The Maddest Match Around

March Madness in the past has been reserved for college basketball. But in 2013, biologist Katie Hinde and a group of scientists, writers, and other creative souls started the ultimate animal competition that expanded beyond humans – March Mammal Madness. Don’t worry, the competition is virtual. No animals are harmed. Though there might be some embarrassing defeats and even some upset fans, March Mammal Madness is all about science and learning. It is also a fun way to learn about the living world. Dr. Biology grabs a few minutes with Katie Hinde before this year’s tournament gets underway.

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Dr. Biology:

This is Ask A Biologist. A program about the living world. And I'm Dr. Biology. Okay. It's March. And when you hear the sounds of the lights coming on and the bounce of basketballs on hardwood floors, followed by the roar of the crowds, you know, it must be the beginning of March Madness. Since 1939, college basketball players have engaged in a tournament to find the best team in the nation for a given year.

Dr. Biology:

You could say that humans were monopolizing March, but that all changed in 2013. That was the year that a scientist took a classic basketball tournament format and expanded it beyond humans to all mammals. This was the year when biologist Katie Hind and a group of scientists gathered a collection of animals and brought them in for a tournament that was the beginning of March Mammal Madness.

Dr. Biology:

Oh, this is the 10th anniversary for MMM, and we caught up with Katie to learn more about the tournament and this year's challengers. And just like you can do with college basketball, you can get into the action with this year's competitors. The brackets are set. So, let's learn about this tournament and get ready for the competition to begin. Welcome to Ask a Biologist, Katie.

Katie:

Thank you so much for having me, Dr. Biology. I'm really excited to talk about stuff today.

Dr. Biology:

Before we jump into March Mammal Madness, let's make clear that the battles are simulated.

Katie:

That is correct. No animals are harmed in the making of this tournament.

Dr. Biology:

Absolutely. But we're going to get a lot of science out of it. That's the cool part,

Katie:

Right. 

Dr. Biology:

All right. So, the next thing to go over is the competitors are mammals. Can you go over what mammals are? Because in case people don't know it, all mammals are animals, but not all animals are mammals.

Katie:

That's correct. We would say that the most specific characteristic or trait or adaptation of a mammal is the ability to make milk.

Dr. Biology:

Okay. So, the ability to make milk.

Katie:

So, milk, you know, you can buy it at the grocery store as milk, as other dairy products like cheese or ice cream. And so, we kind of forget that milk is what mom mammals make to feed their babies and provide protection in the form of medicine. And also, in cool signals that shape their behavioral development.

Dr. Biology:

Right. So, even dolphins and whales, right?

Katie:

Absolutely. Manatees. They're infants. Nurse for milk out of their flipper pit.

Dr. Biology:

Whoa.

Katie:

Otherwise, they'd have to swim upside down if they were nursing off their chests.

Dr. Biology:

That's a nice adaptation, right? All right, so we've covered mammals, but it turns out that it's not just mammals in this tournament, right?

Katie:

That's correct. In 2018, we decided to really expand the tournament beyond just mammals to include species from across the tree of life. Part of this was because some of the other teammates that make the tournament happen study bugs, they're entomologists. Or they study fish, they're marine biologists. But also, there's really neat adaptations and traits of animals and plants and other organisms on the tree of life. And we wanted to talk about those species, too.

Dr. Biology:

And this is the madness of the tournament.

Katie:

Yeah. So, we're not going to change the name. I obviously, as somebody that studies milk and mammals, have a great love for those species, but since we've spent so many years having that name, we've decided that mammals are the mammals, and the other species are the madness.

Dr. Biology:

Got it. Well, are there any animals slash mammals that are excluded? We do not ever include humans, and by humans, I mean Homo sapiens sapiens. It just would be a really complicated scenario if we were to put a human into the tournament because would they have like our cultural things like weapons? It just gets really sticky. So, we'll let the basketball March Madness be the humans and our tournaments are other species. We have, though, included some really exciting human relatives known as hominids. So, we have this year a combatant known as Homo habilis and that is a human ancestor from about 2 million plus years ago and was the first identified human relative that made stone tools.

Dr. Biology:

Okay, Stone Age.

Katie:

Yeah.

Dr. Biology:

All right, so we have them. Let's talk a little bit more about the science, because this is the thing that makes March Mammal Madness so cool. It's just science, right?

Katie:

Oh, it's the science.

Dr. Biology:

So, let's dive into what it takes to put on a tournament, because this isn't something you just draw up on a napkin, and here we go.

Katie:

Exactly. So, the team, there's about 50 of us that put the tournament together every year. And these are scientists. A lot of biologists among those scientist conservationists. But we also have artists, we have storytellers, we have performers, we have just educators, librarians, all sorts of different expertise that all come together to put together this kind of science engagement extravaganza. 

So, what we do is we figure out some kinds of themes that we want to showcase, and that's how we build our divisions. For example, this year one of our divisions is Mighty Stripes, and these are all mammals that have stripes. Now animals might have stripes for lots of different reasons, so predators might have stripes to have camouflage in the foliage as they're hunting. Other species might have stripes for camouflage to hide from predators that are hunting them, or they might have stripes so that when they're all together in a group, they confuse who the individuals are to predators. Sometimes stripes might signal individual identity. Like these are my stripes. This pattern is me. There's research that shows that stripes can confuse flies that land on you and transmit disease. 

So, there's a lot of things that are going on. And so we wanted to talk about all these different adaptations for animal coloration. And so, then we went hunting in the literature for different animals, mammals, specifically that had stripes. So, we have an entire division of striped mammals. 

We also have a division of animal engineers. So, this is more than mammals. It's a division of species that make really interesting things either with their bodies or they construct things from mud or twine or sticks. So, this is a division of animal engineers. First, we have some aspects of an idea of what could be a theme for a division. Then we find species to go into that theme. Sometimes we have species that we're really excited about, and we create a theme so we can showcase them.

Katie:

For example, we wanted to have Giant Panda, so we had an entire division of animals that had giant in their name or something about Greater Giant. So, there's all these different ways that we do that, and that's how the tournament begins every year. The species, the combatants that we're going to feature in the divisions. Then in March Madness, the basketball tournaments, the teams are seeded kind of based on how good they are playing basketball, right? So our number one seed is top is the best. 

So, we also assign seeds to our species. But these species aren't necessarily ever going to encounter each other in the wild. So, we have to kind of estimate what that might be. Body size, how big the animal is, is a big predictor for where they're going to fit within their division if they're going to be at the top or the bottom. We also look at what their skill set is, right? So, in general, predators tend to punch above their body weight and they get a better seeding than just their body mass would suggest. Because many predators take down animals many times their size.

Dr. Biology:

Well, what about intelligence? Right.

Katie:

Oh, that's a great question. So, intelligence can come in many, many different forms. And animals, you know, ability to solve problems, their cognitive power, if you will, is really about what kinds of problems are they solving in their home environment. And so, it's kind of like paper, rock, scissors. There's no universal tactic that's going to win every time. 

So, we think about problem-solving ability. But also, this goes both ways because we aren't, you know, in these simulations, it's not Thunderdome. We don't force the animals to fight. In nature, animals are really good at assess out whether or not getting into a fight makes sense for them. They could get hurt; they could get killed. They could waste a lot of energy. And is it worth it? Animals are making these calculations all the time. We see this among herbivores every time they see something that might look like a predator. They always ran away; they'd have no time to make friends or forage for food.

Dr. Biology:

Right. So, you're herbivores that are just near plant lovers, right?

Katie:

Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Biology:

You know, they're like, okay, I'm out of here. I don't need this.

Katie:

Or like, they might not always run away. Like, they'll assess whether or not a predator is in a crouched position. They might demonstrate that you shouldn't chase me. There's all sorts of different things that are going on in animal behavior all the time. So, this isn't just about as Sir Alfred Tennyson would have said, read in Tooth and Claw. This is also about how animals are assessing what they have to gain and what they have to lose in these encounters in specific habitat.

00;10;17;17 - 00;10;23;06

Dr. Biology:

Right. And some of these animals truly can do some amazing problem-solving.

Katie:

Absolutely they can. And this is part of, you know, we the scientific team, think about all these attributes of the animals and estimate a probability of what would happen Now, a win is just holding the battlefield so if the other animal runs away or hides or flies away or whatever it does, then it doesn't advance the animal that stayed on the battlefield advances.

Katie:

It's not necessarily a fight. And so, we have that. We calculate that probability and then we use a random number generator to actually determine the outcome based on that probability.

Dr. Biology:

So there's a little bit of there's a little bit of luck.

Katie:

There's some chance there's some probabilistic chance, and that's how we get upsets. That's when things get interesting for us as a scientist running this tournament because unlike a lot of other kinds of March Madness science-themed games that you can play, we don't ask our players to vote, right? This is not about voting. This is about the science. So, then once we have that outcome, a scientist goes into the scientific literature, looks at everything we know about this animal, and creates a story that is then written in a play-by-play sports dynamic to explain what could account for this unexpected outcome.

Dr. Biology:

Right. So, over these years are there some years that it really surprised you?

Katie:

Oh, for sure. People still talk about them. So, one of the prime examples was in 2014. This is probably the biggest first controversy in March, Mammal madness. It was a fossa versus a pangolin. Okay.

Dr. Biology:

A focus on a pangolin right?

Katie:

So, every kid that's a fan of Madagascar, the cartoon knows that a fossa is a carnivore that hunts lemurs on the island of Madagascar. And a pangolin, it's related to anteaters. And it is a mammal that has really tough scales. And when it runs into a predator, it curls up and it uses these scales like a shield. There's amazing photographs online of lionesses trying to bite into a pangolin. And these really hard scales are armor. 

So, a lot of people have the pangolin as the winner. There's no way the fossa is getting in. It's not going to win. It's going to give up and walk away and the pangolin will triumph. Now, the day before that battle was announced in the tournament, it was reported that pangolins are the most trafficked animal in the world by poachers and that their defense strategy to curl up in a ball is a big drawback. If your biggest predator is a poacher that just picks you up and put you in a pack. 

And so, in that battle with this breaking science, the pangolin curls up the fossa using its reversible ankles to try and pry it open. Right? So, fuchsias can walk backwards down, trees. They're really amazing with the strength of their ankles and claws. And a poacher walks up, the fossa draws back, and the pangolin gets picked up, put into a bag and taken away.

Dr. Biology:

Oh,

Katie:

And so, yeah. So, there's third-party intervention, which happens in nature. You're most likely to be caught by a predator when you are engaged in another interaction. So, we talk about that science, we talk about those upsets. We have those third-party interventions. There is no umpire in nature. This is how things happen to animals. And so, we use a tournament to talk about these kinds of conservation issues and human impacts on species.

Dr. Biology:

So that was a surprising year. And you've been doing this, obviously, you started it. Do you have some favorite competitors?

Katie:

Oh, I would never admit to having preferences or biases in my tournaments.

Dr. Biology:

Yeah, yes. Or maybe more than one, actually.

Katie:

So yeah, it's a game, right? So, there's game structure, there's rules. In the first three rounds, the better seeded opponent gets home habitat advantage, and the worst seeded species has to be the visiting team, which is an added disadvantage in that dynamic. And then in advanced rounds we randomize the habitat among four preannounced possibilities. So, when you get to the advance round, the environment starts being unpredictable in certain ways. 

But when originally conceived in general, the tournaments always one combatant versus one combatant. And that's always been our structure. And I love spotted hyenas. I love spotted hyenas and spotted hyenas are this really wonderful social animal. They have really important social relationships. They do this really neat infant care. They have really fascinating dynamics and female-female bonds. I love spotted hyenas. A spotted hyena by itself does not generally do well in this tournament and lost, I think in the first round in the inaugural year of the tournament in 2013. 

And so in 2014 we created the division of social mammals so that hyenas could be there with their family and friends and work together and demonstrate how animals use social groups to solve a lot of their problems. Many mammals, not all, lots of lots of solitary mammals out there. But when we talk about like cognition or how smart an animal is, you know, or how adaptive an animal is, right? There's get big get, you know, bold. But Get buddies is a really spectacular one. And I think we see this a lot in our own primate order. We see this, of course, in humans. And so showcasing that having friends can be the best strategy is a really fun way to expand the tournament. Now, we haven't always had social mammals. 

Typically, it's one animal versus one animal. Another year, one of my favorite, favorite combatants, we did a tag team division. So, these were species in which two animals from different species formed a kind of mutualistic or cooperative relationship. And we had Coyote and Badger. In the American West, coyote and badgers have been documented to hunt together and that when they are both hunting simultaneously together, they each can be more successful. These animal friendships, for want of a better term, can last for a long time. 

And we've seen just really amazing trail cam footage of coyotes and badgers like walking together, coyote like bounce playfully waiting for its badger buddy on it's a wobbly legs to catch up and it's just wonderful. It's a wonderful pairing. And so, they were a very beloved team for me and they ended up being defeated by a warthog mongoose team. Mongoose, pick fleas and other kinds of insects and invertebrates off warthogs, help groom them. So, they have this cooperation that way. So, warthogs get cleaned, mongooses get fed, and they're a really adorable team and they unexpectedly, based on our probabilities, ended up defeating the Coyote and Badger and advancing in the tournament to the championship battle. And we used an explanation, which was the coyote in the badger had been successful at hunting the day before. They totally eaten. And given that how long it takes them to digest their food, they weren't really motivated to tangle with a warthog and a mongoose that day.

Dr. Biology:

So it's interesting because you're talking about teamwork, and we started off with basketball and humans and without teamwork, I bet you everybody would say you're not going to do really well in a in a tournament. So, it's interesting with the animals, the same sort of thing, but it also gets back to motivation.

Katie:

Right, Right.

Dr. Biology:

Right. That's an interesting side point that I wouldn't have picked up on just typically thinking about animals. So, we have these teams, not just single combatants. Okay.

Katie:

Yeah. On occasion, they're always pre-announced if there's going to be teammates. And it's been a really fun chance to as a biologist who works, you know, in my very specific area, working on this tournament, every year I spend six weeks just delving deep into the natural history literature, the descriptions of these species. I've read papers from the 1800s to find out about some of the first descriptions of these animals in their habitats. And the scholarly literature is an incredibly beautiful place to learn about animals, but it's so often hidden behind jargon or academic language. So, the scientists that put this tournament together, we take all that sciency, science, language, and we write it up as though we're, you know, it's just being live announced on the radio like a sporting event.

Dr. Biology:

By the way, when does it start?

Katie:

Our first battle is March 13th it will be at 5 p.m. Pacific, 8 p.m. Eastern. And it is the wild card battle before the full tournament first round begins on Wednesday, March 15th, 2023.

Dr. Biology:

Okay, so if someone wants to get involved, they need to get on to the website.

Katie:

Yep.

Dr. Biology:

Which we're going to include on here.

Katie:

Yeah. And we, redesigned the portal for people at the ASU Lib Guide for the tournament March Madness. So, when you get there, if you're a player, you click the players tab. If you're an educator that wants to use this and have access to lesson plans, you click the educator tab. And if you're a learner, you click the learner tab and there's resources there just for you. And all of them have Ask A Biologist too.

Dr. Biology:

But of course, you know, you talk about your favorite animal being a spotted hyena. And I'm thinking, you know, in our Savannah we have a VR tour where beautiful people can go out. And so we're in Kenya and we have this wonderful part where you hear the hyena, you see it out in the distance, but then we have a VR video of this hyena.

Dr. Biology:

And it's interesting because everybody who watches it and when I'm just watching them, they typically say, That's really cute.

Katie:

Yeah.

Dr. Biology:

But cute at a distance, please.

Katie:

Yeah. Yeah. No, wild animals should be wild. We should give them their space. We should let them engage in their natural behavior. And if we get too close, if we disrupt what they're doing in the wild, they need to feed themselves. They need to feed their babies. They have to do all these different things. And when we disrupt them, we make their lives harder, and then we'll have fewer of them moving into the future.

Dr. Biology:

You talk about these combatants, and it's interesting because early on Ask A Biologist, probably within the first couple of years, and this is clear, back in late 1990s, we had a young future scientist somewhere. I'm hoping he's assigned to somewhere. I think he was only like first or second grade really, really young. And he wrote in and he said he was curious who would win in a battle between a jellyfish and an anemone. And I was like, wow, this is a great question.

Katie:

Yeah.

Dr. Biology:

Because they're looking at these two animals and they're saying, Hmm, they both have some similarities in the way they basically get their prey. But then the question was there was a battle. Now, one of the interesting things is typically jellyfish and sea anemones don't come close together.

Katie:

Now, so they.

Dr. Biology:

Wouldn't even get in the same space. Right. But you guys, we had.

Katie:

Actually, think about this. Yeah. And this I mean, so this is a great question because you actually have to think about all sorts of stuff. You have to think, is that animal actually vulnerable to the venom of the opponent? Right. Because venom is an adaptation that targets aspects of the nervous system. And if the combatant that it is, you know, encountering in our scenario doesn't have that kind of a nervous system that's vulnerable to that venom, then you might not necessarily predict the outcome. I actually ended up looking into last year we had a battle between a venomous sea snake, the Olive Sea snake, and Pacific Hagfish, which is this unjawed slime creating creature that's amazing. It has to basically turn its body into a knot and then use the slipknot process to close its jaw to rip off meat from downed whale carcasses on the ocean floor. If you would like to have nightmares, do a search for what their mouths look like. They're incredible, but terrifying. So, I had to actually go find out if we knew anything about whether or not the proteins in the venom of the sea snake were actually lethal to the hagfish. And it turns out that they are. And so I was able to actually write a battle between these two species. 

But you have to get into those kinds of, you know, very, very precise questions. Would this animal sink or float all these different kinds of things? What is the digestion time of this animal? Right. So, we had a few years ago an Orinoco crocodile, third largest living crocodile, and it ended up having this really huge meal and then two days later had a new encounter and everyone was like, yeah, crocodile. And I'm like, oh, no, that crocodile is going to be digesting for a month. That crocodile is just super chill.

Dr. Biology:

Yeah, Content.

Katie:

So, we think about metabolic rates, digestion times, who's vulnerable to which venoms, who's vulnerable to what diseases. So, in 2017, 2017, 2016, I forget which early on we had an encounter between a flying fox, which is one of the mega bats, one of the largest living bat species with a pig species, African giant forest hog. 

And what we know about, you know, emerging infectious diseases, when diseases jump from animals into humans, a lot of times it's a wild animal and then a domesticated animal that amplifies that. That increases the viral load, and then it jumps into the people that interact with those domestic animals. So, we set up this whole scenario at the beginning of the tournament where it became a big ongoing question as to whether or not the giant forest hog was incubating Nipah virus. Right. And people that were following the treatment, because it happens over 11 nights in March, and we have the giant warthog like have a cough.

Katie:

Right. As like our like cliffhanger at the end of the battle. Right. I mean people against team virus team virus viruses winning it all! And then in the last battle we got to do this big reveal which is the pig family is not vulnerable to Nipah virus in the sense that it has a lethal kind of infection. Right. It's not bad for them. And so, you have that building of story arcs and suspense and then the reveal. 

So, this is part of the excitement around the tournament because people are trying to figure out not just what's going to happen in this individual encounter in a night, you know, quote unquote, battle. But what might happen as the tournament unfolds, who might give up, who might get hurt, who has other things to do, who's incubating which virus? And that's really how we tell this story. And build huge excitement among our players.

Dr. Biology:

Well, this is great because I know people can go to the website to find out who won in past years.

Katie:

Yes.

Dr. Biology:

And get these backstory hive. Yeah.

Katie:

Full archive. All the play by plays are there from the past. Every single piece of science we've shared in this tournament is available at the ASU Lib Guide

Dr. Biology:

Well, Katie, this is this is always fun. This year it's even more fun now that we've expanded the world of March Madness to March Mammal Madness, which is perfect. But before my scientists get to leave, I always ask three questions.

Katie:

I'm excited for them.

Dr. Biology:

Are you okay? Well, good. Well, the first one is when did you first know you wanted to be a scientist?

Katie:

This is a great question. And anticipating it. I was thinking about that this morning, and I knew I wanted to be a scientist when I was a freshman in college. That's when I figured out before that I was going to study constitutional law and become a professor of constitutional law. That was my aim since I was 11, which was odd. And I started taking college science biology classes. And before that, when I'd been earlier in K through 12, science always seemed like a lot of facts and I wanted something that was more creative. 

Once I got to college and started learning how in a more robust way, how we go about doing science, I realized that this is a field entirely based on imagination. You take what you know about the world and imagine an explanation or a scenario or something, and then you design a study to go test it, right? So it's creative and imagination. And I think I wish I had known that earlier because I know I would have wanted to be a scientist at a younger age.

Dr. Biology:

Right. Without imagination and creativity, you're not a good scientist.

Katie:

No, not possible.

Dr. Biology:

And the same thing about an artist or an architect. Imagination. Creativity - key.

Katie:

Yeah. And I knew I was fascinated by animals from my childhood, right? So I grew up in rural Ohio. We had chickens and we had one mean hen and we had one nice hen and the nice hen would let me follow her and her chicks around all day. And I would just watch the chicks interacting and learning to like peck for invertebrates. And I just loved those days. I'm just watching chicks develop. 

I remember being out in the woods, building a fort, as one does, and a fox walked by, and it looked at me and I looked at it and it went about its business. It was such an amazing encounter. Being an eight-year-old by myself in the woods and seeing a fox. So, I was so lucky that when I got to college, I had professors that were really into animal behavior and I took all those classes. And I was like, never mind about constitutional law. I want to be a scientist.

Dr. Biology:

Perfect. Makes sense to me. I was going to be an architect. All right. So, I'm going to take it all away.

Katie:

Okay.

Dr. Biology:

Because I'm kind of that mean sort and all my scientist. Well, almost all my scientists love teaching, so I take that away as well. So, because I want you to stretch. So, this next question is, what would you be or what would you do if you weren't in the world of science, and you weren't in the world of March Mammal madness.

Katie:

Yeah. Yeah. I would design destination vacations to then be a tour guide on that had to do with world travel and really amazing national parks around the world. So, I would still be doing stuff in nature and still be teaching people things. But in this kind of other venue of informal learners, I love travel, I love seeing new places, I love being there and facilitating other people, discovering new cultures, new places, new ecosystems. It's probably why I lead study abroad every summer that I can. That's what I would do if I had to have a different career.

Dr. Biology:

That's one of those things that a lot of people say, look, do you like to travel? And I'll be talking to young kids, and they'll raise their hand and say, You might be a future biologist. Yep. All right. So, the last question is, what advice would you have for a young scientist or perhaps someone that was going to be in constitutional law, but they decided that they're going to want to get into the world of science?

Katie:

Yeah, my advice, which is very specific, is to always stay curious, always, always wonder about things, and always seek answers from people who know well and when I say be curious, I mean, don't ever think that one discipline - that answered are going to be in biology alone or astronomy or anthropology or sociology or, you know, creative writing. It takes all of these fields to really understand and explain the world in which we live. So, stay curious from the physical sciences, the life sciences, the social sciences, the humanities, never, ever turn your back on a space where there are things to learn.

Dr. Biology:

Wonderful. So, Katie, thank you for taking time out this very busy time of year.

Katie:

Yes. Yeah, we're excited. It's a very fantastic time of year.

Dr. Biology:

I will be tuned in and I'm hoping others will tune in and we'll find out who's going to be. Do you have any prediction, by the way? Any prediction?

Katie:

Oh, I think as Alex Trebek would say, anybody's game, [laughter] but probably not one of the 16th seeds, just throwing that out there.

Dr. Biology:

Got it. Okay. That's you got some inside knowledge there, gang. So, let's all go over to March Mammal Madness and see what's happening. You've been listening to Ask A Biologist and my guest have been biologist Katie Hinde. For those who have caught the fever for March Mammal Madness will include a link in the episode notes to get you to the tournament, 

You can learn more about the combatants and how they play. And by the way, the action starts March 13th, so don't wait to get started. The Ask A Biologist podcast is produced on the campus of Arizona State University and is recorded in the Grassroots Studio housed in the School of Life Sciences, which is an academic unit of The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. And remember, even though our program is not broadcast live, you can still send us your questions about biology using our companion website. The address is askabiologist.asu.edu, or you can just use your favorite search engine and use the words Ask A Biologist. As always, I'm Dr. Biology and I hope you're staying safe and healthy.