Quirks and Quarks - Summer Science Spectacular

Episode Date: July 3, 2026

From camping out on 'bird poop island,' chasing down wild dogs in Madagascar, or even looking for bombs in a bog in Ottawa –– no one quite does summer like scientists. This week, we revisit some of the hijinks that Canadian researchers got up to last year as they left their labs to get their hands dirty in the field.FEATURING:Camping out on a remote island with thousands of screaming, pooping, barfing birdsDodging lions and mongooses to monitor what wild dogs are eating in MozambiqueSaving ancient silk road graffiti from dam-inundationProspecting for Second World War bombs in an Ottawa bogTechnology allows examination of Inca mummies without disturbing themEavesdropping on chatty snapping turtles in Algonquin Park

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. Welcome to the best of Quarks and Quarks. This program was originally broadcast last September. Hi, I'm Bob McDonald. Welcome to Quarks and Quarks. Every summer, Canadian scientists leave their labs and classrooms

and fan out across the planet to do research in the field. and we've asked them to bring that science back to us. So today you'll hear from a team searching for lost explosives in a local bog. It's funny when we started doing magnetometry subsurface exploration for mining, we didn't think that we'd be looking for bombs here in Ottawa. And researchers studying the reintroduction of wild dogs in Africa and what they leave on the landscape. We actually collect wild dog coop, which is just,

A truly disgusting material. It's sort of black, almost tar-like, filled with bones and hair, and it smells absolutely ranted. But it's worth collecting. Plus, we'll travel the fabled silk road across Eurasia, bunk with birds in Alaska, scan mummies in Peru, and listen for turtles in an iconic Canadian park.

All this today on the best of Quarks and Quarks. tucked away in the Gulf of Alaska, 130 kilometers away from the mainland, lies remote Middleton Island. It hosts at a Cold War U.S. military base in the 1950s, but now all that remains are decrepit buildings, a decommissioned radar tower, and hundreds of thousands of breeding sea birds. And every summer, scientists too flocked to the island to study these birds and learn what they can reveal about the conditions on the Pacific Ocean. This year, McMaster University students, Abby Eaton and Flynn O'Dayker,

spent two months camping on Middleton Island studying seabird species like the black-legged kitty wake and the rhinoceros o'clet. Here they are to tell us about it. Hi, I'm Flynn O'Dayker. I'm a second-year master's student in the Department of Biology at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.

This is my third year on Middleton Island. Hi, I'm Abby Eaton. I'm also a student at McMaster University like Flynn. I'm a first year master's student. This was my second year on Middlesand Island. It's a pretty crazy arrival. So we leave from Anchorage in a tiny plane, and we fly an hour over the ocean. And then you see the land approaching, and it's just this tiny island. It's only eight kilometers by two kilometers wide. And then there's old abandoned.

infrastructure and there's an old military base and old barracks that are kind of decomposing. And then we land on this tiny little runway and ATVs drive up and we have to unload all the food from the plane so that we can survive on the island for the months that we're there. And then you take the ATVs and you wind along the island and you get to the chateau, which is kind of like our comfort base while you're on Middleton and you unload all the food and then you set up your tent and you get your stuff all positioned and then it's resettled and you're ready to go. When you first get there, you really hear it.

Birds everywhere. And it's just deafening sound of hundreds and thousands of birds. And you can smell it as well. There's lots of poop. That's a big smell. They also puke sometimes. That also smells like fish. It's kind of like a, it's a very distinct smell.

I was there to study the rhinoceros ocklet. They're a relative of fun. a puffin and they're small black birds with a horn on the tip of their beak, which is really cool. They're about the size of a football and the shape of a football. So the questions we were looking into were to do with measuring metabolic rate through a technique called respirometry. And that usually involves taking the animals out of their natural habitat and putting them in a respirometry chamber, kind of like just a box.

But since it's not exactly the best to take them out of their natural habitat, because that risks them abandoning their nests. So we wanted to create a technique to measure respermatory in a more natural way. And these birds happen to live underground. And the Middleton Island Research Facility, they have several nest boxes in the ground, which are a standardized shape. They're just boxes buried underground for the birds to live in instead of excavating their own natural burrows.

And since these are in place, we were able to use them as a makeshift respirate. to respirametry chambers while leaving the birds in their natural habitat. Hi there. We are currently in the rhinoceros ocklet colony on Middleton Island, Alaska. We're going to try recording the metabolic rates of rhinoceros oclets in their nest boxes. And we're whispering because we have to be really quiet. The birds are prone to leaving their nests if they're too disturbed and they live underground in a burrow. So we're being super quiet so that we don't bother too much in their natural habitat. When we arrive, we arrive at the nest box.

We set up all our equipment around it. We take out our new plexiglass lid and replace the nest box lid after we dig it up. Then we bury it in dirt again. All our equipment is starting to run. We let it warm up for an hour while we sit there. We pressed record and we sit there for three to four more hours as everything records. And then we unburry the lid, replace it with the original one, and crawl away.

It gets a bit tiring when you can't stand up and stretch and you're in a bit of a cramped position. But we made it work. We listened to audiobooks. We made some friendship bracelets. We took some naps on the ground while we waited. So I was trying to study the black-lighted kidney wank. They're about 300 to 500 grams.

They kind of look like a standard gull, to be really honest. I think they're significantly cute. but I think there's a little bit of bias playing into that. And the population that we were working with was specifically they nest on the old radar tower. So Middleton Island used to be a military base during the Cold War. And following its deactivation, a lot of the birds started nesting on the old infrastructure. And one of the foundational researchers, Scott Had, he began renovating the tower to create these nesting platforms

where all of the nests sites at the tower have one way removable. glass. So on the kitty wake side, they're just living at their nest, and one of their walls is a mirror, but on our end, that mirror is actually a window. So we can see what the bird is doing through that window. And they're just outliving in the natural world, but we can see exactly what we're doing. And then below that, there's a little craft. So through that crack, we slip a small hook, and we grab the kidney wake around the leg, just below the knee. And we lift the window, we grab the kidney wick by the bum, unhook the leg, grab a wing, and bring in the tower.

It's okay. It's cool. Nothing's calm. Depending on the bird, this can be a really seamless, easy process, or it can make such a racket. They yell,

they bite, they scream, they show up on you, they poop. It's like a whole fiasco. Oh, there we go. Then we bring the bird over to the research station

that we're working at. We have our biologgers all programmed. One of us, either me or Abby will hold the kivvy wake. And then the other one will secure the GPS accelerator to the tail

and then the video ladder to the back. We then walk the bird over to the release window, which is the little box also attached to the outside. We pop them in the box and we pull the slot to release the bird to the outside for a row. Yeah, that goes. You get me packed. I know.

Oh, wow. Bye-bye. Nice. There it is. We had a sample size of 45 birds this year, which is incredible. And each bird had the video camera and GPS accelerometer deployed for about one to two days. I haven't had time to go through the footage yet. But at a cursory kind of preliminary glance, we definitely captured a lot of different behaviors in an action.

We saw flapping flight and gliding a flight and swimming and eating and arguing with the neighbor. Hello, we have just taken our final mass measurement for the rhinoceros oculet that we were studying, and now we're getting ready to crawl out of the rhinoceros oclot colony. We packed up all our science equipment into bins, and we have to crawl since the birds live underground in burrows, and the ground is sort of fragile, so we have to crawl so as not to puncture the ground and punch through. And as we crawl, we go through salmonberry thicket, so sometimes you get snagged. with all here equipment. Let's go.

It's always sad to leave. You get to know everyone really well on the island. It's a small group of people. And everyone's always really cool and comes from a lot of different backgrounds and past experiences. So you get really close to people. Yeah, because we didn't really know each other at all

before Middleton. We had met one time. And then we fly to Alaska together. And then we do these amazing research projects and our, yeah, wonderful friend. Yeah, we spend 24-7 together for a few months a year. It's very nice. That was Abby Eaton, a first-year master student,

and Flynn O'Dacre, a second-year master student, both working in the lab of Dr. Emily Choi at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. In central Mozambique, nestled in the Great African Rift Valley, there lies a very special place called Gorongosa National Park. It's 4,000 square kilometers, shaped by a mosaic of rivers that support a huge diversity of animals and plants, some of which aren't found anywhere else in the world. This park used to be home to one of the densest populations of wildlife in all of Africa.

But all that changed when civil war erupted in Mozambique in 1977, and the park became a battleground. Over the next 15 years, poaching and violence led to the extermination of an estimated 95% of the large mammals in the park. But since then, there's been a massive effort to bring the park back to its former glory by restoring infrastructure, regrowing lost vegetation, and reintroducing lost wildlife. Including in 2018, when conservationists reintroduced a pack of wild dogs into the park. The wild dog reintroduction was surprisingly successful, and they're now once again a dominant carnivore in the park, which led Canadian PhD student Nick Wright to wonder just how the ecosystems change when a new predator moves in, which is why he spent his summer stomping through the wilds of Mozambique,

tracking these big changes while also trying to stay out of the way of some of Africa's fiercest animals. Nick Wright is a PhD student. from the University of British Columbia. Mr. Wright, welcome to Quirks and Quarks. Thanks for having me, Bob. First of all, tell me about Gorongosa. What's it like to arrive there? Yeah, so you fly into Gorongosa on a bush plane.

Overhead, you see this enormous savanna landscape. It's totally distinct from anything surrounding it, which is just entirely farmland at this point. And at the center of it is Lake Eurema, which is an enormous floodplain lake that expands during the wet season and then contracts in the dry season. And I'm there in the dry season. So what you can see from overhead

is just this huge short grass grassland scattered with a whole bunch of different large herbivores, most notably waterbuck, which are these sort of shaggy, gray antelope. And really just as far as I can see, there are animals dotted across the landscape. Well, tell me about the wild dogs in Gorongosa. Yeah.

So my focus is, particularly on the wild dogs because although a bunch of carnivore species have recently been reintroduced to the park, including leopards and hyenas, the most successful reintroduction has been the wild dogs. African wild dogs are also called painted wolves. They're beautiful animals. They are all individually identifiable because they have completely distinct coat patterns, sort of this marbled coloration of tawny and white and black. They're not that big. They're much smaller than a lion or a hyena, but they're super social animals. They work extremely closely together, and that leads to them having some of the most successful hunt rates of any species. And I think one

particular fact about wild dogs that I really love is that whenever it's time to hunt, they signal that to each other by sneezing. And it works in a sort of democratic fashion where if enough individuals with sufficient social rank have sneezed, then the group decides it's time to get up and go for a hunt. Wow. What do they like to work with? they're really wonderful to work with wild dogs actually despite their ferocity when hunting are really not a big threat to people there's no records of them killing any humans and so i have never yeah i've never been too worried about working that closely with them our bigger concern is not disturbing them because they are an endangered species across their range gorongosa though is a wonderful place to get to work on them because their populations are actually growing really quickly and so it's a rare success story in an otherwise pretty dire tale. Well, how many of them are in the park now? Right now, there's over 250, which is a huge increase. Initially, just two packs were reintroduced, and so it was just a few individuals. But over the last six or so years, we've seen them spread across the entire park.

They are now inhabiting a whole bunch of different habitats, and I think there's around 10 different packs out there. Well, if these are wild dogs, how do you go about studying them? Yeah, we have a couple focuses with our project. The first is that we're interested in what the wild dogs are eating. And so to study that, we actually collect wild dog poop, which is a truly disgusting material. It's sort of black, almost tar-like, filled with bones and hair, and it smells absolutely ranted. But it's worth collecting, I would argue, because we can take samples back to the lab and do DNA metabarcoding. And with that method, we can actually figure out from the DNA fragments in the feces, what prey animals the wild dogs have been consuming. So you're spending your time walking around collecting dog poop? We are doing what I was already doing at home with my dog, but on a bigger scale out in the bush. We're also putting out camera traps, which are these remotely triggered cameras that can just sort of be deployed out in the wild and collect tons of photos. And we're doing that,

in areas fairly close to wild dog pack ranges, so within a few kilometers of where they're actually denning, and then pretty far away. And we're putting out cameras in both wooded habitats and grassy habitats to look at how the behavior and habitat use of their prey changes in areas with wild dogs versus areas without. Did you have any adventures while you were trying to get close to their den to put a camera in there?

You know, often the hardest part of it was just walking through sometimes thick grass over our heads or these really dense trees. But one particularly terrifying experience I had, which I will say over the course of my time in Goringosa, we've been around lions and elephants. But this was a hundred times scarier than either of those. And it was that as we were setting up a camera, we noticed a small burrow at the foot of one of the trees. So we were cutting down some grass.

And then our field technicians swung the machete a little too hard. and knocked the tree, which reverberated down to the burrow. And I heard the most ghoulish shriek I have ever heard in my life. And out of the corner of my eye, I see this shape just explode out from the burrow. It was sort of long and serpentine. So my first thought was snake, but no, it was even more scary. It was a mongoose, which, although not actually a direct threat, that as far as I know, the scream and the explosion was just so scary.

It puffed itself up to be three times the size that it actually was. So, yeah, I have a permanent fear of mongoose now. Well, I can understand why. Yeah. Did you have any animals visiting your camp unexpectedly? Yeah, so there's a whole community of animals that live in camp pretty permanently. We've got a bunch of baboons and vervet monkeys and warthogs are really some of the main players. But one morning we woke up to a really terrifying sort of squeal. And then we heard the baboons start to go crazy. They were shrieking and running over the cabins, which have these metal roofs and just banging around. And it wasn't until we heard a lion roar that we were able to figure out exactly what had happened,

which was that a couple lions overnight had come into camp and hunted and killed a warthog right between two of the cabins. and then we're dining on it for most of that morning. So we had a little bit of a delayed start because we had to wait for the Lions to finish their meal before we could head out to the field that day. Wow. What does visiting Mozambique and seeing this restoration work in the park up close mean to you? I think Gorongosa is a really powerful story

because globally what we're seeing is widespread declines in large carnivore species. And that's been ongoing for most of the last century as humans have changed habitats and directly hunted predator species and their prey. Globally, in response to these declines in large carnivores, we have seen this rewilding movement emerge, where people are proposing reintroducing species that have been lost with the goal of reintroducing their ecological roles. And so I think Gorongosa is quite compelling because it offers a chance to study this carnivore rena. introduction in real time. When do you plan to go back? I'll be back next summer for another field season. Yeah. So because there's such rapid changes happening right now, there's a lot of incentives to get out there each year and try and capture feces and camera trapped photos and other data that can help record this really rapidly influx animal population. I can hear the excitement in your voice about going back.

Yeah, I can't wait to be back. Mr. Wright, thank you so much for your time. Thank you, Bob. Nick Wright is a PhD student in his third year in the Gainer Lab at the University of British Columbia. The Silk Road was a complex system of trading routes that extended from the coast of China to southern Europe and East Africa, a span of 6,400 kilometers. From the second century BCE to the 15th century CE, it was the connection between east and west Eurasia. and many of those traveling the Silk Road left their mark in the form of graffiti, drawing, or writing on the rocks of the landscape they passed through. But some of these traces, which have remained for centuries, may not last that much longer.

A dam is being constructed in Pakistan across part of the Silk Road, which means a significant portion of this ancient path is going to disappear underwater. Dr. Jason Nielis and Dr. Ali Zadie from Wilford-Lorea University spent their summer on the Silk Road in Pakistan. They're part of an international project to document the petroglyphs before the dam is complete in 2030. Today we are visiting the site of Rudir, which is a group of rocks with about 1,100 petroglyphs

spread out over 25 rocks. on the bank of the Upper Endus River, across from the dam construction site for a Diomar Basha Dam. Because once the dam is built, over 60 sites will be submerged in the flood basin, created by the dam. Missionaries, pilgrims, traders, even warriors, armies, passed through the silk route or the silk roots, you should, we should actually call it, because there was many different paths along valleys and mountain ways that people have been using

for thousands of years, in fact. The silk roots really helped integrate different peoples from around the world. So as we're walking, we can see how the builders of Diamar Basha Dam are excavating down to the bedrock, but we're about to approach two large, rock out croppings, and we think this is going to be our best chance to locate whatever carvings remain here at Shamslovari. We're expecting to find about 30, 40 rock carvings. I was there in April with Dr. Nielis and members of our field team. The urgency to document, the urgency being brought about not only because of the construction of the dam, which will inundate this area

once the dam is functional in five years. There's a lot of gold mining actually happening. So you've got bulldozers, you've got heavy machinery that locals are using because they recognize that this area will be underwinter

very quickly. And so in the process, it's actually destroying some of the boulders and rocks on which these inscriptions have been made. This is a really urgent task for the preservation of the human heritage essentially, the preservation of this immense history. We're very lucky to find many, many petroglyphs on the western end of this large rock outcropping.

So we are all very happy. So we'll come back to the site on another day to begin the digital image documentation process. So we're building. on earlier explorations to fill in the gaps and also apply new techniques of 3D imaging through laser scanning, panoramic visual tours, to create 3D models of each and every individual rock that still has inscriptions and petroglyphs

that we can locate in the field with their precise geographical coordinates of the sites with the rocks, with petroglyphs and inscriptions that are going to be submerged. So in this area, we have one of the world's most extensive concentrations of historically significant petroglyphs that include a variety of designs, from the kinds of animals that was indigenous to this area, to other kinds of expressions of symbols, such as buildings. as well as images of shrines, particularly Buddhist shrines called stupas.

Now, we also have a variety of other human figures drawn on the rocks. The inscriptions are written in a variety of languages, because this was a multicultural crossroads, between areas of what we could conceive of as being ancient India, as well as parts of Iran, and parts of eastern Central Asia as well. What we're doing right now is we're having Asad Ali, one of the members of the Lums or Lahore University of Management Sciences team, do photogrammetry on Iraq with what looks like the remains of a Karosti graffiti inscription. Korohti was a script used for writing a vernacular language,

which we call Gandhari, until about the third century. are the fourth century of the common era. After that time, most of the inscriptions are written in the Brahmi script used for writing varieties of the Sanskrit language or hybrid Sanskrit, as well as some inscriptions are written in Middle Iranian languages. Also, very interestingly, we've been able to see that one of the rock surfaces here has been worked up in prehistoric times with a large scale, rock carving. Typically the rock carvings belonging to prehistoric times in this area depict animals, but there are also some anthropomorphic figures, say larger than life-sized human

figures, but we're not sure that this is what the prehistoric carving represents. In a sense, it is like graffiti. It's like people who nowadays want to leave their mark, you know, like Ali was here, a sense of immortality, wanting to inscrime, on rock, for me, it's just awe, its majesty. This geography is out of this world, really. If you think about, you know,

the confluence of three different mountain ranges of the Karakuram and the Himalayas and the Hindakush, these massive mountains, but also austere, and one feels a sense of smallness in a way compared to this majestic geography. And yet at the same time, there's also a sense of connection, this sense of awe of being connected to humanity, you know, of people who passed through maybe a millennium ago or even more than that. I think I just felt a sense of direct connection that allowed me to contextualize the kinds of conditions that may have led ancient travelers to see. these kinds of rock surfaces as canvases, which people, of course, still do. At the sites that are

closest to the road and more accessible, you'll also see people abrading the rocks to leave their own names, even today. I mean, the way I hope to leave a mark is more through the digital preservation project, but I don't think I would add, I would have anything to add more directly. And besides knowing that it would be submerged, I have even less incentive to write my name on the rocks. Dr. Jason Neelis is Associate Professor in the Religion and Culture Department, and Dr. Ali Zadie is an associate professor in the Department of Global Studies, both at Wilford-Loria University in Waterloo, Ontario. I'm Bob McDonald, and you're listening to Quirks and Quirks on CBC Radio One

and streaming live on the CBC News app. just go to the local tab and press play wherever you are. We're kicking off our fabulous 50th season with our annual summer science special, where we catch up with Canadian scientists to hear about their adventures in the field this summer. Coming up later in the program, Talking Turtles in Algonquin Park. Over the course of nearly 50 years, we had never noticed that they vocalize. So to have my graduate student come to me and say, hey, you know, these turtles are vocalists. They're communicating with each other.

That was absolutely floored. 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. Mayor Bleu Bogg, southeast of Ottawa, is a wetland conservation area home to rare plants, birds, and other wildlife. But it also holds an explosive secret that was largely forgotten for 80 years. Unexploded second World War bombs are submerged deep in the mud at the Merebleau bog. During World War II, Mèrebleu was a military practice bomb range where aerial munitions bombs.

Up to 1,000 pounds were dropped from planes. That made for some interesting surprises for a team from Carlton University who spent the summer using the bog to test sensor-equipped drones they hoped to use to locate other kinds of underground secrets. That's funny when we started doing magnetometry subsurface exploration for mining, we didn't think that we were be looking for bombs here in Ottawa, 15 kilometers away from where we all live. So hi, I'm Pablo Arsate and I'm the founder of 3XMAC technologies. I am a student at Carleton University going through the Sprott faculty, the technology innovation

management and I'm doing academic collaboration with various organizations here in Ottawa. So this comes from my family. My father is a geophysicist and I grew up going into the field doing old school geophysics, you know, old equipment. And we were young and I'm saying we and my brother. You know, the time passed and we develop our own skills. We went back to geophysics saying, hey, we need to fix this. These equipments are way too big, and now that there's drones, we can apply them for all these industries

that we were not even looking at. What inspired now this pilot project and the activity here in Ottawa is the validation of this technology and the validation of the function what we really wanted to do. We've developed this technology mainly for mining and critical resource exploration,

but we know that the technology itself takes advantage of science, right, of the magnetic spectrum that is around us. We're not able to see, like, under the ground say, like, hey, there's a boat here or there's a bomb here. We're able to see, like, hey, there's an anomaly that's spiking at this signal of magnetic interference, and it's this big or it extends this much. It's probably this depth. And it's coming out of plain physics, right? just the materials radiating this magnetic field. It's like everything has a magnet properties. Our equipment is ready and capable of reading these signals really, really accurately.

So we're able to distinguish from signals from, for example, copper to signals from bedrock, right? where there's a difference in the magnetic field that they emit, and our machine captures these fields, and then we process it, and we interpret it. No, it's good. So the Ottawa bog was a happy accident, I like to say, while doing my research, finding out that there were actual bumps in the bog,

which is very organic, and we have artifacts that are metal, they're by nature more magnetic than the organic matter, so we're able to fly over and identify this anomalies under the ground. We stopped counting at 17 in our focused survey. But the place was a test field for bombs, so there's probably hundreds of them. In this station alone, there's a plane taking off every 20 seconds, training tomorrow's fighter and bomber on coastal squadron.

And what's very interesting to us, what was very interesting is that through our research, there was a defined zone where a target, right, like a bullseye zone. But while we were there and when we were doing our studies, we kept thinking about, you know, playing darts and trying to learn how to play darts and how many of those darts that were playing with would fall outside of that bousalais. And by looking at the data, we could confirm that indeed there was a line southwest where it would appear that they would align their planes and they would drop the bombs. Most of them, I would say, or where we focused were in the targeted area. But we had also some readings that extended.

So we could see sort of that line where, you know, some pilots were overshooting. And that's perfectly normal because it was a training. session, right? We can't tell if they're exploded or not exploded, and that's very important to distinguish. We can say they're there, but we don't know their activity. We didn't have to step on the bog,

and that's part of our body proposition. Part of what we're bringing to the table is not having to risk any life or not having to risk anything in going there. You know, I never wanted to be a scientist. So I was sort of a black sheep, of the team. The team is my father, my brother, is also a civil engineer and UAV lead mechanic, an operator. So for me, it's been sort of a story that, you know, I always felt really

lucky and I always felt really close to science. I got myself a little bit away exploring my own product development. I work here in Ottawa for six years and doing prototyping. And now I feel like I'm back and where I am, and it's all destiny, right? That's how it feels. That was Pablo Arzate, the founder and CEO of 3X-Mag Technologies, from Carlton University's Sprott School of Business Technology Innovation Management Program. Dr. Andrew Nelson spent his summer in Peru, but he wasn't climbing the heights of Machu Picchu and enjoying the view.

His team is devising new methods of non-involving. evasively scanning Peruvian mummies dating to the Inca period, so they can study them without unwrapping them. Dr. Nelson is a professor and chair in the Department of Anthropology at Western University in London, Ontario. Hello and welcome to our show. Thank you very much, Bob. I'm delighted to be here. So take me on your trip this summer. Where did you go? Well, it went to Lima, Peru, and, you know, people often have this exotic idea of anthropological field sites. Well, I was in the basement of a museum in their storage facility studying a series of these mummy bundles.

They call them fardoes that were excavated in the late 1990s, early 2000s. And they've just been sitting there waiting for some kind attention. Now, you were working in the basement of a museum, but where were these mummies actually found? So they were found at a site called Purichuko, which is a site just on the eastern outskirts of Lima. as the coastal plain starts to gain elevation a little bit. And they were excavated in the area where a shanty town had set up just immediately on the surface of the site. What's the site like? Well, so now it's an urban settlement.

So there's very little left of the site. But at the time, it was amazing. I remember visiting it. They had excavated, literally excavated the streets of the town and the schoolyard. and there are these mummy bundles sticking out in the middle, peering out of their windows and seeing what they were seeing. It was a pretty amazing sight. Wow.

How old are they? These actually are Inca period. I've been working mostly with pre-Inca mummies so far, dating to the Middle Horizons around 600 to about 900 AD, and the late intermediate period, which is about 900 to about 1470 AD. But this particular collection, the Pulichuco material,

is Inca in date. Well, tell me about these mummy bundles. What do they like? So they range in size from very, very small fetus-sized bundles to these very large ones that we call falsica be maizea. These can be about a meter and a half tall. One of them took all four of us to lift to get it in sight for x-raying. And so they range tremendously in complexity and in size and in richness.

And are they bundles like fabric wrapped around a body kind of thing? Yeah, exactly. So at the core, there is the body generally in a seated flex position. And then they would put various offerings, you know, shells that they would import from Ecuador, for instance, which would be quite high status. Metal artifacts, pins called pirulus or tuppus that would go to pin their shawl. and then just tons and tons of cotton and textiles, lots of raw cotton that still has the cotton seeds, which kind of makes a mess of the x-rays sometimes.

But yeah, they're just this big bundle of all of this stuff together. And so we call that a microcosm, because in that bundle is the microcosm of the individual and who they had been in life and how they were treated in death, so the biological aspects of that, but also the cultural aspects of the burial goods. that are with them and how they were actually treated in death. How many of these bundles have you studied?

We x-rayed 43 of them. We CT scan 15, which was great. Boy. Well, how are you able to study these bundles without actually opening them? So normally they are studied by unwrapping them, which is incredibly informative. You find everything. You can see tattoos and things like that. But it is destructive. So the approach we take is we do x-rays, which is quite a little. elaborate process because to x-ray some of these big bundles, we have to take up to 18 individual x-ray images and then stitch those together in Photoshop. And then some of them we will take to a hospital in Lima and we'll do CT scans. And so, you know, the x-rays allow us to see what's

inside the bundle in general, but the CT scan then allows us to see what's inside the bundle in three dimensions and do all kinds of manipulations with the data to really get a handle on what's inside. Well, now that you've looked inside these bundles, these ancient mummies, what have you learned about the ancient people of Peru and their beliefs? So we've learned quite a bit. We published an article a couple years ago on practice that we absolutely did not expect. And that was they would bury these individuals and they would go back in, they would retrieve the skulls sometime later and then patch the bundle back up and then do something else with the skulls. Now, what else they were doing with the skulls? I really don't know,

but this is, it's part of this sort of ongoing interaction that they had with their dead. The dead were very much part of an ongoing ritual life in the ancient Andes. And this is, this is one way of looking at that. Well, what does it tell you about how they respected their ancestors? So they respected them greatly. They invested an enormous amount in the preparation of these bundles. And as I said, they were part of the ongoing ritual life. They would revisit them. The bundles became Malki.

They are the ancestors. And so the links to the ancestors, it links back to the land. And so they're an extremely important part of the ritual life of these ancient societies. Did you find signs of how? how people died. It's actually very difficult to know how people died. So if an individual had a heart attack, I would never know. But we do have a couple cases where one individual was, he was killed by a blow of a club to the forehead. And so you can see all the bones of his forehead are broken in. And so that undoubtedly killed this particular individual. But what was interesting was that he was

buried in the same cemetery as all the rest of these individuals. He was buried face down, which is unusual. He didn't have any hands and his arms were tied behind his back, which is unusual. And the way he was killed was unusual, but he was buried with everybody else. He wasn't separated out. That's quite interesting in terms of he was treated differently, but also treated similarly. How rewarding is it for you to be looking back in time into these ancient cultures through their mummies? So to me, looking at a mummy, looking at the remains of an individual from an ancient culture, is the single best way to actually identify with that culture of the past. You can look at pots, you can look at buildings,

but if you're looking at the actual person, then if they've got bad teeth, you can identify with that. If they've got a broken bone, you can identify that. It's a much more sort of empathic, I guess, a connection with the past. So to me, that's the big link is to actually work with the people. And I work very much in a team. We work with Peruvian students, work with our partner institutions in Peru. So that to me is that it's a real we kind of approach to doing research. I love that.

I guess it's also the closest you can get to being Indiana Jones as well. Well, I'm not sure Indiana Jones would have been in the basement of the Ministry of Culture. Dr. Nelson, thank you so much for your time. Absolutely my pleasure. Dr. Andrew Nelson is a professor and chair of the Department of Anthropology at Western University. There's nothing quite as iconically Canadian as spending a summer in a national park in a cabin by a lake. And for some lucky people, they can turn it into part of their... life's work, like a group of scientists from the University of Toronto who spend their summers in

Algonquin Park in Ontario as part of a long-term research project on the turtles that live in the area. Just a few years ago, the researchers made a startling discovery. The turtles in the park were talking to one another. So they spent this summer in part listening in on what the turtles had to say. My name is Naila Rawlinson. I'm an associate professor in the department of ecology and evolutionary biology, and the School of the Environment at the University of Toronto. I don't think people often associate turtles with vocal communication. Believe it or not, turtles are actually more closely related to birds and crocodilians than they are to more classical reptiles like snakes and lizards. So birds, of course, have elaborate vocalizations

at the adult stage. They're used in courtship behavior and then territory defense. fence. And similarly, crocodilians have well-developed vocalizations at the adult stage as well, which serves similar purposes. So I run a long-term study that was started in 1972. And over the course of nearly 50 years, we had never noticed that they vocalize. So to have my graduate student come to me and say, hey, you know, these turtles are vocalizing. They're communicating with each I was absolutely floored. What are they doing? What are they saying? Why is that? And so that's something that's really new and really exciting and something that my group here has been exploring over the last few years. So this summer, we went back to Algonquin Park to continue our long-term study

of turtles. Now, this is a study that was started in 1972 and has been done every year since 1972. Oh, I remember her. He's got the bit taken at her. Every year we go up, and we go and catch as many turtles as we can in the population that we study. This is where the eggs are, like right here.

Since we don't have a spoon, I will dig slowly and carefully with my fingers, and I found the nestscap. That was not very hard. We see two eggs at least. We monitor how much they've grown. since the last year, we monitor whether or not they've survived, and every nesting season, we try to collect their clutches and measure how many eggs they've laid. In addition to that, we also performed, as we do every year, a series of experiments to test

particular ideas and particular hypotheses. Specifically, we were setting up an experiment to explore whether males and females vocalize in different ways when exposed to an individual of the same species. So we needed to do a lot of groundwork just to figure out both what turtles sound like and when they vocalize at various stages during development. So in adult snapping turtles, we detected four different distinct call types. The first call is a kind of chirping sound. It almost sounds like a cricket.

We also detected another call that's at a slightly lower wavelength, but it also sounds like a series of quick chirps. Another vocalization is completely distinct from the other vocalization. We call it chuffing. It's almost like a Darth Vader sound. It sounds like deep breathing. But of course they're not breathing because these sounds are recorded underwater. Another vocalization we detected was a sort of combined chuffing and clicking.

Here we hear an adult female snobbing. tapping turtle, engaging in a chuffing vocalization, and it's punctuated by a different call type, which we call a growl that literally sounds like an animal growling. We were also looking at why hatchling turtles vocalize. In particular, we were setting up experiments to determine whether or not vocalization was part of a coordinated social behavior that helps turtles move out of the nest while saving energy during nest emergence. So my graduate student, Claudia La Croix, set up a number of nests on the Lake Sasaji 1 embankment at the Algonquin Wall by Freesert Station. And she put microphones in these nests,

and she recorded audio of turtles emerging from the nest. And she was able to line up scratching sounds and movement sounds and sounds of hatchlings sifting through sand with the hatchling vocalizations that they produce. And what she found is that at the same time that hashlings vocalize, there tends to be movement through the sand. So in other words, they're moving through the sand and they're vocalizing at the same time. And that supports the idea that they're using these vocalizations to coordinate movement through the soil and move as a group.

So in a first experiment, what we did is we took a clutch of eggs, a clutch of snapping turtle eggs out of the field and brought them back to the lab. And the goal of this was just to explore what type of vocal sounds are elicited by the hatchling turtles and when these sounds were produced during development. The first thing we noticed was that before the eggs even started hatching, they started vocalizing. They started communicating with each other for some reason. And even after hatching, this is the most common type of vocalization produced as they emerge. through the nest. We also have vocalizations that almost sound like a small boot stuck in the mud. It sounds like almost a squeak. One of the vocalizations even sounded a little bit like a creaking door

as it's being opened. So in contrast to some of the other vocalizations, we also got clear squeaks, and it was one of the vocalizations produced only during nest emergence. This vocalization was also produced only during nest emergence. and it sounds a little bit like a squawk or a squeak or a squibble. Listening to these sounds is really remarkable to reflect on it being produced by such a tiny little creature in a subterranean nest. Not only that, when you listen to the different types of sounds, they're really different. So there's probably a variety of different ways in which they're producing this sound.

And the really interesting thing about it is that very few people have heard these before. We didn't realize until only about, you know, three or four years ago that turtles even made these types of sounds at the hatchling stage. So to be listening to this and to be appreciating that this has been going on millions of years without humans knowing about it is pretty remarkable. And it's really exciting to be a part of it. This project was passed to me in 2016, and I plan to be there every single year until I'm not able to do it anymore. This is a really interesting environment for me and for my students because we're thrown together with like-minded students from other universities, and we spend the entire summer with them living in cabins by a lake and hanging out in the cookhouse and exchanging ideas and having fun over the course of the entire summer. Being in Algonquin Park is the absolute bees' knees, and I wouldn't trade it for the world. Dr. Nile Rawlinson is an associate professor in the Department of Ecology and the Department of Ecology and

evolutionary biology and the School of the Environment at the University of Toronto. And that's it for Quarks and Quarks and Our Summer in the Field special. If you'd like to get in touch with us, our email is Quirx at cbc.ca. You can find our web page at cbc.ca.ca slash quirks, where you can read my latest blog or listen to our audio archives. You can also follow our podcast, get us on SiriusXM, or download the CBC listen app. from the App Store or Google Play. Works and Corks is produced by Rosie Fernandez, Amanda Buckowitz, and Sonia Biting.

Our senior producer is Jim Leibbons. I'm Bob McDonald. Thanks for listening. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca.com.