Terrestrials
by WNYC
Welcome, nature lovers, to the home of the Terrestrials podcast and family-friendly Radiolab episodes about nature. Every other week, host Lulu Miller will take you on a nature walk to encounter a plant or animal behaving in ways that will surprise you. Squirrels that can regrow their brains, octopuses that can outsmart their human captors, honeybees that can predict the future. You don’t have to be a kid to listen, just someone who likes to see the world anew.You’ll hear a range of nature stories on this podcast. Sometimes these will be brand new Terrestrials episodes, full of original songs (by “The Songbud” Alan Goffinski) that tell a fantastical-sounding story about nature that is 100% true. Sometimes these will be our very best, shiniest, furriest, leafiest Radiolab episodes about animals or plants or nature. The stories that drop here will always be family-friendly and safe for kids. They will always be sound-rich and full of the vivid, gripping storytelling you’ve come to expe
Episodes
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El escondite: Un misterio de la mariposa monarca
Just in time to commemorate Day of the Dead, we are releasing a special Spanish version of our monarch butterflies episode! Este episodio nos lleva a las montañas del centro de México para conocer un oasis donde, después de volar miles de kilómetros, millones de mariposas monarcas se reúnen,...
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The Night Flyer: How Bats sPOOkily Revive Forests (Replay)
This Halloween, we’re going to the dark side. Deep in the darkest tropical forests, some of the world’s most elusive bats hang upside down in their winged sleeping bags. On a quest to find one of these flying mammals, Producerbud Ana ventures into a Puerto Rican forest and the back corridors of…
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The Scarecrow: Scaring Birds with Mary Roach
It’s an epic humans-versus-birds showdown in this follow-up to last week’s crows episode! Ever since humans started farming, birds have been eating our crops. And for centuries, we’ve been trying to figure out how to frighten them away. Science writer Mary Roach walks Lulu and Radiolab’s Latif...
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The Goths: Befriending Clever Crows
Spooky season is upon us and so we are bringing you a tale of Halloween’s eeriest avian mascot. Emma Terry is friends with basically everyone in her town. She personifies a rainbow—she has bouncy blonde hair, sparkly cat-eye glasses, and a closet full of bright colors. But for the last decade,...
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The Hideout: A Monarch Butterfly Mystery
As the leaves begin to change and the air cools, monarch butterflies disappear from our skies and journey …where? The mysterious migration of this iconic butterfly stumped scientists for decades. Until an intercepted message on a butterfly wing led them to the isolated mountains of central Mexico...
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The Snow Beast: A Mystery Animal (Replay)
Today we bring you a story stranger than fiction. In 2006, paleobiologist Natalia Rybczynski took a helicopter to a remote Arctic island near the North Pole, spending her afternoons scavenging for ancient treasures on the ground. One day, she found something the size of a potato chip. Turns out…
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The Wallowers: A Buffalo Comeback Story
Ervin Carlson grew up on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana hearing stories about buffalo (aka American bison) who once roamed the land by the hundreds of thousands. These giant beasts weighed up to 2000 pounds, were almost 7 feet tall, and had two curved horns so sharp they could even buck…
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Celestials: A Bedtime Snail Story Experiment
Meet François Tranquille. He's a snail. He's French. And this is the first episode of a little experiment we're calling Celestials: Bedtime Stories from Terrestrials. Restful tales, bedtime meditations, and the occasional lullaby, designed to help you drift off to sleep. Like Terrestrials, it's...
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The Fuzzy Ruckus: The Power of Lichen (Replay)
Artist Ashley (Ash) Eliza Williams was so shy growing up that they found it hard to speak to people. Instead, they withdrew from the world of humans and found comfort in the forest, where they spent hours exploring, scavenging, and collecting — eventually discovering lichen. They began painting...
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The Jimothy: Seattle Raccoon Steals Hearts
If you’ve been on the internet recently, you might’ve heard of Jimothy—a raccoon from Seattle who went viral. Jimothy t-shirts, murals, tattoos, and tribute songs popped up across the country. We wanted to understand why this raccoon had captured so many hearts, so we spoke to one of the first...
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Dung Beetles from Just the Zoo of Us
It’s summer break! So, while Terrestrials takes a summer breather,, we’re bringing you a show that we really love. It’s called Just the Zoo of Us, and it’s produced by Ellen and Christian Weatherford, a married couple with a shared love of telling stories about this wonderful planet!In every...
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The Charmer: King Cobras' FANGtastic Powers
Lulu has been terrified of snakes all her life. But strangely, her oldest son has been obsessed with them since he was two. So to understand his fascination, she called a snake expert who might also be one of the least afraid people on Earth: Gowri Shankar Pogiri. As a kid in Bangalore, India,...
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The Travelers Update: A Moon Tree Grows in New York
The director of horticulture at Madison Square Park, Stephanie Lucas, spends her days caring for over 300 trees in the heart of New York City. One day in 2022, she saw a callout from NASA giving away seeds that had traveled to the moon. This would be the crown jewel of the park! She and her team...
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The DADventure: Wild Animal Dads from Owl Monkeys to Seahorses
What does it really mean to be a dad? In the animal world, fathers have long been painted as aggressive or absent. At best providers and protectors, but certainly not caregivers. And yet for every tale of a lion or chimp dad eating its own young (yikes!), there’s another creature who tells a...
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BIG CATS 2: Leopards & Jaguars (2 Fast, 2 FURious)
We're back with PURR-T TWO of our big cats journey, and this time, we’re heading even deeper into the cat-iverse. We travel to India, where conservationist Shatrunjay Pratap Singh introduces us to leopards that live among shepherds and ancient temples. Then we head to Colombia, where biologist...
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BIG CATS: Lions, Tigers & Roars (Oh My!)
Big cats are our most requested animal, but Lulu doesn’t really want to make an episode about them! . She thinks lions, tigers, and their feline cousins are the bullies of the animal kingdom. So Songbud Alan and Producerbud Ana set out to change her mind. We head to the Bronx Zoo where big cat...
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The Wicked Smoocha: Anglerfish Break A World Record
In the depths of the ocean, a tiny male anglerfish catches a scent and follows it through the darkness. Eventually he finds a glowing, toothy female with a bacterial lightbulb on her head. He kisses her… and never lets go. Their bodies permanently fuse, merging bloodstreams, flesh, and digestive...
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The Forest Fairy: Aphids Reveal Hidden Harmonies
Amy Ray (whose music you might know from the Indigo Girls) was on a walk in the Georgia woods with her dogs when she passed a tree branch and saw hundreds of tiny, white, fluffy creatures doing a synchronized stadium wave. She was mesmerized. Turns out, she was looking at woolly aphids - small,...
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The Greeting: Yo-Yo Ma's Humpback Whale Experiment
As one of the most famous cellists of all time, Yo-Yo Ma has spent a lot of time playing music inside. But a few years ago, he decided to take the cello out of the fancy concert halls and into nature, bringing our very own Producerbud Ana along for the ride! That brings us to humpback whales.…
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The Red-Eyed Mascot: Loon Resilience in Minnesota
What do loons have to do with courage and community? In January, we received a letter from two sisters in Minnesota - Jude and Mo. They wrote to us because their city was experiencing a lot of unrest, with immigration agents arresting members of their community and protests ringing loud in the...
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The Snowball: Extreme Squirrels in the Arctic (Replay)
Middle schooler, Aanya, has an up-close encounter with a squirrel in the school yard, which leads her to an obsession with one of North America's most common critters. She tells host Lulu Miller all about the overlooked superpowers of squirrels, including one squirrel who lives way up in the...
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The Snoozer: Penguin Slackerzzz Rule
How rested would you feel if you took 10,000 naps a day? Chinstrap Penguins in Antarctica spend their days taking MICRONAPS, each around 4 seconds long. To learn why, Lulu meets one (played by Songbud Alan), who explains how micronaps help them conserve energy and protect their babies from “sky...
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Build-A-Dragon (Replay)
On February 17, in places like China, Malaysia, Korea and Chinatowns across the globe, dragons will rise in the form of massive puppets. Today we bring you a special Terrestrials episode on dragons to understand what they have to do with the New Year, what the dragon myth means, and explore the...
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The Portal: Groundhogs Lead Us Into an Underrealm of HOLES
Holes are full of a whole lot of nothin'. Pure, hollow emptiness. At least that’s what Songbud Alan thought before he fell down a rabbit hole of, well, HOLES! In honor of Groundhog Day, he takes Lulu to a fossil-filled pit behind a Chick-fil-A to dig up 66-million-year-old treasure, and deep down...
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The Spellbook: Ancient Recipes for Animals
Where do animals come from? That's something people have been trying to explain for thousands of years. And for a while, scientists and philosophers believed that any ol' person could create creatures if they just had the right recipe. A touch of sand, maybe a drop of blood and POOF: you could...
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The Present: A Gift from our Furry Friends
To celebrate New Year’s Day, there are all kinds of traditions. Some people eat black eyed peas for good luck, some list out resolutions. But here at Terrestrials, we are taking a cue from the wisdom of pets, who are so, so, so good at sleeping. After a short preamble from Lulu, we’ll turn the...
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The Slowpoke: How Sloths Grow Invisibility
Sloths are the slowest mammals on Earth. How can a creature that moves so slowly survive in a world that moves so fast? Zoologist Lucy Cooke helps us rethink everything we know about sloths and their slowness. We follow a sloth named Nacho from a rainforest to a nightclub, trek deep into mangrove...
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The Bridge: How Rainbows Connect Worlds
What is a rainbow? An optical illusion? Or a thing out there in the world? For centuries, cultures around the world believed that rainbows were bridges - pathways to gods and to the afterlife. Then in 1665, during a plague, a young Isaac Newton made a discovery that changed everything : sunlight…
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A Podcast Turducken: With Wow in the World, Terrestrials and Circle Round
Lulu is hosting a holiday meal. She’s invited the characters from her extended kids podcast family - Wow in the World and Circle Round - for an epic kids podcast crossover special. It’s a potluck of stories and on the table is a turducken. Yes, a turkey stuffed with a duck stuffed with a chicken....
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The Hybrid: A Miracle Mule
In the game of life, every species is like an action figure. You got your dogs and your dung beetles, your bald eagles and your blueberries. And for a long time scientists believed it was pretty much impossible for those action figures to mix and make a new kind of action figure that was able to...
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The Night Flyer: How Bats sPOOkily Revive Forests
This Halloween, we’re going to the dark side. Deep in the darkest tropical forests, some of the world’s most elusive bats hang upside down in their winged sleeping bags. On a quest to find one of these flying mammals, Producerbud Ana ventures into a Puerto Rican forest and the back corridors of…
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Maggies: The Healing Power of Baby Flies
Maggots are disgusting, right? Lulu has a hard time even saying the word maggot. But in this episode, we’re asking you to join us in setting our “ick” aside. If you stick with us, we promise that you’ll go from thinking these bugs are the grossest things ever to actually kinda liking them. Maybe...
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The Travelers: How Moon Trees Hide Among Us
In 1971, a red-headed, tree-loving astronaut named Stu ‘Smokey’ Roosa was asked to take something to the moon with him. Of all things, he chose to take a canister of 500 tree seeds. After orbiting the moon 34 times, the seeds made it back to Earth. NASA decided to plant the seeds all across the...
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The Builders: How Beavers Mend Our Planet
Few mammals have a bigger positive impact on the planet than the beaver. With its bright orange buck teeth, the creature is an expert engineer that brings life wherever it waddles and even fights fires. Our story begins in the Bronx river, once known as the “open sewer” of New York City. After…
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The Unimaginable: How Gravitational Waves (Literally) Rocked Our World
Over a billion lightyears ago, in the darkness of outer space, a collision of black holes sent out a fleet of invisible waves that were headed right toward planet Earth. The waves were so powerful they could ripple spacetime but most people on Earth didn't believe the waves were real. SPOILER...
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PIZZA BFF
Pizza is one of the world’s most beloved foods. But as much as we love the way it tastes, the secrets of its ingredients are even yummier to discover. We explore the surprising sounds tomatoes make when they’re stressed, how wheat became integral to human survival and how mold is sometimes......
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The Horseshoe Crab's Secret
We’re back with an episode from the Radiolab archive. Horseshoe crabs have been around for a long time. They outlived the dinosaurs, survived all mass extinctions and witnessed the sprouting of the Earth’s first trees. The secret to their longevity? Their baby blue blood. Which has been saving…
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The Mastermind: An Octopus Heist
A color-changing creature many people assumed to be brainless outsmarts his human captors. SPOILER: The creature is an octopus! Author Sy Montgomery tells the story of one octopus named Inky who makes us question who we consider intelligent (and kissable) in the animal kingdom. Learn about the...
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Crabtacular! A deep dive into the Hudson River
Today, we splash into the Hudson River Park with our Songbud to meet all kinds of crabs. With Siddartha and Carrie from the Hudson River Park, Alan puts on waterproof rubber overalls, gets his hands dirty in the river and dives into the secret lives of Hudson crabs. Plus, CRAB WEEK is going on...
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CHOWDA: A Souper Fascinating Tale
Today we’re bringing you a live episode we taped in Boston. It’s about clam chowder. We’re sharing it now because we’re doing ANOTHER LIVE SHOW at Little Island in NYC on August 6th + 7th - and that one’s about PIZZA! The show’s free. There will be pizza. Join if you’re in NYC (or make this the...
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The Sea Troll: An Everlasting Shark?
The Greenland shark is ugly. Its eyes look cloudy and dead. Its snout and fins are stubby. Its meat is poisonous. And that may be part of why most people have overlooked these sharks for so long. But there was a rumor circulating among Greenland villagers that this deepsea dweller could survive…
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Bugapalooza! LIVE! Jumping spiders, hissing roaches, and more
We’re doing a bunch of LIVE SHOWS at Little Island in NYC on August 6th-7th. For free. Come join! Check out all of our performances here. Today we’re bringing you an episode we taped LIVE at The Greene Space at WNYC. In a room filled with all types of critters — scorpions, hissing cockroaches, a...
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The Howler: The Dog Who Joined a Coyote Pack
On the outskirts of the Nevada desert, a young dog named Hades jumped his fence and ran away from home. His family lost hope, until one night, they saw Hades on the news. For almost seven months, he had been sleeping, eating and howling with a pack of coyotes. We usually view coyotes as vicious,...
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The Invaders: Coquí Frogs Just Won't Die
Coquí frogs are synonymous with Puerto Rican identity. Residents of the island doze off to the high-pitched calls of coquís from dusk to dawn. There are even playlists of hours of coquí calls that lull listeners to sleep. That’s why ProducerBud Ana, a proud Puerto Rican, was confused when she saw…
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The Snow Beast: A Mystery Animal with Latif Nasser
Today we bring you a story stranger than fiction. In 2006, paleobiologist Natalia Rybczynski took a helicopter to a remote Arctic island near the North Pole, spending her afternoons scavenging for ancient treasures on the ground. One day, she found something the size of a potato chip. Turns out…
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The Windbreaker: Why Farts Make the World Go Round
Farts. Trouser trumpets. Sulfur squeaks. Or toots, as Lulu insists on calling them. Smelly bubbles of air we don’t like to talk about. But Songbud Alan and Producerbud Ana are not ones to shy away from the stinky sidelines of science. First, they take us to a concert hall to meet a FARTchestra…
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The Shadow Creature: Rats Who Save Human Lives
Rats have a bad reputation. They’ve been called evil, terrifying and wicked. The lowliest and most abominable of creatures. Songbud Alan felt the same way until he heard of one rat from Tanzania named Magawa. We meet Pendo, Magawa’s human friend and trainer, who wanted to train Magawa for a...
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More Terrestrials Coming Soon!
Terrestrials returns Thursday, April 17th with a brand-new season! This spring, we’re diving into the wonderfully weird. Get ready to meet some of the fiercest, strangest creatures on Earth—from Hawaiian jungle goblins to New York City’s elusive sewer beasts to nine-foot-tall misunderstood snow...
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The Bullseye: Treasure Hunt to Recursive Islands
Have you ever seen an island on a lake? On an island? On a lake? On another island? Josh Calder has. Working in a dusty room of a library, he first saw one on a map, and has been fascinated with these “recursive islands” ever since. Song bud Alan Goffinski takes us on a wild journey into these...
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An Ocean in Space
BLAST OFF! NASA just sent a spacecraft to Europa, one of Jupiter's moons, and on the side of that spacecraft, they included a poem. Not just any poem — a poem by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón. A poem that’s supposed to represent all of humanity to the universe. No biggie. Host Lulu Miller opens up...
About this show
Welcome, nature lovers, to the home of the Terrestrials podcast and family-friendly Radiolab episodes about nature. Every other week, host Lulu Miller will take you on a nature walk to encounter a plant or animal behaving in ways that will surprise you. Squirrels that can regrow their brains, octopuses that can outsmart their human captors, honeybees that can predict the future. You don’t have to be a kid to listen, just someone who likes to see the world anew.You’ll hear a range of nature stories on this podcast. Sometimes these will be brand new Terrestrials episodes, full of original songs (by “The Songbud” Alan Goffinski) that tell a fantastical-sounding story about nature that is 100% true. Sometimes these will be our very best, shiniest, furriest, leafiest Radiolab episodes about animals or plants or nature. The stories that drop here will always be family-friendly and safe for kids. They will always be sound-rich and full of the vivid, gripping storytelling you’ve come to expe
Hosted by
WNYC