Science Friday - Live in San Antonio: Deadly Disease, Bats, Birds. Aug. 16, 2019, Part 2

Episode Date: August 16, 2019

Imagine stepping into a white suit, pulling on thick rubber gloves and a helmet with a clear face plate. You can only talk to your colleagues through an earpiece, and a rubber hose supplies you with breathable air. Sounds like something you wear in space, right? In this case, you’re not an astronaut. You’re at the Texas Biomedical Institute in San Antonio, one of the only places where the most dangerous pathogens—the ones with no known cures—can be studied in a lab setting. Dr. Jean Patterson, a professor there, and Dr. Ricardo Carrion, professor and director of maximum containment contract research, join Ira live on stage for a safe peek inside the place where the world’s deadliest diseases are studied.  Bracken Cave, 20 miles outside of San Antonio, is the summer home to 15 million Mexican free-tailed bats. Each night, the bats swarm out of the cave in a “batnado“ in search of food. Fran Hutchins, director of Bat Conservation International’s Bracken Cave Preserve, talks about how the millions of individuals form a colony and the conservation efforts to preserve this colony in the face of housing developments and the encroaching city. San Antonio is a great place for birding. Along with Texas Hill country, the Edwards Plateau, and the gulf coast, the region’s intersecting ecosystems make it a good home—and a welcome pitstop—for birds. Iliana Peña, the Director of Conservation Programs at the Texas Wildlife Association, talks about sustainable grazing and other changes to ranching procedures that would make the tracts of land held by large Texas landowners more welcoming to grassland birds. Plus, Jennifer Smith, an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Science and Ecology at the University of Texas at San Antonio, describes her research on the effects of wind farms on prairie chickens in Nebraska.   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, coming to you from the Tobin Center for the Performing Arts in San Antonio, Texas. Yes. You know, San Antonio has a lot of nicknames. You can call it the Alamo City, Military City, Home of the Spurs. I'm going to add another one. I'm adding another one to the list called Bat City, USA. And that's because every summer millions of Mexican freetail bats crossed the border. and they fly up, and they go to do this little timeshare, this cave that they like to occupy. They wing their way to Bracken Cave, located just north of San Antonio, and that makes this town home to one of the largest bat colonies in the world. We're talking 15 to 20 million bats in the Bracken Cave.

Our team went to the cave and brought back a sound portrait of their visit. We are at Bat Conservation International's Bracken Cave Preserve. The mouth of the cave is at the bottom of the 80-foot deep sinkholes. If you look right down into the darkness below that second arch, you can see, it looks like the air is moving a little bit. Those are the bats swirling right there in the darkness, and you'll catch a glimpse of them every now and then. So that vortex is going to move out to the mouth of the cave.

And then once it's in the sinkhole, it has the spiral upwards to get to the top of the trees, and then they stream away in this river of bats in the sky. It smells like kind of a wet dog. That smell of guano, it's all over the floor. The guano is like over 75 feet deep. What? Is it happening? Here they come.

And it pulses, it gets really strong, then it kind of pulses down and pulses up, so as they come out. That's a Swainson's Hawk. See the raptor down range there on the outside of the big tree? They just catch them with their talons. Yeah, they'll just dive in and grab them, eat them. or eat them right on the wing. I'm Edith Burquist, and I'm a volunteer at Brackenbat Cave, and I'm also a master naturalist.

And we live nearby. Can you see them near your house? We can see them from our back porch. What's it look like back there? It looks, at first it looks like smoke coming out. And, of course, now we know what it is, but eventually they actually come right over our house. A lot of bats in the cave.

Yeah. Takes them about three and a half hours to clear out, empty the cave. We're going to be home in bed or home anyway. Yeah, this is like 1%. Joining me now for the rest of the tour is Fran Hutchins. He's director of the Bracken Cave Preserve, part of Bat Conservation International. Welcome, Fran. All right, thank you. Now, the bats fly in from Central and South America, right? In Mexico, yes. And they could stop anywhere they want to. Why the Bracken Cave? Well, it's a perfect setting for the bats.

It's a large cavernor space. You can kind of think of it like a giant incubator. You know, we all talk about people having their own man caves at home. But Bracken is what you call a mom cave. What does that mean? We have somewhere around 8 to 10 million pregnant females of move into the cave. And in March, and then in early June, everybody has a baby. A baby bat's called a pup.

and so that's when our population jumps up to around 15 to 20 million. Wow, wow. And the bats live in Bracken Cave. These bats are called Mexican freetail bats? Right. Tell us about them. What are their habits? What do they eat?

Well, they're insectivores, so they're really important to our local farmers and us because of all the insects that they eat. And Bracken Cave is one of a dozen large colonies of bats that we have in the Texas Hill country. So you're saying that when you say they're important to the farmers because they're They eat so many insects, what mosquitoes and other insects? This particular bat is going to target a lot of our agricultural pests, corn deer worm worm moth, cottonbow worm moth. So tonight, right now, when these bats come out for dinner, they're going to eat about 147

tons of bugs, and that's every night of the week. Wow. So that's less pesticide then. Right. It saves the crop damage and less pesticides to the farmers are having to spray on our crops. That's really great. Now, you say there are millions of bats in the cave. How do they organize themselves?

Do they create little groups? Tell us what goes on inside the cave. This colony is made up of thousands of smaller colonies that have migrated into the Tobracking Cave. We can't really tell the difference between one colony space and another, but they know. You're looking at around 500 bats per square foot roosting on the walls of the cave.

So a sheet of notebook paper-sized space can have a few hundred bats hanging from it. How big of the bats, about the size of your hand? About as big as my two thumbs together with a 10-inch wingspan. So they have to think about dinner every night when they go out. Yes, these are hungry, female, pregnant female bats. And tell us, I heard it describe that when they leave the cave, they swarm into something called a batnato.

Right, yes, we have, yes, we have literally a bat anato in the sinkhole as they spiral up. because they get to get out of the cave and out of that sinkhole to be able to fly downrange. Because they're heading out about 60 miles to feed. They go 60 miles away. Mexican free-tail bat will head out about 60 miles and can feed up to around 10,000 feet in altitude. Just depends on one of those large insect migrations.

They're flying into those insect migrations to feed on them. Now, do they send like a scout bat out first? You know, to see if it's the right? time, the right weather. No, they're just, they, we're not sure what the trigger is. And being a scout bat's really not a good thing because you're the only bat out there. And the hawks, it's easy pickings if you're just the lone bat. So they all come out together and that stream in the sky makes it more difficult for the hawks to get them.

And is this, the swarm of the stream is so big that you can, you can see it on radar. Right. They'll show up on Doppler radar as a cloud forming over the cave. The entire colony goes out for the night. The whole colony goes out. And next question is, how do they get back in? I mean, if they're all out. And they're coming, yeah, so they're coming in from hundreds of feet up in the air.

So they're coming in from about 360 degrees, but primarily south to southeast. So directly above the cave, they tuck their wings and dive bomb into the cave. It literally rains bats in the morning. How fast are they going? We've clocked them at over 40 miles an hour in the dive. That's a 40 mile an hour dive from 10,000 feet? Yeah. And the air going over their skin makes this buzzing sound as they're diving in

because it's faster to dive in because the hawks are there for breakfast too. So they want to get away from the hawks as fast as possible. They'll come in right behind and just pluck them right out of the sky. Wow. Let's go to the, we have, yeah, the microphone there. Yes, sir. Yeah, I've read about a lot of bat colonies being decimated in other parts of the country by this white nose disease, a fungal disease. Is that something that's coming down to Texas?

Right. There's a disease called White Nose Syndrome that's affecting our hybridating bats. We do not have the disease in Texas yet, but we do have the fungus that causes the disease. We discovered it this past February in Bracken cave. But this disease affects our hibernating bats, but basically bats have two choices when it must. they migrate. They can migrate out of an area to when it gets cold or they hibernate like bears do. So our hibernating bats, this particular fungus, it thrives in cold temperatures. It gets on their skin and eats into their skin and it's an irritant and it wakes the bats up

out of their hibernation cycle and they burn off their fat reserves and starve to death. We don't have the disease here in Texas, but the fungus is causing the disease. And bat conservation international is doing a lot of research right now on what we can to mitigate the effects of this disease. Now you are director of the Bracken Cave Preserve. The cave was under possible development at one point, right? Developers wanted to go in and maybe affect the housing they might have put up, might have affected the health of the colony.

Right. Actually, we were rolling on our five-year anniversary. Halloween in 2014, we purchased the land away from a developer so they wouldn't build homes. And this is something that people are doing around the world trying to conserve the bat population. Right. And one of the biggest threats to bats is lost a habitat. So bat conservation international is working in a number of different countries to purchase caves to help protect them from humans, from development, so that our bat species can survive. Over here, yes, sir. Actually, both of the things I was going to bring up are already talked about.

All right, sit down. But no, no, no, no, no. As a reference, I was going to ask more about the pollination. that bats do, not necessarily the freetails because they're insectivores, but the pollination that other bats and other bat species do as well. Yeah, that's a very good question. I'm glad you didn't sit down because that's a good question. They are pollinators. Right.

So besides being insectivores, a lot of our species of bats are pollinators, basically the nighttime version of honeybees. So those plants that bloom at night need bats to pollinate them. So there's over 500 species worldwide, the plants that humans rely on, that bats are pollinate. So, for example, coca. If you like chocolate, you can think a bat. Bananas. So we need our wild bananas to keep our store-bought bananas disease resistant. So bats pollinate bananas. And a very important, especially on Fridays, is tequila. So bats pollinate agave, and we need those wild agave so that we have the farm-raised agave for tequila production. We have time for one more question. Yes. You mentioned these

are all females, where are the males? Yeah, so the male bats are here too, and most of the mating goes on in early February before they migrate, and we have bachelor colonies. So for example, if you're over near the Pearl Brewery at Camden Street, that's about 60,000, 50, 60,000, and so that's a bachelor colony. The males, they can't feed the young, so they're just in the way. And that's where the term man cave comes here. That was the original man cave. I get it. Yeah.

I get it. Fran Hutchidge. You filled in everything we wanted to know. Director of the Bracken Cave Reserve, part of Bat Conservation International. Thank you for taking time for doing this today. After the break, how the things people do from ranching to bird feeders can affect bird populations. Taking us to the break, our musical guests for the evening, Los Nauat Latoz. I'm Ira Flato, and this is Science Friday.

from WNYC Studios. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato, coming to you from the Tobin Center for the Performing Arts in San Antonio, Texas. San Antonio is a great place for birds. You've got the Edwards Plateau to the northwest, the Gulf Coast to the southeast, the hill country nearby,

and a great intersection of ecosystems that make the area either a good place for birds to live or to stop over on their way to somewhere else. And maybe you like watching birds, or you even put out food for them, maybe you do that in your feeder, but have you considered all the many different ways that human actions can affect bird ecology? That's what we'll be talking about,

including some ways that you may not have thought of. So let me introduce my guests. Ilya Pena is Director of Conservation Programs for the Texas Wildlife Association, based here in San Antonio. She's also former director of the Mitchell Lake Audubon Center just south of town. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you. Jennifer Smith is an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Science and Ecology at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

Welcome to Science Friday. I'mliana, for those of us not from here, and I'm looking at myself, what makes San Antonio such a good place for birds? Well, you mentioned it at the beginning. San Antonio is the confluence of three different ecoregions, so you get a beautiful assemblage of birds that come into this area. We've got at Mitchell Lake, we have wetlands, we have hill country, we have South Texas plains. So it's just a really diverse environment, and so it welcomes lots of birds. Now, I understand that you have a special fondness for shore birds. I do. In my other job, before I moved to Texas. I did a lot of work with Texas Audubon on coastal bird species.

A lot of people in Texas don't know, but there are all these tiny islands along the Texas coast that are nurseries for all of your brown pelicans, reddish egrids. That's where they're all born. So yeah, I have an affinity for that a little bit. Can't blame you. Can't blame you. I love shore birds myself. Jennifer, I couldn't help but notice that your accent might not be from around here.

Are there local birds species that now you have come to admire local. come to admire locally? Yeah, for sure, you know, and that's one of the things which attracted me to come to Texas for this job was, you know, I teach ornithology and avian ecology, and this is a great place not only to do research, but to teach. And yeah, of course, the road runners, it's our school mascot, go runners. So, you know, and a wide range of other species. I mean, Texas is home to 600 species.

How many? A little over, yeah. So it's a state with the biggest number of birds in the entire year. US. Wow. And so, yeah. And so I'm a, not only am I an academic ornithologist, I'm a birder too, and so this is an awesome place to be. So you've said, you know, everybody knows that Texas does things big and they do things big with bird species. True. Too. And then I know that you're a bird person, but you spend a lot of time these days thinking about cattle and ranching. I do.

I do. Ironically. Well, because Texas, This is a private land state. So I imagine many of you have heard that we are 95% privately owned, and there are cattle all over this state. So when you're talking bird conservation, you've got to be talking to landowners. Give me an idea of what you mean by that. How do you deal with the two? So I think many of us know that bison used to roam, you know,

the central part of the United States into Canada, and other grazers. And so our grasslands, our environments kind of evolved with grazing animals. And so today we have cattle on our, you know, landscapes, but we use those cattle sometimes in maybe not the most appropriate way. So more and more landowners are beginning to understand that you can use grazers or cattle as a tool to improve habitat. So we are working with landowners to encourage what we call regenerative grazing or ecological grazing. Now we have a couple of slides that we're going to show right now that talk about their before and after pictures of the habit. habitats. What are we seeing up here?

So most often, people that graze will sometimes do what we call continuous grazing. So you have 1,000 acres, you may put out, you know, 200 cattle, and they just kind of do what they want to do, right? So they may make the impacts on that landscape kind of over and over again. What we're encouraging landowners to do is to do rotational grazing or regenerative grazing. And what you see in the first picture is a property just outside of market. Texas that was continuously grazed for years. And when the new landowner purchased it, they implemented this rotational grazing, which more than anything is all about rest, period, right? So the cattle will come and graze really hard, but then they'll leave, and they can leave

that area for more than, you know, three months, six months. And this is what you see afterwards. So you don't want to see bare ground. Ideally, you want to see, you know, Forbes or vegetation cover on the ground. And you also see not just the plants, you see that it affects the soil itself too, right? Don't get me started on soil. Go ahead, I'm getting you started. There's a couple of pictures for you to cut. It's absolutely fascinating.

Like I had one of these like pooh moments, right? Cattle, you know, are these amazing little biological creatures. They, if you use them as a good tool, they're dropping feces and urine, hair, saliva on the ground, they're trampling it all up, they're putting in the soil. Then you take them away and they improve soil. And if we improve our soil health, you guys, we actually. we actually improve soil's ability to capture water, to improve water quality. And in a state like Texas, and all over the United States, that's important.

So here what you're seeing. The first one is like a brick, right? Does it look like a brick? That soil is not doing what it can for the landowner. It's not doing what it can for wildlife. If you look on the one on your right, it's very porous. It has organic material in it. It's actually able, see all those little porous areas,

water to filter through and be captured. It's acting like a sponge like it's supposed to. So good soil health is key to a land manager doing what they would like on their land. What does this all have to do with the birds, though? So grassland birds as a guild of birds love a diversity of different landscapes, right? So they, some like short grasses, some like tall grasses, some like real dense grasses, some don't. And when you've got cattle doing good work on the land, they're creating a diversity on the land. creating a diversity on the landscape.

And so you begin seeing bird populations benefit from good grazing. One of my favorite things about Texas, besides a lot of good food here in town, I'm being San Antonio, is the wind energy that you have, the wind power that you have in this state, Jennifer. You've done work on how wind farms affect prairie chickens. So those of us don't know what a prairie chicken is. Yeah, so I did this work up in Nebraska, but even though I did it in Nebraska, it's really relevant. to Texas. I went on the greater

prairie chicken up in Nebraska, but we have lesser prairie chickens here. We also have the endangered at Waters' prayer chicken here. And obviously Texas, again, it's ranked number one. So Texas being big again, ranked number one in wind energy development in terms of installed capacity.

So the work I did is completely relevant to Texas. But yeah, so we did a really big project led by Larkin Powell, who's a professor at UNL, and it's a big team of us, and we looked at lots of different things. we looked at the effects of pre-existing 36 turbine facility on nest survival, female survival, rude survival. So numerous things that we can look at in terms of population growth

and wind farm had no effect on any of those things. Yeah. And then some of the other things we looked at were we asked a question, do the wind farms affect the behaviour of male prairie chickens? So something about prairie chickens is what's really cool is that in the breeding season, at the beginning of the breeding season, the males congregate at known sites, which we call booming grounds or lex, where a bunch of males, think David Attenborough show, like a wide number of males,

come to these booming grounds, and they perform elaborate displays for females, and the females come, and then they pick the best male with whom to mate. And then after that, the male has nothing to do with the rest of the raising, chicks or incubating. So, yes, we looked at the behavior and we did actually find that the wind farm did affect the behavior of these males at the legs. So we found, interestingly, that the males at sites closest to the wind farm spent more time in breeding, so courtship behaviors than individuals further away.

So that was one of the only kind of effects that we saw of the wind farms on prairie chickens. When you hear wind farms and birds, you're probably think of birds. smacking into the turban blades, right? But that's not what you look at, mainly. Right. So when we think about wind farms and birds, we probably all think about those direct impacts. That's what we see a lot reported in the news.

And those do exist. We know that between 140 and 328,000 birds are impacted directly through collisions on wind farms, but that's not what we considered. So we looked at what's known as indirect effects. So, for example, do wind farms cause habitat loss? which could have an effect indirectly on birds, or do they act as barriers to their movements?

Coming from the Eastwell, we have these giant buildings, I know how many birds are affected by those buildings that no one talks about very much. Right, and so estimates in the literature suggest that there's a number of things affecting birds potentially, and I say potentially because we're still very at the infancy of this research, but it looks like buildings are actually having quite a large impact on birds more so than in turbine.

Wow. Let's go to the floor here. Yes, first question. You spoke about the large landowners. What about the small landowners that maybe have less than an acre? What can we do besides sticking out a bird feeder or sticking out a hummingbird feeder or a birdhouse? I think actually our smaller landowners are wonderfully able to help us with pollinators. Pollinators need a lot of help and you have the ability to make a choice about what kind of yard, you know, you choose to have. And so I would encourage small landowners, like you said, you mentioned about an acre, but encouraging you to help pollinators because that supports insects, that supports birds and the like. But you also are studying bird feeders. Yeah, and so at the moment I'm starting a big project here in San Antonio,

which actually is integrating citizen scientists. So if anyone is interested in doing some really cool citizen science here in San Antonio, get in touch. awesome. I see some fingers. Brilliant. But this project here in San Antonio Antonio is running on from some of my PhD work that looked at the effects of garden bird feeding in the UK.

So we found that bird feeding actually decreased clutch size, so the number of eggs that are bird producers. This is actually kind of opposite to pretty much any other study that's been done, but that really highlights a really important point that you can do one scientific

study on a question, but you often have to replicate it because these results can be site in species specific. So we found that. We found, and this is kind of a consistent finding across studies, we found that feeding garden birds advanced when they laid their eggs and when they initiated

building their nests. So that basically in a nutshell means that they bred earlier. And that can have important consequences because birds, at least in some species, birds that are able to leave the nest earlier in a season have a higher likelihood of surviving over the winter because they kind of got more time to build up those fat reserves, for example. And then we found some slight changes in some other behaviours.

So, for example, we found, and I should say this work was done on two species closely related to chickadees, blue and great tits. And we found that they spent longer in incubation behaviour compared to birds which weren't fed, which allowed them to shorten the amount of time that it took for the eggs to hatch. important because it was a shorter incubation period than those birds hatched sooner and can leave the nest earlier. I'm Ira Flato, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Ileana, let's talk about hunting. I know quail hunting is very popular here. Give us an idea of the interplay between hunters and the quail and how hunting affects the quail population. So hunting is a huge major

contributor to conservation. I mean, our, yeah, honestly, hunting, is used to help manage populations of deer and other wildlife. So hunting used as a part of a management plan is very appropriate and important to manage some species. Regarding quail, our hunters and our conservationists are the biggest contributors to conservation dollars for studying Bob White Quail and research. And so, yeah. And a lot of people aren't aware of this, but our model of conservation, if you are impassioned about protecting the environment,

hunters and hunter dollars actually contribute to over 69% of the conservation dollars that support our wildlife. So, and unfortunately, we're getting, we're seeing less and less hunting. But I have to say, there's a bit of an uptick. More and more people are beginning to say, you know what's better than organic? Wild game. Anyway, as it relates to quail, the interesting thing about Bob White Quail is, as we do good for Bob White Quail, we do good for a slow. or a guild of grassland birds. And so it's funny, it's an iconic bird. It is people, I don't know, raise it by applause.

How many have ever scared up a covey of quail in your lifetime? Isn't that amazing? And sadly, Bob White Quail are in decline, and Texas is in one of those places, South Texas and in the pan handle in which those areas or those birds are doing okay. But it's a challenge, and it's sad to think that my six-year-old,

daughter may never get to experience that. But as I said, what we do for quail is good for other grassland birds. And so that's why quail and hunter dollars are important. I just want to add a little bit there. You know, the project I spoke about on wind farms and great prairie chickens, that's actually funded through what we call Pittman-Robinson dollars. It's exercise tax on hunting equipment. So we awarded that money through the Nebraska Game Parks Commission. And even if you don't hunt, you can go out and buy a duck stamp, and that money goes towards conservation. I want to thank Eliana Pena, Director of Conservation Programs for the Texas Wildlife Association. Jennifer Smith is an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Science and Ecology

at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Again, thanks to both of you for being with us today. Still feeling a little bird crazy? Our Science Friday Book Club has been reading Jennifer, Ackermans, The Genius of Birds, and learning about how smart birds are, pick up the book and check out Science Friday.com slash book club to join the discussion. Taking us to the break, our musical guest for the evening, Los Nauat Latoz. Here we go.

After the break, we take you inside the world's most dangerous biolab safely after this. This is the directions that that's ancestors of the water that's for the

body, for the world, for the sacratas subvened in the tientre, and a

heart, and a heart, and I'm, that I know, and I know,

this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato, coming to you from the Tobin Center for the Performing Arts in San Antonio, Texas. Imagine stepping into a white suit, pulling on thick rubber gloves and a helmet

with a clear faceplate, and you can only talk to your colleagues through an earpiece, and a rubber hose supplies you with breathable air. Sounds like a space suit, right? Nope. In this case, you're not an astronaut. You're working in a biosafety, of the highest level, and that means level four.

The only place where the most dangerous pathogens, the ones with no known cures, can be studied. For example, the latest outbreak of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has killed over 1,800 people since last August. And while that outbreak is happening half a world away, the virus is also here in San Antonio. Did you know that?

It's locked up very safely in a biosafety level four lab here, where scientists are looking for a cure. And joining me now for a safe peek inside the place where the world's most dangerous diseases are studied are my next guest. Dr. Jean Patterson, professor at Texas Biomedical Research Institute. Welcome. Dr. Ricardo Carillon, professor and director of maximum containment contract research at Texas Biomedical Research Institute. Welcome both to the years. Dr. Carillon, first of all, describe what is a level four containment? Level four laboratories, a laboratory that's specially designed to allow us to work with these pathogens that I were mentioned.

So right now up in the screen, you'll see an individual wearing a spacesuit essentially. It's a one-piece vinyl suit that has no penetrations except for a single entry point for an air hose. So the individuals work with a laboratory that's under extreme negative pressure. you're thinking you're in a bubble that's full of air and you're in a negative environment, so air is being forced out of that room. So if you get a hole in your suit, there's really no way for a virus or anything to enter because everything's being forced out of the suit into a room and then passed out through air filters. In this image, you see individuals working with microscopes, but there's yellow hoses that attach

to their suits that supply them breathing air. Once you work in the laboratory, you have to decontaminate the suit. On the way out, they're required to take a chemical shower. So the suit itself, they stand in a large chamber that has a disinfection solution, and they stand in that chamber for about eight minutes where they go through a disinfection cycle or rent cycle, and they walk out of the laboratory, and they're able to then hang their suits up, let them air dry, and they themselves take a physical shower. So the idea being is if, perchance you were to get virus on your skin,

you then wash it off with a shower. Now, all the waste in that laboratory produced gets autoclaved, so that's cooked under extreme pressure and heat before it gets discharged. so everything in that laboratory is disinfected, so there's no way to actually transmit the virus outside the lab into our sewer systems. Dr. Patterson, there are only a few biosafety labs like this around in the country.

How was San Antonio fortunate enough to land one here? Well, why not, San Antonio? Before we built this lab, we went hot in 2000, in March of 2000, we had a lab work, glove box, the old-fashioned glove boxes, we just stick your hands in, and that was to work on herpes B virus. Herpes B is a virus that's carried by monkeys, and it's relatively benign to monkeys, but can be almost uniformly fatal to humans. So, and that's the definition of a level

four. It's potentially lethal. There's no treatment, no vaccines, and can be transmitted in the laboratory. So we had this program for herpes B, which all of the National Primate Centers, and Texas Biomedicin National Primate Center relied on us to tell us if anybody may have been exposed or infected with herpes bee. So when we built this new lab, we decided we would go to a full suit lab, just assuming that it might be necessary to do different kinds of experiments. And so we built it, and then, of course, after 9-11 in the anthrax attacks, there was a great deal more interest in biological weapons. And so we quickly converted the laboratory to using animals,

as well as working with hemorrhagic fevers. And so when did Ebola become one of the main things that you guys study? In 2003 is when we had our first Ebola. Because what was the catalyst of that? Well, the government made a list of things they called select agents, and these are things that the government has predetermined to be potential biological weapons. And again, after the anthrax attacks,

the government became more concerned about potential biological weapons. And so Ebola was high on their list, so there was a lot of interest in, funding to start to work on vaccines and therapies. Because we like to do more than just talk about stuff when we do it when we can. We actually have an example of one of those suits right here to show everybody. I want to ask them to bring it on out right now. That's not Robbie the Robot.

That's Anisha. Anisha's been with us since 2001. So Anisha, you're going to try and put the suit on? So Anisha is going to get into the suit. She can do this without any help. She can get in by herself. She can. Let's watch this.

Actually, she did this on Friday. She was working with Ebola on Friday. Now, she's, there's a one-piece zipper on the suit itself. And we lubricate the zipper with, it's actually a wax lubricant to minimize the amount of air going in and out of that suit. She's going to step into it like you would do overalls. So these suits weigh about 15 pounds. In the old days back in 2001, we had some made by the same company that makes the space suits. and those weighed about 25 pounds, so it's much lighter to work with.

But when you work in the laboratories, it's like being in an airplane for the duration of your experiment, because you're under pressure, it takes some dexterity to be able to handle these small tubes. So she'll step in. You notice that she's wearing a scrub top. That's because on the way out, I mentioned that we take a chemical shower. That scrub top gets removed and gets autoclaved as well. Now she's going to put it in her hands.

Now, we don't have an air hose here, so she's not going to be able to zip up too long, but she wears three pairs of gloves. So there's one pair on the inside of the suit. There's a thicker pair on the outside. So these are like dishwashing club consistencies. So they're thicker material. And then if she's in the laboratory, put a third pair on the outside.

And they get swapped out every three entries into the lab or if they have a hole in them sooner. Of course, you don't want holes in your suits. And then she's going to put the hood on and then zip up very quickly for a few seconds. So even the feet are attached. The boots are attached. It's all one piece.

You're zipping it up. Yeah, I see that. Everything, one piece. And in front there's a little regulator that regulates the amount of air pressure that goes into the suit. So she's all zipped up totally. There she is.

Okay, go ahead and unzit. Thank you. Thank you. Dr. Carriond, do you have to go through some kind of special training to wear that and to also work with the viruses? Exactly. So everybody who works with Ebola virus

has to go through first FBI background checks. So they make sure that you're not prone to, you know, being a bad person. You know, they do some general background checks on you. And then aside, once you pass that, then we let you go into the laboratory. For somebody who's just starting out, it's about six months at least before you're allowed to work by yourself with Ebola virus. If you work with, I mentioned we do vaccine and therapeutic testing, so we have to test these sometimes in animals. So if you do animal research, that can be up to two years before you can be allowed to work by yourself.

and the laboratories. And safety is very important because you look at Ebola virus, the strain that we work with is 90% fatal and there's no cures, so no vaccines, no therapeutics. So if you were to accidentally poke yourself and get infected, you're depending on your immune system primarily to find off the infection. So we put a big emphasis on training. And Dr. Carri-on, what makes Ebola so deadly? Is it what kind of class of problem is it? Ebola virus is a deadly virus because it primarily infects every cell type in your body. The course of an infection, after infection, you have an incubation period that lasts anywhere from 2 to 21 days. And then you'll start experiencing flu-like symptoms.

And when you're in areas where it's endemic, like Africa, that's one of the tough things about identifying Ebola viruses is because many things cause flu-like symptoms, including the flu and including malaria and other endemic pathogens in that area. But the virus itself is able to be infectious at very small particles. So in the laboratory, we work with a tube about this big, and it might have a milliliter. and that's enough to kill 100 million individuals. So it's highly infectious. So in an outbreak setting, we believe that bats are the primary reservoirs of Ebola virus. Individuals come in contact through a spillover event in which they contact a bat that has Ebola virus,

more likely a non-human primate or some other animal that's sick with Ebola virus. As they become infected, family members take care of sick individuals, and they're able to pass the virus onto each other. And if you're looking at 90% case fatality, 90% of people that get these are going to die from Ebola virus. And the way it's transmitted is to bodily fluids, saliva, vomiting, diarrhea. There was a lot of diarrhea with the last large outbreak of Ebola virus in 2014, and that's all full of this infectious virus that I just mentioned. Currently, there's no FDA-approved treatment for Ebola virus. However, in our laboratory, we work on a number of these new investigational drugs, which look at monoclonal antibodies for treating

Ebola virus. So it's an antibody that our body produces. However, the pharmacists through companies that we work with made these in a test tube, essentially, and the antibody targets Ebola virus, and we've shown in our studies that we've been able to protect 80% of animals that are infected with Ebola virus using these antibodies. We've also worked for the last 10 years and working on vaccines, to Ebola virus, so vaccines prevent infection. And currently, for the last outbreak in 2014 and also the outbreaks now, some of the vaccines we tested here in San Antonio, are actually being used in Africa during experimental vaccination. Let's go to the mic first on this side. As far as the actual virus itself, you constantly hear about these flare-ups and outbreaks. It is a very aggressive virus, despite its incubation period. When we don't have these outbreaks, these active events that are happening,

where does Ebola go? Does it have an incubation period? Where does it hibernate, so to say? A lot of these viruses have what's called a reservoir, and the reservoir is often an animal species. We don't know what the reservoir of Ebola is. It's suspected to be in bats, but in fruit bats. One of the reasons we probably don't have a lot of these hemorrhagic syndromes in North America is because we don't have fruit bats. But for the most part, we don't know yet exactly what fruit bat could be carrying Ebola.

So what happens is that Ebola is sitting in its reservoir happily coexisting, working nicely, and then it jumps species. And that's where we generally see outbreaks. When Ebola jumps out of its reservoir that is co-evolved with forever and gets into a species that it hasn't co-evolved with, and it causes a disease. And that's called the zoonotic transmission. Actually, one of the issues that we're seeing now

with such a large outbreak in 2014, 30,000 people infected, half of them survived, that we see some of the survivors can still retain the virus in what we call immune-privileged sites, like the eyeballs, the testes. So what this means is that months, years after an infection, the virus may be able to emerge and now cause a new type of hotspot, a new outbreak.

So one of the challenges that we have in developing therapeutics is that, okay, we're able to protect a person when they have therapy, but what happens three months from now or six months from now? What causes these viruses to hide in these sites, like the eyes? And what can we do to target those so that it won't become a problem in the future? So even though we might be close to coming up with QRUES, and vaccines and therapies, there's still a lot of work to do on these secondary type of infections

that will occur because of this hiding and immune-privileged sites. Let me just interrupt to remind everybody that I'm Ira Flato, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Yes, let's go to this microphone. How long can you stay in suits? How long can you stay in the suits? So as long as you can hold your bladder. So basically, there's no bathrooms in the lab.

But more practically, I mentioned it's like being on an airplane for a long period of time. Well, when you're working with Ebola virus, you want to be really focused. So after about five hours, you tend to lose focus. So we have a guideline that after five to six hours, if you're not done with your experiment, you have to come out, take a break, go to the bathroom, eat something before you can go back in. But it's about five hours before somebody has to go to the bathroom. So when I was going in the laboratory, so now I'm older, so I don't go in. But when I was doing it when I was younger and had to be.

much more hair. We would do things like not drink coffee before you go into the B.S.4, stay away from Kung Bao Beef, you know, right before you enter. So do things to regulate your metabolism. Because after four or five hours, sometimes you have to come out and remember there's an eight-minute shower. So you can't wait to the last second when you're in the BSF war. We have talked about a lot of connections on 30 years of Science Friday, but never Kung-Pao beef. How beef. You got to be careful with that.

And a level four lab. Yes. Question over here. Hi. So you had mentioned the widespread outbreak in 2014 where it was all over the media and many became aware of it. How does that kind of widespread knowledge and almost hysteria affect your research?

Well, hysteria is never a good idea. And certainly there was a lot of hysteria associated with the outbreak in 2014. And that's when, I think it was 10,000 deaths, 15,000 the end and that was the largest outbreak. And we didn't really think that Ebola could ever produce an outbreak like that. That was news to us.

I think that the important thing is to remember that what we've been fortunate enough to have here in San Antonio is that when we built this lab, we told everybody, we went to all of the rotary clubs, we spoke to everyone that we could talk to and tell them what we were doing. We were going to build this lab to work on these global problems. And San Antonio came back and said, well, of course we should have one here. Why aren't you working on that now? And so we try, I think with the attitude that San Antonio had was they didn't do any of this, not in my backyard stuff.

They wanted us to work on things that are important for everybody. Wow, we've run out of time. Very interesting conversation. I want to thank both of you. Dr. Jean Patterson Professor at Texas Biomedical Research Institute. Dr. Ricardo Carillon, Professor and Director of Maximum Campaign and Contract Research at Texas Biomedical Research Institute. And special thanks to our suit specialist. Thank you. Anisha Tyser.

Let's give it up for her, too. So thank you all for taking time to be with us. That's about all the time we have. Our heartfelt thanks to Nathan Cohn, Wendy Womack, and all the great folks at Texas Public Radio for hosting us. Thanks. Thanks also to Christopher Novastad, Sean Jenkins, and all the wonderful folks at the Tobin Center for the Performing Arts

for making this wonderful evening possible. Thank you all. Let's give one last round of applause for our musical guests. Lois now with Atos, who will play us out tonight. Thanks for coming in San Antonio, I'm Ira Flato. Drive home safely, everybody. Thank you, Ariflato and the Science Friday crew. Thank you, Tauvin.

Thank you, San Antonio. This song is dedicated to the beautiful people of El Paso. But nothing But nothing will change if we're We're going to change if we're in it