Science Friday - Tree Soil, Rodent Biologist, Soundscape Artist. Sept 8, 2023, Part 2

Episode Date: September 8, 2023

Where Soil Grows Above The TreesYou might be used to the feeling of Earth under your feet, but did you know that there’s soil high above your head? Way up in the treetops, where ferns, mosses, flowers, and even trees grow on top of the forest. A new study in Geoderma describes the factors that contribute to how canopy soil is formed.Ira talks with lead author Jessica Murray, an ecologist and PhD candidate at Utah State University in Logan, Utah. They discuss the importance of canopy soil, what we do and don’t know about it, and what it’s like to study it.Check out views from Murray’s field sites at sciencefriday.com!‘I Will Not Be Vole Girl’—A Biologist Warms To RodentsThe path to becoming a scientist is not unlike the scientific process itself: Filled with dead ends, detours, and bumps along the way.Danielle Lee started asking questions about animal behavior when she was a kid. She originally wanted to become a veterinarian. But after being rejected from veterinary school, she found a fulfilling career as a biologist, doing the type of work she always wanted to do—but never knew was possible for her.Science Friday producer Shoshannah Buxbaum talks with Dr. Danielle Lee, a biologist, outreach scientist, and assistant professor in biology at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville in Edwardsville Illinois about what keeps her asking questions, what rodents can help us understand about humans, and the importance of increasing diversity in science.This Soundscape Artist Has Been Listening To The Planet For DecadesJim Metzner is one of the pioneers of science radio—he’s been making field recordings and sharing them with audiences for more than 40 years. He hosted shows such as “Sounds of Science” in the 1980s, which later grew into “Pulse of the Planet,” a radio show about “the sound of life on Earth.”Over the decades, Metzner has created an incredible time capsule of soundscapes, and now, his entire collection is going to the Library of Congress.John Dankosky talks with Metzner about what he’s learned about the natural world from endless hours of recordings and what we can all learn from listening. Plus, they’ll discuss some of his favorite recordings. To hear the best audio quality, it might be a good idea to use headphones if you can.To stay updated on all-things-science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Later in the hour, a conversation about rodents and the complicated paths of science careers and checking in on the sounds of the planet with Science Radio Pioneer and nature recordist Jim Metzner. But first, we're talking soil. Now, I know you might feel the earth move under your feet, but I bet you didn't know that there's soil high above your head, way up in the tree tops, where ferns and mosses and flowers grow on to, top of the forest. Yes, they do. A new study in the journal Geoderma picks apart the factors that drive how canopy soil is made. Joining me is the lead author, Jessica Murray, ecologist and PhD candidate at Utah State University in Logan, Utah. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you, Ira. I'm so happy to be here.

Oh, it's nice to have you. You know, I'll bet you that hardly anybody has ever heard of canopy soil. Tell us what that is. How does it get up on the top of the tree? there. Yeah, well, I hadn't heard of it either until I saw it pretty much. Yeah, so canopy soil is called that because it is found in tree canopies on tree branches and the cratches of trees. And it develops over long periods of time. We don't know exactly how long, but probably many decades, if not hundreds of years. Through the decomposition of epiphytes, which is the name for plants that grow on other plants, you might have mosses, You might have vascular epiphytes, so shrubs, trees, et cetera.

The leaves produced by what we call the host tree, the roots of the epiphytes, any mosses, all of this organic material decomposing over time on tree branches builds up this sometimes really thick layer of soil. Wow. Wow. And your study looked at how the canopy soil is made, right? So tell us, what factors did you zoom in on? Yeah.

So we went into the project thinking, let's find out of canopy soil. soil is vulnerable to climate change, but we actually realize we have to take a few steps back because we don't fully understand where it's even found or how it develops. And so I had noticed in some other work I'd been doing in the canopy that canopy soil isn't as abundant in all forests. And also within a forest, sometimes there's a lot on a certain tree and none on other trees within the same stand. And so we started the project just asking, okay, let's identify some sites that represent different climates. So we worked in Costa Rica using elevation gradients that could sort of give us a gradient of temperature and precipitation. And we wanted to know

across forest how different climates might influence how much canopy soil there is. Within a forest, how the amount and also its chemistry might vary. And then even along a branch, we looked at those same questions. Does that mean you have to go up into the tree? It does. A way up into the canopy. What is that like? Oh, it's amazing, Ira. It's one of the most magical experiences I've had the privilege of having in my life. It's just a totally different world. I've mostly worked in the canopy in Costa Rica in the tropics where you get, like I mentioned

before, these really lush communities of these epiphytic plants. I mean, we're talking literally a forest within a forest. Like, if you imagine being a small ant on a branch, I mean, you're walking like, there's a little understory of like mosses. There's, in some cases, small trees growing out of tree branches. It's really incredible. Wow. So how do you get up there? I mean, it's way up there, is it? Yeah, it's a decent amount of work. In our case, we have to get a rope over a branch. And yeah, we use a giant slingshot called a big shot, and then we'll pull a rope over. And then we climb the rope, not the tree, using harnesses, assenders, different types of equipment.

Cool. Cool. Okay. So set the scene for me. You're up there way above us all. You're at the top of the tree. You're in the canopy. What does it look like? Well, yeah, in some of these sites, you are in what feels like a garden of plants, many different leaf shapes, plant functional groups. So like bromeliads, orchids, bushes. There are a lot of bushes in the blueberry family, actually. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. There are blueberry bushes. Yeah, I mean, not the species blueberry, but the family ericase. Yeah, in some of these sites, there are a lot of plants in that family. So they look kind of like blueberry or like huckleberry plants. Right. There are many very beautiful, colorful birds like chlorphonias that will visit the fruits of some of these epiphytes.

And sometimes we see monkeys in Costa Rica. We see three different species of monkeys. I've had them come pretty close. It really makes you appreciate how much better they are at being in the canopy than you are. They saying to you, hey, what are you doing up here? Yeah, sometimes I feel like they're looking at me and making fun of me for having all these like ropes and carabiners and stuff and they're just like effortlessly hanging by a tail. That's cool.

All right. So you're up there. You're taking samples from different parts of, let's say, a branch. What is in the soil? Did the soil vary from point to point? Yeah. I mean, a big part of this study was looking. at the different scales of variation, like how much does canopy soil abundance and chemical

composition vary across forests, within forest, along a branch? And it varies so much along a branch. And I just have so many more questions about why. I think really thinking of this as a forest within a forest is helpful because there's all these different plants. In some cases, it's a really diverse community along a single branch. And I think they're having some really interesting impacts on really small scales over this soil and sort of what it's like. Really interesting. Okay, so you told me about the berry bushes up there. And you tell me about meeting monkeys up there.

What's the weirdest critter you've seen up there? Oh, okay. I can't remember its name. So I'll just describe it. I had never seen anything like it before. It was maybe the size of like a half dollar. and it walked sort of like a crab and was covered in canopy soil. And later I found that it's a creature in the, I think, true bug order, like hemiptera,

that as a juvenile will take soil debris and put it on its body as like an exoskeleton, like a protective layer. And in this case, it looked like this creature was using canopy soil as that protective layer. but I had never seen any insects that looked like that. I did send pictures around and got the name, but I'll have to give that to you later. You said originally you wanted to look at the climate impacts on canopy soil. Were you able to figure any of that out now, or are you just collecting samples? Yeah.

So an important finding of our study isn't actually that surprising to anybody who's worked in canopy ecosystems, but I think was important to be able to quantify, which is that canopy soil is most abundant in big trees, which makes sense because probably it takes a long time and like a large enough surface area for it to develop. And we found that it's more common or more abundant in cool sites and foggy sites. And that's probably because when temperatures aren't too warm, your decomposition is slower.

And the fogginess is probably related. to the epiphyte community. So epiphytes, these plants that grow on trees, their abundance and diversity tends to peak at these middle elevation tropical montane ecosystems like cloud forests. And I don't study epiphytes directly, but I think that's largely because they can use all of this atmospheric water, like cloud water, fog.

They have these really cool adaptations to pull water out of the air, which is important because they don't have roots in the ground. to access groundwater. So we found that, and that relates to climate change, because unfortunately, cloud forests, where these soils seem to be the most abundant, are some of our most threatened ecosystems in the world. They're warming, they're seeing a lifting cloud-based height,

which means forests that previously was considered cloud forest, increasingly are losing cloud cover due to land use change, like deforestation and also climate change. And so, yeah, that finding and just the reality, it doesn't look great for canopy soil. Do we know why the canopy soil is so important? Do we know what it does, where it fits in in the ecosystem of the forest? We have some clues. I would say it hasn't been studied, but the studies that have been done have identified some pretty important roles. So one is canopy soil and the epiphytes that associate with it acts like a sponge for water. So sort of intercept water, hold it like a

sponge so that in these dry periods that we're seeing increasingly, maybe there's a little more water storage. So that's a really important role, the hydrologic impact. Nutrients, actually, so canopy soil, there are organisms, microbes in canopy soil that can fix nitrogen from the air. Often there's moss growing on canopy soil that can also bring in nitrogen from the atmosphere and other nutrients, but it can also store nutrients. And then there are two major, I'll say three major ways that the nutrients in canopy soil and the epiphytes can benefit the greater forests. So one, which is really exciting and people love to hear about, is something called adventitious roots. So we found that, or I haven't, researchers like Malini Nad Karni and Karina Mahfuni have found that sometimes trees will produce roots from their branches that grow into the canopy soil to take advantage of the rich

nutrients in that soil. So they just sprout roots way up there? Yeah, right out of their branches. It's so weird. It's so amazing. I've seen orchids do that, but I didn't know that, you know, the trees, themselves do that. Yeah, we have some records of trees doing it. We don't really know the scale. It's pretty hard to study it. So figuring out who those roots belong to is really difficult,

but we have found that some of them are from the actual tree. But also when there's like a rain event or a tree branch falls, sometimes this canopy soil and the epiphytes are displaced to the ground. So that's a huge pulse of nutrients, you know, to the ground and the tree roots. And then the other way is just as it rains, sometimes the nutrients held within canopy soil is leached and can move down the tree trunk into the soil below. The third one that I find particularly interesting is canopy soil as a carbon store that we're not actually accounting for. So canopy soil is like 45% carbon. And so based on some back of the envelope calculations, I think that canopy soil is like 4% of the total soil carbon, but we're not accounting for it. And so I would like to see

more work to understand on a larger scale to what degree canopy soil is contributing to forest carbon stocks. Jessica, good luck with your work and thank you for taking time to be with us today. Fascinating stuff. Thank you for having me, Ira. Jessica Murray, ecologist and PhD candidate at Utah State University in Logan, Utah. And you can get a peek of the canopy soil that Jessica studies, go to science friday.com slash tree tops. Coming up, we'll meet a mammal biologist who tells us what we can learn about humans from rodents, yes, and just how do you get to be a rodent expert in the first place? Stay with us.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Each week on this show, we have conversations with some really impressive and thoughtful scientists, and sometimes their professional journey is just as fascinating. as the work they do. The path to becoming a scientist is not unlike the scientific process itself, filled with dead ends, detours, and bumps along the way. Sci-Fi producer Shoshana Bucksbaum talked with a biologist whose career took an unexpected path to studying rodents. Here's her story. I got a chance to speak with Dr. Danielle Lee, biologist, outreach scientist, and assistant

professor in biology at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. I was first in introduced to her work when she was featured in a book for tweens called No Boundaries, which profiled female scientists around the world. And since she was a kid, Dr. Lee has been asking questions about animals. Why do they do what they do? She originally wanted to become a veterinarian. So I started off by asking how she went from applying to vet school to becoming a research scientist. In pursuit of trying to go to veterinary school, I had applied and been rejected and had been still encouraged to continue applying and to improve my grades. And I was just taking classes at the University of Memphis. I wrote a paper in my animal communication and

cognition class that the professor said, this is a project. I was like, serious? He said, yeah, you could do a whole project and be done in two months. I was like, really? I could just do a whole project over the summer? He's like, yeah, you should switch to thesis. I wasn't even a thesis student. I was just taking classes. Side note, it took longer than two months to do their project. He got me. It always does. It always takes longer. By the fall, when I was reapplying for vet school, I really realized I was really into the research. I was like, wait a minute, I'm really enjoying this. And I wondered why. And I was like, you know what? All the time I was a child in school and college. I was always curious about animals. So I always loved animals. I was always

interested in animals. And so my interest in becoming a vet was because of that. And And to be honest, I didn't know that there was other careers you could do if you were interested in being, if you were interested in animals. I thought you could be a vet or you could be a zookeeper, which I'm going to be honest. In my young mind, I didn't, I couldn't tell you the difference between those two things either. You know what I mean? Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. I realized then, I'm like, wait a minute, this is how I get the answers to the questions I've been asking and no one has given me a good answer yet. Like, I was always like, you still haven't given me a good answer. I was always asking, tell me why animals do that? Why animals doing that? And I thought it was as simple as you can just give me a straight answer. And then I came to realize there are no straight answers.

They just aren't. They don't exist. And a lot of the answers I was looking for probably hadn't been asked yet. And that's when I realized, wait, this is what science is. This is what this is. I can have a career at asking questions and answering my own questions. I can finally just do the thing I've always been interested in since I was four or five years old. tell me why that animal's doing that. The light bubble went off. I said, then that's what I want to do.

But being rejected was the best thing that ever happened to me. And so, so you did it. And you got your Ph.D. And you followed your dream. And so I want to talk a little bit about your research, which focuses on rodents, which are very underappreciated creatures. So what led you of all the different animals to study? What led you to rodents? So the professor who got me started at the University of Memphis, Michael Furkin, He worked with voles. And I thought he was mispronouncing moles. Like, I thought I was hearing him wrong.

And I was like, he meant moles because, what is a vol? I never heard of this in my life. And then I realized, oh, no, he meant vol. I had never heard of the word in my life. So voles are field mice. They're little cute, cute, they're little fiel mice with little stubby, chubby bodies and short, short tails. And that's important because what most people think of is mice like house mice. They have these scrawny necks.

Like that's the thing that you really want to, scrawny necks and long tails. So you have scrawny neck, long tail mice. And then you have little robust body short tail mice. Now the project that he convinced me to start doing based on the paper was with the metal vows. Metal vows, you can ask them really interesting questions

about their communication because during their breeding season, they're a little bit kind of everyone for themselves. Like kind of everybody's on their own. They mate and then they kind of go in their separate. ways. And then they hope to bump into each other again when receptivity comes back around, which is about every three weeks for a particular female. And the females can be super competitive and like very, very, you know, disinterested in one another. Super, super disinterested in one another during the breeding season. But then once the fall comes and the days get shorter and they're no longer

breeding, that all changes. They turn from, I don't want to see you to, hey, girl, what's you doing this winter? You want to overwinter together? Come over. We can, we'll eat roots and just, you know, keep our body temperature together. It goes from that, like big time. It's weird, but it's fascinating. I was fascinated by that. And so that's how I got started with rodents, because that's what was in the lab. And I knew I was interested in these questions about social interactions. I was really interested in, like, aggression. You know, like, how is it that some animals, you know, win, always seem to win, seem to be on top. What's that about? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

I started pursuing my PhD with someone else who worked with voles. Just on the vol track. I was on the vol track. And the thing is, I had told myself, I will not be vol-girl. I will not be vol-girl. I got into this game because I wanted to work on, you know, like lions and tigers and bears and wolves. I wanted to do sexy megafauna. Yeah, the sexy megafauna. That's what we all want. Then I just, what happened is I realized I was good at it.

And one of my early inclinations that I had a knack for it is that when I had to go trap animals and get more, it was at a time where everybody else was having a hard time across the nation, getting animals. And somehow I had gotten them. And so now I have a reputation among folks who study voles as if you need voles called Danielle, like collar. Instead of fighting being vulgaral, I just went for it. I was like, you know what? I started seeing the benefit of working with a backyard species, working with something

that was always there that was right up under our nose. And then I started learning about different species. And I was like, you know what, this gives us an opportunity to just start looking at how these different rodent species are negotiating life, not just in the wild, but in a while in proximity to people. And then for a postdoc, I got invited to do my postdoctoral research on the giant pouch rat of Tanzania and got into that research because it's not talking about sexy megafauna. You're talking about a rat that's the size of a house cat that has been successfully trained

to sniff out and detect landmines. And then also, they can also sniff out and help detect to diagnose tuberculosis. the rats were being successfully trained, but the breeding was still kind of hit amidst. So there was some basic natural history and etiology, biology questions about the pouch rat that still needed to be sussed out. And that's where I came in. So I got to apply all the things that I had learned with the voles, working with wild populations of animals, and then trying to ask very specific questions about their behavior and their

exploration and their behavioral tendencies. And so obviously rodents have interacted with humans since the beginning of our history. What does studying rodents and how they behave teach us about our world and our ecosystems? This is how I see it. Rodents, particularly the rodents that have made a living off of us and near us, tell us so much about ourselves. There's not been a single human culture across time, across geography, that has not had to contend with rodent infestations.

So rotten nuisance are a part of the human history. We're still dealing with rodent issues. They're the key to understanding what potential next disease is going to come out. Because they're the ones closest to us. They're the vectors. Things can spill over from them or they can carry them on their backs and then that thing infects us. The black plague?

The rat didn't give us the black plague. They carried the fleas and the fleas gave us the black plague. And so understanding their behavior and their ecology helps us understand how to solve problems. We know their rodents are a problem for people, whether you live in the rural area, whether you don't live near a lot of people, or if you stay near a lot of people in urban areas, their problem either way. And what we see is that sometimes it's the same species that can make a really interesting living in both the city and the country and the wild. But then other times, some species do better than others. And so I'm finding myself really, really interested in the scientific study of city mouse and country mouse. I want to pivot a little bit because part of your work is also in diversifying science and who becomes a scientist.

I want to talk a little bit about our educational system, the pipeline of how people become scientists. So how does the inequity of our educational system fail black and brown and indigenous future scientists that want to, you know, answer some of these big questions that we've done. you've just been talking about and thinking of different questions and different ways to go about it as you have. So here's the first thing that I think most people don't realize. The cumulative knowledge we have in the world right now is all based on individual people's personal curiosities. There is no agenda. There is no agenda. So everything that we have that's been codified by this modern system is all because of a lot of people's personal curiosities. I study what I study because it's what I want to do.

And so everybody else. Then think about who's overrepresented in those texts. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And what we're saying unintentionally, and I'm being generous, is that those are the peoples whose questions that matter. But it's also sending a message to black and brown and indigenous kids. Those are the only people who've ever asked good questions.

And we know that that is a fundamental outright lie. Everybody, since the beginning of time, has been asking questions. Black, brown, and indigenous people around the globe have not only been asking good questions, but have sussed out the answers to a lot of important foundational things. But they're not credited in those books in the same way. We could just do better at our citation practices and giving credit to the fact that groups of people, especially groups of people who we know have uninterrupted, contiguous histories for thousands of years that are solid, who have good histories and reliable and consistent analysis and data

about how the world works. We know that the indigenous people of Australia, they told us things. Western science just finally figured out the age of a mountain that indigenous Australians have been telling them. It's 65,000 years old. It's 65,000 years old. In other words, there's so much out there about the world that we either haven't been able to help get the word out about or inspire people to find those answers because we've been unintentionally, or maybe intentionally, but I'm going to be generous, saying there's only one way to science, and that's just fundamentally untrue. And there's only certain people who are particularly good at it. So we've been ignoring all this rich, fertile bed of questions. This is Science Friday.

from W.NYC. Studios. In the book, you talk about how sometimes people are surprised to find out that, like, you're in fact the scientists they're waiting for because of these systemic issues that we've talked about that have prioritized mostly white men of being scientists. And that's like the stereotype that we have for who a scientist is. And, you know, as a black woman, you don't fit that stereotype. So how has that, how have these experiences shaped? your approach to the work that you do, especially because you also do outreach as well. It really makes me think about who I'm doing science for. So I'm doing science for me because I enjoy it. It's how I make a living. But I'm also doing science because I recognize deep down inside, I am ministering to my younger self. That I want, I recognize that the younger me wishes I existed, that someone like me existed, that I can look at it. up to and be like, this is real. This is who I can talk to. I see what it is and then that person or that type of person is accessible to me. But it's not just important to younger versions of

myself. It's also important for all kids to see that. It's important for young white kids, young white kids from really well-out families to know that this is what a world looks like that's plural so that they aren't surprised when they see someone in leadership who shows up who doesn't necessarily look like them. It's about more than just simply getting some people to say, oh, we got a few that made it. We're trying to fundamentally change the fact that all of us can participate. We don't all have to be PhDs to be scientists, but we all absolutely can be scientists. We all can be artists. It's not an either-or. It's a yes-than. And I've even, you know, I hear when I go into communities and I talk to folks, especially folks, you know, who are like middle age or older, they were like, I always like science and I thought I wanted to do this.

I'm like, you still can. Yeah, you still can. And I think that's the thing that surprises them that, like, wait, what? I'm like, you can. You can do it literally right now, right this moment. You want to start a project? We can do this, this moment. You don't even have to wait.

And to close, what advice. you have for the next generation of scientists, whether that be people that pursue master's degrees, PhDs, or people that are rediscovering their connection with science or just other ways to get involved in science in their everyday lives. It's all right to start exactly where you are. There's this perception that you've got to go get something more before you can get started. Nope. You can start exactly where you are. It reminds me of a quote at Tuskegee University. lay down your buckets where you are. And that's because, you know, this idea that there's something to be done right here in this moment.

You have everything you need right now to get started. And like any endeavor, you get started. If you need more, you go get it. Social media gives you direct access to scientists. Many of us are on Twitter or on Instagram. You can start following and engaging folks right now. You don't have to do anything big and fancy all at once. It'll come to you.

That's usually how science is. It's not all things one at once. It's one little thing at a time. And then, like I said, it's all these textbooks started with just people's personal curiosities. And it all accumulated. It will all come together. Yeah, I love that. And I think that's a wonderful place to end our conversation. Dr. Danielle Lee, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me and to be on Science Friday. Thank you. I'm excited. Thank you. Dr. Daniel Lee is a biologist, outreach scientist, and assistant professor in biology at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville. And I'm Shoshana Bucksnow. Thank you, Shoshana. And if you want more stories about the careers and lives of scientists, check out our newsletter, Sincerely Science. You can find that and much more at ScienceFriiday.com slash newsletters. We have to take a break, but when we come back, listening to the natural world with one of the pioneers of science, Radio, Jim Metzner. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flito. To finish out the show, how about some soothing sounds of the natural world from the man who recorded them? Here's Cy Frie's John Dan Koski

with more. I don't know about you, but for years, the alarm clock in my bedroom woke me up with my local public radio station. And what voice did I hear? Very first thing in the morning? Every summer in the McNeil River in Alaska is filled with spawning salmon. It's an annual feast that bears in this region have come to rely on. I'm Jim Metzner, and this is the pulse of the planet. And it wasn't just Jim's voice that eased me out of my sleep. It was the weird and wonderful sounds that he gathered from around our planet. Maybe your memory goes back even further to his show The Sounds of Science, where his guests included Cocoa the Gorilla. She's nice to be with. She's got a sense of humor. She's very warm and outgoing. And she is a gorilla. I'm Jim Metzner, and these are the Sounds of Science.

Jim Metzner is one of the pioneers of science radio, making field recordings and sharing them with audiences for more than 40 years. And now this time capsule of sound he's created, his entire collection, is going to the Library of Congress. Today we're going to talk with Jim about what he's learned about the natural world from endless hours of recordings and what we can all learn from listening. We're going to hear some of his favorite recordings too, so I don't know if you can listen along with headphones, now might be a good time to put them on. Jim Metzner, welcome back to Science Friday. Hi, it's a pleasure to be here, and I just wanted to tell you to put a bookend on it. You might have wakened with my voice, but my voice puts my wife to sleep every night. Well, I certainly appreciated waking up to your voice all those mornings on Pulse of the Planet.

Of all the ways that you can tell us story, Jim, why do you think sound helps us understand the world around us so well? Oh, boy, we could talk about that the whole day. It's such a great question. How does it that sounds grab you? Where do they hit you? They certainly hit me where I live. You know, there's a voice, but then there's the sound of my mother's voice. There's the sound of something that I grew up with. It's like a sound that came in and never left.

Sounds are the touchstones to our emotional world, our emotional life. So that's part of it. They also seem to trickle down, you know, as if there was like some cave inside, the sounds trickle down and go to places where words don't go. and they tell us things. You could be listening to somebody and you can tell as much by the sound of their voice as what they are saying. I wouldn't actually play a sound here

that I know really resonated with you. It's the sound of a parrot and a girl laughing, Jim. So, of course, I can't help but to laugh when I hear that. Tell us about that sound. I still smile and laugh every time I hear it, this recording. So it took place in Brazil, in Bayeia.

I was in Bahia, in the 70s, I was in my 20s, and I stumbled upon this group of young women who were all clustered around another woman with a parrot. And they're talking back and forth. And, you know, it was a serendipitous moment. I waltzed in and recorded it. And what the parrot is saying, I'm mad at, in Portuguese, of course, I'm mad at you.

And the girl says, you're mad at me? Yeah. at you, but it's like, you know, the glee of this moment, you know, I think I could play this anywhere in the world and people would get it. There's something in that sound that just cracks everybody up. Yeah. And that's, as you say, it sort of touches a place inside you that just hearing people talk isn't going to do. The sound of people's laughter is something that we have a physiological response to, Jim. Yeah. Yeah. And I bet you there's something about the sound itself songs video that just does it. I don't think a video would necessarily help. It's the sounds that carry

that emotion. So let's go back a little bit to the start of your series Pulse of the Planet. It's this very popular series in which you've intertwined science and nature and culture and these really short, beautiful segments there on, hundreds of public radio stations around the country. Do you have an idea of what the pulse of the planet is? Is the pulse of the planet what we hear on the daily news every day? I hope not. Underneath is sort of the tsunamis of the news. There's something else going on. There's the seasonal rhythms of nature. The whales are migrating. The cicadas are emerging and so forth. When you said that, the thing that resonated with me is I remember being in the rainforests in Costa Rica and feeling, I don't know what to say. It's a vibration coming from around you. And as you listen, you hear millions of insects and birds and other animals and people and motorbikes and the ocean waves. And they're all coming together. And it feels like this vibration of the earth.

And if you think about, I mean, at least for me, the pulse is not a regular glub-dub, glob-dub that a human would have. But it's this amazing vibration that's coming from everywhere. Yes, indeed. It's many. It is diverse. It is varied. It's ever-changing. So if you were in the rainforest, you'd notice that there was a different sound at night than in the morning, of course, and you don't have to go to the rainforest to hear that anyone in the country or I dare say the city as well. Sounds morph and change moment to moment. So take us through a day of field recording. Like, what is it like? When you go out with a microphone, what are you carrying? anybody come with you? Just, I know, give us a little day in a life because I think our listeners would really love to know how you go and capture the sounds, especially of the natural world. Okay. I rarely use the word capture. I'll tell you why in a moment, but it's a great question.

I remind listeners that right now, for the first time in human history, virtually every one of us is carrying a sound recording device in our pocket. And it makes a damn good recording. And so go out today, take a soundwalk and you record the sounds, please, listeners, try it, whether you're interviewing mom or grandpa or whoever or just the sounds of the neighborhood. Go on a journey of discovery. But if I go out with a recorder, there's no typical day, no typical day. And that's the beauty of sound recording. And I tend to be a bit more inclusive. I don't go out and say, I'm going to record a yellow belly sap sucker today or whatever. I mean, if I comes across my path, then great. But I usually, rarely, sometimes, however, I do go out and search for sounds, but more often than not,

whatever comes up, my way is grist through the mill. I want to play another sound that you see along to us as one of your favorites. And this is a sound that is very rich and varied. It was recorded in Grampians National Park in Victoria, Australia. Let's. Let's listen for a moment. Jim, what are we hearing there? So there I was in Grampians National Park, just west of Melbourne, a park that is run by indigenous peoples. It was an extraordinary place and one of the great visuals. It had nothing really to do with the sound, but I'll just tell you because it was just so out of the ordinary. I was surrounded by kangaroos. They weren't making any sounds, but there they were. And then, of course, there were this canopy of trees and this immense

textured panoply. I'm running out of adjectives to just try to describe it because words only dance around what sounds do. They do so much better than words. But I think the challenge for me and maybe other listeners too is I see that typically, honestly, I don't know how to listen. to the sounds of nature. I mean, it's wondrous at moments, but, you know, if you're going to sit down and listen to, you know, a Bach concerto or, you know, a little bit of Mozart, you can give yourself 10 minutes for that easy, longer maybe. But for sounds, which every bit is interesting and varied, we don't typically have that kind of training and experience. So I'm still learning how to listen to. And you can listen for species. Oh, that's a, that's a liar bird.

for example, or you could listen in another way to this orchestration. That's so interesting the way that you just put that, Jim, though, because by contrast, if you're listening to a Bach keyboard piece, part of the context that's important to you is you know that this man, some hundreds of years ago, wrote this piece, and it's been adapted and adopted, and all the context of it is also what you're listening to and for. But that sound that we just heard, we might not know what any of the birds are that we just heard. But the sound itself clearly is beautiful. It speaks to a natural environment that we can potentially imagine in our minds.

And it's just so evocative of something and hits us in a way that even without context, I think people might think is just stunningly beautiful. I think so too. And just following your line of thought, you could say, you know, unlike Baku only put a year, a mere 10 years into it, this is the result of a million years of evolution that we're hearing right now. They've been working on it for a long time. They're finally starting to get good at it, huh?

I have to ask you, with all of these sounds that you've collected over all of these years, they're now going to go into the Library of Congress. I mean, it's the most basic question in the world, but how does that make you feel? feel. That must be an amazing feeling to know that you've contributed so much and that people will be able to experience these sounds forever. Yes. Recording is often a solo endeavor. You go into a booth. It's a solo endeavor. You know that a lot of people are listening, but that's sort of like an idea. To know that these vibrations will be heard, that's why I don't use the word capture. These were incredible gifts to me. I was extraordinarily honored.

to receive these sounds, to be the one who was entrusted with them. And so the imperative to share them. So how do you share them? That's in part up to the library. To me, I'm writing a book about my adventures called Adventures of a Lifelong Listener. So to answer your question, you know, it's like, I mean, every time you press the red button, it's with the hope that something wonderful will happen. Sometimes it does.

Sometimes it doesn't. And then there's that imperative, that's human imperative, the wish to share these vibrations with other sentient beings. Because in the act of sharing, it's like we're all resonating again together with the environment, with the world around us. So in the act of sharing and knowing that for centuries, people will share in these vibrations, it's a good feeling. But also I feel like I've fulfilled my part of the bargain that I was given this material. and now I've done my best to share it in a way that hopefully will reach across the gap. I'm John Dankowski, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. I'm talking with Jim Metzner, the host of Pulse of the Planet,

about all the many recordings that he's made of our world. They're all going to the Library of Congress. I'd like to share one more sound that you brought us here, and I won't even set this up first. Let's just listen to this sound that you've sent along. Right now we're covering them with blankets and sheets. One, to keep the sun off them and keep them moist. And also, in some degree, help them control their body temperature.

They can quickly overheat in a situation like this. So it'll keep the water on and keep them cool. Or in some cases, if they're going to shock, they can start getting cold. In that case, we'll use other things and put more blankets on and try to keep them warm. This is a good example, Jim, of something where if you give people just a little bit of information or no information at all, they can make up their own minds, tell us where you recorded the sound. I was in Cape Cod some years back, just driving around listening to the radio. And it was a call out to this ad hoc network of seat of your pants, animal rescuers, just vigilante rescuers,

anybody within the sound of the voice of the announcer to come because there was a whale, pilot whales were beaching at this particular location. I thought, well, I'm near there. I'm going to show up. And I had my tape recorder with me. So they show up and I'm with them and they're trying to rescue these whales who have beached themselves for no apparent reason, one of these odd quandaries that we're still facing. Why do whales beach? We really don't know. And so I joined them and saw that they were putting blankets on them to keep, just as he was this man was describing. And then they were trying to lift, getting blankets underneath them and stretchers that they were jury rigging and taking them out and trying to get them out swimming again. And at a certain point, I just put down my microphone

and joined in. But for a moment, you know, to hear the sounds, to be with them and to look a whale in the eye from close up, which I never had that experience before, was extraordinary. And to think that you were helping, how could you not want to help them and feel for them and see that all of these people with the best of intentions were trying to do the best they could to help these fellow creatures? Before I let you go, Jim, quickly, I'd love to hear about your American Soundscapes project. It's a crowdsource project where people can submit their own special sounds. Can you tell us about it? Thank you. American Soundscapes.com. You can be among the first to check it out in its beta form. So if you go, you'll see that there are some

featured soundscapes from some professional sound recorders, some of the best sound recordists I know of, but the chance for anybody using that sound recording device that you have in your pocketbook or back pocket to go out, take that journey of discovery that we were speaking about earlier, go out and have your own journey that way and send it in. It doesn't have to be a whale rescue. It can be something as simple as the bells of the church and the town where you live, the sound that your grandfather makes whenever he picks up a heavy box, a word that only your family knows and is privy to,

or whatever sounds that are in your home, your neighborhood, your environment or in your cultural group that are significant, that are emblematic, that are significant. They can be sounds of nature or culture, but share them with us. This American Soundscape Project is an opportunity for us to share our sounds with each other.

That's fantastic. Jim Metzner, thank you so much and congratulations. Thank you. It's been a pleasure. Jim Metzner is a field recordist and radio producer based in Kingston, New York. His entire collection of sounds is going to the Library of Congress. But you can't listen to all.

all of them there just yet, though. That much sound, it takes a while to upload. That was SciFri's John Dan Koski. And that about wraps up our show for this week. If you missed any part of the program or you want to hear it again, subscribe to our podcasts or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. Of course, you can say hi to us all week on social media or reach us the classic way email. Remember that? The address is SciFri at ScienceFri.com. Send us feedback. Tell us what you'd like us to cover. Have a great weekend. I'm Ira Flato.