The Shocking Vastness of Prairie , Part 4

In this series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss the vast North American grasslands of which poet William Cullen Bryant wrote, “These are the gardens of the desert, these the unshorn fields, boundless and beautiful, for which the speech of England has no name — The Prairies."

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
name is Robert.

Speaker 3 (00:15):
Lamb and I am Joe McCormack. And we're back with
the fourth And are we going to say, for now
final part in our series on the prairie or are
we going to go for more?

Speaker 2 (00:24):
I think I think it's going to make sense to
go ahead and cap it off at least for now.
We can always come back and do more episodes about
things related to the prairie. I know that. You know,
we've touched on a number of topics here in this
series where any one of them we could have blown
it out and made itself a multi part episode, like
the bison, for example, or coyotes and any of the

(00:46):
organisms that we've talked about. Yeah, we could have easily
done a whole series. So it's always possible that we'll
come back. Maybe it's likely we'll come back and do
something else on the prairie in the future.

Speaker 3 (00:56):
Well, totally, we have not even come close to exhausting
the topic, right, you know, we could do one hundred
more episodes.

Speaker 2 (01:02):
It's inexhaustible, vast I mean, just look at it.

Speaker 3 (01:04):
Goes on forever, so the prairie is if you're just
joining us for the first time in Part four. Here
the temperate grassland ecosystem of North America. In previous episodes,
we've talked about what defines a prairie, why prairies are
dominated by grasses and forbes instead of trees, and we
talked about how the factors that maintain that plant balance

(01:26):
have been altered in recent centuries and reasons that the
prairie is now considered an endangered ecosystem. We also talked
about grizzly bears of the prairies, once a top predator
of the ecosystem before they were driven out by humans.
In Part two of this series, we talked about a
prairie formation called mima mounds and the different hypotheses about

(01:48):
how they form. This is still not a settled question.
We also discussed a nineteenth century phenomenon known as prairie madness,
not a recognized psychological condition today, but a sort of
group of symptoms alleged to occur in many European American
settlers of the Great Plains, attributed in part to physical
features of the landscape itself, like openness and howling winds

(02:11):
that we talked about other sources that this malaise could
be coming from as well. In Part three, I talked
about the native bison of the prairie as ecosystem engineers,
creating these little islands of plant and animal biodiversity throughout
the prairie with their wallowing or dust bathing behaviors. And

(02:32):
Rob got into the amazing coyote described by Lewis and
Clark as the prairie wolf, which was once a grassland
native that has now spread and adapted to basically every
habitat in North America. They are masters at filling space,
at filling an open ecological niche. And today we've got
one more episode for you. So Rob, what are you

(02:53):
going to start us off with today?

Speaker 2 (02:55):
Well, it is you speaking of ecosystem engineers. It is
time to talk about the grassland ecosystem engineer par excellence,
the prairie dog. And I want to begin here by
turning at least one last time to the descriptions, the
scientific descriptions of Lewis and Clark, and in fact these

(03:16):
were apparently these are considered the first scientific descriptions of
the prairie dog in the Western Cannon.

Speaker 3 (03:22):
I think these Lewis and Clark journals are a great
way to read about some of the fauna of western
North America because you get to see them with truly
kind of fresh eyes, like somebody who has not seen
a nature documentary about this stuff before. They're walking into
it and they're like, oh, what's this. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:40):
Absolutely, I mean obviously they might have heard something from
the French or from indigenous peoples, but they were definitely
encountering them for the first time. And again, these are
widely considered, you know, the first scientific writings concerning various
species that they encountered, though many of the field notes

(04:00):
from the journals of Lewis and Clark would not be
published in full for some time. So the initial publication
of the journals, this is the eighteen fourteen Nicholas Biddle version,
leaned into the adventure, into the adventure narrative of the thing,
you know, running from bear, shooting at bears, that sort
of sort of encounter, and cut out much of the science,

(04:22):
so you know, more bear bears chasing you and less
let's describe the testicles of all the bears that we encountered,
you know, because there is a lot of that scientific
note taking throughout the journals, where yeah, it has no
narrative importance, but I have to describe to you what
these animals look like, you know, right down to some
of the details here.

Speaker 3 (04:43):
But that was explicitly part of their mission, right, Like
they were tasked with making detailed descriptions of the things
they found, and.

Speaker 2 (04:50):
Yeah, sending back specimens and so forth. So this Biddle version,
I'm to understand, was more of a paraphrasing of things
into an entertaining read and they were gonna do apparently
there was going to be a scientific follow up, and
then it didn't happen. So the full scientific findings bear
testicles and all wouldn't really be appreciated for a good century. Right,
So I'm gonna read now from the journals. This is

(05:12):
from September seventh, eighteen oh four. Near the foot of
this high knoll, we discovered a village of an animal
the French call the prairie dog, which burrow in the
ground and with the rattlesnake. Now to be clear that
Clark here is referring to a myth that I'm assuming
reached him from French sources that claimed that prairie dogs

(05:34):
lived alongside rattlesnakes in their den. He disproves this in
the same entry by stating that they quote killed a
dark rattlesnake with a prairie dog in him. So became
clear that these animals were not living in harmony with
each other. Though we'll come back to what it means

(05:55):
for there to be a rattlesnake or various other organisms
within the tunnels the prairie dog.

Speaker 3 (06:01):
Now we should mention a couple of notes about the
spelling here, because last time we talked about some fun
with Lewis and Clark's spelling choices. You flagged to me
in I think it was a text message. The way
they decide to spell animal. The word animal in this entry,
which is like the name anna and then the word male.

Speaker 2 (06:20):
Yeah, cobbled together into one word ani male that the
French called the prairie dog. Yeah. When you start counting
the different ways that words are spelled, I want to
say mosquito is spelled like nineteen or twenty different ways.
When you know not that I have a lot of
room to judge. I think I've probably spelled it five
or six different ways myself.

Speaker 3 (06:42):
But well, I mean this used to be common. You know,
a lot of older sources you find just wild spellings
of things. English spelling took a long time to standardize.
I was actually reading about this after we were texting
about this. You know, the Webster's Dictionary didn't come out
until like the eighteen thirties, and the Johnson Dicky had
been in the middle of the eighteenth century, so it

(07:03):
took a long time for English spellings to like get
all on the same page.

Speaker 2 (07:07):
Yeah, I think you you mentioned that the spellings were
sort of partially a.

Speaker 3 (07:11):
Vibe situation vipelling.

Speaker 2 (07:13):
Yeah, and certainly, to be clear, Lewis and Clark had
other things they were contending without in the field. Rather
than making sure they were consistent in the way they
spelled animal, they had to run from some of those
animals and or shoot them.

Speaker 3 (07:26):
Yeah, so quickly jot down and a mail. That's good enough.

Speaker 2 (07:30):
And then they do abbreviate a prairie dog to p
do or p dough. I'm not sure how we're supposed
to pronounce it, just like capital P and then D. Again,
they're in the field. These are field notes, so yeah,
go for it. I found myself abbreviating them to pds.
Just in order to get everything on the page, I'm

(07:51):
going to continue reading here. Quote. The village of those
little dogs is under the ground a considerable distance. We
dug under six feet through through rich hard clay without
getting to their lodges. Some of their holes we poured
in five barrels of water without driving them out. We
caught only we caught one by the water forcing him out.

(08:12):
So to be clear, what they did here is they
poured river water down some prairie dog holes until they
finally flushed one out. They also collected some dead specimens,
you know, which was just can't standard practice. I think
it's like maybe three dead prairie dogs. But they also
had this live prairie dog that they had flushed out,

(08:32):
and this one they decided, hey, let's ship this back
to the President of the United States. And that's exactly
what they did. They shipped a live prairie dog back
to President Thomas Jefferson.

Speaker 3 (08:43):
The President will need to see this rodent.

Speaker 2 (08:45):
Yeah yeah. And so at this point, this rodent that
as far as I know, has no name, it was
never given a name, embarks on a forty three day
barge ride just to get back to Saint Louis, then
thrown on another barge and goes all the way down
the Mississippi to New Orleans, then travels by sea to Baltimore,

(09:08):
then by land once more to make his way to
the President himself. And you might be thinking, Okay, just
because you send a prairie dog to the President of
the United States, surely this individual has better things to do.
And I guess Thomas Jefferson probably did, but he still
took time out of his day to meet with this
prairie dog. Some sources say that he lived with the

(09:32):
prairie dog for like a month. I think that might
be stretching things a little bit, but it was around.
He did get to see it, and Jefferson himself described
it as quote, a species of marmot in a letter
to painter Charles Wilson Peel, who later saw the prairie
dog after it had been relocated to the Philadelphia Museum,
and Peel described it as follows. It is a pleasing

(09:53):
little animal and not in the least dangerous to handle
like our groundhog.

Speaker 3 (09:57):
Oh okay, so it's a full petting zo here. They're
all handling this thing presumably.

Speaker 2 (10:02):
Yeah, that quote by the way is sometimes misattributed to
Jefferson himself, but I think all Jefferson had to say
about it was like He's like, oh, yeah, I saw it.
It's some sort of marmot or something.

Speaker 3 (10:13):
I'm imagining it like running up some frilly sleeves into the.

Speaker 2 (10:19):
Yeah, one of sims. I don't think I've seen like
a Thomas Jefferson movie in which they really you spent
a lot of time with, or spend any amount of
time with this particular encounter. But as far again, as
far as I can tell, prairie dog had no name.
Maybe a children's author has given this prairie dog a
name that would be great. I'd like to see that book.
But after meeting the President went to live at the museum,

(10:43):
eventually died. Was taxidermy for continued to for continued display,
and this taxidermy prairie dog is presumed lost or destroyed
at this point anyway, But back to Lewis's description of
the prairie dog, he shares their mouth. Their mouth resembles
the rabbit, head longer, legs short, and toenails long, Their

(11:05):
tail like a ground squirrel, which they shake and make
chattering noise. Their eyes like a dog. Their color is
gray and skin contains soft fur. And then later in
the journals, this one actually comes from John Ordway, who
is a member of their party. He writes, quote shields,
another member of their party killed a prairie dog which

(11:28):
was cooked for the captain's dinner. Captains went out with
some men of the party to see the ground where
those little dogs make their villages, and they found more
than an acre of ground covered with their holes.

Speaker 3 (11:40):
And said, I want to eat one of those? What
does it taste like?

Speaker 2 (11:44):
Some people have and do eat them. I momentarily went
down that tangent, like what do people think the people
like the taste? Basically people are split on it. Some
people like it, some people don't. Apparently some amount of
spice is required, but anyway, Yeah, I love how these
entries delight in the almost alien nature of these creatures,

(12:08):
especially their villages, these vast villages, and their amusing appearance.
Of course, they are, to be clear, not dogs, and
are in fact ground squirrels of the Sonomaus genus, which
includes four or five species, including the largest and also
the most socially complex, the black tailed prairie dog.

Speaker 3 (12:28):
That genus named Sonomas does that does that mean dog? Mouse?

Speaker 2 (12:32):
Is that? Yeah? Yeah, okay, yeah, the prairie dog, and
there are all these comparisons to dog that I think
a lot of it comes down to their vocalizations, though
Lewis and Clark describe their eyes I believe as being doglike,
so you know, I guess you can. You can see
that in their appearance. But the different species, they differ
in size, they different tail, tip, and back colors. They're

(12:54):
otherwise mostly sandy colored, and their main attributes are their
sprawling underground colonies, their diurnal lifestyle, and their barked alarm calls. Again,
the blacktail prairie dog is the most socially complex, and
in some of the others you still see social complexity,
but also some more like individualist, solitary kind of behavior

(13:18):
as well.

Speaker 3 (13:19):
Yeah, before we started recording, I was actually looking up
because I didn't quite know what is the main difference
between a prairie dog and a gopher. I mean, they're just,
you know, they're different animals. But one difference I saw
highlighted was that prairie dogs tend to be the more
social of these animals. Gophers tend to be more on
the solitary side, though there's some variation within them, I guess.

Speaker 2 (13:42):
Yeah yeah. And also like a pocket gopher is not
a ground squirrel, right, just to get into to that difference.
But another interesting thing to point out is that we're
going to be talking about the like how socially complex
the blacktailed prairie dog is, but also it's worth stress
that they are nowhere near as socially complex as something

(14:03):
like naked mole rat, which is generally considered use social
in the way it carries about its business. That is
not the case here with the prairie dogs. Still complicated
and complex, but not use social.

Speaker 3 (14:18):
I mean naked mole rat I think is about as
close as a mammal gets to being like an ant.

Speaker 2 (14:23):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely so. According to Kay and Wilson's Mammals
of North America, which is a little book I turned
to and sometimes travel with, they describe the black tailed
prairie dogs as the largest of the species of prairie
dog and again the one with the most complex social
behavior of them all. They prefer short to mid grass

(14:45):
prairie and they will actually work to keep those grasses
short around their colony for maximum visibility, so kind of
like clearing the shrubs and trees out from around a
castle to deny be Sieger's natural cover as they creep
cloth to the walls.

Speaker 3 (15:01):
Right, you don't want that burnham wood to come to
duncan A.

Speaker 2 (15:04):
Yeah, exactly. And so here in this in these areas
of the prairie dog colonies, they live in high density
underground environments. When not restricted or persecuted by humans. This
can certainly highly disrupt how they carry about their business
and just how many can exist in a single area

(15:25):
all you know. It's also susceptible to various other disruptions
environmental predators and so forth. And they can still form
large colonies today. But before Europeans expanded into the Western
United States, some of these were just absolutely tremendous. K's
in Wilson's site that the largest of these pre European

(15:46):
black tailed prairie dog colonies contained something like four hundred
million individuals and covered sixty five thousand square kilometers or
roughly twenty five thousand, ninety seven square miles.

Speaker 3 (15:59):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (16:00):
So in terms of size, we could, very roughly, and
I want to strus very roughly, compare this to the
size of Latvia, Lithuania or Sri Lanka, and in terms
of population, the United States is not expected to reach
a population of four hundred million humans for decades to come.
So this is just this is just so many prairie
dog individuals in such a large area and it's all

(16:22):
considered one colony.

Speaker 3 (16:25):
Kind of hard to imagine because given those proportions, it
starts to feel more like science fiction, kind of alien
hive proportions, even though when you look at the individuals
they're these cute little good boys.

Speaker 2 (16:38):
Yeah. Yeah, you can just imagine like someone looking out
and just seeing prairie dogs as far as the eye
can see. And I haven't witnessed anything like this, but
when I was at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife
Refuge in Colorado, I do get to see a number
of prairie dogs out there, and I did have that
experience of being like, oh, look, there's a prairie dog.
And then you realize, oh look there's another prairie dog.

(17:01):
There's yet another prairie dog, and you realize that, oh, well,
they're they're a fair number of prairie dog individuals in
this given area, and of course you notice them because
because a lot of them are on duty you know,
they're sort of they're standing erect, they're looking out, they're
they're ever ever vigilant against threats to the colony. And

(17:22):
that's one of the one that's one of the reasons
that they they live in relative close confines like this,
and these colonies could swell to such size. So prairie
dogs were of course long vilified by human settlers, you know,

(17:45):
of European descent, and killed in great numbers because these
settlers saw them as, for one thing, competition for livestock.
And this entailed large scale government sponsored poisoning programs. So
once again, and I mean government sponsored practices that effectively

(18:06):
tried to eradicate a species that is vital, as we'll discuss,
to the prairie environment. And then on top of that,
if that wasn't bad enough, around nineteen hundred rats from
ships arriving in San Francisco brought plague to the prairie dogs.
This is when I say plague, we're talking actual Urcinia

(18:26):
pestis here and you know, or the black death. And
since the prairie dogs had no historic evolutionary exposure to
the disease, they suffered just astonishingly high mortality rates something
like ninety to one hundred percent mortality rates. And again
think about how they live in these rather large, kind

(18:49):
of close confines and confine environments. So you know, pathogen
like this is going to spread relatively easily. So the
plagues spread eastward through populations of prairie dogs, bringing even
more hardship to this you know, already embattled species. And
so you know, in recent decades, conservationists have been forced

(19:12):
to intervene, first with flea killing burrow dusting, and then
even more recently with live virus sylvadic plague vaccine or SPV,
which they administered via like basically little peanut butter baits
in order to like actually get this this vaccine in
their bodies. So again humans trying to poison them, the

(19:33):
plague spreading through their populations. These two things combined, their
range and their numbers are now greatly reduced. They now
hold less than I believe two percent of their historic
North American range. This according to the American Prairie Foundation.
Whereas they once you know, collectively covered hundreds of thousands
of acres in say northeast Montana, for example, they once

(19:56):
just had these sprawling colonies. And it is just not
case anymore. And this is especially rough because you know,
this highly disrupted creature is also a keystone species of
the prairie. Yet again we have an example of a
creature that remakes the environment and in doing so opens
up room for other species of flora and fauna to thrive.

(20:18):
And pretty much all of this has to do with
their earthworks, those expansive tunnels that they build. But on
top of that I mentioned earlier about how they keep
the grass short near their homes, well, this also has
an effect that creates sparsely vegetated areas that are great
for nesting birds and also opens up growth for fresher
grazing crops, much like we discussed last episode with the bison.

(20:42):
On top of that, you know the actual digging and
the construction of these tunnels. It aerates the soil, allows
for deeper rooted grasses, and the continual soil disruption discourages
woody shrubs so helps to maintain the grassland and keep
like the woodier stuff out right. Now, these the burrows,

(21:03):
again we have aeration going on as well as redistributing,
a redistribution of the nutrients within the soil. And then
also the prairie dogs have relatively like complex chambers that
they build in these underground mansions. So for instance, you know,
they'll have places where the young are, they'll have places
where they're dead are sequestered, but they also have chambers

(21:25):
that they use as latrines, and these can serve as
fertilizer for the plants. And then also kind of getting
back to Lewis and Clark pumping water down the tunnels,
you know, this also plays a role in everything. The
tunnels help rain water soak into the aquifer, and this

(21:46):
increased absorption essentially keeps more of the rain where it falls,
rather than a scenario where you have heavy rainfall hitting
the prairie and then flooding and running off potentially taking
you know, vital hop soil with it.

Speaker 3 (22:02):
So it slows erosion.

Speaker 2 (22:03):
Then yeah, yeah, it's definitely an erosion slower. And then
also in sort of allowing the soil to drink more water,
it helps make the grasses more drought resistant because of
that deeper soak that occurs. And at this point, I
want to come back to the myth that Lewis and
Clark briefly bring up the idea that oh prairie dogs

(22:24):
live alongside rattlesnakes, which on one level is absolutely not true,
Like they don't cohabitate with rattlesnakes, but their tunnels do
get reused by various other animals, including snakes, including burrowing owls,
also including the blackfooted ferret, which depends on the prairie

(22:45):
dog as its primary prey. Like, the prairie dog makes
up ninety percent or maybe even more of its diet,
and it is currently endangered. You it is simply not
found outside of prairie dog towns, prairie dog colonies. It's
a highly specialized predator that evolved to thrive on prairie

(23:05):
dog abundance.

Speaker 3 (23:07):
So a wound to prairie dog populations is a wound
to this predator.

Speaker 2 (23:10):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, Again, they just completely depend on the
prairie dog for their sustenance. And on top of this,
various other small mammals, reptiles and amphibians use these tunnels
as cover from aerial and land based predators. You know,
it just creates a more complex environment in which they
can you know, they can seek cover. And so prairie

(23:32):
dog declines have negatively impacted many of these species. With
again that the blackfooted ferret probably being the most obvious
and like high profile of these, since it is, you know,
an obligate predator of the prairie dog. Now getting into
the like the structure of the colony, it's it's complex

(23:53):
but also in a way kind of simple in that
you have a colony that can be just really vast,
cover thousands of acres with I think, but with a
maximum of like I think twenty prairie dogs per acre,
and this is after the young have emerged and the
colony is going to be made up entirely of these coteries.
These are small family groups of prairie dogs living together.

(24:15):
Generally we're talking one dominant adult male, three to four
adult females, and they're young. So again, like you don't
want to think about it too much in terms of
like use social insects or naked mole rats. Like there's
no queen, there's you know, no breeding queen, there's no
government here. It's just all of these little family units

(24:39):
that are living in this kind of loose association of
cooperation with each other. And and I have a little
more to say about this as well. So their society
is also complex, especially with the black tailed prairie dogs.
They engage in all grooming among blood related prairie dogs,

(25:02):
and across the colony there's a vast array of competition
and cooperation. So this is this is not a utopia
where prairie dogs of all the you know, all these
different coteries of prairie dogs are in harmony with each other.
They can still engage in competition and they can have hostility,
violent hostility between each other based on this competition, but
there's also some level of cooperation. Uh, and so you

(25:25):
see this in some of their behavior. For instance, they
have both hostile and friendly kisses that they bestow on
each other. They are they're not actually kisses, but it's
an identification tool where two prairie dogs will touch mouths
to cheeks so they can check on scent cues. So
it looks like they're kissing, but they're just kind of
like who are you? And the way that they do

(25:45):
the who or you can be you know, friendly or
at the cereal And again, everything in the colony is
built around the the coteriees. You again, you can't really
compare what they have to a human culture. But if
we you know, if we were to very loosely do,
so we could think of it as kind of like
an urban radical collectivism that they're practicing. So there's no

(26:07):
there's no government again, no breeding queen, no roles like
we see in use social insects, you know, no workers
or drones. Again, there's there's competition. You do encounter things
like infanticide and cannibalism. But ultimately the pros of living
together like this outweigh the negatives. I was looking at

(26:28):
the website of prairie dog researcher John Hoagland. His website
is let's see, I have it right here. It is
prairiedoghogland dot com and he's also written some books on
the topic, and he points out that the advantages of
living together like this include shared vigilance of surroundings and

(26:49):
increased predator awareness, a lower chance of predation just based
on sheer numbers, just the numbers game, like living in
a school of fish, that sort of sort of situation.
There's also you have the chance that another member will
quote allocate energy toward caring for your offspring in some way,
and then also closer access to sexually receptive individuals. So

(27:12):
it just makes finding a mate easier because you live
in such a vast community of prairie dogs. On the
other hand, he says that the disadvantages include easier spread
of disease, which we've already touched on, increased risk of inbreeding,
higher mortality potential from singular events. So for instance, this

(27:33):
could be a flood, this could be I don't know,
some sort of weather event, something more cataclysmic, or of
course some sort of like human extermination effort. By living together,
you know, there's a greater risk that they could all
go out at the same time. Other disadvantages include competition
for resources. Again, it's like they're not all working together.

(27:55):
There is this competition, and also quote the possibility of
allocating energy to the care of offspring that are not
blood related, so basically they live and you know, there's
the there there's the there's the risk reward of an
individual prairie dog receiving care from someone that is not
a blood relative, and whether that's a pro orcon kind
of depends on where you're falling on that care. I guess,

(28:18):
for again from an animal perspective, and we certainly can't
apply you know, the human cultural motifs to that too much, right,
But the predator protection is key, and this is a
this is something that's very obvious when you observe prairie dogs. Again,
they're very vigilant. Uh, They're kind of it's almost like
they're engaging in a super aggressive neighborhood watch where everybody

(28:39):
has to spend like a large portion of their waking
hours just scanning the horizon and looking out to see
if predators are about uh. And then if they spot something,
they use alert postures and alarm calls. Some calls are
both visual and auditory, such as the yip the jump yup,
not the yip jump the jumpy up call of the

(29:01):
black tailed prairie dog. This alone can signal a few
different things. It can mean that the prairie dog has
just been startled, or it has sided and run away from,
say a snake. Or it can be an all clear
after a predator, say like a bird has left the area.
And it can also be something that they do when
two prairie dogs cease a territorial dispute. And it's just

(29:25):
one among I think a good eleven distinct calls that
prairie dogs. Certainly the more social prairie dogs have been
observed to use, so they have kind of like their
own limited language of signals that they can use in
order to maintain this vigilance.

Speaker 3 (29:41):
That's really interesting. I don't know how well established this is,
but I do remember reading somewhere at some time that
a surprising amount of information could be encoded in prairie
dog calls. Yeah, so I wonder is there some kind
of like combination of calls or something that can form
a grammar or uh, I don't know what what what

(30:02):
were you reading on this?

Speaker 2 (30:03):
Uh? Well, basically there there is just a lot to it.
There's a lot of continuing research into it. This is
an area that again, this is one of those moments
where I was researching prairie dogs for a portion of
a single episode and realizing, oh man, we could have
done a whole series on the prairie dog because I
feel like we've only really, you know, touched the tip
of the iceberg on the the complexity of like the

(30:25):
physical complexity of their burrows, like all the different sorts
of chambers that they have in there, and how those
chambers get reutilized by different organisms. So uh yeah, they're
they're they're so fascinating. And again, there there is sort
of like above ground below ground scenario here, Like there's
the prairie dogs that you see above ground and they
do uh have a have a lot of of of

(30:47):
activities that they cover above ground. But then there's this
underground world of the prairie dog, and not only like
their actual actions, but also the influence of their life
when you get into the way that it's aerating the
soil and affecting the way that that water is retained
by the soil, it's just so fascinating.

Speaker 3 (31:04):
Totally.

Speaker 2 (31:05):
Yeah. Again, keystone species and one that has has suffered greatly,
but there are a number of efforts out there to
like try and and you know, bring back their numbers somewhat,
you know, realizing that they do just a lot of
good for the prairie environment.

Speaker 3 (31:32):
Well, Robert, you ready to push through and talk about
an animal species that had perhaps you might say, an
equally vast impact on the prairie uh, that has actually
gone all the way as far as we know, to extinction.

Speaker 2 (31:45):
Let's do it, provided that it's smaller than a prairie dog.
Because I feel like we've been talking about smaller and
smaller animals here.

Speaker 3 (31:52):
Smaller individually, not smaller in mass, all right, So I
want to talk about what is at this point. I
belie leave a classic article on the subject of a
really awe inspiring prairie insect known as the Rocky Mountain locust.
So this article is called the Death of the super

(32:13):
Hopper by Jeffrey Lockwood. This article is it's not a
scientific paper. It's written for a popular audience. But the author,
Jeffrey Lockwood, is actually an entomologist who was involved in
primary research on the insect in question. He is still
Lockwood is a professor of Natural Sciences and Humanities at
the University of Wyoming. This article was originally published in

(32:35):
High Country News in February two thousand and three. It's
a really great article. I love stuff that comes together
in this way. It's like part science writing, part autobiographical
mystery because he's talking about his own personal history of
working on this research question. It's part a historical account
and part a kind of reflective nature essay. It's just

(32:56):
a really great piece of writing. So in the beginning
of this article, well, Lockwood paints a picture of what
life was like during a late nineteenth century locust plague,
particularly a locust plague of eighteen seventy five from the
point of view of somebody on the ground in Plattsmouth, Nebraska.
The way he tries to convey this is to say,

(33:18):
imagine a winter snowstorm, except swap out every snowflake for
an insect for a locust, which is essentially inform a
lot like a grasshopper. I'll get into the differences in
just a minute. And Lockwood claims that this is quote
the largest congregation of animal life the human race has

(33:40):
ever known. Now, that might be a kind of hard
thing to a hard category to establish the winter on,
because how do you define the boundaries of that, But
the other sources have talked about this, like I think
this is also considered the Guinness record holder for whatever
that's worth, for like the largest gathering of animals in
world history, as far as we know that human beings

(34:00):
I have ever seen. So this is a giant, giant
swarm of locusts.

Speaker 2 (34:06):
Like biblical proportions. Here, I think we can we can
fairly stay.

Speaker 3 (34:10):
You could probably say beyond biblical proportions. So I'm just
going to read this description from lockwood'sccount quote, a swarm
of rocky mountain locusts, streams overhead for five days, creating
a living eclipse of the sun. It is a superorganism
composed of ten billion individuals, devouring as much vegetation as

(34:33):
a massive herd of bison. A metabolic wildfire that races
across the Great Plains. Before the year is up, a
vast region of pioneer agriculture will be decimated, and US
troops will be mobilized to distribute food, blankets, and clothing
to devastated farm families. So almost a literal storm of

(34:55):
insects just stripping the earth of food and vegetation, so
thick in the air that they blot out the sun.
It's darkness at noon caused by locusts. In other sources,
I've read really harrowing things about the voraciousness of these
locust storms, so particularly this one. Now, of course, it

(35:15):
goes without saying that they devoured entire crops. You know,
they ate up all the weed, ate up all the
crops and exposed vegetation, leaving a path of destruction that
is often compared to what's left behind after a fire.
But the swarm also reportedly ate things you wouldn't think
they would eat. They ate people's clothes, they ate through
objects made of leather and wood. There even accounts that

(35:39):
they ate the wool off the backs of living sheep yikes.
And one of the sources Lockwood talks about in this
article is a scientific report that was composed at the
time so it is. It was called the second Report
of the US Entomological Commission, published in the year eighteen eighty,
and it was based in part on the work of

(36:01):
doctor Albert L. Child, and expert affiliated with the US
Signal Corps. He put together some calculations in this report,
so he measured the speed of the locusts as they
passed overhead, and he gathered reports from a network of
surrounding towns by telegraph to try to estimate the size
of the swarm. He concluded that this swarm of insects,

(36:23):
which to be fair, is not going to be of
uniform density throughout. But this one swarm of insects was
in total one hundred and ten miles wide and one thousand,
eight hundred miles long. That makes this an insect swarm
that's almost two hundred thousand square miles. For comparison, the

(36:43):
state of California is one hundred and sixty four thousand
square miles. So the swarm is bigger than California. Wow,
I read now there have been different numbers about exactly
how many insects we're talking about here. In this seen
that Lockwood talks about with childs measuring the swarm, he

(37:05):
mentions an estimate of ten billion insects, and other sources
I've read that Child himself estimated the number was twelve
point five trillion. Obviously, that's a pretty big difference in
estimating the total numbers. And I don't know if that
difference is because Lockwood is creating a more confined estimate
like a subset or part of the swarm, or if

(37:26):
he just disagrees with Child's method for calculating the total.
I don't know what that difference is. But even if
you go with the lower number ten billion insects all
grouped together, that's a lot of insects.

Speaker 2 (37:36):
Like one is very tempted to compare it to like
a Kaijus situation, But even that fails to capture the
scale because at least, like Godzilla, can only attack one
city at a time.

Speaker 3 (37:47):
Yeah, this is the Yeah, so a swarm of insects
just like scouring the land basically the size of a state,
but again not going to be uniform density the whole way,
but like just enormous, unimaginable.

Speaker 2 (38:00):
Really yeah, and how can you fight back? How can
you protect yourself against it? It's it is like a blizzard.
It's like it's like the weather, like you know, and
it's it's eating the clothes off your back, even potentially. So.

Speaker 3 (38:11):
The insects species in question here was the Rocky Mountain locust.
The scientific name is Melanoplus spritus spritus. I think that
word means like despised. But swarming, it turns out, is
a regular part of locust behavior and a feature of
the insects life cycle. But this was an exceptionally huge swarm,

(38:35):
So it wasn't like the swarm is always this big,
but the locusts do regularly swarm.

Speaker 2 (38:42):
Yeah, I mean, you know, you can you see similar
behavior with various other insects like this, like there. I
have fond memories of visiting Arizona and going out and
and a relative's yard there and collecting like little grasshoppers
that were you know, abundant, seasonally abund and we would
collect them and put them in little jars and then

(39:03):
we'd let them all go afterwards, and we would often
catch them breeding with each other that sort of thing.
But we're talking about something on a much larger and
also destructive scale.

Speaker 3 (39:14):
Now, what makes this swarming behavior take place? Lockwood says
that when population density is low, locusts actually behave mostly
like typical grasshoppers, but when population density gets high, things
begin to change. The locusts start to react to chemical
signaling that they through detecting feces of other locusts. So

(39:39):
there's a lot of poop, you know, a lot of
locusts poop, and they're picking up chemicals from that, saying like, oh,
I think there's a lot of us around. And then
they also get tactle mechanical cues by feeling like bumps
and contact with other locusts from the hairs on their legs,
and signals like this combine to tell the locust it

(40:02):
is time to swarm. And this actually, interestingly doesn't just
change the locusts behavior. It leads to physical changes in
the locust's body, where it gets longer wings in a
darker body like literal changes to the shape of its
body in response to these cues around it that are
saying it's getting crowded, it's time to swarm.

Speaker 2 (40:24):
Well, it reminds me a little bit. It's still fundamentally
different in some ways, but it reminds me a little
bit with a tiger salamanders. How if population density can
trigger the development of cannibal morphs in the larvae, where
you'll have these sort of specialized you know, egg and
larva gobblers whose whole purpose is to like sort of

(40:45):
deal with the environmental scenario they find themselves in. So yeah,
but also involves physical change. So here we have population
density induced physical and behavioral changes in the locusts.

Speaker 3 (41:01):
Yeah, totally. So question is like what causes it. Lockwood
argues that swarming is probably a survival mechanism in response
to drought primarily, so you know what a locusts eat.
They eat plant matter, you know, leaves, stems, fruit seeds,
that kind of thing. When there is a drought or

(41:23):
clim climate stress that kills or limits the growth of plants,
and that reduces the locusts food supply. Locusts can then
be driven into shrinking areas where food remains available, and
this leads to crowding and over exploitation of the areas
that they're funneled into, and the crowding triggers the swarming response.

(41:43):
The swarm mobilizes as an army, and it moves into
new territory en mass, so they start traveling farther. Their
body becomes optimized for long distance travel, and they all
start moving as a group, seeking new food resources and
sort of devouring the landscape as they go, and the
results of this often inspired fear and awe in humans

(42:06):
and became the subject of folklore and literature. There's actually
a part where Lockwood quotes a passage from Laura Ingalls
Wilders on the Banks of Plum Creek, which is an
autobiographical book about the author's own childhood living in Frontier,
Minnesota in the eighteen seventies. And so I just want
to read part of this that he features. So she writes, quote,

(42:31):
the cloud was hailing grasshoppers. The cloud was grasshoppers. Their
bodies hid the sun and made darkness. Their thin, large
wings gleamed and glittered. The rasping whirring of their wings
filled the whole air, and they hit the ground and
the house with the noise of a hailstorm. Laura tried
to beat them off. Their claws clung to her skin

(42:53):
and her dress. They looked at her with bulging eyes,
turning their heads this way, and that grasshoppers covered the ground.
There was not one bare bit to step on. Laura
had to step on grasshoppers and they smashed, squirming and
slimy under her feet.

Speaker 2 (43:09):
This is pure horror movie. Wow.

Speaker 3 (43:11):
Incredible. Yeah. And then also at the end of this
passage that she notices her father is crying about the
wheat because there's a real economic situation here too, which
is they're devouring the crops. Oh man, Now, one question
I briefly wanted to address is what makes a locust

(43:31):
different from a grasshopper. The answer is that, in some
ways not much. Locusts are actually a type of grasshoppers.
So all locusts are grasshoppers, but not all grasshoppers are locusts.
Locusts is a subset. Locusts are the grasshoppers that exhibit
this swarming behavior when certain environmental triggers such as physical

(43:54):
crowding take place. But anyway, when you read all these
descriptions from the time of people experiencing prairie locust storms,
it does not sound real. It sounds like something out
of a dream or from a monster movie. And the
really unbelievable thing, which is the central story of Lockwood's essay,

(44:16):
is that within about three decades of this unbelievable locust
blizzard in the eighteen seventies, the species behind it, the
Rocky Mountain locust, would be completely extinct.

Speaker 2 (44:28):
Wow, which seems crazy because how could something exist in
such abundance and it just begone? Like, you know, we've
touched on many of the ways that creatures and organisms
in different forms of life may seem really dominant, but
they're actually fragile but still like on a very visceral
gut level. It's like, you're just like that, we have

(44:49):
no power over this. How could this ever go away?

Speaker 3 (44:51):
Yeah? And this ultimately is one of the kind of
reflective themes of this essay is about how phenomena in
nature are not always as robust as they see, especially
just by sheer magnitude and numbers. So you can have
this species that is producing, you know, producing swarms that
cover the area of entire large states, and yet there

(45:13):
are little bottlenecks. There are little sort of like pins,
structural things you could remove that will completely make it collapse. Apparently,
the last Rocky Mountain locust ever confirmed found alive was
in the year nineteen oh two in Canada, and you know,
people have gone looking for them ever since, but haven't
haven't found them. Wow. Now, Lockwood says that the dominant

(45:46):
explanation for a while for the disappearance of the Rocky
Mountain locust was what he calls a quote vague conspiracy
of vast ecological changes, and this would include stuff that's
going to sound very familiar by now if you've been
listening to the series. Disappearance of the bison, declined in
the number and extent of fires on the prairie, as
we've talked about several times, changes in climate patterns, as

(46:11):
we know, all these things have massively impacted prairies and
the species that depend upon them. And the thinking was
for a while that these factors together had changed the
Rocky Mountain locusts' habitat and killed them off. But Lockwood,
as an entomologist who studied insects like this, was not convinced.
He looked at the issue and he believed these factors

(46:32):
did not adequately explain the disappearance of the species. And
then the essay hits this awesome turn where he writes, quote,
digging through old, obscure geological reports, I learned about the
existence of grasshopper glaciers strung along the spine of the Rockies. Curious,

(46:52):
I did more research and learned that these glaciers were
so named because of their contents. They had entombed wayward
grasshopper swarms centuries ago. Oh wow, I had no idea
about this.

Speaker 2 (47:07):
So this is sounding more and more like a horror movie,
I know.

Speaker 3 (47:10):
Yeah, So this article is so great, so it sent
me on a tangent. I just went elsewhere reading about
grasshopper glaciers. So grasshopper glaciers can be found in multiple places.
I was reading about one that's actually named grasshopper glacier
in the Beartooth Mountains of Montana, but you can find
him in other places too. There was a good short

(47:31):
piece on grasshopper glaciers and a series called field Notes
of the Montana Naturalist put together by Montana Public Radio.
This is by an author named Terry Habiger in twenty
twenty two, and the author here talks about how one
way these can come together. Lockwood himself actually talks about
a different mechanism later on, But in this example, the

(47:55):
author talks about how long ago, in the ancient past,
you have swarms of locusts that my flood into areas
experiencing snow and icy weather. Many of the locusts would die,
They would fall down in the snow, and then somehow
they would be encased in a layer of ice. So
maybe the snow falls on top of them and freezes
forms an ice layer on top of a glacier, or

(48:17):
they somehow get washed into a glacier area and frozen
into it. And as this happened, year after year, you
would get multiple accumulating layers of grasshopper studded glacier ice,
piling up, one on top of the other, with generation
after generation of dead grasshoppers mummified inside the ice. Habiger

(48:40):
writes quote James P. Kimball's eighteen ninety eight survey in
the Beartooth Mountains estimated that thousands of tons of grasshopper
remains could be found on the lower edge of a glacier.
He noted that not a fragment of ice could be
broken without finding the remains of grasshoppers. Wow, it's like
a chocolate chip cookie or something it's.

Speaker 2 (49:01):
Just all you drink, or maybe you do.

Speaker 3 (49:03):
I don't know. So he also mentions that grasshoppers found
in a glacier in Wyoming have been radiocarbon dated to
the thirteen hundreds, so you know, I think it's some
very old grasshoppers in there. Anyway, Lockwood says he learns
about these grasshopper glaciers and he wonders if some of
the preserved grasshoppers in these glaciers, if they were actually

(49:27):
Rocky mountain locusts, maybe they could provide clues that would
help illuminate the cause of the species extinction. So Lockwood
discusses his attempts with the help of his students to
study the hoppers frozen in first of all, in grasshopper
glacier in Montana, the one I mentioned a minute ago.
He talks about difficulties encountered that encountered there, like the

(49:49):
glaciers were starting to melt and most of the insect
corpses were badly decomposed. Others were in better shape, but
they were too recent in the wrong species. Finally, he
says that they found ideal specimens at a place called
Knife Point Glacier in the wind River Mountains of Wyoming,
and Lockwood and his team determined that these locusts had

(50:10):
probably been blown in from River Valley somewhere in the
north within what is today Yellowstone National Park in the
early sixteen hundreds. So Lockwood describes the process of how
they got into the glacier, saying, quote, scattered across the
glacier in a seething carpet of brown, green bodies. Some
of the locusts may have escaped and continued their journey,

(50:34):
but millions were probably immobilized by the cold. In the
course of summer, melting rivulets washed them into crevices or
not sorry, not crevices, crevasses, as we've talked about on
the show before, the crevasses in the ice sheets that
split the top of the ice field. With time, they
were frozen deep in the glacier and slowly transported down

(50:58):
the side of the mountain. So like frozen washed, you know,
melted and washed into the crevasses and then moved further
down the mountain. So Lockwood writes that the patterns of
locust deposition within the glacier revealed something very interesting. There
were evidence against a previously held belief and that belief

(51:19):
was that these observed outbreaks in locust swarming behavior must
have been driven by crisis or catastrophe. Maybe it was
the alteration of the environment by settlers that made the
locust populations boom and swarm and then bust. But no,
This glacier seemed to reveal a quote pattern of locust
outbreaks extending centuries prior to European alterations of the Western landscape,

(51:45):
and Lockwood reflects on this, writing that it is true
that sometimes extreme dynamics and ecosystems reflect distress or reflect
changes imposed from outside, but not always. Some times erratic
extreme dynamics are just part of nature. That is just
how these animals are evolved in what they do in

(52:08):
their environment. You get these occasional crazy outbreaks in locust
populations and these exploding swarms. Another running theme in the
essay is what you actually brought up earlier, Rob, It's
the idea that people have a hard time accepting that
something so gargantuan in its impact could just vanish. It's

(52:31):
hard to believe that insects which gathered in the billions
or trillions into an area the size of a state
would be completely gone within the lifetime of people who
were there for the swarm of eighteen seventy five. Another
thing that he brings up it's interesting is that if
humans had been able to eradicate it at the time,

(52:53):
they probably would have tried. It would have just seemed impossible,
Like he has the sectionary he writes, quote, but at
the time of the insects disappearance, there were no synthetic
carbon based pesticides, no modern earth moving equipment, not even chainsaws.
Settlers fought back with what tools they had, from flooding
to fire to dynamite, but this hand to hand combat

(53:15):
didn't make a dent against an enemy that was billion strong.

Speaker 2 (53:19):
Wow. Yeah, just realizing that modern pesticides were not an
option against this, because I think that would be sort
of like the first line of defense that people might
think of when imagining something like this. That those tools
were not even on the table.

Speaker 3 (53:34):
Right, So all these farmer settlers would have would have
liked to destroy the locusts if they could, but they couldn't.
And yet somehow something or someone did And I had
no idea how that happened. So it was still a
mystery while Lockwood's research here was going on. But he says,
Eventually he stumbled into what is most likely the correct

(53:58):
answer by thinking a completely different insect species, the monarch butterfly.
So in a similar situation, migratory adults of the monarch
butterfly can be seen across much of North America in
the summer, and yet monarch butterflies are still considered vulnerable
or endangered, in part because they have to return to

(54:20):
much more limited overwintering grounds during the cold weather, primarily
a Lockwood describes these few strips of forest in the
mountains of Mexico. So even though they spread all over
North America in the warm season, there's just this geographical
bottleneck on their survival due to their seasonal need to
return to these limited southern habitats. As Lockwood puts it,

(54:43):
quote loosed on these pockets, a logging crew armed with
chainsaws could put an end to this magnificent butterfly in
a matter of weeks. Oh wow, So that's one where
I don't know if the situation is substantially different now
than at the time this essay was written, but at
least as a point of analogy, it got him to

(55:04):
think about what is now widely considered the probable reason
that the Rocky Mountain locust when extinct, and it was
having to do with a geographical bottleneck on a certain
part of their life cycle. So the Rocky Mountain locust,
like the butterfly, though it may have spread far and
wide during its outbreaks during these swarms, at other points

(55:27):
in its life cycle, it was limited to an extremely
tiny range of habitats. Between outbreaks. It seems that the
locust probably lived in river valleys in Wyoming and Montana,
the exact same areas that settlers in those regions had
discovered were the best places for farming. So factors contributing

(55:48):
to the destruction of the locust habitat would have included
the conversion of these lands into farmlands. So taking the
grassland of these valleys, turning that into cropland or into
rangeland livestock. You're bringing in the cows and the plows.
You're also getting alteration of natural waterways, like using streams
for irrigation. Elimination of beavers and beaver dams is something

(56:12):
Lockwood mentioned. We've done episodes on this before. What happened
the other eco engineer totally Yeah, So much like the
bison we talked about last time that engineer the prairie
ecosystems by creating these wallows with their dust bathing beavers
are ecosystem engineers that promote biodiversity by creating these wetland
habitats that have all kinds of effects. You get rid

(56:36):
of the beavers, you change the landscape substantially, and a
lot of other things depend on beavers. So eventually, it
seems this became the most widely accepted account of what
happened to the Rocky Mountain locust Even though they could
spread far and wide, they had to go back to
retreat to these narrow these narrower refuge sites in these

(56:58):
river valleys, and human development sting settlers turning these areas
into farmlands. That is probably what killed off these locusts.
Now After this, Lockwood goes on to talk about a
few other interesting ideas. One is he says, even after
he landed on this explanation, he made many attempts to

(57:18):
find still living specimens of the Rocky Mountain locusts, thinking
maybe it hasn't been fully eliminated, Maybe it's still alive somewhere,
like in a particular undisturbed river valley in or near Yellowstone.
Maybe we could find one there. He went looking for it.
Many times, these attempts failed. It seems like this locust
really is probably gone. But he ponders, I think this

(57:42):
is a really interesting question. If it did still exist,
what would human beings want to do. Would people want
to protect it or would they would they like read
the accounts of these swarms in the nineteenth century, just
like blotting out the sun and devouring everything, destroyings, you know,
untold damages and agricultural destruction, and would they just conclude

(58:06):
that this thing had to be eradicated entirely. And there's
another way he puts it, which is he he introduces
this idea of thinking about a different way of thinking
about biology, which is not thinking about individual organisms as
like independent clusters of cells, but instead thinking thinking of

(58:26):
a species as a process, a process that acts through
an ecosystem. And he says, quote, in this light, the
Rocky Mountain locust was an immense, a periodic process of
energy flow, linking life processes across a continent. And he says,
by this definition, even if some individuals of the locust

(58:47):
still existed, the process identity of the Rocky Mountain locust
would be extinct. It no longer is what it once did.

Speaker 2 (58:56):
That's an interesting way to look at it. And you know,
we can we fply that to some of the other
examples we've talked about, like like the grizzly bear. You know,
yea and grizzly bear is still very much around, but
it is not certainly within the prairie context. It is
not quite the same process as it once was. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (59:15):
Absolutely, So that's it's another way of framing how we
think about like animal populations and extinction. Like, uh, you know,
is a thing not extinct if there are still some
individuals in some kind of refuge, you know, in captivity
or in a particular nature preserve or something, but but

(59:36):
the species no longer comes anywhere close to having the
ecological impact that it used to. Does that species still exist?

Speaker 2 (59:44):
Yeah, It's almost like the difference between having a book
on a shelf and books actually actively being read by people,
you know, like, are those books actually alive, are the
ideas in them alive or do we just we just
have some copies of them and and yeah, it's they
still exist, but they're not part of the system anymore,
not in the way they once were.

Speaker 3 (01:00:03):
Yeah, but I truly don't know what the answer would
be like if we So, if we found these locusts
that were once you know, considered like the pest of pests,
and that some still were alive, like, what would people
want to do? Would be like, well, should we protect
them or I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:00:21):
We see a similar situation with the bear, of course,
like should we reintroduce brown bears into into their historic ranges?
You know, in many cases these these ranges don't really
exist anymore. You'd be reintroducing them into into areas close
to human habitation and so forth, and so it becomes
a very sticky and again even political point. And with
the locust, yeah, I can imagine there would be a

(01:00:43):
number of people saying, let's not bring back the locust,
let's not bring back the locusts warm, And you know,
I don't know, I can see I can see why
there would be maybe some strong arguments on both sides there.

Speaker 3 (01:00:55):
There's another really interesting question Luckwood gets into toward the
end of his essay more in the Nature Essay reflection mode,
and it comes back to this intuition we have that
something very powerful and widespread can't just disappear it can't
go extinct, But in the case of the locust, we
learned that it could. There are, actually there are these

(01:01:16):
little things it depends on. We might not even know
what they are at the time. And so he raised it.
He applies this question to us. Are we so powerful
and widespread that we also could never really go extinct?
To certainly, we feel like it would be hard to
drive humanity extinct. But what if we have kind of
particular weaknesses we don't realize. Do we have ecological bottlenecks

(01:01:41):
we depend on, like the locusts, river valleys, some kind
of either literal or metaphorical, narrow strip of refuge that
we depend on in some way, a refuge that is
more fragile than we care to think about, but have
something to do with access to water, coastal settlements, or
even things like the crops we depend on, you know,

(01:02:03):
many of which now grow in places that were once
tall grass prairie, which is now an endangered ecosystem.

Speaker 2 (01:02:09):
Yeah, this is this is a great point. Yeah, it's
easy to think of ourselves as something that's too big
to fail in the in the you know, certainly, in specifics,
we think it's easy to think about this in terms
of institutions and nations and empires, but even the whole
human exercise itself, which you know, thinking back to this
idea about or an organism as a as a process,

(01:02:30):
you know, like the the human process is fundamentally different
now than it was you know, in other points in
our evolutionary history. So like the thing that we are
now is is rather different in terms of its energy consumption,
the thing and and and also just the overall shape
of it. Like you know, this is I think this

(01:02:51):
is kind of something that's kind of popping around in
our head, maybe unnamed in our various post apocalyptic and
apocalyptic media installments, is we realize that for humanity to
go back to some previous form by necessity, you know,
some like returning to a hunter gatherer lifestyle, it is

(01:03:12):
a would be a fundamental, fundamental change from what we
have now. It would basically be a complete change, like
it would be in many ways, we would be unrecognizable
and at the same time acknowledging that there would be
certain things that are key to the human existence that
that would hopefully still remain part of the human experience.

Speaker 3 (01:03:30):
Yeah, totally. I mean, we would have the same DNA
are would be the same type of individual animal, but
our impact, our you know, us as a process moving
through the world would be totally different. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:03:44):
Yeah, but this is a I think this is a
fitting place to finish off our discussion of the prairie here,
because the prairie in its entirety is this thing that
has has always appeared so vast to us and just
almost beyond our ability to comprehend it, madness inducing even
in some of the more you know, extreme and juiced

(01:04:06):
up descriptions, and it seems like it's something that we
couldn't possibly have control over, that we couldn't possibly impact,
that we could hope to harness or certainly destroy. And
yet we've seen time and time again all of these
ways that we have managed to do, in large part,
just that wiping out, you know, vast swaths of prairie land,

(01:04:27):
disrupting it in major ways, disrupting the organisms that give
it the shape that it has. So yeah, again, I
think this is a fitting place to close it out
and a get a fitting place though with hope though,
to remind ourselves the importance of being stewards of the
current shape of the prairies and you know, finding these

(01:04:47):
ways that we can conserve what's left and in at
least in some ways work to bring back what has
been lost. All right, we're going to close it there,
but as always, we'd love to hear from everyone out there,
Prairie to wa, prairie visitors, people who have never been
to the prairie, and just have thoughts on some of
the various topics we've discussed in these episodes right in

(01:05:08):
we would love to hear from you. Just a reminder
that The Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science
and culture podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursday,
short form episodes on Wednesdays and on Fridays. We set
aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird
film on Weird House Cinema. Wherever you listen to the podcast,
or if you watch the podcast on Netflix, that's where
we have our audio video version of it. So kind

(01:05:29):
of like the Prairie Dog Dance, where you get the
barking and the move and the motions. If you don't
want to just hear us bark and you want to
watch us dance, that's where you should go. But wherever
you get in the podcast, be it Netflix or any
of the various podcast sources out there, just make sure
that you rate, review, subscribe. If you're on Netflix, that
means two thumbs up. That means asking to be reminded

(01:05:51):
about new episodes. These are all things that help us.

Speaker 3 (01:05:54):
Out huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer
JJ Posway. If you would like to get into touch
with us with feedback on this episode or any other,
to suggest a topic for the future, or just to
say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff
to Blow your Mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (01:06:16):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.