 the more we have what they established in Chesapeake Bay is that when they had a larger areas created as a centuries, centuries that you cannot harvest them because when you harvest oysters when that you know two or three years old you are not giving them enough time to reproduce and live 15, 20 and some species 80 years old I think I have one image that shows how big oysters can be and this is this is very close to in in in Massachusetts in the slide number five you can see the size of the man's hand and the size of the oysters that for five years old everybody thank you so much for joining us at this discussion of biomimicry restoration healthy oysters for healthy coasts oceans and climate I would like to introduce to you Jim Loree and Anna Maria Frankech Anna Maria has spoken at a couple of biodiversity for livable climates conferences she is the founding director of the green harvest project and the biomimicry living labs a professor at the University of Zadar and an adjunct professor at the University of Split in Croatia she is a biomimicry fulbright and sea grant now's fellow in 2014 she co-founded biomimicry new england her interdisciplinary work is grounded in biology ecology limnology and marine science so suffice it to say that she has a lot of experience in what she's talking about and has done some wonderful restorations projects in 2009 she initiated the green harvest project with the vision that any urban harbour can become green and sustainable if managed within environmental limitations and natural resiliency she developed and teaches introduction to biomimetry coasts and communities coastal system management and h2o a life story of water while at UMass Boston she launched the adopt a student for a green job program that provides employment for most of her undergraduate and graduate students during the educational process which as we know is an invaluable opportunity for young people as they go through their go through their educational lives and Jim Laurie is biodiversity for a livable climates staff scientist he has been working on eco restoration projects for decades and teaches young people in who are who are homeschooled as well as running two classes so far this year at bio for climate on eco restoration and biodiversity and he's going to be teaching a class this I guess it's a winter class starting at the end of January on water in its its variable and various approaches to as probably the most essential process that we're dealing with um in addressing climate and survival of survival of ecosystems and human society so at this point I will turn it over uh oh excuse me at this point we're going to watch a short introduction to one of Anna's videos called deep water and then Jim and Anna will take it away we lost that close contact with nature in a sense that we are part of that nature oyster species were abundant for millions of years in every single ocean and surrounding coast of every continent as the continents were changing we believe that we lost more than 90 percent of oyster reefs globally and that also includes island and this weekly county and shoreline and in the temperate latitudes our oyster reefs are the equivalent of coral reefs so just imagine if somebody tells you tomorrow oh my gosh we lost 90 percent of coral reefs the whole world would be on its feet and they would just start to figure out what to do now we know so much about coral reefs because we had underwater photography but we've nothing like that for oyster reefs so we're shooting in disaster we don't know what was here we always this humans think we are above other species we're smarter that we know better but nature only solved all the problems oysters in the sea are what we call ecosystem engineers and they're very important our keystone species in that habitat we're starting to realize that now this generation have actually realized where the problem is whereas my generation we will just fed the consumer message make more money use up more resources buy more cars it's appalling that we all do this it's changing but will it be on time how can we work together to bring natural systems back to its health we have to get real about this thing and oyster reef restoration is a good start yes this is great it's great to be part of bio for climate again thank you for inviting me and this intro of this brief two minute intro is an interesting documentary of the project that we started two years ago in island and it's the native oyster reef restoration island and we had a student who was a master student in documentaries and she joined us and made a beautiful documentary so I would encourage everybody to see the whole thing so thank you uh yeah quite impressive I um I really am interested in this idea that if we've lost 90% of the of the oysters uh what what do you see long term if we were to get really good at restoration what what what can you see decades down the road well I think a lot of work has been done globally and I have to say that United States and in Chesapeake Bay was a leader in in understanding oyster ecology and restoration although what we are now working in Europe it's a different species and each continent in each area has a different species of oysters and they behave different so and they are also under different type of stress so we have to be very cautious and knowledgeable about um not just passionate about this restoration so as I worked on the phd in marine science in the Chesapeake Bay at Virginia Institute of Marine Science in 90s that's where oysters were totally getting depleted and degraded from cumulative impact and we start realizing that it's just causing more damage to the whole ecosystem of the Chesapeake Bay because the water quality was starting to be unhealthy for any other species to live in so management often of certain species that are commercially viable is very hard because for oysters there were still commercially harvested and that's one of the reasons why we don't have them in our coastal waters and estuaries because we over harvested them and at the same time we were polluting our estuaries and coastal systems in the last couple hundred years and that was cumulative impact of pollution to oysters to not have a healthy habitat to live and now you know very often when we do try to restore certain species with oysters they're almost at the brink we have lost 95 percent of oyster population in europe austria edelis and globally it's around 85 percent but each state in each country are trying to do their best in restoring this keystone species because if we go and maybe look at the powerpoint presentation that i sent on the slide number four you can see how important and the benefits provided by oysters as a keystone species and very often what i learned working with my students and working with outreach and education when i came to united to i'm sorry to umas boston i realized that people don't really know that oysters are not living in their native habitat and they're not creating oyster reefs that they're aquacultured so we started a very passionate initiative with my students we created a green harbor project trying not only to bring oysters back but also collaborated with the people who were working in the watersheds because we started to understand more and more so that you cannot just restore one species without understanding the link with other systems that they used to live in like salt marshes and other shellfish and mollusk species of the mud flats and also eelgrass beds so those systems are crucial to systems in new england salt marshes oyster beds and shellfish beds and eelgrass beds so we were basically working in a more holistic approach and then a bit biomimicry explaining that learning from nature because we always ask how would oyster restore itself how can we learn from what's left there in nature and restore this habitat and this essential species not only globally basically but starting locally i had i've had many years i've taught home schoolers and they give presentations at our bio for climate conferences and one of the things we learned we found out about areas in the Gulf of Maine that were not being dredged anymore not being trawled and we saw kelp forests come back within you know in 20 years we had really deep kelp forests and then we had on the bottoms we had horse muscles and every kind of muscles you could think of just attached to the the rock you know Maine has a lot of rocky coast and and and it reminded me of Rachel Carson when she spoke of the fact that there's so many larvae and and tiny copepods and things like that that this the Gulf of Maine would just draw fish like crazy and into these kelp forests and and seagrass beds and so forth and i'm kind of curious as you know now in a lot of those areas because we're trawling so many places we we just don't have that same kind of uh life life base so well that's you know something that my students realize when we were working on coasts and communities um part of the history of our place when we try to understand how this place used to look like 100 years ago 200 3 4 all the way to maybe and to imagine how this nature in our estuary is our harbors used to look like and what do we need to do to bring not i mean we can't bring it all back but we can at least bring back the more resilient and healthy systems in our harbors and that was the whole initiative with a green harbour project that we started and slide three will show you that uh uh we were so good in understanding and identifying and monitoring that uh every single estuary and coastal system is degraded and my professor at then's Bob Diaz actually established this initiative was the key person in research of the health of the estuaries and this dead fish so the students said like you know it's really depressing and and so unhappy to constantly learn about the problems so we said like okay so what are we gonna do so we said like okay let's just try to from the dead fish create a happy fish and the live fish and what would fish like to be in what type of the environment so that's when we started understanding how everything is linked and students from kindergarten's all the way to my phd students are understanding if you want to improve the conditions in one little bay we have to understand everything on the land on the in that watershed in uh human activities that are happening there and also the link to the coastal systems and the ocean so everything is communicating and in order to restore we cannot just focus on one thing and that's why you know the work in Chesapeake Bay now is showing that we need a larger areas for restoration I think one of the question was asking what are the man made oyster habitat restorations and the largest are actually at the in the Chesapeake Bay Harris River in my knowledge is one of the most successful one with 350 acres of restored um a restored population of oysters which is a huge success I mean a billion oysters and we have also a billion oyster project in New York a lot of the initiatives are happening along the United States coast and we learned a lot from that and we are now um repeating the same in in Europe with native oyster restoration alliance that I'm also part of and the project that I'm working on in island native oyster reef restoration island that you saw the short documentary is also part of this large initiative for bringing austra austra edulis back in our coastal waters and in the waters wow um New York City used to have huge oyster oyster beds it was called the big oyster everybody had oysters for breakfast and I wonder do you have any sense of how deep how deep were these oyster reefs how big did they get well they're depending on the areas and how far from the coast we are finding some data that oyster reefs could be up to six and seven meters and I'm talking about different type of information and of course that it all depending on geology and the shoreline shape and the depth and bathymetry and how the oyster reefs were not degraded by harvesting because not only harvest and fishing of oysters were degrading them but also collecting the couch and their shells for other purposes of building there are you know so many books written and this movie of Emily Driscoll shell shocked is a great documentary that I often show to my students to understand how in a very short period of time one estuary can be degraded to the level that there are no oysters left and the water is totally polluted and all the other species are gone as well because they all depend on each other and communicating for resilient and healthy system and this is something that the whole community initiated and and fought even against a lot of I have to say silly policies and regulations that we today need almost 100 permits in order to restore something and then we don't need a permit to destroy it and that's what we need to change we need to start working with our with our conscience and the justice for right to have a healthy environment to be able to not only swim and enjoy clean water but also eat from that clean water and not be afraid and this is where you know today and I think the 21st century is going to bring more solutions because we in in this process of not only learning about oysters and about nature and the systems that they live in we are also trying to learn from them and that's that shift that biomimicry taught me to and in biology I always was taught to learn about certain species and dissect them to the level to understand everything not only the anatomy and physiology but also the ecology of it where they lived and now we are shifting the questions and learning from those species and those systems so that we can together work on restoration and that's that's the biomimicry approach in restoring systems together because we just cannot compete like we used to are we going to restore ill grass beds or salt marshes or oyster raves I think we need to start restoring them together I used to work in the chemical industry and we had terrible wastewater problems and we had every kind of pollutants you could imagine and my mentor in that Gary was a guy named John Todd from Cape Cod who used to be at the New Alchemy Institute and was kind of a visionary and his approach was to add everything that he could think of to a wastewater stream and think of it more as a nutrient stream and so I was always trying to figure out the formula and he would just say no no just throw it all in there and it'll self organize and when you think about what rivers used to be he taught me that number one freshwater mussels and clams depend on fish moving upstream the look the young the young larvae of the the freshwater mussels have to attach to fish in their gills and then they filter feed all the way up the upstream and so we used to have rivers that were full of freshwater mussels but then in Massachusetts we dam 3000 rivers and now we're starting to break those rivers down and we're finding the fish can come back that a lot of the sea trout and so forth there are coming back to these rivers and so kind of my hope is that people start saying we need freshwater mussels you know to help filter the water we need to exactly and so that's kind of this holistic approach like you're saying exactly and if you can just show quickly on a slide nine where we are trying to just very visually and simply explain the biomimicry approach in restoring coastal species and this is where we often don't have this integrated approach showing the interactions between land and the sea and when I see some of the questions regarding what killed 90% of the oysters or what is happening with all the other pollution so this is where we have to say that cumulative impacts of 350 years of activities of over harvesting and destroying the reefs and at the same time we were taking everything that was good and healthy from the estuaries where we mainly established our cities and our habitats humans love estuaries every single town and city when you look globally is in a estuary small or large and we destroyed salt marshes we destroyed mud flats with shellfish beds and eelgrass beds and of course then we are surprised that we have so many nutrients and we have a murky waters and a very low quality of the water when we don't have creatures that are going to improve that quality so we need to stop thinking different and that the machines and technology are not going to filter and clean the system in the way how nature does it and that's why this approach of chicken or egg because in Boston Harbor we could never get the permit to restore oysters because it's a very degraded polluted water body and that's some of the answers of your questions that I can see here is yes they filter feed they filter 50 gallons of water one adult oyster and per day so you can just imagine when you had billions of oysters in a certain harbor how important they were to create healthy environment for other species so they also accumulate everything that is good or bad in that water body so that's why we cannot get the permit to restore something that maybe humans will eat or consume and get sick so it's again you know you can't improve the water quality if you don't bring oysters back but you can't place them in a dirty water because it can maybe hurt and get into the food chain so it's a it's a very tricky policies and regulations when we have to start educating people and maybe how we did it in 7 Hill Cove in Boston Harbor where we did restore oyster habitat by just placing oysters together and they start spawning because you know when they feel safe and there are enough of them they start spawning and they start creating a nice little healthy bed but again it's not in a clean water so it's also dangerous so we were trying to work with the local communities and constantly my students were educating from you know from schools K to 12 and also going to those monthly meetings with the with the community meetings that they were educating them not to harvest any oysters because that that that's a very dirty environment and it can be very dangerous so if anybody has good answers to that how can we restore oysters in Mystic River or in the areas that we used to have oysters and feed whole Boston that Massachusetts oyster project is working on is amazing and beautiful so we need to support activities like that and educate ourselves that not everything is for consumption we should definitely think about other ecological services that provide Mary Beth Larbeckis lives up in she lives up near the San Quarry River in Wisconsin and near Minnesota and she's she's actually working with interfaith groups to try to help ocean recovery and she's very much inland it's quite interesting but she's interesting and how do we get volunteer groups and faith communities involved in these kind of restoration projects is that something that you thought about or I'm sorry at the same time I'm listening to you and trying to see all these questions there are so many questions that probably try to type the answers later if they don't mind because some of them are very lengthy and a detail and I would like to communicate maybe we should start creating a blog and communicate through bio for climate even after this this conversation because I'm having trouble keeping track of two things and I just think you know regarding the restoration that we often take a big chunk of thinking how we need a very big project but sometimes like how they learned in Chesapeake Bay you start in a certain little areas but in those areas you try to listen to that nature to that cove and not always monitoring and research science can guide you and give you the recipe how to really do it so very often people ask me well you were successful and you were successful in well-fleet which is a totally different and very unique environment or when we try to do it on an untucket island that there is a great project going on there and in parts of different parts of massachusetts and often the areas that people are trying to restore oysters are in a degraded water quality so we cannot do it there and then what do you do how do you ship that and you know exactly that the water quality is not going to improve if you don't start bringing filter feeders because very often we are talking about the nutrient loads in certain areas and we did it in a Cape Cod that now the initiative of bringing oyster restoration is the key for improving nutrient conditions, nutrient loads in a lot of coves and in vehemence and this is something that can be done either creating a sanctuary so that oysters are not going to be harvested and in we did have that approach in well-fleet but we also said that after a few years we will have enough and the high population that it will be also able to harvest it and you'll create a hotspots where from where larvae can actually be transmitted with the current and by their swimming to other areas and settle so it's to me very important to create this caring capacity and certain number of oysters as a healthy population and I can't give you that number because every cove and every environmental conditions are different so everybody say like how many do I need well we don't know but we just do know that the more we have what they established in Chesapeake Bay is that when they had a larger areas created as a centuries, centuries that you cannot harvest them because when you harvest oysters when that you know two or three years old you are not giving them enough time to reproduce and live 15, 20 and some species 80 years old I think I have one image that shows how big oysters can be and this is this is very close to in in Massachusetts in the slide number five you can see the size of the man's hand and the size of the oysters that for five years old five to six years old if you don't if they're happy they can grow and they can reproduce so this is what we also need to establish is the healthy population of all the oysters that can start creating an offspring that are resistant to diseases because that's another problem that a lot of restoration is not successful because of predation and because of diseases that are in the water. I'm thinking when you were saying that I'm thinking of two things one is upstream and how do we how do we make the water coming out of the rivers you know healthier water and and I think if uh if the people watching if if they would start thinking about if you see brown water coming down if you see mud in the rivers that's not healthy that's not normal that's not what we're looking for it's to run clear and I think also there you made this comment about how big the the mussels can get and how old they can get um and oysters yes and there was a there was a group up in northern Pennsylvania on the on the headwaters of the Susquehanna River that had a park that had oysters and they were all over 60 years old because they had dammed they had dammed the rivers and the fish couldn't get upstream and they there were there were no young ones every the young ones are getting washed down stream into the ocean you know and these freshwater mussels die when they get to the ocean so that's that's one thing I thought about and the other thing I thought about is that New England we used to have 200 years ago we used to have uh tens of square miles of menhaden uh schools there'd be schools that were tens of square miles in size and they would bring all the other fish with them all the fish that we really wanted and this is the famous squanto fertilizer fish you know the squanto taught the pilgrims how to fertilize their corn and so forth and that used to be the the basis of the whole food web and they also were incredibly filtered incredibly good filter feeders so so it's just uh daddy how oysters will come back I think if we can make clean water happen well they are coming back I mean even when I just walk along the shorelines when I'm in United States from the squantum to in Quincy and in the area where the low tide I can see them they're they are attached to to a rocky shoreline and I'm very happy every time I just like you know it's a it's funny when you know whenever we see oysters I mean first students and kids that I I work a lot with volunteering uh in K to 12 and kindergarten and different environments bringing kids to this living lab because this is where you learn getting dirty and and and touching those creatures and sharing the love and passion with them and and care so some of them didn't know anything about biology but they said like well we are artists can we sing to them and they start singing to them so that was beautiful they make music and and and storytelling and singing beautiful songs for them and the students uh just love doing that this is just the slide from my graduate students having fun because it's hot and muddy and they're counting and trying to do some research and science work approving that what oysters like what they don't like our project in well fleet um um I think the next slide can is that shows how it before and after image we actually improved the nutrient nutrient conditions just in two years by bringing around uh almost like uh six million oysters so they're um I don't know I love showing it what we did just in two years and how nature is resilient and uh just putting culture and people in local community and all hardworking uh was just amazing to show uh how they just need a little bit of triggering where to settle and because we didn't have to bring them because well fleet has a lot of aquaculture and still little beds of native oysters so I mean native there are those are um Chesapeake Bay, Casosta, Virginia oysters and that they were brought a long time ago from from Chesapeake Bay and they settled and they created those beds that are so visible at the low tide and at the same time we could prove that the water quality improved tremendously just in in two years and then when we had those big storms and they were covered with mud the water quality again declined so that's that's one of very important ecological services the other ones are that I see here the questions about um sea level rise acidification from some of my colleagues and also uh very good question here is from Russ Cohen that asks about what division of marine fisheries because I worked with them very closely when we were trying to restore soft shell clams at the mud flats in the Boston Harbor and even though it was a dirty water and you can just imagine what is in that mud uh after 350 years of dumping waste but we still had the uh depuration facility where those soft shell clams were and steamer clams were placed until they are clean why can't we do the same for oysters well we do we we had this oyster gardening efforts and initiatives not just in Chesapeake Bay when I was working there but also all along eastern coast and new england where people would have oyster gardens and then place them uh in ocean clean ocean themselves you just drag them in the open ocean water and after a couple days they're they're clean and I mean we can definitely have to consider the safety and the vision of marine fisheries would definitely has this this set of rules what type of coliforms and viruses now and what type but but they're still not measuring the heavy metals and um pops and other retardants and some other chemicals that are accumulating so we need to start thinking about improving and not dumping and now we are actually doing a big project in Europe I'm also working with students at the University of Zadar on microplastic in shellfish and uh how is that accumulating and what that impact is going to have on aquaculture and food safety because everything at the end ends up in a human body the um you wrote a handbook for oyster restoration well I it wasn't me it was the whole team of 40 scientists I mean and uh even more I mean this is how can people get a hold of this handbook that uh everything what we've done in the last couple years since I uh moved more time in Croatia and in Europe in the last several years we've been working through native oyster restoration alliance in Europe and the link is Nora Europe you will find every single publication there it's a amazing project and initiative that is spread all over Europe and globally because we are learning from experiences done in the United States in Australia Asia and the handbook just came out also for oyster restoration and also building on oyster restoration in the United States and also we have this paper that just came out on 40 research questions key questions that um I think more than 100 scientists worked on that and we just uh try to guide future research in order to help restore this essential species for our safety and our health I'm gonna I'm gonna get a copy for sure um I think we're we're about at the end of our conversation but I think Adam wants to ask some more questions so yeah I I hate to interrupt this fascinating conversation um and we have some people with some really good questions out there so um here's an interesting one how can oysters help with sea level rise and can they help with the acidification of the ocean that's a great question because when you think about if you can just imagine how oysters probably like 350 million year old species were adapting to changes of the coasts through millions of years with a sea level rise um ice age and everything that was changing chemical physical and biological so they adopted to that we have some really cool research done also by Tony Rodriguez in North Carolina that actually showed that uh we know that coral reefs grow couple centimeters per year but depending on on the area but um oysters can grow much faster they say even about 10 centimeters per year uh depend I mean depending on their reef and the population so if you think about that one square meter of native oyster reef had six six thousand oysters if you just stack them we have some amazing data that you know we will keep it here but there are a lot of initiatives that we tried to to do and and research that bringing back oyster reefs would also minimize the shoreline erosion and also as an engineers they would improve the conditions for other species to thrive and at the same time you know how can we learn from them to be more biodynamic and resilient um to to adapt to sea level rise and regarding the acidification you know when you think about I always try to you know um brainstorm with my students if you think how many oysters in their shells were present in our coastal waters and now we have a acidification problem cumulative problem with the old pollution degradation and climate change and oysters in such a low population and in our aquaculture activities cannot create their shells because of the um acidification and a small change in pH uh level uh in the oceans and the coastal waters it's it's absolutely necessary that we need to start bringing them back in in a huge numbers in billions in billions that's why the billion oyster project in New York was just so beautiful and it was great to work with them as well on Governor's Island and which I had a couple biomimicry workshops there with them as well and it's essential to start linking this these changes that are detrimental to other species and oysters could probably become a solution because they would they would bring solutions in a sense of connecting with other essential parts because we can't just see you know it's a whole forest I mean one example is that they restore the forest in Japan in order to restore oysters in the water that's how we have to start thinking we we've probably lost half the biomass on our planet and uh that's an awful lot of carbon that's in the air that used to be in the soils and used to be in the forests and and uh if we if we could reverse that CO2 number and get it back into living stuff that takes a lot of pressure off the oceans to try to take up the CO2 the acidity would start dropping in the oceans and to make easier for these these shellfish to to grow it's really hard on baby shellfish when they're trying to grow shells and in acidic waters so exactly there are also some questions I mean there are a lot of organization out there world oyster organization and world oyster society I'm also a member and we had the big Cape Cod conference world conference and world oyster society in 2016 I think it was so we are sharing the knowledge and we have the technology and it's not just the research projects and science projects it's an outreach and education and volunteering and sometimes when I'm in a library or in a marina and people ask me like what can we do I said like when you go to a restaurant and you eat your oysters don't leave the shelves although the a lot of organizations regulations and marine the vision of marine fisheries would not really appreciate what I'm saying but I think if I pay for my oysters I'm gonna take those shells whether whether them and then not put them maybe on my my whatever pavement but bring them back in the in the water because that's also what's missing in our waters because they're like tums they're a calcium carbonate we need to bring them back in the oceans so they will help to deacidify well you know what it needs to be a lot of them right of course you have that to have that uh proof well is would there be such a thing as local deacidification where there's a concentration of the calcium carbonate where at least in a particular area it would become less acidic it's a it's a great question and I think we can definitely do a research which we proposed for Gloucester actually in the Massachusetts we proposed creating a green harbor where we would do piers from green concrete or green cement and which would actually help minimize the issue of acidification and poor water quality because even with the lobsters which was a high you know commercial lobster fishery there they had to create special pools for them to save them from poor water quality and acidification locally so if we start building our shorelines not just like paving it with the Portland cement but also with this biomimetic approach of working with nature and building it from green cement or ecocrete or something that is more natural and also working on carbon sequestration in the same time we could create surfaces that are more suitable for oysters to be attached in other life and maybe and that was the idea of one of the projects to show that it could also improve the water quality including pH. Another interesting question do you see parallels here with efforts to improve soil health on the land through improved farming methods methods increased ground cover and no till farming and it feels like both are creating a reservoir for nutrients and a natural filter for toxins. Exactly totally the permaculture and the whole approach of bringing the microbiome of soil healthy and not just destroyed by all this artificial fertilizers and chemicals and pesticides and insecticides and just name it we just constantly create new ones if we could just like work with nature to create conditions conducive to life for all the species and because when we have a higher biodiversity we have a healthier system and that's exactly you know when Adam you and I spoke before it's what this pandemic is sometimes also attacking us when we are stressed and full with fear and we have a low vibration and energy and our frequency is low of course we are more susceptible to diseases and the spread of diseases and pandemic will be more prone when you are not in a healthy environment in a healthy social and natural environment so we have to start thinking and learning from nature in a way that they do communicate they're trying to communicate with us we are just not listening carefully and we just need to a little bit tune more to their frequencies and because healthy nature is healthy humans. So apropos of that there's been a growth of study and information about intraspecies communication and interspecies like mycelial networks and trees and and how there's all this cooperation among various species and and we even talk about cultures in in cows for example Fred Prevenza has done a lot of work in that. What do we know about communication among oysters? That's a great question thank you for for asking that. Well I'll just show maybe 18 a slide which is an intro to our introduction to our new research project here in in Europe it's number 18 and because we we now know that in different environments by frequencies measuring frequencies and you know energy that we can't hear but it's there and every single creature in the in not just on land but in water is communicating and we can measure that so what what I'm learning from some of the scientists is that you know when you can measure and how high the biological diversity is in certain area so they could actually measure I would say like happy coral reef and non-happy coral reef depending on their frequencies that they capture from different species and the high diversity of those frequencies show very often the different different species and how they actually communicate so one of the biggest problem that we have now not only in the United States but in Europe is the parasite bonamia and that causes the death to all the natives native species but we often cannot know if the oyster is damaged or not so we will open them and destroy and we kill a lot of oysters in order to understand their conditions so we are trying to now which also is one of the part of those 40 research questions to identify technologies that are non-invasive that we can detect by measuring frequencies because we now know actually the frequency of this parasite so we can actually measure how healthy oysters are to make it simple because we could measure the health conditions of different species and I think that's where the future should be in our way of communicating not only with nature but also with other human beings we don't need to dig to find out if we if we have certain diseases or not that's my optimistic view and I'm not an expert in that but it's just the gut feelings that I have that's all intuition we we have time for Jim did you want to say something I just said I'm just thinking about how much energy we put to try to turn everything into language and if we would listen to what nature's trying to you know I'm wondering if the indigenous folks can see a whole lot more than we can just because they they're paying attention oh my gosh Jim thank you for saying that because that's what we work there I mean Lisa Grieber was one of my best students graduate students and we worked with native people in Massachusetts we were just learning from them and becoming members of their societies and their tribes that most of them are not recognized but it's just then a beautiful storytelling and always when I had I would invite them to the classes and they would just share their stories of nature and how they communicate with nature to my students and in the beginning it was just like so where's the science here well now we can prove that not only the trees can communicate above the ground and below the ground that every single living creature communicates because nothing wrong I don't think I thought of when Adam when you were talking about the mycorrhizal networks plants seem to be a connection between the atmosphere and the mycorrhizae and most you know it's like we're trying to pump carbon down into the mycorrhizae as soon as possible because we want to build something in the soil that's that's healthy and if we have bare ground you know at any time I mean we want to have cover crops we want to have you know forests we want to have everything we want to have the ground covered so sunlight can't skin burn it you know it's like we were watching so many areas turn to desert and it's just really kind of a sad state so and that's that's that's where the acidity in the oceans comes from it's just too much carbon left in the sky and a lot of negative energy so let's not forget about that we have we have to ground ourselves we also need to to help bring positive energies and frequencies to so we're going to learn a lot in the next few decades I think yeah yeah but you know it can be an avalanche of happening when we all start moving forward and just even not just first let's just think positive and then when we start acting and not waiting for the permission to do sometimes good stuff that's another that's for another talk yes it is and I think we have time for one quick question and someone is asking if you have any experience with bio rock which is Tom Garo's development um reducing erosion do you have any thoughts on that well definitely uh it's a it's a great those are solutions biomimetic solutions that we definitely need to start using more so and I think somebody was asking me about um uh islands in Canada and using them there so I'm I'm not uh aware of how to use it in a certain area although those islands look to me like Nantucket island like like after after erosion and the storm but we need to start using a biomimetic materials and technologies to build our shoreline in a more healthy way so that that's one of the solutions that yeah just to explain very briefly bio rock it's um an approach by Tom Garo who's a bio geophysicist and in general uh pretty amazing scientist supposed to be tonight with us yeah who but he is in a place where there's little internet so um the the bio rock uses a very low voltage electricity to stimulate the the building of a coral reef on a steel rod skeleton which and he uses a generator that is driven by waves so it's it's not an ultimate cure because you have to keep pumping in the electricity but it does really give the coral reef a good a good start and it helps it survive some of the challenges that's exactly what we were talking about we were doing something similar I mean not me but the people for in New York to put some electricity to in order to attract oysters to settle down very similar so that's what we also suggesting let's just put some healthy frequencies in the area to bring life back okay well Anna Jim this was a great discussion and um thank you to to you and and many thanks to our audience for the great questions and please stay in touch contact our panelists and contact biodiversity for a livable climate and um come again to our life saves the planet series through GBH thank you very much Jim thank you yeah it was a lot of fun and thank you audience for great questions I hope I can answer them even after after this talk and conversation