Science Friday - Utah Dino Bones, Salt Lake Migrations, Tree Canopies. Sept. 21, 2018, Part 1

Episode Date: September 21, 2018

If you stood in southeastern Utah over 200 million years ago, you’d be overlooking the ocean. The landlocked state wasn’t quite the same landscape of scarlet plateaus and canyons you might see today, but a coastal desert where sand dunes butted up right against the sea. And it was home to some of the earliest dinosaurs. In this region of Utah, today known as Indian Creek in Bears Ears National Monument, the remains of dinosaur relatives, known as protodinosaurs or “dinosaur aunts and uncles,” are buried in the Earth. Their bones tell the stories about the dawn of dinosaurs, prehistoric Utah, and a much warmer Earth. In the northern reaches of Utah’s Great Salt Lake sits Gunnison Island, a narrow strip of land just a mile long and half a mile wide. Despite its small size, the island hosts the world’s second largest white pelican rookery, with an average of 20,000 birds and 6,000 nests. Biologist Jaimi Butler of Westminster College’s Great Salt Lake Institute calls the birds the “polar bears” of Great Salt Lake—because as lake waters drop, the birds’ island refuge is now threatened by humans, coyotes, and other predators. Butler and her team have installed cameras on the island, and citizen scientists can now use these “PELIcam” images to help Butler and her colleagues catalog the white pelican population on the island—and the appearance of predators, too. Forest ecologist Nalini Nadkarni pioneered the exploration of tree canopies—the “new frontiers” of the forest, using hot air balloons, rock climbing gear, and cranes. There, high in the trees, she found soil coating the branches, much like the soil on the forest floor—and unique adaptations, like the water-gathering abilities of spiky bromeliads. In this segment, recorded live at the Eccles Theater in Salt Lake City, Nadkarni takes Ira on a tour of the forest canopy, talks about how fashion can be a tool for science communication, and describes her work communicating science to underserved populations, like inmates in prisons around the nation—from minimum security to Supermax. 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 coming to you from the Echoes Theater in Salt Lake City. For migrating birds flying for thousands of miles, did you know that Utah is a very popular pit stop? Why is that? The Great Salt Lake. It's like a giant oasis, a service station where the birds can feast, fatten up, and rest. In fact, 10 million birds, 10 million stopped by the Great Salt Lake every year. And if you're counting, that, is three times as many birds as people living in Utah. Yeah, and there are some pretty charismatic species who call the Great Salt Lake their part-time home. My next guest is here to tell us all about a few. Jamie Butler is a coordinator of the Great Salt Lake Institute at Westminster College here in Salt Lake City. Welcome to the program. Tell us why the lake is so special

to the migrating birds. Well, we all know that Great Salt Lake has some salt in it, right? And a lot of times people say to me, oh, well, it's dead or nothing lives in there. And really, it's so alive that sometimes it smells. And you all might have smelled that smell. In fact, my son John often tells me, ah, mom, it reminds me of you. Love comes in many flavors, does it? And smells. Lots of different smells. Is there anything special about the salt that attracts the word? Well, I think, think one of the really cool things about Great Salt Lake is that it's not just salty. It's super hyper-sailing to fresh water and everything in between. And so that's a huge diversity of habitats

for lots of different microorganisms and bugs and then the birds that eat all of those bugs. So the lake is full of shrimp too. Oh, yeah. That was my first love at Great Salt Lake is the brine shrimp. Brine shrimp are really special because they're the only organism that really live, the macro invertebrate that lives in Great Salt Lake full time. And the really cool thing about them is that they lay these hard, walled sists. They're like the little eggs that people harvest and use as fish food. And those little brine shrimp, they can hatch out in the springtime and repopulate the lake for all of those birds.

And one of my favorite facts about brine shrimp is that sometimes in Great Salt Lake, there's so many brine shrimp. There's the biomass equal to 1.8. million people in the lake at one time. Wow. So one point, I mean, like the Wasatch Front in Great Salt Lake at one time. What other kinds of birds do you find? Name some of the popular birds that are in the Great Salt Lake.

I mean, it's hard to name. There's 260 species of birds that lives at Great Salt Lake at some time during the year. Definitely eared grebes. They're these little tiny water birds and they feed primarily on brine shrimp. So every single day, those little eared grubes, they have to eat 28,000 brine shrimp. So they pick them out one by one out of the water. They don't filter a feed.

Every second, they have to catch two brine shroom. Every second? Every second. Another unusual species that loves to hang out is the white pelican. All these white pelicans. American white pelicans come to Great Salt Lake to breed. So there's lots of these little barren islands that they come to scratch. their little barren nests and lay their eggs and breed.

Wow. We're not taking calls this hour, but if you have any questions, we have a couple of microphones in the aisles. Feel free to come and ask your questions. And there's a huge colony living on an island called Gunnison Island, right? Yeah, Gunnison Island, it's a protected island. So the only way that you can go there is if you trespass, which you shouldn't do. And the only other way is to go with the Utah Division of Wildlife Revenue.

resources who manages and conserves the populations of branch rope and birds at Great Salt Lake. And this island is a couple miles long by maybe half a mile wide. And it doesn't have any trees. It's very rocky and there's just like small vegetation on there. It's exactly perfect for pelicans. Wow. You were talking about the odor of birds before. Does Gunnison have its own unique odor? Yeah, so, I mean, maybe some of you have cats, and you could imagine, like, putting your head in the litter box, and then maybe timesing it by 100 and adding some rotten fish and dead birds into the mix, and that's what it smells like. It, like, stays. Yeah. And I don't mean that in a bad way.

That's why I have five grand dogs. I did, you know, we do use these, I think, behind me. me, I have this scarf on and I brought you one of these from Great Salt Lake Institute just in case I stink really bad. Wow. Then you can just put that on. I'm glad I'm not sticking my head in the box on this. This is beautiful.

You're actually holding. Is it tough to catch those birds? What are you doing? What's going on in that picture? So in that picture, that's a juvenile pelican right before it flies. And one of the ways that the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources tries to understand more about these pelicans is they can. them and they put these green wing tags with a white marker on them with the numerical

code so that people all around the world can tell us when they see these birds. So bird nerds, photographers, if you're out there and you're along the Pacific or the central flyway and you have pelicans, please tell us if you see these pelicans with green wing tags. But it turns out, you know, pelicans are very shy. They don't really like humans. They're way smarter than we are. and the baby pelicans are much easier to catch when they can't fly. So we heard them into these little corrals where we're able to catch them and put the tags on them. Watching a video, the pelicans being herded.

Are there dogs that do that? No, the Utah Division of Wildlife just like pays people not very much money to do this. It's pretty funny. And we have the video up at ScienceFriety.com slash Pelicans if you want to see it over and over again, which I'm sure you want to do that. And you have set cameras up all over the island. Yeah, so in 2016, we were watching water levels at Great Salt Lake decrease, and we were watching these land bridges form to their island where they're breeding. And these are little ground nesting birds that if four-legged animals can walk out on this highway, it's, you know, very, it can.

impact these populations greatly and so we decided to put some Pellicams on Gunnison Island. That's the best part about the whole project is the name. So we put these Pellicams on Gunnison Island and there's 15 of them. We originally just planned for one of them and it was going to be a live camera where we could log in and the students I work with at Great Salt Lake Institute at Westminster College they could watch all of these images and see if predators were going out on these land bridges. We can see when the birds were arriving, if they were starting to arrive earlier. We could tell all sorts of things.

And then we were like, well, if we can put one camera, we could put 15. Why not? And so now we have two seasons of the pelicams, two breeding seasons of pelicams with over 200,000 images that we need help analyzing. They don't like take selfies of each other. Well, they have dance parties and they... They do take selfies of each other. I've never seen us.

We're looking at bird selfies. I can't top that so I'm going to the audience. Question here. Yes, there's been a lot of talk about migration and changes with migration patterns because of climate. it changed, and I was just wondering if you've noticed a big change in the populations, and has there been an increase or a decrease that is natural or not natural to our specific area? Are they on course or off course because of that? Thank you so much for this question. I really love this question, and I'm so glad you asked

it. So in the case of eared grebes, there's actually more eared grebes that are coming to Great Salt Lake every year because of our abundant branch shrimp that they love to feast on and fatten on. And the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources has done a really great job of managing their populations, the branch of the plant populations, even though they're harvested. And so we've actually seen an increase in eared grebes.

With pelicans, we don't really know. So you're right that some research has indicated birds are starting to migrate earlier. and that can impact them with like severe spring storms and less food. We don't know with the pelicans. We do know that their populations have stayed pretty stable over the last five years or so. But we don't know because we don't have pelicams, and so we need your help to. Now that's, I'm glad you brought that up because our audience can actually help you with this project.

Tell us how that works. Yeah, please go to zuniverse.org. And Zuniverse is so awesome. and they have been such a big help in this project because, you know, we had 200,000 images to look at. And this is, Zuniverse is a community-based science platform where anybody can go and they can help us analyze all of these pictures of pelicans. Like you can, I don't know if you can see it, but there's some little teeny tiny, ugly salmon-colored babies under that pelican. And you can click on them and tell us all about it. So you want them to look at the photos that you've taken.

and sort through the photos and tell you what they see in each photo. Do you see babies? Do you see pelicans with wing tags? Do you see predators? Do you see humans? Well, if you want to find out and you want to get involved in this, this sounds like a lot of fun, we have a link to the project that our website at sciencefriety.com slash pelicans

if you want to get involved in this. Jamie Butler, coordinator here at the Great Salt Lake Institute at Westminster College here in Salt Lake City. Thank you for... Thank you, Ireland. And if you want to spy on some of those pelicans yourself and help out Jamie's research, as I said before, you can go to Science Friday.com slash pelicans to sign up. And we hope all of you will go do that. After the break, we'll talk about the exotic life hiding up in tree canopies and one scientist's mission to bring biology lessons behind bars.

Stay with us. Taking us to the break, our musical guests for the evening, Salt Lake City's own, the Boys Ranch. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Thank you. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato coming to you from the Echols Theater in Salt Lake City. If you've ever hiked through a rainforest, you'll notice there's a lot of stuff that looks like it's just sprouting from the trees. A hanging garden of orchids or you've got spiky pineapple-looking things.

And, of course, they're always ferns. What's it all doing up there when the soil is down? here underfoot. What about nutrients and water? How does a plant get food up on a tree limb? My next guest has spent her life exploring these exotic worlds overhead, pioneering new ways to get up there too, which has slingshots, rock climbing gear, cranes and hot air balloons, and she's come back down here to Earth to talk to us, tell us about that last frontier of the forest. Now, Leni Nat Carney is a professor of biology at the University of Utah here in Salt Lake City. Science Friday.

Thanks. University of Utah. Go Uts. Is that right? Yes. Go Uds. Tell us what it is that fascinates you so much about the canopies of the trees. Well, you know, in keeping with the theme of tonight, this new frontiers idea, I guess I have to say there are really three reasons why I find the canopies so fascinating and why I've spent the last 35 years climbing up there and trying to understand what's going on up there.

One of them is just it's about trees. And just as some people are attracted to the same. sky or to the stars. I've always been attracted to trees. They're like us. We have crowns. They have crowns. We have limbs. We have trunks. They have trunks. So it's really the trees. But it's also the climbing of trees, which I've loved to do ever since I was a little kid. Just getting up there, you know, with my grasping hands and my binocular vision, which evolved to really make us comfortable, which made us feel at home in the canopy. And I guess the third reason is really because it is, it has been the last biotic frontier.

And I think it's the job of everyone in science, whether you're doing research or learning about it or teaching eighth graders about science to find and discover new things. And the canopy really has not been much explored. So those three things attract me to the canopy. And you've had to invent a lot of new ways to get up there, right? Tell us about some of these things that you've been inventing.

Well, you know, there's the old-fashioned way of climbing, of course. But when you climb into rainforest trees, which are very tall, very often they don't have lower branches, very often they have stinging insects or thorns. It's important to sort of avoid those things by getting ropes into the canopy. I learned from a biologist named Don Perry who used a crossbow to first shoot a line into that.

But I was working in Costa Rica, and so when I would carry my crossbow in the luggage across international borders and said that this was a scientific instrument, I met with some skepticism, So I actually invented an instrument to get that first line into the canopy called a master caster. You have one with you. I did bring it tonight, Ira.

Let's look at that. The master caster, ladies and gentlemen. Look at that. It's got a, for our players at home, let me describe it. It's got a fishing casting reel on it, right? Yes. It looks very much like one. How is it different?

Well, it is a fishing reel. It's actually just a rod. It's about a half a meter long with a fishing reel. underneath it so you can retrieve the line. And then the feature that's most important, of course, is this strong slingshot. Actually, you can buy at any Army Navy store. And so what I do is there's a two ounce fishing weight

here at the end of the line. The idea is to simply hold the fishing weight. You take off the bail right here. You load up the slingshot. So this really gives you the power to move that the weight and the line up and over a first branch. You then tie a parachute cord, a quarter inch nylon, pull that up and over, and then you can tie a regular climbing rope and pull that up and over. Tie one end of the rope off of that.

And after that, you just put on climbing gear, you would get at REI, you jumar up the rope. It's safe. It's non-destructive to the tree. When you're done doing your studies up in the tree, you just pull the rope down, and there you are. Wow, it's great. Now, as someone who raises orchids, I'm always looking at them growing wild in trees. So if I go to Costa Rica, where are you? Yes.

Yeah, you see them all over the place. How do these plants that live up on the canopy? How do they get the nutrients that we would normally do fertilizing them if they lived in the ground? How do they live up there? So these plants, they're called epiphytes, epiphytes, epi meaning a pond, fight meaning plant. They don't have roots that grow into the host tree tissue,

the vascular tissue, nor do they go all the way down to the forest floor. But instead, these plants, and they are enormously diverse, Just orchids alone, 28,000 species of these have evolved ways to capture nutrients from rainfall and mist and just dry deposition, dry particulates falling down. Some of them have tanks that allow them to absorb water from their little ponds. Others have foliage that allow them to take up nutrients through the leaves rather than roots. And these plants then intercept and retain, hold on to those atmospherically born nutrients. When they die and decompose, they stay right there on the branch,

and they create actually this just fascinating stuff, this canopy soil that can be 20, 30 centimeters deep. And you want to know something really cool, Ira? Always. Okay, I know you do. I know you do. When I was a graduate student working in the temperate and tropical rainforests of Washington State in Costa Rica, I was peeling back these mats of living epiphytes

and that dead organic, that canopy soil that was on the limbs, and I found these root systems up high in the canopy. I thought like, where the heck are these coming from? So I traced them back. And it turned out these root systems originated in the trunks and the branches of the host trees themselves. So these canopy plants were generating a soil. The trees are putting out roots into these mats of dead organic matter, absorbing water and nutrients.

So it was kind of a shortcut in nutrient rainforest cycles. And that was really cool. Mind bloom. Yeah. Now, as someone who raises plants and likes to look at plants in different ways that they grow, I noticed that some plants are able to collect water, right? And they can collect water and they use that as their source of water? That's right.

So one big plant family that is epithetic, the bromeliaceae, actually, as you mentioned, the pineapple family, have these tight rosettes of leaves. Water falls into them from rain, leaves fall into them, decompose. They create really their own little microcosm, their own little ecosystem, And there are trichomes or hairs that go into that little pond, and the leaves can then absorb water and nutrients from their own little ponds. So what happens, unfortunately, some of those plants up in the canopy die? Yes, they do. They do die.

Well, that's the cycle of life, right? Yes, it is the cycle of life. What happens to them? Do they fall down? Do they contribute to the nutrients for the other plants? That is also a great question, and that's some work that we did sort of mid-career, where we noted that these epiphytes sometimes would fall down individually, little bits of them might fall down, sometimes they, what I call epislytes.

They're like little avalanches of whole mats of epiphytes that fall to the forest floor. And we would monitor these over the months and found that they experienced something that we called moss meltdown, where they would just decompose and disappear very rapidly. So there's something about the canopy environment that allows these mats of organic matter to persist, but when they fall to the forest floor, which is, of course, wetter, damper,

might have other microbial communities, they decompose, and their nutrients then are available to the terrestrial rooted materials. So epiphytes are really, although it looks and it seems like they're this own little world up there, they're actually deeply connected to the forest as a whole. And that, to me, is really wonderful, too. That's very interesting. If you want to ask a question, you step up to the mic. Question over here, yes.

How do the trees, or the new plants underneath the trees, get enough sunlight to grow, or do they just all die off until, like, another tree falls or breaks down to get sunlight? Yes, that's a very interesting dynamic in tropical rainforests. Because trees are so big, the canopy levels are so layered, there's very little sunlight, sometimes only as little as 2% of the sunlight that comes into the top of the canopy, reaches the bottom of the forest floor. And so very often there's a dynamic, where it's important and necessary for trees to fall down to create a light gap

that allows the next generation of rainforest plants to germinate, to grow, and to survive. I want to ask you something about not about what you study, but what you're wearing. That's a terrific jacket. It's a terrific jacket. Actually, I was in the lobby, and several people came up to me, and they said, wow, I like your jacket. And that is exactly the point of this jacket. This is a new item called Naturewear. Describe it, of course.

Yes, I will. First, it's a smart-looking little jacket. It has patterns of leaves on it, leaves on light, and it's green. It's a bright green color. Not something a lot of people wear to a formal occasion. But in my case, what I'm using this jacket for and more generally fashion, sort of I'm exploring this, is the possibility of using fashion to enhance conservation, to raise awareness of tropical rainforest. So the pattern that you see here is, um...

It's actually the pattern. It's a photograph I took of a plant called Piper Oridum. It's related to Piper Nygrim, which is the plant that makes black pepper. It lives in the tropical montane forest of Costa Rica, one of the most threatened ecosystems by climate change because of the loss of mist and fog as temperatures go up. So I took this photograph. We had it printed on fabric. I worked with the theater of the costume room designer at the University of Utah. We brought in a tailor and we created this. But what What's most important is when someone like you, Iris, says, I really like your jacket. There's also a hang tag here which has information about Piper Aretum, the fact that it is, in fact, related to Piper Nygrim, the black pepper that you put on your scrambled eggs. You know, this is fantastic because one of the things we always talk about is scientists as communicators. Yes, that's right. This is an absolute great demonstration of great science communication.

And I think, too, what is also important is that we have information here about. joining the Rainforest Alliance and other conservation groups. So this is something that anybody who wears this nature wear becomes a walking vector not only for education but conservation. And I think it's sort of hilarious that ecologists who are probably the worst dress people in the nation might intersect with an industry, the fashion industry that we view as being the most consumeristic, the most wasteful, the most polluting. But in fact I think we, as as scientists have to look everywhere for ways that we can create opportunities to spread our scientific knowledge and the deep importance of conservation.

Yes. And in spreading that, and in creating that deep conversation, you take that conversation, I understand, into prisons, too, correct? Yes, I do. This actually was an idea that grew out of an ecological problem that concerned epiphytic moss. I was living in the Pacific Northwest. I learned that there's an industry sort of on secondary plant materials where people go out to the old growth forest of the Pacific Northwest and just grab mosses from branches and trunks

of trees in the old growth forest, which they then sell to people in the horticulture trade, the florist trade, and so forth. And as our research has shown, this moss takes a very long time to grow back, two, three, four decades. So it's not a sustainable industry. So I thought, well, if I could learn how to find

moses, maybe that would take some of the pressure off of this wild collecting. So I wanted to learn how to grow mosses. I didn't have any students or a greenhouse at the time. And I began thinking, who would be great partners in this? People who would really enjoy and benefit from contact with nature. Maybe people who don't have access to nature. People who have a lot of time and a lot of space. And it occurred to me that probably the incarcerated men and women and youth of our country,

of which we have 2.2 million, and 100,000 youth who are incarcerated, they might be exactly the right partners, and it turned out that that was the case. My students and I brought mosses to a small minimum security prison in Washington State. We taught the men how to tell the species apart, and they helped us learn which species of mosses

grew the fastest. And that led to other conservation projects, other educational projects. It was pretty cool. We started programs five years ago here in Utah, so we have science lecture series, and conservation projects at the Draper State Prison, just 30 miles south, with the Salt Lake County Jail. And now recently we just got some funding from the Juvenile Justice Service.

So we have five juvenile detention centers where we're bringing science lectures and conservation projects. That's been really fabulous. Amazing. I'm Ira Flato, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Do you know, do you follow up with the prisoners to see if it affects their lives at all? We get a lot of information from the men and women and youth who are inside. It's very difficult to follow up over the long term. Basically, once they're off parole, they're really on their own,

and even the Department of Corrections can't contact them. But we do get information every now and then, a letter or a visit from one of these inmates who has been released and has since found work with landscaping. One of them actually has gotten his PhD and has done a postdoc at the University of Nevada, inspired by the work that he encountered. encountered with us. So I think that's, but you know, I think even though that's a big impact

and even though that sounds really wonderful, I think really the biggest impacts are on the scientists who go into the prisons and into the jail, who have the opportunity to interact with inmates, to hear their good questions, to recognize that this is a group of people who are as interested in science as you are and who may not have the opportunity to go to a library, go to a museum, to learn, but when you present them with science as well as you can with a single lecture from a graduate student or a faculty member in the Department of Biology, for example, at the University of Utah, that spark of science, that feeling of curiosity, that desire to penetrate a new frontier is present in those men and women and youth just as it is in people who aren't

incarcerated. Very, very interesting. I see our audience is interested also. They've lined up at the mic. Yes, sir. How do these seeds or spores or whatever? How do they take root in the canopy, in the leaves or the trees or whatever? How do they take root?

Yeah. Yes. There are a couple of ways. In many, many canopy plants, such as orchids, which I was very, very interested in, these orchids produce millions and millions of what we call dust seeds. They're just tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny seeds. They flow through the air, almost like pollen, and they can settle on branch surfaces or trunk surfaces. If the conditions are right, if there's enough moisture,

if the proper fungus is there, usually they require a fungus, especially orchids, then those plants can germinate and take place. Mosses, for example, use a different kind of strategy. Very often they break off little pieces of them, and those can sort of flow through the air or fall around, and those little bits of mosses can get stuck in a crevice of the bark, and then they can take off as well.

So the germination and the survival of these plants is very similar to what we see with plants on the forest floor. But if you think of where is a safe spot for a new plant to take place, you don't have like the forest floor, which is a two-dimensional plane where a seed can land anywhere. You have these tubes, these cylinders of branches in three-dimensional space, and in between that space is not a safe spot. So actually germinating, finding the right safe spot and germinating there is really much more of a challenge for these canopy dwelling plants than those, you know, not quite as interesting plants on the forest floor. Nalini, this has just been fascinating. Thank you so much for coming out.

Nalini Nat Carney, Professor of Biology at the University of Utah here in Salt Lake. Thank you again for taking down to viewers today. taking us to the break, our musical guests for the evening, Salt Lake City's Own, the Boys Ranch. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Utah is known for its great Salt Lake, as we've been saying. It's also known for its dinosaurs. We'll talk about that a bit later in the show. But it's also known for having some of the darkest skies.

I can't wait to get out there when I go on my trip through Utah to see the dark skies. It's famous to astronomers who more than 50 years ago started a dark skies movement to try to preserve the night sky as a natural resource. But a dark sky is more than just a backdrop for stargazing. More studies are showing that light pollution is harmful to bird migration, animal behavior, air quality, and even human health. Joining me to tell us more about the potential harm caused by light pollution is just wire, biologist, education. and founder of Dark Sky SLC. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks so much.

Now the video was talking about how light sort of stops our production of melatonin, right? Yep. It keeps us from going to sleep. When did we first realize how much of an effect light has on a lot of things in our health? I think we first realized it

when we started asking people to turn out the light when we wanted to sleep. We started having data. The biggest piece of evidence came from a massive study called the nurses study that looked at over 200,000 nurses and found that nurses who do shift work were six times more likely to contract breast cancer than their non-nightworking peers. And we didn't really understand that. We thought, oh, maybe it's something about staying up all night. And then in the same study, we were able to look at those nurses' neighborhoods,

analyze satellite imagery, and identify that even day-sleeping nurses in more light-polluted neighborhoods were at increased risk of breast cancer. Do we know what the mechanism is for the increases in cancer and other illnesses? Yes and no, in that just this last year, the Nobel Prize in biology was awarded to the folks who found a mechanistic location of our circadian rhythm in our cells. So this is really new science. That being said, the basics are that our optic nerve cruises into our brain right in the center of most of our hormonal control. So we can understand that there's a relationship there.

If we're seeing the physical relationship and the impacts, now we just need to discover that mechanism. So what kind of other diseases are linked to not getting sleep or the light keeping us away? Most of them are ones that we can think of being linked with hormones. So referenced in the video, anything to do with serotonin or dopamine, so anxiety and depression, anything helping us regulate our adrenaline, which then impacts our heart. We see increased risks of heart disease. Heart disease, you stopped at the big one. It's true.

That's important. Yeah, and the tricksy thing about it is it's really hard to track because the location and the way that light finds its way into our homes while we're sleeping, or how long we look at our screens at night, is tough to track on a person-by-person basis. Yeah, I was reading some of your research, and I noticed that your studies show that light at night can actually make air quality worse. Oh, that was really important to hear, and your mic cut out, so I'm going to repeat it. Yeah, some research came out last year, published in nature and indicates that there's a scrubbing quality to dark skies. So photochemical smog, ozone, gnarly stuff comes out of our tailpipes.

It goes through a couple of iterations with photons from the sun and turns into ozone, which is really good at tearing up our lung tissue. So what we discovered in that nature paper was that with the addition of energy throughout the night, those precursors to ozone stayed at higher levels. So once the sun came up, we were one step closer to making ozone. So we used to make ozone at lower levels.

Now it takes the same amount of energy to increase ozone production. That's really interesting. You know, all day we've been smelling smoke from the forest fires nearby here. And will the artificial light make it harder for that smoky haze here in Salt Lake? harder to disperse it.

Yeah, we're super lucky here. We get two kinds of air pollution to look out for. So the first kind, photochemical smog, the photons are a part of the story. Particular matter is what we deal with during our inversions. And that's what you're tasting when you go outside right now with the smoke. So not directly. Photons don't increase that. But if we think about those light fixtures, they waste 60% of the light that they produce.

So nationwide, that means we could save about $3 billion a year if we just stopped using 60% that wasted light. If we think about the fossil fuels that go to make that light and the way they're increasing climate change, and the way climate change is increasing the frequency and severity of forest fires, then we can make a connection. Okay, but what do you say to people who say, you know, I want to be able to feel safe outside? at night? I don't want you to take all my street lights away. Yeah, I was one of those people. My friends call me safety Jess. I have a CPR mask on my keychain just in case. I text folks, like when I'm going to the bathroom, just so they know where I am. So I wasn't sold on the safety thing either until I saw some really robust studies. Chicago was concerned about this in the early aughts,

and they compared a really rough neighborhood, and they split, so they watched for a year, took some crime stats, and then in every alley installed increased lighting. In every type of crime, they saw an increase with an increase in lighted spaces at night. We've seen that replicated across 62 cities, across the world, and we think that it has to do with the way that glare impacts our eye.

So in a lit alley, there are actually darker spaces for potential assailants to hide because our eyes calibrate to the brightest thing. We're actually removing our eyes natural ability to adjust to darkness. Is there a way that we can change their lighting fixtures, you know, on the street so that maybe it doesn't pollute the neighborhood for everybody else trying to sleep? There's so many ways. That's the best thing about working with light pollution is it's. win, win, win. We can save money. We can feel better. And we can get access to the cosmos again.

So the first thing is just off when you don't need it. And then we want to make sure that the bulb is fully shielded. And then, oddly, we're going to make sure that our color looks an amber orange, but has a color temperature of 2,700 Kelvin or below. What's that? Repeat that again? Yeah, a color temperature is a way that we measure the amount of energy coming out of a light bulb or any light emitting source. We measure in Kelvin. So we want our light at a color temperature of 27,000 Kelvin or lower. 2,700? Oh, sorry, good to catch. 2700. That's like an incandescent yellowish color, right?

So actually the lights in here are a nice amber color. And we can usually see it. If it feels cozy to look at, if it reminds us faintly of a, campfire, that's a nice color to keep around. The bluer it looks, the bright whiter it looks, the more it's going to trick our brain into thinking that it's daylight. You know, with all the new bulbs being LEDs, it should be easier for us to pick and choose a color, right? It's a color temperature. Yeah, the LED revolution was such a wonderful thing for energy savings and no one knew yet to look at color temperature. So we brought in a ton of very blue LEDs, which

What's beautiful about it is that we're learning how to change those color temperatures. And as the promise of an LED lifespan isn't quite as long as we were promised, communities are now taking what we call a commitment clause to say that once those lights are ready to be replaced, they're going to replace with amber and 2,700 Kelvin lights. Now, I know you've got into this movement because you're a biologist, and because light at night actually affects bird migration. Explain how you put that together to what you're doing now. Yeah. Unfortunately, I didn't put it together. The good folks at the Fatal Light Awareness Program in Toronto put this together when they walked around downtown during migration season and started collecting the bodies of birds that had collided with buildings.

In North America every year, we lose one billion birds a year to bird collisions. one billion birds a year. Passerines, songbirds, two-thirds of those kiddos migrate at night, and they do so because they're tiny, and they want the cooler air temps, and they want the calmer winds, they'd like to avoid predation, and we see that they migrate using starlight, as they have for millennia, and they get thrown off when they get into cities. Sometimes they die from exhaustion, and sometimes they actually die from collisions.

So in Salt Lake, Tracy Avery, we've actually started our own campaign. It's called the Salt Lake Avian Collision Survey. And you can volunteer as a citizen science and help us walk around downtown during migration and see what we find. Sometimes it's heartbreaking, but the data has really helped us to show that this is something that we need to be concerned with in the valley. Jess, thank you very much for taking time to be here with us today. Thanks so much, Ira.

It's great to be here. Just wire, biologist, educator, and founder of Dark Sky SLC. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato coming to you from the Eccles Theater in Salt Lake City. Last time we came to Salt Lake City, we talked a lot about Utah's dinosaurs. So this time, we had to up the ante. We decided to turn two of our staff into paleontologists. Before we arrived here in Salt Lake, we sent producers Lauren Young and Katie Heiler out into the field with our past guest, Randy Irmus. and they discovered what it was like to be paleontologists for a day,

and it was no walk in the park, as you will see. Not even 15 minutes into this fossil hunt, and I've lost my guide. Randy? He literally disappeared. Paleontologist Randy Ermis is leading two of his team members up into the hills of southeastern Utah to excavate a phytosaur skull they found just a few days ago. If you think about a skeleton of any animal, there's only one skull, but there's many ribs, there's many vertebrae, there's two of each type of limb, so you don't find a lot of skulls, so that's always really exciting. Randy manages the slippery, steep climb up to our dig

site like a seasoned desert hiker. My colleague Lauren and I have to move a little less quickly. Sorry. No, I got you. We're here? So you've got the animal laying upside down. That's Andrew Milner, the second paleontologist in our group. The long crocodile-like skull of the Phytosaur is still mostly buried in the rock. Only the roof of the mouth is exposed. It's a pretty good size skull. We have a lot of rock to remove. Randy and Andrew pick up their brushes and rock picks and set to work. But up here on this narrow cliff ledge, there's only so much room to move around. So they give the seat of honor to our third party member, the guy who found the phytosaur skull in the first place. That's what I saw first. I'm Cody Rock, and I deliver

pizzas for a living. Yep, it's not just professional fossil hunters on this dig. If you happen to have the right stuff, you can join Randy out in the field as a volunteer. I figure it's kind of crazy to think that I got to come out here and get karma points for taking around for bones. That's a cool one. Everything I've learned from the stuff, especially in these areas, has all been from this place. Just coming down here and getting exposed to it. This is the side of the head right here.

And then the long snout. and we figure the end of the snout will end about here. And just when you thought paleontology was all dainty work, Andrew breaks out the rock saw, which he uses to separate the hunk of rock with the fossil in it from the rest of the cliff face. Now we can get a nice plaster jacket around the end of it because it's going to have a rough ride down the hill.

Hopefully not too rough. We are cutting burlap into strips that will then dip into the plaster. You know, you're trying to put a big jacket together, and next thing you know, somebody's slopping plaster on somebody else, and then the favor of the return, and next thing you know, there's people flinging plaster. And then it gets in someone's long hair. Yeah, and it's really a mess.

I'm pretty funny. The excavation process can take a few days, so before a plaster fight breaks out, it's time to drive back to camp. We leave the fossil jacket to dry overnight and head back down the hill. Just be careful. there's lots of slippery rocks that act like ball bearings. So just make sure you have good footing. What I can tell a lot of what you do is grunt work.

All that rock slamming today and the cutting. Yeah, I mean, we do joke that, you know, there's a lot of people out there who are into the idea of paleontology, but once they see the real hard work, it's a lot less sort of romantic. Now, as you have seen, Utah is famous for its dinosaurs, and we just heard about Randy and his team uncovering the skull of a 200 million-year-old phytosaur. It's a long crocodile-looking animal that's actually not related to crocs or dinosaurs.

So what is it? Joining us again to share more about the discovery is Randy Irmiss, curator of paleontology at the Natural History Museum of Utah, professor of geology and geophysics at the University of Utah. Welcome back to Science Friday. It's a pleasure of you here again. Now, as we saw, you guys ended up carrying the phytosaurus skull down that steep hill a few days later, and was it a rough ride, like Andrew said, in the piece?

Yeah, we can't drive anywhere that there aren't roads, so we have to carry everything out by hand. And some of the smaller pieces we could put on frame packs and carry out, but the large one was over 300 pounds, and that's four people carrying it on a medical backboard for three hours about. How's your back feel? It's recovered. My knees were actually the ones that were really, you know, kind of sore after it works. So if a phytosaur is not a dinosaur and it's not a crocodile, what is it? Well, it's a reptile, but it evolved before the common ancestor of both dinosaurs and crocodiles.

And it was only alive in the late Triassic period between about 235 and 200 million years ago. That was just the beginning of right before dinosaurs came on. Yeah, the very beginning of the age of dinosaurs, which is why I find this time period so exciting. It's interesting. That really long snout, how many teeth did one of these animals have? Well, you certainly wouldn't want to run into one in a Triassic River or stream or lake. I brought here a cast of one of the lower jaws of a phytosaur, and I don't know, you can see how slender the snout is. The tip of the snout is up here, and hopefully you can see all these little tiny holes, and all of those would have been filled by teeth when this animal was alive.

It's about two feet, a little more than two feet long? That's right, and it's not even complete. It would have another foot added on to it. So approximately how many teeth would you guess? Oh, easily, you know, a couple hundred in the entire jaws of the animal. And so how big is the whole animal compared to that two foot length? This particular individual probably was about 15 feet long, but we have skulls of phytosaurs that indicate they got up to about 30 feet long.

Wow. Yeah. Wow. I have to recover from that one. Is it related to anything that's around or similar to anything around today? It doesn't have any direct descendants that are alive today, but it certainly would have acted like and lived a lot like a modern day crocodile. So with those teeth that ate what a crocodile today would be eating? Are there animals?

Yeah, an animal like this that has this really slender snout is eating lots of small fish. and other aquatic prey. Other things that have more robust snouts could have gone after larger prey like early dinosaurs. It could have eaten an early dinosaur. Oh, yeah. Dinosaurs at this time were at the bottom of the food chain, and they were just the little things scurrying about.

It was small ones. Yeah. So how many phytosaur skulls have we found? There's several hundred worldwide, but we don't have very many from Utah, and particularly in the area where we're working. We just have just a few because we've been working there for about five years, and so it was really exciting to find another complete skull just a few weeks ago.

Now, in the postcard we heard from Cody, the guy who found the phytosaur skull, the pizza delivery man. Do you have a lot of pizza delivery men who get on your digs and help dig up? Or people like them? Can you, you know, can just regular folks go and do this? As far as I'm aware, he's the first pizza delivery man we've had, But we have people from all walks of life that volunteer with us at the museum that come out on digs and also prepare the fossils back in the lab that is removing all the rock from around them and working in collections. It's incredible.

And the best part of my job is interacting with our volunteer. Let's talk about people in our audience and people who are listening to us. If they'd like to become a volunteer, do you need the right stuff to do this sort of thing? Well, you certainly need to be able to deal with. the elements as you saw and hike long distances and camp. But we train everyone. We do training courses and so you don't need to come in with any prior knowledge of paleontology. You just need to have a passion for it. That's great. Let's go to the audience right here. Hi, thank you. I was hoping to ask two questions. When you are extracting a specimen, how do you know when to stop removing rock

or surrounding material and how do you know when you've reached the specimen? Because I imagine and it looks similar. Yeah, that's a wonderful question. We are lucky that in most cases, the bone, fossil bone, has a little bit different texture and color than the rock around it. But it's this delicate balancing act of exposing enough of the fossil to tell what it is,

what type of bone or skeleton it is, and how it's oriented, but leaving enough rock around it to support it so we can get it back to the lab in one piece. And most of the time, because we've spent a lot of time looking at these fossils. We have a good sense of how they're oriented, but we can get it wrong sometimes,

but that's why they make glue. And we're glad that they do. Let's go to this gentleman here. Yes, sir. Can kids volunteer? We have volunteer programs that involve

folks under 18 at the museum. For basically safety reasons, we don't have a volunteer program in the field yet, but there are other opportunities at other museums that allow that. What if he brought his parents along? Sometimes that happens, yeah. We got to talk your parents into that. That's right. You can do that. Just do we have another question up there at the mic. Just go ahead. Do you know how much, like what they eat, these feed phytos or whatever? Yeah, find anything in their stomachs? Oh, great question. Yeah. So the worst part is that the name is

totally misleading. Phyto means plant, so it means plant lizard. But these were definitely carnivores. These were meat eaters all the way. And we do have a couple of examples where they found stomach contents of various small lizard-like reptiles and other things in the stomach. And we find a lot of their poop as well. Fossilized poop is called coprolites. The good thing is unlike the modern poop we talked about with living dinosaurs out in the Great Salt Lake, it doesn't smell. And thankfully, and we see from their poop they ate a lot of fish because there's tons of fish scales in it. Do you think people out just who are going hiking like I'm going to go hiking and among the rocks that we pass these things every day and just never know that they're fossils?

Certainly you walk past fossils all the time out in Utah and, you know, some of them are very recognizable like a shell or a complete bone, but a lot of them are very modest looking. They're just tiny fragments on the surface and it's just a matter of eye training. getting to recognize those. Over here, yes. How can you tell if you're just walking by if it's a rock or a fossil, and if it is a fossil,

how can you tell how old it is right off the bat? Well, we have a very scientific way of telling that it's fossil bone, which is to lick it. I'm not joking. I'm not joking. That's really true. Wait, wait, wait. It's technical.

You lick it. Yeah. Yeah, so generally... I don't see that on National Geographic or any of... Well, you know, maybe their shows would be more popular if they showed them. No, I'm not, this is not a fib. Rock typically does not stick to your tongue, but fossil bone generally does.

And I haven't gotten any diseases, I don't think. I'm Ira Plato. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. This could go in so many directions. So is that really? is that's something that's a standard test. It is, it is. And there's actually multiple different types of taste tests in geology and paleontology. What do you mean?

Well, now I like to this. So one of the things you want to know about in geology is whether the sediment was deposited by fast-moving water or slow-moving water. And the finer grain, the sediment, the slower the water was. And when you get down to really fine-grained sediment, you can't really see it with the naked eye or even with a little hand lens. So to tell the difference between mudstone and silt stone, you bite off a little piece and grind it between your teeth. And the mudstone will be very smooth, sort of like a milkshake you get a fast food place because they actually put clay in those. And then the silt will grind a little bit and be a little gritty. I'm not going to ask about the corporalites.

They do stick to your tongue as well sometimes. They stick to you. Okay. Did the phytosaurus survive that great die-out beginning the Triassic period, the Herald the dinosaurs? Yeah, the Triassic period is bookended by two mass extinction events. And at the very end of the Triassic, this mass extinction really resulted in the final rise of dinosaurs. But phytosaurs, although they were super successful for 30 million years,

They didn't make it through that, and that's why they don't have any descendants today. And you're really interested in this Triassic period. What draws you to this? Well, beyond sort of the origin of dinosaurs, which I think a lot of people find really cool, and there's all these weird and wonderful creatures that evolved in the wake of the first mass extinction at the beginning. But also from sort of understanding our own world, this is a time when we had high carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, and in fact this mass extinction was probably caused by massive release of greenhouse gases. So if we're interested in where we might be going as the earth warms,

we have to go far back in time to times like the Triastic to understand that. Well, I hope we're not headed for a mass extinction. No, in all seriousness. I hope not either. There's still time to change our ways. Let's go here first and then we'll go down here. Yes, over here. So I don't know how you extract the DNA.

from that, and I was wondering how you do that because it gets encased in rock? Unfortunately, with fossils this old, we can't extract any DNA as of yet. They're over 200 million years old, but there are fossils that are much more recent that are tens to hundreds of thousands of years old where people are able to extract DNA. And for the most part, those are preserved in sediments that haven't turned into rock yet, so it's a bit easier. But we do get proteins and other complex organic molecules like pigments that sometimes do get preserved in rocks these old. Let me go to this side of the audience. Yes, sir.

Why does it stick to your tongue, the fossil? Great question. You see you've created a whole new generation of scientists. I really hope so. You have. Although most of the pores and holes in the bone have been filled by rock and mineral, there's a few left that have spaces, and so that provides just a little bit of stickiness and surface tension to stick to your tongue

because of the moisture on your tongue. I love it. Randy, when we go in directions I never anticipate when we start. I want to thank you for taking time to be with us today. Randy Ermus, curator of paleontology at the Natural History Museum of Utah. Thank you. Professor of Geology and Joe Physics

at the University of Utah. Once again, thank you for being with us today. Thanks again. That's about all the time. have our heartfelt thanks to Maria O'Mara, Gail Ewer, Elaine Clark, Doug Fabrizio, Kelsey Moore, and all the great folks at KUER, NPR, Utah for hosting us. Yes. Thank you guys. And thanks to the amazing staff at the Eccles Theater for making this wonderful evening possible, and the George S. and Dolores-Durray Eccles Foundation. And thanks to all our Science Friday staff, you know,

It does take a lot of people behind the scenes to run the ship as you have seen tonight. Oh, and let's give one last round of applause for the Boys Ranch. You're going to play us out tonight. Thank you for coming. Salt Lake City, Utah. I'm Ira Flato. Drive safely. I'll have a good night.