Science Friday - African Wild Dogs, Spotted Lanternfly, Seashells. July 9, 2021, Part 1

Episode Date: July 9, 2021

Sniffing Out How To Save African Wild Dogs One of the most endangered mammals on Earth, African wild dogs are known for their oversized ears, social bonds, and highly efficient hunting style. That predatory nature is now contributing to their threatened status, as their territory in sub-Saharan Africa increasingly overlaps with human farmers, who often use poison or other lethal deterrents to protect their livestock from wild dogs and other predators. Producer Christie Taylor talks to carnivore biologist Gabi Fleury about their research on African wild dogs and other threatened wildlife, and how thoughtful applications of technology could help solve conflicts between farmers and hungry predators—hopefully saving dogs’ lives. Plus, she talks about what it’s like to make it into conservation biology, after a lifetime of dreaming about it. See A Spotted Lanternfly? Squash It! If you live in Pennsylvania or any of its surrounding environs, you’ve probably seen a really interesting looking bug in the past few years: the spotted lanternfly. Around this time of year, it’s in its nymph stage. But when fully grown, these lanternflies sound a little like the joke—they’re black and white and red all over. They’ve also got spots, as their name suggests. The charming news about how interesting they look is offset by the bad news: They are an invasive species. And they frighten crop farmers because they have a taste for just about anything, and a fondness for grapes, which could have dramatic economic consequences.  Many states have a unified stance on what to do if you spy a spotted lanternfly—stomp them out. But is that an effective way to stop their spread? Joining Ira to chat about stomping techniques and lanternfly biology is Julie Urban, associate research professor in entomology at Penn State University, in State College, Pennsylvania. Listening To Shells, An Oracle Of Ocean Health If you’re a beach person, few things are more relaxing than slowly wandering along the shore, looking for seashells. Your goal might be a perfect glossy black mussel shell, or a daintily-fluted scallop, or a more exotic shell full of twists and spirals, like a queen conch. The human fascination with seashells dates back to prehistory. Shell trumpets have been found in Mayan temples. Shell beads abound in the remains of the midwestern metropolis of Cahokia. And the Calusa Kingdom, in what is now Florida, literally built their civilization on shells.  But seashells are more than just a beachgoer’s collector’s item. They’re homes to living creatures known as mollusks, built through a complex process called biomineralization. They’re also a harbinger of environmental change—and warming seas and acidifying oceans could change the outlook for shells around the world.  Environmental journalist Cynthia Barnett joins Ira to talk about the biology, history, and environmental significance of the seashell. She’s the author of the new book, The Sound of the Sea: Seashells and the Fate of the Ocean. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. One of the most endangered mammals on the planet is the African wild dog. There are only perhaps 6,000 left in all of sub-Saharan Africa. And as their habitat gets broken up by more human settlements, they're learning that an easy source of food is, well, farm animals like goats and cattle, which, it turns out, results in a not-so-great outcome for the wild dogs. producer Christy Taylor interviewed a researcher working on exactly this problem. Hey there, Christy. Hey there, Ira. You know, if I were an endangered animal trying to get by,

it seems like eating a farmer's goat would be like a brilliant idea. I mean, it's a good source of food. You would think so, Ira. Unfortunately, it turns out that when you are a farmer and you have a predator eating the source of your livelihood, it's actually a very natural response to try to kill that predator. And farmers who often use poison are actually a really big problem for African wild dogs and even other carnivores like lions and jackals. So a lot of researchers are actually working on ways to keep these carnivores away from livestock in order to keep them all alive. Yeah, I see what you're talking about.

So tell us a little bit about your story. Sure. I talked to Gabby Fleury, who is an early career scientist who is up to all kinds of cool stuff. They've done research in Namibia, South Africa, and Kenya, and they are a Fulbright scholar with an upcoming research project in Botswana. Wow, sounds like a lot of frequent flyer miles. Yeah, I'm not going to lie, Gabby's work sounds amazingly cool to me. And it's all in the name of finding technology tricks to keep livestock safe from African wild dogs and other big endangered carnivores, which, as I mentioned, will keep those carnivores themselves alive and thriving.

And I started by asking Gabby how they first got interested in carnivore conservation. Yeah, so I've always known I wanted to become a conservation biologist. I knew from the age of three, I'm not sure if I watched too much Captain Planet or too much Lion King, probably one of the two. But it's something I've always wanted to do. And it wasn't until college that I realized that a lot of the species that I was most passionate about, such as big carnivore species, that have such a big impact on the environment, were actually really heavily impact by something called human wildlife conflict. There's positive interactions, and there's negative interactions. And human wildlife conflict often falls on the negative side. And essentially what I focus on is something called predator livestock conflict.

A lot of what that means is due to many different reasons, carnivores will sometimes take farmers' livestock, and that will cause conflict with the farmers that often go after carnivores or kill carnivores. So it's not great for farmers, and it's not great for conservation. So it's trying to essentially be a bit of a diplomat and try to figure out ways to reduce livestock loss, but also work very closely with farmers to try to figure out ways to, not only help them retain their livelihoods, but also work on, you know, building tolerance and trying to figure out kind of what some of the drivers of that conflict is on both sides.

So next year, you'll be embarking on a Fulbright scholarship project in Botswana to study African wild dogs. What's the story with that? Yeah, so African wild dogs are an amazing species, and they're one of the most endangered carnivores in Africa. Only the Ethiopian wolf is more endangered. There's only about 6,600 African wild dogs left in the world. And Botswana has one third of the remaining population of African wild dogs. So there's a huge conservation need. And there's many other reasons why I love them and why I find them really fascinating is that they're very social. They have a really unique and complex social structure.

They're very intelligent. And also because their ranges are so big, they often are really complex to try to conserve because their ranges can cross countries. So a lot of the time, it's trans-boundary conservation as well. When I was working for the Cheetah Conservation Fund in Namibia, we actually had some African wild dog puppies that were rescued due to a conflict event. So farmers had shot their entire pack, and we brought the puppies back to rehabilitate them.

Well, I realized working with these farmers in Namibia is that African wild dogs actually overall took less livestock than jackals for instance, but farmers had an outsized dislike of African wild dogs. And I found that really interesting that the perception of how much of a problem they actually were was different than the actual recording of events. So they thought that they were more of an issue than they actually were. So this is actually like where some of the threat to an endangered species like African wild dogs comes from is farmers killing them. So like what is the normal relationship between farmers and carnivores. When I was working in Kenya, I worked with an organization called

Big Life Foundation, and they worked very closely with the Maasai community there. And they had a compensation fund that usually compensation funds are not particularly effective in conservation, but this one was because it was an idea that was sparked from the community. And they were able to reduce a lot of lying killings by working very closely with the community. So even though there might still be a bit of conflict because carnivores eat livestock and farmers want to protect their livestock, there's ways to kind of work around that. As well as, you know, in terms of reducing livestock, a big driver as well is just the fact that carnivores usually would prefer to go after natural prey, but if there's less natural prey in the area, it's an easy meal. So they tend to go

for livestock when a lot of their prey has been driven out. And that could be due to man cover change, habitat destruction, but also things like bushmeat poaching. So there's a lot of different factors that could drive that. So I know you're looking at technology as sort of a source of ways to reduce this conflict. What do we know so far? Yeah, there's many different strategies from very low tech to very high tech. Some of the things I've tested in the past have been, they're called non-lethal deterrence. So essentially, you try to scare away predators from livestock in a way that doesn't hurt

the actual wildlife. So there's these systems called fox light systems, which you, can put up on a livestock enclosure that has a flashing light system that looks like somebody's walking around with a flashlight. So if a carnivore sees that from far away, it looks like people are around and they get startled. And people sometimes even get really creative. There was a recent study out of Australia where they use the tube men from like they used car salesmen tube. They're inflatable and they're very tall and they kind of flail around. And they use that in a study to see if they could startle dingoes and try to prevent them from going after a livestock.

And also one thing I tested was something called an e-shepherd collar, which goes around the neck of a goat or sheep. And when the goat or sheep runs, the collar emits this really high-pitched noise that humans can't hear, but animals can to try to break that attack pattern and startle the predator. So there's a lot of different things. And I think the biggest challenge with all of these is something called habituation. So carnivores are very smart. They essentially get used to things. And if you don't continuously switch things up and they learn that it's not really a threat, then they don't respond to it and it doesn't work anymore. So a big challenge is trying to figure out not only which the turns are effective, but at what time. So you're not putting the turns out all the time so they can

get used to it. So then in this case is all we need to do to save these predators, these endangered African wild dogs and other animals. Is it just as simple as keeping them from eating as much livestock? No. If it was, that would be great. That would make my job a lot easier. I think the other aspect of this is, of course, local communities, working with local communities.

There's often the expectation that if you reduce loss of livestock to predators, that people will like them more and there will be less conflict. And I don't necessarily think that's the case, not in all places, because there's also, you know, historical factors and cultural factors to take into consideration. So I think a lot of it also depends on working really closely with local communities to try to figure out where some of that conflict is coming from on the farmer's side that isn't necessarily directly tied to just pure livestock losses. Like I mentioned with the African Wild Dogs versus jackals before. It's not always as cut and dried as these animals are a problem and we don't like them. So I think also that that aspect is important. This is a lot of new science around

something that in theory could have been a problem for a long time. Like, you know, why are some these questions still in need of answers? I think one of the reasons why it's become such a question now is because the conservation need is greater than ever and because animals have less space to exist. So 80% of carnivores in Africa live outside of protected areas, which means that they're living among communities. And there just isn't that much room for people and animals in the same way that they're used to be. So I think it's more of a challenge than ever, trying to figure out different ways for them to coexist. And I think that's what makes it really exciting science as well, because we're also, we're thinking less in terms of just behavioral ecology, but also trying to think in terms of things like anthropology. and working really closely with local communities.

So we're not working off assumptions of what people think and feel, but actually having it driven by people from those communities. So they're not only just part of the science, but they're essential to the science and they're driving the science. And I think that that's a very new thing in conservation in terms of trying to move away from kind of a neo-colonialist mindset of going into a place and telling them what to do. I assume I know nothing about the culture,

at all. I don't try to carry over what I've learned in other places to where I'm working. And before I even set up a study, I'll meet with the community and we'll design the study together. And I think that that's really important. What was it like when you first got out into the field and found yourself actually observing and doing science on wildlife? I cried a lot, happy tears. I think it was very surreal. I remember being in South Africa for the first time and sitting down. And I had been visiting Kruger National Park and I could hear the lions roar in the distance. And I remembered being a little kid when I was seven years old in Boston going to a zoo and

hearing them and being like, wow, you know, like this is cool. But it would be so amazing to actually be there and to actually experience it. And sitting there and actually hearing lions roar in the distance and being like, I made it there. I'm here. And that was really amazing. And I don't know, it's indescribable, that kind of feeling that if you do work hard enough and you put your all into something that you can live the life that you dream for yourself

when you were small. I guess I would just like to give some encouragement to anyone who's interested in conservation that it's possible. I came into conservation with no contacts. I don't come from, you know, a lot of income. And I was able to find a way to make it work. and being a black researcher and LGBT researcher. I had a lot of things working against me, but I made it happen.

So if I can do it, anyone can do it. That's so awesome, Gabby. And I want to thank you so much for being on Science Friday. Thank you very much. It's been great to be here. Gabby Fleury is a conservation biologist studying how technology can deter carnivores from eating livestock. They currently work for the Rainforest Trust and have an upcoming Fulbright Scholarship project studying African Wild Dogs in Botswana. I'm Christy Taylor. Great story, Christy.

We have to take a break, but when we come back, the quest to stomp out the invasive spotted lanternfly. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. If you live in Pennsylvania or any of its surrounding environs, you've probably seen a really interesting-looking bug in the past few years. The spotted lanternfly. Around this time of the year, it's in its nymph stage.

But when fully grown, these lanternflies sound a little like the joke, They're black and white and red all over. They've also got spots, as their name suggests. The good news about how interesting they look is offset, of course, by the bad news. They are an invasive species. Sci-Fi producer Kathleen Davis is here with her up close and personal experience with these bugs. Hi, Kathleen. Hello, Ira.

So, Kathleen, what's been bugging you? Yeah, funny. Yeah, it's interesting. So I have lived in New Jersey for a little bit over a year. And last year I saw probably one or two fully grown spotted lantern flies in my neighborhood in late summer. And they're really distinctive looking. They look like moths, kind of like the size of a cicada for those listeners who have experienced Brew 10 this year. Wow, that's pretty big, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. They're really big, actually. So this year, though, the plants around my house have been covered in these little black spotted. bugs and they are super distinct looking. Dare I say, they're a little bit cute. They are, they're black and they've got these white polka dots all over them. They also jump really far if you touch them. So I thought these are really funky looking bugs and I looked them up and

sure enough, they are spotted lanternfly nymphs. Well, if they're an invasive species, what can we do anything about them, if anything? Well, I've been trying to figure that out. But I looked it up and the main advice for getting rid of them is to to stomp on them. Wait, that's the official advice, the high-tech answer, stop on them. I'm not joking. The state of New Jersey's official instructions for what to do if you see a spotted lanternfly is, quote, join the battle, beat the bug, stomp it out. Oh, wow. Well, I'm putting on my stomping boots, Kathleen. Hoping my next guest can give you some more advice. Thank you.

Thank you, Ira. And my next guest is Dr. Julie Urban, an associate research professor in entomology at Penn State University, State College, Pennsylvania. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, great to be here. Dr. Urban, do you agree that the best way to deal with a spotted lantern fly, as New Jersey says, is to stomp it out? Well, it's better than the alternative, which is to spread it, right? trying to direct the public and how to effectively manage it and not transport it and further contribute to its spread is kind of a hard issue that we've been really wrapping our brains around

for quite a while. So the short answer is yes. That's not to say that we're not spending a lot of a lot of money on control efforts, but yes. Yeah. Let me rewind a bit so we can we can talk a bit about how the spotted lanternfly became an invasive species. Tell us about the origin story there. Yes. So the origin story actually spotted lanternfly was an invasive that first occurred in South Korea in 2004. And so there it was reported to damage grapes, apple, stone fruit, and was a nuisance pest to residents. So we were all primed in the U.S. and looking for it anyway. And so it was first detected and reported to Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, September, 22nd, 2014. So they knew immediately what this thing was, confirmed what it was, and reported it to USDA, and immediately action was taken.

And so it was suspected from where it occurred and from how we know it got to South Korea and what we know about the biology of other lanternfly species is that essentially they'll lay their eggs on anything. They don't require a host plant that they're offspring can feed upon to be a viable host for their, eggs. And so we suspected they were transported in that egg mass state on a shipment of stone. So they were either laid on the stone itself that was shipped or on the palate. And that's how they got here from their native range, which would be somewhere from China, Vietnam, Japan, or India. So we're talking about tropical bugs, right? I mean, Pennsylvania isn't not really a tropical state. Well, now what the 90s we're having for the summer. You could you could, you could, you could argue that. I mean, how is it that they're establishing themselves so well in the northeast?

And here's where we get into some complexity of lanternfly. Lantorflies are a family of plant hoppers called Fulgority. There's 500 species and largely most of them are tropical. That's what I study. But there are a few that occur in more temperate habitats. And spotted lanternfly like Korma Delacutula is one of those. It's native range. You find it in Beijing, which is 40 degrees north latitude, which is the same as, you know, the north latitude of Philadelphia and New York City. So this is one of the very few lanternfly species that could get here. And it is able to survive these harsher temperatures, you know, winter temperatures, because it overwinters in its egg stage. Not all landerflies do that. Other species do other things. So this is just one of the

few outliers of this particular family. And that's what makes them so good at spreading is that they can survive. Yes, that's one of the things. That's not the only thing. Okay. What else makes them so good at spreading? They're so good at spreading because they'll feed so broadly on such a huge range of host plants. They're sap feeders. So more specifically, they're flowing feeders. And they'll feed on essentially anything except for conifers. So they feed so broadly. So there's plenty of different host plants they can feed on. Their biology doesn't have to be honed in just the timing of one plant. Because they're feeding on so many different things, they're broadly diffused across the habitat. So it's really hard to know when they're there, right, because they're kind of spread out.

And then the other thing about them is that while they like a lot of things, they really like one host plant in particular that also comes from their native range, Ilanthus Altissima or Tree of Heaven. That's an introduced invasive that's here in the United States. It persists throughout the United States, and it's generally found in highly disturbed habitats. So along railroad corridors and roadsides, you know, once you know what tree of heaven looks like or smells like, you're going to see it on the New Jersey Turnpike. You're going to see it everywhere. Is that the one with the long, thin leaves? Exactly. Oh, I call them junk trees. They're everywhere. It's the kids' book, a tree grows in Brooklyn, where the tree grows out of a crack in the sidewalk, right? And so,

So basically, because lanternfly are always moving around and their eggs are laid on anything, that lets them move along with Ilanthus along these corridors. And so that's also how they're able to spread. And what makes them so bad? I mean, if there's so many of these trees around, what are they attacking that we don't like? There's two answers to your question. The first, what are they doing? What are they attacking that we like?

They're attacking grapes, right? They'll feed on different plants throughout their life cycle, but they'll feed on grapes throughout their whole life cycle, and they'll actually damage grapes. And so we've seen significant economic impact in actual vineyards. The only other tree that they'll actually kill is tree of heaven. Otherwise, they're just a stressor to other trees. They're not going to do a tree in and of itself. But the other way they're so damaging in terms of their direct impact is that they can move around, right? And so they can get. into goods that have to be shipped and we have quarantines, you know, for protection to prevent

land or fly from spreading. So the other place we're seeing economic impact is in the nursery industry because, you know, you can't ship nursery stock. These bugs will get into them, even if they're not feeding on those plants, like topiaries or conifers, they're not going to feed on them, but they'll certainly get into them and they'll get into Christmas trees and lay their eggs on them. And so now we have these nurseries and Christmas tree growers who have to spend a lot of money to keep them out of their products before they transport them, but also anything else. You know, if you think about them getting here on stone, they can get on anything. So this is a significant impact to any kind of company that transports anything over state or international lines. But the other reason Spotted Lanterfly is so bad is because they evade our regular bag of tricks we have to control insects.

So, you know, one of the things we often use to monitor insects is figure out what is their chemical cue, what is their pheromone that they use in mating, because then if we can use that, we can build a lure and build a trap, and we can use that for detection and trapping. Well, nobody's found a pheromone for spotted lanternfly. No plant hopper's known to use a pheromone, so I'm not too surprised. So we don't have a really good lure or way to trap them, and they're really voracious. So it's really hard to rear them in a lab. I mean, we have a colleague at USDA in particular, Tracy Leske, who's doing a great job developing a colony. But basically, they live through one generation a year. You can't grow them in the lab. And it's really hard to grow them and say, hey, grape vineyard grower, let me put these on your grapes and kill them to understand their biology better. It's really hard.

It's really hard to study them. But there are people who are going to say, just spray them with insecticide. Oh, yeah. We joke. Harsh language kills them. So it is an effective way to go about it. But if you think about it, how you time that is very challenging depending on what they're feeding upon.

We don't want to go and spray pesticides on everything out there, right? We don't want to hurt pollinators. We don't want to hurt beneficial insects. We don't want to just spread toxic chemicals everywhere. And so that's one of the challenges that we're trying to deal with. And then where you get a particular problem for grape growers is that, you know, Latterflies will persist in their vineyard throughout the year, and we actually don't even recommend additional insecticide sprays for the nymphs because what they apply for Japanese beetle will do them in, that's fine. But later in the season is when grapes are close to harvest.

And so we call that the pre-harvest interval. And so any kind of insecticide that you apply at that point can't be very long acting because you don't want that to impact the grapes when they're harvested. And so what you'll see in these vineyards is that, you know, at that time of your first couple weeks of September, lanternflies do this, to me, fascinating thing. They move and you see massive flights. If you're in New York City, you haven't seen that yet, I bet you're going to see it in the next couple of years. And so you'll get thousands or tens of thousands on one particular tree. And so for vineyards, you'll go into a vineyard and they'll spray a contact insecticide that'll knock them down and kill a bunch. And you'll walk through a vineyard and you'll see just piles of hundreds or thousands of dead lanternfly underneath every vine.

It looks like they've mulched with lanternfly. No kidding. And more and more will keep coming in. And they just can't keep up. And they're spreading. I mean, we're talking about the Northeast, but I'm imagining that they're spreading throughout the country then. Well, yeah, that's what we're worried about. I mean, we've been working with California since 2018, right?

They came out to look at this. Basically, they've shown up dead on shipments to five other states that are not contiguous to Pennsylvania, including multiple times in California and Oregon. So we're really, really worried about the great-growing regions. And because their food preference is relative to what's around, right, they're going to have changing impacts as they spread. This is Science Friday from WNIC Studios. Talking with Julie Urban Research Associate Professor in entomology at Penn State University, in State College, Pennsylvania, talking about the plague.

It's like one of the plagues of lanternflies. I understand that we know from our friends at public radio station, W.E.S.A. in Pittsburgh, they told us about a story about a dog that's been trained to sniff out by the lanternfly eggs? Yes, I think that's really cool. So that's something that Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture has, but also it's a program that USDA is working on. And so the idea here is that you're not going to have them running through the forest, right, really looking at trees, but in terms of pulling over cargo trucks that are shipping things,

how do you inspect a truck and make sure that there aren't lanternfly eggs on it? And so that's a really good use of sniffer dogs in terms of trying to find egg masses on shipments and prevent spread that way. So with this insect, because it's almost, it goes through four different nymphal stages, an adult stage plus the AK stage, it's kind of like you have to think about. those six different stages as it being a different animal in each stage. And so in terms of trying to prevent the animal that is the egg from moving on cargo, sniffer dogs seem to be a very promising route. We don't have any silver bullet. We just need a lot of tools targeted across each of

those different stages. Okay. Leave us with your best advice for squishing them successfully. for squishing them successfully. Yes. I mean, that's what we're told to do. Is there a technique, a method, a time in their life cycle, whatever, that's the best time way to squish them? Okay, for me, I like them. I would kill them, but not squish them. Frankly, rather than squish them, if you poke them in the rear end or you put a bottle over their head or some kind of container over their head, you can like get them to pop up into a container, like into an iced tea container or into a soda bottle, whatever, and throw them in the freezer. That's how I would do it. I wouldn't want to squish. You can get a lot

that way. Well, but now that you've got it in your freezer, that'll kill them. That'll kill them. Oh, I see. I see. Yeah, yeah, that way you don't have to, you know, be all violent. That's that, okay, good words, because, yeah, I'm all for that kind of technique. How would you rate the attack of this bug with other historic bugs that have attacked us before? It's different because, like, if you think about the Emerald Ashboro, you think about something that's, you know, targeting trees, which this thing kind of is. Emerald Ashboro or something like that is, is taking out species diversity. This isn't, right? This is kind of across, you know, gypsy moth will defoliate and it'll like just knock down and kill a lot of things.

Other than Tree of Heaven and Grape, nobody cares about Tree of Heaven. It's not really killing things. It's just more of a stressor in terms of its impact on the plants. And it's weird. because besides the great economic impact, this economic impact when it comes to transport of goods is where it can just hit so many different industries. Like I was sitting in a meeting at Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture and somebody in one of the early years, and they have an inspector that will inspect like a certain percentage,

10% of the beehives that get shipped out of state because people raise beehives for pollination services that they'll sell to California. And they'll inspect those for varroa mites and that kind of thing. And they realize that, like, oh, my gosh, a lanternfly could lay its eggs on the underside of one of these beehives and get transported to an almond farm in California. And essentially, now you just have a Trojan horse that you introduce there. And so now they have to inspect 100% of their beehives that leave the state. Like, holy cow.

It's like things you don't think of, milk trucks getting infested with egg masses on them. And of course, if we're talking about going to California with all the grapes that are out there. Exactly. I mean, could we expect shortages or increases in the price of wine if this really gets moving? I think so. I mean, I talk with people from California. I have funding from California right now. I mean, they're very proactive, but they're very worried.

We're just about out of time. I have one more question for you. What spotted lanternfly info do you want to leave people with before we go? What's the take-home message here? I mean, maybe this is too nerdy, but for me, who's an evolutionary biologist, who studies fundamental biology suddenly, like leading the national efforts on this, it shows the importance of studying the fundamental biology of species in their native range while their native range exists because you just don't know when anything is going.

going to be a problem. And you just better hope that somebody who is an expert is in the wings, you know, who can help solve the problem. Julie Urban, Research Associate Professor in Entomology at Penn State University in State College, Pennsylvania. Thank you, Dr. Urban, for taking time to be with us today and all this great advice. Thank you so much. This was a treat. We're going to take a break. And when we come back, diving into some summer science for a look at seashells. Ooh, take a walk on the beach with us. We'll be right back after this break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. If you're a beach person, few things are more relaxing

than slowly wandering along the shore looking for seashells, a perfectly glossy black muscle shell, and maybe a scallop, or some more exotic shell full of twists and spirals. But shells, of course, are more than just a collector's item. They're homes to living things and a harbinger of environmental change. Cynthia Barnett is an environmental journalist. She teaches environmental journalism at the University of Florida in Gainesville, and her most recent book is The Sound of the Sea, Seashells and the Fate of the Ocean, just out from W.W. Norton. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you, Ira. Thanks for having me on.

Nice to have you. Let's start on the biology side, if you will. Give us a definition of what is a seashell and how does something make. A sea shell. A sea shell is made by an animal, a wonderful animal called a mollusk. Mollusks writ large are the second largest group of animals in the sea and on land, after the arthropods that include insects on land and crabs in the ocean. So the animals in the sea that I've written about are the marine mollusks, which you sometimes might think of as sea snails or sometimes they're called shellfish, and they build their shells with minerals from the surrounding sea water. So those that build a spiral shell like a conk or a whelk are known as the

gastropods, and those that build paired shells like clams are the bivalves. And there are other mollusks as well, but those are the two primary ones that I focus on in this book. I just find that fascinating and always have that they must have a little chemical factory going on inside that assembles all of the minerals. They have a wonderful chemical factory to do what's known as biominerization. They have an apparatus called their mantle

that is constantly taking in elements to create their wonderful shells. So when we look at a giant kunk, for example, The top part of the conch is the first piece that was made? Yes. So if you hold a conk up with the spiny part at the top, it's actually called the apex, the pointy top, that little pointy piece is the oldest piece of the seashell.

That's where the conk fit when it was a tiny baby or when it was still a larval creature floating around in the sea. There are 50,000 different kinds of known marine mollusks. They build all different kinds of shells, and they do this all different ways, and they're born in many different ways. But I'll give you the case of a queen conk when it's in its larval phase, its shell is just this beautiful, shimmering, like a gossamer bubble. And over time, that little gossamer bubble becomes the very top, the apex of the shell. And ultimately, the animal buries itself. It lands in the seagrass. It sort of settles in, and then it begins building the rest of the shell. And over time, that Queen Conch shell

will become a monstrous five pounds of shell sometimes. Wow. Wow, that is fascinating. You know, an idea that has always amazed me, and I've written about this a lot, is about how much of the world around us is made up of shells or there remains in the sandy beaches we walk on, in the bottoms of the oceans, they're just covered. I love that idea too, Ira, that idea that we walk on a world of shell. I already thought about that a lot as a reporter who specialized in water, that our limestone aquifers underfoot are the carbonate remains of life. right? So the world we walk on is the carbonate remains of all the calcified life that has ever lived. And that's that's sort of beautiful to think about. You're right, there are beaches, they are our mountains, and there also are marble.

And I love this idea, too, that they built some of our iconic human spaces. So if you think about the limestone Pentagon or the Lincoln Memorial or even the Empire State Building, these are really powerful buildings and they owe their strength to incredibly fragile, soft beings. And you're right that many people really don't know what shells are. Yeah, so that is really the specific fact that got me thinking about this book and made me decide to write this book. I was actually, I was giving a talk about one of my previous books at this lovely little seashell museum on Sanibel Island here in Florida. It's called the Bailey Matthews National Shell Museum. And I learned they had surveyed visitors, many of them tourists visiting Florida

with their children, to find out how much people already knew about seashells. And some 90% of the respondents didn't know that a seashell is made by a living animal. Most people thought they were some sort of rock or stone. And I just couldn't stop thinking about that. And I also started to think about it as sort of a perfect metaphor for the ocean itself, because we've loved seashells for their beautiful exterior while ignoring the animal that builds the shells or maybe just not knowing about that animal. And in the same way, we've loved the oceans almost like a postcard, right, as this idyllic backdrop of life rather than the very source of life. So that's the metaphor I was thinking about. The sea is so huge and so beautiful that it's hard to understand sometimes what impact

we're having beneath the waves on things like water quality and ocean chemistry and certainly climate change. So I started thinking of seashells almost like an ambassador to help explain. some of the pressures that are happening in the ocean as a result of climate change and other human pressures. How much effect does climate change have on these creatures that make all these seashells? Well, that's a difficult question to answer. I'll start with the broader answer about the impact of climate change on the oceans. Essentially, climate change is changing the chemistry of the oceans.

The carbon dioxide we send into the atmosphere has turned seawater about 30% more acidic than it was at the start of the industrial era. So this chemical change has begun to limit the carbonate that mollusks use to build their shells. And acidic waters are also boring into some shells, pitting or eroding them. On the other side, mollusks are also threatened by the warming sea. Some parts of the ocean have already become too warm for some mollusks. But you can't make a blanket statement about them. As I was mentioning, there are 50,000 known marine mollus living in the oceans today. There are a lot more than that on land and in the sea.

They're experiencing and dealing with climate change in different. way. So some of the tiniest seashells known as terrapods or sea butterflies were some of the earliest seen by scientists to really be impacted by what's known as acidification. So some of these shells were seen to be dissolving in the Pacific Northwest. And that has been more than a decade ago that scientists began to see that and now that's being seen all over the world and now scientists have done all kinds of experiments to show what the oceans will be like say 20 years from now or 100 years from now and they show dissolution of shells in acidic water On the other hand, some mollusks are clearly beginning to adapt to the acidifying seas, some in only a generation or two.

So there's also a hopeful side of the story. And the other thing that I've enjoyed learning about them is just how, what incredible survivors they are. Like they're 500 million years old. And those that are with us now have just lived through incredible mass extinctions. And they've lived through acidic seas before. They've lived through warmer seas before. And so part of what's really interesting about them is what they symbolize in terms of survival and adaptation. But definitely some mollusks are really beginning to struggle to build their shell.

and that includes some really important seafood that people rely on, such as oysters and muscles. You talk about how long they have survived. Another link to paleontology is paleontologist Mary Anning. Maybe the origin of that famous tongue twister, she sells seashells by the seashore? I was worried that you were going to make me say it, but you said it. In my business, you have to know how to say that. She sells seashells by the seashore. I did it. So, yes, Mary Anning, who's a bit more well-known now, but yes, Mary Anning was a British fossil expert who was in Charles Lyle's time, as a matter of fact.

And she had a curio shop. She and her family had a curio shop on the Jurassic coast of England. and she found all kinds of extraordinary fossils, not only marine fossils, but also dinosaurs. And she actually did some work for Charles Lyle, the famous geologist, and wasn't credited for that work. And that's another theme and another fascinating part for me, just all the many different people who contribute to science and who are sometimes not recognized for centuries. Another interesting woman in the book is Charles Lyle's wife, Mary Elizabeth Lyle, who was a shell collector, who had studied with her geologist father and also became an expert in the taxonomy of fossil shells. So I try to give voice and credit to a lot of people who haven't been credited in the past. Very interesting. This is Science Friday from WNYC,

studios. In case you're just joining us, I'm talking with environmental journalist Cynthia Barnett. Her most recent book is The Sound of the Sea, Seashells and the Fate of the Ocean. You write about another long ago seller of Seashore Trinkets and how that became the foundation of Shell Oil. Tell me about that. Yeah, that's another fascinating and surprisingly little-known story, shell oil's history actually dates to the early 19th century and a Jewish curio shop owner in the east end of London named Marcus Samuel. He imported tropical seashells from Japan. There was a, there was a shell craze. There had been an earlier kind of shell madness in the 17th centuries in in europe but it was mostly among really wealthy people and kings and royalty by the

Victorian age this shell craze had spread to the middle class so Marcus samuel and his family sold seashells out of this little tiny curio shop and he actually conceived the little seashell bedjeweled boxes. You know when you are at a little gift shop near the beach, even to this day, you can find these little gift boxes that are covered with, you know, glued seashells all over them. He conceived those to sell in beach resort towns around Brighton and all around England. and those little seashell boxes were so popular in Victorian times, along with other seashell curios, that it really made the family's first fortune. And Marcus Samuel grew and grew to be more of a traitor with Japan. He was a very successful importer in his time.

And then in the next generation, he had three sons, and they were still working out of their father's seashell shot. in the East End when they, it's a long story, I devote a chapter to it, but they essentially beat John D. Rockefeller in Standard Oil's earliest bid for global oil domination by, they built the first tanker that could travel through the Suez Canal with oil. So they brought kerosene to Asia through the Suez Canal, and they named the tanker, the Murix for the tropical seashell. that their father had loved. They named it after this one seashell, and the middle son ended up founding the company Shell Oil, the same company we know today as Royal Dutch Shell. Very interesting. And of course, the connection between that you made before about global warming

and climate change and fossil fuels and comes full circle back to the beginning with Shell, a shell being the symbol. Yeah, the symbol and it comes full circle in some incredibly specific and poignant ways. Since I finished the book, actually some new research has come out about the Mediterranean. Just a few weeks ago, I interviewed a scientist named Paolo Albano at the University of Vienna, who is working on warming in the Mediterranean. and they found the single most devastating die-off of mollusks along the Mediterranean coast right around where the first Murex tanker entered the Suez Canal. It was one of the fastest warming places on Earth, and the great irony is that the one very common animal that they could find absolutely nowhere where they did this study was the Murix.

that shares the name of the first shell oil tanker. Wow. Two degrees of separation. Yeah. Degrees is right. Yeah. I guess that's the unintended pun right there. Well, it's a great book, Cynthia.

I want to thank you for taking time to be with us today. Thanks so much for having me on. Cynthia Barnett is an environmental journalist. She teaches environmental journalism at the University of Florida in Gainesville. The most recent book is The Sound of the Sea, Seashells, and the Fate of the Ocean, just out from Norton. And you can read an excerpt from the book on our website at ScienceFriday.com slash shells. Charles Berkwurst is our director. Our producers are Christy Taylor, Katie Feather, and Kathleen Davis.

Our intern is Emily Zhang. Our senior producer is Alexa Lim. John Dan Koski is our contributing editor, BJ Leiterman, composed our theme music. And on the Science Friday Vox Pop app, you know it's been hot. Have you been perspiring heavily this summer, feeling clammy, moisture, otherwise damp? Send us your questions about sweat. Yes, we want to know what you want to know about sweat, all for an upcoming show. That's on the SciFri Vox Pop app wherever you get your apps.

Have a great weekend. I'm Ira Flato.