Speaker 1: Welcome. This is Marsha for RADIOI and to day I
Speaker 1: will be reading National Geographic Magazine dated August twenty twenty five,
Speaker 1: which is donated by the publisher as a reminder. RADIOI
Speaker 1: is a reading service intended for people who are blind
Speaker 1: or have other disabilities that make it difficult to read
Speaker 1: printed material. Please join me now for the first article
Speaker 1: titled the World's most Indomitable duck. The Madagascar pochard was
Speaker 1: thought to be extinct until one local biologist accidentally stumbled
Speaker 1: on a tiny flock in the unlikeliest of places a
Speaker 1: century ago. The Madagascar pochard thrived in its only known
Speaker 1: habitat Lake Eli Ultra, the country's largest lake, but over
Speaker 1: time many of the bug filled marshes surrounding the shallow
Speaker 1: lake were converted to cropland and the ducks started to
Speaker 1: die off. The last flock was recorded in nineteen sixty.
Speaker 1: A small group of scientists spent decades looking for the
Speaker 1: poachard by hiking through torrential rains, paddling across wetlands and
Speaker 1: dugout canoes, and even putting ads in the community paper,
Speaker 1: with little to show for it. By the mid nineteen nineties,
Speaker 1: the duck, known by locals as Photismaso or white eye
Speaker 1: for the bright eyes of mature males, was thought to
Speaker 1: have gone extinct, but in two thousand and six, Malagasi
Speaker 1: biologists and National Geographic Explorer Lily Arison Rene de Roeland
Speaker 1: chanced upon thirteen of the pochards on a remote volcanic lake,
Speaker 1: far from their historic range. The sighting led to a
Speaker 1: nearly twenty year collaboration among scientists, officials, and local companies
Speaker 1: communities to revive the species, including an extensive effort to
Speaker 1: breed the birds and release them into the wild. The
Speaker 1: work is far from complete, but it's starting to pay off.
Speaker 1: There are now some two hundred and thirty ho chyards
Speaker 1: across Madagascar. This by Carol Hwang. Next The Hidden World
Speaker 1: of Cave Dwellers by John Bartlett. For centuries we've sought
Speaker 1: shelter underground. Today, this ancient way of life is under
Speaker 1: a new threat. What can we learn from the last
Speaker 1: subterranean societies before they disappear? Nearly a decade ago, documentary
Speaker 1: photographer and National Geographic Explorer Tomorra Marino was driving a
Speaker 1: camper van through the hot and seemingly desolate expanse of
Speaker 1: Australia's Simpson Desert when one of her tires blew out.
Speaker 1: The nearly seventy thousand square miles of barren red dunes
Speaker 1: are not a place you want to have car trouble.
Speaker 1: Summer temperatures push into the one twenties and water is scarce.
Speaker 1: Marino coaxed her van down the road and began to
Speaker 1: see signs of a town, but there was no one
Speaker 1: in sight and the few buildings felt abandoned. Wandering the streets,
Speaker 1: she spouted her rudimentary meatal cross on a hilltop. She
Speaker 1: scrambled up to take a look and found that a
Speaker 1: wide courtyard opened up below, forming the facade of an
Speaker 1: underground Orthodox church. Marino soon discovered that she was in
Speaker 1: an Opal mining outpost called kuber Peti. After a gold
Speaker 1: prospector discovered an Opal in the area in nineteen fifteen,
Speaker 1: miners flocked to the region to cash in. When soldiers
Speaker 1: returning from World War One joined the craze, they began
Speaker 1: living in dugouts excavated from the hillsides to escape the
Speaker 1: extreme daytime temperatures. It was a novel idea that stuck,
Speaker 1: and today much of the community of two thousand lives underground.
Speaker 1: The people there are so deeply connected to their environment.
Speaker 1: Marino says she stayed for a month, captivated by the
Speaker 1: unusual way of life. The practice of humans living in
Speaker 1: caves dates back millions of years to when our early
Speaker 1: African ancestors began taking refuge in underground caverns. Over time,
Speaker 1: they became more than that. As people added rock art
Speaker 1: and held communal ceremonies, they became homes. After visiting kuber Peti,
Speaker 1: Marino realized that in some places this ancient lifestyle still indoors.
Speaker 1: Exactly how robust these communities are is hard to quantify.
Speaker 1: In the early two thousand, some thirty to forty million
Speaker 1: people lived underground in Yaodong homes carved into the hillsides
Speaker 1: of shang Si Province in central China, but according to
Speaker 1: a twenty ten estimate, that number has fallen to around
Speaker 1: three million as the population urbanized. Some communities have abandoned
Speaker 1: their subterranean homes entirely. In the thirteen hundreds, the Dogon
Speaker 1: people lived in caves along the Bandiagara Cliffs in Mali
Speaker 1: to escape religious conquests and slave raiders, but over the
Speaker 1: centuries the threats receded, and they abandoned their rocky abodes
Speaker 1: and moved into villages in the valley. Whatever the taily,
Speaker 1: its clear, underground living is becoming increasingly rare. Over the
Speaker 1: past two years, Marino traveled the world to seek out
Speaker 1: the remaining practitioners of this dwindling way of life to
Speaker 1: discover the advantages of their enduring tradition provides. The subterranean
Speaker 1: world is a continuous lesson in sustainability and circular economy,
Speaker 1: says Pietro Louriano, a climate focused architect and UNESCO consultant
Speaker 1: who studied cave populations. It also teaches us a different
Speaker 1: symbolic relationship with space. Today, we have forgotten the importance
Speaker 1: of the hidden, the unseen, the underground, and indeed, from
Speaker 1: a small pocket of Mormon fundamentalists in Utah to a
Speaker 1: town of more than three thousand in southern Spain, Marino
Speaker 1: found that while life in these communities seems more precarious
Speaker 1: than ever, they have much to teach us about human
Speaker 1: ingenuity and resilience. The holdouts staying cool as Tunisia heats
Speaker 1: up for thousands of years. The Imazigen, also known as
Speaker 1: berbers in southern Tunisia have built their homes by chiseling
Speaker 1: into the low slung sandstone hill sides that run through
Speaker 1: the wide plains of the Sahara. These cave shelters offered
Speaker 1: a cool escape from the searing heat and harsh desert winds.
Speaker 1: Then the national government suggested there might be a better
Speaker 1: way to live. It all started when Tunisia gained a
Speaker 1: dependence from France in nineteen fifty six, and the new president,
Speaker 1: tabib Bourg Burguiba began pushing for the country to modernize,
Speaker 1: which meant moving cave dwelling imbazigen into government built housing
Speaker 1: above ground. The people were promised cheap running water and electricity,
Speaker 1: though many who re located soon found that wasn't the case.
Speaker 1: They lied to us, says Slimen ben Masoud, a seventy
Speaker 1: year old who was born in a cave but moved
Speaker 1: to one of the government settlements in the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 1: They took everything from me and gave me nothing in return.
Speaker 1: Other attempts at relocation have been somewhat more successful. After
Speaker 1: a flood destroyed many of the homes around Matmat, Matmata
Speaker 1: and Hadej in nineteen sixty nine, residents were offered land
Speaker 1: at nearby Nu Matmata for three dnurs a dollar a
Speaker 1: square meter. For many, it was an offer too good
Speaker 1: to pass up. To day, there is one main road
Speaker 1: through the town, lined by a string of packed coffee shops,
Speaker 1: a butcher, and an arcade with a few gaming consoles
Speaker 1: set up in front of flat screen televisions. But the
Speaker 1: town still fails to address the one problem the cave
Speaker 1: homes solved thousands of years ago. The heat. Tunisia, like
Speaker 1: much of the rest of the world, is heating up
Speaker 1: at an alarming rate, and temperatures are expected to rise
Speaker 1: by as much as eleven point seven degrees fahrenheit by
Speaker 1: the end of the century. You could have brought modernity
Speaker 1: to our traditions, but you can't do the opposite, says
Speaker 1: Ali Khayel fifty nine at his empty roadside cafe, staring
Speaker 1: out over the moonscape of Hadej, where he was one
Speaker 1: of more than a thousand people born and raised in
Speaker 1: the hundreds of cave homes on the valley floor. He
Speaker 1: remembers how when he was a child, the smell of
Speaker 1: food drifted between the caves, which would house two or
Speaker 1: three families each people started to move away in the
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies, and the area has been abandoned since the
Speaker 1: nineteen nineties. Khayal says that the state never contemplated protecting
Speaker 1: his way of life, and many of those who moved
Speaker 1: out of the caves came to regret it. Those who
Speaker 1: have stayed have found clever ways to meld the benefits
Speaker 1: of their ancient homes with modern living. Eight miles from
Speaker 1: Niu Matmata, the ham Ha'amdi family live in five rooms
Speaker 1: dug deep into the sandstone hillside of Beni Aissa. Their home,
Speaker 1: one of just a dozen or so occupied in the town,
Speaker 1: is accessed via an above ground brick foyer that bakes
Speaker 1: in the Saharan sun, but the living areas beyond are
Speaker 1: comfortable and cool. A complex system of water channels and
Speaker 1: walkways engineered over centuries connects the two dozen homes, poked
Speaker 1: across the desert. When it rains, the channel's flood gardens
Speaker 1: of palm, almond, and olive trees. Inside the aha AMI's
Speaker 1: house looks much like any other twenty first century Tunisian home.
Speaker 1: The walls of a small pantry are adorned with shallots
Speaker 1: and garlic. The flooras in the main living areas are
Speaker 1: lined with pillows and throw rugs. When eldest son Salem twenty,
Speaker 1: hooks up his phone to a copper antenna, the cave
Speaker 1: as Petchy internet and Laylah fifteen, the youngest daughter, can
Speaker 1: record tik tok videos in a whitewashed store room. Grandfather
Speaker 1: Ali seventy three, the family's oldest member, was born in
Speaker 1: the cave and has lost count of how many generations
Speaker 1: came before him. I will never leave here, he says.
Speaker 1: Leila and Salem aren't thinking of leaving either. They're making
Speaker 1: plans to dig further into the forous rock, the tribe
Speaker 1: preserving a connection to the land. The city of Petra
Speaker 1: was carved into the sandstone cliffs and canyons of the
Speaker 1: Jordanian desert over two thousand years ago as the dazzling
Speaker 1: trading capital of the Nabatean Empire, but for more than
Speaker 1: two centuries Bedouin have called its labyrinth of catacomb's passageways
Speaker 1: and chambers their home. It was a bucolic and pastoral existence.
Speaker 1: The slopes below the royal tomb were used for agriculture,
Speaker 1: and the tribe herded their goats through the long canyon
Speaker 1: into the city. It was the perfect spot until the
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies, when the Jordanian government made plans to convert
Speaker 1: the site into an archaeological tourist attraction. King Hussain bin
Speaker 1: Tellal brokered an agreement for the one hundred forty Bedouin
Speaker 1: families to leave, and officials built towns nearby to house them. Essentially,
Speaker 1: it was justified as preservation of the monuments, as well
Speaker 1: as establishing new employment and subsist distants opportunities, says Michael Vile,
Speaker 1: a professor of ethnology at the University of Copenhagen and
Speaker 1: author of Being Bedouin Around Petra. By nineteen eighty five,
Speaker 1: most of the tribe had vacated the ancient city, and
Speaker 1: Petra was named a World Heritage Site. The Bedouin who remained,
Speaker 1: some one hundred twenty of them, were moved from the
Speaker 1: main archeological areas to a peripheral valley, where tribe members
Speaker 1: have made use of whatever space they could find. What
Speaker 1: were once Nabataean tombs have become store rooms and ancient
Speaker 1: halls now house tractors, pickup trucks and camels. Rya who
Speaker 1: sign Suleiman Samahin was born in the royal tomb when
Speaker 1: her tribe had free reign over Petra. Now aged ninety,
Speaker 1: she lives in a row of caves cut into the
Speaker 1: red rock of the adjoining valley. A kitchen with a
Speaker 1: wide fire pit and blackened walls, a bedroom dimly lit
Speaker 1: by lights powered from a solar panel, and a wardrobe
Speaker 1: cave or. Her clothes and scarves are hung on a
Speaker 1: string suspended between two juniper tree branches on a dusty
Speaker 1: hilltop several miles from the valley. The government recently built
Speaker 1: a modern village with the intention of rehoming Petra's remaining residents.
Speaker 1: Some cave dwellers are ready for a new way of life.
Speaker 1: Haniya Suliman Ali Samahen, thirty seven, wants her eight children
Speaker 1: to be closer to the school and have permittent access
Speaker 1: to fresh water, which currently trickles out of a tap
Speaker 1: on the valley floor just once every three or four days. Others, though,
Speaker 1: will never leave Petra for life of concrete and modernity.
Speaker 1: We like the open airs, as eighteen year old Suliman Samahin,
Speaker 1: the nature and the freedom as the sun sets. Suleiman's
Speaker 1: mother sits on a stone slab outside her cave home,
Speaker 1: tending to a fire nearby, Suliman and his brother's cook
Speaker 1: mansaf a traditional dish of lamb and yogurt in a
Speaker 1: sand filled pit that once held nabatan wine. When nightfalls,
Speaker 1: the family will lie outside on mattresses and animal pelts
Speaker 1: underneath the stars. Taking the bedouin out of Petra is
Speaker 1: like taking the spice out of a dish, says Raya.
Speaker 1: Your left with nothing a home for the homeless, the
Speaker 1: cave vet Ha Koma has always been a place of
Speaker 1: last resort. In the early nineteenth century, a Basotho chief
Speaker 1: named Koma led his tribe into the Melati Mountains, fleeing
Speaker 1: a period of war that displaced millions of people throughout
Speaker 1: Southern Africa and led to countless deaths. Komi came across
Speaker 1: a vast east facing cave surrounded by steep valleys and
Speaker 1: mountainous plateaus, and set up camp. The location was strategic
Speaker 1: for security reasons during those times, says Joshua Chaikawa, a
Speaker 1: senior lecturer in the Department of Historical Studies at the
Speaker 1: National University of Lisoto. Members of Komi's tribe, he said,
Speaker 1: were able to shield themselves and critically their livestock from
Speaker 1: the violence. Eventually, the tribe built individual homes within the
Speaker 1: Kahoma Cave, molding six foot high domed huts from stick's
Speaker 1: mud and during done before smearing orange clay around the
Speaker 1: low doorways. Locals dubbed the cave the Mahalapana or palette,
Speaker 1: imagining it as a huge open mouth. At the turn
Speaker 1: of the twenty first century, thirty three of Come's tribal
Speaker 1: descendants still lived in the huts beneath the rock. Over
Speaker 1: the past two decades, nearly everyone has moved to a
Speaker 1: cinder block village constructed on the bed rock above the cave,
Speaker 1: where the homes are basic but provide little comforts like
Speaker 1: glass windows, and are more pleasant than the huts within
Speaker 1: a cave. But the mahalapan is still a place of
Speaker 1: refuge and security for those in need. Ne Fane net
Speaker 1: Fane and forty one year old farmer can't afford to
Speaker 1: build a home in the village, so he lives in
Speaker 1: the cave, sleeping on a bundle of animal skins and
Speaker 1: washing his clothes in the Thutiyatsana River, which flows past
Speaker 1: the cave's mouth. He sweeps the dust out of his
Speaker 1: house with a straw room and shovels it into a
Speaker 1: small fire grate, where an old teapot sits over the flames.
Speaker 1: Inside he is a few empty candle holders set on
Speaker 1: a shelf in the corner, and three leather suitcases are
Speaker 1: stacked beside buckets and wash bowls. Adjacent is Sebastian kuts
Speaker 1: Sane fifty eight, who is using the one room hut
Speaker 1: where he raised his children. It's a quick solution to
Speaker 1: a temporary problem. His daughter in law is bidding visiting
Speaker 1: from South Africa, and he's given her and her family
Speaker 1: his home in the village. The men wake each morning
Speaker 1: with the sunrise as copper pink light bathes the rock.
Speaker 1: The only shade comes from a la Kassi tree, a
Speaker 1: variety of wild peach, which, according to local lore, was
Speaker 1: planted two centuries ago by Komme to ward off lightning strikes.
Speaker 1: Soon Kuanes daughter in law will head back to South
Speaker 1: Africa and he'll move up to the village, and Netafane
Speaker 1: says he'll build a house of his own when he
Speaker 1: can afford it. Until then, they do with their home
Speaker 1: beneath the metal pane the dwelling that checks all the boxes.
Speaker 1: The volcanic landscape of Cappadocia in central Turkey has eroded
Speaker 1: over millennia to form mountain ridges, sandstone valleys, and rows
Speaker 1: of gaudisque cones that the tourism industry likes to call
Speaker 1: fairy chimneys. Over four thousand years, humans too have carved
Speaker 1: the porous rock, excavating a warren of caves, tunnels, and passages.
Speaker 1: Among two hundred five thousand acres of archaeological sites in
Speaker 1: the region, there are dozens of abandoned underground cities. One, Kamakli,
Speaker 1: is over four thousand years old and extends eight stories
Speaker 1: below ground, complete with stables and wine cellars. Another, during Cuyu,
Speaker 1: was vast enough to have housed twenty thousand people at once.
Speaker 1: While these larger archaeological trees measures haven't been occupied in
Speaker 1: more than a hundred years, many of the individual homes
Speaker 1: carved into the area's rocks are still in use. Okte
Speaker 1: seventy two and Hanifa Torun sixty four have lived in
Speaker 1: their cave home in the hill top town of Ortahisar
Speaker 1: since their wedding day more than four decades ago. They
Speaker 1: are one of maybe ten families left living full time
Speaker 1: in a cave in all of Cappadocia, and they love
Speaker 1: it for a simple reason. It satisfies all their needs.
Speaker 1: The home has plumbing and electricity, The living room stays
Speaker 1: warm enough in winter, while the adjoining storage room, separated
Speaker 1: by a thick rock wall, maintains a stable cool temperature
Speaker 1: that allows them to eat summer crops all year round.
Speaker 1: Rows of ampheri hold bulgar and lentils harvested five seasons ago,
Speaker 1: and walnuts and fresh fruit are stacked on silver trays.
Speaker 1: While the Torans have always seen the value in their
Speaker 1: cave home, the rest of the world has started to
Speaker 1: take notice. Two nearly five million people visited Cappadocia in
Speaker 1: twenty twenty three. This tourist boom has prompted many locals
Speaker 1: to convert their cave homes into shops and hotels, and
Speaker 1: ancient storehouses into underground restaurants and bars. Recently, one of
Speaker 1: the turn's neighbors sold his cave to hotel developers, leaving
Speaker 1: the couple completely surrounded by tourism projects. Now, when they
Speaker 1: duck into their cave, they're met with a low throb
Speaker 1: of a drill shaking the floor and trails of fine
Speaker 1: dust dropping from the ceiling. Oktay and Hanif's son, Refat
Speaker 1: forty five, grew up playing hide and seek in the
Speaker 1: maze of carved churches and catacombs beneath the family home. Now,
Speaker 1: like almost everyone here, he works in the hospitality industry,
Speaker 1: driving visitors from all over the world from one attraction
Speaker 1: to the next. The steady advance of tourism in or
Speaker 1: Tahisar is likely to force the foam the family out
Speaker 1: before too long. If we have to leave, we will
Speaker 1: sell everything and end up living just like everybody else.
Speaker 1: Hanifa tears welling in her eyes. Many of those who've
Speaker 1: moved out of the caves around Cappadocia have ended up
Speaker 1: in the city of Niveshir, where squat apartment blocks with
Speaker 1: double glazed windows and enclosed balconies, crowded basketball courts and shops.
Speaker 1: Living in an apartment is like a jail, says Hanif,
Speaker 1: as she rushes about her house, filling bowls with fruit
Speaker 1: and vegetables from the store rooms, while she skins a
Speaker 1: plate of green onions onto a tray fresh milk from
Speaker 1: the families. Two cows bubbles on a stove to make cheese.
Speaker 1: When I open the door, I need to breathe fresh
Speaker 1: air and see the valley next. The future of data
Speaker 1: storage is DNA by Diana Marcus and Patricia Heally. Eons ago,
Speaker 1: evolution invented DNA to store vast quantities of information. Now
Speaker 1: scientists think a similar technology could offer a solution to
Speaker 1: our fast growing data storage dilemma. The world produces a
Speaker 1: tremendous mane out of data, some four hundred billion gigabytes
Speaker 1: every day, a number that's increasing rapidly. Most of it
Speaker 1: is stored in the cloud, which is a pretty word
Speaker 1: for a network of millions of computer servers in air
Speaker 1: conditioned warehouses that transfer and save our data to cassettes
Speaker 1: of magnetic tape. But the cloud demands huge amounts of
Speaker 1: space and energy and has heavy impacts on the environment.
Speaker 1: The magnetic tape also degrades, needs to be recopied, and
Speaker 1: requires frequent updates. Enter DNA, the tiny molecule that stores
Speaker 1: our genetic information. Scientists have come up with a way
Speaker 1: to mimic DNA artificially to meet our escalating data storage needs.
Speaker 1: The secret lies in translating binary code of ones and
Speaker 1: zeros into the chemical bases that make up our genetic code.
Speaker 1: As the future of innovation will require massively more data,
Speaker 1: we will need more sustainable ways to store it. This
Speaker 1: novel solution takes up almost no space and can last
Speaker 1: for millennia, keeping human knowledge safer than ever. Will it
Speaker 1: totally replace the cloud, not yet. For now, the technology
Speaker 1: is being developed for long term storage of things we
Speaker 1: don't frequently access, think medical records or library archives. But
Speaker 1: costs and processing times are going down and experts are
Speaker 1: working on scaling the technology. The revolution is expected to
Speaker 1: accelerate over the next decade, upending data storage as we
Speaker 1: know it. How DNA storage works, scientists and engineers can
Speaker 1: convert entire libraries into microscopic threads with the help of
Speaker 1: specialized laboratory equipment. Here, they build the word hello into
Speaker 1: a strand of DNA and then turn it back into letters,
Speaker 1: encoding bits into bases. Computer store each letter or pixel
Speaker 1: of digital data in combinations of ones and zeros. Algorithms,
Speaker 1: then convert them into combinations of the four letters representing
Speaker 1: DNA's chemical bases THAA, G, and C. Building a DNA
Speaker 1: strand compounds called nuclear leotides that contain these DNA bases
Speaker 1: are in a solution of chemicals or enzymes and bond
Speaker 1: together to build a strand. Long term archiving. A strand
Speaker 1: can then be kept in a sealed vile glass bead
Speaker 1: or even synthetic bone for preservation. DNA is stable if
Speaker 1: stored away from light, water, and hydrogen oxygen. Retrieving files,
Speaker 1: One of the several ways to retrieve a specific file
Speaker 1: is to send in a probe with a tiny magnet
Speaker 1: to attach to its ID tag another magnet that extracts
Speaker 1: the tagged file reading DNA. After retrieval, strands that make
Speaker 1: up a file are read via variety of methods, including
Speaker 1: the two shown at right that revealed the order of
Speaker 1: the bases, turning DNA back into data. The algorithms that
Speaker 1: initially converted digital bits into DNA bases reverse the operation,
Speaker 1: converting archived information back to digital ones and zeros, and
Speaker 1: then back in next. Extreme Birding at the Edge of
Speaker 1: the World by Tom Kleins how an abandoned military station
Speaker 1: in Alaska became an unlikely hotspot for sea bird research
Speaker 1: and approving ground for the young scientists who spend their
Speaker 1: summers there. For decades. Middleton Island was little more than
Speaker 1: a forgotten outpost, a flat sliver of land battered by
Speaker 1: the restless winds and waters of the Gulf of Alaska.
Speaker 1: In the late nineteen fifties, the U. S. Air Force
Speaker 1: built a radar station on the remote island to scan
Speaker 1: the skies for Soviet bombers during the Cold War. The
Speaker 1: facility was shuttered just seven years later, its squat buildings
Speaker 1: and steel towers left to rust. Today, the qualities that
Speaker 1: made Middleton perfect for military surveillance isolation, bird's eye views,
Speaker 1: and the absence of human distraction have made it ideal
Speaker 1: for a new kind of outpost. Amid the dilapidated Air
Speaker 1: Force structures. Small crews of scientists arrive each summer by
Speaker 1: air taxi to turn this ghostly military complex into a
Speaker 1: frontline research station for seabird science. Where radar once scanned
Speaker 1: the skies, cameras now monitor nests where airman once stood
Speaker 1: guard researchers peer through observation ports, studying the delicate interplay
Speaker 1: between marine life and climate, using birds as a window
Speaker 1: into ocean health. Birds are a barometer, says wildlife biologists
Speaker 1: Scott Hatch, who founded and directs the Institute for seabird
Speaker 1: research and conservation. Sea birds, particularly kittiwakes, are sensitive to
Speaker 1: environmental changes, so they reflect the conditions and health of
Speaker 1: ocean ecosystems. Hatch first visited Middleton in nineteen seventy eight
Speaker 1: with the US Fish and Wildlife Service and started the ISRC,
Speaker 1: which partners with universities to run the monitoring program in
Speaker 1: two thousand and nine. Changing ocean temperatures and currents can
Speaker 1: reduce fish populations, making it harder for birds to find
Speaker 1: food and successfully raise chicks. When food is scarce, birds
Speaker 1: reproductive rates decline. Because sea birds accumulate pollutants like plastics,
Speaker 1: heavy metals, and oil as they eat and preen, they
Speaker 1: are useful indicators of contamination levels in marine ecosystems. Like
Speaker 1: the birds they study. Graduate students and other budding scientists
Speaker 1: arrive at this avian crossroads from different parts of the world.
Speaker 1: Drawn by the opportunity to explore the mysteries of sea
Speaker 1: bird behavior and ecology under nearly twenty four hours of daylight.
Speaker 1: Researchers immerse themselves in the demanding work of documenting the
Speaker 1: lives of birds and piecing together the deeper story of
Speaker 1: the forces shaping life in Earth's oceans. The centerpiece of
Speaker 1: the research is the old radar tower, repurposed as a
Speaker 1: one of a kind's sea bird observatory. In nineteen ninety three,
Speaker 1: Hatchet and his growing team began to outfit the tower
Speaker 1: with artificial nesting platforms to house black legged kittiwakes and
Speaker 1: pelogic cormorants. Observation ports allow scientists to monitor every stage
Speaker 1: of the bird's development. The setup lets scientists conduct controlled
Speaker 1: experiments that would be unfeasible elsewhere. By tracking differences in
Speaker 1: feeding behavior and parenting success, they can gauge the impacts
Speaker 1: of environmental changes on seabird populations. These long term studies
Speaker 1: have turned Middleton seabirds into sentinels of ocean upheaval. When
Speaker 1: the twenty fourteen through sixteen marine heat wave hit, seabird
Speaker 1: diets revealed a crash in fish, triggering breeding failures and
Speaker 1: the death of an estimated four million common moores, or
Speaker 1: about half Alaska's population of the birds. The scale dwarfed
Speaker 1: even the Exxon Valdez disaster, making it perhaps the las
Speaker 1: largest single species wildlife die off ever documented, and a
Speaker 1: stark arding that climate driven ecosystem shifts can be fast, brutal,
Speaker 1: and possibly irreversible. While the Seabird Tower offers a bit
Speaker 1: of luxury for its avan inhabitants, island life for the
Speaker 1: researchers is decidedly more rugged. You're pooping in out hoses
Speaker 1: and bathing in pond water that you heat on the stoves,
Speaker 1: as Morgan Benowitz Frederick's, a biology professor at Bucknell University,
Speaker 1: who spent seven field seasons on the island, and you're
Speaker 1: covered in bird poop and fish guts and blood all
Speaker 1: the time. Despite or perhaps because of these challenges, the
Speaker 1: researchers forage strong bonds. Evenings are spent together in the Chateau,
Speaker 1: a former military building that serves as the island's kitchen,
Speaker 1: office and living room. Meals are a shared ritual, with
Speaker 1: spirited conversations around a long dinner table. In between the
Speaker 1: many hours of field work, the researchers in joy moments
Speaker 1: of play. This concludes readings from National Geographic Magazine for
Speaker 1: to Day. Your reader, husband Marsha, thank you for listening,
Speaker 1: Keep on listening, and have a great day.