Episode Transcript
[00:00:13] Speaker A: Are we doing this?
[00:00:14] Speaker B: Let's do it.
Wait a minute.
We'll keep this. No, just joking.
I feel like. Radio lab intro with it. This is blip.
Okay, go ahead.
[00:00:26] Speaker A: I'm Aaron Nathans.
[00:00:28] Speaker B: I'm Michael Ronstadt.
[00:00:30] Speaker A: And this is the Nathan's and Ron cast.
[00:00:41] Speaker B: The draw gets bigger every time. Aaron.
[00:00:46] Speaker A: Oh, boy. Hello.
[00:00:48] Speaker B: How are you doing?
[00:00:49] Speaker A: Good. We're in Boston.
[00:00:50] Speaker B: We are. You know, we recorded a lot of harmony vocals and lead vocals for North Wind. Two albums ago in this very room. So it's right here. Yeah, it's correct that we're back.
[00:01:03] Speaker A: It's got good acoustics. We just did a show last night in West Brookfield, mass.
[00:01:09] Speaker B: How'd it go?
[00:01:10] Speaker A: It went really well. There were good acoustics in that room, too. Little library. More than 100 years old.
[00:01:16] Speaker B: Yeah, almost. It had these angled walls, and the sound went up and then pushed straight to the audience. And then we had two air conditioners giving us a slightly out of tune g or a or something like that.
It was very lively.
[00:01:32] Speaker A: Only you would know the note made by an air conditioner.
[00:01:35] Speaker B: Well, I'm. I'm sounding like. I know, but I'm taking a guess, so know that. I don't really know, but I'm pretty sure.
[00:01:42] Speaker A: Pretty close, knowing yours.
[00:01:46] Speaker B: You know how I mentioned not to pop your peas? I just popped a pee, by the way.
[00:01:49] Speaker A: I'm sorry. Can we say that on radio?
[00:01:52] Speaker B: Yeah, I think so. No one will complain because it's audio jargon, I guess.
Well, we've got a song for this episode, and it's called man and a whale.
[00:02:06] Speaker A: Man and a whale.
[00:02:08] Speaker B: And only I would write a song with that title. It's kind of a fantastical journey on land, in water. I'm not sure where it goes or how it makes any sense, but, Aaron, you liked the song, and that made me like the song more. And I wrote it years ago, tried a bunch of different settings. And about the fourth rewrite I had it for, this was just. It's kind of a global warming, global change, whatever we want to call it song. Fear of nature going away, sadness about parking lots. And humans building things on top of what's already there. So it's kind of a lament, in a way. And it doesn't end very happily. I'm guessing. At Least a song doesn't end very positive. The whale just roams so many miles.
So many miles it almost hearkens to the blue 52 whale that apparently, at one point, they felt existed. And it was the only one of its kind because they could hear this one whale song, but it was only just a single song. That idea that it's just searching for someone else. I don't know. How did the song hit you?
[00:03:25] Speaker A: Well, can we play a bit of the song just to.
[00:03:28] Speaker B: Yeah, let's play a snippet of it. Yeah.
[00:03:32] Speaker C: He walks around saying, oh, no.
Pondering the road built on nature's veil littering the ground with wild disease footsteps take us closer to the peak that drops far down.
[00:04:02] Speaker A: You'Ve got a lot of very specific ideas when you talk about the song. For me, the way that it hit me was just that this was a beautiful, dark, but kind of all encompassing song stream of consciousness. At least that's how it hit me in a way where I was just kind of letting it wash over me. I couldn't necessarily tell that it was an allegory about climate change, but upon second or third listen, I'm able to start to get that. And I heard this song, and I heard harmonies. And so to me, it felt like a little bit of an indigo girls type opportunity to really dig in and sing a song together.
Sometimes you harmonize on my stuff and I harmonize on yours, and we come up with different parts for the songs we write together. But I think this is one of those rare times where we're actually singing together through almost the entire song.
And I'd hear myself in your song.
[00:05:12] Speaker B: That's awesome. And you're mainly a lead vocal person, so when I know you hear harmonies, that means that's extra special. In my mind.
This song has a lot of really amazing musicians. Let me look at the track. 1 second.
[00:05:29] Speaker A: I think they're all you.
[00:05:32] Speaker B: There might be all me. Let's see. It's track six. The way we listed it.
I'm doing lead vocal, apparently.
What else? Amazing musician.
[00:05:43] Speaker A: Well, you play cello.
[00:05:45] Speaker B: I played a five string electric cello doing bass lines, which just sounds like an upright bass, but this low whale sound br.
When you hear that, it's resonating. Yeah. And I guess I did some acoustic cello. Yeah. It looks like I had nylon string guitar. It's a pretty simple approach, quite honestly. Aaron, you added steel string guitar and then harmony vocals, and you did the solo.
[00:06:17] Speaker A: That's right, yeah. And I don't do a lot of solos. I think being a part of this duo, you really stretch me. You cause me to do things that are a little bit out of my comfort zone. And I think part of the joy of making music with you is your confidence in me to do things that I'm not necessarily.
Having Aaron do a solo is kind of like an off label use of Aaron.
[00:06:46] Speaker B: But you're like the grocery store brand.
[00:06:50] Speaker A: But you trusted me, and having me do know that doesn't come naturally to me. That's a skill I learned through working with you. So I think this song really stretched me as a musician.
[00:07:03] Speaker B: Why don't we play the solo?
[00:07:06] Speaker A: Oh, boy.
[00:07:07] Speaker B: Just listen to how melodically perfect this thing is. I always like to throw at least one solo per album at Aaron because he's going to go and hunt for a bunch of melodic ideas. We're all going to go, that's it.
And what does it do? It is iconic. So let's play.
[00:07:27] Speaker A: That's very generous of.
[00:08:18] Speaker B: The foundation for me to have this cell orchestra come in because I think there's a big old cello orchestra that comes in in the second half, right, and just does flurries and flutters and fligglewops and flabbergasts and all that stuff. There's just a cacophony of more cello than you thought you needed.
[00:08:38] Speaker A: Do you know how many cellos are there?
[00:08:39] Speaker B: Did we do twelve on that one? I don't know.
[00:08:41] Speaker A: I mean, we try to outdo ourselves on every album.
[00:08:44] Speaker B: I can't remember. I'd have to look at the session. It was a lot.
[00:08:48] Speaker A: It feels very nautical, this song.
[00:08:50] Speaker B: Yes. And we don't tend to record with a click track. We practice with a metronome and then we try to have an eb and flow. It's almost a classical approach, but if it feels good and you can still snap your finger to the music, it makes the song work. And there's something to that kind of natural. This is live feeling. So when we track our instruments, we do it without the click track. In general, there's a few songs that want it, but most allow us the freedom to present it to you in a very organic way. Are there any other sections of the song that stand out to you?
[00:09:29] Speaker A: It's been a little while since I've heard it.
[00:09:32] Speaker B: It's a pretty simple chord progression. We have kind of a minor ish section, and then the chorus tends to be like this major seven, almost 60s pop ballad thing. At least I see it as that. When I think of major seven chords, we'll play a little bit of, like the chorus progression.
[00:09:50] Speaker C: Mountains to the west and blue skies leak through the clouds and see dark.
[00:09:59] Speaker B: Green trees never boys okay, we'll play a little bit of the verse progression.
[00:10:08] Speaker C: He walks around breathing oh, so slow, pondering the tone.
[00:10:15] Speaker B: I think the progression kind of helps emote something, but go ahead.
[00:10:21] Speaker A: Well, I mean, we're going to be introducing our guests in a moment. Okay. Any final thoughts on the music before we start to talk about whales?
[00:10:32] Speaker B: Our voices over the years have blended more and more harmoniously. You work together for about ten years, plus. It's almost like you're related. So we have an amazing guest because even though the song is kind of this whimsical wonderland of imagery and a world that doesn't quite line up with the real world, but more of a dream world, it does have an air of darkness and despair or maybe a loss of hope at the end. One of the creatures that I think on this planet happens to be one of the largest creatures. Their environment is very threatened by humans. We have an expert on whales.
[00:11:14] Speaker A: That's right. It's exciting to. This is kind of our jumping off point into the world of whales. We're in Boston for a reason, and we'll be telling you a little bit more about that in the next episode. For now, I suffice it to say that we are going to be speaking with Nick Pianson. He's the author of the book spying on whales, which is great book. It's just so evocative. He's a great writer. He's a scientist. He's traveled all over the world looking for whales, working with whales, looking into the bones of whales. So Nick is the curator of fossil marine mammals at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D. C. And his work has taken him to every continent, and his scientific discoveries frequently appear in major publications like the New York Times, the Washington Post, National Geographic, yada, yada, yada. He has just. He's very accomplished, and we're so honored that Nick has agreed to speak with us today about his wonderful book. So without further ado, here is our interview with Nick Pyenson.
All right, we're here with Nick Pyanson, and he's the author of the amazing book spying on whales, which is really an enjoyable read, and we're so glad that you're able to be with us today.
[00:12:49] Speaker D: So happy to be here.
[00:12:51] Speaker A: All right, are you in Washington right now?
[00:12:53] Speaker D: I am, yep.
[00:12:54] Speaker A: Awesome. I am a graduate of american university in I.
[00:13:00] Speaker D: Right up the road from here.
[00:13:02] Speaker A: Quite fond of that city.
So let's talk a little bit about, since this is a podcast about music and connections to music, whale song. Can you tell us a little bit about the song that a whale makes and why we as humans are so interested in the whale song.
[00:13:23] Speaker D: Oh, gosh. I think I can do the former but not the latter so well. Or at least I can give you a personal answer. That's not everyone's answer, maybe. But whale song, the kind that I think has been made famous over the last 50 years, kind that you hear on recordings and imitated and elaborated in pop culture, those tend to be what people think when they hear the idea of whale song are specifically probably the songs of male humpback whales. And those were first identified in the 1970s.
And these are long, deep moans and groans that sound unearthly.
I will not imitate one for you.
I'll leave that to other people to.
[00:14:26] Speaker A: Do, and Michael will be doing that later.
[00:14:28] Speaker D: Sure. Go for it.
[00:14:29] Speaker B: On the cello, please. On the cello.
[00:14:32] Speaker D: However, you.
You know, it's only male humpback, so we think that it's related, know, probably has some sexual selection context that probably relates to mating.
And what we know is that since it's been identified and studied over the last 50 years, it has evolved in structure and the complexity of it, the hierarchical structure, has changed through time. So whale song that we've originally measured in the 1970s is different from the whale song today. The other really interesting part of it, for me, I think, is that it's a great example of culture outside of our own species. There's many other examples that I'm sure listeners would be familiar with from other animal species. But in the context of humpback whale song, it is an example of culture because it is information that is transmitted and imitated and elaborated between individuals that are not related to one another across ocean basins and through time. So this parcel of information, this way of communicating, gets exchanged and traded, and then it evolves in its own right, which all these traits kind of fit our basic definition of culture.
For me, I don't have an issue talking about culture outside of our own species. But for some people, that's a trigger.
[00:16:06] Speaker A: I don't like to put my head underwater as much as I don't like boats. I definitely don't like deep sea diving. And I'm sure.
Can you hear sound underwater?
[00:16:20] Speaker D: I'm not a diver.
The stuff I'm looking for for whales tends to be found well above water or on former seafloors that have now been uplifted or sea levels fallen away.
So their bones, their skeletons are the things that I look for and study.
I can tell you, as somebody who's gone swimming a lot, that you can hear underwater.
Our human ears are not as adapted for hearing underwater as other marine animals. But whales have the ability to hear because they have acoustically isolated earbones that allows them to hear directionally and attune to low frequency sound.
And it's because their earbones float in a space cavities on either side of their skull, separate from the rest of their skull, that it gives them a receiver that is independent of the housing of that receiver, which is the skull. And that's a really unusual arrangement among mammals. And whales have had that arrangement for over 40 million years before they really became fully adapted to life in the water. They had acoustically isolated earbones, and that's an insight that you can only get from studying their fossils, which I think is the big picture for me, is the reason why fossil whales are cool is because they tell you something that you wouldn't otherwise know just looking at the world as it is today.
So going back to humans swimming underwater. Yeah, when you put your head underwater, you try to listen. It's not easy, right? It just sounds like lublub lub sound everywhere. Well, that's because our ears are adapted to hearing out of the water, in the air. And most terrestrial animals are the same way. And any species that's evolved to live in the water. And whales, like other marine mammals, all share terrestrial ancestry. So they represent lineages of animals that have returned to the water and undergone subsequent evolutionary transformations. Loss of the hind limbs, a tale that evolves. A fluke, maybe. There's a whole bunch of breathing and diving and other sensory system modifications from what they had as terrestrial species many millions of years prior. So in the case of whales, they've evolved the ability to hear underwater and to hear directionally. And what that means is that you're able to know where predator is coming from, if it's emitting sound, or know where your food is, or know where another individual of your own species is for the purposes of your podcast. What I think is a big takeaway is that sound is essential for how whales see and perceive the world.
One group of whales today, toothed whales, use sound as a way of navigating and communicating. Another group of whales, the filter feeding whales, use sound as well. And we know that they emit sound. They sing, they're like humpback whales that have whale song. How they hear is not exactly as well understood, but in either case, sound is an essential part of how they operate in the world. And that should concern us because we've made the oceans far more noisy than they were even decades ago.
There's also the use of sonar and really loud bangs from various industries that all contribute to a soundscape that is really, if we're being honest, detrimental to their well being. So I always like to think of this as the bigger picture of wanting a future with whales living alongside us. It's clear that many whales are ocean ecosystem engineers, that their presence in ecosystems enhances ocean health. So we should want a world with more whales. Now, one of the problems is, as we as a species, urbanize the world's oceans, we're making it a lot harder for whales to survive. So a lot of these answers are different in different ways. The measures we can take collectively to make the oceans less of a harmful place for whales, that comes down to economic choices and legal instruments that we have to protect them, because I do think we want a future alongside them.
[00:21:17] Speaker A: Sure. It seems like I was listening to the beginning of Moby Dick, and it seemed like just a different time, a different world.
It seemed like whale hunting was kind of really prevalent at that time, and it seems like today it's pretty niche around the world. But the fact that it's so much less than it used to be shouldn't necessarily give us comfort that we're doing what we can to ensure the future of Wales.
[00:21:54] Speaker B: Right.
[00:21:54] Speaker D: Yeah, well, there's lots unpack with that one chronicle.
Moby Dick, to me, know whaling, steampunk. If you know about the context of Herman Melville and his contemporaries, you kind of understand a bit more of why he was writing in that way and definitely inspired by his own experiences. And America at that time was a different place than the United States right now. Whaling was an industry and contributed to the wealth of cities like New Bedford and made them one of the most prosperous places in the United States at the time, and that certainly isn't true now. Right.
Wealth has a different manifestation now in different industries, and the whaling industry was powered in large part by having ships that did go all around the world to collect their quarry, whale oil, either rendered from the thick blubber around the sides of whales, or they would go after sperm whales in the thick chambers of oil that sat right above their skull in what's kind of anatomically the homologue of our nose.
Whale oil was really important before the discovery of petroleum. But that doesn't really answer why whales nearly went extinct in the 20th century. That was a major industry that was basically powered by whale meat for human consumption or for the purposes of whale oil used as an oil substitute, like margarine. And the scale of devastation in both cases is dramatic.
Certainly in the 20th century, more than in the 19th century. But this is all just the tail end of centuries of exploitation of whales wherever they could be found. Whatever nations were pursuing them started in the north Atlantic, expanded to the western side of the north Atlantic, and then the south Pacific, and then the North Pacific and the southern. You know, throughout time, these oceans, as we got better and better at killing whales and hunting them and removing that biomass from ocean ecosystems, we really changed the structure and we think the function of ocean food webs.
Consider the amount of biomass that you remove with any single whale and multiply it out by the several million of, what, millions of whales that were killed during the 20th century. Not to say anything about previous centuries, which we have reliable records, but probably less accurate, if that makes sense. And today. Yeah, you said niche. The word, I guess I'd use to describe it, is artisanal that whaling today happens. The United States is still a whaling nation.
[00:24:57] Speaker A: That was surprising.
[00:24:58] Speaker D: Yeah, well, it happens. North of the 48 continental states, native Alaskans still hunt whales, and they have an exemption from the US Marine Mammal Protection act to do so. So we are whalers, Americans are whalers. And I have a colleague, Michael Moore, who has made the argument in a book, and the book is titled we are all Whalers. That says that the scale of our consumption, our need for products that in many cases are shipped to us by cargo ships or the cruise ship industry, those are the industries that cause the greatest threats to whales today. Because when whales just stay in the United States, feed in the summertime, they feed in the same places that happen to be the busiest ports in the United States. So the survival of whales, the future of whales, having made it through whaling, now relies on how we protect them from our own economic needs.
[00:25:55] Speaker B: I'm always curious when someone's like, you're such an expert at a certain field, and so if you ask a musician like me, a cello player, where would you go back in time?
I guess it relates to a question, this burning question you want answered. Is there something that has been such a mystery in all your research and all your publications, where you're like, I need to know why this happens, and the only way is a time machine. Is there a certain period of time, or, like a burning question that you've run into that you just wish you wish you could answer because it would solve other problems that you're trying to figure out?
[00:26:39] Speaker D: When I take a step back and I look at whale evolution, there's two big features to me about it. And from those two big features, if we're going to outline it, you can draw a lot of questions, and those questions kind of yield more questions, and you reconcile your questions with what's available as evidence.
So I wouldn't say that the scientific work I do is so contingent on wishing that I had a time machine for a specific place, but instead, what? I'm kind of interested in looking at these broader evolutionary patterns. So, for whales, the two phases of their evolutionary history is, first, the transition from living life on land to life in the water. And that takes place in the first 10 million years of their evolutionary history. But then the next 40 million years is the second phase, which is the story of what happens to whales once they are in the water. And for a long time, I thought, as of this week, I thought that story of what happens to them in the water includes innovations, evolutionary innovations, of navigating and feeding. If you're a large filter feeding whale, well, how does filter feeding evolve? That's a very complex tissue system, and we don't have all the data, but it sure is interesting. The same is true with toothed whales. Like killer whales and sperm whales. They navigate using sound, using echolocation. Well, how did echolocation evolve? And is this related to how brainy toothed whales are? I would also say size is an innovation itself. Extremely large body size. We kind of think of just kind of like scaling up an image, but that in itself is also an innovation. And I thought that a lot of these innovations were kind of restricted to the second phase of whale evolution. But this week, I think the paper that was published shows that size was also an innovation in the first phase as well. And for me, I get the most out of interrogating these patterns, not in isolation. So it's the realization that whales are among the most recent examples of a phenomenon that has been ongoing in earth history for a quarter of a billion years. And that's the rise of ocean giants from land ancestors. And that happened 250 or so million years ago with all the marine reptiles that adapted to life in the water from terrestrial ancestors as well. And these are groups of marine reptiles now completely extinct, but lived alongside dinosaurs during the mesozoic era. Ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, mosasaurs, sea turtles, even penguins that evolved a little bit right after the end of the Cretaceous.
These are all different lineages of four limbed organisms that made a living eventually in the world's oceans and modifying their skeletons tremendously to do so. And we, by inference, also think they modified parts of their soft tissue and parts of their behavior and parts of their ecology. So that's really what's pretty cool, is if you answer a set of questions about whales all of a sudden, because whales have such good fossil record, you can go over to other groups that don't have such a great or don't have such a well understood evolutionary history and start to ask these cross cutting comparative questions.
Why is it that these organisms are successful when they undergo this ecological transition?
What are the evolutionary steps that have to change in their skeleton? Are there similar patterns? Are there unique aspects? And then I think, looking right now, we want ocean giants in the world's oceans. Ocean giants are good. There are ecotourism industries. There are also reasons for our own appetites. Some people eat these ocean giants, and they also probably, again, as I said before, have a role to play in ocean ecosystems with ocean health. So understanding the traits that make ocean giants successful, whether they're a whale or things that are almost like whales, is going to be really important right now and looking ahead into the future.
[00:31:26] Speaker B: I was listening to an interview with a polar bear specialist, and they had made the comment.
[00:31:33] Speaker A: You took a little pause there before you said special.
[00:31:37] Speaker D: I was really wondering where that was.
[00:31:42] Speaker B: Sorry, let me start. Take two. Let me take two.
[00:31:44] Speaker A: Oh, no, we're keeping that in.
[00:31:46] Speaker B: Go ahead.
Okay. We had a polar bear specialist, Dr. Aaron Curry from the Cincinnati Zoo, and she was saying that if you have no arctic ice, you have no polar bears. So it was really interesting to hear in the interview that you had how you mentioned that when polar ice melts, you get more water, more food resources for whales, which could be, in some sense, in the short term, good for whales. But the problem is you also have shipping lanes that open up that haven't been opened and new resources that humans want. It broke my brain a little bit to hear that. I was like, well, it didn't break my brain, because I understand that it's complicated. I'm curious between different types of animals and with your expertise, what kind of connections you see with where we are possibly going on this planet.
[00:32:42] Speaker D: So we're all caught in this situation together, right? How we adapt. And for scientists, evolutionary biologists, when they talk about adaptation, they're talking about traits that happen across generations.
But the way you hear about in the media is talking about adaptation to our current situation within a generation. It's meant more specifically for human culture and humankind rather than across generations, which is, by extension, also implied for the marine mammals that live alongside us, in your case, polar bears and whales. Yeah. The effects of climate change are complex and not necessarily clear cut in one direction or another. Less ice means no ice for polar bears to get around and hunt. So that is going to push that species in a direction that's probably perilous.
That kind of peril is true for, say, a species like blue whales. If there's no krill, if krill can't adapt to a more acidifying ocean, then blue whales are really stuck with trying to find some different prey to feed on. And they have to feed on prey at the right density, or else they can't make the return on the energy investment to maintain their enormous body.
Know, the natural world is not as simple as species x eats species y in a static stage. Environments are changing all the time. They change seasonally, they change annually. And for arctic species, they've only adapted to an arctic that's been around for maybe the last 3 million years. And that arctic is being pushed through major change that is beyond what we know of in the past, both in its rate of change and magnitude.
I think when I wrote spine on whales, the data that we had said the arctic was warming maybe two to three times as fast as the rest of the world. Polar regions warming two to three times faster, and now it looks like it's more like three to four times faster. And we hope that rate doesn't change, but we don't know. Earth systems are complex and really dynamic, and it's hard to predict. We've really pushed these systems hard. So what I would say is that sounds like it's perilous for some species and maybe a boon to others.
But we don't know how organisms evolve in the context of these changes and how fast they can evolve.
Some corals may actually evolve to future climate states on earth. And yes, extinction is bad, but it's also many species kind of evolve new tolerances for the states that we'll be in. So we don't know. And I think that lack of ability to really predict the response of biodiversity to climate change, that should be cause for concern.
That doesn't mean, in my view, this is an opinion. It doesn't mean that we should just keep on going. It means that, well, clearly, we ought to try to mitigate these changes as much as we can, while it's also understanding that organisms will adapt to future climate states, whatever they may be.
[00:36:21] Speaker B: Hey, when I'm in Boston, I like to go to a few different places. Aaron, do you like nature?
[00:36:26] Speaker A: I do like nature. I like to get away from it all, even when I'm in the middle.
[00:36:30] Speaker B: Of it all, we are in the haven of green space in Greater Boston, in the neighborhood of Jamaica plain.
[00:36:37] Speaker A: I don't always go to Boston, but when I do, I go to Jamaica plain.
[00:36:43] Speaker B: Yes. And so there's some places we could go. We could go to the Lauren Greenow house, Franklin Park, Jamaica Pond, the Arnold Arboretum, and you could even take a walking tour with the historical society, you know?
[00:36:57] Speaker A: And there's one place, whenever I'm in Jamaica Plain, that I like to go to, it's a vegan ice cream shop, and it's got a great name. The name of that vegan ice cream shop is Fomo.
That's right, FOMo.
Have you ever been to FOMU?
[00:37:16] Speaker B: Did we go last time?
[00:37:17] Speaker A: I don't think we did.
[00:37:18] Speaker B: We didn't. There was a place in Tucson called Cash Ukao, and so I'm very happy that there's a Fomo in Jamaica plain.
[00:37:29] Speaker A: There's a lot of history here.
Catch it while you still can. It's a beautiful place to walk around. If you have a dog. It's a good place to walk your dog. If you don't have a dog, you can still borrow one and walk it.
[00:37:44] Speaker B: You get one of those fake leashes that has an imaginary dog at the end. It's like you didn't wash the leash for about a year, and it just holds its own shape.
Fake dog leash, that type of thing.
[00:37:55] Speaker A: And the funny thing is, nobody will look at you as if you're doing anything strange. People are very accepting here. People just take you the way that you are. And if you need a little bit of coffee in the morning, you can go to third cliff.
I'm drinking some third cliff coffee, right?
[00:38:12] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, we have more. There's even more.
[00:38:16] Speaker D: And if you like cow in your ice cream, we have JP licks. JP, short for Jamaica plain.
[00:38:23] Speaker B: Look at that. When you visit Boston, you want to go here first. Come to Jamaica Plain.
[00:38:29] Speaker A: They'll stamp your passport.
[00:38:31] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:38:32] Speaker A: Then you're free to move about the.
[00:38:33] Speaker B: Area, the esteemed neighborhood of Greater Boston.
[00:38:38] Speaker A: Let's get back to the show and our interview with Nick Piansen.
Why do you think humans are so fascinated in popular culture? With whales?
[00:38:56] Speaker D: We know that fascination is millennia old.
Rock carvings have pretty good evidence for humans hunting whales, or at least scavenging them, if not hunting them. And we know that the many eras of whaling have inspired so much.
Know Aristotle definitely dissected, or at least studied whale carcasses on the beach in the.
You know, it's from that legacy of fascination and investigation that we have our knowledge about a group of animals that are fundamentally really hard to know. It is hard to know about something in the oceans, especially something that moves around a lot, that lives at human lifetimes and has a biology of superlatives, the biggest, the largest, the fastest, the deepest diving.
So that invites all kinds of fascination for human culture and also investigation. I mean, the science of whales has evolved as we have gotten better tools and as we've asked different questions, using different lines of evidence, and actually been better at observing whales in the environments in which they live. Ocean environments are extremely complex and can change daily to annually to decadally.
So I think that there's very good basis for how much space whales occupy in our common cultural lexicon and iconography, for sure.
You just said it yourself with Moby Dick as one of the key pieces of american canon.
Leviathan, a story a few centuries older, is a description of political economy, and it clearly is describing something monstrous, something like a whale. We use leviathan to evoke the idea of a whale. So they're gigantic, they're hard to know. They're sometimes inscrutable. Even when we ask basic questions, we still don't know the answer. And I think there's something about that remoteness, that distance, that just is endlessly appealing and fascinating. Whale song, going back to the intro, is so captivating to us that we put its recordings on the human greeting sequence of the voyager one and two golden discs that are now outside of our solar system. I just think that's such a wild thing that we don't even know what it means, and it's been put on the side of spacecraft. So, yeah, that's about as strong of a testament to human fascination, I think, as you can point to.
And we still don't know. We still don't know how many species there are actually of whales in the world's oceans alive today. We still don't know what most whales do for a living. Their natural history is incompletely known. So if it is so important that we know something about how whales will live alongside us in the future, gosh, we have a lot of work to do, and I think that should be exciting to anybody who wants to study whales, that there's so much more to know.
[00:42:32] Speaker A: So why do you study whales? And how much does that tie into your, for lack of a better word, day job?
I know that you deal with fossils at work, right?
[00:42:44] Speaker D: Yeah. So in my professional capacity, I'm curator of fossil marine mammals. And the way I think about it is a curator is a steward, takes care, organizes, preserves, something. And those things are fossil marine mammals. Whales are marine mammals, and they do have a fossil record. And the Smithsonian Institution where I work at has the world's largest collection of fossil marine mammals. We have some 15,000 specimens from every continent from every time period, a lot of which was collected before I started working here. And it's my job to know about them, take care of them, make sure that they stay around for another 175 years. In some cases, add to the collection, and knowing about these bones is not really trivial either. Some of them tend to be really large.
Collecting them is not an easy thing either. So that stewardship aspect is really important. As a public facing institution. We want to take care of it, preserve it, but also be able to share it. And that's where new tools like 3d digitization are really important for being able to communicate what we think we know and what we think is important.
And also, I think, as when we talk about communication, we are telling stories. Now, we're not telling tall tales. These stories are all rooted in fact, but they're stories in so many different ways. They can be stories about scientific fact. They can be stories about humans and stories of discovery. They can be stories about what it means to other people outside of Washington, DC. And I think about that with first peoples and indigenous peoples. They have their own stories about whales, and having an inclusive framework for thinking about that is really important.
Moving ahead as we try to recognize spaces for all these ways of telling stories and ways of knowing.
[00:44:53] Speaker B: Well, I'm so thankful that you came on to do this tiny little podcast with us. We've been trying to take what we did in our musical expression for this whole album and try to help those who know our music to learn a little bit about anything we may have been singing about. The people we sang about, we wrote their stories. In this case, the general topic that I had some lyrics on, and you've really helped expand that, so that everyone's going to have a lot more to listen to. Everyone's going to have a lot more to think about.
[00:45:28] Speaker D: I'm so touched to hear that. That kind of connection is really humbling. And I think of music as just another kind of storytelling. It's just as old as, actually, it's as old as anything, really, that we do, and it's pretty important for our well being and our understanding. I think these are all different ways of knowing, and there's something powerful about combining it with things that fascinate us.
The written word and songwriting writing lyrics is part of that. It's an essential way of us to understand the world that we're in that is complex and not really fully, you know, I think that everybody has that experience.
Aaron, you're talking about trying to go on a whale watch, and I recently tried to do the same thing with my children, and it was a complete failure. We tried to go on a whale watch in the Bay of Fundy and got fogged out. There was not a whale to be seen. I don't know if we went in the afternoon instead of the morning, but their first experience, trying to see a whale in the flesh was a huge bummer. And those are the chances that you take when trying to do something in the real world. But also, gosh, it really underscores how hard it is to know about this group. And you think in today's age, with all the tools that we have, satellites and removable probes and drones and boats everywhere, that we still can't find whales on a given day in a place where they should be, where they were hours before, in the summer, where they should be feeding.
It is hard to know about parts of the world. And for me, one of the reasons I'm a scientist is because the scientific way of knowing, for me, is elevating it, inspiring. To me, it's a common language that cuts across cultures and boundaries, and it's a way of knowing that's hard in some ways. It's durable, and that's literally as hard as the fossil bones themselves that are in the collections right here in the natural history building. So it's the timescales to me that sometimes gets me. I was talking to somebody the other day, and they said something about a 40 million year old whale, and they said, did I get that right, 40 million years? And I said, yeah, I deal with millions of years like it's pocket change. And to me, it's a very casual thing to do, right. But if you try to wrap your mind around millions of years, it wrecks you.
It's so hard for us to grasp that. And as a day to day scientist, I take it pretty casually, and I try not to think about what it really means, because I would stall out. I wouldn't be able to do the work. Instead, what's a little easier for me is to contemplate the history of my workplace, which is the Smithsonian has been around for 176 years, and we definitely have collections from just before the institution was founded. There are fossil whales in here that were collected before the Smithsonian was around in the United States. And so if I do my job right, hopefully someone 176 years from now will open a drawer at the Smithsonian and look at what I've done and say, yeah, nick didn't screw it up too bad. I can still answer my given question 176 years later. And that's the kind of contribution that I think is that's where I get a lot of meaning out of my work.
[00:49:28] Speaker A: Do you listen to music out when you're working around the world?
[00:49:32] Speaker D: Of course.
I don't bring music on a device with me. I usually like to have it. I have enough to keep track of.
[00:49:43] Speaker A: You bring a mandolin or something?
[00:49:45] Speaker D: I don't bring instruments, so I don't bring instruments. But let me get to. I'll give you a vignette. Recently, for recent field work, I've been in the Middle east, so it's been exposure to a non western culture. And in Qatar, I end up driving around for hours on. I just. I like having the radio on, and just listening to whatever's on local radio stations and whatever my colleagues bring along is usually what. It's kind of full immersion in another culture, which is something I really enjoy.
In Chile for a while, I was listening to Inti Ilmani, which is like their classic chilean musical group, and maybe you guys can queue up their music, they're great. But personally, I discovered one of my key collaborators does Tom Jones covers, and he's kind of has his own recording studio that he's built. And the most precious thing to me is receiving know message on my phone, all the audio files that are Tom Jones covers and a few other new wave covers that he did.
All this is Suarez, who's. Who's actually in spying on Wales, key collaborator in Chile. And I always knew that.
We always talked about how Mario had such a great voice, know, listening to him sing in the field. And he'd sometimes bring music on a phone and know dancing to Duran Duran while we're looking for fossils. But I didn't realize that he was also a know, so invested in his own craft that he recorded his own covers. So that's something that music will tie me to time and place. And I cherish that because I've had such great experiences doing field work in places like Chile. And when you go to a place field season after field season, you grow a lot more connected to it in a familiar way. And that's been one of the great privileges is being able to connect to place and people who are far away from home and give you a sense of camaraderie. It's not necessarily belonging, but it's partnership and collaborations are some of the most important parts about doing science today. I think there's too much to know and it's too specialized for any one person to know everything. So your success as a scientist in doing science is contingent on having a good team. And unless you're just recording your own music all on your own, I'm sure you guys have had the experience. Playing together with other people is really fun.
[00:52:40] Speaker B: It's absolutely key.
[00:52:42] Speaker A: Yeah, you're looking at it right now, me and Michael.
[00:52:45] Speaker D: It's true for science, too. Yeah. I mean, science is a creative enterprise, and so is art. And these similarities between art and science, to me, are not that surprising.
[00:52:54] Speaker A: It can be so easy to speak in a language that excludes most people, and you found a way to take this fascinating material and expose it to the broadest audience possible. So my hat is off to you.
[00:53:10] Speaker D: Thank you so much, Aaron.
I'm so glad to hear that. I'm so glad to hear that it was useful to you and that it said something to you. And I think that's the job of scientists now more than ever. It's the people who know the information who.
Not everybody's a storyteller, but it's something you can learn. And some people may discover they like it a lot more than others. And if you aren't such a great storyteller and you are a scientist, partner with people who are, I've had such a great time partnering with illustrators, artists to convey visually, sometimes really arcane, really specific technical parts of it, and that technical knowledge can be a real barrier, for sure. And scientists kind of sometimes don't know the audiences that they're talking to. That's a big challenge as well.
I think the issues are just so acute. Right.
Climate change, biodiversity loss, generational, intergenerational injustices. We're trying to fix all those things. People are, and those solutions are manifold. You can be at different scales in different ways, but almost in all of them, you can't get around communicating. Right. You do have to talk to somebody about the issue and about the solutions, and it will require expertise, and it will require how we communicate that expertise. People learn in different ways. And I'm just so struck the ways how my children learn, that's different from the ways.
Here I am holding a pen. I'm still very analog.
Yeah, I like using fancy 3d tools, but I still take all my field notes with pen and paper. I'll use my phone, occasionally, take pictures, which is a funny thing, for those who were born before the Internet, using a phone to take pictures would strike somebody 50 years ago, 100 years ago as being sounding pretty strange. But that's just how things change. And you don't know how to communicate or you don't know what are going to be the best ways to communicate in the future. So I think it should be a positive challenge. Let's all learn how to become better storytellers in the ways that play best to our own skills and talents.
[00:55:33] Speaker A: We're honored that you chose us. So thank you.
[00:55:38] Speaker D: Thank you for reaching out and thanks for creating the opportunity for this kind of conversation. I can't wait to see who you guys bring on next.
[00:55:49] Speaker B: Thank you.
[00:55:50] Speaker A: One word, Oppenheimer.
[00:55:54] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:55:59] Speaker A: There's actually a garbage truck rolling out.
[00:56:01] Speaker B: Let's listen for a second.
If I pan it right to left or left to right, it'll make it feel real.
[00:56:12] Speaker A: Michael, I have one question for you.
[00:56:14] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:56:15] Speaker A: What note is that?
[00:56:16] Speaker B: I don't know.
No one can see what I'm doing.
[00:56:23] Speaker A: He's opening a tuner.
[00:56:25] Speaker B: It's a G. Wow.
All right. I'm really good.
[00:56:30] Speaker A: You are good. That's why we keep you.
[00:56:32] Speaker B: I have relative pitch, but not perfect.
[00:56:35] Speaker A: Know, that was a great interview and I really enjoy. Thank you, Nick, for coming on the.
So we've got some exciting stuff coming up later today on the topic of whales.
[00:56:48] Speaker B: Yeah. Next episode, we're going to be remotely reporting back to you, not live, but delayed from a boat. A catamaran. Is that what it's called?
[00:57:02] Speaker A: I guess it's a catamaran.
[00:57:03] Speaker B: I'm sorry. To anyone who knows about kind of a cat. Yeah.
Anyway, we're going to be sitting on a thing that sits on water called the ocean. And we're going to go visit and look at whales. And they guarantee that we will see one. I'm not sure how they can unless they speak whale, but that's what we're doing. And next episode, you can hear all about it.
[00:57:28] Speaker A: I can't wait.
This will be the first time that we've ever ventured out into the real world to do something other than make music.
[00:57:37] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:57:37] Speaker A: This will be at least professionally, so this should be interesting.
Anyway, thank you for joining us today.
Before we play the full song. Okay, do we have the word of the day? Is it time?
[00:57:54] Speaker B: It's going to be after.
[00:57:56] Speaker A: We're going to listen to the full song.
[00:57:57] Speaker B: Yeah. So we're going to play manned. Manned. We're going to play manned.
We're going to play man and a whale this is a tale of a.
[00:58:08] Speaker C: Man and a whale who dreams of the world in giant snail in ocean palm sitting quietly he walks around breathing oh so slow pondering the tones beneath each bow flapping in the warm and subtle breeze mountains to the west and blue skies leak through the clouds can see dark green trees never poisoned by human disease that's the truest luxury.
[00:59:13] Speaker B: This.
[00:59:13] Speaker C: Is the tale of a man and a whale dreaming of the world and happy betrayal in ocean pond sitting quietly he walks around saying oh no pondering the road built on nature's veil littering the ground with wild disease footsteps take us closer to the peak that drops far down hundreds of feet sailing downhill to our wild dreams singing old song and by God or how to stop the danger flowing he doesn't bow his head in shame world can pass us by without a word unknown trails lost to the whales who roam so many miles who roam so many hours and.
[01:02:06] Speaker B: Fence for listening to that I enjoyed hearing it again.
And we have a word of the day.
[01:02:22] Speaker A: Word of the day.
[01:02:24] Speaker B: Aaron, do you have one? You want to start?
[01:02:26] Speaker A: Blubber.
[01:02:29] Speaker B: Blubber.
[01:02:30] Speaker A: Blubber. Top that.
[01:02:36] Speaker B: Well, I can't.
Can't be done.
[01:02:41] Speaker A: Well then fail to top it with a different word.
[01:02:48] Speaker B: Bird.
[01:02:50] Speaker A: I think you win actually. I think the simplicity is really what this bird calls for.
[01:02:54] Speaker B: That's right bird. So anyway, that's our podcast you've been listening to.
[01:03:00] Speaker A: The Nathan's and roncast.
[01:03:03] Speaker B: Have a great day.
[01:03:04] Speaker A: Peace meow.
[01:03:21] Speaker B: Sea croons and self to rest a soft wind bends the slender blades of the dune grasses in the.
[01:03:31] Speaker A: West.
[01:03:34] Speaker B: A pale cloud turns to pink and fades.
