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Science, Wonder And The Natural World · Cariboo Signals

• 0:25
  Casey: Welcome to Cariboo Signals, an AI-generated review of the latest tech news and ideas that impact our rural communities. It's Sunday, July 5th, 2026. Reaching you from the heart of the Cariboo, the homeland of the Secwépemc, Tŝilhqot'in, and Dakelh nations. Today's theme is Science, Wonder & the Natural World — I'm Casey.
• 0:49
  Riley: And I'm Riley. Today we're talking about what science keeps discovering it doesn't know yet — and what that might mean for the wild places right outside our windows.
• 1:01
  Casey: Quick weather sweep — out at Horsefly Lake it's 9 degrees with mainly clear skies, headed for a high of 19. Across the region, 100 Mile House is sitting at 8 and clear, Williams Lake at 10 and clear, Quesnel at 10 with some cloud cover, and out on the Chilcotin plateau, Redstone is at 8 with clear skies too. Good morning for anyone heading outside.
• 1:30
  Casey: Let's get into what's happening out there.
• 1:34
  Riley: Starting with something genuinely staggering — researchers estimate there may be three times more insect species on Earth than we've catalogued. The overwhelming majority are still unknown to science.
• 1:47
  Casey: Three times. So most of what's crawling around out there doesn't even have a name yet.
• 1:54
  Riley: That's the estimate. Taxonomists have been chipping away at insect diversity for two centuries and they may have barely scratched a third of it.
• 2:06
  Casey: Sticking with things science took decades to figure out — submarine crews in Antarctic waters heard a mysterious mechanical quacking sound for fifty years before anyone identified the source. Turns out it's a call from minke whales, now nicknamed the "bio-duck."
• 2:24
  Riley: Fifty years of "what is that noise" is a long time to sit with a mystery.
• 2:32
  Casey: From ocean mysteries to space ones — a 10-year sky survey has begun filming what astronomers are calling a "cosmic movie," continuously imaging the same patches of sky to catch transient events as they happen.
• 2:48
  Riley: And that pairs with a story out this week about a "mammoth structure" found in deep space that's challenging existing models of how the universe is organized at large scales.
• 3:01
  Casey: Cosmologists finding out the universe is bigger and weirder than the textbook allowed for. Not exactly new territory for cosmology.
• 3:10
  Riley: There's a companion piece worth flagging too — researchers at Utrecht University argue we may already be missing evidence of extraterrestrial life, not because it isn't there, but because our detection methods and assumptions about what life should look like are too narrow.
• 3:29
  Casey: We'll come back to that in a minute — it's basically the thesis of today's Deep Dive.
• 3:38
  Riley: Closer to home in terms of timescale — scientists confirmed the origin of the Silverpit Crater beneath the North Sea. An asteroid roughly 160 meters wide struck the seabed somewhere between 43 and 46 million years ago and triggered a tsunami estimated at 330 feet.
• 3:58
  Casey: Puts a bad commute in perspective.
• 4:02
  Riley: On the medical side, researchers at University of Utah Health say they may have found how Alzheimer's spreads through the brain — a common protein appears to carry toxic tau proteins from damaged neurons into healthy ones, which opens a possible target for blocking the spread before it happens.
• 4:24
  Casey: Paleontology had a moment too — researchers reconstructed the brain of a 319-million-year-old fossil fish, which helps explain how ray-finned fishes came to dominate the world's oceans.
• 4:36
  Riley: Three hundred nineteen million years and we're still learning how fish got so good at being fish.
• 4:44
  Casey: Also worth noting today — Al Jazeera reports Indonesian troops recovered the body of an American pilot from Papua after a crash in the region. And WIRED has a piece on wildfire prediction markets letting people bet on whether a fire will burn down their town — survivors quoted in the piece call it "morally reprehensible."
• 5:09
  Riley: That one's uncomfortable on a lot of levels, given what the Cariboo's been through with fire seasons.
• 5:16
  Casey: And on a lighter note — Boing Boing flags a website called Real Image Alphabet that spells out names using photographs of ice, bugs, and trees. Genuinely charming, no notes.
• 5:30
  Riley: Before we move on — a listener correction. In our July 2nd episode, we referenced Indigenous-led forest rehabilitation work without naming the specific nation involved, and a listener wrote in to note that attributing regional forestry initiatives without confirmed sourcing risks getting the details wrong. Fair catch — we should have either named the confirmed partner or kept the framing general. Thanks for holding us to that.
• 5:59
  Casey: Appreciated. Now — from asteroid craters to actual living creatures we haven't finished counting yet, let's head into the Community Spotlight.
• 6:08
  Riley: Today we're highlighting the Quesnel Shelter & Support Society. Since 2006, they've run minimal-barrier emergency shelter, transitional housing, and supportive recovery programs in Quesnel — including Seasons House and Bridges Supportive Housing. It's the kind of steady, unglamorous infrastructure that keeps people from falling through the cracks, year after year, regardless of who's paying attention. You can find them at qsss.ca.
• 6:35
  Casey: Two decades of showing up for the same work without a press cycle behind it — that's the kind of organization worth knowing exists before you need it.
• 6:48
  Riley: Speaking of things we don't fully see until we look closely — that's exactly where today's Deep Dive starts.
• 6:56
  Casey: So the premise today: insects, three times more species than catalogued. Astronomers finding a "mammoth structure" that doesn't fit existing models. Researchers at Utrecht arguing we might already have alien biosignatures sitting in the data and not recognizing them. The pattern is — science keeps discovering that its blind spots are bigger than its knowledge.
• 7:20
  Riley: Which is the actually exciting part. Every one of those stories is really the same finding dressed differently: the tools got better, and the universe got bigger in response. That's not a failure of prior science. That's what discovery looks like.
• 7:38
  Casey: Sure, but "the universe got bigger" is a nice line for deep space. Closer to home, it's a nice way of saying nobody's finished counting the bugs in your backyard either.
• 7:51
  Riley: Which is genuinely true here. The Cariboo has never had a comprehensive insect survey. If the global undercount is running two or three to one, there's no reason to think this region is an exception — there could be species living in the Cariboo Mountains or the Chilcotin grasslands that have never been formally described.
• 8:15
  Casey: How would anyone know, though? Insect taxonomy takes specialized training most regional biology departments don't have staffing for. UNBC has ecology researchers, not a standing team of entomologists cataloguing beetles in Wells Gray.
• 8:30
  Riley: That's not a wall, that's a design problem. The insect undercount globally has been driven partly by amateur naturalists and citizen collectors feeding specimens to museum taxonomists who do the identification work later. You don't need a resident entomologist in Quesnel. You need people collecting specimens correctly and a pipeline to someone who can identify them.
• 8:54
  Casey: Right, but that pipeline is the whole problem. Who's the someone? The Royal BC Museum has a backlog measured in years for undescribed specimens sitting in drawers. A rancher near Horsefly submitting a jar of beetles isn't getting an answer this decade.
• 9:12
  Riley: Maybe not this decade. But the value isn't only the identification — it's the specimen existing at all. A hundred years from now, whoever finally gets to that backlog has a dated, located sample from the Cariboo instead of nothing. That's how the North Sea asteroid crater got confirmed — decades of seismic data sitting around until someone had the right instrument to interpret it.
• 9:41
  Casey: That's a fairer comparison than most of what gets thrown around here. Data can sit and wait for better tools. People collecting it can't always wait that long before losing interest.
• 9:54
  Riley: Which is exactly why you attach it to something people are already doing, not a new volunteer program that fizzles after the first grant cycle. Ranchers already walk their land daily. Trail crews already move through backcountry nobody else sees. If specimen collection rides along with work people are already paid or motivated to do, it doesn't need its own funding line to survive.
• 10:22
  Casey: That's the same argument you made about ecological baseline data a couple weeks back, and I raised the same concern then — riding along with existing roles doesn't solve who trains people on collection protocol, or who owns what gets found. Say a rancher near Alexis Creek collects a genuinely undescribed beetle. Whose discovery is that? Does it get named for the collector, the land, or does it just disappear into a museum drawer with a catalog number?
• 10:56
  Riley: Fair question, and it's not resolved by enthusiasm. But look at what happened with the Antarctic "bio-duck" sound — fifty years of submarine crews logging something they couldn't identify, and eventually acousticians matched it to minke whale calls. Nobody owned that discovery in a proprietary sense. It became public scientific record because the data trail existed and somebody eventually cross-referenced it.
• 11:23
  Casey: Submarine sonar logs are military infrastructure with a budget line that outlives any individual sailor's interest. A jar of beetles on a rancher's shelf in the Cariboo doesn't have that institutional continuity behind it.
• 11:38
  Riley: No, but it doesn't need a military budget — it needs one steady local point of contact. The Williams Lake area already has a natural history society; if a similar group anywhere in the region formalized a specimen intake — even mail-in to the Royal BC Museum with a standard collection card — that's infrastructure that costs almost nothing and outlasts any single volunteer.
• 12:06
  Casey: That's a real, cheap version of the idea — not a grant-funded observatory, just a mailing protocol and a form. I'll grant that clears my usual objection about ongoing costs. What it doesn't solve is expertise recognition — the same undercount problem applies to who's allowed to call something "discovered." Indigenous knowledge holders in the region have almost certainly identified species and behaviors that never made it into a peer-reviewed description, because the system only counts something as "found" when a credentialed taxonomist names it.
• 12:43
  Riley: That's real, and it's not new to today's conversation — Secwépemc and Tŝilhqot'in land users have generational observation of exactly the kind that Western taxonomy is trying to catch up to with better tools. The insect undercount story isn't really about bugs being newly present. It's about which observation counts as "official."
• 13:05
  Casey: Which is where the wonder story gets complicated. It's genuinely exciting that there's more out there than we knew. It's less exciting that "more than we knew" often means "more than institutions bothered to ask the people who already knew."
• 13:23
  Riley: Though the alien biosignature piece cuts a different way on that point — the Utrecht researchers aren't arguing we lack information, they're arguing our detection assumptions are too narrow, that we might be looking for the wrong signature entirely. That's a methodology critique, not a credentialing critique.
• 13:43
  Casey: Same root problem though, just aimed at instruments instead of people. If your detection method only recognizes life shaped like the life you already know, you miss what's actually there. If your discovery process only recognizes expertise shaped like a university degree, you miss knowledge that's actually there too.
• 14:05
  Riley: That's a clean parallel, and it's worth sitting with. What would change if a regional natural history record in the Cariboo explicitly logged both formal specimen collection and Indigenous observational knowledge, side by side, without ranking one above the other?
• 14:22
  Casey: You'd need buy-in from the nations involved on how that knowledge gets recorded and who controls its use — which starts running into the same governance ground we've covered on other Thursdays. I'll flag honestly that neither of us has spoken directly with First Nations knowledge keepers about whether they'd even want their observations logged in a settler-run database, however well-intentioned.
• 14:49
  Riley: Fair to name. But even short of a formal joint archive, there's a smaller experiment worth trying — a regional bio-blitz, the kind some BC parks already run, where for one weekend anyone documents whatever species they find using something as simple as iNaturalist, and organizers make a point of inviting elders and land users alongside biology students. Not a permanent institution. A single, low-cost event that tests whether people show up.
• 15:20
  Casey: That's small enough to actually happen without anyone needing a three-year grant to run it. The real test is whether it happens twice — most one-off "let's document biodiversity" weekends in small towns don't get a second year, because the person who organized it moves on and nobody replaces them.
• 15:42
  Riley: So don't build it around one organizer. Build it around an existing group that already has continuity — the Williams Lake Field Naturalists, or a similar regional society, hosting it as an annual fixture the way some communities already do a Christmas bird count. That's decades-old infrastructure in some towns precisely because it's owned by a club, not a grant.
• 16:08
  Casey: The Christmas bird count model is the strongest example you've given all segment — it's genuinely survived on volunteer continuity for a century in places, no funding treadmill required. Whether the Cariboo has an equivalent group with that kind of staying power for insects or plants specifically, I don't know.
• 16:30
  Riley: Neither do we, honestly — that's a question for listeners more than us. Is there a natural history group, formal or informal, in Quesnel, Williams Lake, or 100 Mile that would want to test something like an annual bio-blitz?
• 16:47
  Casey: And if there's an Indigenous-led observation initiative already underway that we're simply not aware of, that's worth knowing too — the Utrecht point about missing what's already there because you're not looking the right way applies to us as much as to any telescope.
• 17:06
  Riley: Which might be the honest note to end on. The insect count, the deep-space structure, the missed biosignatures — none of it is really about isolated topics. It's a reminder that whatever we think we've fully documented about the Cariboo, we almost certainly haven't.
• 17:25
  Casey: And the fix isn't a bigger grant or a fancier sensor. It's paying attention to who's already watching and giving that observation somewhere real to go.
• 17:36
  Riley: If you know of a naturalist group, an Indigenous-led observation project, or even just have a jar of unidentified beetles sitting on a shelf — get in touch. Corrections, story tips, or ideas for what a Cariboo bio-blitz should look like, all welcome at feedback at cariboo signals dot c-a.
• 17:58
  Casey: Hope you had a great weekend. We'll see you tomorrow.
• 18:03
  Riley: Take care, everyone.