Host: Nick Howe
Welcome back to the Nature Podcast. This week, how noise and light pollution are affecting birds…
Host: Benjamin Thompson
And the problem of organised crime in fisheries. I'm Benjamin Thompson.
Host: Nick Howe
And I'm Nick Howe.
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Interviewer: Nick Howe
For most of human history, we've been a relatively quiet species. But since the Industrial Revolution, we've been getting noisier and noisier and noisier. Not only that, but we've been getting brighter, not, sadly, in the intellectual sense, but we now fill the skies at night with light from our cities and cars. These are examples of sensory pollutants and for years, ecologists and conservationists have been concerned about what the effects of these pollutants might be on wildlife. After all, they can easily be drowned out.
Interviewee: Clinton Francis
So there's been growing knowledge about how noise and light are impacting birds.
Interviewer: Nick Howe
This is sensory ecologist Clint Francis. He researches the effects of these sensory pollutants on animals, particularly birds.
Interviewee: Clinton Francis
So, we can say that animals seem to change their behaviour in the presence of noise. For example, they might change how their song sounds, they may sing more loudly, or they may sing to otherwise avoid interference with noise. We've also seen that birds might change when they sing if there's a lot of light pollution in a particular area.
Interviewer: Nick Howe
Whilst it seems clear that there are effects of noise and light on birds, it's not quite clear what these effects actually mean for the birds.
Interviewee: Clinton Francis
One scientist might look at this and say, oh, well, these changes mean these animals are essentially coping or dealing with this noise through these strategies that make them successful at living in these environments. Another scientist might look at the same kind of responses, and say, oh, wait a minute, but those might have some downstream consequences that we just might not have measured. For example, if a bird is changing how it sounds in terms of its song, well, maybe that has implications for how well it's able to attract a female for mating and securing a territory for reproduction.
Interviewer: Nick Howe
So, this week in Nature, Clint and his collaborators have been looking at a measure that may give a more direct impression of the effect of noise and light on birds – reproductive success. If a bird is successful in producing a lot of offspring, it could indicate that things like noise and light are not having much of an effect, whilst if they produce few or no offspring, it's indicative of something going kind of awry. The challenge there, though, is going from a bird living in a noisy or bright environment to ultimately laying fewer eggs involves, well, a fair few steps. So, you need a lot of data.
Interviewee: Clinton Francis
The hope is that with large enough sample sizes and controlling for the most obvious other variables that could potentially influence reproductive behaviour or reproductive success in birds that we could, so to speak, see through the noise to see some larger trends.
Interviewer: Nick Howe
So Clint and his team collected data on bird nesting from across the contiguous United States. Now, as they couldn't exactly climb every tree to view nests themselves across such an enormous area, they use data that had been collected by volunteers from the NestWatch project.
Interviewee: Clinton Francis
I can't even begin to think about how many person hours went into monitoring all of these different nests. These are citizens who essentially find out when birds have laid their first egg in the nest or the nest box. They come back and they monitor that nest to see how many eggs are actually laid. If they're visiting frequently enough, they can find out when the eggs actually hatch, and they keep visiting the nest all the way up through fledging or failure, and so fledging being when at least one chick successfully leaves that nest or not.
Interviewer: Nick Howe
These data from 58,000 nests of 142 species were then combined with data on light pollution and noise from the same region. Put together, Clint could then begin to work out how these pollutants affected the birds’ ability to reproduce.
Interviewee: Clinton Francis
The first really big trend that we saw, if you look across all species, there's no major trend of noise or light influencing the timing of when birds start their nest, how successful their nest is, how many eggs they lay, and a few other metrics. But it's once you start digging into the details, where we really start to see some interesting patterns.
Interviewer: Nick Howe
One such interesting pattern was how human-produced noise affected birds that had calls of different pitches. Take the white-breasted nuthatch, the small songbird found across much of North America. That’s it’s call. Now, it has what's known as low-frequency vocalisation. It's got a deep voice. Now, noise produced by humans is also typically of a low frequency. Think of a truck rolling down the road or similar. And what this means is that this human noise can mask the birds call, which could mean that they're less able to reproduce well. Perhaps the females can't hear the males calling to them. And indeed, Clint’s analysis showed that when the white-breasted nuthatch lived in a noisier environment, it delayed when it reproduced and tended to produce fewer offspring. Compare that to the house wren. It's called is higher-pitched, at a frequency quite unlike the sounds being produced by humans. Unlike the nuthatch, Clint’s analysis showed that the house wren was unaffected by noise. And this sort of trend, with noise affecting birds with lower-frequency vocalisations, was seen across the dataset. But that's only one part of the sensory equation. What about light? How did that affect the birds? Again, when Clint and the team dug into the data, there were some other interesting patterns.
Interviewee: Clinton Francis
It appeared that birds really advance when they start their nesting in response to light exposure. And so, what that means is they're essentially breeding earlier in the season in brighter locations. And this makes sense because, a lot of birds, they essentially know when to breed based on day length, and by artificially changing how long the days are, this essentially is a mistaken cue that perhaps the season has advanced farther along than it actually has.
Interviewer: Nick Howe
So, these birds were breeding earlier in response to light. What did that mean for their reproductive success?
Interviewee: Clinton Francis
So we expected a lot of these birds to actually have reduced reproductive success. But once we dug into species specific types of results, we actually saw something that was quite surprising. And what we found is that the birds that seemed to advance most strongly in respond to light pollution, also tended to have increased reproductive success in response to light pollution.
Interviewer: Nick Howe
Why might breeding earlier be a good thing? Well, it isn't clear at the moment. Clint said that one hypothesis is that climate change is resulting in resources like food becoming available earlier. And the shift in the birds breeding time may mean that the two actually line up better. That means, in a weird way, the birds being affected by human-caused light may help them buffer the effects of human-caused heating.
Interviewee: Clinton Francis
It is one probable explanation for the surprising result that we ended up seeing.
Interviewer: Nick Howe
The huge dataset and analysis that Clint and his collaborators have put together had many other such associations between light, noise and reproductive success. The next step will be to try and work out what they all mean. But one thing is clear, when we're trying to work out what is happening with species in a changing world, cutting through the noise may not always be the best.
Interviewee: Clinton Francis
Our study demonstrates that both of these stressors, both of these stimuli, should be considered alongside a lot of like traditional aspects of habitat change for conservation efforts. Including some of these dimensions of the environment that we haven't really looked at before might help clarify a lot of patterns that we've seen that don't totally make sense with our traditional measurements of anthropogenic change.
Interviewee: Nick Howe
That was Clint Francis from California Polytechnic State University in the US. To find out more about how birds are responding to noisy and bright environments, make sure you check out Clint’s paper. We'll pop a link to that in the show notes.
Host: Benjamin Thompson
Time now for Coronapod, where we discuss the latest coronavirus news. Joining me this week are Noah Baker and Ewen Callaway, Hello to you both,
Ewen Callaway
Hello.
Noah Baker
Hi, Ben.
Host: Benjamin Thompson
Now, over the past few weeks and, it has to be said, months, we understandably haven't had a huge number of good news stories on Coronapod. But we might have one this week and, Ewen, it's related to a press release that recently came out outlining some results from a phase three vaccine trial. What's the story here?
Ewen Callaway
Yeah, a press release, and what a press release it was. It just kind of landed in our inboxes late morning on Monday, and it was from the drug company Pfizer and their German partners BioNTech. They’ve been developing together a COVID vaccine that was seen as one of the leading candidates. And the press release was announcing what's called an interim analysis or preliminary results from their trial of the vaccine. They said that it looked like it was greater than 90% effective at preventing COVID when comparing cases in people who got the vaccine and people who got a placebo injection. So, ostensibly and probably, really good news there from that top-line result.
Noah Baker
Ewen, can I ask, how does that compare to other vaccines? Is like 90% a really, really good efficacy for a vaccine? Are we expecting it to be higher or lower? How does that compare?
Ewen Callaway
I’ll answer your second question first. I asked people whether this exceeded expectations, and people were a bit coy and a lot of people said they don't know what to expect, but my hunch, at least at this stage – and remember, the efficacy could go down, the trial is not over yet – but this seems a bit better than people had expected. The US Food and Drug Administration had set a bar saying we want a vaccine to be better than 50% effective. And researchers told me that it's very unlikely that, as this trial continues, its efficacy will drop anywhere near below that threshold. How it compares to other vaccines, I think it varies. The last vaccine I wrote about that is similar to this was an Ebola vaccine, and that vaccine – at least it's kind of early trial in Guinea at the end of the West African Ebola outbreak – was shown to be 100% effective. There are a lot of devils in those details, and I'm not sure what the latest measurements are. So, this looks like – at least at this point – to be potentially a highly effective vaccine, though there'll be a lot more data to see that can caveat this statement significantly.
Host: Benjamin Thompson
Yeah, I mean, what data has been reported thus far? Obviously, there's a lot of attention on this 90% which you say might change. Where has this figure come from?
Ewen Callaway
Yeah, the way this came about is that these trials are blinded, they’re double-blinded, so neither the people who are running them nor the participants know whether they got the placebo or the control, and they need to stay blinded until the trial ends or is ended for other reasons. And so, this analysis that gave us these results came from an independent data monitoring board that looked at the data after a predetermined period. This happened to be after a total of 94 cases of COVID-19 had been accrued in both arms of the trial. And they did an analysis and compared rates of COVID and found that people who got the vaccine were more than 90% less likely to develop COVID compared to people got the placebo, with some caveats. There’s really a lot to unpack here and a lot of questions that scientists and regulators will have of these data. But, right now, we just have this kind of almost magic number, 90%, and we need to know a lot more about the data behind it.
Noah Baker
Can I ask as well about the 94 cases number? So, like, 94 is a relatively nondescript number, but it's like a milestone, right? My understanding is that when you're going through vaccine trials, there are sort of statistical milestones people look at. And eventually they are going to continue this trial until you get to 164 cases which, again, seems arbitrary to someone that doesn't know what they're talking about, but can you describe what these milestones mean?
Ewen Callaway
Yes, I can do my best. So, when you're designing a trial like this, you have a protocol that basically defines how you're going to run the trial, how you're going to define a case of COVID-19, and it decides when you're going to allow your independent safety monitoring board to look at the data. So, it's not uncommon in trials to have an interim analysis, so you look at the data before the trial is complete, and there are a couple reasons for doing this. I mean, first off, you want to be aware of safety and flag any safety concerns. And secondly, I think, if your vaccine is stonkingly effective, like really, really effective early in the trial, or if your drug is really, really effective early in the trial, you might have an ethical obligation to end the trial and give the people who got the placebo the drug or vaccine. That's not going to happen in this case, I think, because there's a lot more important data to collect. And Pfizer sounded confident that they should get to the end of the trial, that 164 case number fairly soon.
Noah Baker
I'm interested as well, so this is one vaccine being developed by this pair of companies, but it can also provide some encouragement for other vaccines, right? So, this is an RNA vaccine, one of these nucleic acid vaccines that works in a particular way, and this sort of promising result is also promising for other trials with vaccines that work in a similar way.
Ewen Callaway
Yes, that's what researchers told me. I think the company that will get the biggest boost maybe from this is Moderna, a US biotech that's developing another mRNA vaccine with the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease. And these vaccines, the Moderna NIAID vaccine and the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine, they're really similar. They're both mRNA, the mRNA is encoding similar molecules, and the data from early phase trials where they basically just gave participants the vaccine and measured their immune responses, those look broadly similar between the two. And moreover, people have told me that the immune responses from vaccines based on other technologies, such as those based on proteins or those based on viral vectors, such as the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine, that those got broadly similar immune responses as well. And so, people were telling me that this should be encouraging to lots of developers, and maybe we should expect a high level of efficacy in those trials as well which are ongoing. I mean, the devil’s in the details. We don't have any data yet. So, people seem to think it's a boost for COVID vaccines as a whole, but there are a lot of caveats and things we need to know that I could talk about.
Host: Benjamin Thompson
Well, you almost read my mind there, Ewen. I was going to say, seemingly good news thus far, certainly with this vaccine trial, but there are a lot of questions that remain to be answered. What are some of the biggest ones that you think needs to be addressed in the near future?
Ewen Callaway
I think the biggest one that will definitely need to be determined, or at least addressed before these vaccines are approved for any type of use, is what is the spectrum of disease that these vaccines are protecting against? When you say COVID-19, it can mean a lot of things, anywhere from somebody who's in the ICU, intubated and at high risk of death, to somebody who has a mild cough, loss of smell, a sore throat or something like that. And so, from these data that Pfizer presented in this press release, we really don't know anything about the spectrum of disease that we see in these 94 cases. So, we don't yet know how well the vaccine performs against different spectra of COVID-19, and that'll be really important. I think scientists and regulators will want to see evidence. In fact, I think regulators will require that there be some evidence that the vaccine offers some protection against severe COVID. So, they'll want to see some cases of severe COVID in the placebo group. Another important question is, this is an announcement that came from analysis of 43,000 some-odd participants. We don't really know anything about the demographics of these participants. We really need a vaccine that protects against the people who are most at risk of severe COVID and death. So, we're talking about people over 60, over 65, people with comorbidities, such as diabetes and obesity. And we don't really know anything about how this protects in different racial and ethnic groups. And I think that'll be something really important for companies to address when they get a look at all the data and when they present these data to regulators. And the last thing I'll say about what's missing, and I'm not sure if we'll have an answer to this right away and maybe not before we get an emergency approval for this vaccine or for other vaccines, is how long does the protection last? These participants, one scientist told me are probably at the peak of their immune response to the vaccine, and so what happens in three months or six months? Do these immune responses and therefore their ability to fend off SARS-CoV-2 wane? We just don't know the answer to that question, and we're only going to know with time.
Noah Baker
And then I guess there's the final question, which is sort of beyond efficacy and how the vaccine works. There's also the question of how realistic it is to get this vaccine to people, and there are caveats that appear here as well. This particular vaccine needs to be kept cold. You need to have two doses of the vaccine. Those things all impact how useful the vaccine is in the real world context when it comes to giving it to people.
Ewen Callaway
For sure. Pfizer and BioNTech, like a lot of companies, have been manufacturing millions of doses, but the world needs billions. I've seen estimates that maybe tens of millions of doses of this vaccine will be available by the end of this year, and then the companies hope to manufacture somewhere around a billion, maybe more than a billion, doses next year. Remember, this is a two-dose vaccine, so halve everything you see. So, this vaccine is going to be very dear for quite a while, and Pfizer has been among the savviest developers in cutting deals with countries to sell pre-orders of their vaccine. So, the UK, the US, have bought significant stocks of this vaccine. So, it's unclear when it's going to be widely available even to people in those countries. As far as delivery, yes, this vaccine currently needs to be stored at minus 70 degrees. I think Pfizer and other companies are developing these special like cool boxes to not maybe require doctors’ offices to have a minus 70 freezer like you do in your molecular biology lab, but it requires significant infrastructure. Yeah, there's a lot of nuts and bolts that need to happen, and hopefully have been happening, when you think about rolling out not just this vaccine but a lot of these vaccines. So, people who are saying that this vaccine is going to mark a turning point, I think, maybe are speaking a little bit out of turn. I think we've got a tough winter ahead. And this vaccine, and others like it, we don't know whether this is going to put an end to the pandemic. One thing we also don't know about this vaccine is whether it does anything to prevent the spread of SARS-CoV-2. It's entirely possible it doesn't. There are other vaccines that can prevent disease but they don't prevent transmission very well. So, you might have a situation where you've got a vaccine that protects you from severe COVID and death, which would be great, but people are still spreading this thing all over the place. So, until we have an answer to that question and a vaccine that can stop transmission, we're going to be social distancing and wearing masks for a while and doing Coronapod remotely, I'm afraid.
Noah Baker
And I guess that also brings into question one of the other buzzwords that we've mentioned sporadically or Coronapod and the Coronapod segments is herd immunity. If you can't stop transmission then herd immunity doesn't exist anymore. So, you have a vaccine that only helps if you've had the vaccine.
Ewen Callaway
Yeah, exactly.
Host: Benjamin Thompson
It struck me that we've been doing this from home now for months and months, and vaccines, as we know, can take 10-20 years to develop. But here we are, potentially, obviously, caveats to one side, on the cusp of one that does work. Scientists must be jazzed by the way this has gone about.
Ewen Callaway
Yes, I think people are through the Moon that we've gone, in 11 months, from having a sequence and having a virus to nearly on the cusp of having an effective product and effective tool against this virus. Yeah, I mean, vaccines take years and some take decades to develop, and to do all this in less than a year is stunning, I think a lot of scientists will say. But the work is not over yet. These trials have to continue as these things have to get approved and rolled out so don't count your victories yet, I'd say.
Host: Benjamin Thompson
Well, absolutely right, Ewen. Still plenty of data to be analysed just yet, and I hope you'll come on again when it does exist and hopefully we'll have a little bit more good news. But for the time being, Ewen and Noah, thank you so much for joining me.
Ewen Callaway
Thanks for having me.
Noah Baker
Thanks, Ben.
Host: Benjamin Thompson
More from Coronapod next time.
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Host: Benjamin Thompson
Now, back in the 1920s, the infamous gangster Al Capone exploited the fishing industry as part of his rum-running network. That might seem like fairly ancient history. But it turns out the problem of organised crime in the fishing industry hasn't disappeared. More on that coming up later.
Host: Nick Howe
Right now, though, Dan Fox is here with this week's Research Highlights.
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Dan Fox
A matchbox-sized bat has broken the bat record for migration. Nathusius’ pipistrelles is an incredibly small bat, weighing in at about 10 grams. But despite its tiny size, researchers have found that it was able to migrate thousands of kilometres. To do so, the team put a ring on a male bat in a park in southwestern Latvia in August 2015. That bat was then found dead two years later in Navarra, Spain, 2,224 kilometres away. And the record-breaking figure is likely an underestimate, only representing the shortest distance between the two points. In fact, bats of this species are known to follow the convoluted coastline of the Baltic Sea as they migrate. Migrate over to Mammalia to read that research in full.
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Dan Fox
Scientists have successfully tricked mice into thinking they were somewhere they were not, by triggering the cells in their brains associated with location. An animal’s place cells fire when the animal is in a specific location. By using genetic modification in mice, researchers can monitor play cells’ behaviour and use light pulses to make the cells fire. The team set mice on to a virtual reality track, where the animals learned to lick a spout in a designated reward zone receive sugar water. The scientists recorded which place cells fired when the animals were in the zone and then activated the same cells when the mice were in a different location, causing the mice to lick as if they were back in the reward zone. The researchers say these findings can help to show how spatial memories are stored and provide a new strategy to reactivate specific memories. Activate the play cells you associate with Cell to find that research in full.
Host: Benjamin Thompson
When you think of organised crime, fishing probably isn't the first thing that comes to mind. But actually, billions of dollars are made every year by criminals exploiting the oceans for illegal gain. This week, Nature features a United Nations blue paper about the impact of organised crime in the fishery sector, and what can be done about it. Reporter Anand Jagatia spoke to lead author Emma Witbooi, a research associate at the Nelson Mandela University in South Africa, and director of PescaDOLUS, an international fisheries crime research network,
Interviewee: Emma Witbooi
One of the most useful things to start out by saying is that we're talking about crime in the fishing sector and not necessarily crime to do only with fishing itself, and that does matter. So, on the one hand, you have crimes that are committed within the industry that range from vessel registration to the actual fishing or harvesting itself. You then also have crime that takes place outside of actual fishing operations, but using the fishing sector in some way. So, for example, using fishing vessels as a mode of transport to move, let's say, drugs or illegal firearms or smuggle humans or goods, and a prime example here is human trafficking, which is really modern slavery.
Interviewer: Anand Jagatia
And how widespread would you say fisheries crime is around the world?
Interviewee: Emma Witbooi
It takes place throughout the world, but particularly in relation to what one could call vulnerable states, so states that, first of all, have a very high reliance on the oceans and the fishery sector, and also that have weak governance and ineffective, for whatever reason, enforcement resources and mechanisms.
Interviewer: Anand Jagatia
I think people might be quite surprised by just how much money can be generated from this sort of crime. Would you be able to give us a sense of the sums that are involved?
Interviewee: Emma Witbooi
So, the figures are huge. It's been estimated that Africa experiences annual losses of between US$7.6 and US$13.9 billion in economic impacts due to the redirection of catches from legitimate to the illicit seafood chain.
Interviewer: Anand Jagatia
In the paper, you give a couple of examples of cases. Would you be able to go through one of those just to illustrate the kinds of crimes and offences that are that are being committed?
Interviewee: Emma Witbooi
Yes, sure. So, I'm not sure if we'd call it recent anymore, because it took such a long time for the case to actually go through the system. This is the case that we refer to as ‘the rock lobster case’. A South African-based fishing company had a quota to harvest rock lobster, completely overharvested its quota deliberately, and what happened was there was a tip-off, and one of the containers were opened and it was discovered that there was a large amount of overharvesting going on being exported to the US. So, the US, and the authorities were alerted and they intercepted the next container coming from South Africa. And it resulted in the director and various others of the company being arrested and subject to criminal proceedings, both in South Africa and in the US. And then there was a final settlement of US$7.5 million.
Interviewer: Anand Jagatia
And what is it about the fact that these crimes take place in the ocean and in the fishery sector that actually makes them quite hard to deal with?
Interviewee: Emma Witbooi
One of the major factors, I would say, is invisibility. And that is physically, first of all, because the ocean is huge, so it provides a kind of ideal cover where criminals are operating illegally in plain sight, if you know what I mean. And there's also invisibility around the true beneficial ownership of the vessels and the fishing operation companies. Then it becomes almost impossible to pin down the actual physical person or persons who are running these criminal operations, and if you can't do that, you can't ground a criminal investigation and prosecution in a particular national jurisdiction, so the follow-through becomes extremely difficult.
Interviewer: Anand Jagatia
You also mentioned that this is crime that really actually affects some of the poorest and the most vulnerable people.
Interviewee: Emma Witbooi
It diverts huge amounts of revenue away from governments that really need it, so largely it's developing countries, and they need that money to invest in sustainable development. And it devastates also the sustainable livelihoods of coastal communities that depend on the sector for income, for basic necessities, for employment, for food. Also, very relevant is that people in fishing communities become victims of fisheries crime, for example, human trafficking, and many become involved in the crime itself. This may be because they are no longer able to make money from fishing and there are no legal alternative livelihood options for them.
Interviewer: Anand Jagatia
And aside from those impacts that you've just described, there are also obviously impacts on the oceans themselves, on the marine resources that the criminals are exploiting.
Interviewee: Emma Witbooi
Yes, of course. So, it obviously contributes to decline of fish stocks. For example, this case I spoke to earlier, the rock lobster case, so that particular species significantly crashed in terms of its stocks. But once the operation was shut down, there was empirical evidence that focused particularly on the stock that indicated that it rose again, it became healthier.
Interviewer: Anand Jagatia
Given the scale and the severity of the consequences of fisheries crime, do you think that it gets as much attention as it deserves compared to other forms of crime that people might be more familiar with?
Interviewee: Emma Witbooi
I would say largely not, and I think that this is because the problem is perceived as largely concerning ‘only fish’. And related to this, it's often packaged as an almost purely conservation matter, which doesn't put humans centre of focus.
Interviewer: Anand Jagatia
So, how do we deal with the problem then? What are the recommendations that you put forward as a way of tackling fisheries crime?
Interviewee: Emma Witbooi
So, it's a) developing a common understanding of the problem at political level and then b) devising and implementing practical, preventative enforcement tools. They would include, for example, increased cooperation between the relevant government agencies within the countries. And then we also need to encourage and facilitate civil society engagement with the fishing industry, for example, via corporate social responsibility, holding companies accountable for sustainability in their supply chain. I definitely think more dedicated research on the topic to understand the causes, nature and scale and impact. I think it's very clear to see that it does directly impact so many people, particularly in developing countries, small island developing states, coastal communities.
Host: Benjamin Thompson
That was Anand Jagatia talking to Emma Witbooi. We'll put a link to this blue paper in the show notes.
Host: Nick Howe
Finally on the show, it's time for the Briefing chat, where we discuss a couple of articles that have been highlighted in the Nature Briefing. Ben, why don't you go first. What's caught your attention this week?
Host: Benjamin Thompson
Well, Nick, are you familiar with time capsules?
Host: Nick Howe
I did one of these when I was a kid. We planted that just before the Millennium to be dug up for the next millennium, I think, rather optimistically, so 1,000 years’ time. Basically, it's a little capsule, as you say, where you put a few trinkets together and bury it and then you hope in a few years’ time that will be discovered by someone then they'll find out something about you.
Host: Benjamin Thompson
Yeah, that's exactly right. Now, a time capsule has been discovered off the coast of Ireland that maybe isn't quite so much fun.
Host: Nick Howe
Okay, why wouldn't a time capsule be fun? Surely that's a fun activity we all do.
Host: Benjamin Thompson
Well, let me give you the backstory to this time capsule, Nick, and this is a story I read in The Guardian. So, a Russian-owned nuclear-powered icebreaker ship, which is a heck of a thing to start a sentence with, called 50 Years of Victory travelled to the North Pole and takes visitors up there. And it reached the North Pole in 2018, and the crew and passengers buried a metal tube containing some you know trinkets and ephemera, beer mats, photos, that sort of thing, in the ice around the North Pole.
Host: Nick Howe
Right, okay, so this was their time capsule. But this has been discovered in Ireland, did you say? How was that happened?
Host: Benjamin Thompson
That's exactly right. It was discovered last week off the coast of the northwest of Ireland. It turns out that a that a pair of surfers spotted it when they were looking out to the coast to sort of check the surfing conditions. And one of them said that, well, he was obviously quite intrigued by what this metal tube was, saw that it was engraved, had a date on it. First, he thought it was a bomb. Then he thought maybe it had someone's ashes in it. But once he got a friend to translate the Russian, he sort of opened it up and found all these messages and photos and beer mats and what have you.
Host: Nick Howe
Right, okay, but you said this was buried in 2018. Here we are, barely two years later, like how is it gone from the North Pole to Ireland? Surely it should be buried in ice still?
Host: Benjamin Thompson
Well, yes, Nick, it seems that the cold hand or maybe I suppose the warm hand of climate change is resting on our shoulder once more. And one of the letters that was in this time capsule was dated to 4 August 2018. And it said, ‘Everything around here is covered by ice. We think that by the time this letter will be found there will be no more ice in the Arctic, unfortunately.’ Now, the fellow in Ireland who found this tube got in contact with the people who wrote this, and they said they thought it'd be like 30, 40, 50 years before this time capsule was discovered. But in fact, as you say, it's taken two years to make the over 2,000-mile journey from the North Pole to the coast of Ireland.
Host: Nick Howe
I mean, the ice hasn't completely disappeared, but is this sort of like an indictment of how quickly things are changing in the Arctic?
Host: Benjamin Thompson
Yeah, I mean, this is a fun story, but it's also super sobering as well, I think you'll agree, Nick. Things really aren't looking too clever up in the Arctic. Just a couple of weeks ago in the Briefing, there was a story saying that this year was the first time since records began that over in Siberia, where a lot of sea ice forms before it travels west, there wasn't any in October, which has never happened before. And there's been some papers as well in Nature Climate Change as well suggesting that if we don't get on top of things, sea ice really could be a thing of the past quite soon. Anyway, Nick, moving on. What have you got for us this week?
Host: Nick Howe
Well, my story this week is about a sort of time capsule, although it wasn't intentionally buried. I'm looking in the world of archaeology and human remains from 9,000 years ago. And, Ben, are you familiar with the long-standing Man the Hunter hypothesis?
Host: Benjamin Thompson
It’s not something I've heard of before, I have to say, Nick, but I have a feeling that maybe it's written in the textbooks that it was men going out in year dot to hunt food and what have you.
Host: Nick Howe
Yeah, I mean, the Man the Hunter hypothesis is basically what it says on the tin. It's something that came about in the 1960s that men were the ones going out hunting and women were gathering things. They were collecting fruits and stuff like that. And this has been a long-standing hypothesis and it's not gone unchallenged. A lot of archaeologists have said, like, this doesn't make a lot of sense, but evidence for women being hunters has been very scant, perhaps until now.
Host: Benjamin Thompson
Well, you mentioned at the start that some remains have been found, and I'm guessing that they're quite important to this story.
Host: Nick Howe
Yeah, so I was reading about this in Science and basically, some 9,000-year-old human remains have been discovered in the Andes in South America, and these remains were buried with a lot of stone tools that were things that are to do with hunting, so things like spear points and knives and that sort of thing. And when you're buried with something, and it was all very neatly arranged next to them so it looked like it was intentional, it generally means it's something that was important to you. So, originally, the archaeologists that discovered it, were thinking, oh, this must be a great chief, like a big, great man in the community, but then one of the archaeologists actually said, ‘I think this hunter might be female’, and on examining the bones, they saw, indeed, that the bones were more slender, which indicates that it was, in fact, a woman.
Host: Benjamin Thompson
So, quite an important finding, and obviously, someone of quite important stature in the community. Is this causing researchers to re-examine other findings at all?
Host: Nick Howe
Well, the people who did this research who found these remains of this around 17 to a 19 -year-old woman, they actually went on to find 10 additional women buried in similar ways across the Andes. So, it seems like it was actually quite common for women to be hunters, or at least these findings indicate that because they were buried with hunting tools. And for some archaeologists, this is the smoking gun because, as I say, this Man the Hunter hypotheses has been challenged for a while, and for some archaeologists, like this is the smoking gun. Clearly, there were women who were hunters throughout history. However, another archaeologist has pointed out that just because you were buried with something doesn't necessarily mean that you used it in life. It could be another hunter honouring the person who is buried by burying their stone tools with them. So, it's not entirely clear, but a lot of archaeologists think it is very strong evidence for the fact that women were hunters as well as men. And the author's themselves, they have done a meta-analysis of different remains have been found and they said that early big game hunting was likely gender neutral.
Host: Benjamin Thompson
Well, Nick, that is an awesome story, and I'm sure we'll read more about it in the Briefing when more evidence is uncovered. But for the time being, let's call it there, and listeners, if you want more stories like this, then sign up for the Nature Briefing and they'll get delivered directly to your inbox. Head over to the show notes where you can find a link to do so.
Host: Nick Howe
That's all for this week. As always, you can send us a message. We’re @NaturePodcast on Twitter or podcast@nature.com on email. I’m Nick Howe.
Host: Benjamin Thompson
And I’m Benjamin Thompson. Thanks for listening.