Nature's Archive Podcast

Michael Hawk owns copyright in and to all content in transcripts.

You are welcome to share the below transcript (up to 500 words but not more) in media articles (e.g., The New York Times, LA Times, The Guardian), on your personal website, in a non-commercial article or blog post (e.g., Medium), and/or on a personal social media account for non-commercial purposes, provided that you include attribution to “Nature’s Archive Podcast” and link back to the naturesarchive.com URL.

Transcript creation is automated and subject to errors. No warranty of accuracy is implied or provided.

[00:00:00] Michael Hawk: Hey, Michael here. Before we get into today’s episode, I’d like to give you a gift. After all, it’s the holiday season for many. Specifically, I’d like to give you the gift of podcast topics that you want to hear. So I made a super short survey at naturesarchive. com slash survey.

[00:00:16] If you have two minutes, please check it out. I’d love to hear what you’d like to hear. And it’s linked at the top of our show notes as well. And if you’re feeling generous, would you give us a gift as well? Please follow, like, and share this podcast with one friend or one group that you think would like it too.

[00:00:32] Now onto the show. Okay. How did it get to be December already? As Kermit the Frog says, time’s fun when you’re eating flies.

[00:00:40] To that end, this is going to be the 24th episode we released on our feed this year. So I thought I’d try something new and create a bit of a highlight reel from the year. So if you haven’t had a chance to listen to all of the other episodes, here are some fun and salient tidbits. So starting on January 1st, I shared an episode from Michelle Fullner’s Golden State Naturalist.

[00:01:00] It’s an episode about California condors and the Yurok tribe. Michelle features her guest, Tiana Williams Clawson, from the Yurok tribe. If you didn’t know, the Yurok have been leaders in reintroducing condors to the wild, and they have a close relationship with these birds, dating back thousands of years.

[00:01:17] But condors, and vultures for that matter, have a bit of a marketing problem. They’re scavengers, and it’s a lifestyle that’s foreign to us, and it’s easily derided. But in reality, scavengers like condors act as nature’s immune system, and they do so much more. They halt the spread of disease.

[00:01:34] They clean up our landscapes and they cycle nutrients among other things. California condors are critically endangered and Tiana Williams Clawson discusses one of the reasons why.

[00:01:44] Tiana Williams-Claussen: impactful contaminant on condors today is actually lead contamination in the environment, which is coming from the use of lead ammunition.

[00:01:55] And so what happens is lead is the most conventionally used material for ammunition and particularly we’re talking about large game ammunition, rifle ammunition. So for deer and elk and things like that, bears. What happens is that lead being such a soft material, it actually fragments into hundreds of pieces upon impact with an animal.

[00:02:15] And on the one hand, this is actually quite beneficial for the hunter because each of those little bits of lead carries kinetic energy with it, and will quickly and cleanly kill the animal, which is what every hunter wants to see. Unfortunately, when those bits of lead get into, say, a gut pile, which most hunters will leave behind and which normally would be excellent food for a scavenger, A piece as small as the head of a pin is enough to kill a condor.

[00:02:40] And furthermore, it’s enough to kill a bald eagle or a golden eagle or a black vulture, all of whom are just as susceptible to lead poisoning as condors are. And so lead contamination at this point actually accounts for about 50% Of mortality in the wilds

[00:02:54] Michael Hawk: I’m going to jump ahead to episode number 102 with Sophie Osborn from last September. Sophie’s a biologist who’s had a hand in reintroducing condors, peregrine falcons, and the Hawaiian crow. We discussed all of those amazing experiences in that episode, but we also talked a little bit about lead.

[00:03:12] Sophie Osborn: when you shoot lead into an animal, it loses about 30 percent of its mass and it fragments into these just tiny little particles. You can look at an x ray of a deer that’s been killed, shot by a hunter , and it looks like just the starry sky at night. There’s just tiny powder. Small little pieces of lead that spreads very far from the actual entry wound. And when you see those x rays, you realize how it would be nearly impossible for a group of condors feeding on a carcass or a gut pile. If a hunter has killed an animal and field dressed it and, and left the gut pile there, it’s, it’s, it makes perfect sense how they just can’t avoid ingesting lead.

[00:03:54] the x rays really bring it home to people. Like, we had a lot of hunters on our field crew when I was working with condors, and the first time we finally saw an x ray of a deer that had been killed, it just was shocked. Everyone immediately started using non lead ammo.

[00:04:10] for many years I don’t think people realized how harmful this lead ammunition could be to people, too. But when we started seeing x rays of deer that had been killed and could see just the, Fragments and powder dust of lead spread in the carcass people became concerned.

[00:04:28] And so to investigate that, a North Dakota doctor x rayed packages of venison that had been donated to local food banks by hunters in 2007. And he x rayed 100 packages and 59 percent of them had visible lead fragments in an x ray.

[00:04:45] Michael Hawk: And as is an all too common theme, what harms wildlife also harms us too. On January 15th, I released an episode with Josh Jackson, known for his incredibly popular Forgotten Lands social media accounts. Josh discovered BLM lands, that’s Bureau of Land Management, during the pandemic and was struck by how these lands offer so much to outdoor enthusiasts and nature in general.

[00:05:12] So he made it his personal mission to explore these lands and help engage the public with BLM lands as well.

[00:05:18] Josh Jackson: when I started this Project, I was asking the question, what kind of landscapes do these BLM lands contain and are they worth protecting? And I said earlier, I realized, hell yes, they’re worth protecting. these are some Sacred places out there.

[00:05:33] And as I kept documenting and deep diving on these places, it started to be, become more apparent that. They had such a beautiful story to tell and I wanted to be a part of that.

[00:05:44] my very first trip I had went to, I decided on a place called the Armagosa Canyon, which is just south of Death Valley, and it’s where the, the Armagosa River, which mostly flows under underground flows above ground, and it.

[00:05:57] And I had read about this place called the China Ranch Date Farm where , you could park your car and there were trails there. And I thought, Oh, for my first trip, this will be a good experience. I was new to BLM and didn’t want to get in over my head. And so I went, I started hiking and it’s already beautiful.

[00:06:15] I’m walking out on this bluff and to my left is the, What this mountain they call Rainbow Mountain, and it’s got like those vibrant colors moving in the rifts and cracks it. I think it’s a good example of armagosa chaos and geology where like the stacks are stacked up like in thin layers on top of each other.

[00:06:36] And so I’m looking at this mountain. blown away by how vibrantly colored it was. And then I’m walking out towards the river, this beautiful kind of bend in the river. And I look down to my right, and there’s just this coyote staring at, like frozen in time, staring right at me. And of course, I just paused, I pull my binoculars up and I’m just looking at this beautiful coyote eye to eye and I’m not kidding, up to 45 seconds.

[00:07:03] It was just this incredible moment. And then the coyote sort of turned and sauntered towards the river and I put my binoculars down and I was just thinking man, if all of the BLM lands are as beautiful as this and the experiences that I’ve already had just in my first trip, like there’s going to be a great story to tell,

[00:07:21] Michael Hawk: Josh is actually creating what promises to be an incredible book due out in 2025. It’s part travelogue, part adventure, part history, and part guidebook for BLMlands. I just can’t wait to read it. Now on January 29th, I released what turned out to be the most downloaded episode of the year. My guest was Lenya Quinn Davidson.

[00:07:42] Lenya has an incredible resume of engaging with wildfire and prescribed fire and the public, And she made the perfect guest to discuss the importance and necessity of wildfire, while also considering safety of people and property and the health of our ecosystems. There is so much misinformation about wildfire, as well as valid information that just gets misrepresented.

[00:08:04] So if there’s one episode I’d like people to listen to, it might be this one.

[00:08:09] Lenya Quinn-Davidson: There’s some interesting research that has come out of UC Berkeley. A professor there named Scott Stevens has done some really nice reconstructions, historical reconstructions, of how many acres burned historically in California pre pre European settlement. And he showed that typically in any given year in California, there might have been 4 to 11 million acres that would have burned.

[00:08:32] Just to give you a little perspective on that, if you remember the 2020 fire season here in California, with the August complex we had that widespread lightning event that set off a bunch of wildfires. We had 4. 2 million acres burn that year, and people were beside themselves with it.

[00:08:51] That was this unprecedented amount of fire, and all the smoke, and how crazy this was, and really that was on the low end of what we would have expected historically. Now I think the important caveat to that is it’s not the acres, but it’s really how they burn, right? We’re seeing that fires are burning at much higher severity now, and the smoke can be a lot different when you’re talking about the full canopy of the forest burning, rather than just a creeping understory burn. The actual content of the smoke is different, and the amount of smoke is different.

[00:09:25] And so just one important note is that, you know, a lot of people use the terms fire severity and fire intensity interchangeably, and those are different things in the sense of fire behavior and fire effects. So fire intensity is the amount of energy and heat that’s coming out of an individual unit of fire.

[00:09:42] And then fire severity is the impact that it has on the landscape. So there are a couple different ways of looking at fire severity. You can look at vegetation fire severity. So how is it affecting, the actual vegetation on the ground? And then there’s also soil burn severity. So how is it affecting the soil in addition to the vegetation?

[00:10:01] Dan Katz: Pollen itself isn’t harmful to people. However, some people end up having immune systems which attack pollen. And what can then happen is, uh, uh, if somebody is exposed to pollen, uh, that they’re allergic to.

[00:10:19] Their immune system mounts this vigorous, uh, uh, defense, uh, which ends up making that person miserable.

[00:10:27] Even though the pollen itself is really no big deal on its own, the body’s response for somebody who’s sensitized, it can be, it can be downright dangerous. And so, um, so that’s kind of the, the gist of allergenic pollen. Now some people are allergic to, um, just a couple of types of pollen and some people are allergic to a variety.

[00:10:53] Allasandra Valdez: so when you see the things on, maybe when you look at the web and look at the weather, they’ll have like a pollen counter online.

[00:11:03] Does that. Do you know anything about that? Does that take into account different types of pollen or just the most common, um, allergen ones?

[00:11:10] Dan Katz: There’s maybe 10 different sources for this type of information out there on the internet.

[00:11:16] a lot of them break it down into broader categories, weeds, grasses, and trees., Of course, people can be allergic to specific types of trees. Or specific types of, of weeds, which isn’t even a very good category. so that’s the first layer of how what you see on the internet may not be relevant for you as an allergy sufferer. The other part, and. What is a little less widely known is that a lot of these predictions that are made are based on very little data and do not actually have much validation.

[00:11:55] Michael Hawk: Well, that’s disappointing. Dr. Katz goes on to discuss how pollen forecasts might improve in the future and other topics such as how urban heat island affects pollen and warming temperatures in general affect pollen. Thankfully, I don’t suffer from many allergies, but I feel for those of you who do.

[00:12:13] On February 26th, I released an interview with Dr. Lucy Kirhoulis, she’s a forest ecologist, and we discuss tree and forest physiology, including how scientists measure tree respiration, assess drought tolerance of trees, and much more. isotopes Are created by burning fossil fuels.

[00:12:33] And with this knowledge, scientists can actually look at historical carbon levels and see what’s known as the smoking gun effect.

[00:12:41] Lucy Kerhoulas: so one thing that’s kind of interesting that plant physiologists have kind of put together with C13 research in tree rings is that because Rubisco discriminates against C13, plant material is by nature depleted of C13. It’s relatively light of C13. We know since the onset of the Industrial Revolution that our CO2 concentrations in our atmosphere have been increasing, and we can see this from the data that started being collected in the 1950s from the Mauna Loa Observatory, and then before that, we can see this rise in CO2 concentration in our atmosphere via ice cores. And so we can track this, and it’s yep CO2 concentrations are increasing in our atmosphere, and we think this is what might be contributing to global warming via the greenhouse gas effect. But some folks think, oh, I don’t know, I’m not totally convinced, the increasing CO2 concentration in our atmosphere, it might just be natural variation in our climate, if you go back into the 500 million years ago and look at stuff, we think that the, parts per million of CO2 were 3 to 9, 000 and right now they’re at 420.

[00:13:53] What’s the big deal? Maybe this is just natural variation. It has nothing to do with human activity. And so interestingly, what we can see though, via ice cores, the air trapped in them, going back in time, is that since the onset of the industrial revolution, we can see that the C 13 signature of our atmospheric CO2 has been changing since we started burning fossil fuels, which are largely plant based.

[00:14:19] And so we’ve seen, via burning fossil fuels, that the isotopic signature of our atmospheric CO2 has depleted. It’s become lighter because we’re burning material that already discriminated against C13 via rubisco, if that makes sense. If you have follow up questions, feel free, but that’s kind of, so some people have called this the smoking gun.

[00:14:43] This proves that the increased CO2 concentration in our atmosphere is from burning plant based materials that have this light c13 signature.

[00:14:53] Michael Hawk: Next up, Dr. Joseph Wilson, famous for his work on the bees in your backyard, joined us to talk about one of his core passions, velvet ants. In fact, he and some colleagues released a new field guide to velvet ants. These beautifully fluffy creatures are actually wasps and definitely one of the most asked about insects reported on the various bug ID groups that I’m part of.

[00:15:13] Dr. Joe Wilson: They look more like ants partially because they’re wingless. The females are wingless and they’re, with these kind of ancient evolutionary stories that we try to tell, we don’t know exactly why they’re wingless, but there are many benefits to them being wingless.

[00:15:29] One is that the females are parasitic. digging into other nests. So the wings really aren’t helpful for that lifestyle. We see other kind of wasps with similar lifestyles that spend a lot of time crawling on the ground even when they have wings. So the winglessness could be because the wings weren’t really advantageous and they, were lost evolutionarily.

[00:15:47] Which is an oversimplification of how evolution works, but the basic story of it. One other thing that Velvet Ants have that most other wasps don’t is they are really heavily armored. Velvet Ants take, so someone actually did this study to see how much force it takes to crush a Velvet Ant, and it’s about 11 times as much force to crush a Velvet Ant compared to a honeybee.

[00:16:10] Michael Hawk: Well, I don’t recommend crushing velvet ants, but that sure is fascinating. We have so much to learn from creatures of all shapes and sizes. And one other thing about velvet ants that we talked about, they’re known to have a particularly painful sting, but they aren’t aggressive creatures, so if you leave them be, they’ll leave you alone as well.

[00:16:28] Hey, did you grow up watching Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom on TV? My guest on March 25th was Dr. Rae Wynn Grant. She’s co host of the modern version of Wild Kingdom. She’s also a carnivore ecologist and has an amazing personal story that we spend most of the episode discussing.

[00:16:45] Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: I am doing research on a population of mountain lions on the Jack and Laura Dangermond Preserve. And this is a nature preserve that is managed by the nature Conservancy on the central coast of California, around the point Conception area.

[00:17:00] it’s a relatively small preserve, but it is so special. There are multiple ecosystems in that space. So we have, hills and we have oak, woodland forest, and we have scrub brush and sand dunes and coastlines. And then the ocean. That meets the coastline is part of a marine protected area, so we actually have this like land to sea connectivity. This nature preserve, the Dangermond Preserve has a lot of wildlife and a lot of carnivores. So we’ve got black bears and mountain lions and bobcats and coyote and fox, and they haven’t been studied until recently. So there hasn’t been long-term study on these animals. There’s been, just studies that have sprouted up in the last couple of years.

[00:17:45] So it’s going to be really interesting to see what these mountain lions are up to. How do they travel? Where do they move? How much time do they spend on the preserve? And in particular, I’m really curious about what they eat. There’s a lot of anecdotes out there about what do these mountain lions eat?

[00:17:59] There’s an abundance of deer and wild pigs and rabbits, but yet I’m capturing these mountain lions on my camera traps on the beach, like walking on the sand, and they’re not in the business of wasting their time. So I’m really curious, and so are my colleagues of what these mountain lions are eating and is it a marine resource?

[00:18:18] And if it is, that really changes our understanding of mountain lion ecology as well as the importance of protected coastlines around the world.

[00:18:29] Michael Hawk: Have you found any evidence of the beach lions actually, partaking in a in a Marine meal or, I’ve heard about the beach bears as well, either of them.

[00:18:40] Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant: So we do not have photographic evidence yet, and there’s some other things in the works that I can’t talk about yet, because there’s some research that will be published this year that’s really exciting which is a diet analysis from some poop that we collected. Poop can be an incredible source of data but we’ve seen carcasses of elephant seals in places that we think only mountain lions could have accessed.

[00:19:08] And that is a big anecdote that’s driving a lot of these hypotheses. So I am waiting with bated breath to see what we find.

[00:19:18] Michael Hawk: Check out Dr. Wynne Grant’s memoir called Wildlife. It’s a deeply personal endeavor for her and it’s well worth the read. Now along with wildfire, I think the oceans are deeply misunderstood and undervalued for a host of different reasons. So I made a concerted effort in 2024 that’s probably going to carry over into 2025 to cover more marine topics, starting with the secrets of the octopus.

[00:19:40] Sy Montgomery and Warren Carlyle were my guests.

[00:19:44] Sy Montgomery: you would have to go to outer space or science fiction to find a creature more unlike us. These animals can pour their boneless, flexible bodies through an opening that’s smaller than an orange. Even if they weigh 40 or 50 pounds, they can just flow through anything they taste with all of their skin. They have three hearts. They have blue blood, they have strength that’s incredible. Each of their suckers, a three and a half inch sucker on a giant Pacific octopus can lift 35 pounds. And they have 200 suckers on each of their eight arms. So they’re tremendously strong animals. All octopuses are venomous, also.

[00:20:31] And yet, these animals with tremendous strength, with superpowers, with bodies so unlike ours, you can still be friends with someone like this. And that is what blows my mind.

[00:20:45] Michael Hawk: You might recognize Secrets of the Octopus from the similarly named documentary series that was on NatGeo last year. Be sure to check it out, it was truly enthralling. 2024 was a year of a rare double emergence of cicadas. As I researched cicadas, I came to learn that they are super important to all of the ecosystems they live in.

[00:21:04] And in the United States, there are annual cicadas that come out every year and cicadas that only emerge every 13 or 17 years. Dr. Chris Simon helped Dr. Chris Simon helped decipher what’s going on here.

[00:21:19] Chris Simon: Periodical, cicadas come out in the spring. They emerge from the ground. And they’ve spent either 13 or 17 years underground growing up. But they emerge within just a few days of each other. So the first week of an emergence will be mostly, you’ll see cicadas all over the trees and lower down in the vegetation, and then they’ll start crawling up into the tops of the trees.

[00:21:45] The second week of the emergence, the males will start singing. And if you actually look at the individuals, the males come out slightly before the females. And this happens in a lot of insects, ’cause apparently the males by natural selection are more expendable. And they’re very close together.

[00:22:02] Just a maybe a few days. In the beginning there’ll be mostly males. And then in the middle of the emergence week, there’ll be both sexes. And then near the end of the emergence week, it’ll be mostly females, but it takes ’em a while before they can start singing.

[00:22:17] So they start singing. After about a week, only the males sing, not the females. And then during the end of the second week and the beginning of the third week, they start mating. And then during the third and fourth weeks, they start laying eggs . They lay eggs and the males tend to die before the females.

[00:22:35] So near the very tail end of the emergence, it’ll be heavily female biased. That’s because the males come up a little bit earlier, so just a few days earlier. Also the males are singing, and so predators can cue in on the males, whereas the females don’t sing.

[00:22:52] So then after the females lay the eggs, they’re in the branches for about six weeks. And so the eggs hatch later in the summer. And all of the nymphs will just launch themselves into the air out of the tree branches.

[00:23:06] Oh, and the eggs are laid in, slits in the tree, branches in v-shaped nests, and each nest has about 12 eggs. Then they go down the branch it looks sort of like a sewing machine has gone down the branch and they lay a whole bunch of these v-shaped nests, and then they’ll make another nest.

[00:23:24] And so they’ll just keep, they’ll make a skip and then start another nest. And if they’re disturbed, they might fly to a different branch and make nests and, so those eggs hatch, the eggs fall to the ground as a first stage nymph, we call instar.

[00:23:39] Michael Hawk: Cicadas are also a great case example of evolution in progress, with different broods separated by geography and time of emergence evolving in their own ways. In May, Snakey Mama, Dr. Emily Taylor, joined me to discuss snakes.

[00:23:54] Dr. Emily Taylor: I’ve recently become pretty obsessed with snake behavior. through a research project that I started with my collaborator Scott Bobak from Dickinson College.

[00:24:02] It’s called Project Rattlecam and this project involves using new technology to be able to spy on snakes with secret cameras. So, Long story short, and I can tell you more about this later if you’re curious, is we have a, years of putting time lapse cameras on rattlesnakes in these big gatherings so we can go back and study them later on.

[00:24:20] But three years ago, we also started a live streaming camera. I mean, everyone’s putting live streaming cameras in Eagle’s nests and hawk nests and falcon nests. It’s about time we have one in a rattlesnake nest. And indeed there’s these communal birthing areas that some rattlesnakes go to. And I’m very excited because this May, 2024, we’re putting up the first live streaming camera at a big rattlesnake den where there’s going to be lots of activity of snakes all year round.

[00:24:44] That’s right about the time the snakes start to wake up. So I think in the beginning of May, we’ll see snakes occasionally. And then based on experience from visiting by mid to the end of May, there’s going to be lots and lots of snakes males, females, babies, everyone comes out of this.

[00:24:58] Volcanic outcrop where they’ve been spending the winter underground together under the snow line and they all bask during the day all day long. So we think there’s probably like 2000 rattlesnakes at this combined, there’s two little peaks that are side by side, which is a lot of rattlesnakes.

[00:25:12] They interact. They have all these cool social interactions. And then in the beginning of June, the males and the non pregnant females will all leave and they’ll travel for miles around into the prairie to hunt, but the pregnant females are going to stay behind and the pregnant females will stay back there basking in the sun, probably getting eaten by red tailed hawks.

[00:25:30] Who knows? And then they’ll have their babies in September. And so we’ll be able to watch that maternal care and check them out. And it’s very short season that they have before the males and the other females come back in September and October.

[00:25:41] And once when I was up there, I decided to, to see something because, when you go up there, the snakes are scared of you. So they all dive down into these, little holes. And that’s, again, the beauty of the camera is that we’re watching their natural behaviors when they’re not scared and stressed by the presence of the researcher.

[00:25:56] That’s beautiful for science. But anyway, I sat down and I just sat down and sat still and the snake started to come out and they were like giving me side eye. I was like, is that person? But I sat. Super still. And I just waited. And within about an hour, they all had come back out and just curled up all around me because I had become part of the background.

[00:26:13] So I was just surrounded by dozens and dozens and dozens of snakes. And they just curl up and they start interacting and doing their thing. And it was the coolest experience to just sit there and watch them and to see how they actually are when I’m not trying to catch them or trying to otherwise study them or harass them.

[00:26:28] Michael Hawk: Wow, what an experience that must have been. Rounding out May, Forester Ethan Tapper was our guest, discussing his experiences that led to his new book, How to Love a Forest.

[00:26:39] Ethan Tapper: But and it’s been a journey of discovery since then, cause forestry is actually a lot of different things.

[00:26:43] So I would, I would say that what forestry really is, is foresters are the people who navigate our relationship with forests and that takes all different kinds of forms but sort of the biggest bucket is within this, the role of forest management in our forests. So how we manage forests in a bunch of different ways, but often using the cutting of trees as a tool to achieve different objectives.

[00:27:08] Now, if you were to talk to some foresters, they would term the value and the purpose of forestry solely as a means to extract resources from forests, to harvest timber, to produce wood. And then, you might talk to other people who are foresters, who don’t think that that’s our job at all, that in fact, see our job, and I’m one of these, I should say, that see our job as yes, harvesting timber from forests, by the way, timber is a local renewable resource, and we know that we need a lot more of those, but doing so in a way that is always within the context of how do we care for these ecosystems in a holistic way, in a way that actually benefits their integrity their resilience, their diversity that’s actually regenerative

[00:27:52] if you want to understand what’s going on in a forested ecosystem in a very like fine tuned way. Bring in an ecologist, right? If you want to do something about it, bring in a forester, because we know how to actually like effect changes in those ecosystems and are very good at, doing that.

[00:28:11] So one of the sort of my journeys has been then taking this forest ecology background and then mixing that up with other experiences that I’ve had that are more sort of like on the timber focused side. And then asking this question of how do we use these tools of action to then, not just produce timber, I’m also very proud to be able to produce renewable resources, but to also use that to affect positive change with respect to forest ecology, biodiversity, all these other things.

[00:28:40] Michael Hawk: Ethan goes into a lot of depth about how he handles invasive species, and why there are many cases where tree removal is necessary, such as the absence of natural disturbance, or due to pathogens or other changes to forest ecosystems. It was definitely an eye opening conversation. In June, it was back to the oceans.

[00:29:00] I saw a wonderful short film earlier in the year about the plight of kelp forests, narrated by Tristin McHugh. I knew I had to talk to her, so we spent are critical keystone species in many mid latitude temperate marine environments.

[00:29:16] Tristin McHugh: Kelp is an organism and a habitat. Kelp in itself is a photosynthesizing organism, like a tree, but it’s underwater, so it creates this beautiful dimensional structure that many organisms use for food, habitat, and shelter.

[00:29:32] Taking a step back like when we’re talking about where a kelp forest is, we’re talking about these cold temperate reef areas, right? California in itself, As opposed to a coral reef system, we have a temperate reef system. So at its foundation, we have rock, and then building upon that rock is everything else that attaches to it, like kelp, right?

[00:29:52] we’ve lost 96 percent of kelp canopy in under a decade, That is like unusual and unprecedented, in California and specifically Northern California, Sonoma, Mendocino counties. And the question now is like, what, if anything, can we do to mitigate? Any more loss and protect and defend that 4 percent that we have left.

[00:30:14] Michael Hawk: Tristin also explained how warming oceans hurt kelp’s ability to germinate, and sea star wasting syndrome has thrown the ecosystem off balance, causing these losses. Speaking of sea star wasting syndrome, a couple of months later I visited the Sunflower Star Lab, which is working to recover another keystone species of the kelp ecosystem, the Sunflower Sea Star.

[00:30:36] and Andrew Kim were my guides.

[00:30:39] Reuven Bank: I wanted to get across in this interview how cool sunflower stars are. Not just in terms of how important they are in our ecosystems, but they’re these absolute, you know, Alien looking underwater Roombas, just zooming around as the cheetahs of the subtidal and the inner tidal. where their prey smells them coming and runs off in fear.

[00:31:01] They’re brilliantly colored. They can live for decades. It’s a life that seems wholly different to our own, the way that they’re living in the ocean. And yet, because of their importance to kelp forest ecosystems, we are inexorably connected to sunflower stars, despite how different they may be from us.

[00:31:20] Andrew Kim: I think what was really shocking is that the sea star wasting appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, and it wasn’t like a trickle, it was just open the floodgates and every star was melting away.

[00:31:35] It was literally like, they would melt away in days. that was the most alarming thing, I think, the sea star wasting event was almost kind of like a blip where this thing came through and totally, wreaked havoc on Pycnopodia in particular. They were the hardest hit and the quickest to go.

[00:31:54] it really just came through gutted the population.

[00:31:58] Reuven Bank: Seastar wasting syndrome is one of the largest marine epidemics on record. It impacted over 20 different species of sea star. And like Andrew was saying, it was almost overnight where you had the symptoms of wasting start to occur. Because wasting almost describes a collection of symptoms.

[00:32:15] Almost like sepsis in humans, where you have ending up in total body failure on behalf of the sea star. So it would start with symptoms such as, The star is almost looking deflated and arms beginning to twist, to soon arms dropping off and eventually the entire star turning into a giant mushy pile of goo.

[00:32:35] Michael Hawk: As incredibly heartbreaking as that is, the Sunflower Star Lab, along with many partners, have started an aquaculture breeding program with great initial success, so there is plenty of hope. This episode delves into the details of that program and what comes next. Back in July, I had the incredible opportunity to interview Jake Davis, a world renowned wildlife photographer and cinematographer.

[00:32:59] Among his credits is his work on the documentary Planet Earth.

[00:33:02] Jake Davis: So this episode was called extremes. That’s like the theme of the episode. and for all of the planet earth, it’s like, since snow leopards were such a significant part of planet earth one, there’s been like, we want a snow leopard bit for each, planet earth.

[00:33:17] And so they’ve been filmed a lot and these kind of higher, like if in the Himalayas, we’re in. Bigger mountains in the snow, like where you think about the snow leopard living. But what’s really interesting is that they also live here in the Gobi desert, which is like hot and dry.

[00:33:31] And there’s a real lack of water in the summer. And so that was the main angle that we had was, it was more about the place and the behavior and stuff like that was fleshed out once I got there. And once I realized, okay, here’s a mom with cubs and maybe I can get some interactions, I was like.

[00:33:48] a building block that was added later on. But the starting place was like, let’s see if we can just film them in a way that anchors them in a place that is really striking. Like a snow leopard on a landscape that looks like Mars, right? It’s just not, it’s not what you would expect. Even for me the whole time, I was just like, how, this is not what you think about when you think of snow leopards

[00:34:08] Michael Hawk: Jake goes into great depths in how he finds snow leopards and how he sets up his camera rigs. All of this together requires great skill, biological knowledge, technical aptitude, and patience. Next up is Dr. Hannah Makowski. Dr. Makowski is studying tree phenology, that is the timing of seasonal and cyclical growth factors like leafing out and dropping leaves.

[00:34:32] When tied together with genetic data, scientists can better understand tree adaptations and then use this information to assess adaptability, and perhaps even aid in supporting more resilient forests. Here she talks about one of the applications of this research.

[00:34:48] Hanna Makowski: climates are shifting we’re having earlier springs and later falls, and it’s important to know how species are going to respond to these shifts.

[00:35:01] to know whether, you know, they’re going to be able to respond or they’re going to have negative effects that impact their ability to persist. And I think this can, you know, there can be impacts that affect the individual’s ability to persist. Like, if there’s a frost that kills that individual, there’s that effect that individual dies, but then that individual also is not existing in this silo.

[00:35:28] It has interactions. So understanding how these mismatches in you know, the, the life cycle timeline how shifts in seasons are going to impact that. have implications beyond just that individual and it, you can have mismatches between pollinators and the timing that the flowers come out.

[00:35:53] So if, for example, flowers are driven by day length and they don’t shift when they’re flowering, but you have an insect that is a pollinator it’s hatching is driven by temperature, you could have An early spring where that insect comes out way before that flower even flowers, and then that insect doesn’t have its food source or home, and then that flower doesn’t get its pollinator services.

[00:36:22] So there can be wide ranging effects to these mismatches Between individuals that experience, the effects of these shifts.

[00:36:31] Michael Hawk: Now I said forests in the intro to this clip because Dr. Makowski is focusing on trees at Black Rock Forest, but this type of research can also be done with plants of any type.

[00:36:41] Next up, Ashley Bray gave us an introduction into wildlife forensics. She’s the host of her own podcast called Get Out Alive.

[00:36:50] Ashley Bray: So if you haven’t looked them up, please look up the vaquita. It’s spelled V A Q U I T A. They’re so cute. So they are a species of porpoise, so they are the most endangered porpoise in the world, so like a type of dolphin.

[00:37:04] And They are so unfamiliar or like endangered to the point that some people in Mexico believe that they were like a mythical animal made up by the government to criminalize fishing and whatnot. And we’ll get into what that means in a second, but a survey conducted this year by the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society observed only six to eight vaquitas, none of which were new calves, which is down from spotting the eight to 13 last year.

[00:37:30] And this survey didn’t encompass their whole range, but there’s only thought to be around or less than 20 individuals left in the wild. So like devastating. We could get into like genetic bottlenecking and stuff like that, but it is, it’s not great to have that few of individuals and we don’t know like how related they are and whatnot.

[00:37:47] So there have also been attempts to capture them before and like try to keep them in captivity. And we’re going to talk about California condors after this, which that was a thing that worked for them. One vaquita was caught and tried to, they tried to keep her in like an open sea pen so that they could further protect her, but then also like do some breeding.

[00:38:07] And she ended up dying. So they aborted the entire program because they were like, it’s not worth another vaquita dying. There’s already so few. So that

[00:38:15] Michael Hawk: Yeah. You’re talking, if one dies, that’s like 5 percent of the global

[00:38:18] population.

[00:38:19] Ashley Bray: Which is horrifying. And these vaquitas only live in the Northern Gulf of California, also known as the Sea of Cortez. The thing that has driven down their numbers isn’t even direct poaching of the vaquita, it’s the illegal poaching of a fish called the totoaba. So what ends up happening is people who are poaching the totoaba use gill nets, which are nets that are just set and left in the ocean, and the vaquitas become bycatch in those nets and end up drowning. So gillnets have been outlawed by the Mexican government in an attempt to save the vaquita, but because the swim bladder of the totoaba can fetch so much money and because fishermen went out of business because they could no longer use gillnets, even if they were not trying to take the totoaba, if they were just doing, , normal fishing.

[00:39:05] So now they’re not allowed to do that. And then the Mexican government tried to subsidize money and like, you know, tried to, you know, Compensate for making gillnets illegal, but it was not nearly as much money as they would have made fishing. So a lot of people started struggling and then actually turned to poaching the totoaba because they can get so much more money. Where this gets even more complicated and we’ve touched on it. But the people that are involved in Totoaba poaching are also involved with the Mexican cartel. And the cartel is the one making contact with Chinese nationals to purchase the swim bladders and then export them to China. So as you’re trying to combat this illegal poaching of this fish and thus the death of vaquitas, you’re also going up against the Mexican cartel.

[00:39:49] Michael Hawk: Well, that’s the gist of the story, but there’s a bit more to it in the episode, and plenty more fascinating stories from Ashley, so be sure to check it out. And just last month, I had Kevin Wiener from All Bugs Go To Kevin on. He has an incredible story that he calls From Fear to Fascination. In fact, he used to fear certain insects. Then, to his surprise, he got into the pest control industry. But his desire to do a good job for his customers started a journey of discovery to the point where he recognized that many of these insects were wonderful and actually helping us.

[00:40:23] You’ll have to listen to hear the whole story. But part of Kevin’s story is his discovery of amazing wildlife interactions that happen in our own yards and neighborhood parks, if we only look.

[00:40:33] Kevin Wiener: That is, that’s, that’s, that’s the fun.

[00:40:36] Get out there people. you, you have aphids on your plants. Go see, see who else is there because you’ll find, you’ll find like the, the hoverfly larvae that are down there feeding on it and ladybugs and, um, lacewings and, and even assassin bugs sometimes that are, that are in there doing the work and, um, And other predatory flies, like the long legged flies, which are, you know, like, metallic green, red, crazy cut, like, they just, depends on how the light hits, they’re just so cool looking, these tiny little, quick little flies.

[00:41:05] it’s, and the reason I know this is because I get down there and I look, But that’s where the excitement is, is like when you start to plant in your yard, especially if you really have some diverse plants, you’re gonna, after a year, possibly even more quickly, you’re going to start to see those predator prey relationships take place because you’ve got.

[00:41:23] You’ve got food for lots of different animals that are going to support a healthy, balanced, ecosystem, even in your backyard

[00:41:29] Michael Hawk: And lastly, Chloe Jelly joined us to discuss ants. I’ve been wanting to talk ants for ages, because it seemed with every tiny discovery I made about ants, an entire new world opened up before me. There are so many ant species that have taken up entirely unique ways to live. If you have rugged individualism on one side of the spectrum, well, ants are rugged collectivists on the other end of the spectrum.

[00:41:56] Living in super colonies of billions or tiny colonies, if then a few acorns, they could be living in the earth or in trees. They’ve figured out how to succeed in nearly every environment. They farm, they ranch, they protect, and as Chloe describes, perhaps even harass each other.

[00:42:14] Chloe Jelley: I work on Iridomyrmex in Australia and I was able to go do field work on these colonies and do some behavioral tests. So I was out there observing them for a while. And.

[00:42:26] These colonies are like really large too. They have multiple mounds and they’re so large that, and their bodies are so large that , if you’re sitting there, you can hear the ants walking along like the leaves. It’s really cool. But there’s also like a lot of other ant species living in proximity to the nest.

[00:42:45] So there’s these large ants in Australia called bulldog ants. And they’re really.

[00:42:50] Michael Hawk: I’ve heard of

[00:42:51] Chloe Jelley: Yeah, from a human perspective, they’re very scary ants. Actually, they can track you with their eyes. They have very large eyes. it’s a species of ants where you’re, you’re standing there and you can see that they’re watching you because their head is moving along with you, which is unnerving for an insect. But I noticed that there was a bulldog ant nesting near the meat ant colony. And I thought it was cool that they’re living so close together. Especially cause a bulldog ant is a potential predator for these meat ants. And I was sitting, I was just watching the ants walking past each other.

[00:43:24] And I noticed this meat ant pick up a pebble and like throw it down the colony entrance of the bulldog ant nest. So it was picking up the pebbles and throwing it into like this ant nest. And I thought it was So funny because it seems like such like a petty like act to be like, oh, like I hate my neighbor.

[00:43:43] I’m gonna throw, I’m gonna throw a rock like in their nest entrance. And I don’t entirely know, I assume like the behavior is they want that colony to like not be there anymore. They are like trying to be a nuisance. They’re trying to fill up that colony. But it was such like a petty little.

[00:44:02] Behavior that it made me laugh a little bit

[00:44:05] Michael Hawk: I love that story, and yes, we did post the video on the show notes at naturesarchive. com. So that’s 2024 in a nutshell. I’m not sure what 2025 has in store for us, but I can say that you’ll hear about earthquakes, acorn woodpeckers, oak masting, and much, much more. As you know, Jumpstart Nature is my new non profit organization, and in 2024 we formed our board of directors and filed with the state of California.

[00:44:30] Thanks We’ve been patiently waiting for 501c3 designation from the IRS. We’re on month number 7 now, actually, and it’s really hurt our ability to fundraise. So as a result, I’m actually looking for work so I can pay the bills and keep Jumpstart Nature going. But thankfully, with our team of volunteers, I’m confident that we’re here for the long haul.

[00:44:50] After all, I started Nature’s Archive while I was actually working full time.

[00:44:54] But if you want to help ensure we sustain, you can always support us through Patreon or a direct contribution. So check out jumpstartnature. com slash donate for ways that you can help.

[00:45:04] And if you’re curious, you can also see who our Board of Directors are and our volunteers.

[00:45:08] Most of all, thank you for listening and thank you for your support. And may 2025 exceed your expectations in every way.