Science Magazine Podcast
Transcript, 9 November 2012
http://podcasts.aaas.org/science_podcast/SciencePodcast_121109.mp3
Music
Host – Kerry Klein
Welcome to the Science Podcast for November 9th, 2012. I’m Kerry Klein.
Host – Edward Hurme
And I’m Edward Hurme. This week: climate and ancient Mayan politics [10:36], the
challenges of weather forecasting [19:09], and an unusual coral symbiosis [00:54].
Interviewee – Mark Hay
We know of no other example, anywhere in nature, where something that is threatened by
a competitor chemically calls in a bodyguard to take care of that competitor.
Host – Kerry Klein
Plus, a few stories from our online daily news site [27:56].
Promo
Support for the Science Podcast is provided by AAAS: the American Association for the
Advancement of Science. Advancing Science, Engineering, and Innovation throughout
the World for the Benefit of All People. AAAS—the Science Society—at www.aaas.org.
Music ends
[00:54]
Host – Kerry Klein
Coral reefs are diverse, dynamic ecosystems, reliant not only on water temperature and
chemistry, but also on a give and take with neighboring flora and fauna. In a report this
week, Mark Hay and co-author Danielle Dixson reveal a surprising marine symbiosis, in
which corals chemically cue protection from nearby fishes. Hay spoke with me from his
office in Atlanta.
Interviewee – Mark Hay
Corals are declining worldwide, while seaweeds are increasing. And we’ve been
studying sort of how seaweeds damage corals, often showing that it’s seaweed-produced
compounds that are damaging corals on contact. And we know that, from large studies
that herbivorous fishes are really important at a reef scale. When those are overfished, it
advantages seaweeds and disadvantages corals. But we started thinking about this on a
small scale and saying, “Well, it’s really where the seaweeds and the corals come into
contact, and do corals have any way of mediating that interaction?” And one of the
things we thought about is, well, recruit bodyguards to take care of you. And so we
wanted to look at some of the fishes that we knew were associated with these corals, and
whether they might be doing something to protect their home coral.
Interviewer – Kerry Klein
And for this study, you decided to focus in on one particular species of coral, a very
common species called Acropora nasuta. Why did you decide to focus on this one?
Interviewee – Mark Hay
Well, one, it’s really common on the reef we were working on. Two, because it was
common and it’s typical of a genus that’s particularly important worldwide in that it’s a
branching coral, and it creates a lot of the structure on coral reefs. It’s not the only thing
that does that, but it’s one of the main, what we call making topographic complexity.
And that complexity gives lots of other organisms on the reef a structure in which to live.
And so we thought it was sort of a key species that produced something that many other
organisms on the reef needed.
Interviewer – Kerry Klein
And so you had this notion that there might be these herbivorous bodyguards out there
for corals. How did you delve into this interesting relationship a little bit more closely?
Interviewee – Mark Hay
Okay. Well, we looked at a number of species of fishes. There were four that we saw
that were commonly associated with this coral – two species of gobies and two species of
damselfishes. And the damsels hang out around the coral and dart back into it when
threatened. The gobies actually live down in the coral framework almost all the time.
And we’d also studied a bunch of different seaweeds. So we took the most toxic seaweed
that was the most damaging to these corals, and we moved it against the coral and said,
“What did the fish do?” And when we did that, the damselfishes that move among coral
heads but are often associated with one just said, “Okay. Our home site is in trouble.
We’re leaving.” And within 24 to 48 hours, they all abandoned that coral and went to
another one. The gobies, on the other hand, went out and started trimming this toxic alga.
And there were two species of gobies. They both went out and trimmed it back. So
they’re like little barbers that run out and just eat enough of it or bite enough of it off so
that it doesn’t touch the coral anymore. And this seaweed actually has an oily substance
on the surface of the seaweed that has to rub off on the coral to transfer this toxin. And
when those gobies did this, one of them actually ate the alga. That goby makes a
mucilage when it’s attacked that is toxic to predators, and that mucilage became more
toxic. The other goby didn’t eat it. It would bite it off, but it didn’t consume it. And it’s
not toxic. So one of them was actually using a toxin in its own defense, and the other one
was simply protecting the home site.
Interviewer – Kerry Klein
Now, is this toxic seaweed a normal part of the goby fish’s diet?
Interviewee – Mark Hay
No, probably not. In other words, it’s a fairly rare seaweed on the reef. It’s maybe – on
our reefs – one or two percent of the cover on the reef at most. And so many times you
would find these gobies on corals that would not be anywhere near this particular
seaweed. And so we looked at the gut contents of gobies from around the reef, and we
almost never found this seaweed unless we had put it against the coral. And that’s when
they came out and ate it.
Interviewer – Kerry Klein
So what exactly is signaling these fish to eat this seaweed?
Interviewee – Mark Hay
Okay. So here’s the really cool part of this whole thing. It’s sort of a chemically
mediated or nuanced dance that goes on. The seaweed recruits and uses chemistry to
start to kill the coral off. The coral then makes a compound – we don’t know what that
compound is, but we know the coral is doing it – that signals the goby to come over and
whack this seaweed back. And we can tell that by, we can suck water from the seaweed
and squirt it into the coral head, and the goby doesn’t care. We can suck it from where
the seaweed and the coral are touching each other, and then the goby runs over to that
site. We can let them touch each other for a little while and then remove the seaweed for
20 minutes – and we can show with dye studies that all the water that was there is gone
within a couple of minutes – and then suck water from that site where the coral and the
seaweed were touching and squirt that in, and then the gobies run over toward it. And so
the coral itself is producing something that’s calling in the bodyguard.
Interviewer – Kerry Klein
Wow! So you’ve really uncovered a very unusual symbiotic relationship here that
through chemical signaling from the coral, the gobies then protect the coral, but by doing
this, the gobies are simultaneously sort of armoring themselves against their own
predators.
Interviewee – Mark Hay
One of them is and the other isn’t. So it’s not just that. Both of them are protecting their
home site. This is a place where they’ve lived their whole lives, by and large, in a single
coral head. That coral head provides them with some food – they eat part of the coral
mucilage – and so it’s a feeding site as well as a home site. So both species are
protecting the home site. One of them is also becoming more toxic to predators when it
does that.
Interviewer – Kerry Klein
Wow! Well, do we know of any other pairs of species that behave in this same sort of
way?
Interviewee – Mark Hay
We know a little bit about some. We know of no other example anywhere in nature
where something that is threatened by a competitor chemically calls in a bodyguard to
take care of that competitor. But we do know of other things that look like this. There
are terrestrial plants that make special little places on themselves – these sort of hollow
thorns – where ants live in those, and they make special little food bodies that they feed
to the ants. And those ants then patrol the plant. And if insects that would eat the plant
land on there, the ants run out, they grab them by the legs, they sort of rip the legs and
wings off, and pitch them off the plant. They will also patrol right under the plant and
remove competitors that are in contact with the plant, just like our fish do. So, you know,
30 years ago when I first went into the deserts, I started looking at plants’ and ants’
interactions. And seeing these fish, I thought, you know, something like that could be
going on. And actually my post doc, Danielle Dixon, was the one that really came up
with this, because she knew more about the fish and the coral association. And we said,
“You know, a little crazy, we don’t know about this from marine systems, but it could be.
These could be underwater ant plants.” And it looks like they are.
Interviewer – Kerry Klein
Oh, that’s so cool. Now you begin your paper by outlining the dire circumstances that a
lot of corals are in right now around the world. Coral cover is declining, especially in
many areas in the Caribbean Ocean and the Great Barrier Reef, and, of course, that
decline is happening for a number of reasons. But how do you see this particular study
fitting into the greater field of coral reef research and conservation?
Interviewee – Mark Hay
What we’re trying to do in my lab is to sort of interpret how reefs work, and we’re trying
to understand the language that is used there. And if you think about it, most organisms
on earth don’t have eyes, don’t have ears, and so they either eat the thing next to them,
run from it, or mate with it based on chemical signals. And so we’re trying to understand
those chemical signals in a way that allows us to understand more about how the whole
system is working. And in this particular instance, what we wanted to do is to say, you
know, “What can corals do to fight back, and are there critical things we don’t know
about that may help this system run?” And so at some level, you know, we’re looking at
communities in general or ecosystems in general and trying to understand the language
that the instructions are written in so that we could intervene in wiser ways for both
conservation management, but also just to fundamentally understand the ecology and
evolution of those systems. When we find that these corals are producing a chemical that
tells a particular fish to come over and do a particular thing to a particular alga, that
means that over evolutionary time, competition with seaweeds or other similar organisms
has been important enough to drive those kind of signalings, and to drive those
mutualistic relationships. And so it gives us evolutionary insight to know what the
mechanisms are and to say this has been important enough that this has evolved to work
in this way.
Interviewer – Kerry Klein
Right. Great. Well, Mark Hay, thank you so much.
Interviewee – Mark Hay
Well, thank you, and I appreciate you guys’ interest.
Host – Kerry Klein
Mark Hay and Danielle Dixson write about chemical cues for coral bodyguards in a
Report this week.
Music
[10:36]
Host – Edward Hurme
As one cycle of the Mayan calendar approaches its end, we may be closer than ever to
understanding why their civilization ultimately collapsed. Of the many theories for
Mayan collapse, a several-hundred-year drought in the region is a primary candidate for
their decline. Douglas Kennett and colleagues examined this idea using isotopic oxygen
in stalagmite deposits to calculate rainfall patterns during the Mayan civilization. I spoke
with Kennett from his office at Penn State University.
Interviewee – Douglas Kennett
So the Maya are a sophisticated and complex society that developed in the tropical
rainforests of Guatemala, Belize, Mexico, and Honduras during the Classic period – a
period between AD 300 and 900. And there are a variety of different ideas about why the
Maya collapsed. They range from environmental degradation related to their agricultural
systems and overpopulation to political kinds of explanations where there was interpolity
warfare between those centers, which ultimately led to disintegration. And then for a
while, they’ve been at the idea that climate and climate change may play a role, in
particular, drought in this region. Interviewer – Edward Hurme
So in your paper, you were interested in isolating the climate conditions during the
Mayan civilization. How did you determine these conditions, and how do they differ
from what other researchers have tried?
Interviewee – Douglas Kennett
Yes. We were particularly interested in developing a climate record for this region that
was very well dated. So we were interested in developing a record for the last 2,000
years. And we did this using cave deposits – stalagmites – which grow in caves. If
you’re lucky, they grow continuously, and you can obtain a climate record from them by
using oxygen isotopes, which basically reflect the amount of rainfall at any given time
falling above the cave, and then that rainwater seeping into the cave system and forming
a stalagmite. So basically they grow like – you can kind of think about tree rings – they
grow incrementally like that, and they preserve a climate record. We were lucky enough
to basically obtain stalagmites that grew continuously through this time period – through
the last 2,000 years. And we basically were able to see sort of broad cycles of wet
conditions and dry conditions, and then we were also able to see fairly abrupt and shortterm drought in the record. So and we were actually interested in climate change on both
of those time scales. And what we’ve determined was that the growth of Maya
civilization and increases in population and levels of sophistication actually correlate
with a very wet interval that, you know, spans several hundred years during what’s called
the Early Classic period. And the sort of decline of the Maya actually appear to correlate
with a downturn generally in climate and climate drying starting at around AD 660. And
what we see is an increase in warfare at this time, which we argue in the paper is linked
to troubles in their economic system related to decreased productivity of their agricultural
systems.
Interviewer – Edward Hurme
So there wasn’t enough rain, and they couldn’t grow their crops, and that just led to strife
within the civilization.
Interviewee – Douglas Kennett
Exactly. That’s our basic argument. And that led ultimately to a political decline where
actually we see some of these cities collapsing as early as the late AD 600s, starting after
about 660. And then we see a large number of them decline between AD 800 and 900.
And there is a long-term drought that does occur in that interval, but we’re actually
looking at that compounding problems that were already occurring in the system related
to this more general drought that was occurring after AD 660. That’s what’s generally
known as the Maya Collapse, are the collapse of those political systems – cities like
Tikal, Copan, Calakmul – these are Maya cities. Divine kings that were in charge of
those basically lost control. Then we see population decentralization, so people started
moving away from those centers.
Interviewer – Edward Hurme
So does this research kind of put the nail in the coffin for why the Mayan civilization
eventually collapsed?
Interviewee – Douglas Kennett
Well, I think it’s a major contribution to trying to understand the complex processes that
went into the decline of the Maya. Now that we have this very well constrained climate
sequence, we can start thinking about some of the more complex social and political
processes involved with that collapse. Because it clearly played out over several hundred
years, and climate plays one role in that decline, we argue. What’s interesting is after the
major period of political collapse, there’s actually the biggest drought in the record,
actually occurs after that time between AD 1000 and 1100. And we’re very interested in
that because that may have major population effects within the region. We hypothesize
this based on some new archeological data that’s coming out from several regions
suggesting that although the political systems had collapsed earlier, people living in
smaller agricultural communities persisted in the region. But after that time, we see very
little in the way of population in multiple areas within the Maya region.
Interviewer – Edward Hurme
What do researchers think caused these climactic events?
Interviewee – Douglas Kennett
Well, they’re basically, you know, linked to broader periods of global climate change.
The overall team, the climatologists involved in this interdisciplinary team – I should
mention that this is a large group doing this work – they’re actually looking at some of
the interrelationships between this rainfall record and what we argue to be the primary
mechanism for change, which is the position of the intertropical convergence zone, which
basically is positioned mainly over the equator and then moves up and down kind of over
parts of the northern part of South America. And depending on its position, either the
Maya region receives more rainfall or less rainfall. This actually happens seasonally.
There’s a seasonal monsoon there, so you get a period of wet conditions during the year
and a period of dry conditions. And that’s actually related to the position of this
intertropical convergence zone. But it also moves on longer time scales, so you can have
intervals where there’s very little rainfall occurring within the Maya region, or there may
be more rainfall if it’s in a different position. And that looks like it could be tied to the
things that are happening in the Northern Hemisphere – Northern Hemisphere
temperature changes. At this point, we’re looking at those kind of complex linkages to
try to see how the climate system in the Maya region is actually linked to broader patterns
of global climate change.
Interviewer – Edward Hurme
So do you think this methodology will actually lend itself to studying other cultures?
Interviewee – Douglas Kennett
Oh yeah, there’s no question about it. Anywhere we have cave systems that have
stalagmites, this kind of work can be done. There is an analogous study that’s already
been done in China, and I imagine that there are other studies that are also occurring in
that large country. So there’s some interesting historical records, as well. Because that’s
the other part of this story is we also looked in detail at some of the historical records in
the Maya region. You have to have a specific kind of karst environment, which is
basically like rich limestone geological substrate. And if you have that, then you have
the potential for having caves that have stalagmites in them. And if you have stalagmites,
then there’s a possibility of extracting these very detailed and well-dated climatic records.
Interviewer – Edward Hurme
So what are your future plans for working with the climate of the Mayan civilization?
Interviewee – Douglas Kennett
Well, this is really the first phase of a large interdisciplinary project that’s focused in on
just kind of the complex relationship between societal responses to the economic
systems, social systems, and political systems to climate change, but also to
environmental changes of different types. So humans also influence the environment
through their agricultural systems – through deforestation and through that erosion to the
landscape. So we’re kind of looking at climate as one part of a very complex system.
And this is one of the foundational datasets for looking at these complex interactions in a
much more detailed fashion using a modeling approach. So that’s really the next stage, is
developing some more sophisticated models for how climate influences societies. And
that’s the long-term goal of the project.
Interviewer – Edward Hurme
Well, Douglas Kennett, thanks so much for talking with me.
Interviewee – Douglas Kennett
Thanks so much, Edward.
Host – Edward Hurme
Douglas Kennett and colleagues measure historical rainfall patterns during the Mayan
civilization using oxygen isotopes in this week’s issue.
Music
[19:09]
Host – Kerry Klein
Since the 1990s, U.S. meteorologists have been able to push tornado warnings from an
average of 3 minutes prior to the appearance of the dangerous funnel to an average of 10
minutes in advance. However, about 75 percent of these warnings are false alarms. Sarah
Crespi spoke with Science Writer Richard Kerr about the sunny outlook for weather
prediction and the few cloudy spots that remain.
Interviewee – Richard Kerr
There’s been considerable increase in understanding the weather – what it is and why it
changes. But most of that advancement was – the really breakthrough stuff – was back in
the earlier part of the last century. The big drivers now are better observations. The
National Weather Service has Doppler radars spread across this country. We’ve got
increasingly capable satellites in orbit. But combined with that is the increasing available
computer power. Weather forecasting these days is all about computer model
forecasting. And the more computer power you have, the more you can do with the
models.
Interviewer – Sarah Crespi
And that’s been on the rise, right? What’s happened with computing power in the past
decade or so?
Interviewee – Richard Kerr
Well, weather forecasters got into computer models in the 1950s, and since then, the
computer power available to the National Weather Service has gone up by a factor of a
hundred billion.
Interviewer – Sarah Crespi
Wow!
Interviewee – Richard Kerr
I mean, they’ve got a hundred million megaflops to work with. Now, they’re doing a lot
of different kinds of weather forecasting, and to this day, it’s the computer power that’s
limiting. Forecasters know a bit more of what they could do to improve forecasts than
they’re actually able to implement. They’re always hungry for more computer power.
Interviewer – Sarah Crespi
And just to go back for a second. What is Doppler radar?
Interviewee – Richard Kerr
Oh, well, Doppler radar is able to paint a picture – a three-dimensional picture – of the
weather by reflecting microwaves off of raindrops. And that gives you not only the
picture you see on TV – you know, where the rain is, where it’s heaviest – but it can also
determine wind speeds – which way and how fast the wind is blowing, where the weather
is going. And that was really pivotal in improving things like tornado forecasting. It
really made a big difference in how soon the forecaster could warn you that a tornado
was likely on the way.
Interviewer – Sarah Crespi
Right. So you make an interesting point in your article about how data collection from
additional detectors – like satellites and these Doppler radar centers – have improved, but
there’s also some changes in how the data that we collect is actually used. And that’s had
a big impact on our ability to predict. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Interviewee – Richard Kerr
Sure. These improved observations have to be fed into a forecast model. The model
needs to know a starting point for the forecast – what’s the weather right now – so it can
extrapolate, calculate into the future. But getting weather observations into the models is
not all that straightforward, especially in the case of weather satellites. Weather satellite
data was going into the models starting in the 1970s, but it wasn’t being used as
effectively as it might have. And so in the ‘90s, forecasters and model developers figured
out better ways to, what they call, assimilate the observations into the computer models.
And so by more effectively using the existing observations, they were able to improve the
forecasts, especially forecasts of where hurricanes were going to be going. Hurricanes do
not propel themselves; they’re carried along and steered by the broad weather patterns
that it encounters. And so this improved assimilation of data greatly improves that
general pattern prediction – where the highs and the lows and the jet streams are. That is
a key improvement in improving forecasts of where hurricanes are going to go,
something that was done very well in the case of Sandy.
Interviewer – Sarah Crespi
Right. Right. Of all the major modeling stations out there, the European Center has the
best record. Why is that?
Interviewee – Richard Kerr
Well, the European Center for Medium-Range Forecasts has been in operation for more
than 30 years, and it has always had the lead in its specialty – forecasting out long-range
out toward a week, or now they go much farther even. They have one focus, and that’s
long-range forecasting around the world. And they have the most computer resources at
their disposal for that one kind of forecast. And that combination has kept them in the
lead for 30 years. It gave them the edge forecasting Sandy. European Center’s forecasts
were picking up the unusual behavior of Sandy; it was going to take this left turn in
toward the eastern seaboard. It picked that up more than a week ahead, and it was
beating out everybody else’s models – US model, British, Japanese. But the models, they
came together and reached a consensus three or four days ahead, which was plenty of
time to do what could be done in New Jersey and New York.
Interviewer – Sarah Crespi
And when we say that they have the best record, it’s not just for predicting this hook in a
hurricane’s path, but also the number of days ahead, right?
Interviewee – Richard Kerr
Yes. They are able to produce useful forecasts out to 8-1/2 days ahead.
Interviewer – Sarah Crespi
Wow! For everyone, for all the centers, there are definitely still some forecasting
bugaboos, as you call them – tough to predict phenomena like tornadoes and hurricanes.
What makes some of these weather patterns so difficult to predict?
Interviewee – Richard Kerr
Well, I’ve mentioned forecasting how strong a hurricane is going to be. That’s one.
Another is forecasting when a particular storm is going to produce tornadoes. The
Doppler radar helped increase the lead time for warnings of tornadoes, but it hasn’t really
improved the situation with is there going to be a tornado out of that storm or isn’t there?
Both these phenomena are happening on a small scale, and they’re happening very
quickly. Tornadoes might come out of a particular storm for 20 minutes out of a severalhours’ lifetime for the storm. A hurricane may intensify a couple categories, you know,
from Category 2 to Category 4, overnight. In both cases, it’s all happening inside of a
severe thunderstorm or around the eye of a hurricane. That’s where you have trouble
knowing what’s going on from hour to hour. The observations just aren’t there. And you
have difficulty simulating that in the computer forecasts, because the computer forecast is
very fuzzy. You’ve got what you call a resolution – how fine a detail can you pick out of
five or ten or twenty kilometers?
Interviewer – Sarah Crespi
In short periods of time.
Interviewee – Richard Kerr
You can’t have a Doppler radar by every severe storm in the Midwest. We’re not there
yet by a long shot.
Interviewer – Sarah Crespi
But will we get there? Is the trend of improving predictions that we’ve seen, is that going
to continue?
Interviewee – Richard Kerr
Well, the improvements in observations continue. The National Weather Service is
getting ready to go operational with incorporating airborne radar in hurricane forecasts.
Better and better satellites keep going up. And the trend in increasing computer power
availability is expected to continue. So forecasters are optimistic about keeping up the
improving forecast skills over the next five or ten years. Those two bugaboos, there’s
some optimism about resolving or solving the hurricane intensity forecast problem, partly
with the radar. The tornado problem is going to be tougher to crack.
Interviewer – Sarah Crespi
Okay. Well, Richard Kerr, thanks so much for talking with me.
Interviewee – Richard Kerr
My pleasure, Sarah.
Host – Kerry Klein
Richard Kerr is a staff writer for Science. He writes about the advancing science of
weather prediction in this week’s Science.
Music
[27:56]
Interviewer – Edward Hurme
Finally today, I’m here with Science news writer Carolyn Gramling, who’s here to give
us a rundown of some of the recent stories from our online daily news site. In our first
story, we look at a cockatoo prodigy named Figaro. So Carolyn, why is Figaro so
special?
Interviewee – Carolyn Gramling
Well, Figaro is actually unique among cockatoos – at least as far as we have observed –
in that he is the first one to actually both invent and also make tools. We know that a lot
of different species of birds, most famously maybe the New Caledonian crows – are sort
of natural toolmakers. Crows have been known to sort of fashion things out of bamboo,
making hooks to sort of forage for grubs, and things like that. But we’ve never actually
seen that in cockatoos before.
Interviewer – Edward Hurme
Okay. So how did the researchers actually discover and begin to study this unique
behavior in Figaro?
Interviewee – Carolyn Gramling
Well so normally, cockatoos live in the forests of Indonesia. But there’s actually a
colony of them in Austria, and Figaro lives there in this colony – and it’s a captive
colony. And one day, a student who was studying the birds actually observed Figaro
behaving kind of strangely. He observed that he was trying to get a pebble that he had
dropped through the wire mesh of his cage, and he was trying to reach for it. He tried
with his claw first and he couldn’t get at it. And so then he picked up a piece of bamboo
that was lying nearby and was trying to sort of hook it in. And the student thought this
was really interesting. And they immediately were curious about how much effort Figaro
would put into trying to make a tool to get this pebble.
Interviewer – Edward Hurme
So what did they do next? They decided to do some experiments. What did they do?
Interviewee – Carolyn Gramling
Well, so one thing they wanted to do is, first of all, they’d never seen a cockatoo doing
anything like this before, and they didn’t want the other birds in the colony to see him
doing it and to learn from his behavior. They wanted to know what he would do just on
his own, and the other birds would not learn from watching. So they isolated Figaro.
And then they placed a peanut just outside his cage on a wooden beam, and they sat back
and they watched to see what he would do. And he tried to reach it, and he couldn’t
reach for it. And so eventually he started experimenting. And he stripped a piece of the
wooden beam off and tried to rake the peanut in with that piece of beam. Didn’t work, it
was too long. He snipped it half and then he used it to rake it in again. And so he
basically demonstrated all these different aspects of toolmaking. He created a tool, he
resized it, and he successfully used it to get the peanut.
Interviewer – Edward Hurme
Okay. And what happened when they looked at other cockatoos? Is this something that
they can easily learn?
Interviewee – Carolyn Gramling
Well, so the other cockatoos who had initially seen him trying to get the pebble, they
learned from that, and they did try to use similar tools like that. But Figaro was the only
one that they actually saw innovating. And that’s actually a very rare quality among any
species.
Interviewer – Edward Hurme
Okay. And in another event of unexpected findings, our next story looks at a case of
mistaken identity for a pair of beached whales in New Zealand.
Interviewee – Carolyn Gramling
Yes. So back in 2010, a couple of whales washed up on the shore of New Zealand. It
was an adult female and a juvenile male. And they looked a lot like a kind of whale
that’s known as a Gray’s beaked whale, and so people just assumed that that’s what they
were. The officials assumed that’s what those whales were. But they did take tissue
samples from the whales. And now a genetic analysis of those tissue samples shows that
they were never Gray’s beaked whales in the first place; they were actually a different
kind of a whale known as a spade-toothed beaked whale.
Interviewer – Edward Hurme
So what do researchers actually know about spade-toothed beaked whales? I’ve never
heard of them.
Interviewee – Carolyn Gramling
They don’t know very much, because these whales – there’s actually 21 different species
of beaked whales – and they’re among the least understood of all whales, because they
spend most of their time at depth. They mate down there. They feed down there. They
breed down there. So basically they hardly ever surface and we never really see them.
So we think of them as very rare. So this was actually the first time that anyone has ever
actually spotted these spade-toothed beaked whales.
Interviewer – Edward Hurme
So what do they actually do now that they realize that they had found this extremely rare
whale?
Interviewee – Carolyn Gramling
Well, I think it’s basically because it’s the first time anyone has actually seen these
whales, they were able to actually, you know, finally get a better understanding of their
biology. And so they actually were able to exhume them and try to see basically what
their structure is. But we still know so very little about any of these kinds of whales.
One thing, though, that’s interesting to think about is that even though we think of them
as rare, it probably is more likely that we just hardly ever see them because they don’t
spend much time at the surface.
Interviewer – Edward Hurme
So, Carolyn, what else have got on the site this week?
Interviewee – Carolyn Gramling
Well, Edward, for ScienceNOW, we’ve got a story about why we think early humans
managed to pass along toolmaking and other technological advances to their descendents,
and we will also have a story about “body storming,” which is using the movements of
dancers to explain cellular motion. And for ScienceInsider, our online policy blog, we
ask our readers to stay tuned for our ongoing coverage of the aftermath of the U.S.
election and what that’s going to mean for science. And finally, for ScienceLive, which
is our weekly chat on the hottest topics in science, this week’s ScienceLive is all about
cooking food, and how that may have been the secret recipe that allowed human brains to
grow. And then we have next week’s chat, which is going to be about food genomics.
So be sure to check out all these stories on the site.
Interviewer – Edward Hurme
Great. Thanks, Carolyn.
Interviewee – Carolyn Gramling
Thank you.
Interviewer – Edward Hurme
Carolyn Gramling is a news writer for Science. You can check out all of our news at
news.sciencemag.org, including daily stories from ScienceNOW, and science policy from
ScienceInsider. While you’re there, be sure to check out ScienceLive, a live chat on the
hottest topics every Thursday at 3 p.m. U.S. Eastern time.
Music
Host – Kerry Klein
And that concludes the November 9th, 2012, edition of the Science Podcast.
Host – Edward Hurme
If you have any comments or suggestions for the show, please write us at
[email protected].
Host – Kerry Klein
The show is a production of Science Magazine. Jeffrey Cook composed the music. I'm
Kerry Klein.
Host – Edward Hurme
And I’m Edward Hurme. On behalf of Science Magazine and its publisher, AAAS,
thanks for joining us.
Music ends