Science Friday - Societal Climate Impacts, Alaskan Crab Shortage, Protected Fisheries Surprise. October 21, 2022, Part 1

Episode Date: October 21, 2022

A Boost For U.S. Electric Vehicle Battery Production This week, the Biden administration announced it would issue grants totaling some $2.8 billion to increase U.S.-based production of electric vehicle batteries and mining of the minerals used in their manufacture. The grants would go to companies in 12 states to help boost domestic production of key battery ingredients such as lithium, graphite and nickel, reducing the country’s reliance on China and other foreign battery producers. Casey Crownhart, a climate and technology reporter at MIT Technology Review, joins John Dankosky to talk about the plan and the road ahead for U.S.-based electric vehicles. They also talk about a surge in renewables use in Europe, new options for COVID vaccine boosters, charges of environmental racism against the state of Louisiana, and new research into why some of us seem to be magnets for mosquito bites.   Climate Change’s Toll On Our Social Fabric Climate change is already driving many visible effects in our world, from extreme flooding to the extinction of species. It threatens agriculture and life on coastal lands. But researchers predict a changing climate can also affect humans in other, more nuanced ways, including changes in human behavior and mental health. Co-host Shahla Farzan talks to Stanford researcher Marshall Burke, whose research has looked at the link between climate extremes, including heat waves and drought, and historic and contemporary conflicts. Plus, John Dankosky interviews Queens College neuroscientist Yoko Nomura about her work finding high rates of childhood psychiatric disorders among children whose mothers were pregnant, and under extreme stress, during 2012’s Superstorm Sandy—a hint at the generational toll of intensifying disasters. They discuss why the answer to both challenges may be providing more social and economic support to those most vulnerable to stress as the globe warms.   The Mysterious Case Of Alaska’s Crabs For the first time ever, the Bering Sea snow crab fishery will not open for the upcoming season. Alaska’s Department of Fish and Game announced the closure Monday afternoon. The Bristol Bay red king crab fishery will also be closed this year — for a second year in a row. Gabriel Prout co-owns the F/V Silver Spray with his dad and brothers. The Silver Spray is a 116-foot steel crabber that’s homeported in Kodiak. He said he wasn’t surprised that Fish and Game closed the king crab fishery — in a normal year, he’d go out for king crab, too. But numbers have been on the decline and that fishery didn’t open last year, either. “The real shocking part is the total and complete collapse of the snow crab fishery which no one expected last year when it happened, and a complete closure this year was equally as shocking,” Prout said. Miranda Westphal, an area management biologist with Alaska’s Department of Fish and Game, said the sudden decline in snow crab came as a shock to biologists as well. Back in 2018, there was record recruitment in the Bering Sea snow crab stock. Those numbers started to go down in 2019, and there was no survey in 2020 due to the pandemic. Read the rest at sciencefriday.com. In Hawai’i, Conservation Has Also Provided Fishermen Economic Benefits Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, along the northwestern Hawaiian islands, has been under some kind of conservation protection since the days of Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency. It is a deeply sacred place to native Hawaiians. And at more than 583,000 square miles, it’s also the world’s largest fully protected no-fishing zone, after its expansion under the Obama administration in 2016. Marine protected areas like Papahānaumokuākea are designed to provide refuge to fish and other marine mammals that have been overexploited and otherwise threatened by human activities. But research has remained inconclusive on if these protections provide enough benefits to nearby areas to blunt the economic impact of exclusion zones. This is especially debated in the case of big, mobile, migratory species like Hawai’i’s all-important bigeye and yellowfin tuna. Now, new research from an interdisciplinary team of economists and ecologists looked at how well Hawaiian tuna fishermen did when they fished close to the monument, and further away. And they found, to their surprise, that there was a strong benefit, which increased in the years after the monument’s expansion. Fishermen near the monument caught more tuna, for the same amount of effort, than fishermen further away. Co-host Shahla Farzan talks to first author Sarah Medoff about the surprising findings, and why the economics of a marine protected area might matter to conservation decisions.   Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Shayla Farsan. I'm a science podcast editor with APM Studios, and I'm excited to be guest hosting this week for Ira. And I'm John Dankowski and Shayla, it's great to have you here. Coming up later this hour, we're going to get some good news and some, well, some not so good news from fisheries off of Alaska and Hawaii. And we're also going to look at new research about the toll of climate change, not just on humans' physical health, but also their mental health. Speaking of climate change, one of the ways the U.S. is trying to address this problem, as we've been talking about on the show, is a rapid move toward electric vehicles. And just this week, the Biden administration announced it would issue grants totaling some $2.8 billion to increase U.S.-based manufacturing of electric vehicle batteries and boost production of the minerals used in their manufacture. The grants would go to companies to help boost domestic production of key battery ingredients like lithium, graphite, in nickel, reducing the country's reliance on China and other foreign battery producers. Here with this story and some other science stories of the week is my guest, Casey Crownheart,

a climate and technology reporter at MIT Technology Review based in New York City. Casey, welcome back to Science Friday. Thanks so much for having me back. So tell me first about these battery grants. Who gets them and what exactly are they for? Yeah, so like you said, there's about $2.8 billion in grants that were awarded to 20 projects across the battery supply chain. And these are for companies working on battery components and minerals, basically like you said, the ingredients of batteries. And the goal here is really to build

out the battery supply chain here in the U.S., which could help keep battery supplies up and prices down and really create jobs and boost local economies. So I know that you've done a lot of reporting on this topic. Is this a game changer for these companies? Yeah. So it's going to be a really big deal. I think that This is also just kind of the first part of a lot of funding that we're going to see out of the U.S. federal government. So this money was actually set aside in the infrastructure law that was passed last year. So we kind of knew it was coming. But to see what companies got the money is really interesting. And we're looking forward to a lot of these announcements in the coming months.

So is this like a little boost to some bigger existing companies? Is this a big boost to some others? Explain exactly the scale of what this could mean to some of these companies. Yeah, most of the grants are hundreds of millions of dollars. So it's a lot of money. They're going to a wide range of companies. Some of them are kind of startup. Some of them are more established. But across the board, this is really going to accelerate what they're working on. I talked to one company that said that, you know, this is really going to speed up their timeline to be able to build this lithium processing plant that they're working on and really be able to kind of be in the market a lot sooner. So what exactly happens next, though? I mean, what else needs to happen aside from this influx of money to make batteries in the U.S.? Part of it is just lots more money. Like I said, we're waiting on a lot of other funding for different parts of the supply chain. So for example, this is really for the pieces and parts of batteries. There's going to be a lot more funding needed, especially in mining, kind of those really early parts. And then a lot of time just to see if these companies are going to be able to really stay afloat and make an impact in the battery. industry. And I just want to make sure we understand here, too, when we're talking about the money these companies are going to get, this is for what we're calling production of these battery

materials, not necessarily mining for these materials. Can you help us parse out the difference? Yeah. So battery supply chains are really long and really complicated. But basically, a lot of this funding is going to companies that are doing, like, refining or processing of materials. So some of them are also involved in mining, like getting stuff out of the ground. But this vending in particular is for that kind of second step in the process, where they turn what they pull out of the ground into stuff that can actually go into batteries, that processing step. Yeah, and we know that mining for some of these minerals is pretty controversial in some of the places where it's done in the U.S. and some of the places it could come to. Yes, and we're going to need to see more mining

for these materials as well. And so we're going to have to keep a close eye on kind of where that's happening and how that's happening and how companies are really balancing the need for more materials with potential environmental harm that could come from it. So moving on from batteries here in the U.S. to renewables overseas, there are some new numbers out this week on renewables use in Europe. And there's some pretty, I don't know, striking numbers. Yeah. So we've seen that in the European Union, they've been hitting record numbers of wind and solar, really across the continent, across the EU. but some countries in particular are seeing, you know, Poland, for example, saw about a 50% jump in their wind and solar generation, and Spain was right behind them. What's behind this jump?

There's a couple of things behind it. Part of it is just that we're seeing a lot more wind and solar as prices are coming down and a lot more countries are building more supply for those renewables. But a lot of it is also the war in Ukraine. Countries are really rushing to get off of Russian gas. and they're trying to kind of get their electricity supply from anywhere else that they can. Just so we have some scale, some comparison here, how much is this compared to their overall energy needs? It does sound like a big deal, but it's only a fraction of what they overall use. Yeah, totally. So only about a quarter of electricity supply came from wind and solar between March and September.

Gas is still making up 20% of supply, and a lot of the rest of it is still fossil fuels. remember too that this was over the summer when we typically see higher levels of solar. So it might not be the same, you know, going into the next six months. And as they turn away from Russian gas, there's also a lot of countries, Casey, that are looking for other energy options, including extending the life of some nuclear plants. Yeah. So this is really part of that kind of all-in strategy to just find other ways to get electricity. And so we've seen this in countries like Germany where, you know,

they had nuclear plants that were kind of planned to come offline, and they're keeping them running in order to just have other options when it comes to generating electricity. But not necessarily putting new nuclear plants online. That's a very long process, and it can be kind of controversial. Yeah, totally. So we're mostly seeing just older plants getting extended at this point. So let's move back to the U.S. here. Winter is, of course, coming. And people are being urged to get their flu shots and get boosted for COVID. And there's a new booster that's been approved this week, right? Yeah. So the FDA just granted authorization to a new booster from Novavax. This joins a lot of other boosters that are already on the market, like you said,

just in time for the fall and winter. How is this booster different than what's out there now? So the other boosters on the market are made using the MRNA technology. So that's the one from Pfizer and Moderna that you may have already gotten. And this booster is made with protein. So that's the same way that the flu and the shingles vaccines are made today. I'm wondering if this difference might help with some of, I don't know, the problems the U.S. is having in getting people to take this booster. I know that as folks shop around to get a Moderna or a Pfizer booster, some people have had some side effects.

They're wondering, oh, can I afford to miss a couple days of work because I'm not feeling that well? Is this something that might work for some people better than others? Yeah. So it's really something, it might be kind of a small fraction of people that have to take this shot for say, you know, they have some allergy or something, you'll still probably get side effects with any booster that you're going to get. So I'm not sure really how much it's going to help really boost those booster numbers. Yeah. And talking about boosting the booster numbers,

they're not really where health officials would like to see them, right? Yeah. So only about half of Americans have gotten any COVID booster at all. And those were the ones that have, you know, been out for about a year or so. But if you remember about a month ago, the FDA authorized new booster shots, what they called bivalent boosters that provide protection both against original COVID variants and the Omicron variants that are the most common in the U.S. right now. And less than 10% of Americans have gotten those. I think there's just, you know, a sense of apathy about COVID and also people are putting it off. That's my excuse. I've got mine scheduled for next week, though. Yeah, exactly. Sometimes you just can't fit it in. That first number you gave

the less than half of U.S. adults have gotten any boosters. That's a, that's an important one to remember. Yeah, and I think we're going to see cases start to rise as we get into these colder months. So it's important that people get their booster if they can. So let's switch topics here. There are charges of environmental racism against the state of Louisiana, and specifically, this involves a region that's been known for a long time as Cancer Alley. Casey, what's going on there? This is a region that is pretty well known for high rates of industrial activity and high rates of cancer. But we're seeing this week from reporting from Grist and ProPublica that the EPA recently sent a letter to Louisiana state regulators that the state has to examine how polluters are harming the health of black residents in the area. So we have a lot more information about this now because of this reporting, but are there any changes that are likely to come out of all this?

Yeah. So this specific complaint is about this elementary school that's close to a synthetic rubber factory. And officials were measuring that there's pollution from cancer cancer. causing chemicals that are about 11 times higher than the EPA limits. So, you know, EPA officials have urged the state to move children out of the school, and now the agency is going to negotiate with the state and figure out what else needs to be done to really keep residents out of harm's way. And hopefully this is part of a movement that the EPA is going to, you know, take these claims a little bit more seriously and watch more closely, these industrial sites that are doing harm to

residents and disproportionately to black residents. Yeah, we've been hearing about some. like this for years. And it'd be nice if this reporting shines a light and hopefully helps get something done. Well, finally, let's end with a story that it seems like it might be fading, Casey, because mosquito season's kind of going away in a lot of the U.S. as it gets colder. But there is some research that's pretty important to think about when it comes to mosquitoes, about why some people seem to be mosquito magnets. Tell me more. Yes. I love this story because I've always felt like mosquitoes unfairly target me. And new research shows that certain body odors influence how attractive you are to mosquitoes.

And it's not some small effect. In this study, researchers found that some people were more than 100 times more attractive to mosquitoes than others. And when researchers looked at what these mosquito magnets had in common, they found that it's people with higher carboxylic acids on their skin that tended to attract more mosquitoes. And we know that these carboxylic acid levels tend to stay constant on your skin over time. not really affected by your diet or anything like that. So I guess I'm just stuck being a mosquito magnet. That's so interesting because it sort of seems a little counter to how people think about things, right? You'd assume that if my diet is a certain way, I'd smell a certain way to mosquitoes or if, I don't know, if I live a certain place, maybe I'd be more attracted to mosquitoes. But this is something a little bit different.

Yeah, it is really interesting. We do know that, you know, your body chemistry, a lot of it stays the same over time. So, you know, they're looking at ways that they could maybe use this research to develop new kinds of mosquito repellents that would kind of help. But it is really interesting. Well, that's all the time we have. Casey Crownheart is a climate and technology reporter at MIT Technology Review. She's based in New York City. Casey, thanks so much for joining us. I really appreciate it.

Thanks so much for having me. When we come back, some of the less expected ways that climate change might alter human behavior. That's coming up after the break. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm John Dankoski. And I'm Shayla Farsan. John, as climate change brings hotter temperatures and shifting patterns of precipitation,

Science Friday has talked a lot about how that affects our physical structures, agriculture, and even physical health. But what about our behavior and mental health? Yeah, I assume here you're not talking about just trying to drive less or anxiously checking your weather apps all the time. Yeah, in this case, we might actually. be responding to climate change in ways that we're not even aware of, like individual level violence or society-level conflict. Dr. Marshall Burke researches this question at Stanford University,

specifically the question of how hotter temperatures and more erratic rainfall might be tipping us toward more violent behavior. He's also found that this is very much a historic pattern, and we may see it worsen as our entire climate regime shifts. Marshall, welcome to the Thanks so much for having me. Great to be here. So you've done research looking pretty far back into history for a possible connection between major climate shifts and conflicts over the last 12,000 years. How strong of a connection did you find there? What we see when we look far back in history is we certainly see societies that have thrived when the climate has changed, but we also see examples of the opposite. We see iconic societies throughout the world that have really struggled in the face of either

slow-moving climate change or rapid onset climate change. We see many examples in the historical record where societies have really fallen apart and sort of disappeared off the map when faced with dramatic climate shocks. Some classic examples that we've seen in the collapse of the Mayan Empire and the Yucatan, the collapse of Inquoat in Southeast Asia, both followed by protracted periods of drought. So many, many years where things were historically dry. And what archaeologists, an anthropologist, have shown in these settings is that these societies were trying to do their best. So Anchor Watt is very well studied, and they had a very extensive network of canals that would bring water in from miles and miles away to the city. And what they showed is

in these protracted droughts, you see these canals silting in, unable to get water into the city. You see the hydrologists in these cities actually responding, trying to move the canals, but really just being unable to keep up with the rapid climate change that they experienced. The research that you're describing here involves working with a lot of historical and paleo-climate data from things like sediment cores and tree rings. How can you be sure that this connection between climate and conflict actually exists? How do we know it's not explained by some other factor that we're not looking at. Yeah, that's a great question. And as researchers, this is the fundamental question that we're always worried about. Are we actually looking at the effects of climate,

or are we looking at the effects of something else that was going on? So these very deep historical looks, looking at ancient societies, often it is a data challenge. Scientists are putting together all the data sources they can from various climate proxies, as you said, you know, tree rings, cores various things, sediments, and trying to reconstruct what the climate was, you know, again, as best they can. Similarly, on the societal side, right, we don't have perfect records of what was going on in these societies. They have to be reconstructed from the various data sources that we can put together. So there's absolutely uncertainty as to whether climate was the only cause here or even the main cause of some of the collapse. And I think that's true

in more recent times as well, even where we have a lot more data. there where I think we're able to isolate the role of climate a little more specifically. That said, climate never acts alone, right? It often amplifies other things that are going on in these societies. The defense establishment in the U.S. calls climate a threat multiplier, right? A force that multiplies other threats that might already exist. And so I think that's what we see in the deep historical data as well. So maybe not necessarily that the climate is the sole factor that's driving these conflicts or that's, you know, pushing these conflicts forward, but that it's a contributing factor. Yeah, that's right, a thumb on the scale. So let's move towards the present

day. You've also found connections between climate extremes and more recent conflicts between groups. What kinds of contemporary conflicts can we trace back to the climate? Using more recent data, we can actually take a pretty granular look at many different types of So we can look at individual level conflict, things like homicide or violent assault, individuals harming one another. Or we can look at group level conflict. So we can look at when groups fight each other. So I think of communal violence or civil conflict, even up to the large-scale civil wars

that unfortunately still happen in parts of the world. And what's, from a research perspective, what's nice here is we actually have very good data in some parts of the world on where these events occur, when they occur, when they occur, how serious they were. And we also have very good data on what's going on in the climate system. Was it dry or wet? Was it hot or cold? And so we have a lot of data to really be able to line these things up and try to understand, okay, was it climate that caused these events or was it something else? And here again, we see consistent evidence that changes in climate. and in particular we mean more extreme rainfall, typically dry, sometimes wet, but higher temperatures

is where we see the strongest signal. So higher temperatures can induce many different types of conflict. Individual level conflict, again, clear links to more violent assault, more homicides in places we can measure it, and clear increases in civil conflict. hotter temperatures appear to increase the risk of civil conflict in many parts of the world. Is it possible for us in this research to kind of put a finger on a specific reason here or factor that's driving this? Like, for instance, food scarcity that's driven by climate extremes, like some reason why these climatic events would increase conflict even now in modern day?

So this is a question about mechanism. What is the mechanism that links to? ages in climate to conflict. And there's likely multiple mechanisms at play. So one that has been studied and I think for which there is growing evidence is the role that climate plays in shaping economic conditions. And then when economic conditions change, how that might change people's incentives to start or join a rebellion. So when rainfall is more extreme or when temperatures increase, this can worsen economic conditions. So imagine, you're a farmer, your agricultural yields drop when it gets very high or when there's no rainfall. And this can happen to millions of people in a given country in a given time.

Now, certainly not all of these people, or very, very few of them would even think of joining a conflict, an existing conflict, but a few might, right? A few might be driven to that extreme just because they have no other option. And we see in the data that you don't need that many people to join a conflict for one of these to occur. And so that appears to be one of the mechanisms, climate worsening economic conditions and not changing people's incentives to join or start conflicts. Economic conditions are certainly not the only mechanism. And they do not explain what we see in the individual level data.

So what we see there is you get a hot day. On that day, you see increases in violent conflict. You see increases in homicide. You see increases in domestic violence. And that's unlikely explained by changes in economic. conditions. Our incomes just don't change that quickly with temperature. It's much more likely explained by a physiological, a human physiological response to hot temperatures. I think this is intuitive on some level. How do we feel when it's really hot? If you get really hot, you're wearing a jacket,

you feel grumpy, right? You might feel irritable. And what psychologists have shown in the lab for decades now is that you can induce aggression in humans if you put them in a room and you heat up the room. You can make them irritable and act more aggressively. And indeed, that's what it looks like in the data. What we see is that a small number of people get irritated enough that they are more likely to carry out by this. We've been talking a lot about the negative effects of climate change on human behavior. But is there anything good that we can pull from the data here? I think so.

Again, we should not be climate determinists here. We shouldn't think that climate is destiny. We have many examples in the past, communal level examples where people come together and share resources during climate shocks. This has been documented by anthropologists, by economists, many different settings around the world, all the way up to societal level examples, where again, societies have responded to and survived and resilient to a really negative climate events. And so absolutely we shouldn't, this is not just a gloom and doom story. The climate problem is caused by human choices and human behaviors. The solutions will be also due to human choices and human behaviors. And those are under our control. And we can

absolutely choose to work together. And we've seen examples of that in the past. Yeah, along a similar vein there. I mean, now that we know that there is this connection between climate and human conflict. Can we use that knowledge in some way to do something to help alleviate that heightened risk? Are there any solutions here? That's absolutely my goal is a researcher. So in studying this, we hope to, number one, understand the relationships. And then number two, use that understanding to help guide interventions that will make us more resilient as the climate changes. So one thing we see in the group level, group conflict setting is that certain government programs, in particular social safety nets, appear to reduce or even break the link between

climate and conflict. So there's a very nice study in India by Thimo Fetzer, not done in my group, that looks at the rollout of a large Indian social safety net program and shows that once people were able to access the social safety net program. Basically, it guaranteed them work and a wage when there was no rain or when agricultural product would be failed so they could get a job. And they were backstop against really bad outcomes when the climate worse. What that did was completely break the link between rainfall and communal violence in this community setting. This is right now our best piece of evidence that social safety nets and broader social support programs can really help build climate resilience and reduce the likelihood that violence

breaks out when climate takes its turn for the worst. That's interesting. So there is some evidence then that there are these solution-based programs that can help kind of erase that connection between climate and conflict then. Absolutely. And there's other examples too. So we can think of insurance programs. It doesn't have to be government programs, you know, drought tolerant crops. Again, all the ways we can think of to help bolster people's incomes when the climate worsened. I think we'll have to leave it there for now. Thank you so much for joining me, Dr. Burke. This has been such an interesting conversation. Thanks so much for having me. Dr. Marshall Burke is an associate professor of Earth System Sciences at Stanford University in

Stanford, California. I'm Shayla Farzan. And I'm John Dankowski, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Shaila, we've been talking about how climate change may and encourage us toward more intergroup conflict or even interpersonal violence. Which researchers are still trying to isolate exactly why either of those things happens. I want to take a look at a new piece of research that looks at something a little bit different, mental health, and the intergenerational toll of a single stressful event like a hurricane. Lake Superstorm Sandy, which happened 10 years ago next month on the East Coast, and which some researchers have found was made worse by climate change.

Dr. Yoko Nomura researches stressful events in pregnancy and how they may touch the mental health of children after they're born. And in her research of children whose mothers were pregnant during that very stressful, catastrophic event, she found some pretty dramatic results. Dr. Nomura, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. I want to talk about this study, and you looked at the children of women who were pregnant when Superstorm Sandy hit the Northeast. So you looked at the children after they were born. And these children ended up having the very high rates of diagnoses of psychiatric disorders. Maybe you can talk about the types of problems that these kids were showing.

So we specifically structured the interview for psychiatric diagnosis, and we focus on the disorders which are prevalent in young children, young age. So they are specifically anxiety disorder, phobia, depression, and depression. and behavioral problems such as ADHD, conduct disorder, oppositional defiant disorders. My sample have a high rate of disorders because I have a children who are fetus during Superton Sandy or children who are already born, which is our control subject. So both of them, even if there is a control versus exposure group, they are really at high list. So their rate of disorder are higher than the general population.

Even so, children who are exposed to superstorm Sandy in neutral have about two to three times higher rate of disorders. Specifically, a five-fold increased risk for anxiety disorders and about 16-fold increased risk of depression. And about four-fold increased risk of depression. disrupt the behavior of disorders. So help us, if you would, understand the connection between the stress experience of a mother during pregnancy and what happens in a child's brain. I mean, what would cause a child to develop anxiety or depression as a result of that stress? The short answer is we don't know.

We know the association. We know if you are exposed to super storms and do any sort of disaster or stress or condition in neutral, lead to an elevated risk of psychiatric disorders, which are related to emotional regulations. This study doesn't really investigate the causes underlying mechanisms of the increased risk. What I do know is placenta is a key. Children who are exposed to Superstorm Sandy in neutral

is connected to their mother through placenta. mothers experience, mothers' nutrients, mother's oxygen, mothers, everything is passed on to the fetus. And among zo is a stress hormone. So mothers who are exposed to traumatic stressor produces stress hormone, and that stress hormone is going to be passed on to the fetus. So if we know that these events are potentially setting up kids who are born afterward to have extra mental health challenges. What do you think, talk to the solution is? People tend to think disaster is short-lived. When it happens, it happens, and people are able to recover from it. Without really knowing there is a long-term consequences of a trauma during pregnancy. So what I am

advocating for now is to focus on strengthening the community, investing in the community house, having an idea, having a backup plan, having a safety net by itself is a stress moderator. You are going to feel safer because of the fact that something is there for you in case something happens. And it's not fair for us to just put everything on pregnant women or teachers or healthcare providers. Yoko Nomura is a neuroscientist at Queens College in New York City. She studies child development. Thank you so much for this research and thank you for your time in the show today.

I really appreciate it. Thank you very much for having me. We have to take a short break. When we come back, the mystery of Alaska's missing snow crabs, plus a good news story about an enormous marine protected area in Hawaii. That's all coming up after this break. This is Science Friday. I'm Shayla Farson. And I'm John Dankoski. And now it's time to check in on the state of science.

This is KERNNO. St. Louis Public Radio News. Iowa Public Radio News. Local science stories of national significance. Alaska has announced that two upcoming crab fishing seasons will be canceled. For the first time, snow crabs will not be fished in the Bering Sea. Neither will red king crabs for the second year in a row. The reason for this cancellation? Well, the populations of these crabs have plummeted, and scientists are trying to find out why.

So where did they go? Joining me to talk about this is someone who's been covering this story, Kirsten Dobroff, is news director and reporter at KMXT Public Radio in Kodiak, Alaska. Kirsten, welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for having me. Let's start with a headline first. It reads, one billion crabs have gone missing. So first of all, how do we know it's one billion?

Well, if you can believe it, it's actually a lot more than one billion. The estimate, total population estimate for snow crabs in 2018 was 11.7 billion animals. And last year, when the survey was done to kind of estimate how much of that population was still around, it was 940 million crabs. So that's more than 10 billion crabs in about three years that have gone missing. When we see a headline that says the crabs have gone missing, the question is, are they men? missing or do we just have a lot fewer crabs? I mean, explain exactly what we're talking about here to the best of our knowledge. Well, they can't really say definitively what happened to the crabs. The best estimate is that this was climate-driven changes in the ocean that led to the

population collapse. And, you know, they can't see what's happening on the bottom of the ocean, but the best guess that they have is that they died. And they don't really have answers right now beyond what the theories are as far as the causes for that. So this must be an enormous deal economically for your part of the world. Explain a little bit how big the economic impact might be. It's huge. You know, commercial fishing directly employs about 60,000 people in Alaska, and that doesn't include supporting jobs.

It contributes billions of dollars to Alaska's economy, and Bering Sea Snowcrab is a pretty lucrative fishery, one of the most lucrative fisheries in Alaska. On top of that, coastal communities collect taxes off the of seafood landed at their ports. So that's millions of dollars in taxable revenue. You know, on top of skippers that are going to be missing out, a deckhand alone can make $50,000 to $80,000 in a season going out for snow crab. So these are people that are not going to be working this year. Those boats are tied up and it costs money not to fish. Those people who own boats, they are going to have to be paying for insurance, boat payments, you know, upkeep and maintenance on

their boats. So this is a really big deal that has a lot of ripple effects. And that snow crab fishery alone is worth about $200 million in Alaska's economy. Wow. So then what are you hearing from the fishermen? I spoke to a fisherman here in Kodiak the day after the closure was announced, Gabriel Prout. He's a multi-generational crab fisherman. He was still kind of reeling from the news, but this is what he had to say about learning about the closure. People are really going to have to make some hard calls here on whether that's selling out completely of their quota shares, selling their vessels, looking for other opportunities and other fishing sectors, which are few and far between. Fishermen are really going to be hurting the next year.

The Bristol Bay Red King Crab, which is the other fishery that's closed, that had been on the decline, and they had been anticipating that that fishery would close again. But to see such a precipitous collapse in the snow crab population has just been really hard for people to fathom. You know, they're going to have to make some pretty hard decisions, not just Gabriel Prout and his family, but a lot of fishermen. Is this being thought of as just a really bad season, or is this something different? Well, I think it speaks to what I've heard from a lot of fishermen researchers and biologists in the last year. And that goes to the variability of the ocean right now and the changing ocean conditions

from climate change. Just in the last year, 14 of these federal fisheries disasters were approved by the U.S. Secretary of Commerce for fishery collapses that happened between the years 2018 and 2021 with most of those disasters coming in 2020. So we're seeing a lot of variability and vulnerability in Alaskan fisheries. You know, this goes beyond just Bering Sea snow crab fishermen. Even though this is a very big one, this is something that fishermen across the state are paying attention to. So near where I live over the years, the lobster fishery has changed because of warming water temperatures.

Lobsters like to survive in a very specific narrow band of temperatures. Is there something similar happening here? Is climate change changing the water temperatures in such a way that scientists think it might be affecting the crabs? Yeah, that's exactly it. So basically, snow crabs love sea ice. And in the winter, traditionally, there's this covering of sea ice in the Bering Sea. And in the summer, that sea ice melts and it creates what's called the cold pool. So it creates this dense cold water that sinks to the bottom of the ocean floor and provides really critical habitat for snow crab. In 2018 and 2019, in particular, these warmer water temperatures were observed in the Bering Sea. And researchers for the first time saw no almost no sea ice, almost all the way up to the Bering Strait. So that was the year that there was also, if you keep in mind, this record number of snow crabs that were seen was 2018. And then over the course of the two years that the water warmed up, the cold pool was much

smaller. And one of the theories is that because this cold pool wasn't present, particularly in the summer, it allowed more predators to get at the snow crabs. It allowed for, you know, these snow crabs were probably pushed into a smaller area with less habitat and less food, they could have just starved because they didn't have that critical habitat to foster their growth. So what happens next? Well, that's the big question. I've heard from a lot of people that there's a need for more research to better understand this, but I've also spoken to researchers who point to the fact that climate scientists have been saying we're going

to see this type of variability in the oceans for decades. So I think that there's a few different levels to this. And one is how do we connect fishermen, researchers, and policymakers and make sure there's a clear line of communication between them. How do we engage social scientists to prepare coastal communities and fishermen about the decisions they're going to have to make and the variability they'll see in the ocean? And then from this, you know, very real financial aspect that these fishermen are dealing with, how do we find better ways to support our fishermen when they need it? How do we provide fast relief as the ocean is changing? And I know it's not really satisfying, but I don't think there's a clear answer on that right now.

And nobody that I've spoken to has had one either. Kirsten Dobroff is news director and a reporter at KMXT Public Radio in Kodiak, Alaska. Kristen, thanks so much for bringing us this important story. I appreciate it. Great to be here. Thanks. We're going to leave Alaska and head south. And we're fishing for a good news story. We're visiting the waters around the north.

Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, the Papahano Mukuakea Marine National Monument. It's a pristine stretch of ocean and islands that's been under conservation protections of some kind since 1909. So there's no fishing at all allowed there. I feel like that would kind of be a nice place to be if I were a tuna. Yeah, that's the hope. These marine protected areas are established to try to give fish and other marine life a safe place to breed, grow, and recover from the stress of us trying to eat them. But it's been hard to tell if that protection will eventually come back to benefit the local fishermen who are agreeing to stay outside those boundaries. That is, will people catch more tuna outside the refuge just because the refuge is there? Scientifically, this is called spillover. Dr. Sarah Medoff is a fisheries economist and researcher at the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology. That's at the University of Hawaii and Manoa.

And she's part of a research team that's found that at least with this particular, Marine Protected Area, the answer seems to be a resounding yes. Sarah, welcome to the show. Thank you. I'm happy to be here. First, can you introduce us to the Papa Hanomukwakea Marine National Monument in Hawaii? What makes it so special? Yeah, this is a marine protected area that is surrounding the Northwest Hawaiian Islands. In 2016, it was expanded, making it the world's largest contiguous marine reserve or no fishing zone in the world. The size of the area is, I think, roughly about three to four times bigger than the state of California. And this area is also culturally important to Native Hawaiians. As someone who's lived in Hawaii your whole life,

how would you describe that cultural significance? Yeah. So in Hawaii, the culture here on the islands is very connected to all the natural resources that the islands provide. And so that area is very culturally significant to the Native Hawaiians just because it has all of these resources encompassed in the boundaries. I think on the island, we prioritize conservation efforts of our native species pretty heavily just because they are so vulnerable to extinction or over-extruction or over harvest. Why tuna in particular and not some other fish species? Like I'm sure we're talking about more than just fancy sushi here, right? Yeah, so it's funny you should ask that. Originally, this project, we weren't originally going to focus on tuna specifically. When we started this

project, we were kind of shared that common perspective as everybody else that no fishing zones, but it only benefits smaller, less mobile species like coral or like lobster. And that really there wasn't going to be a no fishing zone large enough to really offer any benefits for larger, more mobile species like tuna. And so the original idea for this project was to really look at the Papahana Mokuoka'a and see if it was going to provide any benefits to smaller fish. And maybe we would see some sort of relationship with species mobility and spillover. benefits. And so when I had written the code and ran our models and conducted our analysis and I went to go view the results and there was in fact a positive spillover effect for yellowfin and big it too. We were kind of in a state of shock because it was results that were really

surprising. We were not expecting. And that's when we really realized that we might really have something here. And that's when we started to focus in on yellowfin and big it tuna. Could you give us some numbers there? What kind of increases were you seeing for these different tuna species? So it was actually pretty large. The magnitude of the spillover benefits was largest for yellowfin tuna. We show that there was a 54% increase in catch per unit effort when fishing efforts were placed near the monument borders or the NPA borders as opposed to further away after the monument or the NPA was expanded. Big-Ey tuna increased about 12%. And I think all species caught on an aggregate level increased about 8%. For those of you who just joined us, I'm Shayla Farson, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Talking to Dr. Sarah Medoff about how a marine protected area in Hawaii seems to be economically benefiting commercial fishermen.

Why would a no-fishing zone lead to more fish outside of the protected area? Like, does this tell us that tuna populations are maybe recovering from past overfishing? We're not really clear what the mechanism is. I think that we'll require more data on inside of the marine protected area boundaries. But we have two ideas of what could be potentially driving these results. So the first is, you know, a growth in reproduction effect. So it could be that inside of Papahana Mukula Kea boundaries, tuna species are using these areas as spawning grounds. Another idea is just like this local aggregation effect, in which case,

maybe it's possible that inside of the MPA boundaries, they are providing a safe refuge for species that tuna feed off of or prey species. And in which case, those populations are rebounding and growing as Big Eye and Yellowfin pass through those waters and they see a large amount of food supply within a certain area, they might gravitate to that area. And that's kind of causing this, like, local aggregation effect. And in which case, as they start swimming past the MPA boundaries, they're literally like spilling over the borders and onto fishermen's and captain's hooks. Okay. So it sounds like there's kind of a couple different possibilities here, like either the protected area is boosting tuna populations by giving them a safe place to breed. But it might also just be

that tuna are drawn to that area and they're kind of using it as a safe haven then? Yes, exactly. Do you think it matters that the fishing industry is benefiting from us protecting the fish? Or is it just more important that we're protecting them, period? I think it's important that we are balancing both conservation while still supporting the livelihoods of people who depend on this resource. You know, with a project like this or with a conservation effort like this, where we can get conservation and economic viability to both kind of align and work in unison rather than being

viewed as, you know, two opposing forces that we have to sacrifice one for the other is probably the most optimal outcome. Yeah, you know, we're often told by policymakers and other folks that there's this choice we have to make between economic prosperity and protecting the environment. And this seems like an example where we don't necessarily have to choose, where we could maybe have both? Do you think that's accurate? Yeah, I definitely think so. I think this is what was so exciting about this project and why I personally was really excited to be a part of it, was because it is this perfect example where conservation and economic profitability can kind of align and work in unison. And I think it's a nice sign that our conservation efforts are actually working. And it kind of

gives me hope that if we construct a well-thought-out conservation plan, we can reverse environmental damages. You know, obviously you looked at this one protected area, but how generalizable do you think that these results are? Like, can we look at your data and say, okay, great, let's put marine protected areas everywhere and fishing is going to benefit? I think the biggest lesson. I think the biggest lesson I had taken personally out of this was that these marine protected areas need to be well designed. So the location matters, the size matters, the fact that Papahana Makua Kea is in this like horizontal, you know, spanning horizontally across the globe matters. And so I hope that this project sparks those discussions, but for future MPAs and no fishing zones, we do have to recognize that these

do impose an initial cost, and we have to make sure that our investments are going to pay off in the future. And so I think the main takeaway is to make sure that these conservation efforts are well thought out and strategically planned. Thank you so much for joining me today to talk about your research. This is so interesting, and it gives me a little bit of hope about the world. Yeah, thank you. I'm glad. I'm glad I'm on the show, and I'm happy to share it. Dr. Sarah Medoff is a researcher at the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology at the University of Hawaii in Manoa. And that's all the time we have for this hour. Here's Shoshana Buxbaum with a few of the folks who make this program possible.

Kyle Marion Viterbo is our community manager, D. Peter Schmidt and Emma Gomez are our digital producers. Our NSF fellow is Jason Dyn. Sandy Roberts is our education program manager. And I'm Shoshana Bucksbaum, radio producer. Thanks for listening. Thanks, Shoshana. And thanks to our friends at St. Louis Public Radio for their help with this week's show. BJ Leaderman composed our theme music. If you missed any part of the program or you'd like to hear it again, just subscribe to our podcasts. Or you can ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. You can email us to the address is sciFri at sciencefri.com. I'm John Denkowski. And I'm Shayla Farsan. Thanks so much for joining us.