Science Friday - Weight and Health Myths, A Corvid Invasion. May 19, 2023, Part 1

Episode Date: May 19, 2023

Can Science Find An Antidote to Americium? With some poisons, there’s an antidote — something you can take to block the effects of the poison, or to help remove it from your body. But when the harmful chemical is a radioactive element, options are limited. Iodine pills can be used to help block radioactive iodine I131 from being absorbed by the thyroid, but there aren’t many other drugs that can help deal with contamination with other radioactive substances. One of the two existing medications can only be delivered via IV in a clinic. This week, the NIH announced the start of an early clinical trial for an oral drug delivered as a tablet that could potentially be used to bind and remove radioactive elements including plutonium, uranium and neptunium from the body. Rachel Feltman, editor at large at Popular Science, joins Ira to talk about that trial and other stories from the week in science, including an experimental universal flu vaccine, research into the amount of trace DNA humans shed every day, and an update on the planet Saturn’s moon count.   Debunking Common Myths About Being Fat Weight loss is big business. Americans spend roughly $60 billion each year trying to lose weight, forking over cash for supplements, diet plans, and gym memberships. Yet somewhere between 90 to 95% of diets fail. Much of what we think we know about the relationship between weight and health is based on a series of assumptions that don’t always match up with the latest science. Science Friday producer, Shoshannah Buxbaum talks with Aubrey Gordon, co-host of the podcast Maintenance Phase and author of the recent book “You Just Need To Lose Weight” and 19 Other Myths About Fat People, about the history of the Body Mass Index or BMI. She discusses why the word “obesity” is tangled up in stereotypes about fat people, the flaws in commonly cited mortality statistics, and how anti-fat bias translates into worse healthcare for fat people. Read an excerpt of “You Just Need To Lose Weight” and 19 Other Myths About Fat People here.   What To Do When 500-1,000 Crows Roost In Your Neighborhood Laura Young was at a breaking point when she submitted a post titled “Request: Make 500-1,000 crows leave my street alone” to the subreddit r/lifeprotips in January. “I think you can tell that I was feeling very frustrated and running out of options and I clearly needed help,” she said. Starting last October, Laura’s neighborhood in Baltimore was the site of a massive crow roost. And unlike past years’ roosts, which usually only last a few weeks with a few dozen crows, this one showed no signs of leaving. “The numbers that they’ve attracted ever since then are unbelievable,” she said. “I mean, we’re at the point where it is frightening to walk out at night.” According to Laura, hundreds of them filled the trees in the park outside her apartment. “And they’re all screaming,” she said. “It is loud enough to wake you up indoors with all the windows closed. I don’t think anyone on my block has slept past 6:00am in three months.” There was the noise, and then there was the poop: coating the streets, the buildings, and the cars. “It is just disgusting. I’ve never spent so much money on car washes in my entire life,” she laughed. To read the rest, visit sciencefriday.com.   To stay updated on all-things-science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters. Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm I Refleto. Later in the hour, I'll look at some of the scientific misconceptions around weight and health and a case of a crow conundrum in Baltimore. But first, with some poisons, there's an antidote, right? Something you can take to block the effects of the poison or to help clean it from your body. But when the harmful chemical is a radioactive element, options are limited. Iodine pills can be used to help block radioactive iodine. isotopes from being absorbed by the thyroid, but there aren't many other drugs that can help deal with contamination from radioactive materials. This week, though, the NIH announced the start of an early clinical trial for an oral drug that could potentially be used to bind and remove radioactive elements like plutonium, uranium, neptunium from the body. Joining me now to talk about that and other stories from the week in science is Rachel Feldman, editor at large at popular science. Welcome back to Science Friday. Thanks for having me, Ira. You're welcome. Okay, tell me more about this radiation, potential radiation treatment. Yeah, so right now, there are a couple of options that

serve to basically pull radiation from the body right after contamination, but they're both administered by IV. And recently, in a move that I found a little existentially, nauseating personally. The FDA said, we really need more drugs to combat radioactive contamination. We want to find more options that prevent acute radiation syndrome, which is, you know, the very severe illness that can happen when you're exposed to ionizing radiation. And they said, we really need things that are easier to stockpile like oral pills. And we need to fast track those. So while that new set of guidelines from the FDA is still pending, this new trial is definitely part of that wave of enthusiasm. But how do you do a trial of something like this? I mean,

you can't expose people to plutonium and see what happens, can you? Exactly. You definitely can't. And that was, you know, why the FDA put out those guidelines. Kind of the point of them was saying that from now on, drugs in this category will be tested for their efficacy in non-human animals. and then they'll only have to prove their safety in humans, which, again, is something you have to do when a drug just cannot be tested ethically on a human. You can't dose a human with plutonium just to make sure it works. So now we have this drug that's shown quite good efficacy in non-human animals. And so basically, a few dozen healthy participants are going to go on higher and higher doses of the drug. And if they get up to the maximum dose, then that is.

great information about our ability to use these drugs and humans. Yeah, then we'll just stockpile them. Yep, and hope we never need them. Hope we never need them. On another serious medical note, we've all seen the power of the mRNA technology with the COVID vaccines. Researchers are now trying to use a similar technique for a universal flu vaccine. That sounds promising.

Yeah, we've wanted universal flu vaccines for ages, of course, but there are so many strains of the flu and it mutates so quickly. And historically the best we've been able to do is every year there's this very intense academic scramble of trying to guesstimate to the best of our scientific ability what the predominant flu strains will be and then create a vaccine that protects against those one to three strains, let's say. And you can't just pack all of the possible strains in there because primarily of the way we make vaccines right now. It's just so much material to work with. And what's cool about

MRI vaccines is that instead of carrying the thing that the body needs to learn to fight, it carries instructions in this messenger RNA that tells the body, you know, what kind of defense to mount. So it's like instead of a wanted poster, it's more like tips and survival tricks, life hacks. So, you know, this is just one way that research. are working on making a more robust universally effective flu vaccine. But the MRNA technique is definitely helpful in that it allows you to sort of target a broader swath of strains without having to like literally pack in information about each one. And probably this vaccine wouldn't be the kind that like kept you from getting the flu, but it would drastically lower your risk of severe

illness, and that would be for every strain. That's pretty cool, too. Yeah, totally. Let's move on to something a little less scary than radiation treatments, but maybe scary for a different reason. And I'm talking about new research on finding traces of human DNA everywhere. Yeah, absolutely everywhere. Researchers for years now have been using environmental DNA or E-DNA to study lots of ecological and biological questions. Basically, you know, they're taking samples from soil or water or air and just like seeing what all DNA is in there as like sort of a scattershot, you know, evidence. And researchers have known for a long time that that meant probably there was human DNA in there that you could also analyze. And some researchers who primarily study endangered sea turtles decided to do a study

seeing like, let's just check in on how big of a security risk this actually is. Unfortunately, the answer was a big one. They took a bunch of random environmental samples and found human DNA in almost all of them. And most of the samples were high quality enough to analyze for sequencing. They took samples from footprints in the sand on the beach and were able to heal like partial sex chromosomes and like pieces of people's genetic ancestry. Wait a minute. There's enough DNA in footprints on a sandy beach. Yep, we are always shedding DNA everywhere.

And scientists have gotten really good at sequencing it. There were a couple of remote areas they tested, I guess, as kind of a control. So, like, they looked at one uninhabited island and another sort of, like, very distant mountain tributary. And in those two, there was no human DNA. But everywhere they looked where humans trafficked, they found at least partially identifiable DNA. Well, think of the privacy problems here, right? Yeah, yeah.

You know, and it's one of those things where it's probably not something most of us have to worry about, but it is an important concern to keep in mind. Some bioethic is somewhere probably, probably has a real tummy ache over this, and I don't envy them. Yeah, I'm getting one right now. A few weeks ago, we talked about the death cap mushroom, and how it's spreading in some parts of the country. But there's news this week on just why it's so deadly.

And maybe they have found an antidote. Yeah. So aminated death caps are responsible for something like 90% of mushroom-related deaths globally. And one issue is that fungal toxins are like notoriously poorly understood and studied. I did some mycology in undergrad. And my professor warned us all that if we ever suspected, basically any kind of fungal contaminant, we should understand that the emergency room doctor might know less than we did.

Oh, my goodness. Yeah. Things have definitely moved since then, but it's still an area where there's a lot of room for research. And fortunately, this new study is really exciting. Basically, researchers took human cells and they were editing them to break individual genes while feeding them the toxin that aminom mushrooms produce. And when they found ones that survived, they were like, okay, this is the gene that was mutated there. So let's start looking at things that interrupt that gene in human cells because maybe this keeps the toxin from getting to the liver.

And they found this like very innocuous iodide-based dye that's been used in humans since the 50s. It's used to diagnose eye disease that seems to, at least in mice, it improved survival rates by up to 50%. which is pretty big. Yeah, because right now, if you get ammina poisoning, you are quite likely to need a liver transplant. That's how little there is that can be done. Yeah. Wow. You might want to send this news back to your professor there on undergraduate. Let's finish up with a couple of space stories because we all love space stories here. I know we all keep an eye on the weather heading into the weekend, but there's news this week about a possible improvement in space weather forecasting. Tell us about that. Yeah, so, you know, as many people know, solar weather, you know, solar flares coming off the sun is a concern. And most of the time, it's not a huge deal, but there have been a couple of historical events. The biggest one, the Carrington event in 1859, where this geomagnetic storm set telegraph stations on fire and shut down communications. And we have a lot more stuff that would be interrupted by a storm like that these days.

Just a bit more. Yeah, not just the telegram machines. So NASA has announced that using a combination of actual satellite data and an AI model called Dagger, they have developed like the most accurate, timely detection system that would essentially give us like 30-minute warnings for exactly where a serious solar storm was going to hit. 30 minutes is enough time? Well, so we already have capabilities to say like, you know, within the next day or the next 12 hours, like there might be some serious activity. And this is like 30 minutes. It would be like a tornado warning, like right here, right now.

And it doesn't sound like a lot of time. But the thing is that a big risk with these kinds of storms is the chaos and confusion, you know, because communications are shutting down. The internet goes away, you know, self towers go down. So having that 30 minutes, assuming that cities and states put in the work to like set up preventative measures and like a plan, that 30 minutes is plenty of time to like make sure people know that this is about to happen, which would actually solve a lot of the potential problems. An early warning system. Where have I heard that before? Finally, finally a change in the honor of the mooniest planet in the solar system. envelope please. Yes, so Saturn has catapulted back into first place in the moon race. It now has a tally of 145 recognized moons and about half of those are new and it has overtaken Jupiter, which has 95 moons. And this also makes it the first planet to have more than 100 confirmed moons in total. What's it? What's the definition of a moon? I mean, if you look at satellites, the rings of

Saturn, they could all be, you know, those individual particles could be moons. Do you want to get picky? So, I mean, you know, it comes down to the size and the stability of the orbit. So there's actually a distinction they make between regular moons and irregular moons, which, you know, gets down to the specifics of the orbit. But these are all objects of size. Yeah. Somewhere Pluto is laughing at all of this. Yes, yes, absolutely. Thank you, Rachel. Thank you. Rachel Feltman, editor at large at popular science based in New York. We have to take a break. And when we come back, looking into the mysteries of weight, nutrition, and health, there's a lot of mythology at play here. We'll be right back after this short break. This is Science Friday. I am Ira Flato. Weight loss is a big business. Americans spend roughly $60 billion each year. trying to lose weight, forking over cash for supplements, diet plans, gym memberships,

and yet about 90 to 95 percent of diets fail. Much of what we think we know about the relationship between weight and health is based on a series of assumptions, assumptions that don't always match up with the latest science. Science Friday producer Shoshana Bucksbaum is here with a closer look. Hi, Shoshana. Hey, Ira. So I've been listening to the podcast maintenance phase for the past, you know, a couple of years. And it's fundamentally shifted how I thought about health and nutrition research.

So I recently caught up with the show's co-host, Aubrey Gordon, to talk about her new book, You Just Need to Lose Weight, and 19 other myths about fat people. I started off with some basics by asking her about the history of the word obesity. Yeah, there's this sort of ambient belief or assumption amongst folks out in the world that obese or obesity are originally medical terms because they're currently, used in medical context. They actually predate that. They have long been used to describe basically people who we think of as being unacceptably fat, right? The actual roots of the word in Latin literally mean to have eaten oneself fat, right? So it's already aligning a fat body with gluttony,

which is a deadly sin, right? Right, right. It assumes a cause of their fatness. There is judgment-built into the term itself, no question. And you also talked about in the book a study that looked at doctors and found that actually after medical school, they're more likely to view their fat patients as either not being compliant or have all these sort of negative associations with them, which is maybe not what you'd hope after a medical school education. Yeah, absolutely. There was a study of medical students that looked at sort of their attitudes toward fat patients and found that throughout the course of medical school, that bias appeared to intensify, particularly because it was being modeled by professors and by older physicians who were sort of coaching them, right, into their roles.

There is also some research into the attitudes of physicians who are more likely to describe their fat patients, as non-compliant, awkward, and ugly, as well as unhygienic and just a series of like very personal judgments that precede even meeting the patient, right? This is sort of on the basis of appearance alone. And I think it's important to note that physicians get an incredible amount of technical training in so many things, but that technical training doesn't generally include confronting their own biases about the patients they may serve. And that's true. of fat patients in particular. It directly affects people accessing health care, which is obviously a big equity issue.

But I want to touch on this statistic that kind of comes up when we're talking about this issue a lot. And you really dive into the methodology of it in your book and also in the podcast. So this number, 360,000 to 400,000 people die from obesity every year in the U.S. And this number gets floated around as like, we've got to do something about this because this is a leading cause of death. So you looked into it. Let's dig into some methodology behind this number here. Yeah, let's do it.

I'm into it. So this number, this 400,000 Americans die every year of obesity is a number that's been getting kicked around for about 20 years now. So in the research for this book, I went back and found that original paper and read the method. section, I mean, the whole thing, but particularly the methodology section, in which the paper plainly stated that it was looking at actual death rates, right, between thin people and fat people. More fat people died in the years that they were looking at. So that sort of gap between deaths in fat people versus deaths and thin people, they said, we're just going to assume that that's the result of them being fat.

they didn't die in plane crashes, they didn't have car wrecks, nobody got struck by lightning. Right. We're going to attribute every single thing to that. Right. They just got so fat that they dropped dead. I would also say for this 400,000 number, if that many Americans were dying every year of just getting too fat, more of us would know someone who just got so fat that they died. Right. That would be sort of part of the conversation a little bit more.

that's because these mortality estimates vary really widely because you're dealing with huge data sets, right? It's worth knowing that this 400,000 number gets kicked around quite a bit because it is the largest one of these mortality estimates. Those range down as far as 20,000 a year in the U.S., right, attributable to fatness. And even that might be an overreach, right? According to some researchers, these are highly disputed numbers because it's so hard, to get at because what we're talking about with fatness isn't a health condition that causes people's death. It's a risk factor for other health conditions that go on to cause people's deaths, right? So trying to track down the mortality rates of a risk factor is a really tricky

proposal. I mean, one of the things that people point to when they're like, okay, like how big is this quote unquote problem? They're looking at the BMI, the body mass index. And so it seems really simple. It's like height divided by weight, seems scientific. Then people get grouped into categories, underweight, quote unquote, healthy weight, quote unquote, overweight, quote unquote obese. But like who came up with this system in the first place? I think folks that don't know the history might be a little bit surprised on how we landed on this as a categorization system. Yeah. This is another one of those things like the term obesity where folks assume that it is medical in origin. It's worth noting that the BMI. was actually not developed by a physician and wasn't designed for individual health care. It was designed as a population level, essentially like statistics tool. It was developed by a Belgian astronomer and mathematician named Adolf Kutle, who was looking for what he considered to be the quote unquote ideal average man, right?

He wanted to figure out what the average of the human populace was so that we could all aspire to that. was in the 1800s. So he created the BMI as one way of measuring the physical aspects of that. And he based it on the height and weight of French and Scottish members of the military in the 1800s. Now, most of us have figured out that bodies have changed a lot since the 1800s, right? We're taller, we're fatter. Lots of things have changed. It's also worth noting that all of those people were, you know, overwhelmingly white.

and overwhelmingly men, right? And the BMI has never actually been fully adjusted for anyone who's not white and anyone who's not a dude. The BMI essentially only entered into health care provision when American insurance companies were looking for essentially reasons to charge some policyholders more than others. And they settled on body size as part of their ratings, and that began the sort of path to get

this wormed into individual health care provision. And now we're at a point where this tool that was designed for population-level analysis for sort of a social project around finding this quote-unquote ideal man, now comes up on every after-visit summary for patients in the U.S., right? Is now considered a primary marker of individual health at a cultural level and has been totally divorced from this history that really has nothing to do with individual health. You know, if you've been conscious the past several decades,

you've probably heard policymakers raising and ringing alarm bells about the obesity epidemic. So how did policymakers sort of come together to consider this an epidemic? The defining of quote unquote obesity as an epidemic starts with defining quote unquote obesity as a disease, right? And that actually happened through a number of sort of major health. health care institutions and medical institutions in the U.S., the American Medical Association did this, the National Institutes of Health, a number of entities, went through a process to essentially study in each of their organizations. Does obesity qualify as a disease?

And in most of those study groups, their researchers and physicians and so on and so forth, came back and said, actually, we can't really determine that because we don't actually really have an operating definition of what a disease is. So you're asking us to classify this thing that is sort of a risk factor for other health conditions as being a quote unquote disease in and of itself, but we don't really have an operating definition there. So we don't really feel comfortable making this statement. Those institutions then overrode the recommendations of their own study groups and their own committees and declared obesity to be a disease in and of itself. And that sort of paved the way for an understanding of obesity as a quote unquote epidemic,

which also positions it as a kind of contagion, right? When we talk about epidemics, we're usually talking about contagious diseases. So it recast fat people as kind of social contaminants or health contaminants, right? And a war on obesity, I will say, just as a, a person who was a fat kid and a fat adult during this time just feels a lot like a war on fat people, right? It felt pretty staggeringly stigmatizing. Yeah. And I think at this point in our conversation, right, some listeners at home might be thinking like, okay, I'm here with you. This relationship between weight and health is like really oversimplified. Obviously, it's much

more complicated. What about the association between weight and other health conditions like diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, how can you make sense of these sort of associations that we see while not falling into the trap of like an anti-fat bias? Yeah, I think a couple of things are worth noting. If you're concerned about diabetes, the best way to track that is through your blood sugar, right? And through regular blood work from your doctor, right? I would also say there are strong correlations between a number of these health conditions,

diabetes and hypertension and cardiovascular disease in particular, there are pretty strong links to what's called minority stress, which is daily experiences of racism and sexism and anti-fat bias, right? All of those things contribute significantly to folks' risks for each of those health conditions. So measure your blood sugar, measure your blood pressure, right? We actually have ways of getting this information pretty easily, and we should be taking advantage of those, rather than hanging everything on this existing sort of framework that we have around fatness and fat people and sort of looking for reasons why we assume fat people must already be unhealthy.

This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. The myth in the title of your book is you just need to lose weight. And this message is absolutely everywhere. I mean, it's pushed as an easy solution to preventing any number of bad things. things from happening to you. I mean, like, I once had an abnormal result on an eye exam. I went to a specialist who said, like, everything looks totally fine. But before I left, he was like, you know, you really should lose some weight. And like, why is this advice of you just need to lose weight? One, way harder to follow than it sounds. And two, also extremely harmful to fat people who are on

the receiving end of this advice constantly. I would say, you just need to lose weight is the way that people decide not to pay attention to what fat people are going through. You just need to lose weight is the thing that I hear when I talk about being denied care by a health care provider or being escorted off a plane. If you don't like it, you should just lose weight, right? I mean, I think the first thing we forget in the just lose weight conversation is actually our own personal experiences, right? Most of us have experiences trying to lose weight, and most of those experiences have failed or have succeeded in the short term and led to longer term weight gain. The data here is strikingly consistent, and that is the overwhelming majority of diets

lead to a small amount of short-term weight loss and then long-term regain, and usually a little bit more weight is regained than you started with. So over time, paradoxically, dieting and weight cycling seem to make people fatter in the long term. That's for a lot of reasons. One of the current theories, which comes out of a study of contestants on the biggest loser, appears to be that going on these sort of extreme calorie restrictions in diets appears to permanently alter our metabolisms and lead folks to burn hundreds of calories less per day than their peers in the same age group.

So folks who go through this kind of extreme calorie restriction, their bodies sort of permanently downshift and assume that it will continue to get lower levels of energy, smaller amounts of food over time. And as a result, it stores more fat. That's one of the sort of theories currently. The other theory here that we're learning more about is sort of this idea of willpower is kind of everywhere in dieting. And increasingly, research is really clear that willpower as such is pretty much just a couple of hormones, right, in your endocrine system. It's ghrelin, the so-called hunger hormone, and leptin, the so-called satiety hormone, each of which kick in really differently when you're dieting, right?

Your body will signal to you to eat more if you are eating less than usual. That's not a matter of willpower. That's a biological mechanism to keep you alive. Right, right. And is one worth paying attention to. So it's really interesting to me that we continue to have this very sort of personal responsibility kind of narrative about weight loss in defiance of almost all of the available data, which says, willpower isn't really a thing. D diets don't really work. And we don't consistently know how to make fat people thin in the long term.

So after each chapter in the book, you have a few reflection questions. I really love this approach to learning. So what's some advice that you can give to our listeners to help them think a little bit more critically? You know, the next time they see a news article about some new magic diet that works miracles or some new, here's the latest on the obesity epidemic. You know, how can folks maybe take pause and critically reflect on this information they're consuming? My hope is that this is a welcome pointer for a Science Friday audience. which is don't base your judgments on a headline.

Don't actually even base it on an article about a study. Go read the actual study, right? We get a lot of sensationalized news about new weight loss methods that will double your weight loss. And then when you look at the research paper, it says it did, in fact, double people's weight loss, but it took them from losing a third of a pound to two thirds of a pound in a month, right? Right. That's not quite the static. claim that it seemed to be initially. So I think checking against the actual findings and checking

against the methodologies of these studies is a really, really essential part of sort of putting these in their right place. Yeah, I think that's great advice. And hopefully our listeners will utilize that next time they see some wild headlines out there. So Aubrey, thank you so much for being on Science Friday. It's been a real pleasure talking to you. Likewise, what a joy. Aubrey Gordon is the co-host of the podcast Maintenance Phase and author of the book. You just need to lose weight and 19 other myths about fat people. For Science Friday, I'm Shoshana Bucksbaum. We need to take a break and when we come back, the story of a Baltimore neighborhood terrorized by crows. No, this is not the movie. Stay with us.

Just a reminder that Science Friday depends on donations from our audience, and that means you, you help fund the radio show each week, plain and simple. So if you find value in what we do, please go to ScienceFriiday.com slash support and give what you can. Any amount makes a difference. And thanks. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. Hey, Ira.

Knock, knock. Hey there, it's Cy Fri's Experiences manager Diana Plasker. Okay, Diana, I'll bite who's there? Interrupting Octopi. Interrupting Octopi. Well, did you know that there's three ways to pluralize octopus, and they're all correct. Octopi, octopuses, and my personal favorite octopaties. I like it.

I haven't heard that one before. Why have you graced us with Cephalopod-themed humor today? Well, thanks, Ira. I just wanted to remind you that Cephalopod Week is coming up starting June 16th. We'll have so many things happening to Cephalobrate our favorite undersea invertebrates. Our book club will be reading Monarchs of the Sea by Dana Stoff. We'll have a Science and Arts themed special email newsletter, and we're hosting four in-person events in Atlanta, Houston, Miami, and Thousand Oaks.

Folks can learn more by visiting our website, sciencefriott.com slash octopus. That's really cool. Let me repeat that. Science Friday.com slash octopus. Thanks for the heads up, Diana. Does your neighborhood get a local crow roost every fall? You know what I'm talking about? Large numbers of crows congregating together during the cold months, usually accompanied by a cacophony of cars, cars around dusk and dawn.

It's a pretty common sight across the country. I know you've seen it. But there was one extraordinary case that took place. in a Baltimore neighborhood this winter where a massive crow roost took up residence for months. When sci-fri producer D. Petershmidt heard about this,

they got in touch with someone who tried to do something about it. Here's D. with the rest of the story. Laura Young is used to crows roosting in her neighborhood in Baltimore every fall. Usually, she sees a few dozen of them perched on the trees in the park outside of her apartment,

and then after a couple weeks, they move on to a new roosting site. But it was a little different this past October. It's insane. I mean, the numbers that they've attracted ever since then are unbelievable. I mean, we're at the point where it is frightening to walk out at night. Instead of a flock of just a few dozen crows, many, many more quickly amassed. And to Laura, initially, it's kind of cool. Halloween, spooky season, crows, all part of the fun. And then they just didn't leave. It's like hundreds of them on every twig of every branch of every tree. And they're all screaming.

That was a recording of them that Laura sent me. It is loud enough to wake you up indoors with all the windows closed. I don't think anyone on my block has slept past 6 a.m. in three months. They'll kind of dive bomb you. I don't go outside without a raincoat on anymore. Because the other sound that you can audibly hear at all times outside is just poop hitting the ground and hitting cars and hitting every surface exposed to the world. It is really horrifying.

So Laura works in marketing, but she actually knows quite. a bit about birds. She got her degree in wildlife conservation, and she spent five years doing field research with birds throughout the U.S. And then we kind of had a paradigm shift as far as funding goes when Trump was elected. So I think it was kind of a moment when a lot of ecologists did a major career pivot. I was one of them. So I ended up getting a job in marketing, and I've been there since. But my background originally is in bird biology. We first talked in January and the roost was still going strong. Laura estimated that close to

a thousand crows took up residence. And she says, Crows are freakishly intelligent. They almost have the same intelligence level as like a human toddler. And the few things that I did definitely know just from the outset were one, no matter what, when you're trying to

get rid of the birds, you don't let them see your face because they can recognize human faces. They will decide they don't like you and they will tell all their friends to hate you too. So, you know, we're not just like up against some regular old bird that isn't strategizing too. Sounds insane, but it's actually true. A common suggestion to disperse large roosts is to tie something shiny up in a tree, but these trees are way too tall for Laura to reach.

She also tried scaring them with a laser pointer, which did freak them out a bit, but they would just come back as soon as she stopped. So she joined forces with her neighbors. They all started a group chat and talked strategy. But some of them are reaching a breaking point. There's this really cute family. It's like two parents and two kids, and they walk around holding hands while the kids just scream at the birds. Like, they just screech at them.

It's hysterical. And then, you know, at 7.30, there's this guy who comes out of his place and he blows a Vuvu Zela at them. So that's not the Horn of Gondor. That's an actual recording of Vuvu Zela guy that Laura sent me. And like the laser pointer, it hasn't really worked. So, you know, we're kind of like this rag-tag team of poor, unfortunate souls trying to fix this problem, but no one knows how. So anytime I need to know how to do something, I feel like I just go to Reddit. I figured there have to be people out there who have successfully defeated the flock of pros.

Laura turned to the subreddit Life Pro Tips, which offers and receives requests for life advice. She named her post, Request. Make 500 to 1,000 Crows, Leave My Street Alone. and close to 400 people responded. The best suggestion, according to Laura, was to play the sounds of crow's natural predators. So she rigged up a speaker in her window to play owl noises, but it didn't really work. Timing is very critical, it turns out. Apparently, once it's dark out, it's not in their best interest to leave the entire roosting site and find somewhere else to sleep.

So pretty much, you know, I need to communicate to Vuvuzela guy that he's doing this way too late at night. Because all he's doing is scaring the crap out of them, like literally out of them and onto a our cars. Well, I'm wondering if you can read like the last paragraph from that post. Sure, I can do that. So the last paragraph says, we are going insane as a community. I can't even believe I'm writing this post. I used to do bird research for a living too. So all my neighbors expect me to somehow know how to evict a thousand angry flying poop rockets, as if that was part of my college curriculum. Why am I in charge? Yeah, I think you can tell that I was feeling very frustrating. and running out of options, and I clearly needed help.

Well, we're going to try to get you some. That's what we do here at Science Friday, apparently. So when I heard about Laura's situation, I knew I wanted to get Kaylee Swift's take. Kaylee is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington with a specialty in Crows. Laura and I wanted to learn more about these roosts, get a sense of how unusual Laura's case was. and if there was anything Laura and her neighbors could do. A month later, we all got on the phone. Hi, Laura.

Hey, Kaylee. It's good to meet you. I've heard a lot about it. Yeah, you too. You too. It's always fun to meet fellow bird people. Laura brought Kaylee up to speed and Kaylee started offering suggestions. So for many years and particularly across European cultures, we've had this real negative association with black birds, including Crohn Ravens. And then particularly when they gather in large numbers, sometimes seem to be. that strikes people as ominous or out of the ordinary, and it's just not. This is a really normal part of their behavior.

Crows have also adapted extraordinarily well to human-dominated landscapes, as opposed to other birds. There's a few reasons why that is. They might have a decent food source. More concrete means more heat is retained, and they can stay warmer at night than in a forest. There is also usually more light from street lamps, which provides better safety from predators. So crows roosting in urban areas, it's not uncommon at all. Where it becomes a problem, though, as we're seeing, is that, you know, when you get a really large group of, you know, what's arguably like a fairly big bird together, they do make noise and they do poop. The amount of feces is very real.

And so while we need to be sort of careful to not, like, villainize these birds for just doing their totally normal. bird thing, I think it's really important for people who love animals and love crows to extend empathy to folks living in these communities that are just covered in bird crap. Because no one would want to live with that. So as far as what to do, the unfortunate short answer is that you as an individual civilian are not going to be able to evict this crow roost. Kaley specifically says individual civilian here because crows are federally protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.

And they're on that list partially because of the particularly bloody history of crow exterminations in the U.S. One of the most extreme examples of this took place in 1940 when the city of Rockford, Illinois, used dynamite to kill a roost of 328,000 crows.

And so it's good now. We don't do that anymore. Now, local government has to officially intervene with non-lethal approaches when dealing with a large roost. The cities have taken different approaches to dealing with large roosts over the years. In the 2010s, Portland, Oregon was the home of a roost that was about 10 times the size of Laura's.

Portland actually did two things. They invested in what was called the like Poop Master 3000, which was, sorry, Master 6,000, which was based. What? Yes, this is a real thing. This is a real thing. The Wander 6,000 is basically a zamboni for sidewalks that cleans up. Obviously, that doesn't do much for your cars, but it was an effective way to just keep the sidewalks cleaner.

But the best thing you can do is hire a falconer and do hazing. If you can get an actual raptor to just go around and scare them and harassing, them and basically showed them that this spot that they've picked isn't safe. That's really the best thing you can do. And a falconer is going to be able to execute that hazing strategy in the most ethical way possible. But Kaylee had a pretty big caveat here. These birds are going to go somewhere. And one of the sources of conflict when it comes to ruse management that I don't hear cities talking about enough when they do embark on hazing strategies is considering like where are these birds going to go and is what we're doing just pushing them from a wealthy community that has

resources to do this into a poor community that doesn't and so we just it's really important to be thoughtful and sensitive about that and really the like long-term solution to this is cities should take this into consideration and create green spaces. where these birds can roost without coming into conflict with people, because they are going to roost somewhere. And that's obviously not a helpful thing for Laura in this moment. But it is something that I wish cities thought more about because we could live in a situation where we just didn't have this conflict nearly as often.

Laura, what do you make about that? Yeah, I have so many thoughts. They, you know, eventually I'm not sure why they decided two or three days ago to move five or six blocks away that they did. And that means that, like, my car is safe now, but, like, my friends that live a few blocks away are now dealing with Chromageddon. And they were the ones laughing at me just a few weeks ago. But, I mean, one of the things about my situation is being in downtown Baltimore, the sort of, like, wealth of the community really varies from block to block. So it almost feels like the role of the dice about

like, you know, where they go next, could be anything on that spectrum. Laura was also wondering why so many more crows stayed for so much longer this winter. Kaylee said that's something that people who study crows don't really know the answer to either. But no matter the cause, Kaylee still recommended that Laura coordinate with the city about hiring a falconer. I wish I had a magic wand that's like, oh, if you just do this, you can just take all of the crows that are crossing problems and put them in this perfect place where they can live in harmony. But that's just not a thing. Unfortunately, at the end of the day, like sometimes there are just human wildlife conflicts that don't have easy or fast resolutions.

We had this conversation in February, which meant that Laura had another option. Just wait until spring when the crows would probably naturally leave for the mating season anyway. And then this problem could disappear completely or change in a more tolerable way. And so, you know, time can be a good solution to this. Oh, yeah. Okay, then we'll keep in touch. And I don't know, best of luck. That resolves ideally for both parties here.

Yeah. Thank you, yeah. All right, you too, enjoy the rest of your days. You're listening to Science Friday from WNYC Studios. The next time I checked in with Laura was a month later in March, soon after the first day of spring. Were the crow still there? Or did Laura find a falconer? Yeah, so I wasn't exactly sure how to get that process started.

Laura was able to find someone in Baltimore City government and explained her situation to them. He was a little confused at first, but he said if she priced it out, he could get the right person to look at it. And then magically, I think two or three days later, the crows just disappeared. I almost didn't notice at first, but I got a text from someone who lived next door. And they said, am I going crazy or have you not heard the flock the last two nights? And I was just like, oh my gosh, now that you say that, I feel like it has been less scary here. And they really have not come back. So, you know, I think we just ran the clock out with them.

But I still kind of want to price out some falconers in case they come back. So that gives us six months to scheme what we're going to do about it. Right. It's like, yeah, they heard that you were hiring a falconer. And they're like, oh, time to go. I know. I know. I mean, I should have just priced out a falconer earlier. They probably would have known somehow. Like, oh, she's doing the numbers.

I mean, they're right outside my window. They're probably watching me on the computer, goozling how to hire a falconer to scare crows. So in the end, this whole ordeal lasted about five months. Laura's still curious about why the local population exploded this past winter, and she's going to keep her eyes on the trees when October comes back around this year to see if things will change. And you know what? I think after the... year, first of all, like, everyone in the neighborhood really came together. You know, we had a lot of just extra communication between everyone.

You'd run into people on the street and they would all want to talk about the crows and what are the crows doing? And I feel like we've almost banded together. It happens again this fall. I feel like I know I have support in all my crazy plans to fix the problem. And it's kind of been fun now that it's in retrospect, I will say. Yeah. It's like the real treasure was the, the first. friends and neighbors we made along the way, literally. I know. It's wild. But I think we're better prepared this time. And I think if they start coming back next year, I'm going to invest in a car cover.

There we go. Cool. Well, thanks for taking us along this journey with you, Laura. And yeah, we'll circle back in the fall. Okay, great. Looking forward to it. I feel like we need a crow pun to end this off somehow. Oh gosh. Like you'll be calling me. Okay, I'll take it. Oh, it was so bad. Oh, gosh. No, no, no. It counts. It counts. That's good. I'm glad it worked out.

If you want to see some of the photos and video Laura took of the massive crow roost, including her feces covered car, head to sciencefriiday.com slash crows. For Science Friday, I'm D.Pettersmith. See, Alfred Hitchcock, these birds are not. as scary as you'd like us to think. And hey, we'd like to learn about your experiences with large crow roosts. So if you have stories, audio recordings, pictures, your own neighborhood's version of Vuvuzela guy, let us know. Send them all to SciFri at ScienceFriad.com. That's sciFri at ScienceFriaday.com. And we have run out of time. We had help from lots of folks with the

program this week. including controller Beth Rammy, experiences manager Diana Plasker, and Grants' managers Jordan Smudjik and Jason Rosenberg. B.J. Liderman, compose our theme music. And of course, if you missed any part of the program, or you would like to hear it again, subscribe to our podcasts, or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. And we're active all week on social media, but if you'd like, you can still email us the old-fashioned way. SciFri at Science Friday.com. Have a great weekend. I'm Ira Flato.