Science Friday - Cephalopod Week Wrap Up, California Carbon Credits Error. June 25, 2021, Part 1

Episode Date: June 25, 2021

California’s Climate Program Is Actually Adding Carbon To The Atmosphere California has a reputation as the state that’s doing the most about climate change. And the lynchpin of those efforts is California’s Cap-and-Trade program, where the state’s biggest polluters—like ExxonMobil, BP, and others—are required to offset their carbon dioxide emissions by investing in carbon reduction strategies. But according to a recent investigation by ProPublica and others, this climate solution is actually adding millions of tons of carbon to the atmosphere. They discovered a loophole in the state’s forest offset program, which seeks to reduce carbon emissions by preserving trees. Uncovered by additional reporting, they found that the Massachusetts Audubon Society, a forest conservation organization, enrolled 9,700 acres it owned into California’s program and received the credits, even though it was unlikely that Mass Audubon ever intended to cut down its preserved forests. The intended use of these offsets was to change the behavior of landowners who were likely to cut down trees, releasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The result, in this instance, seemed to go against the spirit of the Cap-And-Trade program, that the state’s biggest polluters’ emissions weren’t truly being offset. Guest host Sophie Bushwick is joined by Lisa Song, a ProPublica reporter who broke this story with MIT Technology Review, with help from Carbon Plan, a nonprofit that analyzes the scientific integrity of carbon removal efforts. Read Lisa’s investigative story here.     A Monterey Bay Aquarium Scientist Gives Fun Facts About Cephalopods It’s the most wonderful time of the year! No, not the holidays—it’s Cephalopod Week, and SciFri uses any excuse to celebrate the mysterious squid, the charismatic octopus and the cute cuttlefish. If anyone matches SciFri’s enthusiasm for marine invertebrates, it’s the folks at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Guest host Sophie Bushwick talks to Christina Biggs, senior aquarist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in Monterey, California. Biggs spills behind-the-scenes details about everything from raising cephalopods from eggs to how their dietary preferences can resemble those of picky toddlers. “She’ll come right over to grab food,” Biggs says of one of the aquarium’s Giant Pacific Octopuses. “And on Sardine Sundays, she just tosses it right over her head and just waits for something better.” Can’t get enough of Cephalopod Week? Listen to the latest episode of SciFri’s Science Diction podcast, or check out some fun cephalopod-themed videos on TikTok.     The Long Tail Of Long COVID As the highly transmissible delta variant of COVID-19 continues to spread, it now makes up more than 20% of cases in the United States—including in Missouri, where cases are the highest since mid-February. Meanwhile, a new report finds the number of people experiencing long-term COVID symptoms is as high as 23% of those who have ever had the disease, including people who never had symptoms in their initial infection. The report from FAIR Health, which surveyed the insurance records of more than two million people, is the largest yet to investigate long COVID. Guest host Sophie Bushwick talks to the MIT Technology Review’s Amy Nordrum about the long reach of COVID-19. Plus a bet about improbable physics, the arrival of baby bobtail squid at the International Space Station, and what happens when a spider eats a snake. 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 Sophie Bushwick. I'm the technology editor for Scientific American and a regular contributor on the news roundup here. And I'm excited to be sitting in for Ira Flato while he's away this week. Later in the hour, we'll talk about California's carbon credit program and whether it actually works. Plus, the secret lives of cephalopods with the Monterey Bay Aquarium. But first, the extra contagious delta variant of COVID-19 has now. been found in more than 80 countries and now makes up more than 20% of cases in the United States. Experts are predicting another surge of cases as a result of the variance higher transmission rate, especially in areas and populations where fewer people are vaccinated. Here, with more about this

and other stories, Amy Nordrum, an editor for the MIT Technology Review. Welcome, Amy. Hi, Sophie. Thanks for having me. Let's start with this Delta variant. It's more transmissible, potentially makes people sicker, and it seems to be spreading around the world. What are the big worries here? Well, this variant is expected to become the dominant strain in the U.S., eventually more common than the original alpha variant. Currently, it represents about 20% of infections in the U.S. As you say, it is more transmissible, and there is evidence that it's more dangerous. So a recent study in the Lancet found that twice as many people who get it become hospitalized as compared with the original variant.

So that's certainly a concern for people who are unvaccinated. That's who's most at risk for this variant, especially those people living in parts of the country or parts of the world where vaccination rates are low. And in those areas, we could see a surge of cases from this variant. So in the U.S., that would be states like Missouri or Utah or Nevada. And there's a new report on COVID-19 patients who experience long-term symptoms, finding that more people may have experienced this than we think.

thought. That's right. Yeah, since the beginning of the pandemic, it's been clear that some people who get COVID still have symptoms that last for weeks or for months after they're first infected. And these patients have been called long haulers and there's been a lot of anecdotal reports of people suffering for a really long time, being in pain or feeling fatigued or having trouble breathing. But there's not been a lot of data on how common this condition is. Now, this week, a nonprofit called Fair put out one of the largest analyses that's ever been done on this condition. And they looked at insurance records of about two million COVID-19 patients over a one-year period. And they found that about 23 percent of everyone who had gotten COVID-19 ended up having symptoms that lasted for more than 30 days after they were

first infected. So this really is a pretty common experience. And they even found some long haulers who were asymptomatic when they first got COVID, so they didn't have any initial symptoms from the infection, but later went on to develop these longer-term problems. As you've mentioned, some of these symptoms include sleep problems, headaches, and brain fog. To what degree do you think long COVID should be considered a disability? That's a great question. There's a lot of conversation about this right now. Just this week, the CDC put out new guidance on exactly how to treat these patients,

telling primary care providers to focus on managing their symptoms, which can vary so much between patients, and also just telling them to take it seriously because some of these symptoms are really hard to formally diagnose or test for. And the CDC was emphasizing to doctors that they should still do what they can to help patients. Clearly, we're just still in year two of this pandemic, and there's not a lot known about what the long, long term affects from this long COVID syndrome might be. You mentioned that those guidelines were just issued recently, but we've known that long haulers have had these issues for a while now. Why do you think it took so long for those guidelines to come out? Yeah, that's a great question. I'm not sure. I think, you know, sometimes,

it takes a while to even issue preliminary guidance like that because the CDC wanted to be sure that this was happening or to understand it better. And, you know, many doctors have been helping patients along the way with the symptoms that they were experiencing. But, you know, the truth is that even this report is likely an underestimate of how common this condition is. It's actually based on private insurance records. So that tends to represent a wealthier population that might be in better health than the general population. And of course, some symptoms likely go and reported just because people deal with them on their own and don't go to the doctor. So even this 23 percent, this is likely an underestimate of how common these situations really are.

Let's move on to your next story, looking at energy prices and the cost of renewable energy specifically. Can we say that it's looking sunny? I think you can say that. You know, you've probably heard that solar energy and wind energy is getting more competitive with fossil fuel plants over time. But a new report out this week by the International Renewable Energy Agency looks back at the last decade, and it shows just how far we've come in terms of renewable energy becoming more economically feasible. So the cost of electricity from utility scale solar panels, for example, fell by 85% from 2010 to 2020, and the cost of electricity from onshore wind fell by 56% during that period. And so as a result, their analysis found that

on average, building solar or wind farms today can actually generate cheaper electricity than building new power plants that run on fossil fuels. Why do we think that those prices are falling so quickly? Well, it's due in part to things like the economics of scale, building more facilities, building things more efficiently, people getting better at building and installing these facilities at a lower cost. And it's also because fossil fuels have become more expensive to burn due to carbon taxes. So that's also a factor here, especially in Europe, where, you know, you need to pay taxes on greenhouse gas emissions that any plant generates.

Okay. This next story seems pretty weird, partly because it's about a bet, but also somehow physics. Please tell us more. Well, let me start with the question that this bet is trying to answer, which is, is it possible for a wind-powered vehicle to travel downwind, faster than the wind is blowing. So if you think about a sailboat, you might expect it to go as fast as the wind that's blowing it. But this question is, you know, could it go even faster? And a lot of physicists might tell you that this isn't possible because, you know, as they point out, like, where is the energy coming from that allows a vehicle to accelerate faster than the wind that's

hitting its sails. So that would seem to violate the law of the conservation of energy that says you can't create or destroy energy. But, and this is where the vet comes in, there's an engineer who years ago claimed he'd successfully built a vehicle that could actually do this and go more than twice the speed of the wind blowing it. So he's been saying this for a while and it's been a really controversial claim. And recently a YouTuber named Derek Mueller took this vehicle out for a spin and made a video showing him in it in which he appeared to be going faster than the wind blowing it. So this video reignited this whole debate and Mueller made a $10,000 bet with a physics professor at UCLA over whether this vehicle really works as an inventor claims it does. And when will we find out the results of the

bet? So actually on Wednesday, the professor, Alexander Kuczynko, conceded the bet. He didn't really say that Mueller was right or that this was possible. He said it was technically possible for the vehicle to temporarily be faster than the wind because of changes in the wind speed. So if the wind started to die down while the car was still going at a faster rate for a moment because it hadn't yet slowed down to match the current wind speed. So he conceded the bet, but didn't necessarily agree with Mueller on the reasons why. So would you say that this is settled or that there could be follow-up debate over the issue? I think there will be follow-up debate over the issue. You know, the mechanism of how this might be possible is under debate still. Like Mueller had said the propeller on Blackbird,

this vehicle acted like a kind of fan. And the professor says it's more like a fan in a turbine. So there's just kind of disagreement on exactly how the vehicle propels itself forward. So I think there could be more studies and more debate over this for sure. I have to say I was not quite ready for this next story. There's a new study out on spiders that eat snakes. I had no idea I needed to worry about this. I didn't know about this either. And so, yes, this happens.

And it happens pretty often in the wild. So this new study found that many different species of spiders eat all kinds of different snakes all around the world. It's really a pretty common behavior. It characterized hundreds of examples in the wild where this had been recorded happening. And so, you know, spiders have been known to eat bats and birds before, actually, but this is one more animal that can clearly become their prey. How does a spider take down a snake? Well, these are venomous spiders. So in some cases, they do catch the snake in a sort of web and then bite it, poisoning them.

And then it takes a while sometimes for the snake to die. But they hang around. And once they're dead, the spiders just go for it. And I mean, is the spider eating the whole snake or is just kind of nibbling on the edges or what's going on there? Yeah. So they actually suck out the insides of the snake rather than eating them whole. Yeah, so that is the same kind of thing that they do with a lot of insects. They do it to snakes as well.

Well, that is horrifying. Okay, okay, that's all I think I can manage with the spiders and the snakes. Moving on to something a little less monstrous. As I mentioned before, it's cephalopod week here at Science Friday. So we can't let this news roundup pass without a story about squid in space. That's right. Yes, there are currently more than 100 baby squid living on the International Space Station. So these squid were raised in Hawaii, and NASA sent them up earlier this month to study how living in microgravity affects a symbiotic or a mutually beneficial relationship that

these squid have with a certain type of bacteria. So this bacteria lives inside of a special organ in the squid, and it causes it to light up when the squid are hunting at night, which actually that helps disguise the squid from its prey because it mimics the way that the moonlight looks on the water. So these squid are up there now in space for the next month, after which they will be frozen and sent back to Earth to study. So they're frozen. Do they survive that transition? They do not survive the transition back, but they will, yeah, so they will just be studied once they're dead. But yeah, hopefully they will help us learn more about this relationship between a micro-abendan organism. Oh, man, I was hoping for this to be a little cuter, but I guess the poor squid also end up like the poor snakes just, at least the squid are contributing to science.

That's true. I mean, it could help us even learn more. You know, we have lots of microbes in our digestive tracks and they help to strengthen our immune system. And astronauts have experienced some issues with their immune systems during some long-term space missions in the past. So these tiny little squid might help us kind of understand better how microgravity affects microbes and help future space missions. That's good to know. And that's all the time we have. Though, keep listening for more sepulapod stories later in the hour. Thanks again, Amy. Thanks, Sophie. Amy Nordrum, an editor for the MIT Technology Review. When we come back, how California's major climate change program is actually adding tons of CO2 to the atmosphere via a loophole. We'll be right back after this short break. This is Science Friday. I'm Sophie Bushwick. California has a reputation as the state that's doing the most to combat climate change, and the linchpin of those efforts is California's cap-and-trade program, where the state's biggest polluters, ExxonMobil, BP oil, and others, are required to offset their carbon dioxide emissions.

They do this by investing in strategies that mitigate climate change. But according to a recent investigation by ProPublica and others, This climate solution is actually adding millions of tons of CO2 to the atmosphere. How? Through a loophole in the state's forest offset program, which seeks to reduce carbon emissions by preserving trees. My next guest is Lisa Song, a pro-publica reporter who broke this story with MIT Technology Review and with help from Carbon Plan, a nonprofit that analyzes the scientific integrity of carbon removal efforts. Lisa, welcome to Science Friday.

Hi, thanks for having me. Before we talk about your article, for those who aren't familiar, what is California's Forest Offset Program and why was it established? Sure. So the carbon offset program is part of California's cap and trade program, and it is there to help major polluters find other ways to reduce emissions. So under cap and trade, these large polluters have to buy permits that allow them to emit CO2, and they can get those permits from the state, or they can buy them from other polluters who have some to spare. But something else that they can do is to pay for offsets, which means they're paying somebody else somewhere in the country

to reduce their CO2 emissions, and then that polluter gets to claim those reductions as their own. So the whole idea of these forest carbon offsets is there are landowners around the country who sign up to join the program, and they promise to keep their trees standing instead of cutting them down as they would have. And then you calculate how many tons of CO2 you're preventing from going up into the air, and those get converted to carbon credits, which the polluters in California can claim. And this program is far from perfect, but your article explains exactly why. Tell us who you teamed up with and what you found. Sure. So I reported this story with James Temple at MIT Technology Review. And we were reporting on a study from the nonprofit carbon plan. It's a very complicated study that looks in detail at a flaw in the rules behind the forest offset program. And just for context, this part of California's offset program, the forestry offsets, there have been prior studies criticizing how the program was designed in various aspects of the program. But this study by Carbon Plan is looking at a brand new flaw that nobody else had written about before. And the way the flaw works is once you've picked the forest that will be enrolled in the offsets program, you go ahead and, you go ahead and, and you do a survey of the trees to figure out how much carbon is stored in the forest,

how much carbon per acre. And then you look at the amount of carbon per acre stored in a typical forest of that type. And then you take the difference. So if my offset forest has 200 tons of carbon per acre, but a typical forest of this type would have 80 tons per acre, then I win something like 120 tons of carbon per acre for my project. The issue is who gets to set what a typical forest looks like and how much carbon is in a typical forest. That is defined by the California Air Resources Board and the regulator sets those numbers.

And what the study was pointing out is that those numbers were calculated from course data that didn't take into account a lot of nuances. And so they were allowing people who were running offsets to selectively choose to put offsets in forests where the trees held a lot more carbon than what's in a typical forest. And the result was you end up inflating the carbon savings generated and you get a bunch of carbon credits that aren't actually helping the climate. Can you give an example of what that might look like, like what type of forested area might be exploited in that way? Yeah.

So one example we had was an offset project in Alaska, where the forest enrolled in the offsets program consisted almost entirely of giant Sitka spruce trees. These are really big trees that store a ton of carbon. But the local regional average was calculated from a wide mix of trees and a much smaller percentage of which were these Sitka. spruces. So if you look at the trees that went into the regional average, it had a lot of smaller tree species like cottonwoods that store far less carbon. And the whole point of these regional

averages is the trees that go into calculating a regional average should resemble the types of trees in your project. But because the data behind the regional averages were so coarse, it allows landowners and project developers to selectively pick offset project sites where the trees are totally different types of trees and have a ton more carbon. And that skews the results. So if they'd wanted this to be more honest, they should have been comparing this stand, say, of Sitka spruces to a forest of Sitka spruces. And instead they were comparing it to a forest of a lot of small trees with just a few spruces in it. Basically, yes. And so the way that the carbon plan folks did their research was they recalculated what they believe is a more reasonable regional average for each of these projects.

And they did that by choosing to get data from tree species that better resemble the actual types of trees in each project. And in each case, they recalculated that new regional average and said, if the data were more honest, this is how many credits this project actually would earn. And in most of the cases, they found that the projects would and should earn a lot fewer credits than they actually did. So the loophole here seems to lie in the way the forests are chosen for the forest offset program and the fact that this lets people select the areas they want to maximize the amount of credit they can get. Right. Just to be clear, the study itself couldn't prove that any particular person deliberately

gained the system or cherry-picked the exact site of their project. But what the study found was that overall, the pattern shows that so many projects were in areas where the trees had way more carbon than the types of trees in the regional average, that overall, some people definitely were deliberately choosing where to put their projects in the most advantageous areas. And it's important to note that nobody broke the rules by doing this. The rules allow you to do this. And so the problem isn't that anybody broke a law. The problem is that the rules are constructed in a way that lets people take advantage of the system. And I'd like to know a little bit more, about the developer's role in this transaction.

From what I read in your article, they seem to function as kind of the middleman between the California Air Resource Board, which is setting the rules and the forest property owner. Right. So project developers are professionals who make their living by developing new offset projects. And what they will do is they will go around and, If there is some forests that they think would make a good offset project, they would go find the landowner and approach the landowner and basically say, if you pay me, then I will do all the paperwork for you, do all the survey work, hire the contractors, and handle all the logistics of turning your forest into an offset project. And at the end of the day, the developers are often paid as a fraction of the credits earned.

So once the project is all done and polluters start buying credits from the offsets, you know, the, they might, the project itself may generate millions of dollars and perhaps the developer would take a 25% cut or something and the rest of the money would go to the landowner. So one of the things we wanted to make clear in our story was that it's likely that some of the landowners don't really understand the rules and don't understand how the system can be gained. So it's possible as a landowner to benefit from the over-crediting of your project, even if you don't understand how it was done or even if you don't really understand the rules. But the project developers are the people who really understand the rules. So it would be hard to believe that project developers don't understand how this kind of cherry-picking could happen. It just seems ironic that there's all these strict rules and all this paperwork to calculate the carbon stored in an individual landowner's forest. But at the same time, the data that these calculations are based on is too granular. It's not strict enough.

Yeah, it's a funny disconnect that the rules themselves are so complicated. And there are various steps along the way where you're double checking your calculation. and everything. But these regional average numbers are really at the foundation of this entire California system. And the raw data themselves come from the U.S. Forest Service. There is this regular survey that the U.S. Forest Service does of all representative forests in the country. And what the Air Resources Board was they took that raw data and they generalized a lot of it in groups or buckets. So they would take a large geographic area across northern California and average the carbon stored in all the trees there as one type of regional average.

And it's that aggregation of the raw data that introduces these opportunities for error and inflated credits. Is there a solution for fixing that? I mean, could possibly the Forest Service or the California Air Resources Board take, say, car. carbon plan's method of calculating stored carbon and use that instead? Yeah, that that is possible. It is entirely within the Air Resources Board's power and authority to change the rules underlying these calculations. What Carbon Plan did in their study was they offered one alternative method of recalculating the regional averages and doing it in a way that's more accurate. It is not the only possible way that you could recalculate these numbers,

but it does offer a blueprint for what the Air Resources Board could do if they chose to. And what did the Air Resources Board say when you reached out to them about this? They did not agree with Carbon Plan study. We did send the Air Resources Board the study weeks before publication, we also sent them a lot of questions and offered to talk on the phone for months beforehand. Basically, the board disagrees that anything was wrong with their rules, and they don't agree with the conclusions of the study. I'd like to pivot a little bit to some other issues with forest offsets. You wrote a follow-up piece highlighting how the Massachusetts Audubon Society is enrolled in California's program. And

that's a little odd because they are a forest conservation organization. So this issue here is actually a universal struggle with all offset programs. Because fundamentally, in order for a carbon offset program to work, the program has to cause carbon savings that wouldn't have happened otherwise. So the existence of these carbon offsets must cause the landowner to change their behavior. That means if you own a bunch of forest and you plan to cut it down and make money from selling timber, but suddenly you decide to save the trees because you sign up for an offset program and so you're going to earn money through offsets instead, then that's good.

You have been forced to change your behavior and all of that new carbon saving you're doing is real and additional to what it would have happened otherwise. But if you are never going to cut down the trees and suddenly you're being paid to preserve the trees, you would have preserved anyway, then it doesn't actually help the climate in any case. Those trees were never in danger. And in this situation, Mass Audubon said in its paperwork that it could have cut down a lot of its trees and seriously depleted the carbon stored in its forest. And now with the carbon offset program, they enrolled about 9,700 acres of its land and would keep all the trees standing. The problem is, it's hard to believe that a major conservation group would have really cut down so many trees.

In other words, it's hard to believe that those trees were really at risk. Again, this is a situation where the landowner followed all of the rules. The rules, as written by the Air Resources Board, doesn't require you to state you would have cut everything down. It just requires you to state that you could have cut down those trees. I'm Sophie Bushwick, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. So do you place any blame with Mass Audubon, or is the issue more about the rules?

The fundamental issue here is the rule. and the way the Air Resources Board has set the rules. Mass Audubon certainly was following the rules, but Mass Audubon is also staffed by a bunch of smart people who understand science and understand climate change. So at some level, they should have been familiar with the many discussions around these issues in forest-related offsets, because this is an issue that's come up again and again

in other forest-related offsets long before California had its system. Can the forest offset program be fixed? Or do you think that there's something fundamentally broken about the way it was built, that fixing it would just mean starting all over again? I don't know that I can speak to every problem with the forest offset program on this particular issue of those regional average calculations. That is something that can definitely be changed in the, rules if the regulators want to. Other people have criticized this forest offset program for issues

like how it judges whether someone would have cut down the trees. There's also another issue of if you protect the forest in one area, won't people just log the trees somewhere else? And so you're not giving a net benefit to the climate. I think some of those other issues can be pretty challenging and I just don't know enough to say how easily they could be fixed. We have to leave it there. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks for having me. Lisa Song is a reporter for ProPublica. When we reached out to Mass Audubon about this story, they offered us a statement, which reads in part, we chose California's market over many other voluntary programs because it was one of the first regulated compulsory economy-wide programs

that put a price on carbon emissions from large industrial sources and power generators. By committing ourselves to managing 10,000 acres of forest explicitly for carbon storage for 100 years, we are confident that by centuries end, our participation in this market will result in substantial additional benefit to the climate. You can read their full statement up on our website at sciencefriday.com. We have to take a break, and when we come back, continuing our celebration of cephalopon, week with the folks at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Soapucus. It's the most wonderful time of the year. Forget the holidays. It's cephalopod week. It's the time where we celebrate our favorite invertebrate

sea dwellers like squid, octopuses, and cuttlefish, to name a few. It's hard to find a group of people who care more for a wide range of cephalopods than the folks at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California. So we're going to go behind the scenes of one of the world's most beloved aquariums to learn more about these wonderful creatures. Joining me today is my guest, Christina Biggs, senior aquarist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in Monterey, California. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, Sophie. Thanks so much for having us during Sepulapod Week. It's Cepleopod Week for us every week here at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, but we're really glad to join you. Awesome. And just a note that this segment was recorded in front of a live Zoom audience. To learn more about attending a

future live recording, visit ScienceFriiday.com slash events. Christina, let's start with the basics. How many cephalopods do you have at the aquarium? Currently, we have 10 species of cephalopods. We have anywhere usually from 8 to up to 20, depending on how many exhibits we have open, the time of year, and those types of things. But right now we have 10 and about 7 to 8 that we're actually culturing here behind the scenes. And are all the cephalopods on display or are there some that are behind the scenes? We have a lot. I would say only about 10% of the cephalopods that we have here in the building are on display at any given time. We do a lot of culturing here. So we're raising up babies continually. As you know, cephalopods are very short-lived. A lot of them span is about six months to you know, GPO, the very big ones, the octopuses will live maybe three to five years,

but a lot of the, the squids live about a year. So we have a constant culture going so that we have animals that we're able to offer to the public. And can you explain what exactly you mean by the term culturing? Sure. In the very beginning, this exhibit has been open for, I think, about eight years now. So in the beginning, we received wild-caught eggs. They're a fisherman who often pull them up accidentally and they'll offer them to us. And so we receive eggs from the wild. And then over the years, we've developed techniques. I think we're one of the only occurrence in the world that has figured out how to culture some of these animals. So we take the eggs, we figure out what they need to stay healthy until the embryos inside grow up. And then we hatch them out.

And when they hatch, then you have to try to figure out what to feed them. And so we have a lot of different food options here. And as they grow up, then they have differing habitat needs. So we have to figure out how to grow with them as they grow and change our techniques. Like I said, their diets change over time. And then hopefully, if they're comfortable enough, they'll decide to mate here in the aquarium. And we can take those eggs and start the whole process all over again. And we've got a lot of listener questions now about cephalopod intelligence. Abril has a question about human versus cephalopod brains. Go ahead. Hi, I'm Abril. I was wondering compared to humans, what makes an octopus brain different

from a human brain? Yeah, octopus brains are very different. I've heard some people describe them as alien brains. So you know how humans have one big giant brain that's kind of connected to their spinal cord that goes out to all their nerves? Well, octopuses actually have, they're not, network goes all the way throughout their body. So they have basically they say they have eight brains. They have one brain for each one of their arms. And those brains can act independently of the other ones. So each arm can be doing something different. And actually, all of those suckers, you know how their arms are lined with suckers. All of those suckers can also be acting independently. So everything can move differently from the other part of the body, which is why they're able to do such

amazing, you've seen all these these amazing things where they can squeeze through things and, you know, the texture changes and the color changes. All of those things are done with this sort of diffused neural net that they have. That's incredible. I'm imagining if all of my fingers had a different brain controlling them. But to move from brains to stomachs really quickly, what do you feed all of these cephalopods and do they all eat the same things? That's a really good question. So we have, a whole host of both live foods and frozen foods. When our hatchlings hatch, we have to start out with live foods.

Sepulopods don't recognize things that aren't alive, like the salmon we eat on our plates. That wouldn't look like food to them. So we train them over time because they're so intelligent. We can get them to work with us on the diet because maintaining these live foods are also very difficult. It's like keeping a whole other set of animals in the aquarium. So we feed them everything from mycid shrimp to grass shrimp to live fish. And then we transition them to frozen things,

almost the same thing, frozen mycid, frozen shrimp. And then we'll move on to various fishes. A lot of the octopus will eat clams. They eat clams in the wild. You'll see that they have those really tough beaks that drill into things. So that is a good form of enrichment for them. So we'll offer them live clams, live oysters. We have both fresh and frozen crabs that they eat.

That's another thing that they have to work really hard to cut apart. And they also like to hunt. They're great hunters. So those are some of the foods we feed here. Have you noticed if any individual might have like a favorite food? Or do you think that they're just sort of whatever they get they like? Oh, no, they definitely have preferences. There are some GPU that I'm working with right now, the giant Pacific octopus, definitely does not like the fish that I feed.

We have sardines here. And she'll come over. I have her train to come over to what we call a station. And she'll come over to grab that food. And on Sardian Sunday, she just tosses it right over her head and just waits for something better. So yeah, they definitely have preferences. And listener Robin has a question about finding cephalopods for the aquarium. Go ahead, Robin. Hey, so I know that y'all talked earlier about cultivating cephalopods on the aquarium. But what do you do to ensure that? that the cephalopods that come in from the wild are ethically sourced. That's a really good question. So we have vendors that have been vetted by our veterinary staff here and ethics committee and relationships that we've developed. We often travel to meet these people and to see what their setups look like.

And definitely it's one of our top priorities. We certainly follow all of the AZAA recommendations on ethical animal treatments. their long-term relationships. Like I said, right now, our cultures here have been established for about eight years. And so we just do this groundbreaking work where we raise them from egg here and don't have to take from the wild. And we also have a couple questions about the cool abilities that cephalopods have. So let's start with listener Kimberly, who has a question about camouflage. Go ahead, Kimberly.

We were wondering, we have a whole classroom full of students. And we were wondering this one right there. How can you identify or know when an octopus is camouflage or not? Since they're colorblind. Aren't they colorblind? They are colorblind. So I think that's two questions. One, how do we find them?

Well, in the wild, one of the ways that we can find them, if they are camouflaged, is they tend to live in a den. They make themselves a home where they settle into. And outside of that din, they will pile up sort of the scraps of their food. food. We call that a midden. And so if you're scuba diving in the wild and you want to find an octopus, a good thing to do is to kind of look in dark, craggy cave-like places and look for that pile of, you know, clam shells or crab shells or fish bones, things that they would discard. And that's a good way to find a camouflage octopus in the wild. So because they're colorblind, how does that work?

How do they camouflage? They have a set of cells underneath their skin, pigmented cells called chromatophores. And they use those chromatophores. They can squeeze pigment in and out in a fraction of a second. And that is what changes their colors. And can an octopus know that another octopus is using camouflage? Or are they fooled just as easily as other animals are? That's a good question. I actually don't know that. I would assume, I mean, some of the cephalopods are cannibalistic, so they'll eat others of their own species. So probably the same techniques they use to escape from other predators is what they would use if they encountered another octopus. But I don't know if we know that. So one of the coolest escape techniques is probably ink. And we have a question from an anonymous

listener. How do octopuses make ink? They have a gland inside their body. It's an in in effect. And just like you make blood or any type of bodily fluid that you have. So the chemical reaction in the body that's produced by their exact plan. And the aquarium was closed for a while because of COVID. How did taking care of the cephalopods change when no visitors were there to see them? You know, it really didn't change. We were essential workers. We came in 365 days, as we do every year, to provide just the best possible care we can for

these animals. I would say just anecdotally, the octopus is definitely mitherto having the public to entertain them, during the day. So we spent a lot of more time offering them enrichment and giving them interesting things to look at and do since they didn't have that public interaction that they usually get. Speaking of entertainment, listener Clara has a question about keeping cephalopods entertained. Go ahead, Clara. Hello. What sort of enrichment do you do for your cephalopods at Monterey Bay Aquarium? That's a great question. We have a lot of things that we do. So we offer them things. I'm sure you've seen the videos of octopuses who, you know, you can, you can screw them into a bottle and they

will work to get themselves out and unscrew bottles. We make puzzle toys out of things like acrylic and plumbing hardware. We buy dog toys. This is a Kong toy, the kind of thing that you stuff with treats for your dog. We'll put food and enrichment items in here for them. We use common things like plastic Easter eggs, puzzle balls. We do things like we have our beautiful Kelt Forest exhibit on the other side of the building, which they have to regularly trim. And so we'll take things like those algae's and throw them in and they love to interact and play with the algae. Obviously, human interaction. We make skin contact with them every day. They have those amazing chemical receptors in their suckers. And so they can differentiate between

the humans that come to their exhibits. We offer them, like I said, we offer them some live food. So they have hunting opportunities. There's just a lot of different things we do. We typically, we do a training session every day with our with our octopuses. It helps us do things like weigh them or take them for veterinary care or make sure that we're getting them their proper diet. So it's a constant, constant sources of enrichment here. And we have a couple questions about eggs. First up is Carrie. Go ahead, Carrie. Hi, this is Carrie. I was just wondering what the eggs looked like. Are they big or small? Yeah, we have all of our eggs. We have four different species here. The first eggs we have here, these are our local market squid eggs.

These were collected just off our back deck here. And just for the people who can't see, these look like almost long tubes. Is each tube an egg? So each tube for these guys, there's probably about 100 eggs. I like to call them, they're like fat peepods. They're long cases and within that are probably about 100 embryos.

You know, squid, they're probably about the size of half a grain of rice and they hatch. So a lot of them become food for other animals. And so there have to be thousands upon thousands of them released into the ocean to have a couple that make it into the next generation that's going to breed and reproduce. And these animals are really neat. They are phallagic squid, meaning they live their entire lives out in the open ocean. And they make dramatic migrations every night up and down in the water column. So they live deeply during the day. And then at night, they come up to feed on the small plankton that rise each evening.

So these little guys are for our pajama squid. You've seen them. They're striped. So they tend to lay their eggs underneath rocks and shells. And these are each, as you're asking, Sophie, these are individuals. So each one of these is just one baby pajama squid. They're little white balls. That's what they look like.

Yeah, probably no bigger than the size of a pea. And then if we move down one more, we have these are, common cuttlefish eggs, these eggs are black. They're like about the size of a grape and their eggs are pigmented with ink. So the female cuttlefish, when she lays the eggs and puts the casing on, she injects ink into those egg casing. And that's because she needs to camouflage these really well so that they're not eaten by predators. Just a reminder that I'm Sophie Bushwick and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. We're celebrating Cephalopod Week with Christina. Nina Biggs from the Monterey Bay Aquarium. We also have another egg question from Greg. Greg, go ahead.

Hi, my name is Greg, and we were wondering, how do you know what type of cephalopod you get if they're just eggs when you receive them? Oh, that's a really good question, Greg. So if it's an egg that we've seen before, because we've worked with so very many of these cephalopause, if it's an egg, that we've seen before, we can compare it to pictures we have of other eggs. That's one way to do it. Sometimes you just have to wait until they hatch and just see what it is. If they come in, like I said, fishermen sometimes pull things up and you're right, you may not know what they are. I would say based on the knowledge that we have, we can usually make a pretty good guess. If they're these long ones that look like pepods, we know that they're going to be squid.

if they're sort of the round ball ones, we know they're going to be cuttlefish. And octopuses, octopuses guard their own eggs. And so if we find octopus eggs, it's going to be with a mother octopus, and she's going to be taking care of them and fanning them and cleaning them just until they hatch, and then they go on their own way. But that's how we would know. We would see which kind of octopus those eggs would be with. Tricia has a question about the life of an aquarist.

My question was that since you work so closely with them from birth and your role is their care and enrichment, is it hard not to get attached to them? That's a good question. Definitely, you know, the giant Pacific octopus is the one that stays with us the longest. They're here usually three to five years. Those definitely, I would say, we do become attached to. Some people jokingly ask us, do we name these animals? And I'm like, well, you know, we have probably 400 plus squid. on site at any one time. So it'd be impossible to name them. But, you know, some of the, some of the bigger octopuses, we definitely have house names for. And yeah, you do. It's, you know, the intelligence of a three-year-old. It's kind of like my dog is probably the intelligence of three-year-old. So I compare them. It is like having, you know, an animal in your life that you take

care of. So, yeah, obviously we care about all the animals. Yeah, definitely. That's all the time we have for now. I'd like to thank my guest, Christina Biggs, Senior Aquarist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in Monterey, California. Thank you so much for joining us. Oh, thank you, Sophie, for having us. We really love that you guys raise the awareness of these amazing animals that we have the privilege of working with every day. Thanks again for having us. Charles Berquist 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 Dankoski is our contributing editor. B.J. Leaderman composed our theme music. If you missed any part of this program or would like to hear it again, subscribe to our podcasts

or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. And on the SciFri Vox Pop app, do you have spotted lanternflies in your neighborhood? Those invasive insects that have spread in some eastern U.S. states? Tell us about your experience with them. That's on the SciFri Voxpop app, wherever you get your apps. You can email us, too. The address is SciFri at ScienceFriday.com. I'm Sophie Bushwick.