Episode 278 | LOST
Sure, polar bears are scary, but at least they're not venomous.
A full transcript of this episode is available below thanks to donations from our Patrons!
00:00:00 - This episode Ryan is joined by four (4!) guests to talk about their paper published in Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics about whether or not humans are to blame for the extinction of Caribbean mammals. What did they discover? You can read a summary of the work written by co-author Alexis Mychajliw here and then listen to find out even more!
00:31:08 - Island life goes better with a drink. Doing the show all these years means there are occasionally bottles with a very small amount of left in them being "saved for the show." This week, Ryan downs the final two ounces out of a batch 1 bottle of Barrell Bourbon, a very good overproof whiskey, if you like that sort of thing.
00:33:12 - Part two of Ryan's chat covers how a multi-first author collaboration even works, as well as what we can expect to see from their team next. We also discuss the recent hurricanes in the region, and what that means for both the people and for the science. You can help out by donating to Puerto Rican scientists and contributing to crowd-sourced projects to better understand hurricanes like this one. Follow along with each of the interviewees using these handy links!
Aleix Mychajliw: Website and Twitter
Siobáhn Cooke: Website and Twitter
Liliana M. Dávalos: Lab website and Facebook
Nate Upham: Website and Twitter
01:05:18 - PaleoPOWs are a lot like localized extinctions: entirely avoidable but sometimes inevitable. This week we're keeping it short with a simple thanks to Lisa K. for her recurring donation. Thanks, Lisa! No thesis this week since Ryan is solo, but if you want your own thesis title, head on over to Patreon and sign up for the Avogadro's Army level or higher.
More cool rewards await you if you decide to support us on Patreon!
Music for this week's show:
Main Title from "LOST" - Michael Giacchino
Buttons - The Weeks
Barrel of a Gun - Guster
Change the World (Lost Ones) - Anberlin
Image credit: Modified from the hilarious must-read Missing Missy
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Episode 278: LOST
Ryan: Wow, I just botched every single name. Sorry about that. I should have had you say your own names like a real- I’m going to do that. Okay. I’m going to reset real quick here. Okay. This is when I pretend that I’m doing real radio.
Announcer: From Sciencesortof.com, you’re listening to Science sort of.
Ryan: Hello and welcome to Science Sort Of. This is episode 278. Our theme this week is lost. I’m your host Ryan Haupt and I will be joined shortly by four other scientists who are going to be talking to me about mammalian extinctions in the Caribbean and some of the work they’ve been doing to figure out what exactly caused those. And you know what? Since I’m alone, there’s no reason to delay it. So without further ado, here’s the interview. Please enjoy. All right. So I am being joined by the most people I’ve ever been joined by and I’m going to have them introduce themselves. So if you could each just say hello and your name and the order in which you’re listed on the paper, that would be great.
Siobáhn: Hello, I’m Siobáhn Cook.
Liliana: Hi, I’m Liliana Dávalos.
Alexis: Hi, I’m Alexis McIlo.
Nate: Hi, Nate Upham.
Ryan: And I’m speaking with you all because you all are equally contributing authors to a paper in the Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics called “The Anthropogenic Extinction Dominates Holocene Declines of West Indian Mammals”. But Alexis wrote a behind the paper sort of blog post essay, which is in Nature, Ecology, and Evolution called “On the Extinction and Survival of Caribbean Mammals”, which might be a little bit more clear title for the layman. And I’ve never had this many people on before, so I don’t even really know where to start. Do you guys just want to tell me how this paper came together and how you all ended up working on it?
Liliana: Sure. Yeah. I think Nate can get started.
Nate: Okay. Yeah, yeah. The creation story, I guess, for this project started with a symposium in 2015 for the American Society of Mammalogists, where a bunch of us got together. I guess, yeah, everyone on the paper ended up contributing a chapter into a special feature into the Journal of Mammalogy, but those were based on talks in 2015. And then I kind of after that, and really at the meeting, we talked to each other and we were like, there needs to be a synthesis of kind of first and last date, first and last occurrence dates, both for extinctions of Caribbean native mammals and first appearances of humans on each island. And really Liliana Davalos took charge on assembling the database and getting us all in line. So maybe Liliana can jump off from there.
Liliana: Well, I think one of the most interesting things about being in the symposium that Nate organized is that we got to sit together and face a room full of scientists. And when you have a room full of scientists that’s willing to ask you questions, we’ve each given our presentations and they’re there and they want to find out more. And one of the things that really struck me at that moment was that some of the people in the room were asking questions and they were asking questions that suggested that they thought that a lot of these extinction events that had happened in the Caribbean were only related to the last 500 years. And they really didn’t have a perspective about the Amerindian past and about the transformation of those landscapes. So I think when we started having those conversations that Nate described afterwards, where we talked about wouldn’t it be nice to actually have a chronology that put everything together, that’s when a light went off for all of us and we decided to just not only have the individual contributions that many of us had, but also put something together that tied all of these events and that gave us a sequence. And the reason why we are all equal contributors is because in fact, we all had to pitch in very hard at thinking through the problem and at, you know, the database is one part of it, but there’s lots of other moving parts. It’s trying to use analytical methods, but also trying to bring a cohesive story to fields of science that are really separate like archaeology and paleontology and then geochronology, whatever different fields that are historical. There’s really different professionals working there and not all of us are equally conversant in all of those things. So we had to read those papers and really understand what they were trying to say and to put our contribution together.
Ryan: Very cool. And so what would you say is maybe the story of this paper?
Liliana: Siobhan, would you like to chime in on this?
Siobhan: Oh, sure. With this paper, we were interested in examining the relationship between the first occurrence dates for human settlement on the Caribbean islands and the last occurrence dates for many of the endemic mammals.
5:10
And we established a pattern that once human beings arrived on the islands, the fauna started to disappear and there were multiple waves of extinction. Initially, a lot of the larger bodied animals disappeared right when human settlers first arrived. And on some of the greater Antillean islands, that would have been six to seven thousand years ago. And then there were subsequent waves of extinction that occurred when Europeans arrived and brought with them many non endemic animals such as cats and mongooses and many of the smaller bodied rodents and insect eating shrew like animals disappeared from the islands. So with the analysis analyses that were completed, it seems that human caused extinction is the major force that’s acting in the Caribbean for that causes the disappearance of these animals.
Ryan: And was that something we had suspected before you guys did this study and just didn’t have great confirmation of or what was kind of what new information did you guys bring to light?
Siobahn: Yes, there had been a long debate within the literature about whether climatic change that would have changed the vegetation and also whether or not caves were habitable, whether they were underwater or above water, whether climatic change would have caused enough change to the environment to cause these major extinctions because many of the extinctions were not terribly well dated. And so in some cases, it appeared that these animals were disappearing, were occurring last in the fossil record at the same time that we had major regional and global environmental change at the end of the ice age. So it was that was a reasonable explanation. However, humans started coming into the islands just a bit later. And so without really accurate dates, it wasn’t readily apparent whether humans were the major cause or climatic change, or maybe a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B. But with better dating and a more complete database of the last occurrence dates, we don’t see a really strong coupling of climatic change with the disappearance of some of these animals.
Liliana: So I want to add a couple of sentences to this to Siobahn’s really good synthesis of the findings. So I was on the record with a paper that says climate’s at fault. So I had actually published a few years ago an analysis that looked at our relationship between the size of the islands and the number of extinctions. And those two things are related. And so the conclusion was that when the water rose at the end of the glaciation and it made the island smaller, it could play a role in a lot of the extinctions. But crucially, one of the things that we left open in that paper was that we didn’t have good dates for things. And it really is, that’s really, it boils down to that. That’s our insight as a team was to focus on the dates above everything else. Because an analysis like the one that I’d published in the past, for example, if the dates are off, then it’s wrong. Even though it fits, even though it matches, it’s still wrong. So I think that it was really helpful for us to pull all these dates together, bring them to a common standard, and to then try to make sense of them. And I remember, I don’t know, obviously it’s kind of, Siobhan and I actually met at an excavation to try to work out how to analyze this. And, you know, it kind of looked like we didn’t understand at all how we could analyze it. And so that was one of the stumbling blocks in that we were collecting all these data, but the methods that are available either require much more data or they were a lot more impressionistic. So we had to find a way to account for the fact that different islands, people and animals go extinct on different islands at different times, and people arrive at the islands at different times. And so trying to account that and yet have some kind of statistical model working there. And so I suppose Siobhan, were you drinking? Did you help solve the problem by drinking?
Siobhan: Always. I will say that Liliana really, really took the lead on figuring out all the statistical methodology that ultimately the team used to analyze these data.
Liliana: But the starting point was not knowing how to do it though. The starting point was…
Siobhan: Yes, absolutely.
Liliana: The starting point was not having a super clear idea of how to make it work.
Siobhan: Absolutely. Yeah. We sat in Columbia, because I do field work at a site called LaVenta, which is much older than what we see in the Caribbean, Miocene. And Liliana came two summers ago with me to the field. And we were sitting underneath a tree, and I’m probably drinking, and talking about how to work on these data, because a number of researchers before us have tackled the problem of extinction and how to really pinpoint when an animal goes extinct statistically, at least.
10:18
Ryan: Why is there so much uncertainty in when animals go extinct, I guess?
Liliana: Alexis, you need to jump in there.
Alexis: Yeah. Yeah. So I can take that one. So there’s a lot of things that can happen between when an animal dies and when an animal becomes a fossil, number one. So simply, we might be having issues with finding things preserved or having preservation of the important things we need to date, like collagen, which is a protein in bone that normally preserves really well in cold places. but in warm, humid places like the Caribbean, trying to get a date on specimens is really hard because of that preservational environment. So we already have something against us in terms of getting the sample sizes we would need to have a really clear chronology of exactly when a species went extinct. It’s a lot harder for us to find that last fossil remain, if you will. But even then, even with a perfectly amazing record in someplace like, you know, North America, Canada where you have great preservation, you still have an issue of how likely is it that you’re actually going to find the very, very last mammoth or mastodon or something like that. Chances are, you’re not finding the very last one. You’re finding one of the last ones. And so as species are going extinct, their populations are getting smaller and it’s probably going to be a lot rarer for something to fossilize and for us to find it. And so there have been statistical approaches developed to look at the gaps in between the dates you do have available to estimate based on that when we think the last occurrence would have been based on the gaps we see in the dates we are able to collect. And so that’s a method that Siobhan and I used for the Jamaican monkey. But you need at least five dates and most of our species in the Caribbean might just have one or none.
Ryan: You need at least five dates for like the statistical methods you want to use to work?
Alexis: Exactly. Yeah.
Ryan: All I was thinking about is when you were talking about the odds of finding the last one was Martha, the last passenger pigeon on display at the Smithsonian. And it’s like, that might be the one example where we know…
Alexis: Yeah.
Ryan: 1914 is the year and this is Martha and she’s the last one.
Alexis: Yeah. And so it’s an interesting dilemma too, because for the Caribbean in the historic period, we actually got to go into a lot of these old documents from like the first travelers who accompanied Columbus or those early naturalists, or even in the 1800s, people who were just taking notes about the biodiversity they saw around them. And so you could actually get pseudo last occurrences in the historic record of when someone found, you know, decided that there was a record of people eating some weird big rat. So you can try and infer a historic last occurrence, but yeah, it’s a lot harder with the fossil record.
Ryan: I don’t know much about the anthropological history of the Caribbean. But if I understand correctly, didn’t most of the first humans arrive from the south?
Alexis: There’s definitely some debate. I would say there’s multiple waves of people with different cultures too. So the earliest waves show up, excluding a place like Trinidad and Tobago, which is really close to South America. They show up in Cuba probably around 6,000 to 7,000 years ago. And there’s debate in the literature if they may have come from Central America or South America.
Ryan: Okay.
Alexis: And then later waves mostly came from South America, each bringing different agricultural practices, different South American species with them and different pottery.
Ryan: Siobáhn have just spent more time in the actual exhibits when we were at the museum last year. That would have answers to these questions.
Alexis: I don’t know if those are the most up to date.
Siobáhn: Yes, they could use some updating some of those exhibits.
Liliana: Which ones are these? Which exhibits are those?
Siobáhn: Mousseau de Lambre de Minacano.
Liliana: Oh, all right.
Alexis: Yeah. We made a solenodon one though.
Ryan: Oh, you made a solenodon exhibit for them? Yeah, Alexis, do you want to say anything about the solenodon? I know that’s kind of your mascotte mammal for these extinctions and I’ve heard you on podcasts talk about your love for the solenodon before.
Alexis: Wow. I won’t decline that.
Ryan: Does the solenodon present like a good like mascot animal for this story?
Alexis: So I would, yes and no, right? Because the selenodon is like this ancient mammal. So it diverged from all of its living relatives, which are hedgehogs, shoes and moles about we think sometime around 70 million years ago. And so it’s, we normally think about ancient evolutionary mammals as generally being of high conservation risk today. And the solenodon, right now we’re trying to understand it’s been around for so long in the Caribbean.
15:04
We have a very terrible fossil record of it, but we think it’s been there, you know, for millions and millions of years. And it managed to survive not one but two waves of extinction that wiped out almost all other terrestrial Caribbean mammals. So it’s this paradox, which is its scientific name, Solenodon paradoxus. How is this ancient animal managing to survive through all of these rapid changes, both in climate and then with humans arriving and multiple cultures of humans? And so for me, the solenodon is exciting because it’s this example of what conservation paleobiology can do. So integrating both fossils with modern data to inform modern conservation planning. And the solenodon is interesting because it’s a medium sized mammal. So Siobhan mentioned that we lost the big mammals when people first arrived, things like sloths and probably monkeys.
Ryan: My poor sloths.
Alexis: Yeah. Well, they probably had it good. I mean, they outlived all of their continental relatives for what, 10,000 years? They clung on.
Ryan: If there’s one thing that sloths are great at doing, it’s hanging on to things.
Alexis: Yeah.
Ryan: But yeah, the story of the Caribbean sloths breaks my heart every time because we just missed them.
Alexis: We were so close.
Ryan: They were right here.
Alexis: Every time people bring up Caribbean sloths, I’m like, this is why we can’t have nice things. This why.
Liliana: Is that why the thing in Newsweek, was it in Newsweek that said this is why we can’t have nice things?
Alexis: That’s probably me.
Liliana: That’s probably, yeah. So that was the headline, the headline in Newsweek. And I was like, oh my God, that’s so sad.
Alexis: Yeah, that’s me.
Liliana: But I think it’s kind of, you know, when you put two and two together, and again, I think I want to emphasize that we’re not the first team to come to this conclusion, but we’re the one that’s bringing the most data to bear to the conclusion of the human activities. I think it’s been difficult. There weren’t as many dates ever before as the ones that we compiled, but when you think about sloths and you think about the reproductive, you know, the reproductive output that a large animal like that could have, we hypothesize in the paper that even very light hunting pressures could really tip them over. So the thing about those waves, Alexis was talking about those waves of people, right? The first one that’s known basically by a handful of stone tools, it’s really not very clearly understood what, you know, we don’t know who they are. We don’t know very much about them. But even light hunting pressures, when you think about animals of that size and you think about how many babies they have and at what rate, they can go extinct with very light hunting pressures. And when you think about other animals, it’s a little bit harder. But I think for me, what’s really compelling is thinking about the other two waves that came later and the extent to which they used agriculture and they used fire to clear out and really transform the landscape. And by the time the encounter with the Europeans happens, the islands have been transformed. The islands, you know, Puerto Rico, these are agricultural environments. A lot of the lowlands are agricultural environments. And so the species have either adapted to that or they can deal with that with this open, more open environments and they can deal with the pressures of that or they can’t. And that’s what we’re seeing or that’s one of the take home messages from the paper.
Alexis: I think that’s a really important point to make that landscapes were transformed before Europeans arrived, because a lot of times in conservation biology today in North America, especially when we think about conservation baselines, we think about 500 years ago, we assume what was the landscape like before Europeans arrived and we don’t really take into account the fact that there were indigenous people living here for thousands of years modifying the landscape in their own ways. And that could have already led to a very different landscape than what’s quote unquote natural for the system. And so I think it provides multiple baselines that we can look back to as conservation biologists and ask under what conditions do we get this type of species diversity or under what conditions is this ecosystem functioning in this way?
Nate: To put in context what Alexis said about solenodon diverging about 70 million years ago, that’s before the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction event of non-avian dinosaurs, right. So you think about this lineage that’s now only represented by two species, right, two different solenodons, one in Cuba, one in Dominican Republic, that also is very shrew like, and this kind of medium body size, which is what the ancestral placental mammal is often reconstructed to look like. So it’s sort of this interesting idea about this early diverging mammal that has these primitive features that has continued to evolve but really persist is like the main feature and persists through this human-related wave of extinction throughout the Caribbean. It’s really remarkable.
Ryan: Yeah. And I’m glad you said the thing about continuing to evolve because that whole living fossil concept kind of is a pet peeve of mine. Nothing is a living fossil. Everything has continued to evolve…
20:05
Nate: Absolutely.
Ryan: Even horseshoe crabs.
Nate: Yeah, everything’s been evolving for exactly the same amount of time, right?
Ryan: Right, right. The stromatolites in Shark’s Bay are just as evolved as you or I…
Nate: Right.
Ryan: Just along a different axis of change. Interesting question I thought of because you guys have brought up Cuba a couple of times and a little over a year ago, we all thought our relationship there might be getting a little better, but that hasn’t really materialized in the way I think some of us might have hoped. Has it been hard to do a project where Cuba is a big part of the story but it maybe is a little bit off limits or difficult to access from American institutions?
Liliana: I think some of us have, I mean, I have sort of two thoughts about that. One is that I think for research purposes, there has been work ongoing in Cuba. I know of at least two successful expeditions by the American Museum of Natural History recently. You know, they’ve worked locally and I think they’ve had problems bringing some of the materials back, but those happen anywhere you go, you know, independent of whatever the political situation. I think my other thought is that I’ve had experience where, as you know, the way that all of the scientific, a lot of the scientific work requires federal funding and I’ve been in this bind where you’re submitting a project and you’re saying, we’re going to do this and that and it’s with the Caribbean and I remember not including Cuba because it was federal funding and we couldn’t use the federal funding to go to Cuba. And then it came back, it bounced back and there were reviewers saying, oh, well, you’ve, you really can’t do this project without going to Cuba. So there’s no real, so scientifically, in other words, scientifically, there’s no excuse to not include Cuba in doing your scientific work, even though federally we can’t go to Cuba. So I don’t, I don’t really know what, what to answer to that, you know.
Ryan: That’s so unfair. That’s such a catch 22.
Liliana:I’ve been, I’ve been there, I’ve been there and I think, I think we’re still there, to be honest. You know, we still can’t.
Ryan: Oh man.
Liliana: We’re still there. We’re still in that situation where you can’t use your federal, you can’t use federal funding, but scientifically it’s unjustifiable. For this particular project, I think that we’re lucky that Cuba has a very strong base of a community of scientists in this field who have been publishing their work and therefore their work has been accessible to us. Obviously not all of it. There must, there are tons, you know, there’s tons of material that are within Cuba that would be fantastic for us to be able to collaborate and work. And in fact, it’s something that Sam Turvey, who’s based out of the UK has been able to do, but we’re not.
Ryan: Oh, okay. That’s a good work around there. One of the parts of this story that you guys pushed forward, which I think is really interesting and I love when paleontology does this is that even though this is a paleontological story, there’s conservation lessons that we can learn from it for today.
Liliana: Absolutely.
Siobahn: Absolutely.
Alexis: For sure.
Ryan: So what are some of the lessons you think conservationists or conservation minded people should be thinking about based on studies like yours?
Alexis: One thing that I think is really interesting is that normally we think about extinction vulnerability today for mammals that are big and we definitely see that for the Caribbean with the first wave of extinctions, but then we saw something interesting, which is that we saw the loss of all of the really small mammals, things that we normally associate as being very resilient to change things like the shrew-like animals as well as rodents. And so normally again, we think of those animals as very successful in human modified landscapes, but that’s not what we saw in the Caribbean. Instead, we saw medium sized species surviving, things like the solenodon as well as some of the larger rodents. And so I think that shows the importance of including the fossil record and understanding that there were differences in the selectivity of extinction through time. What causes species to go extinct can change. It’s not just a static selective force and so taking that into account can be really helpful in illuminating what the threats are for a particular species.
Siobahn: Absolutely. And I think Alexis made a good point that we saw in our data a lot of these small mammals going extinct, but a lot of the conservation funding and conservation focus, at least the public focus is on big charismatic animals, right, pandas, tigers, elephants, large things that can be kind of a mascot for a conservation program. And of course, those animals deserve funding and deserve focus
Ryan: I don’t know about the pandas.
Siobahn: But the very small bodied animals are often at great risk. And if you’re looking at a small mouse or a rat or a bat or some other, perhaps less photogenic or less charismatic critter, they may not receive the focus and the funding and the push to preserve their habitat. And in many cases, these animals have relatively small ranges. And if that habitat is destroyed, they’re done. And so this project did highlight the harm that can come to really small bodied mammals as a result potentially of introduced predators, but also of habitat disturbance.
25:21
Liliana: Right. And for me, this really opened my eyes. I’m a specialist on bats. So I often, you know, this collaboration was really helpful because I always see these other mammals, non bat mammals as essentially doomed in the Caribbean. So I wasn’t necessarily surprised by the extent to which, you know, pretty much every non bat mammal species is endangered. But I was taken aback by looking at just sifting through the data that we have hotspots of bat threat and risk that are actually rather large. So we’ve got a hotspot in Cuba, another hotspot in Jamaica, and another hotspot in Guadalupe. So even the bats, so bats, there’s a couple of reasons why bats don’t jump out generally. And it’s one of them is flight. You know, the ability to flight means that you can, you know, if your habitat gets transformed in one area, you can go find some habitat a lot more easily than if you’re a shrew or a little mouse. So generally bats are expected to be less threatened on the whole, but we have this very clear hotspots. We have this species hanging on that are known only from one type of palm and there’s only 10 left of that palm. We have at least three species throughout the Caribbean that are known from single caves, that if the cave just collapses or it gets, somehow people go in to get the guano and burn the top as it happens because they go in with these torches, that species could go. So I wasn’t really, I wasn’t quite as up to speed on that as I became as part of this project. And that was a real surprise and really motivating actually for us to go on and continue our research and go over, cross over to conservation.
Ryan: And having read some meta-analyses of mammalian systems before, bats very often just get left out.
Liliana: Completely, yes. You have from Paleo, definitely. People publish, they say, here’s all the mammals, paleontological and it includes zero bats. And so we’re just lucky that in the Caribbean, there’s literally, you know, some of the work that Alexis and Siobhan have been doing, there’s literally buckets of remains from the caves that include bats. And therefore, we do have a better record for this last 100,000 years or so for that part of the world than we do in general for the fossil record of bats.
Ryan: I also wonder, and any of you can answer this who might have a thought on it, are the effects that we see in terms of development and human introduction of new species and plants and habitat changes, are those magnified on small islands? Because I know islands just kind of work different.
Nate: I mean, if you just look at the invasive species that are present across the Caribbean, I mean, it’s dramatic, right? Like per island, we summarize some of that information in one of the figures where we look at body size distributions and kind of replacement of small and large bodied mammals with invasive, I guess, ungulates and black rats and cats and all these things.
Ryan: When you say invasive ungulates, do you mean like cows and pigs and horses?
Nate: Yeah, exactly. And certainly, like the small geographic ranges of these native mammals that we’re talking about, you know, they’re on the edge on some level. Just, like, they exist because of the islands and they’re on the edge because of the islands.
Siobahn: I was just gonna say, one of my other fancy pants media lines is, you know, the islands of the Caribbean are the longest running experiment we have in the meeting of old and new world species, right? That’s where Columbus landed. That’s where the first European invasive species would have shown up.
Liliana: Yes.
Siobahn: Would have been the Caribbean. That is the meeting point. So really, we’re watching 500 years of an experiment continuing to unfold. So I think the Caribbean is one of the best places to study that.
Ryan: That’s a really cool point. Yeah.
Nate: Can I highlight one other thing in terms of, so the Caribbean as an archipelago, I mean, I guess in terms of one of the questions that our study raises is that, you know, there’s other kind of comparable archipelagos throughout the world. The Philippines is maybe the most comparable in terms of latitude and other things, but there was not near the record of mammal extinctions in other parts of the world. So what makes the Caribbean special is certainly like a question that needs to be addressed.
Ryan: And do you have an answer or do you have an idea of what makes it so special?
Nate: Do you guys have an answer?
Alexis: Because I see paper number two.
Liliana: Well, I think, you know, we got that question in the symposium as well as to like, why aren’t you guys doing the same thing, but for the Philippines to find out what happened there like what, and I think that there is something unique regarding the availability of the fossil record to the extent that we have it compared to, as far as I can tell, compared to the Philippines.
30:07
We do have that clarity with this archipelago that we just don’t have for a lot of other places. I think there are some islands in the Mediterranean that have been colonized by people much earlier and there are some records there, you know, people, you know, pygmy hippos and that kind of thing. But they just don’t have the diversity and they also, I think the timing of human arrival, there just aren’t as many islands either. And so you can’t have that discernment of when did people get where to a particular place and it’s not like it’s perfect for the Caribbean either. I think we did our best and it’s what’s available in the archeological literature, but we could do more or there’s going to be future work. But that confluence of those two things, you have lots and lots of islands. So you have a lot of replicates to draw from. You have different times of arrival. So for example, there are islands on the Caribbean that were never colonized by Amerindians. They never had Native American populations. You know, they only were found after the fact. So the caimans come to mind and they have a fossil record as well. And that’s pretty unusual to have those two things together.
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Ryan: And of course, it would not be an episode of Science sort of without a what are we drinking? But again, I’m alone. I know you’re not supposed to drink alone, but it’s the evening. I’ve been working all day. And while I have a moment here to record in the silence of the apartment, I am going to enjoy a quick little spirit. And that spirit this week is Barrel Whiskey, which is a barrel strength whiskey out of Kentucky from Barrel Craft Spirits. And I picked this up when I was in Nashville a couple of years ago, actually. And this is batch one and I am a sucker for a batch one. It’s also an overproofed spirit. It’s at 122.5 proof. And I really, really enjoyed it when I got it. And I’ve been saving like the last two ounces of the bottle for the show, and my wife, rightly so, has been getting frustrated because there are a couple of bottles that are facing that same fate where there’s just a little bit left. And I’m hesitant to have it because I’m like, oh, I want to save it for the show. So no more saving it for the show. Having it on the show. It’s a great whiskey. If you feel like checking it out, if you’re already familiar with it, let me know what you think. Let me know if you like an overproofed whiskey as much as I do, because why would you pay to have water shipped to you from Kentucky? But that’s just me. Okay, now that we’ve covered that, back to the interview.
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Ryan: Nate, you mentioned right before we started recording, and I pointed out a little bit that you did the equal author contributions. So how did you guys each contribute, or how did that collaboration actually work? Nate was kind of saying that it was legitimate, you really couldn’t have done it, anyone on your own, so I’m just wondering if you could kind of speak to the nature of working together on a project like that.
Nate; Yeah, I definitely would echo that. I don’t think any one of us could have done this on our own, and it was also more than the sum of its parts. I mean, just having all these sounding boards to discuss different ideas back and forth with. I mean, the project came together, as Liliana will testify, in a very rapid amount of time when we had a deadline.
35:02
Siobahn: That’s an understatement.
Liliana: Okay, so we were committed through this. So we made a pitch to the journal, and the journal said, yeah, that’s a good pitch. And we probably knew that this was going to happen like 18 months in advance, something like that. Somebody can jump in if I’m getting that wrong, but it’s something like 18 months when you, and so we started, we kind of were ramping up, we were like, it’s kind of like one of those non-linear progressions in which you kind of start slow, and there’s kind of like we’re around the edges, and then Siobhan and I got together for a little bit and bounced some ideas off, and we had calls, and we would bounce ideas off. And all of a sudden we have this looming deadline like eight weeks away or something. And in the meantime, we’ve been working on what to put in and what to not include. But yeah, that deadline really focused our minds. I remember I was outside the United States, I was in Egypt, and that was really helpful, I think, because Egypt is nine hours ahead of the United States. So it was kind of a relay team, the US-based part of the team would kind of do US time, and then I would receive those things at like two in the morning Eastern time, see that, and then start working. We were just bouncing those things back and forth.
Ryan: Wow, that’s crazy.
Liliana: It was pretty amazing. Yeah.
Siobahn: Yeah. You guys, this team travels a lot, a lot of us do fieldwork or travel for fun or all those sorts of things. And then Sam Turvey, who is also an author on the paper, as someone already said, is in the UK. So…
Nate: And he travels more. He travels even more.
Siobahn: And he travels a lot. Yeah.
Alexis: I think he travels more than he doesn’t travel.
Siobahn: That’s true.
Liliana: That’s right. Yeah.
Siobahn: Yeah. And having these different time zones, you know, you’d think it would be a hindrance, but it’s actually kind of awesome because you end up being able to pretty much constantly have someone doing something rather than sitting around waiting and twiddling your thumbs and thinking like, okay, when she’s done with the discussion part, I’ll pick up and I’ll do something else from, you know, while she’s working on that. But I enjoy the time zone.
Liliana; I do want to remind everybody, do you remember when we had to cut back like 5,000 words?
Nate: Where did those words go Liliana?
Alexis: That’s true. Yeah.
Liliana: They’re in previews. I mean, some of them weren’t necessary, that’s great, it’s great to have a limit.
Ryan: Yeah, no, I often find that having limits really focuses things for me when I’m trying to write something. So I think, it’s why I enjoy Twitter so much.
Liliana: Yeah, no, no, it definitely helps because I think we distributed different sections. Once it became clear like what the major findings were, once we had clarity about the stats and the database and all of those things, we try to work in parallel so that each of us was, you know, was doing the part that was writing something that they knew the most about. And so we were working in parallel and then trying to put it together. But you know, each of us was trying to tell the story of that and it wasn’t together yet. So yeah, those were very frantic weeks when we put it all together and then we realized that we’ve got this sort of volume, this monograph, and we need to deliver an actual manuscript that’s for a paper in a journal. And that’s when the crazy, you know, when they sort of, as I call it, the hatchets come out and you start cutting.
Alexis: I was just going to say there was a time when like every few days there would be an email where there’d be like a list of tasks and then we’d all just like each respond back, grabbing a task. And so I think that worked really well. I think we were all very on it and eager to do different pieces of it. And it did feel very much like passing the baton constantly.
Liliana: Right. Exactly. That’s what it felt like. And that’s why I think as a team, we, it didn’t make sense to envision it as being quote led unquote in any real sense, because we were all working so hard to make it happen as a whole.
Ryan: Right. Okay. I like that. I like that a lot.
Siobahn: We had different areas of expertise as well. That was a real strength in this team. You know, I’m trained as a paleontologist and biological anthropologist. So I bring that particular baggage from my discipline for better or for worse. And then other folks who are molecular ecologists bring their area of expertise and then the expectations of their discipline. And so when you have a really diverse team of people working together, I think that you can easily get out of a rut in your thinking because somebody else brings such a different perspective, something that you may not have thought about before, or a different way of asking a question or a different focus on a question about extinction or evolution that you can really approach problems in different ways. And that was one of the things that I really, really enjoyed in working on this paper with everyone else is that I had so many different perspectives available to me. And that made it really enjoyable and really intellectually stimulating.
Nate: And different mastery of the literature, too. I think we all had different little corners of literature that we were more expert in and then could bounce that back and forth through each other.
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Including Liliana’s expertise in the Bayesian statistical methods, which, you know, I think it’s always really tough to approach causality in historical sciences. You know, we do these reconstructions and there’s a lot of association-based work looking at correlation. But in that context, if we can fully look at all the uncertainty involved and really probabilistically model it, that’s an area that a lot of people don’t go to and that this paper does and I think is really nice.
Ryan: Yeah, and for those people who may not know, a lot of times when you hear about statistics used in science, even in pretty advanced studies, it’s still sort of along the lines of like the odds of rolling a six on a six-sided die. And then when you bring in the Bayesian stuff, it’s a much more nuanced, thoughtful approach to the statistics that is complicated enough that usually you need someone on the team who really knows how to work it. So it’s good that you guys had that.
Siobahn: Yeah.
Ryan: In terms of communication, obviously thank you guys for coming on this show to talk about your work, but since this does have conservation implications, how are you now maybe sort of trying to get the word out or explain to local communities what this work means for the place they actually live? Have you guys thought about that level of engagement with the results of this study?
Alexis: Oh, absolutely. I think that that’s always been on our mind. And I think we’re very aware too that we don’t have Caribbean authors directly on this paper, but we’re all working in those places and working with those people and really acknowledge everything they’re doing. So I know I work with the museum in the Dominican Republic. There’s some great people there, paleontologists like Juan Almonte, as well as conservation biologists. And so I know Siobhan and I and Liliana have worked directly with conservation groups like Grupo Jaragua, which works in national parks in the Dominican Republic. And they’re incredibly receptive to the idea of bringing fossils into the discussion. They’re really excited about, I think, what we’re revealing about the biodiversity heritage of the Caribbean and how that really shows the urgency of conserving what’s left, those last survivors. And I think the fossils can tell a story that just looking at the modern data alone can’t.
Liliana: Right. And I think one of the great things to come out is that we are not, I mean, like, I’m really happy we’re having this conversation because it’s not like we’ve finished the paper and it’s a done deal and we’re going to move on to go our separate ways. We’ve been working together as a team to actually put together a workshop to bring the people from the Caribbean, the scientists from the Caribbean, and the people from the social sciences and from the conservation side, besides people like Sam, who are already on the team, from Caribbean experts so that we can have a much stronger contribution in the future and so that we can actually bridge over to action and to involving communities and to actually making a change and not just leave it as an academic, you know, just a paper that other academics are going to cite, which is kind of exciting and we all like it, but I don’t think it’s enough based on what we found.
Ryan: Awesome. That’s great to hear. And I think we would be remiss if we didn’t also acknowledge that the Caribbean’s been having a bit of a rough go of it lately. And Alexis, you included some links at the end of your essay about ways that people who aren’t a member of those communities could still contribute and help out. So there’s a Zooniverse project about the storms and then a cause of your choice. You mentioned Ciencia Puerto Rico. I didn’t know if you wanted to speak at all to either of those efforts to help people on the ground who are dealing with some tough times.
Alexis: Sure. I’d just like to put a friendly reminder that Puerto Rico is part of the U.S. and they are U.S. citizens. And so I think that’s important as we think about the Caribbean isn’t just some faraway place even for U.S. citizens, U.S. scientists, it’s part of the U.S. and I think there is some infrastructure there, but you know, while Puerto Rico is certainly a part of the U.S., it’s not receiving as much aid as I think it needs to get back into the game, especially scientifically. I mean, there are universities there. We don’t even know if the lab spaces are still there, what happened to their experiments, what happened to any of the paleontological collections. But even before that, the people that do that work, you know, they not only have to worry about the same things U.S. scientists have to worry about, like trying to get funding for the next round or trying to apply to that, you know, graduate program or postdoc position, they have to worry about just dealing with if they have power or if they have water. And so I think anything we can do as professional colleagues but also the general public to help rebuild that, it’s pretty critical right now.
Liliana: And I think I would like to put kind of a more general statement in regarding what we’re seeing about human-caused climate change and how we’re seeing it play out in ways that are predictable.
45:07
There’s a relatively simple equation that predicts the energy that storms will have based on the temperature on the sea surface. And we see it play out in the strength of these hurricanes. And thanks to some of the statistical advances that you were mentioning with Bayesian statistics, I think it’s become a lot easier for this 2017 round of storms to have a probabilistic estimate of the relationship between the human emissions of greenhouse gases and the strength of the storms and the frequency of the storms. So what we’re seeing are things that really, back in the 90s where people were discussing action on human-caused climate change, people thought that we wouldn’t be seeing things like this until 2050. And we’re seeing them right now and we’re seeing them to dramatic effect, Puerto Rico, which is part of the United States. But there’s also the entire island of Barbuda was flattened, right, and its inhabitants now will have to find another place because all the infrastructure is gone. And we are not, you know, this is going to happen again. So I think it’s really important, yeah, okay, so we have this perspective with the extinct mammals and it helps us understand human effects. But the fact that we as humans in our activities, we’ve changed the atmosphere and that we have these consequences and we understand them and we can use mathematical models to tell us how they will play out. We must take action now. We must take action now because this is already, you know, again, we’re talking about American Commonwealth, you know, having the majority of its inhabitants without access to basic resources. We’re talking about entire islands, they’re not American, but they’re, you know, they’re just, they’re people, right? Entire islands being leveled to the ground. The infrastructure didn’t matter what they had, the houses, they’re all gone. And it’s from the energy from these storms and the energy comes from the greenhouse gases. So we know how this, we know how this happened and we know how it’s played out. So it’s time to take action on that too.
Ryan: Right. I think it’s worth pointing out that climate change being caused by the industrialization of the first world meant that countries like the U.S. and other large industrialized countries got the benefits from burning all these fuels for many years. And it’s the people living in parts of the world that didn’t get access to all those benefits who are also seeming to pay the costs first. And that doesn’t seem very fair.
Liliana: Well, I want to be an optimist. So this takes me back. I actually studied, I took some courses on international relations at the School of International Public Affairs at Columbia in New York. And back in the late 90s, you know, there was this big discussion, the discussion that you’re bringing up about the costs and benefits, who got the benefit, the buildup and all of that. I think at this time, those are important things to bear in mind in terms of costs. But I am kind of, on climate change, I’ve become a technological optimist. I think we have the technology and we have the incentives for different countries, for all countries, especially the ones that are industrializing the fastest now, to have wholesale adoption of new technologies that enable us to produce the energy. And that was something that back in the 90s, when those discussions that you just laid out were really, really, really important, we didn’t have, we didn’t have the capacity to generate energy power the way that we do now. And so I think that there’s, I have a lot of optimism that with the right mix of incentives, countries that are already industrialized, like ours, or countries that are in the process of industrialization can do this. What we can’t do is sit around and think that the problem is going to solve itself. It won’t. It’s not going to solve itself. We see the consequences. The consequences are here and they are arriving earlier than we believed back in the day.
Alexis: I think we’re very clear in an agreement on this. There’s no healthy biodiversity without healthy people. There’s no, we can’t protect the species that are these last survivors if we can’t make sure that the people that live alongside them have livelihoods and have access to food and water and, you know, basic human necessities.
Liliana: Absolutely.
Alexis: So if we’re going to talk about conservation, we have to talk about people.
Liliana: Yes. And I agree. Again, on this, I’m an optimist. I think it’s our privilege to live in a post-scarcity society. There’s no scarcity. We actually live in a world where, you know, for tens of thousands of generations, we humans have been always on the brink of starvation. And thanks to our ingenuity and thanks to our technology and thanks to coming together and working together, we’ve overcome this. And we have more together all around the world, not just in developed countries, like all around the world. There’s never been a time when people haven’t been, as a group, most of humanity haven’t been the healthiest with the most access to resources and all of that.
50:05
So we are actually in a post-scarcity world. And I would like people to think about that, about how amazing that is and how we can bring this realization forward and make it so that everyone has basic necessities everywhere, wherever they are, because then we can conserve and we can conserve our environment and change the atmosphere to levels that are safe for everybody and conserve biodiversity.
Nate: Amen.
Ryan: Yeah. I want to applaud, but I don’t think it would work well on the podcast. Are you guys planning future collaborations together in this same vein or what comes next in the world of research?
Siobahn: We are. We have several grants that we’re interested in working on that will examine the effect that some of these hurricanes and disruption in the natural environments of the various Caribbean islands have had on the endemic fauna, particularly rodents and bats, because that’s largely what’s left on these islands. So we’ll be working on that in the next few weeks and months.
Liliana: And on the workshop.
Siobahn: Oh, yes. And on our workshop. Hey, do you know when we’re supposed to hear about that?
Alexis: I’ve been wondering.
Siobahn: Yeah, I was thinking about it the other day about, hey, it’s been a little while.
Alexis: It said January.
Siobahn: Yeah.
Alexis: Online, I think.
Liliana: Yeah, I think. Yeah. You know, they’ll send us an email and we’ll find out if we’re on for the workshop or we’ll keep trying.
Nate: I think and maybe see if you guys agree or not, but our study is potentially one of the few that can demonstrate or put together a logical argument for direct human impacts on extinctions. In the context of this debate, particularly of Pleistocene, like end Pleistocene extinctions, this debate of is it climate change, which was presumably more of a natural process at that point, or was it overhunting? And, like, that’s particularly a debate in continental North America, and so our results don’t necessarily apply to that directly. But there is this kind of, you know, it’s a piece in the puzzle of we’re in this setting where we actually have a lot of dates and we have these island replicates. It looks like humans were the causal factor.
Alexis: I will say though, we don’t have any kill sites. So while I think there is very clear evidence from the dates and from some of the paleo ecological proxies, we’re still waiting to find that site with the sloth and the human tool next to it.
Ryan: It’s never going to happen. It doesn’t exist.
Alexis: I need to find it.
Liliana: No, we’re not going to find it, we’re not going to find it. And I think the closest that we can come is to have human linked fires. Because remember that, yes, light hunting pressures probably played a role in the extinction of those early mammals, but I think the bulk of the pre-Columbian extinctions are happening from agriculture.
And furthermore, even all of those extinctions that happen, especially in the Lesser Antilles, we have all these extinctions happening with the arrival of Europeans and with the arrival of the rats and the mongoose and all of those things. We also don’t have kill sites for those. We also don’t know, what we have is something really fascinating, which is the Amerindians eating some of these rats as meat and kind of like, having pressure with them for hundreds and hundreds of years having access and use of these resources, and then the invasive species come in from Eurasia and then these rats are gone completely. So we don’t have that, kill sites, I don’t think it’s going to happen. It’s going to be inferential. It’s going to be a circumstantial case.
Nate: Well, it’s also not overhunting. It’s human impacts that are not direct like, I’m killing you.
Liliana: Yeah. Yes, exactly. Right. Right, exactly. Because I think overwhelmingly, overwhelmingly those are going to be more important in terms of the numbers of species. I think for a lot of species that we’re seeing, what we’re seeing definitely for bats, what we’re seeing is a consequence of the habitat change and the invasive species and not directly people eating them. So yeah, I mean, it would be great. I mean, Alexis, I mean, maybe it will happen. Who knows? But I don’t know.
Alexis: I’ll keep my dream.
Lilana: You hang on to your dreams.
Alexis: Well, I just think that, you know, so many people when they get this, image of megafauna extinction, they have like, you Google it, right? And you see all these paintings of like cavemen throwing spears at mammoths and like these very masculine like humans dominating megafauna directly hunting them. But I don’t know if that’s necessarily the case. Especially in the Caribbean, we don’t have any proof for that. All of it is really this more pervasive landscape change fire. So I think challenging that perception of what it means for humans to cause extinction and how people today, how you contribute to extinction, you don’t have to go out there and kill the endangered animal. It’s in the other ways you interact with your environment.
55:03
Ryan: But also don’t go kill the endangered animals. Don’t do that either, yeah.
Alexis: Yeah, please don’t.
Siobahn: Please don’t. Please don’t do that.
Liliana: Don’t use rhino horn. Please.
Ryan: It’s not medicine, it’s not real.
Liliana: It’s not real. Yeah. I mean, I see your point about the megafauna and I’d say also, you know, that this kind of very sort of very, I guess, “man the hunter”, right, like the man the hunter type of thing is also at odds with, in a place like the Caribbean and with animals like sloths, you would just have to go like steal a baby every once in a while and the species can go extinct. The population will go extinct if you just kind of, you know, every other year you go in and eat one of the babies, right?
Ryan: Well, that is also one of the things about human hunting that’s different than a lot of other animals is where, like, a lot of species that hunt will actually go after the young or the old or the sick, whereas humans we are able to, with our tools, we can bring down pretty much the healthiest elephant with a well-thrown spear. So it makes us a particularly fearsome and potentially devastating predator to exist in an environment.
Liliana: Right. The tools that were found from the archaics, not from the archaic, from the lithic, so from the period when, when we see the, the sloths and the monkeys go extinct, the tools that are found are literally, you know, this little stone, you know, this little rocks that are broken up and that are being used. They’re not even flint. They’re not, we don’t have flint tips from that period. So, so yeah, that can change, you know, I mean, we can imagine people eating the animals. I can just picture that. How the animals died is not clear.
Ryan: Well, Alexis, you got me thinking with the cave art, that cave art is usually these big epic animals, you know, aurochs and buffalo and things that a teenage boy who is likely drawing the cave painting would have liked bragging about killing. Maybe the sloths were just too dopey to be worth, like, maybe there was no social cred that you got for killing a sloth because they were just too dumb.
Siobahn: Oh, well, it could well be that the ladies are drawing those cave paintings…
Ryan: Could be, as well.
Siobahn: And there’s actually, there was just a note about this cultural idea of man the hunter. Something in hunter gatherer society is something like 70% of the caloric intake is usually, modern hunter gatherer societies, is provided by women’s labor.
Ryan: The gathering part?
Siobahn: Gathering and hunting, small animals.
Ryan: And hunting?
Siobahn: Yeah. This idea of like big megafaunal hunting with spears, you know, that’s very much tied to the idea of cavemen is made up. You know, there certainly is large megafaunal hunting in the archaeological record, but the number of calories that were probably provided to the population is relatively small relative to other food types, except in extraordinarily northern latitudes where all you have is large animals to eat. But the other thing that we should think about with these animals is that on islands, there were no mammalian carnivores on these islands. There were some large birds that would have eaten some of these animals, owls, raptors, but they would have been naive behaviorally to the threats that a human would pose to them. And so it’s not inconceivable that a person could literally walk up to a primate or a sloth and just whack them or grab them. And certainly that type of human animal interaction has occurred on other types of oceanic islands. You know, there’s reports like Darwin’s report of his travels on the Beagle. He talks a lot about how you can walk up in the Galapagos Islands and poke the birds with your walking stick or the iguana because they’re naive to the threats that those large animals and humans would pose to them. So as humans moved on to these islands, if they were consuming the large rodents, the large sloths, the primates, they could have really done them in extremely rapidly. And there may not be that much archaeological evidence of it because if they’re so naive that you can literally just go up and grab them, well, you’re not going to have potentially lots of cut marks and things like that on the bones.
Nate: I guess I’d add with hutias, that’s still the case that you can climb a tree, not even a very high tree, and grab a hutia with your hands. And if you get them by the neck, they don’t bite you.
Ryan: Hutia is like a little rodent, right?
Nate: Yeah, well, it’s pretty big. It’s about the size of a cat. And yeah, so it’s large enough to feed your family for at least one meal, if not two. And so yeah, I mean, there’s certainly incentive to hunting them. And we know that modern people do that. But yeah, it’s just sort of the question of whether Amerindians were also doing that.
Ryan: You guys have used that word a couple of times. AmerIndian is just a contraction of the words American and Indian.
Liliana: That’s correct.
Ryan: Or is there some other context?
Liliana: That’s what it is. Yeah.
1:00:00
Alexis: I would say too, with the lack of native mammal predators, we see that with solenodons today, where, so solenodons are awesome in so many ways, but in one particular way is that they’re venomous and they actually secrete a venom from their salivary gland.
Ryan: Are they the only venomous mammal?
Alexis: They are not.
Nate: A couple other shrews.
Alexis: Shrews, platypus, male platypus only, slow lorises kind of are considered, they can induce anaphylactic shock. And then some people based on the definition of venom have called vampire bats venom because of the anti-collagulant.
Siobahn: Right.
Alexis: But, yeah. I’m just saying what I’ve read. With solenodons, so a lot of my fieldwork has been working with modern solenodons. And so when you talk to farmers, they’ll tell you that their dogs have killed the solenodons. They go into their burrows at night and will pull them out and unfortunately kill them. And the solenodon will bite the dog, but the dog will take a few days to die. So the dog has already killed the animal, even though the animal’s injected its venom and it will take up to, from one account, three days. The dog will get really lethargic and then it will die. So the venom clearly is not very effective at protecting this animal from a mammalian carnivore.
Nate: Well, why would it be in a way, like, there were none?
Alexis: Exactly.
Liliana: They evolved with them.
Alexis: Yeah. So it’s just not, even though it’s venomous, which we think of as something that would protect an animal, this animal is still very vulnerable just because of that evolutionary history.
Ryan: So we need to like genetically engineer solenodons that have fertile ants venom sac.
Alexis: You know, there’s a movie about that called Attack of the Killer Shrews, which, are dead serious.
Nate: Wait, that exists?
Alexis: We should all have a party and watch this. It’s like, but it is bad, it exists, I’ve watched it multiple times. And, it’s about, like, this couple, they get shipwrecked on an island and they’re having these experiments where they’re trying to make giant shrews that attack people. And it’s really German shepherds in costumes. It’s like from like, it’s in black and white. Anyway, that to me is the story of the solenodon.
Ryan: Well, all right.
Alexis: So.
Liliana: Totally watching that movie.
Alexis: It’s so worth it.
Liliana: From 1959.
Ryan: Wow.
Liliana: The Attack of the Killer Shrews is what we’re going to be what we’re going to watch in my lab next time.
Nate: Nice. That means the venom is targeted for their insect prey then, is that…
Alexis: That’s my guess.
Nate: But they have so many teeth as well.
Alexis: Based on poop work. That’s my guess.
Ryan: That’s not the quality of your work. It’s what you’re actually working on, right?
Alexis: Yes, yes, I should be clear. Nate actually dropped off a bag of poop for me the other day.
Ryan: Oh, that was nice of you, Nate.
Nate; It was not my own.
Alexis: Yeah. Good, good clarifying statement.
Nate: It was some wood rats from Joshua tree.
Ryan: Well, I know, I know some of you have things coming up later in the day, so I don’t want to keep you for too much longer, but I do want to give you all a chance to promote yourselves as individuals. If you have any other outreach outlets or social media presence that people could follow you on. So are any of you on Twitter or do you have websites for your labs that I can link people to in the show notes or tell them about right here right now? Alexis, I can put you on the spot and make you go first.
Alexis: Sure. Yeah. You can find me on Twitter. I’m usually tweeting about paleontology and hedgehogs, and it’s just my name, Alexis Mychajliw, and I will not spell my name because…
Ryan: I’ll link to it on the…
Alexis: Yes, please link to it. Yeah. And my website is insectivora.org and I’m now at the Librea Tar Pits and because of the way the Librea Tar Pits work, you will be trapped there forever.
Alexis: I am trapped here forever, forever preserved.
Ryan: Stuck in a tar pit.
Alexis: Yeah.
Siobhan: I have a Twitter feed that is a it’s my last name Cook and my first name Siobhan. So at Cook Siobhan and it is a mix of science and politics, because the political is personal and we all need to advocate for better science funding and social justice issues both inside science and outside. So that’s where I can be found. I also have a lab website that has a long, a long address so I don’t actually know what it is.
Ryan: I will just link to it in the show notes so people can find it there.
Liliana: So people can find my lab at DavalosLab, one word, DavalosLab on Facebook and that’s it for our social media footprint.
Nate: Yeah, I’m on Twitter n then the number eight and then my last name UPHAM (n8_upham). Yeah, just I’m a postdoc at Yale and yeah, you guys can find me there.
Ryan: Very cool. Well, thank you again so much for joining me. I really appreciate you all taking the time and coordinating all of your schedules so that you could all come on and talk about this together.
1:05:03
This was a bit of an experiment for us here on the podcast and I think it worked out really well. You guys have great chemistry and really talk very well as a unit about the science you’ve been doing. So thank you so much for talking about it with me.
Siobahn:Thanks for having us.
Liliana:Thank you for having us.
Alexis: Thanks.
Nate: Yeah, this is a cool opportunity. Thank you.
Ryan: Absolutely.
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Ryan: All right. Well, after the somewhat momentous occurrence of having four other people join me on the podcast for an interview, I’m really happy with how the conversation went and I hope you are too. And I hope you’ll go to the website, sciencesortof.com, check out the show notes for this episode where you can get the links to everything that they’re working on. But I also hope that you support the show in one form or another. You can leave us an iTunes review. You can call our voicemail line. You can send us a package. You can donate to the show in a recurring fashion via Patreon. But before Patreon, which you can find at patreon.com/sciencesortof, by the way, there was a previous way of donating to the show, and that was PayPal, which had a recurring donation system set up. And believe it or not, we still have a few folks who we haven’t thanked yet for their continued support of the show. So today I want to thank LisaK. Lisa, thank you for being a supporter of the show. We actually had a previous LisaK also as a recurring donor to the show. So these are two separate LisaK’s. So to both of you LisaK’s out there, thank you so much for your continued support of the show. We really, really appreciate it.
We couldn’t do the show without the help of the listeners. And unfortunately, because I’m alone, there will not be a patron thesis today because I only do those when we have other folks helping me out to do the heavy mental lifting that is required to determine the thesis for the degree in podcast support you receive as a patron reward for this podcast. So that means this is the end of the show.
Thanks again to my wonderful guests. Again, I really encourage you to go check out their work. They do other forms of outreach besides joining me on a podcast. So you will be well served by checking out what they’re up to. And thanks for listening to the show. Feel free to reach out to us on Twitter or Facebook at sciencesortof on both of those and let us know how you’re digging the show, what kind of content you want to see moving forward. We’ve been getting a few people suggesting guests to us, which is great. So keep that up and thank you again for listening to the show. My name is Ryan. I forgot to have all four of my guests say the phrase we say at the end of the show.
So just know that when you come back for the next episode, you will indeed get a whole lot more science and that will be of the sort of variety.
Announcer: Visit sciencesortof.com for show notes, links to all the stories we talked about and ways to interact with the hosts, guests, and other listeners. Science Sort of is brought to you by the Brachiolope Media Network of podcasts with audio engineering by Tim Dobbs of the Encyclopedia Brunch podcast. That’s all for this week. We’ll see you next time on Science sort of.
Music
Siobahn: Okay, that sounds good. So what was the question again? Oh, right.
Alexis: So what was the paper about?
Sipbahn: What’s the paper about? Yes. Okay. Alrighty.
Transcriptions provided by Denny Henke of Beardyguycreative.com
