Red is the warmest color
There’s few certainties in life. But the sun will always rise, the seasons will change, and the Outside/Inbox will forever remain answered.
From lighthouse paint hues to polar bear lovers, this week the team takes up your questions on all things red.
What makes cardinals red?
Do our dogs love us?
Featuring Alex Funk, Jeremy D'Entremont, Karyn Anderson, and Francesco Ventura. Thanks to Outside/In listeners Liz, Tyler, Monica and Lera for their questions.
LINKS
Here’s Karyn’s paper on how same-sex behavior in animals is far more common than previously thought.
Olney, Illinois is known as “the home of the white squirrels.” Learn more about how they’re trying to protect these rare albino animals in this small Midwest town.
Here’s the Northeast District’s 2025 US Light List, which lists an astounding 40,000 different lights, sound signals, and other visual aids to navigation.
Francesco Ventura’s paper analyzing divorce rates in albatrosses came out in 2021. You can find it here.
SUPPORT
Producer Marina Henke at the red-striped West Quoddy Headlight in Lubec, Maine. She can confirm it pops against the background.
To share your questions and feedback with Outside/In, call the show’s hotline and leave us a voicemail. The number is 1-844-GO-OTTER. No question is too serious or too silly.
Outside/In is made possible with listener support. Click here to become a sustaining member of Outside/In.
Follow Outside/In on Instagram or join our private discussion group on Facebook.
CREDITS
Host: Nate Hegyi
Reported, produced, and mixed by Marina Henke, Felix Poon and Nate Hegyi
Special thanks to Bob Trapani, Agus Bentlage, Ruijiao Sun, and John Stencel.
Editing by Taylor Quimby and Marina Henke
Our staff includes Justine Paradis and Jessica Hunt
Executive producer: Taylor Quimby
Rebecca Lavoie is NHPR’s Director of On-Demand Audio
Music is from Blue Dot Sessions, Matt Large, Ryan James Carr, and Ooy.
Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio
Audio Transcript
Note: Episodes of Outside/In are made as pieces of audio, and some context and nuance may be lost on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.
Nate Hegyi: Hey, this is Outside/In a show where curiosity in the natural world collide. I am your host, Nate Hegyi, here with producer Marina Henke. Hey, Marina.
Marina Henke: Nate, I want to tell you a fact that I recently learned.
Nate Hegyi: Okay.
Nate Hegyi: Do you know that multiple states can claim the same official state bird?
Nate Hegyi: Really? The same state bird? They're not… I feel like they're just not being very creative.
Marina Henke: I mean, I imagined it a lot like, you know, the NFL draft, right? You know, each state they come with their picks, their MVP. Oklahoma wants the ruffed grouse. I don't know!? But yes, many states they can and they do have the same bird mascot. What do you think is the most popular state bird?
Nate Hegyi: Listen, I'm gonna say that they are repping Ben Franklin, the original American mascot. The turkey.
Marina Henke: Okay, you're never gonna hear me knock a good guess. But it's not that. It is the Northern cardinal.
Nate Hegyi: Ooh. Great choice.
Marina Henke: I mean, we've got Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia, and West Virginia. Also, lest we forget very popular sports mascot.
CLIP: The Cardinals are world champs!... The Saint Louis Cardinals are headed back to the World Series!
Marina Henke: What do you think makes the Cardinal so popular?
Nate Hegyi: Oh, it's got to be the color. They pop.
Marina Henke: Yes. So this was also my guess. And turns out we are following in suit with our species. So humans tend to have a naturally heightened reaction to seeing red. This has sometimes been called the red romance effect. Even the red dress effect. There's even been some experiments that show that people playing with red poker chips perform better and wrestlers wearing red bibs are more likely to win.
Nate Hegyi: Presidents wearing long red ties aka Donald Trump winning all the time here.
Marina Henke: I was thinking you were gonna go for the US women's hockey team… just won a big medal, they’ve got red on their uniform.
Nate Hegyi: No no no no no no no no. Canada wears red and Canada lost twice. I’m Canadian… I don't want to talk about it. We're recording this right after the Olympics, by the way.
Marina Henke: This is where humans and cardinals aren't all that different. Because cardinals, in a way, are red for the same reason. The shock of color that all male cardinals It's saying, “Hey, look at me. I'm gonna make a good mate!”
Nate Hegyi: Ooh, I like that. So it's like. It's like wearing a nice suit.
Marina Henke: Yeah. It's like, what's up, Lady Cardinal? Nate. Do you know what makes Cardinals red?
Nate Hegyi: Uh, they're embarrassed all the time.
Marina Henke: Super sheepish. Uh, no. So they get that color from the food that they eat, specifically something called a carotenoid.
Nate Hegy: Carotennoids… Okay.
Marina Henke: … These are pigments that show up in berries and in seeds. Now I feel like you're going to ask me. You're going to say “Marina, but tons of birds are eating berries and seeds. You know, why don't I see way more red birds?”
Nate Hegyi: You read my mind.
Marina Henke: Yeah so lots of birds can attribute their red eyes to carotenoids. But cardinals take it a step further. So male cardinals have a very special gene catchily that's going to roll right off my tongue. It's called CYP2J19. Now, that activates those carotenoids in their feathers.
Nate Hegyi: Hmm. Okay. Interesting. So that's how they become red.
Marina Henke: But every now and then that gene does not fire. And you get.
CLIP: And going viral on social media tonight. This photo capturing a rare yellow cardinal. A woman spotted the bird right outside of a window.
[MUX IN: Bismuth Bossa]
Marina Henke: But we're not here to talk about yellow. Nate Hegyi!
Nate Hegyi: No, we are not.
Marina Henke: Any guesses what we're here to talk about?
Nate Hegyi: We're here to talk about red!
Marina Henke: Today we are opening up the outside inbox. To all you listeners who called in with some pretty fantastic red related questions. In fact, quick shout out to our Outside/Inbox Hall of Famerer Jean Bartlett, who called in with a question about carotenoids, thus prompting my cardinal rabbit hole.
Nate Hegyi: Thank you Jeannie.
Marina Henke: All right. We got a lot of good stuff ahead of us, so let's get into it.
BREAK
Nate Hegyi: Hey, I'm Nate Hegy, and this is outside in a show where curiosity and the natural world collide. And we are back to answer your questions about all things red.
Marina Henke: Yeah, I think we should just dive straight into it. This question that we got from Liz in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Stay, bird, by the way, ruffed grouse.
Liz: Hi Outside/In team, this is Liz calling from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. My red inspired question is, why do albino animals have red eyes? Looking forward to your response. Thanks for all you do.
Nate Hegyi: Our producer, Felix Poon looked into this. Do you get it? Looked into it.
Marina Henke: Okay. All right.
Nate Hegyi: Here he is.
Felix Poon: Albino animals tend to attract a lot of attention. In 2024 the lakota held a special ceremony for the birth of an albino bison. There are lots of states that outlaw the hunting of albino deer. And when a white gorilla named Snowflake was born at the Barcelona zoo people visited in hordes. Part of the fascination is that there just aren’t a lot of albino animals out there.
Alex Funk: Albino animals in nature are rare. The same way. Maybe an animal that you know is missing a front leg is rare. It has negative consequences for the survival of animals, in the wild.
Felix Poon: This is Alex Funk. He’s a PhD student at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, where he studies cane toads… more recently albino cane toads. Albinism, is a genetic condition that reduces the amount of melanin in the skin, hair, and eyes. The condition can also occur in humans, but since we’re gonna be talking about evolutionary fitness in the wild, we’ll just stick with animals today. For a long time, researchers assumed albino animals are rare because they can’t camouflage. After all, being seen in the wild often means being eaten. But Alex thought there might be more to it than that. So he designed a study where he created a bunch of albino toads using genetic modification. And, when he measured their growth and survival rates… things looked pretty good! But when he raised those albino toads in the same cage as non-albino toads, or what he calls the “wild types”...
Alex Funk: the albinos barely grow. and the wild types grow like gangbusters.
Felix Poon: This was surprising…because these toads were raised in captivity, no predators around. So…what gives? It didn’t take long for Alex to figure it out. All he had to do was watch them eat their daily meal of termites. The “wild type” toads were able to catch the termites with their tongues most of the time. But, the albino toads?
Alex Funk: the albino toads would kind of just be wildly striking and missing and falling over and all sorts of comical stuff.
Felix Poon: Turns out, albino toads don’t have very good vision. And we’ll get to why in just a minute. But first, this brings us back to our listener’s question, why do albino animals have red eyes?
Alex Funk: that red is just the reflection of the blood vessels in your eye and the tissue in your eye.
Felix Poon: Of course, other animals’ eyes have blood vessels and tissue… but they also have melanin, which gives them color. Without that melanin, those blood filled capillaries are plain as day. And unfortunately for Alex’s toads, that lack of melanin doesn’t just translate to red eyes. It also translates to bad eyesight. I won’t get into the science of why, other than to say that a lack of melanin in the eyes affects something called stereopsis. That’s the ability to see in 3 dimensions
Alex Funk: So that's why you see, in my experiment, the toad's striking and missing constantly because they can't really see very well in 3D.
Felix Poon: And the problems for albino animals’ eye sight don’t just end there. Just like melanin protects the skin from UV radiation, it also protects the eyes. Without that protection, an albino individual’s vision can decline faster than non-albinos. All of this is why it can be tough to be an albino animal in the wild. And why humans sometimes get involved trying to protect them. Just ask the albino squirrels of Olney, Illinois… where they’re kind of the town’s unofficial mascot. They even have legal right of way on local streets and sidewalks.
[MUX IN, Kamilah]
Marina Henke: Nate, can you imagine stopping for the night on a road trip? You open your car door, you look down. What are you looking at? Eye to eye. An albino squirrel.
Nate: Marina I routinely travel with three dogs. I mean honestly if a squirrel was that close, one of my dogs would just try to eat it.
Marina Henke: I mean I’d be terrified to drive… I don’t want to get a ticket for not giving them right of way!
Nate Hegyi: Exactly I don’t want my dogs to go to jail if they eat one!
Marina Henke: So in fact, it's the opposite. So only actually draws a lot of tourism from these albino squirrels. And get this, the town has also passed an ordinance banning free roaming cats in order to protect these cherished mascot.
Nate Hegyi: I mean, that probably helps with songbirds and everything else like that too.
Marina Henke: Moving on. Um, our next question comes from Tyler in South Carolina. State bird… Carolina Wren.
[MUX IN, Gerner]
Tyler: My question for you is what is the significance of the color red being used with lighthouses all over? I'm very curious. Thank you.
Nate Hegyi: Marina, you answered this one, right?
Marina Henke: Yeah. So, I mean, I live in Maine, so I think I'm actually contractually obligated to tackle any lighthouse related question that we get.
Nate Hegyi: All right, take it away.
[SDX ocean sounds come in over mux, both fade]
Marina Henke: It may be tempting to think of lighthouses as stand-alone tourist attractions — perched on rocky outcrops… maybe flashing a lone light across the water. But a hundred years ago the federal U.S. Lighthouse Service maintained nearly 1,000 functioning lighthouses across the country.
Jeremy D'Entremont: They, uh, built enough lighthouses eventually so you were never out of sight of a lighthouse.
Marina Henke: Jeremy D’Entremont is a historian for the US Lighthouse Society. And during this heyday of lighthouse navigation he described the resulting effect as a “light network” strung along the coast. Like our listener noted, it was a network with a whole lot… of red.
Jeremy D'Entremont: Sankaty Headlight on Nantucket…. White Shoal Light in Michigan… On Cape Cod Nauset Light is kind of an iconic lighthouse…
Marina Henke: Beyond making for dashing gift-shop keychains the reason for this popular hue is two-fold. First, is that the color red often helps lighthouses stay visible. To be seen, after all, is the primary purpose of a lighthouse.
Jeremy D'Entremont: I always tell people they’re kind of like the signposts on the sea basically or on our waterways.
Marina Henke: But these “sign posts of the sea” are only useful if sailors can spot them. At night a lighthouse’s beam does the trick, but during the day that flash of a bulb can be pretty hard to spot. Which means a lighthouse’s paint job actually matters a lot.
Jeremy D'Entremont: I should point out that in New England, most of our lighthouses are very simple white with black iron lanterns.
Marina Henke: Against the dull browns and greys of a New England coastline, white stands out. But…not always. Just like an outfit, sometimes a lighthouse benefits from a pop of red.
Jeremy D'Entremont: For instance, in Maine, West Quoddy Head Light at the easternmost point of the United States, has red and white stripes… There's a pretty fair amount of snow up there. So the red shows up really well against the snow background.
Marina Henke: Red, it turns out, is a highly employed color in the nautical world. That’s because our eyes pick it up extraordinarily well – yes, against snow – but also water. The second reason for red’s popularity comes from a lighthouse’s need to be unique. With so many white lighthouses along the coast, sailors found that the structures could be hard to tell apart.
Jeremy D'Entremont: So uh they decided to give some lighthouses distinct paint schemes or daymarks as they’re known.
Marina Henke: These daymarks are the reason for the delightful variety in light house patterns that exist today – red checkers, red diamonds, black stripes. All these variations leave most lighthouses with their own unique fingerprint. They’re cataloged in a yearly report that the Coast Guard puts out called the US Light List. Today, lighthouses are often a backup to more high-tech instruments. But, it doesn’t mean these structures are without a purpose. After all, sometimes tech fails.
Jeremy D'Entremont: you know, people tell me all the time, they still like seeing that lighthouse, that actual physical confirmation of where they are.
Marina Henke: Whether it’s the stripes of West Quoddy or the thick band of Nauset Light, there’s a sailor out there who knows that red marking… means they’re coming home.
[MUX IN, Town Market]
Nate Hegyi: You know, this is something I've been thinking of Marina. I live in southeast Alaska. Fishing season has begun, and I am seeing, like, tons of orange buoys. And I'm like, when did orange replace red? Because I feel like everything is orange these days.
Marina Henke: There is something that feels like somehow more modern. When I think of orange, like, I feel like I'm not imagining like 1700s fishermen, you know, repping a bunch of orange beanies.
Nate Hegyi: Yeah, exactly. Like it's just like it is the now go-to bright color… that neon orange.
Marina Henke: I'm wondering sort of a cardinal throwback, but if this could have something to do with, like, pigment history. Like, at what point did we have the technology to make neon orange and mass production? I don't know.
Nate Hegyi: I think this would be a great Outside/Inbox question. I'm gonna put a pin in it.
Marina Henke: Somebody tells the truth out there listening. Now let us know. Nate, I know you have inlaws in Boston. Have you ever heard of Minot's Ledge Light?
Nate Hegyi: No, I have not.
Marina Henke: Picture this. We have a lighthouse that is just south of Boston's Harbor. In 1894, this is the exact moment when the US Lighthouse Service realizes, like, okay, we need to have lighthouses differentiate themselves a little. What do they decide to do but to give some lighthouses individual flash patterns?
Nate Hegyi: Okay.
Marina Henke: They choose Minot's Ledge as the first experiment of this kind, and they give it a one for three flash pattern. So what that was, you know, it's flash pause flash flash flash flash pause. Flash flash flash. What do you think that was a signal for?
Nate Hegyi: I love you.
Marina Henke: …You got that?
Nate Hegyi: Yes, I yeah, I just watched this movie where that was like a whole plot device was like one for three these taps, and it meant I love you.
Marina Henke: Wow. Total sleuth, Nate Hegy i! So, yeah, it picked up the nickname Lover's Light from this. People wrote poems about it. They played songs all about this, you know, very quintessentially romantic lighthouse.
Nate Hegyi: And evidently a movie ripped the whole thing off.
Marina Henke: The IP that just keeps on giving, you know? So, okay, this is clearly great anecdote also helping me with perhaps a not so subtle pivot to our next batch of red questions.
Nate Hegyi: Nice.
Marina Henke: So up next we are going to embody red as the color of infatuation, desire, and all things love.
[MUX IN, Daydreaming]
Nate Hegyi: That is going to be right after a quick break. But before we go, we are opening our inbox to more questions. We've had a lot of fun lately, getting some really random submissions, so this time our only ask is give us your weirdest, most unhinged questions you can think of.
Marina Henke: Yeah, I'm thinking like Nate's fluorescent outdoor gear question.
Nate Hegyi: Yeah, exactly. Give us questions like that or weirder ones.
Marina Henke: As always, you can do that by calling our hotline at 1-844-GO-OTTER. Or even better, sending us a voice memo to outsideinradio@nhpr.org. And you know what? Little Easter egg for me, throw on your state bird!
Nate Hegyi: More questions to come. After a quick break.
MIDROLL
Nate Hegyi: We are back. This is outside in a show where curiosity and the natural world collide. I'm Nate Hegyi.
Marina Henke: And I'm Marina Henke, and we are tearing our way through an Outside/In roundup all about the color red. We've just shifted the tenor of our questions to the theme of love. To kick things off, a couple listeners asked questions about pets and love. I have a very important question for our three dog owning host. Do you think your dogs love you?
Nate Hegyi: I think that one does. I think Gilly, my three legged rescue, knows. The other two, the boys are just like, whatever, I'll take you or leave you. But Gilly, she loves me.
Marina Henke: And do you think Gilly knows that because she is such a problem causer?
Nate Hegyi: Yeah, exactly. She cost me, like, thousands of dollars in vet bills every year because she's constantly getting into trouble, so she owes me a little bit of love.
Marina Henke: But okay actually, researching this question, I came across a line from a science journalist writing about his own conviction of dog love that just felt so accurate, he wrote, “It wasn't the strength of a single study that convinced me of this. It was the breadth.”
Nate Hegyi: Dog breath?
Marina Henke: Okayyyyyy. All right. Well, okay. I mean, okay, look, dogs, brains, they light up just like ours. When they get reunited with family after time away, their blood pressure drops when we pet them. Just like how our own blood pressure drops and their oxytocin, that's the love hormone, surges when they're with people.
Nate Hegyi: That's really sweet. So maybe they do actually love me.
Marina Henke: Oh they totally do. Well I say we just keep the good times rolling and hear our next question. This is coming from Monica down in Hartford, Connecticut. State bird. American. Robin.
Lera: Hi. Outside in, I was wondering if there's any examples of same sex animal relationships and raising their young. Thanks.
[MUX IN, Falaal]
Marina Henke: Nate. You looked into this, right?
Nate Hegyi: I did, yep.
Nate Hegyi: A few years ago, the children’s show “Peppa Pig” released an episode that was all about families. Suzy Sheep lived with her mummy. Mandy Mouse lived with her mummy and daddy. And Penny Polar Bear…
CLIP: I live with my mummy and my other mummy. One mummy is a doctor and one mummy cooks spaghetti!
Nate Hegyi: The episode garnered the usual controversy. An Italian far-right politician tried to ban it. A Christian fundamentalist organization in the U.S demanded Penny and her family be written off the show. But here’s the thing, “Peppa Pig” was accurate. Over 1500 species – including polar bears! – have been known to couple up with a partner of the same sex. We’re talking swans, giraffes, monkeys, sheep, penguins!
Karyn Anderson: There's a lot of examples in zoos where male penguins will, for lack of a better word, sort of kidnap an egg, and then raise that egg together.
Nate Hegyi: This is Karyn Anderson. She’s a primate behavioral ecologist at the University of Toronto. She studies same-sex relationships in the animal kingdom. And she says, first off, there are probably way more than just 1500 species that have this behavior. But it’s been underreported by researchers. In fact…
Karyn Anderson: In almost every animal where we are interested in researching same-sex sexual behavior, we find it.
Nate Hegyi: When researchers are trying to figure out whether, say, two chimps are more than just friends, they aren’t only looking for sex. Just like in humans, attraction can take many forms.
Karyn Anderson: If we're talking about monkeys, usually we define their relationships a lot by how much they groom each other. But that's not always the case. Sometimes some animals really only pair up to have sex and that's it, but in other species there is this long-term bonding going on.
Nate Hegyi: As for same-sex animals raising their young, most of the species that do that are birds. Black swans in Australia have been documented rearing chicks. And in one albatross colony in Hawaii, researchers found that up to 30% of the parents were actually two unrelated females. These gals would often take turns laying eggs after mating with males who were already coupled up. So, yeah, a little bit of a swinger vibe, but I’m not gonna kink shame.
Nate Hegyi: Now, in this case, scientists believe this was happening because of a sex ratio skew in the colony; there were way more female birds than male birds. But in other cases, it may have to do with genetic or even environmental factors. Some primates, for instance, will couple up with the same sex when their world is more stressful, like when there’s too many predators and not enough food or water.
Nate Hegyi: Usually, when this happens these animals are having less reproductive sex. Karyn thinks this could be a strategic choice: why have babies when conditions are bad? But even then, same-sex chimps and gorillas are still “Netflix and chilling” if you catch my drift.
Karyn Anderson: So it might point us to an idea that even in stressful times, or perhaps especially in stressful times, same-sex sexual behavior is really important for animals as a way of maintaining these important social bonds.
Nate Hegyi: Sex can be a means for reproduction, but it can also be a way to strengthen a bond or show some affection. Just ask Penny the Polar Bear’s parents.
[MUX IN, Even Spread]
Marina Henke: Look, I'm not a parent, but I've had not two but three parents tell me how much they hate Peppa the pig.
Nate Hegyi: I will say that both me and you got that clip of Peppa Pig stuck in her head the entire time we were writing and editing this.
Marina Henke: My mommy cooked spaghetti!
Nate: My mommy cooks spaghetti!!!!!
Marina Henke: All right, this next and final question is also about love and mating in the natural world, specifically about species that pair up, which scientists often call pair bonding. This question comes from the state whose state bird is the black capped chickadee.
Lera: Hi Outside/In my name is Lera. I live on Nantucket Island in Massachusetts, and my question is how do environmental changes affect pair bonding? Thanks.
Nate Hegyi: And Marina, you looked into this one.
Marina Henke: I did.
Nate Hegyi: All right, hit it.
[MUX IN, Your Touch]
Marina Henke: Listen. I am a hopeless romantic. Put a rom-com in front of me and at some point I will quite earnestly begin to weep. “Love Actually?”
CLIP: That will be… nice!
Marina Henke: “Notting Hill?”
CLIP: I’m also just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her!
Marina Henke: I mean c’mon! But when asked to look into pair bonding among animals, I had to face some hard facts. How animals choose to mate can be pretty practical. For the most part, animals mate to reproduce. And they want to do that as easily and successfully as possible. Which, look, as someone who wants kids one day, I get. So how animals do this comes down to all kinds of factors: their reproductive window, their population density, and their environment. Like, when temperatures get hotter, you’re more likely to see multi-queen ant colonies. Or during years of harsher weather, some rodents will band together to raise their young in groups.
Marina Henke: But then there’s the species who just want one partner. Take the albatross, a bird that mates for life. For them, harsher climates lead to something that’s incredibly human sounding: increased divorce rates.
Francesco Ventura: When you think about changes in environmental conditions you don't immediately think about divorce being a consequence.
Marina Henke: That’s Francesco Ventura, a biologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution who studies albatrosses. Unlike the more common effects of climate change seen in animals – lower birth rates, habitat migration, bad health outcomes – Francesco found that following warmer years, these massive birds were sometimes getting divorced at almost twice the normal rate! His first hypothesis for these broken marriages was pretty straightforward.
Francesco Ventura: When the conditions are tough, birds may return later to the breeding colony or in poorer physiological condition.
Marina Henke: If that happens, breeding between these love birds may not be successful. Which is a big-time trigger for divorce. But after analyzing the data, Francesco has another theory. It’s called the “partner-blaming hypothesis.” Here’s how it works…
Francesco Ventura: In harsh seasons, birds get stressed...
Marina Henke: And turns out female albatrosses do not like stress. So…
Francesco Ventura: It may be possible that harsher conditions trigger higher levels of circulating stress hormones which may be kind of misinterpreted or misread by the female as a poor performance by the mate.
Marina Henke: Did you catch the logic mistake there? Even if a pair of albatrosses successfully breed the year before, if that male shows up to mate stressed out, well… cue the proverbial divorce papers. Now before you start worrying about an albatross loneliness epidemic, Francesco explained to me he does not lose sleep over this.
Francesco Ventura: So I just got back from a breeding colony with over 200,000 breeding pairs. So in this sense it's not an immediate concern for conservation
Marina Henke: But for other monogamous animals with smaller breeding selection and range, a spike in divorces could make for less reproduction overall. Either way, scientists like Francesco think it’s important to look at these ripple effects of climate change, even if it’s a bit less flashy.
Francesco Ventura: When you think about rough environmental conditions, you think about extreme events that wash out the nest and kill hundreds of adult individuals. Yes, that can happen. But also it can tweak and it can modulate the breeding processes that regulates the life of these ocean voyagers.
[MUX IN, Alicante]
I mean, really, isn't this behavior just, like, the most human sounding thing you've ever heard?
Nate Hegyi: Oh my gosh. Yeah. Stressful situation. You take it out on your partner and it eventually leads to divorce. Yeah, that's like what divorce is.
Marina Henke: Yeah. I mean, I try so hard on this work not to anthropomorphize. Yeah, but, you know, I met with this study where I'm reading it, and I'm like, well, that sounds like one of my relationships.
Nate Hegyi: Exactly, exactly.
Marina Henke: By the way. Okay, I think this is the fourth time you and I have talked about albatrosses on the air in the past 12 months. I am declaring it here now, abatross moratorium for the show.
Nate Hegyi: Okay, but before you do, I have to ask you… any states have the albatross as their state bird??
Marina Henke: (Laughs) I don't think so.
[MUX, Come 2gether]
Nate Hegyi: They should. Maybe. Antarctica's got it, I don't know. Alrighty. That is a wrap for today, but I'm gonna say it one more time. Our Outside Inbox is open for your questions.
Marina Henke: I'm gonna ask one time and one time only. Please. Somebody can fish, get seasick?
Nate Hegyi: I hope not! That'd be very disadvantageous for a fish.
Marina Henke: Again, you can call our hotline to do that. It is 1-844-GO-OTTER or send us a voice memo at outsideinradio@nhpr.org.
Nate Hegyi: This episode was recorded, produced and mixed by Marina Henke, Felix Poon and me. Nate Hegyi, your host. It was edited by our executive producer Taylor Quimby. Our staff also includes Justine Paradis and Jessica Hunt. Rebecca Lavoiei NHPR's director of on demand audio.
Marina Henke: Music is from Blue Dot Sessions, Matt Large, Ryan James Carr, and Ooy.
Nate Hegyi: Outside in is a production of NHPR. Where our colors, by the way, are red.