Science Friday - Fish Kills, Potential Sulfuric Acid Shortage, Goats for Invasives Control. Sep 9, 2022, Part 1

Episode Date: September 9, 2022

COVID-19’s Lingering Toll On The Heart As new omicron-specific boosters against COVID-19 unroll in cities around the US, research is revealing more about the longterm consequences of even one infection with the SARS-CoV2 virus. Writing this week in Nature Medicine, a team of researchers from Germany describe finding long-lasting signs of heart disorders in the majority of recovered patients in their study group–even up to nearly a year later. FiveThirtyEight’s Maggie Koerth joins Ira to describe the research and how it fits into what we’re learning about the scope of Long Covid. Plus taking the temperature of the melting Thwaites Glacier, new insights into the genes of both immortal jellyfish and human astronauts, and a post-mortem of the world’s first known amputation. Why Are Dead Fish Piling Up Across The San Francisco Bay? Thousands of dead fish are piling up across the Bay Area. From the concrete outer edges of Oakland’s Lake Merritt to the sandy beaches of San Francisco’s Fort Funston and the pebbled banks of Oyster Point in San Mateo County, the carcasses of fish likely poisoned by a harmful algal bloom — more commonly known as a red tide — are washing ashore. It’s a mass-death event the San Francisco Bay hasn’t seen the likes of in years, says Jon Rosenfield, senior scientist with environmental group San Francisco Baykeeper. “From a fish’s point of view, this is a wildfire in the water,” he said. By SF Baykeeper’s count, the number of fish dying off in the San Francisco Bay could easily exceed hundreds of thousands, and that, Rosenfield said, might even be a “low” estimate. His field investigator confirmed “easily tens of thousands of fish dead” in Lake Merritt alone. But Rosenfield cautioned, “What you see is just the hint of what’s actually happening further beneath the water’s surface and in places you’re not getting to on the shoreline. So it’s really an uncountable number.” It may be harmful to humans, too. An algal bloom of this size can cause skin irritation and respiratory problems, and the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board is advising people to avoid swimming, kayaking or other activities on the water until the bloom subsides. Read the full story at sciencefriday.com. As Temperatures Get Warmer, Fish Are At Risk Climate change is expected to have a big effect on a sensitive group of creatures: fish. A new study out of the University of Arkansas predicts that there is likely to be a six-fold increase in large fish mortality events between now and 2100, specifically in freshwater lakes in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Known as “summerkills” and “winterkills”, seasonal die-offs are a part of fishy nature, but have been happening at a greater frequency as temperatures increase. That’s due to climate change-related factors like algal blooms, infectious disease, and oxygen deprivation. Joining Ira to talk about the future for freshwater fish is Simon Tye, PhD candidate in biology at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.  As The World Decarbonizes, Sulfuric Acid May Be In Short Supply A move towards more alternative energy sources and away from fossil fuel production is a net positive for the world. But there’s an unanticipated side effect—a possible global sulfuric acid supply shortage. Eighty percent of the world’s sulfuric acid is the byproduct of fossil fuel production. Cutting back on coal, oil, and natural gas means producing less sulfur acid. That’s important as sulfuric acid is critical to making fertilizer, as well as green technology like solar panels and batteries. Ira talks with Mark Maslin, professor of Earth System Science at University College London, about his latest research, which points to a looming sulfur shortage. The New G.O.A.T Of Park Systems Is An Actual Goat If you walk into a park, the odds are pretty high that you’ll find an invasive plant species, like buckthorn, giant hogweed, or multiflora rose. These resilient plants can often grow uncontrollably and out-compete native species for resources, which has consequences for native wildlife that depend on other native plants. They can also be incredibly difficult to remove. That’s why a growing number of parks across the United States are turning to unlikely helpers: goats. Conservation grazing is a practice in which livestock are used to maintain biodiversity. Because goats eat almost everything, they chow down on invasive plants and make them much easier to remove. Radio producer Rasha Aridi speaks with Hillary Steffes, the chief goat herder at Allegheny GoatScape in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, about using goats as a conservation tool. Then, Rasha takes a trip to Riverside Park in NYC to meet some goats, and talk with Marcus Caceres, a field supervisor at the Riverside Park Conservancy. 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 Ira Plato. A bit later in the hour, how climate change may be killing more fish and why we might be facing a looming sulfur shortage, plus we drop in on a herd of goats chewing away some invasive species. But first, as the new Omicron-specific booster shots for SARS-COVID 2 unroll nationwide, new research on the long-term consequences of COVID suggests another reason to avoid infection. A team writing in nature medicine, describes finding a large proportion of heart problems in patients recovering from COVID, even months or even a year later. Here to explain more, Megha Kerth, Science Journalist for 538. She joins me from Minneapolis. Welcome to Science Friday. Welcome back, Maggie. Thank you so much. I'm happy to be here. Nice to have you. Let's look at this, Maggie.

What kinds of heart problems are we talking about? Yeah, so we are talking about things like Palpit. mutations, chest pain, shortness of breath. A small minority of people in this study were experiencing more serious things like fainting. And this is out of 346 previously healthy people who were followed up with over the course of about a year after they had a COVID infection. The study found that 73% of them had these symptoms about three months after infection, and 57% were still showing. signs of these kind of complications a year after COVID. That is amazing. Do we have any symptoms that we could look out for? The symptoms that we're talking about, you know, we're talking about things that

would be noticeable. Your heart is racing or you're having chest pain or shortness of breath. But I think like what was really interesting is that when they put these people also through blood markers and MRIs, what they were finding is that they were suffering from inflammation of heart tissue. So this is something that you're having external symptoms of, but it's also something that is happening inside. Did it matter if people were vaccinated or not? We don't know. These screenings were all happening between April 2020 and October of 2021. So people were in the study were getting vaccinated during that time, but because some of them had gotten vaccinated after their infection, some had gotten vaccinated before. There just wasn't a good baseline to do that.

kind of research from. And age or gender, any differences? A large proportion of them were women. And this was also a thing that was happening in people who are fairly young. You know, this is not something that people were suffering from who were older and kind of more likely to have COVID complications to begin with. The average age was around 43. Wow. So this tells us something about long COVID and maybe sets up more of a red flag for it than we were talking about before. Yeah, you know, heart issues, these are just one of some 200 different symptoms that have been connected to long COVID as a syndrome. Part of the mess that we have here is just trying to figure out what is happening, what is likely, how many people have it. And those estimates are still all over the place.

So you have some studies that are saying like 30% of people are having symptoms of long COVID, 24 weeks after infection. And some studies say up to 70% in that same time period. And you've got this new study out of China that found 55% of people having at least one symptom two years after infection. There's a freelance journalist named Leah Schaefer who has a great piece right now in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It kind of sums up a lot of what's going on with this long COVID research. Because one of the big takeaways right now is that science is still getting its head wrapped around this thing. Right, right. Well, we'll have a link to that story on our website.

Let's move on to another story. Last week, you know, we talked about the scary-sounding phenomenon of the zombie ice in Greenland. But you have an update on a different story from the other side of the world. The so-called Doomsday Glacier Thwaites in Antarctica. These all have such cinematic names, don't they? Yeah. Tell us about that. Well, Thwait's Glacier is a massive hunk of ice that just kind of hangs off the side of Antarctica.

It's rooted to the sea floor, not onto the land. And it's about the size of Florida. So if it all completely melted, it could raise sea levels by as much as 10 feet. And already, this one glaciers melt accounts for 4% of annual sea level rise. So this is something that scientists are paying attention to pretty intensely. And it's not, you know, when we say Doomsday, we are talking about its size. We're talking about the risks that it could pose. We're not talking about like an immediate threat.

And one of the things they found out recently by looking at these ridges that were left in the seafloor, by movement of the glacier kind of going up and down with daily tidal rise and fall, is that there was a five and a half month period that could have happened as recently as mid-20th century when this thing was retreating at a rate double of what has been observed in the most recent years. Really? Yeah. So we know that it can melt much faster than it is right now. The good news is it is not melting that fast right now. But scientists have also documented in recent years that this thing's being hollowed out from below. Because again, it's sitting kind of right on the water. And as that water warms, it's intruding into the base of the glacier. So in 2019, they found a cavity the size of Manhattan on the underside of this thing. Oh, wow. Yeah, and they're really worried that it could break away from the Antarctic coast in just a few years. Wow, that's incredible.

It seems like call it a doomsday glacier because if you get a 10-foot sea level rise, it's going to be doomsday for a lot of people living on the shorelines of places. Well, and a lot of the world's population does live on the shorelines of places. Let's stay in the ocean for a moment because you have a story about the genetics of an animal called the immortal jellyfish. Is it really immortal? Kind of. If their body gets sufficiently damaged, these jellyfish can just turn back into a baby and grow again. Now, they are still edible, of course, and they could also be injured in ways that can lead to death.

So they're not, like, completely immortal. But they don't have to worry about the slow decline of old age. And that naturally makes them really interesting to a certain intelligent species that does have to worry about the slow decline of old age. Who could that be, I wonder. Yeah, yeah. And scientists have gotten this better understanding of what's going on in the genes of these jellyfish as they regrow now. So they went to the coast of Italy. They captured some immortal jellyfish. They triggered this rejuvenation process by withholding food. And as these jellyfish were shrinking back into little balls and starting to regrow, the scientists were taking samples at each stage, mushing them up and extracting RNA to study what's changing. genetically during that time. What in the things that they're sort of finding is that there's not a single gene governing immortality in these jellyfish. It's more that there are duplicates of some genes, including ones that repair DNA. And they're turning genes on and off at different stages.

So the genes associated with pluripotency, which is the ability of, you know, baby cells to grow into lots of different adult cells instead of just one kind of cell. Those go dorm. as this animal ages, just like ours do. But then they can kick back on when it's time to regrow. Wow, it's the Benjamin Button of jellyfish. Kind of, yeah. Kind of. Another gene story is out there about something else that floats around but in zero gravity. And I'm talking about astronauts and genetic changes in astronauts. Tell us about that. Yeah. So scientists took these decades-old blood samples from astronauts before they flew in space and after they had. And these are from people who flew on the space shuttle between 1998 and 2001.

And they're finding that basically everyone who goes up comes back changed in some small way. Now, these were not big alterations. The scientists don't think anyone's long-term health is likely to be threatened. But it shows that exposure to radiation in space has an impact. And it has that even on young, exceptionally healthy people like the people we send into space. And these changes that we're seeing in these samples, they're kind of things you'd expect to see in adults who are a lot older than the astronauts were. You know, the median age was 42 in these samples. And they're showing genetic mutations that you would expect in elderly people.

One of the things that the scientists say that we're really taking away from this is that anybody who's going into space for these long stretches, for these moon bases, for these trips to Mars, they're going to need detailed regular health screenings. and we're also going to need to make sure that we are limiting the amount of time you're in space based on age. Yeah, well, we haven't figured that one out yet either, have we? No, thankfully, that is not yet actually a serious immediate problem. But it's, yeah, more something to look forward to. One more piece of news, and this one is really interesting. Human amputations were successfully done thousands of years earlier than we thought they were. Does this count as good news?

If you are an ancient human who needs your foot amputated, yeah, this counts as great news. So the idea that used to be around is that medicine emerged alongside agricultural societies. And previously, the oldest evidence of amputation that we had was a 7,000-year-old skeleton of a Neolithic farmer in what is now France. but researchers found this skeleton in Borneo that appears to have had a foot amputated and lived to tell about it, and it happened 31,000 years ago. Wow. How do we know that this actually happened? So, okay, this is pretty cool.

So these researchers, they went and consulted with doctors and scientists who actually study amputation and bone growth after amputation and sort of what happens to your body in the wake of that. And they took this skeleton with its whole lower left leg was completely gone. And there was this kind of bony growth that was left at the place where the limb was missing. And the scientists that study bones now were able to say, like, this looks like what happens when you surgically cut a limb. And it's different from what you see with an accidental limb loss. So it suggests that this was not just like somebody that got the lung. their foot trapped in something or that got it eaten off by a saber-toothed tiger, this looks like

actual intentional cutting and what the healing process looks like after that. And because of how much growth is on that bone, it also suggests that person lived for at least six years after they lost their foot. Wow. And of course, we don't know what happened to the person after he or she lost that foot. No, we don't know, but we do know that there's no sign in the bone of infection, which is also a really big deal because that implies, not proof, but it implies that whoever was doing this amputation also knew something about how to use the plant biodiversity around them to prevent infection. Well, I hope they learned how to use the plant biodiversity around them for anesthetics because I can't imagine having an amputation without anesthetics and it's been done.

It's been done many, many times and it does not sound like fun. Maggie, you always sound like fun. Thank you for taking time to be with us today. Thank you so much. Maggie Kerth, Science Journalist for 538 based in Minneapolis. We have to take a break, and when we come back, we'll talk about why thousands of dead fish have been washing up in the Bay Area. Stay with us. This is Science Friday.

I'm Ira Plato, and now it's time to check in on the state of science. This is KER News. For WWNO, Iowa Public Radio News. Local science stories of national significance. You may have seen pictures of what's happening in the Bay Area around San Francisco. Thousands of dead fish, dead fish are washing ashore. What in the world is happening. Joining me now to explain this fish tale is my guest, Leslie McClurg, health correspondent for KQED Public Radio in San Francisco.

Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for having me. You're welcome. Okay, so when did people start to notice this die-off? So about a month ago, I would say people started to notice that the water started to turn red. And then as the weeks progressed forward, it started to go from red to brown. And then I was actually out there about a week and a half ago. And it was this kind of chocolatey syrup color.

I mean, not the entire bay, but pockets of the bay. And it was kind of lapping up on my paddleboard. And so it's over the weeks, over the last few weeks, gotten worse and worse until it's a pretty murky, dense color in many areas of the bay. Is it, well, that's what I was going to ask, is it the whole bay or just in some parts of the bay? I mean, it's just in some parts of the bay, but it is proliferated out into all parts of the bay. So even though it's not chocolatey brown in every part of the bay, there is chocolatey browns areas, you know, as far from San Jose to Vallejo to out to the Golden Gate Bridge. So all across the bay and then even into estuaries that, you know, the bay is connected to. So, for example, there's a really bad red tide or this algal bloom.

in Lake Merritt, which is in downtown Oakland, because that lake is connected to the bay. So let's get into why this is happening. What are the scientists saying? So there's probably a couple of factors at play here. They don't know exactly why, but probably climate change is a factor here because we had one of the driest, warmest winters on record. So it didn't rain at all, or almost not at all, January, February, March, which is really unusual. So that means those were hot, sunny days, which warmed up the water this time of year, and there was no freshwater runoff during that time of year. So that's a factor. We've got warmer water. But the primary reason this has probably been happening, and sciences have been warning

about this potential for years that we are kind of primed for a red tide is the fact that there are 40 wastewater treatment plants that discharge into the bay. And those wastewater treatment plants clean the sewage, they remove the bacteria and the solids, but they do not filter out the nutrients. So you've got a lot of nitrogen and phosphorus that is being discharged into the bay, and algae love to eat that. Yeah, perfect. Yeah, exactly. It's like a perfect cocktail.

Absolutely. Has something like this happened before in the bay? Not to this level. So it's really common to have small algal blooms along the shoreline or around marinas, but we've never seen something that's lasted this long or is as widespread as what we're seeing right now. No kidding. So what fish are affected?

Is it everything? It's really, really sad. I mean, everything from anchovies, you know, worm. clams, mussels, but all the way up into the food chain into, you know, bat, raise, sharks. And we're even seeing six-foot-long white sturgeon and even green sturgeon, which are federally protected. And it's just tragic to see these giant fish, you know, washing up on the shore. It's a really, really kind of emotional experience to watch this much marine life die. That is really sad. I know that you went out to Lake Merritt. You mentioned Lake Merritt to

check it out? I did, and I talked to a woman there who, I think, kind of captured the sentiment of what I was experiencing. I walked up to the shoreline, and it was just gut-wrenching. And I talked to this woman named Laura Bagley, she's a volunteer there, and this is what she said. I just started sobbing when I realized the enormity of it, that they're literally dying, like, at our feet. I feel like an emotional wreck. Yeah, so, you know, her emotional experience was what a lot of people who were standing along the shoreline were experiencing. They were either plugging their nose and sort of disgusted by the whole situation or just extremely saddened by the fact that, you know, it looked like leaves kind of floating on the surface of the lake, but it was actually

just massive numbers of fish floating along the lake. And just on one day alone, they shoveled 1,200 pounds of fish out of the lake and thousands and thousands of pounds, you know, of fish are dead. And the thing that scientists keep pointing out to me is that that's just on the surface, most fish have drowned. And so the bottom of the lakes and the bottom of the bay, they fear are just, you know, feet and feet and feet of dead fish. This is like a horror movie, you know? It is. It's kind of like apocalyptic, apocalyptic, apocalyptic, it's horrendous. Yeah. But is it dangerous for people or other animals? It's not dangerous, dangerous, dangerous for people, but they are warning folks to stay out of the water because it can't irritate your

skin, it can't irritate your eyes. You can kind of have an allergic reaction to the water. We don't actually know if it's going to move its way through the food chain, say, is it going to affect birds? Is it going to affect larger marine life like seals? We don't actually know because this kind of algae is not super well studied and especially at the levels that we're seeing it at. So there's a bit of an unknown here that we're going to grapple with going forward. Speaking of the unknown, do we know the sequence of how this plays out? Any idea what's going to happen next? It's a great question. I think we all hope that this is a wake-up call that we do something about the issue. I talked to Seagil Choksy Chu. She's the executive director for the environmental group, San Francisco Baykeeper. And she pointed

out that the issue really here is that we've got to get filtration systems on all of these plants. And what we really need to be doing is investing in our infrastructure so that we can upgrade those plants. San Francisco has some of the worst water recycling programs of anywhere in California. I mean, the problem is that that's going to take a lot of time and money and it's not an immediate solution. But if they can upgrade these plants and filter it out those nutrients, then we at least have a lever that we can control so that we potentially going forward won't have an issue like this again. But it's going to take millions of dollars and, you know, lots of stakeholders have to be on board to make that happen. Well, you know what it might take?

It might take this being the new normal where you see it happening more and more over the years as climate change progresses, that's something we probably can expect, right? Unfortunately, yeah, they say warmer water, we could see these, you know, more frequently going forward. And so unfortunately, these are the kind of wake-up calls that are going to hopefully motivate us towards action. So we'll see. Have people gone out just to look at the huge amount of dying fish? There was a huge group of people when I went to look at Lake Mirate the other day, just standing there taking photos. And it's been quite the, viral social media picture explosion because it's so horrific.

Wow. Thank you, Leslie. You know, in all my trips to San Francisco, I never would imagine seeing something like this. Thank you for telling us about it. Thank you for having me. Leslie McClurg is health correspondent for KQED Public Radio in San Francisco. This story is part of our State of Science series where we track local science stories of national significance, and we want to know what's going on in your area. Please tell us what local science or environment stories are you keeping an eye on. Tell us, tell us on the SciFri Vox Pop app, wherever you get your apps. It's not just the Bay Area suffering the effects of climate change. We're now going to head to the Upper Midwest, where new research predicts how warming temperatures will make the problem worse.

Joining me to talk about this is Simon Tye, Ph.D. candidate in biology at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you, Ira. Happy to be here. Can you set this scene for us, Simon, exactly. What were you analyzing in this study? Yes, we compiled the fish mortality events across the lakes in Wisconsin and Minnesota and associated those events that were caused by warm temperature with concurrent temperatures so we could predict into the future how many events might happen. And I'm guessing that the results did not turn out well. What did you find in your analysis? No, not particularly. We found that under the worst climate change scenario, RCP 8.5, we can expect to probably a 600% increase in the frequency of these events by the end of the

century. Six times, right? 600% by the end of the century? 600%. Wow. Yes, sir. Well, you talk about summer kills and winter kills. Are these normal? Are they routine things that happen in the fish world? Yeah, summer kills and winter kills are common terms used to refer to mortalities caused by seasonal temperatures, specifically warm temperatures in summertime and cooler temperatures in the wintertime. They are routine things, but their frequency and magnitude is probably changing quite a bit with warming temperatures. And these go out of the normal range in your predictions or in the study predictions. Yes, they do. With increasing temperatures, we expect to see an increase with the amount of fish mortality, such as we're seeing in San Francisco, in part because fish aren't expected to evolve higher thermal tolerances at the rate that the climate is changing.

Simon, walk us through specifically why it is that these mortality events would happen so much more frequently. There are several deleterious environmental conditions associated with the warming climate that can directly affect fish. What we're seeing in San Francisco right now is due to a harmful algal bloom, which can either pass toxins up through a food web, such that there's toxic algae that's eaten by the zooplankton and then the fish, which can cause harm to the zooplankton and fish, often resulting in mortality. or just the fact that the water is warming, that can cause direct thermal stress, and it is simply too hot for the fish to persist. And lastly, all of these conditions reduce the dissolved oxygen concentration within the water body, which can result in fish and other organisms, literally suffocating the water. Is it because the fish can't survive in the hotter temperatures?

Yes, there are several reasons why they die, but one is direct thermal stress, just the actual warmer temperature. and then there's also indirect effects associated with that, such as lower dissolved oxidant concentration that results in many of the aquatic organisms literally suffocating in the water. Suffocating in the water. Does this happen to all fish or are some fish more susceptible than others? Most of the documented events have affected warm water fish or fish with high thermal tolerances. However, one of the important findings of our study is that similar temperature deviations can affect both warm and cold water fish. And fish of all ages.

Yes, fish of all ages. Mainly what we record is the adults that are visible to the human eye. However, earlier life stages such as juveniles and embryos are particularly sensitive to warm temperature, and we may not be able to recover those and document them. And they're the worst stage of life to die, right? You're not going to get any new fish. Right, right. Yeah, it can have severe effects on population growth over time. And if the fish are going to be dying so much more, how could that affect the rest of the ecosystem? It will likely destabilize the system to a degree. Most ecosystems function better and are more stable when they have all pieces of the food web.

and a lot of the fish dying will remove much of the predation in these systems. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. We're talking to biologist Simon Tye about fish die-offs due to climate change. He's based in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Are there any parts of the Midwest that are more susceptible than other parts? Our research show that there's an appreciable latitudinal gradient, such that southern locations are more apt to have these events. However, another key finding of our paper is that fish mortalities occurred at similar temperature

deviations, which implies that local heat waves, like much of what the U.S. saw throughout this summer, can cause mortalities regardless of the location. And how much of a temperature heat wave does it take? That's a very good question. It could probably be around the critical thermal maximum for cold water fish. which is the temperature that they can persist at in a water body. However, for warm water fish, mortality has occurred. It's about 5 to 10 degrees below their critical thermal maximum.

So in other words, if you have probably 5 to 10 degrees above average, that could lead to a mortality event. Are we talking about the Great Lakes here also, or is that a whole different story? The Great Lakes is a whole different story. because there's a lot more intricacies of modeling temperature dynamics in those large bodies of water compared to smaller bodies of water. What body of water would we know of that would be most affected? They can happen all over the place.

Maybe Lake of the Ozarks is a larger lake in Missouri north of where we are. But I wouldn't be surprised if these events happened throughout the U.S. There was a similar event to San Francisco that happened along the major river between Germany and Poland about a month ago. And there was tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of fish. And that would be comparable to a mass diop in the Missouri relative to North America. As someone who studies this, I imagine this is really concerning for you. It is concerning. The reason I chose to study this topic and similar topics is I want people to understand the implications of a warming climate and realize what the effects could be

when their children grow older. Yeah. And as someone who, is younger and is going to be living with the effects of climate change? Is there anything you think that could be done to reverse this prediction? The most that we can do as a society is just an act more sustainable policies. I don't know if there's anything at an individual level you can necessarily do besides noticing these events and reporting them to the authorities. But it's more of a societal issue that we need to address. So it's not something that the fish could possibly evolve to handle? No, from what we, from what we've learned so far about fish evolving higher thermal tolerances is that the rate's much lower than the rate of increasing temperature. So they won't be

able to evolve fast enough, if you will. Yeah, so what's happening, the big fish kills happening in the San Francisco Bay Area is sort of, well, portends what's going to happen in other places around the upper Midwest. Yes, yes. The way I like to think about it is, past generations learned about the Chesapeake Bay and environmental degradation there. For my generation, I learned a lot about the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. And I think future generations are going to learn a lot about just the fact that fish are declining globally and not necessarily about a specific location necessarily. Yeah, as someone who has lived through those, I think you're right.

And I want to thank you, Simon, for taking time to be with us today. Thank you. It was my pleasure. Simon Ty, PhD candidate in biology at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. We have to take a break at when we come back. We might be facing a global sulfur shortage in the next decade, and that's important. We're going to talk about why it matters and what we can do to prevent it.

So sulfur is used to actually dissolve stuff, and what's really important is it dissolves rock. So for fertilizer production, it dissolves the phosphate. rocks and gets the phosphate out. But it also dissolves rock to get at those essential metals. So we're thinking of lithium, we're looking at, say, nickel and things like that, which are essential for making lightweight batteries for electric cars, but also for solar panels. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Decarbonization is a net positive for the world, right? Reduce fossil fuel production.

reduce CO2 emissions. But there's an unanticipated side effect. We may be facing a global sulfuric acid shortage, you know the corrosive stuff that's in your car battery. Turns out that 80% of the world's sulfuric acid is the byproduct of fossil fuel production, cut back on coal oil and natural gas production, and we're lowering our sulfur supply. Sulfuric acid is critical to making green tech, like solar panels and batteries, and infertile. production. Joining me now to explain more about this potential problem is Mark Maslin, Professor of Earth System Science at University College London in London, England. Welcome to Science Friday. It's a pleasure to be on. Nice to have you. Let's start off by talking about why

sulfur is so important to the global economy. What's it used for? So sulfur is used to actually dissolve stuff. And what's really important is it dissolves rock. So for fertilizer production, it dissolves the phosphate rocks and gets the phosphate out. Because we know when we actually want to sort of fertilize the land for agriculture, we need both nitrogen and we also need phosphate. And so it's a really, really quick way of dissolving the rocks and getting that out. But it also dissolves rock to get at those essential metals. So we're thinking of lithium, we're looking at, say, nickel and things like that.

which are essential for making lightweight batteries for electric cars, but also for solar panels. And to give you an example, these metals are very rare. So even when they occur in a rich seam, they're only about 1% of the rock. And so what happens is you use this sulfuric acid, dissolve the 99% away to leave these invaluable metals behind. And before reading your research, you know,

I didn't really understand just how many things, sulfur was used for. What got you so interested in this? I'm always looking at these systems, how the global economy works and how connected everything is. So for example, the invasion of Ukraine stops grain being exported from Ukraine to the rest of the world, which then makes food prices go up in Africa. So we live in a very connected world. And when we're looking at decarbonization, We were looking at how this would affect lots of different minerals and metals, and we suddenly discovered that sulphur had been forgotten about. And the reason why it's been forgotten about is because it is the fifth most common element on planet Earth.

And so there's a huge amount of it, except it's all locked in rocks. Whereas now what we do is we get nice sulphur in its actual yellow elemental form by getting it out of fossil fuels. We have to do that because the legislation around the world says fossil fuel companies clean up your gas and oil and coal because we don't want the sulfur in the actual fossil fuels because when it gets burnt, produces sulfur dioxide, which creates acid rain.

That's bad. So basically, please get rid of it. So do they get rid of it? I mean, are we able to mine sulfur and those ores safely and environmentally safe? So the big problem is and why we were so keen to get this paper out is we want to avoid mining sulfur

because the way you actually mine sulfur is you pump really hot, super critical steam, so basically incredibly hot water through rocks, which then dissolves the actual sulfur out of these sedimentary rocks. And what you do is you get this sulfur acid out at the other end. And that sulfuric acid you then collect and then pass around the world. So that causes two problems. One, actually as you're dissolving the sulfur, you're also

dissolving other nasties like mercury and, of course, arsenic, which can get into the water of the surrounding area. So that's really bad. Second thing is you're then having to transport sulfuric acid around the world, which is actually dangerous and difficult, whereas transporting the yellow sulphuric acid on site, where you need it, is much safer and much easier. So is it possible to do that, transport it more solidly the yellow stuff around the world? No, because the only way of actually getting solid sulfur is either from fossil fuels, or you can actually mine it from volcanoes. So in Indonesia, there are lots of people that mine it on the sides of volcanoes and literally chip away at the

yellow rock and bring it down. But that's very small scale. We're needing millions and millions of tons of sulfur. So in our paper what we're suggesting is, well, how about reducing the need for sulfuric acid, which then reduces the need to get sulfur and hopefully we'll stop the expansion of mining in the next couple of years. I get it. So how do you then reduce the need for a sulfuric acid? Well, the first thing is if you think about the fertilizers, phosphate. Well, why create new phosphate when we could recycle it?

So there's a lot of phosphate that is in our sewage. So there are really interesting systems where we could actually recycle that sewage and get the phosphate out and have a bit of a circular economy, whereby we make fertilizers, we put it on the land, it goes into our sewage, we then reclaim it and put it back onto the land. So we can start to think of a much more circular economy when it comes to that. When it comes to metals, again, why can't we recycle things? We are advocates of making sure that all our products, whether it's our computers, our phones, whether it's our electric battery in our car, they should be designed from day one,

to be recyclable. And therefore, all that lithium that we need, all that nickel and all those other metals, actually we can recycle a lot of them because we can get back all of the stuff we've already mined, reducing the damaging mining, but also meaning that we don't need so much sulfuric acid. And what about all these new batteries that I'm hearing about that can use sulfur instead of some of these rare earth elements in them? Well, again, this is sort of a balancing act, which is, does the sulfur in the batteries mean that you need less lithium, which means you need less sulfuric acid? Because if you think about it, for mining something like, say, cobalt, you are using about 250 times the amount of sulfuric acid as the nickel you get out.

So if you can replace, say, 10 grams of metal with 10 grams of sulfur in your actual battery, then, of course, you're going to win in that balancing act. But what we do need to do is think about new batteries. And this is where the new technology comes in. Can we actually build batteries which are using less rare metals that are easier to recycle, which actually have a much higher storage and also a longer light? And the technology is accelerating so quickly. Well, if we don't find a way and if we don't take your advice and recycle a lot of this stuff of the waste,

are we going to have a global sulfur shortage? There will be a shortage in the future if we don't actually deal with it now. And what will happen is different industries will be able to pay the higher price. So therefore, if you think about it, the metals industry, a ton of lithium is, so much more expensive and profitable than a ton of fertilizer. So we have the idea that perhaps green tech would out-compete the fertilizer industry. And that means that fertilizers would become more expensive, food production would become more expensive, and therefore the food that we buy on the shelves would obviously be more expensive. So what we're trying to do is provide a warning,

a decade ahead saying, look, we can see this crisis ahead. Why not actually do something about it? Do you think this will happen? Are you optimistic about this? Well, I think that we are starting to thinking very different ways. I think we're starting to think systematically about the implications for decarbonizing the world, how we actually produce enough renewable electricity, how do we actually transport it, how do we start it, how do we store it in a green way. And again, I think because people are now thinking more holistically and in a more joined up way, we can put these resource crises into the mix and work out how we can actually mitigate against those. Thank you very much, Dr. Maslin, for taking time to be with us today.

Pleasure. Mark Maslin, Professor of Earth System Science at University College London, of course, in London, England. You're listening to Science Friday from WNY studios. If you've ever been around goats, you know they'll eat well just about anything and everything, which makes them perfectly fitted to spruce up overgrown, weedy areas, including urban spaces. SciFri Radio producer Russia, Irides, is here to tell us more about her experience with goats. Hi, Russia. Hey, Ira. So I live in New York City, and a little while ago, I heard that a herd of goats had taken up residents at a park near me, and they were

were there to help with conservation efforts. And it sounded strange, right? Because you usually hear about livestock harming biodiversity instead of helping it. Yeah, yeah. Livestock and Conservation are sort of on the opposite ends of the feedlot. Yes, exactly. And this concept of using livestock to help with conservation is called conservation grazing. And the goats are there to chow down on invasive species.

So I was wondering, does using goats actually work? And is there any harm in it? So I called up Hillary Steffis, and she has the best job title I've ever heard. She's a chief goat herder. And she works for a nonprofit called Allegheny Goatscape, which takes goats all around Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to munch on invasive plants. Yeah, they're very industrious, and they're very hungry. They eat a few pounds of food a day, which if you think about how many leaves it would take to make four pounds. That's a lot of volume.

So we're just paying them to do what they want to do already. They're also good at navigating. challenging topography. They just run up and down these cliffs pretty impressively. So, Hillary, how do the goats do their job and where do you fit in? Working with the goats is a fun collaborative effort. We usually set up a site and let them do some work. And then once they have thinned out the vegetation to a degree that allows us to come through with our tools and mechanically remove certain plants. Are there any downsides to using goats? Like, what should people be careful of? People think that goats are a one-and-done solution, and that's a

misconception. Goats are going to come through and it might seem impressive how quickly they reduce the vegetation that you don't want, but vegetation is strong and typically storing a lot of energy in a root system. You know, so you're going to need several seasons to weaken and replace an entire plant community. Are there any concerns about the goats' down on native plants or causing erosion to these parks? Yeah, goats could actually do a lot of damage to a site if not managed properly. So when we set up a site, first we make sure that we're avoiding large stands of natives or if there's a handful of trees worth saving within the site, we might create an enclosure

within there or put some fencing around the trees. Also, if goats are left on a site for too long, they can certainly disturb the soil. and because for erosion. So in order to avoid that, we just make sure that we're moving them around in proper timing. And also, if a goat has been on a site that's very steep and they've been wearing away at the soil and the grass, reseeding afterward would just be the simple follow-up. And do you have a favorite part of working with goats? Yes, I have very nice coworkers.

I'm never complaining about my coworkers. They're very soothing. I do really like looking around while working and thinking about the fact that me and the goats together are working on this huge ecological project and it feels like we're making a difference. Because goats have such a great track record at removing invasive species, a growing number of parks across the country are recruiting their help. They're in cities like Madison, Wisconsin, Minneapolis, Minnesota, Boulder, Colorado. so I took a field trip to my local goat park, Riverside Park, in New York City. Ladies, ladies, come on, ladies. Let's go.

How you doing? Hey, baby. I met with Marcus Casares. He's a field supervisor at the Riverside Park Conservancy, and he's in charge of the park's four goats. Cheech, Eleanor, Biggie, and Skittles. I like that, Cheech? Yeah. They get pampered every day.

They get petted every day. They're all retired and they just eat a whole bunch of food every day. Riverside Park is sandwiched between the Hudson River and a busy part of Manhattan. So there are lots of cars and sirens and airplanes flying overhead. But it's on a really beautiful hillside though with lots of old trees and trailing vines. For the third time, Riverside Park has brought Goatsw into helping, in clearing out invasive plants which out-compete with native species. And that can have negative effects on the native wildlife that depend on those plants.

for food or for a home, for example. Riverside Park was built in the 30s, so technically a lot of the spaces that we do have here are disturbed, which makes it easier for invasive plants to take hold and not so easy for native plants because they don't know the area. And invasive plants are like, I don't care, I've been here for a long time. This is totally fine. That's where the goats come in.

Some of their favorite foods just so happen to be the plants that the Conservancy once gone, and their two-acre enclosure is a giant leafy buffet. The goats usually go after. Burdock or some multifluor rose, porcelain berry, some mugwort, all the common weeds and invasive plants that we have in the park, but they won't go after asters, white snake root, all those herbaceous species that are native for our area to win-win for us.

Take multiflora rose, for example. It's a really pretty shrub with white flowers, but it's a very invasive plant. It forms tangled, almost impenetrable thickets that make it difficult for native plants to grow. But the goats, they love it. They munch off all the leaves, and they leave the stems. Sometimes they'll even munch on the stems too,

especially if it's new growth. They really like the new growth because it's filled with moisture and nutrients. The old growth is very woody and hard to munch on, and then that's where I come in to cut that so that that can be removed. and then new shoots are being created, and then the goats are always attacking that new growth, and then that's how we stunt the growth. Besides being really great at their job of clearing out invasive plants,

there's another reason the Riverside Park Conservancy keeps inviting the goats back. It's because people love them. They're a phenom. School groups come out. Dogs love them. They come and take pictures of them all the time. People make it part of their morning routine,

and that's what we want as a conservancy. We want people to come and use the park more. What better way to doing that and breaking a whole bunch of goats? Great story. Sounds like there's no budding heads with that idea, Rasha. So where's this team of goats now? Are they still munching away? They actually just finished eating through all the plants in their enclosure.

So they are out of food and their summer job is done. So they went back home to their farm. Not a bad way to retire. Summer in the city, you eat all day. Thanks for the story, Rasha. Yeah, anytime, Aaron. And that about wraps up this hour. Here's Diana Montana with some of the folks who helped make this show happen.

Thanks, Ira. Our radio producers are Christy Taylor, Kathleen Davis, Shoshana Bucksbaum, and Rasha Aredi. Beth Rami is our controller. Jordan Smudjik and Jason Rosenberg are our grants managers. And I'm Diana Montana, Experiences Manager. Thanks for listening. Thank you, Diana. BJ Leiberman composed our theme music.

And of course, if you missed any part of the program, or you'd like to hear it again, subscribe to our podcasts, or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato.