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Seeds with Cheryl Birker by Golden State Naturalist

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Seeds are far more present in our lives than most of us realize. They compose everything from our morning coffee to our favorite chocolates and have helped shape the world as we know it. California native seeds are just as vital, and protecting them is a way of safeguarding our very future. Join me and Cheryl Birker at the California Botanic Garden as we explore the hidden world of seeds. In this episode, we take a deeper look into the difference between spores and seeds, seeds that require fire to germinate, seeds that survived for 2,000 years in the Judean Desert, and how safeguarding seeds is a way of safeguarding life as we know it. Links: Get 15% off your order of California native seeds from the California Collection by Nature’s Seed when you use the code GOLDEN15 at checkout. Speak up for California’s public lands with CalWild.Cacao Seeds as Currency California Plant RescueSeed Germination DataSeed photos by John Macdonald Seed Savers Exchange (the catalogue mentioned at the end of the episode)Support Golden State Naturalist on ⁠Patreon⁠ and get perks starting at $4/month. Follow me on ⁠Instagram⁠. My website is ⁠goldenstatenaturalist.com⁠. Get podcast Merch. The theme song is called “i dunno” by grapes and can be found ⁠here⁠.Photo: Prickly poppy seeds by Michelle Fullner, taken at the California Botanic Garden.

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Dawn Redwoods | Save the Redwoods League

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Dawn Redwoods Facts FACT WHERE Tallest Dawn Redwood in China: 120 feet Lubeiba, Hubei Native range: Sichuan-Hubei region South-central China To learn more

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This week we’re grabbing a branch, pulling ourselves up off the forest floor, and stumbling into a secret garden in the sky.

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Researchers use sound to determine soil’s health - The World from PRX

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Four years ago, the Restoration Ecology team at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, published new research that uses super-sensitive microphones to listen to and analyze the health of soil. The researchers say this new method could replace traditional ones, which are expensive, disruptive and laborious. Reporter Bianca Hillier reports. This story originally aired on Sept. […]

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KQED interview with the author

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David George Haskell on ‘How Flowers Made Our World’ | KQED

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Acclaimed biologist David George Haskell’s new book “How Flowers Made Our World” paints flowers as revolutionaries that have determined the evolution of all life on earth — and who need our help to weather climate change.

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Native To Right Here: the plants, animals, and people of Tuushtak

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On 11 April 2019, a spacecraft crashed on to the Moon. The Israeli Beresheet probe was supposed to land gently in the Mare Serenitatis, a huge plain of basalt rock formed in a volcanic eruption billions of years ago. It would have been the first privately funded mission to land on the Moon. But owing to a last-minute instrument failure Beresheet did not slow down enough and slammed into the surface at 500 kilometres per hour.

From the Moon's point of view, this was a failed alien invasion. Beresheet was carrying animals called tardigrades, which look like stunted, microscopic caterpillars. They may not seem like an obvious candidate for interplanetary travel, but tardigrades are famed among biologists for their ability to survive conditions that would kill almost any other animal. It is possible that some of them survived the crash.

Don't worry, we haven't seeded the Moon with new life. The tardigrades were sent out in an inactive state, and that is how they will stay: they cannot become active again without water, something the Moon is notoriously short of. Eventually the extremes of temperature and searing solar radiation will kill them all - but it may take a surprisingly long time.

A picture taken by the Israeli Beresheet spacecraft, of the moon, minutes before it crashed on to the surface with its tardigrade passengers. Photograph: -/AFP/Getty Images

How did tardigrades become so resilient that they can survive being transported through space, and possibly endure even a high-speed lunar crash? What is their secret, and could we ever use it ourselves? Perhaps most profoundly, why did they evolve to be so tough when most animals didn't?

Tardigrades are not hard to find. Go outside on a damp day and find a patch of wet moss or lichen. If you have a microscope handy you may well be able to find tardigrades puttering around in the water. They look like a cross between a woodlouse and a caterpillar, shrunken to microscopic size.

Despite their size, we have known about tardigrades for a long time. They were first described by the German naturalist Johann August Ephraim Goeze in 1773. He called them "little water bears", because of the way they walked. The name tardigrade (which translates roughly as "slow stepper") was bestowed on them a few years later by the Italian priest-turned-biologist Lazzaro Spallanzani in his book Opuscoli di Fisica animale e vegetabile ("Booklet of Animal and Vegetable Physics").

They can survive being frozen to a degree above absolute zero. They can be heated up past the boiling point of water

Thomas Boothby

Despite their tiny size they are complex animals. "They're built of maybe 1,000 cells, but they're just as complex as a cockroach or a fruit fly," says Nadja Møbjerg at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. That includes mouthparts for puncturing algal cells and other food sources.

Tardigrades also have very variable reproductive strategies, says Lorena Rebecchi of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia in Italy. While some have males and females, others are hermaphrodites, while still others reproduce by parthenogenesis or "virgin birth".

However, none of these details is as famous as tardigrades' extraordinary resilience. Thomas Boothby at the University of Wyoming in Laramie lists the threats they can endure: "They can survive being dried out. They can survive being frozen down to about a degree above absolute zero, which is the temperature at which all molecular motion stops. In their dry state they can be heated up well past the boiling point of water. They can survive thousands of times as much radiation as we can. And they're the only animal we know of that can survive prolonged exposure to the vacuum of outer space."

The basic story of tardigrades' survival has been clear ever since Spallanzani studied them. He encountered them when he took sediment from a gutter and added water to it. What had previously looked like a bunch of lifeless grains became vigorously swimming tardigrades.

When Spallanzani's tardigrades dried out, they shrivelled up, shrinking to about a third their normal size. They stopped moving, stopped breathing, stopped doing pretty much everything. They became tiny immobile lumps. Scientists call this their "tun" state. Tardigrades can stay in tun for years, only to revive when they encounter water again.

Johann August Ephraim Goeze, who first discovered tardigrades, calling them 'water bears' because of the way they walked. Photograph: The Picture Art Collection/Alamy

The tun state challenges the popular idea that there is a hard line between life and death. A tardigrade in tun is not doing any of the things we associate with being alive, but it is not dead either.

This can sometimes be misinterpreted, says James Fleming of the University of Oslo Natural History Museum in Norway. "Something that has been bandied around a lot in popular media is the idea tardigrades can live for hundreds of years," he says. In reality, tardigrades only have a few weeks of active life. The interval between when a tardigrade is born and when it dies might be very long, but only if it spends most of that time in this "super-hibernation" to escape an environmental threat. "Really it's best to think of it as a lifespan of a few weeks, but not necessarily consecutive," says Fleming.

Entering the inactive tun state clearly offers a way for tardigrades to survive. If conditions become too dry, too cold or too radioactive, they can shrivel into a tun and wait it out. But most animals cannot do anything of the sort. Even if we humans could survive losing most of the water from our bodies - which we absolutely cannot - we would still die: DNA and other key molecules in our cells would become damaged, so when we rehydrated we would find that nothing in our bodies worked.

Something must be happening inside tardigrades' bodies to preserve them in the tun state.

In the late 20th century, the American biologist John Crowe and the Danish researcher Hans Ramløv both homed in on one key molecule: a sugar called trehalose. In tardigrades, and other animals that can survive being dried out such as nematode worms, trehalose often accumulates as the water leaves their bodies, and it is destroyed when they rehydrate.

"Trehalose is an important molecule," says Rebecchi. In particular it seems to be good at preserving the outer membranes of cells, which might otherwise be ruptured as they dry out, or if the animal becomes so cold that ice crystals form inside it.

"At high levels, trehalose forms these super-viscous environments that kind of slow everything down," says Boothby. "While damage might still accumulate, it will only do so slowly - so provided the tardigrade does not have to stay in tun too long, it should be OK."

A tardigrade in the tun state is not doing any of the things we associate with being alive, but it is not dead either

Boothby adds that tardigrades also use other "mechanisms of stress tolerance". In 2017 his team showed that some tardigrades make unusual proteins, which preserve the innards of their cells. "They start filling up the cells of the tardigrade," says Boothby. "You can think of that as like turning the inside of a cell from water into honey." Eventually the cells start to resemble glass.

This ability depends on the three-dimensional structure of the proteins. All proteins are long molecules like chains, which are twisted into pretzel shapes. Most proteins have a handful of preferred shapes that their chains like to fold into, but the tardigrade proteins do not have preferred shapes and instead just flop around seemingly at random. Only these "intrinsically disordered proteins" can form the glass-like substance.

"It slows down all these biological processes that are going on inside the cell," continues Boothby. That includes slowing down damage. For instance, most proteins do need to be the correct shape to work. Being surrounded by water helps them to do that. "If water is removed from the system, most proteins unfold and break," he says. "By creating this super-viscous environment inside the cells, these tardigrade disordered proteins actually slow down processes like well-folded proteins unfolding and breaking."

Intrinsically disordered proteins from tardigrades are so good at protecting biological material, we might find them useful for storing medicines such as vaccines. One bottleneck in the fight against Covid-19 is that many of the vaccines need to be kept cold. But it should be possible to preserve them at room temperature using intrinsically disordered proteins. "We are actively working on that," says Boothby. He explains that the proteins have evolved to protect tardigrade cells, not vaccines, so his team is making small tweaks to optimise them for this new purpose. "We have patents out on these things and have some partnerships," he says. "If all goes well, hopefully we will see this technology out soon."

Even intrinsically disordered proteins are not the whole story. There is also a protein called damage suppressor (Dsup), which was identified in 2016 by Takekazu Kunieda of the University of Tokyo and his colleagues. Dsup binds to DNA in the cell, protecting it from damaging chemicals.

"We don't know how the protection works, but the protection works anyway," says Simon Galas of the University of Montpellier in France.

Last year, Galas's team published a study of tardigrades in the tun state which revealed that structures resembling the ramparts of a castle form outside their cells. "This species can synthesise a specific structure that surrounds every cell of the tardigrade, that can protect the tardigrade for desiccation, but only desiccation," says Galas.

There is more to come, predicts Boothby. "There are almost certainly a myriad other mechanisms and tricks that these organisms are using to protect themselves," he says. Intrinsically disordered proteins seem to be good at protecting other proteins, and Dsup protects DNA, but there are many other substances and structures inside tardigrade bodies that must be preserved.

Indeed, some of tardigrades' abilities remain almost entirely mysterious. For example, in 2020 researchers found a new species that can resist intense doses of ultraviolet radiation. It seems to do this by fluorescing, but it's not clear what the fluorescent substance is or how it works. If it can be identified, the team suggest it could form the basis of a new kind of sunscreen.

Studies such as these point the way to an explanation for how tardigrades are so resilient, but they don't tell us why. If such resilience is possible, why is it only these peculiar little animals that have it? The answer may lie in tardigrades' evolutionary history.

The biologist Georg Mayer prepares Petri dishes containing tardigrades in order to study their nervous system at the Institute of Biology, Leipzig, Germany, 2013. Photograph: Waltraud Grubitzsch/DPA/PA Images

Researchers think they have the basics of the story. Like the other major animal groups, tardigrades originated in the sea. Millions of years later, along with other groups such as insects, they began venturing on to land. But there they encountered a problem: becoming dried out.

Other land animals such as reptiles evolved waterproof skin so that they did not easily lose their body water, but tardigrades never did. "They don't have a skin that allows them to hold on to their water when they go on land," says Møbjerg. Instead they evolved the tun state, a way to become dormant when conditions become difficult.

On this view, tardigrades first evolved resilience to desiccation to survive on dry land. Their strategy was to enter a dormant state with their cells and organs packaged away by protective chemicals. This inadvertently also made them resilient to other stressors including cold and radiation, because temporarily halting all biological processes works just as well for those situations too.

If this is correct, tardigrades' near-invincibility is a kind of accident. An accident that worked so well that they can even preserve themselves in outer space.

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The microscopic animals can withstand extreme conditions that would kill humans, and may one day help in the development of Covid vaccines

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An infectious disease expert explains the tick-borne illness and why it’s so often misunderstood by patients and the practitioners advising them.

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Critical Mast: Oak Trees with Zarah Wyly by Golden State Naturalist

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We need every single species of native tree here in California, but our 20+ varieties of native oaks are the most crucial of all. In this episode, join me and my guest, Zarah Wyly, on a walk through a relatively new oak woodland in Folsom dotted with two ancient, magnificent oak trees. Learn the story of how this unusual woodland came to be, find out why oaks are my all-time favorite trees, and explore such questions as: What kinds of life are supported by oak trees? If I plant one, will it wreck my house? What do you have to do to acorns to make them edible? Why does it look like some oak trees are growing apples? How do oaks spread such heavy seeds? What kinds of variety is there among different oak species? What does any of this have to do with the Declaration of Independence?And here’s a handy list of the other podcasts participating in Critical Mast! Future EcologiesJumpstart Nature Nature’s Archive Learning from Nature: The Biomimicry PodcastOutside/InOk, get ready for a lot of links. Here you goooooo! The Declaration of Independence and the Hand of Time The Nature of Oaks, by Douglas Tallamy National Resources Conservation Service Resource on GrazingSecrets of the Oak Woodlands, by Kate Marianchild Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall KimmererCity Nature Challenge Sacramento Tree Foundation Calscape (to help with planting natives!) Daniel Airola’s research on bird diversity in urban forests The theme song is called “i dunno” by grapes, and it can be found here. Follow me on Instagram @goldenstatenaturalistMy website is www.goldenstatenaturalist.com You can find me on Patreon here. Episode photo by Bendp

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How Ticks Dig In With a Mouth Full of Hooks | Deep Look

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Transcript (click to view)

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[00:00:00] Michael Hawk: Today's guest is the brilliant Dr. Wendy Bohon, an earthquake geologist who has a passion for making the complexities of our planet accessible and engaging. Dr. Bohon is known for her dynamic science communication. In fact, you may have seen her viral videos through her Dr. Wendy Rocks channel on YouTube and other social media platforms.

[00:00:19] Today, Dr. BoBohonelves into the fascinating world of geology and earthquakes, exploring their impact on our environment and society. In this episode, you'll discover how earthquakes occur, how earthquake geologists figure out how often a fault might rupture through fascinating paleoseismology. And what terms like magnitude and epicenter really mean, and how they can very often mislead us, too.

[00:00:43] And did you know that the Richter scale is actually no longer used? In fact, it began phasing out way back in the 1980s. So what replaced it? Check in around 49 minutes to hear the story. It turns out that earthquake magnitude is actually a pretty poor way of understanding earthquake impacts, too.

[00:01:00] Dr. Bohon has some excellent metaphors to help us visualize what really happens to a fault during an earthquake rupture, and why no two earthquakes are ever exactly the same.

[00:01:10] We also discussed some of the common myths about earthquakes, from breaking down the misconception of earthquake weather, to clarifying the real risks of seismic events. For example, did you know that in some respects, people in the eastern United States actually face greater potential impacts from earthquakes than those, say, in California?

[00:01:29] We also talked about how you can prepare for the inevitable. And can people cause earthquakes? The answer is a resounding yes. Now, if we can cause earthquakes, does that mean that we can trigger small earthquakes to release pressure and fault systems and avoid the big one?

[00:01:44] Well, you'll have to listen to find out.

[00:01:46] Today's episode was one of the most fun ones that I've done in a long time. You can find Dr. Wendy Bohon at wendybohon.Com and DrWendyRocks on YouTube, Instagram, and blue sky. She's also on TikTok under DrWendyRocksIt. I promise you her content is spectacular. So check her out. So without additional delay, Dr.

[00:02:07] Wendy Bohon.

[00:02:09] Wendy, thank you so much for joining me today.

[00:02:11] Dr. Wendy Bohon: It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.

[00:02:14] Michael Hawk: As we were chatting a little bit here before hitting the record button, this podcast is very often about topics of ecology, but I've always had a deep interest in broader natural sciences geology included. And I don't know why it took me so long to reach out to you, but I finally did. And I'm really looking forward to the discussion that we're going to have today.

[00:02:34] Dr. Wendy Bohon: I'm so glad you did. I love to talk about geology and earthquakes and the natural world, so it's a great fit.

[00:02:40] Michael Hawk: And now I live in California, which is known for some earthquakes and plate tectonic actions. So it's a doubly meaningful for me.

[00:02:49] Dr. Wendy Bohon: It's always helpful when it has a direct impact on you personally, for

[00:02:53] Michael Hawk: Yeah, I'm right in between the San Andreas fault and the Calaveras fault,

[00:02:58] Dr. Wendy Bohon: I know where you are.

[00:02:59] Michael Hawk: Yep. The Calaveras is a little bit closer, barely by maybe a mile or two. And that seems to be the one that's been more active for us in recent years. Yeah.

[00:03:09] Dr. Wendy Bohon: Yep, although, the activity on faults isn't always indicative on the level of danger that they pose. No,

[00:03:17] Michael Hawk: Yeah, and I think we're, we'll talk a lot about that here in a moment, so maybe back up a little bit and, tell me a little bit about what you do, you, you said you're an earthquake geologist, so what does that look like from a day to day standpoint

[00:03:32] Dr. Wendy Bohon: people often confuse being a seismologist with being an earthquake geologist, which is totally understandable. So seismologists, which is a more common thing. Thing I think people are used to hearing about study kind of the interior of the earth and the waves that the earthquakes produce.

[00:03:47] I'm interested in how earthquakes impact the surface of the earth. And so I study how they change the rocks, how they change the shape of the ground and how they impact humans and our infrastructure and our systems. So, for me, on a daily basis, that can mean looking at earthquakes around the world doing research to understand earthquakes, but more specifically to understand certain fault systems.

[00:04:10] Like, say the San Andreas, right? We want to know how often there are earthquakes, how big those earthquakes can be, when the last earthquake was, answering those sorts of questions.

[00:04:22] Michael Hawk: Gotcha. And I guess it makes sense in retrospect, but before this discussion I would have conflated those two professions for sure. So does this part of what you do then do you look into sort of the paleo record to assess the periodicity of earthquakes on certain faults and

[00:04:38] Dr. Wendy Bohon: Oh, yes, that is my favorite thing. There's nothing I love more than sitting in a fault trench, staring at a dirt wall. So, um, earthquakes are interesting because they happen on a geologic time scale, and that's much longer than a human time scale. And so the number of earthquakes that we, as humans, observe on any one fault is going to be very limited.

[00:04:59] And so in order to understand the history of a fault system, we have to use various tools. And one of those is called paleoseismology, or the study of ancient earthquakes. And what we do is we will find an active fault, we dig down into the fault, make a sideways cut across the fault. And then we look at how the layers of rock and dirt have been disturbed by past earthquakes.

[00:05:20] Then we can date those different layers that have been disturbed to figure out when earthquakes happened in the past. And by looking at when those earthquakes happened, we can start to get a cadence for about how often earthquakes happen on that fault or that part of a fault. And that gives us the information that we need to figure out the recurrence interval or about how often earthquakes can happen on that section of that fault.

[00:05:44] Michael Hawk: Can you get a sense for the intensity of the earthquakes that happened in the past as well? Gotcha.

[00:05:49] Dr. Wendy Bohon: Order to do that, we have to have multiple trenches on the same fault. And so, the magnitude of an earthquake is the way we describe the amount of energy that was released or the size of the earthquake, and that is related to About how much of the fault that ruptured. So it's related to the area of the fault that broke the length and the depth inside of the fault itself.

[00:06:12] So if we have multiple paleo seismic trenches across one section of a fault, and we see an earthquake in all of those, we can start to get an idea for what the magnitude of that earthquake was. If we only see it in a couple of them, that would be a smaller magnitude earthquake versus if it's the entire length of a very long fault, then we would know that Fault section is capable of generating larger magnitude earthquakes.

[00:06:36] It

[00:06:40] Michael Hawk: way. I was thinking more, I guess there's different fault systems we'll get to. So I'll withhold my comment here that I was about to say until we get to that section. But I am curious. What led you into this field in the first place?

[00:06:52] Did you live around earthquakes or discover it later in life or, how

[00:06:56] Dr. Wendy Bohon: was a later in life discussion. So I actually I was very much an arts kid, right? I was into theater. I did ceramics. I wrote poetry. I loved, guys with long hair playing guitar and doing sappy love songs like that was my total jam. And I had actually a theater major in college. And while I was there, I took a, just a general education class.

[00:07:19] And it's one of those big lecture halls with like 325 people, you know, and I'm just frantically scribbling notes thinking, this is so interesting. There's this guy's talking about soils and how soils are made and the vegetation and the ecology around soils. And I look around and I am the only person that's awake.

[00:07:36] And I was like, Oh, I probably should take some more geology classes. So we ended up picking up a geology major. In addition to the theater major, just because I thought it was really interesting, but it was just truly like an interest. And then I moved to LA and I was a professional actress in Hollywood.

[00:07:51] And then I felt the Hector mine earthquake. That was a magnitude 7. 1 that happened in the middle of the night out in the desert, but it was widely felt across all of Southern California. And I was hooked. Yeah, there were aftershocks rolling in all night. And I was like, this is, it's scary, but it was also exhilarating.

[00:08:09] And I had. So many questions. And so I went and I drove to the USGS in Pasadena and was like, I want to volunteer. And they were like, no, because it was the day after a big urban earthquake, right? They were a little busy. So I finally I did. I went back and I said, you know, I really want to volunteer. I want to learn more about earthquakes.

[00:08:29] This is my background. And a woman there named Lisa Wald was like, well, I could use some help doing some outreach and education stuff. And I was like yes, thank you. So I started doing that. Then I eventually ended up getting hired at the USGS. And then I decided that I wanted to learn more about the science of earthquakes.

[00:08:46] And so I went back and got a master's degree and a PhD in earthquake geology. So you never know how one thing is going to literally shake up your life.

[00:08:54] Michael Hawk: Yeah it's interesting to hear that story. And so often. I know for career changes, it begins with volunteering somewhere.

[00:09:01] It's great that you were able to convince them to take you in, which then led to this whole new direction. And the other thing is like you mentioned the theater major, I imagine that probably comes in pretty handy when it comes to science communication.

[00:09:14] Like, some of the techniques to reach people and engage people.

[00:09:17] Dr. Wendy Bohon: yeah, absolutely. Those so called soft skills are actually really important in a lot of different jobs. But especially for me with earthquake hazards, I feel that I have a societal responsibility to explain the science behind earthquakes and to act as a bridge between the scientists and the people that can actually apply the information to help make infrastructure safer, to make communities safer, and for each individual person, right, to take some have some agency with their own personal safety when it comes to earthquakes.

[00:09:47] Because, there's no such thing as a natural disaster. What we have are natural hazards that become disasters when we have vulnerable people and vulnerable infrastructure. So if we can reduce vulnerability through education, through preparation, then we can really, start to lower our risk and make sure that we don't just survive the earthquakes, but that we thrive in their aftermath.

[00:10:09] Michael Hawk: So we'll make sure to talk about. How people can get that sense of agency and take action a little bit later. But I'm intrigued. I think of this podcast as a means of science communication.

[00:10:22] So since I brought up that topic, I'm curious as what you would like to see more from. Either from the scientists themselves in terms of how they can communicate and reach people better or from people like me who are coming at it from a more of a amateur enthusiast perspective.

[00:10:40] Dr. Wendy Bohon: I love this question. I don't know that I've ever been asked this question before in terms of scientists. I think that we can do a much better job explaining our science, explaining why it matters and explaining, how it matters to individual people as well as tilt lawmakers and, organizations when it comes to science enthusiasts.

[00:10:58] That's my sweet spot, right? Because we're all mhm. Having this human experience together and geology in particular is an observation based science. We all touch the ground every day. So rocks, the soil, the dirt and the things that happen because of natural processes impact all of us. And so tapping into people's curiosity I think can go a long way towards helping people understand.

[00:11:23] Things that they've never been exposed to. There's no reason most people should know any of this stuff about earthquakes. No reason, right? We don't really talk about it in formal education unless you really love the Discovery Channel and catch, like a Documentary or something. There's no reason people should know.

[00:11:38] So this is a great opportunity to get some of that information out there Not just because it's interesting because oh my gosh, it's so interesting But also because it has real world implications and could actually help to save people's lives

[00:11:50] Michael Hawk: Yeah, I'm thinking again through the sort of ecology lens. And I think a lot of people when they're out exploring, looking at an ecosystem, looking at the plant life, the, and on up the trophic levels to to the animals understanding the soils is very often where it all begins. Like we have this Ridge.

[00:12:07] Along the Calaveras fault, in fact it's made of serpentine rock and serpentine soils. And we learn in ecology that those are kind of low nutrient soils and we learn how they were created deep sea. I don't remember I'm, I'll probably cut that out, but it's like a deep sea process that that somehow this deep sea rock gets, thrust to the surface over time.

[00:12:30] And then it creates this unique habitat where you only find specific plants. You don't find them anywhere else. So like, to me, that's a direct tie in for uh, topics that we're talking about here today. Just

[00:12:43] Dr. Wendy Bohon: absolutely. And if we're thinking of California, for instance, a lot of the land use patterns and the settlement patterns across California can be they're dictated in part by the location of the faults. So in the desert, you can often tell where a fault is reaching the surface of the earth because there will be a line of springs and like palm trees.

[00:13:03] Because when a fault moves, it grinds up the rock, which makes it easier for water to move up and down. And so you'll have more water in the system, and so you create these really interesting, like, ecosystems along the fault. And then people can, they know that water is there. It makes for easy transport.

[00:13:19] Most of the missions in California are actually built on fault scarps, because they have such beautiful views. So a lot of the things that we do in California are based around the landscape. And the landscape here is controlled largely by the tectonics.

[00:13:32] Michael Hawk: So why don't we take this as an opportunity to talk about the different processes that lead to earthquakes

[00:13:39] how would you I mean, I think there's a lot of different reasons why earthquakes occur, but if you were to start, how would you explain that to somebody?

[00:13:46] What are the primary causes of earthquakes?

[00:13:48] Dr. Wendy Bohon: right. So let's just start the story at the beginning. Okay, so that the surface of the earth is covered by a thin skin of rock that we call the crust. And if we think about cutting the earth in half, it's almost like a hard boiled egg. You have that thin, brittle skin of rock, and then you have the white part of the egg.

[00:14:04] That would be like the mantle. And then you have the inner part, which is the core and you can actually divide up the earth in different ways. You can divide it up by how. Different parts of the earth behave, their mechanical properties, or you can divide them up by their composition. And so if we think just about the crust, mantle, and the core, that's based on their composition.

[00:14:22] But we have something called tectonic plates, and that's basically covering the surface of the earth, and that's made up of the things that behave brittly. So the crust and the very upper part of the mantle. It matters that those are brittle because only things that are brittle will break. So if we imagine chocolate chip cookies, okay, we're pulling out a beautiful, fragrant pan of chocolate chip cookies.

[00:14:45] You pull one off, it's burning your fingertips, and then you can bend it, right? Because it's still nice and soft and hot, but once they cool, you can't bend it anymore. It's gonna crack. It's gonna break because it's cold. And so that is what causes earthquakes in the lithosphere. So the brittle part of the crust in the upper mantle is like cold and brittle.

[00:15:05] Cold is relative here, but yeah, Only the rocks that are brittle are the ones that can break, and that breaking causes earthquakes. Okay, so now we have the lithosphere that's covering the earth, and there are tectonic plates. It's broken up into these big pieces, and these big pieces are moving around over the surface, and the places where they come together are the places where we have the most earthquakes.

[00:15:26] So they can come together in different ways. They can slide past each other. This would be a strike slip or a transform fault. So the San Andreas fault is a strike slip fault. They can push together, and that's called a convergent boundary. And that's where you get subduction zones where one, tectonic plate is diving down, sliding down underneath the other one.

[00:15:48] That's where we get the largest earthquakes. You can also have divergent boundaries. And this is where the tectonic plates are pulling apart from each other. This is like the mid Atlantic Ridge. So this is where new crust is being created, being born all the time. And so those three places, Are the places where we have most of the world's earthquakes.

[00:16:07] Michael Hawk: So a lot to unpack which is exactly what I was looking for. So just a terminology question before we get much further. So the lithosphere is inclusive of the crust and portion of the upper portions of the mantle that are a

[00:16:20] Dr. Wendy Bohon: Yes,

[00:16:21] exactly.

[00:16:22] Michael Hawk: brittle. Okay. Yeah, that's one of those things. I think when I went through school, they didn't really talk about lithosphere until maybe college.

[00:16:28] So they left that. That extra bit of information out at first and now when I think about the tectonic plates, the easy and overly simplified sort of model I have in my head is that they're they're floating around on top of molten earth and these plates are moving in different directions, which is why you have the different types of faults that you talked about.

[00:16:53] Convergent, divergent, strike, slip. Yeah. Now the question that I have is, since, like, to me, it seems like the crust is contiguous. So even though they're plates, they connect everywhere. so there's, it's hard for me to envision how is there momentum? How is there a force that's causing these plates to move?

[00:17:16] I have an idea but. I don't have a good way of explaining it. So I'm hoping you can help me here.

[00:17:21] Dr. Wendy Bohon: that's such a good question and I love the way you framed that. again, it's like, there's lots of pieces and parts to dig into. So I'm going to do my best to answer that. People often think of faults as like big cracks in the ground, like you see in Iceland, and that's not really what it looks like.

[00:17:37] You do have these tectonic plates that are crushed together. There, there is continuous crust, continuous ground everywhere. There's no, like, big, deep hole to fall into, but we have this model that, there's this line between these 2 plates, right? And 1 is 1 plate and 1 is the other plate. And this exact spot that you could put your finger on is the boundary.

[00:17:59] But it's actually much more complex than that. It's like a zone where it's come together and it's like broken up. So, for instance, the San Andreas and I'll keep referring to that just because it's the most famous fault system. I feel like people have a pretty good idea of where it is. That's a very broad zone of faulting and deformation related to the plate boundary.

[00:18:19] Now, what's moving the plates? This is the coolest thing. About geology. So much of it. You have to use creative ways to understand it, right? Because we can't really see inside the earth and we can't go down there and touch it. So we have to use all of these creative tools in order to figure out what's happening.

[00:18:34] And as we get better technology and more powerful computers in order to make models, we learn a lot more. So when I was in school, like we learned kind of the convection model, you can imagine like you're boiling a pot of water and you have something on the top and it's, you're going to have those convection cells that are rotating away from each other and they're moving things on the surface.

[00:18:53] But now what we think is happening is you get you get a push from the divergent boundaries, like the mid Atlantic Ridge, you have molten material that's coming up and that's pushing the plates apart. But you also have slab pull. So, as a tectonic plate starts to dive down into the mantle, the heat and pressure will actually cause the minerals to change and get more dense.

[00:19:17] And as they get dense, it's like having a bowling ball on the end of that plate that starts pulling it down faster and faster. So, you have both slab push and slab pull that's causing the plates to move through time. And, I also learned that the mantle is like molten rock, right? And when I had that conception in my head as a student, it was like looking down into a volcano and it's this bubbling red liquidy mass.

[00:19:44] The mantle is actually more like silly putty. So, if you have silly putty, it looks like a solid, but if you set it down on a table, it will start to spread out really slowly. So it's like both a liquid and a solid, not really either one. It depends on what the pressures are on it and what's happening.

[00:20:01] So, that's more like what's happening inside the mantle. It's not a bubbling brew, a witch's brew down there. It's more like a silly putty.

[00:20:09] Michael Hawk: Right. So it's a little more viscous and not so, movable, I suppose underneath all that pressure.

[00:20:15] Dr. Wendy Bohon: Right.

[00:20:16] Michael Hawk: , it's really interesting to hear that description. And the other, I guess, sort of related question, we, I think a lot of us are familiar with the super continent Pangea and how, like over time, Plates have moved and separated and, contract or contract is not the right word but reconverged,

[00:20:33] can we Infer that the plates that exist today are pretty similar to the plates that existed, all those hundreds of millions of years ago?

[00:20:43] Dr. Wendy Bohon: Oh, no, man, they are changing through time. They will break up. They'll come back together. And where the land masses are, what parts are because each plate can have a land mass and it can have, ocean, so continental crust and oceanic crust. It's just crust. One is just low enough that it has water on top of it, but what that looked like, it changed.

[00:21:03] It changes through time continuously. And so the plates are moving very slowly. Again, it's this human versus geologic time scale issue. The plates are moving really slowly to us, but over geologic time, we have millions and billions of years for these things to reconfigure. And so we have had super continents in the past, Pangea, Gondwana, Laurasia.

[00:21:24] And we still deal with the consequences of those past supercontinents today. So I was saying, most earthquakes happen along the boundaries of the tectonic plates. But if we think about the United States as a whole, we, most of the United States, sits on the North American plate. And so the edge of the North American plate runs through California.

[00:21:45] And then, the other side is the Pacific plate. L. A. sits on the Pacific plate, but the rest of the continental United States sits on the North American plate. But we have earthquakes in the plates interior, right? We have earthquakes in, there was a big one in New York that people felt. There was recently one in Maine that people felt.

[00:22:01] There was a earthquake in Texas not too long ago.

[00:22:04] Michael Hawk: I've always been fascinated with the the new Madrid fault area in Missouri, which had, phenomenally large earthquakes.

[00:22:11] Dr. Wendy Bohon: Yes. So there's lots of these old fissures, old cracks, old faults. From when we had different super continents, they collided, creating faults, they tore apart that created faults. And so as the plates are moving, they're not moving exactly the same rate across the whole entire landmass. And so the interior of the plates are also accumulating stress and strain through time.

[00:22:36] And eventually that stress and strain will be released in earthquakes on these old faults. But. There's a couple of things that happen, right? We don't necessarily know where all those faults are because they don't have earthquakes very often and because many of them are covered with a layer of sediment.

[00:22:53] The Appalachian Mountains have been eroding for 250 ish million years. And so all of that rock and sediment is covering up the bedrock where we would actually see those faults. So they're not very active and they're buried. Difficult to see where they are and what's happening. But also, earthquakes in those areas because the crust there is very old, cold and dense, earthquake waves travel really well through that kind of environment, as opposed to the West Coast, where our rocks are more warm.

[00:23:21] They're broken up. The waves don't travel as well. So earthquakes on the East Coast and in the Midwest are often felt over about a 10 times broader area than a similarly sized earthquake on the West Coast. And so Even small earthquakes on the East Coast that are happening as a result of, old faults and the, accumulation of very slow stress and strain through time.

[00:23:41] They're felt by people. And it can be really jarring and upsetting because it doesn't happen very often. But when it does, lots of people tend to feel them.

[00:23:50] Michael Hawk: Right. A lot of population centers and I, I mentioned the New Madrid fault. I know that Charleston has a history of some major earthquakes in South Carolina and just thinking about what you just said, where they, earthquakes can be felt approximately 10 times further. I'm assuming the impact. Is also similarly proportion where, like, the impact of buildings and infrastructure and things like that.

[00:24:12] Dr. Wendy Bohon: Yeah, that's an excellent point. And that gets to the idea and the difference between hazard and risk. So, on the East Coast, there's a pretty low earthquake hazard, right? They have a high hazard for certain things like floods or snow storms or hurricanes, but they have a low earthquake hazard. On the West Coast, we have a high earthquake hazard.

[00:24:31] We have lots and lots of earthquakes. But on the West Coast, we're generally prepared for earthquakes. We have seismic building codes. We have a population that knows what to do. Our infrastructure has been built or modified in order to withstand earthquake shaking. for listening. On the East Coast, even though they have a low earthquake hazard, they have a very high earthquake risk, because when earthquakes do happen there, the buildings are not built to withstand earthquake shaking, people don't know what to do when an earthquake happens, and so the consequences of even a moderate size earthquake can be really outsized just because that hazard risk is a little bit different for the East Coast than it is for the West Coast.

[00:25:09] Michael Hawk: So this might be a little bit speculative and I do want to. Roll back to causes of earthquakes, because I've taken this in a different direction. But when we think about, again, just like, I'm not, I don't study earthquakes, but just my top of head knowledge, I'm aware of a few of these big events that I want to say we're like magnitude 7.

[00:25:27] 0, 8. 0 Charleston and new Madrid, and that's over a couple hundred year period. So is it fair to say when you say that there's a greater risk in the East coast That were generally underprepared in those parts of the country.

[00:25:42] Dr. Wendy Bohon: Oh, yeah, new Madrid earthquakes, so an 1811 and 1812, there was a series of very large earthquakes in the mid continent. Centered around the Mississippi River Valley, Missouri in particular. And they, the magnitude, we didn't have seismometers, so we don't know exactly what the magnitude was the way that we would measure it today.

[00:26:00] So we have to rely on what is recorded in the rocks and what's recorded in people's diaries and letters. And because earthquakes are felt over a broader area, it can sometimes be difficult to figure out exactly what the magnitude was by using these subjective reports of what happened. So we think they were magnitude seven, maybe magnitude seven plus.

[00:26:21] That's a huge earthquake, especially to happen, in the middle of the country where they don't happen very often. And so people are not generally prepared. And even now structures aren't built to withstand earthquakes. People don't generally know what to do when there's an earthquake. And so they can be really potentially damaging and dangerous.

[00:26:39] A magnitude seven earthquake in California, if it's under a population center, could be, extremely problematic. And then you take that and you put it on the East Coast, where you also have these population centers, but populations that aren't prepared could really be devastating.

[00:26:53] Michael Hawk: So, as I hinted before, we will talk a little bit more about like what you would like to see individuals, governments, et cetera, do perhaps, and, to address this risk, but back to causes of earthquakes. So I think we have a general understanding of kind of some of the simple. Plate tectonic action that's happening.

[00:27:14] What's sort of the next level that you would go into?

[00:27:17] Dr. Wendy Bohon: Right? So, as the tectonic plates are moving, they're causing stress and strain to build up inside of the rocks. And as that stress and strain builds up, eventually it's. Something people don't know is that rocks are actually elastic y. They can bend. Not a lot, but some. And so you have a whole lot of rock.

[00:27:35] You can actually have some deformation that happens inside the rock. Some bending before it breaks. Eventually, the rocks aren't going to be able to take up any more of the stress and strain that's caused by the motion of the tectonic plates. And the rocks are going to break. And when they break, they release energy that we feel as shaking.

[00:27:53] So, it's if you snap your fingers, what are you doing? You're pushing two surfaces together. Eventually, you overcome the friction between your fingers and your fingers slide, and they release energy that we hear a sound. So it's just like the same thing in a fault. You move the rocks, you build up stress and strain.

[00:28:11] Eventually, it moves. It releases energy that we feel as shaking. That's the seismic waves.

[00:28:16] So every earthquake produces different kinds of waves, regardless of what kind of fault it happens on. And those different types of waves travel at different speeds. The first wave is a P wave, a primary wave. I call it a push pull wave. That wave, if you imagine that it's coming towards you from my voice, every little particle of rock is going to move back and forth in the direction that the wave is moving.

[00:28:38] Dr. Wendy Bohon: And that wave travels at around six kilometers per second. Earthquakes also produce S waves. I call them shaky, snaky waves. They're shear waves, and they travel more slowly, about four kilometers per second. And if you imagine again that the wave is coming towards you like my voice, every little particle of rock would be shaking back and forth.

[00:28:56] So perpendicular to the direction of the wave propagation. And now the difference between those helps you to figure out where the earthquake is. And so, or how far away it is, right? So like, thunder and lightning, you see the flash of lightning, you start counting. To wait until you hear the thunder, and that tells you about how far away the lightning was from your location.

[00:29:15] You can do that with the P and S waves as well. So when you feel the P wave arrive, then you count until you feel the S wave, and you can get an idea for about how far away the earthquake was from your location. Now, you don't know exactly where it was coming from, but you can get an idea of how far away it was.

[00:29:33] Michael Hawk: Which of these waves do we feel on the surface the most? Do we feel both the P and the S waves as people?

[00:29:40] Dr. Wendy Bohon: Yes. So, there's P waves, there's S waves, there's love waves, there's Rayleigh waves, there's all these different waves. P and S are the fastest ones. So if you're far away from an earthquake, you may feel a jolt and then there would be a pause and then you would feel some more shaking. What you felt is the arrival of the P wave and then the arrival of the S wave.

[00:29:58] So, in April of this past year, I was in Maryland and I felt the P wave from the New Jersey earthquake arrive. And I was like, that was an earthquake. Okay. And I start counting and then I feel the S wave and I'm like, that was an earthquake. That was an earthquake. I'm in Maryland. I felt an earthquake.

[00:30:16] And so, I knew about how far away it was. And I, my first thought was, oh my God, was that in Charleston? My second thought was, oh my God, was that New Madrid? And then I start looking at the data to see, is there shaking near Charleston? Is there shaking near New Madrid? And then I look and I'm like, New Jersey, like what?

[00:30:33] You can feel both of those. Now, if you're close to where the earthquake is, you're going to feel it all at once. So it'll just feel jolty and you won't be able to tell the separation just because you're close and they haven't had time to spread out yet.

[00:30:46] Michael Hawk: Makes sense. And I think the other piece of it is you often hear or see, like you pull up the USGS website and you'll see an epicenter location. So I think with this principle that you just mentioned the time differential gives you a distance. So if you have multiple stations that are recording triangulate a little bit and figure out where the center of the rupture was.

[00:31:08] You

[00:31:09] Dr. Wendy Bohon: Exactly. Yep that's one way to do it. We have computers that can do it faster now, but you can definitely do it on, using pen and paper doing triangulation for sure.

[00:31:18] Michael Hawk: Yeah, and I'm always amazed I'll pull up the usgs website after feeling an earthquake and literally within seconds, they've already have their first estimate of the epicenter and of the intensity, the magnitude, I should say of course, that sometimes gets refined over the next several minutes as they, assess more data,

[00:31:36] Dr. Wendy Bohon: Yes, that's an important point that you just made. We try and get information out as quickly as we can, but there is a tradeoff between speed and accuracy. And so if magnitude change magnitudes change slightly, or if the depth changes a little bit, if the location changes a little bit, that is a feature, not a bug.

[00:31:56] That means we've gotten more data and we're refining our understanding.

[00:32:00] Michael Hawk: So I'm afraid maybe I'm getting into the weeds too much when this idea of an epicenter, what you described before, when looking at the paleo size, Seismology record. Is that right? Paleo seismology, is that the

[00:32:12] Dr. Wendy Bohon: Yeah.

[00:32:12] Michael Hawk: You're looking across the fault to see like how long of a section ruptured.

[00:32:18] So what is the epicenter in that context? Is it just the very center of the rupture or

[00:32:25] Dr. Wendy Bohon: Oh, so good.

[00:32:26] Michael Hawk: definition?

[00:32:27] Dr. Wendy Bohon: That's a good question. Earthquakes actually start miles below the surface of the earth at a place called the hypocenter. The epicenter is the point on the surface directly above the hypocenter. And we just use that, how do we refer to a place deep inside the earth? Right? So it's just easier and Matthew to talk about the epicenter.

[00:32:46] Not, this is some of the complexity, right? It sounds pretty easy when you just describe it, but not every fault actually reaches the surface of the earth. Only some faults go all the way to the surface. You can have buried faults. And so we couldn't use paleo seismic methods to study buried faults because we can't dig that deep.

[00:33:04] We have to look at use basically seismic waves from other earthquakes. To act like an ultrasound that allow us to look inside the earth the same way, you know, you use an ultrasound wand to look at a baby inside someone's tummy. We can use earthquakes and the waves from those earthquakes to look at .

[00:33:22] The subsurface of the earth the first few miles of the crust, right? And see where the faults might be and try and figure it out that way. So the epicenter is the point on the surface. The epicenter is the point below the surface of it. But as to whether or not, like if we're talking about, say, the southern section of the San Andreas, you can actually have earthquakes.

[00:33:43] Earthquakes on zip, kind of like a zipper. They don't break all at once. So you can start that zipper at one end and zip. Say towards the north, you could start at the north and unzip towards the south. Or you could start in the middle and unzip in both directions. So there's lots of different ways that the faults can break, and that can cause differences in where we feel the most shaking.

[00:34:07] So generally speaking, the shaking intensity that you feel is gonna be different depending on how big the earthquake is, how far away you are from the earthquake when it's happening, and the local rock and soil conditions where you are. But it also has something to do with the directivity of the waves.

[00:34:24] So if you imagine you're skipping rocks in a pond, you skip the stone and it hits the water and creates waves. But the largest waves are gonna be in the direction that the rock was going, right? They'll go out in all directions, but they'll be biggest. In the direction that you threw the rock.

[00:34:38] Earthquakes are the same way.

[00:34:40] Michael Hawk: Wow. So in the case where you unzip in a certain direction. Is the epicenter the source of the unzipping, the point where it first ruptures.

[00:34:49] Dr. Wendy Bohon: yes, the epicenter is the place where the earthquake starts.

[00:34:52] Michael Hawk: Okay.

[00:34:52] Dr. Wendy Bohon: Or the place on the surface above where the earthquake starts, because it actually starts below the surface.

[00:34:58] Michael Hawk: . And I think that also drives home the point where sometimes people say, hey, my house was fine when we had this earthquake, like the Loma Prieta earthquake or something like that.

[00:35:06] So, so I don't really need to worry but in actuality, every earthquake is going to be different because it might you know, as you said, the directionality of the waves may be different even if the intensity or the magnitude is the same.

[00:35:18] Dr. Wendy Bohon: Right, and I think we've done a disservice by talking a lot about the big one. And I recognize that where you are, the big one is different. So if you're in the mid continent, right, the New Madrid is the big one. If you live in Southern California, a rupture on the San Andreas is the big one.

[00:35:34] If you live in Northern California, it could be a ruptured on the Hayward that people talk about as the big one. If you're in the Pacific Northwest, the Cascadia is the big one. So recognizing that, if we focus in again just on California, because it has a lot of faults there's more than 500 active faults.

[00:35:51] In California, more than 70 percent of the population of California is 40 million people live within 30 miles of an active fault. And so it doesn't have to be 1 of these enormous earthquakes in order to cause local or regional damage. And so. People need to. Stop focusing on the big 1 that may or may not even happen in your lifetime and focus on the earthquakes that are much more likely to happen and impact you personally that happen on smaller faults closer to where you are, because those happen more often.

[00:36:23] And even though they don't cause these huge regional problems, they can still be a big deal for the people that live nearby.

[00:36:31] Michael Hawk: So I guess the other aspect of impact on the surface is also the depth of the earthquake as I understand it because I remember. There was this is many years ago now there was like a major earthquake near seattle It may have even been like almost an eight or something like that but there was very little damage on the surface and I remember this story being that it was so deep that

[00:36:51] Dr. Wendy Bohon: Nisqually. Yeah.

[00:36:52] Michael Hawk: Yeah so how does the depth of the earthquake factor in and How might that vary across the continent?

[00:36:59] Dr. Wendy Bohon: that's a good question. When we were talking about intensity, so every earthquake has one magnitude, but it generates many different intensities of shaking. So what people are often most interested in is the intensity of shaking because that's what actually we feel and what matters to us more than the magnitude.

[00:37:14] But what controls what you feel during an earthquake? Okay. Are again, the magnitude of the earthquake. Larger earthquakes cause more shaking over a broader region, the distance away from the earthquake in your local rock and soil conditions. Now, distance can be map distance like you are 35 miles away as the crow flies, or it could be distance as in depth down into the earth.

[00:37:37] So if you have an earthquake that happens three miles below the surface, then the closest people to that earthquake or three miles away. Okay. If you have an earthquake that starts 300 miles below the surface, then that means the closest people are 300 miles away. And so that depth makes a big difference as to what is going to be experienced on the surface.

[00:37:59] And so we can have really big earthquakes, especially along subduction zones, where you have one plate subducting down beneath another, so you can keep the crust or the lithosphere brittle down deep into the earth. And they don't do any damage at all because they are so deep below the surface.

[00:38:15] Michael Hawk: that makes a lot of sense and Okay. I'm going to go, I'm going to go with the subduction question. So, So we've been talking about plate action as a trigger for earthquakes I know that volcanoes can trigger their own earthquakes from like magma movement and things like that. And I, and talking about the subject subduction area, I immediately think of the cascade range.

[00:38:37] It has a number of large volcanoes. So can you tell me a little bit about how. How volcanoes and earthquakes relate.

[00:38:43] Dr. Wendy Bohon: Oh, yeah. So the Cascadia is so fascinating and the volcanoes there, if you think about a map of the Pacific Northwest, they make a line, but they're offset from the seashore, right? And the tectonic setting of that region, you have the Juan de Fuca plate that's subducting or diving down beneath the North American plate.

[00:39:05] And as it dives down beneath the North American plate, once it hits a certain depth, the water that's inside that plate starts to come out of the crystals. And what that does is lower the melting point of the rocks above it. That creates magma, and that magma moves up towards the surface and forms those volcanoes.

[00:39:23] So you can actually tell how deep the plate is by the location of those volcanoes. Now, there is something called, like, volcanic earthquakes. And as magma is moving around inside of the crust of the earth, it can cause rocks to break and cracks to vibrate. So it could be magma, it could be superheated gases, and those are called volcanic earthquakes.

[00:39:49] It can be harmonic tremor. So as things are moving, it's going to cause earthquakes. And we can track the location of those earthquakes to figure out how likely the volcano is to erupt. So if they're moving up towards the surface, then that's making an eruption more likely. Right. Or they could be moving laterally.

[00:40:09] They could be moving sideways. Like, there's all kinds of ways that magma can move through the crust, usually following zones of weakness. And so we almost always, or at least usually have some idea of what's happening based on the volcanic earthquakes as to whether, volcanoes are, like, getting close.

[00:40:27] So it's pretty cool.

[00:40:29] Michael Hawk: Yeah, I think it's really fascinating just putting a couple pieces of what you've talked about together when you look at the map. Well, I guess the first thing that I think I found is a bit of a myth is the assumption that the San Andreas just goes all the way up the West coast. So you mentioned that there's actually a different plate up there.

[00:40:45] The Juan de Fuca plate.

[00:40:47] Dr. Wendy Bohon: Mhm.

[00:40:48] Michael Hawk: Um, That's subducting as opposed to strike slip, like you see in California.

[00:40:53] Dr. Wendy Bohon: It's so cool. The whole western plate boundary is so amazing. So if we start at the bottom and think about the Gulf of California, right, that's actually a divergent plate boundary. That's opening up. It's spreading apart. And then, as you move up into California the way the plates are interacting changes, and it changes into a strike slip boundary right at the end of the Salton Sea near Bombay Beach.

[00:41:14] That's the official start of the San Andreas fault. And then that fault goes up. As it gets to L. A. It takes a bend. It twists. And that's where you have the transverse ranges. They're there because they're getting squeezed. It can't slide right. There's something in the way. And so the transverse ranges are going up and then you continue along the San Andreas fall up towards northern California.

[00:41:36] Up through San Francisco, and then it goes off to shore and actually bends to the West pretty steeply. In near Eureka. It's called the Mendocino triple junction. It's like where all of the plates are playing bumper cars. So that is where the San Andreas goes off to sea. And then just above that, we have the Juan de Fuca plate, and that's where subduction starts.

[00:41:59] So in Eureka, you have all of this stuff going on. And it's actually the place that has. the most large earthquakes in California, lots of magnitude sevens up there. We had 1 on December, the 5th magnitude 7 offshore of Cape Mendocino. So super fascinating tectonics and geology all along the West Coast related to how the Juan de Fuca plate, the North American plate and the Pacific plate are moving through time.

[00:42:24] And oh, my gosh, this is so cool. The Juan de Fuca plate is actually the remnant of a larger plate called the Farallon plate. And we can do something called seismic tomography, which is like looking deep inside the earth and looking at the. The density and like how warm or cold the rocks are. We can see the Farallon plate chilling underneath the North American plate.

[00:42:47] It's under there and we can see it. That's wild. Like, it's just so cool.

[00:42:52] Michael Hawk: And back to like looking at the map and what you just described, it sort of explains why the mountains are a little bit taller in Los Angeles as compared to the Bay area. I think it explains that anyway but

[00:43:03] Dr. Wendy Bohon: There's other things going on. Anytime you get off of the direction of plate motion a little bit, sometimes you can open up these little these little, they're called sag ponds. Or you can squeeze it together a little bit and that will make mountains. And so. Any time mountains, there's a fault that's lifting those mountains up.

[00:43:24] So think about that when you're driving around. Think about driving like through Nevada. Anybody that's ever been to Las Vegas. It's like you know that you're driving through these valleys and there's mountains and everywhere you go. It's like valleys and mountains.

[00:43:34] It's called the basin and range. And at the base of every one of those mountains is a fault. And it's because the crust in that area is actually getting stretched. And you can imagine if you stretch it, some pieces are going to drop down, right? So those are the basins and they're dropping down along normal faults throughout the basin and range.

[00:43:52] So like, there are faults literally everywhere.

[00:43:54] Michael Hawk: John McPhee's Basin and Range, as you talk about that. So, and then as you head northward, the volcanoes start in Northern California, parallel to Eureka, like, Lassen and Shasta. And then

[00:44:09] all the way Up. And then that offset from the plate boundary is really interesting.

[00:44:13] And I think you were describing that as the. The Juan de Fuca is diving beneath the North American plate. And you can think of it almost at a, an angle. And apparently at that depth where we see the volcanoes, that's where the process you described occurs of the water. is Is it getting heated out?

[00:44:33] Dr. Wendy Bohon: It's it de waters. It's like a, it's like a heat pressure thing. The water comes out of the rocks as they go down and then that melts. The rocks above it. And then that, hot things rise. That's why hot air balloons work. So the hot magma will rise up through the colder crust. And then when it gets to the surface, that's where we have the volcanoes.

[00:44:51] Michael Hawk: And those volcanoes are almost in a straight line, not quite a straight line,

[00:44:55] Which is really interesting. So when I hear about earthquake swarms, very often they're associated with volcanoes, but I don't think they always are. Can you tell me, like, is this just a pop science term? Is there a real definition

[00:45:08] Dr. Wendy Bohon: Oh, no. Swarms are a thing. So usually what happens is, we'll have an earthquake, we call it a main shock, it's the biggest, the main earthquake, and that will be followed by lots and lots of aftershocks, or the earthquakes that happen after that big earthquake. They happen as a result of kind of the crust settling into its new position, rocks around it are jostling in, they're cracking and breaking in these little earthquakes.

[00:45:31] A swarm is different because there is no main shock. What you end up having is lots of earthquakes or multiple earthquakes that are all around the same magnitude. So you won't have like a magnitude five followed by one magnitude for lots of magnitude threes and twos and ones. You'll have like lots of magnitude 2.

[00:45:49] 5 to threes. And they often happen in areas where you have high heat flow. So there's a lot of, the crust in that area is very warm. And so the rocks are not brittle in exactly the same way or in places where you have a lot of fluid moving around in the crust. So the process that governs swarms is still something that's like, being actively investigated.

[00:46:10] I'm not sure that we really understand swarms very well. But they don't just happen in places like California, right? There are earthquake swarms in Connecticut. There's earthquake swarms in North Carolina recently. There have been earthquake swarms in Arkansas. So there are earthquake swarms that happen, all over the country.

[00:46:28] It is a normal process.

[00:46:30] Michael Hawk: And I thought maybe you were going to talk about Oklahoma there so I'm going to ask about fracking.

[00:46:35] Uh,

[00:46:35] Dr. Wendy Bohon: different.

[00:46:36] Michael Hawk: Yeah, so, I think over the years, as fracking has become more and more of a common activity at first, there was a loose correlation noticed with earthquakes, but I think it's settled science as settled as it can be now that fracking can lead to earthquakes.

[00:46:52] Is that right?

[00:46:54] Dr. Wendy Bohon: So what happens, they're Human induced earthquakes happen all over the place. And they're related to the extraction of hydrocarbons in the subsurface and. It's actually not the fracking that really causes the earthquakes. So they'll cause little earthquakes. Okay. Starting from the beginning when we're talking about fracking, that's hydraulic fracturing.

[00:47:17] So you have places that have oil or natural gas and energy companies will take. A slurry of water and grit and different things, and they'll inject it down into the ground in order to break up the rocks that have the hydrocarbon that they're trying to extract because it's like stuck in the pore spaces or something, right?

[00:47:36] Stuck in between all the little pieces of the rock. So they break it open in order to suck it out more easily, and that can cause small earthquakes. But once they've sucked it out and they've gotten everything that they want out of the ground, they have the wastewater that's left over, what they had put in to help break up the rocks.

[00:47:53] You need to get rid of that. And so they will drill deep down into the subsurface, below aquifers, below anything that impacts people up here, and they will inject that into the ground because the ground can act like a giant sieve and clean that up. The problem is in some places when you inject it down, if you have faults that already exist there that are in the proper orientation, you can cause earthquakes and the size of these earthquakes can be significant.

[00:48:20] There was a magnitude 5. 8 induced earthquake in Pawnee, Oklahoma. It caused chimneys to collapse. It caused damage. I believe people were injured. One person was killed. So induced earthquakes are real and they can be damaging. They tend to happen more because of wastewater injection. Then they do because of fracking and it's interesting because Oklahoma is in the mid continent, right?

[00:48:43] So it has naturally a very low rate of earthquakes, as opposed to, say, California that has a naturally very high rate of earthquakes. And so it's easy to make a correlation between injecting wastewater down and earthquake earthquakes happening. So before 2009, there weren't that many earthquakes.

[00:49:01] Thanks. 2009, there was a lot of injections. And for part of that time Oklahoma had more magnitude three earthquakes than California. That is not normal. And it was correlated with how much wastewater injection was happening. And so once all of those things were made, those connections were made, and that was understood the wastewater injection ramped back down.

[00:49:22] And the number of earthquakes decreased, and it's not immediate, right? There is a time offset. It takes a while for the system toe to re equilibrate. But yes, or induced earthquakes is settled science. And in a lot of places, we know for certain that's what's happening. Other places. It's harder. It's harder to say.

[00:49:41] Michael Hawk: So we've been talking about 3. 0s, 7. 0s, throughout this discussion. So, and I made a mistake in planning for this discussion and I referred to it still as the Richter scale. So maybe we can talk about how the magnitude is measured and what scale is used and some of the updates that have happened over the years.

[00:50:02] Dr. Wendy Bohon: Right? Yeah, I worry sometimes that I get too much into the semantics, but I think the history is really interesting. Like, How we understand things, how things came to be so Charles Richter was a scientist that was working in Caltech in Southern California, and he had this particular type of seismometer, and he wanted to understand or, create a scale to talk about the different sizes of earthquakes and because there's such a difference in the sizes of earthquakes, it's a logarithmic scale, which is not intuitive for our human brains, or at least not my human brain.

[00:50:36] So I tend to think about just an easy way to think about magnitude for me is using spaghetti, love to eat, love spaghetti. If you imagine breaking one strand of spaghetti is like a magnitude 5, in order to get to a magnitude 6, you would have to break 32 strands of spaghetti to release the same amount of energy.

[00:50:54] What about a magnitude 7? That would be 32 times larger. So a magnitude 7 would be breaking 1026 strands of spaghetti. A magnitude 8 Would be breaking more than 33, 000 strands of spaghetti. Okay, so, like, that's the logarithmic scale, and that's what he came up with. Now, when Charles Richter came up with the Richter scale, what he was looking at was the amplitude of the seismic waves or, like, the size of the wiggle that you see, like, on the news when you see, like, the earthquake and what's recorded by the earthquake from the instruments.

[00:51:28] And so he was looking at the amplitude of different earthquakes. And how far away he was from that particular earthquake, and that was how he came up with the Richter scale just based on amplitude and distance. Well, now we have a better understanding of how earthquakes work. We have faster computers, we have better instruments.

[00:51:45] And so we're able to get more information out that describes more about each particular earthquake. And so we use something called the moment magnitude scale. It's based loosely on the Richter scale so that they can be correlated. But it takes into account how far the ground slipped during the earthquake, the area of the ground that moved and the rigidity of the rocks that moved.

[00:52:08] And all of those things factor in to how big the earthquake was and how much energy it released. And there's a whole, magnitude is so confusing. Like, I don't know why some things have to be so confusing. But, Richter was describing the difference between each magnitude as a tenfold increase in amplitude or the size of the waves.

[00:52:28] And to do the conversion, that's where you get 32 times more energy. So that's why you'll sometimes hear 10 times or sometimes 32 times. That's the difference in the size of the waves versus the difference of the energy released during the earthquake.

[00:52:41] Michael Hawk: Okay, that's a good point. I was going to ask about that because I always have this 10 times in my head. tying back together some of the way I think about the world from the ecology standpoint, there are a lot of community science efforts that people have, like going out with iNaturalist and taking pictures of plants and insects and reporting them.

[00:53:00] I have a friend who has an at home size seismometer, I

[00:53:03] Dr. Wendy Bohon: Yep.

[00:53:04] Michael Hawk: it would be it uses a raspberry pie computer, which is a cheap little computer. And I want to say, I'll have to look it up, but I want to say maybe they cost around 500, give or

[00:53:13] Dr. Wendy Bohon: Or less, depending on what you want. Yeah.

[00:53:16] Michael Hawk: Aside from an interesting little hobby to see what's happening, in your street.

[00:53:20] Is that helpful to the broader science? Is there a community science aspect to tracking earthquakes?

[00:53:26] Dr. Wendy Bohon: Absolutely. And Raspberry Pi, Raspberry Shakes, they've done a great job in putting together the community effort and creating tools where hobbyists and enthusiasts can look at their data together. And there was actually, this is so neat. There was a scientific paper published in Science that used that community data along with professional data and had a lot of these hobbyists as co authors on the paper.

[00:53:53] And what they were doing was using this It's, huge network of seismometers, both the professional kind of research grade seismometers, but also raspberry shakes, raspberry pies to look at COVID lockdowns. Seismometers measure anything that causes the ground to move. It could be earthquakes.

[00:54:10] It could be ocean waves. It could be the breeze blowing trees nearby people walking. It's construction noise traffic. There's a lot of anthropogenic noise in the world. Right. And so what they were able to measure using the super dense network of seismometers, including these at home seismometers, was the reduction in anthropogenic noise in cities across the world as they shut down during COVID.

[00:54:34] It's a fascinating paper if anybody's interested in reading it. And that was a really good, way to look at how we can use these community efforts in order to advance the science.

[00:54:47] Michael Hawk: Well, I will look for that paper and link to it in the show notes along with the raspberry shakes in case anybody out there wants to get one of their own.

[00:54:53] Dr. Wendy Bohon: There's also, by the way, Lego seismometers that really work. So it's a Lego kit that you can build. So if you got kids at home that love Legos, like I do, right? Like, they can build a Lego seismometer.

[00:55:05] Michael Hawk: Huh? I didn't know about that one. All right, why don't we talk a little bit about some of the topics that we're Some of the myths and actions that people can take as well.

[00:55:15] So starting with the myths I'll leave it open ended for you, because you're the expert, you're the one doing the communication. So you probably see a lot more than I do, but what comes to mind in terms of some misperceptions maybe that exist in the public?

[00:55:28] Dr. Wendy Bohon: So one is that a large earthquake on the San Andreas is going to cause California to fall into the ocean. That's a big no. The part of California that is on the Pacific plate on the other side of the San Andreas fault for most of the country is sliding up towards Alaska at about the rate that our fingernails grow.

[00:55:46] Another is earthquake weather. So our human brains love to make patterns and earthquake weather in China is considered to be when it's unseasonably like cold and damp, whereas in Southern California, most people think of earthquake weather as being unseasonably hot and dry. And it usually correlates with the most destructive earthquake in that historical time and what the weather was like then.

[00:56:09] But as we talked about before, earthquakes start miles below the surface of the earth. Weather only impacts, the very surface. And so there is no such thing as earthquake weather. There's no correlation between weather and when an earthquake can happen. Another myth that I hear a lot is that we should try and create lots of little earthquakes to stop a large one from happening.

[00:56:29] Which makes sense, but unfortunately, that's not really how it works because of the logarithmic nature of earthquakes. So, back to the San Andreas, the largest earthquake we could expect is probably like a magnitude 8. And so, how many small earthquakes would we have to have in order to not have that magnitude 8?

[00:56:49] Well, we would need to have about 32 magnitude 7s. Or a thousand magnitude 6s, or like 33, 000 magnitude 5s. So just to put that in context, the Northridge earthquake, which a lot of people remember that happened, outside of L. A. 1994, it was a magnitude 6. 7. Okay, so we would need to have hundreds of earthquakes that size in order to potentially stave off a magnitude 8.

[00:57:17] But also, we can't, anytime an earthquake happens, it changes the stresses and the crust around it. So if we ever make an earthquake, we cannot be sure of what else we might cause.

[00:57:28] What

[00:57:28] Michael Hawk: be like whack-a-mole,

[00:57:29] Dr. Wendy Bohon: right, that breaks the camel's back? Do you really want to try and rupture the San Andreas, but hope it's only going to be a little bit?

[00:57:36] Not me.

[00:57:38] Michael Hawk: Well, and it seems like the physics of that just doesn't work because I'm thinking back to you describing the, these stresses building up to the point where a rock ruptures and it's not just a rock, it's like a massive slab of rock that ruptures. It would be hard to make it ruptured.

[00:57:52] Just a little

[00:57:53] Dr. Wendy Bohon: Or rupture where you want to, right? We can cause earthquakes, like we just talked about, through wastewater injection and those sorts of things, but we can't control what happens once we change the stresses in the subsurface.

[00:58:07] Michael Hawk: And how about predictability, because I think this is confusing to people because we start talking about probabilistic

[00:58:13] views over long timescales versus, I think people would love it to be just like the weather where you have a pretty good feel for what's going to happen, three to five days out

[00:58:23] Dr. Wendy Bohon: Right. I want to be very clear. No one can predict earthquakes. Anybody who says differently is selling something, okay? Nobody can predict earthquakes. What we do is forecast earthquakes, much like people forecast the weather. But you'll get a weather forecast for, like a week in advance. We can give you an earthquake forecast for 30 years.

[00:58:43] So we'll say something like, there's an 87 percent chance of an earthquake in this area in the next 30 years. And that takes into account all of the faults in that area, the known slip rates or recurrences, how often earthquakes happen there, what their magnitudes could be. We just don't know exactly what is going to cause a fault to to break and exactly when that's going to happen.

[00:59:07] When is that switch going to flip? When is it going to be just the too much stress to happen? The exception to this is aftershocks. So we know that after an earthquake, particularly a large earthquake, that there will be aftershocks. We don't know exactly how big they're gonna be or exactly when they're gonna happen.

[00:59:25] But we do know that they're gonna happen. And they actually follow a mathematical distribution, which is pretty rigorous. We know that because of observations of, lots of earthquakes through time, but still, we can't tell you exactly how big they're gonna be. When, there's going to be a magnitude 4.

[00:59:41] 2 and it's going to happen at 2 PM on Wednesday. Like, we just, we can't do that. I don't know that we'll ever be able to do that. And this is an interesting side note, for a long time in, like, the 60s, 70s and 80s. Earthquake predictability was, like, the Holy grail of seismology. We thought it was going to happen.

[00:59:58] Everybody wanted it to happen because you could do a lot with that. Can earthquakes actually even be predicted? Because in order to do that, you would have to have an earthquake precursor. There would have to be something that happens that we can measure and identify that happens before an earthquake and happens before every earthquake.

[01:00:17] And we just don't see that. There was something called the San Andreas Fault Observatory at depth, where there was a hole drilled down into the San Andreas in an area where there was a lot of small earthquakes happening. To see if there were changes inside the fault that we could measure changes in heat, changes in water flow, changes in electrical current changes in anything.

[01:00:34] And we were not able to find anything. Does that mean it doesn't exist, or does that mean we can't measure it or that we don't know what we're looking for? So, there's a lot of questions that still remain to be answered. People are still working actively towards that. But we're not there. So if somebody tells you they can predict earthquakes, don't listen to them.

[01:00:54] Michael Hawk: and and backing up to your comment about aftershocks, I know sometimes there's even cases where, Okay. A quote unquote aftershock is has a higher magnitude than the original incident.

[01:01:04] Dr. Wendy Bohon: Yes, so that's called in that case, we changed the terminology, right? So about 4 to 5 percent of earthquakes have an aftershock that's larger than themselves. And in that case, we call that initial earthquake a fore shock. We call the new largest earthquake, the main shock, and then all the little earthquakes afterwards, or they can be big all the other earthquakes afterwards aftershocks.

[01:01:27] And so that means that about 1 out of every 20 earthquakes. Has a larger earthquake that happens afterwards. We have no way of knowing beforehand what earthquake is a foreshock and what isn't.

[01:01:39] Michael Hawk: Right. And this is probably a good transition into what people can do. Because I think an obvious thing is if there's a, if you feel a major earthquake, be prepared for more earthquakes

[01:01:48] Dr. Wendy Bohon: Exactly. It's important to like level set and figure out what to expect because earthquakes can be really scary. And so if people are afraid. That's okay, but you don't want to just be scared. You also want to be prepared and the time to get ready for an earthquake is before it happens because they happen without warning.

[01:02:07] So if you live in an earthquake prone area, and by the way, most of the United States can have earthquakes. So this applies to everyone. You want to make sure that you have an emergency kit. If you already have an emergency kit for hurricanes or for tornadoes or for whatever, that can be the same thing.

[01:02:23] But you want to have water. You want to make sure to have medications. You want to have a radio that runs on batteries. If you have kids like me and the thought of not having an iPad running. For three days makes you a little twitchy, make sure you can get like those solar panel charger things, like there's lots of things you can put in your emergency kit that would be good for earthquakes and other emergencies.

[01:02:44] Make sure you have medication, make sure you have food and water for your pets, they're part of the family too. If you live in areas that have a lot of earthquakes or have earthquakes often, like on the west coast, you probably want to make sure to have your water heater strapped down. You want to have your house.

[01:03:00] Secured to the foundation. Make sure that you've secured your space. If you have a big picture or mirror or something hanging above your bed, you might want to move that because we spend a lot of time in bed. You don't want things to fall on you. Make sure you strap bookcases to the walls. Strap TVs to the walls.

[01:03:18] Don't put your liquor cabinet above the refrigerator because you might need a drink after the earthquake and all of those will have fallen off and be broken. Created a hazard, glass on the ground. There's a book, a booklet that's free online. It's called Putting Down Roots in Earthquake Country that gives you all the things you can do before an earthquake happens. It tells you what to do when you feel earthquake shaking. So you drop down to the ground, take cover underneath a sturdy object like a table and hold on until all the shaking has stopped.

[01:03:46] If you're near the ocean or near the beach, when you feel strong, prolonged shaking, that could be your natural tsunami warning. In that case, you immediately leave the beach. Go inland or go up to high ground. So, lots of things that you can do to prepare beforehand and to make sure that you can do after the earthquake has come.

[01:04:07] Michael Hawk: Yeah. A couple of little things that that I did when I moved back to California I did purchase special hooks for hanging things on the wall

[01:04:16] that would reduce The chance of something falling off the wall and especially if you put it in the studs, but back to your mirror comment If you had a mirror over your bed and you use these hooks, I still wouldn't feel safe because sometimes the actual glass part is attached to the back of the frame and it can actually slip right off so even if your frame is attached nicely to the wall, the glass can slide right down and out.

[01:04:38] Dr. Wendy Bohon: People also need to consider what they would do if they're not at home. What if you're at work and your kids are at school? What if you're at Home Depot? What if you are out and about? You need to think about the places that you go on a regular basis and just really just think through what you would do.

[01:04:54] Who would you contact? How would you get home? So thinking through those things, it's the an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. So just thinking through What you might do and how you can be prepared can really increase your resilience and decrease your anxiety. Because once you know what to do and you know that you are ready for most things, it really can help you sleep better at night.

[01:05:17] Michael Hawk: And speaking of sleeping at night, this was the other thing that, that I always recommend people do. I keep some hard soled slippers underneath my bed

[01:05:24] so That if I have to get up because of an earthquake, I have something I can quickly slip on in case there is broken glass or other, broken things on the ground.

[01:05:33] Dr. Wendy Bohon: Yes. Yes.

[01:05:35] Michael Hawk: so I will link to that that resource that you mentioned. Is there anything Else that comes to mind that people can do from a preparedness regaining a little agency in the sense of this unknown that might happen at any time.

[01:05:49] Dr. Wendy Bohon: I think understanding what can happen near you can be helpful because you don't want to panic. Right? We have, there are maps showing the the probability of earthquakes where you are, and I'm actually doing a video series called earthquakes in all 50 states, where I go through earthquakes that have happened in every state in the country and what could potentially happen in the future.

[01:06:12] So the more, the more, you know, sort of thing, and some places you're going to feel earthquakes every once in a while, and that's okay, but maybe they're not likely to be damaging, but you still want to know what to expect and what you can do. And a lot of the things don't cost a lot of money, but they can make a big difference in the long run.

[01:06:31] Michael Hawk: And what about earthquake warning apps

[01:06:33] that you can get on your phone?

[01:06:35] Dr. Wendy Bohon: Reminder. So there is something called earthquake early warning, and that doesn't mean prediction. That's a warning that you get after an earthquake has already started. And so we talked about the speed of seismic waves while electricity travels a lot faster. So what happens is you have an earthquake that starts and as long as three seismometers nearby pick up shaking above a certain level, they will send that information to a data center, which then can send out an alert.

[01:07:00] And this is available all across the western U. S., so Washington, Oregon, and California. And you have to sign up to get the alerts in some cases. So it's the my shake app and that will give you a warning to expect earthquake shaking. Okay. If you are really close to the earthquake, you're not going to get a warning.

[01:07:20] You're just going to feel the shaking. But if you're farther away from where the earthquake is, it can give you seconds to tens of seconds of time to take protective action. And you may be like, who cares about five seconds? Like, what am I going to do? If you were having LASIK eye surgery, Those five seconds would be important.

[01:07:37] You're at the dentist, right? Getting a cavity drilled. Ooh, those five seconds are important. But other things like if you're in elevators, it can open the elevator at the nearest floor. So you're not in an elevator during the earthquake. The earthquake early warning system can slow down trains to prevent derailments.

[01:07:53] It can open firehouse doors to prevent the emergency response equipment from getting stuck inside. So there's a lot of things that earthquake early warning can do besides just give us a few seconds notice. But know what to do when you get that warning. Drop down to the ground, take cover underneath a sturdy object, and hold on until all the shaking has stopped.

[01:08:14] Michael Hawk: And in the case of that Humboldt earthquake from December 5th, I I was sitting right here at the same desk when that happened. And I got a warning, I'm pretty far away. Like, I don't know, 300 miles, probably maybe more from the epicenter. And it popped up. It said expect light shaking and it already had the preliminary magnitude estimate.

[01:08:35] And sure enough, it was probably, my memory's a little. It was probably 20 seconds, maybe 30 seconds before I felt the shaking, but I didn't have to do anything. It was just light shaking, but I could imagine people closer. It would have been beneficial to have

[01:08:52] Dr. Wendy Bohon: I also got that alert. I was actually on a call with the State Geologist of California. We both got down underneath our desks. Neither one of us felt anything. But that muscle memory of practicing drop, cover, and hold on can be important. And then the following week, I was at work on the 19th floor of a building.

[01:09:10] And we got another alert for a magnitude 5. 7 in Nevada. Did the same thing, drop cover and hold on. And after 15 or 20 seconds, I felt the shaking. It was very light, the things were swinging and it's good to practice that muscle memory and having an app available like that can really give you, seconds notice that can help you to make good choices.

[01:09:34] Michael Hawk: Can I squeeze one more question in before we get to the wrap up?

[01:09:36] Dr. Wendy Bohon: Absolutely.

[01:09:37] Michael Hawk: So very often what I do, because I'm a numbers oriented person, I'll immediately go to the USGS. Earthquake, latest earthquake website. And after a few seconds, they give you an opportunity that they actually have a section that says, did you feel it?

[01:09:53] And you can go in and answer a few questions. How has that information used?

[01:09:58] Dr. Wendy Bohon: Oh, did you feel it is super cool. So there's two products that the USGS creates after every earthquake of, particular magnitude or higher. One is called shake map that shows the distribution of earthquake shaking as measured by the seismic instruments. And then there's the, did you feel it map that takes the responses from people and puts it on a map to show what different people felt in different places.

[01:10:22] Now, they are really important in places that don't have earthquakes a lot, or earthquakes very often, and where we don't have a lot of seismometers. So each person is like a little seismometer, right, that's recording their experience. And it asks you questions like, did it wake you up? Did people near you feel it?

[01:10:38] Were you able to stand? Were there cracks in your walls? Did you see plants swaying? Lots of different questions to help understand what the intensity of shaking was in that location. And that can tell them a lot about like the local rock and soil conditions and give them more data about what shaking was like in these particular areas that may not have been measured by seismic equipment, right?

[01:11:00] Because there's not a lot of seismometers everywhere. They're very expensive to have and to maintain. And so it can give a lot of important data.

[01:11:09] Michael Hawk: Yeah, and I very often feel earthquakes because I spend so much time on the second floor of my house and my family, when they're on the first floor, don't feel it. So like, I'll come out and I'll be like, Hey, did you feel that? And, on the first floor, they don't. So one of the other questions they ask is, were you on the ground level or not?

[01:11:22] So, so there's some interesting things that can be derived.

[01:11:26] Dr. Wendy Bohon: There is one thing that I do want to say about that. That is really interesting to me. So, Where you are in a building often impacts what you're going to feel and the type of building impacts what you're going to feel. And so if you are far away from an earthquake, but you're in a tall building, you may still feel it.

[01:11:42] So, here's my example, right? You're sitting in your house and somebody drives by and they've got the stereo up really loud. What do you hear? You hear the bass thumping, right? You hear the low frequency sounds. You don't hear the person singing or the guitar. You hear the low frequency earthquakes are the same way.

[01:11:58] The high frequency waves attenuate or die off faster than the low frequency waves. And so if you are, for instance, in a tall building, those tall buildings are attuned to that low frequency. And so they will rock back and forth and you'll feel it. There was a magnitude seven earthquake off the coast of Jamaica.

[01:12:18] And people in Miami and skyscrapers were evacuated because they were swaying so much because of that earthquake that was far away. And so so many things influence and impact people's experiences of earthquakes, their distance, the size of the earthquake, the type of building that they're in. So all of those things matter, which is why there's a lot of confusion because people are like, well, no, that was a jolting earthquake.

[01:12:42] No, it was a rolling earthquake. No, it just depends on where you were.

[01:12:46] Michael Hawk: I hadn't really thought about how a building might be sort of resonant with the wavelength that's that's being felt that's really interesting. So I love learning about this stuff. Obviously following you on your social media channels is a great way to learn more. So maybe can you tell folks how they can follow you where to go?

[01:13:06] Dr. Wendy Bohon: Absolutely. I am Dr. Wendy Rocks across all social media, except for TikTok, where I'm Dr. Wendy Rocks It. But you can find me on YouTube, Instagram, Blue Sky, TikTok and I do have a website, just wendybohon. com, so you can find me there too. And I, I try and put out information that everybody can use and understand.

[01:13:27] Some of it's just for fun and silly and some of it is You know, trying to explain a little bit more about the science to give people some insight into our Earth.

[01:13:38] Michael Hawk: It's great content, and I will link to all of that, of course, and one last, well, I'm sorry, I keep lying. Two last questions. One, do you have any favorite resources like books or documentaries or anything like that? There's so many out there, but like, does anything just spring to the top of your mind when you get asked this question?

[01:13:55] Dr. Wendy Bohon: I really love the stories of science. And there's a seismologist, Dr. Susan Hough, that writes books about earthquakes. So she has a biography on Charles Richter, if you're interested in him. And she has some other books about that. And then my mentor, Dr. Lucy Jones, wrote a book called The Big Ones. Which is not just about earthquakes.

[01:14:17] It's about natural hazards through time and how they impact and change society. So if that's something people are interested in, The Big Ones is a fantastic book.

[01:14:27] Michael Hawk: And I promise now the last question So you mentioned your earthquakes in all 50 states series. Do you have any other projects or anything else that you'd like to highlight that listeners can look forward to in the coming months?

[01:14:38] Dr. Wendy Bohon: That's The Big One that I'm working on. I try and do a kind of a myth buster series. And I am working on a series to explain to people why the structural monitoring of buildings with seismic instruments can be really important. And the data that we get from that which can help us understand not only earthquakes, but how we can build better buildings to make sure that we don't just build buildings that won't fall down and kill you, but buildings that we can use after the earthquake so that we can recover more quickly.

[01:15:09] Michael Hawk: All right. Well, this has truly been fascinating. I really had to bite my tongue in many parts of the discussion because I wanted to ask more, but we could go forever. Thank you so much for all the time that you've spent today and all the work that you do. I really appreciate you.

[01:15:24] Dr. Wendy Bohon: Thank you. Thank you for having me and allowing me to talk to your audience and thanks everybody for listening. I appreciate your time and energy. I know you have a lot of things to do and you chose to be here.

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#111: Earthquakes: Myths, Surprises, and Hidden Dangers with Dr. Wendy Bohon

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Dive deep into the fascinating world of earthquakes with Dr. Wendy Bohon as she demystifies seismic science, elaborates on the misconceptions and risks, and recounts her eclectic journey from a theater major to a renowned earthquake geologist. Discover the truths that could shake your understanding of our planet!

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Educator's Guide to Ohlone Indians of California

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Educator's Guide to Ohlone Indians of California

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The Ohlone People of Central California_Petersen_Yamane

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Oak Galls article from Edgewood Explorer

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Oak Galls article from Edgewood Explorer

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by Bruce Homer-Smith and Vicky Stein

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Ferns Get Freaky

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Zoë Schlanger's new book is "The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth." (Photo courtesy of Zoë Schlanger)

There has been a sweeping reevaluation of animal intelligence over the last decade as we've realized that all kinds of organisms are smarter than we thought. A similar movement is occurring in the study of plants. Botanists have been discovering that plants have remarkable abilities to communicate, adapt, behave socially, act on stored memories and trick animals among other intelligent behaviors. We talk with author Zoë Schlanger about her new book, "The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth".

Guests:
Zoë Schlanger, staff writer, The Atlantic; author, "The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth"

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Your Houseplant is Smarter Than It Looks | KQED

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We talk with author Zoë Schlanger about her new book, "The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth".

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Compiled by docent Mike Morgan

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Fun podcast about Roxie Laybourne's investigation launching a whole new field of science that changed aviation and forensics.

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Love what we do? You can help.
We're a free multimedia magazine without a paywall or intrusive ads-and we'd like to keep it that way. We believe these stories need to be told; that inspiring both a deep appreciation for life on Earth and hope for its future is a critical step toward a thriving planet. If you agree, please consider making a donation to help secure the future of bioGraphic. Every little bit helps.

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Love what we do? You can help. We're a free multimedia magazine without a paywall or intrusive ads-and we'd like to keep it that way. We believe these stories need to be told; that inspiring both a deep appreciation for life on Earth and hope for its future is a critical step toward a thriving planet.

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Wonderful Interview with Robin Wall Kimmerer

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Wonderful Interview with Robin Wall Kimmerer

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It's November and you need chill vibes. And Native American Heritage Month is the perfect time to encore this classic. World-renowned author, botanist, Indigenous ecology professor and bryologist Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of "Gathering Moss" and "Braiding Sweetgrass," talks about her passion for moss. Cozy up for the most beautifully doled-out information about hidden worlds, overlooked mysteries, botanical drama, forests in miniature, Native peoples' uses for moss and philosophies about science and ecology. Dr. Kimmerer will change the way you see mosses forever, will inspire you to wear a loupe on a rope, and will soothe your soul with her beautiful voice and prose. Also bathmats, lawns and smoothies made of moss? We discuss.

Listen via Stitcher, Apple, Podbay, Podcast Addict, Spotify, Overcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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Bryology (MOSS) Encore with Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer - alie ward

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It's November and you need chill vibes. And Native American Heritage Month is the perfect time to encore this classic. World-renowned author, botanist, Indigenous ecology professor and bryologist Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of "Gathering Moss" and "Braiding Sweetgrass," talks about her

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Curious about implicit bias? Take this training from UC 

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Curious about implicit bias? Take this training from UC 

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Systemwide Talent Management eCourses | UCOP

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As part of the University’s mission to provide public service and advance knowledge, Systemwide Talent Management has made select eCourses available to the general public. The University does not provide certificates of completion to public individuals for courses taken through the links below.

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The Friends of Huddart and Wunderlich Parks is a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving the local environment and historic legacies of these two exceptional parks in Woodside, California.

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Listen to Ologies on Stitcher, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get podcasts.

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with Terry Smith

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Forest Health Initiative for Huddart & Wunderlich Parks

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Forest Health Initiative for Huddart & Wunderlich Parks

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About

Around the world, guides, docents, and naturalists at parks, museums, zoos, and cultural and historical sites strive to provide meaningful experiences for visitors. Interpretation is the essential tool they use. Upon successful completion of this course, you'll receive a certificate issued by the Eppley Institute for Parks and Public Lands, Indiana University.

The Foundations of Interpretation provides the learner with the fundamental theories and practices of effective interpretation and is ideal for those new to the field or simply interested in a refresher on interpretation concepts.

Course Schedule

This course is self-paced, allowing learners the flexibility to complete the course as quickly or slowly as they need. While exploring course content, learners can investigate topics in greater detail through enrichment activities that link to real-world examples, original source materials, and policy documents. Learners can easily move from section to section as they navigate through the course, revisiting concepts as needed.

Elements of the course

Informational text

Interactive practice activities

Videos

Informal assessment quizzes

Reference materials

Final assessment

After completing all course activities, you will complete a brief assessment to demonstrate your understanding of key course concepts. Upon successful completion of the assessment, you will be awarded a certificate of completion.

Course Chapters

What is interpretation?

Why do we do interpretation?

What skills do interpreters need?

How do you do interpretation?

Be able to:

Describe the history and philosophy of interpretation

Recognize the importance of providing interpretive services

Identify the skills needed to be an interpreter

Describe the interpretive process

Recommended Background

There are no prerequisites for this course; all are welcome.

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Around the world, guides, docents, and naturalists at parks, museums, zoos, and cultural and historical sites strive to provide meaningful experiences for visitors. Interpretation is the essential tool they use. Upon successful completion of this course, you'll receive a certificate issued by the Eppley Institute for Parks and Public Lands, Indiana University.

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Flowering Plant Morphology with Trevlyn Williams

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Flowering Plant Morphology with Trevlyn Williams

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Enrichment: Flowering Plant Morphology 2_10_21

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By Robin Wall Kimmerer

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Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is the author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Kimmerer lives in Syracuse, New York, where she is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology and the founder and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment.

Studio Airport is Bram Broerse and Maurits Wouters. Together with a small team of creatives, they run a design practice based in Utrecht, the Netherlands. The studio has been recognized with international awards for projects such as Hart Island Project (New York), Amsterdam Art Council, and Greenpeace International.

As Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests serviceberries alongside the birds, she considers the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy. How, she asks, can we learn from Indigenous wisdom and ecological systems to reimagine currencies of exchange?

The cool breath of evening slips off the wooded hills, displacing the heat of the day, and with it come the birds, as eager for the cool as I am. They arrive in a flock of calls that sound like laughter, and I have to laugh back with the same delight. They are all around me, Cedar Waxwings and Catbirds and a flash of Bluebird iridescence. I have never felt such a kinship to my namesake, Robin, as in this moment when we are both stuffing our mouths with berries and chortling with happiness. The bushes are laden with fat clusters of red, blue, and wine purple in every stage of ripeness-so many, you can pick them by the handful. I'm glad I have a pail and wonder if the birds will be able to fly with their bellies as full as mine.

This abundance of berries feels like a pure gift from the land. I have not earned, paid for, nor labored for them. There is no mathematics of worthiness that reckons I deserve them in any way. And yet here they are-along with the sun and the air and the birds and the rain, gathering in the towers of cumulonimbi. You could call them natural resources or ecosystem services, but the Robins and I know them as gifts. We both sing gratitude with our mouths full.

Part of my delight comes from their unexpected presence. The local native Serviceberries, Amelanchier arborea, have small, hard fruits, which tend toward dryness, and only once in a while is there a tree with sweet offerings. The bounty in my bucket is a western species- A. alnifolium, known as Saskatoons-planted by my farmer neighbor, and this is their first bearing year, which they do with an enthusiasm that matches my own.

Saskatoon, Juneberry, Shadbush, Shadblow, Sugarplum, Sarvis, Serviceberry-these are among the many names for Amelanchier. Ethnobotanists know that the more names a plant has, the greater its cultural importance. The tree is beloved for its fruits, for medicinal use, and for the early froth of flowers that whiten woodland edges at the first hint of spring. Serviceberry is known as a calendar plant, so faithful is it to seasonal weather patterns. Its bloom is a sign that the ground has thawed and that the shad are running upstream-or at least it was back in the day when rivers were clear and free enough to support their spawning. The derivation of the name "Service" from its relative Sorbus (also in the Rose Family) notwithstanding, the plant does provide myriad goods and services. Not only to humans but to many other citizens. It is a preferred browse of Deer and Moose, a vital source of early pollen for newly emerging insects, and host to a suite of butterfly larvae-like Tiger Swallowtails, Viceroys, Admirals, and Hairstreaks-and berry-feasting birds who rely on those calories in breeding season.

In Potawatomi, it is called Bozakmin, which is a superlative: the best of the berries. I agree with my ancestors on the rightness of that name. Imagine a fruit that tastes like a Blueberry crossed with the satisfying heft of an Apple, a touch of rosewater and a minuscule crunch of almond-flavored seeds. They taste like nothing a grocery store has to offer: wild, complex with a chemistry that your body recognizes as the real food it's been waiting for.

For me, the most important part of the word Bozakmin is "min," the root for "berry." It appears in our Potawatomi words for Blueberry, Strawberry, Raspberry, even Apple, Maize, and Wild Rice. The revelation in that word is a treasure for me, because it is also the root word for "gift." In naming the plants who shower us with goodness, we recognize that these are gifts from our plant relatives, manifestations of their generosity, care, and creativity. When we speak of these not as things or products or commodities, but as gifts, the whole relationship changes. I can't help but gaze at them, cupped like jewels in my hand, and breathe out my gratitude.

In the presence of such gifts, gratitude is the intuitive first response. The gratitude flows toward our plant elders and radiates to the rain, to the sunshine, to the improbability of bushes spangled with morsels of sweetness in a world that can be bitter.

Gratitude is so much more than a polite "thank you." It is the thread that connects us in a deep relationship, simultaneously physical and spiritual, as our bodies are fed and spirits nourished by the sense of belonging, which is the most vital of foods. Gratitude creates a sense of abundance, the knowing that you have what you need. In that climate of sufficiency, our hunger for more abates and we take only what we need, in respect for the generosity of the giver.

If our first response is gratitude, then our second is reciprocity: to give a gift in return. What could I give these plants in return for their generosity? It could be a direct response, like weeding or water or a song of thanks that sends appreciation out on the wind. Or indirect, like donating to my local land trust so that more habitat for the gift givers will be saved, or making art that invites others into the web of reciprocity.

Gratitude and reciprocity are the currency of a gift economy, and they have the remarkable property of multiplying with every exchange, their energy concentrating as they pass from hand to hand, a truly renewable resource. I accept the gift from the bush and then spread that gift with a dish of berries to my neighbor, who makes a pie to share with his friend, who feels so wealthy in food and friendship that he volunteers at the food pantry. You know how it goes.

To name the world as gift is to feel one's membership in the web of reciprocity. It makes you happy-and it makes you accountable. Conceiving of something as a gift changes your relationship to it in a profound way, even though the physical makeup of the "thing" has not changed. A woolly knit hat that you purchase at the store will keep you warm regardless of its origin, but if it was hand knit by your favorite auntie, then you are in relationship to that "thing" in a very different way: you are responsible for it, and your gratitude has motive force in the world. You're likely to take much better care of the gift hat than the commodity hat, because it is knit of relationships. This is the power of gift thinking. I imagine if we acknowledged that everything we consume is the gift of Mother Earth, we would take better care of what we are given. Mistreating a gift has emotional and ethical gravity as well as ecological resonance.

How we think ripples out to how we behave. If we view these berries, or that coal or forest, as an object, as property, it can be exploited as a commodity in a market economy. We know the consequences of that.

Why then have we permitted the dominance of economic systems that commoditize everything? That create scarcity instead of abundance, that promote accumulation rather than sharing? We've surrendered our values to an economic system that actively harms what we love. I'm wondering how we fix that. And I'm not alone.

Because I'm a botanist, my fluency in the lexicon of berries may not easily extend to economics, so I wanted to revisit the conventional meaning of economics to compare it with my understanding of the gift economy of nature. What is economics for anyway? It turns out that answer depends a lot on who you ask. On their website, the American Economic Association says, "It's the study of scarcity, the study of how people use resources and respond to incentives." My son-in-law teaches high school economics, and the first principle his students learn is that economics is about decision-making in the face of scarcity. Anything and everything in a market is implicitly defined as scarce. With scarcity as the main principle, the mindset that follows is based on commodification of goods and services.

I'm way past high school, but I'm not sure I grasp that thinking, so I fill a bowl with fresh Serviceberries for my friend and colleague, Dr. Valerie Luzadis. She is an appreciator of earthly gifts and a professor and past president of the US Society for Ecological Economics. Ecological economics is a growing economic theory that expands the conventional definition by working to integrate Earth's natural systems and human values. But it has not been standard practice to include these foundational elements-they are usually left out of the equation. Valerie prefers the definition that "economics is how we organize ourselves to sustain life and enhance its quality. It's a way of considering how we provide for ourselves."

The words "ecology" and "economy" come from the same root, the Greek oikos, meaning "home" or "household": i.e., the systems of relationship, the goods and services that keep us alive. The system of market economies that we're given as a default is hardly the only model out there. Anthropologists have observed and shared multiple cultural frameworks colored by very different worldviews on "how we provide for ourselves," including gift economies.

As the berries plunk into my bucket, I'm thinking about what I'll do with them all. I'll drop some off for friends and neighbors, and I'll certainly fill the freezer for Juneberry muffins in February. This "problem" of managing decisions about abundance reminds me of a report that linguist Daniel Everett wrote as he was learning from a hunter-gatherer community in the Brazilian rainforest. A hunter had brought home a sizable kill, far too much to be eaten by his family. The researcher asked how he would store the excess. Smoking and drying technologies were well known; storing was possible. The hunter was puzzled by the question-store the meat? Why would he do that? Instead, he sent out an invitation to a feast, and soon the neighboring families were gathered around his fire, until every last morsel was consumed. This seemed like maladaptive behavior to the anthropologist, who asked again: given the uncertainty of meat in the forest, why didn't he store the meat for himself, which is what the economic system of his home culture would predict.

"Store my meat? I store my meat in the belly of my brother," replied the hunter.

I feel a great debt to this unnamed teacher for these words. There beats the heart of gift economies, an antecedent alternative to market economies, another way of "organizing ourselves to sustain life." In a gift economy, wealth is understood as having enough to share, and the practice for dealing with abundance is to give it away. In fact, status is determined not by how much one accumulates, but by how much one gives away. The currency in a gift economy is relationship, which is expressed as gratitude, as interdependence and the ongoing cycles of reciprocity. A gift economy nurtures the community bonds that enhance mutual well-being; the economic unit is "we" rather than "I," as all flourishing is mutual.

Anthropologists characterize gift economies as systems of exchange in which goods and services circulate without explicit expectations of direct compensation. Those who have give to those who don't so that everyone in the system has what they need. It is not regulated from above but derives from a collective sense of equity and accountability in response to the gifts of the Earth.

In his book Sacred Economics, Charles Eisenstein states: "Gifts cement the mystical realization of participation in something greater than oneself which, yet, is not separate from oneself. The axioms of rational self-interest change because the self has expanded to include something of the other." If the community is flourishing, then all within it will partake of the same abundance-or shortage-that nature provides.

The currency of exchange is gratitude and relationship rather than money. It includes a system of social and moral agreements for indirect reciprocity. So, the hunter who shared the feast with you could well anticipate that you would share from a full fishnet or offer your labor in repairing a boat.

The natural world itself is understood as a gift and not as private property; as such, there are ethical constraints on the accumulation of abundance that is not yours. Well-known examples of gift economies include potlatches or the Kula ring cycle, in which gifts circulate in the group, solidifying bonds of relationship and redistributing wealth.

The question of abundance highlights the striking difference between the market economies which have come to dominate the globe and the ancient gift economies which preceded them. There are many examples of functioning gift economies-most in small societies of close relations, where community well-being is recognized as the "unit" of success-where the interest of "we" exceeds that of "I." In this time when the economies have grown so large and impersonal that they extinguish rather than nurture community well-being, perhaps we should consider other ways to organize the exchange of goods and services which constitute an economy.

In a market economy, where the underlying principles are scarcity and maximizing return on investment, the meat is private property, accumulated for the well-being of the hunter or exchanged for currency. The greatest status and success comes from possession. Food security is assured by private accumulation.

In contrast, gift economies arise from the abundance of gifts from the Earth, which are owned by no one and therefore shared. Sharing engenders relationships of goodwill and bonds that ensure you will be invited to the feast when your neighbor is fortunate. Security is ensured by nurturing the bonds of reciprocity. You can store meat in your own pantry or in the belly of your brother. Both have the result of keeping hunger at bay but with very different consequences for the people and for the land which provided that sustenance.

I haven't studied economics in decades, but as a plant ecologist, I've spent a lifetime asking the plants for their guidance on any number of issues; so I wondered what the Serviceberries had to say about the systems which create and distribute goods and services. What is their economic system? How do they respond to the issues of abundance and scarcity? Has their evolutionary process shaped them to be hoarders or sharers?

Let's ask the Saskatoons. These ten-foot-tall trees are the producers in this economy. Using the free raw materials of light, water, and air, they transmute these gifts into leaves and flowers and fruits. They store some energy as sugars in the making of their own bodies, but much of it is shared. Some of the abundance of spring rain and sun manifests in the form of flowers, which offer a feast for insects when it's cold and rainy. The insects return the favor by carrying pollen. Food is rarely in short supply for Saskatoons, but mobility is rare. Movement is a gift of the pollinators, but the energy needed to support buzzing around is scarce. So they create a relationship of exchange that benefits both.

We've surrendered our values to an economic system that actively harms what we love.

In summer, when the boughs are laden, Serviceberry produces an abundance of sugar. Does it hoard that energy for itself? No, it invites the birds to a feast. Come, my relatives, fill your bellies, say the Serviceberries. Are they not storing their meat in the bellies of their brothers and sisters-the Jays, the Thrashers, and the Robins?

Isn't this an economy? A system of distribution of goods and services that meets the needs of the community? The currency of this economic system is energy, which flows through it, and materials, which cycle among the producers and the consumers. It is a system for redistribution of wealth, an exchange of goods and services. Each member has an abundance of something, which they offer to others. The abundance of berries goes to the birds-for, what use are berries to the tree other than a way to make relationships with birds?

Eating too many berries has the same effect on birds as it does on people. Fuchsia splats decorate the fence posts. This of course is the whole point of berries-to make themselves so irresistible and plentiful that birds will come and feast, as we are doing this evening, and then distribute the seeds far and wide. Feasting has another benefit. Passage through a bird gut scarifies the seeds to stimulate germination. The birds provide services to the Serviceberries, who provide for them in return. The relationships created by the gift weave myriad relations between insects and microbes and root systems. The gift is multiplied with every giving, until it returns so rich and sweet that it burbles forth as the birdsong that wakes me in the morning. If the abundance had been hoarded, if Juneberries acted solely for their own benefit, the forest would be diminished.

Charles Eisenstein expresses that we have created a grotesque economy that grinds what is beautiful and unique into money, a currency that enables us to purchase things we don't really need while destroying what we do.

I think that the Serviceberries show us another model, one based upon reciprocity rather than accumulation, where wealth and security come from the quality of your relationships, not from the illusion of self-sufficiency. Without gift relationships with bees and birds, Serviceberries would disappear from the planet. Even if they hoarded abundance, perching atop the wealth ladder, they would not save themselves from the fate of extinction if their partners did not share in that abundance. Hoarding won't save us either. All flourishing is mutual.

As I watch the Robins and Cedar Waxwings fill their bellies, I see a gift economy in which abundance is stored "in the belly of my brother." Supporting a thriving bird community is essential to the well-being of the Serviceberry and everyone else up the food chain. That seems especially important to an immobile, long-lived being like a tree, who can't run away from ruptured relationships. Thriving is possible only if you have nurtured strong bonds with your community.

This system of exchanges looks like an economy to me; but I'm a plant ecologist. I wonder whether an economist like Valerie would see a gift economy in the Serviceberry's distribution of goods and services. I want to know if natural systems could be understood as analogs to economic systems. Could we engage in a kind of economic biomimicry to design systems of exchange which benefit human people and more-than-human people at the same time?

"Yes!" Valerie says, as if she'd been waiting a long time to be asked this question. "Natural systems can surely be understood as analogs to economic systems."

Imagining human economies that are modeled after ecological systems is the realm of ecological economists like Valerie. This is quite distinct from environmental economics, which tallies up the costs and trade-offs of choosing to wreck or restore ecosystems. Ecological economists ask how we might build economic systems that meet citizens' needs while aligning with ecological principles that allow long-term sustainability for people and for planet. Valerie says that "ecological economics emerged after observing [how the] neoclassical economic approach fails to provide for everyone and does not adequately consider the ecosystems that are our life support. From a strictly utilitarian view, we've created a system such that we self-identify as consumers first before understanding ourselves as ecosystem citizens. In ecological economics, the focus is on creating an economy that provides for a just and sustainable future in which both human life and nonhuman life can flourish."

What might Serviceberry teach us here? She replies, "Serviceberry, or Shadbush as I learned it, provides a model of interdependence and coevolution that is the heart of ecological economics. Serviceberry teaches us another way to understand relationship and exchange. With a Serviceberry economy as our model, it prompts the opportunity for articulation of the value of gratitude and reciprocity as essential foundations for an economy." Reciprocity-not scarcity.

As a participant in a traditional culture of gratitude, with a bucket full of berries in my hand, there's something I've never quite understood about human economics, and that is the primacy of scarcity as an organizing principle. Capitalist market economies depend on the motive force of scarcity in order to regulate markets with supply and demand.

As a person schooled by plants, my fingers stained with berry juice, I'm not willing to give scarcity such a prominent role. Gift economies arise from an understanding of earthly abundance and the gratitude it generates. A perception of abundance, based on the notion that there is enough if we share it, underlies economies of mutual support.

There is no question but that all living beings experience some level of scarcity at various points, and therefore that competition for limited resources, like light or water or soil nitrogen, will occur. But since competition reduces the carrying capacity for all concerned, natural selection favors those who can avoid competition. Oftentimes this is achieved by shifting one's needs away from whatever is in short supply, as though evolution were suggesting "if there's not enough of what you want, then want something else." This specialization to avoid scarcity has led to a dazzling array of biodiversity, each avoiding competition by being different. Diversity in ways of being is an antidote to scarcity-induced competition.

Evolutionary biologists would perhaps reject this notion, framing the lifeways of Serviceberry as maximizing self-interest through natural selection, which is the same sort of argument made by market economists: maximizing self-interest in economic behavior through competition for scarce resources. Competition between individuals for success is seen as the driving force.

What if scarcity is just a cultural construct, a fiction that fences us off from gift economies?

Valerie points out that even ecologists are reevaluating the assumption that intense competition is the primary force regulating evolutionary success. Evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson has found that competition makes sense only when we consider the unit of evolution to be the individual. When the focus shifts to the level of a group, cooperation is a better model, not only for surviving, but for thriving. In a recent interview, author Richard Powers comments, "There is symbiosis at every single level of living things, and you cannot compete in a zero-sum game with creatures upon whom your existence depends." And yet, we continue to operate our economic systems from the foundation of competition. I think the Serviceberries discovered this long ago, and we humans need to catch up.

What if scarcity is just a cultural construct, a fiction that fences us off from gift economies? When I examine Serviceberry economics, I don't see scarcity, I see abundance shared: photosynthate is usually not in short supply, since sun and air are perpetually renewable resources. Of course, sometimes there's not enough rain, and then the scarcity ripples through the web of relationships, for sure. That is real scarcity: when the rains don't come. A physical limitation with repercussions that are shared, just as abundance is shared. That kind of scarcity is not what troubles me.

It is manufactured scarcity that I cannot accept. In order for capitalist market economies to function, there must be scarcity, and the system is designed to create scarcity where it does not actually exist. Because I have not thought much about economics since my introduction to it in high school decades ago, I realize that I had just been accepting the principle of scarcity as if it were a natural fact, not an economic assumption.

I try and lay out the understanding for myself, to think like an economist, not an ecologist. In order for money to be made, there must be commodities to be bought and sold. The scarcer those commodities, the greater the revenue. So, I guess I do understand this: market economics demands that abundant, freely available, earthly gifts be converted to commodities and made scarce by privatization and a high price. This seems crazy, so let me test my understanding with the example of pure, beautiful water, a gift from the skies. It was previously unthinkable that one would pay for a drink of water; but as careless economic expansion pollutes fresh water, we now incentivize privatization of springs and aquifers. Sweet water, a free gift of the Earth, is pirated by faceless corporations who encase it in plastic shells to sell. And now many can't afford what was previously free, and we incentivize wrecking public waters to create demand for the privatized.

In contrast, in Indigenous societies all over the world, where remnants of gift economies endure, water is sacred and people have a moral responsibility to care for it, to keep it flowing as the lifeblood of Mother Earth. It is a gift, to be shared by all, and the notion of owning water is an ecological and ethical travesty.

The Indigenous philosophy of the gift economy, based in our responsibility to pass on those gifts, has no tolerance for creating artificial scarcity through hoarding. In fact, the "monster" in Potawatomi culture is the Windigo, who suffers from the illness of taking too much and sharing too little.

At one point while writing this essay-as I was struggling to imagine how the ways of Serviceberries and ancient gift economies could help us imagine our way out of the mutually assured destruction of unbridled capitalism-I needed a break from the Windigo shadows that were creeping toward me. Thankfully, I was interrupted by a text from my neighbor, Paulie. As though she were reading my troubled mind from across the valley, Paulie invited me to come pick berries at her farm. Serviceberries. For free. The tingles of synchronicity propelled me from my desk to the orchard.

She planted this orchard with commodity in mind, part of her revenue stream as a small local farmer; an innovative crop destined for "pick your own" fees, which can be lucrative. But instead, she has invited her neighbors to come and pick for free. Her labor and expenses are not free: tilling, irrigation, and marketing cost real money. The trees cost money, as does the gas when Ed mows between rows-and the Serviceberries won't be paying their own way.

She is losing the return on her investment by inviting us to come fill our buckets with this surfeit of sweetness. She is not obeying the rules of the capitalist market economy; she is not behaving in a way that will maximize her profit. How un-American.

In one fell swoop her berries rolled from the commodity column on a spreadsheet into the beribboned box called "gift." The berries hadn't changed a bit: they were still juicy and bursting with antioxidants. The farm hadn't changed either. It's a small, family operation, diversified with an array of crops that generate revenue all year-from early spring lambs to Christmas trees. The only thing that changed was whether the folks who came to pick berries were asked to put pieces of green paper into the coffee can inside the barn door.

I asked her why she did it, especially in these pandemic days, when every small business is struggling to make ends meet. "Well," she said, "they're so abundant. There's more than enough to share, and people could use a little goodness in their lives right now." People came to pick in the cool of the early evening, socially distanced at opposite ends of the rows, isolated yet somehow connected by the rhythm of fingers moving from bush to bucket-and mouth. "Everyone's so sad now," she said, "but in the berry patch all I hear are happy voices. It feels good to give that little bit of delight."

But it's also education, she says. Most people don't know Juneberries yet, and giving them away is an invitation to try them. True, Juneberries have long been a staple food for traditional people who share habitat with Amelanchier alnifolia. Harvested in great quantities, they were used as the basis for pemmican, the original energy bar. Now used for making pies and jam and cramming your mouth full, they are celebrated as a gift from the land but are little known as a product in the market economy.

Paulie has a reputation to uphold for being no-nonsense in her approach to life, so she qualifies her explanation: "It's not really altruism," she insists. "An investment in community always comes back to you in some way. Maybe people who come for Serviceberries will come back for Sunflowers and then for the Blueberries. Sure, it's a gift, but it's also good marketing. The gift builds relationship, and that's always a good thing. That's what we really produce here-relationship, with each other and with the farm." The currency of relationship can manifest itself as money down the road, because they do have to pay the bills. Free berries might translate to better pumpkin sales, because people will want to come back to a place they have a relationship with. "People feel like they got something more than they paid for," she explained. "They learned about a new food, or watched the kids climb on hay bales." Good feelings are the real value added. Even when it's paid for as a commodity, the gift of relationship is still attached to it.

Hoarding won't save us ... All flourishing is mutual.

The ongoing reciprocity in gifting stretches beyond the next customer, though, into a whole web of relations that are not transactional. They are banking goodwill, so-called social capital. "Being known as a citizen is always of value," she says. If someone leaves a gate open and her sheep end up in my garden, there's a cushion of goodwill in place so that the munched dahlias may be forgiven. "The way I see it," she says, "always value people over things. There's that old line that farmers like to spout, 'Without farmers, you'd be naked, hungry, and sober.' But it goes both ways: without good neighbors, you'd also be alone, and that's worse."

And that customer who comes to value the smell of ripe berries and the view of lambs on pasture and the memory of their kids climbing on hay bales-they just might vote for the farmland preservation bond in the next election. That's a fine return on investment from a free bucket of berries.

I cherish the notion of the gift economy, that we might back away from the grinding market economy that reduces everything to a commodity and leaves most of us bereft of what we really want: relationship and purpose and beauty and meaning, which can never be commoditized. I want to be part of a system in which wealth means having enough to share, and where the gratification of meeting your family needs is not poisoned by destroying that possibility for someone else. I want to live in a society where the currency of exchange is gratitude and the infinitely renewable resource of kindness, which multiplies every time it is shared rather than depreciating with use.

You might rightly observe that we no longer live in small, insular societies, where generosity and mutual esteem structure our relations. But we could. It is within our power to create such webs of interdependence, quite outside the market economy. Intentional communities of mutual self-reliance and reciprocity are the wave of the future, and their currency is sharing. The move toward a local food economy is not just about freshness and food miles and carbon footprints and soil organic matter. It is all of those things, but it's also about the deeply human desire for connection, to be in reciprocity with the gifts that are given you.

The real human needs that such arrangements address are exactly what we long for yet cannot ever purchase: being valued for your own unique gifts, earning the regard of your neighbors for the quality of your character, not the quantity of your possessions; what you give, not what you have.

I don't think market capitalism is going to disappear anytime soon; the faceless institutions that benefit from it are too entrenched. But I don't think it's pie-in-the-sky to imagine that we can create incentives to nurture a gift economy that runs right alongside the market economy, where the good that is served is community. After all, what we crave is not trickle-down, faceless profits, but reciprocal, face-to-face relationships, which are naturally abundant but made scarce by the anonymity of large-scale economics. We have the power to change that, to develop the local, reciprocal economies that serve community rather than undermine it.

In Sacred Economics, Eisenstein reflects on the economy of ecosystems: "In nature, headlong growth and all-out competition are features of immature ecosystems, followed by complex interdependency, symbiosis, cooperation, and the cycling of resources. The next stage of human economy will parallel what we are beginning to understand about nature. It will call forth the gifts of each of us; it will emphasize cooperation over competition; it will encourage circulation over hoarding; and it will be cyclical, not linear. Money may not disappear anytime soon, but it will serve a diminished role even as it takes on more of the properties of the gift. The economy will shrink, and our lives will grow."

I see this in the example of my neighbors, both the farmers and the berries. Yes, they have to pay the bills and are part of the market economy, but with every commodity traded, they add something that cannot be commodified and which is therefore even more valuable. People come for a sense of connection to the land, a laugh with the farmer as a fellow human who cherishes the crisp fall air-not for the commodity of a pumpkin, which, after all, you could buy anywhere.

Continued fealty to economies based on competition for manufactured scarcity, rather than cooperation around natural abundance, is now causing us to face the danger of producing real scarcity, evident in growing shortages of food and clean water, breathable air, and fertile soil. Climate change is a product of this extractive economy and is forcing us to confront the inevitable outcome of our consumptive lifestyle: genuine scarcity for which the market has no remedy. Indigenous story traditions are full of these cautionary teachings. When the gift is dishonored, the outcome is always material as well as spiritual. Disrespect the water and the springs dry up. Waste the corn and the garden grows barren. Regenerative economies which cherish and reciprocate the gift are the only path forward. To replenish the possibility of mutual flourishing, for birds and berries and people, we need an economy that shares the gifts of the Earth, following the lead of our oldest teachers, the plants.

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The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance - Robin Wall Kimmerer

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As Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests serviceberries alongside the birds, she considers the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy.

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Botanist in the Kitchen: Thanksgiving edition

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Botanist in the Kitchen: Thanksgiving edition

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Docent Enrichment with Dr. Katherine Preston and Dr. Jeanne Osnas

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NPR interview with Suzanne Simard

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subscribe to Fresh Air podcast

subscribe to Fresh Air podcast

Ecologist Suzanne Simard says trees are "social creatures" that communicate with each other in remarkable ways - including warning each other of danger and sharing nutrients at critical times. Her book is 'Finding the Mother Tree.'

Also, classical music critic Lloyd Schwartz reviews a collection by composer Bernard Herrmann, best-known for the scores he wrote for Alfred Hitchcock.

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Ecologist Suzanne Simard says trees are "social creatures" that communicate with each other in remarkable ways - including warning each other of danger and sharing nutrients at critical times. Her book is 'Finding the Mother Tree.' Also, classical music critic Lloyd Schwartz reviews a collection by composer Bernard Herrmann, best-known for the scores he wrote for Alfred Hitchcock.

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Gall Talk with Kathy Schick and Joyce Gross, Docent Enrichment Part 1

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Gall Talk with Kathy Schick and Joyce Gross, Docent Enrichment Part 1

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About galls & photos of galls

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Gall Talk with Kathy Schick and Joyce Gross, Part 1

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Gall talk with Kathy Schick and Joyce Gross, Docent Enrichment Part 2

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Gall talk with Kathy Schick and Joyce Gross, Docent Enrichment Part 2

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Gall Talk with Kathy Schick and Joyce Gross, Part 2

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"These tiny wasps cannot sting," says Dr. Kathy Schick, Assistant Specialist/Curatorial Assistant at the Essig Museum of Entomology at UC Berkeley. "Gall-inducers are fascinating in that they are very specialized to their organ of the host plant." Galls are generally formed when an insect, or its larvae, introduce chemicals into a specific location, to push the plant's growth hormones into overdrive. This can result in a great profusion of normal cells, increased size of existing cells, or the alteration of entire plant structures into new, alien forms.

These wasp houses are not homes exactly, but more akin to nurseries. The galls serve as an ideal environment for wasp larvae, whether it is a single offspring, or dozens. The tree is tricked into generating outsize amounts of soft, pillowy tissue inside each gall, on which the larvae gladly gorge themselves as they grow.

But gall-inducers are not the only wasps who come to the party. All the free eats and nice digs attract uninvited guests. These other wasps - called inquilines - invade other galls to steal the food from the larvae. Yet another kind of wasp -- a parasitoid -- injects its eggs into the first wasp's gall, so its offspring can eat the plant tissue eating the food and even the residents. And the parasitoids, they have to watch out for other Johnny-come-lately wasps called hyper-parasitoids, which go after their larvae or even the parasitoids themselves. And on and on.

But assuming the original offspring survive, the larvae pupate and as new adult wasps chew their way out - weeks, months, or even years later depending on the species and environmental conditions.

Then off to find a mate. Or not?

The life cycle of gall-inducers can be exceedingly complex, especially among Cynipids.There can be both sexual (male and female get together, eggs are fertilized) and asexual (no males = parthenogenic) phases at different times of year, which result in different types of galls, even on different parts of the plant.

And the California Gall Wasp in our video, Andricus quercuscalifornicus? Researchers are still searching for a male specimen. To date, not a single one has been found. It is debated whether they even exist at all. Yet another unsolved mystery, in the under appreciated realm of plant galls and their iinhabitants.

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What Gall! The Crazy Cribs of Parasitic Wasps | KQED

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Plenty of animals build their homes in oak trees. But some very teeny, tricky wasps make the tree do all the work. "What nerve!" you might say. What... gall! And you'd be right. The wasps are called gall-inducers. And each miniature mansion that the trees build for the wasps' larvae is weirder and more flamboyant than the next.

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with Paul Heiple

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With Kate Marianchild

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Learn with a Naturalist: Who's Who in the Oaks October 1, 2020

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BBC Attenborough

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Oak tree and wasp eggs - Life in the Undergrowth - BBC Attenborough

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Sir David Attenborough takes a closer look at the weird and wonderful life cycle of the wasp as it lays its egg inside the protective layers of an oak tree. Brilliant images from BBC animal and wildlife show 'Life in the Undergrowth'.

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If you'd like to learn more about Native Foodways, Ancestral Seeds, and the Traditional Ecological Knowledge

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Welcome!

The Native Seed Pod is a podcast that explores and celebrates Native Foodways, Ancestral Seeds, and the Traditional Ecological Knowledge needed to renew the health of the Earth and all our relations. From planting songs to cultural foodscapes, we highlight the importance of protecting and restoring agrobiodiversity and food sovereignty to sustain resilient communities.

We hope to serve as an antidote to the monoculture of the mind, by asking the questions: what seeds have we inherited? What seeds have we lost and are revitalizing? And what seeds are we planting to nourish the future?

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The Native Seed Pod is a podcast that explores and celebrates Native Foodways, Ancestral Seeds, and the Traditional Ecological Knowledge needed to renew the health of the Earth and all our relations. From planting songs to cultural foodscapes, we highlight the importance of protecting and restoring agrobiodiversity and food sovereignty to sustain resilient communities.

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Fungus Fun

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Merlin Sheldrake eats mushrooms sprouting from his book, Entangled Life

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A little plague to go with your pandemic?

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A little plague to go with your pandemic?

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National Geographic article shows how a 'swarm' forms. Fascinating! And scary

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Pearl millet

Pennisetum

glaucum

Solitary femur

18% greater volume

A toxic new look

Swarming locusts turn bright yellow-a warning

to birds, reptiles, and other predators that they may be unappetizing or poisonous.

Pearl millet

Pennisetum

glaucum

Solitary femur

18% greater volume

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See how a plague of locusts forms-and blazes its path of destruction

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Pearl millet Pennisetum glaucum Solitary femur 18% greater volume A toxic new look Swarming locusts turn bright yellow-a warning to birds, reptiles, and other predators that they may be unappetizing or poisonous. Pearl millet Pennisetum glaucum Solitary femur 18% greater volume

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Newt Sex: Buff Males! Writhing Females! Cannibalism! | Deep Look

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Every winter, California newts leave the safety of their forest burrows and travel as far as three miles to mate in the pond where they were born. Their mating ritual is a raucous affair that involves bulked-up males, writhing females and a little cannibalism.

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Webinar Intro to Poetry

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Webinar: Nature as Inspiration and Transformation: An Intro to Nature Poetry

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Award-winning poet and nature writer Aimee Nezhukumatathil discussed using nature to inspire and transform our writing.

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Juristac Resources from Amah Mutsen. Native history and culture

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Juristac Resources from Amah Mutsen. Native history and culture

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Welcome, teachers. This page contains resources and activities for students regarding Juristac, Amah Mutsun history, and related subjects. This collection of resources is a work in progress, and additional materials and activities will be added based on the feedback we receive from classrooms. While the activities here are tailored to a high school learning level, they can easily be adapted and used in many different grade levels and instructional settings.

We invite and encourage your feedback and stories of classroom experiences while teaching with these materials. Please contact us by email at curriculum [at] protectjuristac.org.

Juristac curriculum: Activities and study guides

The following activities and exercises are aligned with the English Language Arts (ELA) and History/Social Studies Common Core State Standards. In these activities, you will find opportunities to engage your students in meaningful research into local history, reflective discussion, critical thinking, and persuasive writing. We have prepared a Standards Alignment Guide (PDF, 3 pages) that provides a detailed list of standards aligned with the activities and a chart outlining which standards are covered by each assignment.

Additional resources for educators

This list will be expanded periodically. Email us if you are looking for resources around a particular topic related to Juristac or the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band that you are not finding here.

Selected videos

Amah Mutsun Tribal Chairman Valentin Lopez's Perspective on Juristac by Stanford Journalism-3 minutes, 2020.

Juristac: A short film by Ariel Bobbett​- 4 minutes, 2018.

Here and Now- by Bay Area Open Space Council, 2015. 18 minutes. Documents the work of the Amah Mutsun Land Trust and Tribal Stewardship Corps.

Excavating the past; Improving the future- UC Berkeley, 2018. 4 minutes. Portrays ongoing collaboration between the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band and UC Berkeley archaeologists and anthropologists.

UMUNHUM by Plus M Productions, 2017. 11 minutes. Featuring the story of the return of the Amah Mutsun to their sacred mountain in Santa Clara County, Mt Umunhum.

Beyond Recognition: "A film exploring the quest to preserve one's culture and homeland in a society bent on erasing them"-featuring one of the Amah Mutsun's neighboring tribes, the Confederated Villages of Lisjan. 25 minutes, 2014. Available via streaming and DVD.

Telling the Truth About California Missions, Classroom Edition (featuring Valentin Lopez, Elias Castillo, Mark Day)

Videos from December 2018 Protect Juristac panel in Morgan Hill

Additional videos on this Protect Juristac YouTube playlist

Wildlife corridors / landscape linkages

Amah Mutsun and Ohlone

Rekindling The Old Ways: The Amah Mutsun and the Recovery of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (Bay Nature article)

Contemporary Ohlone History (article)

Ohlone/Costanoan Indians of the San Francisco Peninsula and their Neighbors, Yesterday and Today- by Randall Milliken, Laurence H. Shoup, and Beverly R. Ortiz. National Park Service, 2009. Individual chapter PDFs on NPS website

"No Somos Animales": Indigenous Resistance and Perseverance in Nineteenth Century Santa Cruz- by Martin Adam Rizzo. Unpublished dissertation, September 2006.

Mutsun-English English-Mutsun Dictionary, mutsun-inkiS inkiS-mutsun riica pappel- full 677 page PDF of dictionary available for free download.

The Case of California's Amah Mutsun by E. Richard Hart, published in the journal Western Legal History, 2003 - a scholarly review of the legal history of the dispossession of Mutsun people from their ancestral lands, with a focus on the case of Rancho Juristac (Sargent Ranch)

An Eco-Archaeological Study of Late Holocene Indigenous Foodways and Landscape Management Practices at Quiroste Valley Cultural Preserve, San Mateo County, California

Ohlone elders and youth speak: Restoring a California Legacy

Related curriculum resources

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Curriculum for Educators " Protect Juristac

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Welcome, teachers. This page contains resources and activities for students regarding Juristac, Amah Mutsun history, and related subjects. This collection of resources is a work in progress, and additional materials and activities will be added based on the feedback we receive from classrooms. While the activities here are tailored to a high school learning level, they can easily be adapted and used in many different grade levels and instructional settings.

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Field Studies, Virtual Tours and Backyard Nature

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Field Studies, Virtual Tours and Backyard Nature

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East Bay Regional Parks

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Parks to People: Bringing our parks into homes, classes, & communities

East Bay Regional Park District is committed to the idea of lifelong learning, helping people make their own discoveries about our parks. These resources are designed to be used at home, in a classroom, or part of any online learning. Use these resources to build your own learning opportunities.

Virtual Reality Park Experiences | Learning Packages | Additional Content Videos

Virtual Reality Park Experiences

East Bay Regional Park District and Timelooper, Inc. have developed virtual reality tours of selected Regional Parks. People can now virtually visit the parks to discover more about these lands and their unique stories.

To experience the parks in Virtual Reality, please download the Timelooper App onto a tablet or smartphone from the App Store or Google Play. Once the App is downloaded onto your device, follow the steps below to find East Bay Regional Park District's Virtual Reality Experiences.

1. Download the Timelooper app in the Apple App Store or in Google Play Store.

2. Once downloaded, select the app icon to run the app. It is a white background with a black infinity symbol.

3. Select your language from the drop-down menu and select "START".

4. Press "SKIP" if you would like to skip the introduction video.

5. In the menu of different locations around the globe select "San Francisco Bay."
It is the third icon down on the right-hand side.

6. East Bay Regional Park's four virtual reality experiences are listed here.

7. Select an experience and click "DOWNLOAD" to download the experience onto your device to be used anywhere.

8. Once downloaded, select "START".

9. Do you have a cardboard Virtual Reality Headset, select "YES" or "NO".

10. Read the caution message and select "OK".

Learning Packages
Geology

Introduction to Geology: Sibley, 4m:33s

Geology Ancient Life: Sunol, 2m:20s

Oreo Cookie Faults (Activity Sheet, Coming soon)
Field Studies

Soil Health, Backyard Study: Ardenwood, 6m:34s

Pond Study: Tilden, 5m:50s

Activities for the Youngest Learners

Wood Duck Discovery 360: Shadow Cliffs - Ashley G., 4m:49s

Songs and Stories - Habitats, 10m:44s

5 Senses Discovery (Video, Coming soon)

5 Senses Scavenger Hunt (Activity Sheet, Coming soon)

Ohlone Programming

Gathering Tule Reeds, Building and Launching Tule Boats, 7m:53s

Additional Content Videos
Plants and Pollination Reptiles, Amphibians, and Gastropods Birds

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East Bay Regional Park District is committed to the idea of lifelong learning, helping people make their own discoveries about our parks. These resources are designed to be used at home, in a classroom, or part of any online learning. Use these resources to build your own learning opportunities.

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Lots of fun facts about this amazing symbiotic relationship.

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After nearly 100 years of study, the consensus by the 21st century was that the lichens of the Smokies were a known quantity. Biologists estimated that the 463 species that had been documented in Great Smoky Mountains National Park represented at least 90% of the total number of lichen species in the park.

Erin Tripp and James Lendemer were not so sure. On a trip to a nearby state park in 2005, they had made several discoveries, leading them to suspect Great Smoky Mountains also harbored many unknown lichens. Tripp, a botanist from the University of Colorado, had set up a 1-hectare plot in the eastern part of the park to monitor ecological changes in the hardwood forest, and they decided to start looking for lichens there.

The first day they examined the plot the following summer, they identified 110 species of lichens, including 36 that had not previously been found in the park. An additional 11 lichens they collected within the forest plot turned out, after further examination, to be new to science. That same day, Lendemer, a renowned lichenologist at the New York Botanical Garden, hiked a couple of miles up a nearby trail and added several more new-to-science lichen species to the park's list. The two friends were exuberant.

"You keep encountering things that you hadn't encountered before," said Lendemer, whose passion for lichens dates to his high school days. "That's what I live for."

Every summer for the next decade, Tripp and Lendemer came back to Great Smoky Mountains to look for more lichens, organisms that Tripp describes as fungi and algae sandwiches. Through their work - including a field guide to the park's lichen species to be published this spring - the duo hopes to introduce both scientists and park visitors to lichens' diversity. But one of the main goals of their research is to help staff protect the many rare species of lichens found in the park. And the first step to preserving them is to know where they are. Armed with that information, park managers can take additional steps to protect trees, rocks and soils that are host to unique lichen populations.

"It's one of the fundamental building blocks of the ecosystem."

The inventory can also help scientists monitor the impact of climate change on lichens. Warming temperatures have favored tree pests, which have decimated trees such as eastern hemlocks that provide lichen habitat, said Jessica Allen, a lichenologist at the Atlanta Botanical Garden. According to Allen's models, the Smokies' high-elevation lichens are particularly threatened, but she needs accurate lichen distribution data to make reliable predictions. "Now we have this incredible baseline," Allen said. "We're set up to watch what's going to happen there."

Lichens come in a variety of colors, from olive gray to rust orange, and range from crusty to leafy to shrubby in appearance. The fungi provide much of the lichens' structure, and the algae or cyanobacteria supply food through photosynthesis. Lichens don't have roots, but they can attach themselves to almost anything. Most are found on rocks, tree trunks or dead branches, but they can also cling to tombstones, abandoned cars and farming equipment. Some can live thousands of years, and they can grow in extreme conditions, thriving in arctic climates and withstanding long periods of drought. Lichens have even survived exposure in space on the outside of the International Space Station.

According to some estimates, lichens cover 6% of the surface of the Earth, but while they live pretty much everywhere, they receive relatively little attention. Conservation plans typically focus on megafauna and routinely ignore lichen species, Tripp said. Lichenologists have identified scores of rare species - at Great Smoky Mountains, for example, nearly a quarter of the lichen species are known from a single occurrence. Yet, only two lichen species are listed under the Endangered Species Act across the entire United States. "There should be hundreds of species," Tripp said. "Hundreds!"

Lichenologists note that the symbiotic organisms perform crucial ecological roles. They serve as a food source for flying squirrels in the Appalachians, pronghorn in the West and tree snails in the Everglades, said David Lamfrom, NPCA's regional director for the Southeast and a wildlife biologist. Green salamanders use lichens as camouflage to hide from predators, some bats roost almost exclusively in lichens, and birds collect lichens with antibacterial properties as nesting material, he said. "It's one of the fundamental building blocks of the ecosystem," he said. "It's food, it's shelter and it's medicine."

Humans have also benefited from lichens in various ways. Dyes made from Scottish lichens color the wool used to make Harris tweed, tea made with old man's beard lichens is believed by some to provide various health benefits, and some Native American tribes have eaten specific lichen species (some other species are poisonous). Allen once enjoyed a dinner prepared by a Chinese lichenologist that included lichen salad, soup and pancakes. "The best are breaded and deep-fried," she said.

One of the lichens' most valuable attributes for humans is the organisms' sensitivity to air pollution. When sulfur concentrations increase, some lichen species change color or die off, so monitoring lichen populations can help scientists track air quality. Allen said pollution had nearly extirpated all lichens from New York City by the 1930s. "With increased air regulations, we see these species come back," she said.

Susan Sachs, the chief of Great Smoky Mountains' education branch, said the park had "tremendous issues with air quality" in the 1990s and early 2000s, and Sachs has taught groups of middle school and high school students how to use lichens as a monitoring tool. Sachs also has used her position to tell people about Tripp and Lendemer's research and introduce visitors to microscopic fauna such as rotifers, nematodes and tardigrades that use lichens as habitat. "It's really fun to watch people discover this hidden world," she said.

So exactly how big is that world? Over the decade that Tripp and Lendemer studied the park, they examined nearly 50 1-hectare plots covering a variety of habitats, and they picked up other specimens while hiking for a total of about 6,000 lichens collected during their fieldwork. In addition, they looked at more than 11,700 specimens from existing collections under a microscope. After walking at least 2,000 miles and devoting personal funds and countless hours to the effort, they identified a total of 920 lichen species - a record for a national park - including eight that occur nowhere else in the world and one that had been presumed to be extinct.

"I don't think either of us thought we would double the park checklist," Tripp said.

Discovering a host of new species offers some side benefits. Over the course of his career, Lendemer has made a point of naming lichen species after women. (He and Allen are behind lichens honoring Dolly Parton and Oprah Winfrey, for example.) At Great Smoky Mountains, Tripp and Lendemer wanted to recognize park scientists and educators, who are crucial to the development of science yet rarely receive the credit they deserve. They named five of the lichen species they discovered after park staff members who supported and promoted their research. One of the new lichens, Lecanora sachsiana, whose common name is Susan's Sacs (for its sacs of spores), is a whitish lichen so nondescript that even when Lendemer was pointing at it, Sachs had trouble seeing it. Still, she is thrilled with the honor. "It bears my name, so of course, I love it," she said. "It's not showy. It's got its own beauty."

About the author

Nicolas Brulliard Senior Editor

Nicolas is a journalist and former geologist who joined NPCA in November 2015. He writes and edits online content for NPCA and serves as senior editor of National Parks magazine.

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After nearly 100 years of study, the consensus by the 21st century was that the lichens of the Smokies were a known quantity. Biologists estimated that the 463 species that had been documented in Great Smoky Mountains National Park represented at least 90% of the total number of lichen species in the park.

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Now you can enjoy all of these!

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Got a minute? In this Minute with Matt series, POST employee Matt Dolkas explores our local wildlife, plants, farms and our work protecting open spaces. Dive into these Minute with Matt videos to learn something new about this awesome place we call home:

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Got a minute? In this Minute with Matt series, POST employee Matt Dolkas explores our local wildlife, plants, farms and our work protecting open spaces. Dive into these Minute with Matt videos to learn something new about this awesome place we call home:

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The Art of Slowing Down, Sitting Still, and Paying Attention

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The Art of Slowing Down, Sitting Still, and Paying Attention

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John Muir Laws

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This is an excerpt from The Laws Guide to Nature Drawing and Journaling by John Muir Laws, published by Heyday in spring 2016.
Writers, naturalists, and scientists in all disciplines use journals to preserve what they have seen, done, and thought in the course of their work. As a naturalist, educator, and artist, I have found that my journal is the most important tool I carry into the field with me; it is even more necessary than my binoculars. Sketching and writing as you explore is the most effective thing you can do to launch yourself in the process of discovery.

Observing and journaling will slow you down and make you stop, sit down, look, and look again. How often do we take the time to be still, quiet, and attentive? Engaging in this process helps you organize your thoughts, piece together answers, and ask richer questions. Once you slow down and look long enough to record observations in your journal, mysteries will unfold before you. At the core of all science are insatiable curiosity and deep observation, qualities that lead to the best kind of learning: learning motivated by your intrinsic wonder and hunger to understand.

I draw and work in my nature journal for three reasons: to see, to remember, and to stimulate curiosity. These abilities will be reinforced for you, too, every time you sit down to journal-and you don't have to be good at drawing. The benefit of journaling is not limited to what you produce on the page; it is, rather, found in your experience and how you think along the way.

In any moment, it is possible to learn about your surroundings through observation. It is also easy to walk through the world caught up in your own thoughts and worries, looking without truly seeing. The difference between these two experiences is conscious, focused attention. Inspired by Kerry Ruef's Private Eye Project, I use three prompts-"I notice," "I wonder," and "It reminds me of"-as the foundation of my practice because they lead to conscious attention.

I notice ...

Examine whatever you are looking at. Start by saying your observations out loud. Do not filter anything out: If you see it, say it. Look at structure, behavior, color, interactions. Change your perspective: look up close or far away and see what else you can observe. Pay attention to what surprises you. This gives you insight into ways that the world is different than you had thought.

I wonder ...

After observing your object, start to come up with questions about it and say those out loud, too. There is no need to worry about answering the questions yet. Just get them all out there.

It reminds me of ...

Last, say out loud everything that your object reminds you of. Say anything that comes to mind: the object may have jarred your memory, reminding you of an experience you've had or a piece of information you already know. Try looking at individual parts of the object, then back up and examine it as a whole.

Projects

When you walk outside with your journal, pick a project to focus your awareness. It will give you new lenses through which to look at the world. Use it as an invitation to inquiry and to launch your discoveries in nature.

Make a Collection

Pick a subject that interests you and collect examples that describe its range of variation in your journal.

Observe Changes Over Time

Find an interesting subject and follow its progression over a period of minutes, hours, days, or weeks. Record the changes that you observe, make note of when they occur, and wonder about what might have caused the changes.

Make a Map

Make a map view of a landform feature or part of the landscape. You can create a map of a large area or of a small feature. This process will lead you to look at the geography of a place and it might reveal patterns you would otherwise overlook.

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Bay Nature Magazine: Excerpt from John Muir Laws Guide to Nature Journaling

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This is an excerpt from The Laws Guide to Nature Drawing and Journaling by John Muir Laws, published by Heyday in spring 2016. Writers, naturalists, and scientists in all disciplines use journals to preserve what they have seen, done, and thought in the course of their work.

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UC Davis Entomology/Nematology Seminars: What a Wealth of Information

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Published on: April 1, 2020 So, you're sheltering in place and thinking about honey bees, bumble bees, monarchs and assorted other insects. Nematodes, too. And maybe a spider or two? You're in luck. You can access (for free) the newly uploaded UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology's fall and winter seminars, 2019-2020.

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Tune into the national parks

The National Park Foundation and the National Park Service invite you to tune into PARKTRACKS, an innovative audio experience to help counter the hustle & bustle of city life, and tap into the trends of tranquility and mindfulness. PARKTRACKS will virtually transport you to national parks across the country with sounds captured by the National Park Service's Natural Sounds and Night Skies Division.

Hit play below and tune in to the relaxing sounds of America's national parks.

Ever wonder which national park is your perfect fit? Take our quiz and find out today.

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Tune into the national parks The National Park Foundation and the National Park Service invite you to tune into PARKTRACKS, an innovative audio experience to help counter the hustle & bustle of city life, and tap into the trends of tranquility and mindfulness.

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For starters, what trees can be tapped to make maple syrup? Maple trees of course! The syrup actually comes from the sap contained in these trees. The trees definitely need to be healthy and free of damage or disease to collect their sap, but size is also an important detail to account for when it comes to tapping trees. The tree must be mature if it is to be tapped for its sap. The minimum diameter size required is 1 foot. If the maple tree has a diameter of roughly 12 to 20 inches, it can be tapped only once. If the diameter is between 21 and 27 inches it can be tapped twice. Once the tree's diameter surpasses 27 inches, it can be tapped three times.

There are actually four main types of maple trees used for syrup making. They are: sugar, black, red, and silver maples. The sugar maple is, naturally, the best for making maple syrup. This is because it has a high sugar content. Sugar maples are predominately found in Canada and the northeastern United States, but can also be found as far west as Minnesota and as far south as Tennessee. These trees do well in various soils, but dislike very wet or very dry conditions. The black maple is the second most favorable for syrup making, as it has the second highest sugar content in its sap. Its growth range is more limited however, found within Canada in southeastern Quebec as well as the USA amongst central Wisconsin and down south to Tennessee. Coming in third is the red maple, which has a lower sugar content - but still makes great quality syrup. A pro of this tree is that it grows almost anywhere. It can be found growing all the way down in Florida and as far west as Texas. Lastly, silver maples can also make syrup but are these least desirable for this process - simply due to their low sugar content. As they grow early on in spring their sap can evaporate before being tapped. These trees do however have a large growth range similar to red maples.

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Tree Tapping and Maple Syrup - Our City Forest

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Ever really think about how maple syrup is made? It is many people's favorite breakfast accoutrement, but most do not consider the story behind it. Well it comes from OCF's oldest friend, the tree! Today on the blog we learn all about tree tapping and the process of creating maple syrup.

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Illustration by Tim Bower

To deliberately attract a tick, you need to emulate a large animal-which shouldn't be that hard because humans are essentially big, lumbering apes. You increase your chances of attracting the blood-sucking parasite by doing what Ceili Peng, manager of the Swei Lab at San Francisco State University, calls "the wedding walk": proceed slowly in a straight line while also occasionally roughing up the leaf litter with your shoes like a clumsy deer. That way the ticks are sure to notice you passing.

The coup de grace is heavy breathing. The ticks have sensory pits on their front arms called Haller's organs that allow them to detect the carbon dioxide you exhale. Trace amounts of this and other gases set them to "questing." They climb the nearest twig or blade of grass and wave their arms around, trying to grasp the animal they know is moving through.

Peng demonstrates the wedding walk one beautiful January day, breathing heavily and dragging behind her a 1-meter-square white cloth to collect the ticks. We're at China Camp State Park in Marin County, where Andrea Swei, head of the lab Peng manages, has spent 17 years studying the relationship between, among other things, biodiversity and the prevalence of Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacterium that causes Lyme disease.

Lyme disease, which is transmitted by tick bites, is currently the most common vector-borne disease in the U.S.; more than 300,000 people are infected yearly. Swei's research could help illuminate both why the prevalence of Lyme has increased so dramatically in recent decades, mostly in the Northeast and upper Midwest, and also why Lyme remains much less common in California.

Climatic differences are almost certainly involved. California is much drier than the Northeast and ticks need ample moisture to survive. Lyme is also probably underdiagnosed in California; doctors in the state are less familiar with it than those on the East Coast. But as we walk through the oak woodland-prime tick habitat-Kacie Ring, a graduate student in Swei's lab, explains how she knows Lyme is actually less prevalent in these parts.

Tick infection rates vary tremendously from place to place and year to year, but Swei's research suggests a prevalence of between 5 and 10 percent around the Bay Area. And it's likely lower in Southern California. By contrast, around 45 percent of ticks test positive for Lyme in many parts of the Northeast. "We have the hard data," Ring says.

A better understanding of why ticks in these parts tend to harbor Lyme so much less often could, if the lessons are generalizable, point the way toward limiting the spread of the disease, for which there's currently no vaccine. "It can be hard to diagnose and treat," says Ring. "We need to better understand how to prevent it."

One hypothesis the Swei Lab is pursuing is that the structure of the ecosystems in California, which are somewhat less disturbed and more intact compared to the Northeast, and the presence of certain key animals may limit the spread of the bacterium. Swei's research could thus have big implications not just for Lyme disease, but for conservation generally. Biodiversity may have an under-recognized role in keeping people healthy by limiting certain infectious diseases.

The emergence and spread of the "COVID-19" coronavirus, which probably came from bats, is a good reminder that throughout history ecology has often driven infectious disease. To see the relationship, you just need to loosen how you define an ecosystem.

The first pandemic diseases emerged thousands of years ago in Egypt and elsewhere, evidenced first in writing and then in human remains. By then, well into the age of agriculture, people were living in more densely populated settlements than in earlier times, often in close quarters with newly domesticated animals. Clear-cutting, plowing, and irrigation had transformed the landscape. Together these changes probably facilitated the jump of pathogens from animals to people; most of the great pandemics are caused by microorganisms that originated in wildlife.

Smallpox, among the deadliest pathogens in human history-the virus killed nearly a third of the people it infected-likely descends from a virus native to camels. Measles followed a similar trajectory, hopping from cows. And judging from genetics, the most virulent strain of malaria, Plasmodium falciparum, moved from great apes to people at some point in the past 10,000 years, presumably transferred by an African mosquito that fed on a gorilla and then a person.

In a previous era, maybe the malaria-causing parasite would have died out in its new host, unable to find a new person to infect. But clearing and irrigation of land for agriculture likely changed the landscape, producing many sunlit puddles of the sort that favor the human-adapted mosquito. Enabled by this altered ecology, malignant malaria eventually hopscotched out of Africa, around the Mediterranean, and across South Asia.

Then in the 14th century came the bubonic plague. Perhaps the best analog for Lyme disease, the bacterium is native to marmots and other rodents in the steppes of Central Asia. Some shift in human activity-trade along the Silk Road, perhaps, or the mass migration of people within the Mongol empire, at that point the largest ever to have existed-freed the microbe from its Central Asian home.

Yersinia pestis, or plague, would ultimately kill at least one-third of the Eurasian population. Although the idea has recently been challenged, scientists have historically blamed rats, which likely flourished in human settlements, for aiding the outbreak of the plague. That shadow population of rodents in the nooks and crannies of buildings and sewers was a precondition, the disease reservoir. Fleas transferred the infection from these rodents to people. A skewed ecology may have enabled the Black Death.

What the major pandemics of history teach us is that how we shape the ecosystems around us, whether by newly introducing certain animals into the human orbit or inadvertently encouraging creatures like rodents and mosquitoes to proliferate, can greatly increase our exposure to infections. This dynamic continues to this day.

The emergence of new infectious diseases, particularly "zoonotic" ones that jump from animals, accelerated in the 20th century. Most of the big scares of modern times-SARS, MERS, Ebola, HIV and coronavirus-originated in animals.

One probable reason for the growing number of zoonoses is that a large and growing human population is coming into contact with more wild and domesticated animals than ever before, increasing the odds of what the science writer David Quammen calls a spillover. But another possible reason is subtler: the erosion of biodiversity.

Humans tend to affect ecosystems in predictable ways. First the large animals go; then the medium-size ones dwindle; finally, mainly small animals remain. Some argue that these small animals, the rodents and bats of the world, tend to be the very species that can pass infections to humans. The implication is that human activity inadvertently makes the wild disease-scape more virulent.

And that's where the story of Lyme begins.

Illustration by Tim Bower

Borrelia burgdorferi, the microbe that causes Lyme, is not a new arrival to the human body. Ötzi, the 5,300-year-old mummy discovered in an Italian glacier, had the infection. But something about Lyme seems to have changed around the mid-20th century.

A doctor near Old Lyme, Connecticut, first described the disease in 1975: a mysterious illness that featured malaise, arthritis-like joint pain, and occasionally neurological problems. Infectious disease doctors eventually linked the ailment to a corkscrew-shaped bacterium transmitted by black-legged "deer" ticks. After that initial description, the number of reported infections soared, increasing roughly fourfold in the past 30 years or so.

Some of that increase likely stems from improved awareness. You can't diagnose a disease unless it's described first. But scientists have worked out another explanation for the rise of Lyme in the Northeast. And it begins, paradoxically, with ecological recovery.

Nearly clear-cut during European settlement, northeastern forests finally began to regrow as farming moved west in the 19th century. Parts of the Northeast are now more forested than at any point since Colonial times. But the ecological diversity of these young forests remains relatively depleted, a problem made worse by widespread fragmentation of the landscape. The very animals that tend to be infected with Lyme disease in the Northeast-mice and chipmunks-thrive in fragmented landscapes. Other animals that might control the number of Lyme-infected rodents, like weasels, are relatively scarce. These small hunters are very sensitive to forest disturbance, says Rick Ostfeld, an ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in New York, which may be one reason for their rarity.

Ostfeld has christened such animals "dilution hosts": unlike rodents, which tend to amplify disease, they reduce disease prevalence. And they're not all hunters. The opossum, for example, is immune to Lyme and thus won't transmit it to ticks. And it grooms itself so obsessively that it serves as a tick death trap, reducing the number of ticks on the landscape: any tick unlucky enough to end up on an opossum pelt is probably destined to become a snack.

To compound the issue, a predator that has returned, the Eastern coyote, may be making things worse. Originally from Canada, this coyote is a hybrid. One quarter of its genome comes from the gray wolf. The arrival of a large-ish predator should be good news, but Taal Levi, an ecologist at Oregon State University, thinks this oversize coyote is competing with and occasionally killing red foxes. Foxes specialize in hunting rodents. He's found a rough correlation between high coyote densities in New York state and lower fox numbers and a higher prevalence of Lyme. By displacing foxes, coyotes may have changed the behavior and abundance of rodents-and aided the spread of Lyme, Levi suspects.

Together these findings suggest that the shape of northeastern forests, fragmented on the one hand and ecologically simplified (compared to precolonial times) on the other-and suffering from a paucity of predators large and small-has yielded an ecosystem perfectly tuned to churning out Lyme-infected ticks. That's a great starting point for understanding what's different about California.

One of the most important factors limiting Lyme in California, explains Andrea Swei, has nothing to do with biodiversity and everything to do with the weather. Ticks have four life stages: egg, larva, nymph, and adult. In the Northeast, the nymphs emerge from their leaf litter hideouts in spring, infecting the animals they feed on with Lyme. Younger larval ticks next arrive on the scene feeding on the same animals and picking up the infection. The Lyme transmission cycle in the Northeast is amplified simply because of this quirk in timing-because older, already infected ticks show up before younger uninfected ones.

In California, by contrast, tick larvae and nymphs begin feeding at the same time, making the younger ticks much less likely to encounter and feed on an infected animal. This different schedule probably has to do with California's comparatively long dry season. Ticks are very sensitive to desiccation. They need to get their blood meal before the long hot, dry summer sets in. So in California their feeding season is shorter than their counterparts' in the Northeast.

Biodiversity is also greater in California than in the Northeast, which may blunt the spread of Lyme. The existence of distinct microclimates-coastal, inland, hills, the Sierra-near one another has allowed for this greater variety of wildlife to evolve and coexist in California. Whereas three to four species of mice might live within a given area in California, there might be at most two species in the Northeast. Even the number of tick species is more diverse. The western black-legged tick, Ixodes pacificus, the species scientists worry about most when it comes to Lyme, is one of six tick species that feed on humans in the state and one of 48 tick species overall. (By comparison, the East Coast has three human-feeding ticks.) And not all these animals are equally susceptible to Lyme infection. So from the Lyme bacterium's perspective, the greater variability in animals probably changes how easy it is to move from tick to host, and back to tick again. It acts like rough terrain might for a hiker, making passage through the landscape of bodies more difficult.

Then there's our stealthy apex predator, the mountain lion. After decades of hunting and trapping, the mountain lion population began recovering in the 1970s, and the deer population, which reached a peak of 2 million in the 1960s, has declined by at least three-quarters over roughly the same period-partly because of mountain lions, Taal Levi suspects.

Deer do not carry the Lyme bacterium, so they can't infect ticks, but they likely serve as a kind of all-you-can-eat buffet for the parasites, boosting their numbers and physically moving them to new areas. The relationship isn't linear, according to Levi's analysis. With each additional deer, you don't get 100 extra Lyme-carrying ticks, for example. Rather, some evidence suggests there's a threshold of deer density, around 10 deer per square kilometer, beyond which the population of infected ticks increases and then quickly levels off.

Much of the Northeast is way beyond that threshold, while several studies suggest that, in some parts of California, the deer population falls below it. Some of that difference may stem from the state's drier climate, but Levi suspects mountain lions are also controlling the deer population. Each cat kills some 50 deer per year, or roughly one a week. (Research by UCSC scientists suggests that mountain lions near human settlements kill even more-up to 80-possibly because they're constantly interrupted before they can eat and have to hunt again.) "It's hard to imagine that mountain lions don't play a role" in the relative scarcity of Lyme in California, Levi says. "They kill a lot more than the public thinks."

Small predators are also abundant in California, including bobcats and gray foxes, famous for their tree-climbing ability. What strikes Swei is how close these many predators, mountain lions included, come to human settlements in California. "In our very suburban field sites, we have an amazing diversity of carnivores," she says. Their mere presence might change the behavior of animals in a way that limits the spread of Lyme.

Swei has set up wildlife cameras at her 14 study sites around the Bay and, in a still unpublished study, finds that when predators are around, prey species tend to have fewer ticks. That's not necessarily because tick-infested animals get eaten more, she thinks, but because they travel shorter distances in the presence of animals on the hunt. This dynamic, called the "ecology of fear," could turn rodents into bigger homebodies.

Illustration by Tim Bower

Another unique aspect of California's Lyme disease-scape may come down to dumb luck. In the Northeast, the main Lyme reservoir is the white-footed mouse. In California, a major source is the western gray squirrel. (Another is the dusky-footed woodrat.) But for reasons that aren't entirely clear, when a tick bites a Lyme-infected squirrel, it's much less likely to pick up the bacterium compared to one that bites an infected mouse in New York. In experiments, approximately 1 in 4 ticks acquires the infection from California gray squirrels, whereas 9 of 10 do when feeding on northeastern mice and roughly 1 of 2 in the case of chipmunks. "There's no known host in California that's nearly as infectious as on the East Coast," says A. Marm Kilpatrick, an infectious disease ecologist at UCSC.

And then there's the western fence lizard, a reptile with a storied relationship to Lyme in California. As we walked through the oaks that day at China Camp State Park looking for lizards, Ring and Peng shared tick-researcher war stories. One can stumble into a "larval bomb": hundreds of tiny, just-hatched ticks crawl all over your clothes. Other times you struggle with the animals you catch. Gray squirrels, probably the most important rodent in California when it comes to Lyme, are notoriously difficult to catch for tick counts. They view the peanut butter-baited traps with suspicion, declining to enter sometimes for weeks. And when you finally get one, they're impossible to hold. Adult woodrats, likely the second most important reservoir for Lyme, also thrash around and bite. "They're tough. They know their rights. And they didn't sign up for science," said Peng.

"Oh, there's one!" Ring announces as we pass through a small clearing.

"She's got lizard vision," Peng says, as I search in vain for the lizard. Finally I see it, a tiny silhouette on a sunny log across the clearing, maybe 20 feet away. Ring approaches quietly, arranges a dental floss noose at the end of an extendable fishing pole and, after a few tries and some encouragement from Peng-"If you can't do it, no one can!"-finally loops the noose around the lizard's neck from about 10 feet away.

It's a healthy-looking male with two iridescent blue smears along its belly and one on the underside of its neck. (But no ticks; too early in the season, she says.)

The fence lizard is what Ring calls a "double agent" in the Lyme story in California. The saga of the animal begins in the 1990s when a UC Berkeley researcher named Robert Lane noticed that the ticks he pulled off fence lizards never seemed to carry Lyme. Through a series of experiments, he and his colleagues worked out that the lizard's blood had unique proteins that killed the bacterium. Any tick that fed on a fence lizard was thus cleansed of the disease. And a lot fed on lizards.

When Lane and his colleagues put black-legged ticks in cages with mice and lizards, the ticks swarmed the lizards and mostly ignored the mice. (Ring's field work has corroborated that preference. "I've pulled 100 ticks off a single lizard," she says. On rodents, by comparison, she tends to find tick numbers in the single digits.)

Massive quantities of ticks feeding on a reptile that clears them of Lyme was a nice explanation for why the disease is so much less prevalent in California compared to the Northeast. But then Andrea Swei blew the story up.

For her graduate work, Swei removed lizards from a section of woodland at China Camp State Park and then monitored the prevalence of Lyme-infected ticks. Instead of Lyme infection increasing without lizards, the opposite happened; the number of infected ticks declined. "It was counterintuitive," she told me. But the likely explanation was this: So many ticks feed on lizards that when you remove them from the landscape, the tick population plummets. With so many fewer ticks alive, the total number of infected ticks also declines. The end result is a lower risk of people encountering ticks that harbor Lyme.

Swei's study lasted only one season; its conclusions are preliminary. She still doesn't know how removing lizards might change Lyme in the longer term. Maybe as the ticks learned to feed on other hosts, Lyme would have gone up. So there may be a final twist in the fence lizard story.

Even if lizards increase the prevalence of Lyme on the landscape, Ring says, when it comes to humans, they still may be protective. That protection stems from a peculiarity in the life stage of ticks that tend to infect people.

Left undisturbed, ticks feed for about three days. Lyme takes between 36 and 72 hours to move from a feeding tick to a person. That leaves a large amount of time to notice the parasite and remove it before infection occurs. So people tend to get infected not by large adult ticks, which we spot (and freak out about and google frantically) and then remove, but by the much smaller poppy seed-sized nymphs we don't notice.

As it happens, the young larval ticks really like dining on lizards. So when they molt to become nymphs-the life stage that tends to infect people-the ticks often don't have Lyme. The implication is even if fence lizards increase the prevalence of Lyme-carrying ticks overall simply because they feed so many, Ring suspects that by preventing infection in the very life stages that tend to transmit Lyme to humans, fence lizards might actually protect humans from Lyme disease in California.

A few years ago, a team of biologists calculated how many car accidents the mountain lion, by controlling the deer population, would prevent in the Northeast if it recolonized the region. Over 30 years, the predator would save $2.13 billion in accident-related costs, they found, prevent 21,400 human injuries, and save 155 human lives.

No one has yet put a similar number on ecosystem-based Lyme prevention in California or anywhere else-on the preventive value of the mountain lion, bobcats, gray foxes, and overall biodiversity in California. And the truth is, the research exploring these complex relationships is still in its infancy; the estimate would be difficult to formulate. But the roughly 226-fold difference in the incidence of confirmed Lyme cases in 2018 between California and Connecticut suggests that number might be substantial. And it raises a question: Can California be proactive about limiting Lyme? Can we do more of what we're already doing right?

Limiting landscape fragmentation might be a wise management policy going forward, and tolerance of predators large and small might be a good hedge against disease. "There's great potential for harnessing dilution-effect thinking for management," Rick Ostfeld told me.

Swei is also studying a newer area of disease ecology that could prove important: how the group of microbes inhabiting the tick gut-the tick microbiome-affects the spread of Lyme. Theoretically, manipulating these microbes could allow scientists to make ticks and other parasites resistant to the diseases they pass to people. In Australia, experiments have already begun with mosquitoes whose microbes have been tweaked so that they don't carry the virus that causes dengue fever.

Such microbial communities represent another, until recently mostly overlooked, factor that may affect prevalence of disease. The research highlights the possibility that every level of ecological diversity-including the microbial community in a tiny parasite's gut-may play a role in how people get sick.

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Biodiversity and the Spread of Lyme Disease - Bay Nature Magazine

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To deliberately attract a tick, you need to emulate a large animal-which shouldn't be that hard because humans are essentially big, lumbering apes. You increase your chances of attracting the blood-sucking parasite by doing what Ceili Peng, manager of the Swei Lab at San Francisco State University, calls "the wedding walk": proceed slowly in a straight line while also occasionally roughing up the leaf litter with your shoes like a clumsy deer.

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Deep Look Video

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Banana Slugs: Secret of the Slime | Deep Look

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Beneath the towering redwoods lives one of the most peculiar creatures in California: the banana slug. They're coated with a liquid crystal ooze that solves many problems slugs face in the forest -- and maybe some of our own. SUBSCRIBE: http://goo.gl/8NwXqt Banana slugs are important members of the redwood forest community, even if they aren't the most exalted.

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Deep Look Video

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Look Inside a Rattlesnake's Rattle | Deep Look

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Deep Look Video

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Why Does Your Cat's Tongue Feel Like Sandpaper? | Deep Look

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As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together.

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Most people don't automatically seek on-line resources when want to deepen their naturalist practice and knowledge. However, increasingly many of the tools of modern naturalists are online, like iNaturalist. In response to recent "shelter in place" orders and an increasing demand for online and hybrid delivery courses in general, we are curating a list of our favorite online resources for quality California-focused natural history education.

* Online Natural History Content
Online Content
We have tried to choose resources across multiple topical interests and types, in-line with California Naturalist curriculum. Most are either explicitly teacher or adult-focused, or can be adapted to an adult audience. This list is growing and is by no means exhaustive. It is sorted by subject.
Free Distance Delivery Tools
In an education environment with increasing demands for online delivery, there are many options for instructors. These are a few of the free tools that UC California Naturalist instructors and partners recommend.

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Most people don't automatically seek on-line resources when want to deepen their naturalist practice and knowledge. However, increasingly many of the tools of modern naturalists are online, like iNaturalist. In response to recent "shelter in place" orders and an increasing demand for online and hybrid delivery courses in general, we are curating a list of our favorite online resources for quality California-focused natural history education.

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Podcast

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subscribe to Short Wave podcast

subscribe to Short Wave podcast

Many people are staying home these days, and Elisabeth Tova Bailey is no stranger to that experience.

For years, she was bedridden from a post-infectious autoimmune disorder. Unable to get out of bed or sit up, a visiting friend brought her a snail. And with the snail's entry into her life, she found companionship and solace. Elisabeth spent the following year observing the snail and it was the inspiration for her memoir, " The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating."

Bailey talks to Short Wave reporter Emily Kwong about the joys of snails and what lessons we can take from one of the slowest creatures on earth.

Follow Emily on Twitter @emilykwong1234. Reach the show by emailing shortwave@npr.org.
This episode was produced by Rebecca Ramirez, edited by Viet Le and fact-checked by Emily Vaughn.

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Lessons In Being Alone, From A Woodland Snail

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Bedridden with illness, Maine writer Elisabeth Tova Bailey found an unlikely companion - a solitary snail a friend brought her from the woods. Elisabeth spent the following year observing the creature and it was the inspiration for her memoir, "The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating."

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Deep Look Videos

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Porcupines Give You 30,000 Reasons to Back Off | Deep Look

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MOVIE