WEBVTT - How Extinction Works 0:00:00.920 --> 0:00:04.120 Welcome to you stuff you should know from house Stuff 0:00:04.120 --> 0:00:12.399 Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. Don't 0:00:12.520 --> 0:00:16.680 Josh Clark, there's Charles W. Chucker's Bryant. Jerry is over there. 0:00:16.960 --> 0:00:19.880 I'm gonna said your last name, Jerry. How weird. And 0:00:19.880 --> 0:00:23.040 then today we have a fourth character in the in 0:00:23.079 --> 0:00:29.400 the studio with this Chuck. This a scent scent coming 0:00:29.480 --> 0:00:32.560 together to make like a changeable human being. So you 0:00:32.680 --> 0:00:37.240 are wearing Patuli, uh not wearing well, you have Petulia 0:00:37.280 --> 0:00:39.720 on you as a result of one of Emily's sugar 0:00:39.720 --> 0:00:44.880 scrubs right from Mama and it's Love your Mama dot com. Okay. 0:00:45.159 --> 0:00:49.440 And then Jerry is contributing to that with um an enchilada, 0:00:50.320 --> 0:00:54.400 so that all of them combined, I would say, there's 0:00:54.520 --> 0:00:56.560 like there's an extra person in the seat right here. 0:00:57.280 --> 0:01:00.440 What kind of person is that? Just another person? Okay, 0:01:00.680 --> 0:01:06.240 a viable living organism, one that when we leave the 0:01:06.280 --> 0:01:12.120 studio we'll probably become extinct. That's a good one. Did 0:01:12.200 --> 0:01:15.480 you like that? Yeah? I've had that plan since probably 0:01:15.520 --> 0:01:20.520 two weeks ago. How are you doing, man, I'm good. 0:01:20.520 --> 0:01:23.760 I've been thinking of Busta Rhymes all day. Why did 0:01:23.760 --> 0:01:26.240 he have a song about extinction had an album called 0:01:26.280 --> 0:01:29.520 the Extinction Level Event. Oh yeah, yeah, and that was 0:01:29.560 --> 0:01:32.880 in one of the songs that sounds super nineties. Well 0:01:32.959 --> 0:01:36.360 let's Buster Rhymes has. But I mean even those words 0:01:36.400 --> 0:01:40.200 extinction level Event. People were worried about stuff because of 0:01:40.319 --> 0:01:43.640 like the turn of the millennium. You remember, Exiles is 0:01:43.680 --> 0:01:48.680 a huge hit Deep Impact and Armageddon came out of 0:01:48.880 --> 0:01:52.280 like on the same day basically, and both were hits. 0:01:52.280 --> 0:01:56.680 Like people were just nervous and um. As a result, 0:01:57.600 --> 0:02:02.080 Buster Rhymes is very popular, that's right, although he's not anymore. Uh, 0:02:02.200 --> 0:02:05.640 he's still good though he hadn't been doing much no, 0:02:05.800 --> 0:02:09.200 but his body of work is yeah, leaders in the 0:02:09.200 --> 0:02:13.320 New School and his early work with Chip call Quest. 0:02:13.919 --> 0:02:15.840 Oh yeah, he guessed it on one of my favorite 0:02:15.880 --> 0:02:20.040 songs is What's the Scenario? Was that the one I 0:02:20.080 --> 0:02:22.079 think so? I mean it was definitely on that one, 0:02:22.480 --> 0:02:26.320 but they that was the one also where I think, um, yeah, 0:02:26.400 --> 0:02:29.480 he makes fun of people with saggy pants because it 0:02:29.560 --> 0:02:33.440 was so new. Apparently Bustter Rhames wasn't down with it yet. Yeah, 0:02:33.760 --> 0:02:36.760 just pretty ironic because he got hardcore into that. That 0:02:36.840 --> 0:02:41.200 was raw, raw, like a dungeon dragon, right, it's pretty awesome. 0:02:42.880 --> 0:02:48.240 So extinction is clearly what we're talking about today. Uh 0:02:48.320 --> 0:02:50.440 and uh, I guess we should probably give a shout 0:02:50.440 --> 0:02:53.679 out to some of the extra reading material. Yeah, man, 0:02:53.760 --> 0:02:57.559 we picked up on UM. There's a woman named Elizabeth 0:02:57.800 --> 0:03:01.800 um Colbert or Corp Colbert depending on what if you 0:03:01.840 --> 0:03:07.239 watch the Colbert Report. Um and she is basically a 0:03:07.360 --> 0:03:11.680 leading expert as far as journalists go on extinction. She 0:03:11.720 --> 0:03:14.200 wrote a book called The Sixth Extinction. That's a good 0:03:14.200 --> 0:03:16.920 it's a good article. Yeah, and like she wrote an 0:03:17.000 --> 0:03:19.239 article in the New Yorker. She's a New Yorker journalist 0:03:19.760 --> 0:03:21.720 that was basically the predecessor to the book. You know 0:03:21.720 --> 0:03:24.360 how they do. Like, I need an extra twenty grand, 0:03:24.400 --> 0:03:27.200 so I'll just write a synopsis of the book I'm writing. 0:03:27.919 --> 0:03:30.079 Um And it's a good article, and we worked from that. 0:03:30.600 --> 0:03:33.359 There's another one from the New York Review of Books 0:03:33.400 --> 0:03:37.200 called They're taking Over about the explosion of jellyfish. UM. 0:03:37.360 --> 0:03:39.840 On how stuff Works, there's one that I wrote years 0:03:39.840 --> 0:03:43.240 back called will We Soon Be Extinct? And there's another 0:03:43.280 --> 0:03:45.880 how stuff Works one that we've done an episode on 0:03:46.040 --> 0:03:49.800 called wise bio Diversity Important. Yeah, and I found one 0:03:49.840 --> 0:03:54.080 in an I O nine for animals that we thought 0:03:54.120 --> 0:03:59.080 were extinct but miraculously pop back up nice, which is 0:03:59.080 --> 0:04:01.480 always a good story. Oh yeah, it's a it's a 0:04:01.520 --> 0:04:06.040 heartwarming story of triumph of raversity and coming back when 0:04:06.040 --> 0:04:08.480 everybody thought you were down. Yeah, some of them like 0:04:08.520 --> 0:04:11.640 basically rocky, hundreds of millions of years later. Even Yeah, 0:04:11.680 --> 0:04:15.320 it's crazy, like the Silicon I think that's when I 0:04:15.360 --> 0:04:19.560 was at the Big Fish. They just caught that thing 0:04:20.560 --> 0:04:24.120 one day, yeah, and said, hey, wait a minute, Yeah, 0:04:24.279 --> 0:04:27.840 this thing's extinct. It's supposed to be. And we'll talk 0:04:27.880 --> 0:04:32.359 about how and why things fall off. But things do 0:04:32.600 --> 0:04:35.640 fall off, and it seems that there is a um 0:04:36.880 --> 0:04:40.599 that the whole thing is a very natural process. Extinctionists. 0:04:41.279 --> 0:04:46.560 But for a very long time, I guess scientists um 0:04:46.800 --> 0:04:52.800 believed that the God created all of the animals on 0:04:52.839 --> 0:04:56.840 Earth and that his will was too perfect, his creation 0:04:56.920 --> 0:05:00.600 was too divine to even allow for extinct and so 0:05:01.240 --> 0:05:04.320 because they were aware of the fossil record, they rationalized 0:05:04.400 --> 0:05:06.800 these huge bones of animals that he didn't see anywhere 0:05:06.839 --> 0:05:09.400 as we just haven't found him yet. Well yeah, and 0:05:09.400 --> 0:05:11.000 this was all the way up and you know, into 0:05:11.000 --> 0:05:13.880 the nineteenth century and some really smart people like Thomas 0:05:13.960 --> 0:05:17.960 Jefferson thought, for instance, when he sent Lewis and Clark 0:05:18.000 --> 0:05:21.000 out west, that they might come across the great Mastodon. 0:05:21.600 --> 0:05:23.719 He's like, it's found to be out there somewhere, guys, 0:05:23.880 --> 0:05:26.719 to be careful. But there were some other smarter people, 0:05:27.520 --> 0:05:31.640 um like George Cuvier in eighteen twelve, he was pretty 0:05:31.680 --> 0:05:34.039 ahead of his time. In fact, in eighteen twelve he 0:05:34.080 --> 0:05:36.839 was way ahead of his time because he published an 0:05:36.920 --> 0:05:40.280 essay called Revolutions on the Surface of the Globe and 0:05:40.680 --> 0:05:43.760 he kind of asserted that now things can go extinct, 0:05:44.360 --> 0:05:50.479 and he called them a species produced lost species and 0:05:51.040 --> 0:05:55.200 basically hypothesized that there have been cataclysmic events that have 0:05:55.320 --> 0:05:59.680 caused extinctions. In so many words, this is basically flew 0:05:59.760 --> 0:06:01.839 in the face of this that like, not only was 0:06:01.880 --> 0:06:05.280 their extinction, but there were there were huge events that 0:06:05.320 --> 0:06:08.040 caused it. And so the the religious thinkers of the 0:06:08.080 --> 0:06:10.240 day said, okay, wait, wait, wait, we can work with this, 0:06:10.839 --> 0:06:14.000 because buddy, what you're talking about is like Noah's flood. 0:06:14.520 --> 0:06:19.280 So you, my friend, just proved the Bible correct using science. Yeah. 0:06:19.360 --> 0:06:22.240 Darwin wasn't on board though, Although he did believe in extinction, 0:06:22.320 --> 0:06:24.679 he thought it was the only way it could happen 0:06:24.839 --> 0:06:28.200 is the gradual extinction. That is also true, and we'll 0:06:28.240 --> 0:06:30.159 talk about that as well. And of course Darwin is 0:06:30.160 --> 0:06:34.520 this huge hero of biology so well, Darwin's right about 0:06:34.600 --> 0:06:40.960 just about everything, so literally, until the nineteen nineties, Darwin's 0:06:41.080 --> 0:06:46.880 view that extinction happens extremely slowly, slower than speciation events, 0:06:46.880 --> 0:06:50.320 so ultimately you should always have more species, new species 0:06:50.360 --> 0:06:56.000 coming up, then you have going extinct. Until the nineteen nineties, 0:06:56.040 --> 0:06:58.360 that's the way that it was, That's the way it seemed, 0:06:59.200 --> 0:07:02.120 so Chuck, like I said, all of this um stayed 0:07:02.160 --> 0:07:06.760 around until and it was the result of like think 0:07:06.800 --> 0:07:09.800 about it, think about how you think of mass extinctions now, 0:07:10.200 --> 0:07:15.320 you think of a asteroid hitting Earth, destroying everything. And 0:07:15.360 --> 0:07:20.800 it wasn't until that that view became widely accepted. And 0:07:20.840 --> 0:07:24.520 it was because of this dude um named Alvarez. He 0:07:24.600 --> 0:07:28.480 was a geologist, I believe, Walter Alvarez, and in the 0:07:28.520 --> 0:07:32.800 seventies he started studying this clay layer that was basically 0:07:32.840 --> 0:07:35.600 in the fossil record right at the time the dinosaurs 0:07:35.640 --> 0:07:39.200 suddenly died out, and no one could quite explain what 0:07:39.320 --> 0:07:42.200 was going on here. They just knew that this must 0:07:42.240 --> 0:07:45.320 have happened gradually, so it must be a problem with 0:07:45.360 --> 0:07:48.120 the actual fossil record, not our way of thinking. And 0:07:48.120 --> 0:07:50.160 there are plenty of problems with the fossil record, which 0:07:50.160 --> 0:07:53.440 we'll get into as well. But UM Walter Alvarez said, 0:07:54.040 --> 0:07:55.560 let me, let me look at this in a little 0:07:55.560 --> 0:07:57.840 more detail, and he looked at the iridium and found 0:07:57.880 --> 0:08:01.400 that the iridium levels were off the arts, which shouldn't 0:08:01.440 --> 0:08:04.080 be because it's very, very rare, and we associate a 0:08:04.160 --> 0:08:06.440 ridium on Earth as being brought here by, say, like 0:08:06.480 --> 0:08:09.680 an asteroid or whatever. Yeah, it's superabundant asteroids. So all 0:08:09.720 --> 0:08:12.520 of a sudden, this guy goes, oh, wait a minute, 0:08:12.880 --> 0:08:17.240 maybe we can explain this dying out of dinosaurs where 0:08:17.240 --> 0:08:21.480 the dinosaurs went sixty five million years ago by an asteroid. 0:08:21.800 --> 0:08:24.360 And that was in nineteen eighty that they proposed this hypothesis, 0:08:24.440 --> 0:08:27.680 and they ran into a lot of resistance UM and 0:08:27.720 --> 0:08:33.400 then finally in n UM, a year after a crater 0:08:33.600 --> 0:08:38.800 was discovered under the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, UM they 0:08:38.880 --> 0:08:41.600 dated it and said, yeah, it just so happens that 0:08:41.640 --> 0:08:44.560 this crater was formed just at the moment the dinosaurs 0:08:44.600 --> 0:08:49.040 died out. So Valvareus hypothesis is probably right, and extinction 0:08:49.080 --> 0:08:52.640 can happen on a mass sudden scale, just as it 0:08:52.679 --> 0:08:56.160 can also happen on a very long term scale too. Yeah, 0:08:56.200 --> 0:08:58.240 that crater was a hundred and twelve miles wide, so 0:08:58.240 --> 0:09:03.000 it fit the profile and basically ended the Cretaceous period 0:09:03.160 --> 0:09:06.319 in the Mesozoic era. And for a while they called 0:09:06.360 --> 0:09:09.880 it the Cretaceous Tertiary event, but now they call it 0:09:09.960 --> 0:09:13.280 the Cretaceous paleogene event. And did you notice that the 0:09:14.400 --> 0:09:18.719 right they noticed the that. Did you notice the Cretaceous, 0:09:18.720 --> 0:09:21.360 which is spelled at the sea is denoted with the K. 0:09:22.600 --> 0:09:25.480 Did you see why? It's just German. It's just a 0:09:25.520 --> 0:09:28.559 German translation for it. I figured out something like that. Yeah, 0:09:29.320 --> 0:09:32.600 it was just bugging me. So now we now believe 0:09:32.640 --> 0:09:35.400 in asteroid brought us into the Cenozoic era that we 0:09:36.040 --> 0:09:39.200 that we enjoyed today. Love the Cnozoic. It's pretty good, 0:09:39.320 --> 0:09:43.079 pretty awesome. I mean it's our era, so you gotta 0:09:43.120 --> 0:09:47.320 love it. You gotta love it. Um, So Chuck, like 0:09:47.360 --> 0:09:51.600 I said, the extinction, extinction can happen, and it does happen, 0:09:51.600 --> 0:09:55.440 and it's a natural process. Um. If you talk to 0:09:55.480 --> 0:10:00.560 people about extinction today though, they say, yeah, we're kind 0:10:00.600 --> 0:10:04.520 of in a huge extinction event. Yeah, and it makes sense. 0:10:04.520 --> 0:10:07.839 I mean when you look at the our past. They 0:10:07.960 --> 0:10:10.840 estimate maybe up to five billion species have lived on 0:10:10.880 --> 0:10:14.840 Earth and more than those are gone. And I love 0:10:14.840 --> 0:10:16.960 how the New Yorker put it. I think that there's 0:10:17.000 --> 0:10:19.480 an old joke that all of life on Earth today 0:10:19.520 --> 0:10:22.600 could be accounted for with a simple rounding error, like 0:10:23.040 --> 0:10:28.000 everything we know. Um, so, yeah, we've lost of things 0:10:28.000 --> 0:10:31.160 that have ever lived on this planet due to extinction, right, 0:10:31.200 --> 0:10:34.640 which again is like it has such a terrible connotation 0:10:34.720 --> 0:10:39.120 these days, extinction, extinction, but it happens naturally. Apparently. What 0:10:39.200 --> 0:10:42.240 they've found from looking at the fossil record from studying 0:10:42.280 --> 0:10:46.200 life on Earth is that a species tends to have 0:10:46.280 --> 0:10:50.079 about a ten million year lifespan, and there a speciation 0:10:50.120 --> 0:10:54.320 event occurs where it branches off from one specie produces 0:10:54.320 --> 0:10:57.640 an entirely new species, and that species on average will 0:10:57.640 --> 0:11:00.480 stick around for about ten million years, and then something 0:11:00.600 --> 0:11:05.480 happens and it dies out and other species take its place. 0:11:06.040 --> 0:11:08.520 This is the natural course of life from what we 0:11:08.600 --> 0:11:12.280 can tell. The thing is, it normally happens on a 0:11:12.400 --> 0:11:18.840 very slow time scale, like when it's what's called background extinction, right, Yeah, 0:11:18.880 --> 0:11:21.839 the background rate uh is supposed to be between one 0:11:21.840 --> 0:11:25.040 and five species per year, but they think that now 0:11:25.120 --> 0:11:27.800 it could be like a times that I've seen up 0:11:27.840 --> 0:11:31.280 to a thousand times the normal rate, and I saw 0:11:31.320 --> 0:11:35.360 another study from two thousand fourteen, so it's fresh and 0:11:35.400 --> 0:11:38.960 it it said that they these researchers calculated the normal 0:11:39.080 --> 0:11:42.200 rates and they found that there's between point zero two 0:11:42.240 --> 0:11:47.120 three and point one three five extinct species per million 0:11:47.200 --> 0:11:51.839 species per year. That doesn't really mean much. It means 0:11:51.840 --> 0:11:54.840 so much that it boggles the mind, you know, Like 0:11:54.880 --> 0:11:57.280 that's a really strange way of putting it. But basically 0:11:57.559 --> 0:12:00.400 they're saying, like, for every million species on on earth 0:12:00.679 --> 0:12:04.160 at any given point in time during a year, as 0:12:04.200 --> 0:12:08.320 low as point zero two three species will die out. 0:12:08.960 --> 0:12:11.280 So in a year, you shouldn't necessarily have that Maine 0:12:11.320 --> 0:12:15.920 species in two In current times though, like you said, 0:12:16.000 --> 0:12:19.040 between a hundred and a thousand times that rate is 0:12:19.120 --> 0:12:22.400 what we're seeing right now, which is you could say, alarming. 0:12:22.600 --> 0:12:25.120 It is alarming. The reason they don't have hard numbers 0:12:25.120 --> 0:12:28.120 on this stuff is because, like we said, it's a 0:12:28.160 --> 0:12:31.439 tough thing to study because the fossil record is well, 0:12:31.440 --> 0:12:34.960 there's a lot of problems. One is it's incomplete. We 0:12:35.000 --> 0:12:39.760 don't really know how many species have been on Earth 0:12:40.120 --> 0:12:44.520 since the beginning of Earth. It's just impossible to tell um. 0:12:44.720 --> 0:12:48.600 Fossils forum under you know, really specific conditions. So you 0:12:48.640 --> 0:12:51.480 may think something is gone because it has disappeared from 0:12:51.520 --> 0:12:54.000 the fossil record, but all that means is there wasn't 0:12:54.040 --> 0:12:57.120 a fossil doesn't necessarily mean it's gone. So that's why 0:12:57.160 --> 0:12:59.560 things will pop back up that they'll think, hey, we 0:12:59.559 --> 0:13:03.000 haven't seen the fossil of this guy and two thousand years, 0:13:03.000 --> 0:13:04.560 but here it is all of a sudden, And even 0:13:04.600 --> 0:13:08.200 if it has gone extinct, just where it stopped showing 0:13:08.280 --> 0:13:11.000 up from the fossil record doesn't mean, like you said, 0:13:11.280 --> 0:13:13.960 that's when it went extinct, right then it could have 0:13:14.040 --> 0:13:16.560 been millions of years later. Well, because then you're supposing 0:13:16.600 --> 0:13:19.560 that the last thing of that species happened to make 0:13:19.600 --> 0:13:22.760 a fossil, which is just silly um. And also it 0:13:22.800 --> 0:13:25.080 makes you wonder how many species have lived and died 0:13:25.120 --> 0:13:28.360 on Earth that just never showed up in the fossil record. Yeah, 0:13:28.480 --> 0:13:31.480 just weren't fossils at all. Yeah, Well, if it never 0:13:31.559 --> 0:13:35.760 crawled into amber or you know, was buried by ash 0:13:36.040 --> 0:13:40.880 or something that's luck, or got trapped in Bronosaurus poop. 0:13:40.920 --> 0:13:42.280 I don't know if that's good luck or bad luck. 0:13:43.000 --> 0:13:46.440 It's just it is what it is. It's nature. So 0:13:46.559 --> 0:13:49.240 because of all these gaps in the fossil record, UM, 0:13:50.200 --> 0:13:52.960 these researchers that love this topic tend to do a 0:13:52.960 --> 0:13:56.920 lot of math and a lot of speculating with algorithms 0:13:56.920 --> 0:14:01.160 and mathematical formulas. This up out, sure, and that's the 0:14:01.200 --> 0:14:04.719 only way to do it, really, to speculate with numbers. UM. 0:14:04.760 --> 0:14:08.000 It also helps them define things like the minimum viable population, 0:14:08.080 --> 0:14:11.360 which if you go below that then it's bad news 0:14:11.400 --> 0:14:14.400 for the species. It's the minimum amount you can have 0:14:14.559 --> 0:14:18.920 to still be considered to have a bright future right 0:14:19.040 --> 0:14:23.040 as a thing, or to just survive as a species. Right, Yeah, 0:14:23.040 --> 0:14:26.760 that's what I mean, damn future if you're not surviving. Yeah, 0:14:26.760 --> 0:14:29.920 math is pretty grim. It can be in this case 0:14:29.920 --> 0:14:33.640 for sure. UM. So we'll talk about exactly what makes 0:14:33.640 --> 0:14:37.600 an extinction and and then what makes up mass extinctions. UM. 0:14:37.640 --> 0:14:45.800 But first let's do a little break it un Okay, So, Chuck, 0:14:46.200 --> 0:14:52.080 you've been talking about um animals, animal species, going extinct 0:14:52.080 --> 0:14:54.680 and then showing up again like the Ceila can't or 0:14:54.680 --> 0:14:58.280 at least disappearing from the record, but we as humans 0:14:58.360 --> 0:15:00.920 assume they were extinct like a again, the Cela cant 0:15:01.040 --> 0:15:03.600 is this fish um that they caught off the coast 0:15:03.600 --> 0:15:05.720 of South Africa. When did we talk about it wasn't 0:15:05.720 --> 0:15:08.120 into this day in history. I remember we definitely have 0:15:08.240 --> 0:15:11.440 hit on that though. I think it was. It's huge, right, Yeah, 0:15:11.480 --> 0:15:14.360 it's a big, ugly fish and it looks like an 0:15:14.360 --> 0:15:17.640 old dinosaur. But they thought it had died out like 0:15:17.640 --> 0:15:21.600 like fifties, sixty million years ago, actually way longer. They 0:15:21.600 --> 0:15:25.080 thought it disappeared four million years ago, even more impressive. 0:15:25.560 --> 0:15:27.760 So then they caught one off the coast of South 0:15:27.760 --> 0:15:30.520 Africa in the thirties. Then they caught another one a 0:15:30.560 --> 0:15:34.880 couple of decades later in Madagascar or Mauritius or something, 0:15:35.280 --> 0:15:39.720 and um that made the Seila cant a Lazarus species. 0:15:40.320 --> 0:15:43.160 You know, I hadn't really gone anywhere. We just thought 0:15:43.240 --> 0:15:46.440 it did. So we humans, having the most important perspective 0:15:46.440 --> 0:15:49.800 on the entire planet, possibly in the entire universe, it 0:15:49.880 --> 0:15:52.880 was a Lazarus species to us, Lazarus from the Bible 0:15:53.640 --> 0:15:56.240 race from the dead like the sea cant again with 0:15:56.320 --> 0:16:01.000 the biblical connotations with extinction. Yeah, a lot at stake here, 0:16:01.240 --> 0:16:05.080 that's true. Another way something might disappear and you might 0:16:05.120 --> 0:16:07.920 think it's gone is if it actually evolves into a 0:16:07.920 --> 0:16:11.720 new species. That's called pseudo extinction. And that's a great 0:16:11.760 --> 0:16:14.240 success story as well. It is, but it also I 0:16:14.280 --> 0:16:18.840 don't understand why that's not just a speciation event. I mean, 0:16:18.840 --> 0:16:21.160 why is that pseudo extinction? Why is that any different 0:16:21.160 --> 0:16:26.840 from regular extinction? Um, yeah, maybe just because it's uh, 0:16:26.920 --> 0:16:31.600 it's didn't die out actually just changed and evolved. Those 0:16:31.640 --> 0:16:33.720 are two different things. Yeah, it seems like a gray 0:16:33.760 --> 0:16:38.120 area to me. But for the most part, when an 0:16:38.120 --> 0:16:42.240 animal just disappears, and we should say, like even today, 0:16:42.360 --> 0:16:45.000 we were still finding things that we thought were extinct, 0:16:45.560 --> 0:16:49.000 so called Lazar species, which goes to make the point 0:16:49.240 --> 0:16:53.240 we have no idea how many living species there are 0:16:53.400 --> 0:16:56.720 on the planet today, Yeah, or have been. It's all 0:16:56.760 --> 0:17:01.160 just a good guess it is using math, grim grim math. 0:17:01.800 --> 0:17:04.720 But for the most part we understand that when uh 0:17:04.880 --> 0:17:09.080 species goes away, suddenly it went extinct. And as we've 0:17:09.119 --> 0:17:12.360 been saying again and again, extinction is kind of this 0:17:12.440 --> 0:17:16.359 natural processor. It is a very natural process, um. And 0:17:16.760 --> 0:17:22.239 it typically results from a change in the habitat of 0:17:22.680 --> 0:17:28.520 species and it's inability to adapt so it dies out. Yeah. 0:17:28.600 --> 0:17:34.040 Competition with other species, hunting by humans, or perhaps the 0:17:34.119 --> 0:17:38.080 environment has been tainted by humans, humans, or a new 0:17:38.160 --> 0:17:41.000 bacteria or a new virus. The thing is, though, is 0:17:41.200 --> 0:17:46.160 so these these big factors, habitat loss, competition with new species, hunting, 0:17:46.480 --> 0:17:49.480 and contaminants in the environment. Those are the big four 0:17:49.480 --> 0:17:53.560 reasons that something goes extinct, right, Humans can and are 0:17:53.640 --> 0:17:56.919 responsible for all four of those. Yeah, and the and 0:17:56.960 --> 0:17:59.119 these are This is the extinction that happens over time. 0:17:59.280 --> 0:18:02.119 Obviously not a big asteroid hid in the planet. No, 0:18:02.640 --> 0:18:05.080 But it can't happen pretty quickly. In this this is 0:18:05.080 --> 0:18:08.840 a Tracy Wilson joint and in uh in the introduction, 0:18:08.960 --> 0:18:14.520 she mentions the stellar sea cow, which was an Arctic resident. 0:18:14.680 --> 0:18:17.760 It was a big old manateee basically, and they were 0:18:17.800 --> 0:18:22.480 first described by Arctic explorers in seventeen forty one. By 0:18:22.520 --> 0:18:26.080 seventeen sixty eight they were extinct. So it can't happen 0:18:26.280 --> 0:18:32.119 on a pretty rapid um scale. Yeah, especially when you 0:18:32.160 --> 0:18:34.560 introduce humans. Yeah, and it you know, it has a 0:18:34.720 --> 0:18:37.400 domino effect too, because we talked about and everyone knows 0:18:37.400 --> 0:18:40.600 about the dangers of losing bees. It's not just like, oh, 0:18:40.640 --> 0:18:44.080 well there're no more bees. That's gonna affect pollination and plants, 0:18:44.119 --> 0:18:46.720 and those plants are being fed on by other animals, 0:18:47.280 --> 0:18:51.800 and it tends to have a snowball effect. Um. Like, 0:18:51.880 --> 0:18:54.880 for example, the end of the last ice age, mammals, 0:18:54.880 --> 0:18:57.160 small mammals started to go extinct and because of that, 0:18:57.640 --> 0:18:59.920 large animals started to go extinct because they liked to 0:19:00.000 --> 0:19:02.560 eat the small animals. Exactly. Which is the answer to 0:19:02.560 --> 0:19:06.920 the question why is biodiversity important? Well, because ecosystems thrive 0:19:07.000 --> 0:19:10.560 and survive on a wide number of species that are 0:19:11.000 --> 0:19:15.359 exists pretty much naturally imbalanced. Um. You know. A pretty 0:19:15.359 --> 0:19:20.000 good example of that stuff falling out of balance, um 0:19:20.200 --> 0:19:24.080 is the passenger pigeon. Are you familiar. Yeah, they're trying 0:19:24.119 --> 0:19:27.960 to de extinct to that thing. Yeah. You want to 0:19:27.960 --> 0:19:31.600 talk about the extinction, Yeah, Well, the extinction is um, 0:19:31.680 --> 0:19:34.120 exactly what it sounds like. It is sort of Jurassic 0:19:34.160 --> 0:19:37.880 parky it is. In two thousand three, some scientists revived 0:19:37.880 --> 0:19:43.000 the Burcardo Bucardo, and that's a Spanish mountain goat and 0:19:43.080 --> 0:19:45.520 they did it just sort of like Jurassic Park from 0:19:45.600 --> 0:19:51.360 DNA that was frozen in time. Unfortunately, although it did 0:19:51.440 --> 0:19:55.639 work initially. Uh, the DNA only survived a matter of minutes, 0:19:56.160 --> 0:19:58.879 but they did they did count as a d extinction. 0:19:59.840 --> 0:20:02.679 I think there was a live birth that survived a 0:20:02.680 --> 0:20:05.600 few minutes, wasn't it. Yeah, the the animal itself only 0:20:05.640 --> 0:20:09.000 survived a few minutes, though it was like, I should 0:20:09.000 --> 0:20:15.120 not be that's true. Uh, And I mean they basically said, 0:20:15.200 --> 0:20:19.679 it's happening now, and we have the capabilities and we 0:20:19.720 --> 0:20:22.040 may not be able to bring the wooly mammoth back, 0:20:22.119 --> 0:20:23.719 but we might be able to bring back something kind 0:20:23.760 --> 0:20:26.480 of close, right. So, and that raises in this article 0:20:26.520 --> 0:20:30.520 that you sent um this this moral question, like should 0:20:30.600 --> 0:20:33.159 we be doing this just because we can? Does that 0:20:33.200 --> 0:20:35.680 mean we should? And so like, if you bring back 0:20:35.720 --> 0:20:38.639 an animal that has been extinct for so long that 0:20:38.680 --> 0:20:41.680 its habitat is now gone where they're gonna live, exactly 0:20:41.680 --> 0:20:43.879 where you're gonna put it a zoo, that doesn't seem 0:20:43.880 --> 0:20:45.679 like a good reason to bring an animal back. So 0:20:45.760 --> 0:20:48.280 we could put it in a zoo? Yeah, and just 0:20:48.640 --> 0:20:52.360 uh like maybe it This is my opinion here, which 0:20:52.400 --> 0:20:54.000 we don't do a lot of, but it seems like 0:20:54.080 --> 0:20:57.560 concentrating on the problems we face now with the extinction 0:20:57.640 --> 0:21:00.600 rates is something that we should concentrate on, not bringing 0:21:00.600 --> 0:21:03.240 back the wooly mammoth. Right, And and that also kind 0:21:03.240 --> 0:21:06.480 of dovetails of the point that if we have this 0:21:06.560 --> 0:21:11.800 ability and routinely UM exercise it, we may be less 0:21:11.840 --> 0:21:14.440 inclined to protect the stuff we have now, for like, oh, 0:21:14.800 --> 0:21:17.840 it's important enough, we'll just genetically re engineer and bring 0:21:17.880 --> 0:21:20.160 it back later. Yeah. I think they in the scene 0:21:20.200 --> 0:21:22.159 an article they liken it to just thinking we have 0:21:22.200 --> 0:21:26.679 an undo button on the world controls the Yeah, no, good, No, 0:21:27.600 --> 0:21:29.960 it's funny because the author doesn't realize that controls the 0:21:30.119 --> 0:21:35.800 works outside of Microsoft word too. He specifically mentioned control 0:21:35.920 --> 0:21:42.480 Z and Microsoft word, oh words, specifically Microsoft word. He said, yeah, 0:21:42.520 --> 0:21:44.399 that's a little weird. He could be a schill and 0:21:44.400 --> 0:21:48.160 he was just working it in maybe you know, well 0:21:48.200 --> 0:21:50.960 on max though it's not control UM. Maybe he just 0:21:51.000 --> 0:21:55.000 smit Microsoft and awkwardly put in word maybe, or maybe 0:21:55.000 --> 0:21:59.080 that's the only program he knows. You know, how do 0:21:59.160 --> 0:22:03.119 I work this? UM? So you're saying that they're trying 0:22:03.119 --> 0:22:06.560 to bring back the the passenger pigeon. Right, So the 0:22:06.560 --> 0:22:11.879 passenger pigeon is this really neat example of what happens when, um, 0:22:11.960 --> 0:22:16.520 you have a lack of biodiversity. Um, there were when 0:22:17.160 --> 0:22:21.760 European settlers came to the New World, apparently like one 0:22:21.800 --> 0:22:26.320 out of every four birds in North America was a 0:22:26.359 --> 0:22:30.199 passenger pigeon. A quarter of the entire bird population was 0:22:30.359 --> 0:22:34.359 passenger pigeons. There's a ton of pigeons. There are so 0:22:34.400 --> 0:22:37.000 many that you could just like shoot into like a flock, 0:22:37.320 --> 0:22:39.959 and you would kill a couple hundred. Literally, it was 0:22:40.000 --> 0:22:43.360 that there were that many. The thing is is, um 0:22:43.400 --> 0:22:46.760 if you live, if you read one. I can't remember 0:22:46.760 --> 0:22:48.800 which one it is, but both are excellent books by 0:22:48.920 --> 0:22:51.639 Charles C. Man. He talks about the passenger pigeon and 0:22:51.680 --> 0:22:54.760 how they've recently realized that there were so many passenger 0:22:54.840 --> 0:22:59.720 pigeons because a century before they're one of one of 0:22:59.760 --> 0:23:03.840 their um great predators. The native American had been wiped 0:23:03.840 --> 0:23:06.280 out by disease that had been introduced to the continent 0:23:06.440 --> 0:23:09.199 about a century before that. So by the time the 0:23:09.240 --> 0:23:12.120 Europeans got here and really started to settle and encounter, 0:23:12.520 --> 0:23:15.920 the passenger pigeon, they're like, God, look at all these pigeons, 0:23:16.160 --> 0:23:19.600 and didn't realize that the pigeon population had exploded because 0:23:19.640 --> 0:23:23.840 their natural predator had died off, and so we in 0:23:23.920 --> 0:23:28.720 turned hunted them into extinction. So because of one near extinction, 0:23:29.720 --> 0:23:33.320 the another species was allowed to thrive and explode, and 0:23:33.359 --> 0:23:38.200 then that when they were faced with their their predator again, humans, 0:23:38.800 --> 0:23:41.480 they were eventually wiped out and when extinct. Yeah, the 0:23:41.480 --> 0:23:44.520 American Buffalo, we almost sounded them out of existence. Yet 0:23:44.560 --> 0:23:47.080 we're not for Ted Turner. Yeah, we tried our best too. 0:23:47.320 --> 0:23:50.240 They were just shooting those things for fun at one point, man. 0:23:50.280 --> 0:23:54.560 That's disgusting. Disgusting. You hear about the trains just going 0:23:54.600 --> 0:23:56.320 through the West and just shooting out the windows at 0:23:56.320 --> 0:23:58.840 the Buffalo for no reason and doing nothing, just leaving 0:23:58.880 --> 0:24:01.960 them there to rot. Remember we did an episode on 0:24:02.080 --> 0:24:05.440 the Buffalo that was a good one. So sad um 0:24:05.600 --> 0:24:10.520 So it was good. Well it was sad dude though. So, uh, 0:24:10.600 --> 0:24:13.840 if you want to talk about extinction level events, that's 0:24:13.840 --> 0:24:17.239 a whole different deal. You want to talk that's not 0:24:17.520 --> 0:24:22.760 a slow gradual extinction, that is, uh, some big thing 0:24:22.840 --> 0:24:25.720 that happens that wipes out a lot of living things 0:24:25.760 --> 0:24:29.000