Science Friday - Coronavirus Update, Invasive Species. Jan 31, 2020, Part 1

Episode Date: January 31, 2020

Tracking The Spread Of The Coronavirus Outbreak This week, the World Health Organization declared that the coronavirus outbreak—which began in Wuhan, China—is a public health emergency of international concern. Nearly 8,000 cases have been confirmed worldwide. Chinese scientists sequenced the genome of the virus from some of the patients who were infected early on in the outbreak. Virologist Kristian Andersen discusses how the genetics of the virus can provide clues to how it is transmitted and may be used for diagnostic tests and vaccines. Plus, infectious disease specialist Michael Osterholm talks about the effectiveness of quarantines and what types of measures could be put in place to halt the spread of the pathogen. Putting Invasive Species On Trial When species that have existed in one place for a long time are transported to new ecosystems, there are a few possible outcomes. First, nothing could happen. That flower, fish, or flying insect could find the new environment too hostile. In other cases, the new arrival may succeed and multiply just enough to establish itself in the food chain alongside the native species. But a small fraction of wayward species can go on to dominate. They out-compete an established species so well that they may take over their new home, and change the way a food web functions. Think garlic mustard, jumping worms, and emerald ash borer beetles. And in The Death and Life of the Great Lakes, this winter’s Science Friday Book Club pick, journalist Dan Egan recounts how exposing lakes Michigan, Huron, Ontario, Superior, and Erie to new species had devastating effects on the ecosystems of each lake—first, blood-sucking sea lampreys decimated native lake trout, then tiny alewives exploded in population. Ship-transported round gobies, quagga and zebra mussels, spiny waterfleas, and more have since come on the scene. It’s no surprise that ecologists have had close eyes on the lakes for decades. And now, with species of potentially invasive Asian carp poised to enter from the Mississippi River basin, many wonder what’s next for the Great Lakes’ flora and fauna.  Conservation biologist David Lodge, who helped pioneer the eDNA method for tracking Asian carp, joins University of Michigan ecologist Karen Alofs to talk about how new species become invasive and how biologists decide what to prevent, what to protect, and, sometimes, what changes to accept. When A Correction May Not Be Helpful New work relating to messages about the Zika virus and yellow fever published this week in the journal Science Advances indicates that delivering accurate messaging may be harder than you think. Brendan Nyhan, a professor of government at Dartmouth College and one of the authors of the report, joins Ira to talk about the study and what lessons it might hold for educating people about other public health risks. A Close Call Collision In Near-Earth Orbit On Wednesday night, skywatchers near Pittsburgh looked up, watching, just in case there was a collision in space. Two satellites, an old U.S. Air Force satellite and a nonfunctioning orbital telescope, narrowly avoided collision, passing as close as 40 feet from each other. One estimate ranked the odds of collision at 1 in 20. Amy Nordrum, news editor at IEEE Spectrum, joins Ira to talk about the problem of orbital debris and other stories from the week in science. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Later in the hour, an update on the coronavirus and tackling invasive species in the Great Lakes. But first, Wednesday night, Skywatchers near Pittsburgh looked up watching just in case there was a collision in space. Joining me now to talk about that and other stories from the Week in Science is Amy Nordrim, news editor at the I-Triple-E Spectrum. It's good to have you, Amy. Thanks, Ira. What were they expecting to see when they were looking up there? Well, it was a little tense that night. There were two defunct satellites, no longer operational, that were coming very close to each other as they orbited Earth. These satellites were alerted to the public by a company called Leo Labs, which tracks space junk that's orbiting the Earth. And Leo Labs put out an alert on Twitter that says, you know, we're expecting a pretty close call here. Keep out watch for that. So there were a lot of people that had kind of their eye on the sky that night trying to see if it would actually happen. And fortunately, it didn't because if these two satellites had collided, they would have created a lot more space debris, which is a problem we don't need to exaggerate.

Yeah, because we have enough of that up there, right? Yeah, there's many thousands of pieces. And if these satellites would have collided, all that debris would have kind of spread out into a huge belt that orbited the Earth for many years to come, complicating future launches. So we're thankful that did not occur. And they were expected to be pretty close. Yeah, they think that they came within about 40 feet of each other. And I talked with Dan, the CEO at Leo Labs. And he said these kinds of close calls are becoming more common as we put more stuff up there.

He said his company is tracking so much junk that every week they see two large pieces of space junk that come within about 100 feet of each other. Wow. I've seen that movie way there. Well, that space debris goes crazy. Yeah. Okay, let's moving on. There's a story this week about dungeness crabs and not a good story. No, you know, as we add more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, we're also adding it into the oceans, making the oceans more acidic than before.

And we're starting to see how this affects some of the creatures that live there, including dungeness crabs, which live up and down the west coast of the United States. A new study of the larva of these crabs shows that the shells of the crabs and parts of their bodies are dissolving to the increased acidity of the ocean. And they're also seeing these effects on structures called mechanoreceptors, which are hair-like structures. is that these crabs used to find their way around. And that means our dungeon is San Francisco must be an arm, open arms about stuff like that. Yeah, I mean, it's not totally clear how this is affecting the crabs. It's not clear if it's slowing their development, perhaps,

or maybe making them more vulnerable to predators. But those are some hypotheses that the researchers leading this work are going to further investigate. Yeah, and it's all because, you know, when we talk about climate change, people like to talk about global warming. But it's more than just the warming. It's also about the acidification of the oceans, right? Yeah, one of the researchers I spoke with you

is saying this is kind of an early warning signal that this is a phenomenon definitely worth paying attention to with these crabs. Oh, goodness. The coral and the crabs. I know. Okay, let's move on. We've talked in the past about the maybe miracle material graphene,

one of my favorite subjects. Now there's news about making it cheaply. Yeah, this is pretty cool. So graphene, just to review, is kind of a form of carbon in which the atoms are arranged in a single layer and packed together very tightly into like a hexagonal structure. It's very strong, it's extremely thin, and it's an excellent conductor, which has made people very excited about using this material on lots of different purposes. It was discovered way back in 2004, and it's been really hard

to produce large amounts of this stuff. It's very expensive to do that. So now some chemists at Rice University have come up with a way that they think they can make graphing from essentially trash. And they're using a technique called flash heating that's basically using electricity to heat stuff up very quickly to extremely high temperatures. And they're able to produce graphing from stuff you'd never believe, anything that contains carbon like rubber tires, plastic bottles and plastic waste, even pieces of cabbage or coconut that contain carbon. They can make graphing out of that using this approach. Now, they can make, I mean, they used to make graphene out of putting scotch tape on a pencil, right, on the lead in the pencil and get a one layer of carbon out of that.

Yeah, the trick is to be able to do it at scale and to be able to produce the kind of graphing that's useful. So there's other ways to produce graphing that are kind of kind of make like a chunky version of graphing. But this, that's hard to mix up into stuff. Like if you wanted to use it for something like mixing into pain or mixing into asphalt. So this technique creates kind of single layers of graphing stacked on top of each other, which are a little bit easier for those to use for those purposes, they think. We don't have any products, though, from graphene. Well, they're starting to see some.

So there actually are some Goodyear bike tires out now that are graphing enhanced. And there's also been some experiments using graphing, mixing it into asphalt for stuff like runways on airports when heavy planes land to try to make those materials more durable. So you're starting to see it come out, but the Rice University chemists think that this technique will make it a lot easier for people to use it in more products. All right. Now, finally, you have a story about something I thought I would never talk about, which are sweaty robots. Yes, you know, sweating is very useful.

It helps keep us cool when we're working out or on a hot day. And robots could use it too because they have a lot of moving parts many times. There's a lot of heavy processing going on. You can just think of like when your laptop revs up and sounds like it's going to take off. Overheating can be a problem for these robots. And this is especially true for soft robots. It's hard to put fans into those soft robots and other cooling systems and something that has to be so flexible.

The researchers from Cornell University and Facebook have built a set of robotic fingers. Used a 3-D printer to make these hollow fingers that have pores on the back and you fill them with water. And the pores widen when the material heats up. So the water leaks out and evaporates off the surface of the robot fingers, cooling it down six times faster than fingers made that did not sweat. Do they have a, well, if they sweat, do they have a way to drink and replenish? That's the part that they haven't added yet, which is. is a limitation to this work. So it can't...

Oh, details, details. That's probably the next step is you have to be able to add more water in order to keep it sweating, as we all know. And it's because we all want to make them more human. Is that the point here? If you work out, you should be sweating. Yeah, it's like a more efficient way to cool. It's more flexible. It's not as, you know, heavy fans.

You don't have to add those components in. So, you know, it could be a really good way to go, but it also complicates things. Like, when you sweat, you get, like, slippery. and these are robot fingers, and, you know, they are made to kind of grip things. So there's other complications that may come with sweaty robots, but it's, you know, it's a cool experiment to see. I can see the Gatorade commercials now. There we go.

Thank you much, Amy. Thanks, Ira. Amy Nordrim, news editor at the I-Triple-E spectrum. Now it's time to play good thing, bad thing. Because every story has a flip side. And as information and misinformation about the new coronavirus outbreak continues to spread, How can public health officials ensure that correct information, the correct stuff, is out there? It turns out it may be harder than you think.

Writing this week in the journal Science Advances, researchers say that providing corrective information to counter misconceptions can sometimes have unintended consequences. Brendan Nyhan is one of the authors of this study. He's professor of government at Dartmouth College. Welcome back to Science Friday, Brendan. Thanks for having me. All right, let's talk about some of the misconceptions that people have in your study. What did they have about Zika virus? We looked at three specific misperceptions that had been identified as being prevalent in the area.

One was that genetically modified mosquitoes were spreading the outbreak. And then there were two about the causes of the seeming surge in cases of microcephaly among infants. One story was that that was actually caused by larvicides and another that that was actually caused by vaccines. and in both cases actually, it seems to have been linked to the Zika virus itself. Now, you tried to counter these misconceptions with corrective information. What happened? That's right. My co-authors and I wanted to see if providing corrective information in the form that the

World Health Organization presented it on its own website would be effective. People had said in reporting from the region that rumors and misconceptions seem to be hindering the response to the outbreak. So what would happen if we debunked? those rumors and told people, actually, there's no evidence for any of these claims. There's no evidence that genetically modified mosquitoes are responsible for the outbreak. Instead, it's the regular mosquitoes that are endemic in the region. There's no evidence that vaccines or larvicides cause microcephaly. Would that change their minds about these factual beliefs?

And might that, in turn, cause them to be more likely to take measures to protect themselves or to support public policies that would limit the spread of the disease? So did it have just the opposite effect of what you were hoping? Well, the results were disappointing. We found generally no measurable effect on people's levels of misperception. So it didn't seem to be, the corrective information didn't seem to be effective at reducing those misperceptions. And then even more surprisingly, and this is the bad news that you warned your listeners about, we found some spillover effects on these other factual beliefs people had about Zika.

We asked in our survey, and then we repeated it again to make sure that we, We were, to be more confident that we were right, a number, we asked people a number of other factual belief questions about Zika, claims that people had made about Zika that were either true or false that weren't covered in the corrective information we provided. And what we found was for a number of those factual beliefs, people's beliefs actually became less accurate when they were exposed to that corrective information. So it seemed to have this kind of negative spillover effect where people were becoming more skeptical of other beliefs they held about Zika.

in the process, their beliefs were becoming less accurate because many of those beliefs they were questioning were actually true. Wow. How do you attribute this? What are people just sort of giving up on knowing the truth? Well, our worry is that people are becoming more skeptical of all the beliefs they hold. This is something called a tainted truth effect. When I've heard that these sources that I get information from might have told me something that isn't true, I come to be more skeptical of all the things that I've heard. And in the process, I might not just disbelieve false information I've heard. I might disbelieve true information I've heard, too. You know, this is something I worry about with all the warnings in the United States about fake news, that people may actually apply those indiscriminately and come to disbelieve reputable news as well as untrustworthy news.

You think? Not your show, though. No, it's true. But we deal in the research, but you have real research showing that people are going to give up on the truth and just, not believe anything. Well, it's not that they don't believe anything, but it does seem to move people in the wrong direction. And I think this should make us reexamine how we communicate about emerging diseases, right? There's a real challenge going on right now with risk communication. And sometimes people assume if we just tell people the truth about the misinformation,

they've heard, that'll turn them around, not just in their factual beliefs, but in their attitudes and policy preferences. And that's not always the case. We have found that out when we tried to talk about vaccination. Didn't help. You know, that sort of vaccination and stuff. But that's another show. Okay. Brendan, thanks for coming by and confirming what we were fearing.

Brendan Nye and Professor of Government at Dartmouth College. We're going to take a break. When we come back, we're going to talk about the coronavirus outbreak. Nearly 10,000 confirmed cases. We can't keep up with it on the news here. Every time we report on it, it gets worse. So we'll talk about what's going on with it. After the break, stay with us.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. The World Health Organization has declared the coronavirus outbreak that began in Wuhan, China. Now it's a public health emergency of international concern. There have been nearly 10,000 confirmed cases worldwide. There are cases popping up outside of China. The first case of human-to-human transmission in the U.S. has been reported. So how do you fight a new virus?

like this one, besides quarantine. Chinese researchers have sequenced its gene. Using this research, can we piece together clues to how this new virus might spread and possibly design a vaccine? Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, says research into a vaccine is underway

and may be ready for human trials in as little as three months. What do you think? Well, that's what I want to ask my guests. Let me introduce them. Christian Anderson is an infectious disease researcher, associate professor of immunology and microbiology at Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, Ira. Thanks for having me.

Nice to have you. Dr. Michael Osterholm is Director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, University of Minnesota and Minneapolis. Welcome back to Science Friday, Michael. Thank you, Ira. Let's talk about it. Christian, you worked on analyzing the genomes of viruses to understand. understand transmission, how do you use the genetic sequence we have to estimate transmission? Yeah, so we work on genomic sequences that are a sequence of the virus itself from patient samples, and we all rely on publicly available data, so all the data being produced by Chinese researchers and the CDC. And essentially what we're looking for are small differences in the genomes

between different cases. So if you have patient one and patient two, chances are that there's slight differences in the genome of this particular virus. And we can then use that information to connect exactly how these virus are spreaded, how they're related, and therefore understanding the sort of patient networks. And that allows us to look at things like what are the reservoirs, how many introductions have we had into the human population, how is the virus actually transmitting, and what is the timing of all these events. So have you been able to make progress then with this virus?

Yeah, so some of the earlier questions we were quite interested in was understanding that what is the level of human-to-human transmission versus, for example, repeated spillovers from the animal reservoir. And what the data quite clearly shows is that it's a single event. So this is something that happened also getting from this data sort of mid-November to mid-December or so this virus jumped into the human population, presumably from some sort of intermediate hosts. So we think the reservoirs are bats, but there's probably some other host involved, and then from that host into the human population. And now we see that there has been a secondary infection in the U.S.

Someone who has the virus infected someone else. Do you learn something about transmission in this case? Yeah, so I think especially very early on, there was sort of the belief that the level of human-to-human transmission was probably pretty low because most cases were linked to this one one market in Wuhan. So the belief was that probably the human-to-human transmission is limited, but what the sequencing really shows is that probably from day one, this is really something that has been sustained human-to-human. So having like secondary transmissions outside of China is probably what we would expect. I think the very important question here is that how many

of these are we actually going to see. And so you would expect to see more of this? Of course, one would be an outlier, right? Correct. Yes, we would expect to see more. Michael, what's your reaction to this? Well, first of all, I think the geneticists that have worked on this virus have done an amazing job in a very short period of time, and I congratulate Dr. Anderson and his colleagues, and I think his conclusion about its very recent appearance is right on the mark. Epidemiologically, looking at how diseases spread, this has been nothing short of a remarkable experience. I've worked on both SARS and MERS outbreaks of another coronavirus infections where we really saw a much more reduced human-to-human transmission with occasionally a super spreader, someone who would spread it to a lot

of people. What we're seeing here is really much more akin to what we would see with influenza virus transmission. It's very dynamic. We know we have multiple generations of transmission in China. And in fact, now we have clusters of outbreaks in places like the Guangdong province that they don't even trace back to Wuhan anymore. They're that far removed. And it's now in all 33 provinces and administrative districts of China. It's now in over 20 countries. This is almost what you

would have expected to see if you went back and looked at 2009 H1N1 influenza transmission when that pandemic strain emerged. So this is what has us very concerned is the dynamics here. The case numbers, Ira, that you mentioned and we talk about really represent just a small fragment of the number of cases, in large part because the number of test kits and the availability to access testing in China is extremely limited right now. They're working on that. They're doing everything they can to increase that, but we have estimates now based on our studies from inside of China, one that just came out this morning from the University of Hong Kong, that at least 75 to 100,000 people alone are infected in Wuhan this week. So you can see that this is a very, very dynamic situation,

and frankly one that I think the only way I see this going is that the whole world will potentially look like China over the next six to 12 months. That's alarming. I don't mean that you're trying to be an alarmist, but that's an alarming prediction. Well, it's what we're seeing. And again, you know, we come back to the dynamics of the transmission, you know, and it matches up. I mean, I have to tell you, we have many sources on the ground in China.

and today we actually are seeing emergency rooms that are so overwhelmed that they're not taking any additional patients into the emergency rooms. People are not even able to access health care. It's that major of a health issue. So this is something that, again, none of us would necessarily have anticipated with a coronavirus infection that something might act like an influenza virus. I think the key thing, though, however, is not just how much is it transmitting, but how serious is the illness?

And while the data are still yet really being collected in a way that is most meaningful early in an outbreak, right now the case fatality rate that we see into the well-collected data sets is about 2%. Now compare that to about 0.1% for a seasonal flu in a bad flu year here in the United States. So that's almost 20 times higher. Now, will that continue? We don't know. But where we have this virus transmitted, we know we're going to have a lot of serious illness. You also mentioned just the case numbers, but today they also reported just in China, 1527 people are in critical condition in hospitals, which will surely contribute to those death numbers over the days ahead.

We have, Dr. Anderson, do you share this fear? Yeah, I definitely share something. I think like talking about case fatality rates, which in my opinion really can't sort of accurately be estimated at this case, at this stage. I think it's a little too early, but I totally agree that the number of severe cases especially is pretty high. It's about 15% or so of all cases seem to be severe. The sort of uncertainty we have here, too, is that we don't actually know what is classified as a severe case, right? So there could be many different levels of severity that might be classified as such. But if you look at just a number of deaths, for example, which is about 200 in the number of recovered patients, which is also about 200.

Presumably there's still a lot of patients in the hospital. And that's based on those kinds of things. I think it's too early to try and estimate the case fatality rate. Although I do absolutely agree with Michael is probably going to be in the lower single digits. All right. Let's talk about how we can attack this. Dr. Anthony Fauci of NIH, I said before,

says a vaccine may be ready for human trials in about three months. Is that – Michael, is that a overly applicable? optimistic, do you think? Well, I don't think it's overly optimistic. I think that Tony's right on that such a vaccine will be in trials, but let's just be realistic. I think the fact that we will have a vaccine that will somehow impact this outbreak is a smaller chance than us relocating the Grand Canyon to Minnesota. When we look at all of these outbreaks we've had over the years, SARS, MERS, Zika, I can go through the whole laundry list. And I chair five of the working. groups at the WHO right now on the vaccine road, our research and development roadmaps.

And we have vaccines, but to get them licensed, to get them approved, to get manufacturing plant capacity, to get someone to actually buy them, takes years and years. And Ebola vaccine even took years after the outbreak, but more importantly, it had a great deal of work done beforehand because the biodefense industry and the governments of the U.S. and Canada invested a great deal in Ebola vaccine because of the concern about it. a bioterrorism agent. We haven't seen that similar investment. And remember, we've known about coronaviruses and the need for vaccines dating back to 2003, and we haven't had one. So I think this vaccine work is absolutely critical. We need to bring it to completion as quickly as we can,

but we can't at all assure the public that it's going to have any impact in the immediate days or months ahead. But Ebola was contained eventually. Are there lessons we can learn about now that because we are fighting this that we can use for the coronavirus? Not really in the sense that it's not a very different transmitted agent. Ebola virus was transmitted with body fluid contact, where this is just breathing somebody else's air nearby. One thing we did learn was that when there was an attempt to quarantine people early on in the outbreak in the major cities and keep them basically in a one given neighborhood,

that backfired immediately and people stopped doing any kind of quarantining. I think we have some lessons to learn from China. I would be one to say that I think that the major lockdown that was done on 65 million people in the Hubek province where Wuhan is located actually backfired because we know, for example, that when the announcement that this was going to happen took place, it didn't take place for almost 36 hours after they announced it. and at least five million people left Wuhan and went to wherever in China, which was just like, you know, inventing a viral machine gun to spread it around the country.

I see. I see. Christian, former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb writes in Wall Street Journal that there is a reliable, fast and cheap PCR-based test made by Roche. That could be ramped up. Right now you have to send the samples to the CDC. They do the test. And by that time, it could be, you know, dowers, days, whatever, to get a result. Do you think that if we had a faster method of diagnosing the disease in people, it would be helpful? Yeah, definitely. I mean, fast diagnosis is absolutely critical here, so we can isolate patients that are, you know, that are known to have the infection. I think, first of all, these diagnostics were made based on these first sequences that were released from Chinese investigators and, like, made exceptionally rapidly.

Now, these types of tests are fast. I mean, I assume most labs in China by now will have these up and running, and one can expect a sort of result from that within, I would say, four to six hours or so. So I think, you know, as the capacity on that is being ramped up, yes, in this country, it's for now only the CDC, but I'm sure that the different state labs and so on, also getting geared up to actually run these PCR. So I think they're definitely critical, so again, we can come in with the isolation. Okay, so let's say you have these tests.

and you use them diagnostically and you find out that people are infected here in the States, just hypothetically, are the hospitals ready to deal with a flood of patients that might come and even just people who are worried about whether they have it or not? Yes, this is always a good question where, you know, flu epidemics, flu outbreaks happen every year, right? And then the hospitals are able to deal with this. And I totally agree with Michael that a lot of this looks like flu. It really depends on how many cases we are going to see for sure in China right now there's in Wuhan and other places there's there's too many patients for capacity there was the same thing that we saw in in West Africa for example in

the DRC too during the Ebola outbreaks so it's definitely a real concern is that are we ready with with this uh Michael do you agree that we're just not prepared for this we're not and and I think the important message here is is that we as a country have a health care system a that in many ways is hanging on by a string. You know, the emergency rooms, even in a moderate blue season, let alone a severe one, are severely challenged, the number of beds that are available. We have and have been doing surveys looking at the availability of protective equipment for health care workers, and hospitals are not able today to afford to stockpile this equipment.

They hopefully will get it on a just-in-time delivery basis. Well, now when everybody wants it, manufacturers are in no position to provide it like it is, one of the big challenges right now in Wuhan and other parts of China is that health care workers are actually being made to work in the absence of any available protective equipment because they've run out. And so we do need really to have our health care systems in this country really dust off the book and look at this very carefully for the future. I'm Ira Flato. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios talking about the outbreak of the coronavirus with Christian Anderson and Michael Osterholm. And Michael, whenever you talk about, I think dusting off their equipment is a euphemism for spending money and expanding their facilities. Yeah, in this case, I said dusting off the playbook, meaning that the hospitals actually have preparedness documents that have been worked on over the years. And, you know, they all want to do the right thing.

But when the number of patients outstrip the number of beds, you don't have adequate number of health care workers, you don't have protective equipment. And what's a very difficult situation becomes even more difficult. And that's, I think, that we're worried about right now. And a number of groups are trying to address this. But depending on how soon this might arrive here in any meaningful way, is going to depend in part how prepared we are. One last question. When do we know we've reached the tipping point where things are getting bad in this country?

What are the signs and cases or what? Michael, what would we look for? I say this jokingly, and it's not meant to be disrespectful, but maybe when China Airlines refuses to fly to the United States, we know that we've hit a problem here. I think that at this point, it's really going to be a matter of following our emergency rooms and outpatient clinics to see where we're at and just how many beds are available in any one given community. That's when we'll know. Christian? Yeah, and I think one of the key things to look out for is that how many transmissions do we have? outside China, not just in the United States, but also in Europe and other places where the

virus is being imported, right, via travelers? And the question is, how many cases does that actually lead to? Is it a very small number of cases? So we hope to stop the virus or isn't going to be a large number of cases? And I should say just because I agree with the whole, like the vaccine is too far out. But one thing that is critically important, I could see that could influence this, is the repurposing of pre-existing drugs. The drugs that we already have, they're fully approved for other indications that might actually come in and be helpful in this particular outbreak. Such as? This could be, you know, influenza drugs,

drugs that have been developed for other viruses. It's just general antivirals, for example, ramesivir is one of the ones out there that will presumably go into clinical trials as part of this outbreak. Thank you, gentlemen, for informing us, Christian Anderson, Infectious Disease Researcher, Associate Professor of Immunology and Microbiology at Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla. Michael Osterholm, Director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.

Thank you all for being very informative for us today. Thank you, Your Welcome. After the break, what makes a non-invasive species an invasive species, how quagga mussels have taken over the Great Lakes and why carp might be next. We'll talk about it after the break with Christy Taylor. Stay with us. We'll be right back. This is Science Friday. I'm Irafledo. Japanese honeysuckle, garlic mustard, purple loose strife, and the quagumusel.

All of those species, they are all species you might recognize as invasive to the U.S., that is they were transported here from other ecosystems and managed to not only thrive in a new environment, but to take it over, out-compete the plants and animals that have been there for thousands or millions of years. An invasive species are the topic of this week's book club discussion. Dan Egan's The Death and Life of the Great Lakes. It's taking our readers to ecosystems that have been completely transformed by the arrival of new species in the last century. Book club czar, Christy Taylor is here with more. Take it away, Christy.

Book club czar. That's where we're at now. All right. So for people who aren't reading along at home, the chapter six of Dan Egan's, the death and life of the Great Lakes gets kind of scary. We've been hearing about quagga mussels, which were imported by accident from Ukraine and now carpet the bottom of Lake Michigan. And now they're spreading outside the Great Lakes. They're threatening to clog more waterways with their tiny, relentlessly reproducing bodies. Egan doesn't really mince words.

These muscles, like the zebra muscles before them, are the reason Lake Michigan is twice as clear as it should be and also correspondingly poor in nutrients, nutrients that are badly needed, higher up the food chain by native fish. Wayne State University ecologist Dr. Donna Cashin, who's been reading the book along with us this month, says that quagga mussels are the biggest problem for her area of the lakes, the Detroit River and Western Lake Erie. Quagga mussels are one of the greatest concerns to the Great Lakes and a local problem around me near the Detroit River and Lake Erie. They are a close relative of zebra mussels and have largely replaced zebra mussels in the Great Lakes. They clog water intake pipes, even on nuclear power plants, displaced native species, and they can have impacts all the way up the food chain to the largest. fish. They have cost the Great Lakes over $5 million in damages. $5 million. Like Donna says, the mussels are also our problem. When they get into the infrastructure of city water systems, they can quickly clog pipes and damage hydroelectric dams. Clearing

them out takes time and money to the tune of millions of dollars per year. And mussels aren't the only invasive species that have plagued the Great Lakes just the latest. With invasive Asian carp making their way up the Mississippi from the south, it's clear that the already challenged ecosystems of the Great Lakes may have more disruption to weather. So, a lot of questions. What exactly does the future hold? How are scientists learning to predict which species, like those Asian carp, are actually likely to cause trouble in a new ecosystem? And with species getting transported around the globe by trade, what do ecologists have in their arsenal for deciding what's most valuable in an ecosystem and preserving that? Where does climate change fit into all of this? Again, a lot of questions, and we're going to talk about it with two ecologists. My guests are Dr. David Lodge, a conservation biologist and director of Cornell's Atkinson Center for Sustainable. in Ithaca, New York. Welcome back, David. Thank you. And Dr. Karen Aloff's assistant professor of environment and sustainability at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Welcome, Karen.

Thank you. So, David, I gave kind of a definition of what an invasive species is and how it happens, but you're the biologist. What nuance would you add to that? No, I think you hit it well. An invasive species is a species that has two characteristics. One, it came from somewhere else. I wasn't here to begin with. with. And two, once it got here, it has become very abundant and in the end causes changes in the environment or the economy that humans don't like. So it's harmful. And in the Great Lakes, we have this series of offenders that have changed them over time, starting with sea lamp rays,

going to alewives and now these muscles. How different are the lakes ecosystems now from what they were before all the newcomers came into town? Oh, my goodness, they're just completely transformed. We now have, if you take the Great Lakes as a whole, on the order of 200 non-indigenous or alien species of the animals in that bunch, about 25% are invasive. That is harmful. They include many of the species you mentioned, others, A.L.I.C. Lamperee. Spiney water fleas, round gobies, Eurasian Rough, et cetera. And if we just take Lake Michigan as an example, it's just completely transformed if you were to go back. in time to the early 19th century, you would see a completely different set of species that humans were harvesting and that indeed had attracted so many humans around the Great Lakes

early on and continuing today when we have 50 million people around the Great Lakes. And now we have this invasive Asian carp or potentially invasive. Why is everyone so worried about them? Well, we know that they're on the doorstep, if not already in the Great Lakes. lakes, and there's every reason to think that should they become established in the Great Lakes, particularly the lower Great Lakes, they would have very large ecological and quite likely economic impacts. So recent studies, including some work that my collaborators and I have done suggest that if Asian carp invaded and became established in Lake Erie, they would fairly

quickly perhaps make up a third of the weight of all the fish in the Great Lakes. lakes. A third. Yeah, and while that may sound unbelievable, it's consistent with what has happened in places in the United States in the Mississippi River Basin and the Illinois River, where these Asian carp, the same two species, have become established. Karen Alof, you're studying inland lakes, so not the Great Lakes, but the smaller water bodies in the basin. How many Great Lakes species are getting out of those lakes and into the water that

you're studying? out of the Great Lakes themselves? Yeah. Yeah. So one of the examples of this type of an invasion is we've already mentioned quag muscles and zebra mussels, those Dracinid muscles. Another is a fish called Round Gobe, which is a small benthic fish that has invaded all of the Great Lakes. And where it has invaded, it's become extremely abundant. And this is a small fish that can compete with many other.

benthic bottom-dwelling fish within the lake. And it's also a nest predator, meaning that it'll eat the eggs of other fishes. And this fish, the Round Gobe, is now spreading from the lakes themselves into tributaries further upstream and then into inland lakes. How is that process different from the process by which something like Lake Michigan gets invaded? Is it the same, just on a smaller scale, or can different things happen there? Right.

So many of the most problematic invasive species that have been introduced to the Great Lakes themselves have been transferred by ballast water. So round goby and zebra mussels are probably examples of this to the best of our knowledge. But that ballast water is the transfer from shipping and larger cargo containers that wouldn't be in the smaller inland lakes. The introductions of these invasive species into the inland lakes are more likely. by things like the transfer of belligeres or larval mussels that might be attached to boats, or, for example, Rangobi may be accidentally transferred because it's not recognized as an invasive species and could be used as live bait. So in the inland lakes, we have this opportunity to really change the likelihood of an invasive species being introduced

just because of the different vectors that cause their introductions, and we can change our behavior. We can clean our boats and our waiters and other gear, and we can stop using live bait fish that are transferred from one body of water to another. Does that mean these bodies of water are easier to protect than the Great Lakes? I would say in some ways that's true. So the Great Lakes are different than inland lakes, largely because of this connectivity. So veligers or the larvae of trisidid mussels can spread from one habitat to another in Lake Michigan by water currents.

But the inland lakes are relatively more isolated, and so it's easier to prevent the introduction of these species, which is our most effective means of controlling for invasions in those inland lakes. What about David looking at once a species is here, you mentioned that there's evidence that Asian carp are in the land. the Great Lakes already. I mean, what happens next? Is there a, what do we do to control these species once they, they have actually arrived? Well, as Professor Alas just said, that by far, the very best policy and management approach is to prevent them from arriving in the first place. But, and we're still hopeful and with good reason that the Asian carp have not established in the Great Lakes. But if they do, the chat.

for management becomes very much more difficult and much more expensive. So right now, the best approaches are still to prevent additional carp from making their way into Lake Michigan, particularly through that canal in the Chicago area that connects the Mississippi River, watershed where they are abundant, and the Great Lakes, where they are not, and we hope not even established yet. And so there are a number of barriers using a number of technologies, electrical current, bubbles, acoustic approaches. There are a variety of new things that our state and federal agencies are using to try to keep the Asian carp at bay south of Lake Michigan

and prevent them from entering the Great Lakes. And that's our best hope for the Asian carp right now. Sure. I want to go back to the quagga muscles because as Dan writes about in his book, And as we've all talked about offline, those quagga mussels are spreading out of the Great Lakes and going as far as Lake Mead and Lake Powell in the West. What is the solution for that now that those muscles are actually spreading? Do we give up on bodies of water? There's no scientific reason to give up on bodies of water.

And I think Professor Alavs described it well that the way in which the Great Lakes are often the beachhead for invasion. into North America. And that's because we have so many vectors or mechanisms that are like ships and boats and fishermen that are introducing species into the Great Lakes. And from the Great Lakes, they then have opened them through the canals and recreational boaters that go across country, access to the waterways in the Western United States. But we know how to prevent those things. and in areas where boat inspection stations and cleaning stations have been installed,

they can be quite effective in preventing the arrival of species into a water body or even from an economic perspective, the best way is to prevent species from leaving the already infected lakes, in this case, the Great Lakes. So we know that quagga mussels and zebra mussels made their way across the continent to Lake Mead and then other. their Western waterways by clinging to recreational boaters that left the Great Lakes in the winter to go someplace warmer in the American Southwest in the summer. We know how to prevent

those things. We just have underinvested in actually implementing the management steps that are needed. Thank you for that response. Just breaking in here to remind people that I'm Christy Taylor and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Talking about invasive species in the Great Lakes and beyond. And Dr. Alofs, I wanted to talk more about what makes a species. capable of invading, you know, that we talked about there's something like 200 non-native species in the Great Lakes themselves, but a lot of them haven't actually risen to the level of quagumusals, zebra mussels, gobies. What are the traits that an animal or plant needs to completely take over a new ecosystem? This is a really good question. So I think our conversation

has already hit on a couple of important points. So we have to think about the potential vectors for any species. So how it might be taken from one water body to another, for example, and how frequently that transfer may happen, so the propagatal pressure of those different vectors. We also have to think about the habitat and prey suitability of the areas that they're being introduced to. So, for example, one of the reasons that we're so concerned about Asian carp being introduced to the Great Lakes is that it has a really wide thermal tolerance. So if the lakes were too cold for Asian carp, it would be much less of a concern, but they're definitely not too cold or too warm.

And then finally, we think about things that we call life history traits. So, for example, how quickly a species will reach its reproductive maturity and start to produce offspring and how many offspring it will produce at a time. And all of these different factors can be really predictive of whether an invasive species is going to establish and whether it's going to establish. going to continue to spread and become more abundant and have impacts on the ecosystems from there. And you mentioned water temperature, and this is a question I have for you, but also for David a little bit, but the climate is changing. And one thing that happens when the climate changes is we're seeing

species move to different parts of the world that they haven't been involuntarily because of changing temperature zones. What does that do for our definition of what species are native and what species are invaders, Dr. Alofs? Right. So as climate is warming, we have the expectation that species will move their distributions both to higher latitudes and higher altitudes to track their thermally preferred habitats. And this is already happening. We've seen these changes in species distributions or range expanders occurring across the globe and through out different species of animals and plants. And so for example, I've been working on range expansions in inland lakes across Ontario.

So this is the northern range limit of many warm water species falls across Ontario. For example, smallmouth bass and largemouth bass are warm water-adapted predators. So using natural resource data and monitoring data, I've been able to show that these are two of the species that are expanding their ranges northward, and they're establishing inland lakes that were previously too cold for them. So these species are sometimes referred to as native invaders or more simply as range expanders. Range expanders. So that's, is that the, I mean, David, if we're looking at a future of change, what is your outlook on invasive species? protecting ecosystems and deciding what we need to protect as we wrap up. Well, I think the best case future that we might desire is really up to society to define.

Those of us who are scientists can describe what has been, what is, and what could be. But the choices really have to be societies. I think in my experience, most people in the Great Lakes Basin would agree that they want high water, They want high-quality recreational opportunities and high-quality valuable fishing opportunities. And many people value native species. So as the environment changes and as we have more innovative ways to both predict and manage, even in the face of climate change, we can do much more to prevent harmful species from arriving and to benefit the species that we like.

And we're going to have to leave it there, unfortunately. I'm really sorry. Thank you to both of my guests this hour, David Lodge, Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Cornell's Center for Atkinson Center for Sustainability and Dr. Karen Aloff's Assistant Professor in the School for the Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan in Lansing. Thank you for joining me today. Thank you, Christy. It's not too late to pick up Dan Egan's The Death and Life of the Great Lakes to get your book club on. And for our New York listeners, we have an event with author Dan Egan coming up on February 20th. Go to ScienceFriety.com slash book club to get tickets and find our newsletter, discussion, questions, and more.

And also, Science Friday VoxPop app, our next degree of change. We're looking at how climate change is affecting Native American communities. If you're a tribal member, tell us the climate change concerns in your community that's on Science Friday Vox Pop Op, wherever you get your app. Science Friday's Voxpop app. Go to the air and leave your comments. Have a great weekend. And I'm Iraflato in New York.