Author: Matt Soniak

After a big game in any sport, fans and players are going to be clamoring for commemorative merchandise, often just minutes after the game ends. To meet this demand and cash in on the wallet-loosening “We’re #1” euphoria, manufacturers and retailers produce and stock two sets of T-shirts, hats and other merchandise, declaring each team the champ.

Based on strong sales after the Chicago Bears’ 2007 NFC Championship win, Sports Authority printed more than 15,000 shirts proclaiming a Bears Super Bowl victory well before the game even started. And then the Colts beat the Bears, 29-17.

That’s a lot of misprinted shirts that can’t hit store shelves, and seem like fine candidates for the incinerator instead. And for a long time, that’s where they went, with all four major American pro sports leagues—MLB, NFL, NBA, and NHL—requiring the destruction of incorrect post-season apparel.

Fortunately, most of the leagues changed the way they do things and started donating the gear.

For almost two decades, an international humanitarian aid group called World Vision collected the unwanted items at its distribution center in Pittsburgh, then shipped them overseas to people living in disaster areas and impoverished nations. After losing Super Bowl XLIII in 2009, Arizona Cardinals gear was sent to children and families living in extreme poverty in El Salvador. In 2010, after the New Orleans Saints defeated Indianapolis, the Colts gear printed up for Super Bowl XLIV was sent to earthquake-ravaged Haiti.

In 2011, after Pittsburgh lost to the Green Bay Packers, the Steelers Super Bowl apparel went to Zambia, Armenia, Nicaragua, and Romania.

Beginning in 2015, after 19 years with World Vision, the NFL started working with Good360. After New England defeated Seattle in Super Bowl XLIX, Seahawks gear was distributed in Azerbaijan and Georgia.

Well, @12s here’s what the #BackToBack shirts would have looked like! #Seahawks pic.twitter.com/zUoIxc5HS8

— Kristen Drew (@KDrewKOMO) February 2, 2015

It’s too early to say where this year’s Patriots or Falcons merchandise will end up. In 2016, Good360 chief marketing officer Shari Rudolph told mental_floss that details about the products available for donation will be sent to Good360 in about a week. They’ll notify their nonprofit partners and determine who needs what.

“Once they request the product, it is shipped to a domestic location and stored within their facilities until they have enough product (through Good360 and other sources) to fill a container,” Rudolph said. “Then it is shipped overseas and distributed to people in need.”

As for those hats that seem to materialize out of thin air: Apparel company New Era Caps has already made 288 lids for each team. They’ll be stored in bags and monitored before being brought out to the field so the winners can celebrate in style.

A prior version of this story appeared in 2009. Additional reporting by Jake Rossen.

On December 24, 1955, the red telephone at the Continental Air Defense Command (CONAD) Operations Center in Colorado Springs, Colorado began ringing.

The red phone meant it was either the Pentagon or CONAD commander in chief General Earle Partridge on the other end, and their reason for calling would probably not be pleasant.

U.S. Air Force Col. Harry Shoup, director of operations at the center, rushed over to the phone and grabbed it.

“Yes, Sir, this is Colonel Shoup,” he barked.

Nothing but silence in response.

“Sir? This is Colonel Shoup,” he said.

Silence again.

“Sir? Can you read me alright?”

Finally, a soft voice on the other end.

“Are you really Santa Claus?” a little girl asked.

Shoup was stunned for a second. This must be a joke, he thought. He looked around the room, expecting to see his men laughing at their prank, but found stony, serious faces all around.

He realized that there was “some screwup on the phones,” and decided to play along.

“Yes, I am,” he answered. “Have you been a good little girl?”

The girl explained to Shoup that she would leave some food out for both Santa and his reindeer and then recited her Christmas list to him. Shoup thanked her for her hospitality, noting that Santa had a lot of traveling to do. How did he get to all those houses in one night, anyway, she asked.

Apparently, that was classified intelligence in Shoup’s mind. “That’s the magic of Christmas,” he said. If anyone asks her about that, he said, she should tell them to stop asking so many questions or Santa would put them on the naughty list.

“That red phone, boy,” Shoup later recalled. “That’s either the old man—the four star [General Partridge]—or the Pentagon. I was all shook up.”

The red phone would keep ringing throughout the night. Not because of Soviet nukes or fighter planes heading toward U.S. soil, but because of a typo.

That day, Shoup would later learn, a local newspaper ran a Sears Roebuck ad inviting kids to contact Santa.

“Hey Kiddies!” the ad read. “Call me on my private phone and I will talk to you personally any time day or night.” The ad listed Santa’s direct line, but the number in the copy was off by a digit. Instead of connecting to the special line Sears set up with a Santa impersonator, kids wound up calling a secret air defense emergency number.

After a few more Santa-related calls, Shoup pulled a few airmen aside and gave them a special assignment. They would answer the phone and give callers—barring the Pentagon, we assume—Santa’s current location as they “tracked” him on their radar.

From that night on, tracking Santa became a yearly tradition, carried on by the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) when it replaced CONAD in 1958. A new phone number, separate from the red phone, was established and publicized, and people were invited to call in and find out how close Santa was to their home. Every Christmas Eve, military service members staff phones and email accounts and the Santa Tracker Twitter account to keep kids up to date on Santa’s whereabouts.

Harry Shoup passed away in 2009, remembered by his peers and the public as the “Santa Colonel” who gave a special gift to millions of kids.

This post originally appeared in 2012.

The tradition of giving misbehaving children lumps of fossil fuel predates the Santa we know, and is also associated with St. Nicholas, Sinterklaas, and Italy’s La Befana. Though there doesn’t seem to be one specific legend or history about any of these figures that gives a concrete reason for doling out coal specifically, the common thread between all of them seems to be convenience.

Santa and La Befana both get into people’s homes via the fireplace chimney and leave gifts in stockings hung from the mantel. Sinterklaas’s controversial assistant, Black Pete, also comes down the chimney and places gifts in shoes left out near the fireplace. St. Nick used to come in the window, and then switched to the chimney when they became common in Europe. Like Sinterklaas, his presents are traditionally slipped into shoes sitting by the fire.

So, let’s step into the speculation zone: All of these characters are tied to the fireplace. When filling the stockings or the shoes, the holiday gift givers sometimes run into a kid who doesn’t deserve a present. So to send a message and encourage better behavior next year, they leave something less desirable than the usual toys, money, or candy—and the fireplace would seem to make an easy and obvious source of non-presents. All the individual would need to do is reach down into the fireplace and grab a lump of coal. (While many people think of fireplaces burning wood logs, coal-fired ones were very common during the 19th and early 20th centuries, which is when the American Santa mythos was being established.)

That said, with the exception of Santa, none of these characters limits himself to coal when it comes to bad kids. They’ve also been said to leave bundles of twigs, bags of salt, garlic, and onions, which suggests that they’re less reluctant than Santa to haul their bad kid gifts around all night in addition to the good presents.

Have you got a Big Question you’d like us to answer? If so, let us know by emailing us at bigquestions@mentalfloss.com.

 
Northern flicker woodpeckers come in two color schemes, depending on where they’re from. Although all the birds are brown and black on top, the subspecies that lives in western North America—the red-shafted flicker—has red feathers on the underside of its wings and tail. Its cousin from the eastern side of the continent, the yellow-shafted flicker, has—you guessed it—yellow feathers in those spots. Seems simple enough, but scientists estimate that nearly one-third of yellow-shafted flickers also have orange or red feathers, and odd-colored woodpeckers are found far east of where the two subspecies overlap, potentially producing hybrids. More and more flickers are red where they shouldn’t be, in more ways than one.

A team of researchers has a new explanation for this color shift: Invasive plants are altering the woodpeckers’ palate—and, as a result, their palette. In short, they’re eating things that are changing their colors.

Previously, some scientists had speculated that there was a factor selecting for red feathers, pushing the yellow-shafted flickers to evolve to look more like the red-shafted ones. Others suggested that the flickers were genetically capable of developing either color, and sometimes birds just grew feathers in the wrong shade.

But ornithologist Jocelyn Hudon, of the Royal Alberta Museum in Ontario, thought something else was responsible. A miscolored bird’s feathers, he noticed, can differ in shade from one year to the next. Other east coast birds that normally have yellow feathers—like cedar waxwings and Baltimore orioles—also sometimes have orange or red feathers. Maybe, Hudon, thought, something the birds were eating was causing these color changes. That’s how flamingos get their color.

To find out, Hudon and his colleagues analyzed the “aberrant” feathers on a few yellow-shafted flickers they captured in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, and compared them to museum specimens of yellow-shafted, red-shafted, and hybrid flickers collected across Canada. As they explain in an upcoming paper in the journal The Auk: Ornithological Advances, they found that the yellow-shafted flickers’ red feathers weren’t colored by the same carotenoid pigments responsible for the colors of red-shafted flickers, but by a pigment called rhodoxanthin.

Data from birders that had banded and tracked hundreds of flickers over the last 30 years told the scientists that the birds acquire the red pigment and shift colors during their fall molt in August and September, a time of year that the flickers mix fruit into their ant-based diet. That led Hudon to the likeliest source of the rhodoxanthin: Tatarian and Morrow’s honeysuckles, a pair of invasive plants native to Central Asia that produce abundant berries loaded with rhodoxanthin right around the time of the flickers’ molt.

The berry theory would explain why the red yellow-shafted flickers don’t display any traits of red-shafted flickers beyond feather color (there’s no hybridization); why many yellow-shafted flickers have both red and yellow feathers (the rhodoxanthin only affects feather growth after berries are eaten); and finally, why the red color appears abruptly and can differ or disappear (as rhodoxanthin is cleared from a bird’s system, the color fades). The feather color is affected by when the berries are ingested and how many are eaten.

Hudon’s team thinks that rhodoxanthin may cause color changes in other birds too—and have consequences on their love lives. While yellow-shafted and red-shafted flickers frequently mate with each other and pay no mind to color, many other species use feather color to identify and assess potential mates. For these birds, a meal that changes their hue could lead to problems finding a partner. Though their feathers might be red, they could be left feeling blue.

Although Thanksgiving is a North American holiday and a recent invention in the grand scheme of things, the tradition of breaking the wishbone comes from Europe, and is thousands of years older.

A bird’s wishbone is technically known as the furcula. It’s formed by the fusion of two clavicles, and is important to flight because of its elasticity and the tendons that attach to it. Clavicles, fused or not, aren’t unique to birds. You and I have unfused clavicles, also known as collarbones, and wishbones have been found in most branches of the dinosaur family tree.

The custom of snapping these bones in two after dinner came to us from the English, who got it from the Romans, who got it from the Etruscans, an ancient Italian civilization. As far as historians and archaeologists can tell, the Etruscans were really into their chickens, and believed that the birds were oracles and could predict the future. They exploited the chickens’ supposed gifts by turning them into walking ouija boards with a bizarre ritual known as alectryomancy or “rooster divination.” They would draw a circle on the ground and divide it into wedges representing the letters of the Etruscan alphabet (which played a role in the formation of our own). Bits of food were scattered on each wedge and a chicken was placed in the center of the circle. As the bird snacked, scribes would note the sequence of letters that it pecked at, and the local priests would use the resulting messages to divine the future and answer the city’s most pressing questions.

Continue reading “Why Do We Wish on the Turkey’s Wishbone?”

The people of Australia might not celebrate Thanksgiving, but every November, plenty of animals in the northeastern part of the continent have something to be thankful for, and they gather together for a feast.

The yearly bounty comes courtesy of the metallic starling (Aplonis metallica). These glossy looking, red-eyed birds migrate from New Guinea to northeastern Australia in mid-November, where they stay through the summer monsoons to lay their eggs and raise their chicks. When they arrive at the Cape York peninsula in Queensland, they form enormous colonies, with 1000 or more birds building dome-shaped nests in the same tree. 

The activity draws plenty of attention from local wildlife. Insects, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, and other birds all crowd around the colonized trees to feed on plants that are fertilized by the starlings’ poop, and to eat starling eggs, nestlings that fall from the nests, and even other animals that are attracted to the colonies.

You can see an example of starlings congregating in a tree (likely in Cornwall, UK) in the slo-mo video below. While the entire video is worth a watch, jump to 2:05 for their spectacular departure.

In Australia, the lure of the buffet is so great—and consistent, because starlings nest in the same trees each season, and some trees will host colonies for 15 or more years in a row—that the birds’ arrival radically alters the distribution of wildlife in Cape York’s rainforests, says ecologist Daniel Natusch. The trees they colonize become “ecological hotspots,” where different species gather in great numbers. Natusch and other researchers at the University of Sydney recently described these hotspots for the first time in a paper in PLOS One [PDF], cataloging the species that show up—42 taxa, not including insects—and measuring just how “hot” they are. The small (just 32 x 45 feet) areas under the trees, the scientists say, host some of the largest and most diverse animal congregations in the world.

Natusch’s team took regular wildlife censuses for about 18 months beneath 26 starling colonies. They hung flypaper from the trees’ branches to catch flying insects; collected and sifted through soil to find other invertebrates; and used trail cameras to collect candid shots of mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and birds. They then compared these animal assemblies to the ones they found at nearby trees that didn’t house starlings.

The researchers documented 42 different species—from cattle and kookaburras to rats and pythons—beneath the starling colonies. Brush turkeys and pigs—both seen in the images below—showed up more often than any other species, and the largest gathering they recorded included 50 different individual animals. Overall, they found significantly more animals at trees with starlings than those without, and the densities of some species were 100 to 1000 times higher under the colonies than elsewhere in the rainforest. 

 
“To our knowledge, this system represents one of the highest-biomass and most diverse faunal aggregations in the world,” the scientists write.

It’s not hard to see why the starlings draw such a crowd. Guano from thousands of birds enriches the ground beneath the colonies with nutrients, attracting soil-dwelling invertebrates and fertilizing plants. The bugs and plants attract herbivores and insectivores, which in turn draw predators higher up on the food chain. When the monsoons come and strong winds knock nests to the ground, carnivores like dingoes and snakes also feed on fallen starling eggs and chicks. 

These hotspots are impressive, but Natusch thinks scientists could also put them to practical use. Since the colonies attract some of Australia’s most destructive invasive species, like feral pigs and cane toads, the researchers suggest that they could be sites for targeted control. When large numbers of problematic animals gather at the same tree, conservationists could capture or kill them in one swoop—giving Australia’s native wildlife one more reason to be thankful for the starlings.

Why do people have such a hard time staying awake after Thanksgiving dinner? Most people blame tryptophan, but that’s not really the main culprit. And what is tryptophan, anyway?

Tryptophan is an amino acid that the body uses in the processes of making vitamin B₃ and serotonin, a neurotransmitter that helps regulate sleep. It can’t be produced by our bodies, so we need to get it through our diet. From which foods, exactly? Turkey, of course, but also other meats, chocolate, bananas, mangoes, dairy products, eggs, chickpeas, peanuts, and a slew of other foods. Some of these foods, like cheddar cheese, have more tryptophan per gram than turkey. Tryptophan doesn’t have much of an impact unless it’s taken on an empty stomach and in an amount larger than what we’re getting from our drumstick. So why does turkey get the rap as a one-way ticket to a nap?

Continue reading “Why Does Turkey Make You Tired?”

In 2010, scientists started exploring the Abanda cave system in Gabon after getting a tip about something strange living there: crocodiles. And not just any crocodiles. Orange crocodiles.

Crocodiles will sometimes use caves as temporary refuges during droughts, but the dwarf crocodiles (Osteolaemus tetraspis) in the Abanda caves seemed to have taken up permanent residence there. When we wrote about the expedition a few years ago, the researchers didn’t know much about the cave crocs. They knew they were there, they knew they were weird, and they knew some of them had turned orange. The scientists, led by biologist Matthew Shirley, have since gone back into the caves to study the animals. Their new paper, published in African Journal of Ecology, overturns some of their early ideas about the Abanda crocodiles, showing that life in the caves has been good to them, and offers a new explanation for their strange colors.

After seeing the crocodiles for themselves, the team began surveying the caves and capturing crocodiles by hand, taking their measurements and determining their sex. To see what the reptiles were eating, they used a method called the hose-Heimlich technique, which is exactly what it sounds like. While one scientist flushed a croc’s stomach with an improvised stomach pump, another grabbed the animal and squeezed its belly, expelling the water and the stomach contents through the animal’s mouth. They did the same with a group of crocodiles living aboveground at streams in the forest around the caves.

While the forest crocs barfed up freshwater crabs, shrimp, crayfish, and a variety of insects, the cave crocodiles were eating cave crickets and bats—and little else. The difference in diets, the researchers say, suggests that cave crocodiles don’t hunt or feed aboveground and likely have very little contact with their neighbors. The animals have to come out of the caves to breed and lay their eggs because there aren’t any suitable places to build nests in there, but they apparently don’t spend much time on the surface. They’re not entirely trapped in the caves, as the researchers once thought, but they’re still very isolated.

Even with all that time spent in the caves, the Abanda crocs don’t appear to be changing in response to life underground. Despite some physical and genetic differences between them and the forest crocs, the researchers say that the cave crocodiles “showed no signs of physical adaptation, or repercussion, of living in a hypogean environment”—such as the reduced pigmentation or smaller eyes often found in other cave-dwelling animals. The only notable physical change the team thinks is connected to their lifestyle is the crocs’ orange skin. They initially thought that the color change might have been an adaption to living in darkness or caused by their diet. But they now have a different—and grosser—idea.

With thousands of bats hanging from the cave ceilings, the floor has become covered in a caustic mixture of water and bat waste. “We hypothesize that the orange coloration in large adults is caused by ‘bleaching’ of the skin after what is presumably years of inundation in bat guano,” the researchers say. In some cases, they found, the guano isn’t just bleaching the crocs’ skin and changing its color, but eroding it to the point where the scientists could clearly see the animals’ skulls peeking out through the skin.

Those don’t sound like the best living conditions, but the caves offer plenty to make up for it. After taking all the animals’ measurements, the researchers found that the cave crocodiles were in better physical condition than any of the crocs living aboveground. The team thinks this is because the cave crocs’ prey—bats and crickets—is abundant (numbering in the tens of thousands), easy to catch, and available year-round. Furthermore, the caves provide a stable microclimate and protection from the elements. The researchers also found more crocodiles in the caves than they did in the surrounding forest, where the animals are vulnerable to logging and bushmeat hunting, leading them to think that the caves also provide some safety from humans. Living in guano may have its costs, but at the end of the day, it’s not easy being green.

Columbus crabs (Planes minutus) are tiny and can’t swim very far, but they manage to get around—in more ways than one. They make their homes on anything that floats—logs, ship hulls, plastic junk, and even sea turtles—and ride the waves around. On many of these mobile “islands,” the crabs are plentiful and have an “inclusive” mating system, say biologists Joseph Pfaller and Michael Gil. Sometimes, the crabs like to play the field, readily switching among multiple mating partners. At other times, though, they have more monogamous love lives, sharing their territory with just one other crab, with whom they form a mating pair. The difference? The size of the place where they shack up, say the researchers. They recently published their findings on the crabs’ love life in Biology Letters.

Pfaller and Gil were curious about what made the crabs switch between these two mating styles. What was it about a particular turtle or piece of debris that pushed them toward swinging, or into settling down? For many crustaceans that live on or in other animals, it’s the size of the host that dictates how many critters call it home and how they mate. The biologists wondered if the same was true for Columbus crabs, who thrive in both living and non-living “hosts.”

To find out, they took a boat out into the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre—site of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch—and collected dozens of pieces of plastic debris, from soda bottles to boat bumpers. Back in the lab, they measured the size of the debris and recorded the number of crabs, and each crab’s life stage (adult or juvenile) and sex. To get data on sea turtles, they dove into scientific journals instead of the ocean, reading through 270 records of sea turtle–Columbus crab associations, and recording the same information they did with the debris.

Pfaller and Gil found that even though Columbus crabs can travel far and wide on a hunk of plastic or a sea turtle, they still seek out the cozy confines of a burrow-like refuge on their floating homes. On pieces of debris, they usually take up residence in stalks of barnacles. On sea turtles, the crabs tuck themselves into the supracaudal space—the small area between a turtle’s tail and shell. The researchers say that it’s the size of these refuges, and not the overall size of the host, that matters most when it comes to the size and demographics of a crab community—and thus how they mate.

Bigger refuges, of course, support more crabs. A bigger space with more neighbors makes it harder for any one crab to defend a chunk of real estate or a mate, so they opt for a more open and free mating system. A smaller refuge, on the other hand, can only hold so many crabs and is easier to monopolize, leading the crabs to form monogamous pairs and fend off rivals. This was almost always the case for crabs living on sea turtles, where Pfaller and Gil found lone male–female pairs far more frequently than expected by chance. Because a typical turtle’s supracaudal space is the perfect size for two crabs, the researchers say, “sea turtle symbiosis specifically promotes social monogamy.” Who would have thought that living on a turtle’s tush could provide the key to a happy, stable relationship?

The term “jack-o’-lantern” was first applied to people, not pumpkins. As far back as 1663, the term meant a man with a lantern, or a night watchman. Just a decade or so later, it began to be used to refer to the mysterious lights sometimes seen at night over bogs, swamps, and marshes.

Continue reading “What’s the Origin of Jack-O’-Lanterns?”