Radiolab - From Tree to Shining Tree

Episode Date: July 30, 2016

A forest can feel like a place of great stillness and quiet. But if you dig a little deeper, there’s a hidden world beneath your feet as busy and complicated as a city at rush hour. In this story, a dog introduces us to a strange creature that burrows beneath forests, building an underground network where deals are made and lives are saved (and lost) in a complex web of friendships, rivalries, and business relations. It’s a network that scientists are only just beginning to untangle and map, and it’s not only turning our understanding of forests upside down, it’s leading some researchers to rethink what it means to be intelligent.  Produced by Annie McEwen and Brenna Farrell. Special Thanks to Latif Nasser, Stephanie Tam, Teresa Ryan, Marc Guttman, and Professor Nicholas P. Money at Miami University.  Correction: An earlier version of this story misidentified naturalist David Attenborough as his late brother, actor Richard Attenborough. In addition, it dated the earliest scientific studies of fungi to the late 19th century, whereas naturalists have studied fungi since the 17th century. Lastly, we mistakenly stated that the oxygen that a plant respires comes from CO2, when in reality it comes from water. The audio has been adjusted to correct these facts. Support Radiolab by becoming a member today at Radiolab.org/donate.   

Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. From W. N. Y. C. See?

Yeah. Hey, I'm Chad. I'm Boomerad. I'm Robert Krollowich. This is Radio Lab. Very good to actually be back here talking to you. Yes. It's been a while. Yes.

Where have you? Tell those people who might have missed what you've been doing what you've been doing. We just finished our first. mini season of our first spin-off called More Perfect. When are you going to have part two? Part two is coming soon. I don't know. Not tomorrow.

Okay. But not long because we, yeah, there are definitely stories to tell for sure. And, you know, and if you haven't checked out, check it out at radio lab.org slash more perfect. We're really proud of it. And so let me rescue you from this awkward situation by bringing you back to Radio Lab, where I'd like to begin by building a tall, dark, dense, green forest. Imagine towering trees to your left and to your right. I need a bird, a lot of birds, actually, and a little wind.

So just give me some birds? Sound, yeah. Birds, please. Birds. Why? We haven't even started this. Why? This is what you do?

You give me, like, I want wind, birds, shipmunks. I'm not like your sound puppet here. But I can't, how do I... All right, never mind. This story... You'll get your sound at some point. Begins with a woman. Or at the time, actually, she was a very little girl who loved the outdoors.

And I mean, really love the outdoors. When I was a little kid, I would be in the forest and I just eat the forest floor. And I know lots of kids do that, but I was... Sorry. You mean you got down on all forests and just... Yeah, I would just eat the dirt. This is Suzanne Samard. And so my mom...

always talks about how she had to constantly be giving me worm medicine because I was, I always had worms. She's a forestry professor at the University of British Columbia and might as well start the story back when she was a little girl. Well, when I was a kid, I grew up in the rainforests of British Columbia and my family spent every summer in the forest. And her family included a dog named Jigs. And so in this particular summer when the event with Jigs happened, what kind of dog is Jigs, by the way? He was a Not a weaner dog He was a

What was he? You don't know what your dog was? Not a basset hound But he was a beagle. Beagle? Yeah, he was a curious dog. And on this particular day, she's with the whole family.

They're all out in the forest. It was summertime. And Jiggs, at some point, just runs off into the woods, just maybe to chase a rabbit, whatever. A couple minutes go by. And all of a sudden, we could hear this barking and yelping, and we were all like, oh, my goodness, Jigs is in trouble.

And so the whole family and uncles and aunts and cousins, we all rush up there. So they followed the sound of the barking, and it leads them to an outhouse. And when they go in... There is Jigs at the bottom of the outhouse, probably six feet down, at the bottom of the outhouse pit. Oh, dear. Where we've all been, you know, doing our daily business. Yeah.

He'd fallen in. He's looking up at us, quite scared and very unhappy that he was covered in... Oh. And toilet paper. And, of course, we had to get Jigs out. I mean, Jigs was part of the family. Yes. And...

Since he was so deep down in there? We had to dig from the sides. To sort of, like, widen the hole. Basically expanding it from a... kind of a column of a pit to something that we could actually grab onto his front legs and pull him out. And so we're digging away. And Jiggs was, you know, looking up with his paws, you know, and looking at us, waiting. And they're digging and digging and digging and then all of a sudden.

She says she looks down into the ground and she notices at all around them where the soil has been cleared away. there are roots upon roots upon roots in this thick, crazy tangle. We're sitting on the exposed root system, which is like, it is like a mat. It's like, it's just a massive mat of intertwining exposed roots that you could walk across to never fall through. She says it was like this moment where she realizes, oh my God, there's this whole other world right beneath my feet. Jigs had provided this incredible window for me, you know, in this digging excopade, to see how many different colors they were, how many different shapes there were, that they were so intertwined, as abundant as what was going on above ground.

It was magic for me. So what's the end of the story? Did Jigs emerge? Jigs emerged? We pulled Jigs out, and we threw him in the lake with a great deal of yelping and cursing and swearing and the jigs was cleaned off. But that day with the roots is the day that she began thinking about the forest that exists underneath the forest. And now, if you fast forward roughly 30 years, she then makes a discovery that I find kind of amazing.

She's working in the timber industry at the time. This is, by the way, what her entire family had done, her dad, and her grandparents. And when I came on the scene in the 1980s as a forester, We were into industrial large-scale clear-cutting in Western Canada. Huge machines, loaders and cats. She says a timber company would move in and clear-cut an entire patch of forest and then plant some new trees.

And, you know, my job was to track how these new plantations would grow. And she says she began to notice things that, you know, one wouldn't really expect, like, trees of different species are supposed to fight each other for sunshine, right? Yeah. You've heard that. Yeah, absolutely. They shade each other out.

They shade each other out, and they push each other away so they can get to the sky. But she was noticing that in a little patch of forest that she was studying, if she had, say, a birch tree next to a fir tree, and if she took out the birch... The Douglas fir became diseased and died. There was some kind of benefit from the birch to the fur. There was a healthier community when they were mixed, and I wanted to figure out why. Well, of course, there could be a whole, any number of reasons why, you know, one tree. She's affected by another.

But she had a kind of, maybe you'd call it, a Jigsian recollection. Flashback. Yes. Because she knew that scientists had proposed years before that maybe there's an underground economy that exists among trees that we can't see. And she wondered whether that was true. And so I designed this experiment to figure that out. It was a simple little experiment.

So here's what she did. She went into the forest, got some trees. Douglas fir, birch, and cedar. and then I would cover them in plastic bags. So I'd seal the tree in a plastic bag, and then I would inject gas, so tagged with an isotope, which is radioactive. So these trees were basically covered with bags

that were then filled with radioactive gas. Yeah. Which the trees would just suck up through photosynthesis. So now they had the radioactive particles inside their trunks and their branches. We had a Geiger counter out there. As soon as we labeled them, we used the Geiger counter to, and ran it up and down the trees,

and we could tell that they were hot. They were bo, bo, bo, bo, boo, boo, right? And the idea was, she wanted to know, like, once the radioactive particles were in the tree, what happens next? Would they stay in the tree, or would they go down to the roots, and then what happens? And what she discovered is that all these trees, all these trees that were of totally different species,

were sharing their food underground. Like if you put a food into one tree over here, it would end up in another tree maybe 30 feet away over there, and then a third tree over here, and then a fourth tree over there, and a fifth tree over there, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh, all and all, turns out one tree

was connected to 47 other trees all around it. It was like a huge network. And we were able to map the network. And what we found was that the trees that were the biggest and the oldest were the most highly connected. And so we've identified these as kind of like hubs in the network. And when you look at the map, what you see are circles, sprouting lines and then connecting to other circles, also sprouting lines.

And it begins to look a lot like an airline flight map, but even more dense. It's just this incredible communications network that people had no idea about in the past, because we couldn't, didn't know how to look. It's definitely crazy. I mean, you're out there in the forest and you see all these trees and you think they're individuals just like animals, right? But no, they're all linked to each other. This is Jennifer Frazier.

She's a science writer. And I write a blog called The Artful Amoeba at Scientific American. I like your title. Thank you. I spoke to her with our producer, Ludif Nasser, and she told us that this network has developed a kind of a nice punny sort of name. The wood wide web. The what?

The wood wide web. You mean like the World Wide Web? It's now the Wood Wide Web? It sounds a little like Homer Fudd. The Wood Wide Web. Yeah. So this wood wide web, is this just like the roots, like what she saw in the outhouse? No, no, no, no, no.

It's far more exciting than that. And sophisticated and interesting and astonishing. What? No, I mean, it is. It involves a completely separate organism I haven't mentioned yet. I mean, this is going places. What creature? Where are we going? I'm not going to tell you. I'm going to just go there.

Come on. We went and looked for ourselves. I don't know where you were that day. Annie McEwen, Stephanie Tam, our intern, Annie's our producer. We decided all to go to check it out for ourselves, this thing I'm not telling you about. We went to the Bronx, to the botanical gardens because we need to help. That's how far you have to travel here in New York to get. To actual greenery.

Actually, there was a beautiful green sword in New York has. And when we went up there, there was this tall man waiting for us, an expert. Is that Roy? That is. Roy. His name is Roy Howing. And Roy, by the way, comes out with a strange... It's like a rake.

He's got a trowel. But it has like an expandable... It's a truffle rake. Oh, it's an extent... Oh, listen to that. Oh, that sounds dangerous. And so we're up there in this old forest with this guy. So there's an oak tree right there.

It should have some. And he starts digging with his rake at the base of this tree. He shoves away the leaves. He shoves away the leaves. top soil. Can the tree feel you ripping the roots out like that? I hope not. And so now we're down there. We pulled out a sapling root of some sort. It's just getting started. They're called feeder roots.

We're carefully examining the roots of this oak tree on our knees with our noses in the ground. And we can't see anything. I mean, I see the dirt. Do you see anything white yet? Do you see anything white and skinny? Like I said, it's early in the season. So he says something about that's the wrong season. I thought, okay, so this is just stupid. But then, He gives us a magnifying glass. You know, one of those little jewelers glasses handheld.

Have a look there. And he hands it to Annie. Wow. You see it then? Oh, yeah. The white. Let me, can I see you? Oh, my gosh.

I do see them. What do you say? Little white threads attached to the roots. Smaller than an eyelash, maybe just a tenth, the width of your eyelash. But white, translucent, and hair. Hairy, sort of. And while it took us a while to see it, apparently these little threads in the soil? They're everywhere.

And when you measure them, like one study we saw found up to seven miles of this little threading. In a pinch of dirt. What? A pinch. Mm-hmm. What is this thing? Is it like, is it a plant? What is it?

What kind of creature is this thing? Yes, what is it? This is the fungus. Which, by the way, is definitely not a plant. There are some other kind of category, and for a long time, they were thought of as plants, but now we know, after having looked at their DNA, that fungi are actually very closely related to animals. They're one of our closest relatives, actually. Now, back in the day...

This all has a history, of course. When people first began thinking about these things, we're talking in the 1600s. They had no idea what they were or what they did, but ultimately, they figured out that these things were very interesting. because if you look at 400 million-year-old fossils of some of the very first plants. You can see even in the roots of these earliest land plants. You can see those threads. This is a really ancient association. And then later, scientists finally looked at these things under much more powerful microscopes

and realized the threads weren't threads, really. They were actually... Tubes. Hollow. These little tubes. Tubes? Tubes. And the tubes brain.

ranch, and sometimes they reconnect. So there seemed to be under the ground this fungal freeway system connecting one tree to the next, to the next, to the next. People speculated about this, but no one had actually proved it in nature in the woods until Suzanne shows up. And there was a lot of skepticism at the time. But over the next two decades, we did experiment after experiment after experiment that verified that story. Wait a second. What is this? why is this network even there? Like, why would the trees need a freeway system

underneath the ground to connect? And why would the fungi want to make this network? Why are they going to this trouble of creating this big network? Yeah. Well, they do it because the tree has something the fungus needs and the fungus has something the tree needs. Let me just back up for a second

so that you can, to set the scene for you. Yeah. When you go into a forest, you see a tree, a tall tree. So what does the tree do? What's its job? It's its job. It soaks in sunshine, takes the CO2 out of the air, carbon dioxide, which has, of course, carbon C in it. The oxygen?

Yeah, and it keeps the sea. Carbon, which is, science speak, for food. It turns out carbon into sugar, which it uses to make its trunk and its branches. Anything thick you see on a tree is just basically air made into stuff. Carbon and sugar are the same thing? Yeah, you can think of carbon as basically the sugar that builds the tree. However, if that's all they had was carbon, it didn't have only. be this tall.

That's Roy again. He's holding his hand, maybe a foot off the ground. It would be a teeny tree. It would be smaller. So if all a tree could do is get carbon from the air, you'd have a tree the size of a tulip, a floppy tulip. Huh. A tree needs something else. And what a tree needs are minerals. Minerals from the soil. Very similar to the sorts of vitamins and minerals that humans need. What kind of minerals does a tree need?

like nitrogen and phosphorus, magnesium, potassium and calcium and copper. Why? What do these do for the tree? Can a tree stand up straight without minerals or can... It can't. They can't? No, so for example, lignin is important for making a tree stand up straight. And lignin is full of nitrogen, but also compounds like nitrogen is important in DNA, right? It's an integral part of DNA.

Oh, so that's like crucial. If I want to be a healthy tree and reach for the sky, then I need rocks in me somehow. Liquid rocks. You need the nutrients that are in the soil. And that's where the fungus comes in. The fungus has this incredible network of tubes that it's able to send out through the soil and draw up water and mineral nutrients that the tree needs. Wait, I thought tree roots just sort of did. Like, I always imagined tree roots were kind of like straws.

Like the tree was like already doing that stuff by itself, but it's the fungus that's doing that stuff? Yes, in a lot of cases it is the fungus because tree roots and a lot of plant roots are not actually very good at doing what you think they're doing. She says the tree can only suck up what it needs to, these, you know, mostly through the teeny tips of its roots, and that's not enough bandwidth. Wait, so, okay, so the fungus is giving the tree the minerals? Yeah. What is the tree giving back to the fungus? Remember, I told you how trees make sugar.

Yeah. So that's what the tree gives the fungus sugar. The fungi needs sugar to build their bodies the same way that we use our food to be. build our bodies. They can't photosynthesize. They can't take up CO2. And so they have this trading system with trees. She says what will happen under the ground is that the fungal tubes will stretch up toward the tree roots and then they'll tell the tree. With their chemical language, I'm in the neighborhood. Will you soften your roots so that I can invade your root system? And the tree gets the message and it sends a message back and says, yeah, I can do that. I can start

softening up my cell walls and make room for you. And then those little tubes will wrap themselves into place. It's a little white thread. You can see the white stuff is the fungus. And we saw this in the Bronx. The little threads just wrapping themselves around the tree roots. The last kind of part of the root is tangled just around the edge. And it's in that little space between them that they make the exchange.

What exchange would that be, Robert? That would be sugar, minerals. Sugar, minerals, sugar, minerals, sugar, minerals, sugar, minerals. Sugar, minerals, sugar, minerals, sugar, minerals. And so on. What? I forgot to ask you something. Okay, important. Yes.

If the tube system is giving the trees the minerals, how is it getting it, the minerals? How is it getting the minerals? Is it just pulling it from the soil? Oh, well, that's a miracle. That's like, that is, I got to say, doing this story, like, this is the part that's not me silly. We'll be right back. Hello, this is Ricardo from beautiful Monroe, New York. Radio Lab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world.

More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. I'm Chad Abunrod. I'm Robert Crilwich. This is Radio Lab. So wait, what was the answer to my question about how does the fungus get the minerals? Oh, it's a three-pronged answer. What a fungus does is it hunts. It mines.

It fishes and it strangles. What? I'm not making this up. In 1997, a couple of scientists wrote a paper which describes how fungi have developed a system for mining. Jennifer says that what the tubes do is they worm their way back and forth through the soil until they bump into some pebbles. These little soil particles. Packets of minerals. And then...

They secrete acid. And these acids come out and they start to dissolve the rock. It's like they're drilling. And the fungus actually builds a tunnel inside the rock. And it can reach these little packets of minerals and mine them. What? If you look at these particles under the microscope, you can see the little tunnels. They curve.

Sometimes they branch. They look just like mining tunnels. This is very like if you had a little helmet with a light on it. A human man. Yeah. Maybe not with the helmet, but yeah. It's like snow white in the seven tubes or something. Wow.

And that's just the beginning. Jennifer told Lutif and I about another role that these fungi play. And that's hunter. Hunter. What do you mean? Like the plant is hunting? Oh, hunting for water. I mean, the fungus is.

No, no, no. The fungus hunter. How do you mean? So they're the little insects that lives in the soil. It's just adorable little creatures called springtails. They're sort of flea-sized and they spend lots of time money. punching leaves on the forest floor. They're called springtails because a lot of them have a little organ on the back

that they actually can kind of like deploy and suddenly, boing, they spring way up high in the air. In the David Attenborough version, if you want to look on YouTube, he actually takes a nail. This pin will give you an idea. And it pokes it at this little springtail, and the springtles, and you don't see it anywhere. It's just gone into the air.

Then, of course, because it's the BBC, they take a picture of it. It's doing like a triple double-axle backflip or something into the sky. It's the equivalent of a human being jumping over the Eiffel Tower. Anyhow. One of the things they eat is fungus. But then, scientists did an experiment where they gave some springtails some fungus to eat. They sort of put them all together in a dish, and then they walked away. And then they came back.

And they found that most of the springtails were dead. Instead of eating the fungus, it turns out the fungus ate them. In the little springtale bodies, there were little, tubes growing inside them. What? And this is what makes it even more gruesome. They somehow have a dye. Don't ask me how they know this or how they figured it out,

but they have a little stain that they can put on the springtails to tell if they're alive or dead. When they did this, they saw that a lot of the springtails that had the tubes inside them were still alive. Oh, that's cruel. Yes. The fungus were literally sucking the nitrogen out of the springtails. And it was too late to get away.

No boink anymore. And then they did experiments with the same fungus that I'm telling you about that was capturing the springtails. And they hooked it up to a tree. To try to calculate how much springtail nitrogen is traveling back to the tree. Well, 25% of it ended up in the trees. So they figured out who paid for the murder. Right. The trees did.

Yeah. Is there anyone whose job it is to draw little chalk outlines around the springtail? Inspector Tail is his name. He's the only springtail with a trench coat and a fedora. That's crazy. I can go better than even that. They have found salmon in tree rings, as in the fish. In the tree?

In the tree. Well, in a way. How the hell? Apparently bears park themselves in places and grab fish out of the water and then, you know, take a bite and then throw the carcass down on the ground. The fungi, you know, after it's rained and snowed and the carcass has seeped down into the soil a bit, the fungi then go and they drink the salmon carcass down and then send it off to the tree. And the tree has evidence of its salmon consumption.

I was like, floor. Wow, that's insane. Salmon rings in trees. That's insane. And look, and beyond that, there are forests. There are trees that the scientists have found where up to 75% of the nitrogen in the tree turns out to be fishwood. food. From just bears throwing fish on the ground? Yeah. So if you would take away the fish, the trees would be like blitzed, hobbled, really.

And is it as dramatic in the opposite direction? Like, the fungus seem to be given the trees, a lot of minerals. Like, from the trees' perspective, how much of their sugar are they giving to the fungus? Ah, so, well, I asked Suzanne about that, like 2%, or 0.000-0-0-0-0-1% or? No, well, people have been measuring this in different, forests and ecosystems around the world. And the estimate is anywhere from 20 to 80 percent will go into the below ground. What? Yeah. 20 to 80 percent will go into the below ground community. Oh, the sugar goes down to the mushroom team? Into the roots and then into the microbial community, which includes the mushroom team, yeah. The point here is that the scale of this is so vast. And we

didn't know this until very, very recently. You have a forest, you have mushrooms. Now it turns out but they're networked, and together they're capable of doing things, of behaviors, forestial behaviors that are deeply new. We're just learning about them now, and they're so interesting. Just for example. Let's say it's times are good. The tree has a lot of sugar. I don't really need it all right now.

I'll put it down in my fungi. And then when times are hard, that fungi will give me my sugar back, and I can start growing again. What do you mean the fungi will give me my sugar back? It's like a savings account? It is like a bank. She says we now know the trees give each other loans. Oh, yeah, back and forth, seasonally.

They can also send warning signals through the fungus. Yeah, so we've done experiments in other people in different labs around the world. They've been able to figure out that if a tree is injured... It'll cry out in a kind of chemical way. And those chemicals will then move through the network and warn neighboring... trees or seedlings. That's something bad is happening. I'm under attack. There's an enemy in the midst. So if a beetle were to invade the forest, the trees tell the next tree over. Here come Paul Revere, sort of. Yes, that seems to be what happens. So you can see this as like a game

of telephone. One tree goes, uh-oh, and the next one goes, uh-oh, and then they do stuff. They start producing chemicals that taste really bad. So the beetles don't want to eat them. We'll go, I don't want that. One of the spookiest examples of this, Suzanne mentioned, is an experiment that she and her team did, where they discovered that if a forest is warming up, which is happening all over the world, temperatures are rising, you have trees in this forest that are hurting.

They don't do well in warm temperatures, and their needles turn all sickly yellow. They will send out an, oh, no, this is not so good, signal through the network, but also... The other important thing we've figured out is that, as those trees are injured and dying, they'll dump their carbon into their neighbors. So carbon will move from that dying tree.

So its resources, its legacy, will move into the mycorrhizal network into neighboring trees. Oh, so it says to the newer, the healthier trees, here's my food. Take it. It's yours. Or it could be like, okay, I'm not doing so well, so I'm going to hide this down here in my mycelium.

I don't know if you're a bank or if you're a, so it's not necessarily. sincerely saying, give it to the new guy. We don't know. I mean, again, it's a tree. It doesn't think. I know, I know. I'm just trying to say, make sure I understand this.

I realize that none of these conversations are actually spoken. Give it to the new guy. Give it to the new guy. Well, that's what she's saying. Yes, yes. Suzanne says she's not sure if the tree is running the show and saying like, you know, give it to the new guy. Or maybe it's the fungus under the ground. It's kind of like a broker and decides who gets what.

You know, I don't completely understand. She says one of the weirdest parts of this, though, is when sick trees give up their food, the food doesn't usually go to their kids or even to trees of the same species. What the team found is the food ends up very often with trees that are new in the forest and better at surviving global warming.

It's as if the individual trees were somehow thinking ahead to the needs of the whole forest. So we know that Douglas fir will take, a dying Douglas fir will send carbon to neighboring ponderosa pine. And so why is that? And I think that the whole forest then

there's an intelligence there that's beyond just the species. Wait a second. Wait a second. You just used a very interesting word. I know. Robert, I have to, you know what? It's 10 o'clock and I have to go. Oh, all right.

This is getting so interesting. Unfortunately, right at that point, Suzanne basically ran off to another meeting. But... Hello, Suzanne speaking. Oh, there you are. Hi. Hi, Robert. We did catch up, but there were a few weeks later.

When we last left off, I'm just saying, you just said intelligence. Now, isn't, doesn't, don't professors begin to start falling out of chairs when that word gets used regarding plants? Yes, we don't normally ascribe intelligence to plants. And plants are not thought to have brains. But when we look at the below ground structure, it looks so much like a brain physically. And now that we're starting to understand how it works, we're going, wow, there's so. many parallels. I do find it magical.

I think there is something like a nervous system in the forest because it's the same sort of large network of nodes sending signals to one another. It's almost as if the forest is acting as an organism itself. You know, they talk about how honeybee colonies are sort of superorganism. because each individual bee is sort of acting like it's a cell in a larger body. Once you understand that the trees are all connected to each other,

they're all signaling each other, sending food and resources to each other, it has the feel, the flavor of something very similar. Special thanks to Dr. Teresa Ryan of the University of British Columbia Faculty of Forestry, to our interns Tiffany Tam, Roy Halling at the New York Botanical Garden, to Stevenson Swanson there. And to Annie McEwen and Brenna Farrell, who both produced this piece. Thank you.

All right, Crowett. Okay, it's time for us to go and lie down on the soft forest floor. Yeah, and may hopefully not be liquefied by the fungus beneath us. This final thought. Bye, everybody. Bye. I'm Robert Crulwich. I'm Chad Epumrod.

We're radio out. Thanks for listening. Start of message. This is Roy Holling. Researchers specializing in fungi at the New York Botanical Garden. This is Jennifer Frazier, and I'm a freelance science writer and blogger of the Artful Amoeba at Scientific American. Radio Lab is produced by Jad Abamrod. By Jad Abamrod.

Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Soren Weeler is senior editor. Jimmy York is our senior producer. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Brenna Farrell, David Gebel, Matt Kielty, Robert Kroich, Annie McEwan, Andy Mills, Lateef Nassar, Melissa O'Donnell, Kelsey Padgett, Ariane Wack, and Molly Webster. With help from Alexander Lee Young, Jackson Roach,

and churrus. Our fact checkers are Eva Dasher and Michelle Harris. And remember, if you're a springtail, don't talk to strange mushrooms. Actually, that's good advice for anyone. Thank you. Bye. End of message.