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"content": "\u003cp>A disease caused by salmonella bacteria that spread through bird feeders and birdbaths is killing songbirds across California, the California Department of Fish & Wildlife \u003ca href=\"https://cdfgnews.wordpress.com/2021/02/08/salmonellosis-outbreak-causing-songbird-deaths/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">warned this week\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Salmonellosis is striking down mostly \u003ca href=\"https://www.audubon.org/field-guide/bird/pine-siskin\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">pine siskins\u003c/a>, a species of finch that migrates from Canada. Smaller numbers of lesser goldfinches and American goldfinches have also been stricken with the disease. Most sightings of these sick or dead birds have been in the Bay Area, Central Coast and Sierra Nevada.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Pine siskin are an “irruptive” species, says, Krysta Rogers, a senior environmental scientist at CDFW, because their migration patterns are sporadic and heavily dictated by where they can find food.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1972736\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 638px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2021/02/pinesiskin.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-1972736 size-full\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2021/02/pinesiskin.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"638\" height=\"431\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2021/02/pinesiskin.jpg 638w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2021/02/pinesiskin-160x108.jpg 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 638px) 100vw, 638px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A pine siskin in Kodiak Island, Alaska. A species of bacteria is killing the birds in California around birdbaths and other places birds congregate. (U.S. Department of Fish and Wildlife)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>She said when birds move to this type of alternative food source, it’s often due to “high reproductive success.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“So there’s lots of new birds in the population and then maybe some depleted food resources in their breeding areas,” Rogers said. “And so they move to find food.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And often, they’ll start using bird feeders, which is where the trouble starts. Intestinal bacteria spreads through feces, so areas where birds congregate are a problem. When the birds poop in platform bird feeders or in a birdbath, Rogers said, “the next bird that comes along and either takes a drink out of that water or eats seeds that might be contaminated with the feces can get infected that way.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rogers says salmonella bacteria can live for days or even months, so no amount of cleaning will be able to keep pace with the spread.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The safest thing people can do is take down the feeders, she says, at least until the birds clear out, which usually happens in March and April.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Until then, keep an eye out for finches gathering around your feeders.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Their eyes are made up of hundreds of cells called ommatidia, but they don’t see much detail — just blurry shapes, light and dark.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>ADDITIONAL RESOURCES\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv data-pm-slice=\"1 1 []\" data-en-clipboard=\"true\">Read more about \u003ca href=\"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0w1024x6\">the ecological value of beach wrack\u003c/a> and how regular mechanical beach grooming affects the sandy beach ecosystem.\u003c/div>\n\u003cdiv data-pm-slice=\"1 1 []\" data-en-clipboard=\"true\">\u003c/div>\n\u003cdiv data-pm-slice=\"1 1 []\" data-en-clipboard=\"true\">\u003ca href=\"https://explorebeaches.msi.ucsb.edu/\">Learn more about sandy beach ecosystems\u003c/a>, and the important role that beach hoppers play in the food web.\u003c/div>\n\u003cp>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>They’re drawn toward shadowy blobs on the horizon. They hope it’s kelp, their favorite food.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When they find it, they eat and eat.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sometimes they even eat one another.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This large beach hopper is piercing the other right behind its eye, holding it in place with its claws.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For protection, they dig burrows about a foot deep where the sand is damp and cool.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And males will fight over control of burrows, especially if there are females inside.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Deep in the night, the beach hopper acrobatics build into a dazzling show.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A powerful flick of their curled-up tail launches them skyward.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>They do not stick the landing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A beach hopper can jump as high as your knees, dozens of times the length of its body.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s a quick way to travel — toward food or mates. Or to get out of harm’s way.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Beach hoppers’ diets are mostly beach wrack — anything natural that washes ashore. Wrack is an essential source of nutrients for sandy beach ecosystems.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These shredders break down the wrack into smaller parts. It’s the first step in sending nutrients into the food chain.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When predators like shorebirds or insects eat beach hoppers, they can carry these nutrients further inland.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Without these hungry acrobats, beaches the world over would be strewn with rotting seaweed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After a night of fighting and feasting, they leave only silhouettes behind.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As the sun rises, the beach hoppers retreat to their burrows, just beyond the tide’s reach.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The performers need their rest.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another spectacle is just a night away.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Wild Horses, Part of Romantic West, Are Causing Havoc in Northeast California",
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"content": "\u003cp>In the northeast corner of California, feral horses roam in an area of the Modoc National Forest known as Devil’s Garden. The high desert plateau in the northeastern corner of the state is filled with juniper trees, sage brush, and not quite enough grass for all the grazing animals that live there. A fight over how to manage the horses shifted recently when Congress funded a plan to reduce herds on federal lands. KQED’s Brian Watt recently spoke with \u003cstrong>Sacramento Bee reporter Ryan Sabalow\u003c/strong>, who covered the Devil’s Garden horses in his series, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.sacbee.com/article247934210.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Nothing Wild.\u003c/a>”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The following has been edited for length and clarity.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>How did these horses come to be living in the wild?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Ryan Sabalow\u003c/em>: Some of these horses in the West can trace their ancestry back to the Spanish settlers in the 16th and 17th centuries. The difference with the Devil’s Garden herd is these horses are much more newcomers. They’ve been around since about the \u003ca href=\"https://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/modoc_war\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Modoc War\u003c/a>, which was in the 1800s.[pullquote]‘You can’t find a piece of California, really, that hasn’t been fundamentally altered by humans since the Gold Rush. Yet there’s this huge romantic notion that if we just leave these places alone, they’ll re-wild themselves.[/pullquote]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Devil’s Garden herd is unique in that it’s managed by the U.S. Forest Service instead of the Bureau of Land Management. The BLM manages about 100,000 wild horses on millions of acres.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The issue is that wild horses are not a native species. The federal government is trying to figure out a way to reduce their numbers to try to benefit all these other animals that are out there, while still allowing cattle ranchers to make a living.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>These horses are wrapped up in a romantic narrative about freedom in the Old West. So what’s at stake here?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s a deep, deep, emotional connection to wild horses that advocates have. And there’s a really kind of troubling history of how horses were managed, particularly on these BLM lands, for the first half of the last century.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1972212\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 768px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-1972212 size-full\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2040/01/03_SAC_DMK_Wildhorses.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"768\" height=\"465\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2040/01/03_SAC_DMK_Wildhorses.jpeg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2040/01/03_SAC_DMK_Wildhorses-160x97.jpeg 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 768px) 100vw, 768px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A herd of wild horses are corralled into a holding pen in Devil’s Garden in the Modoc National Forest on Sept. 10, 2020. \u003ccite>(Daniel Kim/Sacramento Bee (used with permission))\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>They were basically rounded up, sent to slaughter for dog food and glue. They were shipped overseas to fight in World War I. They were treated like livestock.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After World War II, there was a fundamental shift in how we viewed wild horses. The horse population in the West was going down, and that coincided with the romance of the American West that was basically all over TV and Hollywood.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Then, in 1971, President Richard Nixon passed a law that protected wild horses, basically saying they are a fundamental part of the American West and they deserve to be protected just like our wildlife. What that basically set in stone was a policy where the federal government can’t kill these animals, and it has created all kinds of headaches for land managers ever since, because horses are prolific breeders. And in many of these areas, they’re breeding to the point where they’re overwhelming the ecosystems they’re in.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>What effect are the horses having on the landscape?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The area is struggling with a lot of ecological stressors right now. The entire base of the food chain is filled with these invasive grasses that have come in over the last few decades; you have juniper trees growing everywhere, and in places where they shouldn’t be. On top of this, you have cattle and wild horses being raised on these lands.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Native species are suffering. Sage-grouse numbers have declined precipitously. There used to be like 14,000 of these animals in the Devil’s Garden. They’re now down to like five; just a couple of years ago they counted five grouse in the middle of their breeding area. The local deer herd numbers are in decline. There used to be tens of thousands in what’s known as the Interstate Deer Herd. Just a couple of years ago they counted under 5,000.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The horse advocates would say, well, if we just removed some of the cows from these areas, the horses would have ample feed. The government says: We don’t allow the cattle to be out there all year long. They’re only allowed to forage for a certain amount of time per year, so the ranchers have to make sure they leave a certain amount of feed available for the wildlife.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the horses are out there year-round. I actually went out to one of these protected springs in the Devil’s Garden, which is a really formidable place — it’s called Devil’s Garden for a reason. It’s a high desert, extremely cold, extremely hot, depending on time of year. Lava rocks everywhere.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What you get are these critically important springs that bubble up from the lava rock. I went to one of these places where cattle ranchers are supposed to put a fence around the spring. And the horses, because they need to get to the green grass and that fresh clean water that bubbles up, they just tear the fence right down.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1972209\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-1972209 size-medium\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2040/01/Sanduskyatthespring-800x538.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"538\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2040/01/Sanduskyatthespring-800x538.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2040/01/Sanduskyatthespring-1020x686.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2040/01/Sanduskyatthespring-160x108.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2040/01/Sanduskyatthespring-768x517.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2040/01/Sanduskyatthespring.jpg 1140w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">“It should be a little oasis. And it’s gone.” — Ken Sandusky, a spokesman for the Modoc National Forest, at a headwaters spring where the native grasses were trampled and eaten by horses on Sept. 11, 2020. \u003ccite>(Ryan Sabalow/Sacramento Bee (used with permission))\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>This place should have been this lush meadow, fenced off from cows, that the deer and the antelope could get into. And it was mowed down; basically it looked like a putting-green covered in horse apples … just completely stomped down.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The folks at the Forest Service tell me there are other springs that the horses had got in and trampled to the point that the water stopped flowing. If you’re a native animal that needs that to survive, that’s bad news; that’s your feed that they’re eating. That’s the water you need to survive.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wild horses are also very aggressive. There have been studies that show they’ll chase away deer and elk and other animals that come in and try to get into these springs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>The omnibus bill Congress approved last month includes money for the Bureau of Land Management to cut herd sizes. How does that gets accomplished?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The current method that’s used just about everywhere is to pay these helicopter cowboys. They set up temporary holding corrals, and they have helicopters that come out, and they try to push as many horses into these corrals as possible to try to reduce the numbers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The government then puts the horses up for adoption, but not all are adoptable. Unadopted animals have ended up in permanent BLM corrals or private wild horse sanctuaries across the country. There’s been some talk of using either surgical sterilization or birth control, but right now the primary focus is helicopters.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4nl4HKSZt4&feature=youtu.be\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Does that get us closer to any solution to the problem?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Back in 2016, they had about 2,200 horses in the Devil’s Garden herd. They’ve done three years of these roundups, and they figure they’ve got about 1,000 adult horses out there now. That’s still twice what the federal government says the land can sustainably support.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Those numbers could also be undercounts, because it’s really hard to keep track. You’ve got these animals living out in these vast places. There are a lot of juniper trees and little canyons and things that the horses can get lost in when counters are trying to count them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Horse advocates say, however, those numbers are inflated and that the government is doing these roundups to appease the cattle ranchers; there’s that side of things as well.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>In the series, you wrote that disagreements over managing wildlife in this region are emblematic of larger divisions within the country. What do you mean by that?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I wanted to get into this idea that you can’t find a piece of California, really, that hasn’t been fundamentally altered by humans since the Gold Rush. Yet there’s this huge romantic notion that if we just leave these places alone, they’ll re-wild themselves.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And I argue that this northeastern corner of California is so fundamentally changed, that’s basically impossible. And it’s not fair to cut out the small rural communities that rely on these places for their livelihoods. How do we split the difference to try to save what’s left?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As part of that, I explore this concept of saving things to death. Every environmental issue with any sort of controversy is [the subject of lawsuits] by the varying factions, sometimes multiple times. These varying groups oftentimes have noble intentions. But it leads to very little innovation by public land managers to act quickly to save species and habitats, because basically, agencies right now are constantly in lawsuit-prevention mode. On the wild horse issue, the ranchers have sued the federal government over too many horses, and the horse advocates have sued over the horse management plan that’s tied to these roundups, because they feel it’s inhumane to remove these animals like the federal government’s doing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So you’ve got these intense ideals just bashing each other constantly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1972214\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-1972214 size-medium\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2040/01/6928686564_074a5d9260_b-800x772.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"772\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2040/01/6928686564_074a5d9260_b-800x772.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2040/01/6928686564_074a5d9260_b-1020x984.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2040/01/6928686564_074a5d9260_b-160x154.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2040/01/6928686564_074a5d9260_b-768x741.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2040/01/6928686564_074a5d9260_b.jpg 1024w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A male greater sage-grouse struts to attract females at a lek (breeding or dancing ground) near Bodie, California. Once in the 19th century, sage-grouse were so numerous that hungry European settlers ate them to survive as they expanded across the American West. \u003ccite>(Jeannie Stafford/USFWS)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The series also explores how every once in a while people of goodwill will come together and come up with an environmental compromise that tries to save species and habitats while allowing people to continue to make a living on these habitats, and then hardliners come in and kill it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Two of my stories mention these compromises around trying to save the sage-grouse in this area, as well as another big compromise that tried to share water, allowing the Klamath River to save salmon, farmers to farm, fishermen to fish. What has ended up happening is hard-liners have come in and basically spiked those agreements through the courts, or just through inaction.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A scientist I spoke to said one of the challenges around this issue in Devil’s Garden is this romantic notion about wild horses: They are so tied to our notions of what the West is. But he said the problem with that is that you often lose the ecological piece of what’s going on. One of the things he wishes is that instead of giving every little kid a My Little Pony, we give them a My Little Sage-grouse.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"excerpt": "Feral horses evoke romantic notions of a Wild West to many a horse lover, but in the Modoc Naional Forest, the animals are breeding out of control, damaging landscapes and harming native species such as sage-grouse and deer.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>In the northeast corner of California, feral horses roam in an area of the Modoc National Forest known as Devil’s Garden. The high desert plateau in the northeastern corner of the state is filled with juniper trees, sage brush, and not quite enough grass for all the grazing animals that live there. A fight over how to manage the horses shifted recently when Congress funded a plan to reduce herds on federal lands. KQED’s Brian Watt recently spoke with \u003cstrong>Sacramento Bee reporter Ryan Sabalow\u003c/strong>, who covered the Devil’s Garden horses in his series, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.sacbee.com/article247934210.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Nothing Wild.\u003c/a>”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The following has been edited for length and clarity.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>How did these horses come to be living in the wild?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Ryan Sabalow\u003c/em>: Some of these horses in the West can trace their ancestry back to the Spanish settlers in the 16th and 17th centuries. The difference with the Devil’s Garden herd is these horses are much more newcomers. They’ve been around since about the \u003ca href=\"https://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/modoc_war\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Modoc War\u003c/a>, which was in the 1800s.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Devil’s Garden herd is unique in that it’s managed by the U.S. Forest Service instead of the Bureau of Land Management. The BLM manages about 100,000 wild horses on millions of acres.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The issue is that wild horses are not a native species. The federal government is trying to figure out a way to reduce their numbers to try to benefit all these other animals that are out there, while still allowing cattle ranchers to make a living.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>These horses are wrapped up in a romantic narrative about freedom in the Old West. So what’s at stake here?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s a deep, deep, emotional connection to wild horses that advocates have. And there’s a really kind of troubling history of how horses were managed, particularly on these BLM lands, for the first half of the last century.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1972212\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 768px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-1972212 size-full\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2040/01/03_SAC_DMK_Wildhorses.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"768\" height=\"465\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2040/01/03_SAC_DMK_Wildhorses.jpeg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2040/01/03_SAC_DMK_Wildhorses-160x97.jpeg 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 768px) 100vw, 768px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A herd of wild horses are corralled into a holding pen in Devil’s Garden in the Modoc National Forest on Sept. 10, 2020. \u003ccite>(Daniel Kim/Sacramento Bee (used with permission))\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>They were basically rounded up, sent to slaughter for dog food and glue. They were shipped overseas to fight in World War I. They were treated like livestock.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After World War II, there was a fundamental shift in how we viewed wild horses. The horse population in the West was going down, and that coincided with the romance of the American West that was basically all over TV and Hollywood.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Then, in 1971, President Richard Nixon passed a law that protected wild horses, basically saying they are a fundamental part of the American West and they deserve to be protected just like our wildlife. What that basically set in stone was a policy where the federal government can’t kill these animals, and it has created all kinds of headaches for land managers ever since, because horses are prolific breeders. And in many of these areas, they’re breeding to the point where they’re overwhelming the ecosystems they’re in.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>What effect are the horses having on the landscape?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The area is struggling with a lot of ecological stressors right now. The entire base of the food chain is filled with these invasive grasses that have come in over the last few decades; you have juniper trees growing everywhere, and in places where they shouldn’t be. On top of this, you have cattle and wild horses being raised on these lands.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Native species are suffering. Sage-grouse numbers have declined precipitously. There used to be like 14,000 of these animals in the Devil’s Garden. They’re now down to like five; just a couple of years ago they counted five grouse in the middle of their breeding area. The local deer herd numbers are in decline. There used to be tens of thousands in what’s known as the Interstate Deer Herd. Just a couple of years ago they counted under 5,000.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The horse advocates would say, well, if we just removed some of the cows from these areas, the horses would have ample feed. The government says: We don’t allow the cattle to be out there all year long. They’re only allowed to forage for a certain amount of time per year, so the ranchers have to make sure they leave a certain amount of feed available for the wildlife.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the horses are out there year-round. I actually went out to one of these protected springs in the Devil’s Garden, which is a really formidable place — it’s called Devil’s Garden for a reason. It’s a high desert, extremely cold, extremely hot, depending on time of year. Lava rocks everywhere.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What you get are these critically important springs that bubble up from the lava rock. I went to one of these places where cattle ranchers are supposed to put a fence around the spring. And the horses, because they need to get to the green grass and that fresh clean water that bubbles up, they just tear the fence right down.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1972209\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-1972209 size-medium\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2040/01/Sanduskyatthespring-800x538.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"538\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2040/01/Sanduskyatthespring-800x538.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2040/01/Sanduskyatthespring-1020x686.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2040/01/Sanduskyatthespring-160x108.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2040/01/Sanduskyatthespring-768x517.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2040/01/Sanduskyatthespring.jpg 1140w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">“It should be a little oasis. And it’s gone.” — Ken Sandusky, a spokesman for the Modoc National Forest, at a headwaters spring where the native grasses were trampled and eaten by horses on Sept. 11, 2020. \u003ccite>(Ryan Sabalow/Sacramento Bee (used with permission))\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>This place should have been this lush meadow, fenced off from cows, that the deer and the antelope could get into. And it was mowed down; basically it looked like a putting-green covered in horse apples … just completely stomped down.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The folks at the Forest Service tell me there are other springs that the horses had got in and trampled to the point that the water stopped flowing. If you’re a native animal that needs that to survive, that’s bad news; that’s your feed that they’re eating. That’s the water you need to survive.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wild horses are also very aggressive. There have been studies that show they’ll chase away deer and elk and other animals that come in and try to get into these springs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>The omnibus bill Congress approved last month includes money for the Bureau of Land Management to cut herd sizes. How does that gets accomplished?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The current method that’s used just about everywhere is to pay these helicopter cowboys. They set up temporary holding corrals, and they have helicopters that come out, and they try to push as many horses into these corrals as possible to try to reduce the numbers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The government then puts the horses up for adoption, but not all are adoptable. Unadopted animals have ended up in permanent BLM corrals or private wild horse sanctuaries across the country. There’s been some talk of using either surgical sterilization or birth control, but right now the primary focus is helicopters.\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/_4nl4HKSZt4'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/_4nl4HKSZt4'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Does that get us closer to any solution to the problem?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Back in 2016, they had about 2,200 horses in the Devil’s Garden herd. They’ve done three years of these roundups, and they figure they’ve got about 1,000 adult horses out there now. That’s still twice what the federal government says the land can sustainably support.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Those numbers could also be undercounts, because it’s really hard to keep track. You’ve got these animals living out in these vast places. There are a lot of juniper trees and little canyons and things that the horses can get lost in when counters are trying to count them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Horse advocates say, however, those numbers are inflated and that the government is doing these roundups to appease the cattle ranchers; there’s that side of things as well.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>In the series, you wrote that disagreements over managing wildlife in this region are emblematic of larger divisions within the country. What do you mean by that?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I wanted to get into this idea that you can’t find a piece of California, really, that hasn’t been fundamentally altered by humans since the Gold Rush. Yet there’s this huge romantic notion that if we just leave these places alone, they’ll re-wild themselves.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And I argue that this northeastern corner of California is so fundamentally changed, that’s basically impossible. And it’s not fair to cut out the small rural communities that rely on these places for their livelihoods. How do we split the difference to try to save what’s left?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As part of that, I explore this concept of saving things to death. Every environmental issue with any sort of controversy is [the subject of lawsuits] by the varying factions, sometimes multiple times. These varying groups oftentimes have noble intentions. But it leads to very little innovation by public land managers to act quickly to save species and habitats, because basically, agencies right now are constantly in lawsuit-prevention mode. On the wild horse issue, the ranchers have sued the federal government over too many horses, and the horse advocates have sued over the horse management plan that’s tied to these roundups, because they feel it’s inhumane to remove these animals like the federal government’s doing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So you’ve got these intense ideals just bashing each other constantly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1972214\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-1972214 size-medium\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2040/01/6928686564_074a5d9260_b-800x772.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"772\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2040/01/6928686564_074a5d9260_b-800x772.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2040/01/6928686564_074a5d9260_b-1020x984.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2040/01/6928686564_074a5d9260_b-160x154.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2040/01/6928686564_074a5d9260_b-768x741.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2040/01/6928686564_074a5d9260_b.jpg 1024w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A male greater sage-grouse struts to attract females at a lek (breeding or dancing ground) near Bodie, California. Once in the 19th century, sage-grouse were so numerous that hungry European settlers ate them to survive as they expanded across the American West. \u003ccite>(Jeannie Stafford/USFWS)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The series also explores how every once in a while people of goodwill will come together and come up with an environmental compromise that tries to save species and habitats while allowing people to continue to make a living on these habitats, and then hardliners come in and kill it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Two of my stories mention these compromises around trying to save the sage-grouse in this area, as well as another big compromise that tried to share water, allowing the Klamath River to save salmon, farmers to farm, fishermen to fish. What has ended up happening is hard-liners have come in and basically spiked those agreements through the courts, or just through inaction.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A scientist I spoke to said one of the challenges around this issue in Devil’s Garden is this romantic notion about wild horses: They are so tied to our notions of what the West is. But he said the problem with that is that you often lose the ecological piece of what’s going on. One of the things he wishes is that instead of giving every little kid a My Little Pony, we give them a My Little Sage-grouse.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>[dl_subscribe]\u003cem>California oak moth caterpillars eat all the leaves on an oak, leaving a brown skeleton. Then they rappel down on a strand of silk, twirling and swinging. If you were enjoying the shade, good luck getting out of their way. For the oak, the caterpillars are a bigger deal – will the tree survive? \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>TRANSCRIPT\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>Ahh. Time for a spring nap under this peaceful oak … unless that oak is under siege by clouds of amorous moths.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Unlike most moths, which are nocturnal, these California oak moths take over in daylight. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This female frantically beats her wings to spread her scent.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A male picks up the signal with his feathered antennae.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Every few years, the moths seem to appear out of nowhere and get down to business.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Once they lay their eggs, the oak is in trouble.\u003cbr>\n[pullquote]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>ADDITIONAL RESOURCES\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Read about how California oak moth caterpillars descended on the UC Berkeley campus in \u003ca href=\"https://essig.berkeley.edu/research/oakmoth/\">this article\u003c/a> by Peter Oboyski, executive director of the university’s \u003ca href=\"https://essig.berkeley.edu/\">Essig Museum of Entomology\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Learn more about the \u003ca href=\"http://ipm.ucanr.edu/PMG/PESTNOTES/pn7422.html\">California oak moth’s lifecycle\u003c/a> from the UC’s statewide integrated pest management program.\u003cbr>\n[/pullquote]\u003cbr>\nBy summer, oak moth caterpillars cover its leaves. And they’re ravenous.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That bulbous head has powerful mouthparts that chew through the tough oak leaves.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The caterpillars eat and eat. They outgrow their skin six times.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>They stuff themselves in the daytime, when birds and other predators can spot them easily. Their bright colors may signal a gnarly taste that keeps enemies away.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The caterpillars leave something behind: tough poop pellets called frass … a little fertilizer that will eventually fall to the ground. At least these gluttons give something back.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When they’re done eating, in a month or two, what’s left of the tree is a brown skeleton. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With full bellies, the caterpillars rappel down from the branches on long silky strands.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sometimes they swing on their silk, Tarzan like, to get that laaast bite.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And down they go.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If you’re sitting below, you might just be in their way.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The caterpillar’s goal is to quickly attach to a hard surface and turn into a pupa.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In this moment of stillness, these destroyers become vulnerable to predators. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A wasp pierces the pupa to inject its own egg inside. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The wasp larva will feed on the developing moth … because in nature, one day you’re the diner and the next, you’re the meal.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And the oak? It’s tougher than it looks. It almost always survives. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a month or two it grows new leaves. And if it’s lucky, these pernicious guests will stay away … at least for a few years.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>ADDITIONAL RESOURCES\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Read about how California oak moth caterpillars descended on the UC Berkeley campus in \u003ca href=\"https://essig.berkeley.edu/research/oakmoth/\">this article\u003c/a> by Peter Oboyski, executive director of the university’s \u003ca href=\"https://essig.berkeley.edu/\">Essig Museum of Entomology\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Learn more about the \u003ca href=\"http://ipm.ucanr.edu/PMG/PESTNOTES/pn7422.html\">California oak moth’s lifecycle\u003c/a> from the UC’s statewide integrated pest management program.\u003cbr>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cbr>\nBy summer, oak moth caterpillars cover its leaves. And they’re ravenous.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That bulbous head has powerful mouthparts that chew through the tough oak leaves.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The caterpillars eat and eat. They outgrow their skin six times.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>They stuff themselves in the daytime, when birds and other predators can spot them easily. Their bright colors may signal a gnarly taste that keeps enemies away.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The caterpillars leave something behind: tough poop pellets called frass … a little fertilizer that will eventually fall to the ground. At least these gluttons give something back.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When they’re done eating, in a month or two, what’s left of the tree is a brown skeleton. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With full bellies, the caterpillars rappel down from the branches on long silky strands.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sometimes they swing on their silk, Tarzan like, to get that laaast bite.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And down they go.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If you’re sitting below, you might just be in their way.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The caterpillar’s goal is to quickly attach to a hard surface and turn into a pupa.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In this moment of stillness, these destroyers become vulnerable to predators. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A wasp pierces the pupa to inject its own egg inside. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The wasp larva will feed on the developing moth … because in nature, one day you’re the diner and the next, you’re the meal.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And the oak? It’s tougher than it looks. It almost always survives. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a month or two it grows new leaves. And if it’s lucky, these pernicious guests will stay away … at least for a few years.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>[dl_subscribe]If an outdoors, socially-distanced gathering is part of your Thanksgiving plans, beware of uninvited guests. I don’t mean friendly neighbors who might invite themselves to a piece of pie.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1971201\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL720_Fly_eats_apple.gif\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1971201\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL720_Fly_eats_apple.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A blowfly feeds on an apple with its straw-like proboscis. \u003ccite>(Josh Cassidy/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>I’m talking about flies. Buzzing around curiously, they’ll help themselves to whatever food you leave unattended. As they walk all around they could spread hundreds of types of bacteria they carry on their legs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So you try sneaking up on one and it skedaddles. Why, oh why, is it so hard to swat a fly?\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1971202\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL720_Fly_escapes_swatter.gif\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1971202\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL720_Fly_escapes_swatter.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Now you see me, now you don’t. A blowfly escapes a swatter in the nick of time. \u003ccite>(Josh Cassidy/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Flies are formidable opponents, with an arsenal of tools they carry all over their bodies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For starters, their hair and antennae help a fly sense us as we walk up to them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“They have sensory hairs all over their body that help them detect air currents,” said entomologist Jessica Fox, who studies flies’ shenanigans at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1971203\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL720_Fly_cleans_eyes.gif\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1971203\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL720_Fly_cleans_eyes.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A fly can see you coming from nearly every angle. \u003ccite>(Josh Cassidy/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Not only can they feel us, they can see us too.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“They have a very small blind spot in the back of their head,” Fox said, “but a lot of flies can see almost 360 degrees around their heads.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And a fly’s eyes and tiny brain process information 10 times faster than human eyes and brains.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Compared to flies, humans are slow and sluggish creatures,” said Sanjay Sane, who researches flies at the National Centre for Biological Sciences at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bangalore, India.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1971204\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL720_Fly_makes_sharp_turns.gif\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1971204\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL720_Fly_makes_sharp_turns.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Quick, sharp turns help a fly dodge your swatter. These aerobatics are possible thanks to a pair of tiny club-shaped limbs called halteres, nestled below the fly’s two wings. \u003ccite>(Josh Cassidy/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Once the fly escapes your swatter and is in the air, it’s in its element and your job is even tougher. Seen up close and slowed down, a fly’s aerobatics are impressive: It makes razor-sharp turns with ease and at great speed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What makes this possible is a pair of modified wings called halteres, a Greek word for dumbbell, which describes their shape. All of the 200,000 species of flies that scientists have described have a pair of halteres and a pair of wings. (That includes mosquitoes, which, wouldn’t you know it, are flies too.) Most other insects — bees, butterflies, dragonflies — have four wings and no halteres.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1971205\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL720_Halteres_of_crane_fly_Fox.gif\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1971205\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL720_Halteres_of_crane_fly_Fox.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The relatively large halteres of a crane fly are easier to spot than most. The halteres are the small, club-shaped parts beating below the fly’s wings. \u003ccite>(Jessica Fox/Case Western Reserve University)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>As a fly turns, its halteres sense the rotation. In a split second, neurons at the base of the halteres send information to the fly’s muscles to steer its wings and keep its head steady.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Houseflies flap their wings about 200 times per second, which means they really only have five milliseconds to figure out what the next wingbeat is going to be like. And if you’re using vision that takes too long to do,” Fox said. “They really need a mechanical receptor in order to be able to sense their body rotations and correct them on the timescale that they need.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Though flies are a pesky pest and we are constantly in their pursuit, they likely evolved halteres to escape other animals besides us.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Flies hang out on the backs of cows,” said Sane. “The tail of a cow trying to flick insects off, it’s likely to kill the fly if it doesn’t fly off fast.” Lizard tongues are also quick-moving threats.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And then there’s flies themselves. In lightning-fast chases, males compete for the ability to mate.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“These chases are among the most aerobatic chases that I’ve ever seen; there’s nothing that comes even close,” said Sane. “And if flies did not turn very fast they’ll get caught and slammed to the ground.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When researchers remove a fly’s halteres, it can no longer control its flight. It loses all sense of where its body is in space. In slowed-down videos, flies without halteres give the impression of being drunk.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1971206\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL720_Fly_without_halteres_falls_Fox.gif\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1971206\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL720_Fly_without_halteres_falls_Fox.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A fly whose halteres have been removed by researchers can’t control its flight and falls down. \u003ccite>(Katie Jordan, Alex Yarger and Jessica Fox/Case Western Reserve University)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“They don’t seem to know; they just keep flapping,” said Fox. “They just keep pitching and rolling and eventually they fall. We’ve got a lot of great videos of these flies comedically falling out of the sky.” \u003cem>(You can see more examples in the Deep Look video embedded in this story.)\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If a fly gets inside your house, its halteres will help it do a fly’s signature move: the ceiling landing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1971207\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL720_Fly_walks_on_ceiling.gif\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1971207\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL720_Fly_walks_on_ceiling.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A fly can stay out of reach by hanging upside down on the ceiling. \u003ccite>(Josh Cassidy/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>It hangs there with tiny hooks and sticky pads on its feet. The pads, called pulvilli, have microscopic hairs that excrete a liquid that sticks to the surface under pressure, sort of like suction. Hooks on the fly’s feet also help it stay put, by attaching to microscopic imperfections on the surface of the ceiling.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1971208\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL720_pulvilli_1920.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1971208\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL720_pulvilli_1920.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1080\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL720_pulvilli_1920.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL720_pulvilli_1920-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL720_pulvilli_1920-1020x574.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL720_pulvilli_1920-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL720_pulvilli_1920-768x432.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL720_pulvilli_1920-1536x864.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The pads on a fly’s feet, called pulvilli, have microscopic hairs that excrete a liquid that sticks to the surface. The photo on the right shows an extreme close-up of the hairs. \u003ccite>(Stanislav Gorb/University of Kiel, Germany)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Despite the fly’s slick tools, Sane recommends one trick next time you try to nab one.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Flies process information about moving objects but they cannot process static objects,” he explained. “Thus, the best way to approach a fly is in small, quasi-static steps such that they do not see you as a moving object.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If you go very slowly, and then pounce, you might stand a chance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Good luck, though,” he said, “because flies are spectacularly fast.”\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "A fly has a pair of tiny, dumbbell-shaped limbs called halteres that were once a second pair of wings. They wield them to make razor-sharp turns and land out of reach on your ceiling. But don't despair – there *is* a trick to smacking these infuriating insects.",
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"title": "Here’s How That Annoying Fly Dodges Your Swatter | KQED",
"description": "A fly has a pair of tiny, dumbbell-shaped limbs called halteres that were once a second pair of wings. They wield them to make razor-sharp turns and land out of reach on your ceiling. But don't despair – there *is* a trick to smacking these infuriating insects.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>If an outdoors, socially-distanced gathering is part of your Thanksgiving plans, beware of uninvited guests. I don’t mean friendly neighbors who might invite themselves to a piece of pie.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1971201\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL720_Fly_eats_apple.gif\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1971201\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL720_Fly_eats_apple.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A blowfly feeds on an apple with its straw-like proboscis. \u003ccite>(Josh Cassidy/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>I’m talking about flies. Buzzing around curiously, they’ll help themselves to whatever food you leave unattended. As they walk all around they could spread hundreds of types of bacteria they carry on their legs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So you try sneaking up on one and it skedaddles. Why, oh why, is it so hard to swat a fly?\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1971202\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL720_Fly_escapes_swatter.gif\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1971202\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL720_Fly_escapes_swatter.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Now you see me, now you don’t. A blowfly escapes a swatter in the nick of time. \u003ccite>(Josh Cassidy/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Flies are formidable opponents, with an arsenal of tools they carry all over their bodies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For starters, their hair and antennae help a fly sense us as we walk up to them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“They have sensory hairs all over their body that help them detect air currents,” said entomologist Jessica Fox, who studies flies’ shenanigans at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1971203\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL720_Fly_cleans_eyes.gif\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1971203\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL720_Fly_cleans_eyes.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A fly can see you coming from nearly every angle. \u003ccite>(Josh Cassidy/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Not only can they feel us, they can see us too.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“They have a very small blind spot in the back of their head,” Fox said, “but a lot of flies can see almost 360 degrees around their heads.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And a fly’s eyes and tiny brain process information 10 times faster than human eyes and brains.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Compared to flies, humans are slow and sluggish creatures,” said Sanjay Sane, who researches flies at the National Centre for Biological Sciences at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bangalore, India.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1971204\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL720_Fly_makes_sharp_turns.gif\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1971204\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL720_Fly_makes_sharp_turns.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Quick, sharp turns help a fly dodge your swatter. These aerobatics are possible thanks to a pair of tiny club-shaped limbs called halteres, nestled below the fly’s two wings. \u003ccite>(Josh Cassidy/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Once the fly escapes your swatter and is in the air, it’s in its element and your job is even tougher. Seen up close and slowed down, a fly’s aerobatics are impressive: It makes razor-sharp turns with ease and at great speed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What makes this possible is a pair of modified wings called halteres, a Greek word for dumbbell, which describes their shape. All of the 200,000 species of flies that scientists have described have a pair of halteres and a pair of wings. (That includes mosquitoes, which, wouldn’t you know it, are flies too.) Most other insects — bees, butterflies, dragonflies — have four wings and no halteres.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1971205\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL720_Halteres_of_crane_fly_Fox.gif\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1971205\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL720_Halteres_of_crane_fly_Fox.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The relatively large halteres of a crane fly are easier to spot than most. The halteres are the small, club-shaped parts beating below the fly’s wings. \u003ccite>(Jessica Fox/Case Western Reserve University)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>As a fly turns, its halteres sense the rotation. In a split second, neurons at the base of the halteres send information to the fly’s muscles to steer its wings and keep its head steady.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Houseflies flap their wings about 200 times per second, which means they really only have five milliseconds to figure out what the next wingbeat is going to be like. And if you’re using vision that takes too long to do,” Fox said. “They really need a mechanical receptor in order to be able to sense their body rotations and correct them on the timescale that they need.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Though flies are a pesky pest and we are constantly in their pursuit, they likely evolved halteres to escape other animals besides us.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Flies hang out on the backs of cows,” said Sane. “The tail of a cow trying to flick insects off, it’s likely to kill the fly if it doesn’t fly off fast.” Lizard tongues are also quick-moving threats.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And then there’s flies themselves. In lightning-fast chases, males compete for the ability to mate.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“These chases are among the most aerobatic chases that I’ve ever seen; there’s nothing that comes even close,” said Sane. “And if flies did not turn very fast they’ll get caught and slammed to the ground.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When researchers remove a fly’s halteres, it can no longer control its flight. It loses all sense of where its body is in space. In slowed-down videos, flies without halteres give the impression of being drunk.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1971206\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL720_Fly_without_halteres_falls_Fox.gif\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1971206\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL720_Fly_without_halteres_falls_Fox.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A fly whose halteres have been removed by researchers can’t control its flight and falls down. \u003ccite>(Katie Jordan, Alex Yarger and Jessica Fox/Case Western Reserve University)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“They don’t seem to know; they just keep flapping,” said Fox. “They just keep pitching and rolling and eventually they fall. We’ve got a lot of great videos of these flies comedically falling out of the sky.” \u003cem>(You can see more examples in the Deep Look video embedded in this story.)\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If a fly gets inside your house, its halteres will help it do a fly’s signature move: the ceiling landing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1971207\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL720_Fly_walks_on_ceiling.gif\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1971207\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL720_Fly_walks_on_ceiling.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A fly can stay out of reach by hanging upside down on the ceiling. \u003ccite>(Josh Cassidy/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>It hangs there with tiny hooks and sticky pads on its feet. The pads, called pulvilli, have microscopic hairs that excrete a liquid that sticks to the surface under pressure, sort of like suction. Hooks on the fly’s feet also help it stay put, by attaching to microscopic imperfections on the surface of the ceiling.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1971208\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL720_pulvilli_1920.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1971208\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL720_pulvilli_1920.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1080\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL720_pulvilli_1920.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL720_pulvilli_1920-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL720_pulvilli_1920-1020x574.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL720_pulvilli_1920-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL720_pulvilli_1920-768x432.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL720_pulvilli_1920-1536x864.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The pads on a fly’s feet, called pulvilli, have microscopic hairs that excrete a liquid that sticks to the surface. The photo on the right shows an extreme close-up of the hairs. \u003ccite>(Stanislav Gorb/University of Kiel, Germany)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Despite the fly’s slick tools, Sane recommends one trick next time you try to nab one.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Flies process information about moving objects but they cannot process static objects,” he explained. “Thus, the best way to approach a fly is in small, quasi-static steps such that they do not see you as a moving object.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If you go very slowly, and then pounce, you might stand a chance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"title": "See Sea Slugs Scour Seagrass by the Seashore",
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"content": "\u003cp>[dl_subscribe]\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“They’re so majestic,” ecologist Brent Hughes says as he looks out across Elkhorn Slough, a large winding estuary off the Monterey Bay coastline. He’s not talking about whales or pelicans. He’s talking about a tiny, slimy, aquatic slug — the eelgrass sea hare. Donning his wetsuit, Hughes hops into his kayak and paddles off toward a section of water where the sea hares live, in an underwater meadow of seagrass.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Also known as the Taylor’s sea hare, these humble, zebra-striped slices of green jello are actually crucial to the health of their eelgrass meadow ecosystem.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Eelgrass sea hares — named for the bunny-like tentacles on top of their heads — can be found munching on the microscopic algae that grow on the surface of eelgrass, a type of marine seagrass. They don’t eat the grass itself; instead they help the meadows grow by clearing the way for sunlight to reach the plants, scraping the blades of grass clean with their rows of tiny teeth. The seagrass, in turn, serves as a safe haven to lay their eggs, and protection from predators like crabs and fish.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1970800\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 590px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-1970800 size-full\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_eelgrass_sea_hare_slide.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"590\" height=\"331\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Eelgrass sea hares symbiotically co-evolved with eelgrass, a type of seagrass found near coastlines worldwide. \u003ccite>(Josh Cassidy /KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The blades of grass also protect more than just these voracious little cleaners. At Elkhorn Slough off of the Monterey Bay, the eelgrass beds form a habitat for a diverse community of animals and plant life, which includes sea otters, Dungeness crabs, clams, skeleton shrimp and various fish.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“Eelgrass is like the ugly duckling of the charismatic habitat world,” says biologist Grace Ha of UC Davis, who studied the camouflage of the Taylor’s sea hare. “Seagrasses are among the most productive habitats in the world, if you compare them to rainforest or coral reefs, but most people don’t even know what eelgrass is.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Eelgrass forms submarine meadows in shallow seawater, estuaries and salt marshes across the Northern Hemisphere. Seagrasses absorb carbon from the atmosphere and prevent coastal erosion, but climate change, and human activities like large-scale agriculture threaten their existence worldwide. Biologists compare the steady decline of seagrass beds to the global crises of disappearing rainforests and coral reefs.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">For decades, the eelgrass meadows of Elkhorn Slough were also disappearing. Since the 1950s nitrogen-based fertilizers from farms in the Salinas Valley have drained into the estuary, overloading the water with nutrients, causing massive algae blooms. Too much algae living on the surface of the water blocks the sunlight necessary for eelgrass meadows to grow, and the grasses begin to die out. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1970796\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-1970796 size-medium\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_eelgrass_sea_hare_MW2-800x450.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_eelgrass_sea_hare_MW2-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_eelgrass_sea_hare_MW2-1020x574.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_eelgrass_sea_hare_MW2-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_eelgrass_sea_hare_MW2-768x432.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_eelgrass_sea_hare_MW2-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_eelgrass_sea_hare_MW2-2048x1152.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_eelgrass_sea_hare_MW2-1920x1080.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Eelgrass sea hares clean the eelgrass of the microscopic algae that coats it. Seagrass meadows help absorb carbon from the atmosphere and control erosion. \u003ccite>(Josh Cassidy/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In 2013, Hughes, now at Sonoma State University, published the results of a surprising discovery. He noticed that the eelgrass in Elkhorn Slough was actually rebounding, despite the extreme algal blooms. Strangely, his data showed, this was happening right around the time sea otters were reintroduced to the area.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Sea otters had been totally missing from the estuary ecosystem since the early 20\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">th\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> century. By that time, fur traders had hunted otters almost to extinction along the California coast. But in the late 1980s, the Monterey Bay Aquarium rereleased a small population of sea otters back into the slough, and their numbers have steadily increased.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Hughes’ research established that the hungry otters were eating copious amounts of local crabs, a natural predator of Taylor’s sea hares. “The otters recovering allowed for an explosion of sea hares that really kind of facilitated the resilience of that seagrass.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1970797\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1970797\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_Eelgrass_Sea_Hare_sea_otter2-800x450.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_Eelgrass_Sea_Hare_sea_otter2-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_Eelgrass_Sea_Hare_sea_otter2-1020x574.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_Eelgrass_Sea_Hare_sea_otter2-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_Eelgrass_Sea_Hare_sea_otter2-768x432.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_Eelgrass_Sea_Hare_sea_otter2-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_Eelgrass_Sea_Hare_sea_otter2.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">When sea otters were reintroduced to Elkhorn Slough, they started eating the crabs that eat the sea hares. This meant the sea hares could get back to work cleaning the eelgrass of excessive algae, enabling the eelgrass to grow again. Researchers call this a trophic cascade, when a top predator, like a sea otter, has a balancing effect on the ecosystem. \u003ccite>(Mike Seely/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Hughes and his colleagues had uncovered a trophic cascade in which the reintroduction of a top predator (in this case the sea otter) results in a balancing effect on the food web.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In an eelgrass ecosystem like Elkhorn Slough, where nutrient-polluted waters cause regular extreme algal blooms, the “grazers just become really, really important for controlling that algal overgrowth.” When otters were missing and not eating crabs, the crab population grew and ate too many sea hares, so the eelgrass had less help dealing with the suffocating algae growth.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“The remarkable thing is that the nutrients are still climbing,” Hughes said. “It’s insane how high the nutrients are in that system.” Despite this continued stress on the ecosystem, the eelgrass meadows in Elkhorn Slough have in fact steadily expanded over the past three decades. Hughes credits the otters and their trophic cascade relationship with the sea hares. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1970798\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1970798\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_Elkhorn_Slough_algal_bloom-800x600.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"600\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_Elkhorn_Slough_algal_bloom-800x600.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_Elkhorn_Slough_algal_bloom-1020x765.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_Elkhorn_Slough_algal_bloom-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_Elkhorn_Slough_algal_bloom-768x576.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_Elkhorn_Slough_algal_bloom-1536x1152.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_Elkhorn_Slough_algal_bloom-1920x1440.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_Elkhorn_Slough_algal_bloom.jpg 2048w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Runoff from farms carries excessive nutrients into Elkhorn Slough, which spurs the growth of thick mats of algae. Left unchecked, these algal blooms block sunlight from reaching the eelgrass, and cause them to die. The eelgrass sea hare’s constant appetite for algae helps to counterbalance these harmful effects. \u003ccite>(Brent Hughes/Sonoma State University)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“These grazers are so abundant in Elkhorn Slough, you just have to reach over and grab some seagrass and you’ll end up grabbing a few sea hares too.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Further north, in the San Francisco Bay, Kathy Boyer has been working for years to restore native eelgrass ecosystems. Eelgrass sea hares had also been easy to find in the meadows she was restoring, until recently.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">2017 was an extremely wet winter and spring for the San Francisco Bay Area. Storm after storm brought so much fresh water to the bay that salinity dropped well below the usual level (below ten parts per thousand). Very soon after this dramatic drop in salinity, Boyer and her colleagues noticed that the Taylor’s sea hare (and another symbiotic grazer called the eelgrass isopod) had disappeared from the meadows in the bay. The sea hares had simply vanished from the eight eelgrass restoration sites she and her team had been monitoring.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“It was shocking,” she says. “We’ve definitely seen fluctuations in invertebrate populations, but we’ve never seen the complete loss of species.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1970799\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 700px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1970799\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_Eelgrass_Sea_Hare_bunny_edit.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"700\" height=\"393\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Sea hares get their name from the bunny-ear-like tentacles on top of their heads called rhinophores, which they use to sense temperature, water movement and smell. \u003ccite>(Mike Seely/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Boyer and her team realized at that moment that the only places in the San Francisco Bay with living Taylor’s sea hares were the experimental holding tanks where she does most of her eelgrass restoration studies, at San Francisco State University’s Estuary and Ocean Science Center in Tiburon.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Boyer immediately recognized the importance of the animals in her tanks. “We’ve got to try to keep these guys alive, because it’s all that’s left of this population.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">She hopes to grow the population, and eventually reestablish them throughout eelgrass meadows in the bay. The good news is “they’re reproducing like crazy, they’re really happy in the tanks. They’ve got no predators, so they’re just doing their thing.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Having worked in ecosystem restoration for years, Boyer intimately understands the complexities inherent to the work. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“There’s lots of interest in just going out and restoring a bunch of eelgrass, but the grass doesn’t live in a vacuum out there in the bay. It interacts with all these other species. It brings up lots of questions about ‘What are restoration best practices?’”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1970795\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1970795\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_eelgrass_sea_hare_baby-800x450.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_eelgrass_sea_hare_baby-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_eelgrass_sea_hare_baby-1020x574.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_eelgrass_sea_hare_baby-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_eelgrass_sea_hare_baby-768x432.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_eelgrass_sea_hare_baby-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_eelgrass_sea_hare_baby-2048x1152.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_eelgrass_sea_hare_baby-1920x1080.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Eelgrass meadows provide a safe haven for sea hare eggs and protection for their young. \u003ccite>(Josh Cassidy/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The disappearance of the sea hares offers a rare opportunity to observe what happens when a species suddenly vanishes from an ecosystem. “Sometimes you don’t know what you have until you lose a bit of it,” Boyer said.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Also, Elkhorn Slough has sea otters, but the San Francisco Bay does not, which translates to a big difference in how the food webs function in each location.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“Whether the trophic cascade will have the same levels, and effect, as Brent is seeing down in Elkhorn, we really have no idea,” says Boyer.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There are different sets of animals in the food web in the San Francisco Bay, but it seems that reintroducing otters is a real possibility. Because their populations have been so scarce over the past century, scientists had assumed sea otters lived primarily in ocean waters.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1970801\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 590px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1970801\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_eelgrass_sea_hare_XCU1.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"590\" height=\"331\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Eelgrass sea hares symbiotically co-evolved with eelgrass, a type of seagrass found near coastlines worldwide. Their patterning helps them bland seamlessly into their grassy home. \u003ccite>(Mike Seely/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“The amazing thing with the otters is that as they’re recovering, they’re revealing their true range of habitats that they can use right now,” Hughes says, citing the recent success of the Elkhorn Slough otter population. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“Now researchers are focusing on these estuaries as areas for sea otter recovery, in areas away from predators, away from big waves that you might experience in a kelp forest, somewhat removed from human influence”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Both Boyer and Hughes are co-authors of a research paper suggesting that if properly reintroduced, the San Francisco Bay could be home to as many as 6,000 sea otters, effectively tripling the current population of sea otters in California.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Whether or not sea otters should be a part of the Taylor’s sea hare reintroduction plan in the San Francisco Bay is still an open question, but it is definitely on Boyer’s mind as she wrestles with the complex decisions of when and how to bring the sea hares back to the bay’s meadows.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Despite the challenges of eelgrass ecosystem restoration, Hughes remains inspired by the example of the Taylor’s sea hares. He says Elkhorn Slough is “a gold mine in terms of scientific discoveries. It’s a story of recovery, of conservation, and it involves not only the imperiled species, the sea otter, but these imperiled habitats that they’re returning to, such as seagrasses and salt marshes.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s also a story of how even a little green slug can be so much more important than its modest appearance might, at first, suggest.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“They’re so majestic,” ecologist Brent Hughes says as he looks out across Elkhorn Slough, a large winding estuary off the Monterey Bay coastline. He’s not talking about whales or pelicans. He’s talking about a tiny, slimy, aquatic slug — the eelgrass sea hare. Donning his wetsuit, Hughes hops into his kayak and paddles off toward a section of water where the sea hares live, in an underwater meadow of seagrass.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Also known as the Taylor’s sea hare, these humble, zebra-striped slices of green jello are actually crucial to the health of their eelgrass meadow ecosystem.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Eelgrass sea hares — named for the bunny-like tentacles on top of their heads — can be found munching on the microscopic algae that grow on the surface of eelgrass, a type of marine seagrass. They don’t eat the grass itself; instead they help the meadows grow by clearing the way for sunlight to reach the plants, scraping the blades of grass clean with their rows of tiny teeth. The seagrass, in turn, serves as a safe haven to lay their eggs, and protection from predators like crabs and fish.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1970800\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 590px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-1970800 size-full\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_eelgrass_sea_hare_slide.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"590\" height=\"331\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Eelgrass sea hares symbiotically co-evolved with eelgrass, a type of seagrass found near coastlines worldwide. \u003ccite>(Josh Cassidy /KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The blades of grass also protect more than just these voracious little cleaners. At Elkhorn Slough off of the Monterey Bay, the eelgrass beds form a habitat for a diverse community of animals and plant life, which includes sea otters, Dungeness crabs, clams, skeleton shrimp and various fish.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“Eelgrass is like the ugly duckling of the charismatic habitat world,” says biologist Grace Ha of UC Davis, who studied the camouflage of the Taylor’s sea hare. “Seagrasses are among the most productive habitats in the world, if you compare them to rainforest or coral reefs, but most people don’t even know what eelgrass is.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Eelgrass forms submarine meadows in shallow seawater, estuaries and salt marshes across the Northern Hemisphere. Seagrasses absorb carbon from the atmosphere and prevent coastal erosion, but climate change, and human activities like large-scale agriculture threaten their existence worldwide. Biologists compare the steady decline of seagrass beds to the global crises of disappearing rainforests and coral reefs.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">For decades, the eelgrass meadows of Elkhorn Slough were also disappearing. Since the 1950s nitrogen-based fertilizers from farms in the Salinas Valley have drained into the estuary, overloading the water with nutrients, causing massive algae blooms. Too much algae living on the surface of the water blocks the sunlight necessary for eelgrass meadows to grow, and the grasses begin to die out. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1970796\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-1970796 size-medium\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_eelgrass_sea_hare_MW2-800x450.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_eelgrass_sea_hare_MW2-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_eelgrass_sea_hare_MW2-1020x574.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_eelgrass_sea_hare_MW2-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_eelgrass_sea_hare_MW2-768x432.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_eelgrass_sea_hare_MW2-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_eelgrass_sea_hare_MW2-2048x1152.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_eelgrass_sea_hare_MW2-1920x1080.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Eelgrass sea hares clean the eelgrass of the microscopic algae that coats it. Seagrass meadows help absorb carbon from the atmosphere and control erosion. \u003ccite>(Josh Cassidy/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In 2013, Hughes, now at Sonoma State University, published the results of a surprising discovery. He noticed that the eelgrass in Elkhorn Slough was actually rebounding, despite the extreme algal blooms. Strangely, his data showed, this was happening right around the time sea otters were reintroduced to the area.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Sea otters had been totally missing from the estuary ecosystem since the early 20\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">th\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> century. By that time, fur traders had hunted otters almost to extinction along the California coast. But in the late 1980s, the Monterey Bay Aquarium rereleased a small population of sea otters back into the slough, and their numbers have steadily increased.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Hughes’ research established that the hungry otters were eating copious amounts of local crabs, a natural predator of Taylor’s sea hares. “The otters recovering allowed for an explosion of sea hares that really kind of facilitated the resilience of that seagrass.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1970797\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1970797\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_Eelgrass_Sea_Hare_sea_otter2-800x450.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_Eelgrass_Sea_Hare_sea_otter2-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_Eelgrass_Sea_Hare_sea_otter2-1020x574.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_Eelgrass_Sea_Hare_sea_otter2-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_Eelgrass_Sea_Hare_sea_otter2-768x432.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_Eelgrass_Sea_Hare_sea_otter2-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_Eelgrass_Sea_Hare_sea_otter2.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">When sea otters were reintroduced to Elkhorn Slough, they started eating the crabs that eat the sea hares. This meant the sea hares could get back to work cleaning the eelgrass of excessive algae, enabling the eelgrass to grow again. Researchers call this a trophic cascade, when a top predator, like a sea otter, has a balancing effect on the ecosystem. \u003ccite>(Mike Seely/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Hughes and his colleagues had uncovered a trophic cascade in which the reintroduction of a top predator (in this case the sea otter) results in a balancing effect on the food web.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In an eelgrass ecosystem like Elkhorn Slough, where nutrient-polluted waters cause regular extreme algal blooms, the “grazers just become really, really important for controlling that algal overgrowth.” When otters were missing and not eating crabs, the crab population grew and ate too many sea hares, so the eelgrass had less help dealing with the suffocating algae growth.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“The remarkable thing is that the nutrients are still climbing,” Hughes said. “It’s insane how high the nutrients are in that system.” Despite this continued stress on the ecosystem, the eelgrass meadows in Elkhorn Slough have in fact steadily expanded over the past three decades. Hughes credits the otters and their trophic cascade relationship with the sea hares. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1970798\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1970798\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_Elkhorn_Slough_algal_bloom-800x600.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"600\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_Elkhorn_Slough_algal_bloom-800x600.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_Elkhorn_Slough_algal_bloom-1020x765.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_Elkhorn_Slough_algal_bloom-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_Elkhorn_Slough_algal_bloom-768x576.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_Elkhorn_Slough_algal_bloom-1536x1152.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_Elkhorn_Slough_algal_bloom-1920x1440.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_Elkhorn_Slough_algal_bloom.jpg 2048w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Runoff from farms carries excessive nutrients into Elkhorn Slough, which spurs the growth of thick mats of algae. Left unchecked, these algal blooms block sunlight from reaching the eelgrass, and cause them to die. The eelgrass sea hare’s constant appetite for algae helps to counterbalance these harmful effects. \u003ccite>(Brent Hughes/Sonoma State University)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“These grazers are so abundant in Elkhorn Slough, you just have to reach over and grab some seagrass and you’ll end up grabbing a few sea hares too.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Further north, in the San Francisco Bay, Kathy Boyer has been working for years to restore native eelgrass ecosystems. Eelgrass sea hares had also been easy to find in the meadows she was restoring, until recently.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">2017 was an extremely wet winter and spring for the San Francisco Bay Area. Storm after storm brought so much fresh water to the bay that salinity dropped well below the usual level (below ten parts per thousand). Very soon after this dramatic drop in salinity, Boyer and her colleagues noticed that the Taylor’s sea hare (and another symbiotic grazer called the eelgrass isopod) had disappeared from the meadows in the bay. The sea hares had simply vanished from the eight eelgrass restoration sites she and her team had been monitoring.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“It was shocking,” she says. “We’ve definitely seen fluctuations in invertebrate populations, but we’ve never seen the complete loss of species.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1970799\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 700px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1970799\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_Eelgrass_Sea_Hare_bunny_edit.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"700\" height=\"393\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Sea hares get their name from the bunny-ear-like tentacles on top of their heads called rhinophores, which they use to sense temperature, water movement and smell. \u003ccite>(Mike Seely/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Boyer and her team realized at that moment that the only places in the San Francisco Bay with living Taylor’s sea hares were the experimental holding tanks where she does most of her eelgrass restoration studies, at San Francisco State University’s Estuary and Ocean Science Center in Tiburon.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Boyer immediately recognized the importance of the animals in her tanks. “We’ve got to try to keep these guys alive, because it’s all that’s left of this population.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">She hopes to grow the population, and eventually reestablish them throughout eelgrass meadows in the bay. The good news is “they’re reproducing like crazy, they’re really happy in the tanks. They’ve got no predators, so they’re just doing their thing.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Having worked in ecosystem restoration for years, Boyer intimately understands the complexities inherent to the work. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“There’s lots of interest in just going out and restoring a bunch of eelgrass, but the grass doesn’t live in a vacuum out there in the bay. It interacts with all these other species. It brings up lots of questions about ‘What are restoration best practices?’”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1970795\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1970795\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_eelgrass_sea_hare_baby-800x450.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_eelgrass_sea_hare_baby-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_eelgrass_sea_hare_baby-1020x574.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_eelgrass_sea_hare_baby-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_eelgrass_sea_hare_baby-768x432.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_eelgrass_sea_hare_baby-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_eelgrass_sea_hare_baby-2048x1152.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_eelgrass_sea_hare_baby-1920x1080.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Eelgrass meadows provide a safe haven for sea hare eggs and protection for their young. \u003ccite>(Josh Cassidy/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The disappearance of the sea hares offers a rare opportunity to observe what happens when a species suddenly vanishes from an ecosystem. “Sometimes you don’t know what you have until you lose a bit of it,” Boyer said.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Also, Elkhorn Slough has sea otters, but the San Francisco Bay does not, which translates to a big difference in how the food webs function in each location.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“Whether the trophic cascade will have the same levels, and effect, as Brent is seeing down in Elkhorn, we really have no idea,” says Boyer.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There are different sets of animals in the food web in the San Francisco Bay, but it seems that reintroducing otters is a real possibility. Because their populations have been so scarce over the past century, scientists had assumed sea otters lived primarily in ocean waters.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1970801\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 590px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1970801\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/11/DL719_eelgrass_sea_hare_XCU1.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"590\" height=\"331\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Eelgrass sea hares symbiotically co-evolved with eelgrass, a type of seagrass found near coastlines worldwide. Their patterning helps them bland seamlessly into their grassy home. \u003ccite>(Mike Seely/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“The amazing thing with the otters is that as they’re recovering, they’re revealing their true range of habitats that they can use right now,” Hughes says, citing the recent success of the Elkhorn Slough otter population. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“Now researchers are focusing on these estuaries as areas for sea otter recovery, in areas away from predators, away from big waves that you might experience in a kelp forest, somewhat removed from human influence”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Both Boyer and Hughes are co-authors of a research paper suggesting that if properly reintroduced, the San Francisco Bay could be home to as many as 6,000 sea otters, effectively tripling the current population of sea otters in California.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Whether or not sea otters should be a part of the Taylor’s sea hare reintroduction plan in the San Francisco Bay is still an open question, but it is definitely on Boyer’s mind as she wrestles with the complex decisions of when and how to bring the sea hares back to the bay’s meadows.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Despite the challenges of eelgrass ecosystem restoration, Hughes remains inspired by the example of the Taylor’s sea hares. He says Elkhorn Slough is “a gold mine in terms of scientific discoveries. It’s a story of recovery, of conservation, and it involves not only the imperiled species, the sea otter, but these imperiled habitats that they’re returning to, such as seagrasses and salt marshes.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s also a story of how even a little green slug can be so much more important than its modest appearance might, at first, suggest.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"title": "Tule Elk Decision Looms: Pt. Reyes Could Soon Renew Ranch Leases and Thin Elk Herds",
"headTitle": "Tule Elk Decision Looms: Pt. Reyes Could Soon Renew Ranch Leases and Thin Elk Herds | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Known for its seaside bluffs and dense summer fog, Point Reyes National Seashore is a landscape of rolling coastal prairie blending into forests and marshlands, a sanctuary for hundreds of plants and animals and a destination for migrating birds and marine life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Just a one-hour drive from San Francisco, the 71,000-acre peninsula serves as a haven for native California species like snowy plovers, red-legged frogs, coho salmon and tule elk.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The tule elk are one of the primary attractions of the park, which sees over 2 million visitors annually, and they can be easy to spot in the zones where they’re preserved.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The elks’ beauty and majesty is hard to miss; one frequent visitor to the park described their strange, \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SR2OTFtlUM\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">high-pitched bugle\u003c/a> as “otherworldly.” Once on the brink of extinction, tule elk were reintroduced into Point Reyes in 1978. Now, hundreds of elk live in three herds throughout the park.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">But Point Reyes is also home to about 20 ranches that have operated in the park since the mid-1800s. And the tule elk are at the center of a major battle between ranchers, who say the elk are overpopulated and disruptive to their operations, and animal and environmental activists, who think that ranching has degraded the land, leaving it to resemble a “lunar landscape,” as one activist said. The park, the activists argue, should prohibit ranching and preserve the land entirely as wilderness to protect the elk and other species.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Conflict between ranchers and environmentalists is not uncommon in the West, where wildlife and agriculture often collide. \u003ca href=\"https://www.wyomingpublicmedia.org/post/record-population-boom-wild-horses-raises-hackles-among-ranchers-advocates#stream/0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Wild horses \u003c/a>\u003ca href=\"https://www.wyomingpublicmedia.org/post/record-population-boom-wild-horses-raises-hackles-among-ranchers-advocates#stream/0\">in \u003c/a>Utah compete with cattle for resources; black-tailed prairie dogs in Wyoming \u003ca href=\"https://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/fseprd493991.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">are shot and poisoned\u003c/a> by ranchers who consider them “pests”; and wolves, reintroduced in Western states in the 1980s, are often blamed by ranchers for \u003ca href=\"https://www.hcn.org/issues/50.12/wolves-when-cattle-go-missing-in-wolf-territory-who-should-pay-the-price\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">killing\u003c/a> livestock.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The tule elk in Point Reyes have virtually no natural predators, so management of their population is left up to the National Park Service, which is in the process of implementing a wildlife management plan that includes killing elk in one of the three herds to control their numbers, a process known as culling.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">One of the prime considerations for how to manage the tule elk is how their numbers affect the ranchers, who sold their land to the government when the park was established in 1962. Many stayed on the land and continued ranching under renewable five-year permits.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Environmental groups \u003ca href=\"https://www.mercurynews.com/2016/02/10/point-reyes-lawsuit-challenges-historic-ranching-operations-at-iconic-park/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">sued\u003c/a> the National Park Service in 2016 for planning to extend leases for the ranchers from five to 20 years without analyzing the environmental impact, as required under the National Environmental Policy Act. The groups reached a \u003ca href=\"https://www.nps.gov/pore/getinvolved/planning_ranch_cmp_settlement_faq.htm#CP_JUMP_5580712\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">settlement agreement\u003c/a> in 2017 that required the park service to solicit public input and amend its 1980 general management plan with an Environmental Impact Statement before issuing any 20-year leases.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The park service considered six alternatives for its amended plan, ranging from eliminating ranching in the park altogether — an option favored \u003ca href=\"https://restoreptreyesseashore.org/comments-to-draft-plan/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">in over 90%\u003c/a> of the 7,600 public comments submitted to the agency — to the plan the park service says it prefers, which includes extending ranchers’ leases and limiting the population of the Drakes Beach herd of elk to 120 animals to prevent them from eating cattle feed, bothering cows and causing other disturbances. If the population were to exceed 120, the park service would begin culling. At the end of 2019, there were 138 tule elk in the Drakes Beach population.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">On Sept. 18, 2020, the park service released its \u003ca href=\"https://www.nps.gov/pore/getinvolved/planning_gmp_amendment_feis.htm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">final Environmental Impact Statement\u003c/a>, officially announcing its decision to go with its preferred option. That initiated a 30-day waiting period for the park service to conduct its final consultations with other agencies. That period ends on Sunday, after which a “Record of Decision” can be issued, finalizing the amended management plan and allowing leases to be extended and culling to begin.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>A Serengeti of Wildlife\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Laura Cunningham, a wildlife biologist and California director at Western Watersheds Project, likes to picture what the Point Reyes peninsula might have been like 500 years ago: filled with huge herds of tule elk grazing on lush green coastal prairies while coho salmon swam in the creeks and pods of whales passed by off the coast.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">“I imagine it as a place of just riches of biodiversity,” she said. “It must have been just a Serengeti of wildlife.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In the late 1800s, tule elk were thought to no longer exist, hunted into extinction by settlers. But in 1874, a rancher discovered a herd of fewer than 30 tule elk on his land near Bakersfield, California. The herd was preserved, and now 5,700 tule elk live in about 22 herds around the state.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In 1978, 10 tule elk were introduced into Point Reyes National Seashore, fenced in at Tomales Point on the northernmost end of the peninsula to keep them off ranches. Twenty years later, 28 elk from the Tomales Point herd were relocated to Limantour Beach, about 20 miles south of Tomales Point on the east side of Drakes Estero, a large estuary in the center of the peninsula, establishing a second, free-ranging herd. From there, several of the elk migrated to Drakes Beach, on the west side of Drakes Estero, where a third herd of tule elk in Point Reyes now live. \u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1970502 alignleft\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/TuleElkPointReyesCA529px_0.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"529\" height=\"740\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/TuleElkPointReyesCA529px_0.png 529w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/TuleElkPointReyesCA529px_0-160x224.png 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 529px) 100vw, 529px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The 2020 Environmental Impact Statement addresses how to manage the Limantour Beach and Drakes Beach herds, including the Drakes Beach culling plan.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The National Park Service looked into moving the elk somewhere else before settling on a lethal solution for reducing the population, said Melanie Gunn, park service outreach coordinator for Point Reyes National Seashore. The park service considered relocating individuals from the Drakes Beach herd to somewhere outside of Point Reyes, but tule elk within the park are known to have \u003ca href=\"https://johnes.org/deer-elk/faqs/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Johne’s disease \u003c/a>— a highly contagious and fatal bacterial infection that occurs among ruminant animals. The symptoms of the disease often do not appear until several months after an animal is infected. The elk could not be relocated without risking the spread of the disease to herds outside the park. Tule elk \u003ca href=\"https://www.nps.gov/pore/learn/management/upload/planning_tule_elk_mp_ea_1998.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">may have\u003c/a> caught the disease from cattle in Point Reyes, and they can only be effectively tested for it after death.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">When culling does begin — and it will, unless the Record of Decision does not come through — it will be conducted by the National Park Service and other conservation officials to ensure that genetic diversity and sex ratio are taken into account when selecting which individual elk to kill, especially considering the entire population descended from fewer than 30 individuals.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">“It will be specific, not random,” Gunn said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Elk Trouble\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Driving through the ranching district — 22,000 acres designated as a national historic district on the National Register of Historic Places — the smell of cow feces is distinctive. In some parts of the park during mid-October, scrub grass coats the landscape in a golden brown color; in other parts, hundreds of cattle stand on muddy land devoid of much vegetation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Ranchers operate in the park under one of two types of leasing agreements: a special permit that limits their tenancy to five years, or a so-called reservation of use and occupancy, which gives ranchers use of the land for up to 25 years or, in some cases, for as long as the rancher is alive.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Bill Niman, who operates a beef ranch with about 300 cattle at the southern end of Point Reyes, has a lease that extends for the rest of his life. The deal is similar to ownership, in that he pays property taxes and maintains his facilities, but has some restrictions; for example, he can’t sell the property.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1970503\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 648px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1970503\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/niman-1.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"648\" height=\"432\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/niman-1.jpeg 648w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/niman-1-160x107.jpeg 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 648px) 100vw, 648px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Bill Niman operates a regenerative beef ranch of about 300 cattle in the south end of Point Reyes. \u003ccite>( Julie Kane/InsideClimate News)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Niman and his wife, Nicolette Hahn Niman, a former environmental lawyer and the author of a book defending small-scale, grass-fed beef farms, practice rotational grazing on their land. The couple move their cattle from one patch of land to another to allow time for the land to rest between grazing periods. This keeps the landscape full of diverse plants and helps the soil sequester carbon, they said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">“What we’re trying to do is mirror nature and manage the land in the way that nature would if humans were not interfering,” Niman said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Located just north of Bolinas on the south end of the park, far from any tule elk herd, Hahn Niman said they don’t have an issue with elk on their ranch, thanks to park management.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">But on some ranches, elk consume grass and supplemental cattle feed, like hay and alfalfa. Some ranchers have reported elk eating this supplemental food, but “it has not yet been identified as a significant or widespread problem,” the final Environmental Impact Statement said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And Hahn Niman said she has heard about cases of elk creating more serious disturbance, with dozens of the animals entering barns and eating cattle feed, or acting aggressively toward cows. She spoke publicly on behalf of ranchers during the 2016 lawsuit.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">“[Ranchers] have had a number of their heifers that have been injured or even had to be put down because they were mounted by large male tule elk,” Hahn Niman said. “It’s weird stuff like this that I didn’t understand until I talked directly with ranchers involved.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">She emphasized that ranchers love seeing tule elk and other wildlife in the park. Ranchers, she said, wanted the park to be established, and without the ranchers, the land, so near the Bay Area, would have instead been developed into prime real estate. But without wolves and bears and hardly any mountain lions, she said, the elk have to be managed and their population needs to be controlled.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">“You don’t have the robust population of natural predators that once existed here; they’re almost entirely gone,” she said. “The only remaining predator really is the human.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>A Banned Volunteer\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Diana Oppenheim volunteered for three years in Point Reyes National Seashore — a place she calls “literal magic.” She guided a monthly group that would start the day removing invasive species from the park’s sandy coastal dunes, and then led the group in a yoga class on the beach.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Oppenheim said she was shocked when she started to hear rumors that the National Park Service was planning to cull the Drakes Beach herd.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">“I was a very heavily involved volunteer; I was there all the time and I didn’t know this was happening,” Oppenheim said. “There was a big lack of public awareness around this issue, and I felt like if people knew, we could change the course of what was going to happen.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">She started \u003ca href=\"https://www.forelk.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">ForElk.org\u003c/a> to increase awareness of the park service’s management plan, putting up tables at grocery stores and farmers markets and approaching visitors at the park. Soon, Oppenheim was organizing protests. In August 2019, the park service opened its 45-day public comment period.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">As the momentum of the movement accelerated, Oppenheim also made her views clear on her social media accounts. The National Park Service, she said, asked her to remove all references to her working as a volunteer in Point Reyes, in order to protect the agency’s neutrality on the issue. When she refused, Oppenheim — once named the park’s “volunteer of the year” — was banned from volunteering in Point Reyes National Seashore, she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">“That only fueled my fire,” Oppenheim added.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In late September, she and other activists in the Bay Area banded together to organize a \u003ca href=\"https://www.idausa.org/campaign/wild-animals-and-habitats/latest-news/plan-to-kill-wild-elk-and-expand-ranching-in-ca-national-park-draws-record-300-demonstrators/\">demonstration\u003c/a>. Nearly 300 people showed up to protest the culling plan and call for the ranches to be removed from the park.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">“They’re going to actually kill these elk that have been brought back from extinction in order to appease these ranchers,” Oppenheim said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>A Crucial Role\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The purpose of Point Reyes National Seashore — stated at the top of the legislation \u003ca href=\"https://www.nps.gov/pore/learn/management/upload/lawsandpolicies_usc16sec459c_enablingleg.pdf\">that created it \u003c/a>— is to “save and preserve, for purposes of public recreation, benefit and inspiration” the undeveloped seashore.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Nowhere, activists say, does it mention the preservation of ranching. In fact, said Jack Gescheidt, an activist with the \u003ca href=\"https://treespiritproject.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">TreeSpirit Project,\u003c/a> ranching is contradictory to the park’s purpose.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">“You can either have large scale dairy and cattle operations in an area, or a national park,” he said, “you can’t have both.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Gunn, however, disagreed. She said the park and the ranches have coexisted since the park’s establishment in 1962, and they will continue to do so.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In 2019, a \u003ca href=\"https://www.congress.gov/congressional-report/116th-congress/house-report/9/1?overview=closed\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">congressional statement\u003c/a> said multigenerational ranching is important economically and ecologically in Point Reyes and is “fully consistent with Congress’s intent for the management of Point Reyes National Seashore.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Ranching, Gunn said, has been recognized by Congress as being “part of the fabric of Point Reyes National Seashore. It’s part of our responsibility to maintain.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Hahn Niman said ranching can and should coexist with all wildlife in Point Reyes through regenerative practices.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">“Ranching should be minimizing the use of chemicals and should be always attentive to mirroring natural systems,” she said, adding that ranchers should be “creating a vibrant space here for countless wild animals that are in fact living here.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Elk biologist Julie Phillips said that tule elk are a vital part of the Point Reyes ecosystem, and can be considered a keystone species, because plants in the ecosystem rely on them to disperse seeds and maintain the native environment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Phillips — who is opposed to ranching in Point Reyes — said she has observed native grasses return and landscapes restored after tule elk have been reintroduced in other areas around California.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">If cattle are removed from Point Reyes, Phillips said, tule elk “will help restore that degraded land, and the elk will play a critical role in bringing back native habitat.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Unlike so many species that went extinct after European settlement, tule elk got a second chance at survival. In an era where climate change is \u003ca href=\"https://insideclimatenews.org/news/07042020/global-warming-ecosystem-biodiversity-rising-heat-species\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">threatening to demolish\u003c/a> Earth’s ecosystems, Oppenheim said, a biological hot spot like Point Reyes should be easy to protect.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">“We’re facing a severe loss of biodiversity on the planet,” Oppenheim said, and preservation “should be a no brainer in some of the most protected lands of the world.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">She added: “Point Reyes is a gem and should absolutely be protected and restored.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003ca href=\"https://insideclimatenews.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">InsideClimate News\u003c/a> is a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for the ICN newsletter \u003ca href=\"https://insideclimatenews.org/newsletter\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">here\u003c/a>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "The elk are a main attraction in Point Reyes. But ranchers who share the park say the elks’ numbers create problems.",
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"description": "The elk are a main attraction in Point Reyes. But ranchers who share the park say the elks’ numbers create problems.",
"title": "Tule Elk Decision Looms: Pt. Reyes Could Soon Renew Ranch Leases and Thin Elk Herds | KQED",
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"headline": "Tule Elk Decision Looms: Pt. Reyes Could Soon Renew Ranch Leases and Thin Elk Herds",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Known for its seaside bluffs and dense summer fog, Point Reyes National Seashore is a landscape of rolling coastal prairie blending into forests and marshlands, a sanctuary for hundreds of plants and animals and a destination for migrating birds and marine life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Just a one-hour drive from San Francisco, the 71,000-acre peninsula serves as a haven for native California species like snowy plovers, red-legged frogs, coho salmon and tule elk.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The tule elk are one of the primary attractions of the park, which sees over 2 million visitors annually, and they can be easy to spot in the zones where they’re preserved.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The elks’ beauty and majesty is hard to miss; one frequent visitor to the park described their strange, \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SR2OTFtlUM\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">high-pitched bugle\u003c/a> as “otherworldly.” Once on the brink of extinction, tule elk were reintroduced into Point Reyes in 1978. Now, hundreds of elk live in three herds throughout the park.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">But Point Reyes is also home to about 20 ranches that have operated in the park since the mid-1800s. And the tule elk are at the center of a major battle between ranchers, who say the elk are overpopulated and disruptive to their operations, and animal and environmental activists, who think that ranching has degraded the land, leaving it to resemble a “lunar landscape,” as one activist said. The park, the activists argue, should prohibit ranching and preserve the land entirely as wilderness to protect the elk and other species.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Conflict between ranchers and environmentalists is not uncommon in the West, where wildlife and agriculture often collide. \u003ca href=\"https://www.wyomingpublicmedia.org/post/record-population-boom-wild-horses-raises-hackles-among-ranchers-advocates#stream/0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Wild horses \u003c/a>\u003ca href=\"https://www.wyomingpublicmedia.org/post/record-population-boom-wild-horses-raises-hackles-among-ranchers-advocates#stream/0\">in \u003c/a>Utah compete with cattle for resources; black-tailed prairie dogs in Wyoming \u003ca href=\"https://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/fseprd493991.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">are shot and poisoned\u003c/a> by ranchers who consider them “pests”; and wolves, reintroduced in Western states in the 1980s, are often blamed by ranchers for \u003ca href=\"https://www.hcn.org/issues/50.12/wolves-when-cattle-go-missing-in-wolf-territory-who-should-pay-the-price\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">killing\u003c/a> livestock.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The tule elk in Point Reyes have virtually no natural predators, so management of their population is left up to the National Park Service, which is in the process of implementing a wildlife management plan that includes killing elk in one of the three herds to control their numbers, a process known as culling.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">One of the prime considerations for how to manage the tule elk is how their numbers affect the ranchers, who sold their land to the government when the park was established in 1962. Many stayed on the land and continued ranching under renewable five-year permits.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Environmental groups \u003ca href=\"https://www.mercurynews.com/2016/02/10/point-reyes-lawsuit-challenges-historic-ranching-operations-at-iconic-park/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">sued\u003c/a> the National Park Service in 2016 for planning to extend leases for the ranchers from five to 20 years without analyzing the environmental impact, as required under the National Environmental Policy Act. The groups reached a \u003ca href=\"https://www.nps.gov/pore/getinvolved/planning_ranch_cmp_settlement_faq.htm#CP_JUMP_5580712\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">settlement agreement\u003c/a> in 2017 that required the park service to solicit public input and amend its 1980 general management plan with an Environmental Impact Statement before issuing any 20-year leases.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The park service considered six alternatives for its amended plan, ranging from eliminating ranching in the park altogether — an option favored \u003ca href=\"https://restoreptreyesseashore.org/comments-to-draft-plan/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">in over 90%\u003c/a> of the 7,600 public comments submitted to the agency — to the plan the park service says it prefers, which includes extending ranchers’ leases and limiting the population of the Drakes Beach herd of elk to 120 animals to prevent them from eating cattle feed, bothering cows and causing other disturbances. If the population were to exceed 120, the park service would begin culling. At the end of 2019, there were 138 tule elk in the Drakes Beach population.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">On Sept. 18, 2020, the park service released its \u003ca href=\"https://www.nps.gov/pore/getinvolved/planning_gmp_amendment_feis.htm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">final Environmental Impact Statement\u003c/a>, officially announcing its decision to go with its preferred option. That initiated a 30-day waiting period for the park service to conduct its final consultations with other agencies. That period ends on Sunday, after which a “Record of Decision” can be issued, finalizing the amended management plan and allowing leases to be extended and culling to begin.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>A Serengeti of Wildlife\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Laura Cunningham, a wildlife biologist and California director at Western Watersheds Project, likes to picture what the Point Reyes peninsula might have been like 500 years ago: filled with huge herds of tule elk grazing on lush green coastal prairies while coho salmon swam in the creeks and pods of whales passed by off the coast.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">“I imagine it as a place of just riches of biodiversity,” she said. “It must have been just a Serengeti of wildlife.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In the late 1800s, tule elk were thought to no longer exist, hunted into extinction by settlers. But in 1874, a rancher discovered a herd of fewer than 30 tule elk on his land near Bakersfield, California. The herd was preserved, and now 5,700 tule elk live in about 22 herds around the state.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In 1978, 10 tule elk were introduced into Point Reyes National Seashore, fenced in at Tomales Point on the northernmost end of the peninsula to keep them off ranches. Twenty years later, 28 elk from the Tomales Point herd were relocated to Limantour Beach, about 20 miles south of Tomales Point on the east side of Drakes Estero, a large estuary in the center of the peninsula, establishing a second, free-ranging herd. From there, several of the elk migrated to Drakes Beach, on the west side of Drakes Estero, where a third herd of tule elk in Point Reyes now live. \u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1970502 alignleft\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/TuleElkPointReyesCA529px_0.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"529\" height=\"740\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/TuleElkPointReyesCA529px_0.png 529w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/TuleElkPointReyesCA529px_0-160x224.png 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 529px) 100vw, 529px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The 2020 Environmental Impact Statement addresses how to manage the Limantour Beach and Drakes Beach herds, including the Drakes Beach culling plan.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The National Park Service looked into moving the elk somewhere else before settling on a lethal solution for reducing the population, said Melanie Gunn, park service outreach coordinator for Point Reyes National Seashore. The park service considered relocating individuals from the Drakes Beach herd to somewhere outside of Point Reyes, but tule elk within the park are known to have \u003ca href=\"https://johnes.org/deer-elk/faqs/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Johne’s disease \u003c/a>— a highly contagious and fatal bacterial infection that occurs among ruminant animals. The symptoms of the disease often do not appear until several months after an animal is infected. The elk could not be relocated without risking the spread of the disease to herds outside the park. Tule elk \u003ca href=\"https://www.nps.gov/pore/learn/management/upload/planning_tule_elk_mp_ea_1998.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">may have\u003c/a> caught the disease from cattle in Point Reyes, and they can only be effectively tested for it after death.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">When culling does begin — and it will, unless the Record of Decision does not come through — it will be conducted by the National Park Service and other conservation officials to ensure that genetic diversity and sex ratio are taken into account when selecting which individual elk to kill, especially considering the entire population descended from fewer than 30 individuals.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">“It will be specific, not random,” Gunn said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Elk Trouble\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Driving through the ranching district — 22,000 acres designated as a national historic district on the National Register of Historic Places — the smell of cow feces is distinctive. In some parts of the park during mid-October, scrub grass coats the landscape in a golden brown color; in other parts, hundreds of cattle stand on muddy land devoid of much vegetation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Ranchers operate in the park under one of two types of leasing agreements: a special permit that limits their tenancy to five years, or a so-called reservation of use and occupancy, which gives ranchers use of the land for up to 25 years or, in some cases, for as long as the rancher is alive.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Bill Niman, who operates a beef ranch with about 300 cattle at the southern end of Point Reyes, has a lease that extends for the rest of his life. The deal is similar to ownership, in that he pays property taxes and maintains his facilities, but has some restrictions; for example, he can’t sell the property.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1970503\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 648px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1970503\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/niman-1.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"648\" height=\"432\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/niman-1.jpeg 648w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/niman-1-160x107.jpeg 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 648px) 100vw, 648px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Bill Niman operates a regenerative beef ranch of about 300 cattle in the south end of Point Reyes. \u003ccite>( Julie Kane/InsideClimate News)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Niman and his wife, Nicolette Hahn Niman, a former environmental lawyer and the author of a book defending small-scale, grass-fed beef farms, practice rotational grazing on their land. The couple move their cattle from one patch of land to another to allow time for the land to rest between grazing periods. This keeps the landscape full of diverse plants and helps the soil sequester carbon, they said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">“What we’re trying to do is mirror nature and manage the land in the way that nature would if humans were not interfering,” Niman said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Located just north of Bolinas on the south end of the park, far from any tule elk herd, Hahn Niman said they don’t have an issue with elk on their ranch, thanks to park management.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">But on some ranches, elk consume grass and supplemental cattle feed, like hay and alfalfa. Some ranchers have reported elk eating this supplemental food, but “it has not yet been identified as a significant or widespread problem,” the final Environmental Impact Statement said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And Hahn Niman said she has heard about cases of elk creating more serious disturbance, with dozens of the animals entering barns and eating cattle feed, or acting aggressively toward cows. She spoke publicly on behalf of ranchers during the 2016 lawsuit.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">“[Ranchers] have had a number of their heifers that have been injured or even had to be put down because they were mounted by large male tule elk,” Hahn Niman said. “It’s weird stuff like this that I didn’t understand until I talked directly with ranchers involved.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">She emphasized that ranchers love seeing tule elk and other wildlife in the park. Ranchers, she said, wanted the park to be established, and without the ranchers, the land, so near the Bay Area, would have instead been developed into prime real estate. But without wolves and bears and hardly any mountain lions, she said, the elk have to be managed and their population needs to be controlled.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">“You don’t have the robust population of natural predators that once existed here; they’re almost entirely gone,” she said. “The only remaining predator really is the human.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>A Banned Volunteer\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Diana Oppenheim volunteered for three years in Point Reyes National Seashore — a place she calls “literal magic.” She guided a monthly group that would start the day removing invasive species from the park’s sandy coastal dunes, and then led the group in a yoga class on the beach.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Oppenheim said she was shocked when she started to hear rumors that the National Park Service was planning to cull the Drakes Beach herd.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">“I was a very heavily involved volunteer; I was there all the time and I didn’t know this was happening,” Oppenheim said. “There was a big lack of public awareness around this issue, and I felt like if people knew, we could change the course of what was going to happen.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">She started \u003ca href=\"https://www.forelk.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">ForElk.org\u003c/a> to increase awareness of the park service’s management plan, putting up tables at grocery stores and farmers markets and approaching visitors at the park. Soon, Oppenheim was organizing protests. In August 2019, the park service opened its 45-day public comment period.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">As the momentum of the movement accelerated, Oppenheim also made her views clear on her social media accounts. The National Park Service, she said, asked her to remove all references to her working as a volunteer in Point Reyes, in order to protect the agency’s neutrality on the issue. When she refused, Oppenheim — once named the park’s “volunteer of the year” — was banned from volunteering in Point Reyes National Seashore, she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">“That only fueled my fire,” Oppenheim added.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In late September, she and other activists in the Bay Area banded together to organize a \u003ca href=\"https://www.idausa.org/campaign/wild-animals-and-habitats/latest-news/plan-to-kill-wild-elk-and-expand-ranching-in-ca-national-park-draws-record-300-demonstrators/\">demonstration\u003c/a>. Nearly 300 people showed up to protest the culling plan and call for the ranches to be removed from the park.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">“They’re going to actually kill these elk that have been brought back from extinction in order to appease these ranchers,” Oppenheim said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>A Crucial Role\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The purpose of Point Reyes National Seashore — stated at the top of the legislation \u003ca href=\"https://www.nps.gov/pore/learn/management/upload/lawsandpolicies_usc16sec459c_enablingleg.pdf\">that created it \u003c/a>— is to “save and preserve, for purposes of public recreation, benefit and inspiration” the undeveloped seashore.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Nowhere, activists say, does it mention the preservation of ranching. In fact, said Jack Gescheidt, an activist with the \u003ca href=\"https://treespiritproject.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">TreeSpirit Project,\u003c/a> ranching is contradictory to the park’s purpose.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">“You can either have large scale dairy and cattle operations in an area, or a national park,” he said, “you can’t have both.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Gunn, however, disagreed. She said the park and the ranches have coexisted since the park’s establishment in 1962, and they will continue to do so.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In 2019, a \u003ca href=\"https://www.congress.gov/congressional-report/116th-congress/house-report/9/1?overview=closed\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">congressional statement\u003c/a> said multigenerational ranching is important economically and ecologically in Point Reyes and is “fully consistent with Congress’s intent for the management of Point Reyes National Seashore.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Ranching, Gunn said, has been recognized by Congress as being “part of the fabric of Point Reyes National Seashore. It’s part of our responsibility to maintain.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Hahn Niman said ranching can and should coexist with all wildlife in Point Reyes through regenerative practices.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">“Ranching should be minimizing the use of chemicals and should be always attentive to mirroring natural systems,” she said, adding that ranchers should be “creating a vibrant space here for countless wild animals that are in fact living here.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Elk biologist Julie Phillips said that tule elk are a vital part of the Point Reyes ecosystem, and can be considered a keystone species, because plants in the ecosystem rely on them to disperse seeds and maintain the native environment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Phillips — who is opposed to ranching in Point Reyes — said she has observed native grasses return and landscapes restored after tule elk have been reintroduced in other areas around California.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">If cattle are removed from Point Reyes, Phillips said, tule elk “will help restore that degraded land, and the elk will play a critical role in bringing back native habitat.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Unlike so many species that went extinct after European settlement, tule elk got a second chance at survival. In an era where climate change is \u003ca href=\"https://insideclimatenews.org/news/07042020/global-warming-ecosystem-biodiversity-rising-heat-species\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">threatening to demolish\u003c/a> Earth’s ecosystems, Oppenheim said, a biological hot spot like Point Reyes should be easy to protect.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">“We’re facing a severe loss of biodiversity on the planet,” Oppenheim said, and preservation “should be a no brainer in some of the most protected lands of the world.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400;\">She added: “Point Reyes is a gem and should absolutely be protected and restored.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003ca href=\"https://insideclimatenews.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">InsideClimate News\u003c/a> is a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for the ICN newsletter \u003ca href=\"https://insideclimatenews.org/newsletter\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">here\u003c/a>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>[dl_subscribe]On an extended research visit to a friend’s lab in Tokyo, marine biologists \u003ca href=\"https://www.bowdoin.edu/profiles/faculty/ajohnson/index.html\">Amy Johnson\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://www.bowdoin.edu/profiles/faculty/oellers/index.html\">Olaf Ellers\u003c/a> witnessed something they’d never seen before. The starfish in Tatsuo Motokawa’s lab weren’t content slowly gliding across the floor of their tank, they bounced and galloped, zooming around their enclosure.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For one of the most familiar animals in the sea, this was a new behavior, never before described in the scientific literature.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was an absolute epiphany,” said Johnson who studies how sea stars move and teaches marine biology along with Ellers at Bowdoin College in Maine. “That moment we first saw them go faster by bouncing completely transformed everything we were planning to do with our research.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since then, Johnson and Ellers have worked to change the way we understand these animals, who have successfully made a home on this planet for at least 450 million years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As part of this mission, the two scientists joined a bicoastal collaboration that may one day lead to robots that could move around like starfish to search shipwrecks, clean oceangoing vessels and explore the seafloor.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1970340\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL718_Luidia_bounce.gif\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-1970340 size-full\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL718_Luidia_bounce.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Starfish only bounce like this if they’re in a hurry.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>What Has Five Arms and Hundreds of Feet?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Starfish, also called sea stars, are one of the most recognizable and familiar animals in the sea. But most people have never seen them do anything more than clamp down on a rock, motionless, as they wait out a low tide.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Starfish are actually voracious predators that scour the seafloors of oceans all around the world searching for prey.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Most sea stars have five arms, though some have more — up to 25 in some species. On the undersides of the arms are hundreds, sometimes thousands, of tiny tube feet called podia.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The long slender tube feet are hollow and full of water, like miniature water balloons. Each tube foot is connected to its own tiny sac called an ampulla, that sits inside the body of the starfish.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When the starfish squeezes the ampulla it extends the tube foot in the direction it wants to go.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1970344\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL718_water_vascular_system_animation.gif\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1970344\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL718_water_vascular_system_animation.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The starfish’s tube feet and ampullae are connected to a series of internal canals called the water vascular system, which carefully controls water pressure to power the feet. \u003ccite>(Teodros Hailye/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>A disc at the far end of the tube foot secretes a glue that sticks to whatever surface the starfish is moving across. Then muscles that run along the length of the tube contract, squeezing water back into the ampulla and shortening the tube foot. All those tiny tube feet contracting is what drags the starfish along.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1970345\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL718_tube_feet_ampullae_animation.gif\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1970345\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL718_tube_feet_ampullae_animation.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">During their usual crawling gate, starfish tube feet extend, connect to the substrate and then contract to slowly drag the starfish forward.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“Normally, they either sit around or they glide very slowly,” Ellers said. “If you want to see them bounce, you have to get them excited about something.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Johnson and Ellers use tasty mussels to coax the starfish in their lab to gallop. In the wild, starfish might also gallop to flee predators.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The two researchers record videos from different angles of starfish moving across an aquarium in order to keep track of their numerous tube feet. By painstakingly studying the footage and using computer-assisted motion tracking of the tube feet, the pair has been able to identify the two distinct ways that starfish move.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When starfish are in a hurry, their tube feet don’t just move faster. Instead of just elongating and contracting as they do during their regular crawl, the tube feet lengthen and stiffen in the middle of the step.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s like running compared to walking,” said Johnson. “They kind of vault themselves forward.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1970347\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL718_bounce_animation.gif\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1970347\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL718_bounce_animation.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Starfish only bounce when enough tube feet stiffen at the same time. \u003ccite>(Teodros Hailye/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>When enough tube feet step and stiffen at the same time, it lifts the starfish up slightly as the tube feet vault over themselves. That’s what causes the bounce.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But how do each of the hundreds of tube feet know when it’s their turn to go?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alright, Who’s in Charge Around Here?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Instead of having a central brain that tells each foot when to move, starfish leave most of the decision-making to the individual feet.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Each tube foot is able to use smell, taste and touch to understand the world around it. The long delicate tube feet at the tips of the arms are particularly sensitive.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1970349\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL718_bat_star_sensory_tube_feet.gif\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-1970349 size-full\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL718_bat_star_sensory_tube_feet.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The sensory tube feet at the tips of the starfish’s arms are extra sensitive, but provide little power toward locomotion. \u003ccite>(Josh Cassidy/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>It’s up to each one of the tube feet to figure out which way to go and how to get there.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When a group of neighboring tube feet start heading in the same direction they eventually get the entire arm headed in the same direction. Any of the starfish’s arms can take the lead at any time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think tube feet are amazing,” said \u003ca href=\"https://viterbi.usc.edu/directory/faculty/Kanso/Eva\">Eva Kanso\u003c/a>, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Southern California where she studies the physics of animal movement. “Every single one of them is both a sensor and an actuator that does the work.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Being a tube foot, you don’t need to know what other tube feet are doing to decide whether you need to extend or contract or whether you need to attach or detach.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kanso had been working with biologist Matt McHenry at UC Irvine to develop a mathematical model of the way starfish control their tube feet, when she learned about Johnson and Ellers’ work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDEAbeScVjE&w=560&h=315]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kanso’s model matches the movement of the sea stars filmed by Johnson and Ellers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Biology has evolved a beautiful way of acting on the environment, and in robotics systems we’re still clumsy in how we do the actuation,” said Kanso, who hopes her model will lead to the development of soft-bodied underwater robots.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“So we teamed up,” Kanso said, “to try to understand how does the nervous system actually control the movements and how does this bounce mode come about.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If the sea star needed to know what everything each one of its tube foot is doing, it’s a lot of information to keep track of,” said Kanso. And without a brain, there’s no way for the starfish to keep track. “So it seems that every single one of those tube feet has some autonomy.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But that only explains the starfish’s crawling gate. How do they manage to time up their tube feet during the bouncing gallop that Johnson and Ellers filmed?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsif.2019.0700\">The team of researchers have found\u003c/a> the bounce occurs when a few tube feet happen to match up their steps and the feet around them find it easier to move when their neighbors move since they’re all connected to the same flexible starfish. Pretty soon, more tube feet feel the push and pull, and fall in line.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The pattern emerges from noise,” said Kanso. “It kind of reminds me of how sometimes if people applaud after a show for a long time the claps start to synch up.” No one individual is setting the pace. Researchers call that an emergent pattern.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s similar to a classic physics demonstration using analog metronomes. First, place several metronomes on a board and put the board on top of two cylinders. Set each metronome to its own beat. Because the board is on top of the cylinders it has a bit of give while staying rigid. After a short time the metronomes that were once randomly timed start to match each other’s beat. No one metronome is setting the tempo. It’s an emergent pattern just like the bounce of the starfish.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T58lGKREubo&w=560&h=315]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>An Afternoon at the Edge of the Sea\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So where can you go to see a sea star yourself?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What’s amazing about tide pools is that they’re unavailable most of the time, so they’re kind of like a little secret that only some people know about,” said \u003ca href=\"https://www.cabrillo.edu/salsa/listing.php?staffId=1712\">Allison Gong\u003c/a>, a professor at Cabrillo College who also teaches UC Santa Cruz students about tide pool animals . This episode of Deep Look would not have been possible without her contribution of time and knowledge.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One of Gong’s favorite tide pool denizens are sea stars. “We humans have the bias that the way we do things is the best way to do things. But there is an incredible beauty and elegance in simplicity, which is not appreciated by most people.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The fact that sea stars haven’t changed their basic body plan for a few hundred million years just means that it’s an outstanding plan.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“So the fact that these animals with no brain live life the way they do, finding food, like finding a place to live, and avoiding being eaten by predators. They do everything we do, but they have different tools to use.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gong has a few suggestions for visitors to the tide pools. Always go with someone else. The rocks can be very slippery and you don’t want to be alone if you take a spill. And don’t turn your back on the ocean. Rogue waves can sneak up on an unwary visitor. Also watch where you step and avoid damaging the life that calls the intertidal zone home.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lastly, Gong recommends taking your time and exercising patience. “Just find a good spot and sit there quietly for fifteen minutes and watch everything that happens. Because when you do, all the little animals get used to your presence and they start doing their thing instead of just hiding, waiting for you to leave.”\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>On an extended research visit to a friend’s lab in Tokyo, marine biologists \u003ca href=\"https://www.bowdoin.edu/profiles/faculty/ajohnson/index.html\">Amy Johnson\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://www.bowdoin.edu/profiles/faculty/oellers/index.html\">Olaf Ellers\u003c/a> witnessed something they’d never seen before. The starfish in Tatsuo Motokawa’s lab weren’t content slowly gliding across the floor of their tank, they bounced and galloped, zooming around their enclosure.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For one of the most familiar animals in the sea, this was a new behavior, never before described in the scientific literature.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was an absolute epiphany,” said Johnson who studies how sea stars move and teaches marine biology along with Ellers at Bowdoin College in Maine. “That moment we first saw them go faster by bouncing completely transformed everything we were planning to do with our research.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since then, Johnson and Ellers have worked to change the way we understand these animals, who have successfully made a home on this planet for at least 450 million years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As part of this mission, the two scientists joined a bicoastal collaboration that may one day lead to robots that could move around like starfish to search shipwrecks, clean oceangoing vessels and explore the seafloor.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1970340\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL718_Luidia_bounce.gif\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-1970340 size-full\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL718_Luidia_bounce.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Starfish only bounce like this if they’re in a hurry.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>What Has Five Arms and Hundreds of Feet?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Starfish, also called sea stars, are one of the most recognizable and familiar animals in the sea. But most people have never seen them do anything more than clamp down on a rock, motionless, as they wait out a low tide.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Starfish are actually voracious predators that scour the seafloors of oceans all around the world searching for prey.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Most sea stars have five arms, though some have more — up to 25 in some species. On the undersides of the arms are hundreds, sometimes thousands, of tiny tube feet called podia.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The long slender tube feet are hollow and full of water, like miniature water balloons. Each tube foot is connected to its own tiny sac called an ampulla, that sits inside the body of the starfish.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When the starfish squeezes the ampulla it extends the tube foot in the direction it wants to go.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1970344\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL718_water_vascular_system_animation.gif\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1970344\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL718_water_vascular_system_animation.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The starfish’s tube feet and ampullae are connected to a series of internal canals called the water vascular system, which carefully controls water pressure to power the feet. \u003ccite>(Teodros Hailye/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>A disc at the far end of the tube foot secretes a glue that sticks to whatever surface the starfish is moving across. Then muscles that run along the length of the tube contract, squeezing water back into the ampulla and shortening the tube foot. All those tiny tube feet contracting is what drags the starfish along.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1970345\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL718_tube_feet_ampullae_animation.gif\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1970345\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL718_tube_feet_ampullae_animation.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">During their usual crawling gate, starfish tube feet extend, connect to the substrate and then contract to slowly drag the starfish forward.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“Normally, they either sit around or they glide very slowly,” Ellers said. “If you want to see them bounce, you have to get them excited about something.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Johnson and Ellers use tasty mussels to coax the starfish in their lab to gallop. In the wild, starfish might also gallop to flee predators.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The two researchers record videos from different angles of starfish moving across an aquarium in order to keep track of their numerous tube feet. By painstakingly studying the footage and using computer-assisted motion tracking of the tube feet, the pair has been able to identify the two distinct ways that starfish move.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When starfish are in a hurry, their tube feet don’t just move faster. Instead of just elongating and contracting as they do during their regular crawl, the tube feet lengthen and stiffen in the middle of the step.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s like running compared to walking,” said Johnson. “They kind of vault themselves forward.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1970347\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL718_bounce_animation.gif\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1970347\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL718_bounce_animation.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Starfish only bounce when enough tube feet stiffen at the same time. \u003ccite>(Teodros Hailye/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>When enough tube feet step and stiffen at the same time, it lifts the starfish up slightly as the tube feet vault over themselves. That’s what causes the bounce.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But how do each of the hundreds of tube feet know when it’s their turn to go?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alright, Who’s in Charge Around Here?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Instead of having a central brain that tells each foot when to move, starfish leave most of the decision-making to the individual feet.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Each tube foot is able to use smell, taste and touch to understand the world around it. The long delicate tube feet at the tips of the arms are particularly sensitive.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1970349\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL718_bat_star_sensory_tube_feet.gif\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-1970349 size-full\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL718_bat_star_sensory_tube_feet.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The sensory tube feet at the tips of the starfish’s arms are extra sensitive, but provide little power toward locomotion. \u003ccite>(Josh Cassidy/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>It’s up to each one of the tube feet to figure out which way to go and how to get there.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When a group of neighboring tube feet start heading in the same direction they eventually get the entire arm headed in the same direction. Any of the starfish’s arms can take the lead at any time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think tube feet are amazing,” said \u003ca href=\"https://viterbi.usc.edu/directory/faculty/Kanso/Eva\">Eva Kanso\u003c/a>, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Southern California where she studies the physics of animal movement. “Every single one of them is both a sensor and an actuator that does the work.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Being a tube foot, you don’t need to know what other tube feet are doing to decide whether you need to extend or contract or whether you need to attach or detach.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kanso had been working with biologist Matt McHenry at UC Irvine to develop a mathematical model of the way starfish control their tube feet, when she learned about Johnson and Ellers’ work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/lDEAbeScVjE'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/lDEAbeScVjE'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kanso’s model matches the movement of the sea stars filmed by Johnson and Ellers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Biology has evolved a beautiful way of acting on the environment, and in robotics systems we’re still clumsy in how we do the actuation,” said Kanso, who hopes her model will lead to the development of soft-bodied underwater robots.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“So we teamed up,” Kanso said, “to try to understand how does the nervous system actually control the movements and how does this bounce mode come about.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If the sea star needed to know what everything each one of its tube foot is doing, it’s a lot of information to keep track of,” said Kanso. And without a brain, there’s no way for the starfish to keep track. “So it seems that every single one of those tube feet has some autonomy.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But that only explains the starfish’s crawling gate. How do they manage to time up their tube feet during the bouncing gallop that Johnson and Ellers filmed?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsif.2019.0700\">The team of researchers have found\u003c/a> the bounce occurs when a few tube feet happen to match up their steps and the feet around them find it easier to move when their neighbors move since they’re all connected to the same flexible starfish. Pretty soon, more tube feet feel the push and pull, and fall in line.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The pattern emerges from noise,” said Kanso. “It kind of reminds me of how sometimes if people applaud after a show for a long time the claps start to synch up.” No one individual is setting the pace. Researchers call that an emergent pattern.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s similar to a classic physics demonstration using analog metronomes. First, place several metronomes on a board and put the board on top of two cylinders. Set each metronome to its own beat. Because the board is on top of the cylinders it has a bit of give while staying rigid. After a short time the metronomes that were once randomly timed start to match each other’s beat. No one metronome is setting the tempo. It’s an emergent pattern just like the bounce of the starfish.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/T58lGKREubo'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/T58lGKREubo'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>An Afternoon at the Edge of the Sea\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So where can you go to see a sea star yourself?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What’s amazing about tide pools is that they’re unavailable most of the time, so they’re kind of like a little secret that only some people know about,” said \u003ca href=\"https://www.cabrillo.edu/salsa/listing.php?staffId=1712\">Allison Gong\u003c/a>, a professor at Cabrillo College who also teaches UC Santa Cruz students about tide pool animals . This episode of Deep Look would not have been possible without her contribution of time and knowledge.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One of Gong’s favorite tide pool denizens are sea stars. “We humans have the bias that the way we do things is the best way to do things. But there is an incredible beauty and elegance in simplicity, which is not appreciated by most people.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The fact that sea stars haven’t changed their basic body plan for a few hundred million years just means that it’s an outstanding plan.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“So the fact that these animals with no brain live life the way they do, finding food, like finding a place to live, and avoiding being eaten by predators. They do everything we do, but they have different tools to use.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gong has a few suggestions for visitors to the tide pools. Always go with someone else. The rocks can be very slippery and you don’t want to be alone if you take a spill. And don’t turn your back on the ocean. Rogue waves can sneak up on an unwary visitor. Also watch where you step and avoid damaging the life that calls the intertidal zone home.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lastly, Gong recommends taking your time and exercising patience. “Just find a good spot and sit there quietly for fifteen minutes and watch everything that happens. Because when you do, all the little animals get used to your presence and they start doing their thing instead of just hiding, waiting for you to leave.”\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "There Can Be Only One Fattest Bear, and Now We Know Who It is",
"headTitle": "There Can Be Only One Fattest Bear, and Now We Know Who It is | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Update Wednesday, Oct 7, 2020\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There can be only one.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And this year the one is 747, who bested 32 Chunk to win Fat Bear Week 2020.\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\">\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">Introducing 747, the jumbo jet, 👑 king chonk. Congrats on electing the fattest of the fats for \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/hashtag/FatBearWeek?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">#FatBearWeek\u003c/a>. Photo by Mike Fitz. \u003ca href=\"https://t.co/eL9ZmQVUZM\">pic.twitter.com/eL9ZmQVUZM\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>— explore.org (@exploreorg) \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/exploreorg/status/1313660334155149312?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">October 7, 2020\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js\">https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Full disclosure, our newsroom was pulling for Chunk. However, we nod our collective caps to 747, a bear that “typically keeps his status by sheer size alone” according to tournament organizers. And this year he seemed particularly proficient at piling on the pounds.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://explore.org/meet-the-bears\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-medium wp-image-1970185\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/747-before-and-after-800x1118.png\" alt=\"A before and after pair of photos showing brown bears 747 weight gain.\" width=\"800\" height=\"1118\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/747-before-and-after-800x1118.png 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/747-before-and-after-160x224.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/747-before-and-after-768x1073.png 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/747-before-and-after.png 896w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What is 747 going to do now that he has been crowned the fattest of them all? More salmon snacking and then, sleep. Good call 747, good call.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://twitter.com/exploreorg/status/1313828720000536576?s=20\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For those of us who can’t hibernate through the rest of 2020, the bear cams stream on. Until next year, fellow fat bear fans!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcWTPFnqOLo]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Original Post\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The events of 2020 have not only stripped our lives of routine, but also of celebrations \u003ci>—\u003c/i> the parties and traditions that can help us shake off an interminable workweek or even a bad mood, or mark the transition from one season to another.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But there is one event that 2020 can’t touch (knock, nay pound our fists on wood): Fat Bear Week, a competition that, as it turns out, is the ideal event in a pandemic: The contestants are animals, the activities are online and the objective is survival. The competition celebrates brown bears’ efforts to prepare for hibernation \u003ci>—\u003c/i> they must eat a year’s worth of food in six months, and though salmon are plentiful, so is the competition.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Here’s what you need to know about this year’s event:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>When is it:\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>\nWednesday, Sept. 30, to Tuesday, Oct. 6. \u003ca href=\"https://explore.org/fat-bear-week#vote\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Voting\u003c/a> is open daily 9 a.m. – 7 p.m. Pacific.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>What it is\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>\nFat Bear Week is a single-elimination tournament (think March Madness) featuring the brown bears of Brooks River in Katmai National Park in daily online matchups. The public votes for the bear that they think is the fattest or has the potential to become the fattest. The winner of Fat Bear Week is crowned on Fat Tuesday, naturally.\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\">\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">The second matchup of \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/hashtag/FatBearWeek?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">#FatBearWeek\u003c/a> is a familial fight to the finish, as the fledgling 812 faces off with his famed multitasking mom 402. Can 812’s learned fishing skills propel him to the finish line, or will 402’s mom-entum make her a winner?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Vote Here: \u003ca href=\"https://t.co/NvXCYNigTJ\">https://t.co/NvXCYNigTJ\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://t.co/cvy6q18Arz\">pic.twitter.com/cvy6q18Arz\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>— Katmai National Park (@KatmaiNPS) \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/KatmaiNPS/status/1311395392274264070?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">September 30, 2020\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js\">https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>What to do:\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>\n\u003ca href=\"https://explore.org/meet-the-bears\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Learn about the 12 contestants.\u003c/a> Half are identified by numbers only, and the other half also have names. There’s 747 who “typically keeps his status by sheer size alone”; defending champ and quintessential momma bear, 435 Holly; and 32 Chunk, an 1,100-pound enigma who will “wait patiently to scavenge leftover salmon.” Each of the 12 has advantages ( like size), disadvantages (age, injury) and charms (fuzzy ears).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Once you know the bears a bit, \u003ca href=\"https://explore.org/fat-bear-week#bracket\">fill out a bracket\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://explore.org/fat-bear-week#bracket\">vote every day.\u003c/a> You must enter an email to vote, a security measure to prevent miscreants from casting multiple votes on the same day. Don’t mess with the integrity of Fat Bear Week, lest the wrath of the entire nature-loving internet reign down upon thee. I mean, c’mon, give us this one nice thing!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3sfTvciVd8]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://explore.org/livecams/brown-bears\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Watch the Brooks River webcams\u003c/a>. Fat Bear Week’s main attraction. You’ll see bears fish, swim and, well, chill. You’ll see salmon jump, gulls twitter. There’s even an underwater camera. Sometimes you’ll log on and no bears will be present at the falls, but you’ll find yourself exhaling at the serenity of flowing water and an open sky. Other times you’ll find a bear lumbering up the river, and you’ll lean into your screen, hypnotized by the rhythmic motion of their massive haunches.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.nps.gov/katm/learn/photosmultimedia/brown-bear-frequently-asked-questions.htm#1\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Devour the exhaustive bear FAQ\u003c/a> at the Katmai National Park website and attend one of the live Q & A sessions \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcWTPFnqOLo\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">on YouTube\u003c/a> with Katmai National Park rangers. Questions about “bears, salmon, and Katmai” are welcome.\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\">\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">5/ A Salmon in Every Paw (Holly), by Kyle Brittain \u003ca href=\"https://t.co/a7PcSrgK4v\">pic.twitter.com/a7PcSrgK4v\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>— explore.org (@exploreorg) \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/exploreorg/status/1310684475320229888?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">September 28, 2020\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js\">https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A full schedule of events is pinned to the top of the comments section \u003ca href=\"https://explore.org/livecams/brown-bears\">on the Explore.org web cam.\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To get the most out of Fat Bear Week, join the water cooler conversation by following the hashtags #FatBearWeek and #BearCam and \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/exploreorg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Explore.org\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/KatmaiNPS\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Katmai National Park\u003c/a> on social media. You can also chat in the comments section on the live bearcam, the internet version of a trailside scrum of humans observing a rarely seen animal in the distance, everyone stopped in communal awe.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Update Wednesday, Oct 7, 2020\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There can be only one.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And this year the one is 747, who bested 32 Chunk to win Fat Bear Week 2020.\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\">\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">Introducing 747, the jumbo jet, 👑 king chonk. Congrats on electing the fattest of the fats for \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/hashtag/FatBearWeek?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">#FatBearWeek\u003c/a>. Photo by Mike Fitz. \u003ca href=\"https://t.co/eL9ZmQVUZM\">pic.twitter.com/eL9ZmQVUZM\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>— explore.org (@exploreorg) \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/exploreorg/status/1313660334155149312?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">October 7, 2020\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js\">https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Full disclosure, our newsroom was pulling for Chunk. However, we nod our collective caps to 747, a bear that “typically keeps his status by sheer size alone” according to tournament organizers. And this year he seemed particularly proficient at piling on the pounds.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://explore.org/meet-the-bears\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-medium wp-image-1970185\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/747-before-and-after-800x1118.png\" alt=\"A before and after pair of photos showing brown bears 747 weight gain.\" width=\"800\" height=\"1118\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/747-before-and-after-800x1118.png 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/747-before-and-after-160x224.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/747-before-and-after-768x1073.png 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/747-before-and-after.png 896w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What is 747 going to do now that he has been crowned the fattest of them all? More salmon snacking and then, sleep. Good call 747, good call.\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\n\u003cp>For those of us who can’t hibernate through the rest of 2020, the bear cams stream on. Until next year, fellow fat bear fans!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/IcWTPFnqOLo'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/IcWTPFnqOLo'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Original Post\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The events of 2020 have not only stripped our lives of routine, but also of celebrations \u003ci>—\u003c/i> the parties and traditions that can help us shake off an interminable workweek or even a bad mood, or mark the transition from one season to another.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But there is one event that 2020 can’t touch (knock, nay pound our fists on wood): Fat Bear Week, a competition that, as it turns out, is the ideal event in a pandemic: The contestants are animals, the activities are online and the objective is survival. The competition celebrates brown bears’ efforts to prepare for hibernation \u003ci>—\u003c/i> they must eat a year’s worth of food in six months, and though salmon are plentiful, so is the competition.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Here’s what you need to know about this year’s event:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>When is it:\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>\nWednesday, Sept. 30, to Tuesday, Oct. 6. \u003ca href=\"https://explore.org/fat-bear-week#vote\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Voting\u003c/a> is open daily 9 a.m. – 7 p.m. Pacific.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>What it is\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>\nFat Bear Week is a single-elimination tournament (think March Madness) featuring the brown bears of Brooks River in Katmai National Park in daily online matchups. The public votes for the bear that they think is the fattest or has the potential to become the fattest. The winner of Fat Bear Week is crowned on Fat Tuesday, naturally.\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\">\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">The second matchup of \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/hashtag/FatBearWeek?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">#FatBearWeek\u003c/a> is a familial fight to the finish, as the fledgling 812 faces off with his famed multitasking mom 402. Can 812’s learned fishing skills propel him to the finish line, or will 402’s mom-entum make her a winner?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Vote Here: \u003ca href=\"https://t.co/NvXCYNigTJ\">https://t.co/NvXCYNigTJ\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://t.co/cvy6q18Arz\">pic.twitter.com/cvy6q18Arz\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>— Katmai National Park (@KatmaiNPS) \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/KatmaiNPS/status/1311395392274264070?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">September 30, 2020\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js\">https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>What to do:\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>\n\u003ca href=\"https://explore.org/meet-the-bears\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Learn about the 12 contestants.\u003c/a> Half are identified by numbers only, and the other half also have names. There’s 747 who “typically keeps his status by sheer size alone”; defending champ and quintessential momma bear, 435 Holly; and 32 Chunk, an 1,100-pound enigma who will “wait patiently to scavenge leftover salmon.” Each of the 12 has advantages ( like size), disadvantages (age, injury) and charms (fuzzy ears).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Once you know the bears a bit, \u003ca href=\"https://explore.org/fat-bear-week#bracket\">fill out a bracket\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://explore.org/fat-bear-week#bracket\">vote every day.\u003c/a> You must enter an email to vote, a security measure to prevent miscreants from casting multiple votes on the same day. Don’t mess with the integrity of Fat Bear Week, lest the wrath of the entire nature-loving internet reign down upon thee. I mean, c’mon, give us this one nice thing!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/c3sfTvciVd8'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/c3sfTvciVd8'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://explore.org/livecams/brown-bears\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Watch the Brooks River webcams\u003c/a>. Fat Bear Week’s main attraction. You’ll see bears fish, swim and, well, chill. You’ll see salmon jump, gulls twitter. There’s even an underwater camera. Sometimes you’ll log on and no bears will be present at the falls, but you’ll find yourself exhaling at the serenity of flowing water and an open sky. Other times you’ll find a bear lumbering up the river, and you’ll lean into your screen, hypnotized by the rhythmic motion of their massive haunches.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.nps.gov/katm/learn/photosmultimedia/brown-bear-frequently-asked-questions.htm#1\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Devour the exhaustive bear FAQ\u003c/a> at the Katmai National Park website and attend one of the live Q & A sessions \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcWTPFnqOLo\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">on YouTube\u003c/a> with Katmai National Park rangers. Questions about “bears, salmon, and Katmai” are welcome.\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\">\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">5/ A Salmon in Every Paw (Holly), by Kyle Brittain \u003ca href=\"https://t.co/a7PcSrgK4v\">pic.twitter.com/a7PcSrgK4v\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>— explore.org (@exploreorg) \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/exploreorg/status/1310684475320229888?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">September 28, 2020\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js\">https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A full schedule of events is pinned to the top of the comments section \u003ca href=\"https://explore.org/livecams/brown-bears\">on the Explore.org web cam.\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To get the most out of Fat Bear Week, join the water cooler conversation by following the hashtags #FatBearWeek and #BearCam and \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/exploreorg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Explore.org\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/KatmaiNPS\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Katmai National Park\u003c/a> on social media. You can also chat in the comments section on the live bearcam, the internet version of a trailside scrum of humans observing a rarely seen animal in the distance, everyone stopped in communal awe.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"slug": "raising-peregrine-falcon-chicks-is-a-real-cliff-hanger",
"title": "Watch These Peregrine Falcons Become Fierce Parents",
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"content": "\u003cp>[dl_subscribe]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Grinnell, a male peregrine falcon, looked up from his nest and started screaming. It was late March and he was taking a turn warming the four eggs he and his partner, Annie, were caring for in their home atop the bell tower at UC Berkeley. A young female peregrine falcon, quite a bit larger than Grinnell, was lurking on the ledge above him. Young peregrine falcons will often come around the site where a pair is already nesting to check it out and plot a possible takeover. She walked right up to Grinnell in the nest and shrieked almost in his face. Grinnell spread his wings wide and swiftly chased her off the tower.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Grinnell had reason to be territorial. He and Annie have been raising chicks on \u003ca href=\"https://visit.berkeley.edu/campus-tourscampanile-tour/\">this 307-foot tower\u003c/a> since 2017.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1970077\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Grinnell_pushes_peregrine_falcon_away.gif\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-1970077 size-full\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Grinnell_pushes_peregrine_falcon_away.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Grinnell (right) pushes away a young female peregrine falcon who checked out the bell tower while Grinnell was keeping his eggs warm. \u003ccite>(Cal Falcons)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Peregrine Falcons Love Cities\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Peregrine falcons \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/1944037/peregrine-falcons-are-feathered-fighter-jets-basically\">are the fastest animals in the world\u003c/a>: When in hot pursuit of a pigeon or other bird to pluck from midair they can reach 240 miles per hour — faster than a single engine plane. But even these raptor superstars need to settle down with a mate and have some babies to whom they can pass on their love for meat. When they do, they often pick a tall building in a city. Peregrine falcons regularly make their homes in cities across the United States, from \u003ca href=\"https://www.dec.ny.gov/animals/7059.html#:~:text=Peregrine%20falcons%20are%20listed%20as,DDE)%20residues%20in%20their%20prey.&text=Peregrines%20first%20returned%20to%20nest,New%20York%20City%20in%201983.\">New York\u003c/a> to \u003ca href=\"https://chicagoperegrineprogram.squarespace.com/\">Chicago\u003c/a> to \u003ca href=\"https://www.pge.com/en_US/residential/in-your-community/local-environment/peregrine-falcons/peregrine-falcons.page\">San Francisco\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1970084\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Campanile_Pedal_Born_Pictures_1920.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1970084\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Campanile_Pedal_Born_Pictures_1920.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1080\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Campanile_Pedal_Born_Pictures_1920.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Campanile_Pedal_Born_Pictures_1920-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Campanile_Pedal_Born_Pictures_1920-1020x574.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Campanile_Pedal_Born_Pictures_1920-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Campanile_Pedal_Born_Pictures_1920-768x432.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Campanile_Pedal_Born_Pictures_1920-1536x864.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Peregrine falcons love tall buildings, which mimic the cliffs they nest on in the wild. Peregrine pair Annie and Grinnell live atop the 307-foot bell tower on the UC Berkeley campus, affectionately known as the Campanile. \u003ccite>(Pedal Born Pictures)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“It’s serendipity that cities mimic what peregrines need and are looking for in a habitat,” said bird biologist Sean Peterson, a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley who helped set up \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmjo8Rlp6q98TZlG8TDF4GQ\">video cameras atop the bell tower\u003c/a> last year to monitor Annie and Grinnell and share their comings and goings with the public live on the web. “Cities have a lot of prey animals — pigeons especially. And then they have a lot of fake cliff faces for them to nest on: all these tall buildings. And that gives them protection from predators and lots of places for them to hunt.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1970078\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Grinnell_flies_off_bell_tower.gif\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1970078\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Grinnell_flies_off_bell_tower.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Male peregrine falcon Grinnell flies off the Campanile on the UC Berkeley campus. Tall buildings give peregrines a perch from which to hunt small birds like pigeons. \u003ccite>(Cal Falcons)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>When peregrines nest in the wild, they look for a ledge high up on a cliff.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There might be a shelf that’s 500 feet off of the ground and 300 feet down from the top, and no mammal’s going to get to it,” said raptor expert Doug Bell, wildlife program manager at the East Bay Regional Park District and, together with Peterson, part of a \u003ca href=\"https://calfalcons.berkeley.edu/people/\">small team\u003c/a> that has been giving Annie and Grinnell a helping hand. “No fisher, no raccoon, no bobcat is going to be able to get to the site.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Grinnell and Annie have raised four groups of chicks, called clutches, on the bell tower, affectionately known as the Campanile (camp-ah-NEE-lee), starting in 2017. That’s when Bell, Peterson, his wife, bird biologist Lynn Schofield, and volunteer raptor nest monitor Mary Malec discovered Annie nesting at the top of the tower on a wet sandbag and built her a nest out of a plastic tray filled with pea gravel. Gravel is similar to the pebbles or sandy soil they lay their eggs on in the wild and drains well, which allows the parents to keep their eggs warm. Though two eggs were lost by the time nest construction took place, two chicks were born from the eggs that survived.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Annie and Grinnell Put on a Show\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Last year the team started operating two \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmjo8Rlp6q98TZlG8TDF4GQ\">video cameras that broadcast the pair’s parenting live through the web\u003c/a>. Peterson and Schofield share the happenings in the nest via the \u003ca href=\"https://calfalcons.berkeley.edu/\">Cal Falcons\u003c/a> channel on YouTube and on social media. The raising of Annie and Grinnell’s two chicks last year and three chicks this year drew avid fans and tens of thousands of views.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1970079\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Annie_and_Grinnell_mate.gif\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1970079\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Annie_and_Grinnell_mate.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">In early March, Grinnell mated with Annie atop the Campanile. The male lands on the female’s back, trying to keep his large talons from hurting her and they mate for a few seconds. \u003ccite>(Cal Falcons)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The cameras beam the birds’ behaviors directly to scientists, complementing the information they can gather by patiently watching a cliff all day with a pair of binoculars.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You start to get a better window into what is going on at the nest,” said Bell.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Researchers can watch peregrines laying their eggs, for example, and they can know more precisely what small birds they feed their young.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This year, Annie and Grinnell cemented their celebrity status by performing in a three-camera, rather than two-camera, reality show, with one video feed documenting their every move in the nest.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1970085\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Peregrine_falcons_three_cameras_Cal_Falcons_1920.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1970085\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Peregrine_falcons_three_cameras_Cal_Falcons_1920.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1080\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Peregrine_falcons_three_cameras_Cal_Falcons_1920.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Peregrine_falcons_three_cameras_Cal_Falcons_1920-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Peregrine_falcons_three_cameras_Cal_Falcons_1920-1020x574.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Peregrine_falcons_three_cameras_Cal_Falcons_1920-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Peregrine_falcons_three_cameras_Cal_Falcons_1920-768x432.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Peregrine_falcons_three_cameras_Cal_Falcons_1920-1536x864.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Scientists have set up three cameras atop UC Berkeley’s Campanile to watch peregrine falcon pair Grinnell (left, in his nest) and Annie (top right, with the campus and the cities of Berkeley and Albany in the background) and their chicks. In the right bottom photo, Annie (in the back) and two of the three chicks she raised this year. \u003ccite>(Cal Falcons)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Annie’s first egg \u003ca href=\"https://youtu.be/Nfq9LMrmscs\">plopped right out of her\u003c/a> in early March. In the wild, peregrines don’t build a nest of twigs and leaves; they lay their eggs on a ledge in a cliff into which the female has scratched a bowl-shaped depression called a scrape to prevent her eggs from rolling away. Fans had watched Annie do the same thing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s really cool to see,” said Bell. “She’ll lay with her breast down and she pushes herself into the soil, and you can see her take her feet and she’ll literally scrape the soil out from underneath her and push it towards her tail.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Detective Work Leads to a Success Story\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The four eggs Annie laid in March tell an extraordinary story when you consider that 60 years ago these raptors were on the brink of extinction. In the 1950s and 1960s, they nearly disappeared from the United States.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Scientists had to do some sleuthing to figure out the cause — and they zeroed in on the eggs. Rachel Carson’s book “Silent Spring,” in 1962, raised the specter that the pesticide DDT harmed eggs. With their rusty-red mottled patterns, peregrines’ eggs are so beautiful that private collectors had been taking them from nests as far back as the 19th century. Many of those eggs ended up in museums.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1970086\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Peregrine_falcon_eggs_at_Museum_Vertebrate_Zoology_1920.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1970086\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Peregrine_falcon_eggs_at_Museum_Vertebrate_Zoology_1920.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1080\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Peregrine_falcon_eggs_at_Museum_Vertebrate_Zoology_1920.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Peregrine_falcon_eggs_at_Museum_Vertebrate_Zoology_1920-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Peregrine_falcon_eggs_at_Museum_Vertebrate_Zoology_1920-1020x574.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Peregrine_falcon_eggs_at_Museum_Vertebrate_Zoology_1920-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Peregrine_falcon_eggs_at_Museum_Vertebrate_Zoology_1920-768x432.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Peregrine_falcon_eggs_at_Museum_Vertebrate_Zoology_1920-1536x864.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Peregrine falcon eggs in the collection of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at UC Berkeley. \u003ccite>(Josh Cassidy/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>By measuring the calcium content and thickness of eggshells in museum collections, they were able to determine that eggs were thinning and that the culprit was likely DDT.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Our specimens go back to the late 1800s, early 1900s, so you have this historical material to be able to compare the eggs before and after the introduction of DDT,” said Carla Cicero, curator of birds at the \u003ca href=\"https://mvz.berkeley.edu/\">Museum of Vertebrate Zoology\u003c/a> at UC Berkeley, one of the institutions whose collections contributed to the research.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1970089\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Broken_peregrine_falcon_egg_Museum_Vertebrate_Zoology_1920.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1970089\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Broken_peregrine_falcon_egg_Museum_Vertebrate_Zoology_1920.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1080\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Broken_peregrine_falcon_egg_Museum_Vertebrate_Zoology_1920.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Broken_peregrine_falcon_egg_Museum_Vertebrate_Zoology_1920-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Broken_peregrine_falcon_egg_Museum_Vertebrate_Zoology_1920-1020x574.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Broken_peregrine_falcon_egg_Museum_Vertebrate_Zoology_1920-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Broken_peregrine_falcon_egg_Museum_Vertebrate_Zoology_1920-768x432.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Broken_peregrine_falcon_egg_Museum_Vertebrate_Zoology_1920-1536x864.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A broken peregrine falcon egg at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at UC Berkeley. \u003ccite>(Josh Cassidy/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The pesticide DDT, used heavily in the 1940s and until 1972 to control mosquitoes, bed bugs and agricultural pests, accumulated in peregrine’s bodies. It thwarted the development of embryos in the eggs. And it reduced the amount of calcium in the females, which resulted in eggshells so thin that they broke when parents sat on them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Other times, they were just so fragile that even just a small rock within the nest site or some debris would cause a hole in the egg,” said raptor ecologist Joel “Jeep” Pagel, who as a peregrine falcon specialist for the U.S. Forest Service starting in the early 1980s, and later for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, worked throughout the western U.S. to help their numbers rebound.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1970080\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Peregrine_falcon_flies_towards_Joel_Pagel.gif\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1970080\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Peregrine_falcon_flies_towards_Joel_Pagel.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Raptor ecologist Joel “Jeep” Pagel puts up his hand to keep back a peregrine that flew toward him. Pagel was placing bands with ID numbers on the peregrine’s chicks in a nest outside Cabrillo National Monument in San Diego in 2015. \u003ccite>(National Park Service)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Pagel would rappel down cliffs, removed eggs from their parents and replaced them with plaster of Paris replicas for them to incubate. Alarmed peregrine parents would sometimes attack Pagel, shredding his T-shirt and scratching his back, shoulders and even his face with their large talons. He placed the eggs carefully into \u003ca href=\"https://www.fs.usda.gov/inside-fs/incubator-helped-saved-peregrine-falcons-extinction\">an incubator\u003c/a> and took them to different research institutions to be hatched in captivity. When the chicks hatched, he returned to nests and placed them with their own parents or with fosters.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It worked so well that oftentimes the adults were bringing prey items into the nest site to the chicks even before my rope was all the way up the cliff,” said Pagel. “There was never an instance where this type of fostering did not take. The birds were very efficient and they raised those youngsters as if they were their own, and those youngsters fledged and helped increase the population.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1970087\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Peregrine_falcon_chicks_banded_at_Cabrillo_1920.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1970087\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Peregrine_falcon_chicks_banded_at_Cabrillo_1920.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1080\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Peregrine_falcon_chicks_banded_at_Cabrillo_1920.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Peregrine_falcon_chicks_banded_at_Cabrillo_1920-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Peregrine_falcon_chicks_banded_at_Cabrillo_1920-1020x574.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Peregrine_falcon_chicks_banded_at_Cabrillo_1920-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Peregrine_falcon_chicks_banded_at_Cabrillo_1920-768x432.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Peregrine_falcon_chicks_banded_at_Cabrillo_1920-1536x864.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Raptor ecologist Joel “Jeep” Pagel placed a band with an ID on a peregrine falcon chick in a nest outside Cabrillo National Monument in San Diego in 2015. \u003ccite>(National Park Service)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“It’s a real success story,” said Bell.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 1999, the U.S. government took peregrine falcons off the federal endangered species list, though the raptors continue to be protected in California and elsewhere.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Back at the Campanile nest, it’s Annie who usually sits on the eggs, keeping them at 103 degrees Fahrenheit. Grinnell brings meat to her — pigeons, mourning doves — and takes a turn keeping the eggs warm while she eats.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Of their four eggs this year, one broke, which Bell said could be the result of lingering effects of DDT and its breakdown product, DDE.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Although it is much diluted, there are still some areas with fairly high concentrations in sediments that may resurface from time to time in our bays and coastal areas,” said Bell. “So it is conceivable that a falcon or fish could still get an occasional dose that would have a physiological effect.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Noisy Chicks Demand Their Meat\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After incubating for about a month, three white chicks hatched in April and they were hungry. In one early feeding caught on camera, Annie fed them tiny bits of meat that she plucked from a pigeon carcass and placed in their mouths. Grinnell hunts and stashes carcasses near the nest for Annie. So when the chicks are hungry, she disappears briefly and comes back with a chunk of meat, which Grinnell has already de-feathered. At mealtime, \u003ca href=\"https://youtu.be/1dNIuNUNoBI\">chicks scream nonstop\u003c/a>, making mealtime a raucous affair.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1970081\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Annie_feeds_chicks.gif\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1970081\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Annie_feeds_chicks.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Annie feeds her three chicks, which were only a few days old, small pieces of pigeon meat on April 21. \u003ccite>(Cal Falcons)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“Whereas with other smaller birds they try to keep quiet and not be noticed by predators, peregrines are in this situation where they basically don’t get penalized for making noise and bringing attention to themselves,” said Peterson. “So they can beg constantly for their parents to give them food.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And beg they did. Their parents obliged, making sure not to feed them bones or feathers, which chicks can’t digest. But by the time they were 10 days old, the chicks had fully developed a muscular organ called the crop, which crushes bones and feathers into little bits. The proof was a brown ball called a pellet that one of the chicks coughed up on prime time YouTube.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1970082\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Chick_coughs_up_pellet.gif\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1970082\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Chick_coughs_up_pellet.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">One of Annie and Grinnell’s 10-day-old chicks coughs up a pellet made of bits of feather and bone from the birds that its parents fed it. \u003ccite>(Cal Falcons)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The chicks grew quickly. They went through an awkward phase in which they had white feathers mixed in with the new brown ones. They practiced beating their large wings, fought noisily over food and \u003ca href=\"https://youtu.be/7TCkU0J_wLs\">chased moths together\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And then at the end of May, when they were about 40 days old, they took turns flying off the tower for the first time, a group of noisy fans waiting for them below to cheer them on and make sure they didn’t hurt themselves on the way down. One of Grinnell and Annie’s two chicks born in 2017 died when it hit a window on campus and another chick got stuck inside a building and needed to be rescued, Peterson said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1970083\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Annie_feeds_one_of_her_young.gif\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1970083\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Annie_feeds_one_of_her_young.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Female peregrine falcon Annie (right) feeds her 6-week-old daughter, Poppy, in early June. Even though Poppy had recently taken her first flight off the Campanile, she returned to visit her parents and demand a meal. Young peregrine falcons hang out around their parents’ nest for a month or longer after they fledge. \u003ccite>(Cal Falcons)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>This year, all three chicks fledged successfully. Because each one has been given a small band with a visible ID number, bird watchers can report sightings of the young and follow their journey. One of Annie and Grinnell’s 10 offspring, a female called Lawrencium, born in 2018, is known to be living on some prime Bay Area real estate: Alcatraz.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“She just had her first chicks this year,” said Peterson. “So Annie and Grinnell, we know, are grandparents now.”\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "High up in their 300-foot tower penthouse in Berkeley, falcon stars Annie and Grinnell's romance quickly gets real, as they face the tough demands of raising a family. The four eggs Annie lays tell a poignant story of the recovery of a species from the brink of extinction.",
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"title": "Watch These Peregrine Falcons Become Fierce Parents | KQED",
"description": "High up in their 300-foot tower penthouse in Berkeley, falcon stars Annie and Grinnell's romance quickly gets real, as they face the tough demands of raising a family. The four eggs Annie lays tell a poignant story of the recovery of a species from the brink of extinction.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Grinnell, a male peregrine falcon, looked up from his nest and started screaming. It was late March and he was taking a turn warming the four eggs he and his partner, Annie, were caring for in their home atop the bell tower at UC Berkeley. A young female peregrine falcon, quite a bit larger than Grinnell, was lurking on the ledge above him. Young peregrine falcons will often come around the site where a pair is already nesting to check it out and plot a possible takeover. She walked right up to Grinnell in the nest and shrieked almost in his face. Grinnell spread his wings wide and swiftly chased her off the tower.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Grinnell had reason to be territorial. He and Annie have been raising chicks on \u003ca href=\"https://visit.berkeley.edu/campus-tourscampanile-tour/\">this 307-foot tower\u003c/a> since 2017.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1970077\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Grinnell_pushes_peregrine_falcon_away.gif\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-1970077 size-full\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Grinnell_pushes_peregrine_falcon_away.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Grinnell (right) pushes away a young female peregrine falcon who checked out the bell tower while Grinnell was keeping his eggs warm. \u003ccite>(Cal Falcons)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Peregrine Falcons Love Cities\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Peregrine falcons \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/1944037/peregrine-falcons-are-feathered-fighter-jets-basically\">are the fastest animals in the world\u003c/a>: When in hot pursuit of a pigeon or other bird to pluck from midair they can reach 240 miles per hour — faster than a single engine plane. But even these raptor superstars need to settle down with a mate and have some babies to whom they can pass on their love for meat. When they do, they often pick a tall building in a city. Peregrine falcons regularly make their homes in cities across the United States, from \u003ca href=\"https://www.dec.ny.gov/animals/7059.html#:~:text=Peregrine%20falcons%20are%20listed%20as,DDE)%20residues%20in%20their%20prey.&text=Peregrines%20first%20returned%20to%20nest,New%20York%20City%20in%201983.\">New York\u003c/a> to \u003ca href=\"https://chicagoperegrineprogram.squarespace.com/\">Chicago\u003c/a> to \u003ca href=\"https://www.pge.com/en_US/residential/in-your-community/local-environment/peregrine-falcons/peregrine-falcons.page\">San Francisco\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1970084\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Campanile_Pedal_Born_Pictures_1920.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1970084\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Campanile_Pedal_Born_Pictures_1920.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1080\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Campanile_Pedal_Born_Pictures_1920.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Campanile_Pedal_Born_Pictures_1920-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Campanile_Pedal_Born_Pictures_1920-1020x574.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Campanile_Pedal_Born_Pictures_1920-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Campanile_Pedal_Born_Pictures_1920-768x432.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Campanile_Pedal_Born_Pictures_1920-1536x864.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Peregrine falcons love tall buildings, which mimic the cliffs they nest on in the wild. Peregrine pair Annie and Grinnell live atop the 307-foot bell tower on the UC Berkeley campus, affectionately known as the Campanile. \u003ccite>(Pedal Born Pictures)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“It’s serendipity that cities mimic what peregrines need and are looking for in a habitat,” said bird biologist Sean Peterson, a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley who helped set up \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmjo8Rlp6q98TZlG8TDF4GQ\">video cameras atop the bell tower\u003c/a> last year to monitor Annie and Grinnell and share their comings and goings with the public live on the web. “Cities have a lot of prey animals — pigeons especially. And then they have a lot of fake cliff faces for them to nest on: all these tall buildings. And that gives them protection from predators and lots of places for them to hunt.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1970078\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Grinnell_flies_off_bell_tower.gif\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1970078\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Grinnell_flies_off_bell_tower.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Male peregrine falcon Grinnell flies off the Campanile on the UC Berkeley campus. Tall buildings give peregrines a perch from which to hunt small birds like pigeons. \u003ccite>(Cal Falcons)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>When peregrines nest in the wild, they look for a ledge high up on a cliff.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There might be a shelf that’s 500 feet off of the ground and 300 feet down from the top, and no mammal’s going to get to it,” said raptor expert Doug Bell, wildlife program manager at the East Bay Regional Park District and, together with Peterson, part of a \u003ca href=\"https://calfalcons.berkeley.edu/people/\">small team\u003c/a> that has been giving Annie and Grinnell a helping hand. “No fisher, no raccoon, no bobcat is going to be able to get to the site.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Grinnell and Annie have raised four groups of chicks, called clutches, on the bell tower, affectionately known as the Campanile (camp-ah-NEE-lee), starting in 2017. That’s when Bell, Peterson, his wife, bird biologist Lynn Schofield, and volunteer raptor nest monitor Mary Malec discovered Annie nesting at the top of the tower on a wet sandbag and built her a nest out of a plastic tray filled with pea gravel. Gravel is similar to the pebbles or sandy soil they lay their eggs on in the wild and drains well, which allows the parents to keep their eggs warm. Though two eggs were lost by the time nest construction took place, two chicks were born from the eggs that survived.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Annie and Grinnell Put on a Show\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Last year the team started operating two \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmjo8Rlp6q98TZlG8TDF4GQ\">video cameras that broadcast the pair’s parenting live through the web\u003c/a>. Peterson and Schofield share the happenings in the nest via the \u003ca href=\"https://calfalcons.berkeley.edu/\">Cal Falcons\u003c/a> channel on YouTube and on social media. The raising of Annie and Grinnell’s two chicks last year and three chicks this year drew avid fans and tens of thousands of views.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1970079\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Annie_and_Grinnell_mate.gif\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1970079\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Annie_and_Grinnell_mate.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">In early March, Grinnell mated with Annie atop the Campanile. The male lands on the female’s back, trying to keep his large talons from hurting her and they mate for a few seconds. \u003ccite>(Cal Falcons)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The cameras beam the birds’ behaviors directly to scientists, complementing the information they can gather by patiently watching a cliff all day with a pair of binoculars.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You start to get a better window into what is going on at the nest,” said Bell.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Researchers can watch peregrines laying their eggs, for example, and they can know more precisely what small birds they feed their young.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This year, Annie and Grinnell cemented their celebrity status by performing in a three-camera, rather than two-camera, reality show, with one video feed documenting their every move in the nest.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1970085\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Peregrine_falcons_three_cameras_Cal_Falcons_1920.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1970085\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Peregrine_falcons_three_cameras_Cal_Falcons_1920.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1080\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Peregrine_falcons_three_cameras_Cal_Falcons_1920.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Peregrine_falcons_three_cameras_Cal_Falcons_1920-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Peregrine_falcons_three_cameras_Cal_Falcons_1920-1020x574.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Peregrine_falcons_three_cameras_Cal_Falcons_1920-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Peregrine_falcons_three_cameras_Cal_Falcons_1920-768x432.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Peregrine_falcons_three_cameras_Cal_Falcons_1920-1536x864.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Scientists have set up three cameras atop UC Berkeley’s Campanile to watch peregrine falcon pair Grinnell (left, in his nest) and Annie (top right, with the campus and the cities of Berkeley and Albany in the background) and their chicks. In the right bottom photo, Annie (in the back) and two of the three chicks she raised this year. \u003ccite>(Cal Falcons)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Annie’s first egg \u003ca href=\"https://youtu.be/Nfq9LMrmscs\">plopped right out of her\u003c/a> in early March. In the wild, peregrines don’t build a nest of twigs and leaves; they lay their eggs on a ledge in a cliff into which the female has scratched a bowl-shaped depression called a scrape to prevent her eggs from rolling away. Fans had watched Annie do the same thing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s really cool to see,” said Bell. “She’ll lay with her breast down and she pushes herself into the soil, and you can see her take her feet and she’ll literally scrape the soil out from underneath her and push it towards her tail.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Detective Work Leads to a Success Story\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The four eggs Annie laid in March tell an extraordinary story when you consider that 60 years ago these raptors were on the brink of extinction. In the 1950s and 1960s, they nearly disappeared from the United States.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Scientists had to do some sleuthing to figure out the cause — and they zeroed in on the eggs. Rachel Carson’s book “Silent Spring,” in 1962, raised the specter that the pesticide DDT harmed eggs. With their rusty-red mottled patterns, peregrines’ eggs are so beautiful that private collectors had been taking them from nests as far back as the 19th century. Many of those eggs ended up in museums.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1970086\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Peregrine_falcon_eggs_at_Museum_Vertebrate_Zoology_1920.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1970086\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Peregrine_falcon_eggs_at_Museum_Vertebrate_Zoology_1920.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1080\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Peregrine_falcon_eggs_at_Museum_Vertebrate_Zoology_1920.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Peregrine_falcon_eggs_at_Museum_Vertebrate_Zoology_1920-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Peregrine_falcon_eggs_at_Museum_Vertebrate_Zoology_1920-1020x574.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Peregrine_falcon_eggs_at_Museum_Vertebrate_Zoology_1920-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Peregrine_falcon_eggs_at_Museum_Vertebrate_Zoology_1920-768x432.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Peregrine_falcon_eggs_at_Museum_Vertebrate_Zoology_1920-1536x864.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Peregrine falcon eggs in the collection of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at UC Berkeley. \u003ccite>(Josh Cassidy/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>By measuring the calcium content and thickness of eggshells in museum collections, they were able to determine that eggs were thinning and that the culprit was likely DDT.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Our specimens go back to the late 1800s, early 1900s, so you have this historical material to be able to compare the eggs before and after the introduction of DDT,” said Carla Cicero, curator of birds at the \u003ca href=\"https://mvz.berkeley.edu/\">Museum of Vertebrate Zoology\u003c/a> at UC Berkeley, one of the institutions whose collections contributed to the research.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1970089\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Broken_peregrine_falcon_egg_Museum_Vertebrate_Zoology_1920.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1970089\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Broken_peregrine_falcon_egg_Museum_Vertebrate_Zoology_1920.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1080\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Broken_peregrine_falcon_egg_Museum_Vertebrate_Zoology_1920.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Broken_peregrine_falcon_egg_Museum_Vertebrate_Zoology_1920-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Broken_peregrine_falcon_egg_Museum_Vertebrate_Zoology_1920-1020x574.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Broken_peregrine_falcon_egg_Museum_Vertebrate_Zoology_1920-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Broken_peregrine_falcon_egg_Museum_Vertebrate_Zoology_1920-768x432.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Broken_peregrine_falcon_egg_Museum_Vertebrate_Zoology_1920-1536x864.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A broken peregrine falcon egg at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at UC Berkeley. \u003ccite>(Josh Cassidy/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The pesticide DDT, used heavily in the 1940s and until 1972 to control mosquitoes, bed bugs and agricultural pests, accumulated in peregrine’s bodies. It thwarted the development of embryos in the eggs. And it reduced the amount of calcium in the females, which resulted in eggshells so thin that they broke when parents sat on them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Other times, they were just so fragile that even just a small rock within the nest site or some debris would cause a hole in the egg,” said raptor ecologist Joel “Jeep” Pagel, who as a peregrine falcon specialist for the U.S. Forest Service starting in the early 1980s, and later for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, worked throughout the western U.S. to help their numbers rebound.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1970080\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Peregrine_falcon_flies_towards_Joel_Pagel.gif\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1970080\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Peregrine_falcon_flies_towards_Joel_Pagel.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Raptor ecologist Joel “Jeep” Pagel puts up his hand to keep back a peregrine that flew toward him. Pagel was placing bands with ID numbers on the peregrine’s chicks in a nest outside Cabrillo National Monument in San Diego in 2015. \u003ccite>(National Park Service)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Pagel would rappel down cliffs, removed eggs from their parents and replaced them with plaster of Paris replicas for them to incubate. Alarmed peregrine parents would sometimes attack Pagel, shredding his T-shirt and scratching his back, shoulders and even his face with their large talons. He placed the eggs carefully into \u003ca href=\"https://www.fs.usda.gov/inside-fs/incubator-helped-saved-peregrine-falcons-extinction\">an incubator\u003c/a> and took them to different research institutions to be hatched in captivity. When the chicks hatched, he returned to nests and placed them with their own parents or with fosters.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It worked so well that oftentimes the adults were bringing prey items into the nest site to the chicks even before my rope was all the way up the cliff,” said Pagel. “There was never an instance where this type of fostering did not take. The birds were very efficient and they raised those youngsters as if they were their own, and those youngsters fledged and helped increase the population.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1970087\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Peregrine_falcon_chicks_banded_at_Cabrillo_1920.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1970087\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Peregrine_falcon_chicks_banded_at_Cabrillo_1920.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1080\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Peregrine_falcon_chicks_banded_at_Cabrillo_1920.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Peregrine_falcon_chicks_banded_at_Cabrillo_1920-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Peregrine_falcon_chicks_banded_at_Cabrillo_1920-1020x574.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Peregrine_falcon_chicks_banded_at_Cabrillo_1920-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Peregrine_falcon_chicks_banded_at_Cabrillo_1920-768x432.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Peregrine_falcon_chicks_banded_at_Cabrillo_1920-1536x864.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Raptor ecologist Joel “Jeep” Pagel placed a band with an ID on a peregrine falcon chick in a nest outside Cabrillo National Monument in San Diego in 2015. \u003ccite>(National Park Service)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“It’s a real success story,” said Bell.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 1999, the U.S. government took peregrine falcons off the federal endangered species list, though the raptors continue to be protected in California and elsewhere.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Back at the Campanile nest, it’s Annie who usually sits on the eggs, keeping them at 103 degrees Fahrenheit. Grinnell brings meat to her — pigeons, mourning doves — and takes a turn keeping the eggs warm while she eats.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Of their four eggs this year, one broke, which Bell said could be the result of lingering effects of DDT and its breakdown product, DDE.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Although it is much diluted, there are still some areas with fairly high concentrations in sediments that may resurface from time to time in our bays and coastal areas,” said Bell. “So it is conceivable that a falcon or fish could still get an occasional dose that would have a physiological effect.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Noisy Chicks Demand Their Meat\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After incubating for about a month, three white chicks hatched in April and they were hungry. In one early feeding caught on camera, Annie fed them tiny bits of meat that she plucked from a pigeon carcass and placed in their mouths. Grinnell hunts and stashes carcasses near the nest for Annie. So when the chicks are hungry, she disappears briefly and comes back with a chunk of meat, which Grinnell has already de-feathered. At mealtime, \u003ca href=\"https://youtu.be/1dNIuNUNoBI\">chicks scream nonstop\u003c/a>, making mealtime a raucous affair.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1970081\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Annie_feeds_chicks.gif\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1970081\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Annie_feeds_chicks.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Annie feeds her three chicks, which were only a few days old, small pieces of pigeon meat on April 21. \u003ccite>(Cal Falcons)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“Whereas with other smaller birds they try to keep quiet and not be noticed by predators, peregrines are in this situation where they basically don’t get penalized for making noise and bringing attention to themselves,” said Peterson. “So they can beg constantly for their parents to give them food.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And beg they did. Their parents obliged, making sure not to feed them bones or feathers, which chicks can’t digest. But by the time they were 10 days old, the chicks had fully developed a muscular organ called the crop, which crushes bones and feathers into little bits. The proof was a brown ball called a pellet that one of the chicks coughed up on prime time YouTube.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1970082\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Chick_coughs_up_pellet.gif\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1970082\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Chick_coughs_up_pellet.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">One of Annie and Grinnell’s 10-day-old chicks coughs up a pellet made of bits of feather and bone from the birds that its parents fed it. \u003ccite>(Cal Falcons)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The chicks grew quickly. They went through an awkward phase in which they had white feathers mixed in with the new brown ones. They practiced beating their large wings, fought noisily over food and \u003ca href=\"https://youtu.be/7TCkU0J_wLs\">chased moths together\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And then at the end of May, when they were about 40 days old, they took turns flying off the tower for the first time, a group of noisy fans waiting for them below to cheer them on and make sure they didn’t hurt themselves on the way down. One of Grinnell and Annie’s two chicks born in 2017 died when it hit a window on campus and another chick got stuck inside a building and needed to be rescued, Peterson said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1970083\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 500px\">\u003ca href=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Annie_feeds_one_of_her_young.gif\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1970083\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/10/DL717_Annie_feeds_one_of_her_young.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Female peregrine falcon Annie (right) feeds her 6-week-old daughter, Poppy, in early June. Even though Poppy had recently taken her first flight off the Campanile, she returned to visit her parents and demand a meal. Young peregrine falcons hang out around their parents’ nest for a month or longer after they fledge. \u003ccite>(Cal Falcons)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>This year, all three chicks fledged successfully. Because each one has been given a small band with a visible ID number, bird watchers can report sightings of the young and follow their journey. One of Annie and Grinnell’s 10 offspring, a female called Lawrencium, born in 2018, is known to be living on some prime Bay Area real estate: Alcatraz.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“She just had her first chicks this year,” said Peterson. “So Annie and Grinnell, we know, are grandparents now.”\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>[dl_subscribe]Next time you see a big spider sitting in the middle of its web, before you scream, run away or squash it, maybe pause and consider for a moment all of the wondrous things it can do with that itsy-bitsy brain. Most spiders have a brain no larger than a poppy seed, but with this modest cerebral endowment, they not only construct intricate insect traps, they expertly expand their senses far beyond the limits of their bodies, using their webs as a physical extension of their perceptual abilities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Imagine if you were able to extend microphones out, radiating from your ears, extending the capability of your hearing,” said Francis Windram, a Ph.D. candidate and expert in spider foraging at Imperial College London.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The more than 48,000 spider species have done well for themselves, evolutionarily speaking. They create a wide variety of web styles, though some — like jumping spiders — don’t spin webs at all. There are over 4,000 different species of orb weaver spiders alone; these are the eight-legged spinners that create the famous spiral-shaped webs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1969756\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 590px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1969756\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/DL716_juvenile_cross_orb_weaver.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"590\" height=\"331\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A juvenile cross orb weaver. Even though they are extremely small, orb weavers are born with the ability to spin intricate, spiral-shaped webs. \u003ccite>(Mike Seely/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Anyone who’s watched orb weavers in action has seen them use their exquisite creations to deftly ensnare flying insects. Impressive as this, the webs function as much more than deadly traps.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Mostly nocturnal, orb weavers also happen to be almost completely blind. These species are only able to see light, dark and a little movement, but they are somehow able to quickly navigate their webs, pinpointing their unlucky victims and binding them in silk, a meal saved for later.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Webs play an integral role in everything an orb weaver does. Many species every day eat their silk, recycle it inside their body, and reconstruct the web overnight. When spiders are hungry, they can tighten the web’s strands and even adjust its size and shape, depending on what size of prey they’re in the mood for.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Knowing that beetles and moths use pheromones to communicate, UC Berkeley Ph.D. candidate Ashley Adams wondered whether spiders could use chemical cues to distinguish the webs of their own species from those of other types of spiders.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To make sure they weren’t just checking the web by feel, she soaked cotton threads in solutions made from extracts of webs spun by different species.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The male long-jawed orb weaver spiders in her lab consistently chose the threads treated with extracts from their own species, avoiding those doused with web extracts from other kinds of spiders, suggesting they do sense chemicals with their legs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1969753\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1969753\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/DL716_cross_orb_weaver5-800x450.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/DL716_cross_orb_weaver5-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/DL716_cross_orb_weaver5-1020x574.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/DL716_cross_orb_weaver5-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/DL716_cross_orb_weaver5-768x432.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/DL716_cross_orb_weaver5-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/DL716_cross_orb_weaver5-2048x1152.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/DL716_cross_orb_weaver5-1920x1080.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">An adult cross orb weaver spider lying in wait at the center of its web. \u003ccite>(Josh Cassidy/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Adams’ soon-to-be-published study adds to the already impressive list of complex behaviors for these tiny-brained animals. We know that many mammals and birds seem to be able to construct a mental representation of space, but it’s rare for invertebrates (bees, octopuses and cuttlefish are exceptions). Orb weavers can do so much with their miniscule brains, some researchers ask the question: Is a spider’s web an extension of its mind?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Adams agrees that “at least from a neurological perspective, [the web] is this extremely effective extension of their senses that has helped them succeed in the environment and become so prevalent.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But others, like biologist Hilton Japyassú of the Federal University of Bahia, Brazil, takes this idea a step further, suggesting that orb weavers use their webs as a form of extended cognition, outsourcing advanced mental tasks like problem-solving and memory. For example, once they have killed and wrapped their prey, a spider can store the prey for later, then easily find it again. The way they relocate the insects they have killed looks an awful lot like they are remembering, Japyassú says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Recently, he and his colleagues set up an experiment in which they manipulated the web and removed prey the spider had wrapped up in silk to see how the spider reacted. By limiting the way the animals sensed the world around them, the scientists were able to directly test the “thinking web” idea. They found that when the webs were manipulated, the spiders changed their behavior. For one, they searched for the prey taken by the researchers. Also, if their webs were altered, or they encountered different-sized prey, they could adjust their foraging behavior by changing their capturing technique.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The researchers concluded that this two-way connection between the web and the spider’s behavior suggests that the web is indeed a way for the spider to process information\u003cb>, \u003c/b>reserving precious brain power for other necessary and complex tasks like the actual capture of prey. For tasks that are more memory-intensive, like navigating or relocating prey, they don’t need to remember every single thread they have spun — just a few previous steps.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1969758\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 590px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1969758\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/DL716_cross_orb_weaver_prey_capture2.gif\" alt=\"Cross orb weaver prey capture\" width=\"590\" height=\"331\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A cross orb weaver spider quickly wraps its prey after paralyzing it with a dose of venom. Orb weavers are mostly blind, but they use their webs to help remember where they keep their wrapped-up food. \u003ccite>(Mike Seely/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The idea of extended cognition — that tools like writing, computers, or phones are extensions of our thought processes — is not new to philosophers or scientists. But if you start defining cognition in the traditional sense, “there is no possibility to expand [it] to anywhere else outside of human experience,” Japyassú said. “I prefer to define it in a very simple way; that … cognition helps you to survive, and it’s related to information processing.” By this definition, the web is an extension of the spider’s thought processes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Researchers don’t all fully agree that the webs actually are a part of a spider’s thinking. How do you tell that the spider has an actual plan, or if it is just exhibiting instinctual behavior when it builds its web? With current technology, we can’t see inside the tiny working brain of the orb weaver, so we are left with what behavioral observation can tell us.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Although some philosophers have a problem with the idea that an animal has a mind at all, Japyassú says scientists researching animal cognition “are more open-minded because they can observe such different ways of thinking in other animals.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Spider researchers, said Japyassú, “see these spiders doing things that would seem impossible for a tiny animal.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So, he says, the logical place to look for where all that thinking is happening is in the web.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1969757\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 590px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1969757\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/DL716_orb_web_sunlight.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"590\" height=\"331\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The signature spiral-shaped webs of the orb weaver extend the senses of a spider far beyond the limits of its body. \u003ccite>(Mike Seely/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "Most spiders have a brain no larger than a poppy seed, but with this modest cerebral endowment, they not only construct intricate insect traps, they expertly expand their senses far beyond the limits of their bodies.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Next time you see a big spider sitting in the middle of its web, before you scream, run away or squash it, maybe pause and consider for a moment all of the wondrous things it can do with that itsy-bitsy brain. Most spiders have a brain no larger than a poppy seed, but with this modest cerebral endowment, they not only construct intricate insect traps, they expertly expand their senses far beyond the limits of their bodies, using their webs as a physical extension of their perceptual abilities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Imagine if you were able to extend microphones out, radiating from your ears, extending the capability of your hearing,” said Francis Windram, a Ph.D. candidate and expert in spider foraging at Imperial College London.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The more than 48,000 spider species have done well for themselves, evolutionarily speaking. They create a wide variety of web styles, though some — like jumping spiders — don’t spin webs at all. There are over 4,000 different species of orb weaver spiders alone; these are the eight-legged spinners that create the famous spiral-shaped webs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1969756\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 590px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1969756\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/DL716_juvenile_cross_orb_weaver.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"590\" height=\"331\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A juvenile cross orb weaver. Even though they are extremely small, orb weavers are born with the ability to spin intricate, spiral-shaped webs. \u003ccite>(Mike Seely/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Anyone who’s watched orb weavers in action has seen them use their exquisite creations to deftly ensnare flying insects. Impressive as this, the webs function as much more than deadly traps.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Mostly nocturnal, orb weavers also happen to be almost completely blind. These species are only able to see light, dark and a little movement, but they are somehow able to quickly navigate their webs, pinpointing their unlucky victims and binding them in silk, a meal saved for later.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Webs play an integral role in everything an orb weaver does. Many species every day eat their silk, recycle it inside their body, and reconstruct the web overnight. When spiders are hungry, they can tighten the web’s strands and even adjust its size and shape, depending on what size of prey they’re in the mood for.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Knowing that beetles and moths use pheromones to communicate, UC Berkeley Ph.D. candidate Ashley Adams wondered whether spiders could use chemical cues to distinguish the webs of their own species from those of other types of spiders.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To make sure they weren’t just checking the web by feel, she soaked cotton threads in solutions made from extracts of webs spun by different species.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The male long-jawed orb weaver spiders in her lab consistently chose the threads treated with extracts from their own species, avoiding those doused with web extracts from other kinds of spiders, suggesting they do sense chemicals with their legs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1969753\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1969753\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/DL716_cross_orb_weaver5-800x450.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/DL716_cross_orb_weaver5-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/DL716_cross_orb_weaver5-1020x574.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/DL716_cross_orb_weaver5-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/DL716_cross_orb_weaver5-768x432.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/DL716_cross_orb_weaver5-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/DL716_cross_orb_weaver5-2048x1152.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/DL716_cross_orb_weaver5-1920x1080.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">An adult cross orb weaver spider lying in wait at the center of its web. \u003ccite>(Josh Cassidy/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Adams’ soon-to-be-published study adds to the already impressive list of complex behaviors for these tiny-brained animals. We know that many mammals and birds seem to be able to construct a mental representation of space, but it’s rare for invertebrates (bees, octopuses and cuttlefish are exceptions). Orb weavers can do so much with their miniscule brains, some researchers ask the question: Is a spider’s web an extension of its mind?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Adams agrees that “at least from a neurological perspective, [the web] is this extremely effective extension of their senses that has helped them succeed in the environment and become so prevalent.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But others, like biologist Hilton Japyassú of the Federal University of Bahia, Brazil, takes this idea a step further, suggesting that orb weavers use their webs as a form of extended cognition, outsourcing advanced mental tasks like problem-solving and memory. For example, once they have killed and wrapped their prey, a spider can store the prey for later, then easily find it again. The way they relocate the insects they have killed looks an awful lot like they are remembering, Japyassú says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Recently, he and his colleagues set up an experiment in which they manipulated the web and removed prey the spider had wrapped up in silk to see how the spider reacted. By limiting the way the animals sensed the world around them, the scientists were able to directly test the “thinking web” idea. They found that when the webs were manipulated, the spiders changed their behavior. For one, they searched for the prey taken by the researchers. Also, if their webs were altered, or they encountered different-sized prey, they could adjust their foraging behavior by changing their capturing technique.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The researchers concluded that this two-way connection between the web and the spider’s behavior suggests that the web is indeed a way for the spider to process information\u003cb>, \u003c/b>reserving precious brain power for other necessary and complex tasks like the actual capture of prey. For tasks that are more memory-intensive, like navigating or relocating prey, they don’t need to remember every single thread they have spun — just a few previous steps.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1969758\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 590px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1969758\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/DL716_cross_orb_weaver_prey_capture2.gif\" alt=\"Cross orb weaver prey capture\" width=\"590\" height=\"331\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A cross orb weaver spider quickly wraps its prey after paralyzing it with a dose of venom. Orb weavers are mostly blind, but they use their webs to help remember where they keep their wrapped-up food. \u003ccite>(Mike Seely/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The idea of extended cognition — that tools like writing, computers, or phones are extensions of our thought processes — is not new to philosophers or scientists. But if you start defining cognition in the traditional sense, “there is no possibility to expand [it] to anywhere else outside of human experience,” Japyassú said. “I prefer to define it in a very simple way; that … cognition helps you to survive, and it’s related to information processing.” By this definition, the web is an extension of the spider’s thought processes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Researchers don’t all fully agree that the webs actually are a part of a spider’s thinking. How do you tell that the spider has an actual plan, or if it is just exhibiting instinctual behavior when it builds its web? With current technology, we can’t see inside the tiny working brain of the orb weaver, so we are left with what behavioral observation can tell us.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Although some philosophers have a problem with the idea that an animal has a mind at all, Japyassú says scientists researching animal cognition “are more open-minded because they can observe such different ways of thinking in other animals.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Spider researchers, said Japyassú, “see these spiders doing things that would seem impossible for a tiny animal.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So, he says, the logical place to look for where all that thinking is happening is in the web.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1969757\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 590px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1969757\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/DL716_orb_web_sunlight.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"590\" height=\"331\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The signature spiral-shaped webs of the orb weaver extend the senses of a spider far beyond the limits of its body. \u003ccite>(Mike Seely/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"title": "California Wildfires Scorch Redwoods and Threaten Condors. But There's Still Hope",
"headTitle": "California Wildfires Scorch Redwoods and Threaten Condors. But There’s Still Hope | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>At 3 a.m. on Friday morning, biologist Kelly Sorenson was awake, nervously watching the live webcam feed of a California condor nest on the Big Sur coast. He could see a 5-month-old chick, still unable to fly, as the flames of the Dolan Fire came into view.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was just terrifying,” Sorenson said. “Having the livestreaming webcams was both a blessing and a nightmare because we had to watch the fire as it burned through the canyon.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>California’s massive wildfires have burned more than \u003ca href=\"https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/california-fire-map/\">1,000 homes and buildings\u003c/a> over the last week, destroying irreplaceable possessions and memories for some residents. At the same time, the fires are also threatening some of the state’s rare ecosystems and wildlife.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Biologists are watching closely as the blazes encroach on old-growth redwood trees in Northern and Central California, where some giants are more than 1,000 years old and are known by individual names. While some seem to have been spared, Big Basin State Park — the oldest state park in California — saw significant fire damage.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, biologists say there are reasons to be hopeful, because redwoods have incredibly thick bark that can withstand wildfires. Even fully charred trees can sprout again.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The larger question is whether ecosystems can fully bounce back after extreme fires given that the climate change, already driving the current wildfires, can also make recovery difficult through heat stress and drought.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For the endangered California condors, recovery is still tenuous. In 1987, \u003ca href=\"https://www.nps.gov/articles/california-condor-recovery.htm\">just 27 birds remained\u003c/a>. Scientists brought them into captivity to begin a breeding program. Today, there are about 100 condors free-flying on California’s Central Coast. The \u003ca href=\"https://www.ventanaws.org/california-condors.html\">Ventana Wildlife Society\u003c/a>, where Sorenson is executive director, has been carefully tracking and releasing them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The massive birds, with a 9-foot wingspan, are still threatened by lead poisoning since they feed on the carcasses of animals that have lead bullet fragments from hunters.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Of the eight condor nests with chicks this year, Sorenson says five are within the fire zone.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Even just four or five birds would be a huge loss,” said Sorenson. “It’s just really nerve-wracking now, not knowing.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, Sorenson is hopeful some chicks made it. In 2008, condor chicks survived a wildfire in Big Sur, protected by the tall redwood trees they nested in.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We were convinced there was no way the chicks could survive the fire,” he said. “Sure enough, a chick survived and we named it Phoenix.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Redwood trees are built to survive fires, insulated by bark up to a foot thick. While lightning-caused fires aren’t as common in coastal redwood habitat as they are elsewhere in California, burning is still a natural cycle in the ecosystem. Native American tribes often set regular fires to shape the landscape and encourage certain plants to grow.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Because of their resilience, I feel a lot more hopeful than super worried about the trees,” said Kristen Shive, director of science for \u003ca href=\"https://www.savetheredwoods.org/\">Save the Redwoods League\u003c/a>. “The trees really are so incredibly tough when it comes to fire. Most of them will persist and survive.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even trees that look significantly scorched are still alive and can regrow from their base. Many of the largest redwood trees growing today show burn scars.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If a fire is hot enough to consume the entire crown of a tree, in a pine tree, that tree is most likely dead,” Shive said. “But in redwoods, they have these buds that lie dormant under their bark and they can sprout after the fire.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, the younger generation of redwood trees may be more at risk. Around 95% of California’s redwoods were logged, so the majority growing today are newer, “second-growth” trees. Those forests tend to be denser, allowing wildfires to burn hotter and spread more easily.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Much like other California landscapes, vegetation in some redwood forests is heavier than it used to be. As wildfires were suppressed in the modern era of firefighting and Native American tribes were removed by settlers from their land, there were fewer regular fires to clear out the forest floor.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shive says setting controlled or “prescribed” fires in redwood forests will be even more essential as the climate warms, to prevent wildfires from doing too much damage. While redwoods are able to bounce back, they’re already stressed by hotter temperatures and drought at the southern end of their range, potentially interfering with their recovery.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We still need to be setting these forests up to be as fire-resilient as possible, since, as we’ve seen in this last week, this warmer and drier future is already upon us and it’s going to get worse,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Wildfires+Hit+California%27s+Redwoods+And+Condors%2C+But+There%27s+Still+Hope&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "California's massive wildfires have not only burned more than 1,000 homes and buildings over the last week, they are also threatening some of the state's rare ecosystems and wildlife.",
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"description": "California's massive wildfires have not only burned more than 1,000 homes and buildings over the last week, they are also threatening some of the state's rare ecosystems and wildlife.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>At 3 a.m. on Friday morning, biologist Kelly Sorenson was awake, nervously watching the live webcam feed of a California condor nest on the Big Sur coast. He could see a 5-month-old chick, still unable to fly, as the flames of the Dolan Fire came into view.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was just terrifying,” Sorenson said. “Having the livestreaming webcams was both a blessing and a nightmare because we had to watch the fire as it burned through the canyon.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>California’s massive wildfires have burned more than \u003ca href=\"https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/california-fire-map/\">1,000 homes and buildings\u003c/a> over the last week, destroying irreplaceable possessions and memories for some residents. At the same time, the fires are also threatening some of the state’s rare ecosystems and wildlife.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Biologists are watching closely as the blazes encroach on old-growth redwood trees in Northern and Central California, where some giants are more than 1,000 years old and are known by individual names. While some seem to have been spared, Big Basin State Park — the oldest state park in California — saw significant fire damage.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, biologists say there are reasons to be hopeful, because redwoods have incredibly thick bark that can withstand wildfires. Even fully charred trees can sprout again.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The larger question is whether ecosystems can fully bounce back after extreme fires given that the climate change, already driving the current wildfires, can also make recovery difficult through heat stress and drought.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For the endangered California condors, recovery is still tenuous. In 1987, \u003ca href=\"https://www.nps.gov/articles/california-condor-recovery.htm\">just 27 birds remained\u003c/a>. Scientists brought them into captivity to begin a breeding program. Today, there are about 100 condors free-flying on California’s Central Coast. The \u003ca href=\"https://www.ventanaws.org/california-condors.html\">Ventana Wildlife Society\u003c/a>, where Sorenson is executive director, has been carefully tracking and releasing them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The massive birds, with a 9-foot wingspan, are still threatened by lead poisoning since they feed on the carcasses of animals that have lead bullet fragments from hunters.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Of the eight condor nests with chicks this year, Sorenson says five are within the fire zone.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Even just four or five birds would be a huge loss,” said Sorenson. “It’s just really nerve-wracking now, not knowing.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, Sorenson is hopeful some chicks made it. In 2008, condor chicks survived a wildfire in Big Sur, protected by the tall redwood trees they nested in.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We were convinced there was no way the chicks could survive the fire,” he said. “Sure enough, a chick survived and we named it Phoenix.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Redwood trees are built to survive fires, insulated by bark up to a foot thick. While lightning-caused fires aren’t as common in coastal redwood habitat as they are elsewhere in California, burning is still a natural cycle in the ecosystem. Native American tribes often set regular fires to shape the landscape and encourage certain plants to grow.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Because of their resilience, I feel a lot more hopeful than super worried about the trees,” said Kristen Shive, director of science for \u003ca href=\"https://www.savetheredwoods.org/\">Save the Redwoods League\u003c/a>. “The trees really are so incredibly tough when it comes to fire. Most of them will persist and survive.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even trees that look significantly scorched are still alive and can regrow from their base. Many of the largest redwood trees growing today show burn scars.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If a fire is hot enough to consume the entire crown of a tree, in a pine tree, that tree is most likely dead,” Shive said. “But in redwoods, they have these buds that lie dormant under their bark and they can sprout after the fire.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, the younger generation of redwood trees may be more at risk. Around 95% of California’s redwoods were logged, so the majority growing today are newer, “second-growth” trees. Those forests tend to be denser, allowing wildfires to burn hotter and spread more easily.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Much like other California landscapes, vegetation in some redwood forests is heavier than it used to be. As wildfires were suppressed in the modern era of firefighting and Native American tribes were removed by settlers from their land, there were fewer regular fires to clear out the forest floor.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shive says setting controlled or “prescribed” fires in redwood forests will be even more essential as the climate warms, to prevent wildfires from doing too much damage. While redwoods are able to bounce back, they’re already stressed by hotter temperatures and drought at the southern end of their range, potentially interfering with their recovery.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We still need to be setting these forests up to be as fire-resilient as possible, since, as we’ve seen in this last week, this warmer and drier future is already upon us and it’s going to get worse,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Wildfires+Hit+California%27s+Redwoods+And+Condors%2C+But+There%27s+Still+Hope&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"info": "What kind of no sabo word is Hyphenación? For us, it’s about living within a hyphenation. Like being a third-gen Mexican-American from the Texas border now living that Bay Area Chicano life. Like Xorje! Each week we bring together a couple of hyphenated Latinos to talk all about personal life choices: family, careers, relationships, belonging … everything is on the table. ",
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"info": "Our flagship program, helmed by Kai Ryssdal, examines what the day in money delivered, through stories, conversations, newsworthy numbers and more. Updated Monday through Friday at about 3:30 p.m. PT.",
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"info": "The MindShift podcast explores the innovations in education that are shaping how kids learn. Hosts Ki Sung and Katrina Schwartz introduce listeners to educators, researchers, parents and students who are developing effective ways to improve how kids learn. We cover topics like how fed-up administrators are developing surprising tactics to deal with classroom disruptions; how listening to podcasts are helping kids develop reading skills; the consequences of overparenting; and why interdisciplinary learning can engage students on all ends of the traditional achievement spectrum. This podcast is part of the MindShift education site, a division of KQED News. KQED is an NPR/PBS member station based in San Francisco. You can also visit the MindShift website for episodes and supplemental blog posts or tweet us \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/MindShiftKQED\">@MindShiftKQED\u003c/a> or visit us at \u003ca href=\"/mindshift\">MindShift.KQED.org\u003c/a>",
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"info": "For decades, the process for how police police themselves has been inconsistent – if not opaque. In some states, like California, these proceedings were completely hidden. After a new police transparency law unsealed scores of internal affairs files, our reporters set out to examine these cases and the shadow world of police discipline. On Our Watch brings listeners into the rooms where officers are questioned and witnesses are interrogated to find out who this system is really protecting. Is it the officers, or the public they've sworn to serve?",
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"info": "Political Breakdown is a new series that explores the political intersection of California and the nation. Each week hosts Scott Shafer and Marisa Lagos are joined with a new special guest to unpack politics -- with personality — and offer an insider’s glimpse at how politics happens.",
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"possible": {
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"info": "Possible is hosted by entrepreneur Reid Hoffman and writer Aria Finger. Together in Possible, Hoffman and Finger lead enlightening discussions about building a brighter collective future. The show features interviews with visionary guests like Trevor Noah, Sam Altman and Janette Sadik-Khan. Possible paints an optimistic portrait of the world we can create through science, policy, business, art and our shared humanity. It asks: What if everything goes right for once? How can we get there? Each episode also includes a short fiction story generated by advanced AI GPT-4, serving as a thought-provoking springboard to speculate how humanity could leverage technology for good.",
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"radiolab": {
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"reveal": {
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"info": "Created by The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, Reveal is public radios first one-hour weekly radio show and podcast dedicated to investigative reporting. Credible, fact based and without a partisan agenda, Reveal combines the power and artistry of driveway moment storytelling with data-rich reporting on critically important issues. The result is stories that inform and inspire, arming our listeners with information to right injustices, hold the powerful accountable and improve lives.Reveal is hosted by Al Letson and showcases the award-winning work of CIR and newsrooms large and small across the nation. In a radio and podcast market crowded with choices, Reveal focuses on important and often surprising stories that illuminate the world for our listeners.",
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},
"rightnowish": {
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"title": "Rightnowish",
"tagline": "Art is where you find it",
"info": "Rightnowish digs into life in the Bay Area right now… ish. Journalist Pendarvis Harshaw takes us to galleries painted on the sides of liquor stores in West Oakland. We'll dance in warehouses in the Bayview, make smoothies with kids in South Berkeley, and listen to classical music in a 1984 Cutlass Supreme in Richmond. Every week, Pen talks to movers and shakers about how the Bay Area shapes what they create, and how they shape the place we call home.",
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"order": 16
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},
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"info": "Science Friday is a weekly science talk show, broadcast live over public radio stations nationwide. Each week, the show focuses on science topics that are in the news and tries to bring an educated, balanced discussion to bear on the scientific issues at hand. Panels of expert guests join host Ira Flatow, a veteran science journalist, to discuss science and to take questions from listeners during the call-in portion of the program.",
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