Science Friday - Black Holes, Scallop Die-off, River Sound Map. Dec 18, 2020, Part 2

Episode Date: December 18, 2020

What Would Happen If You Fell Into A Black Hole? A new book, Black Hole Survival Guide, explores different theories of what would happen if you jumped into a black hole. Most of them are grizzly. As the reader traverses one of the great mysteries of the universe, they meet different fates. Author Janna Levin, a physics and astronomy professor at Barnard College at Columbia University in New York, makes a convincing argument that black holes are unfairly maligned—and are actually perfect in their creation. Levin joins Ira to talk black hole physics and theories, and answer some SciFri listener questions along the way. The Case Of The Vanishing Scallops Over the last two years, Long Island's Peconic Bay has lost more than 90% of its scallops—bad news for a community where harvesting shellfish has long been an important part of the economy. Researchers are scrambling to discover why this is happening. Is it predation, climate change, illness—or maybe a combination of everything? Joining Ira to talk about his research with the Peconic Bay’s scallops is Stephen Tomasetti, PhD candidate in marine science at Stony Brook University in Southampton, New York. They talk about what could be causing this devastation, and how a “scallop FitBit” could shed light into how these shellfish are feeling. Composing A Sound Map Of An Ever-Changing River Annea Lockwood thinks of rivers as “live phenomena” that are constantly changing and shifting. She’s been drawn to the energy that rivers create, and the sound that energy makes, since she first started working with environmental recordings in the 1960s. One of her projects has been to create detailed “river maps” of the Hudson, Danube, and Housatonic rivers. Using stereo microphones and underwater hydrophones, she captures the gentle, powerful sounds of the water, along with the noises of insects, birds, and occasional humans she finds along the way. Lockwood’s composition, “A Sound Map of the Housatonic River”—a decade old, this year—takes listeners on a 150-mile tour, from the headwaters in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts, past sites of toxic PCB contamination, to the Connecticut Audubon sanctuary, where the river spills into Long Island Sound. 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 Flito. Imagine you're an astronaut floating through the vastness of space with just endless solitude and quiet on all sides. Peaceful beauty, no? Or maybe just a little bit intimidating. Now imagine as this intrepid astronaut, you come across a black hole in your travels and maybe you lose your mind and you decide to jump in. What would happen? I'll hear with me to talk about her new book, Black Hole Survival Guide, is Dr. Janelle Levin, professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard College of Columbia University in New York. Always good to talk with you, Jana. Oh, it's so good. I would say to be here, but we're just sort of in the ether, aren't we? We are. We are absolutely in the ether. Let's get right into this idea of the book. This isn't

the first book you've written about black holes, and it's not the first time you've been on Science Friday to talk about them, as we're saying. What is it about? about black holes that keeps you coming back for more. Yeah, it's funny. Black holes are extraordinary and not they're astrophysically real. So, you know, the first time Einstein was presented with the idea of a black hole, a friend writes him a letter from the Russian front during World War I right after he publishes general relativity with this mathematical solution. But, you know, Einstein sensibly said nature will protect us from their formation. So they're astounding because nature thought of a way

to make them, which is incredible by killing off a bunch of heavy stars. But they are more than that. Buckholes are almost fundamental gravitational objects. They're almost like fundamental particles. There's something foundational about them. There's something theoretically impressive about them, that they're this unbelievable terrain on which we think about things. And you open your book with the phrase that you repeat a lot all throughout the book, and that is black holes are nothing. I mean, this is different from what a lot of people think, and you go over that. A black hole is dark and bare and empty, you say, and that's a big concept to start off with.

I mean, we all think, and as I say, you mentioned this in the book that we're misttaught about what a black hole is. Yeah, I mean, I had well-versed friends in science who were like, well, it's a really dense object. And so one of the sort of misconceptions I wanted to shuck away was this idea that black holes were things at all. They're really not things. A black hole is an empty space time. It may be formed by a very dense object. So like the collapse of a star. But once that star creates the black hole, it's gone.

The star continues to fall. And, you know, Sir Roger Penrose won the Nobel Prize in October for work he did in the 60s proving this. That once the star creates a curved space time so strong that not even light can escape, the star itself is forced to continue to fall, and it's gone. So where does it go? Well, you know, that remains a quandary. In the same paper where Penrose talked about the inevitability of the formation of the black hole,

he talks about the singularity, which people get very hung up on, that the black hole might have a region in its center where the space time is so strongly curved that it creates an infinite curvature and it's a singularity. But that's not really the important part. We don't know where it goes. You know, we know that the star continues to fall. But the most important part is the event horizon. This region it leaves behind.

We're protected from what goes on on the inside by this event horizon. So the mystery of what happens inside remains and is being debated. But to some extent, you know, it's not our business. There's so much to talk about. And the event horizon is one of my favorite subjects with a black hole to talk about because I'm not quite sure what it looks like. For example, in the pictures we see of a black hole, the event horizon, and in movies where they try to make a black hole, the event horizon is a disc that comes out from the black hole.

My question, is it a disc like a ring around Saturn? Or does that disc go around the whole black hole so that you see it on edge from wherever you are? So this is very interesting because really the event horizon is a spherical point in space. It's a place, not a thing. And it's a shadow. It's literally like asking about the shadow of a tree. And so when you're describing the rings of Saturn like we saw in the movie Interstellar. Right.

Or what we saw with the event horizon telescope, what you're looking at is the luminous material around the black hole that's, casting the shadow. Imagine the shadow of a tree. You don't have a shadow of a tree unless you have a source of light. And so you have to illuminate the tree to cast the shadow. And so this disk that you're describing is casting the shadow. It's illuminating the area around it. And because the space time is so strongly curved that even the light from this disk like the rings of Saturn give you the illusion that they're above and below the black hole. It is just a total illusion. that casts the shadow of the event horizon. The event horizon itself,

like if you were to fall across that event horizon, it would be as unspectacular as stepping into the shadow of a tree. Well, let's talk about that. So that shadow does go around the whole, the entire black hole. It follows your eye around the entire black hole. Now, let's talk about your astronaut falling into the event horizon. Take us through what happens. Well, so, you know, black holes are so perilous from many,

angles and falling inside seems to capture people's imagination. It's very interesting that if you fell inside a black hole about the mass of the sun, the thing about black holes is they're small for their heft, right? So you take something as heavy as the sun and it's only six kilometers across that shadow. So you cross within that six kilometer shadow and you're on the inside. You have a very short fraction of a second to live before you're terrorized by the extreme curvature in the center. So the event horizon itself is actually not that. bad. You can just float right across. If it was dark against a dark background, you wouldn't even know you were encountering a black hole. You could just kind of float happily, drift to the inside,

where you would be shredded and pulverized and all the things that people describe, because the space time is so strongly curved that your feet are pulled away from your head and your body and your ligaments are torn apart until you're into your... I hate it when that happens. Oh, really? And then your fundamental bits go the fate of the star. that originally formed the black hole, which is to say we don't know exactly what that fate is. All right. Let's go to a great question from a listener, Mary Lee in Pittsburgh, on our Science Friday Vox Pop app. So when people describe black holes, they describe them as eating things or consuming things, but a black hole doesn't chew anything or absorb its nutrients. So I'm just wondering what actually happens when it consumes something?

So I think the most dramatic example of this is when two black holes merge. And what you see when that happens is that the event horizon deforms around the object it's absorbing. In this case, the two black holes, it's so strong, the two event horizons just totally bubble and deform. And they create these sort of audible, I mean, very faint to our ears. That's why we required a detector. But these audible ringing in space time until it settles. down to being a quiet black hole. So the really impressive thing about black holes to your listener's question is that once it absorbs something, it deforms a little bit for a second,

but then it becomes flawless and featureless again. It sheds those imperfections. And it grows a little bit and then it quiets down and settles down. That is unlike anything in the universe. Any other object in the universe, you can put a little mountain, a little flaw, a little deformity, You can change it, alter it, but not a black hole. A black hole is flawless. And you're saying the book, they are all identical. Yeah, it's really stunning. If you think of something like a fundamental particle like an electron, there's no electron that's a little bit heavier than any other electron. They're exactly the same. There's so much the same that we considered them to be technically identical. They're interchangeable.

There's no history to them. And once a black hole settles down, after you've thrown something, something in, it is absolutely flawless and featureless and identical to every other black hole of that of that weight. And you say it's perfect. Yeah, they are literally flawless. You cannot have a mountain or a blemish on a black hole for long. It will shed it away. Yeah, and the process I think that was described, and I've read it other places, that it sheds its hair. Is that the hair that settling down and then it becomes smooth and bald, I guess. I mean, this was, none of this was obvious. You know, you think that when Schwarzschild first wrote that letter to Einstein in 1916,

he wrote on this beautiful mathematical solution, but it was decades of people laboring over it to understand these things. The no hair theorems, which you're referring to, exactly suggest that a black hole has to be featureless. I mean, to put it in most simplistic terms, because it forbids the transmission of any information inside the event horizon, it has to be featureless. I mean, after all, if it had features, I could determine what was on the inside, but the event horizon tells me I can't. So, yeah, in a sense, in a sense, they really are perfect, flawless objects.

And I mean, I want to say not objects, but places. Places, that's better, because now we know there's nothing inside a black hole. A good question from Dave on Twitter. What would happen if two black holes met? Would the one with a weaker gravitational pull get sucked into the other? Would weird singularity stuff get sucked out of the weaker one? Well, people are thinking about this. Yeah, it's really interesting.

When LIGO was so widely reported, when they recorded the sound of the spacetime ringing from the collision of two black holes, they didn't really talk about this very much. But this is exactly what happened. A smaller black hole merged with a bigger black hole in the particularly the, the first event, which was detected, which the merger happened over a billion years ago. So, yeah, what's really happening is you have two nothings, which are just deformations in space time, warping each other's space. You say that so nonchalantly.

Two nothings that are just deformations in space time. Yeah, like two shapes, basically. Okay, okay, there you go. Two shapes in space time. And when they get close to each other, though, you notice that the shapes become. unlike either one alone. And eventually what happens is they merge into a bigger black hole. But as with what happened with the gravitational wave experiment,

which recorded the sound of the space-time ringing, is that a significant amount of the energy comes out in the ringing of the space-time, which is shedding away all of those imperfections that we're talking about. So that what results, even when two black holes of equal size merge, is a perfect flawless black hole. black hole and all of the imperfections ring out in the space time and can be recorded by instruments like LIGA. So we have the event of the merger of two black holes that was first seen

in 2015, I guess, first detected, was the most energetic event we've detected since the Big Bang. That's pretty big. And none of it came out as light. None of it. Like that's wild. It all came out in the ringing of space time. And that's just crazy. Speaking of perfect and flawless, I'm talking with Dr. John Levin, physics and astronomy professor at Barnard College at Columbia University in New York. We'll be right back after this break. I'm Ira Flato. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Hey there, folks. It goes without saying this has been a challenging year, no. And if there's one thing we know for sure, it's that the need for fact-based journalism, and the need for science are stronger than ever.

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So, if you have a few dollars to spare and agree that this world could use more science, please support Science Friday with a donation. Any amount makes a difference. Go to sciencefriiday.com slash give. That's science friday.com slash give. Thank you and stay safe. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. In case you're just joining us, I'm talking with Dr. John Levin, author of Black Hole Survival Guide. This is a great little black book, right? With a black hole on it. It's a cute little book. Everything you ever wanted to know about black holes, I think, is in this book. You know, I remember years ago when I first started out in this business, I interviewed John Archibald Wheeler. Supposedly, he was the original. of the term black hole? Yeah, so the story I've heard, apparently he was giving a lecture down

Broadway and got exhausted, this is 1967, got exhausted saying the inevitable consequence of gravitational collapse or I don't know, he had to keep saying these really elaborate terms. And supposedly someone from the back row shouted, how about black hole? And Wheeler in his unbelievably witty way, just foisted the term on the physics community. He wrote shortly thereafter, like the Cheshire Cat, fades from view, leaving only its smile. I'm butchering the quote. You know, the black hole fades from view, leaving only its gravitational attraction. And in that phrase, he foists black hole on us. That's terrific. That's a great story. You know, Jan 11th, author of Black Hole Survival Guide, you remind me, I'm always looking for great physicists who

can speak to the public like you do. You're a great communicator. And your book reminds me of one of my old-time favorite books about physics, quantum physics for poets, written by the late great Leon Letterman with Christopher T. Hill as co-author. Do you feel like you're an evangelist for black holes? You know, it's really, I write about what I love. Maybe I should think more about the audience, But I don't, my first port of call is the subject that I love. But you got interested in black holes very early in life, right? You write in your book how interested you were as a child. Yeah.

And I think one of the interesting things was that it just was normal to me to read about black holes. These were just normal. You know, they had already been discovered. They had already been observed out in nature. And so to kind of reverse the process of rediscovered, how remarkable they were and how remarkable their discovery was, was kind of moving because I took it for granted. Of course there's other galaxies out there. I mean, when Einstein was writing his first papers, we did not know there were other galaxies out there. And we take all of

this for granted. So I think there was this kind of reverse reinvention of it for me, rediscovering them. How much of the mathematics describing black holes, describing the singularity, understanding what's inside that spot, how much of it is real and how much of it is just mathematical? You know, this is profound because even the fact that that's a question means that there's a crisis that we have to solve. What does it mean to say it's real or not real? Like the star falls, it creates the black hole. What happens to it? We're back to the opening question. It's not to be dismissed. It's a major crisis in trying to understand what happens to what falls inside a black hall. For a long time, I think there was this hope that, well, we're protected by the event

horizon. We don't ever have to really know. It's not our business. You know, it happens inside the black call. But we're beginning to realize that forcing ourselves to try to address that question might hold the clues to the theory of everything. Like really the theory that unifies matter and gravity together. Because that's the big mystery, right? We haven't found the gravitons or the quantum equivalents of gravity, right? That's right. We don't know how to quantize gravity. That happens in a black hole? Well, the black hole seems to be the terrain on which we have to figure it out. It's really the only frontier that we know of, which is both real in astrophysics and on paper in math, that is giving us the clues to try to understand

what that quantum theory of gravity is. And it's so elusive that, you know, it goes to Hawking's observation that black holes evaporate through some very subtle quantum process, which is forcing us to try to ask, well, if it evaporates, we need to understand what happened to the stuff that fell inside. We're no longer protected. We're no longer forever safely on the other side

of that one-way window. Because if they evaporate, eventually the event horizon yanked up and we're forced to look inside and confront what happened to that star or that astronaut that fell in. Do we need new concepts in physics? Do we need new physics? Wow. Yeah. Yeah. And I think there was some question over whether or not I should go into the quantum aspects of the black hole in this book because it really is the hard stuff. We like the hard stuff on this show. You can get into the grass a little bit more in the weeds. See, I love that. I love that stuff because when I was a kid, I thought scientists memorized equations and spat out facts.

And that's obviously terribly false and a terrible stereotype. And what I've realized is the most exciting part of science is when you don't know the answer. And that's where we are right now. We're on the cusp. Like it's almost within reach, but we don't quite understand it. So yes, the most interesting concepts coming out of theoretical physics right now are on the theoretical terrain of the black hole. So if something falls inside, is it connected by a quantum wormhole to the hawking radiation on the outside? I mean, the ideas are wild, wild right now. You could go to another universe on the other side of a black hole. Could be another universe. The best way to survive a black hole is to hope that your quantum bits find life elsewhere. Yes. So at least we know what we don't know, right? We've narrowed down what we don't know. Yeah. That's the thing's Black holes in terms of just their space-time description are very knowable.

We understand them beautifully. There's not, there aren't paradoxes or mysteries. It's the quantum aspects where we run into paradoxes and mysteries. All right. Getting into the weeds a little bit more here, we have a question from our day on Twitter who says something you mentioned a bit ago. Explain how black holes evaporate. Do they really disappear?

Wow. I mean, this, you know, this is what earned Hawking his fame. And, you know, here was this sort of inimical character who is provoking people, literally sort of grinning while he caused people great duress. It's very subtle process. The black hole doesn't emit anything. It steals energy from the vacuum around it. So a black hole is nothing, as we've described. There's this event horizon, which is just an empty region of space where you'd have to travel faster in the speed of light to escape the black hole, there's nothing there. But the black hole manages to steal from the quantum vacuum. And this, if you want to get into the weeds, goes back to Schrodinger's very profound

observation, that there is an uncertainty in where a particle is or what it's doing. But that also means that you can't say a particle's not there. There's no such thing as nothing. You can no longer have absolute nothing because that would mean you had this infinite precision in knowing a particle was not there. Right. Okay. We're following. You know what I mean? Go ahead. So, so because of that, there's a sort of frothing possibility that the nothingness of space time has a frothing possibility of particles kind of being there sort of virtually. The blockhole has this ability that Hocking pointed out to steal from the vacuum, steal from this potential. So imagine there's a nothingness. There are two particles that are kind of, you can't firmly say they're there or not there.

They cancel each other's qualities so they're perfectly matched so that they match the nothingness of space time. You can't have them both be electrically charged, for instance. They have to be opposites to cancel everything. The Black Hall's the ability to steal one of this virtual pair that's bubbling out of the nothingness of the quantum vacuum. And leaving exposed its partner. And its partner can't go back to being nothing without its pair. And so the partner just escapes.

And that's what the Hawking radiation is. It's an incredibly subtle process. but none of it originates from inside the black hole. So if you have enough of those events, then your black hole is leaking and evaporating. That's right. The black hole steals energy from the vacuum. It actually gets lighter in the process. It loses mass in the process. And this light escapes out into space time. And in principle, we've never seen this because bigger black holes are cool. They don't evaporate very quickly.

quickly, we haven't observed this yet, but tiny black holes would explode. Wow. It actually is inverse to what you might think. And so what happens is the black hole technically over a very, very long time scale will get smaller and the event horizon will shrink. And yet none of it originated from inside the black hole. So here's the crisis. What happened to the stuff that fell inside the black hole?

if it didn't come out in the radiation, which would be logical, that would be fine like it came out in the radiation. But you're suddenly no longer protected from the horrors of the interior of the Black Hall if it evaporates. And yet we don't know what happened to it is what you're saying. But what's beautiful about it is that it's provoking the most profound conversations about quantum gravity. Well, we're having one right here now. Yeah. So it's giving us the sort of fundamental clues. it's prodding us in the right direction, if you know what he mean. It's giving us the signs along the way. That's great. There are so many questions, so little time. Let me ask about our own black hole that we have at the center of our Milky Way, correct? Is that a prerequisite for a galaxy now to have a black hole in its center?

Well, I mean, nobody expected this. So even after black holes had been named, which took 50 some years, even after they had been observed, nobody expected black holes millions of times or billions of times the mass of the sun. That was totally unanticipated. We called those supermass of black holes. We knew that stars collapsing could form black holes tens of times amassed the sun or even maybe even hundreds, but millions or billions of times of mass the sun, that was unproduicted. And to answer your question, yeah, we think that basically every sort of normal galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its center. And that is hundreds of billions of galaxies in our observable universe.

So there are hundreds of billions of supermassive black holes that we don't know where they came from, how they formed. But we do think that they had maybe a really important role in terms of sculpting the galaxies in which they live, forming regions which are hospitable for life. So they might be very influential in terms of our emergence. I don't have a whole lot of time left because I love to talk about this. I'll try to get this question in. It's one of my favorite topics. Spooky action at a distance. What Einstein made that up. What is it and how could it play into black holes? Oh, I wish I could say it in German. Sometimes it's translated as ghostly.

It may play a role in our quantum understanding of black holes. There are these very creative, wonderful physicists like Lenny Suskind, who think about Einstein's thought experiment way back when, which was when he said that phrase, spiky action at a distance. So what Einstein was talking about, he was talking about these pairs of particles that form, which are so opposite that they cancel each other essentially. I liken it to like a yellow droplet of paint and a blue droplet of paint combining to make green. If they came from green, they better be yellow and blue in order to make the green. And so these pairs, we call entangled pairs.

They have to cancel each other's properties. And yet there's this sense in which, you know, they don't necessarily, in that Schrodinger uncertainty principle way, don't necessarily manifest in some concrete way. So right now, one of the biggest ideas about black holes is exactly about that, the idea that there are these wormholes possibly, which are connecting a particle. So if a black hole stole a particle from the vacuum and released a particle that came out as hawking radiation, maybe they're connected through a wormhole. I know it sounds crazy.

My hair is hurting. But the idea is maybe the particle on the inside and the particle on the outside are connected by an entangled wormhole in the spirit that Einstein that he was thinking about back then. And so the stuff that fell in the black hole is getting out because it's the same. It's entangled or connected by a wormhole with the stuff that came out. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Okay, so joining us now, we're talking with Dr. Janne Levin, author of this terrific new book, Black Hole Survival Guide, everything, everything you've ever wanted to know about black holes.

But how do you prove that? Can you make any experiments or, you know, science really needs evidence, right? Well, I appreciate the question. I also believe math is evidence. Oh. And if it makes predictions mathematically that are confirmed, then I think that's encouraging. If not, you know, a smoking gun, it's encouraging. And so a lot of these predictions are able mathematically to make predictions that correspond to sort of other calculations, like they all fit together. It's like it's like assembling a puzzle on your table and all the pieces fit together.

it's not exactly an observation, but on your table they all fit together, which is encouraging. One last thing on our table. I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about astrophysics. Astrophysics didn't win a Nobel Prize until the 1970s. And now this year, the prize was awarded to three scientists for Black Hole-specific research. Are we seeing, you know, a renaissance in Black Hole research? Should we expect some sort of breakthrough in any of these questions that you're talking about? I think it's really interesting. So back when Hubble was observing galaxies for the first time in the 20s, the first galaxies that we realized were outside of the Milky Way, he really lobbied hard for astrophysics to be considered for the Nobel Prize. And he did not succeed. Hubble did not get a Nobel Prize. Astrophysics, like you said, was not considered for the Nobel Prize until the 70s.

And this century, we've had at least two Nobel Prizes for black holes alone, just black holes. I would say that previous to the start of the century, black holes were fading in terms of their centrality for physics, and suddenly they're back again. And they're back not just astrophysically, but also theoretically. So I feel like we're kind of living in the century for black holes. That's great. I wish we could talk more. This book is excellent, as all of Jana Levin's books are Black Hole Survival Guide.

You need this when you're going out into space. Take it with you. You can read it as your time is changing. We didn't even get into the time. Yeah. The aspect. That's incredibly crazy stuff. Janet, thank you for taking time to be with us.

It's a great book. Thanks so much. It's so fun to talk to you. Dr. Jan 11, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Barnard College of Columbia University in New York, of the new book Black Hole Survival Guide. We're going to take a break, and when we come back, we're coming back down to Earth, talking with a scientist who takes the pulse of scallops, and a composer who makes music from the sounds of rivers. I'm Iraflato. This is Science Friday, from WNYC Studios. This is Science Friday. I'm Iroflato. If you jump in your car in Manhattan

and drive about, oh, 85 miles east out to Long Island, you'll reach a spot where the island forks into two spits of land, the remains of ancient glaciers as they retreated thousands of years ago. In between the north and southern forks is the peconic bay, which opens out to the Atlantic Ocean. The bay, like much of the waters around Long Island, has been losing its shellfish at an alarming rate. First, there was the loss of 90% of the lobsters in Long Island Sound, and now we have a die-off in scallops. This is bad news for a community where harvesting shellfish has long been an important part of the local economy. Here to discuss the science, the biology behind this, is Stephen Tomasetti, Ph.D. candidate in marine science at Stony Brook

University in Southampton, New York. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, thanks for having me. Happy to be here. When did people notice that the scallop populations were dwindling? Well, these die-offs have now happened two years in a row before the start of the scallop fishing season, which begins in November. The first reports were sometime around early August of 2019. And local Baymen were reporting either cluckers, which are really just dead scallops. They're open shells with no muscle tissue or seeing no scallops at all. And this die-off was then confirmed in October of 2019 through a number of dive surveys that were done by Dr. Steve Teitelbeck and a group of researchers from both Stony Brook and Cornell. And how much of a die-off is it? Well, both years, it's been quite

dramatic. We're talking something around 95% decrease in 2019, and now we're about 99% decrease in 2020. And are these baby scallops that just don't thrive, or are the adult ones that just die? Great question. The base scalps have very unique life histories. They usually live for up to two years, and they spawn or reproduce just a few times in their lifetime. So typically at times in the summer, they release their eggs and sperm in the water. That's where fertilization happens. And then the larvae sort of drift around for a while before they become juveniles and attach to seagrass blades where they grow. We call these baby scallops bugs. And we're finding bugs each year in our surveys.

So biologically, the scallops are doing what they're supposed to do. The adults are surviving long enough to spawn. But then sometime in that window between the spawning events and the start of the fishing season, the mortality is happening among the adults. And is this a problem just in the New York waterways or are? Are populations going down everywhere? Good question. We know that Bay scallops historically have been on the decline. If we look at compared to the 70s to today, but in terms of this sort of drastic decline,

we've seen that happen before in New York in the past in the 80s due to harmful algal blooms. But currently, these peconic estuary scalypts are all I know of that are declining so rapidly. I know the Cape Cod populations, by all accounts, seem to have a normal year last year, whereas we did not. Okay, so let's talk about what you might think is causing this. Any guesses? Could it be climate change? Could it be what? Well, we're putting together the pieces in this puzzle now. I should say that this has been a very collaborative effort. After that first die-off, our local peconic estuary program, which is affiliated with the EPA, put together a technical advisory committee. And now after going through a second year of a summer die-off, we know a lot more. And it seems to boil down to from a few. different things. The two things are energetics and potentially also predation. So when marine biologists study environmental stress, we think a lot about bioenergetics. We try to learn about what's called an organism's aerobic scope, which really just means the amount of extra energy that's available for spawning,

for growth, for immune defense. And when environmental conditions become stressful, like, say, for instance, due to high temperature or low dissolved oxygen levels, then that surplus energy shrinks. And if there becomes a point when the animal needs more energy than it has reserved, it can lead to mortality. So we already know from different lab studies that Bay Scalps are particularly sensitive in terms of mollusks in our bay. And we also know that in 2019, we had anomalously high temperatures for the summer.

On top of that, Stony Brooks Marine Animal Disease Lab is also looking at a parasite that could have added additional stress. So there's a lot going on, but the other side is that it also could be predators. Cow-nosed rays have been spotted last year in multiple Long Island Bays, and these are warm water predators that are now being found in our local waters in the summers. So to answer your question about climate change, I think it is very likely. There's a great study that shows the warming climate in our region has led to not only higher average water temperatures throughout the year,

but also a higher frequency of extremely hot summer days, which we know can be very stressful. So you combine that with these other localized issues, and now the scouts are dealing with multiple difficult stressors at the same time. But even if it's not environmental stress and it's predators, like I said before, those countess rays are warm water predators and their summer migrations are reaching further and further north, and, you know, they may be coming in more and more numbers.

So either way you look at it, it seems climate change is probably playing an important role here. Interesting, because climate change also has a factor where the water, because there's so much CO2 in the air, the CO2 is being dissolved in the water and acidifying the water, which marine creatures don't like either. Could that also be a factor? Yeah, that's a great point. That's mainly what I work on, to be honest, is hypoxia and acidifications. and particularly calcifying organisms are susceptible to these types of stress. You see it more often in baby scallops and larvae where they're trying to develop that shell

because it becomes very difficult to develop that early shell when you have acidified waters. But since these are adults that are typically dying, even though acidification might be playing a role in the issue, it's likely not the main or only driver of mortality. You know, lobsters used to thrive in Long Island Sound, and 90% of those lobsters are now gone. And the word is that they have migrated north toward New England. Could this happen to the scallops also? Well, there are scallops up and down the east coast, going down to Florida all the way up to the New England area. And there's different subspecies of scallops.

So some of them are more adapted to certain temperature regimes. and we might see, you know, either a restriction in the scallop range if temperature is playing a very important factor here, or you could see an expansion northward, like what you just mentioned with the lobsters. And of course, this must be a tremendous disappointment and social impact, the economic impact to the Long Island economy, to the fishermen. Oh, yes. The region here, you know, provides lots of both jobs and revenue to local fishermen.

So these are economically important species. but they're also an environmentally important species. Scalops are bivalves, and they have two shells like oysters and clams, and along with other bivalves, they play an important role in the environment because they filter feed. So they remove microscopic algae from the water column, which is important because in many places, if this algae isn't efficiently removed, then it eventually dies, and it gets broken down by microbes in the water. That process will deplete a dissolved oxygen in the water and leads to sort of poor water quality.

They're sort of like the ocean's vacuum cleaners. Exactly. So these animals help to protect this environment they live in. It's my understanding that you're studying the scallops with a scallop fit bit. You got to tell me about this. What does it look like and what information can you get out of a scallop fitbit? Yes. Basically, scallop fit bits look like a bunch of jumbled wires,

but they're actually reflective optical infrared sensors. And we use them to measure scallop heartbeat rates. and they're waterproofed and then glued to the surface of the scallop shell just above where the heart is. And then I connect them to a microcontroller board, which is like a small computer, and that logs data onto an SD card, and it all goes in the bay together. So all of this equipment with the scallops. And the way it works is the sensor both shines but also detects infrared light. And so every time that that scallop heart contracts, the amount of reflected infrared light that's detected by the sensor,

or changes. So when I measure that over a period of time, I can see these regular oscillations in the amount of reflected light, and then I can use that to quantify the scallop heartbeat rates. And what does a scallop heartbeat sound like? Well, they typically beat at somewhere between 15 to about 30 beats per minute when they're, you know, sort of in resting conditions. But then what's cool about this method is that we learn how the scalp is responding to changes in its environment. So, you know, we're also simultaneously measuring the water. And if we might see a scalp heartbeat rate even like triple under low oxygen conditions that they might be in for, let's say, 10 hours. And so that heartbeat rate can then be used as a measure of how quickly they're using up

their energy reserves. Interesting. Can you apply your little Fitbit to other sick marine creatures? Yes. In fact, my people have used the same technology to look at crabs as well. So, Fiddler crabs and also blue crabs, and people have used it for other bi-valves as well. One last question for you, and it's sort of my blank check question. If I had a blank check, I would give it to you, but of course, we're not in the same room. If you could get the answer to anything, what would you like to know? And the blank check means you can spend your money on any kind of material, resources, or whatever. What's the thing you want to know most? That's great. Well, I'll give you a modest answer because, to be honest, the main question I'd like to answer is the question that's driving this chapter of my dissertation research.

So as I mentioned before, I'm very interested in both the threshold temperatures, so high temperatures and low dissolved oxygen levels at which these scalps are adversely affected. So for me, the big picture is really about how does the timing of these spawning events, which we know are a very energy-intensive process, impact to their vulnerabilities to stress from high temperatures and low oxygen? So is it that this spawning events occurring at a certain time in the summer is really exhausting their energy reserves? I'd like to get an answer to that question. Well, we hope you do, and we wish you good look on your dissertation. Thank you very much. You know, send them a little copy of this interview on Science Friday. maybe that will help you with the committee.

Oh, I hope so. Stephen Tomasetti, Ph.D. candidate in marine science at Stony Brook University in Southampton, New York. I'm Irafledo, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. One of the major rivers that feeds Long Island Sound is the Housatonic. It meets the sound in the town of Milford, Connecticut, and begins about 150 miles north in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts. Like many rivers in the northeast, It has a long history of pollution from factories that were built along its banks.

For decades, General Electric's plant in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, dumped toxic PCBs into the river. Parts of the Hussetonic were declared a superfund site. And even after more than 20 years of cleanup, the river is still contaminated. But for long, wild stretches, the river snakes through mountains and undercover bridges, and you wouldn't know about its troubles. It starts here with a mountain spring trickling out of a metal pipe. My name is Inaya Lockwood. I'm a composer. I make pieces for singers and instrumentalists, but also I do a lot of environmental sound recording,

and I have done for many years going back to the 60s. This year marks the 10th anniversary of Lockwood's detailed sound map of the Hussetanik River. she had previously completed sound maps of the Hudson and the Danube. Lockwood, who's now 81, does her recordings from the banks of the rivers using stereo microphones and hydrophones to listen underwater. All of her sound maps are meant to be listened to as immersive sound installations, where listeners travel with her as the rivers change and grow. So if you can, you might want to put on your headphones.

I'm doing it almost entirely by ear. In other words, I look at local maps, look at areas that are marshy, for example, where I expect to be able to find a lot of aquatic bones and make good underwater sources. Look at areas where the flow is clearly going to be fast, in which case I get very complex water textures, which I love, and then just let my ears guide me. I want to draw people into the energy of the river, and by that means arouse associations, personal associations in people's minds with rivers that they know and love. From there, move on to figure concern about the health of rivers. That's my aim. But the sound has to be right, has to be really good for that immersion, you know, of a listener. I don't want the sounds of oars or paddles to be included in the recording. I sort of don't want people's attention to be drawn away from the actual energy of the river itself.

So I always just record from the bank. Besides, the banks are so interesting. I mean, that's where the friction is between water and land and the sounds which rivers create at their banks are beautiful and complex. and varied, tremendously varied. I remember being truly shocked when I got to Pittsfield and I remember reading a sign which pointed out PCB contamination in the mud and if you were trying to embark on a canoe or a kayak,

make sure to wash your legs as quickly as you possibly could. It was the first time I'd seen that sort of warning. It was shocking. And when I got to do a record, which was purely an underwater environment. I've been recording underwater in various spots by then, under Danube and up in Montana and in New York, and was used to hearing a lot of activity underwater.

It should have been plenty going on late spring, early summer. There was very, very little, and I wondered if PCB contamination and the other contamination, which had been flowing down river for so long, are just sort of decimated underwater populations, not just a fish, but of smaller creatures too. No river, in my experience, has an overall characteristic by which you could identify, ah, that's the Danube, that's the Hudson, that's the Hussetonic.

Every single site on a river has its own characteristic. So I regard rivers as live phenomena, which actively create their sound, by the way, they work with the materials of their banks and restructure their banks and change their banks, and not to mention the bed of the river changing constantly. So every single site has its own sound. And moreover, every site's sound changes somewhat within a very short space of time. There's no pinning a river down.

And I like that very much. You can explore more of Anaya Lockwood's sound map of the Housatonic River on our website. Our story was produced by Science Friday's John Dancosky. If you missed any part of this program, or you would like to hear it again. Subscribe to our podcasts or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. Have a great holiday week. I'm Ira Flato.