Real nature science, with songs and zero shame about poop.
Terrestrials turns real field science into kid-friendly stories: Arctic squirrels that go eight months without pooping, loons that can stay under for minutes at a time, chinstrap penguins making the case for naps. Original songs, gross-out questions answered in earnest and a listener Q&A called The Badgers keep the silliness tied to the facts.
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Terrestrials is a family-friendly nature show hosted by Lulu Miller, built on the stranger facts of animal, plant and microbial life. Take Arctic squirrels. Out in the snow, Kelly describes the burrows beneath, which the squirrels line with moss, lichen and caribou fur before each one curls up alone for winter. Once under, they stop eating, stop dreaming and go eight months without pooping, and scientists in the 1960s played catch with them without waking a single one. That mix of solid fact and delighted disbelief is what the show does best. The subject range is wide. Titles run from 'The Greeting: Yo-Yo Ma's Humpback Whale Experiment' and 'The Red-Eyed Mascot: Loon Resilience in Minnesota' to 'The Snoozer: Penguin Slackerzzz Rule' and 'The Spellbook: Ancient Recipes for Animals', each fronted by a short nickname. Inside, the science goes further than the nicknames let on. At the bottom of a lake hole, microbes bob toward the light like a lava lamp, a habit linked to the ancient shift from six-hour days to twenty-four. A chinstrap penguin takes the microphone to defend napping as 'adaptive inactivity.' In the Yo-Yo Ma episode, a storyteller introduces Kanaloa, the Hawaiian deity who holds the oceans and their creatures, and adds that only about five percent of the sea has been explored. Humor does a lot of the work. A listener named Mo asks whether loons fart. Walter, who helps capture and band loons, admits he has never checked, then writes back after looking into it to report that they do not. The reply earns a pun about breaking wind. Listener questions also get their own closing stretch, The Badgers, where they go straight to the experts, cued by a chorus counting off 'me too, me three, me four.' Music is everywhere. Alan Goffinski, credited as The Songbud, is behind the original songs, which are also collected on Spotify. One closer insists 'you gotta yum your yuck,' and another dissolves into a chant about being a penguin at the big poopy club. The tone can soften as well: the Yo-Yo Ma episode ends on a quiet dedication. For classrooms, the team has built handouts, activities and discussion prompts with PBS Learning Media for grades K-8, available at radiolabforkids.org. A natural first stop is 'The Fuzzy Ruckus', the lichen episode Lulu names among her favorites, featuring the storyteller Ash and the magnifying glass Ash carries on hikes to inspect mosses and lichens. Episodes sign off with a promise to return in a couple spins of this dirty old planet, though the planet is sometimes lumpy and, in the episode about holes, holy.
Made for: Suits a listener of any age who wants surprising, true animal facts delivered with songs and silliness, and who thinks a question like whether loons fart deserves a serious answer. It also fits a teacher looking for nature stories that come with classroom handouts and discussion prompts.
What sets it apart: Terrestrials builds its science into a performance: original songs, a penguin's speech in praise of naps, and puns about breaking wind. Its closing segment, The Badgers, then hands listener questions straight to the experts.
Welcome, nature lovers, to the home of the Terrestrials podcast and family-friendly Radiolab episodes about nature. Every other week, host Lulu Miller will take you on a nature walk to encounter a plant or animal behaving in ways that will surprise you. Squirrels that can regrow their brains, octopuses that can outsmart their human captors, honeybees that can predict the future. You don’t have to be a kid to listen, just someone who likes to see the world anew.You’ll hear a range of nature stories on this podcast. Sometimes these will be brand new Terrestrials episodes, full of original songs (by “The Songbud” Alan Goffinski) that tell a fantastical-sounding story about nature that is 100% t…
A loaf-sized sloth and a mic-wearing whale: your curiosity has excellent company.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A reflective whale episode connecting ocean mystery, Hawaiian cosmology, and a Yo-Yo Ma music project.
This single episode brings whales to the crossing point of music, ocean mystery, and Hawaiian cosmology. Lulu and Alan shape the sea through Kanaloa, presented as a Hawaiian deity tied to the ocean, its creatures, and a realm beyond ordinary knowing.
Loon anatomy gets funny, specific, and satisfyingly strange from lake surface to bathroom humor.
The Red-Eyed Mascot finds a lively shape for loon science, turning oddball questions into a grounded look at a bird made for water. White poop, underwater breath, solid bones, powerful legs, takeoffs, and flight all become ways to show how the body works as one design, not a…
A strange, funny winter dive into squirrels, hibernation, and the science beneath the snow.
Extreme cold opens onto a wonderfully odd look at squirrels living beneath the snow. They build careful burrows, pad them with mosses, lichens, and caribou fur, then disappear into an eight-month sleep without eating or defecating.
A chinstrap penguin makes napping feel like smart survival science, with just enough silliness to keep it lively.
A chinstrap penguin turns rest into a surprisingly persuasive bit of survival science, making the case that what gets dismissed as laziness can also be adaptive inactivity.
A hole leads to microbes, ancient sunlight, and breathable air.
The episode treats holes as a way into hidden worlds, starting with ordinary sidewalk gaps and small close-up finds before landing at a lake-lit opening where purple and green microbes rise toward sunlight and sink as it darkens.
A messy, funny case for looking closely at what frightens, disgusts, or slips past notice.
Curiosity gets a little grimy in this single-episode review, following Francesco from the dangerous question of drinking snake venom into squirmier territory: maggots, pond water, and the busy life revealed by a microscope.
A birthday-timed boat trip gives this tiny endangered sloth story an easy sense of wonder.
Terrestrials opens on a cleanly appealing quest: zoologist Lucy Cook wants to see Panama's endangered pygmy sloth, a creature described as among the rarest sloths on the planet and roughly loaf-sized.
Daily TED and TEDx talks hosted by Elise Hu, spanning science, psychology, and creativity.
Pop culture, personal stakes, and room for a tangent.
Terrestrials sends Yo-Yo Ma, Ana Gonzalez, Lulu Miller, and Alan to Hawaii for a cello-and-whale-song experiment aboard Hokule'a.
Terrestrials uses the loon, Minnesota's state bird and soccer mascot, to answer a listener request from nine-year-old Jude and five-year-old Momo in St.
Terrestrials' replay of "The Snowball: Extreme Squirrels in the Arctic" follows Lulu Miller, Alan Gofinski, and 11-year-old Anya as they build a case for Arctic ground squirrels that can drop below freezing.
Terrestrials' "The Snoozer: Penguin Slackerzzz Rule" opens with chinstrap penguins that can take 10,000 micro-naps a day, each only a few seconds long.
Terrestrials marks Lunar New Year on January 29th with a quest from host Lulu Miller, who asks producers Anna Gonzalez and Alan Kafinski to build a dragon from six real traits: body, scales, teeth, wings, talons and fire.
Terrestrials' The Portal: Groundhogs Lead Us Into an Underrealm of HOLES turns a New Jersey fossil quarry, Lake Huron, Mammoth Cave, and a Kentucky sinkhole into a tour of what underground spaces preserve.
Terrestrials examines historical explanations for animal origins, including Al-Biruni’s snake recipe, Jan-Baptiste van Helmont’s mouse recipe, and Francesco Redi’s meat-jar experiment.
Terrestrials: “The Slowpoke” follows Lulu Miller, Alan Gofinski, and zoologist Lucy Cook through the biology of sloths, whose leaf-based diet supports extreme energy conservation.
Terrestrials: The Bridge: How Rainbows Connect Worlds traces rainbow ideas from Aristotle's claim that mist alters sunlight to Isaac Newton's prism experiment in 1665.
Terrestrials follows artist Ashley Eliza Williams as she learns that lichens are composite organisms formed through relationships between fungi and algae.
Terrestrials joins Wow in the World and Circle Round for a three-part “podcast turducken” about a chicken, a duck-like whale sound, and a turkey folktale.
Lulu Miller and Alan Gofinski follow Peanut, a mule born in 1999, whose owners Jerry and Teresa Smothers discover she has produced a filly named Miracle in July 2018.
Terrestrials host Lula Miller follows Puerto Rican bat scientist Angelo Soto-Centeno through a nighttime field study in Dorado, Puerto Rico, and the American Museum of Natural History.
Terrestrials host Lulu Miller and Alan introduce baby flies, or “maggies,” through emergency-room doctor Avir Mitra’s account of medical maggot therapy.
Terrestrials follows Apollo 14 pilot Stew “Smokey” Russo, who carried 500 seeds from five tree species around the moon in 1971.
Terrestrials follows beavers from the polluted Bronx River, where volunteers and Congressman Jose Serrano helped restore a waterway abandoned as an open sewer, to Northern California wetlands studied by Dr.
Terrestrials follows gravitational waves from a collision between two black holes 1.3 billion light-years away to their detection on Earth in 2015.
Terrestrials: “PIZZA BFF” uses wheat, tomatoes, and cheese to connect pizza ingredients with human history and hidden biological activity.
Terrestrials: The Horseshoe Crab's Secret follows Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser from Delaware beaches to a South Carolina bleeding facility to examine horseshoe crab blood.
Terrestrials hosts Lulu, Alan, and Ana investigate the ingredients in New England clam chowder during a live WBUR City Space performance in Boston.
Terrestrials examines Greenland sharks through journalist Johnny Mones’s investigation into their reported lifespan of several centuries.
Terrestrials hosts Lulu and Alan present a live Bugapalooza episode from New York City with entomologist Dr.
Terrestrials follows Hades, a white dog from the Las Vegas area who disappeared for almost seven months and was filmed sleeping, hunting, and howling with a coyote pack.
Terrestrials: The Invaders: Coquí Frogs Just Won't Die examines why Puerto Rico's coquí frog became an invasive species in Hawaii.
Latif Nasser tells Lizzie Miller and Alan Gofinski how paleobiologist Natalia Rybczynski found a 3.5-million-year-old camel bone on Ellesmere Island, more than 1,000 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle.
Terrestrials examines why farting matters biologically, musically, and socially, beginning with Brown University Orchestra musicians imitating flatulence on instruments.
Lulu Miller and Alan Gofinski examine rats through Magawa, a trained pouched rat who learned to detect TNT in buried landmines.
Terrestrials: “An Ocean in Space” follows NASA scientist Cynthia Phillips and U.S.
Terrestrials host Lulu Miller and song partner Alan join Scottish artist and tree researcher Amanda Thompson to examine why tree stumps remain biologically active after trees die.
Terrestrials host Lula Miller and Alan Gofinski tell A.J.
Terrestrials follows bug correspondent Sammy Ramsey into Bangladesh to study overlooked honeybees that may reveal future threats to North American colonies.
Terrestrials hosts Lulu Miller and Alan Gofinski examine tsetse flies with entomologist Sammy Ramsey and Kenyan scientist Paul Mareggi.
Terrestrials follows Illinois wildlife biologist Ed Britton after he observes a female bald eagle and two males sharing a nest near a Mississippi River dam in 2013.
Lulu Miller and Alan Gofinski investigate recursive islands, including islands inside lakes on islands, which can resemble bullseyes from outer space.
Terrestrials' "Vanished Moon!" uses an April Fools thought experiment to ask what would happen if Earth's moon disappeared.
Terrestrials’ “Gettin’ Crabby” follows Mary Akers as she studies hermit crab reproduction after learning that most pet hermit crabs are taken from the wild.
A Radiolab episode teaser about a unique cow, preceded by a call for punny animal cards for Mother's Day and Father's Day.
A Radiolab episode discussing the discovery of volcanoes on the Moon and its implications.
Host Lulu Miller invites listeners to share punny animal cards for Mother's Day and Father's Day, then transitions to a story about the winter solstice.