Terrestrials

The director of horticulture at Madison Square Park, Stephanie Lucas , spends her days caring for over 300 trees in the heart of New York City. One day in 2022, she saw a callout from NASA giving away seeds that had traveled to the moon. This would be the crown jewel of the park! She and her team worked hard on their application, submitted it, and then waited for two years. Eventually they gave up...

What does it really mean to be a dad? In the animal world, fathers have long been painted as aggressive or absent. At best providers and protectors, but certainly not caregivers. And yet for every tale of a lion or chimp dad eating its own young (yikes!), there’s another creature who tells a sweeter story.  Two HUMAN dads bring us on this DADventure: Dr. Eduardo Fernandez-Duque , who has spent dec...

We're back with PURR-T TWO of our big cats journey, and this time, we’re heading even deeper into the cat-iverse.  We travel to India, where conservationist Shatrunjay Pratap Singh introduces us to leopards that live among shepherds and ancient temples. Then we head to Colombia, where biologist Laura Lisbeth Jaimes Rodriguez helps us track one of the most mysterious cats on Earth: the jaguar. We m...

Big cats are our most requested animal, but Lulu doesn’t really want to make an episode about them! . She thinks lions, tigers, and their feline cousins are the bullies of the animal kingdom. So Songbud Alan and Producerbud Ana set out to change her mind.  We head to the Bronx Zoo where big cat expert Luke Hunter introduces us to tigers that cough up furballs and wrestle crocodiles, and lion pride...

In the depths of the ocean, a tiny male anglerfish catches a scent and follows it through the darkness. Eventually he finds a glowing, toothy female with a bacterial lightbulb on her head. He kisses her… and never lets go. Their bodies permanently fuse, merging bloodstreams, flesh, and digestive tracts. Radiolab correspondent Molly Webster brings us the wild story of this eternal kiss. We dive dee...

Amy Ray (whose music you might know from the Indigo Girls ) was on a walk in the Georgia woods with her dogs when she passed a tree branch and saw hundreds of tiny, white, fluffy creatures doing a synchronized stadium wave. She was mesmerized.  Turns out, she was looking at woolly aphids - small, defenseless bugs who have somehow figured out how to survive everything the forest throws at them. Res...

As one of the most famous cellists of all time, Yo-Yo Ma has spent a lot of time playing music inside. But a few years ago, he decided to take the cello out of the fancy concert halls and into nature, bringing our very own Producerbud Ana along for the ride!  That brings us to humpback whales. Like Yo-Yo, humpbacks are musical. They communicate through melodies, clicks, grunts, whispers, and bello...

What do loons have to do with courage and community?  In January, we received a letter from two sisters in Minnesota - Jude and Mo. They wrote to us because their city was experiencing a lot of unrest, with immigration agents arresting members of their community and protests ringing loud in the streets as people tried to protect their neighbors. And in the middle of it all, an unexpected symbol be...

Middle schooler, Aanya, has an up-close encounter with a squirrel in the school yard, which leads her to an obsession with one of North America's most common critters. She tells host Lulu Miller all about the overlooked superpowers of squirrels, including one squirrel who lives way up in the Arctic, where the weather gets so cold the squirrels who live there drop their body temperatures down below...

How rested would you feel if you took 10,000 naps a day? Chinstrap Penguins in Antarctica spend their days taking MICRONAPS, each around 4 seconds long. To learn why, Lulu meets one (played by Songbud Alan), who explains how micronaps help them conserve energy and protect their babies from “sky pirates”!  Then, in a badgermania, penguin scientists Dr. Eric Wagner and Dr. Dee Boersma answer your qu...

On February 17, in places like China, Malaysia, Korea and Chinatowns across the globe, dragons will rise in the form of massive puppets. Today we bring you a special Terrestrials episode on dragons to understand what they have to do with the New Year, what the dragon myth means, and explore the tiny chance that dragons could have ever been real.  First, we meet Mr. Lu Dajie, one of China's most re...

Holes are full of a whole lot of nothin'. Pure, hollow emptiness. At least that’s what Songbud Alan thought before he fell down a rabbit hole of, well, HOLES! In honor of Groundhog Day, he takes Lulu to a fossil-filled pit behind a Chick-fil-A to dig up 66-million-year-old treasure, and deep down to an underwater hole where blobs of colorful microbes reveal a time when Earth’s days were only 6 hou...

Where do animals come from? That's something people have been trying to explain for thousands of years. And for a while, scientists and philosophers believed that any ol' person could create creatures if they just had the right recipe. A touch of sand, maybe a drop of blood and POOF: you could create life. That idea was believed to be true for generations until one brave scientist decided to look...

To celebrate New Year’s Day, there are all kinds of traditions. Some people eat black eyed peas for good luck, some list out resolutions. But here at Terrestrials, we are taking a cue from the wisdom of pets, who are so, so, so good at sleeping. After a short preamble from Lulu, we’ll turn the microphone over to listeners’ furry friends snoring and snoozing in various positions, places, and locati...

Sloths are the slowest mammals on Earth. How can a creature that moves so slowly survive in a world that moves so fast? Zoologist Lucy Cooke helps us rethink everything we know about sloths and their slowness. We follow a sloth named Nacho from a rainforest to a nightclub, trek deep into mangrove swamps to find a rare pygmy sloth and uncover the secret that allows sloths to evade even the deadlies...

What is a rainbow? An optical illusion? Or a thing out there in the world? For centuries, cultures around the world believed that rainbows were bridges - pathways to gods and to the afterlife. Then in 1665, during a plague, a young Isaac Newton made a discovery that changed everything :  sunlight is made of many colors. He counted 7. But artists, poets and curious children weren’t convinced. How c...

Artist Ashley (Ash) Eliza Williams was so shy growing up that they found it hard to speak to people.  Instead, they withdrew from the world of humans and found comfort in the forest, where they spent hours exploring, scavenging, and collecting — eventually discovering lichen. They began painting portraits of lichen’s wild, colorful, and fuzzy shapes.  In time, Ash learned that lichen is actually a...

Lulu is hosting a holiday meal. She’s invited the characters from her extended kids podcast family - Wow in the World and Circle Round - for an epic kids podcast crossover special. It’s a potluck of stories and on the table is a turducken. Yes, a turkey stuffed with a duck stuffed with a chicken. Each show brings a wild  story about one of these creatures. We learn about a chicken’s unexpected jou...

In the game of life, every species is like an action figure. You got your dogs and your dung beetles, your bald eagles and your blueberries. And for a long time scientists believed it was pretty much impossible for those action figures to mix and make a new kind of action figure that was able to have its own babies (dog beetles? Baldberries? Nah). But, today we tell the story of a four-legged beas...

This Halloween, we’re going to the dark side. Deep in the darkest tropical forests, some of the world’s most elusive bats hang upside down in their winged sleeping bags. On a quest to find one of these flying mammals, Producerbud Ana ventures into a Puerto Rican forest and the back corridors of the American Museum of Natural History with Dr. Angelo Soto-Centeno . Why? Because while they may be sca...

Maggots are disgusting, right? Lulu has a hard time even saying the word maggot.  But in this episode, we’re asking you to join us in setting our “ick” aside. If you stick with us, we promise that you’ll go from thinking these bugs are the grossest things ever to actually kinda liking them. Maybe even loving them.  ER doctor Avir Mitra leads us down a rabbit hole of scientific discovery, explainin...

In 1971, a red-headed, tree-loving astronaut named Stu ‘Smokey’ Roosa was asked to take something to the moon with him. Of all things, he chose to take a canister of 500 tree seeds. After orbiting the moon 34 times, the seeds made it back to Earth. NASA decided to plant the seeds all across the country and then… everyone forgot about them. Until one day, a third grader from Indiana stumbled on a t...

Few mammals have a bigger positive impact on the planet than the beaver. With its bright orange buck teeth, the creature is an expert engineer that brings life wherever it waddles and even fights fires. Our story begins in the Bronx river, once known as the  “open sewer” of New York City. After some humans decide to clean it up, we meet one of the river’s residents - José the beaver. We learn abou...

Over a billion lightyears ago, in the darkness of outer space, a collision of black holes sent out a fleet of invisible waves that were headed right toward planet Earth. The waves were so powerful they could ripple spacetime but most people on Earth didn't believe the waves were real. SPOILER ALERT: The waves are called gravitational waves and…they are real! Astrophysicist Dr. Wanda Díaz Merced te...

Pizza is one of the world’s most beloved foods. But as much as we love the way it tastes, the secrets of its ingredients are even yummier to discover. We explore the surprising sounds tomatoes make when they’re stressed, how wheat became integral to human survival and how mold is sometimes... delicious?  This episode also features live tap-dancing, mind-melting cheese facts and what might be the S...