Speaker 1: Guess what will? What's that mango?
Speaker 2: So you know those Golden records that traveled on the
Speaker 2: Voyager spacecraft.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they were loaded up with greetings in different languages
Speaker 3: and these concertos. Wasn't actually Johnny be Good on there too?
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right, there's some Chuck Berry on the record.
Speaker 2: But I was reading this new book by Nick Pinson.
Speaker 2: It's called Spying on Whales, and one of the things
Speaker 2: he says is that there are actually whale songs on
Speaker 2: that record as well. So in the nineteen seventies, scientists
Speaker 2: had just discovered that whales have these complex songs that
Speaker 2: they repeat in loops, and each whale improvises on that loop.
Speaker 2: It's really remarkable. But Pines's point is that in the
Speaker 2: nearly fifty years since, we still don't really understand these songs.
Speaker 2: But even then we find them so intriguing and so
Speaker 2: beautiful that we're happy to throw them on a record
Speaker 2: in case aliens might find them interesting too.
Speaker 1: But reading this book.
Speaker 2: Made me think we should really dig into whales, like
Speaker 2: why are they so large? How do they sustain these
Speaker 2: massive bodies? I mean, these creatures are bigger than any
Speaker 2: dinosaurs that have ever lived, and also, why do they
Speaker 2: have belly buttons?
Speaker 1: Let's dive in.
Speaker 3: Hey their podcast listeners, Welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm
Speaker 3: Will Pearson and as always I'm joined by my good
Speaker 3: friend Mangesh hot Ticket and the man on the other
Speaker 3: side of the soundproof glass not fully prepared today, Mango.
Speaker 3: I do see. He's got eBay up on his computer
Speaker 3: and he's looking up all of these Shamoo T shirts
Speaker 3: Shamoo coffee mugs, so he's probably gonna order some of those.
Speaker 3: I don't know when he's gonna wear them. I'm a
Speaker 3: little bit disappointed, but I'm sure he'll get something. But
Speaker 3: that's our good friend and producer Tristan McNeil. Now today
Speaker 3: on the program, we're chatting with Nick Pynson. He's the
Speaker 3: curator of Fossil Marine Man at the Smithsonian Institute's National
Speaker 3: Museum of Natural History, which is of course in Washington, DC,
Speaker 3: and he's the author of this wonderful new book called
Speaker 3: Spying on Whales, The Past, Present, and Future of Earth's
Speaker 3: most awesome creatures. Nick Pyenson, Welcome to Part Time Genius.
Speaker 4: Happy to be here.
Speaker 3: So going way back, one of the first things I
Speaker 3: stumbled into when reading your book. Here was that the
Speaker 3: first whales were land dwelling creatures the size of a
Speaker 3: German shepherd, that they walked on four legs and even
Speaker 3: had the snout instead of a blowhole. And I have
Speaker 3: to admit, Nick, when I first saw this fact, I thought, uh, oh,
Speaker 3: this guy might not know what a whale is like.
Speaker 3: That is not describing a whale. So can you explain them?
Speaker 3: I mean, that is so bizarre to both know that
Speaker 3: that connection is there and then to know how that
Speaker 3: connection is there. So can you talk us through this
Speaker 3: a little bit.
Speaker 4: Let's go back to have a whale in your head,
Speaker 4: and you're probably imagining a humpback whale or a killer
Speaker 4: whale and just looking at the basics of its DNA
Speaker 4: to know genealogical relationships. That whale in your head is
Speaker 4: most closely related to mammals that have fore legs and
Speaker 4: live on land for the most part, so that those
Speaker 4: are deer, pigs, cattle, sheep, hippos, which are semi aquatic.
Speaker 4: They swim in the water pretty well. But you have
Speaker 4: four weight bearing limbs and whales really don't look like
Speaker 4: that at all. So the earlased whales had for weight
Speaker 4: bearing limbs. It makes them look a lot like their
Speaker 4: near relatives today. But in the process of about ten
Speaker 4: million years, we have this great fossil record of how
Speaker 4: they've transformed, the loss of hind limbs, the transformation of
Speaker 4: fore limbs into paddles, and then all the changes that
Speaker 4: happen to their skulls. Because when they undergo these transitions,
Speaker 4: especially like this one from land to sea, well your
Speaker 4: you know, vision has to change, how you smell changes,
Speaker 4: how you hear changes. We have that documented in the
Speaker 4: fossil record.
Speaker 2: What sort of timeline are we looking at here, like,
Speaker 2: when does this dog sort of appear on Earth?
Speaker 4: You should be really careful and say dog like. Dog
Speaker 4: like dogs are a completely different group of mammoed. So
Speaker 4: this happens in about the space of a ten million years,
Speaker 4: from fifty to about forty million years ago. And this
Speaker 4: time period is interesting because it's during a period that
Speaker 4: was the last greenhouse Earth, and that's the last time
Speaker 4: in Earth history that we had global carbon dioxide concentrations
Speaker 4: that are closest to the ones that we may head
Speaker 4: to in the coming century or two. Whales evolved in
Speaker 4: an island archipelago that bordered the equator, so territory that
Speaker 4: is now India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, the entire Middle East that
Speaker 4: used to be a giant equatorial seaway. Today that's now
Speaker 4: been reduced to the metatre Tranian, but fifty plus million
Speaker 4: years ago that was open waters, and there happened to
Speaker 4: be this giant archipelago of land. And you know, if
Speaker 4: you read anything about evolution on island, you know, crazy
Speaker 4: stuff happens. So I'm not so surprised that the earliest
Speaker 4: whales happened in this setting.
Speaker 3: You know, Nick, there's some great illustrations in the book,
Speaker 3: and one is if this basilosaurus and I guess this
Speaker 3: was one of the first fully aquatic whales. And supposedly
Speaker 3: this whale had one of the strongest bites of any
Speaker 3: mammal ever, or at least as you've said here. So
Speaker 3: how do we know this?
Speaker 4: That's a great question. So one of the ways that
Speaker 4: we can figure out how strong an extinct organism might
Speaker 4: bite is by modeling it. So you can create a
Speaker 4: computer model based on the digital data the geometry of
Speaker 4: that animal's teeth or its skull I'd say especially teeth
Speaker 4: plus skull, because you want to know the bone that's
Speaker 4: holding the business end of whatever's chomping down. And when
Speaker 4: people have done those computational analyzes, and they do it
Speaker 4: with Basilsaurus, which again had a three foot long skull,
Speaker 4: So one, they're not that many mammals with teeth that
Speaker 4: have three foot long skulls. A polar bearer may have
Speaker 4: a skull that's forty centimeters long, that's barely that's not
Speaker 4: even a foot and a half. But Basilsaurus had a
Speaker 4: three foot long skull with these giant teeth that are
Speaker 4: the size of your palm. So the numbers that you
Speaker 4: get are that it has a byte force unrivaled by
Speaker 4: any other mammal.
Speaker 2: So Nick, well, one thing I still don't understand is
Speaker 2: how did wales get so big and why did they
Speaker 2: stop growing? Like why does a one hundred and ten
Speaker 2: foot body work for them? But maybe not a two
Speaker 2: hunderd foot body.
Speaker 4: So that's that's a question I tried to explore in
Speaker 4: the book, which and emphasize that getting big over evolutionary
Speaker 4: time is really a set of trade offs. There's a
Speaker 4: lot of reasons that it might be advantageous to get
Speaker 4: really big, then there are a lot of reasons why
Speaker 4: it may not be. It seems like for filter feeding
Speaker 4: whales they only get big in the last few million years.
Speaker 4: And what's interesting about that time frame is, in contrast
Speaker 4: to greenhouse Earth, during the first few million years of
Speaker 4: whale evolution, the last few million years have been happening
Speaker 4: under ice age ears, a time when we have ice
Speaker 4: caps both south and north global oceans became patchier in
Speaker 4: space and time in terms of their resources with the
Speaker 4: onset of the ice ages. So these kind of these
Speaker 4: natural history films where you see giant schools of fish
Speaker 4: and bait balls and krill aggregations that happen off the
Speaker 4: coast of South Africa or off of Chile or off
Speaker 4: of California, those are very recent geologic phenomena which haven't
Speaker 4: really been around that long.
Speaker 1: And we think this is.
Speaker 4: Deeply tied to the selective forces that allowed whales to
Speaker 4: become big, so migrating the long distances to arrive at
Speaker 4: those places where food is very dense in space and time.
Speaker 4: Being big helps, But on the cost side, if you're
Speaker 4: a lunch feeding whale, you really can't be much bigger
Speaker 4: than about one hundred and ten feet otherwise you can't
Speaker 4: close your mouth fast enough. So's those are the trade
Speaker 4: offs with getting big. Now, could a different kind of
Speaker 4: whale get much bigger? Maybe, but that hasn't yet evolved
Speaker 4: in as far as we know.
Speaker 3: So, Nick, you talk about the whales traveling, I'm curious.
Speaker 3: I know different types of whales travel different distances, but
Speaker 3: how long are we talking for some whales?
Speaker 4: So some whales don't range that far, but others do
Speaker 4: in these filter feeding whales, So ones that are like
Speaker 4: humpbacks or blue whales or minky whales, they can range
Speaker 4: over tens of thousands of miles. Gray whales, for example,
Speaker 4: have no problem, it seems, migrating twenty thousand miles. Humpacks
Speaker 4: will migrate from Maui in Hawaii to the Panhandle of
Speaker 4: Alaska every year. That's a scale that I really tried
Speaker 4: to convey in the book, is that whales range over
Speaker 4: entire ocean basins in many cases, so they're living at
Speaker 4: these big scales. That's a way that whales are teaching
Speaker 4: us about these bigger ideas about how oceans work. That
Speaker 4: I think is really important.
Speaker 1: Nick.
Speaker 2: We've got so many more questions, but we've got to
Speaker 2: take a little break first. Welcome back to part time genius.
Speaker 2: We're here with Nick Pines, and you know, when you
Speaker 2: were discussing the size of a whale and how they
Speaker 2: can only get so large because they need their jaws
Speaker 2: to climb fast enough to get the food. I was
Speaker 2: fascinated by some of the different strategies that whales used
Speaker 2: to hunt that you've described, and I was curious if
Speaker 2: you could sort of go through some of those, because
Speaker 2: like the way they can hold their breath and die deep,
Speaker 2: or almost turn their jaws into parachutes, or how some
Speaker 2: pirouette when they lunch.
Speaker 1: It was just really.
Speaker 2: Beautiful and I'd love for the listeners to be able
Speaker 2: to hear some of that stuff.
Speaker 4: Sure, I mean, I think it goes back to this
Speaker 4: idealized whale that you have in your head. It oversimplifies
Speaker 4: the incredible diversity of living whales, to say nothing about
Speaker 4: all the crazy extinct ones that we know of. But
Speaker 4: among the living whales, you'll see some have a mustachioed
Speaker 4: fringe hanging from the top of their mouth. That's baileing.
Speaker 4: And so those are the filter feeding whales. That's one group.
Speaker 4: The other one are toothed whales. Now, some of the
Speaker 4: toothed whales have teeth. Others don't, but they all echo locate.
Speaker 4: They use a form of biological sonar to navigate to hunt.
Speaker 4: The filter feeding ones will use their mustachioed fringe of
Speaker 4: baileen to capture aggregates of prey in bulk, so you're
Speaker 4: making the highest return on the investment of feeding style.
Speaker 4: And some of these filter feeders will lunge the way
Speaker 4: a blue whale will or a humpback. Others do a
Speaker 4: style of filter feeding called skim feeding. So these are
Speaker 4: like bowheads and right whales where they'll hover around the
Speaker 4: surface and they're not teen gulps, they're just kind of
Speaker 4: passing through a giant super organism of prey. For the
Speaker 4: other group of whales, the toothed whales, they use echolocation.
Speaker 4: And in some cases these are the deep diving ones
Speaker 4: that will dive thousands of feet deep in search of prey,
Speaker 4: sperm whales, beaked whales, even many oceanic dolphins. A bottomnosed
Speaker 4: dolphin will dive very very deep beyond the reach of
Speaker 4: light for their prey. And the way how you can
Speaker 4: do that is if you have a way of navigating
Speaker 4: an underwater world without light, and that's using sound. This
Speaker 4: is an outstanding question, is why haven't whale prey toothed
Speaker 4: whale prey of all defenses against echolocation, because it seems
Speaker 4: like a supremely advantageous tool and to hunt. And that's
Speaker 4: still not entirely well known. And that's important because we
Speaker 4: don't actually see whales feeding at depth. I mean, this
Speaker 4: whole story of the squid and the whale, sperm whales
Speaker 4: feeding on giant squid, nobody's ever seen that. We see
Speaker 4: the effects of that, and we would all love to
Speaker 4: see it. I mean, that's just one of these amazing
Speaker 4: you know, if you could ever get a BBC film
Speaker 4: crew to film it, that would be awesome. We've never
Speaker 4: seen it, so we have to infer it either from
Speaker 4: gut contents or the scars or chunks of giant squid
Speaker 4: tentacles that float around sperm whales after they come to
Speaker 4: the surface. It's just there's a lot about whale science
Speaker 4: that we don't see directly, so we have to be
Speaker 4: clever about how we study it.
Speaker 3: Well. It seems for you know, not for lack of trying, though,
Speaker 3: because you talk about that echolocation and how it's so
Speaker 3: sophisticated in some whales that you know, even our military
Speaker 3: has invested, especially in the sixties, so much in studying
Speaker 3: that ability to echo locate. Why is it so much
Speaker 3: more sophisticated than what we're able to create with you know,
Speaker 3: computers and all the technology that we have.
Speaker 4: Well, I mean, whales have the advantage of evolution, the
Speaker 4: advance of tens of millions of years of evolution for
Speaker 4: that right, evolution in an environment that's actually really complex
Speaker 4: and has properties that are very different from the one
Speaker 4: that we operate in daily. I mean, water is a
Speaker 4: different medium, has different properties for the physics of signals
Speaker 4: moving through it, whether it's sound or light. Whales have
Speaker 4: had tens of millions of years to evolve solutions to that.
Speaker 2: So one thing I didn't realize before this was how
Speaker 2: long a whale could live. And in your chapter on
Speaker 2: Arctic time machines, you talk about bowhead whales and how
Speaker 2: finding harpoons actually helped us determine their life spans.
Speaker 1: Can you talk a little bit about that.
Speaker 4: Absolutely. I mean, it's I think surprising people to realize
Speaker 4: that Americans whale today. It just doesn't happen typically in
Speaker 4: the lower forty eight States, but many indigenous cultures in
Speaker 4: the Arctic require marine mammal meat as sustenance. That's food
Speaker 4: for how people live, and this is ongoing in the
Speaker 4: North Slope of Alaska. And by recovering some of these
Speaker 4: bowhead whale carcasses, what scientists have found is tools embedded
Speaker 4: in these in the bodies of these bowhead whales that
Speaker 4: clearly came from a different era of hunting. These harpoon
Speaker 4: heads are almost like iPhones or smartphones in some ways,
Speaker 4: and that you can tell when they must have been
Speaker 4: embedded in the body based on their technology generation, So
Speaker 4: you know exactly so there was a changeover from stone
Speaker 4: harpoons to metal harpoons in the nineteenth century. And you
Speaker 4: know that the whale that was an unsuccessful strike must
Speaker 4: have been an adult when it was hit, because a
Speaker 4: juvenile would not have survived. So that whale that was
Speaker 4: collected in the late twentieth century in this case must
Speaker 4: have been well over one hundred years old, and the
Speaker 4: best guess was about one hundred and thirty. And that
Speaker 4: exactly parallels the kind of data you can get from
Speaker 4: biological tissues from their ovaries. So different lines of evidence.
Speaker 4: You're telling us that bowhead whales are able to live
Speaker 4: much more than a century, and some of the immunoacidy
Speaker 4: it was coming back with data of two hundred years,
Speaker 4: and so that's I mean, it seems unbelievable. But I
Speaker 4: think the implication of that is that there are whales
Speaker 4: that have lived through the entire rise and fall of
Speaker 4: major historical events in human history, like industrial whaling, or
Speaker 4: the rise of atomic weapons testing, or you name it.
Speaker 4: In terms of our technological innovation or the things we
Speaker 4: put out in the environment, whales, individual whales have persisted
Speaker 4: through that. So by if we were able to study
Speaker 4: these whales in whatever form, they probably could tell us
Speaker 4: a lot about what has happened to the environment. Fortunately,
Speaker 4: in places like the Smithsonian we have bowhead bailein that
Speaker 4: goes back well well over one hundred and fifty years.
Speaker 4: If bilein is able to tell us about isotopic history,
Speaker 4: so the chemical history of the environment, then these pieces
Speaker 4: of bowhead baileen from the nineteenth century before fossil fuels
Speaker 4: were burned could tell us a lot about how the
Speaker 4: world's changed.
Speaker 1: That's really interesting.
Speaker 2: So you know, one thing you mentioned there was whaling,
Speaker 2: and I was fascinated that you actually worked or observed
Speaker 2: at a whaling station in Iceland, and I kind of
Speaker 2: wouldn't have expected that commercial whaling and this pure scientific
Speaker 2: study would have intersected like that. Can you talk a
Speaker 2: little bit about like why you chose to work there
Speaker 2: and how it benefited your understanding of wales.
Speaker 4: Whaling is something that's happened for thousands of years in
Speaker 4: human history and it still goes on today. Many people
Speaker 4: have emotional reactions to it, for sure, and it's hunting
Speaker 4: like any other mammal hunting, so it goes all the
Speaker 4: issues that you may have with big game hunting are
Speaker 4: certainly applied to whaling. And there's two main forms today
Speaker 4: that it happens in commercial whaling, which is undertaken by
Speaker 4: Iceland and Norway, so they see whaling as no different
Speaker 4: from a fishery and they sell the meat that's collected
Speaker 4: that's from a killed whale. And then the other form
Speaker 4: of whaling is so called scientific whaling that happens in Japan,
Speaker 4: you know. And for the latter, I would say that
Speaker 4: that's agenda driven science, and we should always be skeptical
Speaker 4: of agenda driven science because that's saying that you kind
Speaker 4: of know the answer before you go out and look
Speaker 4: for it, and you know, whaling happens in a social context.
Speaker 4: And it's clear that scientific whaling in Japan is not
Speaker 4: really about the science, because we can answer those questions
Speaker 4: that they have using non lethal ways. That is certainly true.
Speaker 4: So scientific whaling really doesn't have that much of a
Speaker 4: reason for existing. Whaling well, that's within the sovereignty of
Speaker 4: those nations, and from my standpoint as a scientist, having
Speaker 4: a relationship with those industrial operations, especially in Iceland, has
Speaker 4: been a boon to understanding some key parts of the
Speaker 4: anatomy of these lunch feeding whales, and it's providing information
Speaker 4: that we wouldn't otherwise have, and that has to do
Speaker 4: with the logistics of working with very large carcasses. So
Speaker 4: a seventy foot fin whale carcass that's freshly killed gives
Speaker 4: you information that you really couldn't otherwise get, certainly from
Speaker 4: a stranded whale. When whales strand one, you don't have
Speaker 4: the equipment at your disposal, usually don't have twenty men
Speaker 4: with giant knives and steam driven winches to manipulate and
Speaker 4: rotate the carcass and pull different parts of the anatomy
Speaker 4: into some way. That you can actually study it, and
Speaker 4: certainly the tissue is not as fresh, and when tissue decays,
Speaker 4: it's far less useful for some kinds of questions, especially
Speaker 4: if you're looking at nervous tissue or muscle tissue. So
Speaker 4: the kind of opportunity you have at a commercial whaling
Speaker 4: station is really different from any other opportunity. That situation
Speaker 4: is the same that's applied to indigenous hunting. I've colleagues
Speaker 4: who work in Alaska and opportunistically sample from bowhead mounts.
Speaker 4: It's the same kinds of anatomical questions that you can't
Speaker 4: answer from a stranded whale. So that was what those
Speaker 4: are kind of the circumstances that allowed us to work
Speaker 4: in Iceland and yielded all the insights that I talk
Speaker 4: about in the book.
Speaker 3: Well, what is the population of you know, many of
Speaker 3: the better known species of whale these days, and how
Speaker 3: does that compare to where it was, you know, a
Speaker 3: couple hundred years ago or one thousand years ago. How
Speaker 3: are whales doing in general? I guess that's the question.
Speaker 4: Many of the whales that were hunted during industrial whaling,
Speaker 4: and especially in the twentieth century, when many of the
Speaker 4: populations for many species were brought down ninety plus percent
Speaker 4: from their baselines. Blue whales now the global population of
Speaker 4: blue whales is probably around one to five percent of
Speaker 4: its starting point in the twentieth century, and some two
Speaker 4: hundred three hundred several hundred thousand blue whales were killed
Speaker 4: in the process of the twentieth century alone. That's certainly
Speaker 4: lowered genetic diversity, that's lowered the individual number of the population.
Speaker 4: It's changed where those whales are in the world, and
Speaker 4: maybe even where they migrate, and maybe by extension, the
Speaker 4: structure and function of ocean food webs by removing that
Speaker 4: scale biomass. And it's not just blue whales, of course, humpbacks,
Speaker 4: minky whales, say whales. So the legacy of whaling on
Speaker 4: world's whales is vast, and we don't in many cases
Speaker 4: have that pre whaling baseline, so it's left whale scientists
Speaker 4: to infer that. And the two main ways to infer
Speaker 4: it are either from calculations using current genetic diverse to
Speaker 4: estimate what the population size was in the past using DNA,
Speaker 4: and the other approaches look at whaling records and look
Speaker 4: at catch records and try to infer and we get
Speaker 4: different magnitudes when we look at those two lines of evidence,
Speaker 4: but in both cases they tell us there were many,
Speaker 4: many more whales before whaling. Now, whaling today doesn't really
Speaker 4: happen at that scale. A fewer than a thousand whales
Speaker 4: are killed every year by whaling total globally. Whaling has
Speaker 4: some serious ethics and geopolitics with it. It doesn't seem
Speaker 4: like it's going away, and it doesn't seem like as
Speaker 4: big of a problem to me as global fisheries. In
Speaker 4: our appetite for seafood, that's really what's causing a lot
Speaker 4: of the major harm towards whales. You know, I think
Speaker 4: a whale killed by a harpoon probably dies in a
Speaker 4: more humane fashion than whales that are entangled in nets.
Speaker 4: What's ethical and what's humane about whales is not just
Speaker 4: a question for scientists. But when we come to the
Speaker 4: facts of just how many more there are per year,
Speaker 4: you know, that's I think where we should listen to scientists,
Speaker 4: and science shouldn't form policies much better.
Speaker 3: Okay, well, we have several more questions for you, Nick,
Speaker 3: but before we get to those, let's take a quick break.
Speaker 3: Welcome back to part time Genius we're here with the
Speaker 3: author of a wonderful new book called Spying on Whales,
Speaker 3: the past, present, and future of Earth's most awesome creatures.
Speaker 3: You know, I think when people imagine whales other than size,
Speaker 3: one of the things they think about at first are
Speaker 3: the whale sounds, the whale noises and communication. Over the
Speaker 3: past few decades, are we getting a better sense of
Speaker 3: what exactly these whales are trying to communicate with one
Speaker 3: another or is it still this great mystery?
Speaker 4: Oh, I'd say it's still a great mystery. I mean,
Speaker 4: it's clear that whales communicate to each other with information
Speaker 4: rich ways. That content of the signal that they're using
Speaker 4: to communicate with each other acoustically is saying a lot.
Speaker 4: Now what it means we don't really know. We don't
Speaker 4: have a context for that meaning. So we don't know
Speaker 4: if they're saying, like, hey, lunch is over there, or
Speaker 4: the answer to the universe is blank, you know. I mean,
Speaker 4: it's just it's fundamentally inscrutable. We really haven't hacked that.
Speaker 4: And I think that has a lot to do with
Speaker 4: the complexity of whales on the one hand, and the
Speaker 4: environment they live in on the other, and our best
Speaker 4: way is to investigate that are whales in captivity which
Speaker 4: may be doing something very different from what whales in
Speaker 4: the wild are doing. And again, that's logistically really challenging
Speaker 4: to do. And mysteries aren't bad things in science. Mysteries,
Speaker 4: I think are great things and a source of inspiration
Speaker 4: and creativity. So I'm actually, you know, as I say
Speaker 4: in the book, I think this is the golden age
Speaker 4: for whale science. We're learning more about whales in more
Speaker 4: ways than we ever have before, so I'm really hopeful
Speaker 4: and enthusiastic to see what future scientists do.
Speaker 2: You know, Nick, I loved reading about all the adventures
Speaker 2: you go on in this book, but I also really
Speaker 2: loved just the little details I hadn't thought about whales,
Speaker 2: like that they have belly buttons, or that they can
Speaker 2: be right or left handed, or that they come up
Speaker 2: to breathe in a synchronized manner. I think it's really wonderful.
Speaker 2: But Spying with Whales is really such a fascinating book.
Speaker 2: I was wondering, what do you hope readers get out
Speaker 2: of it?
Speaker 4: Yeah, this boy, there's a lot of things I hope
Speaker 4: readers get out of it. One of the big messages
Speaker 4: I think is that there's amazing aspects of the natural
Speaker 4: world everywhere. It's not just with whales. It could be
Speaker 4: with trees, it can be with insects. There's amazing things
Speaker 4: to know about the world. But how we know about
Speaker 4: things is really a question that science delivers on in
Speaker 4: a real way. And I think science can be intimidating
Speaker 4: to a lot of people who don't have background in science,
Speaker 4: or maybe didn't like science in school, or just don't
Speaker 4: really get it. And what I really wanted to do
Speaker 4: in the book was to tell stories about how we know,
Speaker 4: and to tell those stories by way of telling the
Speaker 4: people involved with them, so that the stories of science
Speaker 4: become stories about people because people are doing the science.
Speaker 4: You know, science doesn't happen in a vacuum, and that
Speaker 4: science is not straightforward and cookbook like. It happens serendipitously.
Speaker 4: It happens from a lot of hard work. It can
Speaker 4: be random.
Speaker 1: So there's all.
Speaker 4: These unusual aspects about how science has done that I
Speaker 4: think people may not appreciate, and that the way to
Speaker 4: share those stories is to share those stories of discovery
Speaker 4: as in a biographical way. So that's really something I
Speaker 4: try to do in the book was that a narrative
Speaker 4: about science is really a narrative about scientists. If that
Speaker 4: makes any sense.
Speaker 3: It does, so, you know Mego and I both found
Speaker 3: this book to be so delightful. I hope our listeners
Speaker 3: will check it out. It's called Spying on Wales, The Past,
Speaker 3: Present and Future of Earth's most awesome creatures, and it's
Speaker 3: on shelves everywhere. But Nick, thanks so much for joining
Speaker 3: us today, No problem, happy to be here.
Speaker 1: Thanks again for listening.
Speaker 3: Part Time Genius is a production of how stuff works
Speaker 3: and wouldn't be possible without several brilliant people who do
Speaker 3: the important things we couldn't even begin to understand.
Speaker 1: Tristan McNeil does the editing thing.
Speaker 3: Noel Brown made the theme song and does the mixy
Speaker 3: mixy sound thing.
Speaker 1: Jerry Roland does the exec producer thing.
Speaker 3: Gabeluesier is our lead researcher, with support from the Research
Speaker 3: Army including Austin Thompson, Nolan Brown and Lucas.
Speaker 1: Adams and Eves Jeffcok gets the show to your ears.
Speaker 1: Good job, Eves. If you like what you heard, we
Speaker 1: hope you'll subscribe.
Speaker 3: And if you really really like what you've heard maybe
Speaker 3: you could leave a good.
Speaker 1: Review for us. We do we forget Jason, Jason whom
Speaker 1: M