Quirks and Quarks - Seabird poop does whaaat? And more…

Episode Date: April 24, 2026

Seabird poop plays a surprising role in bringing life to barren islands, spreading nutrients throughout the ocean, and even creating wealth for an ancient human empire.PLUS:The precursors of written language go back a lot earlier than we thoughtDolphins exposed to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill also more likely to be hit by boatsFrom the archives: Canadian astronomer spots a supernova visible to the naked eyeQuirks Question: How do beavers choose their trees?Mapping the universe in three dimensions

I am an actor, fresh out of theater school with big dreams and an even bigger drug habit. But things are pretty good. That is until my best friend is set up on a date with David Lee Roth. Yeah, from Van Halen. If you know, you know. From CBC's personally, this is Discount Dave and the Fix. The true-ish story about how a fake rock star led me to a real trial that held up a mirror to me. And okay, let's just say that not everyone in this story is who you think they are.

Personally, discount Dave and the Fix. Available now on CBC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. Hi, I'm Bob McDonald. Welcome to Quirks and Quarks. On this week's show, scientists are mapping the entire universe in 3D. And we can see the pattern of galaxies changing as the university evolves. And 16 years after the Deepwater Horizon disaster,

dolphins are still struggling. It was really tough to see that the animals in such poor health. Plus, Stone Age dashes and dots could be a precursor to written language. Looking back at a Canadian supernova discovery, a question about beaver tastes, and we dive into the wonderful world of seabird poop. All this today on Quarks and Quarks. For much of our ancient past, speech, along with gestures, was about the only way we humans could pass information from one person to another. But somewhere along the line,

our ancestors made a breakthrough. Somebody got the bright idea of using symbols to represent ideas, and those symbols could be etched into stone, clay, or some other material, and writing was born. Now, we don't know precisely when writing was invented, but it was thought to have emerged from ancient Mesopotamia in modern-day Iraq a bit more than 5,000 years ago. That early writing system, known as cuneiform writing, was made by pressing a reed into soft clay to make cuneiform tablets. Well, now a new study by Dr. Christian Benz and Dr. Ava Dutkiewicz is focusing on much earlier objects from the Stone Age, and they found that some of the markings from that era are just as complex as early cuneiform writing, what's known as proto-cuniform.

This raises the tantalizing possibility that writing, or at least, least an early precursor to written language may actually date back 40,000 years. Dr. Benz is an associate professor of digital humanities at Sarland University and Sarbrookin, Germany. Hello, Dr. Benz. Welcome to Quarks and Quarks. Thanks for having me. First of all, describe the objects that you were looking at for this study. What do they look like? So overall, these are 260 objects, which come from a fairly constrained area of southwestern Germany, namely from four caves in two valleys. And we are talking about around 30 figurines, so mammoth figurines, figurines of horses, of cave lions, so the type of animals that would live in these areas at the time. But then also a lot of tools,

like smoothers that were used to work with heights and also flutes, musical instruments, and personal ornaments. Tell me about the people who made these objects and used all these tools. So these were some of the earliest modern humans, Homo sapiens, who came into Europe, and this is roughly around 43,000 to 34,000 years ago. They are hunter-gatherers, so they hunt for the animals which live there in this environment, and they produce these tools and artifacts mainly from, mainly from mammoth ivory, but then also from antler bone.

Now, you said one of the figurines was a mammoth. Tell us about that one. So this was investigated by Eva Dutkiewicz in her PhD thesis, and in particular the geometric marks on it. So you have a figurine carved out of ivory, which fits in the palm of your hand. And it's very realistic about the features of the mammoth. And then there are rows of crosses on it,

four crosses, five crosses, On the backside of it, there is also a row of three crosses and then three deeper incisions, lines, and then next to it there is a line of dots. I think it's seven dots. So there are different kinds of sign types, and they're normally put into a sequential order. Okay. So that's the figurines. Now, you mentioned there were other tools.

Do they also have markings on them? Yeah. So, for example, there is one smoother, or there are several smoothers where you also have rows of crosses. What we found in our study is that in general you can say that on tools, we have sequences of lower information density. So these tend to be more repetitive sequences, also shorter sequences. So the figurines were chosen to carry more information. Well, what went through your mind when you looked at all the markings that were on these objects?

When I first saw them in the museum and tubing, I thought, this must be the beginning of information encoding. So the beginning of starting to think about using discrete signs, discrete geometric signs to encode information, to say something beyond the here and now, to keep this information for the future, and also to communicate it to other people. Did you have any early ideas or speculations on what they might represent? So yeah, there were these different ideas of what they, could mean in the case of the so-called Adorant, this is an ivory placate. On one side, you have a hybrid

figure, so some hybrid creature in between human and lion. And on the other side, you have rows of dots, 13, 12, 10, and 13. So here it has been speculated that it might be moon faces, which are put down. But what we wanted to do in our project is to not go down the rabbit whole of trying to interpret these signs because they're so far removed from us in time and also culturally, we said, okay, what can we really measure about these sequences and how can we compare them to actual writing and other types of science systems? So how did you investigate these markings? So first of all, we built a corpus of all of these artifacts and more. Now we are working on other artifacts from other areas of Europe. We came up with the sign types that we are going to

use to encode the information. And then you have sequences that you can automatically process with computational tools. And then you can calculate certain quantitative features. And with these quantitative features, you can then classify and cluster these sequences. So you can ask, do they cluster more with protocol form? Do they cluster with modern day writing systems? And these are the types of questions you can ask with computational tools. Oh, I see. So you were using computer models to see how similar these symbols are to other languages or similar to each other, see patterns, in other words. Yes, exactly.

And the interesting result was that you can clearly tease them apart from modern-day writing systems. You can clearly say they're not like this statistically, but then on the other hand, they are very similar, in fact, indistinguishable from the earliest proteocuniform. So in a sense, we have bridged an information. gap from around 40,000 years ago to around 3,000 BC. They have the same information density as the earliest protocuniform. This was a really surprising result to me. Wow. Just one last thing. Having spent all this time examining the artifacts as Stone Age humans, how much more insight have you gotten into what these people were actually like? I mean, for me, I am happy to say that these people

had the ability to generate sequences of a very similar complexity to the people 40,000 years later. So essentially, they had the information capacity to produce such sequences. And that, to me, is another piece of evidence that they were like us in a sense. You could probably, I mean, in theory, if you could travel back in time, you could live with them and understand their culture and understand their spoken languages potentially. I don't know if that would be the case for Neanderthals, for instance. So I think these people, these modern humans, homo sapiens that came into Europe back then, they are very close to us nowadays, I would argue.

Dr. Benz, thank you so much for your time. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Dr. Christian Benz is a linguist at Sarland University in Sarban, Germany. April 22nd, 2010. Just before 10 p.m. local time was the moment when British Petroleum's Deepwater Horizon oil rig along the U.S. Gulf Coast exploded into an environmental disaster. 50 miles south of Louisiana, a massive explosion lit up the sky. When 126 workers were doing routine drilling on the oil platform before it was engulfed by smoke and flames. Almost right away, it became apparent how difficult the situation would be to get under control.

This is what a burning rig looks like. It took about 36 hours to put the fire out. And if you can feel the heat right now. The next challenge that really put this tragedy into the history books was how long it took to stop the flow of oil out of the well directly into the ecologically sensitive Gulf Coast waters. The spill lasted nearly three months, spewing millions of gallons of oil and chemicals into the Gulf of Mexico.

Once all was said and done, 400,000 tons of oil spilled into the Gulf, making it the largest accidental marine oil spill in history. Since then, people who live in the region are still reporting health issues related to the spill, and as scientists are uncovering, animals are still being affected as well. In two new studies, scientists went to one of the hardest hit areas along the Louisiana coast to see how well the bottom-nosed dolphins that live there can deal with other stressors in their environment. like ship strikes or getting entangled in fishing gear. The goal was to see if there was anything that could have been done for these dolphins

to better manage their recovery since the disaster. For that, they went to an area along the Louisiana coast where the resident bottlenose dolphins have lost an estimated 40% of their population since the spill. Dr. Lori Swaki was working with the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration at the time of the spill and led the effort, to assess the Gulf of Mexico's dolphins' injuries since the Deepwater Horizon disaster. She's now the Scientific Program Director for the U.S. Marine Mammal Commission and was involved in both studies. Hello and welcome to our program.

Thank you. Hi, Bob. First of all, take me back to the explosion, the aftermath. How much concern was there for the dolphins in the area at the time? Well, you know, we didn't really know what to expect at that time. The thought was that they would just move out of the way, that they would swim away. They don't have fur like seals or sea otters, and so they didn't think that it would be such a big problem to be in the water with the oil. But we soon realized that they weren't swimming away from the oil. They really couldn't escape from the oil.

And we also realized that they were breathing right at the surface where the oil was. So they were really getting a good exposure. At what point did you realize that the dolphin? were being impacted? I mean, to be honest with you, we weren't really sure at first until the dead dolphins started washing up on the beach. And the animals started stranding, kind of consistent with where the oil footprint was. And so we knew something was going on then.

But we also, because they were being exposed to the oil, we did some health assessments. So we used a net and we temporarily caught some of the animals so that we could do veterinary assessments, and we immediately saw when we were doing ultrasounds on the animals for their lungs, that there was lung damage. And so that's when we really started to get concerned. What was it like working with the dolphins at that time as they were getting stranded and sick? Oh, it was tough. It was tough to see, you know, the oiling and the environment. It was really tough to see that the animals in such poor health, and there's really not much you can do for them. We certainly couldn't take that many animals into a rehabilitation facility to try to do anything for them.

And even if we could, there's not really much you can do. The lung damage was done. The damage to their stress response was done. And there really wasn't much we could do for them. So it was really tough. So here we are 16 years later. What kind of impacts has the spill had on the dolphins that survived the spill? Well, unfortunately, the health issues that we saw early on, the lung.

disease and the suppressed stress response are still there 10 years later. So the animals that were impacted by the oil exposure and there when the oil exposure happened, they're still having these same health issues. Our last health assessment was in 2022. So that was about 12 years after the spill. Now you say they don't have a proper stress response. What do you mean by that? Well, when we do the health assessments, the way we do this is to throw a net and basically physically restrain the animals. And this generally, in a healthy animal, would generate a cortisol response. And what we saw in the dolphins in Beretaria Bay is that they didn't have this normal cortisol spike when they were, you know, caught for the health assessment. We also saw

in the dead animals that there was changes in the adrenal gland that were consistent with that. There is a thinning of the adrenal cortex, which is consistent with oil exposure and the damage that can be done by exposure to oil. So what's the cortisol doing? Well, the cortisol is a stress hormone. Basically, it's what controls an animal's ability to fight or flight when something happens. So in a normal situation, when an animal is afraid, when a predator is around, their cortisol kicks in and that enables them to respond quickly to get out of the way. So we think it's

the same thing happening with the vessels that the animals that were damaged from the oil spill and they have an impaired cortisol response because their stress response has been impaired. They don't move out of the way fast enough when boats approach them. So take me through your work. How did you investigate how well they deal with other stressors? Well, we had done approaches with a jet ski to the animals that had lung disease and the ones that didn't have lung disease. To see how they responded to the jet ski, and what we found was the ones that didn't have lung disease were either born after the spill or, for whatever reason, they weren't as exposed and didn't have the same degree of lung disease as the others. But we would approach the animals with the jet ski at a fast pace and a zigzag, and you would experience. a normal, healthy animal to respond to that, right? They would dive in the water, they would get

out of the way of the jet ski. And they did, but what we found was that the animals with the lung disease were slower in their responses. They didn't dive like the other animals did. And so from this, we took that the animals with the lung disease were more likely to not respond appropriately and potentially be hit by a boat. The other thing we looked at in the animals was scarring that we can tell when animals have been hit by a propeller before, it leaves a pattern of scarring on their skin, that we could tell that they had been previously struck with a boat. And so the animals with the impaired cortisol response

were more likely to have scarring on their bodies. It was indicative that they had previously been hit by a boat versus animals with a normal cortisol response. So they had been hit by boats because they were just slower to get out of the way? Exactly. Wow. So how do you put all this information together to figure out if any interventions could have helped? Well, we put this information into a model, and we did estimates on what the change in survival could be if we had reduced the risk of being struck by a vessel. And we ran the model, and what we found was that if we had early on,

right after the spill, done something to basically reduce the risk of vessel strike that the population would be recovering faster than it is now. Reducing it now could still help the recovery of the population. It could still help it to recover faster. But it kind of goes to the importance of when things like this happening, trying to get measures in place to help the population recover faster early on as possible. So if the dolphins' recovery continues along the trajectory it has been going, how hopeful are you for their future? Well, I think they'll eventually recover. I mean, there is evidence of a slow recovery in the population, but it's going to take a long time. I mean, those animals that had the lung disease aren't going to get over it any time soon.

It's probably going to be a chronic problem that they have for their life. really the hope is then in the next generation of animals that they grow up healthy and help the population to recover. But that takes decades for the population to get back to what it would have been had the oil spill not happened. Dr. Swaki, thank you so much for your time. Thank you. Dr. Lori Swaki is the Scientific Program Director for the U.S. Marine Mammal Commission. Well, it's time for a trip down memory lane. This season, Quirks and Quarks is celebrating 50 years on the radio,

and we've got a treasure trobe of interviews in our archives that we'd like to revisit to mark the occasion. Today we're taking you back to March 7, 1987. That's when the Quirks and Quarks host at the time, Jay Ingram, spoke with Canadian scientist Ian Shelton about his discovery of the first supernova explosion bright enough to be visible to the naked eye in almost 400 years. Last week on Quarks and Quarks, we reported the discovery of a new supernova, an exploding star.

It was discovered by a Canadian astronomer in Chile. This supernova is the closest one to the Earth since the supernova of 1604. It's an unparalleled opportunity to watch an exploding star unfold. Already by last weekend, five days after its discovery, it was thousands of times brighter than it had been. Ian Shelton discovered the supernova 12 days ago, and he's been watching it, ever since. He's on the line from Chile. Mr. Shelton, what's been happening to your supernova? Now, would you have expected that cooling to happen so soon? Have you seen anything surprising in this supernova yet? What does that suggest to you? It probably suggests that this is not a normal.

How bright is it right now to the naked eye? To the naked eye, it's... Now, now that you've discovered a supernova, what do you do next? What do you do for an encore? Thanks very much, Mr. Shelton. That was an interview with Canadian astronomer and supernova finder Ian Shelton, with then Quirx & Quarks host Jay Ingraham, which aired on March 7, 1987. Now, because it happened so close to home, just outside our own Milky Way, that event was studied in greater detail than any other supernova in history, and astronomers are still studying its explosive aftermath today.

Question, question, question, question. Well, it's that time of year again. The sun is shining brighter. Flowers are starting to bloom, and that means we're gearing up for a new listener question show to kick off our summer programming. So we need you to send us your science questions, so we can get to work finding you answers.

Just email us at quirks at cbc.ca. Now, you listeners never fail to come up with some fascinating head scratchers for us, like this one from Meredith Kiri in Prince George, BC. My question is, how do beavers choose the trees they wish to take down? We've noticed in our own backyard that sometimes they will pass trees of a similar size and the same species and choose to cut one that is further away. And here's the answer. I'm Dr. Glenys Hood and I'm a professor emerita at the University of Alberta and an adjunct professor at the University of Saskatcham.

Well, beavers certainly have favorite trees, just like humans have favorite foods. And I would say Trembling Aspen and Balsam Poplar are two favorites, at least in this part of Canada. You will sometimes see where a beaver has just taken a little bite of a tree and then not done much more. They also can taste test, and they can see if that's the tree that they really want to cut down. And so a tree like a spruce, which has lots of turpines, in it, which are really not that good for animals to ingest, it might take a little bit of a bite and go, eh, I don't like it. But also the size of the tree matters as well, because they have to bring these stems all the way back to their pond, because they're a central place forager.

And so, for the most part, they want a tree that they can cut down fairly quickly, so that they're not going to be attacked by a predator. They want a tree that has nice sweet bark. And aspen do that. They've got lots of chlorophyll. If you ever look at an aspen tree, first thing in the spring before the leaves are on, you'll notice its bark starts to turn green.

It's already photosynthesizing out of its bark. That's where all the sugars are. And so they do have these special favorites, but they will cut a lot of different things. I've even seen them chew through PVC pipe and put it into their lodges. but they are what we call a choosy generalist when we come to forging theory. That's one of the terms that we can use for beavers.

They have their favorites, but they know they need to get all their other nutrients and they will cut other stems as well. Dr. Glynnis Hood is a professor emerita at the University of Alberta and an adjunct professor at the University of Saskatchewan. I'm Bob McDonald and you're listening to Quarks and Quicks on CBC Radio 1 and streaming live on the CBC News. app. Just go to the local tab and press play wherever you are. Coming up later in the program, we get the inside scoop on why scientists are fascinated by Seabird Pooh. They had privileged

access to Tijuana. That's how they got rich. If you sold somebody a loaded gun who you knew was in a vulnerable state and they shot themselves. I think it is murder. Just because you're using the internet doesn't mean you get away with murder. I'm Damon Fairless. host of Hunting Warhead. This season, I take you inside the business of suicide, and the places desperate people go when they can't find what they need in the real world. Hunting the Suicide Salesman.

Available now wherever you get your podcasts. If you've ever tried to make your way around an unfamiliar city, you know it's a lot easier if you have a map. Now, mapping cities and countries here on Earth is pretty straightforward. We've been doing it for hundreds of years. But suppose you want to map the universe. That's tricky for a couple of reasons. For starters, you need a big telescope,

but when you look past the stars within our own galaxy, you quickly discover that there are billions of other galaxies out there, and they're not all the same distance away. Some are nearby, and some are much farther out. So what you really want is a 3D map of the universe. Well, that's exactly what the dark energy spectroscoping instrument, or DESE was designed to do, analyzing the light from distant objects to figure out how far away they are and plotting them on a map. Well, now DESE has completed its initial five-year run,

and it's produced the most detailed 3D map of the universe that we've ever had, mapping more than 47 million galaxies. Dr. Will Percival is a distinguished research chair in astrophysics at the University of Waterloo and a research associate faculty at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. And he's part of the team that assembled this new map of the universe. Dr. Percival, welcome back to Quarks and Quarks. Thank you. Why did you want to map the universe in three dimensions? Well, it's really a gold mine of information for astronomy. The positions of those galaxies, they're not randomly distributed. They cluster in patterns. there are filaments, there are voids where there are very few galaxies, there are sheets of galaxies.

And the distribution that we observe encodes a huge amount of physics about the universe that went into the formation and evolution of those galaxies. And really where they are is telling us a huge amount of information about the universe as a whole. So we're learning about the structure of the universe and how that's changed over time? The initial positions of the galaxies, the seeds that grow through gravity to form galaxies, they were formed in the very early universe. And by looking at galaxies around us, we can actually learn about that very early universe. And by very early universe, I'm talking about processes that happen sort of 10 to the minus 30 seconds after the Big Bang.

So really, really close to the Big Bang. But we can also learn about the universe at late times. the accelerated expansion, we can see it happening through this galaxy map. As we look at galaxies further and further away from us, we're looking back in time because the light takes time to reach us from those galaxies. And so by having a galaxy survey such as that from DESE, we actually have a historical record of the evolution of the universe, and we can see the pattern of galaxies changing as the universe evolves.

Boy. Well, tell me about the... the DESE instrument. How does it actually work? So to make a 3D mat, what we need is spectra of galaxies. That means we need to get the light from galaxies and disperse it into its component colors. Rather like the classic picture of Newton with a prism dispersing light, we do that, but with a light from galaxies. And then we can look at those spectra and we can pick out features and we can work out from the spectra how fast the galaxy is moving away from us. and then we can translate that into a distance.

Oh, I see. So you're not taking photos of the stars. You're taking their spectra, their little rainbows. Exactly. And that's what you use to tell their distance? Yes. Now, the D in DES stands for dark energy. D.E.

What are you learning about dark energy, or what have you found so far with this survey? Yes. So one of the key ways that we can measure the universe is that in the pattern of galaxies, there is a particular feature, and we can use this as a standard ruler. So when we look back in time at the galaxies

at different time slices, we can see this feature, and it acts as a standard ruler, and then we can measure the expansion of the universe. So we can see the accelerated expansion of present day, and we have dark energy driving this. We don't know what dark energy is, but it's a name given to the process

that's driving this accelerated expansion. And we can see that the way the universe is accelerating doesn't quite match the standard model for dark energy, which consists of Einstein's cosmological constant acting to accelerate the expansion. In fact, preliminary results from DESE suggested that dark energy started off more stronger, or stronger than was required in this model with Lambda, and then it weakened down to present day. But at the moment, we've just got sort of hints of this difference. We've been very careful how we phrase it because we don't quite have that proof that is required for science to say, hey, look, we've discovered this. Okay. Now, let me see if I got this right.

Dark energy, as you say, we don't know what it is, but it's pushing the universe apart and causing it to actually speed up as it expands. and you're suggesting that the strength of its push was stronger in the past, that is getting weaker or could be getting weaker? Yes, that is correct. Okay. Now, I also know that gravity is doing the opposite. It's trying to pull the universe back together, so they kind of work opposite to each other.

What does it mean if the strength of the dark energy isn't constant? That's a very good question. So gravity is an attractive force, and if there wasn't dark energy, we would expect that the expansion of the universe was decelerating because the gravity would be pulling the material within the universe together. So the fact that we see it's accelerating is what tells us that there's something going on beyond gravity,

beyond just the normal Einstein's general relativity. But again, if the dark energy, its ability to push the universe out, if that's changing, what does that mean for the ultimate fate of the universe? Well, that's another good question. You see, with the accelerated expansion, we expect that the universe anyway will keep expanding forever, and it will gradually cool down, stars will turn off, and it will become sort of a cold, dark place in the end where everything is very spread out. With dark energy, it's a little bit more uncertain, but the most likely is that the fate of

the universe is very similar. It will just keep expanding forever. How close do you think we are to actually figuring out what this mysterious stuff it really is? Oh, I really wish I knew the answer to that one. It would help me get out of bed in the mornings and come into work to know there was a definitive time by which we'd know the answer. I will say that we are making progress. Desi is a factor of 20 times better as an experiment in terms of the galaxy surveys mapping the universe than previous experiments. And that is awesome.

anytime you have an experiment that's a factor of 20 times better than what went before, you have a huge discovery space and we have discovered that dark energy might be doing something interesting. The next decade or two, we'll see a huge amount more data as well as the continuation of DESE and the extension to DESE II. There are other experiments coming online. There's the Euclite mission. There's the Roman satellite mission. There's the Ruben telescope.

So they're trying to get a handle on dark energy in slightly different ways, but we'll be getting a lot more data and a lot more information. Dr. Percival, thank you so much for your time. Okay, thank you. Dr. Will Percival is a distinguished research chair and astrophysics at the University of Waterloo and a research associate faculty at the Perimeter Institute. Have you ever heard the saying that a bird pooping on you is good luck? Sounds like a nice idea, but when you're at the beach just minding your business and a seagull decides to target you with some of its guano,

it's hard to feel lucky in that moment. But especially when it comes to seabirds, their poop is, in fact, more than just a stinky pile of waste. Several recent studies have looked at how seabirds can not only act as ecosystem sentinels for both land and sea, but also transport nutrients, create life, and even wealth where you might not expect it, all thanks to their poop. Like new research by Dr. Leo Uwasaka, a behavioral ecologist from the University of Tokyo. He was studying the streaked shear water, a seabird common to the Japanese islands, when he made the accidental discovery that the way the bird's poop is unique to each animal.

Initially, he was studying how the seabirds take flight. Their wings are very long and narrow, designed for gliding gracefully over the water, but they aren't the most efficient at actually getting the birds off the ground. So to better understand exactly how the streaked sear waters take off with these narrow wings, he mounted tiny cameras onto the seabird's legs. But he had to get the cameras onto the birds first. So I catch the birds by hand. When I put the arms into the nest, the birds bite my fingers.

So when they bite my finger, I catch their beak and take them out. It hurts a lot. But I always use the very thick grubs, so that it not hurts too much. While he was reviewing the video footage he captured, something surprising caught his attention. During the flying period, I unexpectedly observed quite a lot of feces, the excretion events. And that's far more than I expected. Not only were the birds pooping a lot, they were doing so at regular intervals

in a pattern that was unique to each bird. So the frequency is dependent on the individual, but usually around every five minutes to 10 minutes. But the interesting point is that the freaking assists, they all have a very, very strict periodicity. So if the one drop feces every five minutes, they keep dropping every every minute, five minutes. And another one drop pieces every 10 minutes. They keep their own rhythms.

This behavior was so fascinating that Dr. Uwasaka changed his research topic. He's now researching why each streaked shearwater seabird drops feces at its own individual frequency and why they only do it while they're flying. So the strange thing is that the seabers never drop feces when they're floating on the surface. And they always, first take off to drop feces. So there must be some reason that they don't want to excrete when they're floating on the surface. It could be like a hygiene, but another reason may be the feces, color or the smell may attract the predators. He estimates that the seabirds are excreting more than 5% of their body mass each hour, which adds up to roughly their entire mass per day.

That all adds up to a whole lot of nutrient-rich material being released both into the ocean and on land as the birds fly. And it can act as more than just a fertilizer, because when these birds eat certain plants, their poop can act as a seed bomb, releasing perfect, ready-to-grow pellets to the ground below. This is how, in at least one case, these seabirds help to transport an entire ecosystem to a barren island. Island. Off the south coast of Iceland, one November morning in 1963, a trawler crew thought they saw smoke coming from a fishing boat on fire. But as they got closer, they were witnesses to the most extraordinary sight. The restless earth in the magnificent act of creation. That is a clip from a British ITV documentary called Savage Earth that told the story of how the island CERTsea rose from the sea in volcanic eruptions lasting three and a half years. It was the birth of a

brand new island that presented a unique scientific opportunity to observe how life establishes itself on a barren island. Dr. Andy Green was one of those scientists. He's part of an international team from Iceland, Hungary, and Spain researching the diversity of plant life on Searcy Island and how it got there. And what they found is that seabird poop has played a huge huge role in establishing the ecosystem on this island, challenging long-held beliefs about how plants take root in new places. Dr. Green is a professor of wetland ecology at the Don Yana Biological Station in Seville, Spain. Hello and welcome to our program. Thank you very much. A pleasure to be here. First of all, tell me about your visit to Circe Island. What's it like there? Well, it's a fascinating place,

and it was a real privilege for me to actually be invited to take part in. the expedition a couple of years ago. It's a really isolated place. I mean, it was difficult to get onto the island. We actually got very wet because we had to be taken by lifeboat and then go into a dinghy and bit by bit one by one with our gear, move onto a beach. And then we were taken off by a helicopter. It's very, very dry.

There's no standing water at all because the volcanic rock is so porous. and you get to see, well, I was looking to see killer whales circling you every day as well, so no temptation to get into the water. But really fantastic, unique place, yeah. Well, if the island is made of volcanic rock, what kind of diversity of plant life is on the island today? Today there's been a total of 78 species of plants that have been recorded. Wow. But not all of them are actually still there right now because it's such a hostile,

place really with the ocean climate and the lack of moisture that a lot of species have been able to establish only briefly and then they've gone extinct, perhaps in a drier year or a colder winter and so on. It's just amazing how plants can just establish themselves on what's essentially solid rock. Yeah, that's right. And the process did start off quite slowly. And then once the birds started to cornize the island, then things took off. bit faster because not only the birds bring the seeds for so many of these plants, but they also,

of course, provide that guano, which has allowed soil formation. So that's actually allowed plants as well to be able to get a grip more easily into that volcanic island. Well, before your latest work, how did we think life got to brand new barren islands like Certsey? There's a lot of speculation about the way that the seeds can arrive. and a lot of belief in the idea that you could predict the way that seeds move just by looking at the structures, and especially the idea that birds will only likely to be moving things in their goods if they've got a fleshy fruit like a berry.

And so many people have been attached to the idea, which you can see, of course, very easily in tropical forests, that only birds that eat fleshy fruits, frugivorous birds, actually have a role in moving seeds on their insides and their goods. And that's the thing that we've really sort of broken that paradigm and shown very clearly that no, birds actually have a major role dispersing plants of a very different kind. Well, tell me about that. What did you find that put together this new picture of how the plants got to Circe?

Yeah, so what we found is that of those 78 species that have arrived, We've got evidence now for 62 that they are actually carried in the guts of the birds. And these are, with one exception, these are plants that have a dry fruit. They don't have a fleshy fruit. In fact, it's such a dry island that it's very difficult for plants to be able to afford to make a fleshy fruit because that requires a lot of moisture. So what we're showing is that gulls and geese and shorebirds, they're all really important in carrying a whole variety of plants whose seeds are very different to those of a fleshy-fruited plant

and have traditionally been thought either not to have any means of travelling far or actually to rely on being stuck on the outside of mammals because they might have hooks that you could actually think whether allow them to tax it into the fur of mammals or to be blown in the wind but in fact we Research has been done shows that the great majority of plants that move in the wind actually couldn't travel far enough to get onto a place like Surte, which is 30 kilometers away from the mainland. Well, I was just going to say that. How far do the birds have to go and where are they getting the seeds in the first place? Yeah, I mean, we haven't actually been able to do any tracking studies, which would be really nice to see where the birds have breed on the island actually go. but it's obvious that the gulls move off the island continuously to feed in other areas. And in fact, when you walk around the island,

you can see evidence that the gulls are bringing chicken bones and sort of lamb chop bones onto the island, which shows that a feeding on human waste somewhere on the main island. We've even found some plastics as well, which could potentially come from birds feeding in sort of waste dumps on the mainland, although of course these days it could also be that the plastic was inside a fish that the gulls had actually caught in the sea as well. Wow. So we know that for sure that birds are moving on to the places to feed. We can see proof of that as well with feces of gulls which contain a lot of these seeds of this fleshy-fruited plant,

which doesn't have any berries on certi. But there's also studies that give evidence that the small passerines or songbirds, the snow buntings that come to the island, they can also come from other areas like Scotland and some of the seeds that were found in some of the early studies in the 1960s inside some of these songbirds. There are plants that don't grow on the Iceland mainland, so it's most likely that they did bring them from even further away as they proposed in the case of Scotland. That's interesting because when we see birds migrating north, you know, if they've been spending their winter down south, they come up north.

We tend to think of them as coming up here to get food, but they're also, in a way, bringing food with them and the seeds and their guts. Yeah, especially in the spring migration, of course, when birds fly north, right? The modelling studies that have been done suggest that could even take seeds over a thousand kilometers in one go

during those migrations. So that's huge potential, of course, to make a big difference to those plant distributions. Dr. Green, thank you so much for your time. It's been a real pleasure. Thank you. Dr. Green is a professor of wetland ecology at the Donyana Biological Station in Seville, Spain. But humans have also benefited greatly from seabird poop. Known as white gold, seabird guano has long been coveted as a nutrient-dense fertilizer.

800 years ago in southwestern Peru, there lived the ancient Chincha kingdom, which would sail out to the Chincha Island. islands located approximately 21 kilometers off the coast. At the time, these islands were famous for having the most concentrated guano deposits in the Pacific Ocean. And new research suggests that this access to the vast supply of nitrogen-rich seabird poop is a key reason that the Chincha Kingdom thrived before being absorbed into the Incan Empire. The work was led by Dr. Jacob Bongers, a digital archaeologist at the University of Sydney, Australia. Here he is.

What we know about the Chincha Kingdom, we know from the colonial era sources that the Chincha Kingdom was very populous. And so you have estimates of at least 100,000 people. So a huge kingdom, right? How did it get there? What we say is that Guano, because it's able to significantly increase,

crop yields, they were able to use it to produce copious amounts of corn, and that can support a very large population in Peru. The coast is basically an arid desert. It doesn't rain that much there. And you have a bunch of these offshore islands, and you've got these seabirds that nest on these islands, and they eat fish, which, again, fish are also rich in nitrogen. They eat. They eat the fish, they nest on these islands, they poop on these islands. And so you have these massive piles, mountains of bird poop that are on these islands. And that is an incredibly powerful fertilizer. But on top of that, it was also a highly coveted trade item. And so we also know that the Chincha Kingdom was composed of a bunch of specialists,

groups, farmers, fisherfolk, and merchants. And the merchants are very famous. And so these merchants would sail up and down the coast with balsa rafts, and they would manage Yama caravans to trade with people inland, in the highlands. And so people wanted Cibirduato. And so what our paper shows is that communities 800 years ago, before the... the Inca Empire. They had privileged access to guano because they lived near the Chincha Islands. And the Chincha Islands have some of the highest quality, most abundant guano deposits. So they had access to that, right? That's how they got rich. We carried out isotopic analyses on maize from a handful of tombs.

So about 20 kilometers east from the Pacific Ocean, you have over 500 tombs in this area. We find tons of maize in these tombs. And maize, in this case, was used as an offering for the dead. So we sampled 35 samples of maize from multiple tombs. And then we carried out isotopic analyses. and we were able to see that more than a handful of these maize cobs have high nitrogen levels so high to the point where it's consistent only with saber guano. But then on top of that, a key point here is that even though that seems pretty strong,

isotopic values can be interpreted in many different ways, right? So there could be aridity, may explain that in part. We don't think so, but that could also contribute to the high nitrogen values that we see, right? But then you look at the art, and I want to shout out to Emily Milton and Beth Scafidi, who carried out the isotopic work, and my co-author Joe Osborne, who looked at the chincha art. She took a look at pottery, textiles, architecture, and what we see is seabirds. We see seabirds in the iconography, abstracted fish. We see this interesting image of what looks to be sprouting maze.

And what this is showing is that. that the Chinchuk communities, they had knowledge of this ecological cycle, right? Land, sea, and air. So as my colleague Joe says, she has this beautiful quote about how our work makes us rethink what wealth means, right? Yes, Siebergruano was incredibly potent and valuable But what was even more important was the knowledge. They had the knowledge of this system. They took advantage of that. And that is what we think led to them being this mighty, powerful empire that caught the eye of the Inca Empire.

That was Dr. Jacob Bonger's, a digital archaeologist at the University of Sydney, Australia. And that's it for Quirks and Quarks this week. week. If you'd like to get in touch with us, our email is Quirx at cbc.ca. Our web page is cbc.ca.ca. slash Quarks, where you can listen to our audio archives and find more information on the research we covered in the show. You can also follow our podcast, get us on SiriusXM, or download the CBC Listen app. It's free from the app store or Google Play. Quirks and Quarks was produced by Sonia Biting, Rosie Fernandez, and Dan Falk. turn is Sarah Hamilton. Special thanks to CBC Radio Archives, Patrick Mooney, Ross Tully, and Zoe

Barraclough. Our acting senior producer is Amanda Buckawitz. I'm Bob McDonald. Thanks for listening. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca.com.