Science Friday - Early Spring, Mumps On The Rise, Gulf Of Maine, Supermassive Black Hole. March 31, 2023, Part 1

Episode Date: March 31, 2023

A Supermassive Black Hole The Mass Of 30 Billion Suns This week, astronomers reported that they may have found signs of one of the largest black holes ever detected–a space behemoth the mass of some 30 billion suns. The supermassive black hole, located in part of the Abell 1201 galaxy cluster, was detected using a combination of gravitational lensing and supercomputer simulations. First, the astronomers observed how the images of other more distant objects viewed by the Hubble Space Telescope were warped by the vast gravitational well produced by the black hole. They compared those images to thousands of simulations created via a supercomputer, and found that a simulation containing a supermassive black hole matched the real-world images. The work was reported in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Umair Irfan, staff writer at Vox, joins SciFri’s Kathleen Davis to talk about the finding and other stories from the week in science, including the FDA’s approval of over-the-counter Narcan, the real-world challenges of EV charging, and the creation of a meatball–made of mammoth.   What’s Driving A Rise In Mumps Cases In The United States? In 1971, the United States rolled out a revolutionary new vaccine for measles, mumps, and rubella. The MMR vaccine nearly eradicated all three of those viruses by the start of the 21st century. Over the last several years, there have been numerous measles outbreaks cropping up across the country, especially among unvaccinated kids. What about mumps—that second “m” in the MMR vaccine? Since 2006, there have been mumps outbreaks too. But unlike measles, most of the people getting the mumps are vaccinated. And they’re older too, mostly teens and young adults. New research suggests that the efficacy of the mumps vaccine wanes over time, unlike the ones for measles and rubella. Guest host Shahla Farzan talks with Dr. Deven Gokhale, co-author of a recent study on the reemergence of mumps. Gokhale recently completed his PhD from the University of Georgia’s Odum School of Ecology, based in Athens Georgia.   Foundational Food Sources In The Gulf Of Maine Are Failing At the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences, researchers Barney Balch and Catherine Mitchell are looking at a map affixed to a large table. “We’re looking at a chart of the Gulf of Maine, and right across the middle there’s a line that’s drawn from Portland, in Maine, to Yarmouth, in Nova Scotia,” Mitchell says. That line is the route along which Bigelow researchers have been taking regular measurements for the last 25 years. They’ve analyzed chemical and temperature data that help describe how the waters of the gulf are changing. One tool they use is a six-foot long cylinder with wings. “This is an autonomous underwater vehicle, or a glider,” Mitchell says. “So it’s a big robot that moves up and down in a yoyo-like pattern, from the top of the ocean to the bottom of the ocean right across the middle of the Gulf of Maine. So it’s measuring a bunch of science things as it goes. It looks a bit like a big yellow torpedo. It’s got some wings on it.” Read the rest at sciencefriday.com.   Is Spring Falling Out Of Sync? Each year, it feels like spring comes as a surprise—too early or too late. For example, new maps reveal that spring is 13 days late in Sacramento, California but two weeks early in Richmond, Virginia. And that could be a problem because plants and animals use environmental cues, like temperature, to know when to flower, migrate, breed, or emerge from hibernation. So when the seasons are thrown off, what happens to those natural rhythms that once flowed together seamlessly? Guest host Shahla Farzan talks with Dr. David Inouye, professor emeritus at the University of Maryland and a researcher at the Rocky Mountain Biological Station, and Dr. Theresa Crimmins, director of the USA National Phenology Network and research professor at the University of Arizona. They discuss the variability in seasons, and the cascade of effects these changes can have on ecosystems.   Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.     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 Shayla Farsan, and I'm a science editor with American Public Media. And I'm SciFRI producer Kathleen Davis. We're filling in for IRA this week. Later this hour, the medical mysteries of mumps and why there are more infections these days. And what happens to the bees, birds, and butterflies when spring springs a little earlier? But first, if you've been feeling that things are spiraling a bit out of control this week, it may not just B.U. This week, astronomers reported that they may have found signs of one of the largest black holes ever detected, a space behemoth, the mass of 30 billion suns. Joining me now to talk about that and other science stories of the week is Umair Irfan, science writer at Vox, based in Washington, D.C. Welcome

back, Umar. Hi, Kathleen. So tell me more about this black hole. 30 billion sons. It really sounds like a lot. It is. And what's kind of surprising about this, it was actually hard to observe. The thing is, when we observe black holes, usually when they're, you know, millions of light years away, we have to look for signals that they're actually in the process of devouring something, eating a nearby star or a planet. And as they take that matter in and they compress it under that immense gravity, it gives off x-rays and light that we can detect. When black holes are far away from any bits of matter, they're really hard to see because they're not giving off that level of radiation, even if they're huge and massive. And so what scientists used here was a technique called gravitational lensing. And rather than looking for the black hole itself, they looked for signs that light was bending around this black hole. Scientists started observing this kind of pattern here around this particular black hole around 2004. And only recently did the advances in observation and supercomputing technology catch up for them to actually calculate and determine that something was there. So this sounds really interesting. But does this get us anything beyond

you know, just another addition to the list of really big black holes. Well, it shows us what's possible. Just seeing something this massive that could still be hidden from our site shows that we need to look for these kinds of things in other places. And we have a better understanding of just how to find perhaps other ultra-massive black holes that may be lurking out there. So let's stay in space for a moment. A few weeks ago, we talked about the fact that a leaking Soyuz craft might mean that

astronauts on board the International Space Station might have to stay up there for longer. That leaky capsule returned to Earth empty this week? Tell me what's going on there. Yeah, that's right. American astronaut Frank Rubio was supposed to return home and instead is going to be staying until September. And that will likely make him the American with the longest stay in space. But that's going to have some interesting effects for science because now scientists can study effects of space over long periods of time. And one thing that they're starting to study more is aging. That brings us to our next story, which isn't about Frank Rubio specifically, but yes, is about aging. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

Right. I read this article in Inverse by John Kelvey, and it looks at this new study that examines biomarkers for aging in space. Basically, scientists have found that when astronauts come back from space, they have all these aging related biomarkers that seem to indicate that they're aging prematurely, but they weren't quite sure of what the mechanism was. And so this team of researchers, they started studying this protein called Sumo, which stands for small, ubiquitin-like modifier. And they found that under normal gravity condition, Sumo is known to respond to stress and play roles in repairing DNA. But in microgravity, when they engineered yeast to produce this protein, they found that it actually increased the abundance of certain kinds of protein by more

than 50% compared to normal gravity. And they're not quite sure exactly what this is doing, but it helps put a link in the chain of what is causing this sort of premature aging signs here. So this isn't quite like the movie Interstellar, but it may bring us a little bit closer to understanding aging? A little bit. You know, in interstellar, the whole thing there was about relativity, that when you're moving really fast in space, time effectively for you moves slower than it does for people on Earth. And it seems like, well, that dividend with aging may be counteracted in other ways. The microgravity could be accelerating the aging on your body and that may not necessarily end up helping you over the long term. Okay, let's go back down to Earth.

For health news of a different kind, the FDA gave approval for the drug Narcan to be sold over the counter. First, Umar, give us a quick rundown of what Narcan is and tell me why this is such a big deal. Right. Narcan is a drug that reverses opioid overdoses. It's administered as an injectable or as a nasal spray. And it's fairly simple to use and it's fairly effective. And it's just in time because in the U.S., opioids have killed about 80,000 people per year in recent years. And we've seen a spike in deaths related to fentanyl, another opioid that's been spreading throughout different parts of the U.S. as well. And this seems to be a very critical backstop to be able to prevent some of the worst effects of opioid overdoses. It sounds to me like making this over the

counter is an undeniable win. It is, but it doesn't solve the entire problem because while it is over the counter, insurance companies may not necessarily pay for it. And, you know, right now it costs about $38 per dose out of pocket. And that could deter people from buying it or keeping it on hand in case of emergencies. And then there's also fears that it can create a moral hazard that it might encourage more reckless behavior if this is more widely available. But health officials and public health researchers say that it's actually a good idea to have more of these around to prevent deaths. And the company that makes them says that they'll have more of them available on store shelves and even available to buy online later this summer. So next up, you have a story about

electric vehicles and the challenges that come with charging them when you're on the go. Yeah, I talked to a couple electric vehicle owners about some problems they've had at the these charging stations, specifically when it comes to superchargers. These are the charging stations that can deliver lots of power to a battery and charge you up in just a few minutes rather than the hours it typically takes when you use a wall outlet. The problem is though if something goes wrong, it can go really wrong. And the people that I talked to had their cars bricked. Essentially, they wouldn't work anymore. And in one case, the plug actually ended up welding to the car and they had to pry it out with a crowbar. And the reason is this is important is that, you know,

EVs are now more popular than ever. Their ranges are longer than ever and people are starting to make road trips. But the infrastructure hasn't quite caught up and it's not as reliable as it could be. And that might be deterring the adoption of EVs in the U.S. So what's the solution here? I mean, other than keeping these chargers in order? Well, there are a few. One is that the government could potentially enforce uniform standards across EV chargers and car makers so that the chargers and cars aren't all speaking different languages. They stick to a consistent. protocol and a standard, and that makes it a little bit easier and leaves less room for things to go wrong. There are also some EV charging companies that are developing chargers that have more fail safes built in. Tesla said earlier this year that it's going to be opening its supercharger network to other automakers as well, and so that'll help bolster the number of EV charging stations

that are out there. And I talk to a couple of companies that are building, you know, batteries into the EV charger so that they don't need to draw as much power from the grid, which means that they can deploy more quickly and with fewer permits and help get through some of the batteries. of the red tape that's holding them back right now. So let's move on to a story that certainly put a smile on my face. I hope it did the same for you, Umar. There's a new study out that shows that some dinosaurs had lips. Can you tell me about this?

Yeah, that's right. You know, when you imagine a Tyrannosaurus Rex or what you've seen in the movies, you see this sort of snagletoothed dinosaur with teeth sticking out. Well, this team of researcher says that's probably the wrong image. That dinosaurs, like a lot of modern lizards, probably had lips that. covered their teeth. What they did was that they looked at this dinosaur called despletosaurus, which is a relative of the T-Rex. And they hypothesized that if the teeth were exposed to air, that would dry out those teeth and make the enamel on them brittle

and prone to splitting and cracking. And so they looked for signs of that on these dinosaur teeth. And they found that they actually looked like that they were very well protected. And that pointed them toward the direction that perhaps that there was a covering over them, maybe a set of lips. then they also looked at modern lizards like Komodo dragons and monitor lizards and looked at how their teeth responded to having lips around them and said that they had a lot in common with these fossilized teeth, get pointing them in the direction that perhaps there were some lips covering these dinosaurs. So they weren't always bearing their fangs. But some scientists disagree saying that the researchers didn't account for changes in bone texture and differences between modern lizards and dinosaurs. But this is an intriguing finding because soft tissue is not something that's fossilized. And so we have to use a lot of our our imaginations to fill in the blanks. And just to be clear, I shouldn't be imagining some, you know, big, juicy red lips on a T-Rex. No, these dinosaurs were not getting filler. They were not, you know, using Instagram filters.

They still looked like dinosaurs. They still look kind of mean and scary, but not with those sharp teeth sticking out. Well, speaking of pointy things, you have a story about a biotech advance that uses bacteria as a syringe. Can you tell me about this? Right. There's been a lot of work recently about using microorganisms as tools like using virus phages to attack bacteria or using good bacteria to treat illnesses. Well, one team of researchers, they found out that they could actually harness this particular feature of this bacterium called photohabdis.

And what they found is that by engineering it, what it would do is that it would actually insert a tube into targeted cells and inject something. And what the scientists say is that effectively this becomes sort of a syringe that, can be used to inject medicine, protein, and even MRI or other kinds of, you know, gene editing tools to help deliver medicine or cause other kinds of modifications in a very targeted way. So we have time for one more quick story and it's getting a little bit warmer outside. So if people are considering an early spring cookout, there's some food news this week involving a mammoth meatball.

Can you tell me about this? There's this company in Australia called Vow, and they announced this week that they have successfully grown woolly mammoth tissue, and they turned it into a meatball, which seems like an odd thing to do when you've been able to engineer and grow an extinct animal. But they wanted to do this as sort of a proof of concept. They were able to isolate the mammoth myoglobin gene, which gives meat its red distinctive taste in color. And they were able to also fill in the blanks using African elephant DNA. and they were able to grow this in a laboratory and grow enough of it that they could actually make, you know, a physical solid object out of this. Now, I don't think anybody is going to be eating this anytime soon and it's not clear exactly what direction they want to go in this. But lab grown meat is proposed as one of the solutions to help deal with warming and some of the impacts of agriculture on the environment.

You know, about 40% of the world's methane comes from livestock production. But it's also sort of a dicey area ethically. and also regulators are still trying to figure out what they can do with this. Singapore right now is the only country in the world where you can actually get, you know, a mammoth meat or rather a lab-grown meat. But the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is evaluating this as well. So you may not be able to buy a mammoth sandwich, but perhaps something else that was grown in a lab could be on your plate sometime soon.

Well, considering that I am not a billionaire, I probably will not be able to sink my teeth into a mammoth meatball. but I can only imagine that it tastes, I don't even know what it would taste like. If you were given the opportunity, would you take one? Would you try one? You know what? I would maybe take a bite,

and then I'd probably feel very ethically conflicted about it later. That's all the time that we have for now. I'd like to thank my guest, Umair Irfan, Science writer at Vox, based in Washington, D.C. Thanks so much for joining me. My pleasure, Kathleen.

Thanks for having me. After the break, why are the mumps back? It might not be the reason that you think. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Kathleen Davis. And I'm Shayla Farsan. Next, we're going to take a step back in time to 1971.

The year the U.S. rolled out a revolutionary new vaccine for measles, mumps, and rebella. The MMR vaccine almost eradicated all three of those viruses, for a while, at least. You've probably seen headlines about this over the last few years. Measles cases popping up across the country, especially among unmanned, vaccinated kids. But what about mumps, that second M. MMR? Well, since 2006, there have been mumps outbreaks, too. But unlike measles, most of the people getting the mumps are vaccinated, and they're older, too, mostly teens and young adults. So what's going on here? To help answer that question and more is my guest, Dr. Davin Goklay, who co-authored a paper on the topic. He recently

completed his Ph.D. from the University of Georgia's Odom School of Econi based in Athens, Georgia. Dr. Goklay, welcome to Science Friday. Hi, thanks. Thanks for having me. We've been seeing these big cyclical swings in Mumps cases in the U.S. since about 2006. Is there something in particular about that year that could help explain why? So there are multiple reasons why we have seen these cases research during that period of time. One story about this particular year is to do with.

There might be importations of college students who had gone back for a vacation and they come back, already infected and carrying the virus. And since the vaccine effectiveness has been altering over a period of time, you start seeing these resurgence as, you know, infected individuals come in contact with susceptible individuals within the population. Right. So I'm curious about the effectiveness of the Mumps vaccine. Does that protection from being vaccinated, wane, or, over time? Yeah, it's interesting because the real ineffectiveness is not really very well

been understood. There have been these competing hypotheses that we investigated in this research article that we recently published. And so one of the hypothesis is that the effectiveness just wanes over a period of time. So you get vaccinated. And then after some period, the vaccine is just ineffective against the virus. And the other hypothesis is that it's always just imperfectly acting against the circulating strain. What we found in our article was that waning is the more probable reason of this delayed resurgence, as you can see in the early 2000s. So not necessarily that there's a mismatch between the vaccine strain and the circulating strain, but more so that protection from the vaccine really does decline over time then. That is definitely the case.

And in a sense, that is a good thing because if it is just that the vaccine wanes over a period of time, the only thing you have to do is then boost the immunity at a population level by introducing boosters within population. Worse as if the vaccine was leaky or was imperfectly working, then you would have to may have to change the vaccine altogether. So that is a good news, not a bad news. So what's the time scale that we're talking about here when we're talking about waning immunity? Like, is it a couple years? Is it longer? Yeah, so our analysis shown that the immunity derived to the vaccine lasts on an average for around 34 to 36 years with like a mean of around 35 years. So it's a very tightly bounded interval that we found and which has been reflected in many other studies, one which was predominantly featured in another journal called Science Translation Medicine in 2018.

who reported an average time span of around 27 years. So it pretty much checks out. So you had mentioned the study that you co-authored earlier this year. And in that study, you estimated about one in three vaccinated people might lose their immunity to the mumps by about age 18. So we're potentially talking about a pretty large swath of the population here who could be not immune to the mumps. Is that right? Yeah, that might actually be the case. And the worst part being is because we do not have a schedule for boosters for adults,

a major proportion of adults could have lost their immunity and might be susceptible to the disease now. Why are vaccinated people still protected against the measles and rebella, but not mumps? Is there something different about mumps then? So the main reason why the mumps vaccine acts a little differently from its other counterparts in the MAMI, vaccine is because we don't really understand what constitutes for immunity for mops as opposed to measles or a rebella for that matter. So what happens is when you get vaccinated, you get an immune response. So you get like a surge of antibodies in your system. But what translates to protection given these amounts or this amount of an immune response is not very well understood

for mom. So that that's one principal reason why there isn't a good explanation behind why the immunity wanes because you kind of see that the antibodies decay over a period of time. But how does that map to protection against the disease is not very well understood. So that's that's one reason why we are not, why this vaccine or why this component within the MMR vaccine works differently from the measles or Rubella. Yeah, you mentioned that the immune response to mumps is still a bit of a mystery, which is honestly kind of surprising to me, just given how long this virus has been around and how long the vaccine has been around.

Yeah, but that's because the issue of protection is far more complicated than like an active immune response because you can have an active immune response as a it could just be a function of having the virus in your systems your body reacts to it or your immune system reacts to it but what is it protecting against is a very complicated and multi-staged process like does it does it only protect against transmission or does it protect against you know establishment of an infection or does it protect against disease of that infection and it is a very complicated problem for moms and I, as much as I would want to answer this, there isn't a very good answer. We just don't understand it yet. Right. So when we're talking about protection, the majority of

kids in the U.S., about 95% or so have gotten the MMR vaccine, but overall vaccination rates have gone down during the pandemic. And the CDC estimates somewhere around a quarter of a million kindergartners are vulnerable to getting these viruses now. And at the same time, we've also seen this uptick in anti-vaccine messaging in recent years. Do you think that either of these could have anything to do with the increase in mumps cases that we're seeing now? Yeah, there might be a conjoined effect of a bunch of these factors. They might be acting simultaneously, for sure.

But at the same time, until 2018, at least, we don't see a drop that is precipitous enough within the vaccine coverage, at least. to lose the immunity that we had acquired, at least for children. So since the pandemic began, everything has gone off the norm of things, as we would like to call it. So these very recent months transmissions might be associated with, like, changes in the vaccine coverages. But overall, until 2018, at least, we don't really see a big drop in vaccine coverages. What might be happening, though, is that you get a code. of individuals who were previously vaccinated and who kind of lose their immunity by the age of

18 and then they get exposed and hence you get like the spike and a shift of this age of infection to to a higher age. That explanation seems to be more in tune with the dynamics in incidents that we see recently than then the hypothesis about oh there might not be enough vaccine going on. And most people getting the mumps are already vaccinated and older, right? Exactly. Exactly. If someone wants to know whether they're still immune to the mumps, are there things that they can do or things they can check? Yeah, as I said, unfortunately, there might not be good tests to check for immunity against mumps. But what one could do is they could ask their doctors to boost them against mumps because it's a very

commonly available vaccine, I would recommend people getting boosted rather than waiting to see whether or not they were immune to it. So during the 2006 epidemic, which was in a university setting, nearly all students in the university were boosted against moms, even if they were, you know, infected. So it's a very accessible vaccine and everybody should just get vaccinated. In what age would you recommend that folks consider getting a booster? I think anybody who's an adult, as I said, on an average, the immunity lasts for around 33 years. But that is an average characteristic. So there is a distribution associated with it.

So there might be individuals who lose their immunity faster than the others. So it's still relatively rare to get mumps in the U.S., but it can cause some pretty serious symptoms for adults. so things like hearing loss and infertility, should we be concerned about waning immunity kind of on a population level? Yeah, so that is the main problem with what happens is what we're currently seeing are these transients as more and more people start losing their immunity. You start seeing these spikes of epidemics within the population. If the immunity isn't restored, however, you'd start seeing bigger waves of mumps.

and most of those will happen in adults, given these patterns, given that there is a severe disease associated with adulthood, amongst diseases. So I would recommend people who have reached an 18 years of age to get vaccinated. That's all the time we have. I'd like to thank my guest, Dr. Davin Goklay, who recently completed his PhD from the University of Georgia's Odom School of Ecology, based in Athens, Georgia. Thanks so much.

Thank you. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. And now it's time to check in on the state of science. This is KERNO. St. Louis Public Radio News. Iowa Public Radio News. Local science stories of national significance. The Gulf of Maine is a complex aquatic ecosystem.

It stretches from the coast of Massachusetts up to New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. It's home to everything from lobsters and scallops to whales. Like many aquatic ecosystems, the Gulf of Maine is changing. New research shows the teeny tiny phytoplankton in the Gulf of Maine are in decline. So what could this mean for the Gulf's food web? Joining me to talk about it is my guest. Murray Carpenter, climate reporter for Maine public based in Portland, Maine. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, thanks for having me on. So explain to me why phytoplankton are just so important in the Gulf of Maine. Phytoplankton, like plants on land, they absorb carbon dioxide and use photosynthesis to grow.

And then these little phytoplankton in turn feed everything from zooplankton to clams and fish. And so everything in the Gulf of Maine depends on them, from lobsters to right whales to bluefin tuna. Some oceanographers even like to say, all fish are diatoms. And Barney Balch of the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Science in East Booth Bay, Maine, put it in simple terms. The part that is the most disconcerting is, you know, these are the microscopic plants that you can't see with the naked eye, yet they are the bottom of the marine food web on which all life in the sea depends. So phytoplankton, you know, as that clip said, they are kind of this building block that the rest of the food web is built atopop of. But they are very, very, very small. So how do researchers actually measure how robust this population?

They've been pretty creative about this. The Bigelow Lab is a nonprofit that's on the coast of Maine, and they've been doing research on the Gulf of Maine for a long time. They're named after the pioneering oceanographer Henry Bigelow. The Bigelow researchers noticed that a ferry between Portland, Maine, and Yarmouth, Nova Scotia was crossing the Gulf of Maine regularly at a very strategic location. So they began taking water samples from the ferry. Then they went one step further, and they built a bona fide sampling lab that they could actually mount on a flatbed truck and they would just drive this truck right onto the ferry

and use it as a mobile sampling lab. So they kind of created this on-the-go laboratory. Yeah, that's exactly what it is. But the ferry service hasn't been continuous. You know, some years it doesn't operate at all. So sometimes they've used private research vessels along the same transect, you know, taking samples. And sometimes they use autonomous glider.

It's basically a sampling robot. It's like six feet long, bright yellow. and it looks like a torpedo with wings, and they just send that across to get samples in the Gulf of Maine when the ferry is not running. And all together with the robot and the ferry and, you know, the private research trips, they've done hundreds of trips over 25 years,

and they've gathered this data together in what they call the Gulf of Maine North Atlantic Times series. And there's yet another variable here. They sink these trips up with NASA satellites. They take photos to the water as they pass overhead. So this allows them to correlate their observations on the water with the colors observed from the satellite. And Bigelow researcher Catherine Mitchell told me the color of the water reveals more than you might think. It's a mix of all these different things.

There's the phytoplankton in there. There's sediments in there. There's this dissolved humic tea-like materials from the land, the forest and the trees and the grass that are in there. And they're all mixed in together to give it that overall color that we're seeing. So 25 years of a lot of data, how have these scientists seen the ecosystem change over that period of time? One huge change is that the phytoplankton populations have declined dramatically. Balchian Mitchell published a paper last year and it showed that phytoplankton in the Gulf of Maine declined 65% between 2001 and 2018. Wow. I mean, is this because of the usual culprit climate change or is there something else going on here?

Yeah, climate's playing a huge role. The researchers were clear that it's really complicated. For starters, the Gulf of Maine is warming really fast. Research from the Gulf of Maine Research Institute shows the water's now nearly four degrees Fahrenheit warmer than it was as recently as like between 2001 and 2018. Wow. They say it's warming faster than 99% of the world's oceans. And on top of that, heavier precipitation some years is sending more fresh water into the Gulf. And that does two things.

One, the water's a bit murkier. and this actually blocks the sunlight from the phytoplankton. But the other thing it does is it stratifies the water. I mean, Bultz put it to me like it's like unmixed salad dressing. So you have the less dense, fresher water on top and the denser, saltier water beneath. And this prevents the kind of mixing that would allow the nutrients to come up from the bottom and reach the phytoplankton towards the top. So there's a lot going on there.

So a lot of changes happening in the Gulf of Maine. what could the future look like? Well, the researchers were very careful to not really predict exactly what it might look like. But they do say the trends, you know, are pretty ominous in a way because the warming trend is predicted to continue. And with the warming, we're seeing these declines in phytoplankton. But as Barney Balch told me, he really hopes he's wrong about this. That's all the time that we have for now. I would like to thank my guest, Murray Carpenter, climbing.

reporter for Maine Public based in Portland, Maine. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, Kathleen. We have to take a break. And when we come back, spring is springing earlier in a lot of places. So what does that mean for the rest of the ecosystem? We'll be right back after this short break. This is Science Friday. I'm Kathleen Davis. And I'm Shayla Farsan. Okay, Kathleen, I live in St. Louis, Missouri. And here, the magnolia trees and daffodils and witch hazel, always, started blooming weeks ago. And I am, once again, amazed, but also not surprised by just how early spring has sprung this year. Yeah, I'm seeing cherry blossoms and crocuses here in New York City. But spring looks very different across the U.S. Our listener Chris in California, Sierra Nevada

Mountains, sent us a voice memo. We are surrounded by four and five and six feet of snow still. and I hear people, other places talking about flowers and pollen and the signs of spring, but we have not seen that here. But for Melissa in the Hudson Valley, spring is here. My first Scythia plant is blooming and it's March 24th. Pretty sure that's a record. As ready as I am for winter to be over, and I am definitely ready, this is also concerning. All of these different plants and animals basically have a built-in,

clock that tells them when to migrate and breed and bloom, you know, important seasonal activities. And for a lot of species, climate change is messing with that clock. It's called a phenological shift. And scientists are trying to figure out what these could mean for the future. Joining us to talk about that are Dr. David Inouye, Professor Emeritus at the University of Maryland and a researcher at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory. He's based in Peonia, Colorado.

and Dr. Teresa Crimmons, Director of the USA National Phonology Network and Professor at the University of Arizona based in Tucson. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you. Thank you, Shaila. So, David, let's start with you. You've been working in Colorado's high alpine meadows for the past 50 years. Could you describe that environment for us? What does it look like for people who haven't been there?

Well, the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory is situated at 9,500 feet in the West Alk Mountain. of Colorado. So it's in the East River Valley and the labs in the valley bottom and we look up at the mountains surrounding us, that 13,000 foot peaks. And it has a relatively short summer. So right now there's about 90 inches of snow on the ground. And it's going to be a little while before that melts and the road opens. But it will be a very busy summer once the snow melts and all of the phenological cues that trigger flowering and activity of polonel. And herbivores commence. So speaking of which, you and your collaborators have collected one of the longest running and most detailed data sets out there on these alpine ecosystems.

Why did you start doing this in the first place? There were a group of us who were all graduate students working at the biological lab in the early 1970s. And we were interested in pollinators. Some of us were working on hummingbirds. Some of us working on bumble bees, some on butterflies. and we decided we wanted to learn more about the floral resources that those pollinators depend on. So we each picked a habitat, and we each went around and set up some two-by-two-meter plots. And then for the rest of the summer, we went around and counted every flower that bloomed in those plots.

And at the end of that season, we had some very interesting data, but it seemed like it might be interesting to also to find out how different is it from one year to the next. So we continued that for a second year. And at that point, most of my collaborators had the data they needed and stopped counting their flower plots. But for whatever reason, I decided to keep my plots going and picked up one other set of plots. And 53 years later, we are still counting those flowers. So how many records so far do you think that you've counted in those 53 years? Oh, we have counted millions of flowers because of the fact that we're counting every flower of about 130 different species and doing that.

every other day or three times a week for the whole growing season. So those numbers add up quickly. I bet. So in the many decades that you've been working there, have you noticed shifts in timing with your own eyes? Yes, definitely. The phenology at that altitude is almost entirely set by when the snow melts. So that determines the beginning of the growing season. It determines when the migratory species move in, when the species that are hibernating underground emerged from their winter hibernation. So the snow melt date has been changing, partly because we're getting typically less snow than we used to, and it's melting earlier than it used to. So that starts the whole phenological clock earlier. It used to be that we could pretty much count on seeing the

beginning of flowering if I got there at the end of May. But now, by the middle of April on south-facing slopes, we sometimes have flowering. So we've been talking about the shifts and timing that you've been seeing in the alpine environment, David. But of course, this is happening all over the world, not just in this ecosystem, right? That's right. I think anywhere in the world that you look, seasonality is changing. And it's changing at different rates and different places. So that causes problems, for instance, for migratory species, like the migratory hummingbirds that are overwintering in Mexico, are using some cue, presumably an environmental cue, for when to begin their migration north to their breeding grounds, but that queue may not be changing at the same rate as the

queues along the way, like the flowers that they're going to be visiting in Arizona, perhaps near Teresa, and not at the same rate as the flowers that are up in Colorado where they're going to be reproducing for the summer. So those differences over time and space are creating problems for a variety of species. Right. Teresa, as we mentioned, you're the director of the USA National Phonology Network. this giant database that keeps track of the timing of plants and wildlife and seasons. Why is tracking that kind of information important? I think David did such a fantastic job kind of illustrating that.

It's really the repeated observations. When you have information on what's happening and when it's happening at a location or even on an individual plant from one year to the next, that's where you can really start to see whether things are changing. There is very often a lot of variability from one year to the next in terms of the timing and when plants or animals undergo their transitions. But when you can look over many years, you can start to see, is there also some sort of temporal shift layered on top of that year-to-year variability? And that's what our network is really intended to help us understand. How are those data collected for the network? We rely on the power of volunteers, basically.

We have thousands of very dedicated individuals, both professional scientists and volunteer scientists, all across the whole country, who very graciously dedicate their time and talents and make repeated reports on what they're seeing happening in plants and animals in their yards. The power of citizen scientists. I love it. So what are we seeing this year in the U.S. in terms of spring timing? This year's been an interesting spring. We had a pretty standard start to things at the very beginning of the year. Nothing really started anomalously early down in Florida. But once we started to hit February, things really picked up in much of the eastern U.S. Southeastern and eastern U.S. experienced a really mild winter and then a lot of warmth very early in the year. And as a consequence, leaf out and flowering activity and activity in some early spring animals and insects has started in some cases many weeks earlier than average in the eastern U.S. And then the flip side of that is that it's been cooler than average in much of the western U.S. And so we are having a slower start to spring here in Arizona, where I'm at, and in some of the Western states. David, you alluded to this a little earlier, but what happens when plants and wildlife shift their timing?

Like, let's say a plant blooms early. What kind of chain of events can that set off? Well, for instance, the, let me use the glacier lily, erythronium grandeflorum as an example. Some of the earliest individuals to bloom are flowering before the, bumblebee queens emerge from underground, and those are the primary pollinators. And so although both species are now starting their seasons earlier than they used to, they're not changing at the same rate. So the earliest glacier lollies to bloom are not getting pollinated. And that kind of mismatch is something that we see between the flowers and the migratory hummingbirds as well. Yeah, it sounds like

what's tough here is that not every species is responding in the same way here. So maybe some are shifting their timing by a couple days. Maybe some are shifting by a month or not shifting at all. Like, is that what makes this hard to really kind of wrap your arms around and understand? It makes it a little bit difficult to study. Perhaps makes it also more interesting because it means you can't generalize. For instance, we have found through looking at different bumblebee species that they're not all responding in the same way. So we can't even say, well, here's what happens to bumblebees. We have to say, well, here's what happens to bomb us apositis, or here's what happens to bombus flavafrons.

Teresa, are there certain kinds of species that maybe we would expect to be at higher risk from changes in timing generally? Oh, that's a really good question. There are different cues that drive the start of activity in different plants and animals. In a lot of species, in the springtime, it has to do with how much warmth they've been exposed to, but sometimes it also has another important key ingredient is how much chill they've been exposed to. Other species are very sensitive to the amount of light, and so they, even if it is warm, they won't respond if the days aren't long enough. Where we really do start to see mismatches emerge, like what David has been describing, is when you have two interacting species that respond to different cues. And so if you

have, for example, a species that's really mostly responding to day length, that species is not likely to be changing the timing of its activity very much because day length is a fixed parameter from one year to the next. In contrast, temperature is very much variable from year to year, and that is where we are seeing these trends and species that are mostly responsive to temperatures are the ones that we are seeing some of the greatest advancements in. And so species that are the most likely to be vulnerable are those that are both showing big changes. and where they are dependent upon another species and that species is not changing. So where mismatches are beginning to emerge.

So it sounds like there's kind of this whole suite of different cues that species may be responding to. So it may not necessarily just be temperature then. Absolutely. And honestly, that's a very active area of research. We know in broad brush terms that these factors play a role in shaping when species undergo their different activity from one year to the next. But when it comes down to specific species, in a lot of cases, we don't really know the exact cues.

And so that's one of the reasons why our network exists. Those data that are being contributed by volunteers across the whole country are actively being used by researchers to try and disentangle and better understand what those cues are so that we can better understand and anticipate where mismatches might start to emerge, which species may be more vulnerable going into the future, and hopefully what we can do to prevent major problems. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. I'm Shayla Farsan talking with two researchers about the effects of spring, springing earlier. David, when we talk about sort of these tiny changes over a long period of time, it can be kind of hard to feel them, right? Like I'm imagining kind of a lobster slowly being boiled in a pot of water. And, you know, some of the big challenges for us are what we often refer to in ecology as this idea of shifting

baselines, right? Like what we think is normal today, maybe is very abnormal compared to what we would have experienced, you know, 40 or 50 years ago. But it seems like these kind of long data sets or large data sets like you've collected can help alleviate that a bit. Is that right? I think they're actually essential for gaining an understanding. The high altitude area where I work is very variable from one year to the next. This year, we have a way above average snowpack. Last year it was way below average, and I couldn't do very much with two data points given that kind of variation. So I really needed to have 10 years of data before I could begin to see trends. One of the projects I looked at was what triggers flowering by a particular species of plant

that doesn't bloom very often. And it took me close to 30 years of data points before I had enough data points to be able to pick out a trend amongst all the variability. So, David, you have dedicated your career to studying these alpine meadows in Colorado. And as you mentioned, you've seen them change a lot over the course of your career. What are some of your big concerns moving forward? Well, I guess one of my concerns is how rapidly things are changing. We're seeing new species moving up to the altitude of the biological lab. We didn't used to have foxes there or moose there, but they're now there year-round.

There's a new species of mosquito that's appeared, a new species of ground squirrel that's moved up in altitude. So there are all these changes occurring in the plant and animal communities because of the ongoing climate change. So the world is going to look very different in the future from what it does now. And I think that's one reason for why it's important to be trying to document what is the community like now and what's changing about it. I can imagine it must be pretty hard to watch. watch this place that you really love change a lot and change in very obvious and visible ways. Yeah, it is difficult. I'm fortunate to have some family members who also do research with me now. My son and his wife are both collaborators and now taking the lead on some of this long-term

phenological research. And their daughter, my granddaughter, spends her summers out there. And I think it's fun to show her the ecology of this area. But what she experiences, she's my age now, is probably going to be very different from what she's seeing now as a teenager. Yeah, I can imagine that. Teresa, you said earlier that the phonology network depends a lot on community scientists to contribute. So how can somebody get involved if they're interested? Ah, they can come to our website, USANPN.org. And we've got all the information that it takes to get started as an observer in Nature's Notebook. There's a list of over 1,700 species of plants and animals that are available now to observe. And basically what it entails is registering yourself

as an observer, choosing a site where you're going to make repeated observations. So we strongly encourage for that to be something that's very accessible, like your own yard. And then identifying one or more of the plants or animals that you would make repeated observations on. And then you become acquainted with the questions that you would be responding to each time that you're making an observation. And you can do that either via paper data sheet or through our app called the Nature's Notebook app. Great. And we should mention here that if you listeners would like to get involved with this kind of research, we'll link to some of those citizen science programs on our website. That's Science Friday.com slash spring. And I think we're going to have to leave it there.

Thanks so much to my guest, Dr. David Inouye is a professor emeritus at the University of Maryland and a researcher at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory. He's based in Payser, Hione, Colorado, and Dr. Teresa Crimmons, the director of the USA National Phonology Network and Research Professor at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Thank you both so much for joining me. Thank you, Shela. Thank you. And a springtime program note.

Are you a STEM educator? Citizen Science Month is coming up this April, and it's a great opportunity to get out and do some real-world science with kids. So check out ScienceFriiday.com slash citizen science for more information. That's Science Friday.com slash citizen science. And that's it for this hour. Here are some of the folks who helped us put this show together. Danielle Dana Johnson is our executive director.

Diana Plasker is our experiences manager. Beth Rami is our controller. And Ariel Zich is our director of audience. B.J. Leatherman composed our theme music. If you missed any part of this program or want to hear it again, subscribe to our podcasts. I'm Shayla Farsan. And I'm Kathleen Davis. is back next week.