 Hi everyone, thank you for joining us today. My name is Mandy. I'm a chemical marine biologist and I study the evolution of venom in snails and I used to think that I worked on the coolest things. I call them killer snails. Then I started reading Nick's book, Buying on Whales and with everything in nature you know you think your animals the coolest and then here comes a big whale to swallow everything up and so today I think we're in for a really really good treat and what Nick it's like when you were six years old and somebody asked you what do you want to be and you answer I want to be a marine biologist I want to be a paleontologist and I want to be a detective solving crime. Nick is all of those rolled into one. He's a vertebrate paleontologist who works at the Smithsonian. He's in charge of curating the largest collection of fossil mammals on the planet and his work has taken him to every single continent and so today he's gonna share with us some of the stories that he's had about Buying on Whales and so Nick would you like to come up? Yeah sure. Whales have captured our imagination for millennia and sometimes that fascination with them manifests in very strange ways. In the 1970s when NASA created the Voyager space missions to send spacecraft on a tour of the solar system and on its way outward it affixed these golden discs to the side and on these golden discs were messages meant to someone something should that entity want to know who sent these spacecraft on their voyage and what's really interesting is these records contain audio images and greetings in 55 human languages and one non-human language which is humpback whale song. Now that should be really strange that's a funny thing. It presumes a lot about what we think whales are saying but the fact of the matter is we still don't know what whale song actually means we don't know if that's really a greeting or if it's just a comment about what they ate for lunch and that's a microcosm of this enigma this mystery of wanting to know where they came from and where they're going so when you think about whales you probably have this image in your head this is a shot of a humpback whale in Antarctica Wilhelmina Bay this is more typically what you imagine when you think of a whale living 99% of its life away from us underwater they remain inaccessible so the ways that we want to know about them require tools of investigation that get us there that extend our senses 30 seconds after this picture was taken I took this one from the boat on top of the water where that whale then came to the surface to go look at the observers observing it and so this is a bit of that connection that we have to this very enigmatic species we want to know more about it but we can't actually interrogate it directly so this is why the questions that scientists ask are some of the best ones for understanding what these animals are all about because they're fantastic because they're amazing because their traits are so spectacular our curiosity leads us to ask more and more questions about them I'm a paleontologist and I work at the Smithsonian which houses the world's largest museum complex on the planet some 155 156 million objects specimens and museums are special institutions because they're kind of like the vaults of past worlds if we want to know what the lost worlds the past were like whether it's in geologic history or human history we need that evidence and there's no better place to find that evidence to safeguard it to study it to take care of it for the future than museums and so the evidence of the past that I encounter the bones of long extinct whales are right there before me but I want to share a bit more about how we know about that and what that tells us about where they came from and where they're going the first most amazing fact about whales is they once lived on land some 50 million years ago they had four legs they had long probably furry snouts nostrils halfway down not right above their eyes and over the course of about 10 million years relatively short period of time they then start to look somewhat more like the whales that we recognize today living underwater full-time having a tail fluke probably doing something that looks pretty fearsome and we have this image of this evolutionary transformation is being somewhat one directional like it's happening in a linear fashion but actually that's not really how evolution works it's really convenient when we look at it from our perspective as one stage going to another in a long series of successes but actually the way Darwin articulated it here is evolution is a bushy tree is actually way more accurate evolution is a story of failures with very few successes and when I look at the fossil record I'm mainly looking at the story of failures and the successes that's where it gets really interesting because that tells you how things are working today and so instead of thinking about the evolution of whales is one sort of long succession leading to a successful dominance this bushy tree of whales if we went back 50 million years ago the beach party would look something like this and all these different forms went extinct except for the one in the back whoops except for this one in the back that beget all the whales that we see today the most likely unsuccessful one at the time was the one that became adapted to the water full-time so the fossil record tells us about past states that we wouldn't otherwise know but the fossil record is actually very incomplete all those artistic reconstructions that I showed you are just that the actual evidence we can sometimes hold in our hands bits of bone shards of teeth that is the direct evidence of the past and from that we have to become good detectives ask good questions and sometimes we get lucky and getting lucky is largely a matter of science in a social context and geopolitics drives a lot of the expeditionary science that I do this is a picture of fossil field work in the Atacama desert of Chile a few years ago right along the side of the pan-american highway a road construction company expanding the highway to make way for road expanding the highway to make way for mining equipment to go up and down the pan-american highway to recover mineral resources they're used by developing countries exposed one two three four and 40 other skeletons of fossil whales all right by the side of the road and that's fairly unusual for someone like me who's used to dealing with fragmentary remains so I had a bit of a logistical problem on my hand in terms of scale and time because the company still needed to continue with their work and we still had scientific questions about what's going on and at the time we decided to do something innovative and we applied 3d scanning techniques to capture a digital facsimile of those records before us the national patrimony of Chile never left the country indeed it still awaits fossil preparation and detailed work to remove the rock from bone but using digital data we're able to capture context this is the crime scene of wanting to know what happened here and as it turns out we think that harmful algal blooms poisons created by single-celled organisms some several million years ago likely led to the die-off and the many fossil whale skeletons that we see before us today but what's great about digital data is that you can then pull it back and it captures a moment in time the way you were in the field that you can then see in the laboratory and in the safe context of the laboratory you have much more time to examine it in detail and if you have the right kinds of tools you can make a 3d print out of it and so this is a 3d print of that same image and it's amazing to me to be able to hold the direct evidence in miniature in my hands but these provide me with tools to communicate it and so the objects that we have in museums only makes sense if we're able to speak for them and there's so one function of the museum is to provide us with scientific answers to create these objects and collections where we can or replicas and facsimiles but also to tell narratives to tell us stories about how we know what we know about life in the past because we do want to know what's going to go on in the future a blue whale like this is a very large organism it's actually larger than any dinosaur that ever lived 100 feet long maybe 200 tons in weight and with the amazing fact the second amazing fact is that blue whales are the largest whales ever to have lived so we are literally living in an age of giants but nearly not so much because in the early 20th century we nearly hunted blue whales to extinction 99% of the blue whales that were on the planet at the start of the 20th century were gone by the 1960s they barely escaped extinction from widespread pelagic wailing and wailing is in the news today because especially in the Asian Pacific region many countries are either involved in commercial wailing or not and it's becoming a big issue that gets a lot of news media coverage but I actually think this is a little bit of a red herring because the real issue is not about wailing which only amounts for a small portion of the total whales killed every year a thousand times more whales are killed each year by ship strike net entanglement by catch those are the real issues that are threatening whales today not so much wailing which is much more artisanal in scale so while wailing did not render any single species extinct in the 21st century some whales species did go extinct and here's one example this is a photo of the Yangtze River dolphin taken in 1918 by the hunter who first collected the specimen that is now actually at this at the Smithsonian in our collections the bones and scale and the rest of the skeleton that belong to this individual represent in in large part what the totality of what we know for the species why because it is completely extinct large-scale urbanization of the Yangtze River rendered that habitat unusable to the species and this is a photo of the last individual from 2002 since that time when this individual died no more Yangtze River dolphins have ever been heard or spotted so this is a tale of extinction in our times now the situation for the Vakita a small porpoise that lives in the Gulf of California gives us some reason for hope there are maybe 12 individuals of this porpoise left on the planet and they're largely a victim of bycatch from a fishery that is dedicated towards going after a single fish the totoaba whose bladder fetches tens of thousands of dollars on Asian markets and so it's not directly because we're killing this individual species but it's a by its bycatch is an indirect victim of another industry and with 12 individuals you're left with not very many options for saving the species but there are some efforts and this includes one two years ago to create ex situ conservation capture the remaining individuals put them in c pens until we can stabilize the external threats to that lineage this effort didn't go so well and it had to be stopped because this one of these individuals actually died out of the capture attempt but a year later to a calf and a mother were later photographed in the same area so they're not extinct quite yet it's a testament to how hard it is to know about extinction in the seas and also the real resiliency of many of these lineages despite human interaction so what's life like for a whale in the oceans today they live at the peril and promise of civilization if you're a large whale entanglement and fishing lines like this north Atlantic right whale is a major threat along with being struck by a ship either a cargo ship a cruise ship and if you're lucky you might get freed from this entanglement by some curious humans who have the ability to free you from those ropes this would be a success story many times it's not and there's reports back from the east coast of the United States of many of these right whales that are showing up dead already this season so it's still a cause for concern especially because this species made it through whaling but it hasn't recovered so even with the cessation of widespread hunting there's still serious threats to whales on this planet now why is this interesting for us and I want to make the case that whales tell us a lot about ourselves some whales live human lifetimes they live actually longer than us this species of whale the bowhead in the Arctic may live up to 200 years so imagine the stories a 200 year old whale would tell us about our own civilization a 200 year old whale alive today would tell us about the rise and fall of many industries about technological innovations and changes in the ocean not to say anything about the rise of pollutants plastics you name it a whale that old has seen it now turn that around imagine a bowhead whale born today what kind of future Arctic will it see an Arctic full of cargo ships cruise ships pollution we have a lot of stake in that and we have a role to play in that future as well so when I think about the future of whales I think that those that are most likely to survive and thrive on planet Earth in the age of humans are gonna be the adaptive flexible ones the ones that have broad geographic ranges flexible diets a bit like this humpback whale in Antarctica in this picture may look very pristine and beautiful but we know that even in Antarctica it is not a pristine environment our footprint our impact on ecosystems on this planet is broad it's going to be persistent and so they're very much living on our planet and so we have a big role to play in the future that we share with whales but I am excited and that's because we are living in the golden age of whale science this is a photo taken from a drone right above one of those same humpback whales feeding in this incredibly complex behavior called bubble netting creating a corral around a school of fish that allows it to eat fish basically in a barrel and we would not otherwise know about this unique behavior if we didn't have this technology so technological innovations for scientists are giving us tremendous insight into a largely inaccessible world and think about this last you know this goes back to our original slide of the discs what can we know about whales moving forward from all these different pieces of knowledge that we have today we are inherently curious species and we want to know more about these enigmas and it's really you know the question of what whale song means it's likely a question that scientists can answer in large part because of the tools that they have so I don't know if we're ever going to know what whales are saying but certainly scientists are still listening thanks thank you Nick for that fabulous talk and as I was reading your book last night you describe especially with the bowhead whales that in three generations from grandmother to mother to baby daughter that you can go through a millennium of time right and so basically these nails are planetary time machines can you describe a little bit for us how you measure that machine and does it really involve the eyeball right so how do we know that these whales are able to live 200 years there's multiple lines of evidence and when you're a detective multiple lines of evidence that point towards the same answer are probably giving you the right answer it's the same logic of induction that gives you that kind of strength of support so one line of evidence is that we find stonate we find specific technological harpoons embedded in whales that are captured centuries later so there are bowhead whales that are hunted by indigenous peoples first peoples of Alaska that are found with stonage implements in their body specifically in their shoulder blade that were failed hunts that were then healed in the 19th century until the whale was then killed in the 21st century so there was already good reason to think these whales did live more than a century but the 200 years comes specifically from looking at proteins in the eyeball and in general if you want to look at the age of an animal you want to look at accretionary tissues and these are the kinds of tissues like hair and fingernails that add layers through time but you do want a chronometer you want a timekeeping type of protein and the best chronometers are the proteins actually in our eyeballs because they form initially when we're in utero and then they're sealed off from the rest of the body and don't change throughout our lifetime and so through various chemical techniques you can know about where those plots fit on the curve of decay and the numbers we get are largely consistent with the evidence we get from anthropologists who look at those Stone Age implements found on harpoons. I'm going to ask Nick two other questions and then I'll pop it out into the audience second question so we are recently hearing a lot about noise pollution in the ocean you know oil tankers and all the other things that are polluting the oceans how is this affecting behavior of whales? Absolutely we live in a very loud ocean relative to what any whale species experienced more than 50 years ago and in some cases the oceans are noisiest exactly where whales are feeding so this is a big problem if you're whale and you want to communicate where the best place is to eat when sound is one of the most important sensory systems for navigating your environment if you can't hear there's a big problem about using that habitat so it's not so much a problem generally across the ocean but it's a problem where whales live which happen to be where people are so whales are living in an urban ocean that's becoming less wild and how we mitigate that is largely something that's in the tools of policy and government and my last question today weff is launching this new deal with nature and as a young scientist yeah who works in biodiversity what role do you think young scientists play in informing the public and governments and private sectors about what's happening in our planet in terms of biodiversity loss and this inflection that's going to happen in 2030 how do we bend that right so we're all concerned if you're a scientist about the rapid loss of biodiversity that's been seen in the last certainly a few hundred years and it's accelerated by all measures that we know about I think the role that scientists play in trying to come up with some framework to deal with this issue is most I think your time is best invested in narrative in telling those stories we can tell many stories about biodiversity loss but some may be more compelling than others we're not going to be able to get non-scientists to care about these issues unless we tell stories with heart and I sometimes think people stories are some of the best stories to tell if you can tell stories that are first person or biographical in nature that's a way to get people interested in science when otherwise the how we know can seem intimidating or obscure okay so we'll break it out into the audience questions for Nick very beautiful story I have two questions the first one is when whales become instinct how would they affect the ocean ecosystem the second question is how is the climate change affecting the whale population okay so the first question is about our whales if whales go extinct what can we expect for the future of oceans to look like and we kind of have run that experiment already if you think about the scale of biomass removal from the 20th century some 2 to 3 million whales were killed in the 20th century and when you multiply that out by the average weight of a large whale 50 70 tons that's a scale biomass loss that has no comparable at all in human history and there's many colleges that have made the case that when you lose that biomass given how important whales are in ocean food webs you're losing some function and so the oceans of today may be functioning very differently than they did at the start of the 20th century that's a bit of a detective question that we still don't know the answer to and the second question was how does climate change fit into all this climate change is a set of changes happening to planetary systems and ocean systems that's happening in different scales and in different parameters at different rates so thermal changes in the ocean oceans are getting warmer that's not happening in a uniform way across the planet and so maybe some whales can get away from the hot zones into waters that are more they're more used to others may not have that opportunity certainly if you're a species of whale in a river humans are occupying a lot of river habitats so that puts them in jeopardy already ocean acidification may be a problem if their food source goes extinct so there's many ways that climate change could have an impact on whales and certainly you might say that those who have very narrow diets they can't eat a large range of foods that may have geographic restrictions those are all traits that make them susceptible to extinction right here up front please remember to identify your stuff briefly my name is Olivia very interested in this animal I have one question about the since we all know that whales are very intelligent and mammals so during your continued research and observation is there any like observed change of their behavior so community adapting to a world that is not that totally friendly to their living and one related question is that you just mentioned in your presentation that you would use a drone to monitor and observe the activities of the whales I read somewhere that the drones may be some you know maybe affecting the lives of the animals like the some some people use drones to approach like leopards and the main scare the animals away I wonder how how the drones may affect the activities of whales thank you okay so the first question has to do with the intelligence of whales and asks are we gonna expect to see any changes in their behavior because of large-scale changes in the oceans and that is a likely thing to happen and we will only know that after the fact can we make predictions about it probably and the best example those predictions are what happened in the whaling industry whaling in the 20th century and in few centuries before was so systematic that many entire pods were killed altogether and today now that we're not whaling for the most part in many places studies have shown us that these pods actually form cultural units and they have specific dialects so there are researchers who've made the case that the loss of an entire pod is the loss of a cultural unit and that's a very that should resonate with many people in the audience who are that there's very strong human analogs to that as well the second question remind me really fast the drones we do know that drones do affect whale behavior if they get close enough they've actually now measured this if you get below a certain height several tens of meters whales are reacting to that so we do recognize that the instruments that we're using to study them are probably changing their behavior is that permanent there's a bit of a trade-off in wanting to know versus any potential short-term bothering that that may cause them sorry was that yeah it's a work in progress there's so much that we don't know because there's so hard to study and that's what makes it very exciting to me because there's a lot of room for innovation thank you I'm she fills seal our mathematician from University of Cape Town I was wondering in your study of whale bones have you noticed any you know according to Darwin's evolutionary theory have you noticed any changes in structure of whales recently oh how recently do you so the question was how if you see any changes if you see any changes in whale bones recently because of whaling or climate change how recently do you mean you talked about adaptive behavior are we seeing changes in structure so when you started your presentation week we could see the changes in whales of a millennia right and are there any forecasts and how they structurally may change in the future great great question evolution happens in different scales within a whole organism and you might expect molecular changes changes to DNA to precede changes in the physical structures that we can see more easily like the skeleton but not always that's one idea there's other hypotheses about how evolution works in whole organisms I don't know of any data that show that specifically because we probably don't have a good enough sampling through time there's so many species that were whaled in so many different ways and we don't always have the evidence from whaling of those two to three million whales that were killed we have museum specimens from that era that may amount to a few hundred there's really not that dense of a sampling for such a widespread ecological experiment thank you very much very interesting presentation would you consider yourself a pessimist for the future or an optimist sure I didn't ask you that question okay so a question is whether I'm a pacifist or not and yeah I don't pessimist or an optimist pessimist I was like do it my violent person I'm very up I'm we have great challenges before us and we are playing a game for future generations right now that is a serious serious challenge that we have to be sober about but we're a very creative species we've had very bad days in the past we know that from looking at our own history in our own DNA there have been human bottlenecks in our own evolutionary past we've had very bad days before so the question is not about the plot I'm sure as many people have said it's not about the planet surviving the planet's gonna be here for several billion years into the future I'm rooting for team human humans are some of my best friends right so so I so I have to be optimistic and I think we only get people to care about these issues if we're able to tell the right kinds of stories that's what I think narrative is so important in science science is a narrative structure to the best science papers that are out there are powerful rhetorical arguments so I think the scientists need to up their game at how they communicate and fortunately here you're seeing the young scientists community many great communicators many not only great scientists but they're actually able to translate what we know and how we know it to non-scientists in the weft community one more question two more questions two more depending on what the questions are and how long you take to answer and the question will be short so blue dresses is about kumar from your news I'm a journalist and my question was you're talking about the enigmatic nature of whale song and how difficult it was to crack now how do you try and crack whale song and if it were to be cracked if this language work to be cracked do you think it'd be a pandora's box that maybe shouldn't be opened we have not cracked it we don't know what they're saying it's it's highly complex it's very strongly organized it has a mathematical structure that requires information theory to study so they are saying a lot but we don't know the meaning and maybe one day we will and that's part of the excitement of why you do science in the first place is it similar to dolphins yeah dolphins use it to navigate they don't use it so much to communicate these different frequencies yeah and last question here before we close out the session over time thank you my name is tissue either from kyo don't use I'm a science newsletter what is a major reason for the slow recovery of a population we have this are the years monatorium away and the human being can do something for that speed up the recovery great question the question is why do some whale populations not respond well to conservation measures and part of the answer probably has to with some aspect of their reproductive biology and their ecology you only get whales if there's enough food to eat and that's an ecosystem-based question but also some whales are probably better at taking advantage of that they may be reproduced more quickly and we don't yet know the full answer to that because there's so many different species of whale there's some 80 different species of the ones that have been most targeted we're talking about maybe a dozen species and they have very different biologies different ecologies so it's not really clear thank you all for coming to the session not a pacifist okay