Transcript of AE 1263 - The Goss: How Did This Rare Animal Wash Up on an Aussie Beach?

G'day, you mob! Pete here and this is another episode of Aussie English, the number one place for anyone and everyone wanting to learn Australian English. So today I have a Goss episode for you where I sit down with my old man, my father, Ian Smissen, and we talk about the week's news weather locally Down Under here in Australia, or non-locally, overseas, in other parts of the world, okay. And we sometimes also talk about whatever comes to mind, right? If we can think of something interesting to share with you guys related to us or Australia, we also talk about that in The Goss.

So these episodes are specifically designed to try and give you content about many different topics where we're obviously speaking in English and there are multiple people having a natural and spontaneous conversation in English. So it is particularly good to improve your listening skills. In order to complement that, though, I really recommend that you join the Podcast Membership or the Academy Membership at AussieEnglish.com.au where you will get access to the full transcripts of these episodes. The PDFs, the downloads and you can also use the online PDF reader to read and listen at the same time. Okay, so if you really, really want to improve your listening skills fast, get the transcript, listen and read at the same time. Keep practising. And that is the quickest way to level up your English. Anyway, I've been rabbiting on a bit. I've been talking a bit. Let's just get into this episode guys. Smack the bird and let's get into it.

Dad, what's going on?

Hey, Pete.

Welcome back.

Yeah, thanks.

It's been a good ten second break.

It has! Yes. I took one sip of drink and we're back again.

We were off and away to the king penguins.

King penguins?

Yeah, on Coorong beach in South Australia. So this was a story that I, I saw come up recently, and I knew you'd love it because you're a bird fiend.

I am, and I didn't get to see them. But then I wasn't going to drive for a day and a half to go and see a king penguin that was no longer there.

Yeah. So the king penguin turns up on Coorong beach in South Australia, thousands of kilometres from Antarctic home. So, "A group of birdwatchers has left amazed by a surprise sighting of a king penguin on a beach in the Coorong area of South Australia. King penguins normally only live in Antarctica and sub-Antarctic islands. But a group of friends of Shorebirds South East saw one north of Kingston South East last week." So yeah. These are the second largest, right? Second largest penguins.

Second largest penguins. The emperor penguins being the largest.

Absolutely massive, right. Aren't these ones like 3 or 4ft tall?

Yeah, well, emperor penguins are that big. These are probably... They'd be nine, close to three foot.

So almost a metre tall. Yeah. They're big white and black birds, right. And yeah, it was interesting reading the article, they were saying that there's only been three occurrences of these guys appearing in Australia. The last one was in 2004, and before that it was in 1987. So that was the year I was born. Like what, 30, almost 37 years ago?

Yeah. So they all appear to be land. Well, all 3 in 40 years, are appearing in the same part of South Australia.

Yeah.

So..

Well you wonder. Yeah. What- what's causing that with how they're getting there. Is it like that there's a regular basis, a current change or something. And they're just getting washed out? And you wonder too, are there heaps that just never make it because they're not in condition, good enough condition, to be able to make such a big journey, right?

Yeah. It's just, I don't understand the motivation, really, to go. Let's go north. Yeah.

Well, yeah. You wonder, right? Is it, is it something that's like encouraging them to go north, or are they just going out to the water..

.. and end up..

Yeah. And then they just come. They don't know where to go back.

.. get up and go. Wait a minute. What happened?

Where the f are we? I've lost my bearings.

Exactly.

But, yeah. Australia used to be home to some pretty large penguins, didn't it? In the prehistoric era? There were massive ones that used to live here. That, in that age of the Pleistocene. So a few million years ago. But yeah. So have you seen any of these sorts of penguins before, besides..

Other than in captivity? No, I haven't. I'm trying to think. I think I've only seen three species of penguins live. And only one in Australia. So, yeah, it's interesting because these guys, it- the person in the article. So this article, by the way, was from ABC news. You can go check it out. It was published on the 30th of January.

Yeah.

But the guy that was talking about seeing it was saying that it was just on the beach, and it started doing some gestures to him, like head bobs and stuff and whatever the shrill calls that it was making, and then just walk straight up to them and kind of just hung out. Yeah.

Well, he'd probably never seen a human being before.

Yeah.

And so these things on the beach, probably just like giant penguins.

Yeah.

It's just..

Yeah. Well that's it, right. They sort of congregate together. So there's obviously an urge to be like, well, there's another tall vertically standing animal.

Yeah. Well go and stand next to them going, that's a..

.. weird looking penguin over there! Seems to be fishing. He knows his stuff. Yeah. So, yeah, it's, it would have been so cool to see them. I have always seen those docos, you know, the David Attenborough doco showing them kind of waddling around in Antarctica.

Yeah.

After a few weeks at sea, going to wherever the other parent is of the pairs sitting on the ice with the egg resting on top of its feet.

Yes.

Thermoregulating the egg, ready to hatch and then, yeah, it would just be so interesting to be able to actually go and see those those huge, huge, huge colonies of these.

Yes. Well, they're Antarctic and sub-Antarctic. A place like Macquarie Island is where the king penguins are. Emperor penguins are much harder to see because they're on, you know, mainland Antarctica and often not by the coast.

Yeah, even harsher..

.. colonies, you know, tens of kilometres inland in ridiculously harsh conditions.

Psychos. There's no polar bears.

I know!

You don't have to go that far inland.

They've got to be a few hundred metres inland. And the seals aren't going to come after you.

Yeah, exactly. And they're not going to really hunt you on land, are they?

No.

So, but it was interesting, right? The fact that it's not afraid of humans. I noticed that, to some degree when I was on Raine Island in Queensland doing the turtle research. And that the birds there, the seabirds in particular, were just not afraid of you. It just didn't seem to care.

No.

Because they don't have any natural predators,

.. experience of humans and have no natural predators on those islands.

Yeah.

It's like when your mum and I went to the Galapagos. The animals there.

Yeah.

Are just, I'm sure they are now habituated to humans, but that because they've grown up with no natural predators other than the bigger birds eat smaller birds, and the lizards eat smaller animals.

Well, they don't have any large mammals.

There's no large mammals or anything, so they're perfectly happy with you just walking straight past them. Yes, I've got this great photograph of your mum who's photographing some birds in a nest by the side, beside the trail, and there's a pair of boobies standing on the trail within half a metre of her, just looking up at her. And she was just oblivious to it because she was concentrating so much on what was going in. So they just sort of walked up and stood next to her going, hello? Yeah.

Well, when I was on Raine Island, I think it was a booby.

The brown boobies?

Yeah. It just, I somehow I can't remember if I sort of encouraged it or it just jumped, but it got up on my arm and was just standing there, and I got a photo of that. And I remember just being amazed at this thing just didn't seem to care at all. It was just like, Oh, look, vantage point! You know, highest part of the island!

You know, I can stand on your shoulders!

Yeah. But it's interesting thinking about those places as kind of this temporary part of evolution, right? Or of colonisation of these animals where. There's, there must be a period, right, of a few hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of years, where they don't have those kind of predators around and they are just totally naive to everything and just don't care, right? You can just go and you can, you know, as a, as a human today, interact with these animals and they just ignore you to their detriment quite often, like the dodo, right where it just gets knocked out.

Yeah. And that's a particular discipline of biology called island biogeography. And where because islands are natural isolation points for plants and animals, that colonise them from other places. But then they're completely isolated and they evolve in different ways, obviously. But they also have this thing of no predators, typically because the larger animals take a lot longer to get there.

Yeah.

And other than predators in the sea, like, you know, sea birds and reptiles and mammals that hang around the beaches and go swimming, whether it's looking for food or for the entertainment value, they're likely to be eaten by large fish, like sharks and things. But land predators just don't exist because they have- it's very rare that you're going to get a, you know, a big cat just arrive on an island, you know.

Well, I guess, yeah. And it's interesting because it's, I remember studying this, and it being so correlated to how far away the island is from the mainland, right, that..

The further away you are from a source.

Yeah. Because you wonder with something like the Galapagos, you're kind of like, what would be the next large predator to evolve there? Because you're unlikely to get any of these land mammals getting there because it's so far away from the mainland. But you're going to get birds and reptiles and other other vertebrates.

The reptiles had to get there from somewhere. The iguanas, land iguanas.

Yeah.

How do they get there? But they..

I would imagine..

.. they're on, you know, floating objects. But having a reptile is easier to have it just hang out on a log for weeks out in the sea than, you know, a jaguar.

Yeah.

Appear out of the rainforest.

And he's got what? Yeah. Minimum. Maximum of a week. He's dehydrated..

Two or three days without water. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. It's it's crazy. I remember too, being on Raine Island and thinking there was this tiny little honey eater that I think that had got there. And I remember looking at it and being like, you poor, you're fucked. There's no way. There's no way you're getting home. Yeah. We're hundreds of kilometres away from the mainland and other islands. You clearly got, you know, pushed out here by a big storm that was, that was brewing before we got here. And then you're on this small island with barely any trees and no water, standing water. I'm like, but this is clearly how these animals get to these locations.

Yeah, exactly. And look, there's, there are a number of very recent, as in recent within my lifetime colonisation of Australian birds in New Zealand, that, you know, spoonbills arrived in New Zealand from Australia 10, 20, 30 years ago. Previous to that, they were never seen. And now there are breeding colonies of them. So, you know, a few of them probably got blown over in a storm because the prevailing storms come from west, from the west. So they'll have been blown out of Australia and ended up in New Zealand. And enough of them are there to have a breeding colony. There's only one species that I know of, of bird that, is a annual migrant. Migrates from New Zealand to Australia. And that's a little double, we call them a double banded plover in ironically, in New Zealand they call it a banded plover. But..

They've already got a double banded plover.

Yeah. No, a tiny little seabird. The shorebird that, over winters in Australia. But not all of them do. There's only some populations in New Zealand that do. And I think it's because the, they tend to in New Zealand, they breed on beaches, like our little plovers do. But they overwinter on river estuaries. And a lot of those estuaries in the South Island are just way too cold.

Yeah.

And then flood in spring because of the snow melt. So, you know, some of them have decided that 'We can fly to Australia!' And a bloody long way to go.

Where are they breeding?

On the beaches in New Zealand.

Okay. Because I'm thinking about speciation and like, if that's going to, if there's going to be the potential there. But obviously if they're not, if they're breeding in the same location, it doesn't really matter.

As far as I know, there haven't been records of a few of them hanging out and staying in Australia and breeding, so we don't have breeding populations of them. They breed in New Zealand. But yeah, that's just one of those weird ones where you go. It makes sense if you went from Australia to New Zealand, because you can see how that would happen.

Just downhill.

Weather, yeah, it is effectively is it? Well, from a wind point of view, it is. It's down wind..

.. the other way, other direction would be a bitch.

But to fly..

Yeah.

To overwinter in Australia is..

Just go the other way!

Because they're tiny little birds.

But keep going.

There's plenty of other tiny little birds like that that fly from Alaska and Siberia to Australia and New Zealand. So..

How did they do it? Like, are they eating on the wing? How- like, I've always, there's, isn't there some massive distance. There's like tens of thousands of kilometres that some birds from Siberia come to Australia.

Bar tailed godwits.

Yeah.

There's records now of satellite tracked bar tailed godwits that have flown from Alaska to New Zealand in one go. They do not land anywhere else.

How- like, are they hibernating on the flight?

Well, yeah, it's..

What are they drinking?

It's astonishing.

Yeah.

Yeah. That's 14,000km because they don't go in a straight line. They go in a curve.

And they clearly they're not stopping, right?

No, they're not stopping. The curvy path I think is probably related to wind patterns.

Yeah.

Where they're getting advantage of, you know, at high atmospheric wind patterns.

But when we have those bands around the earth where the wind's blowing one direction and then blowing the other direction..

So they'll be picking those up.

But yeah, that's what blows my mind. Because you're kind of like, I could probably I could probably walk. You know what? 100 k's before I drop dead, you know, and especially without food or water. Food or water, like, yeah, I'd be dead that day, right? Like, but you think about these birds too, where you're like, they're not.

It's not like they're practising and working up to it. It's not like they're getting ready for a marathon and they're just like, you know, I've got to do a 7K run four times a week and then maybe go..

.. a quarter of the way and then turn around and go back.

Every, every month I do a 20, 20 K run. And then I finally work up to the 48 K's and I'm dead after that. I'm not doing it for another, you know, month. These guys just, what, sit there, eat, get ready, and then one day they're just like, 'Time to go!'.

They're breeding in the northern hemisphere. Which again, is quite bizarre because they must go through a huge gorging period straight after breeding. To get enough body fat reserves, to be able to fly all that way after- you know, breeding is a highly energy sucking process where females are actually having to produce eggs. You're spending half the amount of time that you would normally be out feeding because you're either looking for food for your offspring, or your partner who's sitting on the eggs or staying back and minding the chicks. It's ridiculous to then go, 'All right. In a few weeks, we're going to fly across the world!'

And they don't even know. That's, the astonishing thing is, like, they don't even know. They're like, 'We're just gorging ourselves.' 'Why are we eating so much, guys?' So, 'I don't know, but it's this time, every time, this time of year, we do this'. And it's just, there's just an urge.

One day the moon comes up in the right place. Yeah. 'All right, time to go.'.

And, yeah, it just. It's so funny, isn't it? Thinking they don't even know why they're doing this, right. Like..

.. they're not conscious.

No, they've evolved to effectively dodge winter.

Yeah.

Because it's too cold and there's no resources. But they would never consciously be like, 'Why are we doing this, guys? Why are we flying so fucking far?' So, like and then we get here and it's like the same conditions we just came from.

Yeah.

Like. But it's a completely different place. Why didn't we just stay where we were.

They don't know!

Yeah.

They've got no idea. So..

The odd one will stay and they don't make it.

Yeah. That's it. They come back and find it..

.. they hit spring.

And they're just like, 'Something happened!' But the other thing when you were mentioning the spoonbills going to New Zealand, what do you think the ethics is there in terms of either eradicating an invasive species that but that has got there naturally or allowing an invasive species, a contemporarily invasive species, continue to exist because it got there naturally.

Yeah.

What do you do?

Well, I look at it and say it's a natural process that. A large number of say, you know, the birds in Australia, we've got between 800 and 900 species of birds in Australia, depending on how many of the the odd ones, and the vagrants and things that you count. Many of those will have gone to Australia over the last thousands to a million years.

Didn't we just have a duck that got here to Werribee? You and I went..

Yeah, we saw the tufted duck.

And that was the first time it had been seen in Australia,

In Australia.

From Japan.

Yeah.

And then flew back. Dude, he's like, there's no ladies here. This bar's empty.

And went 'Lots of ducks! But none of my type!' Yeah.

It's this vast full of monkeys guys. Yeah, yeah. But so yeah. So it's, just let it happen.

Yeah. Well it's it's a natural process. It's not like somebody has sort of gone 'I know what we can do. We'll go and get a truckload of spoonbills, stick them on a plane and then release them in the South Island of New Zealand.'.

Imagine if you found that that that's actually how they got there. It's like these fucking guys like this. There's always one. But it's hard, too, because I imagine a big part of it would be what impact are they having on the environment locally.

Yeah.

And that would be when you would decide, right. Because I can imagine if the cane toad naturally got to Australia and you saw it doing, you know, what it was doing, the damage that it does.b Yeah. You'd be like, you know, even though that was a natural process, we're just going to side with the the current occupants who've been here the entire time and eradicate you. But yeah, it's always funny to think that humans are really doing what's best for us, what we prefer. It's not really about the environment objectively. It's about what we expect or want the environment to be like, for our purposes. Because at the end of the day, fast forward hundreds of thousands, millions of years, the environment is going to reach an equilibrium.

The environment will be something different!

Well, I always, this is like that tragedy being an evolutionary biologist, there's- it probably never, ever going to be able to study another planet that has life on it, whether it's intelligent or not, and being able to understand how evolution has unfolded there. And how diversification has taken place, does it mimic effectively what's happened here on Earth? Like, have you got plant like things, mammal like things, algae like things? And then the other tragedy is not knowing what is going to happen here in the world with the future of evolution. And we can tie this back to the penguins. They're, they seem to be one of these kind of weird animals that seem so like a sort of subjectively maladapted. They just look like these awkward little easy to kill.

They look like an evolutionary dead end!

Yeah. They're not like, it's kind of like the halfway point between what whales evolve from. They were originally this wolf-like creature that lived around estuaries that, that over, you know, 30 millions of, 30 million years spent more and more time into the, in the water, until it got to the point where it could pretty much just live there. Like obviously 100% of the time. The halfway point is kind of like a seal or a sea lion that's like, you're like, I would love to see where these evolutionary lineages are going. Like, because it I feel like they're probably still moving towards..

Well, everything will continue to evolve.

Yeah. But..

We know..

Certain things.

We don't reach an evolutionary end point other than, yeah, sharks and crocodiles..

But there are certain, there are certain things that kind of just found a really easy..

Super predators.

Yeah.

That live in a relatively consistent environment.

Yeah.

You know, deep water, deep sea water really hasn't changed much in hundreds of millions of years. Tropical. Tropical rivers and estuaries haven't really changed much. They've changed geographically in terms of where they are on Earth. But..

Yeah.

They've been there the whole time. So if you can live in, if you're a top predator living in an environment that doesn't change much. You don't need to evolve. And..

That's what I need.

Being a, you know, subjective terms. But..

But that's what I mean. I feel like things like otters, any of these things that are sort of semi-aquatic, where they're half in the water and half on the land, it's almost like there must be a, they're transitioning to 100% one or the other, like polar bears, right? I think, was it Darwin who talked about polar bears being a kind of transition between the land animal and something that's fully aquatic, and you're kind of like, it would be so cool to be able to just fast forward 100,000 years, a million years, 2 million years, 10 million years and be like, are these animals actually staying? They're kind of weird selves with their weird adaptations and morphology. Is that stable or are they quickly moving to something?

The other thing, though, is that we as evolutionary biologists, we look at evolution from an historic point of view. We're always looking at what has happened in the past, and so we see it as a transition to something where it actually isn't. It's a transition from something.

Yeah.

So otters, you go, well, otters are, you know, small carnivores that have taken up living part time or in the case of sea otters, full time.

Yeah.

Or close to full time. In water, there's nothing to suggest that that's a direction that they're going in. There is no, you know, there's no intent in evolution. And so it could be that, say, the Oriental small clawed otter.

Yeah.

Which is terrestrial and aquatic. It goes and feeds in water, but it spends the rest of its time messing around on land. It could evolve to be land only.

Yeah?

Yeah. So it could lose the webbing in the feet and start to climb trees again.

Well, it just has to be a...

Turn into a cat, you know? So. Or a cat like, depending on the environment, if the environments that they're living in suddenly dry up suddenly in geological terms. So yeah, it is interesting to look at, you know, those sort of things. But you're right. Penguins have sort of got to the point now where they're an evolutionary dead end. Yeah.

Well, I wonder how much they're stuck because of being egg laying where they that, that I think I wonder if the egg laying aspect of their biology is what's sort of holding them to land? Because I, I don't know how you would transition to being able to lay eggs into in water when they've developed that hard shell. Like what? There must be a way that that could happen. But you wonder..

It's an evolutionary dead end. You can't have, you- it's almost you can't undo some.

Yeah.

Things, like that. The eggs have to be able to get, you know, oxygen passing. Gases passing across them because you've got a living thing inside them. And they've been, they've evolved to do that in air. Not in..

Not in water. Yeah. Well, you wonder, I guess you would have to get to a point where you're able to lay eggs in water, like shallow water. And over hundreds of thousands of years, effectively just transition into completely aquatic environments. But there were..

Crocodiles. Crocodiles have been doing this for hundreds of millions of years, and they still lay eggs on land.

Well, but again though, that's where evolution. If there's no reason for them to become fully aquatic. Because we had mosasaurs, well, I guess they would have to switch to live-bearing.

Yeah.

Right? And that would be the, that would be a more easy, and an easier..

Plenty of reptiles have done that.

Yeah.

Not necessarily for an aquatic point of view, but for, for various reasons about environmental stability. Lots of desert reptiles.

Yeah.

Are live-bearing because they can't guarantee a stable environment to lay eggs in. So it's going to dry out, or flood, or..?

Yeah. Well I think, and for me, too. Something else I would love to know, would be, you know, what is going to happen with domestic animals that are being spread all over the world. Like, if you remove humans tomorrow, every human in the world is gone. And these animals are effectively stuck in the locations that they are currently in today. They're all, you know, each has their own respective species. A cat, you know, is a cat, a dog is a dog. But over the, you know, hundreds of thousands, millions of years, because they're all now geographically isolated, they're going to go on different evolutionary trajectories.

And you're kind of like, are there some that are going to learn to fly? You know, like, are there some that are going to become herbivorous, that are going to start eating plants? So there's others that are going to become gigantic, you know, these huge elephant-sized cats that have claws the size of a leg, you know, are there going to be ones that are, I don't know that get, go aquatic? Are you going to end up with like an otter-type cat that is herbivorous?

We already do have some of those different species, not domestic ones, but different species of cats. Yeah, there's, you know, fishing cats, which, they eat fish, so they spend a lot of time in the water.

Yeah.

But that I would love to see that sort of stuff play out simultaneously with all these domesticated animals, right. That you would have cows, sheep, bull, like just, you know, probably 20 or so different domesticated animals by humans, all, all living in the same environments around the world, right. Like, you would have here cats, dogs, sheep, cows, goats, all of them are in Australia right here.

And they would be interacting. And you're kind of like what would happen evolutionarily with those ecosystems? Because for a while, planet Earth would all of a sudden have effectively the entire planet covered with these, these same groups of animals making up the same ecosystems and ecology and everything you kind of like, how would these vary across the world if you fast forward it?

It's also interesting to to think about how because in most of those cases, humans have artificially selected and bred those animals to look and be completely different from what the wild type was.

But that would disappear in a blink.

And it does. If you look at pigs or, pigs are a good example.

Yeah.

You know. Domestic pigs, as in pigs that are farmed, go wild. And within a handful of generations, they look like, they look like wild boar.

Yeah.

Which, you know, the original wild boar, which is what those pigs were, you know, bred from. So all of those genes that we have selected for because they make good food.

And easy animals, too.

.. to handle, just disappear. The old wild type comes back very quickly.

Yeah.

Yeah. It'd be interesting to see how much of that happened. I don't think there's going to be too many Pomeranians running around. Yeah, maybe in the wild.

They'd be the first to die.

But, you know, you go to a lot of Asian cities.

Yeah.

And, you know, wild dogs just, you know, wild as in not running around in the countryside, but dogs just, you know, domestic, domesticated dogs that are just running around in the streets, they all look the same.

Like little dingoes.

They all look like little wild dogs.

Yeah. Yeah.

And and so it's, you know, they go back to wild type very quickly. So yeah that would be interesting to to see.

I guess last story would be your penguin story, right? You guys raised penguins when I was a kid.

We did.

In your bath.

Yeah. For a few weeks.

Yeah.

It was before you were born, actually.

Yeah. Sorry. It was..

No. Yeah. We have a friend who was, now he just retired. The penguin biologist, the, at the penguin parade in Phillip Island. And for those who don't know about the penguin parade, we have one species of penguin in Australia that is quite common in southern Australia- in Western Australia, South Australia, Tasmania and Victoria.

It's in New Zealand as well.

And it's in New Zealand. Although they call it the blue penguin, we call it the little penguin. And the, it's become a very popular tourist thing to do, is to go down to the beach in one place on Phillip Island, which is extremely well controlled about what you can do and not do, and just watch these little penguins march up the beach. So, this friend of ours was rearing a clutch of eggs that somebody had stolen from the, you know, just taken from a burrow, and been caught. But of course, they're never going to say where they got them from. They just hands up. Oh, nothing to do with me.

'Oh, I found them at Woollies.'.

Yeah. So they couldn't be put back into a burrow and hope that an adult penguin or two would look after them. So he had the eggs in an incubator in his garage.

How many of them?

Two.

Yeah.

And they hatched, and then he had some research work that he had to do away from home. And we were down staying with him for a couple of days, and he said, I need somebody to look after these penguin chicks. Can you take them home for a few weeks while I go off and research penguins in another part of Victoria? So we did. So we had them in the bath at home. And, you know, put a little box for them to go and hide in and, you know, sit them in the bath, and had to go down to the market every couple of days and get fresh pilchards.

Mmhmm. Small sardine like..

Sardine like fish, and hand feed them for a few weeks.

Yeah.

Eventually took them back and they were released once they moulted into adult plumage, they were released into the wild..

And they just get it.

Down where they came from.

They just work it out or..

Well, yeah, they..

Sink or swim. Yeah.

Well, I don't know we- well, Pete the biologist, he would have probably. Well, he would, they would have been banded. In fact, they were bended by the time we got them, but, banded and presumably followed. But I didn't, didn't hear what happened to them in the long term.

You reckon they'd make good pets?

No. They're horrible things.

Why is that? They just. They're picky, and..

They're just loud and aggressive and, well, defensive rather than aggressive. Yeah, they're wild animals. But yeah, they are fun to have in there. And you don't exactly go and pet them and play with them.

Yeah, it'd probably be bad eating too.

Yeah. Just tastes like fish.

The last thought I had on this, I was, I was thinking this at the start whilst reading this article. I don't know if my mind is just fucked up, but I have these sorts of thoughts from time to time and I'm like..

You really want to share this?

Yeah. You wonder how many indigenous people in Australia would have had these sorts of experiences in the past where they just walking along the beach collecting shellfish, and there's a fucking king penguin there..?

Just whack it on the head?

Well, you wonder what they would make of it, right? Especially when it was like a spontaneous appearance of an animal you'd never seen before.

And one that's four times the size of the one you used to see.

And different colours, yeah! You would, I just..

Mutant!

There must have been so many like, and the key example of that would be like when Europeans first colonised Australia and the interactions they have with indigenous people being like, What the F? These guys are like transparent there.

Yeah. And boats, and the size of the ships that they came in, where these guys are used to small canoes.

It would be so good to be able to just put yourself into an indigenous person's body from thousands of years ago and interview them in their own language, without them seeing you as a European and be like, What do you guys think of this animal? This animal just washed ashore? What do you guys make of it? Like, is this weird? Or is this like, Yeah, some more food? Are you used to seeing..

Big taste like shit? Yes.

Yeah. Because this thing, this sort of thing, right. If this is happening every 20 years here in Australia with this king penguin around South Australia..

.. thousands of years.

Yeah, exactly. And so it would just be one of those things I would love to know. What do you guys make of this? You see this happen and you're just like, is it just Oh yeah, whatever. Let's eat it. Or are you, like, That could be toxic. Stay away.

Yeah.

You know, Do we worship it? Do we?

Yeah!

Kill it with fire.

That whole. You know, this is a completely different conversation. But that is an interesting thing about, if you're a hunter gatherer, that is, that you get all of your food from sourcing it in the wild.

How umm, interesting.

And you've, and you've only ever done that.

Yeah.

Then how interested are you in novel things? So..

'Bob, you're first. Where's the taster? Where's the taster?'

Exactly!

He's like, I never get anything new!

Well, you're still here to talk about it, so you're okay.

That's it!

Yeah. So whether you, you know, you just know that you're, you know, you don't just eat a handful of berries, you and stick it on your tongue. And if your tongue tingles, you go, hmm. Maybe not. You know, that sort of..

Got a bad feeling about this.

Yeah, exactly. So.

Yeah.

Yeah, it would be interesting to see. Or whether it's just another animal.

Well, and are you living on the edge at the point where you're just like, Fuck, who cares? Like, if I die, I die, but if I don't, I just got this free dead animal that's got, you know, loads of fat and meat on it that I'm just going to survive from.

I suppose. Yeah, animals are a bit different because particularly, you know, large vertebrates. They're not poisonous.

Just don't eat the liver, right? Is it the kidneys? The liver?

Well, yeah. It's okay to eat the liver, but you don't just only eat the liver.

Yeah.

But yeah, the, yeah, they're they're not poisonous. So.

Typically.

Yeah. Whereas, you know, little frogs and fish and insects and some of those things. Yeah. Just eating them will kill you. But I suppose you're looking at it and going, We don't eat little penguins. Why would we eat the big one? Yeah.

Well, that's. You'd probably have a surprising response that you would just not pick.

Yeah.

Based on, you know, probably cultural things where they're just like, it's white on the front and we don't eat white things on the front. You know, They've got that on them? We don't touch them. Or they they'd be like, it has this other trait and everything like that tastes like strawberries. So let's do it. Yeah. Anyway, random thoughts.

Random thoughts.

All right, see you guys next time! You're gonna leave us with a parting fart, Dad, or..

No, I can't replicate that! The chair won't do it.

It wasn't the chair..

Yeah, yeah, yeah.