#205: The World we Leave (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 205th in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we discuss the state of the world through an evolutionary lens.In this episode, we briefly discuss solar storms, Carrington events, and the possible failure of the electrical grid. Then: what does the absence of organisms where they once were mean? In the Exumas, Bahamas, this month, there were no laughing gulls. Eight months ago they were abundant in the same place. Could they be migr...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast livestream, 205 being the number.
So clearly not prime.
I'm Dr. Brett Weinstein.
You are Dr. Heather Hying.
We have just returned from a trip to the Bahamas, and we are going to talk about some things that we saw and what it might imply about the state of the world or not.
And anyway, more things like that.
Yep, that's where we're going to spend our time today.
Maybe we'll talk about woolly dogs, too.
Woolly dogs, woolly dogs, all right.
And maybe we will take a brief look at the space weather.
Okay.
All right, so we will do a Q&A, our final Q&A.
Actually, no, not our final Q&A of the year.
We will do a Q&A after today's live stream.
In the new year, we're going to reduce these to once a month, but we will continue to do as well our private Q&As on Locals, which we do on the last Sunday of the month, which this month falls on December 31st, New Year's Eve.
So join us on Locals this New Year's Eve at 11 a.m.
for a two-hour private Q&A.
We have a lot of fun with those.
They're small enough that we actually look at the chat and can engage with the chat.
Other things that you can find on Locals are, for instance, our Watch Party right now that happens while we are livestreaming both Evolutionary Lens and the Q&As that we do.
And there's early release of guest episodes there, AMAs with Brett, Zach and I did one once, access to Discord, lots more.
Yeah, if you were going to be a stickler over details and you wanted to hash it out, that'd be a place, and then we could also stickle back.
Yeah, we could totally stickle back.
We could totally stickle back, yeah.
And since, I think since we saw you last, or since you saw us last, the guest episode with the World War II veteran whom you met?
Martin Agagian.
Has posted.
Probably the last B-17 pilot alive, at least who flew during World War II.
People love this episode.
I think I was hoping that they would be interested to hear a man who has seen as much of history as Martin Nagegian has.
He's 100 years old.
100 years old.
He says he's looking to eke out another five.
He'll be satisfied with that.
Anyway, very fascinating fella.
And he was right here in the studio.
He was right here.
I mean, it wasn't all that easy explaining to him what a podcast is, but nonetheless, once he kind of got the gist, he was he was ready to go.
That's awesome.
OK, so check that out.
And if you'd been on Locals, you would have gotten that a day earlier.
And yeah, we're going to move the rest of the stuff that we're going to tell you about to the end, except for our sponsors.
As always, we have three fantastic sponsors to start the episode today.
That's the only place you'll have ads from us during the show.
And if we are speaking ads, then you know that we actually vouch for the products.
And you're going to start today.
Wow.
There you go.
Somehow, after 205 episodes, I did not see that coming.
Our first sponsor, This week is Mindbloom, which offers at-home ketamine therapy, a new tool to improve your mental health.
If you are struggling with anxiety or depression, you are not alone.
Millions of Americans are searching for ways to feel better, but feel like... searching for ways to feel better, but feel like they've exhausted every option and don't know where to turn.
If that sounds like you, then guided ketamine therapy from Mindbloom could be a game-changer.
Mindbloom can help you feel better faster.
Mindbloom is the leader in ketamine therapy, having helped tens of thousands of people overcome their anxiety and depression.
Mindbloom's expert clinicians and guides can help you feel better in days, not weeks, and you can complete treatment entirely from the comfort of your home.
In a study of over 1,000 Mindbloom clients, 89% reported improvements in their anxiety and depression after only four sessions.
Mindbloom has new programs that go beyond depression and anxiety to help you overcome challenges in everyday life.
I wonder if they have anything for spelling.
I bet they don't.
Or reading live.
Anyway, we'll find out.
Right now, Mindbloom is offering our listeners $100 off your first six-session program when you sign up at mindbloom.com slash Dark Horse and use the promo code Dark Horse.
Break free from your anxiety and depression and feel better faster with Mindbloom.
That's M-I-N-D-B-L-O-O-M Yeah, you're one of those rare creatures who, I'm guessing, never had any anxiety about public speaking, but public reading, that's a totally different thing.
Well, I hate to say this, but I think everybody has anxiety about public speaking.
To some degree?
Until you do it a zillion times.
And my, I still, I mean, I don't have anxiety about standing in front of a crowd and speaking, but definitely certain topics.
Well, sure.
I mean, you take things seriously and know that, you know, it's a live fire exercise and things could go wrong and all of this, but to the degree that for some, some people claim that public speaking is their number one fear, you know, the thing that they fear absolutely the most.
And I think, and you know, maybe I'm just misreading what you just said, but that you actually, regard public reading as more of an issue than public speaking.
Very difficult, yes.
Extemporaneously.
Yep.
My number one fear is probably effective altruists.
Really?
Yes.
Not moray eels?
You know, if they've got good morays, I don't think they have any beef with me.
Yeah, I see beefs.
All right, this has gone strange.
But we're going to get back on track.
It's the end of the year.
What are you going to do?
Exactly.
Yep.
Our second sponsor this week is MD Hearing.
We have friends and family who have hearing loss.
There's a good chance that you do, too.
Well, we don't have need for hearing aids ourselves.
We have a good friend who does.
We asked her to assess MD Hearing's newest product carefully and honestly.
Honestly, her testimonial is at the end of this ad.
They've got an even newer one coming out soon.
We're going to hear a new testimonial, I believe, next time.
Here we are with the second testimonial, second product that's been assessed by our friend, positively.
MD Hearing makes high quality, simple and effective hearing aids for a tiny fraction of what most hearing aids cost, helping bring audio clarity and capacity to people who might not otherwise be able to afford it.
MD Hearing was founded by an ENT surgeon who made it his mission to develop a quality hearing aid that anyone could afford.
He keeps the price low by removing several rarely needed components.
MD Hearing's Neo model costs over 90% less than clinic hearing aids, and the Neo is MD Hearing's smallest hearing aid ever.
It fits inside your ear and no one will know it's there.
MD Hearing's products also have rechargeable batteries that last up to 30 hours, and their Volt Plus model is water-resistant and up to 3 feet of water.
You don't need a prescription, which also means there's no middleman.
Here is the newest testimonial from our friend who has substantial hearing loss and who relies on hearing aids.
We asked her to try this product, and this is what she said.
I tested the NEO, she writes, MDHearing's new in-the-ear canal hearing aids.
I was a bit skeptical, since I've never liked the in-the-ear canal models, preferring the stability of over-the-ear sets.
They were surprisingly comfortable and stable, staying put without coming loose even when I wore them to exercise.
I tried the Neo in several situations, from discord voice chat to an in-person conversation in a room with a white noise generator, and they passed every test.
It is true that they don't have the individual audiogram programming and smartphone integration of my usual hearing aids, but they have everything else for less than 5% of the price.
They provide an absolutely stunning level of quality for pennies on the dollar.
If you want MDHearing's smallest hearing aid ever, go to MDHearing.com and use promo code DarkHorse to get their new $297 when you buy a pair offer.
Head to MDHearing.com and use promo code DarkHorse to get their brand new $297 when you buy a pair offer.
It's a fabulous deal for a fabulous product.
You know, when it comes to hearing aids, the only person between them, the middle man, should be you.
Or... I don't know.
But if you think about... Never mind.
Well, it sounds like MD Hearing is thinking along the same lines you are.
Yes, they've gotten rid of the middleman entirely, leaving the position open for you to inhabit it between the hearing aids.
And to hear better as a result.
I would hope.
Sundays, our final sponsor this week!
Maddie's all-time favorite!
She's asleep behind us, out of view of the camera, unfortunately, just zonked.
Glad to have us home.
That dog is.
Sundays is one of our favorites, too, not just hers, because when you make your dog this happy while giving her amazing food that is good for her, what's not to be thrilled about?
Sundays makes dry dog food, but it's not your usual dry dog food.
This is no standard-issue burnt kibble.
The standard high-end burnt kibble that we were feeding Maddie pleases her well enough.
She's a lab.
Labs will basically eat anything.
But it turns out that Maddie does discriminate.
She loves the food that Sundaes makes.
Seriously, loves it.
If we run out of Sundaes and give her her previous high-end kibble instead, she is clearly disappointed.
We should be giving her Sundaes.
She knows it, and we know it.
Not only is Sundaes Maddie's favorite food, it's also far better for her than the standard burnt kibble that comprises most dried dog food.
It's the only human-grade, air-dried dog food.
Brett checked.
It's human-grade.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Air-drying combines the best of cooked and raw approaches.
Like raw, air-drying preserves nutrients and tastes better than high-heat methods.
Better than raw, though, Sundae's unique air-drying process includes a kill step, which kills pathogens.
So unlike freeze-dried raw or frozen raw dog foods, there is no food safety or handling risk with Sundaes.
And Sundaes has no artificial binders, synthetic additives, or other garbage.
All of Sundaes' ingredients are easy to pronounce and healthy for dogs to eat.
Sundaes is an amazing way to feed your dog.
There's no fridge, no prep, no cleanup, no wet dog food smells.
It's a total pleasure for the human interacting with it, which is a bonus.
In a blind taste test, Sundaes outperformed leading competitors 40 to 0.
And our own little anecdote, Maddie, our Labrador, supports that result.
She bounces and spins and leaps in anticipation for a bowl of Sundaes, way more than for her previous food.
Do you want to make your dog happy with her diet and keep her healthy?
Try Sundays.
We've got a special deal for our listeners.
Receive 35% off your first order.
Go to SundaysForDogs.com slash Dark Horse or use code Dark Horse at checkout.
That's S-U-N-D-A-Y-S-F-O-R-D-O-G-S dot com forward slash Dark Horse.
Switch to Sundays and feel good about what you're feeding your dog or your husband.
I see what's coming.
No, I never fed it to you.
No, you didn't.
And you know how to cook, so this was a choice.
I felt that our ability to have a proper testimonial for the dog food was important.
And Maddie refuses to speak English.
She indicates, but she does nothing quotable.
Nothing quotable.
Nothing quotable.
So let's start actually by talking a little bit about the space weather phenomenon that delayed our trip by a day.
We had been planning to go on this adventure to return to the Bahamas as we've done for the last couple years and Something emerged in the news that gave us pause, and it wasn't widely reported, but if you were paying attention to the right channels, you saw it.
And what it was, was some activity on the sun that kicked loose two solar storms.
There was an M-class and an X-class, those are the two highest categories, and then within each of them there's a numeric categorization.
These were not absolutely gigantic, this was a moderate and a pretty big, but What it did was caused us to think twice about getting on an airplane as a result of the fact that these solar storms, these are basically flares that in some cases throw
what's called a coronal mass ejection off the sun, and they do this in effectively random directions, and if they head towards the earth, they can have very serious effects.
The most important historical example of this is something called the Carrington event of 1859.
I don't know I know, it's weird.
It's funny.
So many things happened in 1859.
Pasteur's experiment demonstrating that the life comes from life and does not spontaneously regenerate.
Darwin's Origin of Species.
The Pig War.
It's published.
The Pig War.
The pig war began here in the San Juans.
Relatively insignificant moment, you know, at the global level.
But nonetheless.
And then there's this Carrington event.
event.
And what the Carrington event was, Carrington event was named after an amateur astronomer, I believe, who noticed the correlation between a extraordinary solar event and a disruption of what would at the time have who noticed the correlation between a extraordinary solar event and a disruption of what would at the time have been a very primitive Graphs.
Yeah, telegraphs.
But These are basically wires that connect to distant locations where somebody who typed in the Morse code was able to send messages over these long distances.
Not only were these systems disrupted, but the coronal mass ejection induced a current so that even disconnected messages were still sendable.
So in addition to telegraph operators getting shocked, they had these weird phenomena where they could send messages even though the system was off.
Anyway, It was a pretty large storm, and it had significant effects on the very small electric infrastructure of the Earth.
Since 1859, the electronic infrastructure of the Earth has grown spectacularly, obviously, if you think about all of the things that are electronic in nature.
Our whole civilization depends on it at many, many different levels.
And so anyway, the thought that something had happened on the Sun, because we now have good detectors, we knew something about the nature of it, and just so that people are aware of what these things are, you have an immediate burst of what I think are x-rays that happen, and those x-rays reach the Earth just like sunlight in a matter of minutes, something like eight minutes later,
They reached the Earth and there was in fact a communication disruption as a result of the the solar storm two days before we, two or three days before we left.
So that suggested that this was a significant event, and the question was, was the coronal mass ejection going to hit the Earth sufficiently directly to disrupt communications down here on Earth, potentially knock out components of various grids?
And does that put you in jeopardy if you happen to be in mid-flight at the time?
Mid-flight on a plane that is reliant on electronics.
Right, reliant on electronics, exactly.
reliant on things, yeah, reliant on electronics, both its own electronics and electronics on the ground, right?
You know, this can have effects on satellites.
There are all kinds of ways in which it can be disruptive.
So anyway, we delayed, and it became clear over the course of the couple of days, or several days it would have taken for the particles to reach the Earth, that although the storm itself was not directed that although the storm itself was not directed at Earth, that we would effectively get a glancing blow and it would not be serious.
So the reason I raise this is because I'm still stunned by the fact that our grid is not hardened to these disruptions.
There is a risk Something like a 1 in 8 risk every decade of a major grid disruption.
That is to say something that would destroy transformers on which the grid is dependent.
And the shocking fact is these aren't parts that we have in surplus.
They're not parts that you can easily order.
If your transformers are destroyed, it's something like a year before you can get one replaced.
And if you had 20 or 30 of them destroyed at a time, There's no telling what that would do.
So, the danger of solar storms is substantial.
The cost of fixing them seems large, but it isn't.
Apparently, we could immunize all of our Transformers in North America from this for something like what it would cost to buy a stealth bomber.
Right?
Which is a big cost.
It's many billions, but it's a small enough amount of money that nobody would notice it if we decided to budget
That and take care of this issue in a permanent way and yet we don't somehow the the The idea is so remote to most people the idea that the Sun is gonna fling something off That's going to disrupt things on earth sufficiently that it might do so so that you know that we would have effects for You know years or more It's nobody's top priority and so even though many people are aware of this it doesn't get dealt with
It's also difficult at the human level for many people to take in the idea of this is statistically probable at this level.
It is almost certain to happen at some point, but we can't give you specificity as to when.
And yes, it's expensive to solve at the level of any human, but we're not talking about a human solving it, we're talking about economies solving it, we're talking about governments solving it.
And so these so-called Carrington events, named after the first one, In 1859 is something I just looked it up, you know, we mentioned them in our book.
This is something that you in particular have been thinking about for a very long time.
And it is precisely the sort of thing that humans, that all humans are capable of, but you need to put a little bit of effort in to considering what is the value in protecting against a thing that is absolutely going to happen, but we can't tell you why.
Yeah, it results in all kinds of what's called discounting, right?
The places that you can put your effort where you can increase your profit and reduce your risk in a way that's much more predictable causes people to default to this.
And so I think everybody who is aware of the real hazard Is also aware of the paradox of us not doing anything about it But it's it's very clearly the result of some kind of cognitive defect It's not like anybody's making a profit from our vulnerability here as far as I'm aware.
It's hard to imagine how they would yeah so anyway, Zach, would you show the this is just something for people to Look at if they want to to think more deeply about.
This is a... UnHerd asked me to write on this topic, and so I wrote... When was this?
I don't see a date here.
It's in 2021.
I think it was summer 2021.
Here we go.
So just scroll up again.
So for people who are only listening, it's called, How the Sun Could Wipe Us Out.
A Burst of Plasma Would Set in Motion a Devastating Cascade of Failures.
Yep.
And, you know, anyway, I just basically wrote a narrative in which the very predictable coronal mass ejection eventually hits Earth squarely enough to create a serious event, but not in Carrington's time, in our time, with so much being dependent on the electrical grid and then the cascading events that compound the problem.
Anyway, even though this is something I've been focused on for a very long time, I was a little surprised at how easy it was to write about how the problem snowballs from one that is fundamentally about electrical power to something that is fundamentally about humans in dire circumstances.
So anyway, check it out if you're interested in space weather and the possible hazards that come from it, but also I would advise people to start thinking about how well prepared they are for things like a major disruption of the grid where it doesn't just simply come back up hours later, right?
That's our typical experience of grid failures.
Yeah, I guess we haven't said that.
Like, I mean, you alluded to it with, you know, you could take out these transformers, that we don't just have a bunch of these parts on hand, you know, the world doesn't have these parts on hand.
So, in the event of a very large coronal mass ejection, the likes of a Carrington event, it could be months into years before return of the grid, if possible at all.
Yes, and the question is, what unfolds in the absence of an electrical grid that stretches into at least many months and presumably years?
What exactly does happen, right?
What is the plan to keep stuff normal?
Well, I mean, there's no normal as everyone listening and watching to this knows, because you lose all comms, right?
You lose all communication, and suddenly the world has become a Simultaneously, an extraordinarily local place, and also one that, depending on where you are, people are either fleeing from or coming to, because it seems like the place that might be a place that you could survive long-term.
Yep.
So, alright.
Anyway, on that bright note, shall we talk about our trip to the Bahamas and what it caused us to think about?
Yeah, it's not all that bright, though.
It's the particular thing you want to focus on.
Yeah, well, let's just say we have some interesting puzzles.
So, Zach, do you want to show... I took an odd picture from the plane leaving Florida and into the Bahamas.
It's actually the shadow of our plane on a cloud.
It's not a very good picture, but there was a phenomenon here that maybe one of our viewers will be able to help us figure out.
But what it was, was what appeared to be something like a rainbow, circular, surrounding the shadow of the plane on the clouds.
And it stuck in that configuration long enough that I'm sure it was not an accident that, you know, the sun was directly behind us from the point of view of that spot, which created this prism effect.
So it doesn't have the brightness that I'm used to, and so I can't be totally sure, but I think that, whereas a standard rainbow is Roy G. Biv, in which the eye, the indigo, is mostly there just to make it pronounceable, because blue and indigo, what exactly is the difference?
But if they're all there, I believe, in this sort of circular aura around the plane shadow, it's Vib G. Roy.
It looks outer to inner violet, indigo, blue, green, red, orange, yellow.
So that's interesting.
Now I do wonder... So the red, orange, yellow has reversed... There's an inversion.
An inversion, thank you, an inversion.
Well, okay, so we talked about rainbows and somebody... Fogbows.
Somebody suggested fogbow was the term we should have been using, but anyway... Not for this, but... Suffice it to say, I don't think it much matters.
You've got water vapor presumably breaking light apart into a discernible spectrum.
In the last discussion we had of this, I was talking about the fact that from my vehicle, the Rainbow was clearly very close to the vehicle, because although it appeared to be many miles away, if I looked against the mountains, if I looked down, it was actually in front, from my perspective, of the railing of the road, right?
You can like see it in the splash out of the tires of the cars in front of you under certain conditions.
Precisely, and it was the same arc as the one on the mountain.
So it was my mind putting it far away if I looked up, but it was really physically the water that was breaking apart the light was clearly close to my eye the whole way around.
That was my inference from the last time.
Now in this case, I can't say for sure There's obviously water vapor between us and the cloud, but my sense is something about this has to do with the water in that cloud itself.
And I guess I think that for a couple of different reasons.
One, I don't... somebody will correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think that humidity can create a rainbow fog bow prism effect, because that's truly water dissolved in the atmosphere, whereas rain is droplets of liquid water.
- As is fog, fog is suspended water?
- Yeah.
- Because, okay.
- Yeah, it's particles, it's particles not in the-- - I guess I don't know that humidity isn't as well.
- Yeah, humidity is really water dissolved in the air, and fog is water out of solution, but small enough particles that it's not actively falling.
Again, I'm going to get corrected like 16 different ways on this.
Sure, the physicists are coming.
Right.
The physicists are coming.
The physicists are coming.
Yeah, exactly.
But anyway, I'd love to know what this phenomenon was and why it happens.
I'd also be curious why my color acuity is not nearly good enough to say what order the colors are there.
You know, it's interesting.
You should have told me on your phone.
And at first it's like, that's kind of subtle, but I think I see what I'm seeing.
And the screen that we're looking at on right now, it almost, it's a different It actually, as I'm looking at it right now, that looks like Roy G. Biv outer to inner, so I don't know.
Now I've got two different screens of the same shot in which the colors look different, so I kind of give up since I didn't see it in real time.
I don't know what I would have seen.
Yep.
All right.
Well, anyway, I'm very curious as to what comes back.
I also know, because double rainbows are a thing, that there is a repeating sequence that basically we don't see the triple rainbow, but presumably whatever phenomenon it is keeps going.
And so that raises the question, as you take something that has a large arc and you shrink it down, or maybe this doesn't even have a large arc, because if you compare it to the one that I saw driving that was feet from me, This one, if this really was the cloud, was really the one at a great distance.
So anyway, there's a question about the actual radius of the circle that is described by the water particles that are breaking apart the light.
And it's possible, in fact it's certain, if that really is a prism at the distance of that cloud, that tiny little I don't know.
Maybe.
was many times the size of the one that I was seeing driving, right?
Which-- - I don't know, maybe, I don't know.
Again, I didn't see this at the time, so I don't know how far up we were and how far down those clouds were relative to where we were, so. - Thousands of feet. - And often when you're looking at rainbows, you're miles away.
Right.
But in the case of the one I saw when driving, I know that it was feet from me because it was this side of the rail.
But anyway, so that is neither here nor there with respect to the central issue that we were planning to discuss here.
So, we got to the Bahamas.
The Bahamas is a set of islands in the Caribbean.
The islands can be very different from each other.
There are some major islands that have substantial population centers on them.
Where we spent the bulk of our time was in the Exumas, which are a set of, I guess, barrier islands at the far northeastern edge of the Bahamas.
But in any case, these are very desolate pieces of land.
They are very rocky.
There are a small number of species of plants that live on them.
Just point of order.
Yes.
The Exumas run northwest to southeast, and so, you know, the larger islands are west of the Exumas, but the actual bank of the Exumas, it runs from I think, if I've got the naming right, mark both the north and the southern edge of the Bahamas and the eastern most.
Got it.
All right.
Do you want to show that map?
Sure.
And this is just a map that I pulled up.
No, apparently not.
All right.
In any case.
When Zach finds himself back at the podcast desk, it happens that I took a video of something else that reveals the sort of low-lying, desolate islands of the Exumas.
Do you want to show the shark image?
The one underwater?
Video.
Video, yeah, that's what I mean.
So anyway, what we're going to see here is there's a... I think that's not the one.
Yeah, that is certainly a shark.
You see that island there?
That is what the exumas look like.
And then here is a nurse shark that was curious about us and... I'm swimming her to the boat, if you'll give her a second.
Oh, there it is.
So anyway... These guys are docile and calm and basically harmless.
You have to really work to get attacked by inertia.
Yes, it is certain that they can smell fear and they don't care about it.
Anyway, there's no need to be afraid of them, which causes them not to be able to smell your fear because you don't have any.
But that is neither here nor there.
So you saw that island there.
It's a low-lying island.
It's got some palms and a few other very low, it's got a very low canopy, like maybe six or eight feet high.
And then it's surrounded by these, in this part of the Bahamas, it's basically a shelf.
And this shelf presumably emerges from the water during ice ages.
It's shallow enough that it's, you know, Yeah, I think we talked about it the first time we were there a year and a half ago or so.
And I haven't reminded myself, but it's something like for many hundreds of square miles, there's nothing deeper than 20 feet on average.
And in general, you're in like eight feet of water.
Yeah, something like 8 feet of water.
Obviously the tide changes that, but... But being closer to the equator than most people listening to this probably are, the Bahamas has... and this isn't... there are other things that affect tide scale, but really big tides that you may be used to if, for instance, you're in Southeast Alaska or the Pacific Northwest, In general, all else being equal, which it's not, the larger tides tend to be closer to the poles, and so you only have like a two-foot difference between high and low tide.
On the other hand, it's so flat that you do get a lot more land showing up In fact, there was a lagoon that I was hanging out on, a little island that was unpopulated.
I'd have... I don't know if we have... Oh, just the one of just the water?
Sure.
Yeah, right.
So at low tide, you have this water flowing through the sand flat.
And at very low tide, the whole middle of this lagoon is above land enough that people come.
And one day I saw people playing bocce there.
And the next day, there were like five guys playing football.
And this isn't the part that becomes a fully above water sandbank.
But this is sort of a view of just how shallow It is, and therefore even with just a two-foot difference in high and low tide, you can get vast differences in what's traversable by paddleboard, as I was on, or by real boat.
And so you can see from those images that the sand is mostly empty of obvious life.
It is punctuated, especially around these islands, of which there are islands of every size from, you know, a few square meters to many square kilometers.
Could you show the video of the fish on the coral head?
So, as we discussed last time, the snorkeling... not this one.
You can show this one while we're at it.
This is inside of a cave.
This is a large number of fish that we're schooling inside of a cave.
The cave actually is a famous cave.
Apparently it's where some important scene in the That would be Thunderball.
If you keep watching, you'll see Cave, here's Cave, Thunderball, here's Cave, that's part of it.
And so this is called Thunderball Grotto.
Thunderball Grotto.
But, okay, now if you show the other... Okay, so this is what the snorkeling is like, and it's very devoid of most life in the big sandy spots, and then every so often you've run into a coral head that's full of Fish?
And so anyway, that kind of gets us into the topic that we're going to talk about here.
So the fact that in space we see a clonk, we saw clonks in numbers like we had not seen in a previous trip.
In these vast sandy areas between the coral heads.
Tons of clonks.
And something else I think we've talked about before that I read about.
special selections, the land of the exhumus and the sand is mostly made of parrotfish bark.
Yep.
And what parrotfish eat is they scrape with their beaks, they scrape dead coral.
And so it's mostly calcium carbonate, I think, if you can use it.
And that's what makes the incredibly fine sand, which then over time accretes, which is maybe the wrong word, but into land mass.
Yep.
So, okay, so you've got patches of life interrupting large expanses in which there's very little.
Now, many years ago when I wrote my dissertation, my dissertation was on biological trade-offs and the way evolution occurs.
Occurs in and around various various such structures and one thing I realized in doing that work was that for whatever reason Time and space often mirror each other such that if you see a pattern in time You can often find the same pattern in space.
It will have a different name most of the time and vice versa if you see a pattern in space you can often find an analog in time and And so anyway, you've seen the patchy distribution of creatures here underwater, but what we noticed this time was that there was a dearth of birds.
We did see a few, but literally for days on end we saw zero gulls, for example, which was very surprising.
In fact, The gulls were so common in the last couple of visits that we even talked about them here on the podcast.
In fact, the first time we saw them, I had spent some time photographing them and I misdiagnosed them.
The gulls, the common ones, are laughing gulls, and I had thought they might be terns.
So anyway, here's some laughing gulls that I had taken photos of on a previous trip.
In April of this year?
No, no.
Show that later.
That's not a goal.
So the point is, we were in many of the same places this trip as we had been on the previous two trips.
And in the previous two trips, we had seen so many of these goals.
They were so ubiquitous that it would never have occurred to us to take any sort of measurements of how common they were because, you know, it would have been pointless.
You would have gotten huge numbers and any fluctuation in those huge numbers You know, who's to say if it would have even meant anything?
But what we were not expecting was the number to go to zero.
And, you know, as biologists looking at this creature, various things occurred to us.
It would be not very common for a gull to be so highly migratory that during a perfectly habitable season like this they would be absent from a landscape like this.
But obviously one explanation for the number to be zero would be that they migrated somewhere else.
That would be not very disturbing.
On the other hand, for the number to drop to zero without them migrating, Raises all kinds of questions.
What is going on?
Did something happen locally?
That can happen.
In fact, here in the San Juans, there was an outbreak of a virus that took out 90% of the deer on two of the major islands just a few years ago.
So that was a virus from deer on the East Coast that somehow found its way here, wiped out most of the deer, and the deer are back in incredible numbers.
So, you know, you could have something local like that, or it could be something more global.
But just, I mean, let's just take a step back for a moment.
For those of you who live anywhere with gulls, you know how prevalent they are.
They're like the background bird that you can't ignore entirely, because they're pretty big-bodied, and they make a mess when they feel like making a mess, and they're noisy.
And there are certainly places where there are no gulls, but there are a lot of gulls, a lot of places, basically along all coastlines, at least in the New World.
And I'm not sure they're everywhere in the Old World because I haven't been anywhere.
I mean, I haven't been everywhere in the Old World, but also fairly far inland in a lot of places in the New World as well.
And it's not just the laughing gulls that we were seeing in the Bahamas before.
We were also seeing other kinds of gulls.
They're just the standard gulls.
And gulls is kind of a mess phylogenetically.
There are people who will say you're looking at eight species when someone else says, oh, it's all just one.
It's subspecies.
It's hard to tell sort of the species swarm.
But Put that aside, like laughing gull is clearly a different kind of looking gull, but all those other gulls, those sort of heftier, bigger bodied gulls, were also completely absent this year.
Completely absent.
In fact, I think there were days in which we didn't see a single bird of any kind.
If you'd show the range map.
I did a little looking just to make sure that we weren't looking at a migratory phenomenon.
And here is the range map for Laughing Gulls and the Bahamas is there to the east of Florida.
It's that big strange blob that almost looks like a manatee in the water where it's not, it doesn't look like it's ringing an island precisely because the Bahamas are, you know, so many individual low-lying islands.
Yeah, and I'm sorry I didn't capture the legend here, but the color that the entire Bahamas is here is year-round residents.
Oh, so the lighter color is just migrants?
Yeah.
Okay, migratory routes.
Yeah, so basically migration does actually happen in Laughing Gulls, and what it says is That some of the northern populations migrate south.
And so this is not a northern population at all.
It's central to their range.
And being so much coastline in the Bahamas, these are permanent residents.
So the fact that we weren't seeing them is indeed odd.
Yep.
And then also, and you already mentioned this, to see so many more conch that the number of these conch in the water in these sandy flats that otherwise just have seagrass was surprising in the other direction.
And it wasn't from zero to lots, you know, neither end was zero in that case, so it's not as remarkable, but it was a clear enough change that both of us commented on it, maybe first thing after coming up from Starkling at one point, like, how many of those there are?
Yeah, every time I put on my mask, I encountered way more of them than I had seen in any previous instance.
Now, in that case, I don't know what it means.
It could be, you know, in In many circles, people who study jellyfish, there's a recognition that jellyfish are in some ways taking over ecosystems.
As other creatures die out, the jellyfish are winning, or at least some of them are.
I don't actually know what they eat.
There were major die-offs of other things that the conch would be profiting at a high level.
They would temporarily have a whole bunch to eat, potentially, because...
I don't actually know what they ate.
I don't know why to expect that in particular.
Well, I'm just...
Yeah, I guess I don't know either.
I think they eat a certain amount of seagrass, but I think they also scavenge.
Anyway, we should find that out.
But it's possible that the conch are highly seasonal.
Also, because the conch are widely eaten by people, it's possible that there are effects where people are depleting them in some places, and you could get used to a certain density, and then you go somewhere else where nobody is
uh catching them and it seems like something has boosted the numbers yeah i mean i guess i would have expected that um given that they're on the menus down there uh and given that you know wrasses and parrotfish and colorful little reef fish are not and indeed they are part of what draw tourists there in the first place which is the major economic force in the Bahamas Well, but this is to my point.
things move in one direction, that you would see conch being depleted and the reef fish being protected and therefore doing better.
And I feel like we're seeing the opposite.
Well, but this is to my point.
There's no way the number of conch is so large that there's no way that people could be depleting them over all of these vast, unutilized stretches.
That you might find them depleted in certain places where they're being heavily harvested.
But actually, maybe if you would look up and find out what they do eat, that would be useful.
But while Heather's looking that up, the question on the gulls was pretty profound, and I would say it mirrors an experience that you and I have had many, many times, where some place that we have gone
And become accustomed to the distribution of creatures has radically changed in a very short period, and it is virtually always in the direction of the loss of species that were once common.
In fact, we've discussed here previously The loss of Cayman from the place in the Amazon where we've spent a great deal of time that they were when we first started visiting there.
Any nighttime adventure on the water would result in you seeing many caiman.
You spot them because their eyes shine back in your headlamp.
And the last time we were there, I don't think we saw one.
Um, so that kind of depletion is, um, is a familiar phenomenon.
What'd you find?
That's not an assignment you can give me on the fly, because I don't know what species of cock we're looking at down there.
I quickly discovered there's lots and lots of species in many different families.
I'm not even sure it's a monophyletic group.
They are famously referred to as highly predatory, but some authors seem to be disagreeing with that.
So that's what I found in like 15 seconds, so I'm not going to make a claim.
We'll put it aside.
We have seen many cases of common things becoming so scarce that they were not seen in a very short period.
We've had that experience many times.
And so the question here is what to think about this.
Now obviously what you would want to know is somebody would have to have had Some kind of data, you know, obviously that range map is the result of people having done some kind of counting of individual numbers in the species so that they know exactly where they are and aren't.
But the way that The way that bird populations in particular get assessed is, as I think you know, but is often by sort of very briefly if at all trained lay people, sort of lay birders.
Maybe birders are always lay birders?
I don't know.
There aren't any professional birders.
We call those ornithologists and they're different.
Who, you know, their work is sort of spot-checked, but basically if you know something and you see something, you see a species outside of the range that you expect to see it, there's numbers to call.
But there are also days, in fact, I think the Christmas bird count happens in a lot of places in North America.
It's like a lot of people are going to go out and, you know, pen and notebook in hand and keep track of everything you see.
But that, of course, requires that the identification is accurate and that people have gone to exactly the place that they say they have.
And, you know, they may be wrong or they may have I don't know why you would lie about that, but there's just a lot of opportunity for human error.
So those range maps are not inherently put together under the most careful scientific conditions.
It's not experimental at all, but careful observational conditions don't always apply.
You would hope that those range maps would be conservative?
Because you're always going to have misidentifications that are going to extend the range wildly.
But repeated observations ought to draw those lines pretty carefully.
But anyway, so we've got now several things that we've discussed as possible explanations.
You could have some sort of a seasonal something or other.
This was in fact the first visit at this time of year.
We've been three times in February the first time, in April earlier this year, and now in December.
So not wildly different in terms of, you know, all three of these times have been after hurricane season is supposedly over, although we were there at the tail end of a weather system that some people were saying should have been a named storm.
Did not have a name, but it was a tropical storm that maybe should have had a name.
So, all of those visits within the same season, but at different spots in it.
So, actually, okay, I think we've got four possibilities on the table so far.
You've got some sort of programmed seasonal migration.
This does not seem to be the result of that.
Um you've got something like a pathogen that wipes out the majority of a population but it bounces back because it doesn't go to zero and the habitat remains hospitable as it happened with the deer here.
And like has been proposed for although we doubt this explanation for the sea stars in the Pacific or in the entire uh Pacific Rim really um but um very visible in the Pacific Northwest where there had been They were ubiquitous in marinas and in rocky beaches, and they just disappeared about a little less than 10 years ago.
Yeah, disappeared almost completely.
It's a shocking, shocking level of decrease.
You've also got the possibility that You had a patchy local phenomenon in which you just happened to be in a place where the number was zero, but the actual population size hadn't changed.
That seems very unlikely in this case, especially since we were in many of the same places that we'd seen these animals before, and they should be profiting pretty much anywhere that has coastline, right?
The things that they eat, they're opportunists, and those things should be accumulating.
Everywhere.
And then the fourth possibility is a massive, meaningful decline in an extremely short period of time in this case.
And I guess that's the thing that's so worrying.
What was the number?
What did you have?
So you've got migration, and it's actually possible with regard to these gulls, although it's not consistent with the range map that you show, that because we are at the very beginning of the season where the weather is More safe to travel by air.
And we were in fact supposedly outside of that window, but there was a big tropical storm that was happening as we arrived.
That could have been something if these birds are migratory in this place, which they're not supposed to be.
Yeah.
Pathogen.
And then your final one, a massive meaningful decline, was number three on that list?
It's hard for me to keep track of the numbers.
I think it was a local patchiness that resulted in us having effectively a sampling error issue, which seems very unlikely.
On the other hand... Yeah, but I mean, we were literally in the same place.
Literally in the same place, but... Two of these times.
Show that Thunderball Cave... Grotto, yep.
So the reason that I want to show this is because these animals were extremely dense in this highly unusual cave.
There are caves around, but the basic point is if you were trying to figure out how many of that fish are in the Bahamas you would want to count all of the ones that are disproportionately concentrated somewhere and so if you found them absent and you know this is in fact not the most unlikely thing here because the storm that kept us out could have driven the birds somewhere
So we stayed away because of a solar storm, but there was a separate, maybe totally separate, maybe not, terrestrial storm of a sort of a hurricane style, but much less than that, that was actually keeping a lot of boats from getting down there.
We heard that a lot of people were stuck in the quays, couldn't get down there.
High winds, rain, and it could be that these birds do something in such circumstances and that whatever it is about them that allows them to detect when they're supposed to go spread out again and Go back to where they were.
So that's a possibility too.
You know, we certainly weren't seeing huge numbers.
In fact, we didn't see any carcasses, which could mean nothing.
You might imagine that, you know.
Yeah, nothing.
No carcasses.
No carcasses.
So it could be that those things are so quickly absorbed by the sea and whatever scavengers there are that you wouldn't encounter them.
but we didn't see them.
So, you know, it's possible those birds are fine and they're somewhere.
It's possible those birds aren't fine and that this means something.
Maybe this doesn't fit with where you're going, but another thing, well, one thing you've already mentioned, but two other organisms that we saw a lot of and were the dark sharks, which are always fairly but two other organisms that we saw a lot of and were the dark sharks, which are always fairly common in the places that we have been there, specifically on a key called Compass Key, where the fish entrails are all poured in in the same place, They're effectively tame.
It's a tourist attraction for people from more populated parts of the Bahamas.
But then we also saw, I think, and I haven't been keeping track before, but more rays.
We saw at least two species of rays, and we saw several of them, and I wonder if, like jellies, if the chondrichthyes, the sharkskates and rays, which are all of a monophyletic group, they're all closely related to one another and more closely related to each other than any are to any other Well, I don't know.
You and I haven't talked about this.
I think I saw fewer rays this time.
pathogen, at least, of the four, and maybe to massive meaningful decline, whatever cause that would be, than smaller-bodied bony fishes or to some of the other inverts.
Well, I don't know.
You and I haven't talked about this.
I think I saw fewer rays this time.
Oh.
I saw either four.
There were a place where I might have seen four, but it might have been actually two that I saw twice.
So, So I either saw four or six.
I saw many fewer turtles.
I saw one, actually I saw one thing that must have been a turtle that popped its head up on our first day, and then I saw another turtle, a very small one.
Well, I mean, just in terms of what we're doing here, right?
This is entirely anecdote.
We're not pretending that we have data, but we have been to the same spot three times within 20 months of one another, 22 months of one another.
And interesting that you bring up turtles.
I actually saw a lot of turtles too, but again, I was spending a lot of time in this interior lagoon Where it is so flat and the water is so shallow, even at deep tide, that there are no boats going through there.
I was having to walk my paddleboard.
Even the fin on the paddleboard was too deep in some places at low tide to get into these lagoons.
And it was there that I was seeing the rays.
I saw manta rays and I think stingrays, although I'm not 100% sure they were stingrays.
Toby, our younger son, said that he was pretty sure that one of them had the sting sort of visible on its end, and many turtles.
And so this, of course, is consistent with what we know to be true of the risks of boat traffic to manatees, for instance, right?
That you may find more of these organisms specifically in the areas that we don't frequent as much, at least that we don't frequent with our mechanized vehicles.
Yeah, although that... I don't see how the boat track... I see why it would account for a higher density where the boats can't go than out, but it doesn't account for a difference between this year and any other.
But in any case, so I wanted to just do a couple comparisons.
First off, the story of species decline is one that I think everybody who pays attention to nature is alarmed at.
We all have the places that we used to go, you know, especially the places we grew up and knew well that have seen spectacular declines and things that seemed like they would be there forever.
There are some cases that go in the other direction.
So, for example, you want to show the eagle?
So, I sent you an eagle, you didn't get it?
An eagle?
A bald eagle?
Okay, you want to show the otter?
In any case, we can talk about these things, and if Zach has them, then he'll show them.
Are these videos or photographs?
Photographs.
The fact is, when I was a kid, I don't think I ever saw a bald eagle.
I think it is the kind of thing I would have remembered as a kid.
But are they in LA?
No, but we spent a lot of time in the Sierras.
Are they in the Eastern Sierra?
Yeah.
We have to control for both space and time, of course.
Back to your point about there often being analogs and sometimes more than analogs between space and time phenomena.
And at this point in the Pacific Northwest, We have so many bald eagles.
We see them all the time, right?
And it is still exciting when people come for other people from other parts of the States and other parts of the world to see a bald eagle.
It's an amazing bird.
It's a glorious bird, but it's not a rarity.
But I don't know that the area in the eastern Sierra, and I don't think they're in LA, Well, but even to your point about bald eagles here, I'm not sure you and I agree about this, but I think I'm seeing a small fraction of what I saw last year at this time.
The number of encounters I'm having with them is much lower.
It's still comparatively common, but it used to be many times a day, and now I can go a couple days and not see one.
So anyway, this could be normal ebb and flow.
Leave open that possibility, especially when you're new to a place.
As one of our mentors famously pointed out about the weather in Central America, the first year you go it's normal and every year after that it's not.
So it can be that you just take whatever your first year somewhere is and you think that that's baseline and then things fluctuate and you think it's all out of whack.
But what I would say is Between the time I spent with my parents in the Sierra, the trip I did with my grandfather driving across the country, never seeing a bald eagle is a pretty, it does indicate that they aren't in the places, or they weren't in the places that they are now, and they've come, you know, in this case there is lots of evidence that they've come back spectacularly, and we see it.
Same thing with sea otters, which were hunted because this is an animal that has the thickest fur of any mammal.
It is so thick that the water literally does not touch their skin, which is why they get away with being in such cold waters.
And how do they get away with being so darn cute?
That's another matter entirely.
But in any case, sea otters were hunted to near extinction.
They have seen some trouble in recent years, but nonetheless it is the kind of thing that is now relatively frequently sighted from Monterey north into Alaska.
They're all over the place.
And this is a picture you took in Alaska?
Yeah, that's Alaska.
Yeah, for whatever reason, in the Salish Sea and in the Puget Sound, there are almost no sea otters.
What we have are river otters, which is something I would love to understand, why river otters are comparatively... Yeah, they're in the salt, but they live on land, whereas sea otters never come on land.
So anyway, something interesting is going on there, but... Salty river dogs.
That they are.
So, sea otters are a success story in terms of a bounce back.
Bald eagles, elephant seals were also down below a hundred individuals, and they're now... And was that both northern and southern, or just the northerns?
I believe so.
It's definitely the Northerns.
I'm not sure, I don't know as much about Southerns.
Condors?
Condors were actually, condors went extinct in the wild in 1987, the year you and I graduated high school.
And they are now back.
We're talking American condors, right?
California condors.
California, that's right, California condors.
California condors are now back and reproducing in the wild.
We have populations large enough that we've actually seen wild individuals.
So these are all stories of great success, but they have something in common, which is that they were They had massive human efforts at restoring them in the wild, which, oh, wolves also, which is very difficult to do in the case of all the creatures on the list we just put together, because these are all creatures in which
How to be an otter or an eagle or a elephant seal or a condor is a lot of software, right?
The parents teach the offspring how to do the job, and to the extent that they've gone extinct in the wild, nobody knows how to do the job.
So humans have I had to work very hard to reintroduce animals that were not only physiologically capable of doing the job, but also behaviorally capable of doing it, which means you can't just raise them in a zoo-like environment and then expect them to fend for themselves when they get out into the wild.
But anyway, these are the exceptions, not the rule.
The decrease in the density of species, which we are all experiencing anecdotally, Um, is a, uh, a troubling phenomenon.
And it's also some place that, uh, we often, you and I often trip over arguments that are, uh, leveled by conservatives about the fact that, um, environmental concerns are overblown.
And in one way, environmental concerns may well be overblown in some regards.
You and I have talked about the problem of models being used to augment arguments over Climate change and those models at best are a mechanism for generating hypotheses, but they're being used to test hypotheses, which is especially in a political environment where you can't possibly publish that you've run a model on climate change, and it turns out it's much less of a big deal than we thought or no big deal at all.
And they're inherently reliant on the assumptions built into them.
That is the nature of models.
And the fact that you see different results coming out of different models is both exactly what you would expect, but it also means that when you see authors saying, okay, we just threw all these models at this data set.
And these are the ones we're going to share the results from with you.
You should right away know to wonder, okay, but what are the ones that you didn't show us?
And what did they say?
And why did you choose to show us the ones that somehow actually fit your preconceptions about what you would find?
That is the worst kind of data mining, really.
Yeah, it's like active overfitting, where you're going to pick the models that spit out the right answers, and the problem with models is that if you're free to put as many parameters in as you want, you can get them to look like they match evidence, but it's really spurious.
So anyway, there's a lot of skepticism and quite justifiable skepticism in conservative circles about climate change being used as an excuse for authoritarian changes in policy, for economic games being played on people, and folks are rightly sick of this.
But they have largely conflated.
Climate change with environmental risk, environmental devastation with Coloring all who would be concerned about the environment, or who would call themselves an environmentalist, as I do, as I think you do, as these harbingers of doom that are using flawed models to build policy that forces us to, you know, stop eating meat, for instance.
Right.
To scold each other for driving too far, or whatever.
So, let me just say we are therefore stuck.
First of all, we've got an academic environment that's insane, that can't be trusted to evaluate anything because, frankly, there's so much pressure inside of that environment to reach conclusions that have been blessed by the proper religious authorities that it's not trustworthy.
But that means That in terms of figuring out how healthy the world is and what the effect of what we're doing on the world is, we are stuck with far too much anecdote.
And the problem is that anecdote really is fraught with hazards.
And so, you want to put up the picture of that turn?
So I want to... You start with the zoomed out one.
So I want to return to this photo, about which I am proud, because I set out to take exactly this photo, and it took a few hours of work to figure out how to get the bird and the ice to both register in a way that made sense.
And then nature threw me a bone in this animal doing something Uh, that added to the photo I was trying to take, which is, uh, this is, um, a small fish is in the beak of this Arctic tern, um, and you can see the fish's eyes.
So anyway, nature helped me out on this one.
But the point is, we saw, this is a, this is an animal I'd wanted to see my whole life, an Arctic tern.
The reason I wanted to see an Arctic tern is that Arctic terns do something absolutely extraordinary, which is they migrate from pole to pole, which is something that is not typical.
We have a tremendous number of animals that migrate from the tropics towards the poles, right, that basically opt out of winter by going south into warmer climes, and then they ...profit from the productivity and the reduction in competition by flying north or south into the temperate zones and Arctic zones when it's comparatively warm.
But an animal that migrates from one pole to the other is really interesting.
And so anyway, I'd always wanted to see them and never have.
They're hard to see.
In this case we saw them in abundance.
But we saw them in abundance because we happened to catch the migration as it passed through southeast Alaska.
In early May.
Right.
Now, if you hadn't known what an arctic tern was, or hadn't known that was an arctic tern, you could very well have had the sense of, oh, these birds were so common, and then you could return the next year two weeks off, think you were there in the same season, and not see a one, and think, what the hell happened?
Did the population crash?
And the answer is no, it didn't crash.
You just missed the exact moment that it passed through this exact location, and happened to seem like it was at very high density.
When in fact, you know, there just aren't that many.
So, anyway, you have to be careful with anecdote, because you run into patterns you don't know, and those patterns can create structure where the animal is not distributed in a way that's perfectly even, and then as you pass through the ebb and flow across space of where this animal is, you think you're seeing changes in the population, but you're really just seeing movement or something else.
So, we are stuck.
Go ahead.
Well, actually, I wanted to go back to you providing a list, sort of off the top of your head, but about the four reasons that you identified that we might not be seeing organisms who we expected to.
And you said migration, pathogen, local patchiness, and massive meaningful decline.
And I guess I think That's not a list of alternatives, quite, because local patchiness could be due to pathogen, right?
Although I think the local patchiness that's more interesting is actually Species A is reliant on Species B, and Species B is using the terroir of the soil to thrive there and not there, and so you will find Species A being in literally in soil patches that has nothing to do necessarily with pathogens.
But sometimes local patchiness will be actually, you know, in the case of, gosh, this chytrid fungus that was finally identified after many years of herpetologists, that is those who study amphibians and reptiles, seeing all these declines in frogs across a lot of the tropics.
It turns out that one of the major things, one of the major explanations for that was this chytrid fungus that was largely being brought in by, oh my god, herpetologists, right?
And that wasn't the major thing, but that was in some cases, in some populations of the most charismatic, most well-studied species of frogs, oh, and now these are disappearing.
It's like, oh, it was the people who came in to study them.
How awful is that?
So the local patchiness of some species of frogs in that case was due, in fact, to a pathogen that was coming in on, I don't know, the boots or the clothes of people who were going to study them.
Massive meaningful decline obviously could precisely be due to a pathogen.
But the thing that may be most obscure to people who are listening is with regard to the potential relationship between year numbers one and two, migration and pathogen.
We could spend hours talking separately about why migrate.
What is migration about?
Why do some organisms migrate and some don't?
Sometimes very closely organisms, some stay resident, some don't.
In fact, within species, in some cases, it tends to be short distance migrants where some species, especially bats, actually like in the Pacific Northwest, some species migrate short distances and some just stay put.
Hummingbirds too, right?
A lot of altitudinal migration in the Andes, for example.
But you can have long-distance migrants where the places that they migrate to are quite different, even within closely related species.
And one of the reasons that has been proposed for many of the shorebirds, for instance, to migrate into uh northern wintering grounds uh where they you know they they get there and um they build nests and they attract mates if they're not monogamous if they haven't been traveling with their mates and uh and you know they build nests they have kids right away they have eggs and then they're there in these densely populated colonies where they brood their eggs and then they raise their young
uh until they're young or volan until they're they're they're old enough to fly and make the trip and then they're out of there and they abandon um the the breeding grounds and and head back south and you know it's really easy to imagine this is just due to climate right like how how are how are all these birds going to have enough to eat and stay warm enough uh and uh in a in san alaskan winter uh and of course the colder it is the more they will need to eat so uh the the food being limiting is even more of an issue for them if they're in a cold climate but
It turns out that at the point that they're leaving those breeding grounds, those breeding grounds are just filled with ectoparasites.
And, you know, we tend to use the word pathogen for endoparasites rather than ectoparasites, but it's parasites all the same.
And how do you deal with your bed being full of bedbugs?
Or lice or fleas or whatever it is?
Well, you could move.
And people don't tend to want to do that.
You know, sometimes they have to burn all their bedding or whatever, but you can just move.
Be like, you know what?
Given your lifespan and my lifespan, I'm leaving for the season.
I'll be back in eight months, and by then you'll all be dead, and I will have fresh new land to colonize.
And by the end of next breeding season, here we are again.
You've once again accumulated, and we're going to leave again.
Well, your point is well taken.
The four explanations, potential explanations, are not mutually exclusive in this case, and in the case that you're talking about, you have the same puzzle, which is the ectoparasites are a reason to leave a rookery, and the climate is another, and there's nothing that says they aren't both driving forces and teasing out to what extent one contributes
In the case of the four potential reasons to see a massive decrease in the number of individuals of a particular species, these things interact in various ways as a population crashes.
Competition is obviously another one, and specifically where we're talking about human competition, potentially.
For conchs, we're seeing the opposite, but if we had seen the conchs disappear to nothing, it would have been very easy to assume they got over-harvested.
Maybe that wasn't what happened.
In fact, that isn't what happened at all, because we're seeing more of them.
But it's very easy to jump to the thing that's dominant on your mind.
Oh, they migrate because it gets cold.
Oh, they're gone because we eat them.
Oh, all the megafauna in North America disappeared because we hunted them out.
Well, maybe, and maybe, and maybe, and maybe not in all of those cases.
Is that the driving reason for why those things disappeared?
Yeah, I mean, the key point is that there will always – I think this is logically right – there will always be a driving reason, and there may be other contributing factors.
Yeah, the idea that two reasons are exactly equal in terms of importance is like there being two limiting factors.
Like, no, there's always one that's a little bit more than the other, or a lot more.
But the question of a spectacular decline, so you point out spectacular decline could be the result of over-harvesting, that's not going to be the case in gulls, nobody eats them, or no humans eat them.
It could be the result of toxic exposures, which is what I really worry most about, that the number of novel compounds that we're putting into the world and the industrial scale on which we are doing it creates... The microplastics and just the runoff from the, you know, just the blackwater tanks and the boats and the, and not the stuff from the tanks maybe, but the treatment of the stuff.
Sure, the stuff in the tanks is unlikely because, you know, the ocean absorbs a lot of that, but the things people use to treat it to keep their boats from stinking potentially could have that consequence.
Then there's of course the question of Pesticides and fertilizers and all of these other things.
And you know, as a population decreases, and again we haven't established that the gull population decreased.
It could have been somewhere else when we were there.
It could have been hunkered down from the recent storm.
Yeah, or it could be that past experiences they had concentrated where we were for some reason that we weren't aware of and so that they tend to be thinner on the ground, you know, it could go either way.
But if a population were to crash for some reason, for example, the result of pollution or A pathogen, then of course there's a point at which the population is so small that you have inbreeding depression, which is to say that the individuals are going to be less capable of, for example, dealing with toxins, you know?
Yep.
And then stochastic events have a greater chance of actually wiping you out.
Hey, diversity is our strength!
A less diverse population is going to be, as the pathogen leaps from one person or one individual to the next, it's going to have an easier time because it's already figured out the formula and everybody is genetically more similar than they might otherwise be.
Hey, diversity is our strength.
It should be.
Actually, right?
Diversity is our immunological strength.
Right.
That said, I think we've talked about this on Dark Horse before.
Inbreeding is a topic that is widely misunderstood because the danger to a newly inbreeding population is so obvious that people assume that inbreeding simply has this consequence.
But the reason...
I won't get too deep in the weeds here, but the reason that inbreeding is a hazard is because individuals carry what are called deleterious recessive genes in significant numbers.
These are genes that you don't suffer from because you only have one copy.
So it's estimated that humans have something like each of us on average carry something like eight genes that if we had two copies of them would be fatal or nearly so.
Because we have one copy we're never aware of them.
And as long as you mate with somebody who's sufficiently divergent from you, you're very unlikely to bring two copies of the same deleterious recessive gene together.
That's why you're not supposed to marry closer than first cousin is where it's traditionally been.
In any case, as a population declines and individuals are forced to choose among a smaller pool of mates, the likelihood that they mate with somebody who's closely related to them goes up, and you see the deformity and feebleness of individuals.
But what that does is it also exposes those deleterious recessives to selection, which selects them out.
If the population survives.
Right.
So in the case of... Then it's likely to be more robust afterwards, possibly, is the argument here?
Well, at the very least, those genes are... Those particular relatively simple genes.
...will have been filtered to an extent.
So, you know, you expect when you hear sea otters are down to a population of less than 100, or elephant seals, or converse, or cheetahs, or any of the cheetahs, it's still much higher than that.
But nonetheless, there's always a concern about Inbreeding, but there's also the, okay, well, if they survive the inbreeding, then you're dealing with a creature that's better at surviving inbreeding, right?
It's been favored for it.
So, anyway, it's not exactly a double-edged sword.
It's a hidden reason to be less concerned about that particular threat.
Anyway, I don't know where any of this leaves us, other than there's a general pattern of decline of species that those of us who pay attention to these things are noticing everywhere.
There are cases in which things go the other direction, like jellyfish and conchs.
There are lots of reasons to see variation that have nothing to do with overall decline, so you have to be very careful with anecdote.
But All of these things, you know, the punchline of the story is that zero is an absorbing boundary.
A population of zero does not rebound, right?
A population, the deer populations up here that were hit literally decreased by something like 90%.
became on those same islands now, you'd never know that there was a problem with the deer.
Right.
They bounced back to a level... But it was observable to, you know, us as biologists who'd spent time up here before we moved up here.
The last time that we visited before we lived here, we noticed.
And we started asking people, and they said, oh yeah, yeah, this happened.
They're practically gone.
Right, and in fact... And apparently it had been like a horror show, like they'd been lying dead in clusters.
People had multiple dead animals in their yard and stuff like this.
But anyway, they bounced back.
You'd never know that it had happened if you came here now.
So anyway, many things are possible, but the really important thing is that you don't hit zero, right?
Anytime you hit zero on one of these things, there's no fixing it, right?
It's just done.
So, I don't know how we have that discussion.
I'm sympathetic with those who are fed up with the Academy telling them what freedoms they are to give up because of some change in the world that may or may not be Exaggerated or even real.
On the other hand, at some point you got to start paying attention.
Probably everybody who watches this podcast, if they think back to places that they used to know very well and have gone back to recently, will be able to detect some of these things.
Um, and, uh, and the pattern is, uh, it's not only frightening, but it's, it's tragic.
Yeah.
I think we have an obligation to deliver the next generation, a world that is no less than the one we inherited.
And it's not very, you can't go very many generations in a row degrading the world before you leave a place that is just severely broken.
Indeed.
Um, Well, that seems like a good conversation to have had, and maybe that's sufficient, but maybe let me just say a few things about these curly-haired dogs, these woolly dogs of the Pacific Northwest that are extinct.
You can show my screen here, Zach, and I'll just say a little bit about them.
Some research has recently been published, so this is the Science News article version of it, and then I'll share a little bit from the actual Peer-reviewed publication.
But the title here is Curly-Haired Woolly Dogs of the Pacific Northwest Were No Myth.
Long History of Unique Dogs Recovered by Weaving Together Data from DNA and Coast Salish Oral Traditions.
So, the reason I wanted to talk about this, it's so beautiful when, you know, we have with the Wokeries going on now, We have a lot of people claiming that Western science is no better than other kinds of science, and how dare we come in with our hypotheses and our predictions and our data and our statistics and make claims that we know more than the people who have oral traditions from generations and generations.
And I would say that the best scientists don't say, I know more than what you say you have seen, but Western science is the best tool that we have to understand what is true, and how remarkable when we can use tools both from modern science, Western science, and from oral tradition, and from myth, and find that the answers that we come up with are in fact consistent with one another.
And so this article, which if you would show the screen here, Zach, this is just the Science News article.
This is a reconstruction of the dog from the Coast Salish.
I guess they haven't shown it here.
There was one individual left in the 19th century.
And so basically modern genetic techniques have pulled fur from this one dog named Mutton from the 19th century.
And then talk to elders.
Elders who have stories from their grandparents talking about these dogs.
And so just first couple paragraphs of this piece here.
Growing up in Chilliwack, Canada in the 1950s and 60s, Stolo Nation, I have no idea how to pronounce the the glottal stop or whatever it is there, Grand Chief Stephen Point listened to his elders tell stories of fluffy white dogs whose fur was once woven into blankets for the tribe's hereditary leaders.
By then, it had been nearly a century since any Stolo or other Coast Salish people had seen a so-called woolly dog, alive or dead.
Some Western scholars thought they were myths or exaggerations.
The dogs were all gone, Point says, and we had just that, stories.
Nobody knew what happened.
And of course it is true that throughout much of the 20th century, Western science came in, sort of trumpets blaring, and presumed that we already had the answers, we knew it was what, and people who had already lived places were technologically inferior, and therefore perhaps morally inferior as well, and therefore we couldn't trust what they said.
Uh, this is by and large not what is going on in Western science anymore, but it was the story of Western science, a sort of conquest of local peoples for a long time.
And so it's not that surprising that, um, having no dogs in front of them and myths about dogs, uh, for the most part, Western science said, yeah, whatever, I'm sure you had dogs, but they were probably from Japan or something, like there are lots of dogs around.
Well, this research, so you can show this again, this is published in Science.
I haven't read this.
Can I leap to put the question on the table that undoubtedly this is going to answer?
Okay, I don't know if I will be able to answer it, but go ahead.
Well, one of two things has to be true.
Either these dogs came in with the people into the Americas, or these dogs are the result of a separate domestication event.
I would bet they came in with the people, but that's interesting if they did.
We think now, based on the combination of molecular evidence from the DNA analysis of this one dog mutton from the 1800s, whose coat was partially preserved, in combination with the stories of exactly how the elders dealt with these dogs.
They were beloved, but they were also um prohibited from interbreeding with other dogs because they were being bred for their coats that had a very rich undercoat plus this long spiral overcoat which was particularly weavable and then they were woven with some other um other hairs like goat sometimes and they were particularly conducive to making warm long-lived blankets and so the women Many of the coastal Salish people apparently were in particular in charge of the dogs.
They were understood to be sort of in the life-is-all-of-a-thing ethos, particularly closely related to the dogs, and actually had them isolated on some particular islands where they were kept from interbreeding with other dogs.
And also, yes, it seems that they came over 12,000-15,000 years ago from Asia.
From domestic dog stock in Asia?
With the people.
With the people.
So the influence of people, I don't know if this is exactly apropos what we were just talking about, but the influence of people on the woolly dog genome.
Wooly dogs were treated as beloved extended family members, according to Deborah Kwason Sparrow, a Musqueam Master Weaver.
her grandfather, Ed Sparrow, who lived from 1898 to 1998, told her that quote, "Every village had woolly dogs, that they were like gold because they were mixed with the mountain goat and then rove and spun." The fur was.
Dogs also comprised a form of wealth and status for Coast Salish women who carefully managed the dogs to maintain their woolly coats, isolating them on islands or in pens to strictly manage their breeding.
Island names often reflect their connection with dogs, such as... I'm not going to try saying it in Tlingit or whatever language this is... Little Dog Village on Cameron Island in Nanaimo... Something Territory, British Columbia.
The prevention of interbreeding wool dogs with hunting or village dogs was critical for maintaining their distinct hair characteristics.
Soft guard hairs with an unusually long crimpy undercoat which was highly spinnable and could be made into warm blanket yarn.
These management practices likely contributed to mutton's PCD ancestry long after the onset of settler colonialism.
So I think part of why Western scientists disbelieved this like, yeah, but there had been European dogs, Europeans had been there for hundreds of years already, or at least a couple, a A hundred or two.
And surely, you know, you people, right, would not have been able to maintain their integrity as an isolated population for so long.
But yep, they did.
And so the stories being told by the Coast Salish turn out to be true.
And this really was a distinct breed that is now gone, unfortunately.
So I would guess here that the isolation of these individuals, the fact that it would have been a small, highly prized population that was being prized for its purity, made them vulnerable.
And that in fact, I wonder if there is not a mirror of the story of smallpox spreading in the New World, if there was not, you know, a An analogous story for actually the same, almost the same reasons, the reason that pathogens wiped out the New World populations had to do with various factors.
People should read Guns, Germs, and Steel if they're curious about this, but the difference in Um, domesticable animals in the new world versus primarily Asia, where most of our domesticated animals came from, gave the old world population exposure to pathogens so they had already equilibrated and those pathogens were
Highly virulent to the New World population, which had only Camelids, Vicuña I think.
Or Alpaca and the descendant of Vicuña, I think that's how it goes.
Yeah, whatever the Camelid was that they domesticated, that was the only New World large domesticate That they had, and so the exposure to pathogens was much less.
So I wonder if the dogs from Europe, which would have made contact at the same time or close to it, had resistance to disease that especially an isolated population of New World dogs wouldn't have had.
Yeah, so the story laid out here.
I wasn't going to go here.
I didn't spend a lot of time here with this paper because, unfortunately, it's pitched in the modern language of, let's blame the newcomers.
It's always the newcomer's fault, right?
In this case, I mean, it was the newcomer's fault, but the tone is so common now and so often just barbarically wrong that it's not worth usually spending time there.
But What they say is, by 1857, a year before Mutton's birth, in Stolo territory, where Mutton was most likely acquired.
So Mutton belonged to a white guy, is part of why we still have the remnants of it, because this white guy acquired, I think by reasonable means, this dog whom he loved, and that he saved part of Mutton after he died.
And that's how we come to have... He died in 1859, of course.
I don't know.
No, it's in the abstract.
Was it?
Yes.
Oh, I missed that.
Okay, so we're in that kind of numerology territory now, but yeah, okay.
Where mutton was mostly acquired, the settler population consisted of only a few dozen permanent settlers at Fort Langley.
The following year, more than 33,000 miners arrived at present-day B.C.
during the 1858 Fraser River Gold Rush.
This large-scale migration set off conflicts between miners, colonial governments, and Indigenous peoples.
Indigenous populations declined by an estimated two-thirds between 1830 and 1882.
Smallpox epidemics, almost one every generation from the 1700s to 1862, are estimated to have killed more than 90% of Indigenous people in some villages across B.C., along with steady depopulation due to other introduced diseases such as mumps, tuberculosis, and influenza.
One more thing, though.
um culturally so that's like again that's sort of the easy one it's the it's the germs part of guns germs and steel pathogens are real and certainly to a naive in terms of never before been exposed population they're going to have particularly high efficacy which isn't good for the pathogen either But there's also a cultural effect here.
Survival of woolly dogs depended upon the survival of their caretakers, because of what we've already talked about.
In addition to disease, expanding colonialism increased cultural upheaval, displacement of Indigenous peoples, and a diminished capacity to manage the breed.
Policies targeted Indigenous governance and inherent rights, resulting in the deliberate disenfranchisement and criminalization of Indigenous cultural practices.
And it goes on, but that suggests that maybe, maybe there's some remnants of the woolly dog genome left in some dogs.
Yeah, like Neanderthals in modern humans.
Precisely.
Yep.
Precisely.
That'd be cool.
Yeah, it's a nice looking dog.
It's a really nice looking dog, yeah.
And in fact, the Science News article had a partial version of this.
So here we have the Morpho.
Zach, if you want to show this.
Oh, that didn't help.
Wow.
Yeah, maybe I can do it this way.
Okay, so this is from figure one of this paper, and you have the biggest dog.
These are all domesticates, but the big Alaskan Malamute, Samoyed, Husky.
Husky's bigger than this Coast Salish Woolly Dog, but not by a ton.
And the size is more similar to the Finnish Spitz, and to some degree the so-called German Spitz, the American Eskimo dog, but not closely related.
You can make a similar dog out of not-so-similar starting points.
Well, that has got to be the case, given that they all start at one point.
Right.
All right, well, that's cool.
Yeah, it is cool.
Um, so maybe, uh, that's where we should finish for this, our last full live stream of 2023.
Yes.
I think that's it.
You look at me like you were surprised.
Like what?
No, that sounded like the beginning of a compound sentence.
And I was interested to see where it went.
All right, so we will come back with a Q&A shortly, and we will also come back with a private Q&A on Locals on Sunday, New Year's Eve at 11 a.m.
Pacific.
And, oh, we didn't talk about emotional eavesdropping in rats.
Maybe next time.
Next time.
Yeah.
Or on snake societies being maintained by females.
Maybe next time.
All right.
Yeah, just little teasers for 2024.
Snake societies maintained by females and emotional eavesdropping in rats with, trigger warning for you, some evidence that cats know their names.
Some evidence that cats know their names.
That's about all you're gonna get.
No, we could keep going here now.
I think we'll save it for 2024.
It's gonna be a big year.
Yeah, it's gonna be a big year.
Yeah, boys, it's gonna be a big year.
Cats know their names.
We'll see.
Let's just see.
Okay, so please join us on Rumble and on Locals.
Lots of stuff, lots of benefits to joining us on Locals.
And at the store, you have things like PsyOp, until proven otherwise.
Pfizer, the breakthroughs never stop.
Blueberries, because accidents happen.
And if you live in one of those places where they are thinking about bringing masks back, you can always get some Jake's Micro Pizza.
So good.
They now have it in both gluten-free and dairy-free options for those of you who have sensitivities.
And because it's so small, no one knows when you're done eating.
And that means you can keep the mask down.
No, you just keep eating.
The micro pizza.
No one knows when you're done, and you can just keep the mask down.
Okay, I posted this week on Natural Selections a year in review, so check out naturalselections.substack.com for some highlights from the writing that I did there this year.
