Science Friday - Mars Organics, Museum Collections, Kelp Farming. June 8, 2018, Part 2

Episode Date: June 8, 2018

In 1832, less than a year into the first voyage of the Beagle, Charles Darwin found a beetle in Argentina. Turns out, discovering new species in the depths of museum archives is not so uncommon. 180 years later, an entomologist who happened to specialize in rove beetles requested an assortment of samples from London’s Natural History Museum. There, among 24 pinned beetle specimens, was Darwin’s rove beetle. Dozens of such tales of are told by biologist and author Christopher Kemp in his new book The Lost Species. He describes the treasure hunts and serendipitous finding of species like the ruby seadragon and the olinguito, and why there may be many more discoveries waiting in the backlogged shelves of museums around the world. And Regina Wetzer, associate curator and director of marine biodiversity at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, explains how combining centuries-old museum specimens with modern techniques may help turn up new clues in understanding the past, present, and future of Earth’s biodiversity. This week, scientists published a study in the journal Science that described organic molecules—building blocks for life—in mudstone near Gale Crater, a 3.5 billion-year-old dry lakebed. Another study measured methane in the Martian atmosphere that varied with the seasons.  Astrobiologist Jennifer Eigenbrode, who is an author on those studies, discusses what this reveals about how ancient water and rock processes may have worked on the planet, and what the findings tells us about the possibility of life on the Red Planet. Plus: While it has been a tradition in many Asian cultures for centuries, kelp farming only reached U.S. shores in recent decades—and in part due to its environmental benefits. Ira is joined by Science Friday video editor Luke Groskin and Suzie Flores, a kelp farmer featured in our latest Macroscope video, to discuss the new wave of kelp farming.     Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. A bit later in the hour, a tour behind the scenes of natural history museums where sometimes a whole new species is right under your nose in plain sight. But first, new mysteries on Mars. You remember Curiosity? The rover has been roaming the surface of Mars for six years now, collecting samples and sniffing out the atmosphere, trying to get a sense of what's there,

and the results have finally come in. The samples contained organics, and methane. Now, what caused them? Not signs of life exactly, but indicators that maybe the environment was at one time ripe for the possibility of life. And also signs of how the planet worked nearly four billion years ago. The news was reported in two studies in the journal Science. My next guest is author of one of those studies. Jennifer Eichenbrode is an astrobiologist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt. Maryland, welcome to Science Friday. Yes, thank you for having me.

That's nice to have you. Now, we've been hunting for organics on Mars for a while, even since the Viking mission, right? Back in the 70s, but have always come up empty-handed? But what's the difference this time? Well, this time we sent Curiosity rover to an ancient lake bed. Now, at the time when we were choosing where we were going to put it, we weren't sure there was evidence of a lake there, but we had some indications from the orbiters, the spacecraft,

that are moving around the outside of the planet and looking down at the surface. but we had an idea that, you know, maybe this is a good place to look. There might be heat. There might be some lake sediments there. And it was an ideal place for us to look for organics based on everything that we know on Earth. Right. Now, organics are not going to be the definition that life exists

or has existed on Mars, correct? That's right. Organic molecules are essentially molecules that contain carbon. And they can contain other elements, too, but they're largely just carbon-based. And on Earth, a lot of the organic molecules that we have comes from life. On Mars, the organics that we came across could also be from life. We don't know.

Their presence is not evidence of life. But it might have been life. It might have been. There are two other possibilities. The organic matter could be formed from meteorites, which are falling in through the atmosphere and landing on the surface of Mars all the time. And that was probably continuous with the entire history of the planet. There's also the possibility that the rocks themselves may have formed organic matter,

and in which case they would have been broken up into little pieces and brought into the lake by rivers. So if this could be so many different possibilities, what makes it an important finding? Well, because we are ultimately after the search for signatures of life, we want to know if Mars ever had organisms living on. And when we think of those, we're really thinking about small things like bacteria. On our planet, on Earth, bacteria and similar small organisms really reigned the planet for over 3 billion years. And we think that on Mars, the environments were very similar to those on Earth, more than

four billion years ago. And if life we started on Earth around that time, hey, perhaps life started on Mars too, in which case, hey, it must be around somewhere. So we wanted to go look. This is ultimately what we're after. But to do that takes quite a few steps forward. A colleague of mine gave the analogy of if you want to go search for gold, you just don't go digging in your backyard. You have to do your research. You want to go look for things that tell you, hey, these are good places to go look. Well, we did the follow the water. Finding places that have water are good places to go look for more information. Then we searched out places that might have all the ingredients that we expect of life, such as nutrients and energy sources and that water altogether. And now we have found the organic matter,

and the organic matter could be from life or it could be food for life. Either way, it is sort of the one thing that we can now hone in on to do a more detailed search for signatures of life. Well, so you've checked all those boxes off, right? That's right. What's the next box you need to check off? We need to go look for the biosignatures. What does that mean? Well, so one of the really unique things about the latest discovery is that the type of chemistry

that we unraveled from the data we get from our instruments, us how the organic matter was preserved in the rocks. And we found that at the surface of Mars. Even though the rocks are billions of years old and they were buried for a long time, they eventually were rocks on top where eroded away and the rover came along and tapped into those really old rocks that were now exposed. They're exposed to lots of radiation. and that radiation produces things like free radicals and oxidants.

These are all things that break down organic matter. We found, despite all of those things working against us to destroy the organic matter, we sought. We still found it, and we found it in one of the places that may be regarded as an unlikely place. And what that means for us is that if we get away from that surface, environment, if we get away from the radiation, perhaps if we can find other organic material that is better preserved and still contains the signatures that we seek. So one way of doing that is to drill deep, get away from the radiation at the surface. Another way to do it is to look for places that have recently been excavated, such as by erosion from wind or maybe an impact event.

And is that on the agenda next? Yes. Actually, the European Space Agency has an Exomars rover that's going to be launching in 2020, and it has a drill on it that's going to go down two meters deep. Now, in comparison, the Curiosity rover only drills five centimeters. It's a very big difference. So the instruments on board the XOMARs rover have the ability to detect some of the types of signals. we might expect to be preserved.

You said you were looking for biologics, if I recall. Would you find biologics a couple of feet, a couple of meters down? They could be preserved further down, yes. And what would it biologic be when you say biologics? Oh, well, when we're thinking of life signatures, these are things that are sort of like the imprints that life leaves behind. When we think of a skeleton that is, you know, we might have had a dinosaur around on Earth, you know, or a big mammoth or something like that, and it leaves a skeleton behind and we uncover that later. That's what large animals and creatures do.

But when we're talking about microorganisms, they leave behind chemical clues. And sometimes they even leave behind fossils in terms of cells. and these are the types of things that we might look for. Wow, I'm just, you spun a good yarn there. We find these things in rocks of a similar age on Earth, at least around 3 billion years ago. So, you know, if we can find them on Earth, then we have a whole set of our own processes on our planet that, you know, break down organic matter. We don't have all that radiation, but we have tons of other things that happen. So just the likelihood of those being preserved on Earth are, you know, moderately good.

I mean, we've found some. Yeah. So the chances of us finding them on Mars are, you know, for all that we know right now, are equally as good. Wow. So that's very helpful. Before I let you go, tell us about this methane discovery also in a few moments I have left. Yeah, so methane is a modern chemical that we find in the atmosphere. And there have been a set of observation.

that people have made using different instruments and different techniques. And so we had this idea that, hey, it seems like there's methane there. And with curiosity on the ground and making sets of measurements over three Martian years, that's six Earth years. So we've repeated the measurements over and over and over again. And lo and behold, there is a pattern to how much we see in the atmosphere. And this is the stuff, like, it's in the air. and the rover is actually sniffing it.

And so what does it mean that we found it? Well, it's not constant. And this was a huge surprise. We did not expect this. And it's still a mystery as to why. However, we now know that there's organic matter in the ground. And that organic matter has that carbon that could go through different types of processes and end up as methane seeping out of the ground and into the atmosphere.

And perhaps there's a process that's changing when it releases the methane and when it doesn't. So you have all the dots, but you haven't connected them yet. That's right. We need more information. We really do. And so hopefully the next set of missions will help resolve some of that. We have the Exomarge Rover that I mentioned. There's also the NASA's Mars 2020 rover.

And hopefully that one will cash the right samples. to bring home through the Mars sample return campaign, and we'll bring those samples into labs here on Earth someday and get to really dive in deep. You've been working on this a long time, haven't you? Yes, I have. You're very excited. Is it really like a little bit of a dream come truly where you've gotten this far?

Oh, this is just the next step. We need to search for life on Mars, and particularly the ancient life is really intriguing. because on Mars we have rocks that are super old that we don't have on Earth. And if we can learn about whether or not life started on Mars and what that was like, perhaps we'll learn a little bit more about how life started on Earth. So when do you stop holding your breath? I don't know that I will.

When is the European mission happening? Mars, they're both happening in 2020. Both the Mars 2020 and the X-M-Mars 2020 missions are going on. And so the drilling will commence, and when we get that magic moment coming back? How soon might we know? Oh, I imagine that's going to be in 2021 or 2022, as about right. Promise to come back and talk about it? Sure, I'd be happy to.

We'd be happy to have you. Jennifer Euggenbrode is an author on a study in internal science about what was discovered on Mars. She's a biologist at NASA-Guarded Space Flight Center and storied Greenbelt, Maryland. Thanks for taking time to be with us today. Have a good weekend. Thanks for having me. After the break, scientists describe thousands of new species every single year. Meet the Ruby Sea Dragon and dozens more that were hiding in plain sight in museums. Yeah, they just been in the boxes, in the drawers, and the jars. People say, hey, let's go look at them. Hey, here's something a hundred years old. We'll talk about it. It's exciting. Stay with us. I'll be right back after this break.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Until recently, we knew. about exactly two species of sea dragon. That's a kind of pipefish that lives near Australia, as there's long body, flowing fins, not unlike a seahorse exactly, but definitely much more graceful looking. Then in 2013, a graduate student was looking at all the known museum samples of sea dragons, trying to assess their genetic diversity. It's part of a routine sampling project, and she discovered something amiss, four mislabeled specimens. Four mislabeled specimens. mislabeled in a museum for nearly a hundred years. It was a key serendipitous moment because the specimens turned out to be a third species of sea dragon.

And it wasn't just genetically different. It looked kind of weird. The most recent sample captured in 2007 came with a photograph of a bright red animal that matched none of the known sea dragons. So was born the ruby sea dragon. and, as you might have suspected, it's not the only new species to be found collecting dust on a museum shelf. Natural history collections are vast, backlog, error-riddled, or incompletely described. Think of all those expeditions in the 1800s and 1900s. Imagine drawers with thousands of beetles and flies, countless jars of marine invertebrates.

What other treasures could be collections? Could those collections still be holding? Well, biologist Christopher Kemp wondered about the, that too, and he went on a quest to uncover the forgotten collections and chronicled his findings in the book, The Lost Species, new species that were only found with the help of natural history museums. And you can see pictures of some of these lost species, and read an excerpt from the book at Science Friday.com slash lost species, and Christopher Kemp is with us today. Welcome to Science Friday.

Thanks so much for having me. Nice to have you. I just recounted the story of the Ruby Sea Dragon. This is a fish that got away, so to speak, for nearly 100 years after it was first collected, even though it's so obviously different from the species we already knew. How does that happen? Well, there's many reasons why it might happen. You know, someone might come up with new technology to look at old specimens,

and that was what happened in this particular example, because it required the ability to look at the DNA of the species. because a dried specimen doesn't really look as different as the animal does in real life. You know, another example would be maybe a graduate student would come along and be really interested in sort of an obscure, less looked at type of insect family, and they might be the first person to look at it in a hundred years, and then they would go into the collections and see drawers filled with specimens that just hadn't really been properly appraised.

But I think the two main factors is, you touched on one in your introduction, that the material in collections is just vast. I mean, we're talking about millions and millions of specimens, and many of them were collected 100, 200 years ago, and they just haven't really been looked at with a very careful eye for a very long time. And the other main factor, I would say, is that we just know very little about life, Earth. Scientists estimate that there's probably around 10 million species on the planet and maybe many more, but that's the current estimate, yet we've described less than 2 million of them. So when you think about that, it's just, it's sort of, it's sort of an idea of scope. Yeah. I mean, we've barely scratched the surface of understanding life on Earth.

So what tipped you off that there was a story to be told about these hidden treasures and natural history of museums? Well, I love these stories, but typically they're told in descriptive papers in scientific journals. And I was reading one. I think it came out in 2013, and it was a description of a new species of tapia. And it was, I have to say, it was a pretty boring paper, and many of them are sort of very dry. there were pages and pages of graphs and tables of data and skull measurements of hundreds and hundreds of different skulls. But then when you got to the discussion section of the paper, the authors mentioned that there was another skull that belonged to this new species of tapia, and it was in the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and it had been collected by Teddy Roosevelt in 1914 on his expedition of the Amazon,

and that he'd collected it there and brought it back and it had sat in, basically in a drawer for about 100 years. And that just seems so sort of mind-boggling to me that you would bury that incredibly interesting story and put it in the discussion section, or maybe oftentimes I think authors don't even mention those parts of the story at all. And, you know, it gets to that idea that we're really good at the science, but we're not really good at telling the stories. Yeah. Which is what I sort of embarked on trying to to gather more examples of this and tell stories of it. Because, you know, every, and we read these stories, you know, 10 new Beatles discovered and 50 new frogs. And every story is really fascinating. Who

discovered it? How they did it? Where the species comes from. And these stories need more attention. They're actually, the stories about the people, right? I mean, it's somebody decide to go do that. And some of these stories... That's exactly right. I'm sorry, go ahead. Yeah, well, in many cases, the people who went

in search of these specimens were intrepid and brave and maybe slightly crazy. They would go on these expeditions. It would take sometimes months for them to even get to the place that they were trying to explore, and they would endure

such hardships, and they'd risk death, and many of them did die and never come back. And yeah, so these are human stories, really. Yeah, let's talk about some of them, that Darwin story. You write about an entomologist, as you say, who rediscovered a beetle specimen that Darwin had collected, for example, and he just happened to be the only person who could have known what it was.

Amazing story. Yeah, that's exactly right, yeah. Yeah, so it was Darwin as a 23-year-old naturalist on the Beagle. It ducked in Argentina in 1832, and Darwin was a huge beetle fan. He really loved all insects, but he was especially drawn to beetles. And he fan this, it's called a rove beetle, and it's basically looks a lot like an earwig. It's very lung and sinuous. And this one was particularly interesting because it has a bright green, sort of iridescent head.

It's very atypical, really. And so he picked it up and he put it in with all the other. other specimens that he was collecting from Argentina, and he sent it back with all of that material to London. But when it got there, it was misclassified, and it sort of just disappeared into the collection, which is easy to do when you've got a collection that's as enormous as the one in London. And again, that's sort of, you think about the scope of these collections. In London, at the Natural History Museum, the Beatle collection has about 10 million specimens in. So if you've sort of misidentified something and put it in with the wrong group of insects,

it's sort of like searching for a needle in a haystack. And so the entomologist Stelios Chatsimannolis, he was working on a different group of beetles. He organized a loan, basically, and that's what a lot of these taxonomists do, is they borrow enormous amounts of material from different collections around. in the world and he received it in a little box. And as soon as he saw it, he realized that it was not with the right group of insects. And he was probably the only person who was able to make that distinction. And then the next thought was, I think this is a Darwin specimen.

And that's incredible that sort of the luck that it went to the right person and that it had been lost for about 180 years and that he was finally able to give it a name. Yeah. That's interesting. So I want to talk now about what it's like to sift through the species in a museum collection and do that for a living. Regina Wetzer is associate curator and director of marine biodiversity at the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles. Welcome, Regina. It's a pleasure to be here.

I understand that you have a particular fondness for a kind of bug, a marine bug. What is that? I do. I have a fondness for marine pill bugs. So all four year-olds know what a roly-poly is. I just get to play with ones that live in the ocean. Do they look like the ones that we know? Oh, yes, and they can be very colorful and very ornate.

And Christopher has been telling us about new species discoveries, but sometimes it's not exactly about discovering a whole new species, is it, so much as learning that one species is many, right? Absolutely. And so here at the museum, we had such an opportunity, and it's a pleasure to get to meet Christopher on the, online. And my colleague then student undergraduate, we were revising and re-identifying and designating new type species for a specimen that was attributed to the entire coast. So from

Yelushan Islands all the way to northern Baja, California, the species was attributed to the same name. And this is a group of organisms that bear live young, brood their young, have no dispersal capabilities. So again, like other scientists around the world, we borrowed material from all kinds of museums. We went through our own collections, and we discovered we had one new species in Alaska, one species in Puget Sound. We re-described the original one that bore the name off the central coast of California. We discovered one just outside of Los Angeles, right at the mouth of the port of Los Angeles, and renamed one that had been poorly described, just further down in San Diego off the Scripps pier.

So that became a quite strong paper and gave us a whole bunch of insights. So you found four instead of one? Exactly. So why did you find it? Why were you successful at this and not the people who originally saw them? Is it you were diligent? Were they lazy? Is there some process that goes on?

Oh, no, no. These things are small. The specimen from Alaska was only 7 millimeters long. There's only three of them. And again, technology, new microscopes, scanning electron microscopy, genetic techniques, all kinds of methods allow us to look closer. The types of habitats, organisms, inhabit. And also when these small things are collected,

if one has a specific interest, one would look for a particular isopon isopod in our case, but I would be ignoring the things that I am not an expert in, and those would get set aside. And then in time, either those get lent out to colleagues that specialize in that group, and that material gets worked out. How many undiscovered species do you think could be lurking in your museum alone in L.A.? Thousands. I probably have collected myself hundreds of them that are sitting on the shelf. It's just a matter of time of looking and having the opportunity to work through them. Christopher, give us a sense that if she's got thousands in L.A. alone, and all the museums around the world, there must be millions. There are to make up the difference

from the 10 million that we think there might be and the 2 million or so that are described. Christopher, you agree? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, they're everywhere. And, you know, not just in collections either, but in the world around us, too. You know, a couple of years ago, scientists at the Natural History Museum of L.A. County set fly traps in backyards across the city and discovered 30 new species of fly with hardly any trouble at all. And there were many, many undiscovered species in those nets, but they just concentrated on one genus of flying, and said, let's just describe this particular genus, and they came up with 30 that are, you know,

they're flying around us all the time. We just don't know what they are. No one has had the time to look at them really closely and put a name on them. And that's the same in museums too. I imagine there's more undiscovered species than described ones. They're everywhere. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios.

I'm Ira Plato talking about undiscovered species with Christopher Kemp and Regina Wetzer. We have a tweet that says, How's climate change affecting the discovery of new species? Kavitt writes that tweet. Any reaction to that, Christopher? Yeah, it's a good question. I don't think it's affecting the discovery of new species, but it's making it even more important than ever to do that work.

And it really highlights the importance of natural history collections because how else can you really assess the effect of climate change than by going back in a time machine, which is what a natural history collection is? I mean, you can throw a dart at a world map and you can go back in time 100 years through collections and say what species were there before that are not done. there now and what species are present now that weren't there a hundred years ago. And so

that's one of the really important factors. That's one of the great uses of natural history collections that people generally don't really think about. Regina, what do you say to people who say, why do we need all of these old stuffed preserved specimens anyhow? You know, we have DNA sequencing. It's cheaper. It's easier. It's less messy. I recall touring a group of students. with a teacher and that question came up and she said well if someone came from out of space and they dropped in and they saw this school group they saw you all standing around and which one would they take back to their planet and say this is homo sapiens so species are variable they change over time they adapt to local environments and so it's important to know what the breadth of the adaptation

possibilities might be. And that's only by actually looking at the object itself. That's looking at the objects itself. It's also using other tools. It's also using genetic tools in order to look at species. Are there tools that you would like to have that you don't have? Oh, the tool I would like to have is to be able to extract DNA from formalin-preserved specimens. I work on a group and represent marine invertebrates, which will be able to extract DNA from formalin-preserved specimens.

invertebrates which are vast. It sponges all the way to sea squirts and many of those had been preserved in formulin which is not necessarily amenable to modern DNA techniques. It's done for ancient DNA but extreme cost and so at this at present we are still going out and recollecting modern specimens to compare to existing museum specimens and comparing the DNA of the species that were finding. And lo and behold, we're finding a whole lot more diversity than never before. So if you had a way of taking it out of the jars that you have on the shelves, you could compare it. Oh, and there's examples of that as well. And the sea star wasting disease is one of them, where the virus that's attributed to causing this loss of sea stars along the

west coast that had been going on for a number of years is attributed to a virus. And scientists were able to go back and with QPCR procedures, sample the ethanol that was in the jar and determined that in 1942, we already had that virus present. Wow. Wow. We had to take a break and talk more about what the future holds for Natural History Museums or the scientists hard at work cataloging the world's biodiversity. How museums can be a surprising sorts of new species. On number 844-7-24-8255, you can also tweet us at SciFRI.

right back talking more about what we're seeing in museums and talking with Christopher Camp author of The Lost Species. Stay with us. We'll be right back after this break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. We are talking about the hidden treasures of natural history museums, all the undiscovered biodiversity in the back rooms that visitors like you and me might never get to see. The new species that have been found and the ones we could still find back in those dusty bins in those jars talking with Christopher Kemp, author of the Lost

Species, and he talks about how you find what's in the back rooms he did there, went there and went himself and saw what's going on there. And Regina Wetzer, the director of marine biodiversity at the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles. On number 844-724-8255 you can also tweet us at

SciFRI. Museum is so often used as a synonym for a place where things are preserved and left unchanging. But you both are talking about ways in which these institutions are making new discoveries and also connecting us to the future of life on Earth. Is that how you hope people feel

when they visit a natural history museum, Chris? Yeah, I think that that's how people should feel. And if they don't, it's because maybe we don't do a very good job of telling these stories and we need to do better, I think. Traditionally, we haven't done a very good job of justifying the importance of collections and we need to.

In fact, you mentioned the word dusty a couple of times. I know that anyone who works in a museum is just jumping up and down and gnashing their teeth because they hate that word. And a couple of times I made the mistake of using that word too, and I was told off very, very quickly. They're really state-of-the-art facilities, and they're just as sort of modern and technologically advanced

as any other scientific institution. I apologize for it because I have been in the archives of many museums from the Smithsonian to the Libreir Darpitz, you know. And you're right, they're absolutely spotless places. So I apologize. It's sort of a... But there's many opportunities to engage the public, and I think that's what's so wonderful about being at a natural history museum today.

Technology has many opportunities, We get to, as was mentioned, the malaise trap program here in Los Angeles, discovering flies allowed the community to participate. My group and my colleagues, we take folks out to the near-shore environment. We don't necessarily collect specimens. We don't encourage people taking things off the shore. But it's the citizens in the community that are actually taking photographs, documenting what is present, and that is contributing to field guides and connecting recent documentation, recent changes with the past and the collections that are in the museum.

So there's tremendous opportunity to engage. Interesting. Let's engage with Oklahoma City. Go to Tim in Oklahoma City. Hi, welcome to Science Friday. Hi, good to be here. Thank you. My question was kind of long lines of what are some of the criteria that you use

to define a new species, especially when you're dealing with dead specimens that, you know, where it's the kind of classic example of live specimens being able to reproduce and have viable offspring. That's a great. Is it just DNA? Is it just one, you know, one thing or the other? That's interesting because Christopher, you say in your book that a species is a hypothesis. What do you mean by that? Well, that's true. I mean, and it's a really great question, and I think that it's a question.

and I think that it's a question that the field actually grapples with quite a bit. What is a species? There's a lot of disagreement about what a species is. And really, the reason it takes a long time sometimes to describe a new species is that it's really difficult to do so. We can't really just rely on DNA. They used to rely on morphometry, which would be like just measuring specimens. or their external characteristics or something like that. Now we try and do as much as we can.

So hopefully the DNA would be complementary to someone measuring specimens, looking at differences in the color or the shape of the animal. There's a mammal expert at the Smithsonian that I know who measures 3,000 bats just to determine whether the one bat that he's interested in is different. is a unique species

and then he has to use statistics to map all these things out and see if this one animal sort of sits by itself on the graph which is just in pretty much the same way that the Ruby Sea Dragon was discovered as well.

It was an outlier. So you're looking for an outlier, I suppose. Again, a lot of work going into that. Sounds like, yeah. Absolutely. And again, you put all the jars in front of you, you look at organisms that are similar, you're looking for similarities, you're looking for variation of how much variation, you're judging lifestyle,

geographic locality, depth, food sources, you're putting all kinds of information together to make this hypothesis, which will then get tested over and over again. And as you know, names do change and hypotheses get changed. We add genetic data, we see variability, and in some cases, we are now recognizing that it's very difficult to, or not possible at all, to find morphological characters that distinguish organisms. Thank you very much, both of you for taking that to be with us today. We're getting at Wetzer, Associate Curator and Director of Marine Biodiversity at the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles and Christopher Kemp, a biologist and author of the book the Lost Species, Great Expeditions, and the Collections of Natural History Museums.

You can see pictures of some of those lost species and read an excerpt from the book, Science Friday.com slash lost species. Thank you both for taking time to be with us today. Thank you for having us. Welcome. Thanks so much, Ira. If you've ever gone fishing in the ocean, chances are you've pulled in what my kids used to call a weed fish, long, stringy piece of kelp attached to the hook, a really big disappointment and really a news But some people don't mind kelp at all.

And in fact, some people are making a business out of growing it and putting it on your dinner plate. It's versatile in that it absorbs the flavors of the food it's cooked with. Maybe that's why it's growing in popularity in many restaurants. And now in New England, you can get kelp from your local kelp farmer. While it's been a tradition in many Asian cultures for centuries, kelp farming only reached U.S. shores in recent decades. growing popularity, also due to its environmental benefits, it helps clean the oceans. Our own Luke Graskin set out to discover what was behind this new wave of ocean aquaculture

for his latest macroscope video. He joins us now to talk about it. Hi, Luke. Hi, Ira. And joining us also is Susie Flores, Kelp Farmer from Stonington, Connecticut. She's featured in Luke's video, which you can find on our website at ScienceFriiday.com slash kelp. Hi, Susie. Hi, Ira. Happy to be here. Nice to have you. Look, what's the hype behind kelp? Well, Ira, see, the thing about kelp, you know, when you think about plants and crops, and you want to be sustainable, you want to think of something that's carbon neutral, that doesn't, you know, require a ton of fertilizer, that doesn't harm the environment. Well, the hype about kelp is that it doesn't just do those things. It actually helps the environment. So it absorbs a ton of carbon out of the ocean, which prevents acidification.

It sucks up all the nitrogen where it's growing and in the region where it's growing, which prevents algal blooms in the area and keeps the local area free of this nasty, unwanted algae. And then on top of that, it provides an environment for other species to live and thrive. So you have all these little critters feeding on the kelp, and then in turn you get the fish that comes to eat those. So you create a little bit of a little micro habitat on your kelp farm. So it becomes a kind of net positive, which is very rare in the agricultural world. And you went out and visited Susie's kelp farm?

No, I actually visited Bren Smith's kelp farm in Connecticut. Brent Smith is the head of an organization called Green Wave, and he's kind of a guru behind kelp farming. And he took us out on a very misty day. He looks very, very tranquil, you know, your classic New England coastline. and we get out to the kelp farm and there's just nothing there. It just looks like a pristine, beautiful coastline with a couple buoys. And, I mean, that in and of itself is kind of amazing when you think of a farm. And then they hoist up these lines and you get, you know, eight, ten feet of what looks like plant matter,

just dangling off these lines. And it's absolutely gorgeous. Susie, so you're a new kelp farmer, right? You've been doing it a couple of years now? That's correct. Actually, this was our first full-year kelp farming. So the harvest that we pulled in in April was our first crop. Take us through a season. What does a kelp farm season look like? Well, I should start at the real beginning, which is the permitting process,

in order to get a space for you to grow your kelp. And that can take in the state of Connecticut in between, I'd say, nine months and 18 months, depending on your timing. And then in the fall, we outplant kelp, which was provided to us by Greenwave. That was Brent Smith's organization. And then you allow it to kind of do its thing in the water naturally, but you just check on it, make sure that, you know, the lines are all still intact, and then you just go out and harvest it in the spring. It's pretty low maintenance, which is amazing.

Yeah, it's, if you check out our video, at our website now at ScienceFriday.com slash kelp. And you look at Luke Graskin's video. Luke, you talk about it in the video, how this is almost the perfect kind of farming. It's very low maintenance, low intensity. I'm sorry, there's no fertilizer. I mean, you obviously don't need water.

Right. So there's no irrigation systems. You don't need land either. You don't need land. I mean, Susie alluded to that, that it's much cheaper to get a permit. out in the water than to actually buy, you know, a parcel of land or to lease a parcel of land. So the startup is a lot lower.

Susie, can you sell as much kelp as you grow and how much do you grow? It all depends on the spot where you have your lease set up. But as of right now, we're being asked for more kelp than we have to kind of hand over. So the answer currently is yes. you know, things can always change. And what is a crop like, a kelp crop? Is that what it's called? Would you call that?

Or what do you call it a crop? Yeah. I'd call it a crop. You can grow thousands of pounds. It depends on the way your farm is set up. And our lease site, we farmed three acres. We had four 500 foot lines in the water, and you have to account for a buoy space

that's suspending the kelp up so it can absorb light, so it's not dropping down to the ocean floor. but we pulled in, you know, in a test year, a couple thousand pounds of kelp, which was, we, you know, called that a success. How bad. This is Science Friday from WNIC Studios. Talking with kelp farmer Susie Flores from Stonington, Connecticut, and Luke Graskin, our video editor about a new film, a new video that's up there on Science Friday.com slash kelp. And you know what's interesting? Because I also live in New England.

We had four Norieasters coming through New England this year. Did it wipe out your kelp farm or what did it do? Those nor'easters were a little rough. That's one of the things you have to take into consideration on your farming kelp. It's not just the you can't, you don't have easy access. So if the weather is sketchy or scary, you worry about your farm, but you're not, you can't run out and kind of take care of it in the moment. So that's a bit of a, that was a bit of a stressor.

But we learned a lot about our site there. And we also learned that those nor'easters did not upset our kelp. It grew, we were pulling blades out after the nor'easters that were over 12 feet long. Wow. Let's go to the phones to Oakland. They may have some kelp in Oakland, I have a feeling. And Nathan, hi, welcome to Science Friday. Thank you.

Yeah, I had a question regarding other things that may absorb while it's growing in terms of, like, mercury or other heavy metals. Is that something that kelp may pick up and end up with the... the consumer. Good question. Susie? From what I know, and kelp has been used in sites like the Bronx River where there's high amounts of heavy metal pollution, and it can help mitigate the water and still be safe for human consumption. And there have been studies done on this, and you'd have to reference them just to see what the maximum lows would be. But it does absorb trace metals. It has zinc, iodine, magnesium, which are actually all good for you when you're consuming them.

Yeah, so it has a lot of good stuff in it, and the restaurants are interested in it, but it also could be used for other things besides eating? Yeah, it can be used as fertilizer, which is a great solution for farmers who want to use an organic fertilizer because it's all natural. It isn't going to negatively impact the runoff of the farm

that they're using. be used as feed. It can be incorporated into feed for livestock. And I read somewhere that when cows consume kelp, it can reduce the amount of methane that they produce, which is a very interesting side effect and one that my children find hilarious. Okay, so now everybody's interested in kelp farming. How do you get started? Where do you learn about it? If I wanted to do it, what's the best way, Susie, to go about this? Well, there's a lot of resources out there. We got our start by working with Greenwave, which was based in New Haven, Connecticut, and they, you know, they had a ton of resources just on their website for you to look at,

and they also have a cohort of farmers that they bring through the training process, so they can kind of get you started, show you the ropes, show you some of the mistakes that people like us have made in the past, and you go from there. And it's just sort of like the new tofu, right? I mean, look at it. Well, yeah, especially in that. It absorbs flavor.

Whatever you put it in, you know, you put it in, you know, soy sauce. It's going to taste like that, whatever you do it. It doesn't actually taste like much. So, you know, I wouldn't go so far as to compare it to kale because kale actually has a unique flavor. Right. And so does kelp, but not as much. It more absorbs things. But in terms of the, you know, the hype around it, yeah, I would say, you know, we always hear about 200 years in the future.

We're all going to be eating algae from vats, right? Well, this will be algae in the form of a long blade. It's very popular in Asia already. Yeah, that's the thing. It's already taken off there. It's already been there for centuries. So the difference between this and that is that it's no longer used as a garnish. It is the main dish.

And if you'd like to see that kelp farming in action, you'd check out the Luke's video on our website at Science Friday.com slash kelp. Thank you, Susie Flores. Good luck with your kelp farm. Thank you so much. farmer from Stonington, Connecticut, and she is the subject of our latest macroscope video. Thank you, Luke. Thank you. That's a great video, Science Friday's video editor.

One last thing before we go. You know, Cy Fry's favorite ocean creatures are not kelp. We like kelp, but now, we know we're cephalopods. Yeah. This year, for Cephalopod week, we're going to be stretching our tentacles into Chicago, L.A., San Francisco, Denver, New York, Seattle, and D.C., to throw cephaloparties. So join us. We want to see. Go to ScienceFridy.com.

movie night for tickets and information, ScienceFriady.com slash movie night for our Cephalopod week and Cephalomania going on across the country. B.J. Leiderman composed our theme music, and if you missed any part of the program and liked to hear it again, you know, you can listen on our podcasts, and we're on all the social media, and you can ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday whenever you want.

So every day now is Science Friday. Have a great weekend. We'll see you next week. We'll see you next week from Chicago. I'm Ira Plato in New York.