Science Vs - SHARKS!!! Sink Your Teeth in Again

Episode Date: September 10, 2020

NOTE: This episode first published 6/13/19. Are sharks the super-predators we think they are? Or have we been baited with great white lies? To find out, we interviewed shark researchers Dr. Taylor Chapple, Dr. Tricia Meredith and Dr. Chris Pepin-Neff, along with surfer Mike Wells.  We’re doing a survey for our episode on orgasms! We’d love for you to take it: https://blythet.typeform.com/to/qhESeova Check out the full episode transcript here: https://bit.ly/32hPFac  This episode was produced by Rose Rimler with help from Wendy Zukerman, along with Meryl Horn and Michelle Dang. Senior produced by Kaitlyn Sawrey. Edited by Blythe Terrell and Kaitlyn Sawrey. Fact checking by Diane Kelly. Mix and sound design by Peter Leonard. A huge thanks to the amazing team of musicians who helped us with Flaws and our Snark Week music: Peter Leonard, Bobby Lord, Emma Munger, and Marcus Thorne Bagala. Recording assistance from Caroline Perryman, Shannon Cason, Sam Turken, Beth McMullen, and Jesse Wentzloff. A big thanks to George Burgess, Peter Pyle, Dr. David Shiffman, Professor Peter Klimley, Prof. Jelle Atema, Prof. Stephen Kajiura, Dr. Blake Chapman, Nynke de Haas and others. Plus a special thanks to the Zukerman family and Joseph Lavelle Wilson. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman and you're listening to Science Versus from Gimlet. This is the show that pits facts against fins. On today's episode, sharks. With summer winding down in the Northern Hemisphere and kicking in down south, sharks have been in the news. Just this week, an Australian surfer died after being bitten by a shark. It's the sixth fatality in Australia this year. And a couple of people in the US have recently been killed by sharks too. So we wanted to revisit our episode on these creatures. It first came out last summer.

Okay, so if you start talking to surfers in Australia, chances are pretty quickly you'll find someone who knows someone with a shark story. It didn't take us long to find Mike. Okay, so my name is Mike Wells. I'm from the central coast of New South Wales in Australia. Yeah, I guess what else would you like to know? Mike is a super chill guy. He's been surfing since he was three years old and has had some amazing experiences on the water. I've shared waves with dolphins at my local beaches where they just stayed with us and caught waves for 30 minutes. I've surfed with turtles. I've had whales breach within 20 metres of me. Oh my gosh. So we've always shared the ocean. But Mike has also shared the ocean with a scarier animal.

So let's go back to 2012. It's the middle of summer and Mike had had this crappy day at work and really wanted to surf. His girlfriend, who's now his wife, came to the beach with him. And at first, everything was fine. He got in the water and it felt so good. Completely calm, stress-free, not a thought in my head aside from, you know, it felt really good to be in the ocean. Mike was doing what he always did, lying on his stomach on the surfboard, paddling past the break. And that's when it came out of nowhere. Then coming out of the water with its mouth completely open was a shark.

And so then it clamped down onto my arm and its bottom jaw grabbed the board. So it had the board and my arm in the same mouthful. It was a great white. Whoa. What were you thinking at that moment? A complete, complete shock. Wasn't thinking anything at all. It happened so fast.

I was kind of almost face to face with it. I threw a punch with my left arm and bopped it on the nose. You punched the shark? Yep, bopped it on the nose. You punched the shark? Yep, I hit the shark in the nose. It was a tough thing to punch as well. I'm not a fighter. It's probably the third punch I've ever thrown in my life. Luckily, it shocked the shark.

It let go, went under the water, and then it came back up and it was like a submarine surfacing and then came at me again and so the shark rammed the board and hit me and I spun around almost 180 degrees to be facing almost the complete opposite direction so it really came back with a bit of force and I started thrashing you know know, thinking, okay, kick, do anything you can and I looked to the shore and then my wife was looking at me and she tilted her head to the side and that's when I realised she hasn't seen anything

and that terrified me more because I thought it's going to come back and, you know, and she's now going to watch the entire thing. Then Mike realises that he can't see the shark anymore, but he does see a wave that could help him. And Mike thinks he has to get to it and catch that wave to shore. But he's nervous about sticking his bloody arm in the water with the shark still out there. What I've heard, they can sense a drop of blood in the amount of water that's in an Olympic swimming pool,

but I couldn't paddle hard enough one-handed, so I was just watching my blood spread in the water as I was paddling as hard as I could to get this wave. Mike finally gets to shore and his arm is spurting blood. His wife runs up to him and asks what happened. And I'll remove the expletives, but I said, I believe it was a shark. That's how you said it, didn't you? It's that calm as well.

We seem to have run into a spot of trouble. We're in a pickle here and trouble is brewing. So just to translate. It was a f***ing shark. Run and call a f***ing ambulance. Mike was taken to hospital and went straight into surgery. They ended up counting 17 puncture wounds in my arm, in my forearm. That's a tooth every time there's like 17 teeth.

17 teeth, yeah. Oh, my gosh. Each tooth was up to an inch deep. After a night in the hospital, surgery and a ton of rehab, pretty remarkably, Mike's arm is now OK. Basically, all he's got to show for it is some pretty small scars and, of course, this story. But, yeah, I got out 10 out of 10. Luckiest bloke alive.

And stories like Mike's are often what we think of when it comes to sharks. You know, that they're not just predators, but almost super predators. And if we happen to cross paths with one, there's no hope for us. Getting away would mean we're the luckiest bloke alive. In fact, this message is all over the place. It's what we hear each year on Shark Week. But of course, it usually comes

with sinister music and an intense voiceover. News of the man-eating great white shakes nerves across Australia. The shark is a precision instrument of killing. And look, we love these stories. They're exciting and terrifying and we eat them up. But today, we're going to go beyond the scary stories, diving a little deeper to see what the latest science can tell us about sharks and why they sometimes bite people. And we're going to find out,

are sharks as terrifying as we've been led to believe? When it comes to sharks, there's a lot of... It was a f***ing shark. But then, there's a lot of... It was a f***ing shark. But then, there's science. Science vs. Sharks is coming up just after we paddle past the break. Y'all afraid of ghosts? How about ghost peppers? It's the moment you've been waiting for. The ghost pepper sandwich is back at Popeyes.

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Or visit SecurianCanada.ca. Securian Canada. Insurance designed for life. Welcome back. Today's show is all about sharks and whether you should be scared to go in the water. So far, we've had our scary shark story and been a bit creeped out by Shark Week. Now, let's dive into the science. First up, we wanted to speak to a scientist who gets up close and personal with sharks, Oregon State University researcher Taylor Chappell. He studies great white sharks, and Taylor says seeing them in the wild is exactly

as cool as it sounds. Yeah, it's almost one of those things you can't explain. And Taylor says seeing them in the wild is exactly as cool as it sounds. Yeah, it's almost one of those things you can't explain. So you see it on TV and you're like, yeah, that's a big animal. But to be there in the water with them and seeing them in real life, it really is something special. And even though there are hundreds of different species of sharks, the one that inspires legends is the great white. And a lot of this has to do with how they hunt and kill their prey, which really is impressive, even to scientists. So Taylor described what happens

when a great white hunts one of its favourite prey, the seal. The shark will often start by diving down deep into the water. So the sharks swim around, they're looking up, they're looking up. And then when they see a seal, that's the moment where they accelerate. And it's that split second where the seal has to be not paying attention and the shark is making its approach from down deep straight up. So the shark is barreling through the water, and it's huge. Great whites can weigh like 2,500 kilos or more than 5,000 pounds. And they have all these features that help them move very fast. Like even their skin has tiny little bumps

that create little whirlpools in the water to reduce friction. It's like sandpaper. And it's really cool. It's one of these crazy adaptations. Yeah, so how fast can they swim? Like top speed? So we have put accelerometers and speedometers on white sharks when they're going through these big bursts.

And so they can bust it up to about 25 miles an hour when they're going through those big explosions. Oh, wow. Which is pretty incredible. And that's in just a few tailbeats. Yeah. With just a few flicks of the tail, they can go from cruising at about one mile an hour to 25 miles an hour. And at that moment, the shark goes into full-blown attack mode. Sometimes these bursts are so powerful, you can actually see a shark's head coming out of the water. And meanwhile, to protect their eyes from a seal fighting back. Their eyes roll back. And so at that point, they're, for all intents and purposes, blind. And then, when the shark gets close enough,

chomp, the shark clamps down with teeth that really are shark week level scary. The teeth on the bottom of the jaw are sort of like a like fork tines. And then the top teeth are those really iconic white shark teeth that they're big triangular and they're serrated to sort of move back and forth in order to cut down through that prey. Wow, so it really is like when you, like, grab a steak with the fork and then you, like, cut a little piece with a serrated knife. Like, that is the shark's mouth. Yeah, that's what they're doing, which is, you know, it's pretty cool.

And it's not just the teeth that the seal has to worry about. Great whites have these massively powerful muscles around their jaw, which scientists have estimated gives them one of the strongest bite forces in the animal queendom. And sometimes it'll use those massive jaws to go for the head. Chop it right off. Have you seen a shark decapitate a seal? I have. That part is, it's shocking to see, but it really is incredible

seeing a predator doing its natural thing. You know, you're seeing one animal win and one animal lose. So, yeah, the circle of life. Sharks are definitely a scary predator here. And they're also very cool. But a lot of what we hear about sharks goes way beyond this. They sound like almost mythical hunters. And one part of the myth that we wanted to explore was their sense of smell.

That they can smell a drop of blood from far, far away. And this is something that surfer Mike was thinking about as he was actually being attacked. And you hear this a lot in movies and shark documentaries. You know, that when sharks are on the hunt... The shark's most acute sense is activated. Smell. A great white, for instance, could sense a single drop of blood

in an Olympic-sized swimming pool. And we wanted to find out if this idea was true, if sharks really are that good at smelling blood. So we sniffed out a researcher who really knows the science here. My name is Tricia Meredith, and I'm an assistant research professor at Florida Atlantic University, and I study the sense of smell of sharks and their relatives. And Trisha told us that this idea of sharks as amazing smellers doesn't just come from Shark Week. Like, academics think it's true. Even in the scientific literature, you'll get papers,

swimming noses, sharks are the swimming noses of the sea. Trisha said this idea that sharks are super smellers emerged because people out fishing noticed something weird. When they threw fish blood and guts into the water as bait, sharks would belly up to the boat pretty quickly. Plus, we know that sharks have these huge organs in their heads to help them smell. So it's this really beautiful, complicated labyrinth of tissue inside the nose.

Oh, wow. I just Googled it. It looks like a little bit like a vagina. That's funny. Yeah, I can see the comparison. Despite the signs pointing to super smelling, Trisha said there were hardly any studies that had actually tested if sharks really were star sniffers. So she decided to get her hands on some sharks to find out. First step, Trisha goes fishing and catches some lemon sharks. Then you bag them up like they're giant live tropical fish that you got from the pet store into these giant bags with seawater pumped

full of oxygen and you transport them in a truck up to our marine lab. Wow. And then you drive a truck full of sharks across the state. I don't think I've ever heard of anything more Floridian. Assuming she doesn't get pulled over, Trish gets the animals back to the lab. She'll set them up in a special tank and using a technique that's worked in a bunch of animals, she'll put these brave sharks through the smelling challenge of a lifetime. Cue the Snark Week music. Perfect. Okay, so to find out if these sharks are truly the noses of the ocean,

Trisha has to get up close and personal with these fearsome fish. She's about to stick electrodes up their nose. So what the electrode does is it's recording voltage inside the nose. Generally speaking, when a shark smells something, like blood, its neurons get excited. And back at the lab, Tricia takes advantage of this. She sets up a screen which can actually see that change in voltage. So you see this little dip? Tricia and her team squirt odours into the shark's nose to see what the neurons can pick up.

Their arsenal? They're using amino acids, which are the building blocks of basically every smell out there, including blood. Sure, definitely. Yeah, there are amino acids in blood. And they squirt these smells into the shark noses at lower and lower concentrations.

To see how low they can go. Can they still detect it? Do we still see a response? Did Trisha's sharks pass the ultimate smell test? Could they smell a drop of blood in an Olympic-sized swimming pool? The short answer is no. That's right. The answer is...

Wait, what was that? Can they smell a drop of that odor in an Olympic-sized swimming pool? The answer is no. Sharks are not sensitive enough to detect that concentration. So we kind of busted that myth. Okay, enough snark week. Back to science verses. So when Tricia looked at her findings, she saw that the sharks she tested were about as good at smelling as other fish in the ocean. Like, they were as good as salmon. What a fish slap in the face. Now, Tricia only tested a

couple of shark species, no great whites, but she reckons that what she found applies to other types of sharks as well. We like to paint them as very special, but, you know, they're actually just fish. I know it's a little, like, boring, but they're fish. Okay, so sharks don't have supernatural smelling skills. They can't sniff us out any better than a salmon could. They're fish. But they are fish with a hell of a bite. So our next question is, if you get in the water and a shark is nearby, will they go for you? To find out, we found ourselves a great white shark to be the judge.

Ruth Bader-Finsburg. What was that, Ruth? Sorry, I can't, I can't, um, hmm, okay, not helpful. Well, if we can't talk to a great white, let's turn to the next best thing, a shark scientist. And back to Taylor Chappell. Hey, Taylor. How's it going? So Taylor told us that if sharks loved eating humans, then you would expect that basically every time we're in the water near a shark, they would try to take a cheeky bite. So that's the funny thing is that's not necessarily the case. Scientists in Australia and South Africa have observed great white sharks and bull sharks swimming near hundreds of people, and they just don't go after them. Taylor has seen this too, when he goes tagging

great whites near an island called Año Nuevo in California. And about a half a mile from, or not even a half a mile, from where I work is a surf spot. So I'll have a day where there'll be six, seven, eight, up to 15 sharks swimming around my boat at one time. And I'll have a day where there'll be six, seven, eight, up to 15 sharks swimming around my boat at one time. And I can see a half mile away, the guys in the lineup surfing. And no one has ever been attacked at that spot. So if those sharks wanted to eat us, there would be very few surfers left in the water. Many scientists told us that people and sharks often swim in the same waters, and yet we hardly ever get attacked. Like, millions of people hit the beach each year, and yet only 60 to 100 get bitten by sharks each year worldwide. And on

average, only six people are killed. Six. You're way more likely to be, you know, have a TV fall on you and die. You know, not very many people are terrified of walking past their televisions. And this is all kind of weird, right? Like, you would think that we would be a tasty treat for sharks. So why aren't they going after us all the time? Well, until we learn to communicate with sharks, like Ruth Bader Finsberg, it's hard to know for sure.

But we do know that for millions of years, sharks have been eating marine animals, not weird hairless apes who are bad swimmers. And we know that the animals sharks are regularly going for are made of different stuff to us. Like, for example, seals are chock full of blubber. The blubber of a marine mammal is just like, you know, one of those power bars. It's just packed full of energy and what the animal needs. On top of this, we often have this idea that sharks will eat just about anything that swims

in their crosshairs. But new research is starting to show a totally different picture. Turns out sharks aren't mindless killing machines. They're figuring out exactly what they want and that's the only thing they're going after. They're being very discerning. Taylor told us about some surprising footage that he caught when he strapped a camera to the back of a great white.

You see a silhouette at the surface. You see the shark go from a couple miles an hour, burst speed up to 20-some miles an hour. At the last second, right before it gets to that unassuming silhouette at the surface, it bails. And it turns out that the silhouette at the surface was a bird and not a seal. It looks like when the shark got close, it realised this dinky bird just wasn't worth it.

And newer research in tiger sharks is showing basically the same thing, that most of the time, sharks don't go around chomping everything they see at every opportunity. They're making some sort of calculation about what's worth the effort. And it seems that in the vast, vast, vast majority of cases, humans, you and me, we're not worth it for them. And by the way, if you are one of the very, very, very, very unlucky people who do get bit by a shark, there's a little bit of science that can help you.

One study of over 500 shark attacks done in the 1970s found that poking a shark in the eye was one of the best things you could do to fight it off. This does leave one big question bobbing on the surface though. What do we know about these odd sharks that do go after people? Like that one that sunk its teeth into Mike's arm. What's up with those sharks? Are they different somehow? Are there sharks who have developed a taste for human flesh? That's coming up after the break.

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like TV falling on you rare. But they do sometimes happen. So we wanted to find out more about these attacks because even though they're rare, they're also very scary. They even scare shark researchers, like Dr. Chris Pepper Neff, who's at the University of Sydney. And Chris recently went scuba diving around Cape Town, where great whites are known to frolic. I'm swimming across the water and I'm like, I know the statistics. I know I'm very unlikely to run into a shark and thinking, oh, you know, I can do this as a rational human being. And then I start flailing.

I ran out of rationality. I started screaming to the boat guy pretty early, like, get me out of the water. Chris, like almost everyone who goes into the water, was absolutely fine. Yeah, it wasn't my shining moment of being a shark researcher. But we called up Chris, not because we wanted to hear about his holiday, but because we wanted to know why the odd shark does bite a human. And he told us about one idea that's been floating around since at least the 1950s, and it's called rogue shark theory.

There are rogue sharks that get a taste for human blood, and they're the ones you really need to be concerned about. This idea basically says that there are certain sharks, bad apples, who move into an area, bite one person, get a taste for it, and then they start hunting and biting more and more people. The guy who came up with this was a respected doctor and researcher, and in 1950 he wrote in a scientific journal that a rogue shark, quote, must be hunted until it is destroyed. And if this sounds familiar... It is as if God created the devil and gave him Jaws.

That story, the rogue shark story, is really personified in the movie Jaws. So the shark in Jaws is the quintessential rogue shark, and it captured our imagination. I remember laying on the floor like I had this giant bowl of popcorn and the shark comes out of the water and I flew and so did the bowl of popcorn. It went flying across the room. I was screaming. Chris told us that after Jaws came out, you start seeing this idea of rogue shark theory all over the place. Like Shark Week went wild on it. Is this a rogue with a taste for human flesh? Rogue shark theory is still being touted by people today. Every beach I go to, when there's a shark bite, they'll say it was a rogue shark.

So decades after this idea was first suggested, what do we know about rogue sharks? Can this theory explain why the odd person gets bitten? Well, if it were true, then a lot of shark attacks should be caused by the same shark. You know, the bad apples. The rogues. And is that what we find? Luckily, scientists have been systematically tracking shark attacks for about half a century. And they can't find these rampant rogues chomping their way

through the database. In fact, in all that time, there's only been one case where scientists agree that the same shark bit more than one person. That's the reality. So what we end up with is a much less sensationalized story. So let's go a little deeper on this less sensationalized story. If there were so-called rogue sharks, you'd expect them to make a meal out of every person they bite, you know, because they love the taste of human flesh.

But surprisingly, that's not what happens. Studies of shark bites have found that in the vast majority of cases, sharks will bite a person once and then leave them. They don't stick around to eat them, which, kind of remarkably, is why most people who are bitten by sharks actually end up better off than our surfer Mike. Here's Chris again. I spent a decade researching this, and there's no evidence to support the rogue shark theory.

There are no such thing as rogue sharks. There is something else entirely going on here. Nowadays, scientists generally think that when sharks do bite people, it's probably not because the shark actually wanted to eat a person, but rather they're confusing us for maybe stuff like seals, or perhaps they're freaked out by people in the water and they get defensive. And while Chris says we can never really know what motivates a wild animal, it's obvious that Hollywood sharks are working off a totally different script. Like producer Rose Rimler talked to Chris about what the Jaws shark was getting up to. I mean, it's terrorizing the public. It's picking on little kids.

It's picking on the over-sexualized girl. It's judgy. Mm-hmm. You know, the shark's a total asshole. That's not shark behavior. That's horror movie behavior. Yeah, that's classic slasher movie. That's classic slasher movie.

And it's all false. Still, though, from the evidence we have, generally speaking, sharks aren't interested in eating us. But the ironic thing is that we are very interested in eating sharks. We eat a ton of sharks. Actually, 100,000 tonnes of shark a year, at least. People often shake their fists at shark finning and shark fin soup, which is a delicacy in parts of Asia. But people actually eat shark meat all over the world. Like in the UK and Australia, you can buy shark meat with your chips.

You can also get shark meat in the UK and Australia, you can buy shark meat with your chips. You can also get shark meat in the US. On top of that, we're scooping up a lot of sharks that we don't even want to eat. It happens by accident because of industrialised fishing. It turns out the mighty shark is actually quite vulnerable. They're very easy to catch in the open ocean, and so they end up being a lot of bycatch. And rather than throw the fish back, which they may do sometimes, more often than not, they don't. All of these pressures have created a sort of perfect sharknado. And these days, one quarter of all shark species and their relatives are threatened with extinction.

One quarter. And that includes a lot of puny-looking sharks that don't get a lot of attention, but it also includes the great white. You know, it's a very tragic, very difficult situation. We don't know exactly what will go wrong if we lose more sharks, but from everything we do know about how food webs work, we can see that when we lose predators, it has trickle-down effects. For example, lose the wolves in Yellowstone,

and we got overrun with elk. And so, bottom line, Chris says sharks are important, and we really should stop hating on them. It's our responsibility to try to weed through this fake bulls**t. And it's not that sharks are perfect. Sharks still bite people. But the whole picture of what sharks are is yet to be told. Well, until now. So when it comes to sharks as super predators, the John Wicks of the sea, does this idea stack up? Well, sharks are definitely amazing hunters, but no, they can't sniff a drop of blood from far away.

And considering how many millions of people go into waters where sharks are hanging out and yet don't get bitten, it does seem like sharks aren't out for human flesh. They prefer marine life. So, bottom line, sharks aren't total arseholes. They're just big, cool fish. And the truth is, we're more of a threat to them than they are to us. Every researcher we spoke to is annoyed by this killer shark mythology that just won't die,

and they're working very hard to undo the work of Jaws and Shark Week. By the way, we reached out to those at Shark Week, and they told us that they contribute to shark research and conservation. Despite all their efforts, our researchers all said that sharks need an image makeover. You know, a rebrand. Like Taylor, who studies great whites, told us that he and his mates are now taking the great out of their name. Rather than this really sort of scary great white shark, we just talk about him as a white shark.

Tricia, who did the smelling study, thinks that the shark bite needs a pivot. She wants to call it... A light mouthing. You got that? A light mouthing. Can you tell that I'm team shark? Even Mike, our surfer, who was bitten by a shark,

has his own terminology. It's just having a little nibble. Yeah, I've got no issues with Bruce. Bruce? You named your shark Bruce? Yeah, I've given him a name. Yeah, he's doing his thing, I'll do mine. And perhaps the guy with the grandest plan to give sharks a bit of a glow up is Chris.

Sharks have been demonized. And when I do my musical, Flaws the Musical, it's going to be, you know, like Wicked. It's going to be like Wicked. And the shark is going to be the star of the musical. And the shark starts singing, you know, Defying Gravity and whatever it is. Do you have any songs ready to go? Oh, I'm working on them. I've already bought FlawsTheMusical.com. Rose? Yeah?

Should we help him out a little? I think so. I know you people are scared of me. But I'm not the one to blame. You saw Jaws as a child. And now you think I'm maimed. But I need to eat sometimes. I was as a child and now you think I'm maimed But I need to eat sometimes And even if you're on the beach

I'll choose a seal for food Roll back my eyes and reach! Or I might try to bite a manatee. But human flesh, it's just not my cup of tea. So I won't pull you down. Sharky, I find that hard to believe. Dolphinder, haven't you been listening to anything? You really don't want to eat humans. No, I just want pull you down.

That's Science vs. Sharks. In a couple of weeks, we're going to be dropping our episode on orgasms. Thank you so much to everyone who sent us your stories. We really appreciate it. And we have one more thing to ask. It turns out that there are some gaps in the research when it comes to orgasm. And so we want to collect some data from you. We've got a survey.

It's just informal, but it's very, very anonymous. And we'd love for you to fill it out and to share it with your friends and get them to fill it out. The link is in the show notes. It's also on our Twitter account, which is ScienceVS, and on our Instagram, Science underscore VS. Thank you. How many citations in this week's episode, producer Rose Rimla? Host, Wendy Zuckerman, there's over 120 citations. Whoa, that may be a, like, a record.

There's a lot of shark information out there. There's a lot of shark information out there. There's a lot of shark information. And if people want to read this shark information, where should they go? They can click on the link in our show notes and it'll take them to the transcript with all the citations. Thanks, Rose. Thanks, Wendy. This episode was produced by Rose Rimler, with help from me, Wendy Zuckerman,

along with Meryl Horn and Michelle Dang. We're edited by Blythe Terrell, and this week, with help from Caitlin Sorey. Fact-checking by Diane Kelly. Mix and sound design by Peter Leonard. A huge thanks to the amazing team of musicians that helped us with Floors and our Snark Week music,

led by Peter Leonard, along with Bobby Lord, Emma Munger, and Marcus Thorne-Bagelar. Recording assistance from Carolyn Perryman, Shannon Kaysen, Sam Turkin, Beth McMullen, and Jessie Wensloff. A big thanks to Thank you so much. Plus, a special thanks to the Zuckerman family and Joseph LaBelle Wilson. I'm Wendy Zuckerman.

Back to you next time.