Science Friday - New Covid Vaccine, Moroccan Earthquake, Native Bees. Sept 15, 2023, Part 2

Episode Date: September 15, 2023

New COVID Boosters Arrive Amid Rise In InfectionsThis past week, the FDA and CDC recommended new COVID vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna for anyone over the age of six months. They’re expected to be in larger pharmacies by the end of the week. It’s welcome news for some, as cases have ticked up over the summer, accompanied by higher hospital admissions and deaths.The boosters join a suite of other vaccines to combat respiratory illness this fall, including this year’s flu shot and the new RSV vaccine, recommended especially for children and the elderly.Dr. Katelyn Jetelina, epidemiologist, adjunct professor at UTHealth School of Public Health, and author of the Your Local Epidemiologist newsletter, joins Ira to talk about the details of the new boosters, how long you should wait to get one if you were recently infected, masking recommendations, and if you can get all three shots at once. The Science Behind Devastating EarthquakesOn September 8, 2023 at 11:11 PM local time, a 6.8 magnitude earthquake struck Morocco’s High Atlas mountains. So far, more than 2,500 people died and thousands more were injured or lost.Other natural disasters usually give off warning signs; we can predict when a volcano will explode, ring the alarms when a tsunami starts to build, or evacuate before a hurricane makes landfall, but we still can’t detect earthquakes before they strike. And victims are left to face “the particular trauma that comes from watching the world around you crumble in an instant,” writes science journalist Robin George Andrews for The Atlantic.Ira talks with Andrews about the specifics of this earthquake, where the science stands with earthquake detection, and the particular kind of trauma that comes from watching the world crumble. The Buzz On Native Bees In Your NeighborhoodWhen you think ‘bees,’ you probably think of a neat stack of white hive boxes and the jars of honey on the store shelves.  But there’s a lot more to bees than the agricultural staple, the European honey bee. Around the world there are over 20,000 known bee species, and around 4,000 of them are native to the United States. While these native bees play a key role in pollinating our plants and ensuring the health of ecosystems, they don’t get a ton of recognition or support. Around three-quarters of flowering plant species rely on insects for pollination, and some native plants have evolved a partnership with specific native bee pollinators. Squashes, pumpkins, gourds, and the annual sunflower all have specific species of native bees as part of their life cycles. Native plants such as blueberries, cherries, and cranberries all developed without the European honeybee, which arrived in North America in 1622. Dr. Neal Williams, a professor of entomology at the University of California, Davis, joins Ira to talk about native bees, bee behavior and pollination. To stay updated on all-things-science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.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 Flato. Later in the hour, we'll check in on our native bees and stop thinking honey in this case. And also more information and what made the recent earthquake in Morocco so devastating. But first, this past Tuesday, the CDC recommended new COVID vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna for anyone over the age of six months. It's welcome news for some as COVID cases have been ticking up over the summer, accompanied by higher hospital. admissions and deaths. How should we think about these new boosters? Should we expect to take them every year going forward? Joining me is Dr. Caitlin Jedalina, adjunct professor at UT Health School of Public Health, and author of Your Local Epidemiologist Newsletter. She's based in San Diego, California. Welcome back. Yeah, thanks for having me again. It's terrific to have you back. Okay, let's talk about these new

COVID boosters. When are they available? Who should be getting them? Yeah, big news. So earlier this week, the FDA approved the updated vaccines for this fall. And on Tuesday, the CDC determined that everyone over six months is eligible for an updated COVID-19 vaccine this fall because the benefits of vaccines completely outweigh the risks across all age groups. Now, the next step is when are they available is a really good question. technically you're able to get the vaccine today. However, access may be delayed or challenging while we're waiting for, for example, physicians offices to get their supply in. And maybe we can get into this a little more later, but waiting may make sense for some as well. So yeah,

great news, welcome news, and hopefully it helps our fall and winter. And there's a wrinkle in at this time in that they're not free, right? That's right. So this is the first time the government is not paying for our COVID-19 vaccines, particularly because we are out of a public health emergency. So that means that Pfizer and Moderna, they're charging about $120, $129 per dose. And no-vax, I think, is around the same at about $130. Wow. And for the record, I think this cost of vaccines is absolutely absurd, given that we taxpayers funded Operation 1.30. work seed in the first place. But this is what is happening. Now, the good news is private insurance is going to cover it. Medicare is going to cover it, for example, the biggest challenge will be among the uninsured, which is about 9% of Americans and the government's working on getting them free vaccines as well. And is the vaccine designed to prevent COVID or like the other ones, you're going to get COVID. You just won't get as sick if you get COVID. If you get COVID

and may avoid a trip to the hospital. Yeah, so I know your audience appreciates nuance. So I'll get into a little nuance here. The new vaccine or this updated vaccine for this fall has an updated formula. And it targets a specific omicron subvariant called XBB. And the number one priority for these vaccines is to help prevent hospitalization and death, severe disease, particularly among, of course, the highest risk, which is those over 65 or those people with comorbidities. But there are secondary advantages to the vaccine,

like prevention of infection as well as reduction in transmission. But that effect wanes much more quickly. It wanes probably around three or four months. So the main purpose of these is to protect against severe disease. Now, what if I recently had COVID? Now, like myself, I just came off of being contagious or giving it to people, I'll test it negative. Just let's say a week or so ago, do I wait a few months because my natural immunity is going to kick in first? Yeah, this is a really good question. And it's a tricky answer because it's a bit of a game.

You know, we have a very scarce scientific guidance on optimal timing. But what the scientific guidance is telling us is that you should wait at least two to three months after infection. You don't have to wait. We won't like exhaust or overwhelm our immune system, but weighting ensures that we broaden our B cells, which is our secondary line of defense. It's basically our antibody factory. And with this updated vaccine formula, we want this factory update. So we at least two to three months after infection. The question is on the other end, how long do we wait? And the longer we wait, the more we get out of this vaccine. One study showed that waiting eight months helps. Another study showing that waiting 12 months

help. But waiting is a gamble, right? So even if vaccine protection sooner is not as good as it could be, it's better than waiting too long and catching COVID without limited protection, especially among high-risk people. So all of that to say, if you're over 65 or at high risk for severe disease, I suggest waiting about four months after infection or your previous vaccine. If you're under 65 and not at risk, I would wait at least six months. And what if you had a recent booster? Like the old booster, you said, well, I'm going to get it. And then this comes out.

Should you be waiting also? Yes, I wait. The official guidance from the CDC is to wait at least two months. But I would take the similar suggestions that wait, you know, if you're high risk for severe disease, wait about six months. If not, you can wait a little longer. And how should we be thinking about masking at this point? Well, masking gets everyone's blood boiling. Well, let me preface that by saying there has been a slight uptick in cases, right? There is. We are currently in a wave right now. And that is because of behaviors changing

during the summer. You know, masks work. I will go on record saying that that they reduce the amount of articles you inhale and reduce the amount of viral particles you exhale. And so if you are looking for more layers of protection, which I think is a fantastic idea during a wave, then wearing a mask will help you. It'll help protect against infection, which means also protect against long COVID and will reduce viral load. So I don't know, the way I think about it is when we start getting high up into a wave, kind of like where right now, I start masking in really indoor crowded areas, like when I'm traveling on airplanes. I think it depends on risk tolerance of certain individuals. And some people are more willing to take a risk to get infected than others. And I think that this is

for better or for worse, individualized decisions in the United States. And it's challenging to navigate as individuals as well. Should we expect that we're now entering the holiday season? Should we expect the typical uptick in cases and to be extra careful then? We are. We are expecting an uptick in COVID-19 this winter, particularly because coronaviruses, even beyond COVID, thrive in winter. They thrive because of changed weather.

They thrive because we're changing our behaviors. They thrive because of the changing humidity in the air. So all signs point to that we're going to have a wave. Of course, COVID is not predictable yet. So we do not know what it has up our sleeve. But I think that's a safe bet that we should expect an uptick. All right. Now let me throw in the flu season.

Getting a flu shot and a COVID shot. Should I get them at the same time, same arm, different arms, space them out? What's the feeling on that? Yeah. So you can get a flu vaccine. and other routine vaccines in COVID-19 at the same visit, it is recommended to administer in different arms. But there have been a lot of studies showing the safety and effectiveness of co-administration. And I think that getting him at the same time also reduces the burden of going

to the pharmacy or going to the doctor's office two times, which for busy people is a helpful reprieve. And let's zoom out from COVID. Let's talk about the flu season. which we have, and you mentioned other illnesses and vaccines. What about the RSV vaccine? Can we throw that in at the same time? Yeah, so I think you're highlighting an important theme this fall is that it's the first time that we are going to have vaccines for all three of these big respiratory viruses, which is huge. And one of those tools is the RSV vaccine for older adults. Those over 60 can have an RSV vaccine. These RSV vaccines are very effective and they do not wane as quickly as COVID-19 or flu. So I suggest getting RSV vaccine as soon as possible. It'll last throughout this season and even

maybe into next season. We're waiting on data on that. Well, so you should not be fearful of going into your doctor or your pharmacy and getting all three at the same time or should we space them out a little? So that is a question we do not have scientific data on about getting all three of them at the same time. We know that getting COVID and RSV at the same time is safe and we know that COVID and flu getting at the same time is safe. And so we assume that getting all three at the same time is safe. And I would highly suggest this, especially if it's challenging, for example, an older American to get to a pharmacy or doctor's office. but you can also space them out.

RSV is kind of new to the public, isn't it? We haven't heard about this in many past years. I think it's new to the majority of the public. RSV is not new to parents like me because RSV is one of the most dangerous viruses that our little ones can catch, especially before the age of one. But it is, I think, a new disease on the radar of older Americans

because it's not typically, talked about previously, but there is a substantial burden on older adults. And so that's why I think that this vaccine will bring some reprieve. Is there anything else you think that would be important to talk about that we haven't heard about in larger conversations about the boosters, about vaccines, and maybe it's just about vaccination itself because there's still a lot of people who are afraid to get vaccines, aren't they? There is. There's a lot of hesitancy. I think beyond hesitancy as epidemiologists are really focused on how this respiratory season is going to play out. The biggest concern is if RSV flu and COVID all peak at the same time. Our health systems will

not be able to handle that. Even pre-pandemic, our hospitals would be overwhelmed during a bad flu season. And now we have this new repertoire in our threats. So I think it'll be very interesting to watch how this unfolds. And I would not be surprised if, for example, hospitals and nursing homes reinstated masks requirements because of just the high risk of people visiting these places and the amount of protection we're trying to do for our hospital systems. You know, that's a really interesting case that you make. We have more than one virus to be aware of now. Start masking up. Dr. Jedalina, thank you for taking time to be with us today. Great. stuff. Yeah, thank you for having me.

Dr. Caitlin Jenelina, adjunct professor at UT Health School of Public Health, author of your local epidemiologist newsletter. And if you want to learn more about the new boosters and where you can get yours, head over to vaccines.gov. After the break, reflecting on the earthquake

that struck Morocco and where the science of earthquake prediction stands. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. So last week, a 6.8 magnitude earthquake struck Morocco's high Atlas mountains. In this devastating disaster, thousands of people were killed, thousands more were injured, or are still missing. What's especially horrifying about earthquakes is there's no way to know when they'll strike. You know, scientists have been trying for years to look for signs before a strike, but nothing dependable yet. So what is the science behind the earthquake in Morocco?

and are we any closer to predicting earthquakes? And if not, how do we prepare ourselves? My next guest has been reporting on this earthquake, Dr. Robin, George Andrews, volcanologist and science journalist based in the UK. Robin, thanks for joining us. Hey, thanks for having me. All right, can you walk us through Earthquakes 101? What are they?

How do they happen? What's going on in this one? Yeah, so earthquakes are, they're kind of like the ambushes of the natural world. when something is happening in nature, you at least get some sense that it's on its way or there's some precursory signal. Earthquakes, they kind of just happen. And an earthquake can happen anywhere where you have a fault line.

A fault line is basically just a sort of rupture in Earth's crust, sometimes a bit deeper, and faults move side to side, or up and down, or a combination of both, or apart sometimes. And in any of these scenarios, if that fault moves quite suddenly, you can get quite a powerful earthquake

because earthquakes happen all the time and earthquake is just when the ground is shaking but a powerful earthquake, the things that we are concerned about when I fault jolts forwards up, down sideways in one way and the other and depending on the size of this jolt and the energy released,

you can get either an earthquake that just rattles things on a shelf or you can destroy a city. You know, I have been following earthquake news for quite some time and I don't recall ever hearing of another big earthquake like this in Morocco.

Yeah, so Morocco, Morocco is a seismically active part of the world. It's just a little different from the ones we normally think of. California is a great example. California is pretty much smack bang on a major tectonic boundary. And as a result, there's quite a lot of movement. You get quite a lot of earthquakes. There's a potential of quite big earthquakes. So Morocco sits on the African or, as some people call it, the Nubian plate,

and just above it, Europe sits on the Eurasian plate. they move quite slowly relative to each other. So when you get a slow moving fall, you can get earthquakes, but you don't get large earthquakes because you're not really building up stress. Nothing is moving quickly, then getting core and then jolting forwards.

So large earthquakes have happened. In 1960, for example, there was the Agadir earthquake. It killed about 12,000 people. So earthquakes aren't uncommon, but large earthquakes are relatively rare in Morocco. Yeah, so how did this one happen? In particular, you described a lot of different things that could go on.

What specifically happened on the earth beneath our feet in this one? So, yeah, this one was really tricky to earthquake scientists to work out. They're still trying to kind of pit it down. I mean, one of the major surprises is the location of the earthquake. So the seismic hazards were supposed to be highest in the north of the country near the coastline, because that's near the tectonic plate boundary. That's where you'd expect most of the pressure to be building up and then released. This actually happened in sort of central-ish part of the country.

It's kind of an odd shape. The other thing is the fault networks around these mountains, the high Atlas mountains, are not as well known as others. Some are really old. Some date back to Pangea, you know, the supercontinent that was around at the time of the dinosaurs at hundreds of a million years old. Some of these faults were, you know, suspected to not have moved for eons, you know, maybe before humans even evolved kind of level.

and it's really hard to tell if a fault has moved that far back in the past. You know, the evidence was very hard. So in this case, what looks like happened was a very, very sleepy fall, one that most people didn't have their eye on, thought was inactive, seems to be the one that kind of jolted forwards, and it just happened to jolt forward in an incredibly potent way, and it generated a lot of shaking, you know, so much so that people felt it in Liz.

Yeah, and how deep inside the earth does this earthquake originate? So this one was incredibly shallow. So sometimes earthquakes can happen like hundreds of kilometers deep. They're kind of rare in terms of the ones that affect humans, but they can. But this one was, you know, I think it was 26 kilometers. So, you know, really just a few miles beneath the surface in a way. And generally when you get a shallow earthquake, more of that energy kind of gets transferred to the surface. Like the motions underground are coupled with the surface a lot more rigidly often.

So the shaking was a lot more intense because of the shallowness of the earthquake. So that was unfortunate. How do you know how deep an earthquake is? How does science estimate that? So this is, you know, we live in kind of a wondrous age where a lot of science seems kind of magic even to me who's trained in this sort of stuff. Seismology is a relatively young science, and it essentially is listening for the, you know, it's picking up on the vibrations unleashed by a,

earthquakes and they come in different flavors. And scientists a hundred years ago were barely beginning to understand like how to use these seismic waves to see into the earth to some degree. You know, it was, but in that time, scientists had managed to, you know, use seismometers all over the world in the area, you know, they've used the motion of the ground with satellites in space, you know, they can listen to this kind of symphony of seismic music that's coming from the earth and match it up with ground moving they see at the surface. And they can use that to very accurately pinpoint, not only how deep the earthquake was, or actually the specific fault that slipped kind of thing.

So it's all in retrospect. It's all like after it happens, which is kind of part of the problem. But the fact that it can be done with this precision does give you kind of some optimism for where the field will go in the future. There's a huge difference in this case about how Marrakesh fared versus the villages in the high Atlas mountains faring, right? Yeah, and this is one of, this is something that the seismologists often tell me is like earthquakes don't kill people, buildings kill people.

And that's broadly true, really. I mean, it's the fact that we live in certain areas that have seismic hazards is the thing that makes the hazard. And a lot of deaths are down to bad building kind of construction. Like if you live in an area that has a seismic hazard, ideally there should be funding to make your buildings kind of resist the earthquake. Now, no building can resist any earthquake. But Japan's a great example.

You know, I've been in Tokyo when there have been some fairly modest magnitude earthquakes, and a lot of the skyscrapers are actually sway and wobble a bit, and it's because they're swaying with the motion of the ground, which stops them snapping and breaking. Whereas in Marrakesh, some of the newer buildings kind of resisted the quake a bit more. It helped that the epicenter was also a bit far away. But parts of the old town have no structures designed to resist earthquakes, so that suffered a lot more damage.

And in the high alice mountains, like whole villages have been raised to the ground. I've been, you know, I've enjoyed visiting Morocco and I've been to these mountains. And the villages there are built kind of, you know, it's like mud brick construction, unreinforced masonry. Not only are they in valleys, but they're also on the slopes of these mountains. And it's just, you know, it's exactly the kind of structure that, unfortunately, stands no chance. You know, you can drop to the floor, duck and cover all you like.

but when your entire building is basically becoming a fluid, there's nothing you can do really. So it's unsurprising that that's where most of the damage was. It didn't help that the center of the earthquake was basically in that area, but it doesn't make it any less tragic. You know, entire villages have been obliterated, which is not something that is quite unfathomable, really. In a story in the Atlantic, you wrote that earthquakes carry their own trauma.

What do you mean by that? Yeah, so like every disaster. has trauma, but there's something uniquely nightmarish about earthquakes. Not that it's worse than something else, but it's just a very, for example, a hurricane you can see coming. You can even forecast these things. A volcano can explode without warning, but almost all volcanoes give out some warning.

You know, they change shape, they heat up, they give off a certain kind of gas, they kind of splutter and you get earthquakes symbolizing the movement of magma. Even a tsunami that's rushing across the ocean. It takes long enough now that with modern early walling networks, people can actually do something about it. An earthquake is almost like, it's everywhere all at once around you, everything you take for granted that you think is like a permanent structure from roads to buildings, you know, like entire neighborhoods just vanish. And the only thing I can think that

kind of compares to is it's like a nuclear bomb, really. It's like a giant kind of explosion of energy. The physics are quite different, but it feels deific somehow. Like, it's, even with all the science of understanding how earthquakes work, when an entire city or entire villages can just be like disappeared with no advanced warning, crucially, it just feels, yeah, particularly nightmarish, really. That's just terror and horror. You talked about the frustration of not understanding yet how to determine whether an earthquake can happen. Tell me about where we stand in that effort to try to predict earthquakes. Yeah, so we stand, I rather, the earthquake scientists just, I wouldn't say there are square one, but in terms of like prediction, like prediction requires three things. You need to

know exactly where an earthquake is going to happen next. You need to know how powerful that will be and you need to know exactly when it will happen. That's what defines earthquake prediction. And it's currently impossible. Like there's not even like a famous paper where seismologists and geophysicists got together and they're like, oh, we think we found a precursor for all earthquakes. And then they tested and it didn't quite work. That's just not, even that has not happened kind of thing. It's really difficult to find precursors.

So much of the science is kind of retrospective. And even if scientists understand like, okay, this fault has a high seismic hazard because it hasn't ruptured in 400 years. and they can measure the amount of pressure, essentially, the tension building up on a fall. You can actually measure these things, but that doesn't give you any way to say in 10 days' time it will make the slip. The best scientists can do in some parts of the world is probabilistic forecasting. That's when you say, for example, the San Andreas fault, the USGS say there's a relatively high chance. I can't remember the exact number, but it's relatively high chance in the next 30 years or so, either San Francisco Bay Area or the Los Angeles area is going to experience a relatively

powerful earthquake, but it's not clear how reliable those kind of forecasts are. And even if they are, like, what are you supposed to do about that, apart from make sure your building codes are up today and make sure people are, you know, have got the drop, cover and hold on practice running. I mean, that's important. But without knowing what the precursor signs to a major earthquake are, you know, they always bring about ruin. Yeah.

Yeah, but that's pretty important, as you say, because if you did have the right kinds of buildings, perhaps you wouldn't have such devastation like we're seeing now. Yeah, and each situation is different, right? So parts of the West Coast and the US have like pretty good building regulations. I mean, it's a bit patchworky, but it's better than a lot of places in the world. Like Japan's pretty good on this. As we saw in Turkey, you know, Turkey was like the almost the polar opposite of that. Not only were a lot of buildings in the effective regions not fit to. or retrofitted for earthquake resistance,

but systemic corruption in the construction industry and the increasingly authoritarian government meant that money and effort that was supposed to go towards making sure these buildings were earthquake resistant, was not used, kind of thing. So often the deftol was a lot higher than these people because of building codes. But as you can see in the Morocco case, it's quite complicated.

Like in Marrakesh, it would be a lot easier to kind of have a local government go, okay, we're going to make sure all buildings, even in the old part of the city, are going to be fitted to withstand earthquakes. but what do you do with scattered villages in the mountains? Like that's a lot more of a, that's a much bigger logistical headache to kind of get around.

It's not impossible, but, you know, there's no perfect scenario, basically, for this. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. In case you're just joining us, we're talking about the science of earthquakes. Well, if you're building a building from scratch, how do you make it earthquake resistant? So part, one of the ways is like,

you make sure it sways with the motion of the ground. So earthquakes make the ground move broadly in two ways. They make the ground move up and down, which doesn't help. But the side-to-side motion is really problematic. I mean, that's the sort of thing that can kind of tear buildings apart. And then you get some seismic waves that cause other kind of vibrations. So it's hard to plan for all scenarios. But making sure it moves with the motion of the quake helps.

Like an example of a lot of problems in Turkey is a lot of apartment buildings, building contractors saved costs by instead of having a really strong foundational base, like with really rigid pillars at the base of these buildings, they put a shot in and that required like knocking out a few of the kind of foundation pillars. So when the earthquake happened, the buildings just pancake down on themselves because of that kind of thing. So to actually make a building earthquake resistant is complicated, but it's not so complicated that it can't be done if governments are, and in some cases private companies are willing to.

to invest in doing it. It's basically a question of what cost saving is worth the risk of losing a human life kind of thing. And I think many people would argue that, you know, no cost would be too high. With the rise of AI and, you know, all these other artificial intelligence technologies, do you think that AI might help predict earthquakes or alert people sooner? And so what AI is particularly good is pattern recognition. It can do it tirelessly. And it's much better than humans at that kind of thing. So AI is already being used in seismology. It's tentatively being used in forecasting efforts, but really the main use right now is to map out fault networks in absolutely stunning resolution.

And that helps. And it does that by essentially listening to the entire sum of the seismic noise coming out of, for example, California. And there's a lot of seismic noise in California, not just from earthquakes, but from traffic, from, you know, people walking about. from Taylor Swift gigs, you know, it's a lot of noise happens. And what these networks do is they train themselves on what is an earthquake and what isn't. And they are finding millions and millions of really imperceptibly small earthquakes that kind of light up hidden fault lines like a flare. So really the strongest use I've seen in this field is to help scientists work out where all of the faults are, including ones that may not have moved for a long time,

so harder to kind of detect, exactly like the ones in Morocco. So I think it's a promising thing, but like it's not, it's not going to be a panacea, I don't think, for like, earthquake forecasting. That will require some sort of scientific revelation. In a couple of minutes I have left, let's talk about how do you protect yourself if you feel there's an earthquake coming or there's a, you know, you live in an earthquake prone neighborhood. Right. So the advice does vary in different parts of the world because of things like building codes. But on the West Coast and broadly speaking, the best advice is to drop cover and hold on. that means if you feel shaking, even if you're not sure how powerful the earth is going to be,

you drop to the floor and you go under something that's relatively rigid, like a strong table or some sort of alcove or something that would shield your head from falling debris. You then hold on and wait until the shaking stops. Like, you know, sometimes you might think the earthquake's over, but it's not. So you have to kind of be patient with it. So broadly speaking, that's the best advice. But the other thing I would say is, especially if you live in the West Coast, is download apps or make sure your phone is able to get alerts

from the US Geological Survey Shake Alert System. But basically what it does is there are seismometers all over the West Coast. And if enough of them detect an earthquake and their autonomous systems quickly process that and it's above a certain magnitude, it will warn people in the area and earthquake is coming, you better get to cover.

And it may sound like you wouldn't have any time at all, but the speed of telecommunications is the speed of light and that's faster than the speed of seismic waves, even though they're really, really fast. So if you live 50 miles away from the epicenter, it may give you a valuable like five, six, seven second lead, which could save your life. Robin, I want to thank you for sharing your reporting with us. Very informative. You're very welcome. Anything to help. Dr. Robin, George Andrews, volcanologist and science journalist based in the UK.

And our thoughts go out to the victims in Morocco. We have to take a break. And when we get back, the buzz on native bees, why they're so important as pollinators and what we can do to help them. and we'll be right back after this short break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. When I say bees, you probably think of a neat stack of white hive boxes and the jars of honey on the store shelves, right? But there's a lot more to bees than that. Because around the world, there are over 20,000 known bee species,

and 4,000 of them are native to the U.S. And while these native bees that live in the wild play a key role in pollinating our plants, they don't get a ton of recognition or support, like the ones that live in a box. Well, joining me now to talk about our native bees is Dr. Neil Williams. He's a professor of entomology at the University of California Davis, where he studies bee behavior and pollination. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you, Ira. It's great to be here today.

Nice to have you. Let's get this straight from the beginning. There are bees that live in the colonies in the white boxes and bees that don't live in the boxes, but in the wild, right? That's certainly one good way of thinking about it. There are other bees that live in colonies as well, in addition to honeybees, which are wilder native bees in the U.S., but they are, again, different from what most of us think of, which is European honeybee, which is an introduced species that we manage for our own purposes. So the honeybees we have, they're not native bees. We brought them here from Europe.

That's right. The bees that we use for producing honey or for assisting with pollination and agriculture, They were brought over in colonial times and have been in the U.S. ever since. Okay, so let's talk about the native bees. How many of them do what people might call normal bee things like visiting flowers for nectar and pollen? So really all of those species do that sort of normal bee thing in some ways to visit a flower as part of what's defining a bee because bees are insects that essentially get their food resources from flowers, either the pollen that flowers produce or the nectar they produce. And in a few cases, things like

oils as well. You know, if we think about where they fit in the grand scheme of the insect world, they're basically a branch of the wasps that have switched from being meat eating, from being carnivores to being herbivores that feed on these particular parts of flowers. Okay, so introduce us to some of them. What bees would we be seeing around as bumblebees, things like that? Absolutely. So bumblebees are probably among the most familiar You're non-honeybee bees that we have in the U.S. There's some others that, for listeners in the East, we'll be very familiar.

The carpenter bees, they're large bees the same size as bumble bees, more or less, and often are living in existing wood. We have dwarf carpenter bees that are tiny varieties of the same group of bees. We have mining bees, which are bees that burrow into the ground in the soil. The sciencey name is Andrina. There are a lot of spring bees in that group, but they're ground nesters. We have the mason bees and the leaf cutter bees. Those are bees that generally nest in existing tunnels, either above ground and wood or

sometimes below ground. And as their names suggest, the mason bees are building their nests partly out of mud, which then dries. And the leaf cutter bees are chewing pieces of leaves and making their nests out of those leaf pieces, either as whole chunks of leaves or as chewed up bits of leaves. We have a series of other small to large bees that nest on the ground or nest above ground that fall into other families, but probably those are the most familiar for most people. Interesting. You said they all visit plants. Are they any better or worse at pollinating than the honeybees? Yeah, that's an interesting

question. And we just recently now sort of have a very large summary of that comparison that compares the quality of honey bees at pollinating flowers versus the quality of other bees. And in general, we find that honeybees are sort of equal or slightly less good than many other bees. And what's the old adage, the jack of all trades is the master of none. The honey bee is really that jack of all trades. It's very wide and the number of flowers that it will visit, but doesn't tend to be particularly effective on any one flower visit relative to some of the other bees we have. Some farmers bring their hives of honeybees to their fields or their orchards to help with pollination.

Are there specific crops that the native bees are better at pollinating? The honeybee is particularly useful because it can be moved around and it lives in these very large colonies. So it's a highly valuable agricultural pollinator. But there are a number of crops for which if we look at on the basis of an individual bee, the native bees are actually quite a bit better. A really great example of that would be alfalfa. And although we don't feed alfalfa seed to animals, I mean, that's a mean forage for cows that we get milk from, et cetera.

And the alfalfa leaf cutter bee, one of these leaf cutters, is a really effective pollinator relative to the honeybees at pollinating alfalfa. We see certain bees that are specialized on squash. So for squash and pumpkin pollination, we see bumblebees and some other of the native squash bees that are really, really effective relative to honeybees at pollinating squash. So those are a couple of examples, and there are others as well. Do these wild bees compete with the honeybees? Yeah, and this is a really interesting question that's been sort of an ongoing one over the years. And in recent years has gotten a lot more attention again, whether all these honeybees that we are managed,

are having a competitive, some sort of negative impact on native bees. And it's a question that's really difficult to answer. And so I think there are a lot of different positions on it. What we can say is that when we have honeybees in large densities in an area, there's pretty good evidence that they are going to have a negative impact on the level of flower resources that are available for other bees in that area. And so, you know, it's a question of numbers and being very mindful of the way that we're managing this really social, abundant social foraging organism in the context of those other bees. But we do see evidence for competition for sure. I understand that you published a paper last year about what happens when honeybees are introduced

to an area and the effect on native bees. Tell us about that. Yeah. So we have a couple of papers that are on this. And I should point out that this work is really work that was led by Maureen Page, she was a grad student at the time, a really fantastic piece of work that Maureen led looking at the impacts of honeybees on the native bees. And one of the papers that she led, really, we were looking at what the impacts on the pollination of native plants was. So rather than directly at the impact on the bees themselves, looking at what the effect was on the native plants. And in that case, because the honeybees were numerous and very good at using resources from the flowers. And also because they were not quite as effective or not as effective at all

on a per visit basis in terms of pollinating the flowers, they took resources, didn't do as good a job at pollinating. And so the native bees tended to visit less. And so we saw a decrease in the overall pollination of that native plant. Now, I know your lab has a special interest in bumblebees. Why is that? Well, we have an interest in bumblebees. We have an interest in other bees too. But yeah, bumblebees we've done quite a bit of work on over the years. And mostly they have characteristics that allows us to work on them in a range of different questions. So like the honeybees in a funny way, we can raise wild clean bumblebees that will make their own little nest sort of like mini hives. And that those hives we can then put at different places

in the landscape to explore how, you know, the amount of floor resources, maybe the level of pesticides or something like that will impact the performance of the individual hides. So they're very amenable. We also find them to work really well in lab situations. Some bees really do not like to fly in confinement in cages or in the lab. Bumblebees are pretty good about that. So your bumblebee is sort of the lab animal that's not a white mouse. It's a bumblebee. That's right. It's become a pretty useful organism for studying things in the lab. I should say the other group that we work a lot with are mason bees and leaf cutter bees. And because of the way they nest, they have been really useful

for studying other sorts of questions. So there are a couple of groups that we work a lot with. Could you domesticate a bumblebee like we have the honeybee? Yeah. So people have certainly worked on that question. You can imagine, you know, the really great thing about honeybees in terms of a pollinator for agricultural systems is this mobility, right? You can pick those boxes up and put them in different places. They're also super generalized. They have large numbers of workers and they're perennial, so they're active early and late in the season. And so bumblebees, although they don't share all those characteristics, they can be placed into boxes.

They can be reared. And so there's been a lot of work trying to figure out where they're best usable. I'd say one of the most interesting places that we use them a lot is in greenhouse pollination. So honeybees really don't like to be confined to small greenhouse spaces, but bumblebees again have this characteristic where they're pretty happy to forage. And so for things like greenhouse reared peppers or tomatoes that require bee pollination, bumblebees are a go-to species and have been really useful. And we increasingly see them in areas where they're out in field situations too. How much do we know about the health of the native bees? Is anyone keeping track?

There are people, for sure, who are increasingly keeping crack. There are people who are carefully studying interactions between wild bees and certain kinds of prevalent diseases that we see. And I'd say overall broader initiatives that are underway to do monitoring of populations and communities of native bees in different places, both by the government within, say, the National Park System, on various agency lands, but then also by a lot of citizen groups. One of the really interesting ones that's ongoing is work that's by the Xerces Society, and Xerces has got the Pacific Northwest Bumblebee monitoring and now down into California, and there are similar efforts in the East Coast as well.

Amazing. In recent years, we've seen lots of stories about honeybees on the decline, hives collapsing. Are native bees having similar problems, or are they not? Yeah, this is really one. of those questions that is a hot area of debate even among the researchers. So there's pretty good evidence, I'd say strong evidence even, that certain species are declining. And we can tell that when we use methods where we look at what we call occupancy. So we look at places where they have been found in the past and where they're found now. And that allows us to sort of understand

changes both in the distribution where they're located across a region as well as sort of estimate changes in their overall broad abundance. And so we see for some groups that we have good data for, there's evidence of substantial decreases in that metric. For other species, they seem to be doing okay. And so it's kind of a mixture. And so I think that's where, you know, real caution and trying to draw broad conclusions, but definitely reasons to be concerned among a wide set of different species as well. So real, some alarm bells really, I think, are going off, and so we need to be thinking about this very carefully. When you talk about alarm bells, what are the threats then to these native bees?

Yeah, so there are a variety of threats that native bees face that are shared with a lot of other organisms in general and certainly insects, so some of them will be very familiar to people. that are interested in other groups as well. So bees are threatened by the use of pesticides, both insecticides, sunsicides, and herbicides, that have negative impacts on bees. They're threatened by the loss of reliable foraging floral resources. They are threatened by a set of emerging diseases.

And this is, again, where the honeybee gets a lot of attention, right? These colony collapse maybe resulting from certain viruses. But wild bees, native bees, also, have some substantial problems with certain viruses and also other kinds of pathogens. And then I really big one, you know, is climate change. So we have to be fully recognized that changes in rainfall and also changes in temperature patterns seem to be stressing bees in different parts of the U.S. for sure. I'm I reflato, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Can I plant a little patch of wildflowers and a potter in the yard and really help out?

This is also one of these questions that's a complex one, but we'll try not to make it too complex. I mean, in general, planting flowers for bees is a useful thing. The one thing we'd want to be careful about, if we were planting flowers in the yard, is that we were also being careful about the use of some of these chemical pesticides. But I think also recognizing the importance of natural areas and broader stewardship of habitat for bees across the landscape is really important. And, you know, this tricky one with climate change, too, what are we going to do? It's not, we don't, we don't solve climate change

with the sorts of things that we would do small-scale actions to help bees. But we can do some things probably providing, you know, shady spots where they have what we call microclimates that are maybe protecting them from times where there are heat waves that are particularly problematic, things like that that could be useful. Well, Neil, we could talk about bees all day. We I'm sure is what you do, where you live. But we have run out of time. I want to thank you for taking time to be with us today. It's a pleasure. I really appreciate you giving me the opportunity to talk. So thank you. Dr. Neil Williams, Professor of Entomology at the University of California, Davis. Before we go, we want to say goodbye to two former guests on this show who were pioneers in their

respective fields and who have recently passed away. Ferrit Murad won a Nobel Prize in Physiology, or medicine in 1998 for his work studying nitric oxide's effects on tissue and blood flow. Now, at that time, nitric oxide was known simply for being an air pollutant. But as he told me, just after his Nobel win, he and his colleagues had discovered its many uses as a therapeutic tool. Nitric oxide is very permeable. It's very lipid soluble. Therefore, it can almost move anywhere it wants to undisturbed.

And it can come back out of the cell if it likes. and regulate the biology of a neighboring cell. It may be produced in an endothelial cell lining a blood vessel, but it can also influence the smooth muscle cell adjacent to it and therefore dilate blood vessel. And that made it a great way to treat heart disease, respiratory distress, and even erectile dysfunction. Ferret Murad was 86.

Ian Wilmot was an embryologist who was a member of the team at Scotland's Roslyn Institute that gained fame and startled the world by cloning Dolly the sheep. Remember back in 1996? This breakthrough led to a global discussion of the ethics of cloning animals and even people. Wilmot said many times that cloning human babies was a step too far. As he told me back in 2006, he feared research like his could be frightening at first and then may be taken for granted over time. I believe more opportunities still to come from biomedical research than all of the advances that we've had so far, and just think how many of those there are.

But what we need is basic research to ask as many fundamental questions as we can in order to maximize the number of opportunities that we have available. And I'm at least as afraid of the fact that people take for granted the opportunities each generation have and do not look forward to the future. Willemitt's work extended into stem cell research and an initiative to combat Parkinson's disease, which eventually took his life this week at the age of 79. Before we go, a special SciFRI welcome to folks listening to us on KLCC and Eugene, Oregon. Glad to have you as part of the SciFri family.

And that's about it for this week. If you missed any part of the program, or you would like to hear it again, subscribe to our podcasts or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. And you can join us throughout the week on social media or with our newsletters, science friday.com slash newsletters. You can email us the classic way, sci fri at science friday.com. And if you're celebrating, have a happy Rocha Shana. We'll see you next week. Have a great weekend. I'm Ira Flato.