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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.

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Speaker 2: Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My

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Speaker 2: name is Robert.

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Speaker 3: Lamb and I am Joe McCormack. And we're back with

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Speaker 3: the fourth And are we going to say, for now

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Speaker 3: final part in our series on the prairie or are

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Speaker 3: we going to go for more?

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Speaker 2: I think I think it's going to make sense to

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Speaker 2: go ahead and cap it off at least for now.

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Speaker 2: We can always come back and do more episodes about

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Speaker 2: things related to the prairie. I know that. You know,

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Speaker 2: we've touched on a number of topics here in this

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Speaker 2: series where any one of them we could have blown

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Speaker 2: it out and made itself a multi part episode, like

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Speaker 2: the bison, for example, or coyotes and any of the

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Speaker 2: organisms that we've talked about. Yeah, we could have easily

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Speaker 2: done a whole series. So it's always possible that we'll

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Speaker 2: come back. Maybe it's likely we'll come back and do

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Speaker 2: something else on the prairie in the future.

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Speaker 3: Well, totally, we have not even come close to exhausting

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Speaker 3: the topic, right, you know, we could do one hundred

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Speaker 3: more episodes.

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Speaker 2: It's inexhaustible, vast I mean, just look at it.

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Speaker 3: Goes on forever, so the prairie is if you're just

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Speaker 3: joining us for the first time in Part four. Here

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Speaker 3: the temperate grassland ecosystem of North America. In previous episodes,

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Speaker 3: we've talked about what defines a prairie, why prairies are

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Speaker 3: dominated by grasses and forbes instead of trees, and we

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Speaker 3: talked about how the factors that maintain that plant balance

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Speaker 3: have been altered in recent centuries and reasons that the

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Speaker 3: prairie is now considered an endangered ecosystem. We also talked

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Speaker 3: about grizzly bears of the prairies, once a top predator

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Speaker 3: of the ecosystem before they were driven out by humans.

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Speaker 3: In Part two of this series, we talked about a

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Speaker 3: prairie formation called mima mounds and the different hypotheses about

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Speaker 3: how they form. This is still not a settled question.

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Speaker 3: We also discussed a nineteenth century phenomenon known as prairie madness,

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Speaker 3: not a recognized psychological condition today, but a sort of

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Speaker 3: group of symptoms alleged to occur in many European American

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Speaker 3: settlers of the Great Plains, attributed in part to physical

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Speaker 3: features of the landscape itself, like openness and howling winds

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Speaker 3: that we talked about other sources that this malaise could

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Speaker 3: be coming from as well. In Part three, I talked

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Speaker 3: about the native bison of the prairie as ecosystem engineers,

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Speaker 3: creating these little islands of plant and animal biodiversity throughout

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Speaker 3: the prairie with their wallowing or dust bathing behaviors. And

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Speaker 3: Rob got into the amazing coyote described by Lewis and

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Speaker 3: Clark as the prairie wolf, which was once a grassland

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Speaker 3: native that has now spread and adapted to basically every

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Speaker 3: habitat in North America. They are masters at filling space,

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Speaker 3: at filling an open ecological niche. And today we've got

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Speaker 3: one more episode for you. So Rob, what are you

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Speaker 3: going to start us off with today?

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Speaker 2: Well, it is you speaking of ecosystem engineers. It is

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Speaker 2: time to talk about the grassland ecosystem engineer par excellence,

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Speaker 2: the prairie dog. And I want to begin here by

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Speaker 2: turning at least one last time to the descriptions, the

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Speaker 2: scientific descriptions of Lewis and Clark, and in fact these

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Speaker 2: were apparently these are considered the first scientific descriptions of

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Speaker 2: the prairie dog in the Western Cannon.

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Speaker 3: I think these Lewis and Clark journals are a great

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Speaker 3: way to read about some of the fauna of western

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Speaker 3: North America because you get to see them with truly

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Speaker 3: kind of fresh eyes, like somebody who has not seen

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Speaker 3: a nature documentary about this stuff before. They're walking into

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Speaker 3: it and they're like, oh, what's this. Yeah.

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Speaker 2: Absolutely, I mean obviously they might have heard something from

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Speaker 2: the French or from indigenous peoples, but they were definitely

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Speaker 2: encountering them for the first time. And again, these are

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Speaker 2: widely considered, you know, the first scientific writings concerning various

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Speaker 2: species that they encountered, though many of the field notes

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Speaker 2: from the journals of Lewis and Clark would not be

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Speaker 2: published in full for some time. So the initial publication

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Speaker 2: of the journals, this is the eighteen fourteen Nicholas Biddle version,

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Speaker 2: leaned into the adventure, into the adventure narrative of the thing,

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Speaker 2: you know, running from bear, shooting at bears, that sort

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Speaker 2: of sort of encounter, and cut out much of the science,

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Speaker 2: so you know, more bear bears chasing you and less

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Speaker 2: let's describe the testicles of all the bears that we encountered,

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Speaker 2: you know, because there is a lot of that scientific

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Speaker 2: note taking throughout the journals, where yeah, it has no

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Speaker 2: narrative importance, but I have to describe to you what

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Speaker 2: these animals look like, you know, right down to some

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Speaker 2: of the details here.

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Speaker 3: But that was explicitly part of their mission, right, Like

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Speaker 3: they were tasked with making detailed descriptions of the things

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Speaker 3: they found, and.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, sending back specimens and so forth. So this Biddle version,

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Speaker 2: I'm to understand, was more of a paraphrasing of things

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Speaker 2: into an entertaining read and they were gonna do apparently

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Speaker 2: there was going to be a scientific follow up, and

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Speaker 2: then it didn't happen. So the full scientific findings bear

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Speaker 2: testicles and all wouldn't really be appreciated for a good century. Right,

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Speaker 2: So I'm gonna read now from the journals. This is

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Speaker 2: from September seventh, eighteen oh four. Near the foot of

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Speaker 2: this high knoll, we discovered a village of an animal

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Speaker 2: the French call the prairie dog, which burrow in the

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Speaker 2: ground and with the rattlesnake. Now to be clear that

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Speaker 2: Clark here is referring to a myth that I'm assuming

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Speaker 2: reached him from French sources that claimed that prairie dogs

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Speaker 2: lived alongside rattlesnakes in their den. He disproves this in

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Speaker 2: the same entry by stating that they quote killed a

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Speaker 2: dark rattlesnake with a prairie dog in him. So became

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Speaker 2: clear that these animals were not living in harmony with

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Speaker 2: each other. Though we'll come back to what it means

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Speaker 2: for there to be a rattlesnake or various other organisms

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Speaker 2: within the tunnels the prairie dog.

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Speaker 3: Now we should mention a couple of notes about the

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Speaker 3: spelling here, because last time we talked about some fun

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Speaker 3: with Lewis and Clark's spelling choices. You flagged to me

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Speaker 3: in I think it was a text message. The way

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Speaker 3: they decide to spell animal. The word animal in this entry,

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Speaker 3: which is like the name anna and then the word male.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, cobbled together into one word ani male that the

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Speaker 2: French called the prairie dog. Yeah. When you start counting

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Speaker 2: the different ways that words are spelled, I want to

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Speaker 2: say mosquito is spelled like nineteen or twenty different ways.

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Speaker 2: When you know not that I have a lot of

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Speaker 2: room to judge. I think I've probably spelled it five

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Speaker 2: or six different ways myself.

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Speaker 3: But well, I mean this used to be common. You know,

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Speaker 3: a lot of older sources you find just wild spellings

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Speaker 3: of things. English spelling took a long time to standardize.

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Speaker 3: I was actually reading about this after we were texting

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Speaker 3: about this. You know, the Webster's Dictionary didn't come out

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Speaker 3: until like the eighteen thirties, and the Johnson Dicky had

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Speaker 3: been in the middle of the eighteenth century, so it

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Speaker 3: took a long time for English spellings to like get

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Speaker 3: all on the same page.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, I think you you mentioned that the spellings were

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Speaker 2: sort of partially a.

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Speaker 3: Vibe situation vipelling.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, and certainly, to be clear, Lewis and Clark had

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Speaker 2: other things they were contending without in the field. Rather

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Speaker 2: than making sure they were consistent in the way they

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Speaker 2: spelled animal, they had to run from some of those

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Speaker 2: animals and or shoot them.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, so quickly jot down and a mail. That's good enough.

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Speaker 2: And then they do abbreviate a prairie dog to p

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Speaker 2: do or p dough. I'm not sure how we're supposed

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Speaker 2: to pronounce it, just like capital P and then D. Again,

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Speaker 2: they're in the field. These are field notes, so yeah,

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Speaker 2: go for it. I found myself abbreviating them to pds.

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Speaker 2: Just in order to get everything on the page, I'm

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Speaker 2: going to continue reading here. Quote. The village of those

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Speaker 2: little dogs is under the ground a considerable distance. We

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Speaker 2: dug under six feet through through rich hard clay without

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Speaker 2: getting to their lodges. Some of their holes we poured

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Speaker 2: in five barrels of water without driving them out. We

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Speaker 2: caught only we caught one by the water forcing him out.

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Speaker 2: So to be clear, what they did here is they

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Speaker 2: poured river water down some prairie dog holes until they

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Speaker 2: finally flushed one out. They also collected some dead specimens,

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Speaker 2: you know, which was just can't standard practice. I think

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Speaker 2: it's like maybe three dead prairie dogs. But they also

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Speaker 2: had this live prairie dog that they had flushed out,

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Speaker 2: and this one they decided, hey, let's ship this back

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Speaker 2: to the President of the United States. And that's exactly

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Speaker 2: what they did. They shipped a live prairie dog back

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Speaker 2: to President Thomas Jefferson.

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Speaker 3: The President will need to see this rodent.

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Speaker 2: Yeah yeah. And so at this point, this rodent that

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Speaker 2: as far as I know, has no name, it was

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Speaker 2: never given a name, embarks on a forty three day

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Speaker 2: barge ride just to get back to Saint Louis, then

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Speaker 2: thrown on another barge and goes all the way down

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Speaker 2: the Mississippi to New Orleans, then travels by sea to Baltimore,

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Speaker 2: then by land once more to make his way to

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Speaker 2: the President himself. And you might be thinking, Okay, just

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Speaker 2: because you send a prairie dog to the President of

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Speaker 2: the United States, surely this individual has better things to do.

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Speaker 2: And I guess Thomas Jefferson probably did, but he still

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Speaker 2: took time out of his day to meet with this

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Speaker 2: prairie dog. Some sources say that he lived with the

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Speaker 2: prairie dog for like a month. I think that might

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Speaker 2: be stretching things a little bit, but it was around.

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Speaker 2: He did get to see it, and Jefferson himself described

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Speaker 2: it as quote, a species of marmot in a letter

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Speaker 2: to painter Charles Wilson Peel, who later saw the prairie

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Speaker 2: dog after it had been relocated to the Philadelphia Museum,

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Speaker 2: and Peel described it as follows. It is a pleasing

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Speaker 2: little animal and not in the least dangerous to handle

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Speaker 2: like our groundhog.

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Speaker 3: Oh okay, so it's a full petting zo here. They're

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Speaker 3: all handling this thing presumably.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, that quote by the way is sometimes misattributed to

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Speaker 2: Jefferson himself, but I think all Jefferson had to say

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Speaker 2: about it was like He's like, oh, yeah, I saw it.

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Speaker 2: It's some sort of marmot or something.

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Speaker 3: I'm imagining it like running up some frilly sleeves into the.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, one of sims. I don't think I've seen like

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Speaker 2: a Thomas Jefferson movie in which they really you spent

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Speaker 2: a lot of time with, or spend any amount of

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Speaker 2: time with this particular encounter. But as far again, as

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Speaker 2: far as I can tell, prairie dog had no name.

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Speaker 2: Maybe a children's author has given this prairie dog a

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Speaker 2: name that would be great. I'd like to see that book.

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Speaker 2: But after meeting the President went to live at the museum,

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Speaker 2: eventually died. Was taxidermy for continued to for continued display,

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Speaker 2: and this taxidermy prairie dog is presumed lost or destroyed

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Speaker 2: at this point anyway, But back to Lewis's description of

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Speaker 2: the prairie dog, he shares their mouth. Their mouth resembles

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Speaker 2: the rabbit, head longer, legs short, and toenails long, Their

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Speaker 2: tail like a ground squirrel, which they shake and make

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Speaker 2: chattering noise. Their eyes like a dog. Their color is

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Speaker 2: gray and skin contains soft fur. And then later in

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Speaker 2: the journals, this one actually comes from John Ordway, who

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Speaker 2: is a member of their party. He writes, quote shields,

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Speaker 2: another member of their party killed a prairie dog which

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Speaker 2: was cooked for the captain's dinner. Captains went out with

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Speaker 2: some men of the party to see the ground where

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Speaker 2: those little dogs make their villages, and they found more

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Speaker 2: than an acre of ground covered with their holes.

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Speaker 3: And said, I want to eat one of those? What

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Speaker 3: does it taste like?

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Speaker 2: Some people have and do eat them. I momentarily went

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Speaker 2: down that tangent, like what do people think the people

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Speaker 2: like the taste? Basically people are split on it. Some

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Speaker 2: people like it, some people don't. Apparently some amount of

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Speaker 2: spice is required, but anyway, Yeah, I love how these

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Speaker 2: entries delight in the almost alien nature of these creatures,

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Speaker 2: especially their villages, these vast villages, and their amusing appearance.

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Speaker 2: Of course, they are, to be clear, not dogs, and

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Speaker 2: are in fact ground squirrels of the Sonomaus genus, which

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Speaker 2: includes four or five species, including the largest and also

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Speaker 2: the most socially complex, the black tailed prairie dog.

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Speaker 3: That genus named Sonomas does that does that mean dog? Mouse?

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Speaker 2: Is that? Yeah? Yeah, okay, yeah, the prairie dog, and

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Speaker 2: there are all these comparisons to dog that I think

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Speaker 2: a lot of it comes down to their vocalizations, though

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Speaker 2: Lewis and Clark describe their eyes I believe as being doglike,

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Speaker 2: so you know, I guess you can. You can see

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Speaker 2: that in their appearance. But the different species, they differ

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Speaker 2: in size, they different tail, tip, and back colors. They're

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Speaker 2: otherwise mostly sandy colored, and their main attributes are their

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Speaker 2: sprawling underground colonies, their diurnal lifestyle, and their barked alarm calls. Again,

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Speaker 2: the blacktail prairie dog is the most socially complex, and

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Speaker 2: in some of the others you still see social complexity,

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Speaker 2: but also some more like individualist, solitary kind of behavior

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Speaker 2: as well.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, before we started recording, I was actually looking up

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Speaker 3: because I didn't quite know what is the main difference

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Speaker 3: between a prairie dog and a gopher. I mean, they're just,

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Speaker 3: you know, they're different animals. But one difference I saw

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Speaker 3: highlighted was that prairie dogs tend to be the more

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Speaker 3: social of these animals. Gophers tend to be more on

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Speaker 3: the solitary side, though there's some variation within them, I guess.

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Speaker 2: Yeah yeah. And also like a pocket gopher is not

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Speaker 2: a ground squirrel, right, just to get into to that difference.

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Speaker 2: But another interesting thing to point out is that we're

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Speaker 2: going to be talking about the like how socially complex

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Speaker 2: the blacktailed prairie dog is, but also it's worth stress

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Speaker 2: that they are nowhere near as socially complex as something

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Speaker 2: like naked mole rat, which is generally considered use social

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Speaker 2: in the way it carries about its business. That is

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Speaker 2: not the case here with the prairie dogs. Still complicated

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Speaker 2: and complex, but not use social.

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Speaker 3: I mean naked mole rat I think is about as

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Speaker 3: close as a mammal gets to being like an ant.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, absolutely so. According to Kay and Wilson's Mammals

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Speaker 2: of North America, which is a little book I turned

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Speaker 2: to and sometimes travel with, they describe the black tailed

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Speaker 2: prairie dogs as the largest of the species of prairie

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Speaker 2: dog and again the one with the most complex social

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Speaker 2: behavior of them all. They prefer short to mid grass

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Speaker 2: prairie and they will actually work to keep those grasses

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Speaker 2: short around their colony for maximum visibility, so kind of

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Speaker 2: like clearing the shrubs and trees out from around a

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Speaker 2: castle to deny be Sieger's natural cover as they creep

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Speaker 2: cloth to the walls.

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Speaker 3: Right, you don't want that burnham wood to come to

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Speaker 3: duncan A.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. And so here in this in these areas

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Speaker 2: of the prairie dog colonies, they live in high density

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Speaker 2: underground environments. When not restricted or persecuted by humans. This

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Speaker 2: can certainly highly disrupt how they carry about their business

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Speaker 2: and just how many can exist in a single area

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Speaker 2: all you know. It's also susceptible to various other disruptions

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Speaker 2: environmental predators and so forth. And they can still form

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Speaker 2: large colonies today. But before Europeans expanded into the Western

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Speaker 2: United States, some of these were just absolutely tremendous. K's

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Speaker 2: in Wilson's site that the largest of these pre European

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Speaker 2: black tailed prairie dog colonies contained something like four hundred

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Speaker 2: million individuals and covered sixty five thousand square kilometers or

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Speaker 2: roughly twenty five thousand, ninety seven square miles.

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Speaker 3: Wow.

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Speaker 2: So in terms of size, we could, very roughly, and

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Speaker 2: I want to strus very roughly, compare this to the

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Speaker 2: size of Latvia, Lithuania or Sri Lanka, and in terms

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Speaker 2: of population, the United States is not expected to reach

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Speaker 2: a population of four hundred million humans for decades to come.

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Speaker 2: So this is just this is just so many prairie

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Speaker 2: dog individuals in such a large area and it's all

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Speaker 2: considered one colony.

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Speaker 3: Kind of hard to imagine because given those proportions, it

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Speaker 3: starts to feel more like science fiction, kind of alien

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Speaker 3: hive proportions, even though when you look at the individuals

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Speaker 3: they're these cute little good boys.

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Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, you can just imagine like someone looking out

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Speaker 2: and just seeing prairie dogs as far as the eye

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Speaker 2: can see. And I haven't witnessed anything like this, but

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Speaker 2: when I was at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife

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Speaker 2: Refuge in Colorado, I do get to see a number

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Speaker 2: of prairie dogs out there, and I did have that

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Speaker 2: experience of being like, oh, look, there's a prairie dog.

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Speaker 2: And then you realize, oh look there's another prairie dog.

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Speaker 2: There's yet another prairie dog, and you realize that, oh, well,

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Speaker 2: they're they're a fair number of prairie dog individuals in

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Speaker 2: this given area, and of course you notice them because

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Speaker 2: because a lot of them are on duty you know,

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Speaker 2: they're sort of they're standing erect, they're looking out, they're

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Speaker 2: they're ever ever vigilant against threats to the colony. And

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Speaker 2: that's one of the one that's one of the reasons

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Speaker 2: that they they live in relative close confines like this,

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Speaker 2: and these colonies could swell to such size. So prairie

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Speaker 2: dogs were of course long vilified by human settlers, you know,

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Speaker 2: of European descent, and killed in great numbers because these

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Speaker 2: settlers saw them as, for one thing, competition for livestock.

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Speaker 2: And this entailed large scale government sponsored poisoning programs. So

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Speaker 2: once again, and I mean government sponsored practices that effectively

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Speaker 2: tried to eradicate a species that is vital, as we'll discuss,

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Speaker 2: to the prairie environment. And then on top of that,

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Speaker 2: if that wasn't bad enough, around nineteen hundred rats from

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Speaker 2: ships arriving in San Francisco brought plague to the prairie dogs.

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Speaker 2: This is when I say plague, we're talking actual Urcinia

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Speaker 2: pestis here and you know, or the black death. And

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Speaker 2: since the prairie dogs had no historic evolutionary exposure to

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Speaker 2: the disease, they suffered just astonishingly high mortality rates something

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Speaker 2: like ninety to one hundred percent mortality rates. And again

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Speaker 2: think about how they live in these rather large, kind

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Speaker 2: of close confines and confine environments. So you know, pathogen

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Speaker 2: like this is going to spread relatively easily. So the

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Speaker 2: plagues spread eastward through populations of prairie dogs, bringing even

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Speaker 2: more hardship to this you know, already embattled species. And

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Speaker 2: so you know, in recent decades, conservationists have been forced

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Speaker 2: to intervene, first with flea killing burrow dusting, and then

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Speaker 2: even more recently with live virus sylvadic plague vaccine or SPV,

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Speaker 2: which they administered via like basically little peanut butter baits

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Speaker 2: in order to like actually get this this vaccine in

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Speaker 2: their bodies. So again humans trying to poison them, the

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Speaker 2: plague spreading through their populations. These two things combined, their

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Speaker 2: range and their numbers are now greatly reduced. They now

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Speaker 2: hold less than I believe two percent of their historic

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Speaker 2: North American range. This according to the American Prairie Foundation.

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Speaker 2: Whereas they once you know, collectively covered hundreds of thousands

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Speaker 2: of acres in say northeast Montana, for example, they once

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Speaker 2: just had these sprawling colonies. And it is just not

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Speaker 2: case anymore. And this is especially rough because you know,

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Speaker 2: this highly disrupted creature is also a keystone species of

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Speaker 2: the prairie. Yet again we have an example of a

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Speaker 2: creature that remakes the environment and in doing so opens

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Speaker 2: up room for other species of flora and fauna to thrive.

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Speaker 2: And pretty much all of this has to do with

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Speaker 2: their earthworks, those expansive tunnels that they build. But on

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Speaker 2: top of that I mentioned earlier about how they keep

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Speaker 2: the grass short near their homes, well, this also has

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Speaker 2: an effect that creates sparsely vegetated areas that are great

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Speaker 2: for nesting birds and also opens up growth for fresher

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Speaker 2: grazing crops, much like we discussed last episode with the bison.

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Speaker 2: On top of that, you know the actual digging and

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Speaker 2: the construction of these tunnels. It aerates the soil, allows

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Speaker 2: for deeper rooted grasses, and the continual soil disruption discourages

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Speaker 2: woody shrubs so helps to maintain the grassland and keep

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Speaker 2: like the woodier stuff out right. Now, these the burrows,

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Speaker 2: again we have aeration going on as well as redistributing,

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Speaker 2: a redistribution of the nutrients within the soil. And then

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Speaker 2: also the prairie dogs have relatively like complex chambers that

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Speaker 2: they build in these underground mansions. So for instance, you know,

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Speaker 2: they'll have places where the young are, they'll have places

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Speaker 2: where they're dead are sequestered, but they also have chambers

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Speaker 2: that they use as latrines, and these can serve as

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Speaker 2: fertilizer for the plants. And then also kind of getting

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Speaker 2: back to Lewis and Clark pumping water down the tunnels,

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Speaker 2: you know, this also plays a role in everything. The

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Speaker 2: tunnels help rain water soak into the aquifer, and this

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Speaker 2: increased absorption essentially keeps more of the rain where it falls,

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Speaker 2: rather than a scenario where you have heavy rainfall hitting

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Speaker 2: the prairie and then flooding and running off potentially taking

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Speaker 2: you know, vital hop soil with it.

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Speaker 3: So it slows erosion.

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Speaker 2: Then yeah, yeah, it's definitely an erosion slower. And then

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Speaker 2: also in sort of allowing the soil to drink more water,

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Speaker 2: it helps make the grasses more drought resistant because of

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Speaker 2: that deeper soak that occurs. And at this point, I

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Speaker 2: want to come back to the myth that Lewis and

386
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Speaker 2: Clark briefly bring up the idea that oh prairie dogs

387
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Speaker 2: live alongside rattlesnakes, which on one level is absolutely not true,

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Speaker 2: Like they don't cohabitate with rattlesnakes, but their tunnels do

389
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Speaker 2: get reused by various other animals, including snakes, including burrowing owls,

390
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Speaker 2: also including the blackfooted ferret, which depends on the prairie

391
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Speaker 2: dog as its primary prey. Like, the prairie dog makes

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Speaker 2: up ninety percent or maybe even more of its diet,

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Speaker 2: and it is currently endangered. You it is simply not

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Speaker 2: found outside of prairie dog towns, prairie dog colonies. It's

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Speaker 2: a highly specialized predator that evolved to thrive on prairie

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Speaker 2: dog abundance.

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Speaker 3: So a wound to prairie dog populations is a wound

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Speaker 3: to this predator.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, absolutely, Again, they just completely depend on the

400
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Speaker 2: prairie dog for their sustenance. And on top of this,

401
00:23:16,800 --> 00:23:21,840
Speaker 2: various other small mammals, reptiles and amphibians use these tunnels

402
00:23:21,880 --> 00:23:25,439
Speaker 2: as cover from aerial and land based predators. You know,

403
00:23:25,480 --> 00:23:29,879
Speaker 2: it just creates a more complex environment in which they

404
00:23:29,920 --> 00:23:32,960
Speaker 2: can you know, they can seek cover. And so prairie

405
00:23:32,960 --> 00:23:37,560
Speaker 2: dog declines have negatively impacted many of these species. With

406
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Speaker 2: again that the blackfooted ferret probably being the most obvious

407
00:23:41,480 --> 00:23:44,359
Speaker 2: and like high profile of these, since it is, you know,

408
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Speaker 2: an obligate predator of the prairie dog. Now getting into

409
00:23:49,119 --> 00:23:53,360
Speaker 2: the like the structure of the colony, it's it's complex

410
00:23:53,400 --> 00:23:55,840
Speaker 2: but also in a way kind of simple in that

411
00:23:56,080 --> 00:23:58,320
Speaker 2: you have a colony that can be just really vast,

412
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Speaker 2: cover thousands of acres with I think, but with a

413
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Speaker 2: maximum of like I think twenty prairie dogs per acre,

414
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Speaker 2: and this is after the young have emerged and the

415
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Speaker 2: colony is going to be made up entirely of these coteries.

416
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Speaker 2: These are small family groups of prairie dogs living together.

417
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Speaker 2: Generally we're talking one dominant adult male, three to four

418
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Speaker 2: adult females, and they're young. So again, like you don't

419
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Speaker 2: want to think about it too much in terms of

420
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Speaker 2: like use social insects or naked mole rats. Like there's

421
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Speaker 2: no queen, there's you know, no breeding queen, there's no

422
00:24:33,560 --> 00:24:39,320
Speaker 2: government here. It's just all of these little family units

423
00:24:39,359 --> 00:24:43,800
Speaker 2: that are living in this kind of loose association of

424
00:24:43,840 --> 00:24:50,200
Speaker 2: cooperation with each other. And and I have a little

425
00:24:50,240 --> 00:24:53,080
Speaker 2: more to say about this as well. So their society

426
00:24:53,240 --> 00:24:57,399
Speaker 2: is also complex, especially with the black tailed prairie dogs.

427
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Speaker 2: They engage in all grooming among blood related prairie dogs,

428
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Speaker 2: and across the colony there's a vast array of competition

429
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Speaker 2: and cooperation. So this is this is not a utopia

430
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Speaker 2: where prairie dogs of all the you know, all these

431
00:25:10,720 --> 00:25:14,080
Speaker 2: different coteries of prairie dogs are in harmony with each other.

432
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Speaker 2: They can still engage in competition and they can have hostility,

433
00:25:17,960 --> 00:25:21,520
Speaker 2: violent hostility between each other based on this competition, but

434
00:25:21,560 --> 00:25:25,000
Speaker 2: there's also some level of cooperation. Uh, and so you

435
00:25:25,040 --> 00:25:26,919
Speaker 2: see this in some of their behavior. For instance, they

436
00:25:26,960 --> 00:25:30,240
Speaker 2: have both hostile and friendly kisses that they bestow on

437
00:25:30,280 --> 00:25:34,680
Speaker 2: each other. They are they're not actually kisses, but it's

438
00:25:34,680 --> 00:25:38,160
Speaker 2: an identification tool where two prairie dogs will touch mouths

439
00:25:38,520 --> 00:25:41,639
Speaker 2: to cheeks so they can check on scent cues. So

440
00:25:41,680 --> 00:25:43,320
Speaker 2: it looks like they're kissing, but they're just kind of

441
00:25:43,359 --> 00:25:45,639
Speaker 2: like who are you? And the way that they do

442
00:25:45,680 --> 00:25:47,920
Speaker 2: the who or you can be you know, friendly or

443
00:25:47,960 --> 00:25:52,320
Speaker 2: at the cereal And again, everything in the colony is

444
00:25:52,320 --> 00:25:56,000
Speaker 2: built around the the coteriees. You again, you can't really

445
00:25:56,000 --> 00:25:59,120
Speaker 2: compare what they have to a human culture. But if

446
00:25:59,119 --> 00:26:01,720
Speaker 2: we you know, if we were to very loosely do,

447
00:26:01,880 --> 00:26:03,159
Speaker 2: so we could think of it as kind of like

448
00:26:03,200 --> 00:26:07,399
Speaker 2: an urban radical collectivism that they're practicing. So there's no

449
00:26:07,640 --> 00:26:11,239
Speaker 2: there's no government again, no breeding queen, no roles like

450
00:26:11,280 --> 00:26:14,359
Speaker 2: we see in use social insects, you know, no workers

451
00:26:14,440 --> 00:26:20,160
Speaker 2: or drones. Again, there's there's competition. You do encounter things

452
00:26:20,160 --> 00:26:24,359
Speaker 2: like infanticide and cannibalism. But ultimately the pros of living

453
00:26:24,359 --> 00:26:28,720
Speaker 2: together like this outweigh the negatives. I was looking at

454
00:26:28,720 --> 00:26:33,879
Speaker 2: the website of prairie dog researcher John Hoagland. His website

455
00:26:34,000 --> 00:26:37,000
Speaker 2: is let's see, I have it right here. It is

456
00:26:37,119 --> 00:26:41,280
Speaker 2: prairiedoghogland dot com and he's also written some books on

457
00:26:41,800 --> 00:26:45,240
Speaker 2: the topic, and he points out that the advantages of

458
00:26:45,280 --> 00:26:49,359
Speaker 2: living together like this include shared vigilance of surroundings and

459
00:26:49,400 --> 00:26:53,680
Speaker 2: increased predator awareness, a lower chance of predation just based

460
00:26:53,720 --> 00:26:56,600
Speaker 2: on sheer numbers, just the numbers game, like living in

461
00:26:56,640 --> 00:26:58,880
Speaker 2: a school of fish, that sort of sort of situation.

462
00:27:00,160 --> 00:27:03,000
Speaker 2: There's also you have the chance that another member will

463
00:27:03,080 --> 00:27:07,120
Speaker 2: quote allocate energy toward caring for your offspring in some way,

464
00:27:07,920 --> 00:27:12,040
Speaker 2: and then also closer access to sexually receptive individuals. So

465
00:27:12,040 --> 00:27:14,639
Speaker 2: it just makes finding a mate easier because you live

466
00:27:14,680 --> 00:27:20,240
Speaker 2: in such a vast community of prairie dogs. On the

467
00:27:20,240 --> 00:27:23,240
Speaker 2: other hand, he says that the disadvantages include easier spread

468
00:27:23,240 --> 00:27:27,240
Speaker 2: of disease, which we've already touched on, increased risk of inbreeding,

469
00:27:27,720 --> 00:27:33,320
Speaker 2: higher mortality potential from singular events. So for instance, this

470
00:27:33,400 --> 00:27:35,800
Speaker 2: could be a flood, this could be I don't know,

471
00:27:36,040 --> 00:27:40,399
Speaker 2: some sort of weather event, something more cataclysmic, or of

472
00:27:40,440 --> 00:27:44,800
Speaker 2: course some sort of like human extermination effort. By living together,

473
00:27:45,119 --> 00:27:47,080
Speaker 2: you know, there's a greater risk that they could all

474
00:27:47,119 --> 00:27:51,240
Speaker 2: go out at the same time. Other disadvantages include competition

475
00:27:51,320 --> 00:27:54,080
Speaker 2: for resources. Again, it's like they're not all working together.

476
00:27:55,359 --> 00:27:59,199
Speaker 2: There is this competition, and also quote the possibility of

477
00:27:59,200 --> 00:28:01,840
Speaker 2: allocating energy to the care of offspring that are not

478
00:28:01,920 --> 00:28:04,800
Speaker 2: blood related, so basically they live and you know, there's

479
00:28:04,840 --> 00:28:08,920
Speaker 2: the there there's the there's the risk reward of an

480
00:28:08,960 --> 00:28:12,080
Speaker 2: individual prairie dog receiving care from someone that is not

481
00:28:12,119 --> 00:28:15,000
Speaker 2: a blood relative, and whether that's a pro orcon kind

482
00:28:15,000 --> 00:28:18,160
Speaker 2: of depends on where you're falling on that care. I guess,

483
00:28:18,160 --> 00:28:20,800
Speaker 2: for again from an animal perspective, and we certainly can't

484
00:28:20,840 --> 00:28:25,840
Speaker 2: apply you know, the human cultural motifs to that too much, right,

485
00:28:26,359 --> 00:28:28,439
Speaker 2: But the predator protection is key, and this is a

486
00:28:28,680 --> 00:28:31,760
Speaker 2: this is something that's very obvious when you observe prairie dogs. Again,

487
00:28:31,800 --> 00:28:34,879
Speaker 2: they're very vigilant. Uh, They're kind of it's almost like

488
00:28:34,920 --> 00:28:39,360
Speaker 2: they're engaging in a super aggressive neighborhood watch where everybody

489
00:28:39,400 --> 00:28:41,880
Speaker 2: has to spend like a large portion of their waking

490
00:28:41,920 --> 00:28:45,920
Speaker 2: hours just scanning the horizon and looking out to see

491
00:28:45,920 --> 00:28:49,560
Speaker 2: if predators are about uh. And then if they spot something,

492
00:28:50,320 --> 00:28:54,719
Speaker 2: they use alert postures and alarm calls. Some calls are

493
00:28:54,720 --> 00:28:58,600
Speaker 2: both visual and auditory, such as the yip the jump yup,

494
00:28:58,680 --> 00:29:01,160
Speaker 2: not the yip jump the jumpy up call of the

495
00:29:01,160 --> 00:29:06,120
Speaker 2: black tailed prairie dog. This alone can signal a few

496
00:29:06,120 --> 00:29:08,520
Speaker 2: different things. It can mean that the prairie dog has

497
00:29:08,520 --> 00:29:11,760
Speaker 2: just been startled, or it has sided and run away from,

498
00:29:11,760 --> 00:29:14,320
Speaker 2: say a snake. Or it can be an all clear

499
00:29:14,440 --> 00:29:17,880
Speaker 2: after a predator, say like a bird has left the area.

500
00:29:18,400 --> 00:29:21,120
Speaker 2: And it can also be something that they do when

501
00:29:21,160 --> 00:29:25,320
Speaker 2: two prairie dogs cease a territorial dispute. And it's just

502
00:29:25,440 --> 00:29:28,239
Speaker 2: one among I think a good eleven distinct calls that

503
00:29:28,600 --> 00:29:31,920
Speaker 2: prairie dogs. Certainly the more social prairie dogs have been

504
00:29:31,960 --> 00:29:34,000
Speaker 2: observed to use, so they have kind of like their

505
00:29:34,040 --> 00:29:38,640
Speaker 2: own limited language of signals that they can use in

506
00:29:38,760 --> 00:29:41,160
Speaker 2: order to maintain this vigilance.

507
00:29:41,720 --> 00:29:46,040
Speaker 3: That's really interesting. I don't know how well established this is,

508
00:29:46,080 --> 00:29:48,640
Speaker 3: but I do remember reading somewhere at some time that

509
00:29:48,720 --> 00:29:51,800
Speaker 3: a surprising amount of information could be encoded in prairie

510
00:29:51,840 --> 00:29:55,120
Speaker 3: dog calls. Yeah, so I wonder is there some kind

511
00:29:55,120 --> 00:29:58,880
Speaker 3: of like combination of calls or something that can form

512
00:29:58,920 --> 00:30:01,920
Speaker 3: a grammar or uh, I don't know what what what

513
00:30:02,000 --> 00:30:02,720
Speaker 3: were you reading on this?

514
00:30:03,200 --> 00:30:05,400
Speaker 2: Uh? Well, basically there there is just a lot to it.

515
00:30:05,480 --> 00:30:07,920
Speaker 2: There's a lot of continuing research into it. This is

516
00:30:07,960 --> 00:30:11,040
Speaker 2: an area that again, this is one of those moments

517
00:30:11,040 --> 00:30:13,680
Speaker 2: where I was researching prairie dogs for a portion of

518
00:30:13,720 --> 00:30:16,240
Speaker 2: a single episode and realizing, oh man, we could have

519
00:30:16,280 --> 00:30:18,800
Speaker 2: done a whole series on the prairie dog because I

520
00:30:19,080 --> 00:30:22,440
Speaker 2: feel like we've only really, you know, touched the tip

521
00:30:22,480 --> 00:30:25,600
Speaker 2: of the iceberg on the the complexity of like the

522
00:30:25,640 --> 00:30:28,920
Speaker 2: physical complexity of their burrows, like all the different sorts

523
00:30:28,920 --> 00:30:31,040
Speaker 2: of chambers that they have in there, and how those

524
00:30:31,120 --> 00:30:35,000
Speaker 2: chambers get reutilized by different organisms. So uh yeah, they're

525
00:30:35,040 --> 00:30:38,960
Speaker 2: they're they're so fascinating. And again, there there is sort

526
00:30:39,000 --> 00:30:41,840
Speaker 2: of like above ground below ground scenario here, Like there's

527
00:30:41,840 --> 00:30:43,959
Speaker 2: the prairie dogs that you see above ground and they

528
00:30:43,960 --> 00:30:47,280
Speaker 2: do uh have a have a lot of of of

529
00:30:47,320 --> 00:30:50,040
Speaker 2: activities that they cover above ground. But then there's this

530
00:30:50,160 --> 00:30:53,080
Speaker 2: underground world of the prairie dog, and not only like

531
00:30:53,200 --> 00:30:56,400
Speaker 2: their actual actions, but also the influence of their life

532
00:30:56,400 --> 00:30:58,880
Speaker 2: when you get into the way that it's aerating the

533
00:30:58,920 --> 00:31:02,480
Speaker 2: soil and affecting the way that that water is retained

534
00:31:02,480 --> 00:31:04,480
Speaker 2: by the soil, it's just so fascinating.

535
00:31:04,680 --> 00:31:05,120
Speaker 3: Totally.

536
00:31:05,600 --> 00:31:10,880
Speaker 2: Yeah. Again, keystone species and one that has has suffered greatly,

537
00:31:11,440 --> 00:31:15,160
Speaker 2: but there are a number of efforts out there to

538
00:31:15,400 --> 00:31:18,400
Speaker 2: like try and and you know, bring back their numbers somewhat,

539
00:31:18,560 --> 00:31:20,360
Speaker 2: you know, realizing that they do just a lot of

540
00:31:20,400 --> 00:31:22,200
Speaker 2: good for the prairie environment.

541
00:31:32,760 --> 00:31:34,920
Speaker 3: Well, Robert, you ready to push through and talk about

542
00:31:35,000 --> 00:31:38,360
Speaker 3: an animal species that had perhaps you might say, an

543
00:31:38,480 --> 00:31:42,160
Speaker 3: equally vast impact on the prairie uh, that has actually

544
00:31:42,160 --> 00:31:44,880
Speaker 3: gone all the way as far as we know, to extinction.

545
00:31:45,680 --> 00:31:48,400
Speaker 2: Let's do it, provided that it's smaller than a prairie dog.

546
00:31:48,480 --> 00:31:50,280
Speaker 2: Because I feel like we've been talking about smaller and

547
00:31:50,280 --> 00:31:51,920
Speaker 2: smaller animals here.

548
00:31:52,760 --> 00:31:57,440
Speaker 3: Smaller individually, not smaller in mass, all right, So I

549
00:31:57,480 --> 00:31:59,680
Speaker 3: want to talk about what is at this point. I

550
00:31:59,760 --> 00:32:04,560
Speaker 3: belie leave a classic article on the subject of a

551
00:32:04,680 --> 00:32:09,640
Speaker 3: really awe inspiring prairie insect known as the Rocky Mountain locust.

552
00:32:10,440 --> 00:32:13,120
Speaker 3: So this article is called the Death of the super

553
00:32:13,160 --> 00:32:17,000
Speaker 3: Hopper by Jeffrey Lockwood. This article is it's not a

554
00:32:17,040 --> 00:32:20,720
Speaker 3: scientific paper. It's written for a popular audience. But the author,

555
00:32:20,960 --> 00:32:24,800
Speaker 3: Jeffrey Lockwood, is actually an entomologist who was involved in

556
00:32:24,840 --> 00:32:28,800
Speaker 3: primary research on the insect in question. He is still

557
00:32:29,080 --> 00:32:32,360
Speaker 3: Lockwood is a professor of Natural Sciences and Humanities at

558
00:32:32,400 --> 00:32:35,640
Speaker 3: the University of Wyoming. This article was originally published in

559
00:32:35,720 --> 00:32:39,120
Speaker 3: High Country News in February two thousand and three. It's

560
00:32:39,120 --> 00:32:43,600
Speaker 3: a really great article. I love stuff that comes together

561
00:32:43,640 --> 00:32:47,360
Speaker 3: in this way. It's like part science writing, part autobiographical

562
00:32:47,400 --> 00:32:50,120
Speaker 3: mystery because he's talking about his own personal history of

563
00:32:50,200 --> 00:32:54,080
Speaker 3: working on this research question. It's part a historical account

564
00:32:54,120 --> 00:32:56,720
Speaker 3: and part a kind of reflective nature essay. It's just

565
00:32:56,720 --> 00:32:59,400
Speaker 3: a really great piece of writing. So in the beginning

566
00:32:59,440 --> 00:33:02,240
Speaker 3: of this article, well, Lockwood paints a picture of what

567
00:33:02,440 --> 00:33:07,360
Speaker 3: life was like during a late nineteenth century locust plague,

568
00:33:07,520 --> 00:33:12,040
Speaker 3: particularly a locust plague of eighteen seventy five from the

569
00:33:12,080 --> 00:33:15,880
Speaker 3: point of view of somebody on the ground in Plattsmouth, Nebraska.

570
00:33:16,440 --> 00:33:18,640
Speaker 3: The way he tries to convey this is to say,

571
00:33:18,840 --> 00:33:24,440
Speaker 3: imagine a winter snowstorm, except swap out every snowflake for

572
00:33:24,600 --> 00:33:28,360
Speaker 3: an insect for a locust, which is essentially inform a

573
00:33:28,400 --> 00:33:30,760
Speaker 3: lot like a grasshopper. I'll get into the differences in

574
00:33:31,160 --> 00:33:34,800
Speaker 3: just a minute. And Lockwood claims that this is quote

575
00:33:34,880 --> 00:33:40,000
Speaker 3: the largest congregation of animal life the human race has

576
00:33:40,040 --> 00:33:42,760
Speaker 3: ever known. Now, that might be a kind of hard

577
00:33:42,760 --> 00:33:45,760
Speaker 3: thing to a hard category to establish the winter on,

578
00:33:45,800 --> 00:33:47,960
Speaker 3: because how do you define the boundaries of that, But

579
00:33:48,080 --> 00:33:50,239
Speaker 3: the other sources have talked about this, like I think

580
00:33:50,320 --> 00:33:53,280
Speaker 3: this is also considered the Guinness record holder for whatever

581
00:33:53,320 --> 00:33:57,200
Speaker 3: that's worth, for like the largest gathering of animals in

582
00:33:57,920 --> 00:34:00,360
Speaker 3: world history, as far as we know that human beings

583
00:34:00,320 --> 00:34:04,080
Speaker 3: I have ever seen. So this is a giant, giant

584
00:34:04,280 --> 00:34:06,160
Speaker 3: swarm of locusts.

585
00:34:06,520 --> 00:34:09,160
Speaker 2: Like biblical proportions. Here, I think we can we can

586
00:34:09,200 --> 00:34:10,160
Speaker 2: fairly stay.

587
00:34:10,000 --> 00:34:13,200
Speaker 3: You could probably say beyond biblical proportions. So I'm just

588
00:34:13,239 --> 00:34:17,680
Speaker 3: going to read this description from lockwood'sccount quote, a swarm

589
00:34:17,920 --> 00:34:24,040
Speaker 3: of rocky mountain locusts, streams overhead for five days, creating

590
00:34:24,080 --> 00:34:28,360
Speaker 3: a living eclipse of the sun. It is a superorganism

591
00:34:28,480 --> 00:34:33,680
Speaker 3: composed of ten billion individuals, devouring as much vegetation as

592
00:34:33,719 --> 00:34:38,360
Speaker 3: a massive herd of bison. A metabolic wildfire that races

593
00:34:38,400 --> 00:34:41,839
Speaker 3: across the Great Plains. Before the year is up, a

594
00:34:42,000 --> 00:34:46,320
Speaker 3: vast region of pioneer agriculture will be decimated, and US

595
00:34:46,320 --> 00:34:50,120
Speaker 3: troops will be mobilized to distribute food, blankets, and clothing

596
00:34:50,239 --> 00:34:55,120
Speaker 3: to devastated farm families. So almost a literal storm of

597
00:34:55,200 --> 00:34:59,239
Speaker 3: insects just stripping the earth of food and vegetation, so

598
00:34:59,480 --> 00:35:01,759
Speaker 3: thick in the air that they blot out the sun.

599
00:35:01,800 --> 00:35:06,280
Speaker 3: It's darkness at noon caused by locusts. In other sources,

600
00:35:06,400 --> 00:35:11,680
Speaker 3: I've read really harrowing things about the voraciousness of these

601
00:35:11,719 --> 00:35:15,840
Speaker 3: locust storms, so particularly this one. Now, of course, it

602
00:35:15,920 --> 00:35:18,560
Speaker 3: goes without saying that they devoured entire crops. You know,

603
00:35:18,560 --> 00:35:20,200
Speaker 3: they ate up all the weed, ate up all the

604
00:35:20,239 --> 00:35:24,520
Speaker 3: crops and exposed vegetation, leaving a path of destruction that

605
00:35:24,640 --> 00:35:27,160
Speaker 3: is often compared to what's left behind after a fire.

606
00:35:27,880 --> 00:35:31,640
Speaker 3: But the swarm also reportedly ate things you wouldn't think

607
00:35:31,680 --> 00:35:35,399
Speaker 3: they would eat. They ate people's clothes, they ate through

608
00:35:35,520 --> 00:35:39,640
Speaker 3: objects made of leather and wood. There even accounts that

609
00:35:39,680 --> 00:35:44,800
Speaker 3: they ate the wool off the backs of living sheep yikes.

610
00:35:44,840 --> 00:35:47,200
Speaker 3: And one of the sources Lockwood talks about in this

611
00:35:47,360 --> 00:35:50,279
Speaker 3: article is a scientific report that was composed at the

612
00:35:50,320 --> 00:35:53,520
Speaker 3: time so it is. It was called the second Report

613
00:35:53,640 --> 00:35:57,040
Speaker 3: of the US Entomological Commission, published in the year eighteen eighty,

614
00:35:58,320 --> 00:36:01,000
Speaker 3: and it was based in part on the work of

615
00:36:01,160 --> 00:36:04,799
Speaker 3: doctor Albert L. Child, and expert affiliated with the US

616
00:36:04,880 --> 00:36:08,839
Speaker 3: Signal Corps. He put together some calculations in this report,

617
00:36:09,160 --> 00:36:11,560
Speaker 3: so he measured the speed of the locusts as they

618
00:36:11,640 --> 00:36:15,040
Speaker 3: passed overhead, and he gathered reports from a network of

619
00:36:15,120 --> 00:36:19,080
Speaker 3: surrounding towns by telegraph to try to estimate the size

620
00:36:19,080 --> 00:36:23,480
Speaker 3: of the swarm. He concluded that this swarm of insects,

621
00:36:23,560 --> 00:36:25,319
Speaker 3: which to be fair, is not going to be of

622
00:36:25,560 --> 00:36:30,400
Speaker 3: uniform density throughout. But this one swarm of insects was

623
00:36:30,520 --> 00:36:35,279
Speaker 3: in total one hundred and ten miles wide and one thousand,

624
00:36:35,440 --> 00:36:40,280
Speaker 3: eight hundred miles long. That makes this an insect swarm

625
00:36:40,320 --> 00:36:43,880
Speaker 3: that's almost two hundred thousand square miles. For comparison, the

626
00:36:43,920 --> 00:36:47,240
Speaker 3: state of California is one hundred and sixty four thousand

627
00:36:47,280 --> 00:36:52,239
Speaker 3: square miles. So the swarm is bigger than California. Wow,

628
00:36:53,840 --> 00:36:56,720
Speaker 3: I read now there have been different numbers about exactly

629
00:36:56,760 --> 00:37:00,600
Speaker 3: how many insects we're talking about here. In this seen

630
00:37:00,880 --> 00:37:05,600
Speaker 3: that Lockwood talks about with childs measuring the swarm, he

631
00:37:05,680 --> 00:37:08,960
Speaker 3: mentions an estimate of ten billion insects, and other sources

632
00:37:09,760 --> 00:37:13,720
Speaker 3: I've read that Child himself estimated the number was twelve

633
00:37:13,760 --> 00:37:17,319
Speaker 3: point five trillion. Obviously, that's a pretty big difference in

634
00:37:17,480 --> 00:37:19,719
Speaker 3: estimating the total numbers. And I don't know if that

635
00:37:19,760 --> 00:37:24,280
Speaker 3: difference is because Lockwood is creating a more confined estimate

636
00:37:24,320 --> 00:37:26,359
Speaker 3: like a subset or part of the swarm, or if

637
00:37:26,360 --> 00:37:29,280
Speaker 3: he just disagrees with Child's method for calculating the total.

638
00:37:29,320 --> 00:37:31,279
Speaker 3: I don't know what that difference is. But even if

639
00:37:31,320 --> 00:37:34,399
Speaker 3: you go with the lower number ten billion insects all

640
00:37:34,400 --> 00:37:36,080
Speaker 3: grouped together, that's a lot of insects.

641
00:37:36,480 --> 00:37:38,640
Speaker 2: Like one is very tempted to compare it to like

642
00:37:38,680 --> 00:37:43,000
Speaker 2: a Kaijus situation, But even that fails to capture the

643
00:37:43,760 --> 00:37:46,759
Speaker 2: scale because at least, like Godzilla, can only attack one

644
00:37:46,800 --> 00:37:47,640
Speaker 2: city at a time.

645
00:37:47,840 --> 00:37:50,640
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is the Yeah, so a swarm of insects

646
00:37:50,680 --> 00:37:54,320
Speaker 3: just like scouring the land basically the size of a state,

647
00:37:54,440 --> 00:37:57,160
Speaker 3: but again not going to be uniform density the whole way,

648
00:37:57,280 --> 00:38:00,160
Speaker 3: but like just enormous, unimaginable.

649
00:38:00,200 --> 00:38:02,399
Speaker 2: Really yeah, and how can you fight back? How can

650
00:38:02,400 --> 00:38:05,200
Speaker 2: you protect yourself against it? It's it is like a blizzard.

651
00:38:05,239 --> 00:38:07,440
Speaker 2: It's like it's like the weather, like you know, and

652
00:38:07,480 --> 00:38:11,719
Speaker 2: it's it's eating the clothes off your back, even potentially. So.

653
00:38:11,880 --> 00:38:15,360
Speaker 3: The insects species in question here was the Rocky Mountain locust.

654
00:38:15,680 --> 00:38:20,839
Speaker 3: The scientific name is Melanoplus spritus spritus. I think that

655
00:38:20,920 --> 00:38:26,799
Speaker 3: word means like despised. But swarming, it turns out, is

656
00:38:26,840 --> 00:38:30,480
Speaker 3: a regular part of locust behavior and a feature of

657
00:38:30,560 --> 00:38:35,560
Speaker 3: the insects life cycle. But this was an exceptionally huge swarm,

658
00:38:35,600 --> 00:38:38,400
Speaker 3: So it wasn't like the swarm is always this big,

659
00:38:38,560 --> 00:38:42,120
Speaker 3: but the locusts do regularly swarm.

660
00:38:42,440 --> 00:38:44,800
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, you know, you can you see similar

661
00:38:44,840 --> 00:38:48,160
Speaker 2: behavior with various other insects like this, like there. I

662
00:38:48,200 --> 00:38:51,080
Speaker 2: have fond memories of visiting Arizona and going out and

663
00:38:51,400 --> 00:38:56,840
Speaker 2: and a relative's yard there and collecting like little grasshoppers

664
00:38:57,080 --> 00:39:01,160
Speaker 2: that were you know, abundant, seasonally abund and we would

665
00:39:01,160 --> 00:39:03,200
Speaker 2: collect them and put them in little jars and then

666
00:39:03,200 --> 00:39:06,080
Speaker 2: we'd let them all go afterwards, and we would often

667
00:39:06,120 --> 00:39:08,319
Speaker 2: catch them breeding with each other that sort of thing.

668
00:39:09,440 --> 00:39:11,680
Speaker 2: But we're talking about something on a much larger and

669
00:39:12,000 --> 00:39:13,640
Speaker 2: also destructive scale.

670
00:39:14,000 --> 00:39:17,640
Speaker 3: Now, what makes this swarming behavior take place? Lockwood says

671
00:39:17,680 --> 00:39:22,200
Speaker 3: that when population density is low, locusts actually behave mostly

672
00:39:22,280 --> 00:39:28,520
Speaker 3: like typical grasshoppers, but when population density gets high, things

673
00:39:28,600 --> 00:39:33,640
Speaker 3: begin to change. The locusts start to react to chemical

674
00:39:33,719 --> 00:39:39,080
Speaker 3: signaling that they through detecting feces of other locusts. So

675
00:39:39,080 --> 00:39:40,680
Speaker 3: there's a lot of poop, you know, a lot of

676
00:39:40,719 --> 00:39:44,160
Speaker 3: locusts poop, and they're picking up chemicals from that, saying like, oh,

677
00:39:44,239 --> 00:39:46,520
Speaker 3: I think there's a lot of us around. And then

678
00:39:46,560 --> 00:39:52,000
Speaker 3: they also get tactle mechanical cues by feeling like bumps

679
00:39:52,040 --> 00:39:56,160
Speaker 3: and contact with other locusts from the hairs on their legs,

680
00:39:56,800 --> 00:40:02,440
Speaker 3: and signals like this combine to tell the locust it

681
00:40:02,520 --> 00:40:06,719
Speaker 3: is time to swarm. And this actually, interestingly doesn't just

682
00:40:06,800 --> 00:40:11,080
Speaker 3: change the locusts behavior. It leads to physical changes in

683
00:40:11,120 --> 00:40:15,120
Speaker 3: the locust's body, where it gets longer wings in a

684
00:40:15,239 --> 00:40:18,239
Speaker 3: darker body like literal changes to the shape of its

685
00:40:18,280 --> 00:40:21,120
Speaker 3: body in response to these cues around it that are

686
00:40:21,120 --> 00:40:23,960
Speaker 3: saying it's getting crowded, it's time to swarm.

687
00:40:24,280 --> 00:40:26,480
Speaker 2: Well, it reminds me a little bit. It's still fundamentally

688
00:40:26,520 --> 00:40:28,640
Speaker 2: different in some ways, but it reminds me a little

689
00:40:28,680 --> 00:40:33,600
Speaker 2: bit with a tiger salamanders. How if population density can

690
00:40:33,640 --> 00:40:37,840
Speaker 2: trigger the development of cannibal morphs in the larvae, where

691
00:40:38,200 --> 00:40:42,560
Speaker 2: you'll have these sort of specialized you know, egg and

692
00:40:42,640 --> 00:40:45,960
Speaker 2: larva gobblers whose whole purpose is to like sort of

693
00:40:45,960 --> 00:40:51,520
Speaker 2: deal with the environmental scenario they find themselves in. So yeah,

694
00:40:52,040 --> 00:40:57,080
Speaker 2: but also involves physical change. So here we have population

695
00:40:57,239 --> 00:41:01,640
Speaker 2: density induced physical and behavioral changes in the locusts.

696
00:41:01,960 --> 00:41:07,400
Speaker 3: Yeah, totally. So question is like what causes it. Lockwood

697
00:41:07,560 --> 00:41:11,719
Speaker 3: argues that swarming is probably a survival mechanism in response

698
00:41:11,800 --> 00:41:15,759
Speaker 3: to drought primarily, so you know what a locusts eat.

699
00:41:15,800 --> 00:41:19,640
Speaker 3: They eat plant matter, you know, leaves, stems, fruit seeds,

700
00:41:19,719 --> 00:41:23,080
Speaker 3: that kind of thing. When there is a drought or

701
00:41:23,200 --> 00:41:27,440
Speaker 3: clim climate stress that kills or limits the growth of plants,

702
00:41:27,480 --> 00:41:31,640
Speaker 3: and that reduces the locusts food supply. Locusts can then

703
00:41:31,719 --> 00:41:36,000
Speaker 3: be driven into shrinking areas where food remains available, and

704
00:41:36,040 --> 00:41:39,320
Speaker 3: this leads to crowding and over exploitation of the areas

705
00:41:39,360 --> 00:41:43,360
Speaker 3: that they're funneled into, and the crowding triggers the swarming response.

706
00:41:43,520 --> 00:41:47,600
Speaker 3: The swarm mobilizes as an army, and it moves into

707
00:41:47,640 --> 00:41:50,960
Speaker 3: new territory en mass, so they start traveling farther. Their

708
00:41:51,280 --> 00:41:55,680
Speaker 3: body becomes optimized for long distance travel, and they all

709
00:41:55,719 --> 00:41:59,279
Speaker 3: start moving as a group, seeking new food resources and

710
00:41:59,320 --> 00:42:02,520
Speaker 3: sort of devouring the landscape as they go, and the

711
00:42:02,560 --> 00:42:06,480
Speaker 3: results of this often inspired fear and awe in humans

712
00:42:06,480 --> 00:42:10,440
Speaker 3: and became the subject of folklore and literature. There's actually

713
00:42:10,440 --> 00:42:14,000
Speaker 3: a part where Lockwood quotes a passage from Laura Ingalls

714
00:42:14,080 --> 00:42:17,080
Speaker 3: Wilders on the Banks of Plum Creek, which is an

715
00:42:17,160 --> 00:42:21,360
Speaker 3: autobiographical book about the author's own childhood living in Frontier,

716
00:42:21,400 --> 00:42:25,799
Speaker 3: Minnesota in the eighteen seventies. And so I just want

717
00:42:25,800 --> 00:42:30,720
Speaker 3: to read part of this that he features. So she writes, quote,

718
00:42:31,000 --> 00:42:36,399
Speaker 3: the cloud was hailing grasshoppers. The cloud was grasshoppers. Their

719
00:42:36,440 --> 00:42:39,920
Speaker 3: bodies hid the sun and made darkness. Their thin, large

720
00:42:39,960 --> 00:42:43,720
Speaker 3: wings gleamed and glittered. The rasping whirring of their wings

721
00:42:43,719 --> 00:42:46,400
Speaker 3: filled the whole air, and they hit the ground and

722
00:42:46,440 --> 00:42:49,960
Speaker 3: the house with the noise of a hailstorm. Laura tried

723
00:42:50,000 --> 00:42:52,880
Speaker 3: to beat them off. Their claws clung to her skin

724
00:42:53,040 --> 00:42:56,000
Speaker 3: and her dress. They looked at her with bulging eyes,

725
00:42:56,120 --> 00:42:59,840
Speaker 3: turning their heads this way, and that grasshoppers covered the ground.

726
00:43:00,160 --> 00:43:03,520
Speaker 3: There was not one bare bit to step on. Laura

727
00:43:03,560 --> 00:43:07,319
Speaker 3: had to step on grasshoppers and they smashed, squirming and

728
00:43:07,400 --> 00:43:08,840
Speaker 3: slimy under her feet.

729
00:43:09,400 --> 00:43:11,200
Speaker 2: This is pure horror movie. Wow.

730
00:43:11,239 --> 00:43:13,759
Speaker 3: Incredible. Yeah. And then also at the end of this

731
00:43:13,840 --> 00:43:17,000
Speaker 3: passage that she notices her father is crying about the

732
00:43:17,000 --> 00:43:21,560
Speaker 3: wheat because there's a real economic situation here too, which

733
00:43:21,600 --> 00:43:26,680
Speaker 3: is they're devouring the crops. Oh man, Now, one question

734
00:43:26,760 --> 00:43:31,000
Speaker 3: I briefly wanted to address is what makes a locust

735
00:43:31,280 --> 00:43:35,640
Speaker 3: different from a grasshopper. The answer is that, in some

736
00:43:35,680 --> 00:43:40,200
Speaker 3: ways not much. Locusts are actually a type of grasshoppers.

737
00:43:40,280 --> 00:43:44,879
Speaker 3: So all locusts are grasshoppers, but not all grasshoppers are locusts.

738
00:43:44,960 --> 00:43:49,680
Speaker 3: Locusts is a subset. Locusts are the grasshoppers that exhibit

739
00:43:49,880 --> 00:43:54,600
Speaker 3: this swarming behavior when certain environmental triggers such as physical

740
00:43:54,640 --> 00:43:58,719
Speaker 3: crowding take place. But anyway, when you read all these

741
00:43:58,760 --> 00:44:03,280
Speaker 3: descriptions from the time of people experiencing prairie locust storms,

742
00:44:03,800 --> 00:44:06,759
Speaker 3: it does not sound real. It sounds like something out

743
00:44:06,800 --> 00:44:10,440
Speaker 3: of a dream or from a monster movie. And the

744
00:44:10,560 --> 00:44:16,560
Speaker 3: really unbelievable thing, which is the central story of Lockwood's essay,

745
00:44:16,760 --> 00:44:20,880
Speaker 3: is that within about three decades of this unbelievable locust

746
00:44:20,920 --> 00:44:24,640
Speaker 3: blizzard in the eighteen seventies, the species behind it, the

747
00:44:24,760 --> 00:44:28,000
Speaker 3: Rocky Mountain locust, would be completely extinct.

748
00:44:28,480 --> 00:44:31,279
Speaker 2: Wow, which seems crazy because how could something exist in

749
00:44:31,400 --> 00:44:36,240
Speaker 2: such abundance and it just begone? Like, you know, we've

750
00:44:36,280 --> 00:44:39,920
Speaker 2: touched on many of the ways that creatures and organisms

751
00:44:40,400 --> 00:44:42,640
Speaker 2: in different forms of life may seem really dominant, but

752
00:44:42,680 --> 00:44:46,719
Speaker 2: they're actually fragile but still like on a very visceral

753
00:44:47,040 --> 00:44:49,600
Speaker 2: gut level. It's like, you're just like that, we have

754
00:44:49,680 --> 00:44:51,640
Speaker 2: no power over this. How could this ever go away?

755
00:44:51,920 --> 00:44:54,040
Speaker 3: Yeah? And this ultimately is one of the kind of

756
00:44:54,040 --> 00:44:57,840
Speaker 3: reflective themes of this essay is about how phenomena in

757
00:44:57,920 --> 00:45:00,680
Speaker 3: nature are not always as robust as they see, especially

758
00:45:00,719 --> 00:45:04,439
Speaker 3: just by sheer magnitude and numbers. So you can have

759
00:45:04,680 --> 00:45:09,200
Speaker 3: this species that is producing, you know, producing swarms that

760
00:45:09,280 --> 00:45:13,600
Speaker 3: cover the area of entire large states, and yet there

761
00:45:13,600 --> 00:45:16,960
Speaker 3: are little bottlenecks. There are little sort of like pins,

762
00:45:17,160 --> 00:45:22,360
Speaker 3: structural things you could remove that will completely make it collapse. Apparently,

763
00:45:22,440 --> 00:45:26,640
Speaker 3: the last Rocky Mountain locust ever confirmed found alive was

764
00:45:26,680 --> 00:45:30,040
Speaker 3: in the year nineteen oh two in Canada, and you know,

765
00:45:30,080 --> 00:45:32,720
Speaker 3: people have gone looking for them ever since, but haven't

766
00:45:32,840 --> 00:45:46,759
Speaker 3: haven't found them. Wow. Now, Lockwood says that the dominant

767
00:45:46,800 --> 00:45:49,799
Speaker 3: explanation for a while for the disappearance of the Rocky

768
00:45:49,800 --> 00:45:53,600
Speaker 3: Mountain locust was what he calls a quote vague conspiracy

769
00:45:53,680 --> 00:45:57,319
Speaker 3: of vast ecological changes, and this would include stuff that's

770
00:45:57,360 --> 00:45:59,200
Speaker 3: going to sound very familiar by now if you've been

771
00:45:59,200 --> 00:46:03,759
Speaker 3: listening to the series. Disappearance of the bison, declined in

772
00:46:03,800 --> 00:46:06,600
Speaker 3: the number and extent of fires on the prairie, as

773
00:46:06,600 --> 00:46:11,200
Speaker 3: we've talked about several times, changes in climate patterns, as

774
00:46:11,239 --> 00:46:15,360
Speaker 3: we know, all these things have massively impacted prairies and

775
00:46:15,400 --> 00:46:18,759
Speaker 3: the species that depend upon them. And the thinking was

776
00:46:18,840 --> 00:46:21,360
Speaker 3: for a while that these factors together had changed the

777
00:46:21,440 --> 00:46:25,799
Speaker 3: Rocky Mountain locusts' habitat and killed them off. But Lockwood,

778
00:46:25,880 --> 00:46:29,640
Speaker 3: as an entomologist who studied insects like this, was not convinced.

779
00:46:29,719 --> 00:46:32,320
Speaker 3: He looked at the issue and he believed these factors

780
00:46:32,360 --> 00:46:36,920
Speaker 3: did not adequately explain the disappearance of the species. And

781
00:46:36,960 --> 00:46:41,320
Speaker 3: then the essay hits this awesome turn where he writes, quote,

782
00:46:41,760 --> 00:46:45,920
Speaker 3: digging through old, obscure geological reports, I learned about the

783
00:46:46,000 --> 00:46:52,800
Speaker 3: existence of grasshopper glaciers strung along the spine of the Rockies. Curious,

784
00:46:52,880 --> 00:46:55,520
Speaker 3: I did more research and learned that these glaciers were

785
00:46:55,560 --> 00:47:00,560
Speaker 3: so named because of their contents. They had entombed wayward

786
00:47:00,719 --> 00:47:05,800
Speaker 3: grasshopper swarms centuries ago. Oh wow, I had no idea

787
00:47:05,800 --> 00:47:06,239
Speaker 3: about this.

788
00:47:07,080 --> 00:47:09,680
Speaker 2: So this is sounding more and more like a horror movie,

789
00:47:09,760 --> 00:47:10,000
Speaker 2: I know.

790
00:47:10,200 --> 00:47:14,520
Speaker 3: Yeah, So this article is so great, so it sent

791
00:47:14,560 --> 00:47:17,120
Speaker 3: me on a tangent. I just went elsewhere reading about

792
00:47:17,160 --> 00:47:22,480
Speaker 3: grasshopper glaciers. So grasshopper glaciers can be found in multiple places.

793
00:47:22,520 --> 00:47:25,520
Speaker 3: I was reading about one that's actually named grasshopper glacier

794
00:47:25,600 --> 00:47:28,719
Speaker 3: in the Beartooth Mountains of Montana, but you can find

795
00:47:28,800 --> 00:47:31,400
Speaker 3: him in other places too. There was a good short

796
00:47:31,440 --> 00:47:34,920
Speaker 3: piece on grasshopper glaciers and a series called field Notes

797
00:47:35,040 --> 00:47:39,520
Speaker 3: of the Montana Naturalist put together by Montana Public Radio.

798
00:47:40,120 --> 00:47:43,200
Speaker 3: This is by an author named Terry Habiger in twenty

799
00:47:43,400 --> 00:47:47,839
Speaker 3: twenty two, and the author here talks about how one

800
00:47:47,880 --> 00:47:51,439
Speaker 3: way these can come together. Lockwood himself actually talks about

801
00:47:51,440 --> 00:47:55,120
Speaker 3: a different mechanism later on, But in this example, the

802
00:47:55,160 --> 00:47:58,440
Speaker 3: author talks about how long ago, in the ancient past,

803
00:47:58,480 --> 00:48:01,840
Speaker 3: you have swarms of locusts that my flood into areas

804
00:48:01,920 --> 00:48:06,080
Speaker 3: experiencing snow and icy weather. Many of the locusts would die,

805
00:48:06,160 --> 00:48:09,000
Speaker 3: They would fall down in the snow, and then somehow

806
00:48:09,200 --> 00:48:12,000
Speaker 3: they would be encased in a layer of ice. So

807
00:48:12,040 --> 00:48:14,360
Speaker 3: maybe the snow falls on top of them and freezes

808
00:48:14,480 --> 00:48:17,000
Speaker 3: forms an ice layer on top of a glacier, or

809
00:48:17,080 --> 00:48:20,400
Speaker 3: they somehow get washed into a glacier area and frozen

810
00:48:20,440 --> 00:48:24,640
Speaker 3: into it. And as this happened, year after year, you

811
00:48:24,680 --> 00:48:30,480
Speaker 3: would get multiple accumulating layers of grasshopper studded glacier ice,

812
00:48:30,640 --> 00:48:33,800
Speaker 3: piling up, one on top of the other, with generation

813
00:48:33,920 --> 00:48:40,280
Speaker 3: after generation of dead grasshoppers mummified inside the ice. Habiger

814
00:48:40,320 --> 00:48:44,040
Speaker 3: writes quote James P. Kimball's eighteen ninety eight survey in

815
00:48:44,040 --> 00:48:48,719
Speaker 3: the Beartooth Mountains estimated that thousands of tons of grasshopper

816
00:48:48,760 --> 00:48:51,960
Speaker 3: remains could be found on the lower edge of a glacier.

817
00:48:52,320 --> 00:48:54,759
Speaker 3: He noted that not a fragment of ice could be

818
00:48:54,800 --> 00:48:58,840
Speaker 3: broken without finding the remains of grasshoppers. Wow, it's like

819
00:48:58,880 --> 00:49:01,120
Speaker 3: a chocolate chip cookie or something it's.

820
00:49:01,000 --> 00:49:03,200
Speaker 2: Just all you drink, or maybe you do.

821
00:49:03,320 --> 00:49:08,839
Speaker 3: I don't know. So he also mentions that grasshoppers found

822
00:49:08,920 --> 00:49:11,680
Speaker 3: in a glacier in Wyoming have been radiocarbon dated to

823
00:49:11,719 --> 00:49:14,359
Speaker 3: the thirteen hundreds, so you know, I think it's some

824
00:49:14,600 --> 00:49:20,359
Speaker 3: very old grasshoppers in there. Anyway, Lockwood says he learns

825
00:49:20,360 --> 00:49:23,160
Speaker 3: about these grasshopper glaciers and he wonders if some of

826
00:49:23,200 --> 00:49:27,200
Speaker 3: the preserved grasshoppers in these glaciers, if they were actually

827
00:49:27,280 --> 00:49:30,439
Speaker 3: Rocky mountain locusts, maybe they could provide clues that would

828
00:49:30,480 --> 00:49:35,680
Speaker 3: help illuminate the cause of the species extinction. So Lockwood

829
00:49:35,719 --> 00:49:38,920
Speaker 3: discusses his attempts with the help of his students to

830
00:49:39,000 --> 00:49:42,520
Speaker 3: study the hoppers frozen in first of all, in grasshopper

831
00:49:42,520 --> 00:49:44,839
Speaker 3: glacier in Montana, the one I mentioned a minute ago.

832
00:49:45,520 --> 00:49:49,600
Speaker 3: He talks about difficulties encountered that encountered there, like the

833
00:49:49,640 --> 00:49:52,840
Speaker 3: glaciers were starting to melt and most of the insect

834
00:49:52,880 --> 00:49:56,799
Speaker 3: corpses were badly decomposed. Others were in better shape, but

835
00:49:56,840 --> 00:50:00,520
Speaker 3: they were too recent in the wrong species. Finally, he

836
00:50:00,600 --> 00:50:03,680
Speaker 3: says that they found ideal specimens at a place called

837
00:50:03,760 --> 00:50:07,120
Speaker 3: Knife Point Glacier in the wind River Mountains of Wyoming,

838
00:50:07,719 --> 00:50:10,799
Speaker 3: and Lockwood and his team determined that these locusts had

839
00:50:10,840 --> 00:50:14,359
Speaker 3: probably been blown in from River Valley somewhere in the

840
00:50:14,400 --> 00:50:18,000
Speaker 3: north within what is today Yellowstone National Park in the

841
00:50:18,040 --> 00:50:22,560
Speaker 3: early sixteen hundreds. So Lockwood describes the process of how

842
00:50:22,560 --> 00:50:26,840
Speaker 3: they got into the glacier, saying, quote, scattered across the

843
00:50:26,880 --> 00:50:30,719
Speaker 3: glacier in a seething carpet of brown, green bodies. Some

844
00:50:30,840 --> 00:50:34,120
Speaker 3: of the locusts may have escaped and continued their journey,

845
00:50:34,360 --> 00:50:38,279
Speaker 3: but millions were probably immobilized by the cold. In the

846
00:50:38,320 --> 00:50:43,120
Speaker 3: course of summer, melting rivulets washed them into crevices or

847
00:50:43,239 --> 00:50:46,680
Speaker 3: not sorry, not crevices, crevasses, as we've talked about on

848
00:50:46,719 --> 00:50:50,719
Speaker 3: the show before, the crevasses in the ice sheets that

849
00:50:50,800 --> 00:50:53,960
Speaker 3: split the top of the ice field. With time, they

850
00:50:53,960 --> 00:50:58,080
Speaker 3: were frozen deep in the glacier and slowly transported down

851
00:50:58,160 --> 00:51:02,040
Speaker 3: the side of the mountain. So like frozen washed, you know,

852
00:51:02,120 --> 00:51:05,360
Speaker 3: melted and washed into the crevasses and then moved further

853
00:51:05,400 --> 00:51:10,520
Speaker 3: down the mountain. So Lockwood writes that the patterns of

854
00:51:10,680 --> 00:51:14,680
Speaker 3: locust deposition within the glacier revealed something very interesting. There

855
00:51:14,680 --> 00:51:19,360
Speaker 3: were evidence against a previously held belief and that belief

856
00:51:19,520 --> 00:51:24,759
Speaker 3: was that these observed outbreaks in locust swarming behavior must

857
00:51:24,760 --> 00:51:28,440
Speaker 3: have been driven by crisis or catastrophe. Maybe it was

858
00:51:28,440 --> 00:51:31,480
Speaker 3: the alteration of the environment by settlers that made the

859
00:51:31,520 --> 00:51:35,759
Speaker 3: locust populations boom and swarm and then bust. But no,

860
00:51:36,520 --> 00:51:39,480
Speaker 3: This glacier seemed to reveal a quote pattern of locust

861
00:51:39,480 --> 00:51:45,120
Speaker 3: outbreaks extending centuries prior to European alterations of the Western landscape,

862
00:51:45,680 --> 00:51:49,640
Speaker 3: and Lockwood reflects on this, writing that it is true

863
00:51:49,880 --> 00:51:55,880
Speaker 3: that sometimes extreme dynamics and ecosystems reflect distress or reflect

864
00:51:56,000 --> 00:52:01,240
Speaker 3: changes imposed from outside, but not always. Some times erratic

865
00:52:01,440 --> 00:52:04,600
Speaker 3: extreme dynamics are just part of nature. That is just

866
00:52:04,680 --> 00:52:08,319
Speaker 3: how these animals are evolved in what they do in

867
00:52:08,360 --> 00:52:14,240
Speaker 3: their environment. You get these occasional crazy outbreaks in locust

868
00:52:14,280 --> 00:52:19,840
Speaker 3: populations and these exploding swarms. Another running theme in the

869
00:52:19,960 --> 00:52:23,279
Speaker 3: essay is what you actually brought up earlier, Rob, It's

870
00:52:23,320 --> 00:52:26,359
Speaker 3: the idea that people have a hard time accepting that

871
00:52:26,440 --> 00:52:31,920
Speaker 3: something so gargantuan in its impact could just vanish. It's

872
00:52:31,960 --> 00:52:35,319
Speaker 3: hard to believe that insects which gathered in the billions

873
00:52:35,400 --> 00:52:38,160
Speaker 3: or trillions into an area the size of a state

874
00:52:38,760 --> 00:52:42,480
Speaker 3: would be completely gone within the lifetime of people who

875
00:52:42,480 --> 00:52:46,200
Speaker 3: were there for the swarm of eighteen seventy five. Another

876
00:52:46,239 --> 00:52:49,680
Speaker 3: thing that he brings up it's interesting is that if

877
00:52:49,840 --> 00:52:53,760
Speaker 3: humans had been able to eradicate it at the time,

878
00:52:53,840 --> 00:52:57,000
Speaker 3: they probably would have tried. It would have just seemed impossible,

879
00:52:57,600 --> 00:53:00,160
Speaker 3: Like he has the sectionary he writes, quote, but at

880
00:53:00,160 --> 00:53:03,279
Speaker 3: the time of the insects disappearance, there were no synthetic

881
00:53:03,280 --> 00:53:08,200
Speaker 3: carbon based pesticides, no modern earth moving equipment, not even chainsaws.

882
00:53:08,640 --> 00:53:11,800
Speaker 3: Settlers fought back with what tools they had, from flooding

883
00:53:11,840 --> 00:53:15,080
Speaker 3: to fire to dynamite, but this hand to hand combat

884
00:53:15,120 --> 00:53:18,320
Speaker 3: didn't make a dent against an enemy that was billion strong.

885
00:53:19,360 --> 00:53:24,839
Speaker 2: Wow. Yeah, just realizing that modern pesticides were not an

886
00:53:24,920 --> 00:53:27,080
Speaker 2: option against this, because I think that would be sort

887
00:53:27,080 --> 00:53:29,640
Speaker 2: of like the first line of defense that people might

888
00:53:29,640 --> 00:53:33,560
Speaker 2: think of when imagining something like this. That those tools

889
00:53:33,560 --> 00:53:34,960
Speaker 2: were not even on the table.

890
00:53:34,840 --> 00:53:37,640
Speaker 3: Right, So all these farmer settlers would have would have

891
00:53:37,920 --> 00:53:41,320
Speaker 3: liked to destroy the locusts if they could, but they couldn't.

892
00:53:41,480 --> 00:53:45,759
Speaker 3: And yet somehow something or someone did And I had

893
00:53:45,840 --> 00:53:48,680
Speaker 3: no idea how that happened. So it was still a

894
00:53:48,719 --> 00:53:53,120
Speaker 3: mystery while Lockwood's research here was going on. But he says,

895
00:53:53,719 --> 00:53:58,280
Speaker 3: Eventually he stumbled into what is most likely the correct

896
00:53:58,320 --> 00:54:03,400
Speaker 3: answer by thinking a completely different insect species, the monarch butterfly.

897
00:54:04,440 --> 00:54:07,720
Speaker 3: So in a similar situation, migratory adults of the monarch

898
00:54:07,800 --> 00:54:10,799
Speaker 3: butterfly can be seen across much of North America in

899
00:54:10,800 --> 00:54:15,759
Speaker 3: the summer, and yet monarch butterflies are still considered vulnerable

900
00:54:15,880 --> 00:54:19,880
Speaker 3: or endangered, in part because they have to return to

901
00:54:20,320 --> 00:54:25,560
Speaker 3: much more limited overwintering grounds during the cold weather, primarily

902
00:54:25,640 --> 00:54:29,360
Speaker 3: a Lockwood describes these few strips of forest in the

903
00:54:29,360 --> 00:54:32,919
Speaker 3: mountains of Mexico. So even though they spread all over

904
00:54:33,160 --> 00:54:36,280
Speaker 3: North America in the warm season, there's just this geographical

905
00:54:36,400 --> 00:54:39,920
Speaker 3: bottleneck on their survival due to their seasonal need to

906
00:54:39,960 --> 00:54:43,719
Speaker 3: return to these limited southern habitats. As Lockwood puts it,

907
00:54:43,800 --> 00:54:47,640
Speaker 3: quote loosed on these pockets, a logging crew armed with

908
00:54:47,719 --> 00:54:51,319
Speaker 3: chainsaws could put an end to this magnificent butterfly in

909
00:54:51,320 --> 00:54:55,120
Speaker 3: a matter of weeks. Oh wow, So that's one where

910
00:54:55,120 --> 00:54:57,640
Speaker 3: I don't know if the situation is substantially different now

911
00:54:57,680 --> 00:55:01,279
Speaker 3: than at the time this essay was written, but at

912
00:55:01,360 --> 00:55:04,520
Speaker 3: least as a point of analogy, it got him to

913
00:55:04,680 --> 00:55:08,880
Speaker 3: think about what is now widely considered the probable reason

914
00:55:09,040 --> 00:55:11,920
Speaker 3: that the Rocky Mountain locust when extinct, and it was

915
00:55:12,160 --> 00:55:16,080
Speaker 3: having to do with a geographical bottleneck on a certain

916
00:55:16,200 --> 00:55:19,560
Speaker 3: part of their life cycle. So the Rocky Mountain locust,

917
00:55:19,800 --> 00:55:23,239
Speaker 3: like the butterfly, though it may have spread far and

918
00:55:23,280 --> 00:55:27,280
Speaker 3: wide during its outbreaks during these swarms, at other points

919
00:55:27,280 --> 00:55:29,799
Speaker 3: in its life cycle, it was limited to an extremely

920
00:55:29,960 --> 00:55:34,719
Speaker 3: tiny range of habitats. Between outbreaks. It seems that the

921
00:55:34,760 --> 00:55:39,400
Speaker 3: locust probably lived in river valleys in Wyoming and Montana,

922
00:55:40,040 --> 00:55:43,200
Speaker 3: the exact same areas that settlers in those regions had

923
00:55:43,239 --> 00:55:48,480
Speaker 3: discovered were the best places for farming. So factors contributing

924
00:55:48,520 --> 00:55:51,480
Speaker 3: to the destruction of the locust habitat would have included

925
00:55:52,239 --> 00:55:55,840
Speaker 3: the conversion of these lands into farmlands. So taking the

926
00:55:55,840 --> 00:55:59,160
Speaker 3: grassland of these valleys, turning that into cropland or into

927
00:55:59,239 --> 00:56:03,920
Speaker 3: rangeland livestock. You're bringing in the cows and the plows.

928
00:56:04,680 --> 00:56:08,440
Speaker 3: You're also getting alteration of natural waterways, like using streams

929
00:56:08,440 --> 00:56:12,680
Speaker 3: for irrigation. Elimination of beavers and beaver dams is something

930
00:56:12,719 --> 00:56:15,960
Speaker 3: Lockwood mentioned. We've done episodes on this before. What happened

931
00:56:15,960 --> 00:56:19,960
Speaker 3: the other eco engineer totally Yeah, So much like the

932
00:56:20,000 --> 00:56:23,520
Speaker 3: bison we talked about last time that engineer the prairie

933
00:56:23,600 --> 00:56:27,800
Speaker 3: ecosystems by creating these wallows with their dust bathing beavers

934
00:56:27,840 --> 00:56:32,640
Speaker 3: are ecosystem engineers that promote biodiversity by creating these wetland

935
00:56:32,680 --> 00:56:35,920
Speaker 3: habitats that have all kinds of effects. You get rid

936
00:56:36,000 --> 00:56:39,680
Speaker 3: of the beavers, you change the landscape substantially, and a

937
00:56:39,719 --> 00:56:44,400
Speaker 3: lot of other things depend on beavers. So eventually, it

938
00:56:44,440 --> 00:56:47,759
Speaker 3: seems this became the most widely accepted account of what

939
00:56:47,920 --> 00:56:50,600
Speaker 3: happened to the Rocky Mountain locust Even though they could

940
00:56:50,600 --> 00:56:53,040
Speaker 3: spread far and wide, they had to go back to

941
00:56:53,160 --> 00:56:57,919
Speaker 3: retreat to these narrow these narrower refuge sites in these

942
00:56:58,040 --> 00:57:03,480
Speaker 3: river valleys, and human development sting settlers turning these areas

943
00:57:03,560 --> 00:57:07,920
Speaker 3: into farmlands. That is probably what killed off these locusts.

944
00:57:08,320 --> 00:57:10,520
Speaker 3: Now After this, Lockwood goes on to talk about a

945
00:57:10,520 --> 00:57:14,520
Speaker 3: few other interesting ideas. One is he says, even after

946
00:57:14,560 --> 00:57:18,520
Speaker 3: he landed on this explanation, he made many attempts to

947
00:57:18,680 --> 00:57:22,400
Speaker 3: find still living specimens of the Rocky Mountain locusts, thinking

948
00:57:22,960 --> 00:57:26,840
Speaker 3: maybe it hasn't been fully eliminated, Maybe it's still alive somewhere,

949
00:57:27,480 --> 00:57:32,000
Speaker 3: like in a particular undisturbed river valley in or near Yellowstone.

950
00:57:32,280 --> 00:57:34,920
Speaker 3: Maybe we could find one there. He went looking for it.

951
00:57:34,960 --> 00:57:38,160
Speaker 3: Many times, these attempts failed. It seems like this locust

952
00:57:38,240 --> 00:57:42,040
Speaker 3: really is probably gone. But he ponders, I think this

953
00:57:42,080 --> 00:57:45,440
Speaker 3: is a really interesting question. If it did still exist,

954
00:57:45,880 --> 00:57:50,520
Speaker 3: what would human beings want to do. Would people want

955
00:57:50,560 --> 00:57:53,840
Speaker 3: to protect it or would they would they like read

956
00:57:53,920 --> 00:57:56,720
Speaker 3: the accounts of these swarms in the nineteenth century, just

957
00:57:56,760 --> 00:58:01,000
Speaker 3: like blotting out the sun and devouring everything, destroyings, you know,

958
00:58:01,400 --> 00:58:06,240
Speaker 3: untold damages and agricultural destruction, and would they just conclude

959
00:58:06,240 --> 00:58:10,480
Speaker 3: that this thing had to be eradicated entirely. And there's

960
00:58:10,520 --> 00:58:14,120
Speaker 3: another way he puts it, which is he he introduces

961
00:58:14,160 --> 00:58:18,520
Speaker 3: this idea of thinking about a different way of thinking

962
00:58:18,560 --> 00:58:22,840
Speaker 3: about biology, which is not thinking about individual organisms as

963
00:58:23,000 --> 00:58:26,440
Speaker 3: like independent clusters of cells, but instead thinking thinking of

964
00:58:26,480 --> 00:58:30,000
Speaker 3: a species as a process, a process that acts through

965
00:58:30,080 --> 00:58:33,320
Speaker 3: an ecosystem. And he says, quote, in this light, the

966
00:58:33,400 --> 00:58:38,080
Speaker 3: Rocky Mountain locust was an immense, a periodic process of

967
00:58:38,360 --> 00:58:43,680
Speaker 3: energy flow, linking life processes across a continent. And he says,

968
00:58:43,720 --> 00:58:47,160
Speaker 3: by this definition, even if some individuals of the locust

969
00:58:47,320 --> 00:58:51,120
Speaker 3: still existed, the process identity of the Rocky Mountain locust

970
00:58:51,200 --> 00:58:54,680
Speaker 3: would be extinct. It no longer is what it once did.

971
00:58:56,600 --> 00:58:58,800
Speaker 2: That's an interesting way to look at it. And you know,

972
00:58:58,840 --> 00:59:01,160
Speaker 2: we can we fply that to some of the other

973
00:59:01,240 --> 00:59:04,000
Speaker 2: examples we've talked about, like like the grizzly bear. You know,

974
00:59:04,280 --> 00:59:07,880
Speaker 2: yea and grizzly bear is still very much around, but

975
00:59:08,520 --> 00:59:11,800
Speaker 2: it is not certainly within the prairie context. It is

976
00:59:11,840 --> 00:59:15,439
Speaker 2: not quite the same process as it once was. Yeah.

977
00:59:15,480 --> 00:59:18,600
Speaker 3: Absolutely, So that's it's another way of framing how we

978
00:59:18,640 --> 00:59:25,280
Speaker 3: think about like animal populations and extinction. Like, uh, you know,

979
00:59:25,480 --> 00:59:28,440
Speaker 3: is a thing not extinct if there are still some

980
00:59:28,920 --> 00:59:32,800
Speaker 3: individuals in some kind of refuge, you know, in captivity

981
00:59:32,920 --> 00:59:35,880
Speaker 3: or in a particular nature preserve or something, but but

982
00:59:36,080 --> 00:59:39,480
Speaker 3: the species no longer comes anywhere close to having the

983
00:59:39,640 --> 00:59:44,480
Speaker 3: ecological impact that it used to. Does that species still exist?

984
00:59:44,960 --> 00:59:46,919
Speaker 2: Yeah, It's almost like the difference between having a book

985
00:59:46,920 --> 00:59:50,120
Speaker 2: on a shelf and books actually actively being read by people,

986
00:59:50,200 --> 00:59:52,440
Speaker 2: you know, like, are those books actually alive, are the

987
00:59:52,520 --> 00:59:55,240
Speaker 2: ideas in them alive or do we just we just

988
00:59:55,320 --> 00:59:58,400
Speaker 2: have some copies of them and and yeah, it's they

989
00:59:58,400 --> 01:00:01,680
Speaker 2: still exist, but they're not part of the system anymore,

990
01:00:02,280 --> 01:00:03,400
Speaker 2: not in the way they once were.

991
01:00:03,680 --> 01:00:06,720
Speaker 3: Yeah, but I truly don't know what the answer would

992
01:00:06,720 --> 01:00:08,800
Speaker 3: be like if we So, if we found these locusts

993
01:00:08,800 --> 01:00:12,080
Speaker 3: that were once you know, considered like the pest of pests,

994
01:00:13,280 --> 01:00:16,160
Speaker 3: and that some still were alive, like, what would people

995
01:00:16,160 --> 01:00:18,640
Speaker 3: want to do? Would be like, well, should we protect

996
01:00:18,800 --> 01:00:21,160
Speaker 3: them or I don't know.

997
01:00:21,880 --> 01:00:24,200
Speaker 2: We see a similar situation with the bear, of course,

998
01:00:24,240 --> 01:00:28,720
Speaker 2: like should we reintroduce brown bears into into their historic ranges?

999
01:00:29,280 --> 01:00:31,800
Speaker 2: You know, in many cases these these ranges don't really

1000
01:00:31,840 --> 01:00:35,160
Speaker 2: exist anymore. You'd be reintroducing them into into areas close

1001
01:00:35,200 --> 01:00:38,480
Speaker 2: to human habitation and so forth, and so it becomes

1002
01:00:38,480 --> 01:00:41,240
Speaker 2: a very sticky and again even political point. And with

1003
01:00:41,320 --> 01:00:42,960
Speaker 2: the locust, yeah, I can imagine there would be a

1004
01:00:43,040 --> 01:00:45,920
Speaker 2: number of people saying, let's not bring back the locust,

1005
01:00:46,360 --> 01:00:51,120
Speaker 2: let's not bring back the locusts warm, And you know,

1006
01:00:51,200 --> 01:00:53,000
Speaker 2: I don't know, I can see I can see why

1007
01:00:53,000 --> 01:00:55,480
Speaker 2: there would be maybe some strong arguments on both sides there.

1008
01:00:55,960 --> 01:00:58,880
Speaker 3: There's another really interesting question Luckwood gets into toward the

1009
01:00:58,960 --> 01:01:02,600
Speaker 3: end of his essay more in the Nature Essay reflection mode,

1010
01:01:02,880 --> 01:01:05,760
Speaker 3: and it comes back to this intuition we have that

1011
01:01:05,920 --> 01:01:10,440
Speaker 3: something very powerful and widespread can't just disappear it can't

1012
01:01:10,480 --> 01:01:13,680
Speaker 3: go extinct, But in the case of the locust, we

1013
01:01:13,880 --> 01:01:16,520
Speaker 3: learned that it could. There are, actually there are these

1014
01:01:16,560 --> 01:01:19,640
Speaker 3: little things it depends on. We might not even know

1015
01:01:19,640 --> 01:01:22,880
Speaker 3: what they are at the time. And so he raised it.

1016
01:01:22,920 --> 01:01:26,440
Speaker 3: He applies this question to us. Are we so powerful

1017
01:01:26,440 --> 01:01:29,600
Speaker 3: and widespread that we also could never really go extinct?

1018
01:01:29,680 --> 01:01:32,000
Speaker 3: To certainly, we feel like it would be hard to

1019
01:01:32,080 --> 01:01:35,480
Speaker 3: drive humanity extinct. But what if we have kind of

1020
01:01:35,560 --> 01:01:41,120
Speaker 3: particular weaknesses we don't realize. Do we have ecological bottlenecks

1021
01:01:41,160 --> 01:01:44,919
Speaker 3: we depend on, like the locusts, river valleys, some kind

1022
01:01:44,920 --> 01:01:49,920
Speaker 3: of either literal or metaphorical, narrow strip of refuge that

1023
01:01:49,960 --> 01:01:53,200
Speaker 3: we depend on in some way, a refuge that is

1024
01:01:53,240 --> 01:01:55,960
Speaker 3: more fragile than we care to think about, but have

1025
01:01:56,080 --> 01:01:59,920
Speaker 3: something to do with access to water, coastal settlements, or

1026
01:02:00,080 --> 01:02:03,400
Speaker 3: even things like the crops we depend on, you know,

1027
01:02:03,440 --> 01:02:05,480
Speaker 3: many of which now grow in places that were once

1028
01:02:05,560 --> 01:02:09,560
Speaker 3: tall grass prairie, which is now an endangered ecosystem.

1029
01:02:09,600 --> 01:02:11,720
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is this is a great point. Yeah, it's

1030
01:02:11,720 --> 01:02:13,880
Speaker 2: easy to think of ourselves as something that's too big

1031
01:02:13,880 --> 01:02:16,720
Speaker 2: to fail in the in the you know, certainly, in specifics,

1032
01:02:16,720 --> 01:02:18,560
Speaker 2: we think it's easy to think about this in terms

1033
01:02:18,600 --> 01:02:23,640
Speaker 2: of institutions and nations and empires, but even the whole

1034
01:02:23,720 --> 01:02:26,560
Speaker 2: human exercise itself, which you know, thinking back to this

1035
01:02:26,640 --> 01:02:30,080
Speaker 2: idea about or an organism as a as a process,

1036
01:02:30,840 --> 01:02:34,280
Speaker 2: you know, like the the human process is fundamentally different

1037
01:02:34,320 --> 01:02:37,920
Speaker 2: now than it was you know, in other points in

1038
01:02:37,920 --> 01:02:41,320
Speaker 2: our evolutionary history. So like the thing that we are

1039
01:02:41,400 --> 01:02:46,480
Speaker 2: now is is rather different in terms of its energy consumption,

1040
01:02:46,680 --> 01:02:49,040
Speaker 2: the thing and and and also just the overall shape

1041
01:02:49,080 --> 01:02:51,400
Speaker 2: of it. Like you know, this is I think this

1042
01:02:51,480 --> 01:02:53,360
Speaker 2: is kind of something that's kind of popping around in

1043
01:02:53,360 --> 01:02:57,320
Speaker 2: our head, maybe unnamed in our various post apocalyptic and

1044
01:02:57,400 --> 01:03:03,440
Speaker 2: apocalyptic media installments, is we realize that for humanity to

1045
01:03:03,520 --> 01:03:07,880
Speaker 2: go back to some previous form by necessity, you know,

1046
01:03:08,120 --> 01:03:12,040
Speaker 2: some like returning to a hunter gatherer lifestyle, it is

1047
01:03:12,040 --> 01:03:14,640
Speaker 2: a would be a fundamental, fundamental change from what we

1048
01:03:14,720 --> 01:03:17,680
Speaker 2: have now. It would basically be a complete change, like

1049
01:03:17,760 --> 01:03:20,520
Speaker 2: it would be in many ways, we would be unrecognizable

1050
01:03:20,800 --> 01:03:22,760
Speaker 2: and at the same time acknowledging that there would be

1051
01:03:22,880 --> 01:03:25,680
Speaker 2: certain things that are key to the human existence that

1052
01:03:25,680 --> 01:03:29,680
Speaker 2: that would hopefully still remain part of the human experience.

1053
01:03:30,240 --> 01:03:33,280
Speaker 3: Yeah, totally. I mean, we would have the same DNA

1054
01:03:33,520 --> 01:03:37,680
Speaker 3: are would be the same type of individual animal, but

1055
01:03:38,120 --> 01:03:41,920
Speaker 3: our impact, our you know, us as a process moving

1056
01:03:42,000 --> 01:03:44,160
Speaker 3: through the world would be totally different. Yeah.

1057
01:03:44,240 --> 01:03:47,240
Speaker 2: Yeah, but this is a I think this is a

1058
01:03:47,240 --> 01:03:51,200
Speaker 2: fitting place to finish off our discussion of the prairie here,

1059
01:03:51,240 --> 01:03:54,720
Speaker 2: because the prairie in its entirety is this thing that

1060
01:03:55,360 --> 01:03:58,360
Speaker 2: has has always appeared so vast to us and just

1061
01:03:58,600 --> 01:04:03,640
Speaker 2: almost beyond our ability to comprehend it, madness inducing even

1062
01:04:03,680 --> 01:04:06,320
Speaker 2: in some of the more you know, extreme and juiced

1063
01:04:06,360 --> 01:04:10,200
Speaker 2: up descriptions, and it seems like it's something that we

1064
01:04:10,200 --> 01:04:13,640
Speaker 2: couldn't possibly have control over, that we couldn't possibly impact,

1065
01:04:13,640 --> 01:04:17,720
Speaker 2: that we could hope to harness or certainly destroy. And

1066
01:04:17,800 --> 01:04:19,800
Speaker 2: yet we've seen time and time again all of these

1067
01:04:19,840 --> 01:04:22,960
Speaker 2: ways that we have managed to do, in large part,

1068
01:04:23,160 --> 01:04:27,400
Speaker 2: just that wiping out, you know, vast swaths of prairie land,

1069
01:04:27,560 --> 01:04:32,200
Speaker 2: disrupting it in major ways, disrupting the organisms that give

1070
01:04:32,240 --> 01:04:36,960
Speaker 2: it the shape that it has. So yeah, again, I

1071
01:04:36,960 --> 01:04:38,840
Speaker 2: think this is a fitting place to close it out

1072
01:04:38,880 --> 01:04:40,720
Speaker 2: and a get a fitting place though with hope though,

1073
01:04:40,760 --> 01:04:44,600
Speaker 2: to remind ourselves the importance of being stewards of the

1074
01:04:44,640 --> 01:04:47,560
Speaker 2: current shape of the prairies and you know, finding these

1075
01:04:47,600 --> 01:04:50,480
Speaker 2: ways that we can conserve what's left and in at

1076
01:04:50,560 --> 01:04:53,320
Speaker 2: least in some ways work to bring back what has

1077
01:04:53,320 --> 01:04:56,480
Speaker 2: been lost. All right, we're going to close it there,

1078
01:04:56,480 --> 01:04:59,120
Speaker 2: but as always, we'd love to hear from everyone out there,

1079
01:04:59,400 --> 01:05:03,240
Speaker 2: Prairie to wa, prairie visitors, people who have never been

1080
01:05:03,280 --> 01:05:04,720
Speaker 2: to the prairie, and just have thoughts on some of

1081
01:05:04,720 --> 01:05:08,320
Speaker 2: the various topics we've discussed in these episodes right in

1082
01:05:08,440 --> 01:05:10,920
Speaker 2: we would love to hear from you. Just a reminder

1083
01:05:10,920 --> 01:05:12,760
Speaker 2: that The Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science

1084
01:05:12,760 --> 01:05:15,400
Speaker 2: and culture podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursday,

1085
01:05:15,440 --> 01:05:18,040
Speaker 2: short form episodes on Wednesdays and on Fridays. We set

1086
01:05:18,080 --> 01:05:20,040
Speaker 2: aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird

1087
01:05:20,120 --> 01:05:24,160
Speaker 2: film on Weird House Cinema. Wherever you listen to the podcast,

1088
01:05:24,760 --> 01:05:27,160
Speaker 2: or if you watch the podcast on Netflix, that's where

1089
01:05:27,160 --> 01:05:29,880
Speaker 2: we have our audio video version of it. So kind

1090
01:05:29,880 --> 01:05:32,560
Speaker 2: of like the Prairie Dog Dance, where you get the

1091
01:05:32,600 --> 01:05:35,760
Speaker 2: barking and the move and the motions. If you don't

1092
01:05:35,800 --> 01:05:37,080
Speaker 2: want to just hear us bark and you want to

1093
01:05:37,120 --> 01:05:40,880
Speaker 2: watch us dance, that's where you should go. But wherever

1094
01:05:40,920 --> 01:05:42,840
Speaker 2: you get in the podcast, be it Netflix or any

1095
01:05:42,840 --> 01:05:46,440
Speaker 2: of the various podcast sources out there, just make sure

1096
01:05:46,480 --> 01:05:49,080
Speaker 2: that you rate, review, subscribe. If you're on Netflix, that

1097
01:05:49,120 --> 01:05:51,600
Speaker 2: means two thumbs up. That means asking to be reminded

1098
01:05:51,640 --> 01:05:54,560
Speaker 2: about new episodes. These are all things that help us.

1099
01:05:54,440 --> 01:05:57,600
Speaker 3: Out huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer

1100
01:05:57,680 --> 01:06:00,240
Speaker 3: JJ Posway. If you would like to get into touch

1101
01:06:00,280 --> 01:06:02,360
Speaker 3: with us with feedback on this episode or any other,

1102
01:06:02,480 --> 01:06:04,520
Speaker 3: to suggest a topic for the future, or just to

1103
01:06:04,560 --> 01:06:07,240
Speaker 3: say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff

1104
01:06:07,280 --> 01:06:16,680
Speaker 3: to Blow your Mind dot com.

1105
01:06:16,800 --> 01:06:19,720
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For

1106
01:06:19,800 --> 01:06:22,600
Speaker 1: more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,

1107
01:06:22,760 --> 01:06:39,960
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.