Science Friday - Understanding Caribbean Volcano Eruption, Billions Of T-Rexes, Pterosaur Necks, Lost Feasts. April 16, 2021, Part 2

Episode Date: April 16, 2021

Understanding St. Vincent’s Volcanic Eruption Since April 9th, the Caribbean island of St. Vincent has been rocked by eruptions at the La Soufrière volcano. Over the last week, plumes of ash and gas have rained down on the island, and dense masses of debris, called pyroclastic flows, are destroying everything in their path. Tens of thousands of residents have been evacuated.   La Soufrière has only erupted a handful of times in recorded history, most recently in 1979. But the volcano has a deadly legacy, both for St. Vincent and beyond. Joining Ira to discuss La Soufrière’s impact is Jazmin Scarlett, a social and historical volcanologist based in Newcastle upon Tyne, England.     How Many T-Rexes Once Roamed the Earth? Maybe Billions Tyrannosaurus rex is probably one of the most popular dinosaurs, but there’s still a surprising amount of mystery surrounding these animals, including basic facts like how many there once were. One team of researchers recently decided to figure out how many T-rexes existed during their long reign. The group of scientists did some back of the envelope calculations and came up with a rough population size estimate of 2.5 billion T-rexes over 2.5 million years, with an error rate of plus or minus a factor of 10. Their results were published in the journal Science. Paleontologist Charles Marshall, who was one of the authors on the study, joins Science Friday to explain how they combined fossil records and data from present day animals to calculate the population density of these charismatic carnivores.     Pterosaurs Had A 40-Foot Wingspan And A Giraffe-Like Neck During the age of dinosaurs, there were all sorts of creatures flying through the air with different body shapes and sizes. One of those was a flying reptile called the azhdarchid pterosaur. This stork-like creature had the neck of a giraffe, and a 40-foot wingspan. A group of scientists wanted to know more about the internal structure of the pterosaur’s long neck. Their results were published in the journal iScience. Paleontologist Nizar Ibrahim talks about what this pterosaur can tell us about the evolution of flight, and how it might inform our understanding of other prehistoric animals and dinosaurs found in Africa.     SciFri Book Club Digs Into The Foods We’ve Loved To Death Did humans kill off the mammoths? What happened to the mysterious Roman herb, known as silphium, that was once worth its weight in gold? Can lab-grown meats help save what’s left of our planet’s biodiversity from climate change and habitat loss? Food geographer Lenore Newman sets out to answer these questions, and more, in her 2019 book, Lost Feast: Culinary Extinction and the Future of Food, this spring’s Science Friday Book Club pick. In the book, she eats her way around the world and through history, examining the stories of the dodo bird, Icelandic dairy cows, the passenger pigeon, the Bartlett pear—and all its cousins—and the food species threatened by the sixth great mass extinction. SciFri producer and Book Club captain Christie Taylor talks to Newman about some of the surprises from her research, and what might be next for the foods we love.   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. Since last Friday, the Caribbean island of St. Vincent has been rocked by eruptions at the La Soufaire volcano. Over the last week, plumes of ash and gas have plagued the island. Flows of debris are destroying whatever is in its path. Last time this volcano erupted was in 1979. So what's been happening in St. Vincent and in the volcano? Joining me today to fill us in on the impact of this volcanic event is Dr. Jasmine Scarlett, historical and social volcanologist, based in Newcastle upon Tyne, England. Welcome, Jasmine, to Science Friday. Hello. Take this a picture, of you will, of where this volcano is, where on the island of St. Vincent

it is, how far from people, all that kind of stuff. Okay, so last year is, it's actually part of a chain of volcanic centers. this tiny little island on mainland St Vincent. So these chain of volcanoes, they are extinct, but they run from south to the north, and Nassafira is the active volcano in the north and the island. And I essentially describe this island as a small island of a big volcano in it, because Nassafirah dominates pretty much the northern half of the island. And people live quite close to this volcano.

So this volcano can pretty much impact everything. everybody on the island because it's just that big. When a lot of us think of volcanoes, we think of lava. Is there lava coming from La Sufraer? Yeah. So the time of lava is not what you would think it is. So in December, when this eruption started, it was a diffusive eruption. And this was basically the quiet oozing out of lava.

But compared to, say, Kilauea, for example, in Hawaii, this lava doesn't travel. very far because it's very sticky and it's very blocky and it's just can't flow that far. So what it does instead is it forms a dome. And what happened since December was a new dome was growing alongside the old dome, which happened at the end of the 1979 eruption. So this is the kind of lava that you see. It doesn't go very far, particularly because of the shape of a volcano as well. It can't actually escape the volcano unless there's like low.

and loads and loads of it, but it didn't actually get to that stage. So it's not the kind of typical lava that you think it is. So the dome was sort of a warning that something was going to happen? Yes, essentially. But the problem is that we just didn't know exactly. So this kind of behavior of forming a lava dome and then go into an explosive phase is common philosopher and actually quite common for volcanoes in the Caribbean. So for us, we kind of knew something would happen.

but we just didn't know when. So we didn't know it was going to happen in April. We didn't know that from the growth of the dome. Have a lot of people been evacuated? Yes. So there's, in the red zone is approximately 20,000 people. So they were evacuated pretty much under 24 hours from the first explosion, which I have to say, really give me like a heart palpitations

because I was like, oh, my God, this is very close, but hats off to, a seismic research center, volcanologists, for actually calling it, because essentially they save thousands of people's lives. Has anyone been injured or killed? As far as we know, no. But these kind of reports, they can be quite sketchy, because now there is an exclusion zone down to the orange zone of La Sufrey. So only authorized officials can go in there.

However, we do know that there has been some people that has stayed behind, even though the prime minister and the volcanologists have been trying to encourage them to leave because it is very dangerous to stay there. Yeah, no, I've heard a lot of people talking about pyroclastic flows that are coming from this volcano. Can you define for us what a pyroclastic flow is? Yes, so the new term that volcanologists use are called pyroclastic density currents, but we can still use pyroclastic flows. The French use the term no yondont as well, which translates to burning avalanches.

So essentially, they are very hot and very fast ash flows. And particularly for La Sufre, there are the results of ash column collapse. So essentially some of the plumes that are being generated, they basically can't be sustained from the heat of convection so they collapse. And these are very dangerous because they can flow up to 300 miles per hour they can be up to a thousand degrees Celsius, so very hot and very fast. And they're dangerous because, for one thing, we don't actually still don't really understand how they behave and how they work. But they can be chenelines down river valleys, they can blanket flanks of volcanoes, they can travel uphill and surmounted topography.

They can flow over water as well. So these things are very, very dangerous. And for Lafrae, they can pretty much. impact the whole kind of area where the volcano is. What is it made out of? Is it rock? Is it dirt? Is it part of the mountain? What is it composed of? So it is a mixture of all of that. So it's mainly volcanic material that's in the ash plume and coming out of the volcano, but also gases as well and any debris that it picks up as well. Wow, I didn't know that. As of this recording, there are explosions at the volcano at least once a day

and it's been a week now, when will we know that the volcano is done? So this is a question I have been getting a lot, and the answer is we do not know. So, for example, the 1812 eruption of Las Zafere went on for six weeks, the 1902 eruption, which the 2021 eruption is being compared to went on for 10 months, and the 1979 one went on for two weeks. So we obviously do not know, but what could happen is, that it could quiet down for a bit, but then it could actually pick up its momentum and its activity again

at a later stage. And that was quite common at Lasso Fred to be energetic in the beginning, be quiet for a little bit, but then also pick up back up again. So we really do not know, and that's why it's very important to keep monitoring what's going on at the volcano.

Is the water safe to drink, the air safe to breathe around there? What are officials saying about that and food and all these other kinds of things that people need to know? So with the foods, all these crops have been destroyed or essentially the vegetation has been stripped off their bark, and that's to be expected. So foods that naturally grows and fruits, particularly that naturally grow,

they cannot be eaten and they cannot be marketed. Similar water, if they're not being protected, it's like covered properly or sealed properly, particularly water tanks, they'll be contaminated, so you would have to at least boil the water before you use it because of the contaminants within the volcanic ash, because volcanic ash actually has quite a lot of sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide in it, so it could actually, you know, be harmful to your health and to animals' health as well. So what is happening currently is It's been around the clock work with maintenance, with the water systems,

to make sure people that have been evacuated and the southern portion of the island has that water. Because the volcano, it is a natural source of water, and they do use that. So, of course, they can't use it right now. So they have to try and find alternatives. So there's quite a lot of bottled water being provided. Air quality would be a bit poor. So that's why they have to. to make sure they protect their face and mouths because essentially volcanic ash is very tiny particles

of rock and glass. So it's very abrasive to your skin and to your eyes. And if you inhale these, they can cause respiratory problems, particularly you have asthma. That's a problem. Yeah, even if you're not in those pyroclastic flows, you still have to be careful because the volcanic ash is like a, it's what we call a distal hazard. So something that impacts people further away from the the volcano. This is all fascinating. The last time As Sufraer erupted was back in 1979. What's the legacy of this volcano for the communities around it? Are they used to it? Are they prepared? Are they

not surprised? What does it mean? So with the legacy of the 1979 eruption, so essentially after that eruption, for the past 40 years, there's been continuous awareness and preparedness being put in place. So I was speaking to a colleague and when it was happening and I was kind of worried, I was like, had to be reminded that actually the one place, the one island that would be prepared for this would be St. Vincent because there's been so much effort into preparing communities and with the government as well in terms of making sure their contingency plans are in place, make sure the emergency management plans are in place. They also have their own national emergency management organisation.

that, you know, have been trained to deal with these kind of situations. So in terms of preparedness, they're probably as prepared as they could be, I would say. Now, I know that you know this volcano very well because you did your PhD about La Sufriere. What is it like for you? I would consider this to be my volcano if I were you. I study this. I've lived it. How does this all make you feel?

If I'm honest, it still feels quite surreal because when this was happening, even when the effusive activity in the Lava Dome started in December, I was thinking like I would at least be retiring age or like not in my lifetime that this would happen. So it's quite surprising for me in terms of a person. But from a scientific standpoint, it is, this is my time, my opportunity to do. do more research on this. Do you feel like you should be there now looking at it, documenting it, talking to the people? Absolutely. And I've been so frustrated that I can't be there because it is really surreal because

my PhD essentially did what if this volcanic corruption happened today kind of scenario minus COVID. And a lot of things I've actually predicted is actually happening right now. Like for example, I did talk about that people will stay behind. and that's happened. I talked about disaster relief and a humanitarian kind of like assistance and that's happening now.

I talked about how the evacuation would work and that's what's happening as well. So it is frustrating for me because I could be there to help and you know, this is not just me feeling this is actually my colleagues who are vulcanologists in the UK who have studied last of spread.

They're also like we should be there helping them because more hands will actually make things go faster, understand what's going on more faster. So yes, I am very frustrated. Yeah, I can hear it in your voice. My heart and my good wishes go out to you and all the folks over there by the volcano. Thank you.

Dr. Jasmine Scarlett, historical and social volcanologist based in Newcastle upon time in England. We're going to take a break, and we're going to take you through a dinosaur math problem. what was the population size of T-Rexes? How many were there? We'll take you through the back of the envelope calculations after the break. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Who doesn't know or want to know more about T-Rex? And that's good because there's still a lot we don't know about the charismatic carnivore. One of the questions a team of researchers had was how many total T-Rexes,

how many individual dinos actually existed. And how would you calculate that? That group of scientists did some back of the envelope calculations and came up with a rough estimate, get this, of 2.5, 2.5 billion T-Rexes over 2.5 million years. That's plus or minus a factor of 10. The results were published in the journal Science. My next guest is one of the authors on that study.

Here to quench those Cretaceous stats with us. Charles Marshall, Director of the University of California, Museum of Paleontology in Berkeley, California. Welcome to Science Friday. Good morning, thank you. This sounds like a crazy idea. I mean, not really, but what made you come up with this? Ever since I was a kid, I was struck by how rare fossils were.

If I have a fossil in my hand or I see a T-Rex skeleton, I know that it's rare, but I've always asked myself, how rare? One in a million, one in a billion, one in a trillion. And then I realized, I think I know how to calculate that number. Fill us in on how you did that. But the fossil record alone, it's simply not possible. However, on the landscape today, the bigger the animal, the rarer it is. There are fewer elephants and there are zebras compared to rabbits or mice.

So it turns out there's a very strong relationship between body mass and population density. And I realize that relationship is strong enough that if we had an estimate of T-Rex body mass, which we do, we could estimate its density. All we need to do is multiply that density by the geographic area over which T-Rex lived, and that would give us the total number of T-Rex that lived at any one time. And then all I need to know is the geologic longevity and the number of generations that represents, multiply that, and I get the total number of T-Rex that ever lived. You know, two and a half billion sounds like a lot of T-Rex.

It's a lot of T-Rex. We were surprised by the size of that number. At any one time, it's pretty small. 20,000, a few tens of thousands. I remind you that our human population now, we have about 5 billion adults alive right now. So it's tiny compared to the human population sizes. So can you give us an idea of how many live per square mile, for example?

So it looks like the density is about one T-Rex per 40 square miles. I believe that Manhattan is about 23 square miles. So there'd be about one T-Rex in the area of Manhattan, except I think they were probably clumpy. They were probably following prey. So over time, the average would be about one per Manhattan. Sounds like a lot of number crunching. How did you get all of this data?

So it turns out, particularly in the last 10 or 15 years, our knowledge of T-Rex has increased enormous. Not only is it the iconic dinosaur, it's probably one of the best known dinosaurs, period. And so what we needed for that, we need to know roughly its maximum age, about 28 years. We needed to know how it grew. We have growth curves. You can cut a bone, you can look at the growth rings, and you can estimate its age. You can estimate its body mass, therefore estimate a growth curve.

That enabled us to calculate the generation time. There are enough fossils that you can plot out the geographic area. minimum estimate because the fossil wreck was incomplete. Someone had done some climate modeling, taken it back to the Cretaceous, and using the known distribution of fossils, you can estimate what the climate was that it preferred and then map that out to the rest of North America. It looks like T-Rex may have lived as far north as southern Alaska, Mexico, and perhaps all the way across the eastern, southern, eastern United States. And that gave us a maximum estimate of geographic range, for example.

And one of the variables you had to figure out, I imagine, was how warm-blooded was T-Rex? Ah, yes, very good. The density of animals on the ground is proportional to how warm-blooded they are. Warm-bloodedness takes a lot of energy, so there are less animals. So I think they're about 35 times more lizards, for example, than small mammals of the same size that have the same diet. everybody agrees that T-Rex was warm-blooded. Most people agree that it was probably a little less warm-blooded than, say, a lion or a tiger. Some people think the only way they could get so large, so fast, was if they had a metabolism similar to that of a Komodo dragon. Komodo dragons turn out to be a lot more energetic than the average lizard.

Other paleontologists feel a Komodo dragon is just too cool-blooded to be a T-Rex. And so what we did is we split the difference and said it's somewhere between a Komodo dragon and a lion. I would add that ecological differences for a given body mass are so large that actually swamps out that uncertainty. For example, spotted hyenas are 50 times denser than jaguars, even though they both have about the same body mass. The difference between our estimate of T-Rex and a Komodo dragon and our estimate of T-Rex and a Kamo-Dragon and our estimate of T-Rex and a mammal is it just a factor of two. I understand that you've ignored juvenile T-Rexes. Why is that?

So we ignored juvenile T-Rexes for two reasons. We hoped we could ignore them. If I start off with 100 eggs and they hatch, it's very hard to get any evidence in the fossil record of their and to account for them. The main reason we ignored them is it looks like as they cross into sexual maturity, that they increase in bite force,

they're changing their ecological role. Moreover, when we go to places like Hell Creek, where T-Rex are most common, even though you'd expect more than half of those fossils to be juveniles, it turns out that only 15% are. That suggests they're living somewhere else, where they're not being fossilized, and ecologically playing a different role.

And therefore, in effect, they're almost like a different species. So we just considered that adult T-Roleys. T-Rex. And why is figuring out the population density of T-Rex so important to you? And did you learn stuff that you thought you knew but turned out to be wrong or some new things you never heard of before? The focal record is the only way we know about things like T-Rex and T-Rex, mass extinctions, the history of our own species.

But it's incomplete and it's past. It's gone. So one of my major interests is how much can we know? and how do we go about knowing it? So this was partly an exercise in just seeing how much we can know. I had no idea how much we knew about T-Rex when I began this study. There's a lot of creative work, a lot of fossils discovered, a lot of clever ways of analyzing those fossils.

I was very surprised at the ecological shift. I didn't know about that. I was surprised that we could get a very tight number for the generation time, 19 years plus or minus one. I was surprised at how many T-Rex ever lived. that really surprises me a lot, the size of that number. We also did the calculation of the preservation rate where T-Rex are most common. Across the whole geologic and geographic range, it looks like we have about one in every

80 million individuals that ever walk the earth. In Hell Creek, it looks like we have about one in 16,000. And that strikes me as being an incredible fossil recovery rate. Good, happy hunting to everybody who's looking for more T-Rex, They're still out there. Indeed. Thank you very much for taking time to be with us today. You are most welcome.

We all learned a lot. Charles Marshall, Director of the University of California Museum of Paleontology in Berkeley, California. During the age of dinosaurs, there was no air traffic control. It was probably out of control because there were all sorts of creatures flying through the air with different body shapes and sizes. One of those was a flying reptile called Asdarkid. Teresore. Imagine a pelican-like creature with the neck of a giraffe and a 40-foot wingspan. A group of scientists wanted to know more about the internal structure of the pterosaur's ridiculously long neck.

Their results were published in the journal, I Science. My next guest is one of the authors on that study. These are Ibrahim is a paleontologist and anatomist. University of Portsmouth in Portsmouth, England. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks so much for having me, Ira. Did I get that description right, or could you be a little more specific? Well, it's really difficult to describe these creatures because they're kind of like dragons from deep time. There's nothing alive today that really looks anything like a pterosaur. Terrorosaurs are flying reptiles, so they're not bats or birds. They're not related to those groups. They have a really unique anatomy. And some of them, in particular the Ashdarka terrors, reached gigantic sizes with which, wingspans of 10 meters or more, so well over 30 feet. And figuring out how these creatures work is really challenging. They have long necks, really long skulls, big wings.

And Asdarka terrorsorsors also looked like they were pretty competent walking around on land. So just think giant stork hunting things on land. Some of them would have been as tall as a giraffe when standing on the ground. Working on these terrosaurus really is like working on extraterrestrial. from outer space. Is a pterosaur classified as a dinosaur? No, they are kind of distantly related to dinosaurs, but they are not dinosaurs. And so what we're trying to do in our work is look at the internal structure of the bones of these ashdarka terosaurs. And tell us what you found, especially about the neck bone. I understand that's really interesting from a mechanical engineering

point of view. Yeah, these animals have long necks. The neck bones are really, slender and long, at least some of them are. They're not all the same, of course. So for a long time, we've kind of reconstructed their necks in a fairly simplistic fashion as these long tubes. And so you'd have the neural canal going through the middle, kind of like a tube within a tube. But we know that these animals were, in some cases, really, really big. And we know that they would have had to use their necks for all sorts of things, you know, to maybe if they were catching prey on land, you know, to kind of strike down and catch prey and then lift prey up. So you've got a real penundrum there because you need some stability and some strength, right? But then, of course,

if you're a flyer, your bones are also very light, right? And so, and we know that pterosaurs had very thin bone walls. But we have this three-dimentially preserved neck bone and using cutting-edge technology, we're able to look at the inside of this bone, CT scanning it. And we saw this incredible network of bony struts, a little bit like the spokes on a bicycle wheel, they provided this incredible structure, very lightweight structure, that conferred a lot of additional strength and prevented buckling and catastrophic failure in the bone. So it's a really impressive feat of biological engineering, if you like. You know, you have this beautiful framework with these little spokes coming out and stabilizing

the vertebra from the inside. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. If you're thinking that some of these pterosaurs didn't fly, right, because they were too big or too heavy, why would they have the wings or would the wings evolve away? They were still capable of flight,

even the really big ones. A couple of people suggested that maybe they were too big, but I think they still have the really big wings and attachment circuses for very large muscles. They have the light bone. So they have all the tail, signs of flyers. So they were still flying, but they may have spent more time on the ground,

catching prey on the ground. And there's some really interesting stories about some of these giant terrorsorsors. One type of these Ardarka terrorsors actually lived on, amongst other places, tiny islands in what is now Europe. One of those is known as Hatag Island. So their discoveries mostly from Romania, what is today, Romania. You probably know there's some islands where dwarf elephants used to live, right? Places in the Mediterranean where, you know, you see what we call island dwarfism. And you probably also know there's a type of ancient human

homo Florisians that experienced island dwarfism on the island of Flores in what is Indonesia. You know, dinosaurs experience the same sorts of evolutionary pressures. And so you have these islands of dwarves. So, you know, think long-necked dinosaur with a long tail, but about the size of a pony instead of, you know, the length of three school.

And so you had these tiny dinosaurs, but then you also had these giant, enormous flying reptiles. And of course, the thing is, the giant flying reptiles were not limited because they could, you know, fly wherever they wanted, right? So they did not experience the same evolutionary pressures, right? If you're a big flying reptile, you can fly anywhere you want. You can go to a big landmass, you're not bound to island life. Everything is small, but then you get these giant flying reptiles, and they would probably scare the hell out of you if you're traveling.

back in time to this place. Some of them have a three meter long skull, like about nine feet, so pretty terrifying. That's bigger than any big dinosaur. Many people often don't realize just how big these things were. And even for us, as paleontologists, it's really hard to wrap your head around this. The Azdarka terosaur fossil was found in Morocco. I know that you study dinosaurs in Africa. What would the age of dinosaurs over there look like? Were there T-rexes, stegosaurus, these types of dynos, or were they completely different animals? So one of the things I'm trying to do kind of like an overriding theme to my research is I'm trying to tell the story of Africa's age of dinosaurs, and it was very different.

So the world our terrorist war lived in, for example, was a very strange one. These fossils were found in the Sahara Desert, which is one of the driest and most inhospitable places in the world today. But about 100 million years ago, this place, that we now call the Sahara was home to a huge river system. I was home to several T-Rex-sized predatory dinosaurs. No T-Rex, though. Very different ones, including a crocodile-snouted, sailback dinosaur called Spinosaurus, fish-eating predatory dinosaur, as well as lots of crocs and turtles

and flying reptiles, giant car-sized fish, really, really strange sort of ecosystem. And so that really serves as a reminder that there are many, many places in the world we haven't really explored. Speaking of which, then, what are some of the big questions you have about dinosaurs in Africa to fill in the picture? Well, Africa is important, not just because it's a really big place, but also because there are some geological layers that are not well represented in other parts of the world, but they are present in Africa.

So discoveries from Africa can shed light on the early evolution of some dinosaur groups. from places like North America, right? Another thing we can do in Africa is to test the idea that our African dinosaur fossil assemblage is simply replicating what we see in other parts of the world, like Europe and North America, or are they very different? And as I said a moment ago, they seem to be very different. And we can also learn things about the very end of the age of dinosaurs. One of the big questions in dinosaur paleontology is, you know, where the dinosaurs kind of

on their way out when the big meteorite hit our planet or where they're still very successful. Some people are saying, well, in North America, there's some evidence suggesting that dinosaurs were already becoming less diverse and they're kind of on their way out. But there's some places in Africa where we can look at some of the very last dinosaurs alive before the end of their rain. And we might see something very different. A lot of it is about just improving our data sets. You know, right now many people don't realize just how biased our data. sets are. They're really very, you know, Western-centric in many ways. This has been fascinating, Nizhar. Thank you for taking time to be with us today.

Sure. My pleasure. Nizzer, Ibrahim, is a paleontologist and anatomist University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, England. After the break, is it possible to love a food to death from the dodo and the mammoth to lost varieties of fruit? Plus, how can you participate in this spring's sci-fri book club? All coming up. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Iro-Plateau.

Mmm, lunchtime. Let's see what I packed today. Yep, okay, we got an apple. Great. Some honey. Yeah, that'll go nicely with the apple. Ooh, vanilla yogurt. And a whole bluefin tuna.

Now, that's weird. A stick of Icelandic butter. Okay, I think I know what's going on. Yo, Christy Taylor. Oh my gosh, Ira. I think we switched lunch bags by accident. I'm so sorry. You think?

I'm guessing you got my lunch, and I've got whatever random mishmash this is. Actually, those foods aren't random, Ira. They have something in common. They're all the subject of our spring book club pick, Lenore Newman's Lost Feast, which is a book about the foods that we've eaten to extend. or are at risk of being lost.

Aha. Well, now that makes more sense. The tuna, the honey, given what we've been hearing about bees, and lots of varieties of apples, we know their history. But what's up with the butter? Icelandic butter? Yeah. That Icelandic butter comes from a cow that only lives on Iceland.

Those cows have been bred over centuries to produce uniquely flavorful dairy products from a very harsh environment. And as the demand for Icelandic dairy products goes up, there's a lot of worry about these cows' ability to keep up with demand in a way that doesn't actually endanger them. Rumor has it that the volcanoes naturally churned the butter. Truly, it is supposed to be uniquely good butter. And these are just a couple of many stories Lenore Newman tells us in Lost Feast. Lenore and I chatted earlier this week. And the first thing we talked about was why food extinction was such an important concept. One of the things that really inspired me to write the book

was realizing that there were species that had gone extinct because they were being used for food. And this seemed counterintuitive to me because the food species should be safe, because we care about them. We take care of them. We don't want them to go away because we like eating them. And it turns out that's not exactly true.

We've actually lost a number of species. by over-harvesting them by consuming them to excess. And so this kind of paradox that we were losing species that we really love inspired me to put together the book. One of the first examples that you give is this plant that may sound pretty obscure today, but it was apparently all the rage with the Romans. And it's called sylphium. Yes, sylphium is such an interesting plant species.

We don't quite know what it was exactly, which is one of the oddest things about it. So sylphium was a herb. It was used to excess by the Romans. They put it on everything, and it's in most of the recipes from the time period, and they used both the leaves and the resin. We think it was a little bit like asafatita,

which is a herb used in Indian cooking. And the Romans noted that sylphium was similar, but much better. We can assume that it tasted very nice. In writing, it's described as being a little like leaks. And if you've ever had acid patita, it is a little bit like a leak. It's sort of sulfuric, and it's a very strong taste. From what we can gather, sylphium did have similarly interesting properties, such as preventing pregnancy,

which must have been of extremely high value among the higher ranks of Roman society. and it was produced in only one tiny region of North Africa. And it's literally the only place it grew. It was very hard to move, and no one could cultivate it. And they sold it until it was all gone. And the very last stock was given to the emperor Nero, which was a big change from a few centuries before when the Roman treasury actually carried gold, silver,

and also sulfium at all times. And so though it was loved, it went extinct. Going on to other plants, we've talked a lot in this show before about lost varieties of apples, how many we used to have. And if we look at the biodiversity of fruits and vegetables available in the grocery store today in 2021, how does it actually seem to compare to even like 100 years ago? We have lost in North America about 90% of the varieties of plants that we did use. The way to think of that is they aren't independent species, they're independent subspecies, what we call cultivars.

And it's a bit like if you're from a large family, maybe you have a bunch of cousins. We had a whole bunch of cousins of fruit. Why we did this was because we couldn't move fruit around the globe. We stretched the local season by growing different cultivars. So we'd have a spring apple, a summer apple, a fall apple, a winter apple. and each little region had local varieties because these fruits, they don't breed true. Some plants, if you plant a seed, you get the exact same plant. But in the case of an apple, those seeds will not give you the same tree again because there's genetic material for multiple trees because of pollination.

And so that new apple tree is going to be unique, much as we are. What we've lost is a lot of these varieties that were carefully discovered and then cloned, which is how we make new apple trees if we find a good one. So you can think of it. It's like having a library. And it's like we burnt a large part of that library. And yes, we can make new varieties and we do all the time because the old ones actually wear out. They're like a photocopy.

If we take, say, the Red Delicious. They're awful. They're so poorly named. They're terrible. We have to assume the original Red Delicious was good. Over the century or so we've used it, it's gotten copied so many times that you start to get transcription errors. And it starts to get weaker and weaker over time. And now we have that mealy terrible thing that we get in conference rooms.

And this is actually important. I mean, yes, it's sad. We can't go into a store and have 100 different types of apples to choose from. So that would be very cool. But more importantly, if a disease strikes or a new instance, insect strikes. We need that genetic diversity to go back to to breed resistance, to breed new varieties. So we do need to maintain variety in our food species, and a lot of that has been lost. Is there a number, the number of culinary extinctions or the percentage of biodiversity that we

eat that has been lost to time? It's actually a very hard number to really quantify. And part of that is because there's maybe, say, 50,000 species on Earth that we feel have potential as food species. And we only eat a few hundred of those, maybe a thousand at most. So over the last couple millennia, maybe a hundred of those have gone extinct that we can point to with a few really high value ones that we really noticed, like the passenger pigeon. Now, that number expands if we go back to the time of the megafauna, the Pleistine, in which we lost the great bulk of the Earth's large species due to hunting. A lot of that isn't even documented. I mean, there's ones people know about like the mammoth or the Macedon,

but what you can really trace is a pattern. As humans moved out of Africa and populated the world, wherever we went, species went extinct. If you count the cultivars, we've lost, you know, of thousands of some species. The plant cultivars that you were talking before. Exactly. And including animal cultivars, which we call

breed, a lot of those are gone too. I feel like the first culinary extinction story I ever heard was the story of the dodo. And, you know, it goes like this. Sailors landed on Mauritius and proceeded to club a bunch of really dumb birds to death for soup. But you write in Lost Feast

that it was actually more complicated and nuanced than just they were dumb and we ate them. How did it really go? The Dodo is a bit of a mythical culinary extinction, but it's a great example of an island extinction. And yeah, eventually sailors find this island and it has a bunch of really interesting species, including one that is really cool. Most people don't realize DOTA's were big. They were about a meter high and they weighed like 50 pounds. And yes, sailors ate them occasionally.

but from everything we know they tasted terrible. There's actually documentation about how bad they were. They were tough. They were fishy. But the first attempt to colonize Mauritius was largely a failure, but they left a couple of things on the island. They left pigs and rats. Well, the problem with flightless birds is they nest on the ground.

And pigs and rats very quickly eliminated the dodo because they ate all the eggs. Well, and if we look then to the future of food, because you're not just talking about past extinctions, but what may come. What future losses of food species concern you most? What do you see is most at risk right now? I am most worried about fish populations at the moment. They're hard to protect because they're under the water, of course. It's a wild harvest. It happens in the international water. where jurisdictions are tricky, and climate change impacts the oceans in ways we don't quite understand yet. I'm also very worried about rainforest ecology, because the rainforests contain most of our species.

They're like these giant libraries of beautiful, crazy stuff, and they're being cleared at a very rapid rate, mostly to produce things for the developed countries, particularly beef, animal feed, palm oil is another big one. And we need to get a handle on that very quickly because once we lose that, we can't get it back. On the other side of that, I apologize, you are bullish about the future of cow-like foods and not just advances in fake meat, but lab-grown proteins. You mentioned 3D-printed salmon. Is it possible to get psyched then about these possibilities? Yes, and I'm extremely bullish on cellular agriculture, the science of creating animal products without animals. It's moving forward extremely rapidly and the environmental savings are stunning.

You get multiple benefits. First, the environmental savings of 80 to 90 percent on water, on land, on climate impact, but you also solve the ethical problem. I'm a fisherman's daughter. I grew up in the industry. And the truth is animal harvest is a messy business. It's cruel, even when we do it well. And before people are like, they're clinging to their dilton cheese or their waggo beef. Look at it this way. About 70% of the beef in America goes into hamburgers. And about 80% of the dairy chain goes into powdered milk products.

If we just replaced that with substitutes. So if we use that grown meat technology to produce hamburger, and we use fermentation-based dairy technology, which is one that I study, if we use that to produce powdered milk products, we've just slashed, you know, 70 to 70 to 80 percent of the industry. And we can concentrate on higher-end value products if we really want to. But even if we just do that, it's one of the most massive things we can do for climate change. It dwarfs air travel, for example. it's going to be the story you're hearing for the next 10 years is plant-based and cell-based production of protein.

I'm Christy Taylor. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. One last question. You went on many adventures. You traveled. You ate a lot of food in the process of researching this book. What blew your mind most to learn in the process of this culinary adventure? You know, I love what I do. One of the things that really keeps me going is meeting people. who care about food, the chefs, the producers, people working on ecology, they're so passionate. For this book, there were definitely some highlights. The screaming frogs of Hawaii were a surprise. That was interesting. One of the travel highlights for me was going to the Canada's far north. How much wilderness there is, how big it is, how many wild animals there are. And seeing a wild herd of bison, for example, was sort of show stopping. They're so

amazing those animals. And to imagine what it must have been like to have millions of them roaming the prairies, it's a little stunning to think about. Lenore Newman is a director of the Food and Agricultural Institute at the University of the Fraser Valley in British Columbia, Canada, and the author of Lost Feast, Culinary Extinction in the Future of Food. It was really great to talk to you. No worries. It was so much fun and really glad to take part. All right, Christy, you know, you're right. I'm ready. and I dare say I am hungry to learn more about culinary extinctions. And whatever the heck, Lenore was saying about screaming frogs. Okay, how can people get involved in this spring's reading?

Well, Ira, per usual, our website is the best first place to stop. ScienceFriiday.com slash book club. From there, you can join our online discussion community, sign up for our email newsletter, and even read a full chapter of Lost Feast for free. And if you haven't gotten your copy of Lost Feast for free, is the time. Our friends at Powell's books are offering discounted copies all month, and we're partnering with libraries to offer unlimited e-book loans as well. Plus, we'll be having events

for the next month, and we're even doing a cooking class that you can enter to win a spot in. Ooh, sign me up. You know how much I like to cook. Well, per our ethics guidelines, Ira, you cannot sign up for a free spot. You can join us online as soon as next Tuesday, April 20th, when we're bringing Lenore back for an audience Q&A, along with slow food farmer Mimi Edelman. We'll be talking about losing agricultural diversity, some of the things being done to reverse culinary extinction, and we'll be taking as many listener questions as we can. Of course, information on how to join and more on our website, Science Friday.com slash book club.

Terrific, Christy. I can't wait to chow down. Thanks for stopping by. And if you could just put my lunch back in the fridge on your way out, that would be great. You got it, Ira. I'd rather microwave that tuna anyway. Thanks to sci-fry producer Christy Taylor for that delicious preview of this spring's Lost Feast Book Club. Learn everything you need to know, including how to join author Lenore Newman and a virtual chat on Zoom next week. You can learn all of that on our website, science friday.com slash book club. And as you read Lost Feast this spring, we'll be listening for your voice memos on the SciFri Voxpop app. Tell us what you're thinking, discovering, feeling curious about. That's on the SciFri Vox Pop app wherever you get your apps. Oh, one last thing,

our SciFri Soundcape. We're taking you to Central America, where Jaguar poaching is a big issue. The sounds of bullets and barking dogs are telltale signs that poachers are around. In 2017, to combat this issue, Wildcat Conservation Group Panthera set up acoustic monitoring devices. in Guatemala and Honduras. These recorders collect the sounds of the forest. Those sounds are what you are hearing now. Scientists, with the help of artificial intelligence, analyze the collected audio.

They can then send wildlife patrols to places where the poachers have been most active. It turns out this is working. Evidence of poaching has gone way down around these recorders. And the forest sounds more as it should. more as it should. Natural. That's about all the time we have. If you missed any part of this program or you would like 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 on social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or email us the old-fashioned

classic way. SciFri at ScienceFri.com. Have a great weekend. We'll see you next week. I'm Ira Flato.