 Back to likable science, live from the EcoDays Symposium. I'm your host Ethan Allen and we're broadcasting today from the East West Center of the University of Hawaii at Manoa. The East West Center is hosting this EcoDays, which stands for ecological dissertations in aquatic sciences, I believe. And with me today, I have two participants, Whitney Beck from Colorado State and Aaron Larson from Columbia. The other part of New York. And you guys, I gather actually our collaborators already. EcoDays is all about bringing collaborators together. You already were collaborating before the EcoDays, right? Correct. Yeah. So Whitney and I share a common ancestor. So her advisor, Laura Popp is also on my dissertation committee. But funnily enough, here at EcoDays, we're working on two very independent projects and getting to know some other folks as well. But it's also a fun chance to reconnect. Excellent, excellent. Isn't that cute the way people's pedigrees or in science sometimes, very different people in very different places end up having common ancestors as you put it, sort of. Excellent. So let's start by maybe a very brief, non-technical explanation of what each of you, what your project really is. Wouldn't you want to start? Sure. So my project is about stream algae. I study freshwater algae that grow on rocks. You might have been fishing or swimming in streams or lakes and got it caught in your fishing line or slipped in a stream because it's so slippery from the algae. But I study nutrients in streams, so fertilizers that may become from agricultural fields or wastewater treatment plants and how they influence the growth of algae and how to prevent issues with water quality, like what we're seeing in Florida, for instance, in some of the freshwater streams where there's a lot of nutrients and that's fueling growth and leading to fish kills and things like that. So I'm conducting experiments to try to understand how algae, algal growth, responds to nutrients under different conditions, like different temperatures and stream flows and things like that. So it involves a lot of field experiments up in the beautiful Colorado mountains, but also some quantitative models from larger data sets. Excellent. Excellent. And Erin? Yeah, so I work a little bit up in scale from Whitney in terms of the animals that I study. So I work on stream insects. So if you've ever gone fly fishing, whatever you tied on the end of your line, like a Mayfly, Catus fly, Stone fly is what I study. Also mosquitoes, true flies that you might not like quite as much. And so what I try to understand are the processes that shape how many different species of those types of stream insects we find in a stream, especially things like landslides or floods or other types of what we call disturbances that might influence whether we see a lot of different types of bugs in one stream or just a few. Yeah, okay. So I can see your work interestingly complements one another, certainly at this point. And so going back to your work, the talk of the pesticides and fertilizers, in some sense, those things are sometimes putting sort of counteracting influences on the algae. Some of it may be harming the algae, slowing its growth, others of it may be feeding the algae and enriching its growth. But all in all, disturbances probably are making the algae growth different than it was before the land was being used, right? Yeah, that's right. So I don't study as much the pesticide side of things, but and I don't think as much as much is known in that area about how pesticide runoff is influencing algae. Maybe it's influencing insects that feed on algae, but definitely the nutrient side of things. You look up in the Colorado mountain streams, and you would actually expect them to be a lot more pristine than lower elevation streams. But in fact, what we do in the lower elevations influences the conditions in the mountains. So we have cattle farms and concentrated animal feeding operations that are emitting nitrogen and nutrients into the atmosphere, and those end up in the mountain streams. We also have car emissions in the Colorado kind of lowlands, and those bring nitrogen up into the atmosphere, and then it gets deposited as rain in those high elevation areas. So they can be even more polluted than streams in town. Well, interesting. We tend to think of everything as running downstream. It's really counterintuitive. You can see the atmosphere. Again, this is a great reason why you want to be at EcoDays here. I get some atmospheric scientists working with you to help track those sources and quantify the transport, right? Yeah, and I'll mention that there was a really great program at my university that was funded by the National Science Foundation. So I came in as a fellow in this program, and it was meant to get atmospheric scientists, watershed scientists, and social scientists to collaborate together on water issues. So I made friends in engineering and atmospheric scientists who I've been able to work with on different projects, and that's been so helpful at my university, and I'm extending the net here at EcoDays. Excellent. And of course, all this then really, it has implications, clearly for the health of the streams you're studying, right, in terms of the fish populations, and then the viability of the streams and the usability for people. Yeah, there's no point in fishing a stream where all the fish are dead, right? Of course. But also it really then deals with water volatilities, right? Yeah, so in the newspapers recently, I've been seeing pictures from Florida where lifeguards are wearing gas masks. So there are toxins that are coming from the algae, and they get aerosolized. They're in the atmosphere and people are breathing those in. So there's signs on beaches telling people with asthma or telling small children not to go in that area. And the algal toxins coming into the air is something I hadn't thought a lot about because we don't really get that in Colorado, but in places like Florida that's been a real problem. Although actually I was reading something fascinating a while ago that pointed out that the ocean and the viruses that they've discovered now in the ocean are so numerous and get blown off the ocean surface basically and get up into the upper atmosphere and they circle a globe and something like every square meter of land on earth gets a load of something like 875 million viruses per day landing on earth. But these are amazing that we can resist that. We think we'd rather be up tarnished in viruses, but fortunately they're very small at all. And so I guess in a sense we're going to look at some similar issues with the insects. So why do people say, hey, so who cares a bunch of the insects in a stream die or don't die? Big deal. So the fish eat a little bit more, a little bit less. Who cares? What's the impact of this people? Yeah, so that's a great question and one that people often ask me about because I think when we think about aquatic insects a lot of people think about mosquitoes or black flies or some of the more mean to humans aquatic insects that'll bite you or transmit disease and things like that. But actually a lot of aquatic insects play a really important role in the carbon cycle. So when we think about those headwater streams you might also often think about a stream that has trees over it and so when those leaves fall off the trees and go into the stream insects are the ones that are eating the leaves and playing a really important role in how carbon is transported in the system. They also feed birds when they hatch out of the stream in their aerial farm. They're little like nutrient bags. They have a bunch of fatty acids in them so they're really important for a lot of bird populations and spiders and other types of terrestrial animals. So you can often see birds flying low over the streams right exactly. They're essentially snatching what's hatching right off the surface there. Excellent. And again they're very much dependent on what runs into the stream right so we touch on pesticides and we said she couldn't really speak that so much but do the pesticides and actually influence these larval stages of these insects? They do yeah so a pesticide is designed to kill insects right and so they also kill aquatic insects when they enter into streams and so a lot of people we don't have as much data on aquatic insects as we do on terrestrial insects so things like bumblebees or other important insects like that but we do know that when pesticides get into streams they can kill a lot of the insects that live in streams as well. So I was just reading recently a rather alarming report that suggests that a lot of insect populations of lots of different kinds of insects in lots of different places in the world but most of them are terrestrial that have been studied so are the insect populations are just crashing massively in some cases dropping 10 fold 50 fold just in a few decades. Are you seeing any of this in in stream insects? Yeah that's an awesome question. I wish I had a better answer for you but I'm going to try and answer it to the best of my ability so one limitation with aquatic systems is we just don't have quite as long in a data record so when you do a study like that where you're showing that something's declined you really need data from before we started impacting those systems and so we have seen some evidence that pesticides and other types of pollution are affecting aquatic insects we know that it affects aquatic insects and that different ways of basically hurting bugs home so harming or rearranging streams in different ways does affect their biomass or the amount of them that we find in a stream but we don't right now have quite enough data to do those really big global scale synthesis of like okay do we know that aquatic insects are declining? My sense is yes and I'd love to explore that further with my research for sure. I would think some records like the fishing records from streams could probably give you some insight right if there used to be a lot more people catching a lot more fish out of the river it suggests that that there might be yes you're getting at this idea of like okay that fishing to eat food so if their food is no longer there and we're seeing less fish but if people have been taking the really big fish out there's all kinds of things that can lead to us finding more or less fish so yeah it's hard to say if that's caused by insects or not. Again this is a great a great reason though to be here at EcoDays right now you talk to other people look at some of these other factors could help key some of that out eliminate some as a possible compound and track others it might be really worthwhile and might be very meaningful in your work right? Yeah definitely yeah it's been fun to meet a lot of different folks thinking about aquatic systems especially since we both study streams meeting some people who think more about saltwater systems and you know the ocean or coastal estuaries and things like that and how the processes that are going on there might be different. But of course all your streams ultimately, ultimately they all feed in the ocean right? It all goes to the ocean exactly. There's classical ecology lessons right that everything is connected to everything else you can't really pull one piece out without starting to unravel further right? It's a great summary. It's intriguing. So how do you get sort of started I mean you seem sort of like odd things to be studying in their own way I know all scientists sort of seem to be studying odd things but can you keep for people who might might not be so familiar with science can you sort of say a little bit about how you got involved in this? What grew you into it? Yeah so I'm at Colorado State University right now but I grew up in Maryland and spent a lot of time at the beach and fishing in lakes and streams that feed into the Chesapeake Bay which is one of the largest estuaries and has been in decline for a long time the fisheries and the oysters are declining there's a lot of nutrient and sediment pollution that's leading to algal blooms in the bay. So from an early age I learned a lot about that system and I started going to the University of Maryland as an undergrad and began an environmental science program and my family was like Whitney you're going to save the Chesapeake Bay that is your destiny and it was just this responsibility I was always interested in water and how it connects from the agricultural farms to the streams to the estuaries and that whole cycle how pollutants could be transferred and how the biological systems depend on what happens outside of the streams as well. So it was a fascinating topic and we had a lot of great case studies and courses at the University of Maryland that got me started but then I interned at the EPA's office of water in Washington DC and kept hearing people talk about nutrients and algae and I was like don't we have this solved yet I've been hearing about this for a long time there have been plans for 30 years to save the bay so what's missing and that's why I decided to go to graduate school to complete some experiments try to create better models so that we can predict and present prevent these algal blooms essentially. Yeah so I have a maybe slightly similar slightly different story and I grew up on Long Island Sound in southeast Connecticut and so I grew up similarly by the beach but I spent a lot of time diving as a kid in high school and so I was always really I love fish and I loved fishing I liked seeing fish in the water and when I went to undergrad I went to college in New Hampshire and wasn't near the ocean anymore but got to work on freshwater systems in Colorado and started to get really interested in streams, learned more about algae actually so went from the very big to the very small and after college kind of was at that point where you don't really know what you want to do with your life which might be a permanent state of being and so I went out to Idaho and worked for the Idaho Department of Fish and Game went back to fish and learned a little bit more about how we manage natural systems at a very local level and that got me really interested sort of similarly to Whitney about how I could learn more to help solve the problems that we were thinking about at fishing game I was always thinking about what about the things that the fish are eating what about the things that are eating the fish like sort of the system as a more sort of large connected whole and that's what got me back to grad school thinking more about things at a community and ecosystem level with my research at Cornell. Excellent excellent and these both tie in nicely again to looking at sort of why you're doing the science in terms of sort of the betterment of human beings right which is great science you're always sort of I think just got in the back with Ted right is really wanting to make the world a better place not not not the contrary right and it's it's intriguing that both are looking at these these issues of water that is very interestingly parallel work going on here in Hawaii they're now trying to figure out the groundwater reservoirs of Hawaii because again it seems like something that should have been solved a long time ago right so you should know how much water is here but really the models are typically using 80 year old models and they're really very very crude and simplistic uh and so it's uh again people continue to dig deeper into them study the more now we're trying to use modern techniques so are you guys are finding collaborators here at EcoDays people who can help you look at their streams from elsewhere or other systems that are related to your streams or monitored output of your streams yeah that's right so I found a really fun group to work with we're interested in using a large data set that was collected by the Environmental Protection Agency as well as state partners like Hawaii and so the data set include thousands of points from lakes streams coastal areas and wetlands and we're interested in looking at what drives the nutrients in those ecosystems so we're going to look at how land use and climate might be influencing the nutrients in the water and then eventually connect that to the biology like algae and insects that's that's such a hot trend these days is taking existing data sets that were gathered for some other purpose and reexamining them now through different lens and say look what can this tell us about my question so that's that which is really exciting because we spend so much time and money collecting this data and then if it's just going to sit on a shelf somewhere it's useless but when you get people who know streams and lakes and coastal areas together in one room we can really take a big picture view across those ecosystem types I'm really excited to be working with this group excellent excellent yeah it sounds great again with the history of this group has this being the 13th eco days we probably have people who were asking related questions from some of the early cohort to now have access to other other data sets you might like find interesting right yeah that's why it's good to keep talking to people exactly never know what somebody else gathered right exactly it's one of the real issues we find these days right is there's so much information out there you how do you look it up how do you access it to a poll that the key signal that you want out of the noise of this overwhelming uh daily use of information right that's it's uh that's that's challenging yeah let us know when you figure that out we're working on it don't worry that's the plan goal so um your advice for aspiring scientists yeah um my advice is that science can be one of the many hats you wear being a scientist um and we're all people we're all living on the same planet um we're all stressed about maybe slightly different things but as a scientist I am stressed about climate change I want to figure out solutions and figure out ways that we can have an equitable society um and where we live on a healthy planet and so don't don't forget that scientists are people and that it's okay to also be a mountain biker a knitter those are some of the other hats I wear and other things as well balance the science you do and the things that really bring other types of joy to your life as well excellent excellent and for myself I'm thinking more of incoming students at the undergraduate or graduate level who are interested in doing research and one regret I have in graduate school is that I did not bring in partners um stakeholders who would be using my research until the very end of the project and um we've been taught more and more as graduate students that that's not what you're supposed to do you're supposed to help the people let the people that are going to be using your research help you formulate your research questions and participate and um work in the field with you and that sort of thing and so rather than just publishing an article and hoping that someone uses it I would encourage people to get um the users involved early whether that be talking to your local state water quality managers or local nonprofits or even environmental education groups if you have modules you're producing for instance get people involved in what you're doing and excited about it excellent yeah that's on uh in this uh fscore project that's studying Hawaii groundwater that's one of the things that pushing on now is being sure that every project has can identify what is it going to give back to the community what is that concrete product or process or information that they are going to contribute so you can talk to the community's value of it excellent and um then I'll tell you what I've got I've got my my question I often asked at the end of the end of the shows here as we're coming to the end real quickly it has nothing to do with science great no problem like what you said about gotta be have a life too right if you could have the super power of flying or being invisible which would you choose and why oh man I think I would pick flying because first of all it would be carbon neutral maybe depending on how many how much to be able to do it um yeah and there's just so much of the world I've been lucky to explore so much of the world for my science and there's so much more that I'd love to explore and flying would be a fun way to do that cool I agree I was feeling very guilty coming here to Hawaii because of the carbon emissions on the airplane and I probably travel once a month for work or pleasure my husband and I love to travel to different countries so just being able to get there while seeing everything along the way would be an awesome win-win yeah excellent well thank you both Whitney Aaron so much it's been great having you here and thank you another great episode of likable science this one live from eco days I'm your host Ethan Allen and we hope you'll join us for our next episode