In this episode of Tiny Show and Tell Us, we cover squirrel pox — a disease that hasn’t had a huge impact in the United States but has decimated populations of squirrels in the UK. Then we talk about the story that Napoleon's army lost the Battle of Waterloo because the military uniforms used tin buttons that broke apart in cold temperatures, making it harder for the troops to survive. But is there any truth to that story?
Transcript of this Episode
Sam Jones: Welcome to Tiny Show and Tell Us, the bonus series where you write in with your favorite science news or factoid. We read your email aloud and then dive deeper. I'm Sam Jones, and I'm here with my co-host Deboki Chakravarti.
Deboki Chakravarti: Hi, Sam. Last time we talked about how climate change might affect people who are on certain medications, and also how fetuses can distinguish between rhythmic patterns underlying different languages, and it was really cool.
Sam Jones: Very cool.
Deboki Chakravarti: So if you guys want to help us make more of these episodes, we would appreciate that because it's a lot of fun. We love talking about everything that you guys send in. It's really cool just to see the range of things that you guys come across. So just as a reminder that if you would like to contribute, all you need to do is email tinymatters@acs.org or fill out the form linked in the episode description. Sam, I think you're up.
Sam Jones: Alrighty. This is a very interesting one. Okay. So this is from listener Tammy, who wrote in saying in all caps, squirrel pox, and then continues by saying, I have a family of squirrels that I feed regularly and keep track of in my backyard. I noticed that one has strange growths all over its body. I then learned about squirrel pox being a thing, exclamation point, question mark. Thankfully it recovered, but apparently it can be quite deadly, and I didn't notice any of the other squirrels having growths. How is it passed? How contagious is it? Can people get it? How common is it? Are there certain nutrients that could help it? Okay. A lot of questions, but this is a very fascinating topic. We're going to get into it. So squirrel pox. Deboki, have you heard of squirrel pox before?
Deboki Chakravarti: No. And I am a noted squirrel hater, but I don't know that I would wish pox on squirrels.
Sam Jones: Yeah, I think I'm pretty neutral, I think.
Deboki Chakravarti: I should be. I think it's one of the weirder things about me, but it's just like in college, I had bad squirrel experiences, and even though the ones here are cute and fine, it's just I'm always a little suspicious of squirrels.
Sam Jones: At my college, so I went to Vassar and there were the most confident squirrels ever on that campus because no one would do anything to them. So you'd be riding a bike and they would just chill, and they're like, it's going to go around me. And that was so annoying.
Deboki Chakravarti: We had squirrels in, my friends and I lived in a house together in college, and these squirrels were on our front porch just screaming at us.
Sam Jones: Oh, wow. Okay. I did have one of my friends in college, he left his window open at one point and had some snacks and a squirrel just came in and was just straight up eating them. And he came in the room and the squirrel just kept looking at him and eating them. So anyways, okay. So I feel actually fine about squirrels.
Deboki Chakravarti: Yeah, that's good.
Sam Jones: An annoyance at times, but they're kind of cute. I don't know. Okay. So anyways, squirrel pox. Squirrel pox also goes by the name squirrel fibroma, and it's caused by a virus that'll produce tumors on the skin. It seems like red, gray and fox squirrels are the three types of squirrels that you're going to see this in. Fox squirrels, I didn't actually know what those looked like, but they're the ones that have some gray, but then they have bits of orange as well. And I think I've seen them, but I just had no idea they weren't just a variation of a gray squirrel.
So anyhow, so the squirrel pox virus belongs to the pox group of viruses, which also cause rabbit fibromatosis, rabbit myxomatosis I think is how you say it, hair fibromatosis and some deer fibromas. So in all of these cases, you're getting these tumors that are arising on the skin. And squirrel pox has been reported across North America as well as Europe. In terms of how it spreads, this virus can be transmitted between individuals through saliva or mating, but also stuff that's contaminated. Maybe there's a feeder where a bunch of squirrels will congregate. Also, the virus can be transmitted by mosquito and flea bites. It's always mosquitoes and fleas.
Deboki Chakravarti: Yeah, for sure.
Sam Jones: Like Zika mosquito, Dengue mosquito, plague fleas. So we did an episode of Tiny Show and Tell Us a little while back on wasps where Deboki and I, we voiced our disdain for wasps, and we were like, is anyone even Team Wasp? And someone wrote in, who is Team Wasp, justice for wasps. And so if there's a justice for fleas person, email us. Let us know why. Because in my opinion, there's no upside to fleas.
Deboki Chakravarti: And mosquitoes too. Is there an upside to mosquitoes?
Sam Jones: So with mosquitoes, I know that mosquitoes are a big food source for a lot of animals, and so I'm like, okay, fine. I guess you can kind of, but what is the trade-off? Anyways, we could really go down. We have done episodes where we have talked about mosquitoes a lot, but we just need to do a mosquito episode. Anyway, squirrel pox is another example of these insects being terrible. So Tammy asked, how common is squirrel pox?
The good news in North America at least, is that there are not many documented cases of it each year, and it doesn't seem super deadly. So in severe cases, the growths can interfere with a squirrel's ability to see or eat, which is really sad, and of course puts them at a much higher risk of predation. But generally speaking, the animals will recover without a big impact on the population. However, in some parts of Europe, it's been really devastating. In Wales, for example, I found an article about this from 2023, squirrel pox reportedly killed up to 80% of the red squirrels over the winter. But the non-native gray squirrels seem to carry the virus but not be impacted. So there's something going on between red squirrel versus gray squirrel. So yeah, red squirrels, they have a very high mortality rate, and they'll experience panting and lethargy, and they'll get swollen tumors around their mouth and nose and eyes, and they usually die within two weeks, which is really sad. I feel like even if you're not a person who likes squirrels, that is so sad.
Deboki Chakravarti: For sure.
Sam Jones: So right now, actually, there's this big push in Wales and potentially other parts of the UK to create a vaccine for this, which I thought was really interesting. Also very hard to deploy a vaccination strategy in the wild, but still very interesting.
Deboki Chakravarti: Yep.
Sam Jones: It's cool. And so then Tammy also asked, of course, can it cross species? So yes, it has been transmitted to other animals, woodchucks in the wild, and I guess in a lab setting to rabbits, which is not so surprising because they're somewhat related and also these pox viruses. Yeah, it's not shocking, but important note, it cannot be transmitted to humans or to your household pet, like your dog or your cat. And there isn't a cure at this point, but one suggestion is just to get rid of sources of standing water for mosquitoes can breed, which is generally just a good idea because mosquitoes, as we just talked about, can pass on a lot of things. And squirrel pox is just now on that list.
Deboki Chakravarti: Oh, mosquitoes.
Sam Jones: Mosquitoes, yeah. I had no idea. I didn't know about squirrel pox.
Deboki Chakravarti: Yeah, and like I said, I'm a squirrel hater, but I don't think, I don't want the pox for them.
Sam Jones: No.
Deboki Chakravarti: That's really sad that so many of the red squirrels in Wales-
Sam Jones: 80%.
Deboki Chakravarti: That population just sounds like it got decimated.
Sam Jones: I know. Yeah. It's very, very sad. And it will be really interesting to see, the article I saw was from 2023. I didn't come across anything showing that there is a vaccine, but I think it was more just people in the UK were like, this is a big issue. We really, really need a vaccine. We'll see.
Deboki Chakravarti: Yeah. Well, I have something from listener Wesley who wrote, part of the reason why Napoleon's army lost the Battle of Waterloo is because the military uniforms used tin buttons, but the cold temperatures ruin the button. So the army did not survive as well in the cold temperatures. So Tien did a lot of work digging around on this. And the big takeaway is that we don't know if this is true. The premise of it though is really interesting. The premise is that as the weather starts to get cold, the bonding structure of tin starts to change, and that around 56 degrees Fahrenheit, so not even that cold.
Sam Jones: That's a beautiful New England spring day.
Deboki Chakravarti: Yeah, for sure. Right now, I would love a 56 degree Fahrenheit day. So basically the idea is that that could have evaporated the soldiers buttons.
Sam Jones: It could have evaporated them?
Deboki Chakravarti: Well, not evaporated, basically, they would've just gone poof.
Sam Jones: Oh.
Deboki Chakravarti: Yeah.
Sam Jones: They would've just degraded.
Deboki Chakravarti: Crumbled. Yeah.
Sam Jones: Yeah. Oh, that's crazy.
Deboki Chakravarti: Yeah. So there are a few articles and videos about this, and there is truth to that premise that science, so tin is similar to carbon in that it has different forms. The main ones are called alpha tin and beta tin. And beta tin is silverish metallic. It's easy to hammer into different shapes, which makes it great for a lot of different uses, including buttons, except that when it gets cold, beta tin is not super stable at around just that like 56 degree Fahrenheit point, it turns into alpha tin, which is brittle, and so just a lot less effective. So the science of this bears out, but does that mean that the history part does, and again, we don't know, Tien did find a war history site that breaks down why It probably isn't true though that this is the case for Napoleon's army. One is that around this time, a lot of armies used wood or bone buttons because that was just a lot cheaper.
Sam Jones: Bone buttons is creepy to me.
Deboki Chakravarti: I know, for sure. It could have been from animals. I don't know. Who knows?
Sam Jones: I know. Back then though, anything that has bone, I'm like, it was a person. It was a person.
Deboki Chakravarti: For sure. And so there were tin buttons in Napoleon's army, but they probably weren't super common. The other thing is that the tin they would've been using was probably pretty impure, and that would've actually made it more resistant to cold. Again, we don't know.
Sam Jones: Had a bunch of other elements in it. I'm making this up, but iron or random stuff that's not going to.
Deboki Chakravarti: Yeah, exactly.
Sam Jones: Degrade the way that a beta to alpha would go for tin.
Deboki Chakravarti: Yeah, exactly. And so that's where impurities are actually kind of useful. But I think the most damning thing is just that we don't have any accounts from soldiers suggesting that their tin buttons were causing problems. It does seem like that's something that would've cropped up in a count or two, unless it was just so trivial that they were like, no.
Sam Jones: Right. Where they're like, it's weird now because I'm just wearing an open jacket all the time.
Deboki Chakravarti: Yeah. So for now, at least I think there doesn't seem to be enough evidence that this was the case. I'm curious how it became such a common story. I think that's the one thing where you're like, oh, maybe it is true.
But yeah, so far we don't have much to suggest that this is the case. I do think this is an interesting example. One thing I've realized from working in science communication, I feel like there are the things that I know how to fact-check on the science side, you have more of the instincts about how to figure out what feels right and what feels wrong. History is weirder. It's hard. It's interesting to see how quickly it shifts when you just change over to a different field where it's like, I know how to do the research in the science area, the research and the history, and understanding what are the nuances and what are the right sources, and how do you even really find what feels like a good evidence of something happening or not happening is different.
Sam Jones: Right? Yeah. For me, logic out, that's not really a word. Finding logic to figure out if something, at least from a scientific standpoint, is reasonable or even possible, much easier than going through literature from history and also knowing, in this case, I don't know how propaganda would influence this story, but there's also a lot of things we were like, oh, well, this army did this thing. And it's like, yeah, but what person wrote that? And were they just lying? So that hundreds of years later, someone like me would be like, oh, that's really interesting. They won this battle. And then there's this whole pile of literature being like, no, they didn't. That's propaganda. And I'm like, oh, I didn't come across the propaganda stuff.
Deboki Chakravarti: Exactly. Yeah. It's so weird. It's so hard to navigate. It's hard enough to navigate even in the present day, so you dive back into the past. Well, thanks to Tammy and Wesley for submitting to Tiny Show and Tell Us, a bonus episode from Tiny Matters created by the American Chemical Society and produced by Multitude. And a big thank you to science journalist Tien Nguyen, who did the research for this episode.
Sam Jones: You can send us an email to be featured in a future Tiny Show and Tell Us episode at tinymatters@acs.org, or you can fill out the form that's linked in the episode description. We'll see you next time.
References:
- Squirrel pox in Michigan
- Squirrel pox in Indiana
- Squirrelpox on the rise in Ontario
- Pox outbreak threatens red squirrel population
- Squirrel pox: A guide to this fatal squirrel disease - including symptoms and causes - and its deadly effect on red squirrel populations
- Red squirrels: Vaccine call to save animal from killer pox
- Napoleon’s Army May Have Suffered From the Greatest Wardrobe Malfunction in History
- Napoleon’s Major Wardrobe Malfunction: An Introduction to Science XPlained
- All for Want of a Button: How Napoleon’s Battle in Russia Helps Me Teach Chemistry
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