Science Friday - Seabird Poop, ‘Prehistoric Planet’ TV Show, Dry Great Plains, Six Foods For A Changing Climate. May 20, 2022, Part 2

Episode Date: May 20, 2022

We Need To Talk About Bird Poop Seabird poop—sometimes called guano—was the “white gold” of fertilizers for humans for millennia. Rich in nitrogen and phosphorus from birds’ fish-based diets, the substance shaped trade routes and powered economies until chemical fertilizers replaced it. But while people may no longer find bird poop profitable, these same poop deposits—often found on islands or coasts where the birds nest and rear their young—may also be nurturing ecosystems that would be left high and dry if the birds were to disappear. As seabird populations quickly decline, that’s becoming an increasing risk. Australian researchers Megan Grant and Jennifer Lavers talk to Ira about the under-appreciated role of bird guano in ecosystems, and why scientists should be looking more closely at the poop patterns of endangered seabirds.   How Did ‘Prehistoric Planet’ Make Dinosaurs Look So Real? Being a fan of dinosaurs has its challenges. The largest, perhaps, is that no human has seen these creatures with their own eyes. Depictions of prehistoric creatures in film and media have been based on the research available at the time, but accurate knowledge about feathers, colors, and behavior have changed as science has progressed. The much-anticipated docuseries “Prehistoric Planet” dives into the most recent research about dinosaurs and their environment and illustrates what the world might have looked like 66 million years ago. The show uses hyper-realistic computer imaging to make the most realistic dinosaurs seen on film yet. The result is an epic look at how dinosaurs once lived. Joining Ira to talk about “Prehistoric Planet” is producer Tim Walker and paleontologist Darren Naish, who served as the show’s lead science consultant.    Midwestern Farmers Face Drought And Dust Even with a few recent rains, much of the Great Plains are in a drought. Wildfires have swept across the grasslands and farmers are worried about how they’ll make it through the growing season. Randy Uhrmacher is in his tractor, planting corn and soybeans in central Nebraska. But it’s hard to see his work. The soil is so dry that clouds of dust hang in the air as he drives through his fields. “Not sure how I’m supposed to see what I’m doing tonight,” Uhrmacher said on a recent night of planting. Even turning on the windshield wipers didn’t help him see through the dust storm. If he didn’t use soil conservation practices like reduced tillage and cover crops, he said his fields could look like something out of the 1930s Dust Bowl. It’s the driest spring Uhrmacher can remember in his 38 years of farming. Drought is a challenge many farmers and ranchers are facing in the middle of the country. Read the rest on sciencefriday.com.   When Climate Change Reaches Your Plate No matter how you slice it, climate change will alter what we eat in the future. Today, just 13 crops provide 80% of people’s energy intake worldwide, and about half of our calories come from wheat, maize and rice. Yet some of these crops may not grow well in the higher temperatures, unpredictable rainfall and extreme weather events caused by climate change. Already, drought, heat waves and flash floods are damaging crops around the world. “We must diversify our food basket,” says Festo Massawe. He’s executive director of Future Food Beacon Malaysia, a group at the University of Nottingham Malaysia campus in Semenyih that studies the impact of climate change on food security. That goes beyond what we eat to how we grow it. The trick will be investing in every possible solution: breeding crops so they’re more climate resilient, genetically engineering foods in the lab and studying crops that we just don’t know enough about, says ecologist Samuel Pironon of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in London. To feed a growing population in a rapidly changing world, food scientists are exploring many possible avenues, while thinking about how to be environmentally friendly. Read the rest on sciencefriday.com.   Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.   Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Later in the hour, we'll discuss the Dino docu-series prehistoric planet that comes out next week on Apple TV Plus. But first, every coastline has his birds. And where there are birds, there is, of course, bird poop. And if you live near a beach, you know this well. Whether ducking what may fall from a flying gull or observing the distinctive white color on those offshore rocks. This bird poop or guano, white gold, as it was once, called, was used by people for millennia to fertilize crops. That's because it's rich in nitrogen and

phosphorus, key nutrients for plant growth, and seabirds leave it, well, everywhere, but especially in the places where they build nesting colonies during the breeding season. Seabirds continue to shape and potentially enrich their ecosystems on coastlines and islands around the world. So what happens if the seabirds are at risk of extinction? Hear with more about what we know. about the important role of seabird guano and what we still need to know are my guests megan grant phdddd candidate at the university of tasmania and researcher at the adrift lab in australia and dr jennifer's senior lecturer in marine sciences also at the adrift lab welcome both of you to science friday hello thank you for having us our uh nice to have you mgan why did you decide to research seabird guano in the first

I suppose it's not the sexy topic, but I think it's really interesting because seabirds are so integral to terrestrial environments. It's quite unique in that they move nutrients from the marine environment to terrestrial environments. And that form of movement doesn't happen very often. Most of the nutrients flow from terrestrial areas to marine environments, not the other way around. So seabirds are incredibly important. And seabirds have been suggested as the most important vector or transport mechanism for the movement of nutrients out of any animal on Earth. Tell us about this incredible island. Introduce us to that area you studied.

Yeah. So I work out on Lord Howe Island, which is located roughly halfway between New Zealand and Australia. It's a tropical island with roughly 300 residents living on it, and it's home to thousands of terrestrial birds as well as sea birds. And one of these species is the flesh-footed shear water. You may know it as a mutton bird. These birds come to Lord Howe Island and breed. So rather than being a surface nester, like, say, a gull, they burrow into the ground, and their burrows can be two to three metres long, which is incredible for such a small bird.

Wow. I mean, it's incredible considering they dig these burrows with their feet. It's crazy to think. No kidding. That is crazy. These birds come to Lord Howe Island to breed. Then they fly back up to the Sea of Japan, so in the northern hemisphere, forage there and live there, and then, yeah, come back to Lord Howe Island to breed. Now, I mentioned all the nutrients in bird guano.

Do we have clues that the flesh-footed sheer water is fertilizing Lord Howe Island with all its guano? Absolutely, yeah. So the vegetation structure in the shearwater colonies is predominantly palm species. And it's one species of palm called the Kentia palm. There's very few other species. It's pretty much 95% palm tree. And then if you walk to the edge of the colony and then step out of the colony, the vegetation structure changes almost immediately. All of a sudden you get a variety of shrubs and other tree species and other palm species.

Wow. And yeah, so it seems like there's this really intricate link between the shear waters and the vegetation on Lord Howe Island. And that's where this idea that the shearwaters are bringing really beneficial nutrients to the island. And these areas, these colonies where the shear waters are, the vegetation needs the nutrients from their guano to survive. So that's the connection. Yeah, that's the connection. The palm trees and the guano. Yeah. Interesting.

Jennifer, what are some other places where we might be able to know? notice this connection between seabirds and their ecosystems? Virtually everywhere we look, really, this is the fascinating thing about seabird colonies. Once we see this or we become aware of their ability to kind of drive their habitats or be what we call ecosystem engineers, which is quite a cool term, then we'll start to recognize this pattern everywhere we look. And the vegetation that occurs where those seabirds nest essentially evolves. or adapts to the response of the birds being present.

And so you get this really intimate relationship, as Megan said, between bird and tree, and only certain trees exist where the birds are. And in the case of the sheer waters, the mutton birds that we're studying on Lord Howe Island, they're also what we call turbating or turning over the soil as they dig their burrows over and over again and basically making a big mess of the place. And so that turning over the soil and that constant depositing of these new trees, really dictates what can grow there and what can't. There's a really great, although I suppose, a little bit sad example from the Aleutian Islands in Alaska. It's probably one of the better ones

that we know of where in the early 19th century we introduced foxes as part of the pelt or the fur trade. And the foxes in very short order removed the seabirds basically ate them for lunch and dinner and the seabirds were gone. And so what we noticed for the vegetation, the habitat structure on these Aleutian islands in Alaska was that they very quickly transitioned from being kind of woody and shrubby and having trees and things to now those islands are grasslands. And so that was one of the most kind of marked or clearly demonstrated examples of if you remove seabirds from these habitats, those habitats just don't look the way they used to look. anymore because they're not getting the things that they need to maintain those the trees and other

life. And Megan? So, I mean, part of my PhD is looking at how the Sheawater Guano links very closely to not just the cantia palms that I was talking about, but also to the soil and the soil invertebrates as well within these regions that the Shearwater's breed. For the soil invertebrates, I'm studying a invasive species, is the leopard slug to see whether they also have similar nutrient levels to say like the guano that the shear waters have deposited. But this can be said for, you know, seabird colonies all around the world. It's not just the vegetation that the seabirds influence. It's the soil and it's the soil invertebrates. I can't remember the exact location, but there was an island somewhere where there were seabird and they compared it to an island without seabirds and the island

with seabirds, the iguanas were longer than the iguanas on the island without seabirds. So there are huge flow-on effects from having seabirds in a region compared to without seabirds. It's phenomenal. So that brings me to this question. We're talking so much about what? what we do know. Megan or Jennifer, what do we still need to know? Well, I'm just thinking of your wonderful review paper that you just did, Megan.

And it really pinpointed to us that there are, I'll say, a handful, maybe a dozen seabird species that Megan was able to identify that are endangered or critically endangered. Some of those are known to have been quite heavily involved in the historical guano trade. So we know that there were significant quantities of guano in the past, so much so that our original human societies were based around harvesting of that guano and transporting it around the globe when using it as fertilizer and various kinds of things. Those seabird populations are now numerically far less abundant to the point where they've been listed as vulnerable or endangered. And when Megan was looking at what do we know about these species with regards to their guano, and their population sizes now and various aspects. The answer was kind of not enough. So we've lost a lot of these birds.

We've clearly have the potential to lose significant amounts of guano with that. And yet simple things, very basic metrics like how much nutrients is actually in the guano of that species. So what exactly have we lost or what could we regain if we restore these vulnerable and an endangered species. We couldn't really answer that question because basic measurements of the value of their guano just aren't available. And Megan? I was going to say a very similar thing in that I think it's really important to start studying the species that we could possibly lose.

Megan, I understand that perhaps you can tell people how important seabirds are. Are you consulting on a video game about guano? So this is just, I mean, when my review paper was published, I put it up on Twitter just to basically say, look, I've written a paper, please go and read it and all of that. And then I had someone comment on that post and said, oh, you know, we're making a board game about guano. We would love to ask you some questions. P.S. This is not a joke. And I didn't know whether to take this person seriously because even though they said,

P.S, it's not a joke. It sounded like a joke. I mean, who makes a board game about guano? And basically, they're making a game, a board game about the guano trade when guano was a hot commodity, basically. And in some instances, it was valued more highly than gold. Anyway, so they're making a board game about this. And they've asked me to be their scientific consultant, which is super exciting. Wow.

Wow. Yeah. Well, you let us know when that game is out? It's coming out next year. So I can't give away too many details because it's still in production. Okay. I get it. I get it.

Hush, hush for now. Yeah, exactly. Well, we'll have you back when it comes out, okay? Absolutely, yeah. Thank you both for taking time to be with us today. Thank you so much for having us. It's been an absolute joy. It was wonderful talking about poo all morning.

Any excuse? Megan Grant, a PhD candidate at the University of Tasmania and researcher at the Adrift Lab in Australia and Dr. Jennifer Lever, Senior Lecturer in Marine Sciences, also at the Adrift Lab. We have to take a break, and when we come back, we're taking a trip back to the age of the dinosaurs with two of the folks behind the new show, Prehistoric Planet. Stay with us.

This is Science Friday. I'm Iroflato. If you're a big fan of dinosaurs like I am, you always want to know more. You can learn as much as you can about what they look like, how they behaved. But ultimately, you'll never be able to see them with your own eyes, of course. That's barring any real-life Jurassic Park situation, which you all know how well that goes. A new docu-series from BBC's studios tackles this impossible task, making dinosaurs nobody has seen as realistic as possible. We even see T-Rex swim, velociraptors hunt, and titanosaurs stop around the desert. So how did the team behind the show accomplish all of this? Let's ask them. Joining me now to talk about Prehistoric Planet, streaming on Apple TV Plus, our Tim Walker, producer for Prehistoric Planet, and Darren Nash, lead science consultant for

the show, both based in Bristol, UK. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, Ira. I'm really great to be here. We're very excited to share prehistoric planet with you and the whole of the world. Yeah, great to do here. Nice to have both of you. The BBC docu-series walking with dinosaurs from the 90s was a formative dinosaur media for many people. You know, prehistoric planet feels in many ways like a spiritual successor to that, Tim. What's different about this series? Well, Ira, I mean, walking with dinosaurs was one of the most fantastic TV shows. And personally, I lapped it up and I know a lot of the world did. Now, we've taken the last 25 years of scientific interpretation of the fossil record and comparative biology,

looking at how modern animals work and behave and looking at what we can glean from what we know about the past. And we've created a brand new definitive guide to dinosaurs. So we're walking with dinosaurs was over 20 years ago, I think. You know, we're hoping that prehistoric planet will bring a whole new generation of potential paleontologists and filmmakers to our side. We're showing the dinosaurs and the other animals that lived alongside them at the end of the Cretaceous in a brand new light. Our interpretation of how they looked, you know, what they physically looked like is now very different. to the last 20 years and what people have got very used to from walking with dinosaurs and from other TV shows and movies.

And a key aspect of prehistoric planet is the behaviors we show. We want people to fall in love with the Cretaceous period with dinosaurs generally and realize that dinosaurs weren't monsters. They were magnificent and they were majestic. And of course there are, Darren, a lot of feathers on your dinosaurs and the show speaking, of how they looked like. Was that controversial? It's true.

So many of our animals are beautifully feathered. Some of them don't just have feathers. Some of them have, you know, hair-like filaments covering their bodies. And it's almost surprising, certainly to me, as a specialist of the paleontologist, specializing on dinosaurs, that this is seen as a surprising new thing. We have known, since definitely, since the mid-1990s, the extinct dinosaurs of many kinds had feathered bodies. It's an idea that goes back even further than that, you know, as far back as the 1960s, people had put this idea forward for very good reason, mostly based on the strong

affinity between birds and bird-like non-bird dinosaurs, velociraptor type dinosaurs. And today, you know, we've got literally thousands of fossils, mostly from China, that confirm that predatory dinosaurs and members of some other dinosaur groups looked like this. So the fact that it was discovered in the 1990s, it's not a new idea. I think the public has kind of been misled by certain interpretations of dinosaurs that haven't portrayed them accurately. Of course, we have done everything to be scientifically accurate in prehistoric planet. You're seeing this new view of dinosaurs and the other animals of their time because we wanted to accurately reflect the science as up to the minute as we could. And of course, you did that by showing dinosaurs that have

of muscles and skin. And tell us, Darren, walk us through how you brought a dinosaur to life. And let's use one of the show stars, T-Rex, as an example. You're bringing a dinosaur to life, creating a fully realized, you know, photoreal CG image of this animal is a very long, intensive collaboration involving, you know, tens of different people. So our starting point, obviously, is the fossils and what we understand about the bones and how that should go together, what the skeleton would look like.

So we essentially start with a skeletal reconstruction, which has been compiled by a specialist. Now, we know from what we understand about marks on bones and the anatomy of living animals got pretty good evidence for what the tissue on top of the musculature was like. Bringing the actual animal to life then incorporates a ton of discussion about how big you think the muscles were, how much jiggle there was in the animal's tissues,

the range of movements in the animal's. its joints and how much its knees and ankles and bend, how much, how wide its, its jaws could open. We used all of the scientific data that exists, combined it with a whole load of lines of evidence to do with the rules, air quotes around rules, that exist in nature about, you know, which animals have, which colour schemes, which patterns work best for animals according to their lifestyle and habitat. And we incorporated all of this up-to-date thinking on what the integument, the stuff on the outside of the body was like. We know for sure that loads of dinosaurs had scaly skin on much or all of their bodies, but of course we have this evidence now for feathers

and filaments and spikes and other structures, which we incorporated as well. So it's a really complicated, multi-stranded collaboration involving getting the bones right, getting the soft tissues right, coming up with rules about colours and patterns according to lifestyle and habitat, and incorporating all this brand new stuff about, you know, the external covering of the animal. And then actually getting the thing to move around and walk, that again is a collaboration between what we understand about biomechanics. You know, there's a huge amount of science done on how joints and muscles move, what the range of motions like, combining that with the skill and experience of our team behind the CG building, because they have to build in gravity and

movement to the animals, which it is a scientifically led thing, but it's also something that's in a way intuitive. They have developed this phenomenal understanding of, you know, how do you make an animal that weighs 10 tons, thinking of, you know, a really big T-Rex? How do you make that look like an animal that weighs 10 tons when you're designing it on a computer? It's quite incredible, the animation. I think you also have put in some real surprising moments in it, and I think one of them for me, and probably for the audience, is that you open one of your episodes with T-Rex swimming.

I think a swimming T-Rex is going to surprise a lot of Jurassic Park fans. Yeah, I mean, one of the things that we've been aiming for is to bring an element of surprise to the viewers. I think people do have an expectation that dinosaurs are going to run around

all the time and fight. Now, of course, that does happen in the actual world, but key to the success of prehistoric planet, is the depiction of dinosaurs as animals, just like a bear or a tiger or a lion. If you film these things for real, they spend a lot of time doing very little. Then they've got to eat. They've got to procreate, repeat, you know, on a yearly basis.

And so we've approached the storytelling as if we'd been out in the field, filming the dinosaurs, for real. And when you do that, you would normally spend months and months, in the field filming animals, because as I say, they do very little a lot of the time. However, what they do display is unusual aspects of behavior that until it's been filmed before, has never been seen. And so we've taken that approach.

We've looked at what evidence we have out there to create our stories. And there's great evidence that Theropod dinosaurs swam. We know that T-Rex had a pneumatic skeleton. It had a lot of air in its skeleton. It would have sat comfortably in the water body. And the trace fossils that have been found in many places show that Theropod feet have scraped along the bottom of rivers and lakes, the sediments on the bottom there, and left the remains of a swimming motion. We put those elements together to tell a fantastic story, which will surprise and hopefully delight the viewers as much as it has done us. You know, watching the show there are times where the dinosaurs seem to show emotion.

They have personalities. The babies are especially very cute. and charismatic. Tim, how did you balance keeping the animation realistic and not making it too cartoony? It's a big challenge, you know, making the animation realistic and not too cartooning. We spent a lot of time, I mean a lot of time working on this, getting the nuance of movement of an animal right, then combining that with the storytelling that we've developed at the BBC's Natural History Unit. If you watch the type of things that we've made in the past, you can see a certain style to the storytelling,

which does encourage an emotional attachment with a character. And combining that with the expertise of our animation supervisors, in particular, Andy Jones, who had previously worked on The Lion King and Jungle Book and the incredible team at NBC. And that is absolutely key in maintaining the aesthetic of this being a docu-series and not just a fantastic movie. Yeah.

Speaking of a docket series, prehistoric planet is narrated by the inimitable Sir David Attenborough, who of course is known for his documentary narrations about nature. How did he take to this? Was it odd to craft scripting around footage that was computer animated where he's used to being out in the wild with them, Tim? Well, working with David Attenborough is an absolute delight. And it gives us the final piece of the cake, if you like, you know, having got the stories, the way we want them, having got the animation and the look and feel of the dinosaurs and the other creatures, how we want them. Getting David's endorsement was the final cherry on the top there.

And we spent a lot of time, both researching the scientific side of things and then getting the material right before we showed it. And it was a tense moment. You know, we can't deny it because he's done everything when it comes to telling stories about the natural world. And we waited until things were very, very far advanced in terms of the development of the storylines and the final animation. And when we showed him, he turned and he said, I don't think you could have done it any better, which is a real seal of approval.

And from that moment, he was on board. Right, right. And Darren, how did you choose from so many dinosaurs, which ones to feature on the show? Right from the start, we decided that we were only going to focus on one particular short section of the so-called age of dinosaurs. So in particular, we wanted to focus on what's called the late Cretaceous. The Cretaceous is the last major chunk of the so-called age of dinosaurs. And we focused on one six million year section of the last part of the late Cretaceous called the Mastrichtian. So you're only seeing animals from the Mastrichtian, the very last part of the Cretaceous is the final days of the dinosaurs, if you like. But we're still talking about a long time. Six million years is a considerable time, lots of things happening in that

time. The reason we chose the Mastrichtian was partly because it contains the paleontological superstars that, you know, everyone knows, their household names. So Tyrannosaurus Rex and Triceratops, for example, are Mastrichtian dinosaurs. But doubling up on this is the fact that the fossil record of the Mastrichtian is essentially the best for the whole age of dinosaurs. The fossil beds, the beds that bear fossils are more abundant, you know, global. and they yield a greater diversity in terms of animals and also plant fossils, information, on environments, that kind of thing, than, again, almost any other part of the Mesozoic. This is partly a consequence of the fact that it's the youngest part of the age of dinosaurs.

So it's the bit with the best fossils. We really wanted to focus on the idea that life at this time was phenomenally diverse, abundant, incredibly rich. There were all these amazing dinosaurs, some of which, as I've said, household names, others of which, you know, nobody apart from specialists have really, you know, heard about, and they live in a world that we understand pretty well relative to other sections of geological times. So if you want to start with bringing a very dynamic, new, exciting view of the age of dinosaurs to public, you virtually always start with the Mastrichtian.

This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. In case you're just joining us, we're talking with Tim Walker and Darren Nash about the upcoming Apple TV Plus show Prehistoric Planet. Yeah, and throughout the years, depictions of dinosaurs have been pretty drap, you know, mostly grays and browns, but there's quite a lot of color in the show's dynos. How were the choices made there, Darren? So conventional reconstructions of dinosaurs, which do portray them as not particularly attractive animals, often quite sort of dragony in appearance, you know, jagged teeth. Right.

Right. And lumpy, bumpy, bumpy skin. And, yeah, as you say, fairly dull animals. This is a very, very out of date view of the animals, which isn't in keeping at all with our current understanding. So it's quite distressing to a specialist like me that that stereotype is still being perpetuated. Even at this point in history, it's very strange. We know for a whole bunch of reasons that dinosaurs were, in fact, almost the opposite of this. They were flamboyant, visually oriented, very likely, colorful dinosaurs.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm sure that many species were pretty dull. You know, they would have been greys and browns, and maybe some of them weren't particularly attractive to us. But we know that dinosaurs had enormous eyes. They have the biggest eyeballs of any terrestrial animals from all of history. The parts of their brains devoted to processing information from the eyes are particularly big and well-developed. They're closely related to birds. Birds are living dinosaurs.

So what goes for birds often goes for extinct dinosaurs as well. So you think of in the bird world today, birds are often colorful. They do mating dances and displays, wiggling their tails and all this kind of stuff. That kind of thing applies to dinosaurs, non-bird dinosaurs too. So the idea that you should take away from Perichs planet is that dinosaurs would have been flamboyant, attractive, often, colorful animals. It's not a coincidence. You think about all these remarkable body shapes we have in all the dinosaur groups. Again and again, we see the evolution and elaboration of head crests, plates on the back, spikes, spines, giant dorsal sails, very peculiar anatomical

structures. I think it shows that this group of animals, almost more than any other group of animals in the history of life, are visually flamboyant, doing displays, using color, using body language, sending signals to other members of their species and to the members of other species. And this is very much the modern view of these animals is what you're going to see portrayed in our sequences. It was fascinating to watch. Tim, when walking with dinosaurs came out, we were in the late, what, 1990s, and there was a huge dino-mania. Jurassic Park was one of the biggest movies ever. You had dinosaur toys. Things were huge with kids. And now 20 years later, prehistoric planet is coming out. We've got a new Jurassic World movie coming out soon.

Are we in a new age of dynomania? I think we are in a new age of dynomania. And for me, bring it on. If we can have prehistoric planet and we can have Jurassic Park at the same time, the more people we can get excited and passionate about what we've been spending the last three and a half years doing, well, just fabulous, you know. That's great. And we look forward to it. I want to thank both of you for taking time to be with us today, and good luck. Thank you very much. It's a great pleasure. Don't forget to watch Prehistoric Planet on Apple TV Bus streaming from May 23rd. Tim Walker, producer for Prehistoric Planet, and Darren Nash, lead science consultant for the show,

both based in Bristol, UK. And if you can't get enough of dinosaurs, you can join our Science Friday Book Club. We're reading Riley Black's book, The Last Days of the Dinosaurs. find out how to join at ScienceFriday.com slash book club. We have to take a break on when we come back, drought conditions in the Great Plains are causing farmers to worry about

what this year's growing season has in store. Stay with us. Hey there, folks. Just a reminder that Science Friday depends on donations from our audience, and that means you. You help fund the radio show each week, plain and simple.

So if you find value in what we do, please go to ScienceFriday.com and give what you can. Any amount makes a difference. And thanks. This is Science Friday. I'm Irafledo. And now it's time to check in on the state of science.

This is KERNO. St. Louis Public Radio News. Local science stories of national significance. In recent years, there's been a lot of attention paid to ever-dryer conditions in the western in U.S. Less snow, less rain, increased chance of wildfire. But a changing climate isn't only affecting the West Coast. The Great Plains are seeing increasing dryness also, and with that comes threats to agriculture, loss of vital topsoil, and increased risks of fires. Elizabeth Rembert is a reporter

for Nebraska Public Media and Harvest Public Media based in Lincoln. Welcome to Science Friday, Elizabeth. Hi, Ira, it's so great to be here. Nice to have you. I know that you've been reporting on that dryness, and it's part of the Great Plains weather cycle, but this year it's even worse. Just how bad is it? Yes, it is a bad year. So dryness is a part of life in the Great Plains. Like you said, it's a part of the natural cycle. Climatologists say that we're always operating on a spectrum, where extreme wetness is at one end and extreme dryness is at the other. And the amount of snow or rain that you get throughout a year, and the temperatures factor in to put you somewhere on that

spectrum. But this year, starting in about October, the region didn't get enough snow or rain to get that good moisture into the soil. So would you call it a drought at this point? Yes. Brian Fuchs, a climatologist with the National Drought Mitigation Center, said that those dry conditions in the winter, they weren't a surprise, but then they continued building to establish. a deep drought that we're seeing now. We had a tremendously dry winter through much of the plains, and that was not unexpected, but we really didn't understand last fall what the extent of that dryness was going to be.

Brian Fuchs said that it's the worst drought year since 2012, and in 2012, the Great Plains region saw more than $35 billion in losses because of that drought. Wow, that's 10 years ago. And that dryness has caused wildfires. right? Yes. The dryness of the soil hasn't allowed the new green moist growth to get out of the ground. And so there's a lot of dry, dead grass out there. And many states in the Great Plains are also seeing extremely high, intense winds. Oklahoma clocked its windiest April since 1994. And those are the perfect conditions for wildfires, that dryness, the windiness. And in Nebraska,

tens of thousands of acres have burned and two fire chiefs have actually lost their lives fighting those blazes. Oh, that's terrible. Now, I know from looking at farms, sometimes they have bales of hay out there, right, on the fields. Do they catch fire also? Yes, a colleague of mine spoke to one volunteer firefighter, and he remembered a scene going up to help fight a fire that was coming to a house, and he drove up a road. and on both sides of the road there were bales of hay, and every single one of those hay bales was on fire. So farmers and ranchers are losing those hay bales, but then they're also losing just the grassland.

And that's where they put their cattle out to eat the grass. That's where they get their food. And if they don't have that grassland, then they don't have enough food for their cattle. And that leads ranchers to sell off cattle before they plant, probably for a lower price. When my colleague spoke to that same farmer, he talked about how he's been fighting the blazes, but then also helping farmers and ranchers with the aftermath by organizing hay donations for farmers who need help. So they lost their pasture ground. They lost their bales that were in the yards and in the ranches.

All of it's gone. It's hard to understand that. But for those farmers, they lost their entire inventory of feed. Wow, that's tough to hear. And I imagine a lot of those farmers have been in this business for years, right? They've never seen anything like this at least for a decade. Yeah, I spoke to one farmer who said that this was the driest spring that he's ever seen in his nearly 40 years of farming. And that even beats 2012.

When he was putting seeds in the ground a few weeks back, he said that this was the least optimistic that he'd ever felt putting seeds into the ground. You reported that dryness isn't new for the plains. We talked about that, and farmers have learned some tricks to deal with it. Tell us what they are. Yeah, drought-resistant crops have gained a lot of traction in the region, especially since the 2012 drought when farmers were hit with that extreme dryness. Drought-resistant crops are seeds that have been bred to thrive even when the rains don't come. Other conservation practices can also be helpful to protect soil from our seeds that have been bred to thrive. We're erosion by those extremely high intense winds. Farmers will reduce the amount that they till, which means that they're not plowing over the soil as much. And then sometimes they'll also

plant crops between the growing seasons, and that helps keep the soil down as well. One farmer that I spoke to said that if he wasn't doing those conservation practices, he thought that if you put a black and white filter on a picture of his farm, it would look like something out of the 1930s dust bowl. Wow, grapes of wrath back again. Is it getting to that point? There have been some recent rains in this region, which have been helpful. But remember what Brian Fuchs said, that climatologist, that these conditions have been building since October. So even a few recent rains isn't enough to completely satisfy that deep rain deficit that the region is facing. Wow, as you say, farmers saying this is the worst that they can remember.

Are they doing anything differently this time compared to previous years? One farmer in Nebraska said that this season he did something that he has never done before, which is he turned on his irrigation system even before he put seeds into the ground, before he went through the planting process. Other farmers might also be increasing their crop. insurance, which guarantees some payment if the crops don't come up. Is this true of the whole state? I mean, is the whole state under these kinds of conditions? Most of the state, yes. It gets better the further east that you go. And it's actually, it's kind of an

interesting situation right now because once you cross the Missouri River into Iowa, Missouri, Illinois, those farmers are actually complaining that they're getting too much moisture. Their fields are too, Yeah, they're too soaked, and they haven't been able to get out into the fields planting. So it's, like I said, the two extremes. Wow. Across the Missouri River, you're at one end. You're at a completely different on the western side of the state. This climate change is a crazy thing.

These farmers and renters' lives of their homes and their incomes are all dependent, right, on the weather. I imagine that's incredibly stressful to them as you're talking to them. How are they holding up? Yeah. A lot of people say that drought is, probably the most stressful thing that a farmer or rancher can go through. I mean, these are people who stay in this profession because they love the process of being in the soil, putting a plant in, and then maybe it's a corn seed. They're putting a corn seed in, and then watching it grow into

the beautiful green stock and then that picture-perfect yellow cob that we all picture. So it can be really challenging if you do that investment and then you go out into your fields and you see patches where the plant hasn't even come up or you see patches of those dry dead plants. But farmers and ranchers are also practical. And they say that their whole job is about these variables and adapting to the variables. So I think that they're feeling a little bit discouraged, but they are still praying for rain and ready to make changes if they need to. Yeah, because I would imagine they can expect more of the same in the future and they have to get used to that and adapt.

Yeah, scientists say that some factors of climate change like higher temperatures, which can evaporate moisture more quickly, or we're seeing long spells of dryness offset by less frequent but more intense rainfalls. Those types of factors can push dryness into drought. And so it is a gradual change, and I think farmers are always watching their fields and the weather conditions and they're ready to adapt. maybe they're expecting to use more drought-resistant crops or conservation practices in the future to adapt to those changing conditions.

All right. Thank you very much for taking time to be with us today. Thank you so much for the time. Elizabeth Rembert is a reporter for Nebraska Public Media and Harvest Public Media based in Lincoln. And you can read her reporting on this topic on her website, Science Friday.com slash dry plains. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studio. The impact of climate change and drought on the nation's food system is a big worry not just to farmers,

but to all of us. What will we do to feed ourselves on a warming planet? Last week, we talked about how restaurants are serving up a much different seafood menu than they did even a decade ago. And with rising water temperatures, those changes are expected to continue into the future. So what other foods might better be suited for a warming planet? Anna Gibbs, a reporter at Science News, that's based in Washington, D.C., wrote about six foods that might not be part of your diet now, but might be in the future. Welcome, Anna. It's great to be here. Thanks so much for having me. You're welcome.

We talked last week about how climate change is affecting the seafood that lands on our dinner plates. but obviously more than just seafood is impacted. How else is the food we love at risk? Yeah, so climate change is already affecting the food that we grow, right? We're already seeing more extreme weather events, temperatures getting hotter, we're seeing higher variation in rainfall, so both droughts and floods. And the problem is that on top of that, we have put all of our eggs into a really small number of baskets when it comes to the food that we're eating. The world population relies on getting 80% of their energy intake from just 13 crops. And so if you think about all the different things that you eat, just 13 of those are really

prominent. Wow. Yeah. And 50% of our calorie intake comes from just three crops, which is wheat, rice, and maize. So experts are worried because relying on such a small number of options is really risky. All right. I know that you came up then with a list of six foods that could be. become more popular as the climate changes. Let's go through them. First, we have a millet. It's a type of

ancient grain. It's a great source of carbs. It can be made into a lot of different things, including beer. And it's already a staple crop in many countries around the world. Then we have the Bambara ground nut. It's a lesser well-known crop. It's a type of legume, sort of like soybeans. It's a good source of protein, and that one's native to sub-Saharan Africa. Then I had to get some seafood on the list, so we had mussels. Studies show that seafood will become a bigger part of our diets in the future, and muscles are cool because they can be farmed in the ocean with low inputs. The problem with muscles is that they're threatened by ocean acidification, and so that's

why we also added kelp to the list. You can grow muscles with kelp, and that's really beneficial for the muscles, and then kelp is just awesome because it sucks a lot of carbon out of the air. It's kind of like having a forest underwater. So that's a really powerful duo. Then we have the N-set. It's a funky plant grown primarily in Ethiopia. It's called the false banana because it looks like a banana tree,

but you can't actually eat its fruit. You eat its starchy stem. And it's also called the tree against hunger because you can harvest it year-round. The last one on the list is cassava. It's a starchy root vegetable from South America, good source of carbs. But like Millett, it's already grown around the world. So it's a staple crop. It's one of the top 13 crops that I mentioned earlier. And you may think that you haven't

tried cassava before. I thought that I hadn't, but I actually learned that it's found in the tapioca balls in bubble tea. Right. Yeah. Oh, and I actually, you know, used to feed Millett to my parakeets. Right. Someone else told me that, too. But I have, I had a vegetarian friend of mine, and a few a few years ago, a few decades ago, he said, you've got to try this thing called Millet because he wasn't eating any wheat products either. He was allergic to wheat. And it's delicious. I mean, it's, you know, it's a kind of thing you want to put sauce on it. That's great. And they are gluten-free, which is a really awesome alternative, yeah. Now, tell me how you chose these. Yeah, so after talking with some food experts, it became clear

pretty quickly that the whole exercise of putting together a list was in and of itself antithetical to the key takeaway that I was hearing from these scientists, which was that we shouldn't really be making a short list, right? We should be making a really, really long list. We should be adding to the list. So having to choose to six was challenging. But I had four basic criteria that all of the foods on this list check off. So the first thing was obviously their resilience, so their ability to live in the changing climate. The second one is their nutritional quality. So just inherently are they nutritious, but also how will that nutrition? make up be affected by climate change. So one concern with higher levels of carbon dioxide is that it can actually make some crops less nutritious, which is obviously a problem going forward. And there's some crops that grow better and higher CO2 than others. So that's being studied right now. And then the third criteria, is it sustainable? Is it environmentally friendly? We don't want to be making a worse future for our food while we're investing in these crops. Right. And then the final consideration was, is this food consumer friendly?

will people buy it, which is really important. Yeah, yeah. And not only is it important, but can we find these things in the U.S.? I mean, where are you going to get a Bombera ground nut? I mean, there's cassava I have seen around the specialty food stores, but a Bombera ground nut, not so much. Right, right. And, you know, maybe someday, though,

and that's the hope is that someday you might actually find the Bumbera ground nut as a dairy alternative at your local Starbucks. There's a company that's making Bamnut milk is what it's called. And it's a dairy-free alternative, just like soy milk or almond milk or oat milk. So, you know, hopefully someday it'll get to that point. Now, I know that Millet is out there because I've eaten it, but do people know about it? Will they know about it now that we're talking about it? Yeah, so that's a great question because the UN actually declared next year to be the international year of Millets.

I'm not sure if you've heard of that distinction before. No, I had it. So they gave Kinawa that honor back in 2013, and we all saw how that turned out. I mean, everyone's into Kinawa these days. So hopefully a similar fate will come to the millet. And before we go, Anna, what can we do at home or during our grocery trips to diversify what we eat? Yeah, so I think the takeaway for consumers is to be intentional about trying new things, eating a range of different items.

Even looking for diversity within a particular type of food, like think how apples have lots of varieties, that's great because it increases resilience, right? We're putting our eggs in more baskets. If one variety isn't cut out for certain conditions, another will probably make it. Whereas a crop like bananas, there's lots of varieties, but we tend to really just buy one at the stores.

So looking for diversity where you see it, be willing to try new things on the shelf, be open to these menu changes that are going to happen. And also, we do hold a lot of power as consumers to bring some of these more sustainable options to the forefront. So I'm really curious to see if Kelp will someday take off like Kienwa did. Thank you for taking time to be with us today. Thanks so much, Ira. Anna Gibbs, a reporter at Washington-based Science News. And that's about it for this week. If you missed any part of the program or you would like to hear it again, of course, you can subscribe to our podcasts or ask your sports speaker to play Science Friday. And in light of a likely

overturn of Roe versus Wade, we'll be continuing our special coverage of the science of reproductive health and abortion access in the coming weeks. And we'd like to know what questions you'd like us to answer. Share your questions with us on the SciFRI Vox Pop app. That's the SciFri Voxpop app wherever you get your apps. We'll see you next week. I'm Ira Flato.