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Speaker 2: Oh hey, it's your sister's friend who ate string cheese
Speaker 2: by just biting it, and you think of her with
Speaker 2: disdain every time you eat a string cheese. Ali Ward
Speaker 2: back with another episode of Ologies. So it's June and
Speaker 2: here in the Northern Hemisphere things are getting balmy. Short
Speaker 2: shorts are getting dusted off, mineral based coral safe sunscreens
Speaker 2: are being applied, and days are getting longer, partly because
Speaker 2: we may be stuck at a desk counting down until
Speaker 2: we can be at a barbecue or on an island.
Speaker 2: So let's do an episode on islands. Okay, great, we're
Speaker 2: already doing it. Now before we sail into the horizon,
Speaker 2: let's think a few folks, namely all the patrons on
Speaker 2: patreon dot com who contribute a dollar a month or
Speaker 2: more to submit questions. And thank you to all the
Speaker 2: folks who boost up the show by rating and subscribing
Speaker 2: and telling friends, and of course by reviewing, which we
Speaker 2: all know. I gingerly creep and choose a fresh one
Speaker 2: to read, such as this one by Charlie CC four,
Speaker 2: who apparently describes me as if leslie Nope, and doctor
Speaker 2: Johnson homeschooled and of green Gables until yesterday and then
Speaker 2: released her totally feral on an unsuspecting faculty lounge. Oh
Speaker 2: and she was goth and all of that was a compliment.
Speaker 2: Those are facts and I appreciate them so much. Oh
Speaker 2: and thank you Brian one nine five seven seven for
Speaker 2: calling me the frosting on the pop tart of science,
Speaker 2: which I'm going to tattoo on my back like a
Speaker 2: book blurb. Okay, so island ecology, let's disembark. Let's get
Speaker 2: into it. So the word island comes from some crackled
Speaker 2: old Proto Germanic for thing on the water. But the
Speaker 2: Latin for island is insula. So if something is very insular,
Speaker 2: it's inaccessible or cut off. Even insulation comes from the
Speaker 2: root for island. Isn't that cool? And payne in Latin
Speaker 2: means almost, so a paynee insula peninsula is almost at island.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much for still listening while we had
Speaker 2: that word nerd detour.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 2: Also, ecology comes from a root word for dwelling, so
Speaker 2: island ecology what dwells on these things in the water. Now,
Speaker 2: this ologist was just a chance meeting in the middle
Speaker 2: of the continent. I had just happened to have a
Speaker 2: few hours free in Omaha on my recent Patreon funded
Speaker 2: Midwest road trip to collect interviews and via Twitter, I
Speaker 2: was headed to Creighton University to meet with behavioral ecologist
Speaker 2: doctor Amy Worthington to talk about crickets boning, and as
Speaker 2: it turned out, also in the building was this ologist
Speaker 2: who studies how things live and develop and evolve on islands,
Speaker 2: how Darwinian dramas play out on these tinier insular stages.
Speaker 2: He is an adjunct assistant professor at Creighton University. He
Speaker 2: got his BA in biology the University of Saint Thomas,
Speaker 2: a PhD an ecology and evolutionary biology from Iowa State University,
Speaker 2: and did postdoc work on Galapagos endemic snails. So before
Speaker 2: I headed off to North Dakota that day, I was
Speaker 2: able to sit down with him for thirty short, precious
Speaker 2: minutes and ask him all about his research in where
Speaker 2: else the Galapagos Islands themselves, which he's still doing so
Speaker 2: we focus a lot on them as a model, and
Speaker 2: he explained to me how adaptations are different in smaller territories,
Speaker 2: how islands are impacted by invasive species, including humans. We
Speaker 2: talked about spirate history, a weird disappearance of a barrenness,
Speaker 2: goats throwing wrenches into things, giant animals, tiny animals, volcanoes, goldilocks, zones,
Speaker 2: and what we're doing to re establish populations threatened by
Speaker 2: the advances of you know, GPS and ships and planes
Speaker 2: and us so brave, some rocky waters and drop an
Speaker 2: anchor were island ecologists, Doctor Andy Kramer.
Speaker 4: We're going to end up talking about islands and stuff. Okay, cool,
Speaker 4: because I can, and I think that the best advocates
Speaker 4: for what I study are the.
Speaker 5: Things I study.
Speaker 2: Okay, so you are an island ecologist, and so does
Speaker 2: that mean you study how islands kind of keep a
Speaker 2: balance of.
Speaker 6: Everything in part One thing that we find with a
Speaker 6: lot of island systems is that things are not in
Speaker 6: balance really, and so yeah, they're just all kind of
Speaker 6: moving along at breakneck pace and things are incredibly dynamic.
Speaker 2: My mind is already blown because I thought, like, if
Speaker 2: you're an island and no one's come to fus with you,
Speaker 2: everything's perfect and don't touch it.
Speaker 6: Yeah, no, no, no, everything is always in flux. So
Speaker 6: like I work in Galapagos, which is a volcanic archipelago,
Speaker 6: and because of that, there are eruptions on a regular basis,
Speaker 6: and so places that look like really nice little habitats
Speaker 6: of the snails that I study. For example, you'd have
Speaker 6: a little nice system and you might go there and
Speaker 6: sample it, and then a year later it's covered in lava.
Speaker 5: Oh wow.
Speaker 6: So yeah, you always have to be ready for that change.
Speaker 6: And on top of it, down there there's the El
Speaker 6: Nino system hits it pretty heavily, and so there's incredible
Speaker 6: variation from year to year. And so yeah, things are
Speaker 6: always moving around, and.
Speaker 2: How long have you been studying islands?
Speaker 6: So let's see here. I finished my PhD into twenty fourteen,
Speaker 6: and then I moved on to the University of Idaho
Speaker 6: from Iowa State, and there are no islands in these places. Well,
Speaker 6: there are lots of islands, but not the ocean archipelagos
Speaker 6: that I'm most interested in.
Speaker 2: There, I stand corrected, I'm humbled. I am a horse's
Speaker 2: rear end.
Speaker 6: And so I was her first post doc and I
Speaker 6: got into that system.
Speaker 2: Then, so there are islands in Idaho and Iowa.
Speaker 6: I'm such a There are islands everywhere, so yeah, we'll
Speaker 6: think about it Biologically, an island is a patch of
Speaker 6: habitat that is isolated from other similar patches of habitat.
Speaker 6: So you could think of a pond or a lake
Speaker 6: as an island of sorts. Really, it's an island for
Speaker 6: the fish, right.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, you blow them on.
Speaker 5: It's like everything is in reverse. Yeah, sure, so.
Speaker 2: Quick side, real speedy. Let's define island. So the dictionary
Speaker 2: says it means a piece of land surrounded by water,
Speaker 2: or a thing resembling an island, especially in being isolated
Speaker 2: or surrounded in some way. So, yes, a lake could
Speaker 2: be an island. What this world is upside down?
Speaker 4: Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together.
Speaker 2: So I looked up with the largest islands on the
Speaker 2: planet are planet where and Greenland Friends is the chunkiest,
Speaker 2: although it may be three land masses connected by an
Speaker 2: ice sheet, so we'll see what happens there. Now. We
Speaker 2: typically think of islands as kind of a respite from
Speaker 2: other terrible human beings who'll ask us to email them
Speaker 2: back or look at pictures of their children, but islands
Speaker 2: also have historically been used as a storage heap for prisoners.
Speaker 2: Take for example, Riker's Island, Alcatraz France had Devil's Island,
Speaker 2: or just Australia the whole thing, which I'm sorry, mid
Speaker 2: Sild doesn't count as an island because you're technically a continent. Sucks,
Speaker 2: but let's give it up, Farossi's because your ancestors knew
Speaker 2: how to have a good time. I'm sure some of
Speaker 2: you descended from a person who was exiled for mooning
Speaker 2: a magistrate or something, and we love you for it. Now,
Speaker 2: what about tiny islands? I started to wonder what's the
Speaker 2: tiniest island? And then I went down this kind of
Speaker 2: existential wormhole about whether or not like a wee pile
Speaker 2: of sand and still water counts, if just one grain
Speaker 2: above the water line was the lilis island on Earth?
Speaker 2: How many microscopic islands exist right now? How many islands
Speaker 2: are being formed and destroyed right now? Luckily Google saved
Speaker 2: me from a williwanka tunnel of thoughts, because, according to
Speaker 2: the British government in eighteen sixty one, an island is
Speaker 2: any dot of land that is either a inhabited or
Speaker 2: b has enough grass for the summer's pasturage of at
Speaker 2: least one sheep very eighteen sixty one. For a long time,
Speaker 2: this tiny jagged nubbin known as Bishop Rock held the
Speaker 2: record as the smallest and in the Middle Ages. Guess
Speaker 2: who inhabited it, Yes, prisoners. Wardens would row them out,
Speaker 2: toss him a few loaves of bread and a bucket
Speaker 2: of fresh water, and then just peace out and let
Speaker 2: them die there now. Centuries later it was home to
Speaker 2: a lighthouse which had a pair of keeper's handy to
Speaker 2: run the lights and warn ships of the rocky shore.
Speaker 2: But then lighthouses became automated in the nineties, so those
Speaker 2: folks were like, I'm out of here. They got off
Speaker 2: the rock and another island then became the world's smallest.
Speaker 2: About the size of a tennis court in a river
Speaker 2: between New York and Ontario, you will find Just Enough
Speaker 2: Room Island. Yes, they went with the I can't believe
Speaker 2: it's not butter self aware naming convention here and what
Speaker 2: you see is certainly what you get. There's a tiny house,
Speaker 2: one tree, and water lapping all around the foundation of
Speaker 2: Just Enough Room Island. Just looking at photos makes me
Speaker 2: feel like I'm drowning. I compare, breathe. It looks like
Speaker 2: the final gasp of a sinking ship. But it's been
Speaker 2: there for a few generations. So Just Enough Room Island
Speaker 2: the tiniest in the world. Look it up.
Speaker 5: Really, you'll feel terrified.
Speaker 2: Now, can you own an island? I don't know. I
Speaker 2: don't know your bank statement. I googled can you buy
Speaker 2: an island?
Speaker 5: Or what?
Speaker 2: And shit you not? You can browse around private islandsonline
Speaker 2: dot com and you could call six acres of Nova
Speaker 2: Scotia Island with otters and deer all yours for four
Speaker 2: hundred thousand dollars. Six acres a Wisconsin private island with
Speaker 2: a house just over three hundred thousand and it appears
Speaker 2: to come with a futon and a barbecue. Now, a
Speaker 2: few islands and Belize were also priced fairly, but that
Speaker 2: might just all be in the title. Like Deadman Key
Speaker 2: has been on the market for a while, and I
Speaker 2: think I know why. Either way, you can buy an
Speaker 2: island for less than a condo in Los Angeles, which
Speaker 2: is inspiring and sad. Anyway, in island ecology, something that
Speaker 2: is an ecosystem of its own is like an island.
Speaker 6: And so really it's biologically. We think of patches of
Speaker 6: habitat as the important thing there with islands, and that's
Speaker 6: how we approach it with our work down in Galapagos.
Speaker 2: And so do you study land islands surrounded by water
Speaker 2: more than water islands surrounded by land.
Speaker 5: Absolutely, I'm a terrestrial person. Certainly feels good to be
Speaker 5: back on dry land.
Speaker 6: Okay, I can swim, but I'm not someone to go
Speaker 6: mucking about in the water collecting data points.
Speaker 5: And where are you from? Originally Wisconsin?
Speaker 2: And oh there's a lot of lakes and islands up there.
Speaker 6: Oh absolutely, yep. But I am from central Wisconsin, which
Speaker 6: is a bit more landlocked than the edges of the state.
Speaker 5: So I guess there you.
Speaker 2: And when did you start wanting to study ecology or
Speaker 2: biology or biodiversity.
Speaker 6: I think I fall into the camp of biologists of
Speaker 6: kind of the standard origin story, where you you know, like, well,
Speaker 6: you know, I always was out about in the woods
Speaker 6: and you know, and it was just kind of I
Speaker 6: guess faded in some way. I was pre med in
Speaker 6: college for a long time, and then I realized I
Speaker 6: really didn't want to deal with colds all day long.
Speaker 5: And I at.
Speaker 6: The time, I thought that that would have been what
Speaker 6: a medical professional would deal with. And I wanted to
Speaker 6: be able to, you know, start and want topic, study
Speaker 6: it for a while, and then do something else if
Speaker 6: I got bored. And I think being a scientist allows
Speaker 6: you a lot of freedom to move from topic to
Speaker 6: topic if you really.
Speaker 2: Want to lesson. Don't be afraid to change course if
Speaker 2: something feels like it's not the right thing. GTFO and
Speaker 2: do what you love, because there are a lot of
Speaker 2: people who would not love it as much as you do.
Speaker 2: It's your life. Enjoy the snails. And so you went
Speaker 2: to Idaho and you did a post doc and they
Speaker 2: were studying snails in the galopgos. Had you ever been
Speaker 2: to the Galopogos before, No.
Speaker 6: I had not, uh, and I uh it was it
Speaker 6: was quite an experience. Yeah, it's it's really special down there.
Speaker 6: And uh, but I mean, like, so, when you think
Speaker 6: of Galapagos, you think of like blue footed boobies.
Speaker 2: Let's allow Sir David Frederick Attenborough, historian and naturalist, to
Speaker 2: address these goofy dancy boobies, shall we.
Speaker 3: Yes, well, I think they're called boobies because, in spite
Speaker 3: of what you are inferring, which is one meaning of
Speaker 3: the word booby, booby also means something foolish, there'd be
Speaker 3: a big booby. Is also a perfect respectful thing to
Speaker 3: say to somebody.
Speaker 2: These legendary seafowl have beautiful powder blue webbed feet which
Speaker 2: they flash during very very sexy courtship dancing. They have
Speaker 2: these sensual, slow high kicks. They're kind of like ducks,
Speaker 2: but a bit odd, okay, And of course the Globgos
Speaker 2: also has marine iguanas, equatorial penguins, sea lions, a whole
Speaker 2: menagerie of island critters.
Speaker 6: And the finches in the finches and tortoises and all
Speaker 6: the things that the tourists get to see. You often
Speaker 6: don't think about the fact that there's like thirty thousand
Speaker 6: people are there. Oh yeah, there's tons of people down
Speaker 6: there in some places there are concentrated in the cities,
Speaker 6: of course, but their effects are felt throughout the archipelago.
Speaker 6: To grow food for that many people, you need to
Speaker 6: open up some parts of it for agriculture and so like.
Speaker 6: On a couple of the islands, the humid zone, which
Speaker 6: is kind of the high elevation portion of the island,
Speaker 6: it's completely converted. It's not native habitat anymore. And so
Speaker 6: that was a real surprise for me going down there
Speaker 6: the first time. It's just it's very different in some
Speaker 6: ways than what you would expect, at least in some
Speaker 6: of the parts.
Speaker 2: How long have those thirty thousand people lived there? How
Speaker 2: many people live there when Darwin came ashore.
Speaker 6: When Darwin came ashore there, I don't think was anyone
Speaker 6: living there at the time at all.
Speaker 2: Historical side note, this was in the fall of seen
Speaker 2: thirty five with the arrival of the HMS Beagle. Now
Speaker 2: for more on Darwin's history and how his dad was
Speaker 2: kind of a dick but bankrolled his adventures, which led
Speaker 2: to the theory of evolution, but also how Alfred Wallace
Speaker 2: got a little boned by fate. Listened to the evolutionary
Speaker 2: biology episode in which we also talk about birds. But anyway,
Speaker 2: the Galopos Islands means islands of the tortoises because of
Speaker 2: its many species of absolute unit huge turtles, which means
Speaker 2: that Galapagos tortoise means tortoise tortoise. So the oldest artifacts
Speaker 2: on Galapagos they've dated our pre Inca. And then a
Speaker 2: bishop of Panama stumbled upon the islands in the fifteen hundreds,
Speaker 2: letting Spain know, and then a bunch of surly pirates
Speaker 2: inhabited them like inconsistently for a few centuries until eighteen
Speaker 2: thirty two, and the new Republic of Ecuador took them
Speaker 2: from the Spanish and tossed some convicts, some farmers, a
Speaker 2: few artists out there. Mere years before Charles Darwin came
Speaker 2: by to collect some specimens and come up with his
Speaker 2: theories that would enrage some deeply religious people for hundreds
Speaker 2: of years to come.
Speaker 6: And that was first colonized by people who really stayed
Speaker 6: there for their lives I'd say a little over one
Speaker 6: hundred years ago. It hasn't been very long. The population
Speaker 6: really took off around nineteen seventy or so.
Speaker 5: And who are those people?
Speaker 2: Are they from Ecuador or are they from people who
Speaker 2: are like I'm from Britain and I wanted to just retire.
Speaker 6: You tend to have two groups, mostly those folks. Yeah,
Speaker 6: So you have the most of the people that live
Speaker 6: there are from mainland Ecuador, and so Galapagos YEP is
Speaker 6: part of Ecuador. It's one of the provinces. But then
Speaker 6: you have another set of people that have come from
Speaker 6: further afield, expats from name your western country. People that
Speaker 6: come there from further away tend to be eccentric and
Speaker 6: one could say quite interesting backgrounds.
Speaker 2: You're not, Doug, aren't you?
Speaker 6: And the first inhabitants of Galapagos were actually Westerners from Europe.
Speaker 6: I think Belgian and French or something along those lines.
Speaker 6: But yeah, they're really there was some of the first
Speaker 6: colonists were very weird people. There's some really strange stories.
Speaker 5: Really, any names that I should google.
Speaker 6: Well, La Baronessa, okay, in Floriana, which Floriana was the
Speaker 6: first island that was colonized, and there was a family
Speaker 6: that settled there, and.
Speaker 5: There's just really weird folks.
Speaker 6: Okay, yeah, like there's this whole, whole murder mystery story
Speaker 6: involved with that.
Speaker 2: Okay, yes, I got you. I will look this up.
Speaker 2: One of the first things that comes up when you
Speaker 2: google Love, Baronessa and Galapagos is a highly lauded twenty
Speaker 2: thirteen documentary titled The Galapagos Affair. Satan came to Eden.
Speaker 1: Friedrick and I had been made to look like a
Speaker 1: pair of eccentrics escape from some psychological Now.
Speaker 2: I don't know if I should spoil anything. I'm just
Speaker 2: gonna give you a brief over you because you'll be
Speaker 2: frustrated if I don't. Okay. So a German couple moves
Speaker 2: to Floriana. They love to be naked, and they rip
Speaker 2: out their own teeth for health reasons, and then they
Speaker 2: share one pair of metal dentures. Totally normal, nothing to
Speaker 2: see here.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 2: Another family moves in the Whimers and they're living off
Speaker 2: the land. But then a lady calling herself a baroness
Speaker 2: moves to the island with her two lovers and a
Speaker 2: manservant who may also be her lover. And this barrenness
Speaker 2: runs around with guns and terrorizes everyone. The naked couple
Speaker 2: and the other family do not like her much. And
Speaker 2: then she and a lover go missing in the night,
Speaker 2: and then the other lover flees but ends up shipwrecked
Speaker 2: and dead on a nearby island. Then the toothless nudes
Speaker 2: eat a rotting chicken and one of them dies but
Speaker 2: curses his wife on his deathbed, so the chicken may
Speaker 2: have actually been poisoned. Now the two remaining wives each
Speaker 2: write memoir accusing the other of homicide. It's just a
Speaker 2: bunch of white people on an island. They shouldn't be
Speaker 2: on making a damn mess, which is colonialism in a nutshell. Now,
Speaker 2: what is this kind of foot traffic in this kind
Speaker 2: of colonization due to island ecology. If you're doing research
Speaker 2: down there to see how the native flora and fauna
Speaker 2: are doing, I feel like that's a little bit of
Speaker 2: a different a different reason to go. But what are
Speaker 2: I mean, what are people doing to the islands.
Speaker 6: They're throwing a wrench in it in some ways there
Speaker 6: really are changing the ecosystems and the dynamics of those places.
Speaker 6: It's really hard to know exactly how research down there
Speaker 6: in some ways is straightforward and in others is really difficult.
Speaker 2: Andy says that there's a lot of variation year to
Speaker 2: year because of al Nino weather systems and other just
Speaker 2: earthy hiccups like the wet season might be all over
Speaker 2: the place months wise. So given that unpredictability, it's hard
Speaker 2: to directly correlate some ecological effects just to humans.
Speaker 6: But you can look at the islands where people are
Speaker 6: present and those that are not there, and you do
Speaker 6: see some pretty clear differences.
Speaker 2: So, yeah, what are some of the differences.
Speaker 6: Population sizes and a lot of them. So I look
Speaker 6: at I study the snails, right, see these really cool
Speaker 6: land snails, lots of different colors.
Speaker 2: I love how you can just hear him smiling talking
Speaker 2: about snails.
Speaker 6: They are arranged across the islands in a somewhat predictable way.
Speaker 6: The youngest islands there aren't that many yet. They haven't
Speaker 6: gotten there, they haven't diversified. On the oldest islands, there
Speaker 6: are relatively fewer species because those islands have worn down.
Speaker 6: They're smaller and the diversity has been stripped away in
Speaker 6: some ways. But kind of the goldilocks zone of the
Speaker 6: islands you see the most diversity. Unfortunately, that's where the
Speaker 6: people are.
Speaker 1: You've got quite a crowd out there.
Speaker 6: Oh so, for example, on Scent Cruise that had the
Speaker 6: highest diversity of these snails two dozen species.
Speaker 5: Pretty cool. They have.
Speaker 6: Also exhibited the greatest population growth, and the number of
Speaker 6: species there is way less than it used to be
Speaker 6: forty fifty years ago. We just can't find them anymore.
Speaker 6: And the problem is a lot of them were limited
Speaker 6: to the humid zone, and because it's now mostly farming,
Speaker 6: their habitat's gone. It's kind of weird though, because, like
Speaker 6: I said, it's really hard to understand those dynamics of
Speaker 6: how people impact species because, for example, the humid agricultural
Speaker 6: zone doesn't cover the entire humid zone. The highest elevations
Speaker 6: are off limits. They haven't really been touched by people.
Speaker 6: They're just too steep and I guess not really fit
Speaker 6: for farming. The snails have disappeared from those place.
Speaker 5: How come we don't know? We have no idea why.
Speaker 2: So another murder mystery, but with snails.
Speaker 6: And so there's just a big question, like we it
Speaker 6: seems like humans are at least in part responsible, but
Speaker 6: we just don't understand the system well enough. And I
Speaker 6: think that's the case for a lot of galapago species
Speaker 6: that are changing around.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so what does your research look at I mean,
Speaker 2: are you trying to figure out where do they go,
Speaker 2: when do they go, and what is influencing that?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 6: Well, and my research is kind of looks at those
Speaker 6: dynamics with a deeper lens on, not as much the
Speaker 6: human impacts as the evolutionary dynamics of these species and
Speaker 6: so like, people like the Grants have been working on
Speaker 6: the finches for years. Yeah, and they've learned a lot
Speaker 6: about adaptive radiation.
Speaker 2: So quick refresher course. Adaptive radiation sounds like getting comfy
Speaker 2: with nuclear waste, but adaptive radiation is actually an evolutionary
Speaker 2: biology term. It means organisms diversified pretty quickly from an
Speaker 2: ancestral species, so taking on a bunch of new forms,
Speaker 2: having adapted to different conditions, like a change in the
Speaker 2: environment like hellow new volcanic land or some new challenges.
Speaker 2: So think Darwin's finches, which apparently aren't true finches their passerines.
Speaker 2: Why don't we talk about that more anyway, Darwin's finches
Speaker 2: air quotes succeeded in becoming adapted to each island's environment
Speaker 2: and food sources. As evidence through specialized beak shapes, some
Speaker 2: beaks graded kraken nuts, others adapted to munch fruits. Now
Speaker 2: Doctors b Rosemary and Peter Grant of Princeton have been
Speaker 2: living and researching on the Galapagos Islands for decades, and
Speaker 2: last year one of their studies revealed that a new
Speaker 2: species of bird can emerge after just two generations, So
Speaker 2: islands things can change quickly.
Speaker 6: The more species you have at your disposal, the e
Speaker 6: here it is to understand the factors that are driving
Speaker 6: patterns that we see. Okay, we have seventy species of
Speaker 6: snails and so we have more power to ask those
Speaker 6: same questions in some ways. So I look at mostly
Speaker 6: color evolution because they're incredibly diverse in color. Oh. One
Speaker 6: of the things that is kind of neat about that
Speaker 6: is that you know, you have some species that are
Speaker 6: like brilliant white, others are jet black, every shade of
Speaker 6: brown in between, and it doesn't really seem like there's
Speaker 6: a rhyme or reason for that on the surface. But
Speaker 6: we found that when you really dig into it, one
Speaker 6: of the things that is apparent is that there are
Speaker 6: predators that are potentially really important.
Speaker 2: So at this point, Andy pull up a video on
Speaker 2: his laptop and it featured this spry kind of long
Speaker 2: legged brown and whitebird thrashing and object to the ground
Speaker 2: with the intensity of a drunk guy in a hair
Speaker 2: metal band destroying a hotel room in the nineteen eighties.
Speaker 5: That's amazing.
Speaker 6: But this I'm showing you right now a video of
Speaker 6: a Galapagos mocking bird predating a snail. And so what
Speaker 6: they do is they grab the snails by the aperture,
Speaker 6: so the opening of the shell, they find a really
Speaker 6: good rock or log or root, and they just go
Speaker 6: to town on it. You important prendrift until they break
Speaker 6: off the apex or the very tip of the shell.
Speaker 6: And that's the only place where the body, the soft
Speaker 6: body of the snail is actually attached to the shell itself,
Speaker 6: so then they can flip it around, flick off the
Speaker 6: rest of the shell, and just gobble it down. I
Speaker 6: know they're heartless, but these birds are really intelligent and
Speaker 6: they're very interesting.
Speaker 5: They follow you around all the time. And what kind
Speaker 5: of bird is it? Again? This is the Galapagos making bird,
Speaker 5: a mocking bird.
Speaker 2: And so when you're there, how long are you staying
Speaker 2: there and taking footage and taking samples and essentially collecting
Speaker 2: data points.
Speaker 6: It's expensive in Galapagos, and it's the cost to stay
Speaker 6: down there is about the same as it is in
Speaker 6: the States in some cases a little bit more, especially
Speaker 6: if you want to go to the uninhabited islands. Each
Speaker 6: trip is thousands of dollars. You have to charter a
Speaker 6: boat or helicopter if you're really lucky and have a
Speaker 6: lot of.
Speaker 5: Resources, which I don't.
Speaker 6: So it's expensive, and so we try to make the
Speaker 6: most of the time we have and so in total,
Speaker 6: typically it's just a couple few weeks at a time.
Speaker 5: Oh wow, yep.
Speaker 2: And then how do you make certain that the work
Speaker 2: that you're doing is benefiting local communities or indigenous communities,
Speaker 2: and how do you incorporate, you know, as many local researchers.
Speaker 5: Yep, we do.
Speaker 6: Galapago is kind of a special case because most of
Speaker 6: the local communities are directed towards tourism, right that's where
Speaker 6: the money is in the area. But there's also a
Speaker 6: lot of researchers down there already, and they have a
Speaker 6: pretty good system of scientists and local park rangers that
Speaker 6: help coordinate those efforts with the tourist industry. And so
Speaker 6: One of the things that we do down there is
Speaker 6: we talk to some of the tourists down there, We
Speaker 6: organize with some of the tour guides and can walk
Speaker 6: through some of our own research. A lot of scientists
Speaker 6: do that sort of thing.
Speaker 2: One of Andy's collaborators at the University of Idaho, Christine Parent,
Speaker 2: works with local schools teaching evolutionary and ecological ideas, so
Speaker 2: involving and sharing their findings with the Galapagos community with
Speaker 2: bilingual guide books, and they have workshops for Galapagos Park rangers,
Speaker 2: which is awesome. More scientists should do this now in
Speaker 2: the Research can Unity. There's also a term called parachute science,
Speaker 2: and I feel like I should touch on it. This
Speaker 2: would be a great topic for a whole episode. But
Speaker 2: essentially it means researchers just pop in by a country
Speaker 2: or territory, taking samples and then being like hey bye,
Speaker 2: and sharing the science just with other academics and never
Speaker 2: acknowledging the communities they may have just learned from or disrupted.
Speaker 2: So there's building awareness of avoiding this. And I read
Speaker 2: a blog post called the Dirty Truth starting a conversation
Speaker 2: about colonialism and field work that said a step toward
Speaker 2: correcting this is through community based participatory research CBPR, so
Speaker 2: that means involving the community, working with local scientists and
Speaker 2: acknowledging their contributions. So either way, this is a really
Speaker 2: fascinating and important topic and I would like to do
Speaker 2: it justice with someone who knows way more about the
Speaker 2: approach than I do in this aside, but it's something
Speaker 2: to be aware of, and it's great that Andy's collaborators
Speaker 2: are getting the community so involved with their work. Now
Speaker 2: with a quarter million visitors a year, Galapagos officials have
Speaker 2: to make sure there aren't any plants or animals or
Speaker 2: fungi tagging along on shoes or boats, so they have
Speaker 2: these biosecurity protocols to protect against invasive species. They have
Speaker 2: to inspect every boat and then they have to turn
Speaker 2: away any that have non native hitchhikers stuck to them.
Speaker 2: So so far, scientists have detected five non native marine
Speaker 2: species living in the island waters. Well until last week. Ooh,
Speaker 2: so a fresh study just published in the Journal of
Speaker 2: Aquatic Invasions documented fifty three non native marine species living
Speaker 2: in coastal waters around the islands. They thought it was
Speaker 2: just five. It's up to fifty three, and this includes
Speaker 2: things like muscles that bore into local corals. Now, this
Speaker 2: is what they call scientifically a big oh no. So
Speaker 2: why is preserving the Galopougo so important? Why is so
Speaker 2: much research center there? In essence, why is science so
Speaker 2: horny for these islands? And then why is the Galapago
Speaker 2: such a kind of obviously a hotbed of interest in
Speaker 2: terms of research. I mean, I know that this is
Speaker 2: such a basic, stupid question, but why Galapagos?
Speaker 6: No, No, it's awesome. The nice thing about islands and
Speaker 6: especially work in Galapagos is that you have these little,
Speaker 6: replicated experimental studies of evolution. Right, it's really hard to
Speaker 6: study the evolution of new species in real time. It
Speaker 6: can be done, but it is painstaking and some of
Speaker 6: the big macro evolutionary consequences of evolution, you know, the
Speaker 6: evolution of a completely new structure, for example, it takes
Speaker 6: a lot of time. And so what we try to
Speaker 6: do is we try to find places where the same
Speaker 6: tape has been played a few times.
Speaker 2: By tapes andy means challenges essentially.
Speaker 6: And we look to see whether it has happened the
Speaker 6: same way more than once, or if nature up with
Speaker 6: a new solution every time, and so Galapagos and other
Speaker 6: islands are really powerful in that way because you have
Speaker 6: the same closely related species colonizing a new island, then
Speaker 6: you let it run for a little amount of time,
Speaker 6: and then they colonize a new island, and you let
Speaker 6: it run for amount of time, and so you can
Speaker 6: actually look at the islands as snapshots of evolution through time.
Speaker 2: So I was going to list all the islands in
Speaker 2: order of age here, but y'all, there are eighteen main
Speaker 2: islands and four islets and they each have two different names.
Speaker 2: So I direct you to a site called Wykapadia dot com,
Speaker 2: which has a tidy list along with the many species
Speaker 2: found on each island. I'll give you two standouts. Fernandina
Speaker 2: aka Narborough Island is the youngest. It's still being formed
Speaker 2: by lava who fresh as hell, and there are hundreds
Speaker 2: of marine iguanas just kicking it there on black lava rocks.
Speaker 2: They have flightless cormorants, Galapagos penguins, pelicans, sea lions, fur
Speaker 2: seals and side note, my friend doctor Jason Goldman has
Speaker 2: a company called Saifari alongside Ology's lepidopterologist Butterfly expert phil
Speaker 2: Taurus and Jason told me that marine iguanas can shrink
Speaker 2: their skeletons when they're hungry and just need to reuse
Speaker 2: some of the minerals in them. They're the only vertebrate
Speaker 2: in the world that can do that. Now, the oldest
Speaker 2: island on the Galapagos is Espanola or Hood Island. Now
Speaker 2: this is the southernmost one. It has its own species
Speaker 2: of lava lizard, mockingbird, Galapagos tortoise. They have nesting waved albatrosses,
Speaker 2: swallowtailed goals, they got some bluefoot of boobies, they got
Speaker 2: Galapagos hawks, three species of Darwin's finches. Again, for the
Speaker 2: fullest of the islands and what lives there, please see
Speaker 2: the internet.
Speaker 6: So like the youngest island in Galapagos sixty thousand years old,
Speaker 6: it's the youngest snapshot. The oldest one is a little
Speaker 6: over three million years old. And then we have last
Speaker 6: slices through there and so we can then look at
Speaker 6: the trends and the patterns and see how those things
Speaker 6: change through time.
Speaker 2: Do you think that Galabagos shouldn't allow tourism or living there.
Speaker 6: It's a difficult question. I mean, in the end. It's
Speaker 6: the ship has.
Speaker 2: Hailed, specifically the HMS Bgle.
Speaker 6: You know, like, you have people living there. They need
Speaker 6: to have a way to live, and a lot of
Speaker 6: the damage has already been done in some ways. You know,
Speaker 6: some of the species of snails that we would love
Speaker 6: to study, they're gone. They're not coming back. Others are
Speaker 6: less certainly gone. We find populations scrolled away here and there,
Speaker 6: and that's always fun. But we, I think, need to
Speaker 6: think about in conservation what is important, what are our
Speaker 6: values and how do we want to organize them right?
Speaker 6: People are going to be there. I think that you
Speaker 6: should be able to to enjoy this amazing place. I've
Speaker 6: been able to. Yeah, you know, and I'm not selfish
Speaker 6: enough to think that only scientists should be allowed on
Speaker 6: those islands. That's not fair, and so you have to
Speaker 6: kind of make those decisions and then live with them,
Speaker 6: whatever those decisions are. But it's it's a really hard question.
Speaker 6: I don't have a good solution there.
Speaker 2: Have you ever read Galapagos by Kurt Bonnegat.
Speaker 5: No, but I have, I've heard of it. I haven't.
Speaker 2: It's so good, you got to read it. Is there
Speaker 2: any book? Is there any book or movie about the
Speaker 2: about islands that are always really stuck with you, or
Speaker 2: that maybe kind of like inspired you or fostered a
Speaker 2: love of islands.
Speaker 5: Well it has to be Jurassic part Yeah, come on, yeah,
Speaker 5: that's yeah.
Speaker 6: No, I just I always loved that that idea that
Speaker 6: you could have or you know, think back to the
Speaker 6: original Lost World right.
Speaker 3: Now, it's only a matter of time before this lost
Speaker 3: world is found.
Speaker 6: So Arthur Conan Doyle, that system is an island system, right.
Speaker 6: It was modeled after the Sky Island mountains tabletop mountains
Speaker 6: of South America. Those are real things. If you go there,
Speaker 6: you will find species on tops of those mountains that
Speaker 6: you won't find anywhere else. Oh, I go, and so
Speaker 6: those are islands, And I think that that's a really
Speaker 6: neat idea and the fact that you might have remarkable
Speaker 6: diversity hidden away somewhere, we just have to get there
Speaker 6: and find it and discover it is I don't know,
Speaker 6: it's really powerful as an idea for exploration.
Speaker 2: Can I ask you some listener questions?
Speaker 5: Sure?
Speaker 2: Okay, okay, Now before we get to your patron questions,
Speaker 2: a few words from sponsors at the show. But before that,
Speaker 2: the sponsors make it possible to donate to a different
Speaker 2: charity of theologists choosing each episode, and this week Andy
Speaker 2: chose Island Conservation, which she says does really great work
Speaker 2: restoring island ecosystems. So Island Conservation's mission is to prevent
Speaker 2: extinction by removing invasive species from islands, and an additional
Speaker 2: donation was made to Coology Project dot org. Ecology Project
Speaker 2: International is a nonprofit educational organization whose mission is to
Speaker 2: improve and inspire science education and conservation efforts worldwide through
Speaker 2: field based student scientists partnerships, so they empower youth to
Speaker 2: take an active role in conservation. And the majority of
Speaker 2: EPI students live adjacent to their project sites, which is
Speaker 2: so cool that local students get to participate in the research. Okay,
Speaker 2: now some words about so cool. Sponsors who make these
Speaker 2: donations possible.
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Speaker 2: Okay, back to your questions now. This first one is
Speaker 2: about how essentially galapaghost turtles got so honk and other
Speaker 2: species are soul. I know, but I'm going to ask
Speaker 2: you a couple of questions from listeners. Ok Anna Thompson
Speaker 2: wants to know how is there both island gigantism and
Speaker 2: island dwarfism.
Speaker 6: Ooh, that's a good one. So I think it depends
Speaker 6: on the species. Right, So you have some some things
Speaker 6: where some cases where it might be happening just kind
Speaker 6: of in a random manner. So with islands often come
Speaker 6: small population sizes, and with small populations you end up
Speaker 6: with drift, evolutionary drift where things kind of start moving
Speaker 6: in one direction and then there's nothing stopping them, and
Speaker 6: you might not have as much selection against that sort
Speaker 6: of a change. In other cases, there might be reasons
Speaker 6: for it, and so I think it really depends on
Speaker 6: the case. So if you're a predator and your prey
Speaker 6: is getting larger to avoid being.
Speaker 5: Eaten, I've been on more than I can chew, you know.
Speaker 6: Right, if it's too big to fit in your mouth,
Speaker 6: then it might not be eaten. Well, then you have
Speaker 6: selection to become larger as well. And so I think
Speaker 6: there's a mix of kind of natural so selective forces
Speaker 6: driving that change and kind of just who random yeft
Speaker 6: does random luck it happens. Anna Thompson wants to know.
Speaker 6: Can an island ever be restored after humans introduce new
Speaker 6: animals to the ecosystem that devastate wild populations?
Speaker 5: Yes, okay, and Galapagos is a fantastic example of that. Yep.
Speaker 6: So Carl Campbell and some of his colleagues down in
Speaker 6: Galapagos a number of years ago started the project. I
Speaker 6: think it was Project Galapagos or Isabella anyway.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, you'll have to look that up.
Speaker 2: Yes, it was called the Isabella Project. Okay.
Speaker 6: But they what they did is they started removing the
Speaker 6: goats that have been just eating Galapagos to death. The
Speaker 6: goats had been just eating the hell out of it,
Speaker 6: and it was a huge damage to the system, and
Speaker 6: it was a problem for the tortoises. They didn't have
Speaker 6: anything to eat. And so they the Carl Campbell, some
Speaker 6: other scientists and the park went through and just they
Speaker 6: just killed them all. Oh shoot, And it was a huge,
Speaker 6: huge undertaking. In one year or in a few years,
Speaker 6: they ended up killing over one hundred thousand goats.
Speaker 5: Oh my god. Yeah, there were tons of them.
Speaker 6: And they said on some places, some parts of the island,
Speaker 6: it actually stank if you were there. But yeah, but anyway,
Speaker 6: since then, the systems have recovered quite a lot, and
Speaker 6: so right now they're working on removing the rats, which
Speaker 6: are another problem.
Speaker 5: Yeah introduced.
Speaker 2: Right, no word on what to do about the humans.
Speaker 2: But what are some of the where did it go?
Speaker 2: What are some of the most extreme examples of isolation effects?
Speaker 6: Let's see isolation effects. So I think one of the
Speaker 6: things about islands is that the farther away you get
Speaker 6: from the continent, whatever the nearest continent is, the fewer
Speaker 6: species are able to get there.
Speaker 2: This makes heaps of sense. Of course, organisms are like, ugh,
Speaker 2: that island looks so cool, but it's so far The
Speaker 2: costs and risks and potential benefits must be weighed kind
Speaker 2: of like going to a friend of a friend's birthday party.
Speaker 2: That's a forty five minute train right away. Will there
Speaker 2: be food and someone to mate with? You never know
Speaker 2: till you get there.
Speaker 6: Yeah, And so this was one of the biggest first
Speaker 6: steps in understanding island biogeography or the the the collection
Speaker 6: of species that you find on islands. And like, that's
Speaker 6: some thing that you see in Hawaii, right. So Hawaii
Speaker 6: is about as far away from anything as you can get,
Speaker 6: and as a result, few species have gotten there. But
Speaker 6: those that have, once they get a foothold, then they
Speaker 6: have a world open to them, and in the intervening
Speaker 6: time they've evolved into all kinds of interesting species. And
Speaker 6: so you see that with these snails. You see it
Speaker 6: with Darwin's finches. In Hawaii. There are some really cool insects.
Speaker 6: Some spiders have really diversified. The silver swords, which are
Speaker 6: a group of plants that have diversified into just like
Speaker 6: all kinds of different habitats.
Speaker 2: Okay, I looked up silver swords and there are one
Speaker 2: handed weapons found in the Elder Scrolls versus Skyrim. I
Speaker 2: don't know what that means, but apart from nerds, dabbies.
Speaker 2: Silver swords are also plants endemic to Hawaii, and they
Speaker 2: are really well adapted to low nutrient soils, so buster soils,
Speaker 2: so they can hang out in rocky lava flows in
Speaker 2: bogs and open forests like no big deal, which is
Speaker 2: pretty badass.
Speaker 6: And so you see that one ancestor ends up playing
Speaker 6: lots of different roles in you know, long into the future,
Speaker 6: and they've you know, they evolve into just tons of
Speaker 6: different species. So you see that a lot in the
Speaker 6: really isolated archipelagos that are around for a long period
Speaker 6: of time. Madagascar is another example of that. Yeah, right,
Speaker 6: you know, it's been its own thing forever, and so
Speaker 6: that's why you have lemurs there that there are tons
Speaker 6: of species.
Speaker 5: They're still finding new species.
Speaker 6: I love a lemur. India was like that too, right,
Speaker 6: for a long period of time it was on its
Speaker 6: own and so if you go to India and compare
Speaker 6: it to other parts of Asia that are nearby, they're
Speaker 6: just completely different faunas because of that history.
Speaker 2: If you were to wash up on an island, what
Speaker 2: would you take with you?
Speaker 6: I think for irony, I would probably want to bring
Speaker 6: Treasure Island as a book.
Speaker 5: But otherwise, I don't know.
Speaker 6: I'm a pragmatist, so I try to think of all
Speaker 6: the things that would help me survive.
Speaker 5: You can bring one thing to an island.
Speaker 6: Oh, Marguerite to mix in tequila.
Speaker 2: Okay, that's two things, but in this case I let
Speaker 2: him mix them together before, so it's just one thing.
Speaker 2: What's the worst thing about your job.
Speaker 5: Or about eyelids?
Speaker 6: The worst thing is that I'm not able to get
Speaker 6: down there as much as I want to. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 6: some of the things that keep me from going down
Speaker 6: there more often I are not really bad things, right,
Speaker 6: Like I've got a daughter, Yeah, I just I hate
Speaker 6: spending that much time away from her, and so I
Speaker 6: try to limit my time out in the field that way.
Speaker 6: But I you know, it's kind of nice to be
Speaker 6: home too.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 6: So yeah, like that's there's kind of some give and
Speaker 6: take there. But otherwise, things I hate, well, I don't know.
Speaker 3: That's it.
Speaker 6: I don't love doing answering that type of question.
Speaker 2: I always ask the thing that you hate and the
Speaker 2: thing that you love the most?
Speaker 5: Yes, okay.
Speaker 2: Now you may remember from behavioral Ecology aka the Cricket
Speaker 2: Sex episode, doctor Amy Worthington, who well hot gossip is
Speaker 2: also Andy's wife. What and doctor Worthington said, uh, dead
Speaker 2: cricket smell.
Speaker 5: Oh, yeah, I don't have to worry about that. Yeah,
Speaker 5: I know.
Speaker 6: Oh, dead snail snip spell is the worst, really, the
Speaker 6: dead snail smell.
Speaker 5: Oh that's bad. Yeah, I trust you.
Speaker 2: What do you love the most about islands or about
Speaker 2: what you do?
Speaker 5: Oh?
Speaker 6: What I love most about what I do is being
Speaker 6: able to move onto a new question when I want
Speaker 6: to m hm. And with islands there's always new questions.
Speaker 6: The thing that we are working on right now is
Speaker 6: we're actually kind of getting away from the islands and
Speaker 6: we're looking at the continent. We're trying to find the
Speaker 6: closest living relatives of those snails on the mainland to
Speaker 6: road trip around Ecuador, And in a couple of weeks
Speaker 6: I'll be going down to Peru and we'll be running
Speaker 6: around there looking for more snails in the desert valleys.
Speaker 6: And here's helping we find some cousins.
Speaker 2: Pilot snail trip.
Speaker 5: Oh, it's fantastic, except when you get stuck. That's the
Speaker 5: worst in mud. Yeah, see there's something you hate, Okay,
Speaker 5: that's true.
Speaker 6: The isolation of the field work sometimes leads to some
Speaker 6: harrowing drives.
Speaker 2: Oh god, I bet, I bet, there's definitely not like
Speaker 2: quickie marts along the way. But no, no, no, no,
Speaker 2: thank you so much for doing this.
Speaker 6: Oh, thank you, Ellie. This was a lot of fun.
Speaker 6: I did not expect to have an interview today. When
Speaker 6: I got it, I know.
Speaker 5: Well, thank you so much for doing this. This is great.
Speaker 5: Thank you. Yay No brascot.
Speaker 2: So tap on the shoulder of a nearbiologist and ask
Speaker 2: a smart person a stupid question. Because old land is crumbling,
Speaker 2: New Land is being burped up from lava all the time.
Speaker 2: Nothing is permanent. What do you have to lose?
Speaker 6: Oh?
Speaker 2: And you can follow Andy on Twitter at Andy Kramer
Speaker 2: A N D y k R A E M e R.
Speaker 2: There's a link in the show notes and it's up
Speaker 2: at aliward dot com, slash ologies, slash island ecology now
Speaker 2: ologies is at ologies on Twitter and Instagram. You can
Speaker 2: say hello there, I'm at ali Ward with one L
Speaker 2: on Twitter and Instagram. Thank you Hannah Lippo and Aaron
Speaker 2: Talbert for admining the Facebook Ologies podcast group full of
Speaker 2: wonderful compassionate nerds. Ologiesmerch dot com has all of your
Speaker 2: ologies podcast Merch needs. If you post a photo to
Speaker 2: Instagram tagged with hashtag ologies merch, I repost to you
Speaker 2: on Mondays. Thank you Shannon Felts and Bonnie Dutch for
Speaker 2: helping manage that. They are two sisters who have a
Speaker 2: brand new, wonderfully fun podcast called You Are That and
Speaker 2: it's out now wherever you get podcasts. Their first episodees
Speaker 2: just dropped like yesterday, June tenth, So show them some love,
Speaker 2: subscribe the witty, Amazing ear Candy, I love them. Assistant
Speaker 2: editing was done by Jarrett Sleeper of mind Jam Media
Speaker 2: and of the mental health podcast Make Good, Bad Brain.
Speaker 2: And thank you to Stephen Ray Morris of the per
Speaker 2: Cast and See Jurassic Right for being an island on
Speaker 2: the storm and helping assemble the show each and every week.
Speaker 2: I'd be just lost at sea without you. And if
Speaker 2: you stay till the end of the episode, you know
Speaker 2: I tell you a secret. And this week's secret is
Speaker 2: I guess it's just more of a pro tip. But
Speaker 2: I recently moved and instead of cardboard boxes that you
Speaker 2: have to tape up and then throw away, I rented
Speaker 2: these bins made out of recycled plastic and the company
Speaker 2: delivered them and then I get to keep them for
Speaker 2: two weeks, so I have time to unpack them, but
Speaker 2: it's also making me unpack them because there's a deadline
Speaker 2: and then the company will come back and pick them
Speaker 2: up and you can stack them four on top of
Speaker 2: the others on a dolly. So they were fast to
Speaker 2: move and they're easy to reopen if you want to
Speaker 2: toss more in one. Anyway, ten out of ten would
Speaker 2: move with Again, I use the company Leafy, but there's
Speaker 2: also like Piggyboxes is another one. You can just google
Speaker 2: plastic moving boxes or moving bins. Not having to tape
Speaker 2: up box bottoms and then hope that they don't fall apart.
Speaker 2: Saved so much time, so much stress. So pro tip
Speaker 2: from old dad Word. Also my dad Word advised numbering
Speaker 2: the boxes and keeping a master list of what's in
Speaker 2: each number box and I totally did not do that
Speaker 2: and I should have. So there's some good advice from
Speaker 2: granddad Word fun podcast. Okay, if you go to an
Speaker 2: island and you're not from the island, please try to
Speaker 2: respect the inhabitants in the culture and uses little single
Speaker 2: use plastic as possible, and don't let her and make
Speaker 2: sure your sunscreen is beach safe. Okay it's almost summer.
Speaker 2: Yay forbye Pacadermatology, biology or doe, zoology, lithology, technology, meteorology, otology, anthology, zeriology, elinology.
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