Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey wasn't this stuff to blow your mind?
Speaker 3: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and
Speaker 3: today we're back with part two of our series about
Speaker 3: a cave system in the US state of Arizona known
Speaker 3: as Carchner Caverns. Rob, you wanted to talk about this
Speaker 3: cave because you just visited in person with your family,
Speaker 3: though though you'd been there once before, at least once
Speaker 3: be four years ago, right, that's.
Speaker 2: Right, like fourteen years ago. My wife and I visited
Speaker 2: the area and went to Cartner Caverns and two or
Speaker 2: two of the rooms, and then in the past couple
Speaker 2: of months we went back with our kiddo and we
Speaker 2: all experienced the big room, which we'll come back to
Speaker 2: here in a bit.
Speaker 3: So in the last episode we talked a lot about
Speaker 3: the discovery and development history of the caverns, which involve
Speaker 3: a lot more secrecy things like code names and you know,
Speaker 3: secret messages than you might expect for the discovery of
Speaker 3: a cave. Also some harrowing tales of people squeezing their
Speaker 3: full adult bodies through little melon sized holes in rock.
Speaker 3: And we also talked about a lot of the concerns
Speaker 3: that go into responsible development of caves that are going
Speaker 3: to be open to public tours, and how easily cave
Speaker 3: ecosystems can get thrown out of whack by everything from
Speaker 3: you know what's on the bottom of your boots to
Speaker 3: cheeto dust, to lint to whatever. And we're back today
Speaker 3: to talk about more, and.
Speaker 2: I want to mention once more that in addition to
Speaker 2: visiting the caves and going on on a guided tour
Speaker 2: and going through the museum and so forth, one of
Speaker 2: my key sources here is the book Cartoner Caverns, How
Speaker 2: Two Cavers Discovered and Saved one of the Wonders of
Speaker 2: the natural World, by Neil Miller holding up here for
Speaker 2: the For any of y'all out there that are using video,
Speaker 2: this is a great book, especially if you want a
Speaker 2: much deeper dive, but a very accessible dive into all
Speaker 2: the trials and tribulations the long journey of conservation for
Speaker 2: Cartoner Caverns.
Speaker 3: Get all the squeezing through holes and walking past rattlesnake
Speaker 3: stories and all that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, who got stuck? Some people got stuck going
Speaker 2: through the blowhole early on, you know, because they had
Speaker 2: to bring in outsiders, you know, to check it out,
Speaker 2: and not everybody was as good at squeezing through that
Speaker 2: little hole.
Speaker 3: So to kick things off for today, Rob, you mentioned
Speaker 3: the last time that Carchner Caverns is sometimes referred to
Speaker 3: as a living cave, and what that means is that
Speaker 3: the cave is still hydrologically active, so water is still
Speaker 3: flowing through the rock, and so the shape of the
Speaker 3: cave is still actively changing year by year little by little,
Speaker 3: and the mineral formations within the cave are still growing.
Speaker 3: Sometimes limestone caves can become essentially fixed in place. Even
Speaker 3: that's an approximate because you know, there are always things
Speaker 3: that can change the shape of a cave, you know,
Speaker 3: other kinds of erosion or of course any you know,
Speaker 3: collapses or things like that. So you know, no cave
Speaker 3: is really fixed on geological time. But some caves can
Speaker 3: become more fixed, at least from a water flow standpoint,
Speaker 3: if the flow of water that originally shaped them is
Speaker 3: diverted or otherwise cut off. So these caves are sometimes
Speaker 3: thought of as dead or dormant in form or maybe
Speaker 3: reliced caves. But Kartchner is not one of those examples.
Speaker 3: It is still alive and growing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, very hypercentile of the formations are still alive. And
Speaker 2: that is one thing to keep in mind is that
Speaker 2: even within a very wet, very living cave, you'll still
Speaker 2: you know, water is still has to flow down in
Speaker 2: just the right places for these formations to continue to grow.
Speaker 2: And sometimes particular formations get cut off they're no longer growing.
Speaker 2: Sometimes they fall over or break, you know, under their
Speaker 2: own weight or because of human or animal movement or
Speaker 2: even seismic activity that sort of thing. But then they
Speaker 2: can also be sort of reactivated if the water situation
Speaker 2: changes even slightly.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So, I know we wanted to talk about some
Speaker 3: of these specific types of formations or speliothems you see
Speaker 3: inside Carchner, but I guess before that we should back
Speaker 3: up a step and do a review on the basic
Speaker 3: process that forms a limestone cave. Usually goes like this.
Speaker 3: You've got rain water falls to the ground and it
Speaker 3: seeps through the soil. Where As it passes through the soil,
Speaker 3: it absorbs carbon dioxide, thus becoming weakly acidic. So the
Speaker 3: water now contains carbonic acid, and this acidic water seeps
Speaker 3: down into the ground until it reaches or flows into
Speaker 3: the porous limestone layer, and then as the acidic water
Speaker 3: passes through the limestone, it dissolves little bits of the
Speaker 3: mineral content of the rock. So in this case, the
Speaker 3: rock would be calcite or calcium carbonate, and it carries
Speaker 3: away that dissolved mineral. Actually it's ionic constituents, so it
Speaker 3: turns into calcium ions and bicarbonate ions. It dissolves those
Speaker 3: into the acidic water and it carries them along in
Speaker 3: the liquid. However, when the acidic water emerges from the
Speaker 3: rock into the air filled void of the cave, which
Speaker 3: usually has a lower CO two concentration, it off gases.
Speaker 3: It's kind of like opening a can of Seltzer carbonated beverage.
Speaker 3: The dissolved carbon dioxide is released from the water becomes
Speaker 3: a gas in the air. And once this happens, now
Speaker 3: the acidity of the water has been lowered and the
Speaker 3: water loses its ability to retain the constituents of calcite
Speaker 3: in solution. So the dissolved calcium and bicarbonate ions come
Speaker 3: out of solution and then they form the mineral calcite
Speaker 3: once again. So now as this water runs along surfaces
Speaker 3: and drips from ceiling to floor in these air filled
Speaker 3: voids in a cave. It creates deposits of calcium carbonate
Speaker 3: that can no longer be held in solution, and these
Speaker 3: drip points become things like stalactites and stalagmites and other
Speaker 3: weirder things that we'll get to in just a second,
Speaker 3: that they form as the calcite gradually accumulates and crystallizes
Speaker 3: over time.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's so many different formations, and the crazy thing
Speaker 2: is we haven't even completely figured out how all of
Speaker 2: them form.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, but in.
Speaker 2: General, yeah, they form according to the movements of water,
Speaker 2: which can can certainly take on that simple top down
Speaker 2: stalactite stalagmite model that we're all used to, I think,
Speaker 2: but you can also get all sorts of other formations
Speaker 2: that are typically named after foods, informally by hungry cavers.
Speaker 2: You see this time and time again, because what we
Speaker 2: were talking about in the first episode, you don't want
Speaker 2: to have a big meal before you go in. You
Speaker 2: can bring some snacks, but you got to carry out
Speaker 2: everything you bring in, so you know, generally cavers are hungry.
Speaker 2: Two of my favorites in this category are cave bacon
Speaker 2: and fried eggs.
Speaker 3: Let's hear about them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, so fried eggs, and I encourage everyone to
Speaker 2: look up images of these if they're not forthcoming or
Speaker 2: you don't know what I'm talking about. But fried eggs
Speaker 2: or calcite deposits that develop in existing stalagmites from overhead drips,
Speaker 2: sometimes taking on a distinct egg yolk appearance in the middle.
Speaker 2: These can look very Sometimes they don't look exactly like
Speaker 2: a fried egg, but they look they look gnarly. I'll
Speaker 2: go ahead and say that.
Speaker 3: Well, can I say the picture you have in the
Speaker 3: document here for us to look at is my kind
Speaker 3: of fried egg. You know, there are different ways to
Speaker 3: make a fried egg. Some like a very gently fried
Speaker 3: egg where the white part is going to end up
Speaker 3: being very flat and untextured whites, and then a very
Speaker 3: you know, sort of a gently gently warmed yolk area.
Speaker 3: I like a kind of hard fried egg where the
Speaker 3: white gets very frothy and bubbly and browned on the underside.
Speaker 3: And that's what it looks like here. It looks like,
Speaker 3: you know, you've got a kind of yolk in the middle,
Speaker 3: and then the white all around it looks very bubbly.
Speaker 3: It's textured.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, Now, my favorite of these, so it's certainly
Speaker 2: my favorite of the formations that observed on my recent
Speaker 2: tour is the cave bacon. Cave bacon is a thin,
Speaker 2: wavy flowstone drapery and this is formed by calcite rich
Speaker 2: water trickling down sloped cave ceilings. The way it was
Speaker 2: explained to me on the tour is, think about when
Speaker 2: you're taking a shower and you reach up to adjust
Speaker 2: the shower head and water veins down your arm. Imagine
Speaker 2: that except calcite rich water that forms this thin rock
Speaker 2: formation over time kind of like hanging down like a
Speaker 2: kind of you know, like a shroud or something. So
Speaker 2: they're beautifully translucent. Really when when lit from behind, so
Speaker 2: you know, you get somebody with a light lamp they
Speaker 2: can catch from behind and the light will will actually
Speaker 2: go through the cave bacon and it has this marbled
Speaker 2: appearance that just you know, unmistakably looks like bacon.
Speaker 3: Streaky bacon for our UK based listeners.
Speaker 2: Knows that what they call it in the UK streaky bacon.
Speaker 3: Well, you know you've got the different haus. You've got
Speaker 3: streaky bacon, which is made from the pork belly, so
Speaker 3: you get this striated, streaky appearance. And then I think
Speaker 3: in the UK a lot of bacon is back bacon,
Speaker 3: which has made more from the loin. I think I
Speaker 3: could be wrong about that, but it's got like a
Speaker 3: bigger eye of meat in it and has less of
Speaker 3: that just strata geological layers kind of appearance that American
Speaker 3: bacon does.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so this stuff's really picturesque. Also, of note, so
Speaker 2: to straw formations, which are also mildly the food based
Speaker 2: in their naming. Yeah, these are incredible, really delicate, thin
Speaker 2: hollow tubes that hang down quite fragile, so fragile that
Speaker 2: even young bats learning to fly and echo locate can
Speaker 2: bump into them and knock them down. So it's easy
Speaker 2: to imagine if baby bats are able to damage these,
Speaker 2: human cavers can very easily break them, and sometimes they
Speaker 2: just break off under their own weight.
Speaker 3: Anyway, So I was looking up the formation of soda
Speaker 3: straws because I got very interested in these. Again. Yeah,
Speaker 3: you're exactly right there. They're very thin, very delicate. I mean,
Speaker 3: straw is the perfect comparison. They're hollow tubes and they're
Speaker 3: about as thin as straws. I mean I guess they
Speaker 3: can take slightly different thicknesses, but a lot of them
Speaker 3: really do just look like long straws. And it turns
Speaker 3: out the soda straw is the early stage of formation
Speaker 3: of a stalactite, So most stalactites were once soda straws
Speaker 3: when they were little baby stalactites. My understanding of the
Speaker 3: process is that so they're drip formations of course, you know,
Speaker 3: it's water places where water drips from the ceiling above,
Speaker 3: and they begin as hollow tubes because the water drips
Speaker 3: kind of slowly from the ceiling, and each droplet comes
Speaker 3: into contact with the air and loses CO two, mainly
Speaker 3: at its outer edges. So the calcite the precipitates out
Speaker 3: of each drop tends to be left behind in a
Speaker 3: ring shape from where the you know, the droplet emerges.
Speaker 3: And then over time the straw will get filled in
Speaker 3: by mineral content. And once this inner straw tube is
Speaker 3: finally fully blocked and water can no longer drip down
Speaker 3: the straw through the middle, it will instead have to
Speaker 3: run along the outside, and this is what causes a
Speaker 3: stalactite to take on the more familiar conical shape, you know,
Speaker 3: shaped more like a turnip or a carrot like or
Speaker 3: not a turnip, more like a parsnip er a carrot.
Speaker 3: You know, the cone because the water is now going
Speaker 3: to be running along the outside, but in the early stages,
Speaker 3: when it still has this hollow tube in the middle,
Speaker 3: it remains this thin, delicate, long straw shape.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, so you know, these are some of the
Speaker 2: little guys. But of course, especially the large chambers in
Speaker 2: cartooner caverns, these are just amazing. They're just like you know,
Speaker 2: we often compare them to cathedrals because that's the scale
Speaker 2: of these formations that have just been formed over vast
Speaker 2: periods of time. And you know via this active water flow.
Speaker 3: Now, Rob, which room is it where they've got the
Speaker 3: formation known as Kubla Khan, the really big column with
Speaker 3: all of the it looks like a I don't know,
Speaker 3: a Godzilla sized candle that's been melting.
Speaker 2: I believe this one is in the throne room. So
Speaker 2: this would have been one that I saw fourteen years ago.
Speaker 3: Okay, no Kubla Khan for you this year.
Speaker 2: No, no, but that really, especially for folks that are
Speaker 2: thinking of going, like either tour is going to amaze you.
Speaker 2: You're not gonna you're not going to be hurting.
Speaker 4: For amazing formations.
Speaker 3: So one very interesting, lesser known type of formation that
Speaker 3: you find in Kartchner is one I wanted to talk
Speaker 3: about called heliictite.
Speaker 2: Did you see any of this in the cave, Rob, Yes,
Speaker 2: some of this was pointed out to us, and yeah,
Speaker 2: this was really amazing.
Speaker 3: So yeah, I've got a picture in the outline we
Speaker 3: can refer to here. This is one that the park
Speaker 3: uploaded to their Facebook page this year. It didn't say
Speaker 3: what room it's in, so I can't say exactly where
Speaker 3: in the cave it comes from. But helictites are again,
Speaker 3: they're calcite based deposits. They're formed from the same basic
Speaker 3: chemistry as normal stalactites and stalagmites, but by a different
Speaker 3: mechanism of deposition. So they're formed less by dripping and
Speaker 3: more by capillary reaction and seeping. So they do not
Speaker 3: look like regular stalactites and stalagmites. In fact, to me,
Speaker 3: they do not look like geology at all. They look
Speaker 3: like biology. For one thing, they don't have the helictites
Speaker 3: do not have the straight vertical up and down orientation
Speaker 3: that you see with stalactites and stalagmites in the picture
Speaker 3: we've gotten the outline here. What they look like to
Speaker 3: me are tree roots. It looks like a big, twisting,
Speaker 3: curling root ball with these tendrils spiraling out into the
Speaker 3: air from a thicker central column.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's a It really does feel like there's some
Speaker 2: sort of a reaching, a seeking involved here that's more
Speaker 2: biological than geological, like you said.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, like a growth pattern looking for water or something.
Speaker 3: So I was reading about the process that forms helictites
Speaker 3: on the website of the National Spileeological Society, which you
Speaker 3: can find at caves dot org. And according to their
Speaker 3: fact page written by somebody named Dave Bunnel, the term
Speaker 3: helictite is used to refer to quote contorted depositional spiliothems
Speaker 3: which grow in any direction defying gravity. And they're also
Speaker 3: sometimes called non gravitomorphic, so not primarily shaped by gravity.
Speaker 3: These are the the anti gravity formations. It seems that
Speaker 3: these start the same way, or basically the same way
Speaker 3: as the other formations we've been talking about. So you've
Speaker 3: got the water with dissolved calcite constituents seeping through the
Speaker 3: porous rock, and at some point it reaches the air
Speaker 3: filled cavity of the cave where some of the CO
Speaker 3: two escapes the water and the calcite comes out of
Speaker 3: solution and mineralizes. But the difference is that helictites are
Speaker 3: formed in areas where the flow of the water through
Speaker 3: the rock is very slow. It's slow enough that it's
Speaker 3: not actually coming out in big masses and having to
Speaker 3: drip away. So instead of these big droplets that gather
Speaker 3: at the end of a soda straw or a stalactite
Speaker 3: and then fall off every few seconds, at the tip
Speaker 3: of it helictite, you've only got a tiny film of
Speaker 3: water seeping through and being exposed to the air, and
Speaker 3: there's so little water that the surface tension causes it
Speaker 3: to stick to the end of the formation rather than
Speaker 3: falling off. And then Bunnele writes, quote growth continues through
Speaker 3: a tiny central capillary channel. So Roub, when you see
Speaker 3: these little spikes and roots coming off, imagine that in
Speaker 3: the middle of them there's an extremely tiny, little little tube,
Speaker 3: you know, not a soda straw size tube, but a tiny, tiny,
Speaker 3: microscopic little tube, a capillary. And then Bunnele continues, quote,
Speaker 3: which the solution flows through via hydrostatic and capillary pressure
Speaker 3: to emerge and deposit calcite at the tip. In higher
Speaker 3: flow conditions, it can come out. It can come out
Speaker 3: the tip and travel back along the length of the
Speaker 3: helic tite, making it thicker. Okay, so that's that's how
Speaker 3: you get these these formations. But how do you end
Speaker 3: up with the twisted gravity defying shapes? Like what what's
Speaker 3: determining the emergence of these shapes? And Bunnel identifies several
Speaker 3: different causes or possible causes. You mentioned earlier that actually
Speaker 3: the science of how exactly some cave formations are made
Speaker 3: is not entirely settled. There are some open questions, and
Speaker 3: I think it seems in the case of helictite there
Speaker 3: are still some open questions.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that's the one I was referring to for sure. Yeah,
Speaker 2: where we have some great ideas, but you know, it's
Speaker 2: hard to observe these in real time.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So Bunnle identifies several possible causes. One thing is
Speaker 3: mineral impurities in the calcite might determine, you know, weird
Speaker 3: patterns of growth. Another is quote wedge shaped crystals causing
Speaker 3: uneven deposition. So if you've got crystals that don't grow symmetrically,
Speaker 3: you know, they're kind of growing in a wedge shape.
Speaker 3: They're going to cause a directional curling as the crystal
Speaker 3: extends itself. And then also apparently during dry periods, sometimes
Speaker 3: the central capillary in the formation gets stopped up, so
Speaker 3: when water resumes flowing through this little spike of rock,
Speaker 3: it goes not through the middle, but is forced out
Speaker 3: through a new channel in the side. And if you
Speaker 3: repeat this over and over, I guess you get gravity
Speaker 3: defying shapes. And then finally, one thought is air currents.
Speaker 3: So if there is airflow in the cave, you know,
Speaker 3: gentle wind in the cave, it could influence a gravity
Speaker 3: defying direction of growth of a formation like this, maybe
Speaker 3: because you get asymmetrical evaporation. So if there's faster evaporation
Speaker 3: on one side of the spike then the other, it
Speaker 3: could end up causing the spike to essentially grow over
Speaker 3: time in one direction. And the author notes that sometimes
Speaker 3: you see helick tites facing all the same direction down
Speaker 3: a cave passage, kind of like I was imagining, like
Speaker 3: those spikes that sort of go backwards in the maw
Speaker 3: of a sea turtle.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a good comparison. Yeah, Yeah, definitely looks gnarly
Speaker 2: and adds to this feel of a living cave, of
Speaker 2: a live cave, because it looks a lot like again,
Speaker 2: like biological growths to the untrained eye.
Speaker 3: But this is definitely one where I would urge people
Speaker 3: to go look up a bunch of different pictures of helictites,
Speaker 3: because they don't all look the same. You get a
Speaker 3: lot of different kinds of helictites and different Some of
Speaker 3: them have this melted wax appearance we were talking about,
Speaker 3: you know, melting candles earlier. Some look like melted wax,
Speaker 3: some look like worms. You've ever seen that. I remember
Speaker 3: there is a picture I've looked at many times that
Speaker 3: I think is hosted somewhere in a Japanese parasite museum
Speaker 3: that is like a marine mammal stomach that is erupting
Speaker 3: with parasitic worms, and they preserved this and formaldehyde, I believe.
Speaker 3: So I'm just thinking of that because I'm currently looking
Speaker 3: at a picture we have in our outline of a
Speaker 3: cave in Australia that has a bunch of white calcite
Speaker 3: helic tites growing out of a cave wall. Looks exactly
Speaker 3: like that stomach erupting with worms.
Speaker 2: It does look like some sort of strange Eldric horror,
Speaker 2: doesn't it. All Right, well, let's uh, let's move on
Speaker 2: to an actual form of life, of biological life that
Speaker 2: is found in the caves. Let's talk a bit about bats.
Speaker 2: And but before we do, I want to come back
Speaker 2: to something you asked me about in the last episode.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 2: You asked me if the bats at Cartoner Cavern came
Speaker 2: and went via the same sinkhole and tiny blowhole as
Speaker 2: the human explorers. Yeah, I said yes, and that is correct.
Speaker 2: But I want to share another great bit from Miller's
Speaker 2: book that discusses this. So Miller points out that the
Speaker 2: bats would frequently come in and out of that blowhole
Speaker 2: on summer evenings to forage for insects. Toughsentinan, the two
Speaker 2: explorers and discoverers of Cartoon Caverns would sometimes sit at
Speaker 2: the top of the sinkhole around this time and they
Speaker 2: would just watch the bats. Uh. Yeah, that sounds sounds cool,
Speaker 2: sounds very relaxing. But then there's this I'm gonna read
Speaker 2: from the book here. Quote Tough Santenan's roommate Brad Barber
Speaker 2: describes leaving through the blow Whole crawlway just before sunset
Speaker 2: on his first visit to Xanadu and feeling something brush
Speaker 2: against his face. When there was finally enough space above
Speaker 2: his head so he could turn and look back, he
Speaker 2: saw a line of bats coming through the crawlway at
Speaker 2: surprising speed. By the time he reached the sinkhole quote,
Speaker 2: they were pouring out like a washing machine. He recalled.
Speaker 2: A couple other things I want to mention just real
Speaker 2: quick before you get into the gritty details about this
Speaker 2: particular bat species. It is a threatened species and they're
Speaker 2: roosting in the cave. Served as a biological imperative for
Speaker 2: the Arizona Nature Conservancy Board to act regarding Kartchner caverns,
Speaker 2: So it does play. Their presence there plays an important
Speaker 2: role in the conservation efforts. But also we've been talking
Speaker 2: about bats being like the only mammal to access the caves,
Speaker 2: and for the most part that is true, you know,
Speaker 2: up until humans too. Humans in particular found their way down,
Speaker 2: but they aren't the only mammals to ever access the caves.
Speaker 2: So bones of a thirty four thousand year old horse
Speaker 2: and an eighty thousand year old Shasta ground sloth have
Speaker 2: been discovered in Cartenter caverns, clearly dating back to a
Speaker 2: time when there was some other access point besides the blowhole,
Speaker 2: and also to a time when the surface vegetation an
Speaker 2: environment was somewhat different. The sloth would have accessed the
Speaker 2: cave during the Pleistocene epoch, so a long time ago,
Speaker 2: and I think it's unknown exactly like what its story is,
Speaker 2: how it ended up to come into these caves and die.
Speaker 2: I think when Tussan Tinan first discovered the bones, they
Speaker 2: thought it was a bison, and so for a while
Speaker 2: they were to discovered that there was to refer to
Speaker 2: as the bison bones. And it was only later that
Speaker 2: someone came in and said, oh, this is not a bison,
Speaker 2: this is a sloth.
Speaker 3: Interesting. Yeah, well, I'm trying to picture the ground slows
Speaker 3: doing the coat hangar maneuver.
Speaker 2: But some big animals can squeeze, but I don't think
Speaker 2: that's how this one got in.
Speaker 3: No, Okay, So yeah, they think it was probably closed
Speaker 3: and it had been opened and then was closed.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So Rob, the other day you suggested I look into
Speaker 3: the cave system's key bat species. Of course there are
Speaker 3: multiple bat species that go into the cave sometimes, but
Speaker 3: the vast majority of the bats in there are this
Speaker 3: one species, and this species is the only one that
Speaker 3: roosts does seasonal maternity roosting in the cave, and that
Speaker 3: species is Myotis velafer, the name of which means something
Speaker 3: like mouse eared sail bearer. So the genus name Miotis
Speaker 3: is from the Greek for mouse ear, and the species
Speaker 3: name velafer comes from the Latin vellum and fera to
Speaker 3: carry a sale. More commonly, these bats are known as
Speaker 3: the cave Myotis and they are found in populations throughout
Speaker 3: the southwestern United States, Mexico, and Central America.
Speaker 2: I think I may mention this already, but I've only
Speaker 2: seen photos of these bats as they were not there
Speaker 2: on my recent visit to Kartchner. My past visit was
Speaker 2: to other chambers the rotunda in the throne room, but
Speaker 2: this time I was in the chamber where the bats
Speaker 2: would be during their seasonal roosting. But again, when the
Speaker 2: bats are about to come back, they shut everything down
Speaker 2: in there, They take the lights out. Nobody goes in
Speaker 2: inside there until or at least you know, tours don't
Speaker 2: go inside there until the bats are well done with
Speaker 2: what they need to do.
Speaker 3: So regarding their appearance, most of the sources I was
Speaker 3: looking at classify them as medium or medium to large bats,
Speaker 3: which I found funny because in the pictures I'm looking
Speaker 3: at they look very small. But yeah, maybe I don't know,
Speaker 3: maybe just the general scale of bats runs to the
Speaker 3: smaller end, but they are thought of as a medium
Speaker 3: to large insectivorous bats. Insect eating bat with brown and
Speaker 3: black fur on the back and usually some paler coloration
Speaker 3: on the belly. The color patterns, I think, vary across
Speaker 3: the animal's geographic range. It has short pointed ears and
Speaker 3: tiny little beady eyes. And once again this is a
Speaker 3: subject that's worth an image search because the cave myotis
Speaker 3: in a lot of the pictures you can find. It's
Speaker 3: hitting a very funny pose. It's got the mouth halfway
Speaker 3: open showing a bunch of little pinpoint teeth, like it's
Speaker 3: just kind of like, hey, what's up, guys. It's got
Speaker 3: a very like time to party appearance. I guess, on
Speaker 3: a more sour note, that's probably like the animals showing
Speaker 3: a face of extreme distress at being photographed and captured,
Speaker 3: but anyway, so the males are typically smaller than the females.
Speaker 3: Mating generally occurs in the fall, but females will often
Speaker 3: store sperm until spring, and then pregnant females usually gather
Speaker 3: in communal maternity roosts of several thousand individuals in the
Speaker 3: spring and in the early summer to give birth. These
Speaker 3: roosts are most often in caves, but of course the
Speaker 3: species will make do with other structures like abandoned buildings
Speaker 3: or mines, bridges, and things like that. I mentioned this
Speaker 3: a minute ago. They're insectivorous, so they will eat insects
Speaker 3: of all kinds, including flies and mosquitoes, moths, beetles, and weavils,
Speaker 3: which they hunt by echolocation. To learn more about their
Speaker 3: role in Krchner caverns in particular, I dug up a
Speaker 3: scientific paper from nineteen ninety nine published in the Journal
Speaker 3: of Cave and Kars Studies by the bat researchers Ronnie
Speaker 3: Sidner and Debbie Butcher, called Bats of Carchinger Cavern State Park, Arizona.
Speaker 3: The point of this study was to establish a basic
Speaker 3: observational account and inventory of the bats living in the
Speaker 3: caves before the caves were developed for the public. At
Speaker 3: the time, Carchner Caverns was a summer maternity roost for
Speaker 3: somewhere between one thousand and two thousand miotis vela for
Speaker 3: bats every year. I think usually closer to the lower
Speaker 3: end of that range. I don't know if the numbers
Speaker 3: have changed significantly since the years of the study, but
Speaker 3: you know you're going to be usually getting like one
Speaker 3: thoy fifteen hundred something like that. Bats coming to give
Speaker 3: birth every summer. There every spring or summer, so between
Speaker 3: April and mid September, the pregnant females of this population
Speaker 3: return to the cave to give birth and raise their young.
Speaker 3: The paper notes that these bats are crucial to the
Speaker 3: cave ecosystem because of their poop, because of the guano
Speaker 3: they provide. So bats fly in to roost in the
Speaker 3: spring and summer. The bats poop, and their poop provides
Speaker 3: nutrients that form the basis of the complex invertebrate food
Speaker 3: web inside the cave. In other words, the rest of
Speaker 3: the fauna, the obligate invertebrates and the other things that
Speaker 3: live in the cave could not survive without the bats.
Speaker 3: Their guano is the basis of it all. So the
Speaker 3: loss of a roosting bat population would probably cause the
Speaker 3: collapse of the entire cave ecosystem. You know this has
Speaker 3: come up on the show before. But try to imagine
Speaker 3: continuing our top side food web if the sun stopped shining.
Speaker 3: You know, you're just like now, you are missing a
Speaker 3: crucial base level input on the creation of food resources.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Baguano is sunshine. I believe we've put it that
Speaker 2: way before.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So many caves in general, and this cave in particular,
Speaker 3: are highly dependent on their roosting bat populations to provide
Speaker 3: nutrients and support the food web there, and some species
Speaker 3: of bats can be very sensitive to human disturbance of
Speaker 3: roosting caves. The author is run through a basic background
Speaker 3: of cave roosting research, which has found, among other things,
Speaker 3: that female bats will often try to select a roost
Speaker 3: with high temperature and humidity because as a moist, high
Speaker 3: warm environment it helps their newborns grow. That's good for
Speaker 3: their offspring. And remember what we mentioned about the climate
Speaker 3: inside carchon or caverns. It's very often quite warm and
Speaker 3: quite moist inside. You know, you can get areas of
Speaker 3: the cave that are like seventy one degrees fahrenheit and
Speaker 3: ninety nine percent humidity, and the authors of this paper
Speaker 3: found that in their they found in their research that
Speaker 3: bats often seek the warmest, highest humidity spots within the
Speaker 3: cave for rearing young.
Speaker 2: It was pointed out to me on the tour as
Speaker 2: well that once they have found the cave, once they're
Speaker 2: in the cave, the exact place where they'll roost for
Speaker 2: their young, essentially where they'll give birth and all, it's
Speaker 2: going to be. It's going to be pretty high up too,
Speaker 2: like which part of the cave has the biggest fall
Speaker 2: possible for young bats, just you know, getting their fly on.
Speaker 3: I wonder if that also has to do with heat rising.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it may it may well be a factor as well.
Speaker 3: Just a guess there. That could be wrong.
Speaker 4: I don't know.
Speaker 3: But they also say that our research has found female
Speaker 3: bats tend to be loyal to their favored roost, so
Speaker 3: if they find a good roost location, they're going to
Speaker 3: come back again and again across the years. Bats are
Speaker 3: especially vulnerable around the time of parturition, around the time
Speaker 3: they give birth. Right after they give birth, there is
Speaker 3: a small time window in which the mothers imprint on
Speaker 3: the sound and smell of their newborns and the author's
Speaker 3: right quote. If disturbed prior to this bonding, the female
Speaker 3: may not recognize her offspring and therefore will not attempt
Speaker 3: to care for it. So you know, that's one reason
Speaker 3: that especially around the time these bats are giving birth,
Speaker 3: it's a highly sensitive time for them. Also, if disturbed
Speaker 3: right after birth, bats may try to relocate to either
Speaker 3: a different part of the cave that seems more protected,
Speaker 3: or may try to leave the cave entirely if something
Speaker 3: is garring them there, and whatever location they moved to
Speaker 3: is probably not going to be as ideal in terms
Speaker 3: of temperature, humidity, or other environmental conditions. Also, mothers may
Speaker 3: drop their young during transport, which can lead to juvenile mortality.
Speaker 3: In fact, I think they were citing research that this
Speaker 3: happens very often if mothers have newborns that are not
Speaker 3: able to fly yet and they try to move them
Speaker 3: around or transport them somewhere, they very often get dropped.
Speaker 3: So you don't want to be scaring bats that have
Speaker 3: just given birth. So you get this mounting sense of
Speaker 3: interlocking dependence and fragility. So much depends upon things being
Speaker 3: chill for the bats. The cave system depends on the
Speaker 3: roosting bats, and the bat population is especially sensitive at
Speaker 3: the time around the birth of new young so there's
Speaker 3: just a lot of vulnerability here. The authors of the
Speaker 3: paper talk about a bunch of the methods they use
Speaker 3: to try to count and study the bats without disturbing them.
Speaker 3: For example, they so they rigorously tried to avoid being
Speaker 3: in the cave at the same time as the bats.
Speaker 3: They did not venture inside the cave during roosting season. Instead,
Speaker 3: they collected information about the bats during the off season
Speaker 3: through secondary measures like tracking the seasonal accumulation of guano
Speaker 3: and counting the numbers of dead bats on the cave
Speaker 3: floor under roosting areas, and then during the roosting season
Speaker 3: they did study them, but not inside the cave. They
Speaker 3: tried to create an estimated inventory by sitting outside the
Speaker 3: cave at the sinkhole and having somebody there with a
Speaker 3: laptop just counting bats observed flying in and out, which
Speaker 3: sounds like a wonderfully tedious job.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you want to get the undergrads on that one, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah. But then there's just in this section there's an
Speaker 3: understatedly adorable observation. So they're tracking the number of entrances
Speaker 3: and exits from the cave across the season, and they write, quote,
Speaker 3: it is suspected that the increase in the number of
Speaker 3: exiting bats from June slash July to August is partially
Speaker 3: due to the presence of young bats beginning to fly. Also,
Speaker 3: in the last episode, I mentioned an observation of a
Speaker 3: natural predator attacking the bats at Kartchner, so I wanted
Speaker 3: to come back and fill in some detail on that.
Speaker 3: This is in the spring of nineteen ninety one. The
Speaker 3: authors say that they noticed bats starting to arrive on
Speaker 3: schedule in April and May, but then they write quote, However,
Speaker 3: in late May, the exit flights became delayed sporadic, and
Speaker 3: the total population size declined. On June fourth, the carcasses
Speaker 3: of forty five dead bats were found near the bat window.
Speaker 3: We removed these from the cave to determine the cause
Speaker 3: of death. Observers counting bats on the next two nights
Speaker 3: watched a ringtail species Basariskus a studus leave the cave.
Speaker 3: The following evening, we used a night vision scope and
Speaker 3: observe the ringtail sitting directly in the bat window. Apparently
Speaker 3: this animal was responsible for killing the bats, and it's
Speaker 3: made especially I don't know, kind of sad, but also
Speaker 3: funny if you know what a ringtail looks like, because
Speaker 3: they're adorable. They look like little squirrel, raccoon, kitty cats.
Speaker 3: They got big ears and big eyes and the striped
Speaker 3: pattern on their tails. But they are little predators.
Speaker 2: So this little guy was hanging out like on or
Speaker 2: in the sinkhole and kind of like reaching out and
Speaker 2: grabbing snacks out of the bat's flight paths.
Speaker 3: It doesn't give any more detail. I don't think they
Speaker 3: observed exactly what it was doing, but that's my guess.
Speaker 3: So if it's hanging out at this narrow window that
Speaker 3: the bats have to crawl or pass through to get
Speaker 3: in and out of the cave, I'd imagine yes, it's
Speaker 3: just like sitting there and swatting them as they come through. Though,
Speaker 3: it says, you know, if they found forty how many
Speaker 3: dead bats they found, like forty five dead bats, it
Speaker 3: sounds like this predator is killing more bats than it
Speaker 3: needs to eat. I don't know if it was practicing
Speaker 3: or what.
Speaker 2: Well, Yeah, we've discussed this before in different mammals where
Speaker 2: sometimes if there's an abundant prey, an animal will not
Speaker 2: just say oh, I'm good enough, they will know they'll
Speaker 2: kill quite a few.
Speaker 3: They're not crunching the numbers on what they need, they're
Speaker 3: just they're probably just like acting on an instinct to it. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So the researchers did not interfere here, and the ringtail
Speaker 3: left the cave after June sixth, but the bat population
Speaker 3: continued to decline for a while. They say, quote the
Speaker 3: bat population reached a minimum on the fourteenth of June,
Speaker 3: when only forty nine bats were counted leaving the cave.
Speaker 3: In other years, a bat count at this time was
Speaker 3: about one thousand bats, so huge impact from this ringtail.
Speaker 3: And the authors point out that this is an example
Speaker 3: of how delicate the roosting population is and how badly
Speaker 3: an external interference can harm it. I mean, this isn't
Speaker 3: a human thing. This is a natural predator coming in
Speaker 3: and exploiting this one. You know, this choke point on
Speaker 3: entering and exiting the cave. And they say that after this,
Speaker 3: after the ringtail left, the bat population slowly increased again,
Speaker 3: reaching around four hundred in July, but a lot of
Speaker 3: the bats were gone and that doesn't necessarily mean they
Speaker 3: were dead. I think a lot probably tried to relocate
Speaker 3: to somewhere that seemed safer but may not actually have
Speaker 3: been as good in terms of, you know, raising their young.
Speaker 3: And so they say this was the lowest year for
Speaker 3: bat populations that they recorded. However, there's something telling about
Speaker 3: the fact that a few hundred bats apparently came back
Speaker 3: even after their roosting cave temporarily became this little, you know,
Speaker 3: kitty cat type animal death trap. They say this increase
Speaker 3: in numbers despite the threat of predation may indicate that
Speaker 3: carchiner caverns is superior to other nearby roosts.
Speaker 2: There you go. Yeah, that is fascinating though.
Speaker 3: So yeah, even though they had a ringtail nightmare, they
Speaker 3: still wanted to get back in.
Speaker 2: All right. Well, I mentioned that we would eventually consider
Speaker 2: other planets in this episode. So I want to come
Speaker 2: back to our explorers again. Our explorers. Our two discoverers
Speaker 2: of cartooner caverns were cavers Gary Teenen and Randy Tufts.
Speaker 2: And of these two, Randy Tuffs also stands out due
Speaker 2: to his contributions to space exploration. So I'm going to
Speaker 2: mention a little bit more about his biography, but both
Speaker 2: both men are very fascinating individuals that have done a
Speaker 2: lot of things. But I'm going to focus in on
Speaker 2: Tufts here. He was a University of Arizona geology graduate.
Speaker 2: I think seventy two is when he graduated. After that
Speaker 2: he worked in public service for a while, but he
Speaker 2: was apparently always something of a space husiast. Miller points
Speaker 2: out that one of Tuff's defining characteristics, on top of
Speaker 2: just being very obsessive, like he would really like this
Speaker 2: is a guy that set out to find a cave.
Speaker 2: He's like, I want to discover a cave, and he
Speaker 2: did not stop until it had happened in a major way.
Speaker 2: But also he said that this is a guy that
Speaker 2: would often go straight to the top on matters. So
Speaker 2: if he liked a book, like he was reading a
Speaker 2: novel and he thought it was good, he would be
Speaker 2: the sort of person to look up the phone number
Speaker 2: of the author so that he could call them and
Speaker 2: tell them that he liked the book. This also played
Speaker 2: into their conservation efforts, like he was like, well, we
Speaker 2: should go and just actually talk to the Governor of
Speaker 2: Arizona about the Xanadu situation, and they did it at
Speaker 2: one point, and in nineteen seventy seven, when he had
Speaker 2: the space bug again in a major way, during a
Speaker 2: hitch hiking trip in the eastern United States, he tried
Speaker 2: to get an appointment to speak to one of his
Speaker 2: personal heroes, Carl Sagan, and when he could not get
Speaker 2: such an appointment, he just waited for Carl Sagan in
Speaker 2: the parking lot outside of his office and then supposedly
Speaker 2: came up to him and said, Hey, how might someone
Speaker 2: with a background in geology and community find happiness in
Speaker 2: the space program? And Sagan reportedly replied, I haven't the
Speaker 2: foggiest which makes sense trying to get home here. I
Speaker 2: don't know who this guy is. It's just wandered up.
Speaker 2: This hitchhiker's asking me about careers in space. But however
Speaker 2: this went down that the two ended up corresponding, so
Speaker 2: it wasn't a complete getaway from me a situation or
Speaker 2: anything like that, which also speaks to you know, one
Speaker 2: of the other things about him is that he was
Speaker 2: He alluded to him this question is like he was
Speaker 2: involved in a lot of like community issues, so I
Speaker 2: think he definitely know he was a researcher for sure,
Speaker 2: and could crunch data and look at maps and everything.
Speaker 2: But I think he also value that personal connection, like
Speaker 2: let me talk to somebody about this. So the two corresponded,
Speaker 2: and then in nineteen ninety, at age forty two, Tufts
Speaker 2: went back to the University of Arizona as a grad
Speaker 2: student in geosciences with the hope of getting to work
Speaker 2: on efforts to study the Jovian Moon of Europa. And
Speaker 2: there was the idea. His big hope was that he
Speaker 2: could get on with the University of Arizona's Lunar and
Speaker 2: Planet Terry Laboratory. But this was his new laser focuss,
Speaker 2: like I found a cave if I wanted to find
Speaker 2: a cave, found it. Now I really want to study Europa.
Speaker 2: He was just obsessed with it, particularly obsessed with the
Speaker 2: idea that there might be life on Europa. That's what
Speaker 2: I thought, which is something that Sagan of course had
Speaker 2: been talking about and writing about.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So in ninety three, according to the book here, he
Speaker 2: showed up at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary
Speaker 2: Laboratory and said, hey, I want to work on Europa.
Speaker 2: Went straight to the top talked to the guy running it,
Speaker 2: and at the time no one was really focusing a
Speaker 2: lot on Europa. But then two years later the Galileo
Speaker 2: probe reached Jupiter and its moons, and things started changing.
Speaker 2: We started getting all this data back. So Tuffs came
Speaker 2: back to the lab. He ends up joining up with them,
Speaker 2: working on his thesis there and helping the team analyze
Speaker 2: all of these images coming in from Europa. So now
Speaker 2: in his second career, following the Cave, as he always
Speaker 2: called it, he would just prefer to Cartner as the Cave,
Speaker 2: Tuffs discovered what he would then just always refer to
Speaker 2: as the Fault, an eight hundred and ten kilometer long
Speaker 2: fault line on the surface of Europa near its south
Speaker 2: pole that came to be known as the And I'm
Speaker 2: going to admit I did not look up the pronunciation
Speaker 2: for this Asta Palaa Linnaea. This is a name for Astapalaya,
Speaker 2: the sister of Europa and Greek mythology. Both are Phoenician princesses. Okay,
Speaker 2: so Asta Palaia linea. It's about the size of the
Speaker 2: California portion of the San Andreas Fault, and the important
Speaker 2: detail according to Miller is that Tuffs and the team
Speaker 2: who was working with here, they a model that indicated
Speaker 2: that this fault line in Europe's icy surface could not
Speaker 2: have developed unless there was a large body of water
Speaker 2: under the surface of Europa. You know, its tides pulled
Speaker 2: by a Jovian gravity to force these cracks in the
Speaker 2: ice as things went up and went down. And so
Speaker 2: the possibility of a liquid ocean beneath the surface of
Speaker 2: Europe a really picks up steam at this point due
Speaker 2: to these observations in these models.
Speaker 3: Okay, Now my understanding is there had already been like
Speaker 3: suspicion that there may be a subsurface ocean, but this
Speaker 3: was like a big piece of evidence in its.
Speaker 2: Favor, right. I think that the idea, the hypothesis that
Speaker 2: there might be an ocean under the surface of Europe,
Speaker 2: it dates back at least of the nineteen seventies, like
Speaker 2: early nineteen seventies, that's I think that's when Sagan was
Speaker 2: talking about it and other individuals were considering the possibility.
Speaker 2: But this just provided a whole new level of evidence. Yeah,
Speaker 2: so Tough's so yeah, two major discoveries in Tough's life here, Carshner,
Speaker 2: Caverns and then this fault line on Europa and all
Speaker 2: the additional information we could glean from that. So I
Speaker 2: think it's really a compelling story a man who ultimately
Speaker 2: lived a short life and had these two amazing careers
Speaker 2: because he hearned his PhD in geosciences at the University
Speaker 2: of Arizona at age fifty and then sadly passed three
Speaker 2: years after that in two thousand and two due to
Speaker 2: a rare blood disease which actually is the same blood
Speaker 2: disease that Carl Sagan had died for died from earlier
Speaker 2: at the age of sixty two. So Tufts was taken
Speaker 2: too soon. But his accomplishments again very impressive. His obsession,
Speaker 2: his curiosity, his scientific commitment, I think all of that
Speaker 2: is an inspiration. And for his part, Gary Tinen has
Speaker 2: remained an active figure in Arizona conservation and in the
Speaker 2: Arizona conservation community, so he's still out there getting things
Speaker 2: done and is involved in various Arizona based efforts. So yeah,
Speaker 2: but both of these two I think are really admirable,
Speaker 2: So you know, hats off to them. And if nothing else,
Speaker 2: I still cannot imagine crawling through the spaces that these
Speaker 2: two crawled through to find entry into Cartoner caverns.
Speaker 3: I was about to say we have not yet heard
Speaker 3: from many cavers in the audience in response to our
Speaker 3: first episode, but wait a minute. The first one hasn't
Speaker 3: published out when we're recording this, So.
Speaker 2: That's right, we're the spoiler for everyone out there or
Speaker 2: a little you know, insight into how the sausage is made.
Speaker 2: We used to put out episodes with less lead time,
Speaker 2: less buffer, less time to put it together. Now we're
Speaker 2: like a week out, so used.
Speaker 3: To market sometimes sometimes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but you know, used to we would put out
Speaker 2: part one and then we would do part two while
Speaker 2: people were listening to part one, and so you know,
Speaker 2: we could get the in between mail and I guess
Speaker 2: there's just less possibility of that, but still we do
Speaker 2: want to hear from cavers of all varieties, and also
Speaker 2: other folks that have visited this in other Arizona caves,
Speaker 2: other caves throughout the United States and the world. Because
Speaker 2: there's so many amazing cave systems around the world, some
Speaker 2: of them have become important educational and recreational destinations.
Speaker 3: You if you're a listener to the show, you probably
Speaker 3: know the kinds of things we find interesting. So write
Speaker 3: us your favorite cave facts or your Robin Joe targeted
Speaker 3: cave facts and your own splunking stories please.
Speaker 2: Yeah, cave movies, all of it's fair game. All right. Well,
Speaker 2: we're gonna go ahead and close the book on this topic.
Speaker 2: But just a reminder to everyone out there. Stuff to
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