Science Friday - Shellfish Deaths, Chemical Safety, Humpback Songs. July 23, 2021, Part 2

Episode Date: July 23, 2021

Billions Of Sea Creatures, Lost To Heat Waves A couple weeks ago, the Pacific Northwest saw record-breaking temperatures. News coverage captured countless people suffering, and dying, during triple-digit heat the region had never seen before. Portland and Seattle reached their highest temperatures ever recorded. Canada set a new record for the highest temperature ever seen in the country with a measurement of 118 degrees Fahrenheit in British Columbia. However, there are still more victims of the climate crisis tragedy in the Pacific Northwest: coastal wildlife. Experts estimate that over the course of that one scorching weekend, over a billion sea creatures died. Starfish, mussels, oysters, clams, barnacles, sea snails—all of these animals and more virtually baked to death on the beach as they sat, helpless, in the intense heat during low tide.  Chris Harley, a marine biologist at the University of British Columbia, witnessed this die-off firsthand. He joins Ira to talk about what this loss means for the future of life along the coast.      EPA Whistleblowers Allege ‘Atmosphere Of Fear’ Earlier this month, four whistleblowers from the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) chemical safety office went public with allegations of intimidation and downplayed chemical risks, stating: “The Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention is broken… The entire New Chemicals program operates under an atmosphere of fear—scientists are afraid of retaliation for trying to implement TSCA the way Congress intended, and they fear that their actions (or inactions) at the direction of management are resulting in harm to human health and the environment.” John Dankosky spoke with two of the whistleblowers, along with Sharon Lerner, an investigative reporter who originally broke this story for The Intercept. As EPA staff, they were not authorized to speak with the press, but chose to participate in this interview as private citizens regarding a matter of public concern. We contacted the EPA and received the following statement: “This Administration is committed to investigating alleged violations of scientific integrity. It is critical that all EPA decisions are informed by rigorous scientific information and standards. As one of his first acts as Administrator, Administrator Regan issued a memorandum outlining concrete steps to reinforce the agency’s commitment to science. EPA takes seriously all allegations of violations of scientific integrity. EPA’s scientific integrity official and scientific integrity team members will thoroughly investigate any allegation of violation of EPA’s scientific integrity policy that they receive and work to safeguard EPA science. Additionally, EPA is currently reviewing agency policies, processes, and practices to ensure that the best available science and data inform Agency decisions. EPA is committed to fostering a culture of evaluation and continuous learning that promotes an open exchange of differing scientific and policy positions. Additionally, retaliation against EPA employees for reporting violations alleged to have occurred will not be tolerated in this administration.   EPA leadership are reviewing these complaints, and any appropriate action will be taken.”   How The Humpback Says Hello A humpback whale makes two kinds of noises. The first are songs, long, elaborate, patterned and rhythmic vocalizations made by mature males, with some connection to the mating ritual. Within any given pod, every male sings the same song, but the songs themselves are different in pods around the world. The second kind are calls, short sounds made by every whale, that seem much more consistent across populations and over time. Of around 50 documented kinds of calls, scientists have settled on the meaning of one for sure: the sound the whales make when feeding on one specific kind of fish. In the decades since scientists first began to investigate the calls and songs of humpback whales, the exact function of these noises has been a tough mystery to crack. Humpbacks’ watery habitat makes researching them difficult and expensive, and the whales themselves live on slow time scales that make leaps in understanding a process that can take decades.  Now, the new documentary Fathom tells the story of two researchers working to further understand what humpback whales are saying, and why they say it. Cornell University researcher Michelle Fournet investigated a call—the ‘whup’ call—that seems to be a greeting, and found when she played the sound underwater, the whales responded back to her. And University of St. Andrews scientist Ellen Garland scoured recordings of South Pacific humpbacks to find out how pods will suddenly adopt new songs despite little contact with other populations. Ira talks to Garland and Fournet about their work, the complexity of whale communication, and how understanding it better could help save them from human threats. 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. You've all watched news footage of folks in the Pacific Northwest suffering and dying during record triple-digit heat they've never seen before. But there is also another climate tragedy. The devastation of the coastal wildlife estimates that over a billion sea creatures have died. We're talking starfish, mussels, oysters, clams, barnacles, sea snails, all of these animals and more virtually baked to death. on the beach, as they said helpless in the scorching heat during low tide. Here to talk about what this means for the future of life along the coastline is someone who witnessed the die-off firsthand. Chris Harley, professor in the Department of Zoology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you for having me. Tell us what you saw on the beach.

Was it Kitsilano Beach in Vancouver? Kitsilano is the neighborhood where I live. And so I went down to my local beach on the middle day of the heatwave just out of curiosity to see if anything interesting was happening. And before I saw anything, I smelled it. And it was the smell of death and that was a very bad sign. That was the consistent comment from people that have lived here for decades is I've never smelled anything like that before. And a friend of mine called it the new smell of climate change. And then going to other beaches on the following day, I realized the extent.

of the die-off, it was unprecedented in my experience. It was just dead muscle after dead muscle for kilometers. So as a scientist, how do you rationalize what you just saw and what you experienced? I feel like, you know, when you go through the stages of grief, you also go through stages of scientific excitement. And the first was, oh, I'm going to learn something from this. And then it became much more depressing and sobering when I realized, well, like, there's only so much I can learn from things that are already dead. I came to measure how hot they were getting, and I can't because they've already died.

And I'm worried because the magnitude of this die-off was more than I expected to be possible in Vancouver. And so we haven't even started asking the right questions about what the implications might be because we just weren't expecting something to be this bad here. Because that's your specialty, right? You're a scientist who studies climate change and its impact on ecosystems, was this killer heatwave something that your research had predicted?

Well, maybe for the year 2080 or 2050, and we were trying to simulate warming like this in the field as creatively as possible, including using propane-powered turkey fryers to heat up tide pools and things like that. But it turns out that in our experiments, we weren't getting things hot enough to simulate this actual event that's happening now. And we were trying to simulate something that wouldn't happen for, you know, 30 or 50 years. Boy, that must have been surprising. It was very surprising. So what's different about this happening in British Columbia versus, say, Louisiana or other coastal areas that are heating up as well?

I mean, we're seeing a lot of extreme heat events everywhere, but this one seems particularly striking. The ecosystems in any given place are two. tuned to a degree to the temperatures that are, you might consider normal over the past several decades or even thousands of years. And so getting a few degrees hotter in Louisiana might be just as bad as getting a few degrees hotter in British Columbia. This particular heat dome was many degrees hotter than the normal conditions. And just being out on the shore that day and sweating so profusely and worrying about

heat stroke, it reminded me of being in Baja, Mexico. in August. It is not the kind of thing that I was expecting in Canada. Have any scientists in your experience, your lifetime, ever experienced this kind of die-off on the beach in Vancouver? There have been a few small ones. There have been a few in other places in the world like California and New Zealand. And I don't want to trivialize those. Those killed a lot of muscles and other things. But this one in my 25 years of experience is the most extensive die-off of intertidal life in response to a high-temperature event that I've ever seen. So what are you estimating the British Columbia shoreline looks like down the road if such heat events

continue? I think it's going to end up looking like a strange combination of British Columbia, Southern California or Mexico, and Hong Kong. Places around Vancouver are just naturally a little bit warmer and to find species that can handle temperatures warmer than they are now, you have to go very far south or to other parts of the world to find those species. And the ones from Mexico may or may not be able to migrate here on their own. Ones from Asia are arriving accidentally by ship, and those might be the ones that start to take over. So instead of seeing muscle beds, we might start seeing oyster beds. Instead of seeing kelps, we might start seeing some of the non-native seaweed. So a big ecosystem shift is already underway and I think it's only accelerating.

And not only an ecosystem shift, but what comes with it, which might be an employment shift, if these animals are no longer, you know, able to survive, the fishing industry may have to change too, right? Yes, and we don't know what the impacts on salmon might be. They likely suffered in the streams where the little juvenile fish are. They use a lot of things like mussels and seaweed that have died as cover as they migrate out to sea. The shellfish growers are concerned about this, and they're no dummies. They keep careful track of mortality events on their beaches, and they're out looking now to see how bad it was, and we're waiting to see what the implications are for that industry. Since scientists like yourselves have been caught

surprised by this event, do you anticipate having to change the direction of your own work? Yes, and as luck would have it, I'm writing my five-year operating grant this fall, and I am changing what the topic is going to be. We've been working on warming as a problem, but we had underestimated the magnitude, you know, how soon these events would arrive. So now we're starting to think, well, all right, what happens if you get two in a row? Is that like getting two sunburns in a row that's much worse than just getting one? There's a lot that we don't understand about these extreme events. Speaking of this extreme event, what is the take-home message from this? I think there's a few.

One is, you know, and I forgive people if they don't care deeply about the plight of the barnacle. But the fact that we lost a lot of marine life and the cherry growers had their fruit cooking on the trees and wildfires are much worse than they had been and people are dying in their homes because there's insufficient cooling. and all of these things are point in the same direction. So I hope it is a call to action for even just little changes that we can make. We all stood up in the face of the COVID pandemic and made little changes, and that really helped. We can do the exact same thing with climate change,

with small changes done by enough people. Well, I hope everybody is paying attention, and I thank you for what you do and for alerting us to this danger. So sorry to hear about what's going on where you live. Chris Harley, professor in the Department of Zoology at the University of Brewery, British Columbia in Vancouver. Thank you for taking time to be with us today. Thank you. The official mission of the Environmental Protection Agency is to protect human health and the environment, to keep our air and water clean and to make sure chemicals in the marketplace are safe. But for

years, the agency has been plagued by allegations that it's too cozy with the chemical industry and too quick to approve chemicals that may cause harm to humans. Recently, four scientists at the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention went public as whistleblowers, alleging that the agency has been downplaying the risks of chemicals, risks like birth defects and cancer, and that dozens of assessments were even altered to make chemicals appear safer than they are. Earlier this week, SciFRI News Director John Dan Koski spoke with two of the whistleblowers, along with the investigative journalist who broke the story. Hi, John. Hi, Ira. Yeah, I spoke with the whistleblowers on Monday, and it's important to note here that as EPA staff members,

they were not authorized to do this interview. But because of our concern for what is happening and potential danger to public health, we are speaking today as private citizens regarding a matter of public concern. That was Sarah Gallagher. She's a human health assessor at the EPA with a PhD in chemistry. She, along with three other scientists, went public earlier this month with their concerns, and they issued a statement to Congress saying, quote, the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention is broken. And they go on to add this about the Toxic Substances Control Act, which is known as Tosca.

They wrote, The entire new chemicals program operates under an atmosphere of fear. Scientists are afraid of retaliation for trying to implement TOSCA the way Congress intended, and they fear that their actions or inactions at the direction of management are resulting in harm to human health and the environment. End quote. Now, Ira, the job of the chemical safety office is to keep us safe from hazardous chemicals, whether they're in our environment or in our products, like industrial chemicals, chemicals and cleaning products, in cosmetics. Sarah, like the other whistleblower that we're

going to hear from, her job is to review these new chemicals, look at any safety data that exists, and determine how they might affect our health and what levels of exposure are safe. Well, that certainly is an important job. Yeah, and it's a job. that Sarah says she takes very seriously. The reason why I ended up coming forward is because I, like most of the colleagues that I work for, join the EPA because we're passionate about its mission. And I just want to be able to do the best science and to be able to determine whether these chemicals are presenting risk to the workers who are using them, to the general population, to people who might have increased susceptibility. And the intense pressure and bullying

that I went through. You know, I was able to put up with it and stand up for the science and what I believed in, but I was then watching that in some cases they would go around my back and an assessment would be revised without my knowledge or they would pressure someone who was newer to the program.

And I just, I couldn't watch that happen to the staff that I had worked with and that I respect and also to the American people. I was also joined by Martin Phillips, a fellow whistleblower and human health assessor at the agency who has a PhD in medicinal chemistry. I joined the EPA because I also am passionate about public health and chemical safety. I really enjoy working as part of an interdisciplinary team with engineers and exposure scientists and chemists and human toxicologists. and I'm coming forward again as a private citizen because this is a matter of public concern. Just a note here that both Martin and Sarah have been working with an organization called Peer,

public employees for environmental responsibility. They've been helping them navigate the whistleblowing process, including these legal issues, because Ira, a lot of the documents they worked with included confidential business information. Certainly a very important story, and we will have more of it after we come back from the break. When we return, John continues his report and chronicles the events that led these two EPA scientists to go public and how the EPA is supposed to keep us safe from hazardous chemicals. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato here with Sci-Fi News Director John Dan Koski talking about whistleblower allegations that the EPA has been downplaying the risks of new chemicals, making them look safer in ways that could result in harm to our health. But in their public statement, the whistleblowers wrote that the system is broken.

Well, how is it supposed to work? How is the EPA supposed to keep us safe from new chemicals? Well, when a company has a new chemical that it wants to start using, it has to submit it to the EPA with whatever safety-related information that it has. Now, that information gets reviewed by the EPA, and they evaluate the various risks, like, say, what might happen to frogs if this chemical ends up in a lake? What happens if it's released into the air? Will it persist in nature? Now, Sarah and Martin, their job is to look at how these chemicals affect humans. What do we know about the health risks? What studies have been done? And they come up with an assessment listing any concerns, like will this chemical cause irritation to the eyes? Or has this chemical been linked to birth defects? But here's the thing a lot of people don't realize. A company that wants to start using a new chemical in, say, floss, well, it doesn't have to submit any safety data. if it doesn't have it. So we don't require that companies submit any particular data with their new chemicals, as many other countries do.

That's Sharon Lerner. She's the investigative journalist at the Intercept who broke this story. Now, Sharon says that if a chemical is submitted with little or no safety data, there is something that a human health assessor like Martin or Sarah can do. If there is no signs at all on the actual chemical, what they'll do sometimes is look at what's known about similar chemicals that they can then compare to and kind of extrapolate from that. And these are called analogs. This is one area where Sarah and Martin say their assessments got altered to make chemicals

look safer. Just one example that Sharon wrote about in her piece. In March of 2020, Sarah was looking at a new chemical and she didn't have a lot of safety information to go off of. But she determined that it was most closely related to PFOA. That's something we've covered on the show before. PFOA has been linked with various cancers and developmental risks, and it was enough of a concern that back in 2006, several U.S. manufacturers voluntarily agreed to stop using and manufacturing it by the year 2015. So if there's a new chemical that's about to go into the market that's very similar to PFOA, it stands to reason that it might pose similar risks.

And that's, of course, a concern. So Sarah wrote in her assessment that this chemical's closest analog was PFOA. but then later on a supervisor had her assessment altered, got rid of this comparison to PFOA, which might have set off alarm bells, and instead recommended a much less toxic chemical be used as a reference point, which meant suddenly this new chemical sounds a whole lot safer. Martin says this kind of thing happened to him too. I specifically have had analogs deleted from reports.

You know, I... The analog searches, take quite a bit of work. Sometimes we find a really close analog. Some chemical companies make chemicals that only differ by one or two atoms. In other cases, we have to do a really extensive search. It takes a lot of time and resources. So to do that search and then do the risk assessment

and then have those analogs deleted and be told, you know, this isn't appropriate. when really it may be a very close match is very frustrating for assessors but also is leading to potential risks being missed or hazards being missed. And Sarah and Martin described some other concerning incidents too. In 2020, Sarah was looking at a chemical and she learned that in experiments with pregnant lab animals, it caused a reduction in fetal weight. but her supervisor asked her to change her assessment in a way that would mean the final safety sheet would contain no mention of possible risks to a human fetus.

Sarah refused to make this change, and then a month later, she was transferred to another office. Wow. So do we know what chemical that is? Well, see, here's the thing. We don't know. Sharon, something that struck me in reading your reporting is that you write about chemicals whose risks have been downplayed as, Both of our other guests have said. But you don't really name the chemicals. You write about a compound that Martin was assessing. It's a component of cleaning solutions that cause birth defects and miscarriages in experiments with rats. But we don't know what that compound is.

Tell us a bit more about why we don't have a name for this compound. Yeah. Well, I don't know what that compound is. And that's because these folks who we're talking to are by law not allowed to. not allowed to identify them. In many cases, the information, even the companies that make these chemicals, the names of these chemicals are classified as confidential business information known as CBI. And because the companies claim that this is intellectual property and if it were shared, it would unfairly cut into their, you know, business, we're not allowed.

to know this. So I've got lots of reader responses saying, oh, okay, well, this is really important. Now tell us what the chemicals are. Tell us who the companies are. And they can't tell them. You know, they could run into lots of legal trouble if they share that information. I think that we all can agree that it is critical that the public has this information. And I think hopefully, ultimately, we can perhaps get some of the names out there. So for instance, in that case, Sharon, we don't know the name of the compound. We probably don't even know if it's on the market right now.

I think we can assume it is. I mean, because we can, what they have sometimes are these unique identifiers. So you can follow the story of a compound and you can see from the public record when it's, you know, given its fond, final approval, but you just don't know how to connect it to the name of its actual name or the company that makes it. Okay, John, the kind of work that Sarah and Martin do is pretty sophisticated.

Their job is to pick the right analog, decide what an experiment in rats might tell you about the risk to human beings. And you know, you'd expect there to be some subjectivity in that kind of work. I mean, isn't it possible that these were simple differences of opinion? I mean, that Sarah and Martin saw a high level of risk where someone else just didn't. Well, that's possible, but there are a few things here. We have four separate scientists who have gone so far as to go public as whistleblowers and more who have spoken to Sharon anonymously or after they left the agency to express their concerns. And these alterations that they describe are almost always in one direction to make a chemical look safer,

which is consistent with the rest of Sharon's reporting. Now, she's found it's not just that chemicals can be approved with little or no safety data, but that in another unit within the Chemical Safety Office, the Office of Pesticide Programs, the requirement for toxicity studies is routinely waived and that this is not just accepted, but it's sometimes celebrated. And let me tell you about this. There's an email that Sharon obtained. It's from 2018, and it's inviting staff to the 10th floor conference room to, quote,

celebrate reaching 1,000 studies waived. And Ira, they promised that there would be cake. Oh, wow. Yeah, I know. So scientists like Martin and Sarah, they're alleging that there's a lot of pressure to go along with this. We started facing this enhanced intimidation and harassment probably around November of 2019. And it got really bad when we all, ended up starting to work from home during the pandemic around March 2020.

Sarah tried bringing her concerns to managers, and sometimes she says it seemed like they were listening. But in the end, it almost became a he said, she said, or he said, or whoever, kind of facing off of two opinions where I would have written out my assessment based on my understanding of, let's say, developmental toxicology. and someone would write something that was logically incorrect and didn't follow widely accepted practices, but then it would ultimately circle back to me being told

that I had to just go with what the other proposal was. And there was a number of times that I refused. And then eventually she got transferred to another program. And I guess what really got to me is I submitted a dozen complaints to the Scientific Integrity Office and to managers, and some of those folks who saw some of these complaints were alarmed by what happened. But we weren't seeing any change. And I have heard from more than one assessor who is still in the program that they have found

assessments changed or that they felt uncomfortable speaking their mind. And I don't think it's appropriate that any scientist should ever feel like they're not allowed to say what they see in the data and provide their professional opinion and feel that that opinion, if it's providing the wrong risk picture, could lead to them having some sort of adverse consequence in their career. So you've got intimidation, fear of repercussions. These are obviously very serious allegations. But you know, John, it sounds like there are major gaps in this system that's meant to keep us safe from chemical hazards,

even when it's working the way it was designed to be. Yeah, that's my takeaway, too, Ira. and I asked Martin about this. Martin, it sounds like from what you and Sarah are saying, we're running a kind of a massive experiment here. The EPA is supposed to keep us safe from chemicals, but chemicals are being released into the environment and included in our products

without us necessarily knowing enough about how safe they are. And we're only finding out about this much later, sometimes after these chemicals cause a problem. That's what I'm taking away from some of what you're saying. Is that right? It is right, but I'd like to provide some historical context to that. So every chemical that was manufactured or imported prior to 1976 when the toxic substances control act was passed, was automatically grandfathered in. So that includes things like dry cleaning solvents and things like formaldehyde. There's a lot of chemicals that were already on the market prior to.

in 1976. So those all got a free pass. And then from 1976 to 2016, new chemicals were being reviewed, but 80% of them were just dropped. So if EPA couldn't finish the review within 90 days, it was automatically allowed to enter the market. So what that means is we have thousands of untested chemicals in the market already. But in 2016, Congress amended Tosca. And Martin's take is that this amendment was meant to prevent anything else from going on the market without proper testing. And he thinks if these new rules were followed, we could be confident that the EPA was protecting us from harmful chemicals. I believe so. I believe that if the amended toxic substances control act were implemented as intended by Congress, that we could allow innovation and

allow new chemicals on the market that don't pose unreasonable risks, put on restrictions on new chemicals that are needed for our economy with reasonable restrictions to protect human health and safety and the environment, and not allow on chemicals that just aren't, you know, pose on reasonable risks and just aren't needed in the same way. as some critical chemicals might be. So Martin seems to have some confidence in these existing laws, but Sharon Lerner, the investigative journalist, has some concerns. One important criticism of Tosca as it was revised in 2016

was that we did not include a baseline data requirements. And that's problematic in that, you know, you can submit a chemical for approval, as we've heard, without providing any information about it. And also, companies, if they do have data, are asked to submit what they have, which, perversely, provides the incentive not to do research into your chemicals, right?

So I would say that even if it's at its best, that's a big problem for TASCA that I think many people in the environmental community see with the law as it stands. I'm Ira Flato, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studio. shows. Sarah, what has happened since you came forward? We've gotten a number of messages and supports from colleagues who are both inside and outside the Office of Toxics. But besides that, I haven't heard

anything from management about this at this point. I'm assuming they're allowing the investigation to proceed. And hopefully the Inspector General will start looking into these issues soon, just so we can get to the bottom of it and make sure that we can. can get these issues corrected. Sharon, what kind of response have you gotten from the EPA to your reporting? Well, the EPA has said they take the matter very seriously, that they really value scientific integrity. They did not challenge any of the assertions made in the piece. They did not say that anything was incorrect. And they said that they would investigate. And I think we've heard

from Administrator Regan and from President Biden, that repeatedly that they really value scientific integrity, that they recognize that during the previous administration, there were really consequential, really tragic impacts from the departures from scientific integrity within the EPA in particular, right, around climate and around chemicals. So I think it's great that we're hearing that. And now what we have to do is, you know, see that there is really a proper investigation and that changes flow from that.

And Ira, Congress is looking at this too. California Representative Roe Kana chairs the House Committee on Oversight and Reform. He got a copy of this letter from the whistleblowers and provided a statement to the intercept that read in part, I will continue to monitor the situation and ensure that these scientists' concerns are addressed to ensure that toxic or harmful chemical, are not going out to the market without the appropriate health and safety warnings. End quote. And there's more this week on the chemical front in Congress, too. The House passed a bill that would set up drinking water standards for those so-called forever chemicals that we talked about before, PFOA and PFOS. They've been linked to liver and kidney problems. And the EPA would be

directed under this bill to designate these chemicals as hazardous substances. So it seems Washington is starting to take this stuff pretty seriously. And there's other good news that the bill passed the House of Representatives on a bipartisan vote. It now goes to the Senate. Great story. John, very important. John Denkowski, thank you for sharing it with us. Thanks so much, Ira. And thanks to our senior producer for podcasts Ella Fedder for producing our segment. And also thanking our guest, Sharon Lerner, investigative journalist at The Intercept, as well as Sarah Gallagher and Martin Phillips, both human health assessors at the EPA. We did contact the EPA for a comment,

and they again said that they take allegations like this seriously and are committed to investigating. You can read the full statement up on our website, science friday.com slash EPA. We have to take a break, and when we come back, how to speak to humpback whales, and more than that,

how researchers are tracking the spread of whale culture across miles and miles of ocean. This is Science Friday. I'm Iroflato. Let's say you're a whale swimming around. And you want to say hello. Well, if you're a humpback, your howdy might sound a bit like whoop. I think the whoop is a kind of hello to them. Possibly, hello, I am. If each whale has their own whoop, could they use it to identify each other? That's by acoustics researcher Michelle Forney, talking about her groundbreaking work to identify the function of a small piece of the known vocabulary

of humpback whales, a call that may be how they say hello. But what if you, not a whale, find whale music more your style. They have rhythm, times breathing, rhyming, and repetition. And maybe you'd be interested in the work of Ellen Garland, who has been scouring the complex songs of humpback whales, for evidence that whale songs may spread across hundreds of miles of ocean and be adopted by other whales. Their research is featured in the new documentary Fathom, which aired at the

Tribeca Film Festival. It's now available on Apple TV Plus, and both of those scientists are here with me today. Ellen Garland is a Royal Society University Research Fellow investigating the cultural transmission of humpback whales at the University of St. Andrews in the UK. Michelle Forney is a postdoctoral researcher in bioacoustics and behavioral ecology. That's at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Kali Seyang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you so much for having us. Hello. Nice to have you. Ellen, let's start with digging into your work first. Tell us about humpback whale songs and the patterns and the themes there. Absolutely.

So it's only the males that will sing. And song functions in something to do with sexual selection. So either the males are singing to try and attract a mate or they're seeing to other males saying, I'm big, I'm strong. Or it could be both. We're just really not that sure at the moment. But what we do know is that all the males within a population will sing the same song. So this song is quite complex.

It's got many hierarchical levels in it, but they will all sing the same arrangement of the song each year, and it will slowly change, and they'll all make these same changes to their song, and the song progresses, it evolves from year to year within a population. And what we've been finding is that these songs are then passed between populations. The song on the East Coast of Australia will then be passed to the next population over, which is New Caledonia the next year, and it will take over that whole song display.

This whole new song will appear, and all the males will switch to these completely different songs. And that happens over and over again across that ocean basin. And this takes one to two years for a song, what we call revolution, to spread across. The changes are revolutionary. It has happened with multiple different song types being passed from one population to the next over and over again. Let's listen to an example of the changes you observe. Here's a clip from a song first observed in 2002, and then you watched it move eastward.

And here's a sample from a song first observed in the same place in 2003, and then you watched that move to Wales east of there. So these two songs are really very different. I mean, how easy is it for you to tell how different they are? So the differences are really striking. So with humpback song, it's a nested hierarchy. So single sounds, we call units, and we name these how they sounds. So moan, groans, whoops, purrs, croaks, I think you might have just heard.

And what you heard just there was a couple of sounds. So there's a few sounds will get organised into what we call a phrase. And so you heard a snippet of a phrase. And then these phrases are repeated over and over again to make a theme. And then there's a few different themes which are sung in a stereotyped order to make a song. So it's these multiple levels within this complex hierarchy. And so when a completely new song type comes in, it has a completely different arrangement of themes of sound types within this. And the differences are absolutely striking.

And even if you're not a research, you can hear how we have these different sound types. present, the different arrangements are present. So it's a really striking change when these song revolutions come through the region. And why are they adopting the new song? Is it something they hear through the water? And then they say, hey, let's join in on that. Absolutely. So they're hearing these new songs at different points within the year, but we're not entirely sure exactly why they adopt these novel songs. Clearly they like these novel songs. And And we think it's something to do with, of course, sexual selections. So maybe the females are choosing males with novel songs.

So it's a pretty good idea to switch to something that's slightly new. And we think that this may be driving the system, but we're just not that short at the moment. Would you say then that the whales are passing their culture from their pods, their families to someone else's culture? Absolutely. It's these big cultural revolution. So they're population-wide cultural changes that are then passed from population to population. I like the analogy of, okay, so you're singing your national anthem, right? You're singing along, it's all good.

And then the next year, you abandon your national anthem to what your neighbor's singing. So insert whatever nation that is that you like to do there. It makes no sense. And no other animal does these kind of large population level changes. at such as vast and rapid pace because it only takes one to two years to spread across most of an ocean basin, the only other animal that does that is humans. So we draw analogies with a lot of pop culture, how pop songs will spread across America if, you know, you're the Beatles. Great analogy.

Michelle, let's move on to what you do because you're not looking at the song spreading, but you'd like to eventually be able to talk to the whales. communicate with them. So you're learning how they speak to one another. Exactly. I'm learning how they speak to one another. And the best method for doing that is by talking to them ourselves. Being able to acoustically engage with a humpback whale is fundamental for understanding what the function of these calls are, what they mean, and how they're used. Through our speaker, we will project the sound of a humpback whale whoop call, which we believe is a contact call. and we will listen to see whether or not the whales are calling back to us.

And we believe that if they call back to us, that that is evidence that this call is used to maintain communication, potentially maintain relationships, but certainly to make contact with other whales. Let me play an example of that whoop call for our audience. So what's the big whoop about the whoop call? This call is possibly one of the first. foundational units of sound for all humpback whale communication. So Ellen explained to us that song is produced by male whales. Whop calls are produced by everyone. Male whales, female whales, juvenile whales, all whales produce this sound. And unlike song, which sort of shifts rapidly and changes and is

unique to populations and is very sort of complex, this whoop call is stable for generations. So we've actually documented in southeast Alaska, this humpback whale whoop call persisting from generation to generation to generation 40 or 50 years. But we've also found that this whoop call has been documented in populations. So humpback whales that don't interact with each other. And in fact, they've been genetically and geographically isolated for anywhere from two to three million years. And yet they produce the same call. So all of that is evidence that in strong contrast to song, which is culturally transmitted, that this call is probably innate. It is something that these animals are born with and rely on for basic communication. Well, when you played the

whoop call on your microphone underwater to them, did they recognize you as another whale and tried to communicate with you? It certainly appears so. Yes. Yeah. I mean, the ink is still drying on the final results, but I can say with high level of confidence that when we went to Alaska, provided we set everything up just right. When we played a whoop call to the whales, the whales called back to us, which was extremely, extremely exciting. Michelle, the whoop call is the second humpback call of something like 50

that researchers have identified the function of, why has it taken so long to begin to decipher these sounds? That's a great question. I will remind everyone in myself at times that these animals do spend 80% of their life living underwater. So most of the time, we can't see them. We are using every resource at our fingertips to try and understand what they're doing when we can't see. And so whereas for the whoop call, we were able to experimentally test what the function is, you have to have some hypotheses about that first.

And because the repertoire is so extensive and their communication, communication system is so complex, we are literally shooting in the dark when we first start to guess as to what these calls might be for. And as recently, as I guess 10 years ago, we didn't even have a catalog of the sounds that humpback whales in Alaska made. We didn't even know when we dropped a hydrophone in the water if what we were listening to was a humpback or was it rocks rolling down the side of the beach. And so we really were starting from a large unknown and have been building up ever since on trying to figure out what these call functions are. And unless the call function is something that is observable by our human scale,

forming hypotheses about it can take many, many years, because we have to look at the data and try and imagine the world from the perspective of a whale instead of imagining the world from the perspective of a human. Interesting. And, Ellen, how many years of data did it take for you to observe the shifting of humpback songs? So these are decadal processes, and it's only because I have the most incredible collaborators and they have been recording for years and years and years, and I've been allowed to work on these recordings in collaboration with them. But you need these long-term multiple

location data sets to try and piece these broad-scale dynamics together, and that takes years. but there's a number of groups around the world where these big data sets are starting to come to fruition and it just takes so much time and effort and then analysis to do this. The work that we do, the analytical work, is absolutely painstaking to piece these transmission dynamics together. And so it starts on the water getting the recordings, observing the animal, and then back in the lab and analyzing the sounds and getting the sequences and doing the statistics and then trying to step back and understand why these things are happening. I'm Ira Plato and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios.

Between the both of you studying the calls and studying the songs, at what point do you say, hey, this is language? Well, I would argue never. humans use sounds to represent concrete ideas a thing and action and emotion animals don't there's a handful of very discreet examples in nature where animals use representational sound but generally when an animal makes a sound it's because it's trying to elicit either information or a change it's trying to make something happen if an animal feels threatened a mammal might growl Now, we interpret that as saying, stay away from me, but the animal doesn't make that translation.

The animal is trying to push something away. And so when we think about whales, whales aren't using a sound to represent an idea. They don't have a call that means fish, but they do have a call that herds fish. And so language is this idea of symbolic sound use, whereas animals seem to have functional sound use. So I don't know what the right word is for it, except to call it communication. but I don't know that I would go so far as to call it language. Interesting. Good point. Last question I have because we're running out of time.

You know, humpback whales like other whales are at risk from climate change and human activities. Can understanding their communication and culture help us protect them in what way? I certainly think so. And conservation is at the foundation of my entire research program. In order to demonstrate quantitatively that these calls are, essential for the survival of the animal, we need to know what they mean. And until we can demonstrate that they're important, they are hard to conserve. Anthropogenic noise is a real threat to marine organisms. As humans continue to put noise into the ocean, humpback whales reduce their calling

rates when it gets noisy. They can't hear each other when it gets loud. They have to exert extra energy or they might get stressed when it gets noisy. And if these whoop calls are as essential as I think they are and we have a noisy ocean, what we might be doing is changing how these humpback whales function. We might be altering their social structure and that might have implications for how well they forage or how well they breed. And so ultimately, the more that we understand about the basic behavioral ecology of an animal, the better job we can do of adjusting our human behavior so that we can find balance so that we can successfully ship goods where they need to go, but we can do so in such way that has a minimal impact on these animals.

Ellen? Basically, if you think, well, they can't see very far, so it's all going to be about the sound. How are you going to find a mate if you can't hear them? How are you going to continue this population if they can't hear each other to actually breed? So it's so important, the conservation aspect, and even the cultural aspect, is starting to feed into conservation management. So managing different cultural units is now happening, even with cetaceans.

So culture is feeding into some of the conservation efforts. I'd like to thank my guests. Ellen Garland is a Royal Society University Research Fellow at the University of St. Andrews in the UK. Michelle Fornay is a postdoctoral researcher at the K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics at Cornell University. Thank you both for such fascinating conversation. Thank you so much. Yeah, absolute, absolute pleasure to be here. Thank you. You're welcome. And just a reminder that their research is featured in the new documentary Fathom,

which aired at the Tribeca Film Festival, and you can now see it on Apple TV Plus. And believe me, the film made me wish I had their jobs. That's about all the time we have for this hour. missed any part of the program or you would like to hear it again. Of course, you can subscribe to our podcasts and say hi to us on social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, you know the routine. Of course, you can also email us, SciFri at ScienceFriday.com. We'd love to hear from you. Have a great weekend. We'll see you next week. I'm Ira Flato.