because when peanut moved, that baby moved.

Lulu Miller: Stranger still. While peanut couldn't make any milk because not a thing mule should I ever need to do.

Female Speaker 4: She had clear liquid coming from her teats.

Brian Lehrer: Well, so that was a mule in Kentucky and you went to meet that mule, right?

Lulu Miller: Yes. They named the baby Miracle because it felt like a miracle to them. We went and met the mule who scientists predicted, "If this could happen," every now and then nature lets something seemingly impossible slide through, and there have been a few other scientifically confirmed cases over the years, just very few, but the thought is like, they're going to have so many chromosomal difficulties, they're not going to survive. This mule was now four years old, we went down to Kentucky. I rode the mule.

Then we go and talk to an evolutionary biologist from Stanford about how it may have happened. Then more broadly, this story, this like incredible great story about this mule and her baby also becomes a broader story about how evolutionary biology as a field is changing its beliefs on hybrids, and they used to be considered mistakes or man-made one-offs or flukes. They are now seen, thanks to genetic, sequencing in the last 15 to 20 years. Scientists have realized that about 10% of all animals are hybrids. The wilderness is like a Fantasia of hybrids and so that is now seen as one of the main ways new species are formed. Not the main way, but one of the serious ways they're formed and so there's been a whole revolution there around what a hybrid is. It's a neat story.

Brian Lehrer: To wrap up, you've described Terrestrials as nature the musical and I see that today's episode about mules ends with a song that's intended to communicate the value of humility. We'll go out on this, do you want to set it up?

Lulu Miller: Yes. This is our truly last little moment of the season that's hiding after the credits. I think it's this idea that I personally can get haunted by the sense that our planet and our species keeps just recurring circles of returning to the same bad things and we all know how everything's going to work and everything's been figured out. For me, there's no better feeling than a glimpsing how little we know and how feeble the human mind is in the face of just how much more the universe has in store and how many surprises there are.

Here's what I'll say to set up this last moment, I guess, whether or not you listen to Terrestrials, if anyone tells you they have it all figured out, we've got news for you.

Brian Lehrer: Here we go with that and Lulu Miller co-host of Radiolab and the host now of their series for Kids and grownups, Terrestrials. Amazing, Lulu. Thank you for coming on.

Lulu Miller: Thanks.

[music]

Copyright © 2022 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.