AI Summary
5 min readKleptotherms
The Heat Thieves
In New Caledonia, there is a bright blue and black sea snake that does something strange. It slithers into burrows occupied by large tropical seabirds, sneaks up on them, and then just hugs them. It doesn't eat them. It just curls around the bird and absorbs its body heat. This behavior has a name: kleptothermy—heat theft. And as social scientist Hans Ijzerman explains, it's remarkably efficient. Getting warmth from another creature can decrease the cost of thermoregulation by up to sixty or seventy percent.
The snake is just one example. Male garter snakes pretend to be female so other males will try to mate with them, and the friction warms them up. Dwarf caimans steal heat from termite nests. And humans do it too—cuddling is, for at least one person involved, a theft. Ijzerman's research suggests that because humans relied on getting warmth from one another to survive—even 200 years ago, people would sleep nine to a bed to stay warm—our sense of temperature isn't just about air particles. It's being influenced by the people around us more than we typically think.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (02:41) **Introducing Kleptotherms** - Lulu Miller and Molly Webster set up a fantasy of finding a dusty book called "Kleptotherms" with five chapters, beginning with a picture of a snake.
- 2 (04:19) **Chapter 1: Animal Heat Theft** - The story of a blue-and-black sea snake in New Caledonia that sneaks into seabird burrows to steal body heat without eating the bird.
- 3 (08:06) **Chapter 2: Redundant Clothing** - The story of John, who began wearing multiple layers in summer heat as his schizophrenia worsened.
- 4 (24:24) **Chapter 3: The Cyberball Experiment** - Hans Ijzerman's study on social exclusion and physical temperature.
- 5 (29:27) **Chapter 4: The Myth of 98.6** - A deep dive into the history and reality of human body temperature, especially relevant during the pandemic's temperature checks.
- 6 (46:06) **Chapter 5: Equilibrium and Thermal Death** - The hosts reflect on the concept of balance in the "economy of action."
- 7 Standout Quotes
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
In this episode, we break the thermometer and watch the mercury spill out as we discover that temperature is far stranger than it seems. We first ran this episode in 2021: Five stories that run the gamut from snakes to stars. We start out underwater, with a species of snake that has evolved a devious trick for keeping warm. Then we hear the tale of a young man whose seemingly simple method of warming up might be the very thing making him cold. And Senior Correspondent Molly Webster blows the lid off the idea that 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit is a sound marker of health.
EPISODE CREDITS:
Reported by - Lulu Miller and Molly Webster
Produced by - Becca Bressler, Lulu Miller and Molly Webster
with help from - Carin Leong
Fact-checking by - Emily Krieger
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