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Hey, I'm Latif Nasser. I'm Lulu Miller. This is Radiolab. Okay, should we do this thing? Yeah. And today, we're going to start with a story from our producer, Becca Bressler. How did you stumble across this? How did this little guy possess your brain? Okay. I basically, it was my turn to pitch something. And I was in like a dark Airbnb in Portland with my friend in January and just feeling like totally lost.

lost for inspiration. So I did a thing I actually never do when I'm looking for pitches, which is look for an animal story. Because I actually, I don't even really like animals that much. Like, I honestly am one of those people that I think pets dogs because I'm afraid of being judged if I don't, if I don't bend down and pet the dog. So like, that's...

That's how like animal agnostic like is apathetic like I actually am. Anyways, so like I'm Googling animal like science news. Clicked the animal...

And came across an article about it. It's just this little creature that to me struck me as a total genius. And that's what I want to tell you about. All right. I'm sort of still eating my breakfast. Also, for some balanced reporting, I dragged in animal lover producer Annie McEwen. Hello.

Okay, so this animal lives in these shrubby fields. A bushy kind of open landscape. In India, just outside Bangalore. It is quite an isolated area. This is Ritik Deb. He's an evolutionary ecologist at Vishwa Bharti University. In West Bengal, India. And he says to find this animal, you go out in the evening. In complete darkness. And walk out into the center of this field and just stop.

stand completely still and you wait for their song. Generally, on an average, maybe 10 minutes or so. The song of... A cricket. A cricket? Yeah. Really? Yeah. Hey! I mean, I don't know if I'd call that a song. Like, it's like a chirp.

No, no, no. I'm going to call it a song. All right. Stick with me here. Okay. All right. Fine. Fine. Okay. So these crickets are called tree crickets. And just to give you a visual, they're sort of a translucent green. They've got little tiny wings. They're around one centimeter long. One centimeter. So like your pinky finger. Half of the pinky finger, I would say. So like a pinky fingernail. Slightly bigger than that. Slightly bigger than a pinky fingernail, depending on who you are. Is it hard to find...

It depends on where the cricket is. Once it happens that we hear a cricket and every time we go to a location, it feels like it's calling from behind us. We turn, we go to another location. Then it strikes us that it's calling from within our backpack.

Oh my gosh. And their song that Ritik uses to track these little guys down, that is the thing that makes them so interesting. Yeah. It's a hugely costly phenomenon. Ritik explained that the male crickets, who are the ones who sing the songs, they do this to attract mates. And every night a male cricket sings, it can lose up to 20% of its body weight.

Whoa. It like sings itself skinny. Yeah, it'd be like you or I losing 25 or 30 pounds in one night just to find a mate. Huh. And this is actually a classic conundrum in evolution. You would find it across so many different organisms. Darwin first noticed it in peacocks and it became known as the peacock puzzle. So a peacock's tail, as grand and beautiful as it is...

by the theory of natural selection kind of shouldn't be. It prevents them from being able to really fly well. It gets them like caught up in bushes easily. Peacocks are absurd. Totally, totally. And they really puzzled Darwin. Fashion over function. No, exactly. This is classic fashion over function. Totally. And fashion over function in science is actually just called sexual selection.

There's an official term for it, which is that. Darwin eventually figured out that females prefer peacocks with extravagant tails. And therefore, those peacocks mate a bunch more and they have many more offspring. And that is why that trait survives. Right. So these crickets are kind of like the peacocks, except that instead of having a big colorful tail, they have a very exhausting...

but super sexy song. And Ritchick would eventually discover actually that the sexiest songs are the louder songs. So females like loud, loud songs. Got it. But the genius in this cricket, the thing that made me fall in love with them so much is that some of these little guys give their little cricket middle finger to this beauty standard.

What? How? What do you mean? Okay, so let me tell you. So one night, Ritik is out in the field looking for crickets like he does. Another PhD student was also helping me with sampling. And then... He hears this song. I hear one cricket which...

Sounds louder than usual. Like louder than he's ever heard before. It's so loud that it feels like it's just near my ear, but there is no bush there. It's like the cricket is in his head, but not, obviously. Yeah. So we start searching for that particular cricket. He's moving through this field. I am like trying to overarch through top of a bush. Yeah.

It was really hard to locate it. Yeah, we are completely exhausted. Neither of us can find the cricket. And then suddenly I see that there seems to be a hole in the middle of a leaf. And there is a tiny head which is popping out. A little hole about the size of a penny in this leaf. And inside it, the head of a tiny tree cricket. I was like...

What am I looking at? And then I call my friend. We now are investigating more. Like we are looking from the back. We are trying to look from the side. And what they eventually see is that this cricket is singing from within this leaf. It's calling from the hole of the leaf.

So he's like, that's weird. Yeah, this is something very, very unusual. Because these crickets, they're always on the leaf. They're never actually in the leaf. My supervisor had given her mobile number and had told that only in case of emergencies, you should call.

And I frantically searched for my mobile and I called her immediately. 911. And she told him, you know, I've actually heard about this before. It was written about in some paper a few decades ago. This was a publication which came out in 1975. So what he saw, it wasn't just some fluke. Does it have a name?

They called it... Baffling. And the name that they gave to these crickets was... They called them...

Bafflers. Bafflers. Okay. Why? Why bafflers? So the leaves with the holes are called baffles. And a baffle is a surface that reflects sound, basically. Oh, okay. So the leaf is like taking the vibrations of their song and shooting it out into the field? Yeah, basically. You can think of a megaphone kind of a thing, right? So in other words, if you took that cricket out of the hole, it would be quiet.

And if you put it back in the hole, it would be loud again. The paper also explained that these crickets in the holes, they didn't just like fly.

fall into a hole, they created the holes for themselves. They chewed them with their little cricket mouths and they climbed inside them to amplify their songs. Wow. So they're like fashioning a tool? Exactly. Like a little insect tool? Exactly. Wow. Okay, that is crazy, right? That's pretty cool. Yeah. Okay, but this raises a very real and interesting question for Rittich. Does this work? No.

Like we said before, when it comes to these crickets, females generally prefer louder individuals. Louder is better. Now, sometimes they have to settle for a quiet cricket. Based on how much energy you have spent searching. Like your standards lower. Exactly. Very relatable. Yeah. But if given the choice, it will always go for the louder one.

And it's not even just that a female cricket prefers a louder cricket to a quieter cricket. She'll actually mate with that louder cricket for longer than she would that quiet cricket. And here, Rittik has found a quiet cricket, pretending, using this leaf megaphone thing to disguise itself as a loud one.

And so the question is, do the females actually get deceived? Do they treat this cricket like a loud cricket? Do they stick around and mate with it for longer than they would if it didn't have that baffle? Or can they spot the con? Is she like, I've been punked? Or is she like, let's do it, whatever. It will all boil down to the point whether the female can catch the bluff.

So Rittich didn't experiment to test this out. And what he found was that the female cricket... It spent equal amount of time with a quiet cricket whose call has been amplified by using baffle, with that of a truly loud individual who already calls at that particular loudness. The female crickets mated with the bafflers just as much as the naturally loud crickets. So it was like...

wow, indeed the cheating is working. It's just ingenious. Like this little cricket that by no fault of its own isn't supposed to mate that much has found this incredibly clever way of leveling the playing field, of sort of like playing with the big dogs and like keeping himself in the fight.

But like to me, I don't know. I'm like a little hesitant because like considering it from the female side. Yeah. What the hell? Like this is false advertising. The whole idea of sexual selection, as I understand it, is that the peacock's tail or the loud cricket chirp, like that suggests genetic change.

And the reason that it's lasted for so long in the cricket world is because loud guys are better mates that are going to produce stronger offspring who are more likely to survive. So now what this kind of hack, this is a bait and switch. A lie. Like this is not fair. But this cricket.

Cricket is a genius. Like, I guess that's where I come in is. But is he even, is he an evil genius is the question. No, I know. I've like self-reflected on this a lot and whether or not like I should be ashamed that I am endorsing this type of deception. However, a couple other ways you could think about it. The loudness might just signal this is a good one and I should spend more time mating with it. And

And so whether that is a cricket that is just naturally louder or a cricket that has figured out a way to make its own calls louder, like that is a pretty, that trait, like, I don't know. I feel like that deserves some recognition. I don't know though, Bex. Like it's still a lie. It's still a trick. I just, this is the guy, this is the animal that wooed you over into liking animals? Yes!

It is, okay. And, okay, I guess the other reason that I want to defend this male cricket is, so in the peacocks, peacocks have developed these beautiful tails because females choose and they like big, pretty tails, right? So it's like this whole sex of peacocks has adapted just to be chosen as a mate, used for its body, if you will. Now, my feeling about this male cricket is that

It feels like in a way that what we're seeing is crickets not narrowing in into some like homogenized version of the cricket that is the most likely to get chosen. This cricket's like fighting for itself. It's like I might not measure up to your beauty standards, but I deserve to survive. And so I'm going to find another way of doing that. Producer, animal lover, Becca Bressler.

I wrote a song about the cricket. Oh, sing me the song. Can you guys give me a beat? I guess it's like, they rub their wings so they don't die alone. They use the leaves as a megaphone. They spread their seeds to get the ladies going. They use the leaves as a megaphone. Thank you so much.

Next up, we've got another underdog story for you. But we are leaving the fields of India and heading onto the field in the American South. Hike! We'll be back.

Hey, listeners. This is Becca Bressler. I produced one of the segments for this episode alongside Annie McKeown. First off, thank you. As you know, Radiolab belongs to New York Public Radio, which is to say that we rely on your support. For each episode, we rope in so many people to do so many different things. This episode was no exception.

There were two reporters on this episode, Annie and me, our team of sound designers, and our incredible fact checker, Diane Kelly. We talked to two different guests. We read at least three books, probably like 25, 30 articles. And there were as many as, I don't know, 17 or 18 versions of each story until we made one that worked. And this is just what we do. We dive into each episode as deep as we can. And this takes so much time.

And we do this thanks to you. You help sustain us over time. This is why we created our membership program, The Lab.

We are so very grateful to you. So we also try to make it worth your while. There's so much stuff that we love that we can't include in every episode that you'll get to hear or even events where we get to spend time together. Also, swag. There's like a super cool tie-dye hat that has a goat on top of a cow, which is so strange. Bottom line is that your support makes it possible for us to continue to do the work that we do.

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I'm Maria Konnikova. And I'm Nate Silver. And our new podcast, Risky Business, is a show about making better decisions. We're both journalists who moonlight as poker players, and that's the lens we're going to use to approach this entire show. We're going to be discussing everything from high-stakes poker to personal questions. Like whether I should call a plumber or fix my shower myself. And of course, we'll be talking about the election, too. Listen to Risky Business wherever you get your podcasts.

Latif. Lulu. Radiolab. Next up, we've got another story about some little guys trying to do a big thing. Okay, let's just huddle up, circle up. Yeah, circle up, circle up. What are you here to tell us about? Great question. Okay. From producer Annie McEwen. All right, let's do it.

Okay, so picture a college football field in Atlanta, Georgia. What season? It's fall. It's fall. It's October. Okay. And it's a warm day. It's like 70 degrees plus and it's humid and the fans are cheering from the stands as the players jog out onto the field. Georgia Tech versus Cumberland University. The game is about to begin. A familiar scene in the U.S. today. Yeah. Yeah.

Except these players, instead of bulky pads and giant shiny helmets, are wearing little leather caps and knitted socks pulled up to their knees. Because this game happened in 1916. Oh. Okay. And the spectators in these stands are about to witness history. Something that could never be repeated. Because this football game should never have happened.

Well, that wasn't just a football game because that's ridiculous. Who would do that? Here to help me explain is Cumberland history professor Dr. Tara Mitchell Melnick. I am a ninth generation Tennessean, so we've been here a while.

So this game, this football game, when did you first hear about it? I don't really know. I feel like I've just always known about it. I think that's kind of one of Cumberland's claims to fame or infamy, maybe. I'm not sure. Okay. So let's just begin. If you could just tell me what happened. Okay. So back in 1916...

Cumberland had had some financial difficulties. The university needed to tighten its belt, cut its costs. Decisions had been made. Football had been cut out. And Cumberland no longer is going to have a football team. Now, a game schedule had already been drawn up for that season. So Cumberland had to reach out to all those schools and say, We're sorry, but we don't have a football team. We're not going to play. And every school said, no problem. Except for one. Georgia Tech. Georgia Tech.

The letter they get back from Georgia Tech says something like, You are under a contract. This is a legal contract. If you don't play this game, we are going to sue you for $3,000. $3,000 back then is like $80,000 today. Some people say it was going to bankrupt the school. It was going to close the school. Why was Georgia Tech being so, like, stubborn about this? Why wouldn't they just let him off the hook like everybody else? Well, this part of the story is a bit murky, but according to legend, Georgia Tech was pissed off at Cumberland. Oh.

And not just anyone at Georgia Tech, specifically their head coach, a man named John Heisman. The power, the magic, the power.

of the Heisman Trophy. Have you guys heard of John Heisman? No. The Heisman Trophy. Before I let you go, who's the Heisman Trophy winner? The Heisman Trophy could be decided in this... So the Heisman Trophy is handed out to the best college football player every year. And it's named after one of the most famous college football coaches in history. No one can deny the genius that is Heisman in football. This guy invented the hutch, the snap back to quarterback...

credited with popularizing the forward pass. Without him, football just wouldn't be the same sport. He is the guy. And he kind of looks like this terrifying god, like high cheekbones, strong stern brow. And his coaching style was also sort of godlike. You know, we don't lose, don't show weakness. He was sort of famous for opening each season with a speech to his players where he would hold up a football, look them all in the eyes and say...

Better to have died a small boy than to fumble this football. Whoa. Yeah.

And why was Heisman so angry at Cumberland? Well, as the legend goes, it all had to do with this Cumberland student named George Allen. George Allen apparently is kind of the big man on campus. He's 20, clean cut, ordinary looking white guy from the 19-teens, huge into frat parties, everyone's favorite bro dude. He is the student manager of both the baseball and the football team. And when Cumberland University canceled their football team, George Allen had this idea.

And it was this idea, the legend goes, that would make John Heisman so pissed. Okay. Okay. So George Allen, he's feeling school spirit drop. And one day he's like, if Cumberland baseball, if the Cumberland baseball team can really hit it out of the park at their next game,

then maybe the loss of the football program won't sting so much. He's trying to show the world the school's still sporty. Yes. So he sneakily hires all of these minor league players, these professional baseball players. Quote unquote ringers. Guys who weren't technically Cumberland students. To put on the Cumberland College uniform and play in this like upcoming baseball game. And who are they playing? They're playing Georgia Tech's

baseball team. Oh. Which for some reason is also coached by John Heisman. Oh no. Yeah. And the game is just a complete blowout. There are these like professional players playing these kids basically and they're just like getting bored, hitting everything. At some point they just start bunting. So unfair. And they eventually win by a score of 22 to nothing. Cumberland school spirit is back. But John Heisman is not happy. Yeah. I could see why. And

So when Cumberland says, hey, we're not going to make that football game in the fall in Atlanta because we canceled our football program, Heisman basically says, up yours, George Allen. We are going to play this game. But the problem is Cumberland doesn't have a football team. We've eliminated our football program. And so George Allen steps up and says, here's what we're going to do. We're going to play this game.

But there is no football team. So what does he do? Basically, George Allen just starts recruiting on campus. Petitioning all these young law students. And they're late teens and early 20s. These like life pale figures you can see in the halls of the library or out partying. They were not anti-party. Let's just put it that way. And George Allen is like, we need your help. The school needs your help. Alma mater is asking for your help kind of thing. And people step up. Somewhere between 16 and 18 students. Have they played football?

before? Some of them have. A couple of the guys did, had been football players like in high school. So there is some sense of what does this game look like and how do we play this game? It's not like they're complete novices. So they quickly scrambled to raise money for train tickets and hotel rooms and

And when the big day arrives, there's a huge send-off in Lebanon. Everyone comes out to cheer on the boys who volunteered to save their school. You know, they're waving banners, big signs that say things like, Oh, wow. And then they catch a train and go to Atlanta. And as we head to Atlanta, I'm going to bring in Radio Lab's production coordinator, W. Harry Fortuna, because Harry, I think, is the only one amongst the four of us who knows anything about football. I'm here to help. Okay.

October 7th, 1916, Grant Field, Georgia Tech, a thousand Tech spectators in the stands. For Cumberland, it would have been a big crowd. They would have been probably a little bit in awe of the number of people who had come out for this game. It reminds me a little bit of that scene in Hoosiers where the basketball team goes into that great big stadium and they're kind of like, oh my goodness. This is big.

And they don't have equipment managers. They have to all carry their own equipment. They had barely any pads. It's those old leather helmets, leatherheads. Barely more than a hat on your head. I don't even think there were mouth guards. On the sidelines, suited up with the rest of the players, George Allen says a few words. We're just trying to make this work. We've got to play this game and get home. And as the ref flipped the coin...

up into the air and it fell, flashing in the sun, turning over and over and over. There was this feeling from the Cumberland side that maybe... - We could do this. We could really do this. Turns out to be something they're gonna talk about for the rest of their lives. - Because from the very beginning of this game,

Things start to go sideways. Georgia Tech wins the toss and they elect to kick off. They kick the ball. It flies through the air. It's Kape a Cumberland player who then turns to see a wall of Georgia Tech players hurtling towards him and he freezes.

Edwards, the Cumberland quarterback, uses his body to block an oncoming Tech player and is immediately knocked out cold. The guy holding the ball, the guy who froze, is also flattened. And Cumberland, they can't get out of their own territory. They end up punting it, but the punt only goes 20 yards. Not a lot. Not a lot. Tech gets possession of the ball and quickly runs it into the end zone. Touchdown for Georgia Tech. On the first play. And I just

want you guys to go ahead and access that YouTube file that I sent you guys. Oh, great. Because this is a song that plays every single time tech gets a touchdown. Okay. Hold on, hold on. Let me play. Hell of an engineer.

Georgia Tech kicks for the extra point, and after less than a minute of play, the score is Tech 7, Cumberland 0. And that first touchdown is just the beginning. Georgia Tech begins to run that ball over the line again and again and again and again.

Touchdown after touchdown after touchdown after touchdown. The home crowd is losing their minds. And very quickly, it becomes pretty apparent. This is...

This is going to be a problem. Cumberland is getting clobbered. They're being tackled. Get in the face or the head with all kinds of body parts. Your arm, your head, your shoulder, just whatever it takes to bring him down. That's football. Quarterback Edwards makes it back out onto the field, but is immediately knocked out again. Oh, come on. He's carried off the field again. And basically every time Georgia Tech touches the ball, they run it into the end zone. The Cumberland players are like, this is bad. Just a ridiculous slaughter of a football game.

They do finally get to halftime. What's the score right now? The score at halftime is 126 to nothing. 126 to nothing? Yep. And many of these players now would have been pulled out for concussions. They would not have been allowed to continue, but it's a different time. In a normal game, there would have been just a

forfeit. But if Cumberland does forfeit, then they will have to pay that $3,000. So they have to stay to the end of the game. Gotta keep going. And Heisman, he was not holding back. He also doesn't trust George Allen. He's like, well, maybe he brought in some ringers. And George Allen is over on his sideline just trying to exhort his team. He's like, okay, we're halfway there, guys. Just stick it out.

Halftime came to a close. We can do it. We can do it. We just got to get finished. And now that the goal of winning has been fully abandoned and it's all just about running out the clock, all kinds of instincts kick in. Survival, fight or flight. Some Cumberland players begin to run away from TechPlay

There's even one Cumberland player that is like, every time Tech got the ball, I turned around and I ran with the Techs. And that was the way that he was like trying to protect himself. Once in a while, it sort of felt like they had a chance, I guess, because there's one story where a Cumberland player has an open field to the goal line. He is running. He is going to make it. Cumberland. But no, he falls. He trips over one of his own teammates who is on all fours looking for his glasses. Ah!

Third quarter begins. Our friend Edwards, he was knocked out twice. He's back in the game. Someone gives him the ball. He throws it to a teammate who throws it back. Neither of them want the ball. If you don't have the football, you can't be tackled. So they're standing there tossing it back and forth and back and forth. It's almost like a hot potato football. Until a tech tackler just comes and creams them both and Edwards is carried off the field a third time.

time. Oh, Edward. We have Pee-wee, a law student who was told he would not have to touch the ball. He gets thrown the ball.

He panics. He flings the ball away. He runs and hides behind a fence where two other Cumberland players are already hiding. No! Yeah, they do not want him to give away their hiding place, so they throw him back over the fence. There was one story where Heisman looks over at his bench, and he's like, I don't know that guy. And he goes over and says, aren't you a Cumberland player? And the guy says, don't tell them. Cumberland player, his name is Johnny Dog Nelson. He is chased around the stadium by a dog, a real-life dog. Oh!

So we're full, like, Looney Tunes cartoon right now. Absolutely. Okay, so we're nearing the end here, and this is kind of like an amazing moment because Cumberland is like, like, there's blood in the grass. There are broken noses. Poor Edwards is knocked out for a third time. These people are destroyed. They have nothing left. Score right now? Score is 173-0. Wow. Okay. There's no hope for these guys. But for some reason...

They find it in their hearts to rally. And so Cumberland, they're in a huddle or whatever, talking about their next play. It must have either been a kickoff or they're blocking an extra point. Block a field goal? Yes. And someone proposes this climb the ladder play, which is now illegal. Oh, God. And some of the Cumberland players are like, no, no, this is suicidal. We shouldn't do this. But then this young guy, Fishy Woods...

He's blonde. He's got, like, a nice smile. He volunteers. He's like, I'll do it. And you can imagine, like, the crowd must be freaking out right now because, like, watching a team rally when they're so low. I know. I love that. I love it. It's amazing.

So one player gets on all fours, grabs the knees of a second player, who bends over at the waist and grabs the stomach of a third player. What? As Georgia Tech's kicker kicks the ball, the fourth player, Vishu Woods, he charges at them, runs up their backs and leaps into the air as high as he can. What? He flies through the air with his arm outstretched, reaching for the ball. But his fingers just miss everything.

And instead of blocking the ball with his hand, Vichy takes it to the face. Breaks his nose. Probably has a concussion. Wait, but... He does block it. Yeah, so the score would have been higher if it weren't for Vichy Woods. Yeah, he blocks it with his face. Eesh.

The game ends soon after with a final score of 222 to nothing. Wow. And there were 32 total touchdowns that Tech scored. And was that the highest ever at that point scoring? Yes. And that is actually still the highest today. It's in the Guinness Book of World Records. It's the highest scoring game. I was just like trying to imagine what was the end like, like the final whistle of the game.

on that final minute. Lay down and try to catch your breath and determine, you know, is anything broken? Just exhaustion and frustration. These guys are literally total losers.

But they did stick it out to the end and save their school from potential financial ruin. Did they go out for steak dinners? Apparently they did. Did they go out and party? Apparently they went out partying that night in Atlanta with their swollen eyes, barely able to see anything. But apparently they did. Even Edwards? I don't know about Edwards. Yeah. I'm still like, I want a Vichy Woods tattoo. And I can't not love that. Vichy Woods!

Producer, football commentator, Annie McKeelan. All right. Well, before we go, I just wanted to tell you about a new series that just came out from our colleagues over at Death, Sex and Money. It is called Hard. And it's about...

It's about erectile dysfunction. I was curious how you were going to say that exactly. Yeah. And as a woman married to a woman, I wasn't sure if there was going to be much in there for me. But with Anna Sales Hosting, it turned out there really was. I mean, there are these frank conversations about what intimacy can be.

And there is a really wild history of the invention of Viagra and the totally shocking physiology of how the drug works. I didn't know any of this. It's a series that ends up having a lot of joy in it. By the end, it really...

moves past the idea that quote-unquote erectile dysfunction even is dysfunction and has these really expansive moments of people talking about new visions of what intimacy can be like this. It feels like, the way I've explained it before, is it feels like there's sunlight in my veins. Like everything inside me turns red

white and euphoric. My whole body kind of disappears into this state of pleasure. It feels like I'm injected with pleasure. Again, it's called Hard from Death, Sex, and Money. Hope you give it a listen. ♪

Radio Lab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Susie Lechtenberg is our executive producer. Dillon Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, and

Rachel Cusick, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhun Yenisambindam, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sara Khari, Anna Roskvet-Paz, Ariane Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster. With help from Carolyn McCusker and Sarah Sonbach. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Adam Shibill.

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