Stay Out of the Water!

**SPEAKER_2** (0:08)
You're listening to Strange by Nature, your guide to the strange, weird, unbelievable and improbable wonders of the natural world.

**Kirk Mona** (0:23)
Hello, everyone, and thanks for being here today. I'm Kirk Mona, and joining me are Rachel Gimza and Victoria Thompson. We're all naturalists who together have scoured the world for weird and wonderful wonders just to please your mammalian brain's desire for novelty. Isn't that nice? Let's do this.
Hello, everyone, welcome to the show.

**Rachel Gimza** (0:44)
Hey.

**Kirk Mona** (0:45)
I am really excited to be here. How about you?

**Rachel Gimza** (0:47)
I'm so excited. Like, my, I'm not gonna brag, but my topic is a little bit of a twisty, turny journey.

**Kirk Mona** (0:57)
Exciting. Well, you'll have to wait, I'm afraid, because I'm up first.

**Rachel Gimza** (1:01)
Yeah.

**Kirk Mona** (1:01)
I actually have a question for the two of you. Do you, do you like, do you like water?

**Victoria Thompson** (1:07)
In what context?

**Rachel Gimza** (1:09)
Yes.

**Kirk Mona** (1:10)
All contexts.

**Victoria Thompson** (1:11)
I like to drink water.

**Rachel Gimza** (1:12)
I have a full water bottle right by me and a cup of tea, so, yes.

**Victoria Thompson** (1:17)
I like to swim sometimes and wade.

**Rachel Gimza** (1:19)
Yeah, I do like to wade.

**Kirk Mona** (1:25)
That's a terrible inside joke.

**Rachel Gimza** (1:27)
You're welcome.

**Kirk Mona** (1:28)
Water is, I think, pretty important to living things here on Earth.

**Rachel Gimza** (1:32)
I like being living.

**Kirk Mona** (1:33)
The surface is 71% water, so there's a lot of it. And we record this podcast in Minnesota, which is the land of 10,000 lakes.

**Rachel Gimza** (1:41)
We have more than 10,000 lakes.

**Kirk Mona** (1:42)
And there is water everywhere. I think I may have mentioned this on the show before. My friend Katie, who moved away to Colorado and then came back here to visit, commented on how wild it is, just how much water we have everywhere. Because once she had moved out of the state, you kind of forget that there's just water and lakes everywhere.

**Rachel Gimza** (2:02)
I agree. It's amazing. You can throw a rock and find a lake or a river or a stream.

**Kirk Mona** (2:08)
If it didn't grow up in a place like that, where water is more scarce, you wouldn't have realized that. But I think being a Minnesotan, I love me some water, and I would say I am drawn to the water. I like canoeing, kayaking, sailing, water skiing, which was invented here.

**Rachel Gimza** (2:25)
Yeah, it was.

**Kirk Mona** (2:26)
Sitting on the beach, just being around water is pretty great. It is, of course, though, dangerous.

**Rachel Gimza** (2:33)
Oh, 100 percent. Respect the water that you are by.

**Kirk Mona** (2:36)
Yes, indeed.

**Victoria Thompson** (2:37)
Dihidrogen monoxide, one of the world's deadliest substances.

**Kirk Mona** (2:41)
Oh, we go down that rabbit hole sometimes, yeah. I was just talking to some of my summer campers about the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide.
Yeah, but we won't go into that. Our bodies are mostly water and we need water to survive. It is particularly incompatible though with our lungs. I can't say this enough. Don't put water in your lungs.

**Rachel Gimza** (3:03)
I've done it.

**Kirk Mona** (3:04)
Don't do it.

**Rachel Gimza** (3:05)
It's bad for you.

**Kirk Mona** (3:06)
Especially if you want to breathe, yeah.
Now, growing up near all this water, I naturally took swimming lessons. It's important to know how to swim. Many animals can naturally swim, but a lot can't. And for many animals, ending up in water means death, which is pretty wild if you just stop to think about it. Of course it does, right? But for some animals, you know, it's particularly bad. And 71% of the earth is covered in a substance that they will die if they fall into it.

**Victoria Thompson** (3:35)
Right.

**Kirk Mona** (3:36)
And if you think about that, it's like, that's wild.

**Rachel Gimza** (3:39)
Like you think most of more animals and living things would be equipped to deal with it.

**Kirk Mona** (3:47)
To deal with it, right?

**Victoria Thompson** (3:48)
To be able to swim.

**Kirk Mona** (3:49)
It would be like if 71% of the earth was covered in hydrofluoric acid or something like that, right? For humans.
That would be bad. And I was thinking this would be like really weird to live in such a dangerous world. But here's the thing, most of that water is in the ocean. And it doesn't really matter if I know how to swim. If you drop me in the middle of the ocean, or even not all that far off shore, I'm not going to make it. Really, water is dangerous no matter who or what you are. If you are a land-based creature, I guess you'd say. So my story this week is about how water, that thing that keeps us alive, can turn into our worst enemy in a terribly horrible way. And it probably isn't what you expect. So this week, I'm talking about myrmythids.