Speaker 1: Welcome. This is Marsha for RADIOI, and today I will
Speaker 1: be reading National Geographic magazine dated April 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 Survivors from the Dinosaur Age by Hannah Nordhaus. For
Speaker 1: one hundred sixty two million years, sturgeons have fended off
Speaker 1: everything they have ever faced, until humans push them to
Speaker 1: the brink of extinction. Inside the urgent flight to fight
Speaker 1: to protect the last of these living fossils, the river
Speaker 1: flows vast and soundless. It's December and southern Kazakhistan, and
Speaker 1: the landscape near the Sir Darya River is smudged in
Speaker 1: shades of brown and toupe, dormant grasses, silted floodplains, leafless trees.
Speaker 1: This is not the most picturesque stretch of river bank,
Speaker 1: strewn as it is with food wrappers, bottles, and decomposing sedan. Overhead,
Speaker 1: the sun is obscured by a haze of coal and
Speaker 1: wood smoke. But when it comes to what Berney. Cahooja
Speaker 1: is searching for the spot feels perfect. This is the
Speaker 1: habitat we need, says Cahuja, an aquatic conservation biologist with
Speaker 1: the Tennessee Aquarium Conservation Institute. He's hoping to find a
Speaker 1: species of sturgeon, the sir Daria, that's native to these
Speaker 1: waters but hasn't been seen since the nineteen sixties after
Speaker 1: a series of Soviet dams were built throughout the river system.
Speaker 1: Those projects blocked access to the fish's spawning grounds, and
Speaker 1: fewer changed forever change the flow of the sir Dharia,
Speaker 1: which drains from the high peaks of Kyrgyzstan into what
Speaker 1: is now the remnants of the Aral Sea. If the
Speaker 1: sturgeon somehow still Existskohuja thinks this silty, shallow expanse of
Speaker 1: river is where it can be found. Some months earlier,
Speaker 1: khojaen contact had been contacted by the conservation organization REWILD,
Speaker 1: which administers a program to search for what it calls
Speaker 1: lost species creatures that haven't been seen for at least
Speaker 1: a decade and could be extinct, but there's not enough
Speaker 1: data to be conclusive. The officials at REWILD reached out
Speaker 1: to Kooja, knowing that he was one of a very
Speaker 1: small collection of scientists who have ever laid eyes on
Speaker 1: the Sir Darja star sturgeon. As a graduate student in
Speaker 1: the nineteen nineties, he visited museums in London, Moscow and
Speaker 1: Saint Petersburg and videotaped twenty seven spindled specimens bleached away
Speaker 1: from years of storage. They said, you're the expert, Cahuja said,
Speaker 1: remembering the call with rewild, and I said, well, I've
Speaker 1: seen them dead in a jar. The circuit Darya sturgeon
Speaker 1: is a distinctive looking fish, and, at a maximum length
Speaker 1: of roughly nine inches, is the smallest of the twenty
Speaker 1: six species of sturgeons. The largest is the Beluga, the
Speaker 1: biggest ever recorded, pulled from the Volga River in eighteen
Speaker 1: twenty seven, measuring more than twenty three feet and weighing
Speaker 1: over thirty two hundred pounds. All sturgeons have a long,
Speaker 1: flat snout, dangling whisker like barbeles that detect bottom dwelling prey,
Speaker 1: and five lines of horny bony scouts that climb vertically
Speaker 1: up the length of their bodies. It's hard to mistake
Speaker 1: this ancient fish for anything else. Cross a catfish, a shark,
Speaker 1: a stegosaurus, and a pruning saw, and you're not far
Speaker 1: from imagining a sturgeon. For one hundred sixty two million years,
Speaker 1: they lived through climate swings, continental shifts, volcanic eruptions, and
Speaker 1: a mass extinction. They survived the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs.
Speaker 1: Everything that nature and space could throw at them, says Cahoja,
Speaker 1: everything except humanity. Today, they are most the most endangered
Speaker 1: group of fish in the world. Since nineteen seventy, global
Speaker 1: sturgeon populations have dropped a catastrophic ninety four percent. The
Speaker 1: International Union for Conservation of Nature IUCN lists twenty five
Speaker 1: sturgeon species as vulnerable or endangered, seventeen critically so, and
Speaker 1: one species is extinct in the wild. Three of the
Speaker 1: critically endangered species, including the sir Daria, are feared extinct
Speaker 1: as well. Ecologically, sturgeons are on the brink. Economically, they
Speaker 1: are some of the most valuable animals on Earth. Much
Speaker 1: of the sturgeons decline can be attributed to overfishing. Caviare
Speaker 1: the fish profuse Obsidian eggs is salted and sold across
Speaker 1: the globe as an edible symbol of status and wealth.
Speaker 1: Some tins surpass six hundred dollars an ounce, But even
Speaker 1: for species like the sir Daria that aren't sought for
Speaker 1: their row, human made decisions and environmental changes have been devastating.
Speaker 1: It took only two hundred years for humans to destroy
Speaker 1: every riverine habitat where sturgeons live. Cahoja says. Sturgeons evolved
Speaker 1: over one hundred and sixty million years ago in free
Speaker 1: flowing rivers places without barriers. All sturgeons migrate, says Cahooja,
Speaker 1: there are now simply too many things in their way. Dams, reservoirs,
Speaker 1: dredging and irrigation diversions block migration to spawning grounds upstream,
Speaker 1: and strand larvae floating downstream. Runoff from agriculture can create
Speaker 1: toxic algal blooms, while development, logging and mining destroys spawning
Speaker 1: habitat and produce harmful sediments. Gohujah hopes some small number
Speaker 1: of sier Dharia sturgeons have survived this age of man.
Speaker 1: If the fish could be found, Cahoja will follow a
Speaker 1: now well worn playbook, capture a breeding population of males
Speaker 1: and females, set them up in a hatchery, and raise
Speaker 1: them for reintroduction into the wild. Where there are dams
Speaker 1: blocking spawning roots, there are now hatchery and transport programs.
Speaker 1: Where the overfishing, there are now laws and institutions banning
Speaker 1: or limiting unsustainable harvest. Even the caviat industry is now
Speaker 1: playing a role in bringing sturgeons back back from the brink.
Speaker 1: Before arriving at the river, Khusha had stopped at a
Speaker 1: roadside fishmonger's stand and passed around printed photo of those
Speaker 1: museum specimens. Trucks groaned past on the highway as a
Speaker 1: fisherman studied the picture and then confirmed that he had
Speaker 1: pulled something similar out of the water a few years back,
Speaker 1: which made Khusha even more excited to get into the river.
Speaker 1: Making their way toward the water, Khushaan as colleague Dave
Speaker 1: Neelie Kirrie a custom sown net they will use to
Speaker 1: sweep the river. Three Kazakh fisheries officials have driven down
Speaker 1: from the Aral Sea in a big Soviet era truck
Speaker 1: to supervise the efforts to find the lost fish. One
Speaker 1: of them, tinspik barak Baya, leans against the old vehicle,
Speaker 1: watching as Kahusha and Neely wade into the river. We
Speaker 1: have a chance, he says. With this chance very small,
Speaker 1: we can hope. It's April and Wisconsins Wolf River is
Speaker 1: teeming with sturgeons. The fish prowl the rocks near the banks,
Speaker 1: their fins breaching the water in the frothing spillway of
Speaker 1: Shawano Dam, which lies between a paper mill on one
Speaker 1: side of the river and the town of Shauano's Sturgeon Park,
Speaker 1: a tiered greenway at the river's edge. Since the barrier's
Speaker 1: construction in eighteen ninety two, this is marked the farthest
Speaker 1: point up the river where the sturgeons can swim. A
Speaker 1: crowd is beginning to gather along the banks to watch
Speaker 1: this annual rite of spring, in which thousands of sturgeons
Speaker 1: swim from Lake Wobegon one hundred twenty five miles downstream
Speaker 1: to spawn. These fish are a small number of the
Speaker 1: roughly forty thousand adult sturgeons in the Lake wobe Winnebago system.
Speaker 1: Wisconsin statewide lake sturgeon population is one of the healthiest
Speaker 1: on the planet. Theirs is a comeback story that sturgeon
Speaker 1: advocates are seeking to emulate around the world. Sturgeons were
Speaker 1: once so abundant in North American rivers that, according to
Speaker 1: indigenous lore, you could walk across the river on the
Speaker 1: fish's backs. Lake sturgeons, the fish that are spawning below
Speaker 1: Shawano Dam and top out around seven feet, once ranged
Speaker 1: from the Great Lakes and Hudson Bay south to the
Speaker 1: Mississippi Watershed, but by the nineteen seventies they had been
Speaker 1: largely wiped out of many of their native rivers. In Wisconsin,
Speaker 1: sturgeon populations had plunged years earlier, but foresighted management averted disaster.
Speaker 1: In nineteen fifteen, the state banned all fishing for lake
Speaker 1: sturgeons for a time, then carefully tinkeered with catch and
Speaker 1: size requirements that are still in place. Those catch limits
Speaker 1: are set by Margaret Statig, the states so called Sturgeon General,
Speaker 1: a moniker that tends to stick to all sturgeon bosses.
Speaker 1: State ag is a fisheries biologist with the Wisconsin Department
Speaker 1: of Natural Resources charged with overseeing the health of the
Speaker 1: Lake Winnebago population. She also collaborates with the federal government
Speaker 1: on a breeding program meant to restore lakes sturgeon numbers
Speaker 1: across their former range. This is her first spawning season
Speaker 1: her predecessor pleaded no contest to misdemeanor charges of theft
Speaker 1: of caviare and as she stands along the Wolf River
Speaker 1: watching the sturgeons prepare to spawn, she points to a
Speaker 1: female moving slowly along the rocks, bloated with eggs. She
Speaker 1: looks like a goodyear blimp, Estatic says, noting that the
Speaker 1: males are thinner and sleeker, more like torpedoes. They're more active, too,
Speaker 1: jumping out of the water from time to time, their
Speaker 1: bodies vibrating like plucked guitar strings. When a female sturgeon
Speaker 1: is ready to spawn, a group of males surrounds her,
Speaker 1: thumping her abdomen with their tails so vigorously that an
Speaker 1: onloquor perched on the river bank can feel the rocks
Speaker 1: shake until she extrudes her eggs. Thousands at a time.
Speaker 1: The eggs and milt fish sperm meet and saddle on
Speaker 1: the rocks or gravel at the bottom of the river,
Speaker 1: hatching as larvae a week later to ride the spring
Speaker 1: runoff back down the river. They vibrate when they spawn,
Speaker 1: Static says, referring to what the locals call sturgeon thunder.
Speaker 1: Once the thunder begins, Static's team, which is here to
Speaker 1: count and characterize the fish, also gets biddy busy netting
Speaker 1: the sturgeons and laying them on a tarp. One team
Speaker 1: member holds a fish's head, another the tail, while a
Speaker 1: third scans for telemetric tags that indicate whether the fish
Speaker 1: has been caught before. Static will set the next year's
Speaker 1: fishing harvest caps using an algorithm based on numbers of
Speaker 1: tagged and untagged fish. Thanks to these quotas, the Wolf
Speaker 1: River sturgeons are now healthy enough to sustain their own numbers.
Speaker 1: Federal officials hope to build on that success by breeding
Speaker 1: Wolf River sturgeons to restock rivers in other states. After
Speaker 1: each fish is measured, sexed, and tagged, it is handed
Speaker 1: off to group from the U. S Fish and Wildlife Service,
Speaker 1: which collects eggs and milt from the female and male sturgeons,
Speaker 1: mixes them together with a turkey feather it's soft enough
Speaker 1: to not damage the eggs as they are stirred, then
Speaker 1: transports the fertilized eggs back to the Warm Springs National
Speaker 1: Fish Hatchery and Georgia About a month later. Grow out
Speaker 1: facilities like the Tennessee Aquarium where Cahoja works pick up
Speaker 1: the fish and raise them in tanks, feeding them a
Speaker 1: diet of brine, shrimp and blood worms. After the fish
Speaker 1: have grown six inches long, they are released into rivers
Speaker 1: where sturgeons were long ago wiped out by overfishing, dredging, pollution,
Speaker 1: and dams. Since two thousand, the aquarium and its partners
Speaker 1: have reintroduced more than three hundred thousand lake sturgeons into
Speaker 1: the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers, hoping they will thrive in
Speaker 1: the stretches between dams. The first females are just now
Speaker 1: reaching reproductive age somewhere north of twenty years in lake sturgeons,
Speaker 1: though Cahooja and his team have yet to see evidence
Speaker 1: that the reintroduced fish have successfully spawned and the larvae
Speaker 1: have survived the perilous float through the river systems many
Speaker 1: stagnant reservoirs to transform into juvenile fish, but restocked lakes
Speaker 1: sturgeons have reproduced in river systems with longer free flowing
Speaker 1: stretches in the Kusa River basin in Georgia, and the
Speaker 1: researchers continue to hope when you start a sturgeon regeneration program,
Speaker 1: you are in it for a century, says Khuja who
Speaker 1: joined the team in Wisconsin to collect thin cliffs to
Speaker 1: chart hatchery genetics. It's a long term investment. Before Statics
Speaker 1: team finishes its work, members count out seventy three sturgeons
Speaker 1: to deliver to the Memomini tribe, whose reservation lies above
Speaker 1: Shiuano Dam. For thousands of years, the Mini people gathered
Speaker 1: each spring for a feast and ceremony. We would wait
Speaker 1: for the sturgeon to come after the long which are months,
Speaker 1: says David Grignon, the tribe's historic preservation officer. When the
Speaker 1: dam was built more than one hundred thirty years ago,
Speaker 1: the sturgeon migration was blocked and the ceremony ceased. A
Speaker 1: century later, thanks to the state's recovery efforts, Wisconsin officials,
Speaker 1: in collaboration with the tribe, began hauling the fish around
Speaker 1: the dams. They transport them up in big trucks and
Speaker 1: tanks each spring, says Grignon, and the tribe revised its
Speaker 1: ceremony that features dancers who mimic the movement of the
Speaker 1: sturgeons up the river. Tribal officials are also working to
Speaker 1: install a passage in one dam to restore the natural
Speaker 1: migration of sturgeons to the reservation, but for now, sturgeon
Speaker 1: generals like statig must serve as midwives too, trucking the
Speaker 1: fish across unbreachable human boundaries. Ironically, the very industry that
Speaker 1: caused the decline of some many sturgeon species is now
Speaker 1: playing a key role in their comeback and his family's
Speaker 1: sturgeon farm outside of Milan, Italy, Gio Giovannini stands on
Speaker 1: a metal grill above the water and points beneath his
Speaker 1: feet to a fish named Cavallo. Today, most of the
Speaker 1: world's caviar is produced in aquaculture facilities like this one,
Speaker 1: farms that sturgeon advocates hope can play a part in
Speaker 1: saving many European caviar species. The Gioini family raises three
Speaker 1: hundred thousand Adriatic Russians, stirlet and stellate sturgeons to sell
Speaker 1: on the global market. Most of those fish will be
Speaker 1: sold for caviar and meat, not Cavallo. Everyone had assumed Cavallo,
Speaker 1: which was sleek and jumped like a stallion, was a male,
Speaker 1: hence the masculine name. But in twenty twenty, after the
Speaker 1: family moved Cavallo from a site fed by spring water,
Speaker 1: to the farm's river fed tanks. Cavallo produced eggs for
Speaker 1: the first time she was around fifty years old. Now
Speaker 1: she's contributing those eggs to the future of the species.
Speaker 1: We give this lady sturgeon river water, and after three
Speaker 1: four years, miracles happened Giovanni. He says, it is also
Speaker 1: something of a miracle that Cavallo and the other Adriatic
Speaker 1: sturgeons on the farm exist at all. Sergio's father, Jacinto,
Speaker 1: purchased Cavallo and around sixty other Adriatic sturgeons from fishermen
Speaker 1: on the Po River and its tributaries in the mid
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies, before Sergo was born. They were among the
Speaker 1: last wild Adriatic sturgeons captured alive. The species was designated
Speaker 1: by the IUCN as critically endangered and possibly extinct in
Speaker 1: the wild in twenty ten. Though Giuscinto had experienced breeding
Speaker 1: trout and pike, he had no idea how to breed
Speaker 1: sturgeons in captivity. He had heard the Soviets had been
Speaker 1: successfully fertilizing Capcian Caspian sturgeon species since the eighteen sixties.
Speaker 1: In the nineteen forties, their scientists figure out how do
Speaker 1: introduce ovulation with injections of pituitary home warns, and in
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty nine they retrieved the eggs using laparoctomies invasive
Speaker 1: surgeries to access the gametes, much like human caesarean sections.
Speaker 1: When Giuccinto sought the Soviets help for Adriatic sturgeons in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy eight, they refused. Instead, he learned through trial
Speaker 1: and error with the assistance of French and Italian scientists.
Speaker 1: In nineteen eighty eight, around the time wild sturgeon fishing
Speaker 1: was largely banned, he finally succeeded using a non invasive
Speaker 1: stripping method, applying gentle pressure to a ripe female's abdomen
Speaker 1: to squeeze the eggs out of the fish, no incisions required.
Speaker 1: Soon after, he distributed his first adriatic fingerlings to conservation
Speaker 1: organizations for restocking, and then in the nineteen nineties he
Speaker 1: began raising Adriatic and other species for caviare production as well.
Speaker 1: It's thought every Adriatic sturgeon in the world today is
Speaker 1: descended from the breeding stock Chiacinto collected in the seventies.
Speaker 1: Looking back, says Baadas Strival, writer the World Wide fund
Speaker 1: for Nature's Sturgeon initiative lead. You can say the Giovannines
Speaker 1: have probably saved the Adriatic sturgeon. Experts hope these sorts
Speaker 1: of efforts can protect other species, such as the Russian
Speaker 1: and sterlet sturgeons and Belugas, the grandest, most coveted of
Speaker 1: them all. Belugas came under crushing population pressure when sturgeon
Speaker 1: numbers crashed in the twentieth century as a result of
Speaker 1: overfishing and dam construction. A black market free for all
Speaker 1: then flourished with egg bearing beluga females estimated to have
Speaker 1: fetched as much as three million dollars each. Belugas could
Speaker 1: once be found and fished in northern Italy. Now they
Speaker 1: are gone from Italian rivers and found only in very
Speaker 1: small numbers in the Caspian and Black seas and on farms.
Speaker 1: While the illegal caviar trade persists, expanding aquaculture makes it less.
Speaker 1: When I kill fish with my right hand, with my left,
Speaker 1: I can also be involved with conservation, says Sergio Giovannini's
Speaker 1: brother John, who along with Sergio, continues to provide breeding
Speaker 1: stock for ongoing Adriatic sturgeon reintroduction efforts. From the Giavigninis,
Speaker 1: the farmed sturgeons travel by truck to Cavier Processor Agrohitica
Speaker 1: Lombardo in the nearby industrial town of Calvisando, Augretique Death.
Speaker 1: Lombardo processes almost processes almost thirty one tons of caviare
Speaker 1: each year. Unlike the Giuviannini's breeding program, the caviar harvest
Speaker 1: still requires killing the fish. The sturgeons are unloaded into
Speaker 1: a V shaped slaughtering trough, then move to processing rooms
Speaker 1: where employees clad in surgical gloves and gowns, remove the
Speaker 1: ovaries and pull out hundreds of thousands of glistening dark eggs,
Speaker 1: accounting for up to twenty five percent of a fish's
Speaker 1: total weight. Then rinse, taste, grade whegh salt, hack, press,
Speaker 1: and finely can and label them for sale. During processing,
Speaker 1: tiny black rows scatter across the tables, wash buckets, and floor.
Speaker 1: When you buy caviar, you don't buy the eggs of sturgeon.
Speaker 1: You buy a perception, says Paolo Bronzi, president of the
Speaker 1: World Sturgeon Conservation Society. A luxury product, something special, just
Speaker 1: for rich people. Champagne caviar. A nice girl in the
Speaker 1: grating room. One of the workers offers me a taste
Speaker 1: of ost cetra caviar from the critically endangered Russian sturgeon.
Speaker 1: It's true, it tastes like abundance birth salt sea life.
Speaker 1: In Kazakhstan on the banks of the Sir Dharya, the
Speaker 1: Kazakh Fisheries officials smoke cigarettes and weight sympathetic as kut
Speaker 1: Cahouja's struggles to keep his footing on the silty river bottom.
Speaker 1: He and Neelie drag a net beneath the surface. On
Speaker 1: their first pass, they pull up countless branches and cockleburrs,
Speaker 1: along with a few minnows. At the river bank, they
Speaker 1: place each species they capture into a plexiglass container to
Speaker 1: measure and photograph, then untangle the net and wade back
Speaker 1: into the current, hoping that the next pass will dredge
Speaker 1: up a sturgeon no scientist has seen for more than
Speaker 1: fifty years and pave a path towards its recovery. Work
Speaker 1: like this is making an impact. Thanks to scientists and
Speaker 1: aquaculture experts like Cahoosia Static and the Giuvannines, sturgeon populations
Speaker 1: have begun to recover. In eastern North America. Populations of Atlantic,
Speaker 1: Gulf and Lake sturgeons have all mounted comebacks from the
Speaker 1: lows of the past century. Reintroduced hatchery fish like those
Speaker 1: from Wisconsin's Wolf River have returned to their native watersheds
Speaker 1: everywhere from New York to Minnesota, to Germany to China,
Speaker 1: and in some places are beginning to reproduce for the
Speaker 1: first time in decades. By twenty twenty one, after more
Speaker 1: than thirty years of restocking, scientists had discovered one beached
Speaker 1: egg bearing female and had detected juveniles in three Italian rivers,
Speaker 1: suggesting the restocked fish may have begun reproducing again in
Speaker 1: the wild. In April twenty twenty four, captive bread Yanksi
Speaker 1: sturgeons spawned in their native habitat for the first time,
Speaker 1: almost two years after a panel of international experts had
Speaker 1: declared the fish extinct in the wild. The world's sturgeon
Speaker 1: generals haven't given up on the most critically endangered species either.
Speaker 1: Khoja helped identify the last Alabama sturgeon netted in the
Speaker 1: wild in two thousand and seven. Biologists continued to comb
Speaker 1: the Alabama River for its namesake sturgeon and have found
Speaker 1: the fish's DNA in the waters there sad Lea Kuhuja
Speaker 1: won't find a seer Darya sturgeon on this expedition to Kazakhstan,
Speaker 1: but he plans to return the spring to look up
Speaker 1: river in Uzbekistan, where there are more shallow waters and
Speaker 1: braided channels that are easier to see. Ample He believes
Speaker 1: they are there and that the next expedition may be
Speaker 1: the one that resurfaces that spindled prehistoric long sought fish.
Speaker 1: I'll recognize it the minute it breaks water, Cahucia says,
Speaker 1: and my head will spin on my neck. Ancient adaptations
Speaker 1: sturgeons have survived for millions of years. What accounts for
Speaker 1: their staying power and sudden steep decline dwindling numbers. Once
Speaker 1: prevalent in fresh and salt water habitats across North America
Speaker 1: and Eurasia, sturgeon populations have dropped ninety four percent globally
Speaker 1: since nineteen seventy, with one species now extinct in the wild.
Speaker 1: Breeding blocked all sturgeon species, even those that spend most
Speaker 1: of their lives in salt water, migrate to spawn in
Speaker 1: fresh water. Rivers Dams obstruct the upstream journey of the
Speaker 1: adults and the downstream drifting of developing hatchlings. Jurassic bodies. Physically,
Speaker 1: sturgeons haven't changed much for more than a hundred million years.
Speaker 1: When the fish were first described by modern science, researchers
Speaker 1: assumed they were sharks because of their cartilaginous skeleton and
Speaker 1: tail shape. Next, unraveling the mysteries of the Condo Congo.
Speaker 1: For decades, one of the world's biggest rainforests was largely
Speaker 1: invisible to climate science. Now a new band of researchers
Speaker 1: raised in Central Africa is changing that, and what they're
Speaker 1: discovering there is revolutionizing our understanding of how to protect
Speaker 1: the planet. This article by Meilani Goobi. Within the dense
Speaker 1: canopy of the Congo Basin rainforest, the afternoon light began
Speaker 1: to fade, glinting off a soaring metal tower that rose
Speaker 1: steeply out of the jungle. Measuring one hundred eighty feet tall,
Speaker 1: the narrow steel structure resembled a massive cellular network antennae,
Speaker 1: although it was outfitted with a collection of far more
Speaker 1: critical scientific sensors. The wind had picked up, causing the
Speaker 1: spire to sway and whine with each strong gust, But
Speaker 1: a biologist named fabres Kimbasa appeared undaunted after strapping into
Speaker 1: a safety harness. He grabbed hold of a thin metal
Speaker 1: ladder and clamored briskly upward, leaving me to catch up
Speaker 1: as he raced toward a small platform at the very top.
Speaker 1: This particular structure is what's known as an eddy covariance
Speaker 1: flux tower. When it came online in October twenty twenty,
Speaker 1: it became the first effort to be located in the
Speaker 1: Congo Basin. For climate researchers who track greenhouse gas exchanges
Speaker 1: between the forest and the atmosphere. Such spires essentially act
Speaker 1: like enormous stethoscopes. They're capable of tracking how much carbon
Speaker 1: dioxide is released and taken up by the forest to
Speaker 1: help calculate the world's emissions being sequestered back into the earth,
Speaker 1: among many other factors, and so every day Cambsa makes
Speaker 1: the nerve racking climb to check the equipment's readings, monitoring
Speaker 1: with precision. Now other forest breathes around him. When you
Speaker 1: look at the data, you get the sense that you
Speaker 1: now have a special connection with the forest, he says,
Speaker 1: you can see things others don't. Today, after hours of
Speaker 1: baking beneath the hot equatorial sun, the rainforest seems to
Speaker 1: be exhaling, its canopy engulfed in clouds of mist. The
Speaker 1: recorded data showed a more specific trend over the past
Speaker 1: twenty four hours. Carbon dioxide levels in the area dropped
Speaker 1: substantially during the day as trees and other plants converted
Speaker 1: the greenhouse gas to oxygen during the photosynthesis, only to
Speaker 1: creep back up after sunset. This kind of work has
Speaker 1: never been more vital. Tropical forests were once responsible for
Speaker 1: sequestrian roughly half of Earth's carbon stored on land, but
Speaker 1: their overall efficacy is declining since a peak in the
Speaker 1: nineteen nineties. The Congo Basin encompasses the world's second largest
Speaker 1: rainforest beyond behind the Amazon, spanning about five hundred million
Speaker 1: acres of cross central Africa. Yet, while more than a
Speaker 1: thousand flux towers have been collecting data about gas exchange
Speaker 1: rates around the globe for decades, this region has been
Speaker 1: a blank spot until twenty twenty. Several years ago, an
Speaker 1: international consortium of researchers revealed that, based on a sample
Speaker 1: of tropical old growth forest plots across the Congo Basin,
Speaker 1: the rainforest appears to be storing carbon at a steadier
Speaker 1: rate than the Amazon, where the absorption rate has rapidly diminished.
Speaker 1: But the researchers also noted that since twenty ten, the
Speaker 1: African rainforest has seemed to be following a downward path
Speaker 1: similar to its South American counterparts. To figure out what
Speaker 1: is really happening and perhaps offer some solutions, can Basa
Speaker 1: and a cohort of newly trained Congolese scientists now operate
Speaker 1: out of a revitalized research station within the Young Gambi
Speaker 1: Biosphere Reserve, a nine hundred square mile protected area in
Speaker 1: the Democratic Republic of Congo DRC. The idea that kim Besa,
Speaker 1: who recently graduated from the nearby University of Kisangani, might
Speaker 1: be an important contributor to this research once seemed inconceivable.
Speaker 1: The DRC, where more than half of the Congo Basin
Speaker 1: rainforest lies, still suffers from deep poverty in a history
Speaker 1: of colonial exploitation, dictatorship, and conflicts that have both held
Speaker 1: back the development of a solid university system and restricted
Speaker 1: employment and resources for local scientists. But as the ecological
Speaker 1: significance of the region has become more apparent, it has
Speaker 1: drawn increased attention from global conservation groups such as the
Speaker 1: Center for International Forestry Research, which is teamed with governments
Speaker 1: and universities to invest millions in infrastructure, technology, and training
Speaker 1: of researchers. This concludes readings from National Geographic Magazine for today.
Speaker 1: Your reader has been Marsha. Thank you for listening, Keep
Speaker 1: on listening and have a great day.