 gorgeous alpine mountains I will never be bored in California like I kind of was in Detroit sorry Detroit and so I moved and California became home now California has always been pretty awesome it used to be crazy weird awesome with these mammoth-y things and saber-tooth things and giant wolf-y things and nature kind of took them away semi-naturally but we also had a lot of animals that we had here that we came in and took them away pretty unnaturally and that's things like wolves and jaguars there used to be jaguars in California and grizzly bears and and all kinds of amazing things and we love the grizzly bear so much we put it on our flag but by 1922 we shot our last grizzly bear so the project that we are working on at the Oakland Zoo is a project to really honor animals that we had here we have here and that it's still not too late to do something about and that's what California trail is I've been at the zoo 17 years what scary but that's scary but this project's been being in in the works for about 30 years and the idea has been spinning for a long long long time and the idea was to work with experts so these are wolf experts helping us make the wolf habitat and for it to be super big and expansive with lots of places for animals a smaller amount of space for people I was at all the design meetings where the animal people and the people people were fighting it out for space the animal people one so this is huge spaces for the animals and the people can kind of walk up there and sort of stay out of the way which is the way we like it and it was really really cool to get to see something go from design to reality in just 25 short years but there it was and and I was even shocked in my office is at the bottom of all that that it actually happens and it's really freaking cool so if you haven't come there you're gonna start on a gondola and the gondolas all clear and goes like way the frick up into the sky and some people on that gondola ride laugh and smile and say wow and I've seen two three four five panic attacks so see how you respond it's really fun in the wind but when you get up there you're gonna meet these amazing animals you're gonna meet this particular California condor you're gonna meet this particular beautiful jaguar and if you're lucky you're gonna meet some of these people these are my favorite animals a California trail these are the conservationists that we work with so for every single one of our animals we have a conservation partner who's doing something awesome in California or out in the field to help Oakland Zoo steps up and helps them and the big idea is the public is also gonna do something that that means action for that animal before we even opened our doors so we're still building and designing and putting in signage and we're not ready we get a call about her felt this is a little caloma she was a tiny baby Puma she was found at the side of the road starving maggots flea she had a total awi and the question was can we take her can we take her and heal her and we're like yeah so we took her and we found out that most likely her mom got hit by a car so over a hundred mountain lions a year get hit by cars in California we need to drive more carefully and their babies get abandoned and when a baby mountain lion is abandoned orphaned they can't just go out in the wild and do their best they need mom to teach them up for two straight years so they need to know how to hunt a rabbit and then maybe a coyote and then eventually a deer and people cannot figure out how to do that to teach a mountain lion how to kill a deer try that so we took her and you know second best thing she'll have a home with us many many baby mountain lions get put down because there's no home we were just taking care of her and then we got him and him so this is Toro and Silverado likely the same thing one found by the road again another one most likely the mother got depredated meaning that mom probably killed somebody's poodle or their sheep or whatever pet they were taking care of and that means in California it's legal to get a permit and say I'm pissed off it was probably that mountain lion kill it and they do that sucks so now we have three baby orphans and we're not even open yet and they're in our vet hospital and our hope is that they bond together and then they're gonna like their huge habitat and be happy as happy as you can possibly be and that happened so they did start to love each other and the boss of the group is that tiny little Coloma girl and she bosses the others around and it's great and what I love is when people go by the mountain lion enclosure they often look in there and they're really pissed there's no animals in there you know where's the mountain lion why isn't it standing right there you know giving me kisses and I love it because there's three mountain lions in that tree I can see them can you see a tail hanging right over there down at oak tree so there are three mountain lions laying there there's little ears and little tails there and they're watching the people and I love that because it's showing you that most likely when you've gone hiking and you're hanging out eating your cliff bar under a tree or checking your messages maybe a mountain lions watching you they're out there and they're not out there to bother you so we do share a habitat with them and I love that this kind of gives them that message now again we're not just taking care of mountain lions we're not just helping mountain lions in the wild but we're gonna make you help mountain lions in the wild when you come one of the things we do is teach you how to properly secure your stuffed animals so they don't get beat up by mountain lion but we do want to show that you secure animals in a certain way so that mountain lion doesn't eat your animal and that you don't ask that mountain lion to be depredated depredated we're also trying to work with a group to teach people all about mountain lions in California we also want to thank wildlife wardens who are out there doing the super hard work to deal with a human wildlife conflict so we do in the Bay Area get a call that a mountain lion a big one is in someone's garage or backyard or roaming around and who do we call we call the Department of Fish and Wildlife and they come out with their dark guns and their hazing material and their number one thing they want to do is get that mountain lion back into nature so we want to thank them for what they do and we'll have everybody else thank them too this is a really weird sign where the warden has no legs yet it says I stand with wildlife officers so you know it's our first try um what is really I can't believe more people don't think it's funny too yeah I think it's hilarious but another thing we do is we also go on that call so when there's a mountain lion cruising around and comes in contact with a person and the police are called then the wardens are called I will get a text and I text my team because Oakland Zoo can also go out with our dark guns and our hazing material and try to help and a while back I got to help in the wild and it freaked me out and I was like having an out-of-body experience during the whole thing and I took like the scariest selfie in the whole world there I am I just help capture that mountain lion I don't know really how and there I am with my warden friend kind of freaking out but we did it and he was released into the wild okay we are still not open yet but we got another call there's a family of black bears in black bear world where mom where they all got in trouble how did they all get in trouble somebody left their doggy door open or their back door open and had a whole picnic in their house and oh my god a bear came in bear who lives there came in with her baby and ate all their food and this mom bear kept doing that because it was so awesome and everything was so yummy and so easy to get and why would I bother picking a berry when I can go to the fridge and she was teaching her babies how to do that and as she was trying to leave the house the lady who lived there got scratched or pushed or I don't know they both tell different stories but she reported it and that means mom's got to be killed so our call was can you take these three babies and so we said yes they were like reddish blackish and whitish it was crazy three little boys but we have a great relationship with the apartment efficient wildlife they're our buddies and we begged we begged look at little Pismo he wants his mom I know and because they love us and we love them they said after a good swim you can have mom so we got to take the whole family and I know and we had a promise we're gonna help teach people to not endanger black bears by taking care of your stuff when you're skiing when you're hiking if you live in that area you are making sure your campsites clean you're making sure you pick up your garbage and you lock your car and you lock your tent up and all that and we promised we do that we have a partner called the bear league and they help us do that in Tahoe and they're fantastic mom love she's a really good mama she's taught her babies who are pretty big now how to climb a tree and she loves to go to the very top of the tree and we don't know how she does it I call her like she's bear goddess and she looks really happy when she does bear goddess and it's totally weird but she does it all the time now when we feed her a natural diet so it's not like you get your bear food every day you get your bear food every day we feed her like she's eating the wild so when we got her she was blonde and thinner and she had like flowers and grasses and clovers and things like that and she had blonde hair and the blonde hair was natural and it helps reflect the sun so she stayed cool and thin now that it's bulk up time she eats everything she's eating bugs she's eating salmon she's eating nuts her fur turned dark so that is her like six months later and she's about to go into her dormant phase where she'll not hibernate but sort of chill out and she won't eat for three months and we're not gonna feed her and that's just the way they're happy bears finally we opened and those guys went into their enclosures and we got this call this is a set of grizzly bears from Alaska brothers and the call was that mom bear brought her baby bears into Anchorage to see what's up and that is automatic death for mom so in Alaska with a grizzly bear a brown bear they figure it's so dangerous and there has been incidences that unfortunately even though they're drawn in with junk piles and garbage and trash bins it is automatic depredation for mom they do not there's no way around it so this to this set came to us and oh actually don't know how to play the video thank you over there that's good Rick okay I'll do it I got it okay that is our training so second to work yes so with every animal we train them we never go in with them we don't have a we're the boss of you relationship we have a mutual respectful relationship meaning we're always on the outside of the bars and we're doing a reward relationship and this way the zookeepers can check their ears can check their mouth can check their paws make sure they're in good health and without being invasive so they train these grizzly bears they are now 175 pounds really quickly they went to 450 pounds yeah and in about a year or so they're gonna be 1200 pounds so they're gonna be I don't even know what's gonna happen we're gonna wait and see so they have a giant enclosure huge one in the middle of the in the middle of the exhibit they love to swim these are two sets of brothers without mama with them so they don't have that mom like the black bears just teaching them how to be good bears and they are constantly wrestling and chasing each other and kind of beating each other up which is really fun to watch I like watching this where there's tiny toddlers really close kind of freaks me out and very exciting okay this is sequoia sequoia is a baby gray wolf so an exciting thing is that as we're opening California trail gray wolves that also were extirpated I think the last one was killed in the 20s as well are naturally coming back to California so thanks awesome timing so they are coming over the borders from Oregon and looking for a place to live and it's amazing that we have them during that time this sequoia beautiful boy is not from the wild he's from the California Wolf Center another one of our partners and he came from captivity so we also feed our wolf by the way his enclosure is gigantic and often people can't see our wolves at all and we like it that way come back another time you know we let them have their privacy we feed him naturally to so wolves don't eat every day they eat sometimes and they don't eat sometimes so two or three days a week we give them a pile of like real dead food like a real deer real rabbit and in the wild all the wolves would gather around to eat together and how they eat would determine their pecking order and that's gonna be really important to let them do that when we have more wolves so speaking of more wolves who's on a date tonight okay nice so this is his girlfriend her name is Siskyu and they are making a bonded pair she is bringing he is bringing her food she is leading him around and we're hoping by about Valentine's Day they have pups and it looks like it might or they're gonna make pups it looks like it might happen in the wild this is a baby in the wild this is actually our 7th baby and this is how we protect them this is a range steward and a range steward runs around in wolf country and ensures that the kettles are acting like real cattle and and ensuring that they are not being prey by wandering around and they also okay the different relationships between conservationists and the ranchers and the ranchers is who you have to have a good relationship with our public helps by being part of a roundup for wolves so when you go to the gift shop you're gonna round up what you bought and it goes to these range stewards so we support a whole range steward that was Brie and then we're gonna thank them for doing that hard work of being rangers who are ranchers who don't kill wolves and work in harmony with wolves and they got 600 postcards from us and it really made a difference for them we're gonna go quickly with this last animal this is a pile of bones you don't know what kind of Pala bones it is you can look for two and a half seconds yeah it's bison so we did a number on bison when we came into the west here we are into the plains we're gonna kill most of the bison for whatever crazy reasons we have and we're gonna take them away from the Native American people who really felt a sense of spiritual spirituality and connection but what we decided to do with a bunch of other organizations is go find the small heritage group of bison along that original bloodline in Canada we're gonna caravan them back to Montana and we did that two years ago it was ridiculously awesome it was met with all kinds of ceremony and then just last year we brought 14 of the girls to Oakland Zoo and before we did that local Native Americans blessed the land they blessed me apparently I needed blessing to and we had huge ceremonies and we actually did a whole ceremony that the Montana Black Feet Nation people were given the Oakland Bay Area Native American people the spirituality of our bison to withhold and that was cool and then weirdly enough our 14 females all had babies yeah our 14 females all had babies so they were all knocked up we didn't know but it was exciting and what is gonna happen is we are going to start releasing those bison back into Montana every year when they're old enough keep that bloodline filling up I'm on in Montana so we have an amazing relationship with the Native American people in the Bay Area they call us all the time to sing to the bison to pray with the bison and do ceremony and it's a ridiculous blessing to be part of it so I'm gonna wrap this up and say when you come to California Trail we're gonna hope you appreciate not just the animals you see but all the animals around you take part in community discussions which we have all the time so you can really hear what's going on to be inspired inspired about sustainability to make sure you understand that things you put in the drain go out into the sea and funny there's a comment about spiders because that is my sign in our interpretive center influencing you to please don't kill spiders to understand how to live with wildlife and use social media and I'm gonna end by saying just about a month ago we got two more mountain lions also needing homes also needing to be healed and we're holding them right now until they're all better hoping they find a California home and here's some things you can read quickly to influence you to do to be your own California wildlife hero those things you guys promise to do these things all right and I'll end by saying our two little Puma is totally bonded and I and we did find them a nice home together so I want to celebrate our California home and just be thankful we believe here come see us at the zoo I'm holding on for questions I'll take some questions if you have them thank you yeah I think what you're doing is very cool and very different than what I think about what I think about a traditional zoo animals being kind of the small cage it's much more reminiscent of like the wild animal park in San Diego and you know what do you think is kind of necessary for other zoos to adopt a similar policy and kind of take this more conservation based approach yeah thank you yeah our zoo it this especially California trail is a sanctuary so all the enclosures are bigger than a lot of sanctuaries and about two-thirds of our animals are rescues of one kind or another and we don't talk about that enough but the good news is this is all zoos are talking about now like we just had the last conference every our marketing department our accounting department came back saying conservation conservation conservation and I think it's happening thank God because I'm a lot more proud these days to work at good question yes yes so one of the big things we're working on is trying to get mountain lion overpasses especially for mountain lions in the Santa Cruz mountains I know one is just opening in LA there was a big opening so I think they're they're happening and that is the way to go yeah pardon what is it oh my god you have to go Google highway overpasses they're incredible that means so many animals are getting hit you know as they try to migrate over highways they need that biodiversity to get to their mates if they're gonna have a healthy population so people are building overpasses not for cars that just like a forest going over the highway and they're phenomenal so one more hey me hi just curious to know are you gonna be doing similar programs to the bison in terms of reintroducing possibly wolves or other we reintroduce mountain yellow legged frogs mm-hmm which is amazing we cure them of Kittred virus and then release them it's super amazing work we release Western pond turtles we release Puerto Rican crusted frogs but bison is our our biggest release yeah we hope to do more one more one more no nobody eats live anything cuz we think of oh do the predators eat live things so we get why that would you know be a nice thing for them maybe but no it's actually dangerous for them they could get hurts we don't want suffering so no they don't get things that are live I know for the alligators not these guys we put like a dead chicken on a stick and kind of make it do things which is really kind of fun to watch but no nobody gets fed live on that note thank you all right thank you Amy isn't she awesome it's pretty amazing work right support your zoo after this we're going to do your gut bacteria and electricity and then finish up with Satanism and activism in the meantime we're going to take just a quick break hit the bar enjoy lumpia company the Oakland zoo alright a little disconcerting in the meantime let's see if we can get this to so I went a little too far but to the back to the beginning it's slower than I am all right electricity energy we kind of all get that you flip on the light switch usually it works most of us went through school in a way that made us learn the calculations at some point there's a whole variety of how to do it most of us know what the stomach is or basically where we've been filling it up continue to fill it back up in with lumpia company back there had not thought about combining the two though stomach reaches the esophagus everything's all connected hadn't thought about electricity because what I'm starting to picture is a little bit more like this or even better this is what I'm going for so to represent this to teach us all how to get abs of steel that glow apparently welcome Sam light so does this sound everybody hear me okay great so I'm afraid I don't have any pictures of cute animals in this talk but I think these microbes are pretty adorable so hopefully agree with me so I want to just start off by Tony why microbes or bacteria are in interesting subject matter so they're ubiquitous they live in pretty much every nook and cranny on the entire earth there's an incredible number of these small microorganisms so in a single teaspoon of soil there's a billion microbial cells they literally created the habitable world so about 2.3 billion years ago before that there was no oxygen in our atmosphere but that's when these cyanobacteria came into existence started producing oxygen and resulted in the oxygenation of the atmosphere which allowed oxygen breathers like ourselves to come into existence we often hear about microbes that cause disease cause problems but more and more we're learning about how they can they can benefit us and how they can promote human health there are approximately as many microbial cells in our bodies as our own cells and these are mostly in the gut and we're learning more and more about the different ways in which they promote health prevent obesity prevent diabetes seizures almost everything imaginable and then they also have a lot of neat industrial application so we use them to make a number of different materials and we use them for food fermentation and so this might be a throwback to the high school biology but I want to review how bacteria and other cells make energy and so there's two basic processes and this first process fermentation which I assume you're all familiar with consists of the partial oxidation of a fermentable carbon source like a simple carbohydrate to a fermentation product like ethanol or lactate or acetic acid and in this process ATP which is the cellular energy currency is generated and there's the second process for generating energy called respiration and respiration can use either a fermentable carbon source like this or a non fermentable carbon source like the fermentation products made through the process above and respiration results in the complete oxidation of the carbon source the carbon dioxide but what's different about it than fermentation is that it requires an exogenous electron acceptor and so we typically think about this as being oxygen and multicellular organisms like ourselves exclusively use oxygen for this purpose but microorganisms live in environmental niches where oxygen isn't around and they've evolved the capacity to use a number of alternatives to oxygen including nitrate as well as virtually every other one that you can imagine