Science Friday - Endangered Birds, Urban Wildlife, Lyme Disease Test, Rodent Social Behavior. August 26, 2022, Part 2

Episode Date: August 26, 2022

Attracting Birds To Prime Habitat By Playing Recordings Of Their Calls How do you know a restaurant is good? If the parking lot is full of cars, that’s a pretty good indication. If it’s empty, you probably won’t bother stopping. In this case, the restaurant is a newly restored wetland in Michigan and the customers are rails. The birds migrate at night, so if they don’t hear other rail calls in an area, they’re not likely to stop. Researcher Dustin Brewer is broadcasting recorded rail calls to try to bring the secretive birds to prime habitat—to feed and mate. Rails are declining, mostly due to habitat loss. Experts say if rails are influenced by these recordings, it could help increase the bird’s population.   Collars, Cameras, And Carcasses: Studying Urban Wildlife When you hear the words “urban wildlife,” you might think of rats scampering across a street, pigeons plopped on railings, or crows fighting over a pizza crust. But urban wildlife are so much cooler and more diverse than they get credit for, and scientists have a lot to learn from them. In the blink of an evolutionary eye, urban wildlife have quickly adapted to changing landscapes and learned to take advantage of sprawling urban areas. Guest Roxanne Khamsi speaks with Dr. Chris Schell, an assistant professor studying urban ecology at the University of California, Berkeley. They chat about why urban wildlife is so cool, how scientists can study them, and what we can learn from our scrappy neighbors.   A New Lyme Disease Test In Development May Help Improve Treatment Roughly 476,000 people in the United States are diagnosed and treated for Lyme disease each year, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates. However, the CDC says that this number is likely an overcount because many patients receive treatment based on symptoms without a positive test result. On top of that, there are some limitations of the diagnostic tests available for Lyme disease. The FDA-approved Lyme disease tests can only determine if a patient has had Lyme disease in the past, not if they currently have an infection. The test cannot determine if antibiotic treatment was successful, or if a positive test result is due to a re-infection. Guest host Roxanne Khamsi talks with Pete Gwynne, a molecular and microbiologist at the Tufts Lyme Disease Initiative, who is working to solve some of these problems by developing a new diagnostic test for Lyme disease.   ‘I Will Not Be Vole Girl’—A Biologist Warms To Rodents The path to becoming a scientist is not unlike the scientific process itself: Filled with dead ends, detours, and bumps along the way. Danielle Lee started asking questions about animal behavior when she was a kid. She originally wanted to become a veterinarian. But after being rejected from veterinary school, she found a fulfilling career as a biologist, doing the type of work she always wanted to do—but never knew was possible for her. Science Friday producer Shoshannah Buxbaum talks with Dr. Danielle Lee, a biologist, outreach scientist, and assistant professor in biology at Southern Illinois University about what keeps her asking questions, what rodents can help us understand about humans, and the importance of increasing diversity 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 Roxanne Camsey sitting in for Ira Flato. 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. The local science stories of national significance. Have you ever heard the phrase, thin as a rail? Well, it turns out that old saying might have nothing to do with trains. Some folks claim it traces back to a skinny bird, one that loves to hide out in the dense vegetation of marshes.

Rails are secretive and hard to spot, and in some parts of the U.S., they're in decline. Human development has encroached on their prime breeding grounds, and those shrinking wetland areas are hard to find from the sky as they migrate. So, some researchers are playing audio recordings from restored wetlands to try to get them to swoop down. Dan Wanchura has been reporting on this research for the podcast Points North at Interlockin Public Radio in Mn. Michigan. He joins us now. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, Roxanne. Thanks for having me.

Can you say first a little bit something about what does their thin size have to do with their habitat? Yeah, researchers call them laterally compressed, which basically means really thin. But that allows them to be able to navigate and move in and out of these dense wetland areas and protect them from predators. But I'm curious what got their researchers interested in helping them. Yeah, so really across the Midwest and the Great Lakes Basin, there's been a substantial loss of natural wetlands because of development. That poses a problem for rails because the habitat becomes less and less predictable. When they are migrating, they migrate at night, so they might not be aware of prime habitat visually. That's what this project centered around, this idea, to play audio recordings of the,

the rails. Mike Ward is an avian ecologist from the University of Illinois. He's actually done this sort of research in about a dozen bird species. He describes the idea of what they're trying to do, and he likens that to a restaurant. So if you go by a restaurant and there's no one there, then the thought is it's not very good. You go by another restaurant, there's a bunch of cars there. You think, well, I must be the place to go. You stop and eat there. Well, the same can be true for birds. So these birds are migratory. They buy a web. one and just missing that social cue. So they've got speakers in the wetland or what was the kind of arrangement that they had going

on? Yeah, an audio device that is loaded with a bunch of recorded rail calls, four different kinds of rail species. This will play on a loop just after sunset and just before sunrise to try to lure or trick these rails migrating, try to trick them down into checking out this. habitat. And I think we have some tape too to listen to. Yeah, this is of a king rail, which is pretty rare in the Midwest. This is the king rail call. Yeah, I think I've heard a lot of birds in my life, but it's just not very lyrical. Yeah, it's, it's abrasive, I would say. Some of the,

some of the rail calls are pretty abrasive. But for a rail, you know, it's a siren call. Let me ask you, is this working? I think that's the biggest. question on my mind. So preliminary data shows that, yes, there is been a positive response to the rail calls. In fact, he recorded a king rail, which again is pretty rare in the Midwest, right near one of these audio playback sites. And that's pretty good evidence that the audio playback drew in that king rail. I love this idea of making these wetlands so appealing to the birds. Dan, thank you so much for sharing your reporting with us. Thanks so much, Roxanne. Dan Wonsura is the host of the podcast, Points North, at Interlocking Public Radio in Michigan.

You can listen to the full episode of Points North wherever you get your podcasts. When I say urban wildlife, I know what you're thinking. Rats scampering across the street. Pigeons plopped on railings. Crows, finding over a pizza crust. But urban wildlife is so much cooler and more diverse than we give it credit for. Here to tell us more is Dr. Chris Schell, an assistant professor. and urban ecologist at the University of California, Berkeley.

He joins me from the East Bay, California. Welcome to Science Friday, Chris. Hey there, Roxanne. Thanks for having me. All right, Chris, so the words urban and ecology, they almost sound like they don't go together. Can you walk us through what urban ecology is? So we do a lot of work thinking about how humans and animals interact with each other as well as plants

and what that means for the future as, cities become more urbanized as the landscape generally, because more people, then we start to think about, well, what are the causes and consequences of biological changes in the non-human and human species around us? What are some species that urban ecologists might study? Quite a few. You'd be surprised the different types of species that are studied. Of course, There are the notable, commonplace charismatic megafauna that we think of. Raccoons, deer, foxes, coyotes, which are my personal favorite. And how sparrows, pigeons, even frogs, butterflies, Mount lions, bobcats, you name it, right?

We have quite a few species that are living in the city, even the ones that we thought would never want to live in or around people, but they're finding ways to make it work. Yeah, maybe they want to pick up a domino's pizza. Who knows? Yeah, you know, just a little slice. So what are we hoping to learn from studying urban ecology? I would say the first thing that we are interested in learning is how cities and urbanized spaces are changing the ways in which organisms are thriving or not.

If we scale up from individuals to populations and communities, we start thinking about how do different animals interact with each other. On top of that, we start to think about. well, how are those communities of non-human organisms interacting with people? And all of this is important because even scaling out to things like how we consider climate change and cities and urbanization together and how that squeezes animals to try and make really tough decisions about where they're going to survive. Figuring that out in the city allows us to then better understand how human wildlife

interactions are tools for us to do conservation better, for us to think about environmental equity and justice better, for us to think about what we need to do to manage and conserve spaces as the world and the climate continues to change. You know, it's reminding me. My parents visited and their dog had a little bit of a kerfuffle with a raccoon in my backyard earlier this summer, but we didn't have our cameras out. We missed the opportunity to tape it. Oh, no. So I'm wondering, how do you study urban wildlife? What kind of tools are you using to capture

all these interactions? Well, coincidentally, you mentioned cameras, Roxanne, and that's exactly what we use. So we use these wildlife remote trigger camera traps and set up this camera trap in or around any green spaces, which allows us to see which animals are passing the camera, number one. But number two, for us to also see how they're behaving in real time in front of that camera. You know, can people buy their own camera traps? Yeah, absolutely. So for anybody hearing this podcast, you could go.

go on Amazon and go get one right now. Oftentimes what we'll do when we're working with community members and they have cameras is we work in what's called co-production. So many of the community members and our neighbors that have cameras, take those images on an SD card that's inside of the camera. After a couple of weeks, check that camera, check the SD card. My colleagues and I like to think of that as our mini Christmas because we don't necessarily know what we're going to get on the SD card.

But once we start looking through the files and seeing the photos of different species, we get super excited. So for instance, we have been also capturing some really interesting interactions between coyotes and people, where people will go to a particular site and coyotes will follow right thereafter. And all of this can be done essentially by leveraging each community member as their own scientist and demystifying the entire process, essentially deconstructing or deconstructing or. decolonizing the entire ivory tower of sorts. So that way everybody can participate in the science. So in addition to capturing things on camera, there's other methods too, right? C4 is the acronym that we oftentimes use, but including the cameras, which is the first C. We also use GPS collars to see how animals move throughout the city.

And that allows us to see how individuals are then making decisions about how they move through. C number three is something that's a little bit more messy in carcasses. Yeah, the roadkill is seen as something that may be trash for a lot of others, but for us, it is quite the treasure trove of information because we're able to use the tissues for genomic assays. We're able to use the hair to look at their stress profiles. We're able to do fecal swabs to look at their gut microbiota, and we're able to use their whiskers to look at stable.

isotopes to infer their diets. And then finally, the fourth C here is community, where we will oftentimes do most of our work where we are getting their views, perceptions, attitudes about the animals, and we can do then quantitative and qualitative analyses to see how folks' perceptions and views of those animals may translate to the ways in which animals navigate our place. So, you know, a lot of people are thinking, you know, I live in the middle of a city, there's no wildlife here. How can people engage with the wildlife in places in the city that might seem at first glance to be totally void of any wild critters? The easiest answer? Just go outside and take a walk. Even in the most urbanized cities, I guarantee you you're going to see some wildlife species.

You will likely see pigeons. You may see a rat or two. You may see those small little brown birds, are called house sparrows. But what's really exciting about thinking about even the mundane species, right, the quote, mundane species is that if you take the time to just watch what they're doing, you will see that they are very much in tune to human society. Taking the time to slow down, pay attention, even in the most urbanized of areas, you will start to see wildlife come up to you and around you and experience the, different, fascinating behaviors that they show.

Chris, thank you so much for joining me today. Absolutely. Thank you, Roxanne. Thank you for having me. Dr. Chris Schell is an assistant professor and urban ecologist at the University of California, Berkeley. There's a whole movement of people who are inspired by the wildlife in our neighborhoods. In our latest sci-arts video, wildlife photographer Carla Rhodes turned her skills towards the charismatic creatures that call her backyard home. What she captured? the rarely seen playful, curious faces of juncos, squirrels, and more.

To watch her video and learn how you can try your hand at camera trap research and photography, go to sciencefriiday.com slash camera trap. After the break, we'll learn about a new diagnostic test for Lyme disease and what's wrong with the current ones we've got. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Roxanne Camsey. If you're a fan of the outdoors, and particularly if you've ever lived in the Northeast, you're likely familiar with Lyme disease.

It's an illness carried by poppy seed-sized ticks, and if you're unlucky, it can lead to issues like arthritis or even nerve problems. The CDC estimates that around half a million people in the U.S. are diagnosed and treated for Lyme disease each year, but this number is likely an overcount because many patients receive treatment based on symptoms without a positive test result. making the matter of counting cases even more complicated, the test for Lyme disease can only detect if you've ever had Lyme disease. They can't tell you if you currently have an infection, if the treatment you received was successful, or if you've been reinfected. My next guest is working to solve some of these problems

by developing a totally new diagnostic for Lyme disease. Dr. Pete Gwynn is a microbiologist at the Tufts Lyme Disease Initiative, which is based in Boston, Massachusetts, my hometown. Dr. Gwynn, welcome to Science Friday. Hey, thanks for having me on. So before we get into how you're researching a new kind of Lyme disease test, can you tell me a little bit first about how the current tests work? Sure, so we can't test for the bacteria that cause Lyme disease directly.

So we have to test indirectly, which means looking for the body's response to the infection. So the current tests are all based on the antibodies that you're, body produces when you get the Lyme disease infection, which is why we have these problems with people's continuing to test positive even after the infection's gone away, because that's what antibodies are for. They hang around in your blood for a long time. Yeah. Thankfully so. But I mean, how long can somebody still test positive for Lyme disease after, let's say, they probably cleared the infection? Is there a record out there? We know that people continue to test positive up to 20 years.

I think it's probably the case that a lot of them go longer than that. It's difficult to study because it's hard to get someone to come back to the clinic 20 years after they've been treated. So they've cleared the infection, that they're keeping those antibodies in circulation just to be vigilant in case they encounter the pathogen again. That's fascinating. But your test is similar in a way, I guess. It looks for antibodies, but it's a different kind of antibody. Can you say more about that? Yeah, so we're still looking for antibodies, but what we're looking for is antibodies that

have a really good response during an active infection, but then ones that will go away again as soon as possible after the infection's been cleared. So we're looking for antibodies that have a strong initial response, but then a short kind of half-life in the blood, if you like. So antibodies that will disappear quite quickly after treatment. And there's a certain new name for these antibodies or a special name? The ones we're looking for are antiphosphalipids. They're not new, but they're not as well studied as conventional antibodies which are raised to proteins. So like every, every vaccine or every, you know, diagnostic test tends to be based on antibodies to proteins, like say the COVID spike protein, which is what's in the COVID vaccines. We're looking

for antibodies that are targeting a different class of molecule. So instead of proteins, they're like fats or something like that? Yeah, so they're fat. They're the fats that make up cell membranes, so bacterial cells and also human cells and every other type of cell. Well, that's what's so interesting. It seems like these are antibodies that are actually against some of our own tissues. They're kind of like self-antibodies?

So the antibodies are against things that occur in the human host. They also occur in the bacteria. And we think the bacteria are kind of stealing these fats from the host. Well, it's the only time I'd ever want to be upset about somebody stealing my fat, but sure. Yeah, so the bacteria are really weird. They don't make a lot of their own nutrients because they're always in a host. They're always in either a tick or a mouse or a human or whatever. They've sort of evolved over time to basically steal stuff instead of making it for themselves.

So they steal these lipids from the host. And then we think, we don't know this, but we think that because these fats are now kind of being presented back to the host in the context of a bacterial infection, they're driving antibody formation, even though they're fats that sort of belong to the host, if you like. Right. And so I think these are called auto antibodies. Is that right? Auto for self, like they're antibodies against ourself that have this mimicry type of thing where they're also against the Lyme disease bacterium. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So the auto-antibodies are just any antibody that's raised against host antigen rather than a foreign and invading antigen. So it's so interesting. So you've got this test, but can you tell us a little bit more about how this diagnostic test actually detects Lyme disease? Yeah, so again, we're still looking indirectly. So we're just, we're looking for these antibodies which are a marker of infection.

So we've, you know, we've looked in small groups of people and we find that these antibodies come up during an active infection kind of before someone's been treated. And then as we follow patients after treatment, we see that the antibodies start to go down. for these auto-antibodies, not the ones that hang around for 20 years. Yeah, exactly. So what we see is the conventional tests, the antibodies that are involved, stay high, like we've said, but ours come and go as the disease comes and goes. Wow, so cool. So would using this test be able to detect if antibiotics work to treat the bacterial infection, which causes Lyme disease? Yeah, hopefully.

So obviously there's a big problem with Lyme disease, which is a certain percentage of people, 10, 20, 30, depending on how you count, continue to have symptoms even after they've had antibiotic treatment. So what we're hoping for is that we can use this test to help diagnose some of those people and to help manage those long-term symptoms that some people are getting. And there's some weird history as well in terms of how, you know, syphilis has something going on that's similar to this. Can you say something about that? Yeah. So syphilis, feels like a very different disease, so I understand. But syphilis is actually caused by a very

similar bacteria to Lyme disease. Yeah, last I checked, you can't get syphilis just taking a walk in the woods. I guess it depends what you're doing on the walk, but no, largely not. So the way they diagnose syphilis is they have two different tests. You have one test that's very specific. So if you test positive for that, then you've definitely got syphilis. But that test has the same problem that the Lyme disease tests have where you stay positive for the rest of your life. So what they do for syphilis is they add on a second test, which is less specific. So you couldn't use it to make the initial diagnosis. So exactly like we're seeing, they see that this second, the sort of add-on test declines over time when treatment's been successful. And when treatment hasn't been successful,

those antibodies stay high. So we're basically hoping that we can use our test in the same way. When the antibodies go down, great, the treatment looks like it's worked. If the antibodies stay high, maybe the treatment hasn't worked, and we need to look at either continuing treatment or trying a different treatment or whatever. I know that antifospholubid auto-antibodies, these self-antibodies against these fats in our cells, are kind of a little bit like an antibody du jour, and I know that people are looking at them for COVID. Is there a way to say, if somebody test positive for these auto antibodies, that we're sure it's a Lyme disease signal and not something else?

That's a really good point. And we're still looking into that as far as our test is concerned. We're still, you know, testing all the different possible diseases that might interfere with the test or might get false positives. So we're still trying to work out exactly what the specificity of our test is. I think one way of getting around that is, like I mentioned, you pair the test with a more specific test. So one test doesn't have to do all of the things you need, right? And there are researchers looking at other kinds of tests for Lyme disease, right?

New tests. Yeah, definitely. Lyme disease is a really, a very active research community. There's a lot of people looking at all kinds of different aspects of the disease. Yeah, there's a lot of people looking at. different kinds of tests, either trying to develop ways to detect the bacteria directly, which like I've said, we can't currently do, but maybe we can find a way. And also people, yeah, looking for other ways of detecting them indirectly like we're doing.

Yeah, hopefully, hopefully one of us gets it. So Lyme disease is caused by this nasty bacterium in ticks, Borrelia Bergdorphy. Why can't we just do a simple test that looks for that bacterium? That would be great. And for most bacterial infections, the kind of gold standard for diagnosing them is you take a sample and you drop it into some growth medium and you see what grows. And actually, that doesn't sound very scientific, but it is a pretty reliable way of diagnosing most infections. The problem with the Lyme disease bacteria is they grow quite slowly. So even when we do it in the lab under perfect conditions, they take a about a week to grow and no one wants to be waiting for a week before they can make a diagnosis. The other problem is where you're sampling from in the person. So again, if you're diagnosing a skin infection, you can swab someone's skin. That's easy. Even if you're diagnosing a bloodstream infection, you can just take a blood sample. Lyme disease doesn't stay in the skin for all that long

and it doesn't stay in the blood for all that long. The places it kind of swims to once it gets into your body are not easy places to sample. And where are those places? Your joints, your spinal cord, base of the heart, none of which are easy places to just take a quick swab from. No. No one.

You can sometimes detect from synobial fluid, the sort of liquid that's in your big joints. So if someone gets treatment for arthritis and they have some of that fluid drawn, then you can sometimes detect the bacteria in that fluid. But if someone sort of goes into the doctor's office and says, I've got a bit of a fever and I was out hiking, you're not going to jump straight away to sticking a needle through their knee. No, or a spinal tap, I would think.

No, that would be even worse. So a really big part of this Lyme disease conversation recently has been about people, who have chronic symptoms. So would this type of antibody tests that your lab has worked on and developed determine if somebody has a persistent infection? We hope so. We're not there yet. We still need to do a lot of work. That's actually we're about to start that work looking at a bunch of people with those kind of chronic symptoms, the persistent symptoms. But we think it might. The problem is at the moment, we basically don't know what's causing those as a field. Those symptoms could be caused by an infection that hasn't responded to antibiotics. It could be caused by something going

wrong with your immune system. You know, you've had an infection, everything's become out of sync, and then it's just taking time to go back to normal. You could just be really unlucky, and you had Lyme disease, the Lyme disease went away, and now you've got another disease that's unlucky, but it happens. So we don't really know what's causing those symptoms yet. So we're hoping that one of the ways this test might help is either for, you know, helping to diagnose those people or even just for screening people into clinical trials. At the moment, we don't really have any good idea what to do with those people who continue to have symptoms. To find out what the best treatment options are for those people, then we need to run clinical trials. At the moment,

it's hard to know who to include on those clinical trials. And I know a lot of people listening are curious to know when they might have access to this test. I know you have a provisional patent for this test you've developed. What kind of timeline are we talking about? What further research is needed before they can have access? Yeah, so this is definitely still just a thing under research at the moment. The test doesn't exist in a way that we could make it accessible to the public. I think it's reasonable. Getting tests like this approved diagnostic tests is a faster process than getting drugs onto the market. So that's good news. Bad news is it's still not a super fast process. We still need to do

more bench science in the lab. And even after we've finished all the bench science, then we need to build a machine, an actual device that can run these tests in clinics or in hospitals or whatever. I think we could submit to the FDA within five years. Wow. If we're able to raise the funds to get that done. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. If you're just joining us, we're talking about a potential new diagnostic for Lyme disease and how our current tests are falling short. You know, at the same time, there's work on a Lyme disease vaccine. I guess it's the second iteration or a further iteration since there was one on the market for three years or so or two or three years maybe 20 years ago.

But there's a new one on the horizon. And I was wondering, are you optimistic about it? Would it change some of the testing and treatment strategies for Lyme disease? Yeah. I mean, hopefully if the vaccine works, then it means you would need to run fewer diagnostic tests, which would be bad for business, but good for the world in general. So I'm happy to take that hit. I think what we've seen with this new vaccine is really promising.

It's actually quite similar to the old vaccine. which is good, I think, because the old vaccine actually worked reasonably well. So hopefully that's good news and hopefully, you know, I think the data from the initial trials has been really good and they're going into the third and the final stage of the vaccine, you know, trials process. So I think everyone's kind of optimistic about that vaccine. I definitely think that reducing cases is going to need a whole load of different

interventions. So vaccines will help getting better tests for people who are, you know, suspected of having Lyme disease will help, having better treatment options for people who have definitely got Lyme disease will help. So I think, yeah, it's good to have people working on all of the different angles, you know. So none of this sounds like a walk in the park, that's for sure, but it does sound important. I'd like to thank my guest, Dr. Pete Gwynn, who is a microbiologist at the Tubbs Lyme Disease Initiative based in Boston, Massachusetts. Thanks for having me. Exciting things are happening over at the SciFri Book Club.

We're giving readers like you, yes, you, the chance to vote for the book we will read together this October. We've narrowed down the top four picks suggested by our book club community, but now we need you to make the final choice. Find out about the books and cast your vote by visiting ScienceFriiday.com slash book club. That's sciencefriday.com slash book club. We have to take a break, and when we come back, we'll talk with a scientist about her lifelong quest to better understand animal behavior. I was always asking, tell me why animals do that?

Why animals doing that? And I thought it was as simple as you could just give me a straight answer. And then I came to realize there are no straight answers. And how her curiosity led her to study one of the most unloved mammals. Rodents, particularly the rodents that have made a living off of us and near us, tell us so much about ourselves. There's not been a single human culture across time, across geography, that has not had to contend with rodent infestations. Stay with us. This is Science Friday, and I'm Roxanne Camsey.

Each week we bring you conversations with some really impressive and thoughtful scientists. But rarely do we talk about the journey that it took for them to get where they are. The path to becoming a scientist is not unlike the scientific process itself, filled with dead ends, detours, and bumps along the way. Sci-fi producer Shoshana Buxbaum is here with me now to share with us a conversation she recently had with a biologist whose career took an unexpected path, to studying rodents. Hi, Shoshana.

Hey, Roxanne. I got a chance to speak with Dr. Danielle Lee, biologist, outreach scientist, and assistant professor in biology at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. I was first introduced to her work when she was featured in a book for tweens called No Boundaries, which profiled female scientists around the world. And since she was a kid, Dr. Lee has been asking questions about animals. Why do they do what they do? She originally wanted to become a veterinarian.

So I started off by asking how she went from applying to vet school to becoming a research scientist. In pursuit of trying to go to veterinary school, I had applied and been rejected and had been still encouraged to continue applying and to improve my grades. And I was just taking classes at the University of Memphis. I wrote a paper in my animal communication and cognition class that the professor said, this is a project. I was like, seriously? He said, yeah, you could do a whole project and be done in two months. I was like, really? I could just do a whole project over the summer. He's like, yeah, you should switch to thesis. I wasn't even a thesis student. I was just taking classes. Side note, it took longer than two months to do their project. He got me. It always does. It always takes longer.

By the fall, when I was reapplying for vet school, I really realized I was really into the research. I was like, wait a minute, I'm really enjoying this. And I wondered why. And I was like, you know what? All the time I was a child in school and college. I was always curious about animals. So I always loved animals. I was always interested in animals. And so my interest in becoming a vet was because of that. And to be honest, I didn't know that there was other careers you could do if you were interested in being, if you were interested in animals.

I thought you could be a vet or you could be a zookeeper, which I'm going to be honest. In my young mind, I couldn't tell you the difference between those two things either. You know what I mean? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I realized then, like, wait a minute. this is how I get the answers to the questions I've been asking, and no one has given me a good answer yet. Like, I was always like, you still haven't given me a good answer. I was always asking,

tell me why animals do that. Why animals doing that? And I thought it was as simple as you can just give me a straight answer. And then I came to realize there are no straight answers. They just aren't. They don't exist. And a lot of the answers I was looking for hadn't probably hadn't been asked yet. And that's when I realized, wait, this is what science is. This is what? this is, I can have a career at asking questions and answering my own questions. I can finally just do the thing I've always been interested in since I was four or five years old. Tell me why that animal is doing that. The light bubble went off. I said, then that's what I want to do. But being rejected was the best thing that ever happened to me. And so you did it and you got your

Ph.D. And you followed your dream. And so I want to talk a little bit about your research, which focuses on rodents, which are very underappreciated creatures. So what led you, of all the different animals to study, what led you to rodents? So the professor who got me started at the University of Memphis, Michael Furkin, he worked with voles. And I thought he was mispronouncing moles. Like, I thought I was hearing him wrong. And I was like, he meant moles because, what is a vol? I never heard of this in my life.

And then I realized, oh, no, he meant voles. I had never heard of the word in my life. So vows are field mice. They're little cute, cute, they're little field mice with little stubby, chubby bodies and short, short tails. And that's important because what most people think of is mice like house mice. They have these scrawny necks. Like that's the thing that you really want to, scrawny necks and long tails. So you have scrawny neck, long tail mice.

And then you have little robust body short tail mice. Now the project that he convinced me to start doing based on the paper was with the metal vows. metal bowls, you can ask them really interesting questions about their communication because during their breeding season, they're a little bit kind of everyone for themselves, like kind of everybody's on their own, they mate, and then they kind of go in their separate ways, and then they hope to bump into each other again when receptivity comes back around, which is about every three weeks for a particular female. And the females can be super competitive and like very, very, you know, disinterested in one another.

super super disinterested in one another during the breeding season. But then once the fall comes and the days get shorter and they're no longer breeding, that all changes. They turn from, I don't want to see you to, hey, girl, what you're doing this winter? You want to overwinter together? Come over. We can, we'll eat roots and just keep our body temperature together. It goes from that, like big time. It's weird, but it's fascinating.

I was fascinated by that. And so that's how I got started with rodents because that's what was in the lab. And I knew I was interested in these questions about social interactions. I was really interested in like aggression. You know, like how is it that some animals, you know, win, always seem to win, seem to be on top. What's that about? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

I started pursuing my PhD with someone else who worked with voles. Just on the vol track. I was on the vol track. And the thing is, I had told myself, I will not be voles. girl. I will not be volg girl. I got into this game because I wanted to work on, you know, like lions and tigers and bears and wolves. I wanted to do sexy megafauna. Yeah, the sexy megafauna. That's what we all want. Then I just, what happened is I realized I was good at it. And one of my early inclinations that I had a knack for it is that when I had to go trap animals

and get more, it was at a time where everybody else was having a hard time. across the nation, getting animals. And somehow I had gotten them. And so then I, now I have a reputation among folks who study voles as if you need voles call Danielle, like caller. Instead of fighting being vol girl, I just just went for it. I was like, you know what? I started seeing the benefit of working with a backyard species, working with something that was always there that was right up under our nose. And then I started learning about different species. And I was like, you know what, this gives us an opportunity to just start looking at how these. different rodent species, a negotiating life, not just in the wild, but in a while in

proximity to people. And then for a postdoc, I got invited to do my postdoctoral research on the giant pouch rat of Tanzania and got into that research because it's not talking about sexy megafauna. You're talking about a rat that's the size of a house cat that has been successfully trained to sniff out and detect landmines. and then also they can also sniff out and help detect to diagnose tuberculosis. The rats were being successfully trained, but the breeding was still kind of hit amidst. So there were some basic natural history and etiology, biology questions about the pouch rat that still needed to be sussed out.

And that's where I came in. So I got to apply all the things that I had learned with the voles, working with wild populations of animals, and then trying to ask very specific questions about their behavior and their exploration and their behavioral tendencies. And so obviously rodents have interacted with humans since the beginning of our history. What does studying rodents and how they behave teach us about our world and our ecosystems? This is how I see it. Rodents, particularly the rodents that have made a living off of us and near us, tell us so much about ourselves. there's not been a single human culture across time, across geography,

that has not had to contend with rodent infestations. So rodent nuisance are a part of the human history. Even before, you know, we came together in these big, big cities, even before we were agriculturists, so we started making cultivars, rodents were right there. And so they tell us so much about, you know, how to survive, how to find food, how we make a living, how different species depend on one another. We're still dealing with rodent issues. Like, they're the key to understanding what potential next disease is going to come out.

Because they're the ones closest to us. They're the vectors. Things can spill over from them or they can carry them on their backs and then that thing infects us. The black plague? The rat didn't give us the black plague. They carried the fleas and the fleas gave us the black plague. And so understanding their behavior and their ecology helps us understand how to solve problems. We know their rodents are a problem for people, whether you live in the rural area, whether you don't live near a lot of people, or if you stay near a lot of people in urban areas, their problem either way.

And what we see is that sometimes it's the same species that can make a really interesting living in both the city and the country and the wild. But then other times, some species do better than others. And so I'm finding myself really, really interested in the scientific study of city mouse and country mouse. I want to pivot a little bit because part of your work is also in diversifying science and who becomes a scientist. I want to talk a little bit about our educational system, the pipeline of how people become scientists. So how does the inequity of our educational system fail black and brown and indigenous future scientists that want to, you know, answer some of these big questions that we've. you've just been talking about and thinking of different questions and different ways to go about it as you have. So here's the first thing that I think most people don't realize. The cumulative

knowledge we have in the world right now is all based on individual people's personal curiosities. There is no agenda. There is no agenda. So everything that we have that's been codified by this modern system is all because of a lot of people's personal curiosities. I study what I study because it's what I want to do. And so everybody else. Then think about who's overrepresented in those texts. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

And what we're saying unintentionally, and I'm being generous, is that those are the peoples whose questions that matter. But it's also sending a message to black and brown and indigenous kids. Those are the only people who've ever asked good questions. And we know that that is a fundamental outright lie. Everybody, since the beginning of time, has been asking questions. Black, brown, and indigenous people around the globe have not only been asking good questions, but have sussed out the answers to a lot of important foundational things.

But they're not credited in those books in the same way. We could just do better at our citation practices and giving credit to the fact that groups of people, especially groups of people who we know have uninterrupted, contiguous histories for thousands of years that are solid, who have good histories and reliable and consistent analysis and data about how the world works. We know that the indigenous people of Australia, they told us things. Western science just finally figured out the age of a mountain that indigenous Australians have been telling them.

It's 65,000 years old. It's 65,000 years old. In other words, there's so much out there about the world that we either haven't been able to help get the word out about or inspire people to find those answers because we've been unintentionally, or maybe intentionally, but I'm going to be generous, saying there's only one way to science. And that's just fundamentally untrue. And there's only certain people who are particularly good at it. So we've been ignoring all this rich, fertile bed of questions. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. In the book, you talk about how sometimes people are surprised to find out that, like, you're in fact the scientists they're waiting for because of these systemic issues that we've talked about that have prioritized mostly white men of being scientists. And that's like the stereotype that we have for who a scientist is.

And, you know, as a black woman, you don't fit that stereotype. So how has that, how have these. experiences shaped your approach to the work that you do, especially because you also do outreach as well. It really makes me think about who I'm doing science for. So I'm doing science for me because I enjoy it. It's how I make a living. But I'm also doing science because I recognize deep down inside, I am ministering to my younger self. That I want, I recognize that the younger me wishes I existed, that someone like me existed, that I can look up to and be like, this is real. This is who I can talk to. I see what it is and then that person or that type of person is accessible to me. But it's not just important

to younger versions of myself. It's also important for, it's important for all kids to see that. It's important for young white kids, young white kids from really well-out families to know that this is what a world looks like that's plural. So that they, they, they, they, they, aren't surprised when they see someone in leadership who shows up who doesn't necessarily look like them. It's about more than just simply getting some people to say, oh, we got a few that made it. We're trying to fundamentally change the fact that all of us can participate. We don't all have to be PhDs to be scientists, but we all absolutely can be scientists. We all can be artists. It's not an either-or. It's a yes-than. And I've even, you know, I hear when I go into communities

and I talk to folks, especially folks, you know, who are like middle age or older. They were like, I always like science and I thought I wanted to do this. I'm like, you still can. Yeah, you still can. And I think that's the thing that surprises them that, wait, what? I'm like, you can. You can do it literally right now, right this moment. You want to start a project?

We can do this, this moment. You don't even have to wait. And to close, what advice do you have for the next? next generation of scientists, whether that be people that pursue master's degrees, PhDs, or people that are rediscovering their connection with science or just other ways to get involved in science in their everyday lives. It's all right to start exactly where you are. There's this perception that you've got to go get something more before you can get started. Nope. You can start exactly where you are. It reminds me of a quote at Tuskegee University, lay down your buckets where you are.

And that's because, you know, this idea that there's something to be done right here in this moment. You have everything you need right now to get started. And like any endeavor, you get started. If you need more, you go get it. Social media gives you direct access to scientists. Many of us are on Twitter or on Instagram. You can start following and engaging folks right now. You don't have to do anything big and fancy all at once.

It'll come to you. That's usually how science is. not all things at once. It's one little thing at a time. And then, like I said, it's all these textbooks started with just people's personal curiosities. And it all accumulated. It will all come together. Yeah, I love that. And I think that's a wonderful place to end our conversation. Dr. Danielle Lee, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me and to be on Science Friday. Thank you. I'm excited. Thank you. Dr. Daniel Lee is a biologist, outreach scientist, and assistant professor in biology at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. And I'm Shoshana Bucksdown.

Thanks, Shoshana. If you missed any part of this program or would like to hear it again, subscribe to our podcasts. Or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. Every day is now Science Friday. I'm Roxanne Camsey. Ira Flato will be back next week. Have a great weekend.