Colossal Creatures

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I'm Hannah Fry.

And I'm Dara O'Brien.

And this is Curious Cases.

The show where we take your quirkiest questions, your crunchiest conundrums, and then we solve them.

With the power of science.

I mean, do we always solve them?

I mean, the hit rate's pretty low.

But it is with science.

It is with science.

I think you'll like today's Curious Cases, Darren.

Why is that?

It's all about size, all about being tall and large.

And as an unusually tall comedian.

Am I unusually tall?

I'll come tall.

6'4, right?

But I suppose I'm not I'm not in.

I feel like I'm not on the unusually tall.

And when there's like Greg Davis who's six, seven or ex and and Steve Marsh is six's eight.

I mean, how tall can these things get?

You're notably tall.

Notably tall but yes not rather than unusual like really that people go oh oh how do you function in society because you know with the chairs and the doors it's not the only thing that anyone wants to talk to you about.

No it's not.

It's not the opening thing a lot of the time.

And instead all it does was I was tall enough that I would get just the respect of people.

You know all the malady people because people from being childhood, you're used to looking up at older people and authority figures.

So therefore tall people just get this.

You know, I think I'm probably, I reckon comparatively, I reckon reckon I'm as tall for a woman as you are for a man, I reckon.

And you've lived your life surrounded by

respectful glasses, isn't it?

Yeah.

So the question I'm asking is: how tall can you get?

How tall can you get?

How far can this go before it collapses in?

I mean, great question, Dara.

And would you believe it?

You've exactly hit the nail on the head for today's episode because we have had this question in from a listener.

I have a sneaky little inkling we're going to be able to squeeze some mass into this one.

Have a listen.

Hi, I'm Andrew.

So, my question is: how large can an animal get?

The blue whale is the largest animal today, and it may be the largest animal that's ever existed.

And then you have the movies where you have titans like Godzilla and Kong that are even larger.

So, my question is: what does the science say about how big a single animal can get on land or in the sea?

All right, our challenge then, should we choose to accept it, which I think we will inherently given that we're setting it to a zero,

is try and work out how to make a sort of megazilla.

Okay, grant.

Massive monster animal that's bigger than anything that's ever existed.

And also, and then hopefully, inherently, maybe there's an island somewhere around the world.

Maybe we're doing that.

Exactly.

We've got to keep it scientifically possible, I think.

Okay, fine.

Okay, Grant.

So not ridiculous.

Not ridiculous.

Yeah.

So we're basically going to work out the rules for how big can something get.

How big can something get?

Could it possibly exist?

Maybe it exists now.

Oh, maybe it's listening in on an island somewhere on a shortwave radio.

Each creature going, wait till they get a load of me.

Well, joining us on the quest for new giants of the animal kingdom, we have Ben Garridge, Professor of Evolutionary Biology at the University of East Anglia.

And Dr.

Tori Herridge, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Sheffield.

So we're looking for the biggest things that can be, but looking back,

have you a favourite giant animal from evolutionary history?

Well, my specialism of all the animals are mammoths and elephants.

So I've obviously got a massive vote in for the largest elephants ever, which were probably the straight-tusk elephants.

I love those.

They lived in Europe from about 800,000 years ago to 30,000 years ago.

But they were massive.

They could have been over four meters at the shoulders, maybe years, yeah, maybe even four and a half metres something.

Now that is as high as a double decker bus.

I mean, even the four metre ones, like if you put your hand out the window of the double-decker bus, you could probably pat them on the head.

It's massive.

So that's a big elephant, ten tons plus.

So much bigger than an elephant nowadays, right?

Yeah, well so an African elephant can reach the biggest African elephant ever recorded was 3.9 metres, but typically at the shoulders, yeah, the head.

But that typically they're a bit smaller than that.

These ones were on average bigger and could have maybe pushed even higher.

And let's say, you know, an African elephant, male, six tons, maybe.

This is like 10 tons plus.

This is big.

And why did they die out?

Well,

some people think really humans had a big hand in it.

For the straight tooth elephant, it's not clear.

But yeah, where humans appear, big animals start to disappear, is certainly the correlation.

But at the same time, the climate is changing.

So 25,000 years ago, peak of the last ice age, from that point onwards, things start to cool down.

The straight tooth elephant, though, was a warm adapted elephant.

It was really happy in warmer climates.

So, it used to be found in Britain.

Have they found fossils of them in Britain then?

Yeah, loads.

Really?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, loads.

The great elephant of Slough.

Well, Hannah, you're like this.

Essex.

Really?

Yes.

Thank you so much.

My home.

A13.

Really?

Yes.

Oh, gosh, that's the price.

Yeah, Thurrock mammoth.

Yeah, the Thurrock mammoth.

And then just across the way, you had the Avery elephant, the Straight South Elephant.

Do you know what?

I've never been more proud to be from Essex.

Ben, what's your pick of a big animal from anyone in history?

Dara, I'm a simple soul.

I like monkeys and dinosaurs, so I've picked a big monkey and a big dinosaur.

There was Gigantopithecus, which was a huge orangutan-like ape that lived in what's now sort of Central Asia.

It's about one and a half tons.

So you're talking nearly 10 times the size of modern orangutans.

These things were absolutely huge.

Going back a little bit further, so just over 100 million years, you had Patago Titan, which is the biggest land animal we've ever seen, which is around about 75, 76 tons, reliably.

And I was lucky enough to go out there a few years ago and see this thing, this absolute whopper being excavated in Argentina.

And it was just...

unimaginable how big this thing was.

They had a life-size reconstruction made for the museum and then realized it was too big for their museum, had to hire the old cotton mill next to the museum and stick it in there.

And this is the skeleton cast that's now in the Natural History Museum.

And this thing was, so dippy, the diplodocus, around about 17 tons.

This was 75, 76 tons.

It's at that threshold of how big we think things could be on land.

Um, when it lifted its head up, if it could indeed lift its head up, it was almost the height of a five-story building.

So, you're talking if it could, sorry, what was it on to push it around on a wheel or something?

Potentially, well, as Tori was alluding to, when you start to get really, really big, there are physical constraints.

So, if you've got this very long-necked, long-tailed animal, at what point do you need to counterbalance?

Can you lift your head up?

Will you get such a I mean, it's bad enough, our height standing up suddenly, you get a head rush.

Imagine weighing 76 tons and having a five-story head.

We don't know whether the pressure change was too big.

There are so many variables we don't quite understand about scaling at the moment.

What do you understand about it though?

I mean, did they did there have to be any special adaptations in the sort of structure of the body to be able to get up to that sort of size?

Yeah, there are loads.

So, these things had what we call pneumatized bones.

So effectively, I'm not saying hollow bone, because they were filled with air sacs, but some of the vertebrae, the back bones that lead from the skull down to the pelvis,

were, I mean, the size of this table, you're talking three or four feet across, and yet they were filled with air spaces.

So almost like a giant crunchy bar because their respiratory systems, rather than like our,

unlike ours, sorry, they didn't go straight from the mouth, nose, down to the lungs.

They would extend all the way through their skeletal structures as well, which partly allows a more efficient respiratory system at that size, but also reduce the overall weight as well.

Wait, sorry, they're like breathing in through their backs.

Yep, and through their skeleton, so right through their long bones, through their vertebrae.

And modern birds do the same.

If you look at the

respiratory system of a pigeon, it isn't mouth to trachea to lungs.

It goes all the way through, right down to their down to their feet, basically, which is a leftover adaptation from the dinosaurs.

Favourite adaptation, though, are pressure stockings.

So if you've got a long-haul flight, you'll wear pressure stockings.

You want to avoid DVTs.

Same with some of these big land mammals we have today.

But we have this lovely covering for these long limbs with fascia to increase the pressure, to really bounce that blood pressure.

Rather than having one massive heart that pumps everything around the system, it would be doing so much work.

You have these little tricks for the trade where by having these inbuilt pressure stockings, these big dinosaurs were walking around, pushing the pressure back up

to their sort of trunk and central body parts.

I mean, you do paint quite a picture of a dinosaur in stockings.

It's gone quite rocking hollow already, hasn't it?

Super chunky legs.

Was it a herbal?

It was.

That seems a bit strange, doesn't it?

Why would it be, you know, if it's so massive, like, it's just eating a plant, so it feels like it's the advantage to being that big?

I mean, as a vegetarian, I'm hardly slight, so I'm going to use myself as an example here.

I think we've got this idea that to be big and healthy, you need to eat meat.

But actually, you look at some of the biggest examples of mammals alive today.

Gorillas.

Gorillas are huge.

They sit and eat nettles and thistles all day long.

Cows.

Cows are pretty big just eating grass.

So this ability to eat poorer quality diet, but having the gut space to accommodate that allows you to eat a lot of something that other things don't want to eat.

And also gives you that time to, whether you've got multi-chambered stomachs or you've just got a huge volume, it allows you to fill a niche that others typically don't.

No, my question wasn't, hey, can you get that big just on leaves alone?

It was, why would you want to be that big?

Why would evolution push something to be that huge?

Surely it's better to be smaller and requires less fuel.

I almost think of the advantage to it.

If you're really small, you don't need to eat as much.

But again, everything's going to try and eat you.

There is a trade-off at the other end where if you can eat stuff, first of all, that other things don't want to eat, there are very few animals that actually eat grass or bark or tough leaves.

It takes a lot internally to digest that.

So, first of all, if you have the physical equipment, massive guts, multi-chambered stomachs, huge intestines to take the time to act as a fermentation chamber, you're not in direct competition with lots of other species.

Also, if you're so big, imagine being 76 tons, no self-respecting predatory dinosaur is going to go, yeah, I'll give that a go.

You're just too big.

So, you almost avoid predation and you can fulfill a dietary niche that most things can't even look at.

Does the stockings help with the

I think they're just optional?

It does make it, but it is also that really interesting aspect when you you look at the evolutionary record, the fossil record, that what you do see through time is this inevitable increase in size diversity.

So the asteroid hits, everything's small, you know, you've got rat-sized mammals, largest mammal, and then bit by bit

things get bigger, or rather, bigger things evolve alongside those smaller things.

And it's this law, it's called Cope's rule, that through time things inevitably get bigger, right?

And it's not that everything will get bigger, it's just that you've got this space in the ecosystem for big stuff where are we now on that on that scale of like okay so since the last major extinction event and things have got bigger and bigger and bigger where are we now on that trajectory we're in a bit of a small world oh really and you know that's partly thanks to things having disappeared since the end of the last ice age we're definitely lacking in in big terrestrial mammals we have the largest animal that ever existed, the blue whale in the oceans.

But...

Are we saying that's cheating because it's in water?

I am, yeah.

Yeah.

You know, but we otherwise have, you know, these, yeah, we have a world which hasn't got that many giants in it.

If you were to go back just 50,000 years ago, there were elephants all over the planet.

Elephants and Eclosis, yeah.

Exactly.

Right.

And, you know, everywhere apart from Antarctica and Australia.

But, you know, it was a a world of far more giants than we have now.

And the animal that you mentioned, and the animals we'd regard as being the big animals, Diplodocus, for example, or whatever other titanosaur, the are

four-legged, big, chunky body in the middle, long-necked, longed.

Is there something about that shape which is just stable and strong for being a big animal?

Yeah, when you start to look at body shape, when you start scaling up, it's not typically that you just take a hedgehog and make it five tons.

That just wouldn't work.

You have to have certain adaptations.

As you start to become bigger, you start to see this columnar approach to the limbs.

You start to see these really column-like limbs that just like the big elephants like the paraserotherium like some of the big dinosaurs they're very much like a temple like an old grecian temple just somehow slowly walking a squirrel or a porcupine or a rodent a smaller rodent are very curved limbs in their approach you can't just scale up so when you get to a certain size you typically see these big bodied animals with limbs that fall directly beneath their body they're four legged but adding those long necks and those long tails almost works as a counter lever in terms of the physics.

You start to offset the balance.

You can't just have a body that big with a massive neck and head with a tiny pigtail at the end.

I mean, it would look amazing.

Is there any good straightforward law about this scaling?

Any kind of rule that's that has to happen, basically.

So if you imagine you've got, say, something which is

Let's say like a 10 gram mouse or something like that, yeah.

If you wanted to make a giant mouse, a mouse the size of a cat, you know, one that could chase a cat, instead of the other way around, you cut, if you, if you were to go up to that size, just because of the way that surface area and volume works, right?

So if you were to get a mouse and you were to say, okay, I wait twice the size in height, the surface area of its skin, of the cross-section of its bones, would go to the square, but its volume, just by doubling its height, would go to the cube.

And so that basic principle, which is just simple maths, right?

You know, it just has to happen that way, has all these downstream effects to the physical actions of its skeleton.

Because if your weight is increasing faster than the surface area of your bones, you are going to reach a point based on the material properties of your bones where your body weight is too heavy for the bones supporting it.

So you get a mouse, you double its height, you means you increase its surface of your skin is four times as much, and it means the volume, as in the weight of it, is eight times as much.

Yeah, and if you do that to a certain extent, that has all these kind of impacts on it, it, or you basically get to the point where your skeleton cannot support your weight.

And so something has to give.

So if you took a human being by 1950s science fiction, you invent, you have a box, a black box like they have in 1950 science fiction, where you put something in and it doubles in size.

A 16, or like let's say a 12-foot-tall human walks out of the box.

It immediately breaks its legs.

It immediately breaks their leg.

That's what happens.

The legs collapse underneath them immediately.

Yeah, and also probably their blood starts to boil or something at the same time because your metabolism also is a problem there, because your metabolism, you know, all your cells in your body are producing heat as you process food.

And that heat, you know, we have to regulate our body temperatures, but you're producing heat like that.

And the number of cells will increase with the volume of your body.

So it goes up like that.

But you can only lose heat through your skin.

via surface area.

And so if you don't basically change the way your metabolic rate scales in some way,

as you did that, if you were to scale up a human and everything went at the same time, we had the same, we basically doubled our metabolic rate, we doubled our size, our blood would boil effectively because it couldn't escape.

So, the only way you do that is to follow the rules that we see in nature, which is to basically have your metabolic rate not increase at the same rate as your volume.

And these laws you see again and again and again, they're called scaling laws.

And quite often, you see them to the two-thirds law, so because it's surface area to volume.

And if you actually look at the data, which is really interesting, across, say, mammals, you get a mouse all the way through to an elephant, the data does seem to suggest that sometimes it does indeed look like metabolism scales to the two-thirds if you look at other data sometimes it looks like the three-quarters which is really interesting because the three quarters scaling law is seen in other systems as well it's just one of those like weird like woo universal law how exciting This does remind me of a particularly memorable maths question that I got in a mathematical biology paper by an unusually eccentric professor.

And it was, there are two dogs and a bear.

The two dogs put together weigh the same as the bear.

Which would live longer if you fed the two dogs to the bear or fed the bear to the two dogs?

So, basically, what's more efficient?

What's more efficient?

Exactly.

And then, exactly, as you're describing, because the bigger you get,

the more efficient you have to be.

You can't sort of be running at the same metabolic rate as smaller creatures, because otherwise you'd overheat and it would be catastrophic.

Your blood would boil, as you say.

So, the larger you are, the more efficient you have to be, which means that the bear would eat the dogs and be more efficient with that energy.

Yeah, it would keep it going for longer.

You'd end up with animals for longer.

So we're saying there's the same amount of meat, by the way.

Yeah, because I was getting too complicated going there that

the dogs would be leaner than the bear and therefore there'd be more eating in the bear than there is in the dogs.

I think I was assuming a spherical bear.

Yeah, okay, Grant.

So presumably a consistent bear of exactly the same amount of math.

It's just a meat bear

and two meat dogs.

Yeah, and they weigh the same.

Yeah.

Study maths, kids.

Okay, Grant.

But the idea is that if you fed the same amount to one big animal, it will go through it slower than if you fed half that amount to an animal half its size.

Exactly.

Sucks!

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We the man to be home!

Winner, best score.

We the man to be seen!

Winner, best book.

We demand to be quality.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs.

Playing the Orpheum Theater, October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaysF.com.

All of these things that change with size, one thing that doesn't, how long it takes to empty your bladder.

Well, you know this?

They did it.

There was a study.

I did not know this, but

it feels like it should be true.

Because

when you have a teeny tiny little shrew, for example, they've hardly got any liquid, but then they're sort of fighting against the viscous effects of urine.

And then when you get up to like a giant elephant, for instance, way more fluid, but then you're like fighting against the kind of forcing it out in the correct amount of time.

21 seconds.

It's kind of a universal law.

You're welcome.

And I should tell you that the way they did that study was just by watching animals urinate on YouTube.

Okay.

You are saying this to two people who work with a lot of students.

I can imagine both of us now going, right, students,

your job this week, go watch things pee.

I walk a dog.

Do you have to time the dog?

Time yourself, Darrell.

I mean, you get involved yourself.

Okay, all right.

So I think these scaling laws, though, are generally going to be absolutely key to this quest.

There is another one, actually, that scales in a slightly unusual way.

The bigger you get, the more inefficient it becomes to chew your food.

Have a listen to this.

My name is Martin Sander and I'm a paleontologist who's interested in the largest animals that ever lived on land, sauropod dinosaurs.

So scaling is always the relationship between one factor and another.

Of course, sauropod dinosaurs, everything is about scaling.

So why is chewing a limit?

Because with chewing, you run into a massive scaling problem.

Energy demand scales with body mass of volume.

The bad news for chewers is that chewing performance scales with two surfaces.

One, which is quite obvious, is the grinding surface of your teeth.

The other is muscle performance.

And this is a hugely important scaling thing as well, because muscle performance is not determined by the volume of a muscle, but by its cross-sectional area.

So chewing performance lags behind energy demand as body size goes up.

Okay, what's the solution to the chewing issue?

If you're large enough, then you can simply accumulate the food in your guts and let it ferment.

So that means sauropods managed the option of eating as fast as they could, didn't chew, everything ended up in that vat where it called the stomach where it could sit and be digested.

Okay, so let's do a little recap then.

You get bigger, chewing performance is a sentence I never thought I'd say, increases more slowly than energy demand, so starts becoming ineffective then as a way of releasing energy from food.

So, all right, so you're fermenting food really slowly, these enormous stomachs.

That's a better strategy.

You are right, that chewing is really

costly if you are massive and the dinosaurs strip a lot of food, or you could have big guts that do aid the digestion.

You could also cheat by eating things three or four times, and things like the average mountain gorilla will strip the leaves, eat the food.

A lot of effort goes into chewing and passes...

feces that's not wholly digested.

And the simple solution is to pick it up and eat it again.

And they reckon that the average mountain gorilla will eat the same meal three, maybe four times.

And I've worked with gorillas all across Africa and very luckily you can tell

how often an animal has eaten a particular meal by the content and the actual look and consistency of what's left behind.

Really solid, really leafly, you can pick it up, you can give it a good squeeze, lots of vegetation, very water heavy.

Third go, you can tell it's third go.

Are we adding this to our list then?

No humans, consistent environmental conditions, eats their own poo.

That seems to be the thing.

There's a bit more eating than that.

I don't think you're quite done there.

Okay, all right then.

So we've got our recipe here then.

So let's see.

We're going to rerun the evolutionary process for 65 million years.

Talk to me about the ideal starting conditions.

One, no humans, we're with that.

Yep.

Two, large continent maybe?

If you wanted the biggest possible creatures.

Yeah.

I'd say stable environment more than anything.

But large continent would help.

I'd say large-ish.

Not so large that you've got like a, because if you have a massive supercontinent, the middle is going to be a kind of a burning inferno of hell.

And so you want it to be big enough so you want that kind of sweet spot, you know, kind of you should have a nice environment, not too hot in the middle, plenty of food around, you know, so nothing deserty.

Okay, so we've got this medium-sized continent.

Tropical climate, what would you like?

I think cold is quite good though.

Oh, do you?

I see.

I like

semi-tropical.

I'm thinking of the ancestors of whales that lived exactly where you're describing right now that were dog-like animals.

Pachycetus.

Pachycetus that then found the right conditions to go into...

That was a subtropical region with lots of big continent.

You're describing whale evolution really nicely here.

I mean, thank you.

Completely accidentally.

I mean, I just want the biggest thing ever.

That's what I want.

On that, actually, reduce competition.

Because, as Tori was saying earlier, the end of the dinosaur reign, the largest mammals were really quite small.

But within quite a short period of time, you're talking five, ten million years, you're seeing a diversity of mammals.

And the moment there was nothing big in the water, none of these big marine predatory reptiles, suddenly you've got the ancestors of modern whales going, if I dip my toes in that water, I'm probably not going to get eaten actually, so let's crack on.

I mean, that's not quite how evolution works, but without that competition, you can exploit those niches that nothing else is there.

So you take a dog-sized animal, and within a couple of million years, you've got blue whales.

Yeah, 30 million years

did you know this that the the great great great grandmother of the the blue whale was basically a dog no i did not know that honestly it's one of my favorite things ever like uh it had like teats it had like fur it had like i mean honestly it looks like a dog do you want to see do you want to see the great-grandmother of a whale absolutely do and then it what wandered back into the sea yes it never started in the sea it was a terrestrial four-legged toothy buttons that's the whale's great great great grandmother i mean more greats

Times a million.

Five million generations.

And we can track the evolution of the nostrils, the blowholes of those first walking whales.

And we even had things like Ambulocetus, so the walking whale.

So we can track that really nicely to look for what works.

Like, actually, you've got a really good example of right place, right time, right environment, lack of competition, ocky trot.

Next time you're with your Labrador.

Just keep him away from the sea in case he goes in and then I just swims off and you see

a plume of water.

And all of a sudden she's eating krill.

Biggest animal on ever.

Yeah.

She'd want that as well.

She'd want it.

Come back to the house.

Come back.

Woo!

At the front door.

No, you've chosen to be a whale now.

You can go offer me a whale.

That's what you wanted.

You can be a whale now.

We're not getting you any more of the dog biscuits.

I mean, this does have to be 50 million years later, but that's a minor detail.

It's a small thing.

It's a small thing.

And then you would end up with then something.

The great, great, great, great, great grandchild of

Dara's dog, which was like loads of stomachs, massive legs, maybe.

Eating his own poo.

Eating his own poo.

Slow metabolism, but not too slow.

Would it be like a great big blob?

Yeah, so big, did your metabolism slow down so much you can't do anything at all?

That sounds like just a Labrador anyway.

Yeah, yeah!

She would point out of a golden retriever, just I'm sorry, but it's really important just for factual purposes to say she's a golden retriever.

She doesn't like being misidentified as a Labrador.

She gets really angry like that.

So, hang on.

We were looking for something slightly more active than a blob that sits on the edge of a tropical rainforest on a beach somewhere, ingesting and then eating its own poo later.

I was really looking for something kind of dynamic here, like a 40-foot gorilla with

a spear.

Nature's not always sexy, I hate to say it.

Unless it's wearing stockings.

Well, I think that we have managed somehow or other to sort of answer the question.

Yeah, it's a rolling blob somewhere on a kind of a fake continent, just sitting there going, Why am I here?

What is my purpose?

No friends, no competition, nothing, just slowly vegetating.

And eating a bow poo.

Eating the poo again.

Very much.

It's less inspirational than I wanted it to be, if I'll be honest.

It really was, wasn't it?

Yes, it was.

Science takes you in unexpected directions.

Thank you both very, very much.

Ben Gard and Tori Herridge.

That was a delight.

Well, that's the conclusion then.

Comedians are.

As big as they're going to get.

Basically.

Unless we develop a comedian who just like a big blob who sits on the beach and eats their own poo.

I mean, the material writes itself.

Hey, tap, tap, tap.

Have you eaten your own poo on the beach?

And all the other blobs go, yeah, I've eaten my own poo on the beach.

Yeah,

until that time.

I'm happy with Stephen Mergent being the limit.

Yeah, okay, fine.

He can be the outer edge of that.

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Hello, this is Danny Robbins.

Three years ago, I was told one of the scariest stories we have ever had on Uncanny.

The entire room erupts.

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In 1973, a young climber called Phil spent the most terrifying night of his life in an abandoned house in the Scottish Highlands.

We're absolutely terrified.

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Now, we are going back there with Phil, returning to Louis Belt, 50 years on to confront whatever he experienced there.

There it is, Phil.

Yeah, that's it, all right.

Poking up over the hill like a grim spectre.

How are you feeling?

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Nervous.

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We the man to be honest!

Winner, best score!

We the man to be seen!

Winner, best book!

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs.

Playing the Orpheum Theater October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaysF.com.

Wouldn't it be nice if your cash savings could just grow by itself?

With the Wealthfront cash account, it can, earning 4% annual percentage yield from partner banks on your uninvested cash, nearly 10 times the national average.

Just imagine if other things in your life work the way Wealthfront works.

If your houseplants grew at 10 times the average rate, you'd have 10 times fewer issues with sad, stunted succulents.

Your crocodile ferns would go to the size of crocodiles.

Wealthfront's cash account keeps your money thriving just like that, earning you an industry-leading rate with no account maintenance fees and with free 24-7 instant withdrawals so you can access your money whenever you need it.

Money works better here.

Go to WealthFront.com to start saving.

Cash account offered by Wealthfront Brokerage LLC member FINRA SIPC.

Wealthfront is not a bank.

The APY on cash deposits as of December 27, 2024 is representative, subject to change, and requires no minimum.

Funds in the cash account are swept to partner banks where they earn the variable APY.

The national average interest rate for savings accounts is posted on fdic.gov as of December 16, 2024.