As the leaves begin to change and the air cools, monarch butterflies disappear from our skies and journey …where? The mysterious migration of this iconic butterfly stumped scientists for decades. Until an intercepted message on a butterfly wing led them to the isolated mountains of central Mexico to find the ancient monarch oasis where these butterflies cluster by the millions. It’s here we meet Estela, who grew up around this extraordinary phenomenon and explains that the real mystery isn’t where the monarchs are going but, actually, how??

The answer involves poisonous-tasting caterpillars, supergenerations of buff butterflies, and a web of life that connects a whole continent. Plus, as many people prepare for their Day of the Dead celebrations, we learn how monarch butterflies are a symbol of connection to the ancestors living on in our memories.

Terrestrials was created by Lulu Miller with WNYC studios. This episode was produced by Ana González with sound design by Mira Burt-Wintonick. Sarah Sandbach is our Executive Producer. Our team also includes Alan Goffinski, Tanya Chawla, Natalia Ramirez, and Joe Plourde. Fact checking by Hilary Elkins.

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Today we bring you a story stranger than fiction. In 2006, paleobiologist Natalia Rybczynski took a helicopter to a remote Arctic island near the North Pole, spending her afternoons scavenging for ancient treasures on the ground. One day, she found something the size of a potato chip. Turns out, it was a three and a half million year old chunk of bone. SPOILER ALERT BELOW.

Keep reading if you’re okay with us spoiling the surprise.

It’s a camel! Yes, the one we thought only hung out in deserts. Originally from North America, the camel trotted around the globe and went from snow monster to desert superstar. We go on an evolutionary tour of the camel’s body and learn how the same adaptations that help a camel in a desert also helped it in the snow. Plus, Lulu even meets one in the flesh.

Special thanks to Latif Nasser for telling us this story. It was originally a TED Talk where he brought out a live camel on stage. Thank you also to Carly Mensch, Juliet Blake, Anna Bechtol, Stone Dow, Natalia Rybczynski and our camel man, Shayne Rigden. If you are in Wisconsin, you can go meet his camels at Rigden Ranch. And follow his delightful TikTok @rigdenranch to see camels in the snow!

Terrestrials was created by Lulu Miller with WNYC Studios. This episode was produced by Ana González, Alan Goffinski, Mira Burt-Wintonick, Joe Plourde, Lulu Miller, and Sarah Sandbach, with help from Tanya Chawla and Natalia Ramirez. Fact checking by Anna Pujol-Mazzini.

Our advisors this season are Ana Luz Porzecanski, Anil Lewis, Dominique Shabazz, and Liza Demby.

Support for Terrestrials also comes from the Simons Foundation, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, and the John Templeton Foundation.

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Ervin Carlson grew up on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana hearing stories about buffalo (aka American bison) who once roamed the land by the hundreds of thousands. These giant beasts weighed up to 2000 pounds, were almost 7 feet tall, and had two curved horns so sharp they could even buck away grizzly bears. And they were ecosystem engineers! Just by grazing and rolling in the dirt, they brought new life to the land.

But Ervin had never seen one. Not in the wild. To him, buffalo were a thing of the past. Because in the 1800s, as America expanded west, settlers hunted them by the trainload, for sport and fashion, until the wild herds completely disappeared from Montana.

And that could've been the end of the story, if not for a secret inter-generational baby buffalo rescue mission that you'll have to hear to believe.

To uncover the twists and turns of this tale first-hand, Producerbud Ana travels to Montana where she witnesses an epic horse race, joins a three-day celebration of all things buffalo, and crosses her fingers that she’ll get to meet one of these creatures up close.

Huge thanks to Ervin Carlson, Paul Weatherwax, Chazz Racine, Sloo, everyone at Buffalo Spirit Hills Ranch, the Intertribal Buffalo Council, Latonna Spotted Eagle, Cristina Mormorunni, and everyone who helped organize the 2026 Iinnii Days. Thanks also to Valerie June for lending her voice to Alan's stampede song, and to the students and teachers at the Blackfeet language immersion school.

Terrestrials was created by Lulu Miller with WNYC studios. This episode was produced by Ana González with sound design by Mira Burt-Wintonick. Sarah Sandbach is our Executive Producer. Our team also includes Alan Goffinski, Tanya Chawla, Natalia Ramirez, and Joe Plourde. Fact checking by Sophie Samiee.

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Terrestrials is made possible in part by listeners like you. Support the show by joining The Explorers Club —and we’ll send you a special puzzle as a thank-you gift from our team!

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Meet François Tranquille. He's a snail. He's French. And this is the first episode of a little experiment we're calling Celestials: Bedtime Stories from Terrestrials. Restful tales, bedtime meditations, and the occasional lullaby, designed to help you drift off to sleep. Like Terrestrials, it's about a creature here on Earth. Unlike Terrestrials, it wanders away from the world of facts, towards someplace dreamier.

In our very first Celestials pilot, Monsieur Tranquille tries his hand — er, antennae — at helping you slooowww doooowwwn.

We're experimenting with a few more of these this year, and we'd love your help shaping them. After you listen, take two minutes to tell us what you thought: https://forms.gle/6WKkJsVpbJZgpLLf6

We'll be back next week with your regularly scheduled Terrestrials programming. In the meantime, sweet dreams!

HEY GROWN-UPS!
Love the show? Leave us a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ rating and review on your podcast app—it helps curious listeners find us!

Terrestrials is made possible in part by listeners like you. Support the show by joining The Explorers Club —and we’ll send you a special puzzle as a thank-you gift from our team!

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Artist Ashley (Ash) Eliza Williams was so shy growing up that they found it hard to speak to people. Instead, they withdrew from the world of humans and found comfort in the forest, where they spent hours exploring, scavenging, and collecting — eventually discovering lichen. They began painting portraits of lichen’s wild, colorful, and fuzzy shapes.

In time, Ash learned that lichen is actually a composite organism, a mixture of two species — algae and fungi — working together to live. This idea originally challenged evolutionary theory so much that scientists didn’t believe it. But lichen had much more to teach us.

Chef Prashanta Khanal fills us in on the food science of lichen, and how its collaborative powers also extend to making certain foods healthier! Learning that lichen draws its strength from collaboration eventually encouraged Ash to break out of their shell and reconnect to the world, where they would find not just friends and collaborators, but their true love.

Since the release of this podcast, artist Ash Eliza Williams goes by Ash and uses they/them pronouns.

Check out Ash Eliza Williams’s beautiful paintings.

Visit chef Prashanta's cooking blog, the Gundruk, for more on Nepali food history and recipes.

This episode features punk rock legend Laura Jane Grace, who makes a musical cameo on the song The Fuzzy Ruckus. Watch the music video and find the link to stream on our songs page.

Terrestrials was created by Lulu Miller with WNYC studios. This episode was produced by Brenna Farrel, Mira Burt-Wintonick, Alan Goffinski, Ana González, Tanya Chawla, Joe Plourde, Sarah Sandbach, Valentina Powers and Lulu Miller. Fact-checking by Diane Kelly. Transcription by Caleb Codding.

Special thanks to Siya Sharma-Gaines, Niran Bhatt Scharpf, Scott LaGreca, and Sarita Bhatt.

Our advisors are Ana Luz Porzecanski, Andy J. Pizza, Anil Lewis, Dominique Shabazz, Liza Demby, Princess Daazhraii Johnson and Tara Welty.

Learn more about storytellers, listen to music, and dig deeper into the stories you hear on Terrestrials with activities you can do at home or in the classroom on our website,

Terrestrialspodcast.org.

Badger us on social media: @radiolab and #TerrestrialsPodcast or by emailing us at terrestrials@wnyc.org.

HEY GROWN-UPS!
Love the show? Leave us a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ rating and review on your podcast app—it helps curious listeners find us!

Terrestrials is made possible in part by listeners like you. Support the show by joining The Explorers Club —and we’ll send you a special puzzle as a thank-you gift from our team!

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Subscribe to our weekly newsletter for bite-sized essays, activities, and ways to connect with the show.
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It’s summer break! So, while Terrestrials takes a summer breather,, we’re bringing you a show that we really love. It’s called Just the Zoo of Us, and it’s produced by Ellen and Christian Weatherford, a married couple with a shared love of telling stories about this wonderful planet!In every episode, they rate a different animal on three qualities - effectiveness, ingenuity, and aesthetics. In this episode, they’re tackling the DUNG BEETLE, a beetle that loves… poop. It's a story that will take us to incredible places - beetles in boots, in hats, in planetariums! Enjoy!

Check out the full episode to learn about Moray Eels here!

HEY GROWN-UPS!
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Terrestrials is made possible in part by listeners like you. Support the show by joining The Explorers Club —and we’ll send you a special puzzle as a thank-you gift from our team!

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Lulu has been terrified of snakes all her life. But strangely, her oldest son has been obsessed with them since he was two. So to understand his fascination, she called a snake expert who might also be one of the least afraid people on Earth: Gowri Shankar Pogiri.

As a kid in Bangalore, India, Gowri was his neighborhood's resident snake-catcher — wrangling seven-foot snakes and motorcycling into the sunset with the serpent draped around his neck so he could release it back into the wild. In college, he'd skip school to look at snakes for hours at the zoo.

And the day he met his first king cobra? He became completely entranced. He started working as a professional herpetologist, and became one of the first researchers to track king cobras in the wild. He’d spend his days in the rainforests of India, following the giant snakes as they climbed trees, swam across streams, and hunted prey. Until one day, when a dramatic encounter with a king cobra nearly ended his life.

That remarkable story, plus a last-minute marriage proposal, a heroic bag, and how the only thing that Gowri is truly scared of might just be what Lulu, and all of us, are most afraid of, too.

Terrestrials was created by Lulu Miller with WNYC studios. This episode was produced by Alan Goffinski with sound design by Mira Burt-Wintonick. Sarah Sandbach is our Executive Producer. Our team also includes Ana González, Tanya Chawla, Natalia Ramirez, and Joe Plourde. Fact checking by Sophie Samiee.

HEY GROWN-UPS!
Love the show? Leave us a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ rating and review on your podcast app—it helps curious listeners find us!

Terrestrials is made possible in part by listeners like you. Support the show by joining The Explorers Club —and we’ll send you a special puzzle as a thank-you gift from our team!

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