Americans planted entire forests of exploding Australian trees
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FACTS: Beaver skull obsession, Australian widowmakers, koalas eating $#!%
By: Jess Boddy
This week on The strangest thing (and for future episodes), I will host the show without Rachel while she is on parental leave. That means I’m bringing in pairs of my favorite creative friends to host the show with me!
This week we have two of the funniest people I know: Rickypeacock and MattyisTalking. These two are members of the Goo Crew streaming team, have traveled all of Azeroth via RP, and written YouTube essays about Charlie Brown’s capitalist nightmare. I asked these two certified weirdos to research their favorite science topics for the series, and I think we ended up with a pretty good episode.
Matty explained how, after seeing Zootopia 2he just couldn’t stop thinking about beaver skulls. He would find moments to steal and Google them. So when I asked him to dig deeper into something to The strangest thingof course it was beavers.
And what he discovered was fascinating. Of course, we already know that the beaver’s butt glands secrete a vanilla-scented substance. But now there are new revelations about how they improve the environment in which they live. Some researchers even call them ecosystem engineers and climate heroes because of how their work can help prevent or reduce the intensity of wildfires.
My fact this week was also about wildfires, particularly those on the West Coast fueled by eucalyptus trees. It turns out that none of them are from the United States: they’re all from Australia. In the mid-1800s, Americans believed that eucalyptus was the solution to some major wood shortages. This was very important when we were building lots of railways, for example. But the introduction of the trees didn’t go exactly as planned. Although they provide some environmental benefits (like windbreaks, shade, and improved soil quality), they have proven completely useless for the wood you would use to build railroads. But there were already forests full of them in the West (if you live in California, you’ve seen them). And they are also saturated with highly flammable eucalyptus oil, turning them into bomb trees when set on fire. This is not a good combination with a biome known for wildfires. And that’s not the only reason they’re dangerous: listen to the full episode to learn how they got their Australian nickname, the “widow maker.”
I learned all about these trees during my recent trip to the Blue Mountains, located about two hours west of Sydney and completely covered in eucalyptus forests. In fact, that’s why the Blue Mountains are blue. Ricky also visited Sydney a few weeks ago and decided to regale us with all his weirdest koala anecdotes. Connect with The strangest thing this week to learn all about how they run on the ground at “full” speed (it’s not very fast), have brains as smooth as marbles, and grow to the size of 35,000 candies.
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