Short Wave - These Sea Lions Are Basically Scientists

Episode Date: August 9, 2024

How do you study unmapped areas of the ocean and identify critical habitat for an endangered species? You include the study animal in the scientific process! Researchers from the University of Adelaide fitted endangered Australian sea lions with cameras and tracking devices to better understand where they spent their time. The information could help scientists protect critical sea lion habitat and could give researchers a new tool for mapping the ocean. Interested in more underwater science? Email us at [e-mail]. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, short wavers, Regina Barbara here. And this time I've got some serious science dorks for our regular science news roundup. Starting with Elsa Chang, who hosts all things considered between stints with us. Hey, Elsa. Hi, Dork Supreme here. We're all dorks here, including fellow scientists, biochemist, queen, and producer Burley McCoy. Hey, Burley.

Oh, hey, Gina. Okay, as you both know, we're going to share three science stories in the news that caught our attention recently. Yeah, I heard we're going to talk about a meteor shower. You are correct. We're also going to talk about a barely there atmosphere around the moon. And also something not in space, but in the ocean, sea lions with cams on their bodies. Ooh, I love animal stories. Yes, I do too. We've got all of that on this episode of Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. All right, Elsa, as our guest, which topic would you like to start with first? I want to start with the sea lion cartographers.

Yes, so researchers glued underwater cameras onto Australian sea lions, and then they used that footage to look at where they spent their time. Wait, they glued the cameras onto the sea lions? Is that totally uncomfortable? So these cameras are super lightweight, and the researchers are very gentle with the animals, and they get the back in the water as soon as possible. Well, what do we want to know about where sea lions are hanging out all the time?

Well, the Australian sea lions are an endangered species, and their population has declined by more than 60% in the last 40 years. And even though researchers have a broad sense of where these sea lions spend their time hunting, there's a lot of specifics researchers don't know. Huh. Okay, well, how common is it for scientists to attach cameras to animals? Like, I see people do this with their dogs all the time, not me, because Mickey is really sedentary, but, like, how common is this? Yes, I would actually like to see Mickey's footage. But for marine animals, it's actually not that uncommon. Oh, really?

Well, researchers had attached suction cameras to whales to do things like understand their behavior and acoustics. But it's rare to map the animals like habitat using these cameras. And they also use the footage to explore unmapped areas of the ocean. So neat. So like they can script these sea lions into becoming soldiers for science. Kind of, yeah. But for the area that they mapped, it's a cheap. and less time-intensive way than sending divers down or remotely operated vehicles.

That totally makes sense. All right, so how did they get these cameras back from the sea lions after gluing them on? Well, because the researchers also attach trackers to the sea lions, they could monitor their location, wait until they came back to land, and then gently remove the cameras. And once they get that video footage back, they identified six different habitats on the seafloor. And the scientists used this habitat data to build a computer model

that can predict sea line habitats in other areas. And this work was published this week in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science. And Elsa, this is potentially a new way for other scientists to study the ocean. I talked with a whale researcher who was not involved in this work, whose name, out of respect, I will let him say. My name is Maiv, Ratsimbeza from Janag. So Maiv said it inspired him to go back through the video footage that he's collected from humpback whales to see what else he could learn about their environment. And I think it would complete a lot of missing information on the underwater environment in general. Andy thinks it could encourage other researchers to do the same.

But for me, the videos are just really fun to watch. All right. I'm going to switch gears a little bit right now and talk about the Perseid meteor shower. Should I be out in my backyard stargazing pretty soon? Well, I don't know about your backyard because it's like light pollution, but it might be worth venturing outside of L.A. for. So this weekend is the peak of the Perseids, which NASA calls the best meteor shower of the year. Because sometimes people have reported seeing 90 or more every hour. Wow. Yeah.

And the Perciates are known for leaving these long trains, kind of like the wake of a motorboat but in the sky. That's so cool. And these are ionized molecules left behind in the Earth's atmosphere as the meteor heats up the air in its path. Wow. Well, can you remind us? Like, what are the Perseid meteor showers caused by? Yeah, so the Earth orbits around the sun every year, right? So that means every year around July or August we pass through these clouds of ice and dust

left over from the comet swift tuddle, or 109P. And when that debris hits our Earth's atmosphere, it usually burns up, which creates these bright shooting stars that we see in the sky, like the Perseats. Pretty! Okay, I'm convinced. I'm totally going to check this out. What is the best time for me to watch? So your best time to spot a shooting star is going to be this Sunday night, like after

the moon sets around. midnight and the sky is really dark, but even then, even if it's dark, you still need to have like 30 minutes to let your eyes adjust to that darkness and be patient. Like, at best, you'll see like two a minute. Oh my God. That's so slow, but I'll try. Yeah, exactly. People expect there to be like showers and it's not quite that. I think my eyes are going to dry out from staring so continuously. But okay, let's stay in space and talk about this barely there atmosphere of the moon? What does that even mean for an atmosphere to be barely there? Yeah, it means the moon has like a very thin atmosphere and it's composed of atoms that are like so

spread out, they barely interact. It's like the tiniest wisp of an atmosphere because unlike Earth, which has like active volcanoes that spew at gas and earth has enough gravity to like hold on to all that gas and make an atmosphere, the moon has no active volcanoes and like very little gravity. But a new paper out this week helps to explain some of the mystery of how that tiny atmosphere got there. Oh, I love mystery. So how did the moon's atmosphere get there? Okay, well, I should first give you a little bit of a backstory. So scientists have been debating this for decades. They even sent a lunar orbiter called Laddie up 11 years ago to investigate this, and it couldn't come up with a definitive answer. But there are two working ideas for how this atmosphere formed. So,

okay, the first one is meteorite impacts. So when meteorites, even tiny ones, hit the moon's surface, the energy from that impact vaporizes the soil, and the atoms from that collision go up into the air and create this thin atmosphere. Yeah, the other process involves solar winds, so that's the other part of the debate. Solar winds are just high-energy particles like flowing from the sun,

and these particles are going so fast that they hit the lunar soil, and that knocks particles out, and those particles go up and create an atmosphere. Dang. Okay, solar winds or meteorites crashing into the moon. Yeah. That's wild. Which one ended up being right? Well, that's where this new paper comes in.

Scientists looked at actual lunar soil and rocks brought back by the Apollo astronauts for answers. Yeah, and these samples are very precious. Humans have only gone to the moon a handful of times. The lead author of this paper, Nicole Nia, told me that she was pretty nervous. Before I started to work on lunar samples, I spent three years to develop the chemical method to make sure that I can do it, right? And she and her colleagues published the results of these chemical analyses in the journal Science Advances. And they determined that the majority of the moon's atmosphere, about 70% was because of meteorite impacts. Okay, so the moon's unsolved mystery is solved.

Right. So the big deal is that this might actually tell something about other planetary bodies, like things beyond the moon, maybe the atmosphere around Mercury or even planets outside of our solar system. Very cool. Yeah, no, I'm excited about it. Anything about Moons, right? Elsa, thank you so much for coming on the pod. It's always a pleasure to have you. Of course. I love being here.

Yes, please come back anytime. Oh, I will, I will. Be careful what you wish for. You can catch more of Elsa doing her day job hosting The News on Consider This, NPR's Afternoon News Podcast. Before we head out, just a reminder that Shortwave Plus allows you to enjoy our show without sponsor interruptions, and it helps support our work. Find out more at plus.npr.org slash shorewave.

This episode was produced by Kai McNamee and Hannah Chin. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez and Christopher Intaliata. Burley, Hannah, Rebecca, and I checked the facts. The audio engineer was David Greenberg. And happy leave to Burley, who is taking a well-deserved parental leave through the end of the year. We are truly going to miss you, Burley. I know. I'm at YouTube. Anyway, I'm Regina Barber.

I'm Burley McCoy. Thank you so much for listening to Shortwave, the Science Podcast from NPR.