Science Friday - Polling Science, Gar-eat Lakes. Jan 17, 2020, Part 1

Episode Date: January 17, 2020

The Science Of Polling In 2020 And Beyond In today’s fast-paced digital culture, it is more difficult than ever to follow and trust political polls. Campaigns, pollsters, and media outlets each say that their numbers are right, but can report different results. Plus, the 2016 election is still fresh in the public’s mind, when the major story was how political polling got it wrong.  But despite how people may feel about the practice, the numbers suggest that polls are still working. Even as telephone survey response rates have fallen to around 5%, polling accuracy has stayed consistent, according to a new report published by the Pew Research Center. But things get even trickier when talking about online polls.  So how can polling adapt to the way people live now, with texting, social media, and connecting online? And will the public continue to trust the numbers? Ira talks with Courtney Kennedy, director of survey research at the Pew Research Center about the science of polling in 2020 and beyond. Kennedy also told SciFri three questions you should ask when you’re evaluating a poll. Find out more. Why Native Fish Matter The fish populations of the Great Lakes have changed dramatically in the years since invasive species first arrived. Bloodsucking sea lampreys have decimated native lake trout, and tiny alewives have feasted on the eggs and young of trout and other native species. But there’s good news too, as researchers roll out solutions to help manage invasive fish populations and maintain the diversity of species.  In this next installment of the SciFri Book Club, Fish ecologist Solomon David explains why the biodiversity of the Great Lakes matters more than ever, and how to appreciate these hard-to-see freshwater fish.  Planning For Spring Waters Along The Missouri In Missouri, people are looking towards repaired levees in the hopes of reducing future flood damage. Our Bodies Are Cooling Down 98.6 F is no longer the average healthy body temperature. Is improving health the culprit? Science journalist Eleanor Cummins reports the latest in science news. 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, political polling, and a look at the fish of the Great Lakes. But first, take the back of your hand and touch it to your forehead, just like your parents might have when they were trying to figure out if you were sick. Remember, just like that? Okay. Do you feel warm? Maybe a little feverish? Hopefully not. Hopefully you feel right about average. But what is average for the human body temperature? 150 years ago, the answer was 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, 37 degrees Celsius. I'm sure we're all thinking about that now, too, right? Not anymore. At least in the U.S., body temperatures, healthy ones have been dropping for decades, and chances are good that you two are cooler

than you've been told you should be. What's going on here? Here to help explain the story, plus other short subjects in science. Eleanor Cummins, freelance science journalist living in New York. Thanks for having me. Okay, can't still quite wrap my head around this. We're getting cooler. Yeah, it's crazy to me too. So a new study came out this week in a journal called E-Life, and some scientists at Stanford evaluated 157 years of American temperatures.

So they went all the way back to the Civil War, and then they have some more recent data sets, and they were comparing them. And it looks like with each generation we've gotten a little bit colder. So what this means is that the average guy walking around today, like yourself, would probably be about, 1.06 degrees Fahrenheit colder than your 19th century counterpart. And then the reason for this is?

So that's what they were trying to figure out. Like at first they were like, this must be a problem with, you know, the methodology, right? Like maybe there was some mistake, you know, back in the olden days. But what they've actually landed on is that it's nothing technological at all. It's inflammation. So they think that as, you know, our lifestyles have gotten better because of, you know, economic development, dental hygiene, tuberculosis is not so. common anymore in the United States. Our inflammation has gone down and as a result, our body

temperatures have gone down too. Very interesting idea. We don't know, but that's an interesting idea, right? Yeah, it's definitely interesting. And yeah, challenges. Same for men and women? Same thing? So women are also, their temperatures have been going down, but by about 0.58 degrees Fahrenheit, so a little bit less of a difference. But there are sex variations in body temperatures anyway that we already knew about. So while women actually actually... have a slightly higher core body temperature than men. They tend to have a cooler skin temperature, which is often why women are the ones asking their office places to turn the temperatures up in the winter. Explains a lot. It does. And okay, so let's move up because we know as the human body is cooling

off as you've told us, the oceans are warming, and in fact, 2019 was another record year. It was. So, yeah, the oceans have been taking on a lot of the excess heat we're seeing from climate change. They've been a repository for about 90% of that heat. And this new study that came out showed that 2019 was another record-breaking year. The warmest our oceans have been since we started record-keeping. And they calculated this in jewels, which is a common unit of energy. So they found that in the last 25 years, the oceans have warmed by about 228 sextillion joules. And realizing that that was a lot of zeros, a very hard number to wrap your head around,

the lead study author put it another way. he compared it to adding 3.6 billion Hiroshima bombs worth of heat to the oceans in the last 25 years. Wow. That really does bring it home. It does. And we've talked about things that happen when the oceans are subject to climate change, coral bleaching, other animals feeling the heat too? Absolutely. So another study came out today looking at the common mirror, which is a seabird in the Pacific.

And what happened was is from about 2014 to 2016, they estimate a million of these birds died, which is a massive die-off, something we haven't really seen before. So the study tried to evaluate what was going on. And at that time in the Pacific, we were seeing that giant blob, right, like this incredible heat wave. And so what they've come to conclude is that the birds just couldn't get enough to eat. they, you know, say it was sort of system-wide, like the zoo plankton at the very bottom of the, you know, the food cycle. It wasn't as nutritious. There was more competition with fish. And so these birds became emaciated and died off in mass. And, you know, there's got to be a limit to what the ocean can take in, right? Absolutely. We're not sure what that limit is, but because the ocean has been storing more than 90% of this excess heat, it means that very little has actually warmed our atmosphere, which is crazy to think about. because it seems like everything's getting so hot.

Wow, the ocean is key. Yeah, so it's been an incredible repository. And as it gets warmer, we think that it may be able to store less carbon, which would mean more would warm the atmosphere. Meanwhile, speaking of the ocean, there was a strange seismic hum in the ocean. There was. Last year, right? Yeah, so starting in May 2018, there were these rumblings,

and nobody really knew what was going on. It was in a very quiet part of the Indian Ocean between Madagascar and Mozambique. and that part doesn't see a lot of activity, but there were earthquakes up to 5.9 magnitude. So the scientists were like, okay, we have to look into this. They were seeing sensor data from all over the world showing these rumblings, right? Like Hawaii, Chile, it was showing up.

And it ended up being really the first time that scientists have observed a seafloor volcano being born. Wow, you mean lava and everything coming out? Yeah, so that data was, we were able to, in this recent study, they were able to show how the data actually maps. onto the volcano's development. So, you know, they can show, like, where the sounds were emanating as this magma,

which came from a really, really deep reservoir, 19 miles, they think, beneath the seafloor. They can show in the data as it rises up, as it reaches the seafloor, like, the whole process. I'm waiting to find one of those giant mats they found out on the, you know, floating lava from the plane. Yeah. Maybe this will happen. Totally. And that's, like, such a great example of how little we've known. So to be able to track it this way is incredible.

All right. Now a really crazy story. The last one. This is the oldest matter found on Earth and a meteorite that landed in Australia in 1969. Yes. So the Murchison meteorite has been quite a gift. Scientists have been studying it for a long time. And in this most recent paper, they have identified some grains inside the meteorite that are 7 billion years old, which is vastly older than Earth and the sun.

It was so exciting. Well, wait a minute. So it came from outside. If it's older than the sun, it's a real alien. Yes, yeah, absolutely. They call them pre-solar grains, so it's literally stardust. In this case, it was silicon carbide grains. And so these were, you know, things that the meteorite was collecting and as it formed and as stars were forming in our galaxy.

So this came from a meteorite we already had, we knew about. What was the oldest one before this one? Was that the same meteorite? It was also from the same meteorite, because this meteorite is too hard. 120 pounds so they keep finding new things inside. In this case when they broke off the sample, they pulverized it so they could find these pre-solar grains and they said it smelled like rotten peanut butter. So they really, the scientists here really did us a service by. Rotten peanut butter. Yeah. Have you ever smelled rotten peanut butter? I haven't. Another one of the study authors was

asked like, did it smell like rotten peanut butter? And he was like, I don't know what that smells like, but it was bad. It would be rancid. Yeah. Peanut butter goes rancid. And, and, I wonder if they have any more of these meteorites around that they can find all this stuff. No, no, maybe they will. Yeah, definitely. Well, this is exciting. Thank you, Eleanor. Always good stuff you bring for us.

Thank you. Eleanor Cummings, freelance science journalist here in New York. And now it's time to check in on the state of science. This is KERNNL. St. Louis Public Radio News. Local science stories of national significance. The spring is, of course, still a way off. I'm waiting for spring to get here, but along the Mississippi and the Missouri rivers, communities are still recovering from last year's flooding and looking ahead to what the weather might bring this year.

Among the plans, well, rebuild the levees. Good idea. Joining me now to talk about that and other ways Missouri communities are hoping to reduce the impact of flooding is Eli Chen, science and environment reporter at St. Louis Public Radio. Welcome back, Eli. Hey, Ira, how's it going? In these 2019 flood season, it was unusually bad, right? Yeah. Have communities recovered yet from it?

Well, it depends on what area you're talking about. There are communities hit pretty hard near the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. So like the St. Charles area, Missouri and the Illinois towns of Grafton and Alton. And flooding basically started early spring and waters, you know, didn't recede until well into summer. So recovery, you know, took well into the fall. But farmers in northwest Missouri had to deal with high waters for an even longer stretch of time. Actually, the Army Corps of Engineers District for Kansas City declared the 2019 flood officially over just a month ago. Wow.

But what are they talking about building levees now to maybe hold it back for any more flooding? Yeah, so the state is trying to work on a plan for flood recovery. Our governor, Mike Parsons, last summer, had tasked an advisory group to figure out how to address. this issue and they released this long list of recommendations a few weeks ago that include things like, you know, the setback levees that you talked about along with, you know, studying the impacts to agriculture, revising the crop insurance program, and fixing the levees that got damaged. So one of the items, you know, mentioned trying to support farmers in northwest Missouri who want to set their levies back away from the Missouri River, and that would allow the

river more room to roam instead of constricting it, which can't make flooding worse. You know, that's sort of an inland version of what people are doing on the coast. They're moving away from the ocean. This is sort of moving away from the river. Yeah, I think that a lot of environmental groups are talking about, you know, resilience. That's something that's really important. Yeah, so what's going to happen to these plans? How far along our way from getting the new levees or what's going on about implementing these ideas?

So that's yet to be seen. This list so far is just a roughly. draft and we're expecting to see a full report at the end of May, but I have no idea what that's going to look like. I should mention that the environmental groups were excluded from that governor's advisory group as well as academic scientists. And, you know, a lot of them want to see more things like wetland restoration. They want to see more discussion about how climate change will bring heavier rains to the region and how that will impact flooding. Taking the scientists out of government. Where have I heard that before?

So should be people be buying flood insurance? Can they get, you know, flood insurance? Yeah, so right now FEMA and state emergency agencies are definitely recommend getting it. One of the reasons for that is if your home gets damaged in a flood, you know, homeowners insurance won't cover it. And even if the present grant your governor's request to declare where you live as a disaster area, it's not a guarantee that FEMA will provide aid. And that happened to Illinois residents last year. they were denied financial assistance, and that made, you know, quite a lot of people unhappy. Eli, keep track of this and check in, check back in with us when we know what's going on, okay?

Yeah, definitely. Elaine Chen, science reporter at St. Louis Public Radio. We're going to take a break and when we come back. Have you taken part in a political poll? It is the polling season. How do we know what a good one is? How do polls, how do they take it? We're going to come back after the break and talk with folks who know how to do polling, what to listen for,

what to watch for, what's a good one and what's a bad one. Something I've wanted to know for a long time, the ABCs of polling, how is it done? There are no more telephones, so how do we do them? Lots of different ways. Stick with us. We'll come back and talk about it after this break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato.

The Iowa caucus is less than three weeks away, and the polls this week show that Vice President Joe Biden has a six-point lead over the other primary challenges in the Democratic race. Six days ago, a different poll had Senator Sanders up by three points in Iowa, and at the start of the year, another poll had the candidates tying in the state. Of course, these days it feels hard to trust political polls, with campaigns, pollsters, and media outlets, each is saying that they've got the numbers right. Add to that, the lurking memory of the 2016 election when the major storyline was how political polling got it wrong. No wonder many of our listeners express some polling fatigue and uneasiness when sharing their own experience of being polled. I've been called about asking how I would vote. I believe that your vote should be secret and you should never, ever tell anyone how you should vote.

I've gotten frequent calls on my landline. I used to talk to them and I used to give out some information, but I no longer do that. I feel it's too invasive and too personal. I've been contacted multiple times by, you know, in-person pollers. Every time though that I've asked who's behind the poll, they say they don't know or that they can't tell. I was contacted by political pollsters via email. And to be honest with you, I thought it might be a spam email. So I did some further investigation because I do want to answer it so they can see where people's opinions are. I have been contacted by political pollsters via

email, and I delete all of those emails. Thank you for sharing those experiences via the Science Friday Vox Pop app. But despite how people may feel about political polling, the numbers suggest that polls are still working. According to a new report published by the Pew Research Center, even as telephone survey response rates have fallen to around just 5 percent, that survey says that polling accuracy has stayed consistent. That's been the story with traditional telephone surveys, at least. Things get a bit trickier as polling has moved online. Earlier this week, we spoke with Doug Rivers, chief scientist with the online pollster UGov, who says online polling still faces some major hurdles.

The challenge has been getting a sample that's representative of the population online. You don't have a device like what's used in telephone polling of randomly generating telephone numbers as a way of selecting people. So how can polling adapt to the way people live now with texting and social media and connecting online? And will the public continue to trust the numbers? Here with me to talk about what polling looks like in the year 2020 and beyond is Courtney Kennedy, Director of Survey Research at Pew Research Center. One of the authors of that recent polling report. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you so much. That is a fantastic report you folks have put together. It's just great reading and highly recommended to our listeners. Let me let our

listeners weigh in on polling. 8447248248258485-844 SciTalk. You can tweet us at SciFri. Let's begin at the beginning. Courtney Academy. Give me the ABCs of a typical poll. Take me from the beginning to the end. How's it done? Sure. Ideally, you want to start a poll with what we call a frame. You need some complete list, ideally, that has every single American on it. And so traditionally with polling, as you mentioned, we used to do phone numbers. And there actually is a complete list of all the landline numbers in the U.S. And there's a complete list of all the cell phone numbers in the U.S. And for decades, it worked really well to use those lists to draw a nationally random. sample and contact folks. But as you alluded to, in recent years, a lot of the polling industry has moved online. And as Doug Rivers said, there is no analog online, right? There's no master list of email addresses or, you know, sort of screen IDs or anything like that where we can do that same national random sampling. But that's

where you begin with a nationally random sample. You go out, you do your interviews, try to ask right questions that are neutral and unbiased. And then one piece of polling that is getting a lot more attention these days is the back end, which is the step that we call waiting, where the pollster needs to take their data set of interviews and statistically adjust it to make it as representative as possible of the U.S. population. So do you go in then with a sample error? If you don't have a complete random sample, is there some sample,

already built into it? Well, we don't think of it as bias, but there's definitely sampling error in every survey. And that stems from if you do a census, right? If you interview everybody in the whole country, you have no sampling error because you talk to everybody. But if you do a sub-sample, which we all do, you only interview 1,000 or 2,000 people, by virtue of interviewing a subset of people and not everybody, you automatically have sampling error. And it's not really a bias, but it means that, you know, that margin of error, your one estimate could be roughly three points too high. It could be three points too low.

You're probably going to be pretty close, but you can't assume it's perfect because you didn't talk to everybody. What was behind the inaccurate polling data that we all saw with the 2016 election? Sure. You know, a lot of people look back on 2016 and they remember just feeling misled, right? But they miss that what actually happened was a bit more nuanced than that. Yes, there were problems with a lot of the state polls, especially in the upper Midwest states that flipped from being consistently Democratic to voting for Trump. What people miss, what they forget is that national polling in 2016 was quite good. National pollsters actually had a pretty good year.

But to your question, what was off in those state polls? I worked on a committee we did a comprehensive report looking at this, and we found evidence. Mostly for two things. One is that there's evidence that a substantial share of voters actually were legitimately undecided quite deep into the campaign. Now, you have to remember, in 2016, Clinton and Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, were two historically unpopular candidates. And so there were folks that, you know, a week or two out from the election were still trying to figure out whether they're going to vote and if they vote whom they're going to vote for. And typically voters like that who are undecided wash out about evenly between the two major party candidates. But in 2016, that's not what happened.

In those critical states, those late deciding voters broke heavily for Trump. I'm talking on the order of 15, 20 percentage points. And so for polling, what that means is if you did your poll in September or October, you were in the field too early to capture that late movement. So that's part of it. The other piece is I mentioned waiting. And so that's when the pollster does a statistical adjustment to make their surveys representative as possible. And the reason we have to do that is because we've just known from decades and decades of polling, some people, some groups are more likely to do surveys than others.

And in general, you know, older folks, folks who have a college level education, things like that, they tend to be more likely to take polls. And that doesn't have to be a problem if the pollster anticipates that and fixes it. But in 2016, a lot of the state pollsters, they had too many college graduates responding in their poll, this very common pattern, but they weren't fixing it. And in 2016, having a college education was pretty closely associated with voting for Clinton. And so if you did a poll in Wisconsin, you had college graduates more likely to take that poll. you had too many Clinton voters. And we saw poll after poll after poll this going on and they had not fixed it. It wasn't malicious.

I honestly don't think at all, but that's what happened. Have they fixed it for this year? That's a great question. I wish I could say, yeah, they all did. The reality is that some have and some have not. So you really have to look, dive into the methods paragraph in their press release to see if they mention we adjusted on education as part of their waiting. Let's go to the phones and get some of our clips we have from our Voxpop app. Let me go first to Houston, to Danielle in Houston.

Hi, welcome to Science Friday. Hello. Hi, I just had a quick question. I'm African-American and college-educated, as are most of my friends and family. We vote regularly. We talk about it. It's a common thing that we never see these polls. We always joke about it.

I guess they just don't poll us. and the other thing is, is this going to be factored in, or are they anticipating some variation in the next election with African Americans that are probably going to come out more heartily in this next election? Have they adjusted for the fact that either A, we have a deep mistrust that, you know, is just generational, and B, we don't get these polls. Okay. What do you say to Danielle Courtney? Sure.

Great question. Well, in general, the chances that anybody is selected to take a poll, you know, you're talking like roughly a thousand people out of a nation of over 300 million, right? The chances of being selected for a poll are in, you know, just tremendously, tremendously tiny. But I would say, you know, you do meet people. I think some of the folks that called in earlier about their personal experiences, if you have a landline or if you listen to, in a state like Iowa or New Hampshire, there are some things that lead people, I think, to getting more requests than others. So if you live in a state that frankly is not considered a battleground and you don't have a landline phone, I would say I wouldn't be shocked, regardless

of somebody's characteristics. They just said a landline phone is only 5% of the population. Can you extrapolate accurately from people who are in a landline? Is there a bias on those people who have landlines, why they still have landlines, they may be of a certain character? More than 5% have a landline. I think 5% is the share that have a landline, but not a cell phone, right? But you're right. I'm skeptical. If I see a poll that's mostly done interviewing people on landlines, I know from my own experience that that poll is going to skew old and it's going to skewed Caucasian. Now, again, pollsters can fix that kind of thing to some extent, but in general, that's a bad footing. to start a poll because of those inherent skews that you get with landlines.

The caller also asked about turnout. That's a great question. And it's really interesting because, you know, the last presidential election is typically the one that pollsters would look to to try to anticipate, you know, what is the profile of voters going to be this year? But in 2016, you know, it was quite a break from how voters, turnout patterns you saw during the Obama administration. But then in 2018, it was a historically high turnout for a midterm election.

And so I think there is quite a bit of uncertainty. Is it, okay, is 2020 going to look more like 2016, or is it going to look more like 2018 and look like a public reaction to what they've been seen the last three or four years? Talking with Courtney Kennedy, Director of Survey Research at the Pew Research Center on Science Friday from WNIC Studios. Lots of interest. Let's go back to our Vox Pop app, and let's go to Porto Valley.

Angela from Puerto Valley, California had this to share. In California, some people want to put on the ballot whether ride sharing drivers and other employees like that should be paid on salaries or as contractors. But this questionnaire was very badly worded, and so it was difficult to answer. And I just think that some of the questionnaires need to have better. questions. This one kept asking me again and again because it was trying to change my mind how I would vote. Good point raised there. How do we separate a good poll? How do we know a good poll, Courtney, from a bad one? What do we look for? Well, that's a great question. I mean, I think that that

caller was talking specifically about message testing, which, you know, I've heard from folks, It is annoying, right? If you get called in our subject to one of those polls, I wouldn't deny it at all that that can be a pretty rough experience. So I would just say, you know, please know that that doesn't represent all of polling. There's a lot of pollsters who, most pollsters are not engaged in that kind of thing. And I're really trying to get just an honest read of how Americans are feeling. So the question of, you know, a good poll versus a bad one. You know, I do think from, you know, societal standpoint, the most useful polls are not message testing.

They're trying to get those unbiased reads. In terms of the methodology, what to look for, you know, my colleagues where I would get this question 10, 20 years ago, it's really easy to answer. We could tick off, you know, here are five things you look for and you know if a poll is good. But as our discussion has indicated, and as Doug Rivers mentioned, it's really not that easy. these days because you see tremendous variation in the field of polling. You know, if you think about your favorite news outlet, they're all doing polling a bit differently these days, right? So you still have some who are doing traditional telephone dialing, random digit dial.

You've got others that have moved online. And within that online space, you see massive differences. You've got online polls that are done with basically just convenience samples, like kind of anybody they can find online to take surveys. But you also have really expensive, rigorous ones done online where they actually recruit offline by sampling addresses and recruiting people to take online surveys. So how do you tell which is the good one that you want to hang up on one of them, but you want to stay online with the other? Or is online surveys, are they really still trying to figure out how to do them correctly? I would say as a feel.

we are. You know, and then there's a couple things, right? So this issue of who's doing the poll has come up, and that is, that does matter. So if you're asked to take a poll and they will not tell you who sponsored the poll, they should. We have professional standards as an industry, and one of them is, to be honest with respondents, if they ask, tell them who's conducting the research. So frankly, if they don't say that, I would say feel free to hang up or click out or what have you. Similarly, if you're in the middle of a poll and, you know, it might be one question might not kind of land right with you, but if it's the whole survey sounds really one-sided, you know, you're under no obligation to participate in message testing if you don't

want to. A pollsters really need to make a good faith effort to get an objective measurement. Are you as a pollster disappointed in the quality of general of polling these days? I would say I have a mixed reaction. So it's important to know that the barriers to, you know, quote unquote, being a pollster have basically been eliminated because of technological changes over the last, you know, roughly 10, 15 years. And by that, I mean, you can go online. And if you've got a few thousand dollars, you can, you know, go out and do a national poll, interview a thousand people. That doesn't mean that you're trained to do that or you know how to do that or you know how to do the statistics on the back end. But you do see, you know, organizations, kind of fly-by-night organizations you've never heard of, put out poll numbers.

And they get picked up in the media. And sometimes, you know, they're actually reasonably good, but many times they're not. And so, yeah, I mean, to be honest, that that can be frustrating. All right. We're going to take a break. Get a few more questions. If you're willing to hang around, Courtney, for a couple more minutes. Sure.

Okay. We're going to come back with Courtney Kennedy, director of survey research at the Pews Research Center, one of the authors of the, the recent polling report we're talking about. You can see Courtney's articles. Great. Her survey, ScienceFriady.com slash poll. It's really very in-depth and will answer some of the questions we can't get to in the short period of time we have. But we are going to talk more with Courtney right after the break, 844-724-8255. Stay with us.

You can also tweet us at SciFri. We'll be right back. I'm Ira Flato. This is Science Friday. We're talking this hour about the science of my science of my. modern polling, how methodology has changed through the years, the challenges now to conduct polling, especially online. My guest is Courtney Kennedy, director of survey research at the Pew Research Center. A couple of tweets that came in, a kind of interesting, Courtney.

Aaron writes, there are so many junk calls nowadays. How hard is it to get a representative sample when many people like me just won't pick up the calls. They don't recognize. Yeah, absolutely. Well, we've certainly seen that increase the cost of doing a telephone poll because as you can imagine, when fewer people answer, that means you've got more time paying professional interviewers to dial more numbers to sort of replace the people that aren't picking up their phone. And it's hard to tease out the causality here, but it seems very reasonable to associate that to the dramatic rise in automated calls, especially to cell phones and especially that kind of creepy spoofing where they pretend the number is

your number or some number near you. Yeah, I've been there. That's definitely had a bad effect on pulling it. You know, one thing that's surprising is, I think, is kind of insinuated in that comment is you would assume that that means the polls are off. They're like, how could the data possibly be any good when that kind of thing is happening in the background? And one thing that study after study has found that's surprising is that despite response rates being low,

if you are still doing it with random sampling, the data is still pretty good. It's not perfect. You know, we still have that margin of error. But polls still actually do pretty well, even at those low response rates. All right. I'm going to leave it there on a high note, Courtney. Thank you very much because I've been wondering about polling forever. My pleasure.

Now, I'm wondering why does, why do political parties each come up with their own number, as if polling is supposed to be a science, right? Yeah, they definitely release those selectively, so don't put too much credence into the polls coming from parties. And if you want to see Courtney's study, Courtney Kennedy, Director of Survey Research at the Pew Research Center, if you're distrustful of polling, we have a tip list of questions to ask on whether you should trust a poll based on Courtney Kennedy's expertise. It's on our website at ScienceFriady.com slash poll.

You can also find a link to that Pew Research Center poll. All kinds of great stuff up there, answered lots of my questions. And now we turn the page back to our book club, as we announced last week. We're setting sail for the lakes, the Great Lakes, Ontario, Erie, Huron, Michigan, and Superior Homes, as we call them. And as we read Dan Egan's, the death and life of the Great Lakes, you can learn how to participate on our website at Science Friday.com slash book club. Producer Christy Taylor is captaining the ship and is back with us for an update. Welcome back, Christy. Thanks, Ira.

I still remember learning about homes in great school to. Wisconsinite that you are. Yeah, yeah, exactly. In my blood. As you said, we're celebrating the Great Lakes this month. And they have been through a lot, as you'll know if you've been reading the book, pollution, invasive species. low water and now high water, but there are also places that a lot of people love. Our guest reader, biologist Donna Cashin, shared this memory of a butterfly migration.

I have so many wonderful memories of the Great Lakes, both as a child whose parents had a cabin near Lake Michigan and as an adult doing research on the lakes, but one in particular stands out. I was doing research on Lake Huron. I don't even remember what we were looking at in that particular day. It was late in the season, maybe August. We were in the middle of the lake. It's flat water, clear blue skies, and monarch buttoe. butterflies were just flying everywhere. We're in the middle of their migration south. It was so surreal and beautiful. I knew birds used a lake as a flyway on their migration, but I never knew Marnax did. And our other guest reader, journalist and author Peter Annen, had a particular

summer night that he still looks back on. My wife and I are fortunate to live on a remote section of Lake Superior Shoreline. And on a summer night a few years ago, we paddled to dinner at a friend's house about a mile away. After a delicious fireside meal on the beach, we launched for home into a calm, cloudless, moonless night, with the Milky Way splashed brilliantly across the sky. As we paddled along that dark, uninhabited shoreline, it was as if we were traveling through a snow globe of stars, reflecting off the water and sky all around us. No one spoke. We just silently slipped along with no lights or sound, except for the gentle dips of our paddles in Superior's deep, mysterious water.

Hmm, beautiful. And our listeners have also been sharing their fond memories on the Science Friday Vox Pop app, like Robin, who now lives in Baltimore. My absolute favorite memory is taking the car ferry from Ledington to Manitowoc across the lake. It was the most incredible experience being out. It felt like you were in the middle of the ocean. It made you realize just how big like Michigan really was. And now I want to talk about fish.

There are more than 100 species that make their living in the waters of the lake. lakes. They thrived in the glacier-fed waters for millennia before humans connected the lakes to the sea, bringing in new fish and other pests. And now another invasive fish, three different species, actually, of carp, are threatening to enter the lakes from Illinois. But the native fish are still there, struggling in places, but alive. And our next guest says that while helping those native fish to thrive won't restore the lakes to their former state necessarily, it will make them more resilient to the new dangers of carp, climate change, and more. And here to explain is Dr. Solomon David a fish ecologist and assistant professor of biology at Nichols State University in Tibado, Louisiana.

Welcome, Dr. David. Thanks, Christy. Happy to be here. Yeah, and I can't see you right now, but I hear that you have a fish in the studio with you right now. I do. I try to have a gar on hand all times. So wherever you go, there you gar. Exactly. Well, thank you for bringing a prop today. One of the reasons we wanted to talk to you is because our last book club this summer was about birds and how smart they are.

and how great and beautiful and pretty. And it turns out that there's kind of this science battle between bird people and fish people. The scales are really flying? Why is it making such a splash? I think a battle is a, you know, that's a great way to put it, but I think we should emphasize it. It's a friendly back and forth of scientists showing off the overall diversity,

and in the end that fishes are a lot cooler than birds. Oh, okay. So why do you love fish? Why are fish cooler than birds for you? I think it's the diversity, you've got a high degree of species diversity. There's more species of fish. There's more individuals of fish. They can change color.

Again, they're extremely adaptive and resilient and diverse as vertebrates. But in the end, birds and fish, they're all fish. They're all fish. How is that? So if we think about the tree of life, all the vertebrates kind of are on a particular branch and fishes, certain types of fishes branched off, and then birds went another direction. But really, when we think about it, scientifically speaking, they're all part of the same group that we would actually call fish. So everyone likes to say that birds are dinosaurs or dinosaurs are birds.

Does this mean dinosaurs are also fish? Exactly. So, I mean, the bird people like to say that birds are cool because they're dinosaurs, but really they're all fish. And so I think, you know, it shows that we can all get along and think that biodiversity is really cool. We all love fish when it comes down to it. Exactly. Great. Well, so you've done a lot of research on the Great Lakes, which is where our book club is focusing this month. We've already talked about the invasive species last week that are changing the ecosystems in the lakes, the alewives, the lampraes, the mussels.

But what about the good guys, the native fish? Who's who and how are they doing? Yes, I think it's important to talk about the positive stories of the Great Lakes. So we've got some Great Lakes native species like the Lake sturgeon. It's a species that's charismatic. They grow really large. They can get over six feet long. They've actually had a makeover.

There are once hated fish, and now their respected flagship species of the Great Lakes. So that's one of our charismatic species that we have in the Great Lakes, where their populations are starting to come back with some help from us. Some other species like the Lake Whitefish, which are cousins to salmon. We're seeing migrations return after a hiatus of about 100 years. So that's environmental improvement, habitat improvement. We've got that species starting to.

to come back. What about, so when we talk about the fish that are starting to come back, what makes a fish species more resilient than others? Are all the native species sort of doing about the same, or are some of them more sensitive and still struggling? Great question. It's extremely species specific. So particular types of fish require particular environmental parameters, particular things to

eat. So if particular habitats are improved, then it might draw back maybe a couple different species of fish, maybe one in particular. In other cases, if we can improve habitat, we can bring back entire fish communities. Really? So what is improving habitat then? Is that getting rid of pollution? Is there anything else they need?

I think improving the habitat by getting rid of pollution, but also sort of restoring habitat. So an example from Green Bay, Wisconsin, where we built wetlands, we restored wetlands and created some artificial wetlands. The fish came. So it's sort of a, if you build it, they will come perspective. Nice. Well, and there's a other fish that's kind of ambiguous when we talk about native versus invasive, and that's the introduced Pacific salmon, which was added on purpose to the lake, but it's not from there. Should we call those invasive, or do we care about their health? Do we want them there? Well, you know, human categories are always kind of fun. So we call the bad guys invasive and the good guys are sort of introduced. So I think, you know, they're important to the economy, to recreational fisheries, but they do affect. the ecosystem. So I think it's important to keep that in mind and hopefully maintain balance between our introduced valuable fishes and our native species. And then there's, you mentioned you brought

a gar with you to the studio and we haven't talked about gar yet. What is a gar, Solomon? So if I describe a gar, I'd say, picture an alligator with fins instead of legs. They got a long snout, lots of teeth, armored scales. It looks, again, like a crocodile with fins instead of legs. So very ancient looking fish. And they are really ancient, right? They're older than any other fish or something like that? Yep. They've been around since about 150 million years, so they're older than a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Wow. Why? What's the secret to their success?

I think they've been able to adapt to their habitats really well. They're air breathing, so they can go up for air. They can survive in habitats that may be more conventional water breathing fishes can't. But they're really just persistent. They found a body plan that works, and they've stuck with it for, you know, since the Jurassic. If it ain't broke, don't fish it. Exactly. I just made Ira make a face on the other side of the room. So gar are important, partly because they are also a native fish in the Great Lakes. But they're not just there, right?

They're in Louisiana, which is where you are. How many different kinds of gar are we talking about? So there are seven species of gars that are alive today. They range from southern Canada all the way down to Costa Rica. And like you said, we've got Great Lakes gars that some of those same species, species exist down here in Louisiana throughout the Mississippi River Basin. So what makes them the fish that you have chosen to study? I think they're really cool. I was into dinosaurs as a kid that's not a nod to birds.

But, you know, I think I like the look of them, the sort of ancient appearance, and they're very persistent. So they're very resilient. So I think when we think about biodiversity and resilience, this is a great example of a resilient organism that has persisted for a long time, amidst a lot of other sort of changes since 150 million years ago. Just pausing to say that this is Science Friday from WNY. I'm Christy Taylor. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Talking about fish with Dr. Solomon David,

assistant professor of biology at Nichols State University. And Dr. David, you are also looking at using Gar for medical research, which is kind of confusing to me because I know we have zebrafish as a model organism already. So why do we need another fish model? Sure. That's a great question, Christy. We're helping out some biomedical research. So we're sort of the boots on the ground working with some of these fish.

So the zebrafish works as kind of a lab rat fish, if you will. And we use the zebrafish to understand the human genome and human disease. The gar, since it sort of has this go-between between the zebrafish and the human genome. So the gar genome actually helps us understand the human genome better by sort of translating what we about the zebrafish. So it kind of works as a Rosetta Stone, if you will, to translate it. And the more we know about the human genome, the more we can predict diseases, development, that sort of thing. So, you know, they're important to ecosystems, but they can also be very important to us. Because we're also fish, apparently.

Exactly. I'm not quite going to get over that, I think. So going back to the Great Lakes, one of the species of gar is this giant monster called the alligator gar, which in recent years, the state of Illinois has been trying to restore to their historic range in Illinois. Is this a move that could help the Great Lakes invasive species problem at all? Well, I think it's important to recognize. So alligator gar aren't found in the Great Lakes, but they're kind of almost gatekeepers, if you will. Maybe they could be the guardians of the Great Lakes, if you will. But they're apex predators, but they won't really be able to put too much of a dent in the Asian carp problem.

So they're important for increasing biodiversity. They will eat Asian carp, but there's just so many that it's not going to, it may not make appreciable differences there. But biodiversity has its own value in helping an ecosystem be resilient. Exactly. So the more species we have, the more resistant and the more resilient we can be in the face of threats such as habitat loss, invasive species, which are going to be exacerbated by climate change. Okay. So what if I told you I'm still perhaps a bit on Team Bird right now for all the great things you've said about fish? What would you say to help people like me appreciate fish when we can't necessarily just like hang out in a lake in a scuba tank?

watching them go by every day. Sure, I think it's important to get into nature. I mean, birders still go out into the woods and look at birds. And so I think if you can get out to a stream, a pond or lake, rivers, bayous, that's what I did, and that's what got me into fish, but also a lot of other wildlife. Urban landscapes can also have fishes. There are several towns that have, you know, waterways going through them. And if you can't do that, check out local aquariums and zoos.

They do great work, and you can see some exotic species and native species that you may not be able to. in your backyard. Are there anything fish can do that other animals can't that just kind of blow your mind? I mean, there's a lot of cool things that fish can do. I'm not saying no animals can do them, but something like the lung fish can undergo something called estivation, which is kind of like hibernation. They can go into sort of a suspended animation for six years. So out of the water, they can dry out. You add water, they come back. Fish like the Greenland shark, my favorite shark species, can live up to 400 years old. And they're also personable. So they can respond to

owners if you have a fish. And so I think they don't get as much credit as they deserve. Wow. Yeah, that's amazing. One last question to you, Dr. David, is there something, is there an ocean-going gar? There is not necessarily but alligator garers and long-nose gars

can survive in the ocean so you can see them in saltwater. So they would be called a sea gar. Oh, no. Sorry, I get that. That's great. You guys are going great with the punch. I couldn't be outpunded. You had more than proud than ever. That was a great setup.

I went for it. Thank you so much. Solomon David, fish ecologist, assistant professor of biology and gar pun officinato at Nichols State University in Tibido, Louisiana,

thanks to him and his gar guest. That was great. Thank you. Thank you so much, Christy. Christy Taylor runs the Science Friday Book Club, and you can grab a copy of the death and life of the Great Lakes and learn how to participate on our website

at ScienceFriday.com slash book club. And if you're having your or gar puns, send them, you know, tweet them to us at SciFry. We'd love to hear all your gar puns because we ran out of time. Charles Berkowitz is our director, our senior producer of Christopher Taliatta. Our producers are, Alexa Lim, Christy Taylor, and Katie Feather. Technical and engineering helped today from Rich Kim, Kevin Wolf, Lisa Gosselin, BJ Leidenman composed our theme music. And on Science Friday Voxpop, here's our next thing we want you to answer for our next degrees of change. We're looking at how climate change is affecting Native American communities.

If you're a tribal member, we want to hear what adaptations you and your community are making. It's our Science Friday Vox Pop app for our next degree of change. We want to know if you're a Native American, you live in a Native American community, a tribal member, what adaptations you and your community are making. I'm Ira Flato in New York. Hi, folks, Ira here with a message of thanks. From all of us here at SciFri, thank you for making 2019 a great. great year by listening and downloading our podcasts, reading our articles, watching our videos,

sharing with us, and importantly by donating to support our programming. I've said this before and I mean it. We can't do this without you. So thanks and cheers to more science in 2020.