Ep. 95 - Exploring Forest Microbes: Dr. Julia Huggins on Nature's Hidden Networks and Educational Insights - Science 360

Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
There's two different general approaches to science, and that both are valuable and both
are necessary. And so they havethe surfers, quote unquote, which are
the folks that sort of cruise acrossthe surface and explore lots of different topics,
and then there's the divers, whomaybe focus on one specific area and
go down deep and really get toknow that spot in detail. And of

(00:22):
course the analogy here is to realmsof knowledge. So you have divers that
really dive deep into one realm ofknowledge and become experts on their topic,
and then you have surfers who sortof dabble in lots of different things and
are perhaps more equipped to make connectionsacross fields, but are not experts on
one specific topic. And so theperspective piece is just arguing that both approaches

(00:45):
are valuable, and typically in academicsciences we tend to perhaps favor or catered
toward the divers approach, but thatwe should appreciate and support the existence of
the surfers as well. Well.That's good because I am, with out
of doubt, a surfer. Welcomeback to another episode of Science three sixty.

(01:07):
This is Tim Stevenson, your host, and on this episode, I'm
going to be surfing through a conversationwith deep diving doctor Julia Huggins, an
expert on the microbiome. This isthe first of a two part series.
This episode, dealing with the forest, is the next going to be dealing
with the ocean science teachers. Graba pen and paper, we're gonna want

(01:30):
to take notes and an opening discussionof a special guest coming right up.
This podcast is a proud member ofthe Teach Better Podcast Network, Better Today,
Better Tomorrow, and the podcast toget you there. Explore more podcasts
at www dot Teach Better Podcastnetwork dotcom. Now let's get onto the episode.

(01:56):
Yeah, this is a little bitdifferent because I'm actually flanked by Chris
Jensen, our school librarian who happenedto open the door for the podcast studio
when Julia Huggins walked in and gotus all set up. And so here's
Chris now part of my intro.Yeah, yeah, hire one. I
was in the immense of two celebritiesthat day, and I was It was

(02:20):
quite exciting, quite exciting. Iwas not allowed to be part of the
podcast. That's okay. Yeah,once we hit record, you had to
leave. I did have to leaveyeah, but I heard it was a
really good time that you guys gota lot of good information well your stories.
You're a podcast listener as well,and you're a big fan of long
form podcasts. I am why isthat? I think only in long form

(02:43):
do you get past, like forme, the first fifteen to twenty minutes
of just getting to know you,and then I think what happens is that
you have this whole thing of wearingdown the interviewee because after a while,
the true self comes out. Youcan't hide it anymore. And so the
real stories, they're really good stories, I mean the ones where they really
are showing their caring and thought aboutit, they come out and like for

(03:06):
me, it would be like,you know, like the second half of
that set, right, because bythen you've you've gotten past everything that they
wanted to say, like, oh, it's a podcast, I got to
get this out right. And thenafter you get past that with an interviewer
interview, I think you get peoplethat all of a sudden you go say,
well, now I have a newtopic, and the topic comes up
and actually really a more meaning becauseyou've developed your whole podcast towards that moment,

(03:30):
and so the podcast I've listened tothat like that always have this moment
where you know, all of asudden, the tone shifts in the podcast
and people, all of a suddenget really, really more honest honest.
I think that's what I really appreciateit long for it back, because the
honesty comes out and the veneer ofthe celebrity or the I must have this

(03:53):
persona is gone after a while.They can't. People can't do it that
long. The time just wears themdown. It wears them down, but
in a good way, in apause, But in a pause we because
then all of a sudden you getsome really good information coming out and good
stories being shared and a good agood conversation. How about a very good
conversation happening? So that's what Ilike. Well, I had doctor,

(04:15):
the newly minted doctor Julia Huggins comeon, who's a microbiome specialist? And
to me, having somebody speak toa teacher audience is valuable. And I
have all my reasons why I thinkscience three sixty phills a niche among science
educators. But in your u inyour words, what is the value to

(04:40):
a teacher of listening to podcasts?Okay, Well, first of all,
I mean the teacher I'm looking forlooking for nuggets, right that I can
bring right into my classroom if Ican right off the bat. That's just
professional good practice, right you justsay no, okay, lets some plan
tomorrow. What am I bringing?But I think really what I also like

(05:00):
is that the fact is that Idon't have to be a teacher for a
while too. I can be alearner again. So yeah, and so
so log and format for me isthat way I can I can indulge myself
with a long time listen to agood conversation about people who are smart typically
or specialists in their field. Iknow I'm going to listen to something I

(05:21):
probably don't know about, which Iwant to know more about because I'm a
still learner. The little nature beingan educator you want to know more than
the heart of the matter is we'restill learners. Yes, yes, right,
I think that makes it the bestteachers. I think so too.
Yeah right, So anyway, soyeah, that's what. So I'm looking
forward to, uh, listen toyour podcast this one, right because I

(05:42):
think this is the I think thisis the longest one you've done well talking
about long form. Podcasting is atopic because Julie and I started a record
and it's funny. You don't wearher down because she loves her field so
much that she'll continue to talk.And it's the funniest thing is she she
talks about the microbiome. And shestarted out as a researcher in her undergrad

(06:04):
which, by the way, herstory her education journey is very fascinating because
she didn't she didn't go into universityand just take the courses that the program
guide said to take. She knewwhat she wanted but wasn't quite sure,
but she felt that the courses shewas taking were not giving her what she

(06:26):
actually needed, but all the timenot really sure what she needed. And
she talks about how at one pointshe heard a TED talk and the speaker
was talking about the microbiome and shethought, oh my gosh, this is
this is what I want to research. And so she took the bold move
and of changing majors, restructuring hercourses to take the to get the education

(06:51):
that she wanted, not that shewas told to get, which I think
was a very brave thing on herpart to do, and as a lesson
in and itself, you know.Yeah, that's quite renaissance, isn't it,
to all of a sudden say no, I'm taking charge of my education.
Thank you very much, Thank youvery much. We appreciate what you
have to offer as professors, butI think I'm gonna take it from here,

(07:13):
decide just to just design this what'sbest for me. And I think
we're seeing universities more and more areallowing students to design their own program rather
than saying, here are the onehundred and twenty credit hours that you need
to take. No, you design, you design the course and get the
degree that you want, which makesa whole lot of sense. But Julia
did it on her own, kindof on our own volition. Good for

(07:36):
her, I think that's I mean, it speaks volumes about her passion for
really her learning and her desire tolearn, and knowing the confidence knowing it's
going to turn out the right way. I just don't know the beginning where
it's going, but I know itwill be somewhere important, right, So
good on her, Good on her. And I tell my students all the

(07:58):
time, when you end university,you have no idea when you're going to
meet somebody or you're going to slipinto a special lecture series that's being offered,
or you hear in this case thatTed talk, and something is going
to switch the direction of your trajectoryand you have to keep your eyes and
ears open for that moment because youdon't know what's going to happen. It's

(08:20):
true, It's very true. SoI think it's the advice I try to
give my students, says if they'reheading to university, Yeah, keep your
options open, and you never know, and you never know. So and
so her story takes her from areally forest ecology and then when she finally
got into graduate studies, the advisorthat Julia connected with was an ocean researcher.

(08:46):
Julia, not being an ocean scientist, not having taken marine science courses,
followed the advice and in fact nowis studying her favorite which is the
microbiome, but in the in theoceans instead of in the forest. But
is uber knowledgeable in both areas.So you know what happened. We got

(09:09):
talking for about an hour and ahalf and we hadn't even brought up the
ocean yet, and I said toher, uh, oh, I really
want to get to the ocean andI said, but we've been recording for
an hour and a half. Whatdo you say, Can we take a
break and then come back to it. And I was willing for her to
say no, I'm really tired.I got to get going, but she

(09:31):
said, yeah, absolutely, let'sdo that. So he took a bit
of a break, got something toeat, and then we came back and
recorded the second half on the oceans. And so I've actually taken this episode
and given what I'm bringing today isthe her education journey and how she got
into this area of research, thenall kinds of fascinating information about the interconnectedness

(09:52):
of the of the forest and thepart two, which will be released in
a week, be our discussion.Same idea, but in the ocean sounds
good, sounds really good. I'mlooking forward to listening to both parts myself.
I haven't heard anything yet, soI'm really excited to have a chance
to listen to this. Yeah,the whole idea is, as you said,

(10:16):
a teacher as a learner, canpick up all kinds of interesting little
nuggets and take them right into theclassroom and tell the students things that will
blow their mind. And I'll justpoint something out what Juliet does different from
most people is we look at themacro fauna over short time scales. So

(10:37):
forests, they're the trees, right, and the birds swinging a flying from
branch to branch, and you knowthe ocean is She refers often to the
charismatic macro fauna like whales and dolphinsand seals, but her approach is the

(11:01):
microfauna over large time scales. Soto reiterate, we typically look at the
large things that are visible over shorttime scales. Julia looks at the tiny
things over very long time scales,and it completely changes your perspective and understanding

(11:22):
of the way nature works. Andthat's what I'm looking forward to because when
I listen to long format, reallyi'm looking for is paradigm shifting. I
want to be all of a suddenblown away by some way I've never looked
at the world before. Yeah,and then I grow as the person personally.
But then I know I'm going tobe able to share something cool someone
that I just learned that I thinkis fascinating, right, And I think

(11:46):
that's that helps every one in thisworld to kind of like take a moment
to say, you know what,I'm a step back from myself. I'm
just going to listen to his interestingtale and see where it takes me in
my personal development and growth. Right, and then the teacher then yeah,
I'll try insform into great educational stuff, but it's got to start my own,
my own being and changing listening bylistening to this stuff, and all

(12:07):
of a sudden, you know,where I thought the world was supposed to
be like, it's not anymore becauseI had this, you know, listen
for an hour and a half andpart one I went whoa, Okay,
yeah, yeah, things are thingsare different for me. Now. Well,
I think now would be a goodtime to let Julia take over,
So why don't we switch over tomy conversation with doctor Julia Huggins, And

(12:28):
I think you're going to enjoy thisdiscussion about forest biome. What we probably
should do is start right off thebat with who you are and what it
is you're doing educationally research wise,Yeah sort of thing. Okay, my
name is Julia Huggins. I ama full time scientist and I've just recently

(12:50):
completed my PhD. So I'm nowat a stage in my career where I
have a doctorate and i am whatyou call it postdoc and so regulations.
Thank you so much. I amworking as a scientist full time. I
no longer have any coursework or degreesthat I need to fulfill, but I'm

(13:11):
not quite yet at the stage ofbeing a professor or running my own lab.
So currently at the moment, Ispend my time working on research ships
because a lot of my work focuseson ocean related questions, and in the
fall, I'm likely going to bestarting a position at Woodshole Oceanographic Institute in
Massachusetts, but I'm not there yet. In terms of my field or the

(13:39):
type of science I doo, Imentioned that I go on ships because I
study things related to the oceans,but I'm actually more of an Earth system
scientist, is sort of how Ilike to sum up my area of work.
Have a nerdy name for what mytechnical field is. I'm a biogeochemist,
Okay, So that just means youcan think of the different pieces there,

(14:00):
bio and geo. So I thinkabout and study how the living parts
of the Earth systems and the nonliving parts the bio and the geo interact
with each other. And specifically,I study a lot of chemical processes that
have to do with those interactions,and doing that kind of research means that
I'm a little bit of a biologist. A lot of the organisms that are

(14:22):
relevant to my work are microbes.I'm kind of a microbiologist, but I'm
also a bit of a climate scientistin a sense because I need those are
the types of questions I'm asking isabout big picture processes that affect climate.
I need to know the fundamentals ofoceanography, bits and pieces even of geology
or other Earth system sciences, becausethey all kind of tie into what I'm

(14:46):
studying, even though my specific questionsaren't in one of those niche fields individually.
Got you, Yeah, you mentionedNerdy there just for a second.
We should probably, Yeah, hatsoff to Ross Reed Nerdy about Nature because
you've been on his podcast and alot of people listen to it. I
listened to it. Yeah, it'sgreat work. I love what Ross is
doing over there in About Nature.Ross is on our podcast on my podcast

(15:09):
too, probably in my first season. He was one of my very first
guests back when he wasn't a bigdeal. You know, now he's a
big deal. Yeah, yeah,yeah, Yeah. It's been fun to
watch his platform grow over the years, and it's awesome that you have such
a big reach now because what he'sdoing is really good. Yeah, And
the and the biogeochemistry one of thethings that maybe we can get into at

(15:31):
some point, maybe not right offthe bat, but I've I've asked this
question in my classes that on Earth, how did geochemistry become biochemistry, because
this is a bridge that we don'treally understand how that happened, or or
do we There are there are peopleworking on piecing that together, but it

(15:52):
turns out that that relationship goes backas far back as we know life existed.
So a lot of what we wouldthink of as sort of geology or
geochemistry, as these sort of nonliving physical processes, are actually far more
influenced by biological processes than we tendto appreciate in terms of just like how

(16:15):
elements are cycled, the composition ofdifferent deposits, and even some folks have
argued that even the composition of thecontinents and the fact that they exist in
the movement of those plate tectonic movementshave been shaped and affected by the presence
of life on Earth. So thedistinction between biochemistry and geochemistry is likely less

(16:41):
clear than we tend to divide it. For simple purposes of day to day
conversation, it's useful to distinguish betweenbiochemistry when we're talking about a cell or
cellular processes, and then geochemistry whenthere's no immediate role of life in that
process, but on large time scalesare very integrated, and of course,

(17:03):
in turn, all the geochemistry ofthe planet shapes how life evolved in the
first place and how it has continuedto Like, are you able to give
an example where forms of life influencedgeochemistry? Yeah, there are many,
maybe some famous ones that we don'ttend to think of in that way.
But you know the White Cliffs ofDover, these large so those are biological

(17:26):
deposits, right, Those are mineraldeposits that are now non living and we
would think of them as a rock. But the reason they're there in the
first place was from photosynthetic organisms thatlived long ago that deposited over time,
certain minerals that have accumulated and nowformed a geological deposit. That's just sort
of like a specific place where youcould find that. Other more general examples

(17:51):
might be something like the composition ofcarbon deposits that are in seafloor sediments and
that eventually get subducted in subduction zones. So those sediments start out as like
goopy mud, and then over timehas more sediments s builed up on top
of them, they get more andmore compressed, and then they become part

(18:14):
of the crust that get subducted,and then that changes the composition when that
when those rocks melt and become magmaand come back up to the surface,
the chemical composition of the rocks thatare formed from that magma depend on the
chemical composition of those sediments in thefirst place. In many cases, and
a lot of those sediments were actuallybiological at one point, right, Yeah,

(18:38):
So the original composition of much ofthe seafloor sediments are little bits and
pieces of biological waste. It's deadphytoplankton or poop from various animals living in
the water column. And the specificratios of things like carbon and nitrogen and
silica that end up in those sedimentsdepend on biological processes happening in the ocean,

(19:03):
and so over time, those biologicalprocesses can totally shift the composition of
continental crusts, which they might mightaffect their density and maybe even affect their
movement exactly well. And that's theidea that life influences the actual movement of
the plates is one that I haveheard. I don't know how much evidence

(19:26):
there is supporting that, but it'san idea that some scientists have played around
with, and there's some evidence tosuggest that might be the case. But
that's not one that's like a universallyaccepted idea. Yeah, okay, yeah,
but and it isn't like sand onbeaches predominantly is either it could be
weathered rock, but it also couldbe shells corals totally. It just depends

(19:49):
on your setting. Often the darkercolored sand beaches are typically more rock minerals
like olivine dissolved that we're in rocksthat have dissolved those little crystals can make
sand particles quartz make slighter colored beaches. But in lots of places the especially

(20:10):
if you're near a coral reef,then it's bits and pieces of coral or
other shells that have broken down inthe waves and can make beaches. And
then those beaches can become sedimentary rocks, and those can get recycled, and
then you know limestone and olive andmarble, which is metamorphose limestone. Those

(20:30):
things are all originally shaped by biologicaldeposits or the product of biological deposits.
Okay, we're talking about rock straightoff the path. This is quite of
interesting though. But you know,like I've said to you and many other
times I've said on this podcast,the whole reason this podcast exists is so
that teachers hopefully listen to this andgo, well, wait a minute,
I didn't know that that's interesting.Like you mentioned Olivine. Now, is

(20:52):
that not the one that's related tothe Green sands in Hawaiian? Yes,
that was one of I things.So typical darker sand beaches are usually rocks,
but olivine are the famous. Like, there's a few green sands,
there's one in Hawaii, there's afew other and other parts of the world.
They're just these dark green crystals thatform in mafic rocks depending on the

(21:18):
composition of the magma which becomes lavawhen I guess to the surface, you
get different types of rocks sort ofacross the spectrum magma. That is,
I'm generalizing here. For all thegeology experts who are listening, they will
forgive you. Yeah, So whenthat magma is I think, as a
non geologics think of the word fresher. So it's like most recently come up

(21:40):
from the depths of the Earth.It comes with a lot more metals,
and it's more mineral rich, heavymetal rich, and so are things like
iron, for example. And whenthere's more of that in the rocks,
the rock in the magma, therocks that form are darker in composition and

(22:00):
more dense, and so those wehave a word for that, we call
mafix as a sort of general termfor rocks that have more metals in them,
are darker colored and more dense.And that's from again magma that's very
recently come up from the Earth's surfaceand has cooled like for the first time
basically. And then once that thoserocks become part of Earth's crust, they

(22:23):
get recycled through subduction and they meltagain a little bit, but they don't
go deep down into the core.They kind of stay near the surface and
they can melt and come back up. And every time they do that,
every time they melt again and comeback up to the surface, the magma
changes in its chemistry and as ageneral trend, it becomes lighter. So

(22:44):
the more times you melt and recoolmagma, you get lighter and lighter composition
rocks that are both lighter in colorand lighter in density. And so that's
where eventually you get what we callcontinental crust is typically made up of rocks
that are or felsic, so felsickbeing the opposite of mafic. Yeah,
And so depending on sort of whereyou are on that scale, you get

(23:07):
different chemical compositions. And then I'mgoing to tie that back into life really
quick because depending on the chemical compositionof those rocks, when they weather,
they release chemicals into the environment thatthen in turn shape how life lives in
that space. So mafic rocks,when they weather, they release minerals like

(23:30):
iron and other metals that are insome cases very important for life. If
they have a lot of those heavymetals, in some cases that can actually
inhibit life from growing in ultra maficrocks. And then felsic rocks can have
minerals that are important for some plantsas well, like potassium and other metals

(23:52):
that are or sorry, minerals thatare harder to access otherwise. So depending
on the composition of the rocks,you then influence the biology, and then
the psych keeps going, and theballogi influences how the rocks change over time.
WHOA, Yeah, it just struckme. I just saw an article
today, and who knows. Ifyou know something about this, I'll ask
you anyway. But they said sayssomething about how the asteroid impact that killed

(24:15):
the dinosaurs had an impact on theformation of the Amazon forest, the rainforest.
It just made me wonder if ithad something to do with whatever minerals
that asteroid was carrying. Did itfertilize the land basin that was proper for
that kind of a jungle. Idon't know about that. I haven't read

(24:37):
the article. It sounds super fascinating, so one to look up. Yeah,
in addition to perhaps deposits from theasteroid, I would guess that likely
the impact changed something about ocean circulation, is my guess, because typically when
you have large regions shifting climates fromsomething like a desert to a jungle,

(24:59):
or what was once an ice capbecoming warmer, often not always, that
is driven by shifts in ocean circulation, and so my guess is that maybe
the asteroid had a role in thatas well. But I'd love to read
the article the one mineral or not, I guess not. The element that
was deposited was iridium, you know, the iridium layer. No, that's

(25:22):
okay. I know I've heard aboutit as like a reference point in geologic
time, but I don't know thedetails of it. Yeah, it's two
points. And the main idea withthe iridium layer is that there was some
observation that fossils from dinosaurs seemed toaccumulate more below this global layer of iridium

(25:48):
than above it. Right, okay. And iridium is a very dense I
think it's the most dense element onthe periodic table, and when it's molten,
it should therefore sink deeper into thecrust. So what's it doing near
the surface in these deposits across theplanet, right? Yeah? And then
when they do all this research intomoon rocks and various asteroids, you realize
that they're very rich and heavy metals. WHOA, Well, maybe then what

(26:11):
happened was an asteroid hit the Earth, it distributed this iridium globally. It
may have changed the climate. Italtered it for the cold blooded reptiles that
were living here. And they kindof put two and two together. I
think this is called the Alvaras hypothesis. Yeah, I've heard pieces of this.
I never actually knew about the specificroll of iridium in that though.
That's cool. Yeah, it waslike a clue. And then they thought,
well, then I guess there mustbe a crater somewhere, and they

(26:33):
went hunting for a crater, andthe search found it. Eventually. It's
hard to find a crater though,in half of it's underwater, yeah,
exactly, and then other half isin a jungle, and when it's that
large, it's hard to recognize thatit's a crater. Yeah. But then
the other thing is I actually wantedto hit on this point just a little
bit for the sake of science education, because you were saying it earlier,
and I think it's a very goodpoint about So, for instance, I

(26:55):
bring up this topic of iridium andyou're not one hundred percent familiar with it.
That's, of course, we're notknowledgeable on everything. Yeah, but
you use this metaphor of surfers anddivers. Yeah. I'm going to have
to find the article. I reada Perspective's piece that I enjoyed, and
I'll dig it up and find itfor you. But they were making the
case for that there's two different generalapproaches to science and that both are valuable

(27:21):
and both are necessary. And sothey have the surfers, quote unquote,
which are the folks that sort ofcruise across the surface and explore lots of
different topics, and then there's thedivers who maybe focus on one specific area
and go down deep and really getto know that spot in detail. And
of course, the analogy here isto realms of knowledge, So you have

(27:41):
divers that really dive deep into onerealm of knowledge and become experts on their
topic, and then you have surferswho sort of dabble in lots of different
things and are perhaps more equipped tomake connections across fields, but are not
experts on one specific topic. Andso the perspective piece was just arguing that
both approaches are valuable, and typicallyin academic sciences we tend to perhaps favor

(28:07):
or cater toward the divers approach,but that we should appreciate and support the
existence of the surfers as well.Well. That's good because I am,
without a doubt a surfer, butI've made a thirty year career of being
a surfer and I think for teachers, if I were to have any sort
of opportunity to offer influence, Iwould say, you need to be knowledgeable

(28:30):
to a little extent, a certainextent, not a deep extent, on
a lot of things. I'd rathermy students know a little bit about a
lot of things. And what I'llsay to them is that if one of
those little things you now know youwant to know more about, well,
there's a thing called university. Yeah, go dive deep, yeah absolutely,
and have addr Yeah. And youcan do both too. You can dive

(28:52):
a little bit, explore something andthen realize you're interested in something else,
which I advocate for because it's beena little bit of my own personal path
through the sciences. But being asurfer is very valuable, especially when you're
trying to communicate concepts to other people, which is what teachers do, that's
what we do, and when you'retrying to pull people in who maybe don't

(29:14):
think of themselves as scientists or peoplewho are interested in the sciences. When
you're a surfer, you can say, oh, well, okay, you're
interested in this other thing, thisother topic that you think is not at
all related to science. But didyou know that actually this other process is
going on that makes that possible.And turns out science is connected to what

(29:36):
you care about. And here's someconcepts that can pull you into caring about
the scientific processes behind the topic you'reinterested in. And the ability to do
that requires thinking broadly and not gettingnot putting your blinders on and thinking too
narrowly about a specific symbject which iswhy I probably wouldn't have done well in
an academic route like yourself, becauseI'm just such a thirty thousand foot view

(29:59):
kind of a person. And yousaid, the two things that are literally
my science, my teaching, myeducation philosophy, which is draw people in,
draw them in to a place ofcaring. Yeah, it's so important
that if they have an emotional connection, they'll want to know, not because
they have to, but they wantto. Yep. And that's that's been

(30:22):
my approach to high school education myentire career. Well, that's wonderful.
I'm glad to hear there are teacherslike that out there, because, honestly,
maybe we'll get into this a littlebit more detailed. We talk about
my own journey through sciences, butI didn't experience a lot of teaching like
that, and I don't think Iwould have thought of myself as a scientist
if I hadn't had a few teachersthat did think and speak in those ways

(30:44):
that could pull the big idea picturestogether. And then it clicked for me
and I was like, oh,oh, I'm interested in this because now
I understand what it's connected to andI care about it and I'm interested.
I wasn't one of the students whowas like, I'm going to study just
to study and make sure that Iget a good grade on the tech.
I was very motivated by interest,and says only when those connections happened that
my motivation kicked in. Yeah,I have a student right now. Oh,

(31:08):
I'm just thinking of her right now, and I wish she was here
and I could track her down becauseI love you to meet her. The
reason is because last year she wasin my Grade twelve chemistry class and we
were doing a unit on We're doinga unit on oceans in acidification, which
I definitely want to ask you aton about. And it's because in that

(31:33):
course there's a unit on acids andbasins. So it just seems obvious to
me that you would then teach aboutthe oceans because this is the place where
a certification is a major issue.And what happened was conversation started to wander
around to different aspects of water chemistry, not just the oceans, but just
sort of around and the idea aboutfertilizer being used in agriculture getting into the

(31:56):
water systems and getting out into theoceans and creating these algo blooms, maybe
even leading to hypoxic regions of theocean. That stuck with it. That
was over a year ago now,and she came to me just recently said,
I'm doing my capstone project and I'mdoing it on this because that stuck

(32:16):
with me. That's cool, Yeah, that's what you're looking for. Yeah,
precisely. I an undergraduate. WhileI was an undergraduate, I came
across a quote. I think maybea friend actually sent it to me because
I think they knew that I neededto hear it. I was struggling a
lot with what I should do,what I should major in, what my
you know, purpose should be.And the quote was, don't ask what

(32:40):
the world needs, ask what makesyou come alive? Because what the world
needs is people who have come alive. And that really really struck me and
brought a lot of relief because Iwas stuck in this cycle of like what
am I supposed to do? Andinstead that freed me up to say,
what am I called to do?What am I excited about doing? And
that is the right thing to do. Yeah, And I've found myself frequently

(33:05):
revisiting that, trying to remind myselfof that again now almost ten years later
in my career, as I sortof struggle with some bigger picture ideas about
possible directions my own career could go, and trying to remember to come back
to that idea of like what makesme the most passionate and inspired and alive,
because that's what the world needs,not what do I think I ought
to do with my PhD or withmy science career based on other people's ideas.

(33:30):
I had a fellow named Craig Lesenon my podcast. Craig was the
director of the movie called A PlasticOcean, which is on Netflix, and
there's a and I always get hisquote just a little bit wrong. And
I told him and he said,well, that's not actually exactly what I
said. I said, Okay,well, don't worry about because I think
it's but essentially it says with hesaid, with knowing comes caring, and

(33:52):
with caring comes action. So youwon't act if you don't care. Yeah,
absolutely, but you got to knowbefore you can care. Yep.
This is a connection that I justlove about science. And that's great.
Yeah, I've a huge advocate inmy own outreach work of taking that approache.
That's great. Now, maybe itwould be appropriate to just tell us

(34:14):
because I think I heard you sayat one point that you were originally starting
out of the forest ecologist. Yeah, in your undergrad that was your intention.
Yeah, a bit, and thenit switched because didn't you find an
advisor who said, but you're goingto be an ocean. Yes, it
was a complicated journey. Although itsounds like I've switched a lot, there

(34:35):
are actual underlying themes that have remainedconsistent. And so one of those is
that big mouthful of a word ofbiogeochemistry. I would say that even before
I knew what that, I didn'tknow that word existed, and as part
was part of my struggle. ButI think that I have always been,
at heart, or at least aninterest, a biogeochemist, and that is

(34:55):
what I've been driven by, butI didn't know that that's what it was
called. And I sort of endedup as a microbiologist accidentally in a way,
because I was really interested in understandingecosystems. I cared a lot about
ecological issues and ecosystems in general.Starting out an undergrad, I actually started

(35:20):
as a chemistry major, but thenwas uninspired by what the chemistry curriculum was
doing. I switched over to biology, but was then like, wait,
where's all the chemistry? Why arewe all just seemed to disappear. Once
I was in the biology major,and I came across the concept of micro
micro organisms, but specifically fungi,and I was caught my attention because it

(35:44):
immediately was a combination of ecology,ecosystems, and chemistry all at once.
Was it a course you took orwas it a lecture you attended? I
saw a Ted talk online. Ohyeah, Paul Stamus's Ted talk. It
has now become quite famous. ButI saw that and it was what stuf
it. And then I just startedfinding materials on my own and reading a
bit about it. I talked tosome of my biology professors who were not

(36:07):
microbiologists themselves, but they connected meto one of the faculty at our school
who was a micologist. So thenI started working in that person's research lab
while I was an undergrad gaining firsthandexperience with both fieldwork and lab work with
fungi. And when it came timeto designing my senior thesis, this professor,

(36:30):
even though he himself didn't do alot of work with the chemistry of
fungi, he knew that I wasinterested in that and gave me some free
realm to come up with some questionsand experiments that were looking more at the
chemical interactions of fungi and their ecosystemsand how they interact with the soil ecosystems
in the forest. That freedom todo that and getting my experience was amazing

(36:50):
because it really gave me the spaceto start to say what am I interested
in scientifically and these questions that sortof are at the intersection between chemistry and
biology and ecology. I still didn'tknow the word biogeochemistry, but that's what
I was doing, That's what Iwas trying to do. And then I
took some time. I didn't gostraight to graduate school, partly because I

(37:15):
didn't know the word I was lookingfor in terms of who I wanted to
work with and who was doing theresearch I was interested in. But I
kept working in fungal ecology in thecontext of forests, So that's why I
would say I was a forest ecologist, but really I was studying microbes and
soil chemistry and how they shape theforests. And during that time between my

(37:37):
undergrad and before grad school, whenI was just working as a research assistant
in research labs, I had thespace to explore scientific literature more broadly,
and that's where I had I foundthe term biogeochemistry, and I was like,
Oh, there's a word for this. Why don't we know about it?
Or why didn't I taught? Whyaren't we taught about it? And
then I started looking for specifically researchersthat are biogeochemists. And there's no reason

(38:04):
that biagio chemistry has to be exclusivelystudied in the oceans. It just happens
that many biogeochemists study the oceans.There's reasons why it's common to say the
oceans. The oceans are hugely influentialon our planet. It's relatively easy to
study bigiochemical processes in the ocean comparedto something like soils or sediments. So

(38:27):
sort of just by the nature ofthe field that I was interested in,
I ended up becoming an oceanographer becauseI joined a biogeochemistry lab for grad school,
and some of the questions that labwas working on were based in the
oceans. So I don't have abackground in oceanography. I sometimes put air
quotes up when I call myself anoceanographer. But what I now study is

(38:47):
taking place in the oceans, underlyingat the consistent themes of microbes, their
metabolisms, the chemistry of what theydo, and how that shapes the planet
in different ways. That's consistent,even though the setting for my research has
changed dramatically over that progression of time. But there's an incredibly good lesson in

(39:08):
your journey in that as a student, you didn't just take the courses that
the counselor said, take these courses. If you want to get a degree,
take this course and discourse, andyou searched for the courses that you
really wanted to take, and youchanged your route along the way, and

(39:29):
then it was this ted talk thatfinally said that's what I want to pursue.
Yep, So you kind of huntedit down a little bit like a
lot. I did, and it'sfunny, but I didn't know what I
was looking for. I think it'sstrange when you're searching for something but you
don't know exactly what it is,and you're just kind of like, I
haven't found it yet, but Idon't know what it is, so I
don't know what it looked like whenI see it. But then the moment

(39:53):
it clicks, it's pretty clear,this little light kind of comes on.
It really feels like that, you'rejust like, ohh that's cool. It's
hard to know where you're going ifyou don't know where your endpoint is,
right. But I just think that, like I hope that people who listen

(40:13):
will say, yeah, when Iget into university, don't settle for just
what the course planning guide says todo. Be true to yourself and hunt
down that thing, whatever it is. You don't even really know what it
is, but you will know whenyou find it. Yeah, absolutely.
And universities are becoming more amenable tointerdisciplinary work, so more What school were

(40:38):
you at when you're doing all this. I'm from the US, so I
was at a small liberal arts college, which are not a very common structure
here in Canada, but this isLewis and Clark College. It's a little
liberal arts school in Portland, Oregonthat I was at okay, which is
I think part of what It's notimpossible to have that experience at a bigger

(41:00):
university, but the setting for mebeing at that small school, I think
was an important piece of having thatflexibility to explore a lot and not be
funneled directly into a major right away. So that's an important piece. You
can get that at bigger universities.Though, so I was saying is some
of these bigger universities are becoming moreamenable to interdisciplinary fields of work, and

(41:20):
you'll see that in now majors youcan major in interdisciplinary topics and that's great
for people who are sort of maybelooking for that interest, but it hasn't
clicked in one of the predefined existingmajors. But I would also say that
one thing I didn't fully understand orappreciate at that time was that your undergraduate

(41:45):
degree does not determine what you haveto work on in a narrow minded sense
from there on out. So Ihave a liberal arts degree in the biological
sciences, and that's a really broaddegree. We didn't specialize at our school.
But I could have had a geologydegree. I could have had a

(42:06):
chemistry degree. I could have hada microbiology degree. Any of those degrees,
I still could do the career thatI have now as a biogeochemist.
So if you're at that point,or if you're a teacher who's mentoring students
are at that point, I wouldsay, yes, seek it out,
explore, but also don't panic aboutneeding to find that right away and feeling

(42:29):
that you're going to be siloed forthe rest of your life in something just
because you majored in geology and nowyou're going to only be able to study
rocks forever or something like that.And that was not a perspective I had
until later on as a graduate student, looking at the backgrounds of the other
people I was working with and realizingyou didn't Yeah, you didn't have to
have an interdisciplinary degree to do aninterdisciplinary program in the sciences. As a

(42:52):
graduate student. Okay, yeah,Now in your your first kind of area
of re search that you were reallypursuing hard was the microbiome of the soil.
Meanwhile, here in British Columbia,the curriculum has changed a little bit,
particularly in junior science, and there'sthis very interesting unit now that I've

(43:15):
come to find. It's my favoriteunit where it's basically just saying the interconnectedness
of the spheres. Yeah. Lovethat. Yeah, so air, water,
soil, trees, plants, animals, And as a teacher you literally
can craft that any which way youwant. How do these things interconnect?
Now? The obvious one is well, plants photosynthesize and make oxygen and animals

(43:37):
consume oxygen for coe too in connection. But there's so much more, And
this is what I want to reallyget out of you, is is the
connection between plant, animal, land, air water, between the plants and
both above the ground and below theground. How many hours, yeah,
exactly know how many episodes? Yeah, forget about Ross Russ. I'm taken

(44:00):
over. Yeah, this is myfavorite subject. I mean it is,
in a nutshell sort of My disciplineis the connections between these different parts of
the processes. Like, go toa grade nine classroom in your mind and
just think to yourself if I wasgoing to teach the interconnectedness and I actually
had the if you had the opportunityto lead them on a walk through the

(44:22):
forest, and you were walking backhere towards there's a ravine, there's a
fresh water stream, it's salmon bearing, it is salmon bearing. There's alders
out here, there's conifers, there'sthere's all kinds of interesting understory. There's
big leaf maples with licorice, fernyeap. And you're standing there with your
students, and in your mind you'relike, okay, the interconnectness of matter.

(44:45):
Go, yeah, what would yousay? Where did you start?
Yeah? No, it's a greatquestion. I've done a bit of work
like this, and I have twodifferent approaches, but my my preferred is
more of an exploratory one, onewhere I would say what do you see?
What do you notice? And thenplay the game of why, just

(45:07):
like picture like a three year old, like a toddler, like but why,
but why? But why? Anddoing that I found that you can
I find that you can do thiswith almost any level of you know,
you can do this with older folkswho have a whole career in some field.
You can do this with high schoolstudents. You can do with children.
But once you start going below thefirst level or two. That's where

(45:30):
the interesting puzzle expressions start to comeup. You know. Okay, you're
like, so you know, whatdo you see here? You see a
big tree? Okay, well whyis it here? Well, because there's
soil for it to grow in?Okay, yeah, yes, that you
do need a bunch of a generalamount of soil depending on the type of
tree, it needs to be deeperor whatever. Why is that there?

(45:51):
Why is there more soil here?Okay? Well, maybe you know,
more organic debris broke down over time, Maybe that idea is in their minds.
Maybe not yet, but maybe weget to that second level. But
then the third and fourth levels oflike why why did that organic material break
down and accumulate here? What brokeit down? Yeah? What broke it

(46:12):
down? Why is it building uphere and not on this other part of
the ecosystem that we're looking at overthere, where it's drier and thin soil
and no trees, So why herenot over there? So that's where I
find the interconnectedness pieces start to emergealmost voluntarily from their own minds, where
instead of me needing to say here'show this influences that and this and that,

(46:36):
they are looking for those connections themselves. They're trying to sort of stretch
their imagination to think, why wouldthis happen here? Well, probably it
doesn't have anything to do with thetree. The tree, we need to
move beyond the tree to understand whyit's here. So now I'm starting to
think about water. Perhaps maybe mymind shifts to the water cycle, and
I'm like, well, we're lowerdown in the watershed here, and in

(47:00):
that other area where there was notree, that's higher up in an exposed
area where the water doesn't accumulate,or maybe the wind blows the soil away.
So now we're thinking about atmosphere andwater cycles. We're thinking about maybe
how the geology of the region affectswhere the water will flow, or kind
of like the slope, the slopewhether or not you've got permeable rock deposits

(47:22):
where the water can sink down,or if there's a hard like a granite
surface underneath, it's going to notallow that water to soak in and instead
it's going to wash off. Soall of these things start to affect the
surface level details that were in thefirst round of observation. The presence of
soil in the presence of a tree. And this game is so fun and

(47:45):
almost limitless because you never know whatobservations they're gonna make and where the why
train is going to take you,and so it's not comprehensive because you don't
you know, every hy is sortof like a bifurcating point that has multiple
paths you could go down and veryquickly within a few rounds of why.

(48:06):
There's so many connections that you can'tpossibly in one conversation capture them all.
So instead of trying to be comprehensive, it's more exploratory nature. You don't
know which path of like why andobservations you're going to go down, but
you end up making some really coolconnections once you start pushing yourself to go
level deeper, go level deeper,and think about where that happens, and

(48:29):
there might be opportunity. Then forback in the classroom, if somebody did
ask this question about soil, okay, well, then your job for the
next two or three classes is you'regoing to research soil, like where does
it what really is dirt? Yeah? Where does it come from? And
what turns out in there? It'sa huge topic. Like I've had a
few people ask me what is soil, and I'm like, well, get

(48:52):
a couple of soil ballots in theroom together and none they won't agree,
So there's no It's it's a fascinatingIt's its own huge topic of what exactly
makes up soil? Where does itcome from? How do you go from
sand or silt or mineral deposits,and how much organic matter do you have
to add in before it becomes soil? And I don't want to turn this
into a tangent about soil, butas a good example, it is its

(49:14):
own topic that is so complex andhas so many questions that branch off of
that of you know, how didit come to be here? Why is
it like this? Why does ithave more nutrients of this kind or more
water or less or things like that. Is there a way to equip teachers
right now with just even a littlenugget about what is what are the organisms

(49:34):
in the soil that's breaking down organicmatter leaves and twigs and fallen logs,
what's breaking that down? What's actuallydoing it? Yeah, I'm a huge
advocate of talking about microbes. Ilove them. I think they're amazing,
and so the very general answer isit's all. It's almost all entirely microbes,
and microbe is micro organism, meaningyou generally need a microscope to see.

(50:00):
There's whether or not a fungus ora mushroom is a microbe is debatable,
because you can see a mushroom whenit makes a fruiting body, but
the individual strands of the fungal organismare too small to see with your eye,
so we're mostly talking about things youcan't see, and it makes those
topics hard to interact with sometimes becauseit's much easier to talk about trees and

(50:22):
shrubs or water and a stream thatyou can see, whereas these microbes are
changing the world around us in waysthat are very tangible and real, but
we can't see them ourselves. Andthere's there's a bunch of different categories of
types of microbes that play different roles. Probably the most relevant to think about

(50:44):
or know about is that there's fungusand those are what we call u carryouts,
which just mean complex organisms with coveryeah yep. And then we've got
bacteria and our kia, which aretwo types of prokaryotes, so almost almost
always single celled organisms. There's someexamples of like colonies, but little individual

(51:08):
cells without complex structures in them,and they're just basically little chemical sacs.
Like those organisms are doing very littlewith their lives except reproducing and carrying out
chemical metabolisms. And of course peoplewho study microbes will feel like that's an
injustice to their diversity and complexity.But when we're thinking about them in comparison

(51:31):
to plants and animals and sort ofall these other activities and processes that more
complex organisms do, bacteria in archaiawe can just think of them as like
little chemical sacks that are turning awaymetabologies on leaves and all these things that
fall in the forest floor. They'rechurning that up, yeah, yeah,

(51:52):
releasing nutrients exactly the soil. Thereare a few initial steps of decomposition that
are not carried out by microbes thatare important. So like a leaf can
get directly decomposed by a fungus ora microbe, but many times insects will
chew them up and make smaller pieces, and then that exposes more surface area

(52:14):
to the microbes. So just thephysical breakdown of leaves can happen from small
we call mayofauna, so medium smallsized animals and other things, but that
include worms. That could include worms. Yeah, worms are going to do
a bit more of actual decomposition inthe sense that they take in material and

(52:38):
instead of just breaking it into smallpieces in their guts, there are microbes
that are breaking them, breaking downthe plant matter into they're carrying the chemical
sacks exactly in their guts. Yeah. So almost everything that gets credit for
doing cool chemical processes, it's usuallythat that organism hosts a microbe that does
it. Right. So we say, like termites eat wood, but termites

(53:02):
two wood and have special microbes intheir guts that can decompose wood. The
termite itself does very little in termsof actually decomposing or eating wood, So
microbes is where it's at. Ohyeah. And like nitrogen fixing plants,
for example, this is another oneof my favorites, a little different than
we're talking about with soil microbes,but nitrogen fixing plants, which are super
important things like legumes, and theybring in a lot of nitrogen into the

(53:25):
soil. It's not actually the plant. The plant doesn't do it at all.
The plant has just joined a symbaticrelationship with a microbe that it hosts
on its roots. And it feedsthose microbes sugars, and in exchange,
it's the microbes that are doing thenitrogen fixation. Now i've heard the word
azotobacteria, is that the one thatis a type of me that's a type

(53:46):
of bacteria that can fix nitrogen,and it's got that azo is like a
mean of reference to nitrogen. Sothat's a genus of bacteria that is capable
of fixing nitrogen. But there's lotsof types. And so for example,
one here that many of us arefamiliar with our alder trees, and alders

(54:07):
are in this region at least theonly nitrogen fixing tree. And again I'm
putting air quotes up so our audiencecan't see that. But the tree itself
does not fix nitrogen. But they'vegot nodules on their roots where they are
basically farming nitrogen fixing bacteria, andthose are called Frankia bacteria. So it's
a totally different genus. So there'sactually several different genera of microbes that can

(54:31):
fix nitrogen. And many of theall of the situations where we hear something
is a nitrogen fixing plant, it'salways a microbe that's actually doing it.
There's no organism on the planet exceptdifferent types of bacteria that can take nitrogen
out of the air and turn itinto usable forms, and they talk about

(54:55):
interconnecting it. So the air iseighty percent that's just say nit yep,
and we require nitrogen. Are aminoacids, proteins are DNA, Everything alive
that we know of needs nitrogen.And yet the atmosphere contains a form of
nitrogen that's completely inaccessible to us.Yes, so we're one hundred percent reliant
on the nitrogen cycle. These microorganismsthat may find their home in the legumes

(55:22):
and may find their home in noduleson an alder tree. To take that
out of the air, put itin the soil, it becomes another form
that we then have access to correct. So what is the form and two
in the air? What's the formthat it becomes in the soil. The
ammonium is like the most chemically simpleform of each four biologically available nitrogen,

(55:45):
but the form that it's actually inmost of the time is simple amino acids.
So an amino acid is like alittle ring of a few carbons and
some nitrogen and then like a sidechain. And if you link those together
if you put a lot of aminoacids in a chain, you get a
protein, of course. Yeah,But individually they can also just float around

(56:09):
as little chemicals in the soil.We could just call them free amino acids,
and they're fairly stable on their own, whereas ammonium usually gets oxidized or
used in other ways, and soit's not really a stable form of nitrogen.
So the form of biologically available nitrogenthat is sort of the output from

(56:30):
these microbes is simple amino acids.Would these be one of the twenty amino
acids that we use? Yep,Yeah, so that's the microbes themselves fix
nitrogen selfishly for themselves. They aremaking amino acids. So they're pulling nitrogen
out of the air and making aminoacids. This is one hundred percent new
to me. I thought that theammonium, the nitrates, this was the

(56:52):
typical form. But now you're sayingthat they actually take them and turn them
into amino acids. Yeah, soyou can. It's both are true.
You have ammonium and nitrate are alsofreely available forms of nitrogen that are biologically
available. They're not as stable interms of long term presence in an environment,

(57:12):
and specifically just because they get usedup quickly. So these bacteria that
are fixing nitrogen, pulling end twoout of the air, they have a
special enzyme that can bust those twonitrogens apart and then stick them into organic
molecules in a form that is chemicallysimilar to ammonium, but it's part of

(57:35):
a molecule, so we don't callit ammonium, but in terms of its
redox state, it is similar toammonium, even though it's connected to carbon
in the amino acid. Then whenamino acids are released into the environment because
maybe that bacteria dies or it getstraded with the tree and then you know,
gets cycled around as a protein,those amino acids can break down as

(57:58):
well on their own chemically, butusually as the byproduct of another organism breaking
apart amino acid, sort of scavengingfor parts, and then that nitrogen that
was in the amino acid gets releasedas ammonium because it's still in that same
redox state, so it's like thechemical waste product of amino acid degradation includes

(58:20):
ammonium, So then there's free floatingammonium, and many organisms can take up
ammonium directly and build new amino acidswith it. So that's why we call
it a bioavailable form because they cantake it up right away and use it.
Other organisms actually take up amino asorry ammonium, and they eat it
like they oxidize it, almost likewe would oxidize sugars or food carbon sources.

(58:45):
There are organisms that can use ammoniuminstead of making protein out of it.
They actually just metabolize it and offerenergy. Yeah, they treat it
like the same way we use carbonsugars, organic carbon. They're oxidizing it
in a chemical reaction, not forthe purpose of building amino acids, but
just for the purpose of harvesting energyout of the chemical reaction. And so

(59:08):
when they do that, the byproductof that is oxidized nitrogen, which are
nitrates, and that's how we endup with nitrates in an environment. So
first the nitrogen has to get pulledout of the atmosphere turned into a reduced
form that we call amino acids orammonium, and then it can get oxidized

(59:29):
by other chemical processes and other microbesand turned into nitrates. And that's sort
of the full spectrum of available formsof nitrogen that we typically see in an
environment and where they come from anavailability is it's not a full circle just
yet, because we've gone through thatprocess from air to these forms that are
available in the soil, but they'restill not in us at the top of

(59:51):
the food chain. How do weultimately get them? Yeah, so we
get them when things that we eattake them up. And most of the
time we're talking about plants as theprimary producers. So when we say production
in biology, like primary producers,we're talking about the production of organic material
at the base of a food chainand so on land, that's plants,

(01:00:15):
but in the ocean it's lots ofsingle celled phytoplankton in many cases. But
they take up that free floating nitrogenand they make organic material. Loosely speaking,
there's lots of types of organic compounds, but they use the nitrogen to
do that. Protein being one ofthe main important forms of it. Then

(01:00:35):
it works its way. So thisis the plant based protein that they put
on the labels of those protein powders. Oh yeah, plants are full of
proteins too, Yeah, totally.So you can like break down plant matter
and then we typically think of plantsas carbohydrates, because there's a lot of
carbs and plants as well, butthey have a lot of protein in them.
So the protein that we're putting inthese protein powders that people scoop into

(01:00:58):
their smoothies is is plant. That'sthe that's the proteins made from amino acids
has been fixed from the air intothe soil by these microbes microbes. Yeah,
there's always a microbe behind it.That's so. Really, plants are
pretty good source of protein. They'rea great source of protein, depending on

(01:01:20):
how which plant you're talking about,more or less. In fact, legumes,
which are a type of plant thathave symbatic relationships with nitrogen fixers,
tend to be higher in protein becausethey have a direct source of nitrogen.
They don't have to scavenge it fromthe soil. In one of these bioavailable
forms, they've got little nitrogen factoriesright on their root system, providing them

(01:01:43):
with an endless stream of nitrogen.So producing protein is biologically costly because you
need nitrogen to make protein, Butif you've got an endless supply of nitrogen,
it's much easier for you to producemore proteins. So that's why things
like lentils and peas and other legumeplants are high in protein. For people

(01:02:04):
who have a plant based diet,that's a good source of proteins. But
as you work your way up thefood chain, as other organisms eat plants,
and then organisms eat those organisms,you kind of get higher and higher
up that food chain, and dependingon your own diet where you eat in
that food chain, at some pointyou're eating organisms that got their protein from
ultimately from a plant or another primaryproducer at the base of that food chain.

(01:02:24):
Isn't that so cool? Though?It is so cool total interconnectedness.
Yeah, it's like all of asudden, like the nitrogen cycle is more
exciting than the carbon cycle or thewater cycle. I mean, my PhD
was on the nitrogen cycle, soso you would agree to the choir.
Yeah, yeah, that's funny.The now this is see what other things
can we connect? When you saythis boat in the store. So really,

(01:02:47):
when I grab a handful of soil, I'm not just picking up dirt.
I'm picking up probably an inordinate numberof living organisms. Oh yeah,
so many. And then if Iget my hands dirty, there's all kinds
of creepy for all these all overmy hands in the microscoll all the time.
In fact, they don't need tobe dirty. Right now, your
hands are covered in Oh yeah,I guess you're probably right. Yeah,
and it's good. It's a goodthing you put them. Is there a

(01:03:09):
health benefit to working the soil withyour hands. Absolutely. In fact,
there's some really cool work coming outof UBC right now for those who are
interested in like primary literature and doinga deep dive on it. The Finley
Lab this is a one of thefaculty at UBC with a big research group
and they work on a lot aboutthe human gut microbiome. And some of

(01:03:35):
the work that has come out ofthat lab and affiliated research groups shows that
one of the best ways to havea healthy gut microbiome is just exposure to
dirt and not washing your veggies thatwell, if you can, if you
can source locally produced vegiees like goto the farmer's market or something like that,
or so many people have a gardenin their backyard, Yeah, if
you have them in your own backyard, absolutely, but like if you don't

(01:04:00):
have access to that, something likegoing to a farmer's market looking for vegetables
that you don't need to wash forchemicals like pesticide or anything else. But
if you don't need to wash it, eat them with a little bit of
dirt on them, you know,don't rinse them if there's big globs,
but don't scrub them clean, becausethat dirt has a huge diversity of micro
organisms in it and is, asfar as what we've been able to see

(01:04:21):
so far, the best way tomaintain a healthy gut microbiome. So if
you take probiotics from the store,that's a pill with yes, many many
cells, but only a few strains. The diversity, the actual biological diversity
of those probiotics you can get froma store doesn't help populate your gut with
a broad diversity of organisms that aremore sustainable, so like how long they

(01:04:45):
actually stick around in your gut,And so you have to continually take those
pills to maintain a good gut microbome. But if you just eat dirty veggies
and go get your hands in thedirt and don't be afraid to sort of
touch your mouth and other things likethat, that is better in the long
term for sustaining a healthy gut micropomme, and a healthy gut microbiome is related

(01:05:05):
to what like immunity or oh gosh, a little bit of everything I feel.
So I didn't work in this fieldmost of disclaimer. Yeah, yeah,
that's my little disclaimer. I didmy PhD at UBC in the microbiology
department, but microbiology and immunology ismy department. I was an environmental microbologist,
so I spent most of the time, you know, learning about the

(01:05:28):
work that my colleagues were doing withhuman health microbiome work, but not studying
it myself. But there is somevery cool work coming out of UBC.
UBC is a leader in this fieldof human gut microbiome research, and it
seems like these days there's more andmore evidence that the human gut microbiome is

(01:05:48):
connected to almost everything outside of thingsyou would ever think could be connected to
your gut. So things like theytalk about the gut brain can like a
lot of brain diseases and even mentalhealth have been connected to having healthy gut
micromes microbiomes. Diabetes CUGE like strongevidence that there's an important correlation between health

(01:06:15):
of your gut microbes and your tendencyto develop long term diseases like diabetes.
There's some research on I don't knowthe current state of what they've shown,
but there's research and looking into Alzheimer'sand connection to your gut microbiome, and
so there's a lot of evidence thatyour gut microbiomes related to things we might
expect like dietary digestive issues or sortof like you know, allergens and things

(01:06:39):
like that, But it turns outthat your gut microbiome might influence many,
many other parts of your body healthoutside of just the typical digestive tract you
would think of it. And there'sso many chronic illnesses in our society now,
mental things and these bigger things likediabetes, and I mean, I'm

(01:07:00):
a disclaimer, I'm not a doctor. But the thing is, we see
stuff in our student population, andsimultaneously we also see fewer and fewer kids
hanging around outdoors playing in the woods. Yeah, absolutely, and is there
a connection Like this is a broadquestion that maybe there's no answer to,
but it's a topic that people areactively researching, and there's a lot of

(01:07:21):
evidence suggesting yes, there are connections. Now we don't have the details of
those connections yet and exactly what thoserelationships are, but it's fairly clear that
it plays an important role. Iwould say it's an area of active research,
so people are interested in that.It's a great place to start as
a young scientist or someone who's interestedin in the interconnection. And then the

(01:07:43):
other thing in the soil is themicro rhizal networks. We could go on
and on about that one too,I'm sure, because I think that one
is also connected with They talk aboutjust being in the soil and working it
and you breathe in the spores,and this is opposed to all would be
good for you. Is there anyresearch on that. There's there's some very

(01:08:03):
cool research on that. It's notone that I also work on. Here's
my disclaimer again, but it's noteven just the fungal spores, but actual
chemicals that they produce. Okay,in the air, when you're just outside,
you don't have you don't even haveto get down in the dirt.
You can just be walking around ina forest and breathe in these chemicals and

(01:08:24):
they've shown a connection to mood andmental health and long term well being from
regular exposure to different chemicals that areproduced by So there's actual research showing this.
There's actual research showing it I'm justputting my disclaimer out there that I
don't personally, I haven't worked onthat. I don't know the details.
That's the area where you're just asurfer. Yeah, I know of it.

(01:08:45):
I think it's fascinating, y toocool. But without a doubt,
you can't go wrong saying that youknow what, you're going to find a
benefit by being in the woods.Absolutely, Yeah, you can't deny that.
No, And I think that italso goes to show the just like
I was saying, there's not avery clear distinction between like the bio and
the geo and sort of these differentfields that are all influencing each other.

(01:09:09):
What you're talking about right now alongthose lines, there's not a clear distinction
between us and our environment. We'revery influenced by our environment, and we
and our interactions with it are necessaryfor our own well being. A little
fun fact that I really like isyou have more cells in your body,
not biomass because they're smaller cells,but purely on a number of cell basis,

(01:09:30):
you have more cells in your bodythat are micro organisms than you have
human cells. Oh I've heard thatbefore. Yeah, so you are more
microbe than human in some sense you'renever alone. Yeah, exactly. And
so then when you really think oflike what am I, you know,
yeah, you're not this like isolatedunit. And we're not talking about microbes

(01:09:53):
that are just kind of along forthe ride. These microbes are integral to
your functioning, your ability to getnutrients out of the food that you eat.
And now we're understanding also things thataffect the chemistry of your body and
your sort of whole digestive system andmaybe even your brain health is reliant on
these organisms. So you as afunctioning, whole, healthy organism, you

(01:10:16):
are a sort of symbiotic collection oforganisms. You're not just a human mm
hmm, in sort of a Homosepiens. If I was completely sterilized,
you would not function. I wouldn'tfunction well. I'd probably be sick and
all kinds of horrible things. Yeah, And experiments they do with mice and
they don't live long like this isit's not really an option to live in
isolation. And so understanding our interconnection, interconnectedness with our ecosystem goes I'm,

(01:10:43):
of course bias, I'm going tomake it all about microbes, but it
really does come back to these connectionswith things that are too small for us
to see, but very very influentialon how things are running behind the scenes.
And when I think about the humanhealth side of things, again,
not the area I worked in,but it doesn't surprise me when I hear
about my colleagues who work in thehuman microbiome talking about how influential it could

(01:11:06):
be on brain chemistry and all theseother things. I think about what I
study, and I study how thewhole Earth system as a whole is shaped
by chemical processes that microbes are carryingout, and how little chemical reactions that
are these microbial metabolisms can change oceanchemistry, they can change soil nutrient availability,

(01:11:27):
and they can alter the climate ofthe whole planet. And so it
doesn't really surprise me that a similarconcept could be applied to your own body.
They're carrying out chemical processes in thegut and that is shaping the whole
the system as a whole and howit functions. And yeah, I'm trying

(01:11:47):
not to just make everything about microbes, but when I think about interconnectedness,
they're just such a perfect example ofsort of where those connections happen. Yeah,
and the the you know, youdon't get a microbiome boost on a
screen. And we're just seeing somany kids moving indoors and moving their world

(01:12:11):
online, and we just need tobe pushing them outside and it might be
good for so many things that mightail them. Yeah. Absolutely, And
the research is obviously being done andfinding a correlation. There's a great book
written for sort of a general publicaudience you don't need to be an expert
in science, called Let Them EatDirt, and it is about the importance

(01:12:32):
of children, especially very young children, and exposure to microbes early on and
being outside and eating dirt. SoI would recommend that to anybody who's interested,
say the name of again, letThem Eat Dirt. Let Them Eat
dirt. Yeah, that's awesome.When we're outside with in the forest with
my class, I'll say to themthat, you know, there was a

(01:12:55):
time when we would look at thetrees and say, well, it's okay
to cut them down because we canplant more. But what we didn't realize
is how they're all connected underground.Yep. And now as we look at
the new research, it would belike saying to my students, well,
we could just pluck you three out. We don't really need you. We

(01:13:16):
can just bring in some more students. But the reality is we're all connected.
We're connected on a social level andan emotional level, and we're realizing
now that, of course we can'tjust pluck humans out of the picture,
because we're all necessary, and weall contribute, we all benefit from each
other. But then now we're fine. It was so to the trees from
each other, benefit from each other. Yeah, mediated by microbes. Yes,

(01:13:39):
yes, I know, and I'mkind of I'm setting a stage for
you, I know. So howis the connection between the trees being research?
Now? So this is what Iworked on. When I mentioned that
I, as an undergraduate, gotconnected to a microbiology lab. It was
a micology lab that was studying fungi. And that's what micology means is the

(01:14:00):
study of fungus broadly, but specifically, we were that research group was studying
symbiotic fungi that formed these connections underground, invisible to the naked eye, that
connect many of the trees in theforests. Almost everywhere in the world there
are underground fungal networks. And howlong have you known about those? Me

(01:14:25):
personally? No, No, wescience in general, well decades, we
have so science in general has knownabout the existence of many of these fungi
for I think about a century,maybe a little bit more, But it's
actually very recent that we understood theimportance of them. And I think it
was even as as recently as likethe sixties, the scientific descriptions were still

(01:14:50):
just like this fungus is living onthe roots of these trees, and like
it looks like it goes into theit's not just on the roots, actually
goes into the root system and seemsto be kind of living amongst the tissue
of the tree. Who knows whatit's doing there, but yeah, neat
And then in the sort of lastball parking here, but four or five

(01:15:14):
decades, that's when the science hasreally started to ask what are they doing
and what how does that affect largerscale processes on an ecosystem level. Suzanne
Samard, who's a faculty member atUBC and did a lot of her research
in here in British Columbia, isa huge pioneer of that work and an
advocate for the general public appreciating howimportant these fungi are. To take a

(01:15:39):
course with her, I did notknow so by the time I joined UBC,
I was a graduate student, andthat's when I was working on an
ocean project. So she's a colleagueof the person that I worked with as
an undergrad. I see, Inever worked directly under her, but I've
worked with people that have worked withher, and she's part of that same
community of scientists. Her work's great. She also a couple of really good

(01:16:01):
sort of general public science books.One sort of semi autobiography and also about
the fungus is Finding Mother Tree.And I'd really recommend that to anybody who
wants to get a sense of notjust the cool microbiology of the forest,
but also life as a scientist andwhat that journey looks like and the human

(01:16:24):
side of being a scientist. It'sa really great book for that perspective.
But yeah, so these fungal networks, right, we finally just appreciating relatively
recently that not only are these fungiconnected to the trees and intimately connected in
a way that the tissues are directlytouching in some cases or wrapping around like

(01:16:45):
sometimes the fungal cells wrap around theoutside of the tree cells. Other types
of fungi, the fungal tissues actuallypenetrate into the cells of the tree.
So these are intimate relationships between thesetwo different organisms from dramatically different lineages of
life. Right, a tree anda fungus are not related to each other,
and yet they are living together intimatelyand in ways where their functions are

(01:17:12):
interdependent. So we know that wecan grow a tree seedling sterily for a
little while. We can get itto Germany if we feed it like a
nice little cocktail of nutrients. Wecould even get it to grow sterily for
a while because we basically reproduce whatthe fungus would do for that tree.
We can do it chemically, sowe can get a tree to grow on

(01:17:36):
its own. But generally speaking,a tree is not going to do well
and in any kind of natural setting, it's not going to thrive or survive
very long at all without the fungus. So I think it's safe to say,
in a very general sense, theyare dependent on each other. This
is not just sort of a convenientlittle interaction, but the ability for these

(01:17:57):
trees to become the massive for uswe enjoy here in British Columbia. They
need those fungi. And so justlike you as a human organism, are
more than just human. You area fungal symbiotic unit of a like an
ecosystem in and of yourself. Thesetrees are also that way. So the

(01:18:19):
role of the fungus that I'm talkingabout here, why they're so important,
is those fungal tissues leave or growout from the tips of the roots of
the tree and go way out intothe soil, much further and much more
surface area than a tree root cancover because these strands are tiny, and
they can kind of get into allthe different cracks and crevices, and they

(01:18:42):
can grow further away from the baseof the tree than the tree itself,
and so they increase the surface areaof what the tree has access to in
terms of bringing in water and othernutrients from the soil to feed the tree.
And then the other cool thing thatthese fungi can do is they can
connect to more than one tree,so they're not just helping the seeding,
but the same fungal network might alsobe connected to a big tree nearby that

(01:19:04):
has a ton of extra carbon andnutrients available. And when the baby tree
or young tree is struggling or maybeshaded by the sun by the bigger trees
around it and doesn't have the abilityto photosynthesize. We now know that the
fungi can funnel sugars and other nutrientsfrom a big tree that has access down

(01:19:28):
to through their system, through theirnetwork of fibers, and into the roots
of the baby trees and keep themalive and sustain them in some cases for
decades. And this is like afairly new discovery. I mean I'm talking
scientifically, So within the last coupledecades, scientists have come to realize that
many seedlings can stay in this sortof semi dormant phase where we don't see

(01:19:50):
growth rings, so we would thinkthat they are not that many years old,
because if you just go by growthrings, we wouldn't see any evidence
of that. But based on otherways of dating chemically, they realize these
little seedlings were much older than theythought they were because they're just hanging out
dormant in the understory, not growing, but being kept alive by the life

(01:20:12):
support from these fungal networks, feedingthem with all the extra nutrients from all
the big trees around them. Andthen when a gap in the canopy opens
or some opportunity for that little treeto get more sunlight and grow, they
go. Then they take off,and then they can grow a bunch and
you start to see the accumulation ofgrowth rings and all the growth patterns we
would think of as a young tree. But now we realize that a lot
of the ability for these trees tosort of maintain a healthy crop of young

(01:20:36):
trees relies on these healthy fungal networkssupporting the whole forests as a whole,
not just individual trees. And they'renot species specific. Some of them are.
Okay, so a cedar could helpout an older No, no,
oh, okay, that's funny.Those are two that almost definitely would never

(01:21:00):
connect. Well, we should introducethem. Yeah, maybe they'll get along.
I love that. I actually it'sreally it's neat why they don't.
I'm gonna try to not take toomuch time, but I'll just give you
a little quick side story about that. So alders, Remember I mentioned those
of the nitrogen fixers. Yeah,yeah, so alders. That's their advantage
is they have access to this directsource of nitrogen and they are early succession

(01:21:23):
trees, which means they kind ofshow up early stages of forest development,
and their ability to hold on totheir niche in the succession is the fact
that they have that access to thenitrogen and the other trees don't. And
if they had a fungal network thatwas connected to all the other trees,
those fungi could share that nitrogen probablywith the other trees directly, and that

(01:21:47):
would take away the competitive edge ofwhat the alder trees are able to do
with moving in early before the soilis nitrogen rich. Gotcha, And we
don't know this for sure, butthere's a lot of evidence that that's probably
why alder trees are one of theexamples of trees that different alder trees in
the same area will be connected bythe same fungi, but alders don't associate

(01:22:10):
with fungi that will connect to othertrees, kind of like a noble gas.
Yeah, they're kind of like theygot an insider deal. They're just
like, all right, you workwith me, I work with you,
but as long as you're not givingmy trade secrets away to the other guys,
we got a deal. Okay.So a cedar and a big leaf
maple maybe, well, a betterexample is probably like like a hemlock and
the spruce or something like that.So like the conifers and big leaf maples
and cedars, they actually associate withother types of fungi that are the ones

(01:22:34):
you know, saying, like somefungi go around the outside of the tree
cells and others burrow into the treecells. Is it worth knowing the names
of these fungi or is it betterjust to say the micro rhizal network.
It's a series of fungi that Iwould say, especially for the audience of
people who are working with high schoolstudents, it's worth making those names accessible.

(01:22:58):
But I wouldn't dwell on them changea lot, to be honest,
When I was a young micologist,I got really frustrated with I would learn
the names of some of these scientificLatin names of fungus and then they would
change the next month or something,someone to rename them or whatever. The
categories are. Scientists, I know, you could look at where it's like
our buscular microize versus ectomicroize, Likethere's different categories of fungi. So maybe

(01:23:24):
instead of going into like the genusand species names of individuals, it's more
interesting to think about the groups andhow those are connected to the way those
fungi play different roles. And onceagain that's also an area of interesting research
that a student could take a deeperdive on if they wanted to. Typically,
what I would do after a seriesof lessons like this, I'd be

(01:23:45):
back in the classroom and say,okay, now what part of that really
resonated with you? What do youwant to learn more about? And then
they go and take their own littlepiece of the pie, and if things
work out well, then we'll allcome back together and we'll fill in all
the gaps where you research this andyou research that. Now that share what
we've learned absolutely, and as adefault for me, I would say,

(01:24:06):
anytime you're kind of getting into thedetails of something like a big jargon,
like big words, scientific jargon,try to connect it to the why as
much as possible. Usually these bigclunky words have some sort of meaning in
Latin why they're called that, Andso if you connect it to the meaning

(01:24:28):
behind the parts of the word,it gives some concept to the word,
and it's more likely to stick andmaybe even the student remembers the concept and
not the word. But I wouldsay that's just as valuable. And I
mean the concept of when we lookat the forest, what you're seeing above
the ground is just the sort oftip of the iceberg. Yeah, and
what's going on below the ground isthe connection. And if we're here to

(01:24:51):
learn about the interconnectedness of whoops salimi, the interconnectedness of matter, what better
excus ample is there that the forestis what you see, but what you
see, what you don't see belowthe ground is where all the action is
happening. Yeah, the nitrogen fixingand the microbiomes and the fun guy that's
sort of stretching between the trees isjust a beautiful thing. And we wouldn't

(01:25:15):
have known all of this back whenwe started clear cutting. No, we
did not. We just thought it'sokay, we'll just plant more. But
we didn't realize that. Yeah,And that was a big part of what
Suzanne Sammard's work was actually on originally, and early on in her research was
looking at the clear cuts and sortof asking questions about, well, what
is that doing to the underground communityand does that matter? And then her

(01:25:38):
work showed oh, it does alot does and it really matters. And
so that's where now some of ourappreciation for that in the scientific community has
caught up, but many of thepractices in industry have not, perhaps willfully
or not caught up to the science. Yeah, because really it's the wood

(01:25:59):
that they it is. Yeah,and many of the details of the ecology
and the microbiology are inconvenient to someof those industry practices. I remember hearing
you say on a different interview thatearly on you wanted to fix things,
but then you realize that really whatyou want to do is provide information and
knowledge so that the system can proceed. Systemic change isn't going to happen with

(01:26:24):
a quick fix, but with aseries of understandings. Yeah, And it's
difficult when you're a young person who'sexcited and passionate about an issue. You
want to just go straight to whatcan I do? How can I make
this better? How can I stopthis? How can I get in front
of this thing and make it shutdown or whatever? Like, how can
I just do something now that isgoing to make this feel better? And

(01:26:47):
one of the more difficult and painfullessons for me has been realizing how slow
things are, and not that thatis invaluable, there's still value in it,
but that sometimes the most valuable thingwe can do is slow down and
look at it better, understand what'sactually going on, and then come back
in with a more informed and intentionalapproach to something rather than just like frantically

(01:27:11):
trying to make a big change beforewe know how the pieces fit together.
Yeah, you'd make a great biologyteacher. Thanks. I like the bits
of science outreach that I get todo. It's one of my favorite parts
of being a scientist. Well,and the thing is, you're what do
you What does a person have tohave within them to get excited talking about

(01:27:32):
bugs in the soil and you knowthe cleanliness of dirt. But that's that's
the that's the value that you couldbring to a class. And and the
teachers you have that sort of excitementabout. Well, I mean it's kind
of kind of weird because on theone hand, you see teachers and sometimes
the excitement is is it genuine oris it manufactured? I don't know.

(01:27:57):
I'd like to think that the mosteffective teacher is the one who's truly pumped
by this new found information. Yeah. Absolutely, And with all these things
that you're talking about, anyone wouldbe thinking, oh my gosh, I
could take my students out to thenearest forest and look around you and get
to know the names of identify theolder, identify the seed, or identify

(01:28:18):
the big leaf maple and then starttalking about what's below their feet. Well,
I gotta tell you, so,my relationship with science early on was
not the best. Actually, i'dsay academics in general. I was not
a straight a student. I wasnot even in many cases what most teachers
would have called a good student.And this piece of connecting it to an

(01:28:43):
idea that I care about was sofundamental in my sort of awakening as a
person who's passionate and excited about sciences. And it really does come down to
for me, it came down tohaving something meaningful that I could can idea
too. I did not care aboutI don't even know memorizing which elements were

(01:29:09):
from which part of the periodic tablefor the sake of the test, yeah
whatever. And especially math, thisis like a classic example for me in
terms of my relationship to learning.I just was so uninterested in math for
so much of my time in mypublic school years. And it was because

(01:29:30):
for me, it was always presentedas the only point of math was the
little problem right in front of you. We did the times tables and the
factoring and this and that for thesake of doing it, you know,
we factored things to know what thefactors were, and I didn't care.
Why do I need to take thisequation and make it look like this?

(01:29:51):
I don't know. Then my junioryear of high school, my kid,
you know, I got all theway to my second last year of public
school and I took a chemistry courseand I loved it. The teacher taught
in a way that really resonated withme. Was all concept based, and
I was super into it. Andwe were doing some relatively complex stuff with

(01:30:15):
some chemical equations around calculating like thechange before and after. We're doing like
initial change and concentration calculations, andin more complex situations you end up with
a quadratic formula to get the answer. And I really wanted to know what
was happening chemically, but my mathwas not that great. And in that

(01:30:40):
year, in that single year ofmy second to last year of public school
education, I went back and taughtmyself probably five or six years worth of
math because now I had a reasonto want to know how it worked,
because I wanted to be able tofactor this equation and get the right answer.
And it suddenly meant something to me, and I went from being sort

(01:31:03):
of in the like average track ofmath. Like I wasn't failing, but
I just really didn't do I didenough to get by and just didn't care.
And then in the my senior year, my last year of high school,
I took AP calculus because I didso well in math leading up to
that. During my junior year,I like made a huge turnaround in my

(01:31:23):
relationship to math, and I wassuddenly like acing my tests and doing all
of my homework and I got reallygood grades. I took AP calculus,
which I got to test out ofcalculus when I went to college, and
then I took differential equations, andI went like above and beyond what my
math requirements were for a biology major, because math meant something and I had

(01:31:44):
a reason to think about it asmore than just you know, a rudimentary
practice that we do just for thesake of it. Isn't that fascinating?
And so I think when I thinkabout science and teaching it, That's why
I always try to come back tothe why and like connecting it to something
that students are interested in. BecauseI think my own personal philosophy of teaching
and I've worked as a tutor withstudents who've struggled in math and science before.

(01:32:09):
Most of the time they're really notthat bad at the subject. They
just don't think of themselves as aperson who's good at it or who's interested
in it. And when I canlike turn on the light and the curiosity
around that subject, I find studentsare suddenly way better than they thought they
were, and they're getting problems right, and they're motivated. They're doing their
homework and they're like, wow,I didn't think I could do this.

(01:32:30):
And it's it's not their inherent abilityor lack thereof. It's almost always some
motivation and personal investment in that subject. And so I meet a lot of
people who like will immediately write offthe science to be like Ooh, I'm
not a scientist, or oh Idon't get that stuff, or that's too
much for me, as too advanced, too complex to math, whatever.
And almost always I'm like, youknow, give me ten minutes, let's

(01:32:56):
talk about this in a way thatis relatable to you, and then tell
me if you think you're not amath person or not a science person.
It makes me think of one ofmy favorite stories from my teaching practice,
maybe eight years ago. I wasteaching a grade nine class about something to
do with the oceans. We weretalking about coral reefs, and a couple

(01:33:16):
of weeks into a series of lessonsand this girl raises her hand and says,
I don't want I don't want tosound disrespectful, but why should I
care about the coral reefs? I'mnever going to see them? And of
course all the students, yeah,she's what's the teacher going to say?

(01:33:38):
And I said, well, wait, because actually that might be the best
question anybody's asked me so far.Absolute because if I can't answer that question,
kind of why am I teaching it? So we talked then about why
we should care, and actually Ishifted the lessons that followed to focus on
her question of why we should carebecause if this happens, then that happens,

(01:34:00):
and if that happens and this happens, now you know why we should
care. Yep. And she waswilling to accept that as an answer.
She just wanted to know that's thereason. Yeah, it's wonderful I have
this. I have some friends thatare really into birds, and I've struggled
with like getting into birds myself,and I recently was like, who cares
why, Like why if I can'ttell this goal apart from that goal?
Like why why do I need toknow? And then they stopped and really

(01:34:24):
thought about it and gave me ananswer. And now I'm interested in knowing
the difference between the goals. Youknow. But when it's just like something
that you do for the sake ofgetting it right on a test, that's
not enough. It works for somestudents, and you know, I'm not
trying to discount that, but Ithink very often students who struggle. I
think it's my experience in school isprobably more common than we tend to acknowledge

(01:34:47):
that many people don't do well becausethey haven't been inspired to, not because
they can't. And yeah, microbesand of themselves, Okay, I'm biased.
I think they're inherently interesting, butmost of my passion about them,
truthfully, is because of what they'reconnected to. It's not just like I

(01:35:10):
said at the beginning, I endedup as a micropologist. Accidentally. I
didn't say, ooh, there's singlecelled organisms that exist. I really want
to study them, you know.I just kept saying, like, why
is this ecosystem like this? Andrepeatedly every time I said why. Enough
times I kept ending up at amicrobe, like, why do these trees?

(01:35:30):
Why are they here? Oh,turns out it's a microbe. Why
is there nutrient availability here or nothere? Oh, turns out that's a
microbe. Why are the oxygen's theoceans suffocating in certain areas and like big
die off events? Oh, turnsout that's a microbe. And so just
I kept coming back to microbes,and so now I'm interested in microbes,

(01:35:50):
but because of what they connect too, And that's the piece I try to
convey to other people because it's almosta joke. Like I work on a
naturalist staff team, and we allhave different expertise, and you know,
there's always like the whale person andeveryone loves whales, and there's the bird
person, and a lot of peoplelike birds. Not everybody, but like
a lot of people are interested inbirds. And then you know there's I'm

(01:36:14):
the micro person, and I'm likeand then we're walking through the forest and
I was like, look at thesetrees and I'm like look at this like
in and it's a joke at first, right the beginning of our time together
kind of like hah, okay,microbes, you're weird nerd, and then
by the end I've got everybody downon their hands and knees, digging in
the mud and pulling apart like arotting log and being like, ooh,
look, you can see this thing, and I'm like, it is.
It's so fun to watch the curiositylight up in people's eyes when they start

(01:36:41):
thinking about the world in terms ofquestions about why that are beyond their visible
observations. And to be clear,you kind of stumbled across that strategy on
your own. You were never specificallyinspired to do those things by another person,
right, No, I mean it'show I got into it. So
when I try to think about howdo I create that experience for somebody else,

(01:37:05):
I just try to guide them throughthe very same process that worked for
you, that worked for me.Yeah. Yeah, And as a teacher,
I tend to think of myself moreas a guide than an instructor or
like a textbook of knowledge that I'mtrying to convey. It's more they're they're
inspiring their own curiosity and then askingthose why questions and sort of guiding the

(01:37:27):
whys, but not being attached toparticular topics or curriculum details that we have
to cover more seeing like what weend up at on our own. Now,
going back to that question that girlasked me about the ocean, it
makes me think we haven't even talkedabout the ocean yet. Yeah, and
I want to and we're going to, but not until next week when I

(01:38:00):
release part two in my discussion withdoctor Julia Huggins, as we discuss the
microbes of the ocean. I hopeyou really enjoyed this particular episode, so
many fascinating things. I hope youtook lots of notes. Continue to look
up some of the things that Julieand I discussed, Do a little bit
of research on your own and seehow you can weave these things into your

(01:38:23):
discussions and your lessons. And tryto do those sort of lessons outdoors as
much as possible. If you havethe opportunity, take your class outside to
the forest and allow them to experiencethe dirt, get their hands dirty.
You know, it's good for them, good for the mind, the body,
and the soul. And so untilthe next time on Part two with

(01:38:45):
Doctor Julia Huggins, I hope youhave a great week. Please share this
episode with colleagues, rate and review, and I'll see you on the next
episode. Bye for now,

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Ep. 95 - Exploring Forest Microbes: Dr. Julia Huggins on Nature's Hidden Networks and Educational Insights

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Ep. 95 - Exploring Forest Microbes: Dr. Julia Huggins on Nature's Hidden Networks and Educational Insights