Welcome to 2026! Rachel starts off the year with horrifying wasps that sting cockroaches, turn them into zombies and then lay their eggs in them so their young can devour them from the inside. You're welcome.

Victoria takes on the fascinating topic of all the animals that beat us to the idea of farming by millions of years. They even do weeding and apply fungicides. It gets wild.

Kirk heads to the ocean and discovers that some brittle stars are actually covered in millions of eyes. These eyes are unlike any other and absolutely wild.

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The final episode of 2025. Here's what we have for you:

Kirk kicks off the show by looking into the very strange world of insect hearing. Turns out some flies use a rotating nose to hear.

Rachel is then up and she talks about the arms race between Bats and Moths. This conflict has lead to some amazing defenses on the part of the moths.

Victoria is up third and she brings us the smallest animals on earth, Myxozoans. These little creatures are technically an animal (related to jellyfish) but they are missing most of the genes for the things we usually associate with animals.

A HUGE thank-you to our Patrons that made this show possible in 2025!

Look, we get it. This is a busy week with family for a lot of people. If you are one of those people, we sincerely hope this episode helps you hide from family and obligations and take a moment for your weird selves. We're all in this together.

On this week's show, Victoria kicks things off with a deep dive on Bats. We often think of them as predators but they are prey animals as well. She talks about some of the animals that hunt bats and then stare some bizarre new research showing that even rats have started to hunt bats and unbelievably are catching them while they are flying.

Kirk then brings us the Top 7 birds that actively work to keep predators away from their nests. He covers amazing talents that range from distraction displays to essentially group mass defication on predators until they die. It gets wild.

Rachel rounds out this week by loading fish into a cannon and blasting them off. It sounds cruel but the fish cannon is actually a bizarre device to help migrating fish safely fly over tall dams on rivers.

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Rachel keeps things light as we start off the show with a discussion of Botulism toxin just in time for the holidays. Watch out for those bulging cans.

Victoria is up next and she talks about how rare blue is in nature. She shares the very few examples of true blue pigments found in nature.

Finally, Kirk talks about birds decorating their nests with predator scat to keep away predators.

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This week, Kirk starts us off with a strange story about mushrooms being used as computer parts. He sincerely hopes he never has to pronounce the word memristor again.

Rachel brings us the tale of a group of 100,000 cannibal ants living in a nuclear bunker.

Victoria rounds things out this week with research proving that at least one species of bat can catch and eat birds all while both are flying.

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Victoria starts us off this week with a bizarre story about how some animals can see without having eyes.

Kirk is up next and he tells us about Fugu, a.k.a. the pufferfish and we learn about these highly toxic fish people like to eat. Their poison seems to come from a strange source.

Rachel is up last this week and she tells us all why we should not stick our head into an active particle accelerator. Just in case, you know, you were thinking of doing that.

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Welcome to our 250th episode!

Rachel kicks things off with a discussion of Carrion Beetles.

Victoria then tells us about fish that can climb cliffs. Say what?

Kirk finishes up with the story of how one predator uses static electricity to attract themselves to their prey like a homing missile.

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What a wild show this week. Well, it finally happened. After approximately 700 topics, we finally had two hosts come with the same secret topic. Kirk and Victoria both brought the same story. Kirk kicks things off talking about researchers finding the largest spider web in the world in a sulfur cave. Victoria adds in some fun extra facts from her research on the topic.

Rachel is up next and she discusses some of the weird things we all should know about the Pronghorn. Turns out they are so fast because they evolved with fast predators that no longer exist.

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