Speaker 1: I guess what will what's that mango? So you know
Speaker 1: those Golden records that traveled on the Voyager spacecraft, Yeah,
Speaker 1: they were loaded up with greetings and different languages and
Speaker 1: these concertos. It wasn't actually Johnny be Good on there too. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's right, there's some Chuck Berry on the record. But
Speaker 1: I was reading this new book by Nick Pines, and
Speaker 1: it's called Spying on Whales, and one of the things
Speaker 1: he says is that there are actually whale songs on
Speaker 1: that record as well. So in the venties, scientists had
Speaker 1: just discovered that whales have these complex songs that they
Speaker 1: repeat in loops, and each whale improvises on that loop.
Speaker 1: It's really remarkable. But Pines's point is that in the
Speaker 1: nearly fifty years since, we still don't really understand these songs.
Speaker 1: But even then we find them so intriguing and so
Speaker 1: beautiful that we're happy to throw them on a record
Speaker 1: in case aliens might find them interesting too. But reading
Speaker 1: this book made me think we should really dig into whales,
Speaker 1: like why are they so large? How do they sustain
Speaker 1: these massive bodies? I mean, these creatures are bigger than
Speaker 1: any dinosaurs that have relived and also, why do they
Speaker 1: have belly buttons? Let's dive in. Yea, hey there, podcast listeners,
Speaker 1: Welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson and as
Speaker 1: always I'm joined by my good friend man Guesshot Ticketer
Speaker 1: and the man on the other side of the soundproof glass.
Speaker 1: Not fully prepared today, Mango. I do see. He's got
Speaker 1: eBay up on his computer and he's looking up all
Speaker 1: of these Shammoo tshirts Shamoo coffee mugs. So he's probably
Speaker 1: gonna order some of those. I don't know when he's
Speaker 1: gonna wear them. I'm a little bit disappointed, but I'm
Speaker 1: sure he'll get something. But that's our good friend and
Speaker 1: producer Tristan McNeil. Now today on the program, we're chatting
Speaker 1: with Nick Pyinson. He's the curator of Fossil Marine may
Speaker 1: Emmals at the Smithsonian Institute's National Museum of Natural History,
Speaker 1: which is of course in Washington, d C. And he's
Speaker 1: the author of this wonderful new book called Spying on Whales,
Speaker 1: The Past, Present, and Future of Earth's most awesome creatures.
Speaker 1: Nick Piinson, Welcome to Part Time Genius. Happy to be here.
Speaker 1: So going way back, one of the one of the
Speaker 1: first things I stumbled into when when reading your book
Speaker 1: here was that the first whales were land dwelling creatures
Speaker 1: the size of a German shepherd, that they walked on
Speaker 1: four legs and even had the snout instead of a blowhole.
Speaker 1: And I have to admit, Nick, when when I first
Speaker 1: saw this fact, I thought, Oh, this guy might not
Speaker 1: know what a whale is like. That is not describing
Speaker 1: a whale. So can you explain them? I mean, that
Speaker 1: is so bizarre to both know that that connection is
Speaker 1: there and then to know how that connection is there.
Speaker 1: So can you talk us through this a little bit.
Speaker 1: Let's go back to have a whale in your head,
Speaker 1: and you're probably imagining a humpback whale or a killer
Speaker 1: whale and just looking at the basics of its DNA
Speaker 1: to know genealogical relationships. That whale in your head is
Speaker 1: most closely related to mammals that have four legs and
Speaker 1: live on land for the most part, so that those
Speaker 1: are deer, pigs, cattle, sheep, m hippos, which are semi aquatic.
Speaker 1: They swim in the water pretty well. But if you
Speaker 1: have four weight bearing limbs and whales really don't look
Speaker 1: like that. At all. So they released whales had four
Speaker 1: weight bearing limbs. It makes them look a lot like
Speaker 1: their near relatives today. But in the process of about
Speaker 1: ten million years, we have this great fossil record of
Speaker 1: how they've transformed, the loss of hind limbs, the transformation
Speaker 1: of four limbs into paddles, and then all the changes
Speaker 1: that happened to their skulls. Because when they undergo these transitions,
Speaker 1: especially like this one from land to see, well, you're
Speaker 1: you know, vision has to change, how you smell changes,
Speaker 1: how you here changes. We have that documented in the
Speaker 1: fossil record. What sort of timeline are we looking at here, like,
Speaker 1: what what when does this dog sort of appear on
Speaker 1: on Earth? You should be really careful and say dog like.
Speaker 1: Dog like dogs are a completely different group of mamma um.
Speaker 1: So this happens in about the space of a ten
Speaker 1: million years, from fifty to about forty million years ago.
Speaker 1: And this time period is interesting because it's during a
Speaker 1: period that was the last greenhouse Earth, and that's the
Speaker 1: last time in Earth history that we had global carbon
Speaker 1: dioxide concentrations that are closest to the ones that we
Speaker 1: may head to in the coming century or two. Whales
Speaker 1: evolved in an island archipelago that bordered the equator, so
Speaker 1: um territory that is now India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, the entire
Speaker 1: Middle East that used to be a giant equatorial seaway
Speaker 1: today that's now been reduced to the meta Ranian but
Speaker 1: fifty plus million years ago that was open waters, and
Speaker 1: there happened to be this giant archipelago of of land.
Speaker 1: And you know, if you read anything about evolution on island,
Speaker 1: you know, crazy stuff happens. So I'm not so surprised
Speaker 1: that the earliest whales happened in this setting. You know, Nick,
Speaker 1: there's some great illustrations in the book, and one is
Speaker 1: of this Basilosaurus, and I guess this was one of
Speaker 1: the first fully aquatic whales. And supposedly this whale had
Speaker 1: one of the strongest bites of any mammal ever, or
Speaker 1: at least as you've said here. So so how do
Speaker 1: we know this? That's a great question. So one of
Speaker 1: the ways that we can figure out how strong UH
Speaker 1: an extinct organism might bite UM is by modeling it.
Speaker 1: So you can create a computer model based on the
Speaker 1: digital data the geometry of that animal's teeth or its
Speaker 1: skull I'd say especially teeth plus skull, because you want
Speaker 1: to know the bone that's holding the business end of
Speaker 1: whatever is chomping down. And when people have done those
Speaker 1: computational analyzes and they do it with basil Saurus, which
Speaker 1: again had a three ft long skull, So one, they're
Speaker 1: not that many mammals with teeth that have three ft
Speaker 1: long skulls. A polar bear may have a skull that's
Speaker 1: um for long, that's barely that's not even a foot
Speaker 1: and a half. But basil Saurus had a three ft
Speaker 1: long skull with these giant teeth that are the size
Speaker 1: of your palm um. So the numbers that you get
Speaker 1: are that it has a bite force unrivaled by any
Speaker 1: other mammal. So Nick, well, one thing I still don't
Speaker 1: understand is how did wales get so big and why
Speaker 1: did they stop growing? Like why does a hundred ten
Speaker 1: foot body work for them? But maybe not a two
Speaker 1: d foot body. So that's that's a question I tried
Speaker 1: to explore in the book, which and emphasize that um
Speaker 1: getting big over evolutionary time is really a set of tradeoffs.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of reasons that it might be advantageous
Speaker 1: to get really big. Okay, then there are a lot
Speaker 1: of reasons why it may not be. It seems like
Speaker 1: for filter feeding whales they only get big in the
Speaker 1: last few million years. Uh. And what's interesting about that
Speaker 1: time frame is, in contrast to greenhouse Earth, during the
Speaker 1: first few million years of whale evolution, the last few
Speaker 1: million years have been happening under ice age Earth, a
Speaker 1: time when we have ice caps both south and north.
Speaker 1: Global oceans became patchier in space and time in terms
Speaker 1: of their resources with the onset of the ice ages.
Speaker 1: So these kind of these natural history films where you
Speaker 1: see giant schools of fish and bait balls and kill
Speaker 1: aggregations that happen off the coast of South Africa or
Speaker 1: off of Chile or off of California, those are very
Speaker 1: recent geologic phenomena which haven't really been around that long.
Speaker 1: And we think this is deeply tied to the selective
Speaker 1: forces that allowed whales to become big. So migrating the
Speaker 1: long distances to arrive at those places where food is
Speaker 1: very dense in space and time, being big helps, But
Speaker 1: on the cost side, if you're a lunch feeding whale,
Speaker 1: you really can't be much bigger than about a dred
Speaker 1: and ten feet otherwise you can't close your mouth fast enough.
Speaker 1: So that's those are the trade offs with getting big. Now,
Speaker 1: could a different kind of whale get much bigger? Maybe,
Speaker 1: but that hasn't yet evolved in as far far as
Speaker 1: we know. I think you talk about the whales traveling,
Speaker 1: I'm curious. I know different types of whales travel different distances,
Speaker 1: but but how long are we talking for some whales?
Speaker 1: So some whales don't range that far, but others do.
Speaker 1: In these filter feeding whales, So ones that are like
Speaker 1: um humpbacks or blue whales or minky whales, they can
Speaker 1: range over tens of thousands of miles. Um gray whales,
Speaker 1: for example, have no problem, it seems, migrating twenty thousand miles.
Speaker 1: Humpbacks will migrate from Maui in Hawaii to the Panhandle
Speaker 1: of Alaska every year. That's a scale that I really
Speaker 1: tried to convey in the book, is that whales range
Speaker 1: over entire ocean basins in many cases, so they're living
Speaker 1: at these big scales. That's a way that whales are
Speaker 1: teaching us about these bigger ideas about how oceans work.
Speaker 1: Um that I think is really important. Nick. We've got
Speaker 1: so many more questions, but we've got to take a
Speaker 1: little break first. Welcome back to Part time Genius. We're
Speaker 1: here with Nick Pinson. You know what, when you were
Speaker 1: discussing the size of a whale and how they can
Speaker 1: only get so large because they need their jaws to
Speaker 1: climb fast enough to get the food. I was fascinated
Speaker 1: by some of the different strategies that whales used to
Speaker 1: hunt that you've described, and I was curious if you
Speaker 1: could sort of go through some of those, because like
Speaker 1: the way they can hold their breath and die, I've
Speaker 1: deep or or almost turned their jaws into parachutes, or
Speaker 1: how some pirouette when they lunch. It was just really
Speaker 1: beautiful and I'd love for the listeners to be able
Speaker 1: to hear some of that stuff. Sure, I mean, I
Speaker 1: think it goes back to this idealized whale that you
Speaker 1: have in your head. Um it oversimplifies the incredible diversity
Speaker 1: of living whales to say nothing about all the crazy
Speaker 1: extinct ones that we know of. But among the living whales,
Speaker 1: you'll see some have a mustachioed fringe hanging from the
Speaker 1: top of their mouth that's baling, and so those are
Speaker 1: the filter feeding whales. That's one group. The other one
Speaker 1: are toothed whales. Now some of the tooth whales have teeth,
Speaker 1: others don't, but they all echolocate. They use a form
Speaker 1: of biological sonar to navigate to hunt. The filter feeding
Speaker 1: ones will use their mustachioed fringe of baleing to capture
Speaker 1: aggregates of prey in bulk, so you're making the highest
Speaker 1: return on the investment of feeding style. And some of
Speaker 1: these filter feeders will lunge the way a blue whale
Speaker 1: whelle or a humpback um. Others do a style of
Speaker 1: filter feeding called skim feeding. So these are like bowheads
Speaker 1: and right whales where they'll hover around the surface and
Speaker 1: they're not team gulps, they're just kind of passing through
Speaker 1: a giant super organism of prey. For the other group
Speaker 1: of whales, the tooth whales, they use echolocation and in
Speaker 1: some cases, these are the deep diving ones that will
Speaker 1: dive thousands of feet deep in search of prey sperm whales,
Speaker 1: beaked whales, um, even many oceanic dolphins. A bottom nosed
Speaker 1: dolphins will dive very very deep um beyond the reach
Speaker 1: of light for their prey and The way how you
Speaker 1: can do that is if you have a way of
Speaker 1: navigating an underwater world without light, and that's using sound.
Speaker 1: This is an outstanding question, is why haven't um whale
Speaker 1: prey tooth whale prey evolve defenses against echolocation because it
Speaker 1: seems like a supremely advantageous tour and to hunt um.
Speaker 1: And that's it's still not entirely well known. And that's
Speaker 1: in part because we don't actually see whales feeding at depths.
Speaker 1: I mean, this whole story of the squid in the whale,
Speaker 1: sperm whales feeding on giant squid, nobody's ever seen that.
Speaker 1: We see the effects of that. We would all love
Speaker 1: to see it. I mean, that's just one of these
Speaker 1: amazing you know, if you could ever get a BBC
Speaker 1: film crew to film it, that would be awesome. That's
Speaker 1: we've never seen it, so we have to infer it
Speaker 1: either from gut contents or the scars or chunks of
Speaker 1: giant squid tentacles that float around sperm whales after they
Speaker 1: come to the surface. Um. It's just there's a lot
Speaker 1: about whale science that we don't see directly, so we
Speaker 1: have to be clever about how we study it. Well,
Speaker 1: it seems for you know, not for lack of trying
Speaker 1: that because you talk about that echolocation and how it's
Speaker 1: so sophisticated in some whales that you know, even our
Speaker 1: military has invested, especially in the sixties, so much in
Speaker 1: studying that ability to echolocate. Why is it so much
Speaker 1: more sophisticated than what we're able to create with you know,
Speaker 1: computers and all the technology that we have. Well, I mean,
Speaker 1: whales had the advantage of evolution of tens of millions
Speaker 1: of years of evolution for that, right, um, evolution in
Speaker 1: an in an environment that's actually really complex and has
Speaker 1: properties that are very different from the one that we
Speaker 1: operate in daily. I mean, water is a different medium
Speaker 1: and has different properties for the physics of signals moving
Speaker 1: through it, whether it's sound or light. Whales have had
Speaker 1: tens of millions of years to evolve solutions to that.
Speaker 1: So one thing I didn't realize before this was how
Speaker 1: long a whale could live. And in your chapter on
Speaker 1: architect time machines, you talk about bowhead whales and how
Speaker 1: finding harpoons actually helped us determine their lifespens. Can you
Speaker 1: talk a little bit about that? Absolutely, I mean, it's
Speaker 1: I think surprising people to realize that Americans whale today.
Speaker 1: It just doesn't happen typically in the lower forty eight States,
Speaker 1: but many indigenous cultures in the Arctic require marine mammal
Speaker 1: met as sustance, that's food for how people live and
Speaker 1: um this is ongoing in the North Slope of Alaska,
Speaker 1: and by recovering some of these bowhead whale carcasses, what
Speaker 1: scientists have found is tools embedded in these uh in
Speaker 1: the bodies of these bowhead whales that clearly came from
Speaker 1: a different era of hunting. These harpoon heads are almost
Speaker 1: like iPhones or smartphones in some ways, and that you
Speaker 1: can tell when they must have been embedded in the
Speaker 1: body based on their technologic so you know exactly so
Speaker 1: there was a changeover from stone harpoons to metal harpoons
Speaker 1: in the nineteenth century. And you know that the whale
Speaker 1: that was um an unsuccessful strike must have been an
Speaker 1: adult when it was hit, because the juvenile would not
Speaker 1: have survived. So that whale that was collected in the
Speaker 1: late twentieth century in this case must have been well
Speaker 1: over a hundred years old, and the best guess was
Speaker 1: about a hundred and thirty and that exactly parallels the
Speaker 1: kind of data you can get from biological tissues from
Speaker 1: their ovaries, so different lines of evidence. You're telling us
Speaker 1: that bowhead whales are able to live much more than
Speaker 1: a century, and some of the Muno acity it was
Speaker 1: coming back with data of two hundred years, and so
Speaker 1: that's that's I mean, it seems unbelievable. But I think
Speaker 1: the implication of that is that there are whales that
Speaker 1: have lived through the entire rise and fall of major
Speaker 1: historical events in human history, like industrial whaling, or the
Speaker 1: rise of atomic weapons testing um or you know, you
Speaker 1: name it. In terms of our technological innovation or the
Speaker 1: things we put out in the environment. Whales, individual whales
Speaker 1: have persisted through that. So by if we were able
Speaker 1: to study these whales in whatever form, they probably could
Speaker 1: tell us a lot about what has happened to the environment. Fortunately,
Speaker 1: in places like the Smithsonian we have bohead balin that
Speaker 1: goes back while well over a hundred and fifty years.
Speaker 1: If balein is able to tell us about isotopic history,
Speaker 1: so the chemical history of the environment, then these these
Speaker 1: pieces of bohead balein from the nineteenth century before fossil
Speaker 1: fuels were burned. Could tell us a lot about how
Speaker 1: the world has changed. That's really interesting. So you know,
Speaker 1: one thing you mentioned there was whaling, and I was
Speaker 1: fascinated that you actually worked or observed at a whaling
Speaker 1: station in Iceland. And I kind of wouldn't have expected
Speaker 1: that commercial whaling and this pure scientific study would have
Speaker 1: intersected like that. Can you talk a little bit about
Speaker 1: like why you chose to work there and how it
Speaker 1: benefited your understanding of wales. Whaling is something that's happened
Speaker 1: for thousands of years in human history and it still
Speaker 1: goes on today. Um, many people have emotional reactions to it,
Speaker 1: for sure, and it's hunting like any other mammal hunting,
Speaker 1: so it goes All the issues that you may have
Speaker 1: with big game hunting are certainly applied to whaling. And
Speaker 1: there's two main forms today that it happens in commercial whaling,
Speaker 1: which is undertaken by Iceland and Norway, so they see
Speaker 1: whaling as no different from a fishery um, and they
Speaker 1: sell the meat that's collected that's that's from a killed whale. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then the other form of whaling is so called
Speaker 1: scientific whaling that happens in Japan, you know, and for
Speaker 1: the ladder, I would say that that's agenda driven science,
Speaker 1: and we should always be skeptical of agenda driven science
Speaker 1: because that's saying that you kind of know the answer
Speaker 1: before you go out and look for it. UM. And
Speaker 1: you know, whaling happens in a social context. And it's
Speaker 1: clear that scientific whaling in Japan is not really about
Speaker 1: the science, because we can answer those questions that they
Speaker 1: have using non lethal waves. That is certainly true. So
Speaker 1: scientific whaling really doesn't have that much of a reason
Speaker 1: for existing commerce. Show whaling, well, that's within the sovereignty
Speaker 1: of those nations UM. And from my standpoint as a
Speaker 1: scientist UM, having a relationship with those industrial operations, especially
Speaker 1: in Iceland, has been a boon to understanding some key
Speaker 1: parts of the anatomy of these lunch feeding whales, and
Speaker 1: it's providing information that we wouldn't otherwise have, and that
Speaker 1: has to do with the logistics of working with very
Speaker 1: large carcasses. So a seventy foot fin whale carcass that's
Speaker 1: freshly killed gives you information that you really couldn't otherwise get,
Speaker 1: certainly from a stranded whale when whales strand one, you
Speaker 1: don't have the equipment at your disposal. Usually don't have
Speaker 1: twenty men with giant knives and steam driven winches to
Speaker 1: manipulate and rotate the carcass and pull different parts of
Speaker 1: the anatomy into some way that you can actually study it.
Speaker 1: Um And certainly the tissue is not as fresh, and
Speaker 1: when tissue decays, it's far less useful for some kinds
Speaker 1: of questions, especially if you're looking at nervous tissue or
Speaker 1: muscle tissue. So um, the kind of opportunity you have
Speaker 1: at a commercial whaling station is really different from any
Speaker 1: other opportunity. That situation is the same that's applied to
Speaker 1: indigenous hunting. I've colleagues who work in Alaska and opportunistically
Speaker 1: sample from bowhead once. It's the same kinds of anatomical
Speaker 1: questions that you can't answer from a stranded whale. So
Speaker 1: that was what those are kind of the the circumstances
Speaker 1: that allowed us to work in Iceland and yielded all
Speaker 1: the insights that I talked about in the book. Well,
Speaker 1: what is the population of you know, many of the
Speaker 1: better known species of whale these days, and how does
Speaker 1: that compare to where it was, you know, a couple
Speaker 1: hundred years ago or a thousand years ago. How are
Speaker 1: whales doing in general? I guess that's the question many
Speaker 1: of the whales that were hunted during industrial whaling, especially
Speaker 1: in the twentieth century, when many of the populations for
Speaker 1: many species were brought down plus percent from their baselines.
Speaker 1: So blue whales now, um, the global population of blue
Speaker 1: whales is probably around one to five of its starting
Speaker 1: point in the twentieth century, and some two hundred three
Speaker 1: hundred seven hundred thousand blue whales were killed in the
Speaker 1: process of the twentieth century alone. Uh. That's certainly lower
Speaker 1: genetic diversity. That's lowered the individual number of the population.
Speaker 1: It's changed where those whales are in the world, and
Speaker 1: maybe even where they migrate, and maybe by extension, the
Speaker 1: structure and function of ocean food webs, by removing that
Speaker 1: scale biomass. And it's not just blue whales of course, humpbacks,
Speaker 1: minky whales, say whales. So the legacy of whaling on
Speaker 1: world's whales uh is vast, and we don't in many
Speaker 1: cases have that pre whaling baseline. So it's left whale
Speaker 1: scientists to infer that and the two main ways to
Speaker 1: infer it are either from calculations using current genetic diver
Speaker 1: to estimate what the population size was in the past
Speaker 1: using DNA, and the other approaches look at whaling records
Speaker 1: and look at catch records and try to infer and
Speaker 1: we get different magnitudes when we look at those two
Speaker 1: lines of evidence, but in both cases they tell us
Speaker 1: there were many, many more whales before whaling. Now, whaling
Speaker 1: today doesn't really happen at that scale. A fewer than
Speaker 1: a thousand whales are killed every year by whaling total globally,
Speaker 1: whaling has some serious ethics and geopolitics with it. Um.
Speaker 1: It doesn't seem like it's going away, and it doesn't
Speaker 1: seem like as big of a problem to me as
Speaker 1: global fisheries and our appetite for seafood. That's really what's
Speaker 1: causing a lot of the major harm towards whales. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, I think a whale killed by a harpoon
Speaker 1: probably dies in a more humane fashion than whales that
Speaker 1: are entangled in nets. What's ethical and what's humane about
Speaker 1: whales is not just a question for scientists, but when
Speaker 1: we come to the facts of just how many more
Speaker 1: palities there are per year. You know, that's I think
Speaker 1: where we should listen to scientists, and science shouldn't form
Speaker 1: policy much better. Okay, well, we have several more questions
Speaker 1: for you, Nick, but before we get to those, let's
Speaker 1: take a quick break. Welcome back to Part time Genius.
Speaker 1: We're here with the author of a wonderful new book
Speaker 1: called Spying on Whales, the past, present, and future of
Speaker 1: Earth's most awesome creatures. You know, I think when people
Speaker 1: imagine whales other than size, one of the things they
Speaker 1: think about it first are are the whale sounds? The
Speaker 1: whale noises and communication. Over the past few decades, are
Speaker 1: we getting a better sense of what exactly these whales
Speaker 1: are trying to communicate with one another or is it
Speaker 1: still this great mystery? Oh, I'd say it's still a
Speaker 1: great mystery. I mean, it's clear that whales communicate to
Speaker 1: each other with uh information rich waves. That content of
Speaker 1: the signal that they're using to communicate with each other
Speaker 1: acoustically is saying a lot. Now what it means we
Speaker 1: don't really know. We don't have a context for that meaning,
Speaker 1: so we don't know if they're saying, like, hey, lunch
Speaker 1: is over there, or the answer to the universe is blank,
Speaker 1: you know. I mean, it's just it's fundamentally inscrutable. We
Speaker 1: really haven't hacked that, and I think that has a
Speaker 1: lot to do with the complexity of whales on the
Speaker 1: one hand and the environment they live in on the other.
Speaker 1: And our best ways to investigate that are whales in captivity,
Speaker 1: which may be doing something very different from what whales
Speaker 1: in the wild are doing. Uh. And again that's logistically
Speaker 1: really challenging to do. Uh. And mysteries aren't bad things
Speaker 1: in science. Mysteries, I think are great things in a
Speaker 1: source of inspiration and creativities. So I'm actually you know,
Speaker 1: as I say in the book, I think this is
Speaker 1: the golden age for whale science. We're learning more about
Speaker 1: whale in more ways than we ever have before. So
Speaker 1: I'm really hopeful and um enthusiastics see what future scientists do.
Speaker 1: You know, nick I, I loved reading about all the
Speaker 1: adventures you go on in this book, but I also
Speaker 1: really love just the little details I hadn't thought about whales, like, um,
Speaker 1: that they have belly buttons, or that they can be
Speaker 1: right or left handed, or that they you know, come
Speaker 1: up to breathe in a synchronized manner. I think it's
Speaker 1: really wonderful. But Spying with Whales is really such a
Speaker 1: fascinated book. I I was wondering, what do you hope
Speaker 1: readers get out of it? Yeah, this boy, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of things I hope readers get out of it.
Speaker 1: One of the big messages I think is that, um,
Speaker 1: there's there's amazing aspects of the natural world everywhere. It's
Speaker 1: not just with whales. It could be with trees, it
Speaker 1: can be with insects. There's amazing things to know about
Speaker 1: the world. But how we know about things is really
Speaker 1: a question that science delivers on in a real way.
Speaker 1: And I think science can be intimidating to a lot
Speaker 1: of people who don't have background in science, or maybe
Speaker 1: didn't like science in school, or um just don't really
Speaker 1: get it. And what I really wanted to do in
Speaker 1: the book was to tell stories about how we know,
Speaker 1: and to tell those stories by way of telling the
Speaker 1: people involved with him, so that the stories of science
Speaker 1: become stories about people because people are doing the science.
Speaker 1: You know, science doesn't happen in a vacuum, and that
Speaker 1: science is not straightforward and cookbook like it happens serendipitously,
Speaker 1: it happens from a lot of hard work. It can
Speaker 1: be random. Um. So there's all these unusual aspects about
Speaker 1: how science is done that I think people may not appreciate,
Speaker 1: and that the way to share those stories is to
Speaker 1: share those stories of discovery is in a biographical way.
Speaker 1: So that's really something I try to do in the book,
Speaker 1: was that a narrative about science is really a narrative
Speaker 1: about scientists. If that makes any sense. It does, so,
Speaker 1: you know, Mego and I both found this book to
Speaker 1: be so delightful. I hope our listeners will check it out.
Speaker 1: It's called Spying on Whales, the past, present, and future
Speaker 1: of Earth's most awesome creatures, and it's on shelves everywhere.
Speaker 1: But Nick, thanks so much for joining us today, No problem,
Speaker 1: happy to be here. Thanks again for listening. Part Time
Speaker 1: Genius is a production of how stuff works and wouldn't
Speaker 1: be possible without several brilliant people who do the important
Speaker 1: things we couldn't even begin to understand. Tristan McNeil does
Speaker 1: the editing thing. Noel Brown made the theme song and
Speaker 1: does the mixy mixy sound thing. Jerry Rowland does the
Speaker 1: exact producer thing Gay Bluesier is our lead researcher, with
Speaker 1: support from the Research Army including Austin Thompson, Nolan Brown
Speaker 1: and Lucas Adams and Eve Jeff Cook gets the show
Speaker 1: to your ears. Good job, Eves. If you like what
Speaker 1: you heard, we hope you'll subscribe, And if you really
Speaker 1: really like what you've heard, maybe you could leave a
Speaker 1: good review for us. Did we? Did we forget Jason?
Speaker 1: Jason who