Science Friday - Plants Make Sounds, Frog Science, COVID Vaccine Update. April 7, 2023, Part 1

Episode Date: April 7, 2023

Your Plants Are Trying to Tell You They’re Thirsty Spring is in the air, with flowers blooming and gardens starting. Most people with a green thumb will know a droopy plant is a signal that it needs water. But new research has found another way that plants will signal that they’re thirsty: emitting staccato popping sounds, too high pitched for the human ears. Elsewhere in the world of science journalism, an argument has been made that elephants have self-domesticated. If true, this would make these gentle giants only the third creature to have done this, alongside humans and bonobos. Joining Ira to talk about these stories and other science stories of the week is Rachel Feltman, host of the podcast “The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week” and editor at large of Popular Science.   Your Future COVID-19 Vaccine May Come Through Your Nose The nose knows about COVID-19 infection. It is the entrance to the immune system, after all. The nose’s position as one of our first lines of defense has many experts in favor of developing COVID-19 nasal sprays, with the thought that it may replace the needle jabs we’ve come to expect. The development of nasal vaccines comes at a time when many Americans are anxiously awaiting if the government will approve additional COVID-19 boosters. The bivalent boosters have been out for more than six months, and there have been reports the U.S. Food and Drug Administration will recommend an additional dose for some Americans this spring. Joining Ira to give us the latest on nasal sprays, boosters, and answering some listener questions is Dr. Akiko Iwasaki, immunobiologist at Yale Medical School in New Haven, Connecticut.   Make It Easier To Be Green. Show Frogs Some Love Frogs have been called the equivalent of the canary in the coalmine, harbingers for the health of our environment. When frogs go silent, something is amiss. So we’re going to spend some time talking about why frogs are so important and how you can better support your neighborly amphibians. One idea? Build a toad abode and welcome them in. Plus, there’s another way to help frogs and toads—and that’s by lending your eyes and your ears to the scientists who study them. April is Citizen Science Month, so we’re kicking things off with a toad-ally cool project called FrogWatch. It relies on volunteers from across the country to record frog calls and report them to FrogWatch’s database. Ira talks with Dr. Itzue Caviedes-Solis, assistant professor at Swarthmore College, about making outdoor spaces more frog-friendly. Then, he chats with Carrie Bassett, National FrogWatch USA coordinator and education mission manager at the Akron Zoo, about how volunteers can lend their eyes and ears to help scientists study frogs.   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 Iroflato. A bit later in the hour, we'll talk about COVID-19 boosters and how you can build a frog-friendly home. But first, spring is in the air, flowers are blooming, and I'm starting to get my garden together. I hope you are too. So it's good to know that when you forget to water plants for a couple of days and they start to droop, it turns out they do something else when they need water. They cry for help. Well, not literally. but new research finds that plants make noise when they're stressed. Joining me to talk about this and other science news of the week is Rachel Feldman, editor at large at Popular Science and host of the podcast, The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, based in Jersey City, New Jersey.

Rachel, this may be the weirdest thing I learned this week. Yeah, it's a fun one and kind of a disturbing one in a roundabout way, I guess. Yes, it turns out that when plants are stressed, most frequently when they're deprived of water, they make sounds. You could say they scream. Oh, goodness. So even though the sounds are normally not something we can hear, the researchers, they downsampled this sound to a range we can hear. And let's take a brief listen. Wow.

It's either, sounds like either bad morse code or somebody, hunt and peck typing there. Yeah, yeah, or popping bubble wrap really furiously. Yes. Yeah, researchers had known for a while that plants produce some amount of vibration when they're really drought stressed from this process called cavitation. It's basically when air bubbles form and collapse in the plant's vascular tissue. It's the same phenomenon that makes a noise when you crack your knuckles, actually. But they had only picked it up by like placing sensors directly on the plant. And this is the first time that scientists have shown that, like, it produces, it projects sound waves that, you know, something can hear it, not humans, but probably insects and maybe even like mice and bats.

Really? So what plants are we talking about here? So the main study was on tomato plants and tobacco plants. But that's really just because they're very good cultivars to study in a lab. the researchers did some like preliminary work on wheat, corn, cacti, and grapevines, and those all also emitted sounds. So it seems like this is probably like a pretty universal phenomenon. And we don't know why this happens. It's not really a cry for help, is it? I mean, as we would normally think of it. No, fortunately, there is no reason to think that this is actually a cry of anguish. It's probably kind of an accident of a physical phenomenon that happens when plants are lacking water or otherwise experiencing distress. But the researchers do you point out that just because

the plants aren't doing it consciously doesn't mean it's not an important signal to the animals that can hear it. And it's also a signal that we could learn to listen to. They actually trained an AI to like pretty reliably detect how stressed out the plants were from a drop perspective by listening for these pops. Yeah. Our next story brings us to a creature that a lot of people don't like to talk about, I mean, cockroaches, right? It turns about weird. It turns out that cockroaches are changing their sex lives and we are the reason why. Yes. And it's not the first time we've interfered with cockroach romance either. Basically, when a male roach targets a female roach, he offers a nuptial gift, which is a great euphemistic phrase, for basically what is like

a cluster of proteins, fats, and sugars. So it's kind of like giving a date some chocolates. And, you know, while the female is enjoying that gift, the mating starts to occur. And actually, the poisoned roach baits that so many of us in the New York City area rely on use sweetened bait to sort of hijack this system. You know, roaches are primed to look for sweet stuff because it's part of their reproduction process. And now we use that to poison them. And what happened is that some roaches started having this aversion to glucose. More roaches were surviving and mating if they didn't. want to seek out that sweeten bait. So now we're seeing roaches that don't like the sweet stuff.

And at least in this one lab, we don't know if this has happened in the wild, by which I guess I mean like my kitchen. But in the lab, some roaches have now developed a mutation that allows the males to produce this like other sweeter, slower metabolizing sugar. And the female roaches actually seem to prefer it, including the ones that have this. glucose aversion. So they're just getting sweeter to get around our poison bait traps. Wow. I know you've written a book called Been There, Done That about the history of sex. Yes. Do you have to upgrade your book now and write something else? I mean, listen, I wish this had come out sooner. It would have been a great edition. I do think it's a

great reminder that sex is not just a biological process. It's also very much influenced by our environment and by, you know, environmental pressures and cultural pressures. So obviously we are very different from roaches, but I think seeing the way that roach mating rituals change in response to environmental pressures is a good reminder that like sex hasn't always been the way it is and it might not always be the way it is now. And we're still giving out boxes of chocolate. So that's cool going to happen. Let's go from a very small creature to a very large one. And I'm talking here about elephants. We know that elephants are smart, right? But new research says not only are they smart, they have potentially self-domesticated. What does that mean? Yeah, so it's an evolutionary process,

really a hypothesis of a process that leads to less aggressive and more pro-social individuals, which is just the technical term for basically making nice, like having culture and community instead of fighting. And so far, while scientists have discussed it in lots of animals, it's only really been demonstrated in humans and our very close relatives, bonobos. And these are the only two species that have self-domesticated, the humans and bonobos? What makes elephants fit into this mold? What do they do that we're doing and the bonobos are doing? Yeah, so on the one hand, there's the behaviors, right? They show these really advanced traits, like they mourn their dead. They'll help out, like, sick and injured other elephants that can recognize themselves

in mirrors. And they also just, like, culturally, they seem very empathetic. They're not aggressive. They have a very long juvenile period, and they play a lot. They're very curious. They'll even, like, babysit each other. It's just a lot of very just community-based behaviors that are not super common in the animal kingdom. And researchers are basically suggesting that this developed through sort of a selective reproductive process where you were more likely to successfully reproduce if you exhibited these kinds of behaviors. And they did actually show that elephants have a couple of genetic markers that are associated with domestication. But it's kind of an open question because the whole idea of self-domestication is like sort of almost as much of a philosophical question

as it is a biological one. So it's sort of about just like how, actively did like cultural shifts help shape the changes that we see in elephants versus other, you know, big, awesome animals. Yeah, well, when they start playing mahjana poker, we'll know they've totally moved into it. Hopefully nobody has fallen asleep in our talk this morning because this next story is about possible problems that arise from sleep apnea. Tell us about this. This is pretty important. Yeah, so basically, you know, sleep apnea. There are a couple types.

There's obstructive, which is where your throat muscles relax while you sleep and it blocks your airways. Then there's central sleep apnea, which is less common, which is where your brain kind of literally doesn't send the right signals to keep you breathing while you sleep. Either way, it's definitely an issue. You know, you're not getting enough oxygen in the night. And a lot of people either don't know they have it or don't realize that it's a big deal. And traditionally the thought has been that the big risk is developing heart disease because of that sort of chronic low oxygenation through the night. And sometimes we see cognitive issues, but the idea has always been that these are consequence of the heart problems. And now this very small preliminary study showed that otherwise healthy men with sleep apnea who did not have heart problems and sometimes even had quite mild sleep apnea were.

compared to men without it, they showed poor mental function in areas like judgment, impulse control, and even recognizing other people's feelings. Really? Wow. Yeah. And that's a lot of men we're talking about here, right? Yeah, well, because it's estimated that as many as 26% of adults in the U.S., age 30 to 70, have sleep apnea, and it's actually probably higher than that because, again, it happens while you're sleeping.

So if you don't have a partner like mine who said, I noticed you've stopped breathing sometimes in the night, which is how I finally went to get a sleep study done and got diagnosed. You can really just go a really long time not realizing it. So, you know, if you're feeling sleepy during the day or you know you snore, you should really see a doctor about that. Well, we'll know why you're making bad judgments now. Yeah, exactly. He gave us an excuse. Let's go back in time for our last story. It turns out that medieval monks recorded some of history's biggest volcanic eruptions accidentally. Tell us about that.

So researchers realized that when there's a lot of volcanic activity, you see changes in the sky because you have all of that particulate matter. So, you know, you can have crazy sunsets across the planet after a period of intense volcanic activity. And one of the ways that that can play out is in making eclipses look particularly dark. And, And what's cool is that in many religious traditions, both in sort of like European medieval monks and in a sort of contemporary religious and spiritual scholars in Asia, they cared a lot about eclipses because it seemed like a pretty significant cosmic event from a spiritual standpoint. And they took note of when they looked particularly freaky, you know, when they were like blood red or particularly dark. And so researchers realized that they could sort of cross-reference this with the ice core data we have that sort of tells us when sediment from volcanic activity was prevalent. And they use that to sort of like confirm some periods of volcanic activity that these monks wouldn't have had any way of knowing about because they were not sitting there looking at a volcano as it erupted.

Really interesting. You always bring us interesting stuff, Rachel. Thank you for taking time to be with us today. Yeah, thanks for having me. Rachel Feldman, editor at large at Popular Science and host of the podcast, the weirdest thing I learned this week. She's based in Jersey City, New Jersey. We have to take a break, and when we come back, we'll talk about the possibility of COVID nasal sprays. Yes, we'll be right back after this short break. This is Science Friday.

I'm Ira Plato. When did you get your last booster shot? I got mine, well, about six months ago. But it appears that I'm in the minority. We've gotten very blasé about COVID vaccines, so much so that only about 20% of the U.S. population has received an updated bivalent booster shot. So what's the current state of our COVID vaccines? Could I get another booster if I wanted to?

Here with the answers to what's new with boosters, formulas, and recommendations is Dr. Akiko Iwasaki, professor of immunobiology at Yale Medical School in New Haven, Connecticut. Welcome back to Science Friday. Good to have you. Thank you for having me back, Ira. You're welcome. Okay, let's jump into the bivalent boosters. Can you remind us what makes these different than the original ones?

So the bivalent booster, as the name suggests, has two types of antigens that are included. The original SARS spike protein, as well as the Omicrom, B.A4, B.A5 spike protein. So these proteins are encoded by M.R. and they're mixed together to give a bivalent booster. The idea is to be able to provide antibodies that react against the original SARS-CoB-2 spike, as well as the variance of concern that's circulating right now. Do we know how long this protection from the bivalent boosters last? So typically, if you look at the, you know, history of COVID vaccine,

the protection lasts for about six to eight months. And then it starts to decline. So my guess would be that the booster will also be waning in its effectiveness over time. You know, so as you mentioned, your six months from the last booster, probably it's time to consider getting another booster shot. Well, you anticipated my next question. Can I just walk into the drugstore and get a booster? Will they give it to me?

Yeah, I'm not really sure about that. There is no recommendation from the CDC or FDA about the second bivalent booster dose. But I did check on my CBS app and I was able to get an appointment. My last bivalent booster was about six months ago also. So maybe you can. I don't know. Okay. Well, I'll try it and you try it and we'll compare notes later.

Okay. So should we anticipate that this is the. the new standard? These bivalents are here to stay. This is our new standard for COVID boosters. I would think so. For the foreseeable future, the current bivalent boosters are here to stay. If there is an emergence of another variant that has significant mutations in the spike protein that significantly evade these vaccine-based antibody responses, then there may need to be a modification. But right now, I think the current bivalent booster, should work well.

Okay, let's go to questions we got from our audience. We got a question about the booster from on T.C. on Twitter, who asks, when will the Vax not make me sick? I did Pfizer as a booster to Moderna and was sick as a dog, in capital letters. I won't do that again. Still masking and following cleanliness protocols for protection. Any answer to that Twitterer? Oh, that's a very good question.

that a lot of people have. You know, the reaction to these vaccines vary greatly between people. Some people just have a little bit of soreness in your arm. Some people develop fever. Some people have a long-lasting reaction to these vaccines. So, yeah, it's really hard to, you know, hard to tell whether the booster, the next booster is going to give you the same kind of reactions or not. But I do hear of concerns. And some people are hesitant to get another booster because of the reactions that they got. Yeah. If you look at what I said, 20% just got a booster, that's just amazing.

Right. You'd think a lot more people would have gotten one. There has been talk of a flu and COVID combination shot in the future. Does this make sense to you? Does it seem possible? Yeah, I think it makes a lot of sense in terms of convenience. you know, so that people don't have to remember to make two appointments to get flu shot and then another, you know, another one for the COVID shot. So if it becomes an annual vaccine campaign

for COVID, you know, you might as well get it at the same time as the flu shot. And I think there is effort ongoing to make a, you know, combined vaccine shot that you just have to get one shot for the two viruses. You know, that's hopefully to come in the future. Yeah. Is there any any barrier to doing that? Yeah, well, one of the things that I thought of is that because the COVID vaccines, the MRA vaccines have to be kept in a certain temperature, and you can only use the vaccine after thawing within a limited time window, whereas the flu vaccine is kept in a different temperature, and it stays for a longer time period. So, you know, these kinds of things have to be worked out in terms of stability and, you know, how long you can keep these vaccines out of the

fridge before you have to deliver into somebody's arm. But once those technical details are figured out, it's theoretically possible to combine these vaccines. Okay, a question now from Oren on Facebook. I would just like to know if there's another vaccine booster we should be getting as youngish adults without special risk factors who have already gotten the covalent booster. I'm pretty sure the answer is no, but getting good info has been frustratingly difficult. Dr. Can we give them good info? Oh, again, we don't really have a recommendation from the government yet for how frequently we should be boosting people, especially people are not at high risk. So if you are a healthy adult who's gotten boosters and may have gotten infection in the way, it's possible that you don't, you may not need it quite right now.

But maybe there is a full booster coming that is recommended for people, including the general public. And I would just follow that guideline. Yeah, yeah. I should say that there are reports that the FDA will recommend another booster for certain people like older adults will hopefully know more in the next few weeks. President Biden intends to end the national COVID-19 public health emergency. I think the date is May 11th.

Will that have any impact, do you think, on vaccines and vaccination? Yeah. So because of the emergency provisions, you know, anyone who wanted to get the vaccine could get it for free. After that ends on May 11th, if you don't have a health insurance that covers the vaccine, there may be out-of-pocket payment that one needs to do, you know, to get these vaccines. I'm not sure exactly how that's going to be worked out. but there may be an impact like that where in terms of accessibility of vaccines to anyone who wants it. Do you think when the president ends the public health emergency,

that people are going to say, well, this epidemic is over. I don't have to worry about COVID transmission anymore. I think many people are already saying that. For someone who's studying COVID and long COVID, there are definitely issues that are still ongoing. and we are still seeing a significant number of infections and death happening from COVID. And of course, very worrisome is the fact that a lot of people are also getting long COVID. Yeah, let's talk about that.

Yeah. What do we know about at this point how the vaccine protects against long COVID? And what happens with long COVID? Right. So there are many studies that are done on this topic. And I think the consensus is that the vaccines do prevent long COVID to some. extent, possibly around 30%. So it's definitely best to get vaccinated in order to avoid acute and long COVID. But it's not perfect. People can certainly get long COVID after vaccination.

And so that sort of brings me to, you know, practicing other types of measures to prevent getting COVID, such as mask wearing and avoiding crowded indoor settings and so on. But I know a lot of people are very sick and tired of thinking about these issues, but the virus isn't done with us. So I, you know, I still keep doing that myself. I do too. You know, if I know people with long COVID and you don't want to get, you know, up your chances of getting long COVID. Absolutely not. Yeah. Is that protection against long COVID different if you've received two shots versus a booster

versus two boosters? Yeah, that kind of detailed information. is not available yet. But I would think that keeping your immune system revved up by the amount of booster doses that are needed will be protective against both acute and long COVID. You know, so that would be my guess is that if you're up to date with your booster doses, it's probably best in terms of avoiding getting the long COVID as well. We don't know of any harm to getting more boosters, do we?

Yeah, well, that's, you know, I would never say that, you know, there is no harm associated with anything because every medical intervention carries some risks. And it is true that there are people who are getting reaction to the vaccines, people who are suffering from long-term consequences after vaccination. And that's something that we are starting to investigate these vaccine-associated, you know, adverse events. So I wouldn't say there is no risk at all for getting the booster. There's risk-benefit calculation that one needs to do for any medical intervention. Let's talk about something new in the vaccine world, and I'm talking about the development

in COVID nasal sprays. There was a study this week from Germany that found a live, attenuated nasal vaccine provides special immune protection. Can you tell us about that? Is that promising? Right. So nasal vaccines in general can establish immune responses in the nose, where you first encounter the virus. And that has a lot of advantages, because if you can prevent the virus from replicating and spreading throughout the body, the less chances of you getting sick or transmitting the virus to someone else or developing along COVID and other complications. So nasal vaccines are very promising. The study that you're referring to from Germany uses attenuated virus to elicit these responses. And there is another vaccine that is also

live in attenuated version of the virus that's being developed by a company called Kodgenics. And those are already in clinical phase trials. So hopefully we'll see the results coming from those studies soon. You're also developing a nasal spray for COVID. Can you tell us about what you're working on? Oh, sure. Yeah. So our vaccine is called Prime and Spike. It's a strategy based on taking advantage of our existing immune response to the spike, and then redirecting that response to the nasal cavity by using a nasal spray that delivers the spike protein itself. And so that works really well in pre-clinical animal models.

We haven't taken it to human clinical trials yet, but we have a company that has licensed this technology, and that company is trying to raise money to be able to do that. Yeah, because I've seen thinking that says, you know, the nose is right out there out front. Literally, it's the first place you defend yourself from viruses. Why not attack that, bring in the counterattack to that place first? Exactly. And that's the whole point of the nasal spray vaccines, because it does allow you that the protection and barrier right at the nose, instead of waiting for the circulating immune responses to detect the virus.

could we see the day where COVID nasal vaccines may be more common than the shots we have now? Yeah, that would be like a dream come true because it does make immunological sense to deliver the vaccine where the protection is needed, which is the nose and the mouth and places that you would acquire the virus first. And a lot of people who might be afraid of needles or hesitant about the current vaccines, maybe the nasal vaccine will be a little bit more amenable to taking than the shots. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. In case you're just joining us, we're talking with Dr. Akiko Iosaki, Professor of Immunobiology at Yale Med School in New Haven.

Are you keeping your eye on vaccine developments that are coming in months or years that might be a whole new way of creating vaccines? Yeah, so we're in the, you know, sort of immunology field developing next generation vaccines and the future generations of vaccines. And a lot of people are putting great ideas to, you know, practice and seeing whether that they would be better than the current vaccines. For example, if we can make a pan-sarbico virus vaccines or, you know, things that are cross-reactive against all the variants, that would not require any update for boosts. and it would, you know, prevent future variants from taking over. So those types of a new generation of vaccines are being developed in the laboratories, and some of them are even in early phases of clinical trials.

So you go right to the body of the virus instead of those spike proteins. Right. So that's the other kind of idea where why don't we include other antigens from the virus, like the nuclear capsid or some other molecules that are not as, frequently mutating. And those will afford us sort of cross-reactive immunity as well. Wow. Well, thank you, Dr. Iwasaki, for this update. I think we're all very happy to know what's going on in the vaccine world. Dr. Rikiko Iosaki, professor of immunobiology at the Yale Medical School in New Haven, Connecticut. Thank you for taking time to join with us.

Thank you so much, Ira. And now for something completely different, a sonic treat from the world across according to Sound Podcast. This is blood surging through a person's brain. On either side of your head, right at the temples, the bone thins out enough for sound waves to pass through. So if you've got an ultrasound machine and you point it at just the right spot on your head,

this is what you hear. Blood rushing through the arteries in your brain. Synographer Claire Mills at UCSF can do a lot with these sounds. She can tell if you've got internal bleeding inside your head, or whether you might be at risk for a stroke. Right now, we're hearing three separate arteries. They sound different because of how much blood is flowing through them and how fast. These sounds are part of a podcast and communal listening series, and you can find out more at the world according to sound.org. We have to take a break, and when we come back,

an ode to frogs, how we can help these little critters and the scientists who study them. Totally. We encourage regular everyday people to learn how to identify frogs and toads by their calls alone. And then we enter all of that information into a national database that's open source for anybody in the world to access so that scientists can use that data to track where exactly and when exactly the frogs and toads are calling. Stay with us. We'll be right back. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. It's not easy being green. Frogs have been called the equivalent of the canary in the coal mine, sensitive indicators of the health of our environment.

When frogs go silent, something is amiss. So we're going to talk about why frogs are so important and how you can attract them as you do birds to your garden to make it a bit more easy being green. Just what is the froggy equivalent of a bird feeder? Someone who knows is Dr. Itzwey Kavietta Solis. she's assistant professor at Swarthmore College in beautiful Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you for having me. Nice to have you. You study fraud conservation. Why do you care so much about frogs?

That's a great question. So I care about frogs because I love them, because I think that every living organism deserves our respect and our care. But I think that they're also really undervalued. They're so amazing. And I just want everyone to know how. cool they are. Do you have a cool favorite frog? I do. So the monkey wax frog live in South America and they produce their own sunscreen. Yeah, they're so cool. Their own sunscreen. Yeah, we normally think of frogs that they cannot be in the sun, but they have their own secretions and they can spread it all over their body and they're just amazing. Wow, I talked about frogs being the canary. Are frogs having a tough time right now. How much have their numbers drop? Yeah, so frogs are declining in number for different reasons. They're one of the vertebrates that are the most threatened, according to the Red List in the IUCN. And they face a lot of challenges. They have habitat loss. They suffer from diseases, like a fungus that

is affecting their health. So there's different ways that we can help them overcome those challenges. Let's talk about that. I want to make my backyard more frog friendly, so to speak. I want to make it a toad abode. How can I attract frogs to my home? That's awesome. So something we can do to attract frogs is make a pond. And these artificial ponds that we can have in our backyards help them because frogs reproduce in the water. So they have a place to lay their eggs and their tadpoles can grow. And if you make the pond a natural habitat that is suitable for other species like plants and insects, then the frogs will have a nice place to live and a lot of food that they can access. So I can build a simple one then. You dig a hole, maybe put a liner in there for the water and do what? Yeah. So something you need to consider for the liner is that it needs to be not plastic.

Plastic get decomposed in small particles. And those particles can be eaten by the tadpoles. And that damage the tap pulls and decreases their health. So you can use something like a clay liner. And then you can put some rocks in the surroundings so the frogs can bask. Frogs are ectotherms, which means that they need external heat to do their activities. Something else that can help them is using native plants because native plants don't only help frogs. They have other insects in the ecosystem and they will give shape to the pond.

and prevent overheating, because when the water gets too warm, then the tadpoles will suffer. Right. Do I want to put a lily pad in there? I think you could, but I would prefer native species. If the lily pad is native where you live, I think you should go for it. Right. Do things like pesticides, fertilizers hurt them? Should it be careful of that? Yeah, for sure. So fertilizers have chemicals that also damage the tadpoles and the eggs and the adult frogs because they breed through their skin. So it's better to use organic fertilizers.

And the pesticides, besides killing the insects, which are their food, then they also affect the growth of that pose. Interesting. I'm glad you mentioned that. I mean, if I build a frog habitat like that, what are the odds that a frog is really going to show up? That's a great question. After you put all that effort, like, are they going to show up to the party?

Exactly. So I think that it depends on where you leave. Something you can do is use Eye Naturalist, which is this app that help you find the nature around you. So you can look if they're frogs close by in your neighborhood or your workplace or wherever you build a pond. And then if they're close by, they're more likely to appear in your backyard. So they will find it. If you build it, they will come. They will if they're around.

Yeah. How do they find it? Is it smell or what kind? Did they have special sensors that know where the water? is? Yeah, so that's a really good question. So frogs can absorb water through their skin, so they're really sensitive. So they can sense, for example, if it rains or if there's water close by, because they need to regulate the humidity in their bodies. So it's not super clear how they do that. There's still research going on to figure that one out. That's cool. What do you wish that people knew about frogs? Well,

I just want them to know how cool they are. I think that frogs have been around with those for so many years, like millions of years, and they're still here, and they're so resilient. So I want them to know that they have all these amazing superpowers to do so. Like, they can overcome the seas and disturbance, and they do that with a permeable skin. Like, if I was a frog and I jump in a pond, I will probably die because humans are not that resilient. And then they also are nocturnal. So I want them to know that even though we don't see them, they're there doing amazing things. Like this one that I like has their own sunscreen, but there are others that have different adaptations. Like some frogs turn blue. Some frogs have

claws that are retractable like a wolverine. So there's so many species. So they're like the superheroes of the night. Wow. And one of the superpowers. powers they have is metamorphosis. That is incredible going from a tadpole to a frog. Yeah, that's one of my favorite things too. So their life cycle starts as an egg. And then the tadpole is aquatic. And then the adult can go to land. Some of them can even climb trees and glide from the trees. So when you look at that life cycle, you can imagine how life evolve on Earth. Like life starts being water and then we crawl out of water. And now we have a lot of water. And now we have all these amazing diversity on Earth. And you can see that happening like in slow motion with

a frog just by looking at their developments. I think it really kindled, certainly in me, rekindled interest in me and in our listeners, I hope. Yeah, I hope so too. And I think that what we need is more advocates for frogs. I feel like we have a lot of advocates, you know, for pandas and elephants. But I think we need a stronger crowd to help the frogs. There you have it. Thank you for taking time to be with us today. Of course, thanks for having me. Dr. Utswey Kavayeta Solis, assistant professor at Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. I've got to build a toad abode in my backyard.

But you know what? There's another way to help frogs and toads. And that's by lending your eyes and your ears to the scientists who study them. Yep, it's time to reactivate your citizen scientist genes, as you have done in the past. And that's because April is Citizen Science Month. So we're kicking things off with a totally cool project called Frogwatch. Here with the ribbiting information on how you can participate in Frogwatch is Carrie Bassett, National Frogwatch USA Coordinator and Education Mission Manager for the Akron Zoo in Akron, Ohio.

Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, Ira. I'm happy to be here. Nice to have you. Let's get right into this. What is Frogwatch all about? So Frogwatch USA is a national citizen science project that we actually go out and we study and listen to frogs and toads and their calls. So we encourage regular everyday people to learn how to identify frogs and toads by their calls alone. And then we go out and monitor and see what frogs and toads are living where and what kind of wetlands they're in and what kind of weather they're calling in. And then we enter all of that information into a national database that's open source for anybody in the world to access so that scientists can use that data to track where exactly and when exactly the frogs and toads are calling. So it's a really exciting program that we can use to track the different demographics and habitats that the frogs are currently calling in.

And we appreciate the everyday people that join us in this journey. We're talking about toads are okay here too, right? Yep, frogs and toads. Frogs. Give me an idea of what a typical frog watching event looks like. So we do trainings where we have people come out and we teach them everything they need to know in order to be a citizen scientist with Frogwatch USA. But then once they're trained, the typical event is that we go out and do observations. And we do our observations in the evening, so at least a half an hour after sunset.

So you have to be ready and willing to go outside, you know, a little bit after dark. and then we go to various wetlands all across the country, and we listen to the frogs and toads that are calling. And it's about a five-minute total commitment that you have to do in order to do those observations. We do two minutes of just being quiet and letting the frogs get acclimated to our presence in the wetlands, and then the observation itself actually lasts three minutes,

and we record the calls of the frogs and toads that we hear, along with weather data and location data to go along with it. Can we do a little bit of training here right now? Can we practice a little bit and play some frog sounds? Yeah, I think that sounds exciting. Wow. Yeah, so this would be a typical, probably spring, late spring, early summer evening if you're out at various observation sites.

So when I listen to that, I can actually hear three different frogs and toads calling to us. When you listen, there is kind of a. really short trill that's going on kind of in the foreground, and that would actually be a gray tree frog. And then there's a longer trill sound going on in the background. That's an American toad. And then kind of a little bit further in the background, constantly playing over top of all of the other frogs, you do hear some spring peepers, which are one of my favorites. Speaking of which, do you have a favorite frog? So that's a hard question. I do have to admit the spring peepers are probably my favorite frog. They are a little small tree frog that is probably

one of the loudest frogs that we have here in Ohio. And with their little tiny size and how loud they call, it's pretty exciting. They're also one of the first harbingers that kind of tell us that spring is here. So I know when I go outside and hear the spring peepers, it tells me the good weather is coming around the bend and hopefully we'll be able to celebrate a nice warm spring. So they're one of my favorites. I think there are tree frogs that freeze. Is that correct? Yes, they're probably my second favorite frog. So those are wood frogs. And they're these adorable little frogs also very small. And they look like they have a little bandit mask on their face. So they have a little black mask that goes across their eyes. But they are the only frog in North America that lives above the

Arctic Circle. That means that these guys, when it gets cold, they actually have very special sugars in their that allow them to freeze solid. So they turn into little like frog signals. Yeah. Yeah. Crazy. They turn into little frogcicles and they're able to survive the winter and then thaw out in the spring because of the natural sugary antifreeze they have in their blood.

And they're actually being studied with the hopes that maybe they can help humans someday when it comes to things like organ transplant, like being able to maybe freeze organs and to move them across the country for transplants possibility. So it's really, really cool. Well, if that doesn't get you interested in frogs, nothing will. Okay, so let's talk about the Frog Watch. So you collect this huge database, right? What can it tell us about Frog?

So the big Frogwatch database, because of the different information we collect whenever our citizen scientists go out and do an observation, we collect information about the weather over the last couple of days. We collect information about the weather that is happening during the observation. we collect information about the location of where the frogs are calling, what kind of wetland they're in, where the water comes from, all kinds of fun information like that, as well as what kinds of frogs are calling and how intensely they're calling. Because it's very hard to go out, as you might imagine, and count frogs individually

in a wetland. So we actually do a measurement for the intensity of how many are calling. And then all of that is tracked also with the date and time of the observation. So we have a lot of information that you can manipulate and go to our data collection platform, which is called Fieldscope, and you can manipulate all that data to find all kinds of crazy things. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. One of the things I'd be searching for is if there's some abnormality in the frog calling in a certain place. I mean, are frogs missing, which, as I said before, is usually one of the signs that something's going on in nature.

Right, exactly. Yeah, frogs are really good, as you mentioned earlier. They're a canary in the coal mine. They're an indicator species for wetland health. So by being able to track where the frogs and toads are calling, we can actually go back and look and kind of evaluate what the health of that wetland may be doing. Because frogs and toads are amphibians,

which means double life. That's what it literally translates to, meaning that they are found part of the time of their life in the water and part of their time on the land. So if anything weird is going on in an environment, they pick up both of that. It also, because they have permeable skin, meaning they absorb everything through their skin. They can pick up anything that's going on in a wetland. So if something bad is happening, it shows up in the frogs and toads first.

So by being able to track them, it gives us an early indicator that something might be going on in a wetland. Carrie, this sounds like a really cool citizen science project. How can people get involved in this? Yeah. It is an awesome project. to get involved, you just need to either reach out to your local Frog Watch chapter. You can come to the Akron Zoo website, type in like Akron Zoo Frog Watch, and you can come to our website.

This could be like a life-changing experience for people who never thought that they would enjoy or appreciate frogs. Right. Yeah, I do get some people who are like, oh my gosh, they're just frogs. Like, who cares? Which I think is sad because frogs are just awesome in general. but then they'll go through trainings and stuff and they're so interested in all of the different things like the idea that the wood frog that freezes solid or you know the gray tree frogs

that actually change color a little bit but I noticed the biggest change is people that become our volunteers love to also educate other people I had a volunteer in my own chapter a couple years ago that said she was out on the trail and these people were stopped and they were like what's that sound? And it was during the day. She wasn't doing an observation, but she was so excited to stop and identify the frog and tell them about the frog. And the people got really, really excited. I think the educational piece is definitely a life-changing piece for most people. This sounds so exciting. Carrie, I want to thank you for taking time to be with us today and making us more excited about frogs. Thank you. It's been a great time. Carrie Bassett, National Frog Watch USA coordinator, an education mission manager at the Akron Zoo. in Ohio. By the way, if you're looking for more opportunities to explore nature with the kids in your life, we have just the thing. As I said before, April is Citizen Science Month,

and we've got lots of fun projects and resources to help you get involved. Check out ScienceFriiday.com slash citizen science for information. Let me say that again, science friday.com slash citizen science. Here are some of the folks who help make this show happen. Our radio producers, D. Peter Schmidt, Kathleen Davis, Hoshana Buxbaum, and Rasha Areidi. Emma Gomez is our digital producer, and Sandy Roberts is our education program manager. B.J. Leatherman composed our theme music,

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