August 24, 2023 • 45 mins
Climate change is having sweeping effects on our climate and this is changing the world, not just for humans and other animals, but plants too. Will the Earth’s flora manage to find safe refuge in time?
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is stuff you
should know that we're all melting.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
Addition, Yeah, I'm just a migrating fern.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Oh, that's a good one to be.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
Blowing through of the forest looking for a new home. Sure,
I'm a spore.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
What happens when you get their spore?
Speaker 1 (00:33):
Well, I'll probably grow into a beautiful new fern because
ferns are pretty party.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
That's awesome, and I'll bet you'll contribute to society and
all sorts of beneficial ways that ferns that were already
there couldn't necessarily do.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
I hope. So there is fern stuff in here, and
I have a wonderful fern scene at my camp on
the other side of the feeder creek that goes into
the main creek. I call it. I even have a son.
This is fern forest, and it's a forest of ferns.
Is quite lovely.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
God knows where they're from, because those things can travel
quite a bit, as we'll see.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
Yeah, they could be from Alabamy easily.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
I'm not kidding. Easily. Man, I've got a stat that's
gonna blow your mind in a second. Uh oh boy, Actually,
I'll just bust it out now, you ready? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (01:21):
Yeah? How far can a fern travel?
Speaker 2 (01:23):
A fern can travel. The Tasmanian tree fern in particular,
can send it spores five hundred to eight hundred kilometers.
It's three hundred to five hundred miles from the mother plant.
And get this, a single frond a fraud produces more
than seven hundred and fifty million of those spores.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
So you can understand that ferns, I mean, you find
ferns everywhere. They're really hardy. They can actually survive cold,
colder temperatures than you would think. They also thrive in
the tropics. They're like a really great pioneer plant. They
usually are among the first large plants that show up
in a newly cleared part of Earth. Right, this all
(02:07):
makes sense then, Okay, So what we're talking about then,
is that those ferns that showed up in this new
place and said, hey, let's get this, let's get this
biosphere going again, let's get this biome back into shape
after this wildfire or something like that. Or there's like
a stampede because there was a really great ice cream
truck that drove through one of those two. Those ferns
(02:30):
have migrated. They came from Tasmania apparently all the way
to wherever the ice cream truck was. Right now they're there,
and so they actually moved in that sense, which is
really surprising because plants are what are known as sessile organisms.
They don't move from place to place individually as organisms,
(02:50):
but as a species they can actually move around like inchworms.
Pretty good.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
Yeah, it's pretty cool. I didn't really know much about this.
We're talking about plant migration and the idea, well not idea,
the very real fact that just like humans and animals
will go to more hospitable climbs as the climate may
change or just i don't know, just to seek a
(03:16):
better place to be, plants and trees and things on
mass do the same thing.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
Yeah, and there's all sorts of ways that they do
that too. So they do it by dispersing their seeds
or their spores in that case, fern spores or single
cell organisms. They're not like a seed technically, but they
do the same thing. Right. They show up in a
place and set up shop and they start rocking out.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
Yeah, that's right. And ferns, you know, it depends and
we'll get all into this stuff. But how fast this
happens depends on different factors. How far these plants can
migrate depends on different factors. Why this is happening is
generally climate change. Yeah, and plants are in trees, and
(04:02):
things are generally moving north or up in elevation if
they hit mountains.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
Or south in the southern hemisphere exactly.
Speaker 1 (04:13):
So that's sort of the general pattern. And we mentioned
ferns because, like you said, those spores can really haul.
Ferns also mature very quickly, and you know, the wind
can just that's that's why I got a fern forest
at my camp probably.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
Yeah, So they check both of the boxes that you
need to be a fast migrating plant species. They produce
seeds or spores at a very young age, and their
seed or spore can travel very far distances, right right,
so they can move around. And also it doesn't hurt that,
like I said, ferns are adaptable. Trees and other plants
(04:48):
still move quite so fast. But they move, especially if
you look at the fossil record, a lot faster than
they actually should so if you pay attention to a
single organism saying oak, Those acorns don't travel terribly far.
They may get a little further away from the drip
line if a squirrel happens to bury it somewhere and
(05:09):
a new oak tree grows.
Speaker 1 (05:11):
Sure.
Speaker 2 (05:12):
I think it was Ander Samberg who described acorns as
solar powered factories for producing more oak trees.
Speaker 1 (05:21):
Whoaa Andy Samberg said that?
Speaker 2 (05:23):
No, Anders Sandberg. Oh, okay, he's a philosopher at Oxford.
Speaker 1 (05:29):
That makes a lot more sense.
Speaker 2 (05:31):
Yeah, yeah, Andy Samberg. He ate his lime accidentally in
his Corona bottle. That's that's what he's got.
Speaker 1 (05:38):
You knew he's married too.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
Patricia Arquette. No Arquette, You've.
Speaker 1 (05:45):
Been guessing Patricia Arkette for a lot of things. Slightly.
I feel like he's married to Yeah, I feel like
that's come up before.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
Maybe I don't know her name just rolls off the tone.
Speaker 1 (05:57):
I know a big fan of hers. He is married
to what's her name, Joanna Newsom, the singer and harpist
oh Neatice. And if you like, if you're into architecture
and homes, you should seek out I don't know if
it's architectural digest or something. But someone did a spread
on their home and it is really something else.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
Okay, so that's Andy Samberg per Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
That would just checked a quick detour.
Speaker 2 (06:24):
U Wait wait I wasn't done.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
Oh no, good, go ahead.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
So if you look in an individual tree, an oak tree,
those acorns don't go particularly far away from the tree,
as the old saying goes, But the fact that they
do fall away from the tree moons that very slowly
some of those seedlings are going to grow up a
little more northward or a little more southward. Then it's
mother plant, and very very slowly, the whole group of
(06:49):
oaks can move southward or northward right.
Speaker 1 (06:53):
Over hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
Of years so long. The thing is, if you look
at the fossil record, they moved way faster than they should.
And there's actually a paradox that was named by a
guy named Clement.
Speaker 1 (07:08):
Red right reads paradox.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
Yeah, he's got a great, great title for it.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
Of rapid plant migration. That's the full title.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
It sounds almost like snake oil from the nineteenth century.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
Yeah, it kind of.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
So what is it?
Speaker 1 (07:22):
Oh? Okay, I didn't ever seen me up. We're still
tight after all these years.
Speaker 2 (07:26):
For sure.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
So what he found from the fossil record, like you
were talking about, and as we'll see that that's one,
like you know, pretty good way to study this stuff,
especially pollen fossils.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
Right, yeah, because they're so hardy.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
Yeah. So he saw that trees were migrating a lot
faster than like the rate that you would think, and
so he like those oaks I think was one example
you gave on the British Isles after the last glacial period,
over a span of like ten thousand years or so,
they traveled about six hundred miles and it would normally
(07:59):
take about a million years if the steeds, if the
seeds were just dispersed in a typical way. But what
he figured was that what may be happening here is
like some weird weather event happens that sent things much
farther than usual, or like some deer or something eats
(08:22):
something and then poops out something really far away from
where it started, and so all of a sudden, this
animal has spread it via their poo poo.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
Right, And this is how like large scale migration happens,
or I should say, rapid migration over long distances.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
Right right, Yeah, it's the.
Speaker 2 (08:41):
It's the unusual, not just the acorn falling and hitting
the ground. It's not just gravity assisted. It's animal assisted,
which is called zoochorey, or it's wind assisted, which is
called a nema corey, or water assisted, which is called hydrochory.
And that's just the way that some plants dispersed their seeds.
That's kind of on top of the normal way they
(09:02):
dispersed it, which is just dropping it from their leaves
or the spores blowing on the wind, which I guess
is one type of corey.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
Yeah. So like if a squirrel loaded up its mouthful
of things m h and somehow found its way into
your camper, as you said off for Arizona.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
That would be a freak event.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
Sure it probably wouldn't be en mass, but you know,
that's a way a dree coud move.
Speaker 2 (09:24):
All it takes is that one oak to make it
sure to just survive, and then it starts its own
new part of the range.
Speaker 1 (09:34):
Yeah. Absolutely, And we al should should point out when
when was redoing this. This is a while ago, like
one hundred plus years ago, right.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
Yeah, he was a geologist. I don't know if we said,
but his reads Paradox of Rapid Plant Migration came out
in eighteen ninety nine and it was a smash hit.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
Yeah, so people, I mean for at least that long,
science has been sort of curious about this, this migration
happening at a rate that they would not expect.
Speaker 2 (10:01):
Right. The thing is is it's really hard when you
throw in that X factor to calculate how fast and
actual species can migrate. And there's a few ways that
you can study that kind of thing. One, as you said,
is studying the fossil record, which is super helpful, but
(10:21):
it's not showing you what's going on contemporaneously or within
the last couple decades. This is ten thousand, a million
years ago something like that, right.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
Yeah, So if you wanted to study something a little
closer to home timeline wise, you would maybe set up
what's called a permanent vegetation plot, so you would mark
off an area and you would go back there, you know,
every so often, like every six months or every year
or so, and just sort of chart what's happening. That's
one really good way. I think they've been doing this
(10:52):
for about one hundred years since in nineteen twenty, So
we've got a pretty good data set there. Something else
you could do is go somewhere, like, let's say you
dug up some cool scientific journal from a scientist from
you know, two hundred years ago that went and explored
some island, and while they may not have like charted
(11:14):
everything out exactly like you would in today's science, they
may have a really nice diary about all the plant
life there and things that they saw there and where
it might be. And you could go back to that
place and it's not quite as tight of a record,
but you could still get a pretty good idea of
what's happening.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
Yeah, depending on whose journal you're working from. And back.
In twenty twelve, a Danish team of scientists followed the
record left by a nineteenth century geologist named Alexander von
Humboldt from Germany, who was just an interesting dude in
and of himself. Yeah, he called coffee concentrated some beams.
So he's that kind of guy.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
Oh man, that's great.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
They went back to Chimborazo Volcano in Ecuador, which Humboldt
studied in detail, and not only did he study the
vegetation there and he classified all sorts of new plants
that Europeans didn't know about at that point. He also
noted exactly where they were on the mountain as far
as the elevation went.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
Super helpful, super helpful.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
So based on this information, the twenty twelve Danes were
able to go back and recreate his trip, and then
they were able to note what plants were where, and
they found that everything, all species, on average, had moved
up the mountain by about an average of about five
hundred meters, which is significant. It's like almost a mile,
(12:34):
it's like eight tenths of a mile.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
Yeah, yeah, that's the average. Yeah, there was a lot
of aeriation within that, but that's that's a long way
for sure. And what we found out, and I guess
this comes up a little later, but a plant can
find more hospitable climbs going up five hundred meters than
they might by going let's just say north, like ninety
(12:56):
to one hundred miles. Yes, so like a much quicker
road to better climbs if you just go up that
mountain for sure.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
Yeah, that's kind of two ways they move is longitudinally yeah,
or altitudinally.
Speaker 1 (13:13):
You gotta be in shape though, Oh, for sure, you're
gonna climb that mountain. Should we take a break?
Speaker 2 (13:20):
I think we should. But just to wrap it up
real quick, there's a bunch of ways you can study
the movement of trees. But it's so slow and it
happens over such long timelines, longer than a human timeline,
that it's harder to do than you'd think. But we
still have figured out some ways to do it.
Speaker 1 (13:34):
All Right, we'll be right back and we'll talk about
all this stuff in more detail.
Speaker 2 (13:38):
Right for this.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
One other way we failed to mention. Probably would have
been better to just say that before the break, But again,
still learning after sixteen years. Satellite images is another way
that you can study on the short term. You know,
the fossil pollen is much longer, and those plant plots
and things like that, vegetation plots our shorter term. But
(14:20):
satellite images can also help.
Speaker 2 (14:22):
Yeah, if you want to catch like a venus fly
trap and the act of leap frogging over some other planet,
satellite image is going to help you with that. Fossil
record won't show you that.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
Here's the thing with all this, though, it's not like
we're going to talk a lot about climate change because
that's what's spurring a lot of the movement right now.
But the Earth's climate has changed a lot over the
you know, over the years, and this is not some
new thing. There used to be periods of time where
the Sahara desert was quite green and there was grasses
(14:55):
growing there and tropical plants growing there, and elephants roaming
the Sahara and wildlife living there. And they've learned that
this is actually one of the things that helped move
you know, humans around, Like humans could actually migrate through
the Sahara with much more ease than they could before
during these green Sahara periods.
Speaker 2 (15:15):
Yeah, that's so fascinating that, you know, who knows when
we would have migrated out of Africa into Europe and
the ages had the green Sahara not happened. And isn't
that just nuts?
Speaker 1 (15:26):
Yeah, like hundreds of miles it says here that they
would find tropical plants growing where they shouldn't be, growing
alongside you know, the desert stuff that survived. So that
was this weird sort of mixed up biome for a time.
Speaker 2 (15:38):
Yeah, And the Green Sahara period there were a few
of them that had been documented, but they figured out
that they happened about every twenty three thousand years, right,
We're due for one in about twelve thousand years something
like that. And it's based on the tilt in Earth's axis.
That's neither here nor there. But the point is is
during these these periods where this was just a humid
(16:01):
kind of tropical forest, there was a mixture kind of
what you touched upon, of different like you said, a
hybrid biome of stuff that wouldn't necessarily live together under
normal circumstances, but got along just famously in the couple
thousand years that the Sahara was green and those plants
were growing together.
Speaker 1 (16:20):
Yeah, it's just amazing to think about.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
And then in North America we have another example too.
After the Laurentide Glacier, which is way up in the
Arctic right now, used to be down in Indiana and
northern New Jersey. Yeah, and when it retreated, it took
everything with it. It took bowlers, it carved out lakes,
it did all sorts of neat stuff. But what it
didn't leave behind was vegetation. So it left it was
(16:45):
like a giant ice cream truck basically. Yeah, it left
nothing behind, and it was just a great place for
plants to pioneer and colonie.
Speaker 1 (16:54):
Yeah. I mean that's why you have pine trees in
New Jersey, right.
Speaker 2 (16:57):
I would think so, yeah, or in the south because
they were too far they were trapped below or yeah,
below the Laurentide Glacier down in the southeast, even though
they normally would have been growing in the north, right,
And as the glacier retreated, the climate changed in that area,
(17:18):
and so the trees has moved on up. So that's
an example of migration as well.
Speaker 1 (17:22):
Yeah. Oh wait, I thought they but I thought they
were It was more hospitable in the south for these trees,
and that migration sent them north. Yeah, that's what I said, right,
Oh okay maybe Yeah. The other thing we should talk
about as far as climate change goes, because, like I said,
we're going to mention that a lot is the rate
of change of the climate is increasing, as most people
(17:45):
agree on, and that is kind of where we are
now in discussing this is like, is the rate of
climate increasing too fast for the plant migration to catch up,
or in some cases are the plants migrating ahead of
that pace? And that's really sort of you know, a
lot of this episode is about this rate of change.
(18:07):
In the two hundred years since the beginning of the
Industrial Age, no coincidence, the temperature of the Earth has
increased more than one degree. And again, yeah we all
know now that you know, one degree is like a huge,
huge deal.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
It's one point eight degrees fahrenheit.
Speaker 1 (18:25):
Yeah, exactly, But zero point three seven of that change
over the past two hundred years has come since twenty eleven.
So it's people. Have you know, someone has stepped on
the gas here. Yeah, and it's happening much much faster,
and seemingly in many cases, fasting faster than these plants
can catch up.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
Yeah. So plants are used to migrating, like they've been
migrating through our Earth's history, but these conditions are different.
It's not like it was before. Even when the Earth
was heating up after the last Ice Age, I think,
did you say that it took about an hour average
of fourteen hundred years to increase by one degree after
the last glacial period?
Speaker 1 (19:05):
No, No, that was the setup. That would have been
very helpful.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
Actually, I mean, think about it. So we've achieved one
degree in two hundred years, and after the last glacial
period ended the earth heated one degree every fourteen hundred years.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
Yeah, that's called a rapid increase.
Speaker 2 (19:22):
Yeah, Like you said, somebody's put their foot on the gas,
and that's somebody is Western industrialized nations, right.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (19:28):
So that's one thing that's really kind of putting the
heat on plants literally is their southernmost ranges or their
northernmost ranges, depending on what I guess, they're equatorial pointing
ranges where it's hotter. Those are the ones that are
really at stake. So are those plants ranges big enough
(19:50):
that they'll be able to survive that change in climate
and just keep moving northward or are they going to
be outpaced by the movement of the climate because the
climate is racing towards the poles, just like the plants are.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
Right, Yeah, So who's faster.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
Well, it turns out if you talk about New England's trees,
they move something I think red oaks is what it
was that this University of Vermont group was studying. They
move something like a tenth to three tenths of a
mile a year, right, Yeah. The climate is moving something
like four to six miles a year. So the climate
(20:28):
is really kind of showing up as kind of the
Usain Bolt of this race. And I don't know the
plants are like me racing Usain Bolt.
Speaker 1 (20:41):
Yeah, that lab group in Vermont, they all have t
shirts that just say you do the math exactly. It's
very smarty, but they get their point across for sure.
There's another example of and you know, we've kind of
been talking about northern movement, which is generally the pattern,
but not always. There's a rece Purdue name song Lend Fay.
(21:03):
I think Fay or Fhi. I don't know Fi. I
bet it's Fie who studied eighty six species of trees
in the eastern US over about thirty years from the
mid eighties to twenty fifteen. And it depends on what
the tree is. Hardwoods, scarlet oaks, red maples, magnolias are
moving west at about one and a half kilometers a
(21:25):
year because the Midwest is becoming more wet and the
conditions are good for those trees to grow. Soft woods,
shortleaf pines, red pines, bald cypress. They're actually moving north
about a kilometer of the year, a kilometer a year.
Speaker 2 (21:40):
So.
Speaker 1 (21:42):
Different plants and trees are moving in different directions at
different rates.
Speaker 2 (21:46):
Yeah, it's very much akin to a neighborhood that's this
old settled in neighborhood with a bunch of mix of
people that's being gentrified. It's being pushed out and separated.
Not everybody, just the whole neighborhood doesn't just move. This
neighborhood breaks up and goes in different directions. And so
to ecologists in arborous like this is very concerning because
(22:09):
for a long time we've looked at groups of plants
as communities, like some some plants go with other plants,
like I think was it beach and uh, hickory, where
is it?
Speaker 1 (22:26):
I don't know. I like hickory, though.
Speaker 2 (22:29):
We can't we can't leave that in there. Oh yeah, hemlocks.
I knew it was an h. H. Tree. Beach and
hemlocks go together like peanut butter and chocolate, so to do,
like firs and spruces. Right, So when you find one
of these, you usually find the other one. And there's
also a bunch of other plants that kind of interact,
and usually some types of animals that hang out in
(22:49):
those same types of forests. So if you've got the
hemlocks going north and the beach going west, Who are
the hemlocks going to mix with and who are the
beach going to mix with when they start to set
up these new communities, And that was really troubling to ecologists,
but I think palinologists, these fossil pollen scientists have said
(23:09):
it's always been this way. Communities aren't permanent, they're kind
of instable. They just seem permanent to us because our
life years there are lifespans on the order of like
seventy eighty years, right right, This is it's a much
slower process, but it's a constantly changing turnover, so it's
not that big of a deal. But again, because of
the pace of climate change, when these hemlocks get further
(23:32):
north and the beach get further west, they're going to
have far less time to develop new connections and networks
with the new plants that they set up communities with.
Speaker 1 (23:43):
Yeah, and the other thing too, you know earlier when
I mentioned that a series of trees might move up
a mountain side because it's a way quicker way to
get to a more hospitable climate than moving that ninety
miles north. Yeah, when they and this happens in other
cases as well, it's not just like up a mountain side.
(24:04):
But when they get to the place where they're going,
it may be a better place, may be more hospitable
climate wise, but other things aren't so great. So if
you move up that mountain slope, let's say you have
a shallower soil, and so those trees move up there
because the climate's better. But then they get there and
(24:24):
the soil is in as great, so they get squeezed
into where they can grow, maybe into like a tiny
little narrow band that's you know, potentially choking off the
rest of the forest.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
Yeah, I've figured out it's kind of like hiding in
a closet during a house fire, Like you're going to
be safe in the short term, but in the long
term it's not a great strategy. But it's not like
the trees have any choice. They can't go back down.
It's too hot there, they can't move further up. There's
the soils in hospitable, so they're trapped and they're eventually
going to become a thinner and thinner band until they
(24:55):
just pop out of existence.
Speaker 1 (24:57):
That's right. And the other thing that can happen when,
like you said, when they get to a new place,
and they don't have enough time to make new friends.
All of a sudden, that can open the window for
bad friends to show up. Yeah, and all of a sudden,
invasive species are there, and then you've got a whole
other set of problems.
Speaker 2 (25:14):
Yeah, the ones that were like leather jackets with the
little silver studs on their shoulders, those are the ones
you gotta watch out for. Those plants.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
If this all seems very kind of on too long
of a timeline for you to care, First of all,
you probably don't care much about climate change because that's
the whole name of the game there. Sure, but maple
syrup is a good example that Livia found Lyvia helped
u out. She did great job with this. The maple tree.
(25:45):
Which species is that? The sugar maple is one of
the two main species that we use to get that
delicious maple syrup.
Speaker 2 (25:50):
I'm sorry, this isn't a side. Sugar maple are two
beautiful words that form an even more beautiful.
Speaker 1 (25:57):
You are right on the money, my friend. You know,
sugar maple. It just sounds nice coming out of my mouth. Yeah.
They have been migrating north into Canada, and you might say, well,
that's great Canada is a fine place to live, and
I'm sure they love their maple serve up there too.
But in Quebec, the researchers have found that they're not
(26:18):
gonna go beyond their current range up there because they're
boreal forests up there. So the soil again, they the
climate might be better, but then they get up there
and the soil pH and the microbe content in the
soil is not what they're used to and not what
they work well with and grow well with. So they're
not doing well up there in the forest.
Speaker 2 (26:38):
No, No, And that's it's the exact same position as
the trees that are trying to go up the mountain
are running into. Eventually, these trees that are moving into
the boreal forest areas, they're like they can't go any further,
Like they're not adapted to that.
Speaker 1 (26:54):
Over a long enough timeline, yeah, maybe.
Speaker 2 (26:56):
Those sugar maples could, like a few of them, could
land in the border royal forest and end up surviving
in that kind of soil and then they would be
adapted for and they'd start reproducing. And then as the
boreal forest moved closer to the Poles or the Arctic,
those trees would move where the boreal forest used to be. Right,
totally not a problem over a long enough time span. Again,
(27:18):
climate change has so drastically shortened that timespan that there's
probably not going to be time for this, and those
sugar maples will just run into that boreal soil and
just they it'll be like hitting a brick wall for
their species.
Speaker 1 (27:31):
Yeah, another issue that can happen. And I know this
all just seems like doomsday stuff, kind of is it?
Kind of this though, Let's say, like the Amazon episode
that we talked about, when trees are moving out there,
they might be replaced by something and it may not
be an invasive species, but it may just be weeds
(27:52):
or grasses or something. Those aren't as good at capturing
carbon as those trees were, So then that accelerates the
problem even more.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
Right, And then there's another if you want to keep
talking about these stay scenarios. Those boreal forests, they actually
are if you look at a map or if you
look at planet Earth from outer space, they're dark, which
means that they absorb more sunlight, more heat, more UV radiation.
Then the polar caps the ice that reflects it back
(28:24):
into space. So as those boreal forests advance further and
further north toward the toward the Arctic or the North Pole,
and there's less and less ice to reflect that there's
more and more heat for them to trap, which is
just going to heat the earth that much faster. It's
a positive feedback loop that's super duper negative.
Speaker 1 (28:44):
Yeah, very negative. Maybe we should cover tropical things moving
north and then take a break.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
Yeah, because I got some good stuff on that, man,
I'm super exciting.
Speaker 1 (28:53):
Yeah. I mean it goes both ways. So you can
have like tropical plants and tropical zones like Florida, where
you know, the earth is warming, so they can move
further and further north, and all of a sudden, these
plants that are native to tropical zones are ending up
in areas where it's you know, not necessarily a tropical zone.
(29:14):
I can't remember which zone Atlanta.
Speaker 2 (29:17):
Is, Atlanta's seven B and aight a seven.
Speaker 1 (29:21):
I love that you know that stuff. But the point
is like these these like kill kill frost that you
might get that happen to I love that name kill frost,
Like it'll get really cold and frost over and like
kill things. Maybe that shouldn't be there if that's happening
less and less, and there's even less in the way
of those tropical plants moving northward.
Speaker 2 (29:44):
Right, and so I guess climatologists are expecting that by
the end of the century, which seems like a long
way away. But buddy, that's like less than that's like
eight decades, seventy something years, maybe even seventy seven you
could say to be exact, But in seventy seven years,
climatologists expect all of Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico,
(30:09):
Arizona and California, guessing the southern half to be tropical.
Those are subtropical. Now, if you want an example of
what a tropical country is, go to Ecuador, go to Guatemala.
Those are tropical, and Alabama and Arizona are going to
be like Guatemala by the end of the century. Yeah,
(30:32):
that's insane.
Speaker 1 (30:34):
I know, it's really and it's happening. It's not like
they've shown that it's currently happening.
Speaker 2 (30:41):
Yes, and it's happening because, like you were saying, those
extreme cold events are becoming rarer and they're becoming warmer.
So the coldest day of the year is not as
cold as it used to be.
Speaker 1 (30:50):
In other words, I think the scientific term is kill Frost.
Speaker 2 (30:54):
I love that. That is definitely a band name.
Speaker 1 (30:57):
Oh for sure, Mike. What are they though?
Speaker 2 (31:00):
Oh? I don't know.
Speaker 1 (31:01):
I think it's kind of heavy or something, right.
Speaker 2 (31:03):
I don't know. Remember Destroyer they were great, They didn't
really destroy They had like kind of like a belying name,
you know what I mean?
Speaker 1 (31:10):
No, that's true, so it could be like that. I
think he named the band that for that reason is
a bit of a tongue in cheek thing.
Speaker 2 (31:17):
Maybe I knew I liked that.
Speaker 1 (31:18):
Kay, yeah, Beharts who we're talking about?
Speaker 2 (31:22):
Not Joy Tony.
Speaker 1 (31:27):
I know it's a Dan I think.
Speaker 2 (31:28):
Right, I don't know. I just know a couple of
Destroyer songs. I don't have to know the guy's life story,
do I Well?
Speaker 1 (31:37):
Settle down? No, I wanted to look it up because
he is. He's also a part time member of maybe
my favorite all time band, the New Pornographers, like modern band.
Oh yeah, yeah, he's He's on most of their albums,
but hasn't done the past few.
Speaker 2 (31:52):
Who was the singer for New Pornographers? Was it Nico case.
Speaker 1 (31:56):
Well, she sings and Carl Newman sings, and also the
great Catherine Calder, who is the stuff you should know listener.
Speaker 2 (32:04):
Oh Nat, oh wow, Yeah, I.
Speaker 1 (32:06):
Found that out and I was like, oh, I got
to get in touch with her, and I did, and
now we are email buddies. And on the last New
Pornographer show in Atlanta, she's kind enough to meet me
behind the bus, as they say, in the back parking lot,
and we chatted for a while and she's just wonderful.
And she also gonna plug her other band because she
(32:27):
has put out a great album last year with her
band front person, So get front person. If you like
CYNTHI goodness and like a beautiful angelic voice, then get
front person.
Speaker 2 (32:41):
Speaking of CYNTHI goodness, that's so funny you bring that up.
Just today I discovered an entirely new genre of music
called dungeon synth. Have you heard of it?
Speaker 1 (32:49):
What? No?
Speaker 2 (32:51):
Okay, okay. It's a really well named genre. But it
is synth super like cynthy synth, like eighties a synth.
Speaker 1 (33:01):
I love it.
Speaker 2 (33:01):
But the kind of synth that you would find is
like the score to a seventies hobbit, like cartoon movie,
animated movie, it's super wizardy and fantasy. It just evokes
all that stuff. It does such a good job of it.
But I've only heard one album. I can't remember whose
it was. But check out Frost. Checkout Dungeon Synth. Yeah,
(33:25):
Kill Frost is a Dungeon Synth band.
Speaker 1 (33:27):
Nice work, all right, Dungeon Synth and the front Person album.
Their most recent Parade.
Speaker 2 (33:33):
Is great, very nice. I think it time for a break.
Speaker 1 (33:37):
Yeah, let's take a break. We'll be back with more
album reviews right after.
Speaker 2 (33:40):
This, So, Chuck. One thing you can say about humans
(34:05):
is that we are action oriented. Sure, in a lot
of ways, I will give you that we sit around
in bicker and complain and moan and undermine one another.
But when the chips are down, we can invent our
way out of a lot of problems. And invention doesn't
have to necessarily mean that we, you know, put some
(34:27):
metal on metal and made it go on its own.
It can be something like inventing new areas for species
that are in danger of being lost to climate change
to settle and make another part of their range out of.
Speaker 1 (34:43):
Well, sir, it sounds like you were talking about forest
assisted migration by God.
Speaker 2 (34:47):
I am that's right.
Speaker 1 (34:49):
And that is basically and we'll talk about the good,
the bad, and the ugly of this. That is human
being scientists getting involved in the ecosystem and nature and
spreading seed and sort of getting ahead of the pace
if the pace isn't where it should be to keep
up with climate change, saying well, let me give you
(35:10):
a little little help forward. And this can be kind
of thorny because it's it's humans, like I said, getting
involved in the ecosystem in ways that science has long said,
let nature work it out, and that's the best way
to do it, because you don't know what can happen
once you start messing around.
Speaker 2 (35:29):
Yeah, like nature finds a way it does. These guys
are saying, the people who are in favor of this
are saying that made sense before July twenty twenty three,
which is probably the hottest month in Earth's history, at
least as a kid far as since it cooled basically,
and that followed the hottest June ever. Right, So they're
(35:51):
these ecologists that are like, no, we need to take
much more of an active hand in this, are saying,
like it's our obligation to do something. Not doing any
thing is going to be more destructive. It's like saying like, yeah,
we shouldn't move these people out of this house that's
being bulldozed over because we don't know what they're gonna
do in their new neighborhood. So we're just gonna stand
(36:11):
there and watch them die as the bulldozer crushes them
inside of their house. That's the that's a pretty good analogy.
If I do congratulate myself here, it's very much akin
to that. And so those of colleges have a pretty
good point, like it's like, yeah, it's not a great,
perfect solution, but it's way better than doing nothing.
Speaker 1 (36:31):
Yeah. But and they're not they're not doing it willy
nilly though. They're very aware of the potential pitfalls like
you know, spreading disease and introducing something to an area
that could be really bad for other things in that area.
So they're not just out there, you know, with a
seed cannon blasting stuff all over the place, like like
Dolph Lunderin or something wearing.
Speaker 2 (36:52):
Bike coat shorts.
Speaker 1 (36:55):
There's a couple of different kinds though. There's there's forest
assistance migration. The one that's really sort of thorny is
assisted range expansion. So like, if you're spreading something within
the zone where it might still normally grow in like
two hundred years, that's one thing. If you're moving something
(37:17):
completely out of that range, like you know, they do
forecasting and stuff, and they're like, what might this area
look like one hundred miles from here one hundred years
from now? If they're moving something completely out of a
range that it would even potentially grow, that gets way
way trickier. And I think there's less of that happening.
Speaker 2 (37:34):
Right, yes, for sure, Like, but you hit it on
the head. They're saying, like, Okay, by twenty one hundred,
what is this area going to be, Like is it
going to be like where these red oaks like to
live now in twenty twenty three? And if so, maybe
we can give them a head start and hope that
some of them will survive and adapt and start colonizing there. Right, Yeah,
(37:54):
it gets even prett clear than assisted range expansion. There's another,
even more radical one called species rescue or assisted species migration,
and that is where you take a plant completely out
of its normal range, out of what you would even
predict would be its normal range, and just move it
somewhere it would never be right. This is considered the
(38:17):
riskiest of the three by ecologists because you can easily
take something that's totally innocuous and benign under normal circumstances
and make it into an invasive species when you move it.
And the critics of this typically point to the Monterey
Pine as a good example.
Speaker 1 (38:34):
Yeah, that's right. It's endangered in California. It is native
to California, but they have introduced it in Australia and
it's it's well, I don't know about wreaking habit, but
it's damaging the It's an invasive species in Australia.
Speaker 2 (38:49):
Yeah, for sure. They consider it a weed and where
they see it, they pluck it. They do not like
those in New South Wales and Victoria, I believe states.
Speaker 1 (38:58):
Now that's a weed, right, I don't know.
Speaker 2 (39:03):
No, I'm gonna have to agree with you on that.
I think you just you just came up with a
brand new type of accent. Frankly, Yeah, can we hear
it again? No, Okay, I'm just gonna go back and
replay it.
Speaker 1 (39:16):
You know what's funny though, is I use my the
lady on my phone that talks to me. What's it
called on Apple. I guess I don't use Siri, but
I still have a voice for maps and stuff, and
I use a I usually go between an Irish woman
and a Kiwi A New Zealander. Oh yeah, and the
New Zealander says rye and it always cracks me up.
Speaker 2 (39:38):
That sounds like Matthew McConaughey.
Speaker 1 (39:40):
It does. At the next street, take a rye.
Speaker 2 (39:44):
I gotta hear that. Yeah, I didn't know you could
do something that. Gee whiz to an Apple iPhone make it.
Speaker 1 (39:50):
Talk out, okay, some some regular old thing I don't do.
Speaker 2 (39:53):
I'd like sounds. Digital sounds are one of those. Like
I don't have mesophonia, but if I do, it's for
a digital sound. Like when I get a new computer,
the first thing I do is turn off all sounds
on it. Like anything I have to go, Like I
have to change my text sound every month or so
because I'll just get like anxiety from it. I can't
(40:13):
stand text sounds, so I have to come up with
a new one. I do not like them.
Speaker 1 (40:17):
Do you know what I do is I record? I
record my own text and phone rings and stuff. Oh yeah, yeah,
I record my voice like when my phone rings. I
never had my ringer on, but if it ever does,
it's me going ring ring, ring, ring thoughts. And if
I get a text, it's me going text.
Speaker 2 (40:34):
Man, that's great.
Speaker 1 (40:36):
Yeah, I get strange looks, but who cares?
Speaker 2 (40:38):
Can I just use yours?
Speaker 1 (40:40):
Yeah, I'll say to you if you want, thank you? Yeah,
or you can like you can make one specific for
you me, which is like maybe just her sweet voice
saying hello, hello, my love.
Speaker 2 (40:49):
I used to have a ring tone with her singing
that part from What's Love Got to Do with It?
Speaker 1 (40:55):
That?
Speaker 2 (40:55):
Yeah, exactly, but she just kept saying that over and
over again. It's pretty great.
Speaker 1 (41:00):
Oh, I'd love to hear that. It's also kind of maddening.
Speaker 2 (41:02):
Yeah, no, it never was. Actually, I never got sick
of that one. I think that says a lot.
Speaker 1 (41:07):
But it's better than deludoo doo.
Speaker 2 (41:10):
Yeah, man, you just stressed me out. Sorry you got
anything else?
Speaker 1 (41:15):
Uh? Now, I had a joke about your dislike of
digital sounds, but your love of craft work flies in
the face of that. But I won't even say it.
Speaker 2 (41:22):
That's more a statement than a joke.
Speaker 1 (41:25):
Yeah, but it is true.
Speaker 2 (41:26):
It's quite accurate. I think that's it. Chuck.
Speaker 1 (41:31):
Yeah, I got nothing else. This is uh, this is
a good one. Look out, you know, if you're in
if you're in New Mexico and you see a palm
tree growing, then watch out.
Speaker 2 (41:40):
That's right. It means that you've gone tropical and you're
in trouble now.
Speaker 1 (41:44):
Yeah, not in a good way.
Speaker 2 (41:45):
Uh. If you want to know more about plant migration,
there's a lot of interesting stuff out there on the
internet to read and go do that and maybe go
become an ecologist and figure out how to save the planet.
Speaker 1 (41:57):
Please and I agree.
Speaker 2 (41:58):
Since Chuck's had agreed, it's time for a listener mail.
Speaker 1 (42:03):
This is from William Lloyd. We did a shorty on
the NATO phonetic alphabet, and what we didn't consider was this.
Hey guys, being a pilot and prior Air Force, I
was glad that you did one on this topic. It's
not a correction. You guys did a good job, but
you missed what I think is the best part the numbers.
(42:25):
The NATO alphabet is kind of a misnumber because it
actually also includes number zero through nine. But you can't
really make a word starting from a number, so it's
purely pronunciation. Most numbers are the same with a notable
exception of niner. We use niner instead of nine because
over garbled radio it sounds like five, but mainly because
(42:47):
NATO countries speak German nine No in German nice. Three
is pronounced tree to not be confused with the antiquated
prefix three. SR. Four is two syllable syllables rhymes with lower,
so you'd say four sounds kind of funny to differentiate
(43:08):
it from you know, fo r and five is five
to keep the word fire distinct in some dialects. Huh,
all right, this is good stuff. I feel dumb that
we miss that. That's all interesting, but you're probably thinking,
does anyone actually say it like that? It depends. Niner
was pretty universal, plus we think it makes it sound cool,
(43:28):
which it does. Of course. The rest are much less common,
but depending where you are in the world and what
dialects are involved, they're useful from time to time. Signed
Tailwinds Decker.
Speaker 2 (43:40):
That's awesome and also what a great nickname too. I
hope that's your nickname and your parents wouldn't actually name
you tail wings Well.
Speaker 1 (43:46):
No, no, no, Decker is the name Tailwinds was the.
Speaker 2 (43:49):
Oh the sign of yeah. The cheers are the one
love exactly. So Decker's the first name.
Speaker 1 (43:57):
Well, I don't know it just a Decker Decker maybe
a call sign.
Speaker 2 (44:00):
Actually, all right, well I love that. Thanks a lot, Decker,
much appreciated. I say Niner whenever the occasion arises, you know,
I like that.
Speaker 1 (44:08):
You know, our our good friend, Joe Randazzo, formerly of
the Onion and at Midnight Fame, our our comedy writer friend.
He signs his emails yours with a comma Joe Joe Endazzo.
Speaker 2 (44:22):
That's great, that's very well.
Speaker 1 (44:23):
I think yours is. It's very very warn as is Joe.
Speaker 2 (44:26):
Sure, that's perfect for.
Speaker 1 (44:27):
Him and as always high to the kids. Yeah, Joe's kids.
So listen.
Speaker 2 (44:32):
Yeah, the Randazzos there listening. Family, the flying Randazzos. They're
trepeze artists. Family, just waiting will happen? They should be Well,
we'll see a lot's gonna happen by the end of
the century apparently, so who knows.
Speaker 1 (44:44):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (44:45):
Well, if you want to get in touch with this
like Decker did and confuse me with your sign off,
I'd appreciate it. So with Chuck too, he loves that
kind of thing. You can wrap it up, spend it
on the bottom and send it off to stuff podcast
at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (45:03):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is stuff you
should know that we're all melting.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
Addition, Yeah, I'm just a migrating fern.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Oh, that's a good one to be.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
Blowing through of the forest looking for a new home. Sure,
I'm a spore.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
What happens when you get their spore?
Speaker 1 (00:33):
Well, I'll probably grow into a beautiful new fern because
ferns are pretty party.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
That's awesome, and I'll bet you'll contribute to society and
all sorts of beneficial ways that ferns that were already
there couldn't necessarily do.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
I hope. So there is fern stuff in here, and
I have a wonderful fern scene at my camp on
the other side of the feeder creek that goes into
the main creek. I call it. I even have a son.
This is fern forest, and it's a forest of ferns.
Is quite lovely.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
God knows where they're from, because those things can travel
quite a bit, as we'll see.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
Yeah, they could be from Alabamy easily.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
I'm not kidding. Easily. Man, I've got a stat that's
gonna blow your mind in a second. Uh oh boy, Actually,
I'll just bust it out now, you ready? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (01:21):
Yeah? How far can a fern travel?
Speaker 2 (01:23):
A fern can travel. The Tasmanian tree fern in particular,
can send it spores five hundred to eight hundred kilometers.
It's three hundred to five hundred miles from the mother plant.
And get this, a single frond a fraud produces more
than seven hundred and fifty million of those spores.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
So you can understand that ferns, I mean, you find
ferns everywhere. They're really hardy. They can actually survive cold,
colder temperatures than you would think. They also thrive in
the tropics. They're like a really great pioneer plant. They
usually are among the first large plants that show up
in a newly cleared part of Earth. Right, this all
(02:07):
makes sense then, Okay, So what we're talking about then,
is that those ferns that showed up in this new
place and said, hey, let's get this, let's get this
biosphere going again, let's get this biome back into shape
after this wildfire or something like that. Or there's like
a stampede because there was a really great ice cream
truck that drove through one of those two. Those ferns
(02:30):
have migrated. They came from Tasmania apparently all the way
to wherever the ice cream truck was. Right now they're there,
and so they actually moved in that sense, which is
really surprising because plants are what are known as sessile organisms.
They don't move from place to place individually as organisms,
(02:50):
but as a species they can actually move around like inchworms.
Pretty good.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
Yeah, it's pretty cool. I didn't really know much about this.
We're talking about plant migration and the idea, well not idea,
the very real fact that just like humans and animals
will go to more hospitable climbs as the climate may
change or just i don't know, just to seek a
(03:16):
better place to be, plants and trees and things on
mass do the same thing.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
Yeah, and there's all sorts of ways that they do
that too. So they do it by dispersing their seeds
or their spores in that case, fern spores or single
cell organisms. They're not like a seed technically, but they
do the same thing. Right. They show up in a
place and set up shop and they start rocking out.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
Yeah, that's right. And ferns, you know, it depends and
we'll get all into this stuff. But how fast this
happens depends on different factors. How far these plants can
migrate depends on different factors. Why this is happening is
generally climate change. Yeah, and plants are in trees, and
(04:02):
things are generally moving north or up in elevation if
they hit mountains.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
Or south in the southern hemisphere exactly.
Speaker 1 (04:13):
So that's sort of the general pattern. And we mentioned
ferns because, like you said, those spores can really haul.
Ferns also mature very quickly, and you know, the wind
can just that's that's why I got a fern forest
at my camp probably.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
Yeah, So they check both of the boxes that you
need to be a fast migrating plant species. They produce
seeds or spores at a very young age, and their
seed or spore can travel very far distances, right right,
so they can move around. And also it doesn't hurt that,
like I said, ferns are adaptable. Trees and other plants
(04:48):
still move quite so fast. But they move, especially if
you look at the fossil record, a lot faster than
they actually should so if you pay attention to a
single organism saying oak, Those acorns don't travel terribly far.
They may get a little further away from the drip
line if a squirrel happens to bury it somewhere and
(05:09):
a new oak tree grows.
Speaker 1 (05:11):
Sure.
Speaker 2 (05:12):
I think it was Ander Samberg who described acorns as
solar powered factories for producing more oak trees.
Speaker 1 (05:21):
Whoaa Andy Samberg said that?
Speaker 2 (05:23):
No, Anders Sandberg. Oh, okay, he's a philosopher at Oxford.
Speaker 1 (05:29):
That makes a lot more sense.
Speaker 2 (05:31):
Yeah, yeah, Andy Samberg. He ate his lime accidentally in
his Corona bottle. That's that's what he's got.
Speaker 1 (05:38):
You knew he's married too.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
Patricia Arquette. No Arquette, You've.
Speaker 1 (05:45):
Been guessing Patricia Arkette for a lot of things. Slightly.
I feel like he's married to Yeah, I feel like
that's come up before.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
Maybe I don't know her name just rolls off the tone.
Speaker 1 (05:57):
I know a big fan of hers. He is married
to what's her name, Joanna Newsom, the singer and harpist
oh Neatice. And if you like, if you're into architecture
and homes, you should seek out I don't know if
it's architectural digest or something. But someone did a spread
on their home and it is really something else.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
Okay, so that's Andy Samberg per Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
That would just checked a quick detour.
Speaker 2 (06:24):
U Wait wait I wasn't done.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
Oh no, good, go ahead.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
So if you look in an individual tree, an oak tree,
those acorns don't go particularly far away from the tree,
as the old saying goes, But the fact that they
do fall away from the tree moons that very slowly
some of those seedlings are going to grow up a
little more northward or a little more southward. Then it's
mother plant, and very very slowly, the whole group of
(06:49):
oaks can move southward or northward right.
Speaker 1 (06:53):
Over hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
Of years so long. The thing is, if you look
at the fossil record, they moved way faster than they should.
And there's actually a paradox that was named by a
guy named Clement.
Speaker 1 (07:08):
Red right reads paradox.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
Yeah, he's got a great, great title for it.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
Of rapid plant migration. That's the full title.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
It sounds almost like snake oil from the nineteenth century.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
Yeah, it kind of.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
So what is it?
Speaker 1 (07:22):
Oh? Okay, I didn't ever seen me up. We're still
tight after all these years.
Speaker 2 (07:26):
For sure.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
So what he found from the fossil record, like you
were talking about, and as we'll see that that's one,
like you know, pretty good way to study this stuff,
especially pollen fossils.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
Right, yeah, because they're so hardy.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
Yeah. So he saw that trees were migrating a lot
faster than like the rate that you would think, and
so he like those oaks I think was one example
you gave on the British Isles after the last glacial period,
over a span of like ten thousand years or so,
they traveled about six hundred miles and it would normally
(07:59):
take about a million years if the steeds, if the
seeds were just dispersed in a typical way. But what
he figured was that what may be happening here is
like some weird weather event happens that sent things much
farther than usual, or like some deer or something eats
(08:22):
something and then poops out something really far away from
where it started, and so all of a sudden, this
animal has spread it via their poo poo.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
Right, And this is how like large scale migration happens,
or I should say, rapid migration over long distances.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
Right right, Yeah, it's the.
Speaker 2 (08:41):
It's the unusual, not just the acorn falling and hitting
the ground. It's not just gravity assisted. It's animal assisted,
which is called zoochorey, or it's wind assisted, which is
called a nema corey, or water assisted, which is called hydrochory.
And that's just the way that some plants dispersed their seeds.
That's kind of on top of the normal way they
(09:02):
dispersed it, which is just dropping it from their leaves
or the spores blowing on the wind, which I guess
is one type of corey.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
Yeah. So like if a squirrel loaded up its mouthful
of things m h and somehow found its way into
your camper, as you said off for Arizona.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
That would be a freak event.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
Sure it probably wouldn't be en mass, but you know,
that's a way a dree coud move.
Speaker 2 (09:24):
All it takes is that one oak to make it
sure to just survive, and then it starts its own
new part of the range.
Speaker 1 (09:34):
Yeah. Absolutely, And we al should should point out when
when was redoing this. This is a while ago, like
one hundred plus years ago, right.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
Yeah, he was a geologist. I don't know if we said,
but his reads Paradox of Rapid Plant Migration came out
in eighteen ninety nine and it was a smash hit.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
Yeah, so people, I mean for at least that long,
science has been sort of curious about this, this migration
happening at a rate that they would not expect.
Speaker 2 (10:01):
Right. The thing is is it's really hard when you
throw in that X factor to calculate how fast and
actual species can migrate. And there's a few ways that
you can study that kind of thing. One, as you said,
is studying the fossil record, which is super helpful, but
(10:21):
it's not showing you what's going on contemporaneously or within
the last couple decades. This is ten thousand, a million
years ago something like that, right.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
Yeah, So if you wanted to study something a little
closer to home timeline wise, you would maybe set up
what's called a permanent vegetation plot, so you would mark
off an area and you would go back there, you know,
every so often, like every six months or every year
or so, and just sort of chart what's happening. That's
one really good way. I think they've been doing this
(10:52):
for about one hundred years since in nineteen twenty, So
we've got a pretty good data set there. Something else
you could do is go somewhere, like, let's say you
dug up some cool scientific journal from a scientist from
you know, two hundred years ago that went and explored
some island, and while they may not have like charted
(11:14):
everything out exactly like you would in today's science, they
may have a really nice diary about all the plant
life there and things that they saw there and where
it might be. And you could go back to that
place and it's not quite as tight of a record,
but you could still get a pretty good idea of
what's happening.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
Yeah, depending on whose journal you're working from. And back.
In twenty twelve, a Danish team of scientists followed the
record left by a nineteenth century geologist named Alexander von
Humboldt from Germany, who was just an interesting dude in
and of himself. Yeah, he called coffee concentrated some beams.
So he's that kind of guy.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
Oh man, that's great.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
They went back to Chimborazo Volcano in Ecuador, which Humboldt
studied in detail, and not only did he study the
vegetation there and he classified all sorts of new plants
that Europeans didn't know about at that point. He also
noted exactly where they were on the mountain as far
as the elevation went.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
Super helpful, super helpful.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
So based on this information, the twenty twelve Danes were
able to go back and recreate his trip, and then
they were able to note what plants were where, and
they found that everything, all species, on average, had moved
up the mountain by about an average of about five
hundred meters, which is significant. It's like almost a mile,
(12:34):
it's like eight tenths of a mile.
Speaker 1 (12:36):
Yeah, yeah, that's the average. Yeah, there was a lot
of aeriation within that, but that's that's a long way
for sure. And what we found out, and I guess
this comes up a little later, but a plant can
find more hospitable climbs going up five hundred meters than
they might by going let's just say north, like ninety
(12:56):
to one hundred miles. Yes, so like a much quicker
road to better climbs if you just go up that
mountain for sure.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
Yeah, that's kind of two ways they move is longitudinally yeah,
or altitudinally.
Speaker 1 (13:13):
You gotta be in shape though, Oh, for sure, you're
gonna climb that mountain. Should we take a break?
Speaker 2 (13:20):
I think we should. But just to wrap it up
real quick, there's a bunch of ways you can study
the movement of trees. But it's so slow and it
happens over such long timelines, longer than a human timeline,
that it's harder to do than you'd think. But we
still have figured out some ways to do it.
Speaker 1 (13:34):
All Right, we'll be right back and we'll talk about
all this stuff in more detail.
Speaker 2 (13:38):
Right for this.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
One other way we failed to mention. Probably would have
been better to just say that before the break, But again,
still learning after sixteen years. Satellite images is another way
that you can study on the short term. You know,
the fossil pollen is much longer, and those plant plots
and things like that, vegetation plots our shorter term. But
(14:20):
satellite images can also help.
Speaker 2 (14:22):
Yeah, if you want to catch like a venus fly
trap and the act of leap frogging over some other planet,
satellite image is going to help you with that. Fossil
record won't show you that.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
Here's the thing with all this, though, it's not like
we're going to talk a lot about climate change because
that's what's spurring a lot of the movement right now.
But the Earth's climate has changed a lot over the
you know, over the years, and this is not some
new thing. There used to be periods of time where
the Sahara desert was quite green and there was grasses
(14:55):
growing there and tropical plants growing there, and elephants roaming
the Sahara and wildlife living there. And they've learned that
this is actually one of the things that helped move
you know, humans around, Like humans could actually migrate through
the Sahara with much more ease than they could before
during these green Sahara periods.
Speaker 2 (15:15):
Yeah, that's so fascinating that, you know, who knows when
we would have migrated out of Africa into Europe and
the ages had the green Sahara not happened. And isn't
that just nuts?
Speaker 1 (15:26):
Yeah, like hundreds of miles it says here that they
would find tropical plants growing where they shouldn't be, growing
alongside you know, the desert stuff that survived. So that
was this weird sort of mixed up biome for a time.
Speaker 2 (15:38):
Yeah, And the Green Sahara period there were a few
of them that had been documented, but they figured out
that they happened about every twenty three thousand years, right,
We're due for one in about twelve thousand years something
like that. And it's based on the tilt in Earth's axis.
That's neither here nor there. But the point is is
during these these periods where this was just a humid
(16:01):
kind of tropical forest, there was a mixture kind of
what you touched upon, of different like you said, a
hybrid biome of stuff that wouldn't necessarily live together under
normal circumstances, but got along just famously in the couple
thousand years that the Sahara was green and those plants
were growing together.
Speaker 1 (16:20):
Yeah, it's just amazing to think about.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
And then in North America we have another example too.
After the Laurentide Glacier, which is way up in the
Arctic right now, used to be down in Indiana and
northern New Jersey. Yeah, and when it retreated, it took
everything with it. It took bowlers, it carved out lakes,
it did all sorts of neat stuff. But what it
didn't leave behind was vegetation. So it left it was
(16:45):
like a giant ice cream truck basically. Yeah, it left
nothing behind, and it was just a great place for
plants to pioneer and colonie.
Speaker 1 (16:54):
Yeah. I mean that's why you have pine trees in
New Jersey, right.
Speaker 2 (16:57):
I would think so, yeah, or in the south because
they were too far they were trapped below or yeah,
below the Laurentide Glacier down in the southeast, even though
they normally would have been growing in the north, right,
And as the glacier retreated, the climate changed in that area,
(17:18):
and so the trees has moved on up. So that's
an example of migration as well.
Speaker 1 (17:22):
Yeah. Oh wait, I thought they but I thought they
were It was more hospitable in the south for these trees,
and that migration sent them north. Yeah, that's what I said, right,
Oh okay maybe Yeah. The other thing we should talk
about as far as climate change goes, because, like I said,
we're going to mention that a lot is the rate
of change of the climate is increasing, as most people
(17:45):
agree on, and that is kind of where we are
now in discussing this is like, is the rate of
climate increasing too fast for the plant migration to catch up,
or in some cases are the plants migrating ahead of
that pace? And that's really sort of you know, a
lot of this episode is about this rate of change.
(18:07):
In the two hundred years since the beginning of the
Industrial Age, no coincidence, the temperature of the Earth has
increased more than one degree. And again, yeah we all
know now that you know, one degree is like a huge,
huge deal.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
It's one point eight degrees fahrenheit.
Speaker 1 (18:25):
Yeah, exactly, But zero point three seven of that change
over the past two hundred years has come since twenty eleven.
So it's people. Have you know, someone has stepped on
the gas here. Yeah, and it's happening much much faster,
and seemingly in many cases, fasting faster than these plants
can catch up.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
Yeah. So plants are used to migrating, like they've been
migrating through our Earth's history, but these conditions are different.
It's not like it was before. Even when the Earth
was heating up after the last Ice Age, I think,
did you say that it took about an hour average
of fourteen hundred years to increase by one degree after
the last glacial period?
Speaker 1 (19:05):
No, No, that was the setup. That would have been
very helpful.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
Actually, I mean, think about it. So we've achieved one
degree in two hundred years, and after the last glacial
period ended the earth heated one degree every fourteen hundred years.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
Yeah, that's called a rapid increase.
Speaker 2 (19:22):
Yeah, Like you said, somebody's put their foot on the gas,
and that's somebody is Western industrialized nations, right.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (19:28):
So that's one thing that's really kind of putting the
heat on plants literally is their southernmost ranges or their
northernmost ranges, depending on what I guess, they're equatorial pointing
ranges where it's hotter. Those are the ones that are
really at stake. So are those plants ranges big enough
(19:50):
that they'll be able to survive that change in climate
and just keep moving northward or are they going to
be outpaced by the movement of the climate because the
climate is racing towards the poles, just like the plants are.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
Right, Yeah, So who's faster.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
Well, it turns out if you talk about New England's trees,
they move something I think red oaks is what it
was that this University of Vermont group was studying. They
move something like a tenth to three tenths of a
mile a year, right, Yeah. The climate is moving something
like four to six miles a year. So the climate
(20:28):
is really kind of showing up as kind of the
Usain Bolt of this race. And I don't know the
plants are like me racing Usain Bolt.
Speaker 1 (20:41):
Yeah, that lab group in Vermont, they all have t
shirts that just say you do the math exactly. It's
very smarty, but they get their point across for sure.
There's another example of and you know, we've kind of
been talking about northern movement, which is generally the pattern,
but not always. There's a rece Purdue name song Lend Fay.
(21:03):
I think Fay or Fhi. I don't know Fi. I
bet it's Fie who studied eighty six species of trees
in the eastern US over about thirty years from the
mid eighties to twenty fifteen. And it depends on what
the tree is. Hardwoods, scarlet oaks, red maples, magnolias are
moving west at about one and a half kilometers a
(21:25):
year because the Midwest is becoming more wet and the
conditions are good for those trees to grow. Soft woods,
shortleaf pines, red pines, bald cypress. They're actually moving north
about a kilometer of the year, a kilometer a year.
Speaker 2 (21:40):
So.
Speaker 1 (21:42):
Different plants and trees are moving in different directions at
different rates.
Speaker 2 (21:46):
Yeah, it's very much akin to a neighborhood that's this
old settled in neighborhood with a bunch of mix of
people that's being gentrified. It's being pushed out and separated.
Not everybody, just the whole neighborhood doesn't just move. This
neighborhood breaks up and goes in different directions. And so
to ecologists in arborous like this is very concerning because
(22:09):
for a long time we've looked at groups of plants
as communities, like some some plants go with other plants,
like I think was it beach and uh, hickory, where
is it?
Speaker 1 (22:26):
I don't know. I like hickory, though.
Speaker 2 (22:29):
We can't we can't leave that in there. Oh yeah, hemlocks.
I knew it was an h. H. Tree. Beach and
hemlocks go together like peanut butter and chocolate, so to do,
like firs and spruces. Right, So when you find one
of these, you usually find the other one. And there's
also a bunch of other plants that kind of interact,
and usually some types of animals that hang out in
(22:49):
those same types of forests. So if you've got the
hemlocks going north and the beach going west, Who are
the hemlocks going to mix with and who are the
beach going to mix with when they start to set
up these new communities, And that was really troubling to ecologists,
but I think palinologists, these fossil pollen scientists have said
(23:09):
it's always been this way. Communities aren't permanent, they're kind
of instable. They just seem permanent to us because our
life years there are lifespans on the order of like
seventy eighty years, right right, This is it's a much
slower process, but it's a constantly changing turnover, so it's
not that big of a deal. But again, because of
the pace of climate change, when these hemlocks get further
(23:32):
north and the beach get further west, they're going to
have far less time to develop new connections and networks
with the new plants that they set up communities with.
Speaker 1 (23:43):
Yeah, and the other thing too, you know earlier when
I mentioned that a series of trees might move up
a mountain side because it's a way quicker way to
get to a more hospitable climate than moving that ninety
miles north. Yeah, when they and this happens in other
cases as well, it's not just like up a mountain side.
(24:04):
But when they get to the place where they're going,
it may be a better place, may be more hospitable
climate wise, but other things aren't so great. So if
you move up that mountain slope, let's say you have
a shallower soil, and so those trees move up there
because the climate's better. But then they get there and
(24:24):
the soil is in as great, so they get squeezed
into where they can grow, maybe into like a tiny
little narrow band that's you know, potentially choking off the
rest of the forest.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
Yeah, I've figured out it's kind of like hiding in
a closet during a house fire, Like you're going to
be safe in the short term, but in the long
term it's not a great strategy. But it's not like
the trees have any choice. They can't go back down.
It's too hot there, they can't move further up. There's
the soils in hospitable, so they're trapped and they're eventually
going to become a thinner and thinner band until they
(24:55):
just pop out of existence.
Speaker 1 (24:57):
That's right. And the other thing that can happen when,
like you said, when they get to a new place,
and they don't have enough time to make new friends.
All of a sudden, that can open the window for
bad friends to show up. Yeah, and all of a sudden,
invasive species are there, and then you've got a whole
other set of problems.
Speaker 2 (25:14):
Yeah, the ones that were like leather jackets with the
little silver studs on their shoulders, those are the ones
you gotta watch out for. Those plants.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
If this all seems very kind of on too long
of a timeline for you to care, First of all,
you probably don't care much about climate change because that's
the whole name of the game there. Sure, but maple
syrup is a good example that Livia found Lyvia helped
u out. She did great job with this. The maple tree.
(25:45):
Which species is that? The sugar maple is one of
the two main species that we use to get that
delicious maple syrup.
Speaker 2 (25:50):
I'm sorry, this isn't a side. Sugar maple are two
beautiful words that form an even more beautiful.
Speaker 1 (25:57):
You are right on the money, my friend. You know,
sugar maple. It just sounds nice coming out of my mouth. Yeah.
They have been migrating north into Canada, and you might say, well,
that's great Canada is a fine place to live, and
I'm sure they love their maple serve up there too.
But in Quebec, the researchers have found that they're not
(26:18):
gonna go beyond their current range up there because they're
boreal forests up there. So the soil again, they the
climate might be better, but then they get up there
and the soil pH and the microbe content in the
soil is not what they're used to and not what
they work well with and grow well with. So they're
not doing well up there in the forest.
Speaker 2 (26:38):
No, No, And that's it's the exact same position as
the trees that are trying to go up the mountain
are running into. Eventually, these trees that are moving into
the boreal forest areas, they're like they can't go any further,
Like they're not adapted to that.
Speaker 1 (26:54):
Over a long enough timeline, yeah, maybe.
Speaker 2 (26:56):
Those sugar maples could, like a few of them, could
land in the border royal forest and end up surviving
in that kind of soil and then they would be
adapted for and they'd start reproducing. And then as the
boreal forest moved closer to the Poles or the Arctic,
those trees would move where the boreal forest used to be. Right,
totally not a problem over a long enough time span. Again,
(27:18):
climate change has so drastically shortened that timespan that there's
probably not going to be time for this, and those
sugar maples will just run into that boreal soil and
just they it'll be like hitting a brick wall for
their species.
Speaker 1 (27:31):
Yeah, another issue that can happen. And I know this
all just seems like doomsday stuff, kind of is it?
Kind of this though, Let's say, like the Amazon episode
that we talked about, when trees are moving out there,
they might be replaced by something and it may not
be an invasive species, but it may just be weeds
(27:52):
or grasses or something. Those aren't as good at capturing
carbon as those trees were, So then that accelerates the
problem even more.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
Right, And then there's another if you want to keep
talking about these stay scenarios. Those boreal forests, they actually
are if you look at a map or if you
look at planet Earth from outer space, they're dark, which
means that they absorb more sunlight, more heat, more UV radiation.
Then the polar caps the ice that reflects it back
(28:24):
into space. So as those boreal forests advance further and
further north toward the toward the Arctic or the North Pole,
and there's less and less ice to reflect that there's
more and more heat for them to trap, which is
just going to heat the earth that much faster. It's
a positive feedback loop that's super duper negative.
Speaker 1 (28:44):
Yeah, very negative. Maybe we should cover tropical things moving
north and then take a break.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
Yeah, because I got some good stuff on that, man,
I'm super exciting.
Speaker 1 (28:53):
Yeah. I mean it goes both ways. So you can
have like tropical plants and tropical zones like Florida, where
you know, the earth is warming, so they can move
further and further north, and all of a sudden, these
plants that are native to tropical zones are ending up
in areas where it's you know, not necessarily a tropical zone.
(29:14):
I can't remember which zone Atlanta.
Speaker 2 (29:17):
Is, Atlanta's seven B and aight a seven.
Speaker 1 (29:21):
I love that you know that stuff. But the point
is like these these like kill kill frost that you
might get that happen to I love that name kill frost,
Like it'll get really cold and frost over and like
kill things. Maybe that shouldn't be there if that's happening
less and less, and there's even less in the way
of those tropical plants moving northward.
Speaker 2 (29:44):
Right, and so I guess climatologists are expecting that by
the end of the century, which seems like a long
way away. But buddy, that's like less than that's like
eight decades, seventy something years, maybe even seventy seven you
could say to be exact, But in seventy seven years,
climatologists expect all of Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico,
(30:09):
Arizona and California, guessing the southern half to be tropical.
Those are subtropical. Now, if you want an example of
what a tropical country is, go to Ecuador, go to Guatemala.
Those are tropical, and Alabama and Arizona are going to
be like Guatemala by the end of the century. Yeah,
(30:32):
that's insane.
Speaker 1 (30:34):
I know, it's really and it's happening. It's not like
they've shown that it's currently happening.
Speaker 2 (30:41):
Yes, and it's happening because, like you were saying, those
extreme cold events are becoming rarer and they're becoming warmer.
So the coldest day of the year is not as
cold as it used to be.
Speaker 1 (30:50):
In other words, I think the scientific term is kill Frost.
Speaker 2 (30:54):
I love that. That is definitely a band name.
Speaker 1 (30:57):
Oh for sure, Mike. What are they though?
Speaker 2 (31:00):
Oh? I don't know.
Speaker 1 (31:01):
I think it's kind of heavy or something, right.
Speaker 2 (31:03):
I don't know. Remember Destroyer they were great, They didn't
really destroy They had like kind of like a belying name,
you know what I mean?
Speaker 1 (31:10):
No, that's true, so it could be like that. I
think he named the band that for that reason is
a bit of a tongue in cheek thing.
Speaker 2 (31:17):
Maybe I knew I liked that.
Speaker 1 (31:18):
Kay, yeah, Beharts who we're talking about?
Speaker 2 (31:22):
Not Joy Tony.
Speaker 1 (31:27):
I know it's a Dan I think.
Speaker 2 (31:28):
Right, I don't know. I just know a couple of
Destroyer songs. I don't have to know the guy's life story,
do I Well?
Speaker 1 (31:37):
Settle down? No, I wanted to look it up because
he is. He's also a part time member of maybe
my favorite all time band, the New Pornographers, like modern band.
Oh yeah, yeah, he's He's on most of their albums,
but hasn't done the past few.
Speaker 2 (31:52):
Who was the singer for New Pornographers? Was it Nico case.
Speaker 1 (31:56):
Well, she sings and Carl Newman sings, and also the
great Catherine Calder, who is the stuff you should know listener.
Speaker 2 (32:04):
Oh Nat, oh wow, Yeah, I.
Speaker 1 (32:06):
Found that out and I was like, oh, I got
to get in touch with her, and I did, and
now we are email buddies. And on the last New
Pornographer show in Atlanta, she's kind enough to meet me
behind the bus, as they say, in the back parking lot,
and we chatted for a while and she's just wonderful.
And she also gonna plug her other band because she
(32:27):
has put out a great album last year with her
band front person, So get front person. If you like
CYNTHI goodness and like a beautiful angelic voice, then get
front person.
Speaker 2 (32:41):
Speaking of CYNTHI goodness, that's so funny you bring that up.
Just today I discovered an entirely new genre of music
called dungeon synth. Have you heard of it?
Speaker 1 (32:49):
What? No?
Speaker 2 (32:51):
Okay, okay. It's a really well named genre. But it
is synth super like cynthy synth, like eighties a synth.
Speaker 1 (33:01):
I love it.
Speaker 2 (33:01):
But the kind of synth that you would find is
like the score to a seventies hobbit, like cartoon movie,
animated movie, it's super wizardy and fantasy. It just evokes
all that stuff. It does such a good job of it.
But I've only heard one album. I can't remember whose
it was. But check out Frost. Checkout Dungeon Synth. Yeah,
(33:25):
Kill Frost is a Dungeon Synth band.
Speaker 1 (33:27):
Nice work, all right, Dungeon Synth and the front Person album.
Their most recent Parade.
Speaker 2 (33:33):
Is great, very nice. I think it time for a break.
Speaker 1 (33:37):
Yeah, let's take a break. We'll be back with more
album reviews right after.
Speaker 2 (33:40):
This, So, Chuck. One thing you can say about humans
(34:05):
is that we are action oriented. Sure, in a lot
of ways, I will give you that we sit around
in bicker and complain and moan and undermine one another.
But when the chips are down, we can invent our
way out of a lot of problems. And invention doesn't
have to necessarily mean that we, you know, put some
(34:27):
metal on metal and made it go on its own.
It can be something like inventing new areas for species
that are in danger of being lost to climate change
to settle and make another part of their range out of.
Speaker 1 (34:43):
Well, sir, it sounds like you were talking about forest
assisted migration by God.
Speaker 2 (34:47):
I am that's right.
Speaker 1 (34:49):
And that is basically and we'll talk about the good,
the bad, and the ugly of this. That is human
being scientists getting involved in the ecosystem and nature and
spreading seed and sort of getting ahead of the pace
if the pace isn't where it should be to keep
up with climate change, saying well, let me give you
(35:10):
a little little help forward. And this can be kind
of thorny because it's it's humans, like I said, getting
involved in the ecosystem in ways that science has long said,
let nature work it out, and that's the best way
to do it, because you don't know what can happen
once you start messing around.
Speaker 2 (35:29):
Yeah, like nature finds a way it does. These guys
are saying, the people who are in favor of this
are saying that made sense before July twenty twenty three,
which is probably the hottest month in Earth's history, at
least as a kid far as since it cooled basically,
and that followed the hottest June ever. Right, So they're
(35:51):
these ecologists that are like, no, we need to take
much more of an active hand in this, are saying,
like it's our obligation to do something. Not doing any
thing is going to be more destructive. It's like saying like, yeah,
we shouldn't move these people out of this house that's
being bulldozed over because we don't know what they're gonna
do in their new neighborhood. So we're just gonna stand
(36:11):
there and watch them die as the bulldozer crushes them
inside of their house. That's the that's a pretty good analogy.
If I do congratulate myself here, it's very much akin
to that. And so those of colleges have a pretty
good point, like it's like, yeah, it's not a great,
perfect solution, but it's way better than doing nothing.
Speaker 1 (36:31):
Yeah. But and they're not they're not doing it willy
nilly though. They're very aware of the potential pitfalls like
you know, spreading disease and introducing something to an area
that could be really bad for other things in that area.
So they're not just out there, you know, with a
seed cannon blasting stuff all over the place, like like
Dolph Lunderin or something wearing.
Speaker 2 (36:52):
Bike coat shorts.
Speaker 1 (36:55):
There's a couple of different kinds though. There's there's forest
assistance migration. The one that's really sort of thorny is
assisted range expansion. So like, if you're spreading something within
the zone where it might still normally grow in like
two hundred years, that's one thing. If you're moving something
(37:17):
completely out of that range, like you know, they do
forecasting and stuff, and they're like, what might this area
look like one hundred miles from here one hundred years
from now? If they're moving something completely out of a
range that it would even potentially grow, that gets way
way trickier. And I think there's less of that happening.
Speaker 2 (37:34):
Right, yes, for sure, Like, but you hit it on
the head. They're saying, like, Okay, by twenty one hundred,
what is this area going to be, Like is it
going to be like where these red oaks like to
live now in twenty twenty three? And if so, maybe
we can give them a head start and hope that
some of them will survive and adapt and start colonizing there. Right, Yeah,
(37:54):
it gets even prett clear than assisted range expansion. There's another,
even more radical one called species rescue or assisted species migration,
and that is where you take a plant completely out
of its normal range, out of what you would even
predict would be its normal range, and just move it
somewhere it would never be right. This is considered the
(38:17):
riskiest of the three by ecologists because you can easily
take something that's totally innocuous and benign under normal circumstances
and make it into an invasive species when you move it.
And the critics of this typically point to the Monterey
Pine as a good example.
Speaker 1 (38:34):
Yeah, that's right. It's endangered in California. It is native
to California, but they have introduced it in Australia and
it's it's well, I don't know about wreaking habit, but
it's damaging the It's an invasive species in Australia.
Speaker 2 (38:49):
Yeah, for sure. They consider it a weed and where
they see it, they pluck it. They do not like
those in New South Wales and Victoria, I believe states.
Speaker 1 (38:58):
Now that's a weed, right, I don't know.
Speaker 2 (39:03):
No, I'm gonna have to agree with you on that.
I think you just you just came up with a
brand new type of accent. Frankly, Yeah, can we hear
it again? No, Okay, I'm just gonna go back and
replay it.
Speaker 1 (39:16):
You know what's funny though, is I use my the
lady on my phone that talks to me. What's it
called on Apple. I guess I don't use Siri, but
I still have a voice for maps and stuff, and
I use a I usually go between an Irish woman
and a Kiwi A New Zealander. Oh yeah, and the
New Zealander says rye and it always cracks me up.
Speaker 2 (39:38):
That sounds like Matthew McConaughey.
Speaker 1 (39:40):
It does. At the next street, take a rye.
Speaker 2 (39:44):
I gotta hear that. Yeah, I didn't know you could
do something that. Gee whiz to an Apple iPhone make it.
Speaker 1 (39:50):
Talk out, okay, some some regular old thing I don't do.
Speaker 2 (39:53):
I'd like sounds. Digital sounds are one of those. Like
I don't have mesophonia, but if I do, it's for
a digital sound. Like when I get a new computer,
the first thing I do is turn off all sounds
on it. Like anything I have to go, Like I
have to change my text sound every month or so
because I'll just get like anxiety from it. I can't
(40:13):
stand text sounds, so I have to come up with
a new one. I do not like them.
Speaker 1 (40:17):
Do you know what I do is I record? I
record my own text and phone rings and stuff. Oh yeah, yeah,
I record my voice like when my phone rings. I
never had my ringer on, but if it ever does,
it's me going ring ring, ring, ring thoughts. And if
I get a text, it's me going text.
Speaker 2 (40:34):
Man, that's great.
Speaker 1 (40:36):
Yeah, I get strange looks, but who cares?
Speaker 2 (40:38):
Can I just use yours?
Speaker 1 (40:40):
Yeah, I'll say to you if you want, thank you? Yeah,
or you can like you can make one specific for
you me, which is like maybe just her sweet voice
saying hello, hello, my love.
Speaker 2 (40:49):
I used to have a ring tone with her singing
that part from What's Love Got to Do with It?
Speaker 1 (40:55):
That?
Speaker 2 (40:55):
Yeah, exactly, but she just kept saying that over and
over again. It's pretty great.
Speaker 1 (41:00):
Oh, I'd love to hear that. It's also kind of maddening.
Speaker 2 (41:02):
Yeah, no, it never was. Actually, I never got sick
of that one. I think that says a lot.
Speaker 1 (41:07):
But it's better than deludoo doo.
Speaker 2 (41:10):
Yeah, man, you just stressed me out. Sorry you got
anything else?
Speaker 1 (41:15):
Uh? Now, I had a joke about your dislike of
digital sounds, but your love of craft work flies in
the face of that. But I won't even say it.
Speaker 2 (41:22):
That's more a statement than a joke.
Speaker 1 (41:25):
Yeah, but it is true.
Speaker 2 (41:26):
It's quite accurate. I think that's it. Chuck.
Speaker 1 (41:31):
Yeah, I got nothing else. This is uh, this is
a good one. Look out, you know, if you're in
if you're in New Mexico and you see a palm
tree growing, then watch out.
Speaker 2 (41:40):
That's right. It means that you've gone tropical and you're
in trouble now.
Speaker 1 (41:44):
Yeah, not in a good way.
Speaker 2 (41:45):
Uh. If you want to know more about plant migration,
there's a lot of interesting stuff out there on the
internet to read and go do that and maybe go
become an ecologist and figure out how to save the planet.
Speaker 1 (41:57):
Please and I agree.
Speaker 2 (41:58):
Since Chuck's had agreed, it's time for a listener mail.
Speaker 1 (42:03):
This is from William Lloyd. We did a shorty on
the NATO phonetic alphabet, and what we didn't consider was this.
Hey guys, being a pilot and prior Air Force, I
was glad that you did one on this topic. It's
not a correction. You guys did a good job, but
you missed what I think is the best part the numbers.
(42:25):
The NATO alphabet is kind of a misnumber because it
actually also includes number zero through nine. But you can't
really make a word starting from a number, so it's
purely pronunciation. Most numbers are the same with a notable
exception of niner. We use niner instead of nine because
over garbled radio it sounds like five, but mainly because
(42:47):
NATO countries speak German nine No in German nice. Three
is pronounced tree to not be confused with the antiquated
prefix three. SR. Four is two syllable syllables rhymes with lower,
so you'd say four sounds kind of funny to differentiate
(43:08):
it from you know, fo r and five is five
to keep the word fire distinct in some dialects. Huh,
all right, this is good stuff. I feel dumb that
we miss that. That's all interesting, but you're probably thinking,
does anyone actually say it like that? It depends. Niner
was pretty universal, plus we think it makes it sound cool,
(43:28):
which it does. Of course. The rest are much less common,
but depending where you are in the world and what
dialects are involved, they're useful from time to time. Signed
Tailwinds Decker.
Speaker 2 (43:40):
That's awesome and also what a great nickname too. I
hope that's your nickname and your parents wouldn't actually name
you tail wings Well.
Speaker 1 (43:46):
No, no, no, Decker is the name Tailwinds was the.
Speaker 2 (43:49):
Oh the sign of yeah. The cheers are the one
love exactly. So Decker's the first name.
Speaker 1 (43:57):
Well, I don't know it just a Decker Decker maybe
a call sign.
Speaker 2 (44:00):
Actually, all right, well I love that. Thanks a lot, Decker,
much appreciated. I say Niner whenever the occasion arises, you know,
I like that.
Speaker 1 (44:08):
You know, our our good friend, Joe Randazzo, formerly of
the Onion and at Midnight Fame, our our comedy writer friend.
He signs his emails yours with a comma Joe Joe Endazzo.
Speaker 2 (44:22):
That's great, that's very well.
Speaker 1 (44:23):
I think yours is. It's very very warn as is Joe.
Speaker 2 (44:26):
Sure, that's perfect for.
Speaker 1 (44:27):
Him and as always high to the kids. Yeah, Joe's kids.
So listen.
Speaker 2 (44:32):
Yeah, the Randazzos there listening. Family, the flying Randazzos. They're
trepeze artists. Family, just waiting will happen? They should be Well,
we'll see a lot's gonna happen by the end of
the century apparently, so who knows.
Speaker 1 (44:44):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (44:45):
Well, if you want to get in touch with this
like Decker did and confuse me with your sign off,
I'd appreciate it. So with Chuck too, he loves that
kind of thing. You can wrap it up, spend it
on the bottom and send it off to stuff podcast
at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (45:03):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Should Know News
Hosts And Creators
Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
Show Links
AboutOrder Our BookStoreSYSK ArmyRSSPopular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.