Science Friday - Smoke Chasers, Colorado Apples, Pikas. June 21, 2019, Part 2

Episode Date: June 21, 2019

When wildfires rage in the West, Colorado State University atmospheric scientist Emily Fischer hops into a plane, and flies straight into the smoke. The plane is a flying chemistry lab, studded with instruments, and Fischer’s goal is to uncover the chemical reactions happening in smoke plumes, to determine how wildfire smoke may affect ecosystems and human health. Pikas—those cute little animals that look like rodents but are actually more closely related to rabbits—used to roam high mountain habitats across the West. But global warming is pushing temperatures up in their high mountain habitats, and pikas are now confined to a few areas. And thanks to those warmer temperatures, which are threatening the pikas’ way of life, they may be in danger of disappearing—potentially as early as the end of the century. In this segment, recorded as part of Science Friday’s live show at the Chautauqua Auditorium in Boulder, Colorado, Ira speaks with Chris Ray, a population biologist at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Ray is tagging and tracking the pikas to investigate how closely their fate is tied to climate change—and whether there’s a way to save them before it’s too late. In the late 1800, Colorado was one of the top apple growing states, but the industry was wiped out by drought and the creation of the red delicious apple in Washington state. But even today, apple trees can still be found throughout the area. Plant ecologist Katharine Suding created the Boulder Apple Tree Project to map out the historic orchards. She talks about Boulder’s historic orchards, some of the heirloom varieties like the Surprise and Arkansas Black, and a surprising connection to a hit Hollywood franchise. Plus, cider maker Daniel Haykin talks about how he uses the information from the Boulder Apple Tree Project combined with sugar, yeast and apples to make the bubbly beverage.     Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Hello, podcasters. Ira here with some exciting news. Cephalopod Week is here. Even better, I'm giving you the chance to join the Cephaloparty by sponsoring some virtual cephalopods. Let me explain. Our talented team has built a sea of support on our website, giving each of you the chance to sponsor a virtual Cephalopod for a mere $8 donation. With each gift, you will get to pick from one of eight beautifully illustrated sea creatures, which we will post to our site along with your first name and city. So just head to ScienceFriety.com slash Squid Support to donate and join our Sea of Support. Again, go to ScienceFriiday.com slash squid support to sponsor a cephalopod and support our public radio program. And thanks. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato coming to you from the Chautauqua Auditorium in Boulder, Colorado.

If you've hiked around the high mountains here in Colorado and have scrambled between the boulders, you've probably spotted a fluffy little critter known as a pika. They're pretty darn cute, but don't confuse them with rodents. Oh, no. These tiny mountain dwellers are more closely related to rabbits. But as global warming pushes temperatures up in their high mountain habitats, the pika's way of life is changing, and they may be in danger of disappearing. perhaps as early as the end of this century.

My next guest is tagging and tracking these animals to understand how we might save him. Chris Ray is a research associate at the Institute of Alpine and Arctic Research and the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado right here in Boulder. Welcome, Dr. Ray. Describe for our radio audience what a pika looks like. Well, you know, it's the only animal with truly Mickey Mouse ears.

So it's about as big as your fist. It looks like a baked potato with Mickey Mouse ears. I will never forget that now that you have described it that way. And we have a sound clip of these guys calling. You've heard that often. Oh, yeah. So they're not rodents. They look like rodents, but they're not.

No, they're just related to rabbits and hairs. And how often have you heard a rabbit or a hair? I mean, PICAs are unique in that they have a lot of vocalizations. It's really fun to listen to them. So give me the day in a life of a typical pico, what is that like? They get up just before dawn, they start making their localizations, like you just heard. They start running around and defending their territory, and then they start collecting some forage to make a hay pile. Or maybe it's a female and she nurses her offspring somewhere far away from her hay pile.

They're very territorial, so they have to watch out and keep their offspring away from their hay pile. So the hay, is that their main staple of diet? Yeah, they don't hibernate, and yet they're really small, and so they spend the summer collecting a hay pile, making sure that they have what they need inside their territory to survive the winter. Are they living among the rocks, or are they burrowing into the soil? They live in rocks, so rock slides, rock piles, lava beds, anywhere where there's fractured rock, they get down between the crevices.

It's really cool down in there in the summertime. If you ever stick your hands down in the rocks, you'll notice how to be there. much cooler it is, much more stable climate down underneath there. Now, I understand that pike has once lived in mountain ranges all over the west. Is that right? That's right. And they have been disappearing, especially in the center of the distribution in Nevada. We've been losing populations from some mountain ranges. And why is that? Why are they dying out? Well, that's one reason that I still study them. We're not 100% sure,

but the projections are that with climate change, PICA will disappear, warming summers, and perhaps the loss of snow in the wintertime. So Pikes are adapted to be perfectly comfortable at about freezing, right where water freezes, that temperature. And if they have a snowpack, snowpack, even just ankle-deep, can keep the ground temperature right about freezing,

and so Pikas are comfortable all winter. But if you lose that snowpack, they can get really cold. It can get much below freezing, especially with wind chill. And so they might be actually freezing to death in colder winter conditions due to global warming, which is sort of ironic. Yeah, it is. You mean the snowpack will go away, and that's sort of their blanket.

Yep, that's their wintertime blanket. And so if their haypiles aren't big enough or good enough to survive a really cold winter with no snow on the ground, perhaps they don't make it. might they migrate to other places so pike's only moved right after they're born they're born and then they have to go off and find a territory and when they find one they stay there for life so when we see pike is disappearing from a place it's not because they just got up and moved it wasn't the right temperature it's because they didn't make it they didn't survive or they didn't reproduce there i understand that you're actually vaccinating pike is up there in the mountains tell us why well

if we're not going to do a huge amount about climate change we have to mitigate other possible threats to animals. And one of the possible threats is plague. So literally, boobonic, pneumonic plague that humans can get. It came in to North America about 100 years ago from Asia, and it swept east, and it ended up coming through the Rocky Mountains and was out here by about 1940. And it's probably had huge impacts on small mammal community.

And it's common in mountain areas where PICA is, and marmots live in Asia, so we think that it might be common here too, but no one studied it. So we're giving the plague-specific vaccine to PICA's to see whether or not it increases their survival. So if I'm going up to look for these PICAs and the places that you just mentioned, should I be fearful that I'm going to get the plague? No one has yet, and we haven't seen an enormous difference in survival between the Pikes that we're vaccinating than the ones that we're not. So it's possible that soon we will show that plague is not circulate.

in these communities. By the way, the plague is easily curable, right? Yes, it's just a bacterial disease. And so as long as you get it early enough, go to the doctor if you think you have the flu and say, hey, I was near what could have been a small mammal flea, and maybe I have plague. And tell him you heard it on Science Friday, so they'll believe you that's, yes, over here. What can I do to help PICA survive? Well, make some good choices regarding your carbon footprint. I told you the kids ask the best questions. Okay, right here.

So you said that the newly borns will leave to find their own territory, correct? Yes. So does that mean that if they were to come back to the territory, would the mother, like, welcome them? Or would they shoe them off as in, you're in our territory, get out, or they'd be like, oh, hello, you're my child? I was thinking the same thing myself. Your mom would definitely shoe you off. She would chew you out, chase you off, and try to bite your rump. I can't touch that line.

Can't better that one. Yes. Thank you for that question. It was a great question, yes. How big are there territories? About the size of this stage would be a pretty good-sized pike-a territory. So about the size of a tennis court. Really? That's not very big.

No, no. They live in colonies kind of close to each other, but they don't tolerate each other in each other's territories. They have to be close enough, though, to communicate about predators that might be coming through. So they help each other out at a distance. And they actually box each other sometimes? The males at least appear to box. I've certainly seen that a couple of times.

It's not really common, but this is a fantastic image of it here. That's two pike is probably, uh, contesting the same territory. One of them wants it and the other one wants it too and they're boxing to figure out who's going to get it. Are they boxing, contesting for females also for mating? No, the mating's kind of sneaky. They just go behind a rock and do their thing

and I've never seen it, sadly. Pretty sneaky. Ah, yeah, go ahead. Can you elaborate on what role the PICA's play in the ecosystem? them exactly? Yeah, yeah. So they're small, so everything eats them. That's one thing. They're herbivores, and they do a bunch of collecting of hay, hay being grasses and flowers that they gather from the environment around their territory, and then they put it all underneath a rock, and that ends up creating soil and a seed bank in the rocky areas, which ends up eventually changing the rocky area

to a grass area. So they're ecosystem engineers in that sense. So yeah, mainly as prey, probably especially important prey in the wintertime when other things are hibernating and pikas are still active. Would there be birds, raptors sort of? Their things? Yeah, owls tend to have lots of pica bones in their pellets. Another fact you can go home with this afternoon. Yes. So you mentioned that pikas never leave their territory once they establish it, but could a pika community adapt to relocation to protect them from declining snow packs to insulate them from winter temperature extremes? Yeah, relocation is something that we've considered looking into. It's difficult. You've never seen Pike is in zoos probably. They're very difficult to handle and keep, even in a

laboratory situation, they're thermally sensitive. They don't like it as 75 degrees. They can die in a couple of hours. So at temperatures that we're really comfortable at, yeah. We were talking about that. being similar to rabbits, they don't make good pets. No. They seem like they would when you see them in the wild because they're so spunky, but they really need access to that cool microclimate underneath the rocks, and if they don't have that, they'll expire pretty soon. So relocating them is a difficult task. If relocating a whole population, that would be really tough. So between the combination of plague and climate change, how optimistic of the

are you about the plight of the picas? We think that they might disappear in this century, but they're really good at finding these microclimates. And a pika is a small thing that can get down underneath the snow, underneath the rocks. Other animals might be more sensitive to climate change than picas because pikas are small and can find these places where the climate might not be changing so much. So I'm slightly optimistic. Also, PICA's live in some very hot places.

There are PICA's on the edge of the Gobi Desert. They just don't spend much time on the surface. So even if they do survive, they might become less visible to us and less interesting. We like to give our listeners citizens' science projects. Is there one they could do with PICA's tracking? You know, I'm just thinking out loud, anything that they might help you with. Absolutely. locally we have the front-range PICA project

and that is something that involves people all around the front range through the Denver Zoo and Rocky Mountain Wild to go out to places get trained and survey for PICA's and all these different habitats every year and there are citizen science projects that share our protocol all throughout the West so different states have their own citizen science PICA projects it's actually a really fun thing for people to go out and do during the summer.

All right, that's about all the time we have. Thank you. This is really interesting. Thank you. Dr. Chris Ray, Research Associate at the Institute of Alpine and Arctic Research and the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, the University of Colorado here in Boulder.

And now, would you please welcome back our musical guest, Zimberra. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. We're coming to you from the Chautauqua auditorium in Boulder, Colorado.

It has been an extraordinarily wet winter and spring throughout the western U.S. Here in Colorado, snowpack levels are at a 750% of the usual average this time of year, seven and a half times normal. Yeah. But there's the other side to this. As the summer heat comes, the U.S. will again start to dry out, ushering. in fire season. And that's when

my next guest's work gets started. When wildfires spark up, she and a team of scientists pile into a plane, packed to the walls with scientific instruments, and then they fly straight into the smoke billowing from the wildfires. They're not there

to put out the wildfire, but to study the most visible evidence of one, the smoke. They want to know what is in the smoke. and why. And one of those smoke-chasing sciences is with us. Emily Fisher, assistant professor in the Department of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. Welcome to Science Friday. So does your mom worry when you fly right into the smoke?

I've been worrying my mom for a long time. So kidding aside, why do you actually fly a plane into the smoke? What do you hope to learn there? I study air quality and you can't really understand air quality in the Western US without understanding what's in wildfire smoke because we breathe it every summer here in Colorado. And so to reliably get into that smoke, you need an aircraft because sometimes the wildfires launch the plumes higher than you could get with a car, for example. Describe the scene inside the plane. Is there smoke leaking into it?

Are you wearing gas masks? No, no, no, no, no. But it smells like smoke in your eyes water. So, yeah, we would approach the wildfires list last summer. we would fly behind them. And then as soon as it was safe to do so, we would cross across the smoke as it's outflowing, and then we would turn around like you were mowing your lawn

or shoveling your driveway, crisscrossing back and forth across the smoke and tracing it downwind. And all those instruments you have in the plane, they're taking readings while? That's right. What are they reading? That's right.

The reading, we probably have, it depends on how you want to define an instrument, but we have 30 or 40 different instruments on the plane last summer. And so the plane actually has little tubes out the side and pumps attached. And so we're sucking in the smoke into the aircraft and directly into a variety of different analytical instrumentation. So we're measuring thousands of different things in the smoke. You know, I think ever since any one of us has lit a candle and watched that smoke it,

and you put out the fire and the smoke is left, we've all wondered, what is in that smoke? What is the definition of smoke? Okay, so what is in smoke? So there's thousands of different things. Some of them are gases. Some of them are solids. Some of them are liquids. Some of them are in between things like peanut butter.

Not that there's peanut butter in smoke, but not everything is exactly a liquid or a solid. And each of those thousands of different things, they behave differently in the atmosphere. So each one will interact differently with the sun's light. Each one will have a different set of chemical reactions with oxygen or with other things in the smoke, each one will deposit to the ground differently or dissolve into a cloud water droplet differently. So yeah, there's lots of different things. So there's really like an ongoing chemistry set, chemistry experiment inside that smoke. Yeah, and that's what we did last summer. So we started as close as we could get to the fire.

You can't actually fly a plane into the fire, right? So we actually get to the smoke about 20 minutes downwind, so after emission. And then we trace that smoke for up to four to five hours. So we can understand how it changes from emission to four or five hours downwind. And we tried to go further a few times up to a day downwind. You know, I've heard people from other countries over the Atlantic starting to complain that they're getting hours smoke. Is that true?

It's fair. Yeah, it's fair. Actually, I think maybe two weeks ago, fires in Alberta, right? They were pushing smoke down to the east coast of the U.S. And smoke can actually travel hemispherically. There's some really beautiful case studies of Russian wildfires where they've been able to see the smoke travel around the globe in a few weeks. It'll go around the whole globe.

Yeah. Wow. Over here. For a red flag day, what are the most irritating components in smoke that would cause respiratory problems? So I'll answer this. Red flag day or not red flag day. So some of the things that are inside smoke are particulate matter, right? So that's small particles.

and there are a lot of small ones that can go relatively deep into your lungs. In terms of the gases, there's a suite of gases. So ones that might cause health effects is one that I spend a lot of time on called proxacetyl nitrate. It's a lacrimator, so it makes you cry. There's also formaldehyde in smoke, benzene, talewine. There's a variety of different things in smoke. Hydrogen cyanide. So there's a lot of fun things in smoke to breathe.

Can smoke affect the weather? That is something we're also working on. What we know so far is that smoke can affect clouds. So one thing we did this summer was sample smoke impacted clouds. So we would fly to sort of dilute areas of smoke with little puffy cumulus clouds on them. And we would fly in the smoke under the clouds. And then we would go up into the clouds. And then we would tell the pilots to hit the clouds.

And so we would go, we would go, right? Cloud to cloud, and the back of the plane would get sick. And I would think this is the best job ever. And so those clouds that are smoke-impacted are actually very different than clouds that are not smoke-impacted. They have very small droplets. So for the same amount of liquid water content, the droplets of those clouds are itsy-bitsy tiny. They were actually so small, we had a hard time getting them into the plane to sample. We had a cloud collector on the plane.

And so we know that smoke acts as a cloud-condensation nuclei. We also are beginning to know from the sampling we did last summer that smoke can serve as ice nuclei for clouds. And what we're going to do next, a team at CSU and my department, led by Sue Van and Heaver, will run atmospheric models with and without smoke to see how the presence of smoke changes cloud formation in the West and summer. That's really interesting. Yes. So when you guys get your results, both real-time and long-term, how does that affect firefighting efforts on the ground? We stayed out of the way of firefighting this entire summer. So I stayed out of what's called the TFR, which is the temporary flight restricted area around fires.

We were often operating above the firefighting, because as it turns out, the firefighters don't want to go into smoke. We are the only ones who want to go into the smoke. They call them smoke eaters. You're the real smokeybers. So, yes, we actually were smoke eaters. You could say that. No one's ever pointed that out to me before. That's why we're here.

But, yeah, I actually was at a meeting last week with the EPA and the Forest Service. So we're all working together to better understand what's in smoke and how to advise the public on what, to do when smoke comes to town because with climate change there'll be more smoke in the West. Tell me what you mean by that. What does climate change have to do with it? So the area burned by wildfires in the West has increased over the last several decades. And most atmospheric models looking forward indicate that we will at least have the same amount of burn area if not more. Over here, yes. Hey, do you know of any efforts to connect the kind of research you're doing to health data in Colorado or elsewhere around the country like people have done in big cities looking at air pollution?

Yep, I actually, I personally work with an epidemiologist routinely to help her identify where smoke is impacting people and then she figures out what that means for health. So there's actually a lot of collaboration across the atmospheric chemists and the health community. We're beginning to understand right now the acute health effects of exposure to smoke. So more people die. There or more asthma hospitalizations, things like that. What we don't understand yet is what chronic exposure does to the public. Can the experiments and the things that you're studying, the experiments you're running, help us better forecasts for people?

That's my goal, right? So we are doing the fundamental chemistry in these smoke blooms, and the ultimate goal is to help improve air quality forecasts. So one thing we really don't understand that smoke increases PM2.5, which is a pollutant that's regulated by the U.S. But we don't understand why, yet smoke also appears to increase ground-level ozone at certain sites. It does? Yeah, and so we're trying to figure out that chemistry now.

And ozone is not a good thing. It's a respiratory irritant. Yep. And this Colorado is an exceedance of the ozone standards. So we have plenty of our own local pollution. Stop driving your cars. But fires can also make ozone. Okay, over here.

What is the most interesting thing you learned about? smoke? This summer? I think the most beautiful thing that I learned, actually, was just how many filaments and rivers there are across the west. I have a completely new appreciation for how important smoke is for radiation at the ground, for weather and for air quality after this summer, just seeing so much of it. It was a very large fire year in 2018. And the coolest thing we saw this summer was a plume that, you know, we had flown out to Oregon, and I was very stressed out. There was smoke everywhere, but it was too much smoke, and the pilots couldn't see if we had dropped down into it. And all of the sudden, one of the fires blew up, and there was nobody up at that

altitude fighting it, so we got to go very close to it. So I got to measure wildfire smoke very soon after a mission, which hasn't been done that many times. So it was awesome. I had basically a time clock of when that smoke shot up, and we were able to track it for three hours before heading home. I've interviewed a lot of people, but never have seen anybody so excited about smoke. before. The atmosphere is so cool. Let's go here to this side. I was wondering, since it seems like there are more

wildfires nowadays than there were, is there like a difference between children who were born more recently that would they have like more ill lungs? I don't know the answer to that question. If something's alive, I know very little about it.

I know about gases. Some saw, But alive things, very little. Sorry. You know, if we cut that out and take it out of context, that would be one hell of a quote, you know. I understand that you have a research project called Progress with James to get more women into science and geoscience in particular. Yeah. Tell us more about that. So first, why is it so important that we have women in science? science. So gender diverse teams make better science. And there's a lot of research behind that

statement. So, thank you. So I decided to gather a team about five years ago and figure out how we could best support undergraduate women interested in the earth and environmental sciences. And so what we did was we recruited a group of women and we recruited a control group, so a group that will have their normal college education. And for my intervention group, we offer them a three-part program. So one is a women-only workshop, and my goal with that workshop is to introduce them to the earth sciences, explain to them why these fields are so important for society, inspire them to stay in STEM, and inoculate them against things that might deter them

from staying in STEM, like sexism and otherism, so that they might encounter in their college classrooms. So then we have mentoring and we stay in touch via Facebook. And so we've tracked these women in time and we've learned a lot about college women and their experiences. And so what we found is that you can dramatically increase the mentoring networks of undergraduate women if you try. If you show women, more women, they increase their science identity and their intention to stay in the Earth Sciences. And the coolest thing that we found is that for every role model

that an undergraduate woman can identify, her odds of staying in the Earth sciences doubles. So when women find out that there are other women like them, that really helps. It really helps. And the best part is these are role models. They're not necessarily a mentor, right? So making women more visible to younger women

seems to really help, at least in the Earth and Environmental Sciences. I'm Ira Flato. This is Science Friday from WNIC Studios. I know you're running a related project on sexual harassment in the science as we've done segments on Science Friday about how pervasive that is. How are you working to turn that around to improve the culture? Yeah, so this started about a year ago when I was getting ready for my wildfire sampling campaign. There was a National Academy report that came out on sexual harassment, right? And so when that came out, one of the key findings that this was a culture. issue and so I decided okay I'm leading a big team I need to follow best practices so in doing that I had to figure out what best practices were actually and so what we with support from the National Science Foundation I partnered with a gender psychologist and another NSF funded team and what we

did was we surveyed my entire team on weekend which is about a hundred people prior to the field campaign then we did a training where we did scenarios that are very real to field programs and conference settings, things typical to academic scientists. And then we ran our, flew around in the smoke, as we just talked about, and then we surveyed them again post-campaign. And so, do you want me to tell you what we found? You have no choice now. I'll tell you what we found. Okay, so as it turns out, it happens, and it happens here.

So 50% of the women on my field team had experienced sexual harassment in field settings. 50%? 5-0. You got it. And so the men are experiencing it too. They're experiencing it differently than the women. And hostile work climate is the biggest issue that we have in our field. But we had things reported that were very, very far from hostile work climate.

We're very bad. And then most people are not reporting it. They're avoiding the situation or have other type of social coping. And then what was good news was that people were much more comfortable intervening and discussing it after the training. And so every science team meeting that I have, we revisit sexual harassment and we think about how as a community we can lead. So field teams in particular, I think, have to lead on this issue

because they have science leaders across multiple universities and national labs and government agencies. And so it should be a very effective way to spread best practices. Do you train other field teams how to do what you're doing? That's the eventual outcome of this project is to make basically a recipe book for other principal investigators on field teams so that they can follow the lead. And there's a really awesome project called Advanced Geo

that has developed materials for training a variety of different groups on sexual harassment. That's great. Yes, one last question here. Yeah, so about your work with women in science. I got really lucky my role model. My mom has a PhD in analytical chemistry, so she was very excited when she heard about all the instruments. What can I do as an undergrad in chemistry and sciences

to help other women in science? Stick together and give back to the high schoolers. Okay, thank you. We ran out of time. Goes by so quickly. Emily Fisher, assistant professor, and the Department of Atmospheric Science of Colorado State University in Fort Collins.

Thank you. Our musical guest, Zimbera. After the break, a scientist looking for the lost apples of Colorado and some cider science. I'm Ira Flato, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. This is Science Friday.

I'm Iroflato, coming to you from the Chautauqua Auditorium in Boulder, Colorado. When you drive into Boulder, you are struck by the landscape. It is a visual feast. There are these snow-capped Rocky Mountains, the awesome backdrop of Chautauqua Park, the flat irons, those jagged sandstone structures that rise up from the horizon. Of course, the iconic symbol of this landscape.

But if you were in Boulder in the 19th century, you would have noticed something else, too. Apple orchards. Colorado was one of the top apple-growing states in the late 1800s. The orchards disappeared, but if you look around, you can still find apple trees here and there. Where did all the orchards go? What varieties are here? And if you have apples, well, you should probably make something to drink out of them, too, like apple cider.

My next guest are studying all of these things. Catherine Souding is the leader and founder of the Boulder Appletree Project, and a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado Boulder. Welcome to Science Friday. Daniel Haken is founder and cider maker at Haken Family Cider in Aurora, Colorado. Welcome to Science Friday. So, Catherine, tell me about this. I had no idea that Colorado used to be filled with apple orchards.

Yeah, so I guess we all like apples. Most of us like apples, but in the 1800s, people really, really liked apples. There were reviews and ratings of different varieties, almost like how we would review Hollywood movies. So it was a big thing, yeah. And there was about 1,400 varieties of apples planted across the United States at the turn of the century. It was a passion of Americans for sure. And so when settlers were moving from the east across the plains to make a new life in the West and in Colorado and in Boulder, they wanted to bring the apples with them.

They were super important. So they would bring paper-wrapped saplings of these trees in their wagons across the west or seeds to plant in their new homes. So it was a grand experiment. People were pretty skeptical growing at this high elevation, harsh climate, really dry, cold. There was a lot of failures at first. But then they were pretty successful. By the turn of the century, there were a lot of successful orchards.

in the front range as well as in southern Colorado and in the western portion of Colorado. Where we are right now, in fact, Chautauqua was once an apple orchard before it was bought by the city of Boulder and turned into Chautauqua. So what happened to all the apple trees? So I guess a couple things. First of all, by the turn of the century,

it was clear that Colorado was actually a great place to grow apples. The high altitude made the apples really sweet and an intense and so it was really just an exceptional apple. And apples from Colorado were winning medals at like the World's Fair in St. Louis in 1914. By the 20s, we have some pretty good data that there was about 400 varieties grown here in about one and a half million apples in Colorado. And then kind of a couple things just hit around that time. The first thing was the Red Delicious. It was named Delicious and it was heavily marketed across

the whole United States, where this was the apple that everyone should plant everywhere. And that didn't work out too well for Colorado, because it doesn't do very well in Colorado. But people were starting to plant this apple that really was then hit by disease in our climate, and so it was declining then. And then 1920 was prohibition. And if you look at all the apples and why the settlers were bringing apples here, they were bringing them a lot for hard cider. A little bit of fresh apples,

so there was about quarter of the apples that were planted around here were for eating, and then three quarters were mostly cider varieties. Now, you started the Boulder Apple Tree Project after you found an apple tree in your yard, right? How do you identify an apple tree first, aside from looking for the apples? Is there a way to identify an apple? Hey, I have one in my yard.

How did you discover that? Well, you pretty much know, there's a lot of reasons why you can identify an apple as a tree in terms of the leaves and the bark and the fruit, obviously. Identifying the variety of that apple, super, super hard. First of all, we go to the tree, right? We sample it. We record characteristics.

And I guess it probably, for people who know apples, just from their grocery stores, it probably seems easy to describe the apples, you know, different colors. But actually apples, that characteristic of even the fruit, is amazingly diverse. So there's apples with skin like sandpaper, ones that are super shiny.

There's ones that are shaped like a misshapen potato, ones that are perfectly round, ones that are the size of a cherry, ones that are as big or bigger than a grapefruit. Well, if you don't believe it, we actually brought some slides here to show you. I'm going to have you narrate. I'm going to bring up each slide. The first one is a crab apple. Describe this apple that we're looking at. Yeah, so there's about 12 varieties of crab apples that were grown in orchards around Colorado. And these are not

crab apples like the ones in your yard. They are ones about the size of the golf ball. And they actually are well known for their disease resistance, as well as they have the cider trifecta. They're sweet, they're acid, and they have tannins in them. So they have all the three flavors, all in one single apple. And these guys got hit hard with prohibition because if you bite one of these, you really don't want to eat it, but they are perfect, perfect for making cider. And so they're these kind, even in the grounds of Chautauqua now, that have survived. Let me go on to the second apple I want to show you. I hear that this one is your favorite, the surprise.

The surprise apple? Yeah, so there's... Surprise. So you look at it, it's just this yellow apple, it looks, maybe a little blush. You bite into it. And instead of being red on the skin, the flesh of the apple itself is red. So the antisinogens that are, they're sometimes on the skin of apples, this is in the flesh. And so their people are working on breeding this because they think this could be a sweet, sour,

like the Sour Patch Kid equivalent apple for kids, and they are nutritious because they have the antioxidants and the tissue and not the skin. Okay. Next Apple has a familiar name. It's called Rambo? Yeah, I like this one too. And this one, there's a lot of these around Boulder. So Rambo was a variety that was brought over by the Swedish explorers in the 1600s.

They brought some seeds from Sweden with them. They planted them in New Sweden, which is in Delaware, and this tree grew. And so they called it Rambo after the name of explorer, super popular in the 16 and 1700s. And David Morel, who is the author of the books with Rambo. Rambo as the main character actually tasted this apple, his wife brought some from a roadside stand, and named his character after it because it was so bold and tart. And I like it, too. You should try it. Who would ever thunk?

Rambo's named after an apple. Okay. How about them apples, folks? Is that great? Now, we've talked a lot about cider. Let's get into cider with Dan Haken. And you're a cider maker. We're talking about the boozy kind.

The cider apples are different than the ones that we eat, right, that you make into cider? Yeah, and traditional cider-making cultures, there are apples for eating and apples for cider production. Overwhelmingly, cider apples have a lot of tannin, so fresh, they're rough and astringent, but fermented. They have body and dimension, just like a red wine would. Yeah, you talk like a winemaker. Cider is wine. It's just wine made with apples instead of grapes. Now I understand you have an interesting way of collecting the apples that you need to make your cider. So one of the many wonderful things about apple trees is they're perfectly capable of taking care of themselves, even when humans

ignore them. So in the season, I look for the best fruit. And I don't really care whether that comes from a farm stand or the side of the road. So I drive around with a huge tarp and 50 Home Depot buckets and a sugar testing device called a refractometer and I pull over a lot. And when I find a really cool tree, I have a 20-foot pole and I shake the tree and apples come raining down. So you're like foraging. You're foraging foraging for apples. Quite literally, yeah. Do you go into people's properties? They get invited in. You ask, hey, you got a great apple tree. I want to shake your tree over there. I have trespass before, but I didn't know I was doing it at the time. Okay. What qualities? Are there special apples you'll reject? What qualities are you looking for?

So similar qualities to what you would look for in a wine grape, aroma flavor, acidity, sugar content, and tannin. I noticed you nodding your head as Catherine was going through her favorite apples. Do you ever use some of the apples we were looking at? Yes. Indeed, all of the one she mentioned I've used. Wow. So it involves like fermentation, right? But you don't brew the apples. No, no. There's no heating of any kind. Just two ingredients, apples and yeast. The yeast is a single-cell organism. It's a type of fungus and it converts the sugar into alcohol, carbon dioxide, and heat. First, you have to press the fruit, which is complicated because unlike a grape, apples are very hard, so you can't just squeeze them and juice comes out.

So first you have to grind them, so you have to figure out how to create a whole lot of very coarse applesauce. That gets pumped into our press, and we press it directly into wine tanks. We either will use cultured yeast, which is basically a single organism that's been propagated, so it's consistent and repeatable. And sometimes we use ambient yeast, yeast that's all around us. You just leave it open to the air and the yeast comes in, like baking bread that way? It's not that easy, but yeah, that's the general concept, yeah. Amira Flato, this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios.

We're talking about apples in Colorado with Daniel Haken, who is making cider. You have some samples here. Correct. Of some cider. Yeah, I brought two ciders. The apples, both of them were grown in this region. So on the east side of the Rocky Mountains, supposedly this is a very tough region to grow fruit, and it is for eating purposes. But for fermentation and drinking, we think this is one of the best growing regions on Earth, and hopefully these two ciders showcase that.

All right, let's do a little taste testing. Sure. I have two glasses of cider here, two different bottles, labeled number one, number two soda, you, Catherine, right? So what are we tasting? So number one is made out of an apple called the Akane apple. It's a Japanese apple that's also known as Tokyo Rose because it has a very floral quality to it. Fermented, that floral quality follows through. So it's in effect dry, but it feels sweet because it's so fruity and has such distinct aroma to it.

It does. It smells like an apple. And how long does it take to make that from the time you squeeze the apple? Our fermentation process is usually around three months, and then maturation can be as much as four to six months before we release it. So from the time we harvest an apple to the time a customer is drinking it is usually nine or ten months. Let me look at the second glass. What is the second glass?

So the second glass is made out of crab apples that were four, within a mile of where we're sitting right now. So these are bolder crab apples from 100-plus-year-old trees. These apples have a lot of tannin. So when you take a sip, it'll remind you a lot of a red wine. I was just about to say that. This is absolutely delicious. Good. So the flavor profile here instead of just light, bright, and refreshing, now you have much deeper flavors and tones. Caramel comes out, autumnal flavors like, freshly raked leaves. It's a much bigger... I didn't get that. I don't think I got that. I didn't get the great leaves. Well, can you, if you're foraging for the apples, how can

you repeat getting the same wine again if it's by look of where you can shake the tree out? You can't, and that's why every wine should have a vintage year on it, because you can't ever recreate the same year. The weather changes, everything changes. Is there any effort

to create artistic? seasonal apples here now in Colorado if you have such great apples resurrecting the apple industry. I would love that. I would love to first try to save these special varieties and save them in a community orchards that don't just like try to just grow one of these commercial varieties that doesn't really taste good. I mean, I don't know. Red Delicious, sweet sawdust kind of flavor. You'll get the mail, not me. I'm a little. So the important thing, if Professor's suiting doesn't save these apple trees, there literally could be one out there. And that's it. And it's 100 years old. And if it gets struck by lightning, it's gone forever. So the work that she's doing, she's literally, there's a, you know, there's a clock running right now. And it'll run out on many of these species. And then they'll be gone forever. And she's saving them for us for future generations. It's huge work. Thank you. I want to thank both. Both of you for this is really interesting for taking time to be with us today.

Catherine Suding is the leader and founder of the Boulder Appletree Project and professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado in Boulder. And Daniel Haken is founder and cider maker at the Haken family cider in Aurora, Colorado. Thank you both for taking time to be with us today. And let's give one last round of applause for Zimbira who is going to play us out tonight. Come on back. That's about all the time we have. Our heartfelt thanks to Neil Best, Robert Lieger,

and Ashley Jeff Coat, and all the great folks at KUNC for hosting us. Thanks to all of you. Also thanks to Buddy Baker and all the wonderful folks at the Chautauqua Auditorium for making this wonderful evening possible. Thank you. And thanks to all our Science Friday staff, it takes a lot of people behind the scenes to run the ship.

Plato. Drive safe. Everybody, have a good night.