Transcript

7.10.25 · Smithsonian Magazine

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Speaker 1: Welcome. This is Rebecca Shore for Radio Eye and to
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day I will be reading the Smithsonian Magazine dated July
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August twenty twenty five. As a reminder, Radio Eye is
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a reading service intended for people who are blind or
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have other disabilities that make it difficult to read printed material.
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Please join me now for the first article titled scientists
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are tracking worrying declines in insects and the birds that
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feast on them. Here's what's being done to save them both.
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In Vermont, researchers have investigated the types of creepy crawley
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bugs that their avian predators consume and may have found
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the answers to keeping them both alive. By Madeline Bowden.
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Less than two hours after sunrise, with the shadows still
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blue and slanting hard in a dense growth of balsam
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firs and spruces, the baby bird blundered into a fine
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black net strung along the ridge line of Mount Mansfield
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at four thousand, three hundred ninety three feet, Vermont's tallest mountain.
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Desiree Narrango, a conservation scientist with the Vermont Center for
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Eco Studies or VCE, retrieved the rescued bird and with
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practiced fingers spread one of its wings like a fan.
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From the bird's mottled and rumpled feathers, Marengo could see
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that this slate colored bird was a dark eyed junco,
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a sparrow species found in various color combinations across North America.
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The bird was just a few weeks out from leaving
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its nest. It was too young to tell its sex,
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but she was less interested in the bird itself than
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in what it had been eating. Juncos are known as
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seed eating birds. They spend their days rummaging through the
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undergrowth searching for fallen seeds at feeders. They prefer smaller
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grains like millet, but seeds don't provide the protein juncos
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or any songbirds need to grow a new set of
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feathers while they molt, and the protein this baby junco
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needs to molt its blotchy, juvenile feathers and to grow sleek,
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stone gray feathers on top and white ones below would
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come only from bugs. In fact, ninety percent of the
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more than ten thousand, seven hundred known bird species rely
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on insects for food during at least part of their
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life cycle. Even the most dedicated seed eating songbirds must
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eat insects and other arthropods that many legged group of
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creatures that includes spiders and millipedes, to produce eggs, to
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grow new feathers, and to feed their young. Without insects,
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in other words, they wouldn't survive. Unfortunately, insects are disappearing
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at a rate of about one to two percent a year,
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and the decline is not limited to just one species
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nor just one group of insects. The data suggests that
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the decline is widespread, even global. These findings have been
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confirmed in hundreds of rigorous peer reviewed studies, says David L. Wagner,
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a University of Connecticut entomologist and the lead scientist of
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a program known as the Status of Insects, which coordinates
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pertinent research on insect populations from around the world. The
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weight of the evidence is clear, Wagner says, I feel
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like it would stand up in a court of law. Narrango,
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who was now one of dozens of researchers participating in
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the project, was a city kid from Baltimore with her
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heart set on becoming a zookeeper. Her undergraduate program at
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the State University of New York College of Environmental Science
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and Forestry required a summer semester at a biological field
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station in the Adirondacks. She had never been camping or
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even to the woods. On the tree crowded shores of
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a mountain lake, she was captivated by the bouncy, fluty
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song of an unseen bird. By the time she figured
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out that it came from a white throated sparrow, her
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future had been mapped to day. She investigates the relationship
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between the worldwide decline and insects and a worldwide decline
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in birds. The bird cradled in her hand up on
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Mount Mansfield holds some of the answers to the mystery
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behind these trends. Bees, butterflies, moths, flies, beetles, ants, and
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a few other insects pollinate three quarters of the world's
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flowering plants and crops. Their pollination services are worth up
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to five hundred and seventy seven billion dollars per year worldwide.
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Less well known is their critical role in helping dead
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things disappear piles of leaves and rotting stumps, the rat
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in the street, the elephant on the savannah, the contents
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of your compost bin. Insects also feed on feces, cleaning
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up the messes of wild and domestic animals. Dung Beetles
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provide three hundred and eighty million dollars a year in
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manure recycling for the American cattle industry. All of these
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clean up activities create soil for new plant growth. Insects
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feed many animals we eat, such as trout, salmon, and turkeys.
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In some places, they feed us directly. More than two
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thousand species of insect are eaten by people around the world,
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and that's not even considering honey Bugs also keep each
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other under control. Ladybugs eat the aphids in your garden.
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Craying mantises eat flies, moths, roaches, grasshoppers, and more. Dragonflies
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patrol the skies, eating flies, midges, and mosquitos. Some wasps
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are clever parasites, paralyzing other insects, including some we don't
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like to feed their young. Simply put, insects are vital
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for them the survival of land based life on this planet.
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Ellen Welty, a research ecologist with the Smithsonian's Great Plains
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Science program says there are two groups of people who
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study insects, those who look at them as pests or
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carriers of disease, and those who study insects roles in
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natural systems. While most insect researchers look for better ways
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to control grasshoppers on range lands, Welty says she studies how,
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for example, grasshoppers benefit grasslands by providing enough fertilizer through
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their frasts that is, poop, to increase the yield of
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next year's grasses, which outweighs the damage they do eating
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this year's grasses. The Status of Insects project, led by Wagner,
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helps scientists like Wealthy fill gaps and coordinate their research.
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The network doesn't just focus on the glamorous insects such
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as butterflies, be and dragonflies. Jessica Ware, the curator of
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Invertebrate Zoology at the American Museum of Natural History in
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New York and one of the project's principal investigators, leads
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a research group for cockroaches and termites. These insects are
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a nightmare in our homes, but are part of nature's
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intricate workings outside them. Only two percent of cockroach species
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are pests, while the other seven thousand or so species
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are benign. Ware says, actually a lot of them are
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really pretty, says Eliza Grames, a biologist at Binghamton University
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and another project leader. Similarly, termites, which are a kind
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of cockroach, break down old trees and are vital to
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tropical forest health everywhere where, says they are an important
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food source for birds when they swarm during mating. She
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has even seen birds feasting on termite swarms in New Jersey.
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The Insect Network project grew out of an earlier initiative
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by Grames, who started as a bird researcher and became
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an expert in large scale data analysis, and an entomologist
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friend named Graham Montgomery. The researchers realized that many existing
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research papers tagged with insect data were actually calculations of
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birds food, so they designed a system to mine published
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research for data about insect population levels. It was a
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weird series of events, and now that's everything I do,
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Grames says. Grames believes that repeating long term studies from
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decades ago is critical for understanding why insects have declined.
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While some issues are known, for example, habitat loss, non
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native plants, artificial light at night, climate, and pesticides, scientists
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need to know a lot more about the drivers and
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consequences of the decline. To conserve in while protecting human needs.
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Repeating previous bird and insect studies is what Nurrango is doing.
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On top of Mount Mansfield, VCE scientists have been studying
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birds there since the nineteen nineties. As the scientists weighed, measured,
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and banded birds on Mount Mansfield decade after decade, they
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also collected feathers, placing them in envelopes for future study.
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Those envelopes sit in boxes in a corner of VCE's
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lab in the village of White River Junction. Nurrango plans
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to have those feathers analyzed for the natural variations in
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their carbon and nitrogen isotopes, which will uncover clues about
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each bird's diet. For example, she will be able to
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tell if it ate mostly plants in their seeds, or
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mostly plant eating animals such as caterpillars, or mostly animals
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that eat other animals such as spiders. To have a
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re in comparison, Nurrango's team collects feathers from six bird
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species on Mount Mansfield, including junkos. Another scientist plucked a
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tail feather from the rumpled young junco and snipped off
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half of a still attached wing feather. Dropping the samples
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into a small manilla envelope. Nurngo will analyze these feathers
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for carbon and nitrogen isotopes too. Going one step further,
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Nurrango also pricked a vein in the junco's wing and
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gathered a drop of blood in a capillary tube. After
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it is analyzed for isotopes, the blood sample will give
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her an even more recent snapshot of what the bird
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has been eating. That is not all the bird had
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to offer. As it weighted its turn to have its
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blood collected, it sat in a brown paper bag with
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a piece of filter paper on the bottom. Narrango checked
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the bag and yes, the baby junco had pooped there
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while it waited, leaving a grayish smear on the paper.
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This bird poop was scientific gold. Run through DNA analysis.
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It would tell Narrango everything this bird had eaten in
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the last few hours, right down to the species. It's
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a level of specificity that has only recently become available,
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and for scientists studying the interaction between birds and insects,
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it's hard to beat. As Narrango and others collected data
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on the birds. Zoe Picket, a VCEE summer intern and
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undergraduate at Mount Holyoake College tended the traps set for
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ground insects every week throughout the summer. Picket emptied dozens
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of plastic cups that had been filled with a thick
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liquid preservative and buried in the ground up to their rims,
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waiting for crawling insects to stumble in. She folded the
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filter containing the insects and placed it first in a
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plastic bag, then in an empty plastic cat food jar,
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and finally into her very yellow backpack. Pickett said the
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multiple layers of packaging are vital since slugs, mollusks, not insects,
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end up falling into the liquid and their smell is
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uniquely bad. Back in the lab, hamber Jones, a VCE technician,
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transferred the insect samples into a petri dish and examined
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them under a microscope. Carabid beetles, a type of ground beetle,
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were particularly interesting to the team because they were a
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focus of a University of Vermont researcher who gathered data
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on that spot thirty years ago. That researcher wrote a
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report just on Mount Mansfield's caribid beetles, and Nerango's team
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as identifying each species to compare results. They all look
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small and black, Nrango said, but under the microscope you
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can see the fine differences between them. Jones sorted the
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creatures in the petrie dish, with the tweezer placing a
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spider into one crimped edged aluminum dish, the spring tails
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into another, and the mites, which lived up to their
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name and a third. The dishes were labeled, dried in
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an oven at one hundred and forty degrees fahrenheit for
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twenty four hours, then weighed. The results gave the researchers
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a picture of which insects were available for a ground
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feeding bird like the baby junco to eat the week
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the samples were collected. The night before the baby junco
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landed in the research team's net, a strange shifting light
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filtered through the forest not far from where the long
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trail Vermont's End to end hiking route traverses the Mount
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Mansfield Ridge Line. I sometimes wonder if hikers going by
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think aliens have landed, Narngo said, a closer inspection would
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not have dispelled their suspicions. The source of the light,
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which shifted from blue to green to a white whose
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secret ingredient is ultra violet sat in the middle of
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what could have been an alien lantern, with the other
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worldly light bulb supported in a mystifying structure of translucent plastic.
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It was a moth trap, with the funnel below the
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light to catch the moths drawn in from the surrounding forest.
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Narrango had furnished the five gallon hardware store bucket that
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sat below the filter with a jumble of comfy, cut
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up egg cartons. The moths could rest among them before
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a jar of ammonium carbonate also known as smelling salts
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or Baker's ammonia, hidden at the bottom of the bucket
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killed them. We are looking for non lethal methods, but
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some species of moths you have to kill to identify,
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Narrango said, And that's what they were doing in the past,
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so we stuck with that. When she collected the bucket
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the next morning and searched through the egg cartons, she
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didn't find much. One spectacularly patterned geometrid moth better known
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for its inchwarm caterpillars, and three micro leaf roller moths.
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There was a cattis fly in the bucket, which is
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a type of aquatic insect and a few tiny flies.
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The hall let Narrango know which caterpillars are available for
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birds on the mountain, as each of these moths was
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a caterpillar once. She doesn't survey for butterflies because birds
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don't eat them or their caterpillars. Often. Butterflies are colorful
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because they are typically toxic or at least taste bad
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to birds. She explains, not even their caterpillars make good
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baby bird food with their flashy colors. She says, butterflies
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are just trying too hard. Narrango emphasizes that the poor
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catch is not an example of insect decline, but a
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result of a particularly chilly summer night. This is what
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makes insect research so tricky. If Narrango only sampled moths
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on this chilly night in early August, she would get
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a different idea than if she only sampled them on
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the warm night at the end of May, when moths
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were so plentiful on Mount Mansfield that they covered both
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the inside and the outside of the bucket. This is
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why she sets the light trap every week of the
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field season. Though Narrango and her colleagues don't yet have
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a final count of moths and ground insects or their species.
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She noticed that they were collecting many fewer moths than
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the research team had thirty years ago. They collected their
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moths in a garbage can, Nurrango said she was using
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a mere five gallon bucket. On the other hand, her
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team was collecting more carabid ground beetles than were present
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thirty years ago, and more of the beetles they collected
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were high elevation specialists. This may be a climate refugia,
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Nurrango said, referring to a place that remains relatively unchanged
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during major shifts in climate. The top of Mount Mansfield
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has been spared from the development happening in the world
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below over the past thirty years. Narngo has an idea
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of what's ahead for the baby junco and the other
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birds on the mountain. She previously studied birds in cities,
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and she found that in places with fewer native plants,
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there were fewer protein and fat rich caterpillars, so the
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chickadees she studied turned to eating spiders, which are lower
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in fat instead. In these places, the chickadees laid fewer
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eggs and fewer hatchlings survived to leave the nest Ram's
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research shows that the quantity of insects available to the
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birds matters when there are more insects in a habitat.
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She says, birds raise fatter, happier chicks. Chris Elphick of
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the University of Connecticut, who now helps lead the Status
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of Insects Network, says, if you're a swallow, may be
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some in or more like eating steak and two veg
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and others are like eating lettuce all the time. Even
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knowing the strong evidence of global insect decline, neither Grames
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nor Narrango despairs over the fate of birds and insects.
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They are optimistic that while they wait for policy changes,
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simple everyday actions can make a difference. They advise using
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fewer outside lights, which attract insects, distracting them sometimes to
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the point of death from starvation or exhaustion, and making
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them vulnerable to predators like spiders. It helps when lights
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are motion activated and yellow or another warm color, since
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insects are attracted to bright white light. They also recommend
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using fewer insecticides. Marango knows from her own research that
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planting native plants in a yard or even in a
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pot on an apartment balcony can help provide high protein
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insect wives food for birds. Planting a single tree can
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make a difference, with an oak supporting up to five
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hundred and fifty seven species of caterpillars. People may not
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be motivated to save the insects for their own sake,
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but a world without insects is a world without birds.
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It's a world where no college student will hear the
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fluty song of a white throated sparrow across a mountain
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lake and have her life changed. It's a world where
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nature offers no song to the rising sun. It's a
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silent spring. In the long term, it would become something
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even worse. Without insects, everything dies, all mammals, all reptiles,
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all birds, and even humans. Hre says, if you want
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to conserve any of those other things, including us, you
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should want to conserve insects. What Naranngo did, after making
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sure the junco's needle prick had healed, looked like a
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magic trick, but it came merely from years of experience.
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She fluttered her hands a set of maneuvers to give
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the bird a firm launching pad, and suddenly the junco
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was free. It flew into the blue shadows of a
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patch of balsam firs near the top of Mount Mansfield.
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It was time to find breakfast. Finally, from the June issue,
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this simple but ingenious instrument helped the world measure carbon
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dioxide levels in the atmosphere. Scientist Charles Keeling's invention had
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a profound effect on scientist's understanding of the severity of
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the climate change crisis. By Ashley Braun, to unlock the
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secrets of the atmosphere, first, travel away from cities, forests, cars,
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and people to somewhere the air blows clean, say the
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top of a Hawaiian volcano. Bring two round glass flasks
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volleyball sized, but with their air vacuumed out, wrapped in
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surgical tape for safety. Point the glass nozzle jutting from
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each toward that fresh air. Now, hold your breath and
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walk at least ten feet into the wind. Open the valve,
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let the air rush in, and well after the hissing
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has stopped, close it back up. Then you can breathe.
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Once you've done all that, says Tim Luker, a scientist
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with the Script's Institution of Oceanography. Now you have an
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air sample and I'm still amazed that it works. Charles
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David Keeling established this method in the mid nineteen fifties
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at the California Institute of Technology. Back then, scientists didn't
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know how much carbon dioxide naturally occurred in the atmosphere.
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Measurements varied widely. Keeling cracked how to measure it precisely.
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Then he took this endeavor to new heights eleven thousand
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feet above sea level. At a nineteen fifty six meeting
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with their research director at the U. S Weather Bureau,
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a precursor to the National Weather Service, Healing made an
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ambitious pitch continuously monitoring CO two using a gas analyzer,
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a high tech but as yet unproven tool for the job.
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The bureau's new research station on Hawaii's Mona Loa Volcano,
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with its high altitude and barren landscape, would prove to
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be the ideal collection spot. Along with that continuous monitoring,
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scientists would also gather five literre air flask snapshots sampled
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in pairs at remote locations around the world, analyzing the
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results under controlled laboratory conditions. Nearly on the spot, Kealing
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was offered funding to build a CO two program, taking
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it to scripts in Lojaala, California. He began measurements in
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nineteen fifty eight. As months and years of data arrived,
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Keeling's rigorous work revealed two global phenomena, Earth's plants inhaling
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CO two each summer and exhaling at each winter, and
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CO two levels unrelenting annual increase. The undulating graph marking
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the atmospheric CO two concentration would become known as the
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Keeling curve. On January twenty ninth, nineteen eighty two, at
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the Moana Loa Observatory, ANAA employee first filled glass flask
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I four fifty seven when atmospheric CO two levels measured
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three four one point two eight parts per million ppm
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analyzed at the script's lab. This sample also could now
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reveal CO two's fingerprints from sources like living things, fossil fuels,
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and volcanoes. In the early nineteen eighties, Luker joined Keeling's
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in Lejalla. The researchers were grappling with major questions of
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global carbon math from the ocean to the sky. Activities
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like burning fossil fuels and making cement release CO two.
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But only half of the carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere,
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land based plants, and the ocean to a limit absorbed
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the rest determining those fractions and limits. The mathematical destination
24:28
of fossil fuel CO two was a contentious scientific question,
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complicated by the burning of the Amazon rainforest to clear
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land for farming. Essential to much of this work was
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understanding how and where the planet's cycles, one of its
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most widely distributed elements through the atmosphere, ocean, and land.
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Those answers hissed out of glass flasks like I four
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fifty seven, gathered at stations from near the North Pole
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to Muana Loa and from the tiny Christmas Island to
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the South Pole. In his later years, Charles Keeling reflected
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on the slow footed public response to growing evidence of
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climate change. People, he wrote in nineteen ninety eight, should
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heed the rise in atmospheric CO two concentration as serious
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and less proven to be benign. He died in two
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thousand five. On June seventh, twenty twenty two, flask I
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four fifty seven took its own last breath on Moana
25:32
Loa before embarking on a different journey, one to the
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Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, curator Kristin Frederick Frost
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remembers the flask arriving at the museum, perfectly cradled in
25:47
its custom padding. She marveled at the box's design, made
25:52
to ship fragile flasks all over the world. One of
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my big regrets is not collecting the box. We had
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to send it back, she says. When the flask took
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in its last sample in twenty twenty two, atmospheric CO
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two levels registered four to twenty one point thirty six ppm,
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a concentration that Luker calls unbelievable. When the instrument first
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began collecting samples in nineteen eighty two, CO two levels
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had been eighty ppm lower at that point. The fires,
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the droughts, the floods, the powerful hurricanes, that was all hypothetical,
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he says, and now we're living through it, with global
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CO two continuing to rise faster than expected. The script's
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team is part of a monitoring effort trying to understand
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why the Los Angeles Megacity Carbon Project, a collaboration between
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SCRIPTS and other organizations, seeks to zero in on the
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localized sources and forms of pollution in southern California cities
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to better address it flask samples, still deduce sources co
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two fingerprints. It's almost like a christ still ball the
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glass flask. Lucre ads. It's just stunning that such a
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simple invention could have such a profound effect. Finally, ask
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Smithsonian from Mary Condon. Does anyone ever wear the jewelry
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in the Smithsonian's National Gem Collection? The answer is from
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Russell Feather, Gem Collection Manager, National Museum of Natural History.
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Generally not, though there have been a few rare exceptions.
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In the nineteen sixties, Marjorie Merriweather Post and Polly Logan
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made arrangements to wear some of the jewelry they had
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donated while the Gem exhibition was closed for renovation. Michelle
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Pfeiffer wore many pieces from our collection for the March
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nineteen ninety five issue of Life magazine, including the Hope
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Diamond and the Mackay Emerald, an Art Deco piece that
27:48
once belonged to a diva in the New York Metropolitan Opera.
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Many other items in our collection were worn by famous
27:56
people in their previous lives, from royalty to Hollywood stars.
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This concludes readings from the Smithsonian Magazine for to day.
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Your reader has been Rebecca Shore, thank you for listening
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and have a great day.