Community & Ecosystem Approaches
Conservation Biology
Class Meetings
Dates: 2026-12-02T16:00:00, 2026-12-07T16:00:00
Assigned Background
Conservation planning and priorities
Chapter: Conservation planning and priorities
Ch No.: 11 (Approaches to Conservation)
Pages: 199-219 (Community & Ecosystem Approaches)
PDF: brooks_2010.pdf
Textbook: Conservation Biology for All (see details below)
Days Covered: BIOL4120_W15D1, BIOL4120_W15D2
Text: Conservation Biology for All by Thomas Brooks
Edition: (2010)
ISBN: 978-0-19-955423-2
From conservation theory to practice: crossing the divide
Chapter: From conservation theory to practice: crossing the divide
Ch No.: 15 (Approaches to Conservation)
Pages: 284-312 (Community & Ecosystem Approaches)
Textbook: Conservation Biology for All (see details below)
Days Covered: BIOL4120_W15D1, BIOL4120_W15D2
Text: Conservation Biology for All by Madhu Rao, Joshua Ginsberg
Edition: (2010)
ISBN: 978-0-19-955423-2
Optional Material (Dive Deeper)
Readings
Ch 14 Community and Ecosystem Conservation
Textbook: Conservation Biology (see details below)
Chapter: 14 (Approaches to Conservation)
Sections Assigned: 14.1, 14.2, 14.4 (Community & Ecosystem Approaches)
Days Covered: BIOL4120_W15D1
Text: Conservation Biology by
Edition: 2nd (2025-01-17)
ISBN: 9780197667033 (textbook)
Conservation planning and priorities
Chapter: Conservation planning and priorities
Ch No.: 11 (Approaches to Conservation)
Pages: 199-219 (Community & Ecosystem Approaches)
PDF: brooks_2010.pdf
Textbook: Conservation Biology for All (see details below)
Days Covered: BIOL4120_W15D1, BIOL4120_W15D2
Text: Conservation Biology for All by Thomas Brooks
Edition: (2010)
ISBN: 978-0-19-955423-2
From conservation theory to practice: crossing the divide
Chapter: From conservation theory to practice: crossing the divide
Ch No.: 15 (Approaches to Conservation)
Pages: 284-312 (Community & Ecosystem Approaches)
Textbook: Conservation Biology for All (see details below)
Days Covered: BIOL4120_W15D1, BIOL4120_W15D2
Text: Conservation Biology for All by Madhu Rao, Joshua Ginsberg
Edition: (2010)
ISBN: 978-0-19-955423-2
Video Clips
Climate change can money stop deforestation
The Economist, 11 01, 2022
Video (12:50)
Description
Rampant deforestation has driven economic growth, but accelerates climate change. How do you put a price on trees, to make them worth more alive than dead?
Film supported by Bain and Company
00:00 - Can money grow on trees?
00:55 - What Costa Rica can teach us
01:52 - Down with the trees: rapid deforestation around the world
03:15 - Why tree-planting schemes aren’t always the answer
04:24 - Paying for existing trees: carbon credits
06:38 - How to finance the restoration of forests
08:10 - What are Payments for Environmental Services?
09:31 - Swapping to sustainable returns
10:40 - Is focusing on economic growth the problem?
11.50 - Why world leaders need to decarbonise the economy
Sign up to our daily newsletter to keep up to date: https://econ.st/3n3kIjj
Why tree planting alone is not an adequate solution for climate change: https://econ.st/3rC50Oq
How the world’s wealthiest countries cause deforestation in poor ones: https://econ.st/3rBgW3d
The role of forests in climate change - listen to The Economist’s Intelligence podcast about their importance: https://econ.st/3rJ527a
How Jair Bolsonaro has damaged the Amazon rainforest: https://econ.st/3CFQiwa
Sign up to our climate change newsletter: https://econ.st/3b1dtCQ
A balance-sheet could help to save the planet:https://econ.st/3VcAZSS
Why is the Amazon rainforest doing more harm than good? https://econ.st/3T50KCV
Transcript
Can money grow on trees?
0:00 · [Music] money doesn’t grow on trees but chopping them down has helped lots of the world get richer since the beginning of the 20th century humans have been raiding these resources almost as though they were Limitless the problem is the world is now paying a heavy environmental price it certainly looks like a crisis after the worst drought in 80 years so is
0:26 · there a financial solution if we don’t change the movement of money we’ll continue to finance ourselves into Extinction is paying for trees to be protected and restored the answer and how do you put a price on their worth foreign
0:51 · to understand the alarming story of deforestation let’s start with Costa Rica in the 1980s [Music] Maria’s family was typical of many enticed by The Riches of Agriculture her father cleared and converted their Forest to pasture foreign
What Costa Rica can teach us
1:29 · markets with the driving force behind deforestation from 1940 to 1987 the proportion of land in Costa Rica covered by forests plummeted from 75 percent to 21 percent
1:45 · Costa Rica’s experience is far from unique the rest of the world jumped on the bandwagon too humans have been cutting trees for thousands of years but there was a massive acceleration in the last century the U.N estimates around 10 million
Down with the trees: rapid deforestation around the world
2:01 · hectares of forest are being lost each year that’s around 27 football fields every minute fewer trees means less carbon dioxide being absorbed from the atmosphere and their destruction only adds more emissions accelerating climate change
2:24 · The Heart Of This Global crisis sits the world’s largest rainforest and the so-called Trump of the tropics jair bolsonaro um from 2019 to 2022 the rate of
2:41 · deforestation in Brazil Rose by roughly 50 percent attracting critics around the world the problem is it’s a bit Rich for wealthy countries to demand that poorer ones give up the economic benefits of deforestation the majority of deforestation in recent
2:59 · years has really been driven by agriculture expansion in developing countries it can almost seem hypocritical to criticize these developing nations for following a pathway that effectively made rich countries wealthy in previous centuries
Why tree-planting schemes aren’t always the answer
3:15 · so what can be done the simple answer is for rich countries to incentivize poorer ones to protect and restore their forests one thing the wealthy world has tried is stumping up cash for new tree planting schemes but many of these haven’t borne
3:33 · fruit tree planting programs are incredibly popular they can seem almost childishly easy you plant a tree you save the climate the reality of course is nowhere near that simple in terms of the climate it can be far more beneficial to conserve the forest that’s there so another way is to focus rewards for
3:55 · developing countries on conserving existing forests it works like this using historic rates of deforestation a country predicts how much Forest is likely to lose in the future any Forest that it manages to conserve is judged against this Benchmark the
4:12 · donor hands over a financial reward to the developing country for the trees it saved paying a sum for each ton of carbon dioxide that would have otherwise been emitted it’s not just the developing country that stands to gain the donors often
Paying for existing trees: carbon credits
4:28 · rich countries or companies can benefit too in exchange for their money they can claim what’s called a carbon credit which they can use to offset their emissions elsewhere Carmen credits are a way of allowing companies countries people who can’t
4:47 · reduce their own emissions currently to offset those emissions elsewhere they are seen as an important part of transitioning towards a net zero economy I started out hugging orangutans but now I find myself hugging asset managers and bankers a bit more often Andrew Mitchell is a zoologist turned financial advisor he encourages investors to buy carbon credits and believes they’re an important tool for Forest conservation these credits are hugely valuable it’s a
5:18 · transition strategy whilst you’re reducing your carbon emissions you have to buy offsets you should buy offsets it sounds like a win-win but so far the results are mixed Shady players have gained the system and pulled dirty tricks like duplicating credits or
5:36 · claiming to conserve land never under threat or moving the problem to the forest next door built into the Paris agreement is this consensus that there should be a global scheme for exchanging carbon credits across borders in practice the rules and standards that would govern such a global market have been incredibly difficult to establish and so right now
6:01 · what we’ve got is a system which is really unregulated and although standards and the scale of carbon credit schemes are improving there’s still one big sticking point the rewards for conserving trees still lag behind those for deforesting we need carbon markets to grow they
6:22 · won’t really achieve their full potential unless the price of offsetting a ton of carbon is competitive with the profits that can be generated from other activities on that land ultimately conservation has to become profitable
How to finance the restoration of forests
6:38 · re-enter Costa Rica once the poster child of deforestation but now a global leader in conservation and an example of how to make saving nature pay here landowners are paid by the government to restore and conserve forests and this has helped to create new and sustainable economic opportunities [Music]
7:07 · remember Maria whose father made a living out of chopping down trees like many in Costa Rica her family have since branched out and now do the very opposite [Music]
7:24 · Maria and her grandchildren we plant forests so far 350 hectares worth the government pays them and many other families around 80 a year for each hectare of forest that’s restored or kept intact Graces
7:55 · Ramos [Music] it might sound like a government subsidy scheme but here’s the key bit it’s not
What are Payments for Environmental Services?
8:12 · it’s a system known as payments for Environmental Services launched in the late 90s is paid for by citizens who are seen as benefiting from the services provided by healthy forests like carbon storage the protection of vital food chains and clean water the money is not coming from from the national budget the money comes from those who benefit
8:38 · Carlos Manuel Rodriguez is Costa Rica’s former environment Minister and the brains behind the scheme which is paid for by a levy on consumers water bills and attacks on their fuel use Costa Rica was the first developing country that put a tax on on carbon to
8:56 · generate a revenue for the payment of Environmental Services everybody who uses fuel in Costa Rica and pollutes the environment contributing to climate change must pay in the price of purchases that fuel an extra amount that
9:13 · goes to this foreign fund that pays Farmers so far the scheme has invested more than 500 million dollars in the conservation of forests and it’s paid off in the space of a generation Forest covering Costa Rica jumped from 21 to more than 50 percent
Swapping to sustainable returns
9:32 · with the restoration of trees have come new opportunities for profitable and sustainable Industries blowing away the idea that conservation and economic development are always at loggerheads nature-based tourism has become naturally important because of our jobs in rural Costa Rica as opposed to what we had in the past which was this irrational unsustainable agricultural production there is no dichotomy between preservation and economic development
10:05 · since 1987 the peak of deforestation in Costa Rica the country’s GDP has risen by an average of 4.2 percent a year Costa Rica isn’t a magic formula for saving the world’s forests since it began prioritizing conservation it’s increased food imports an option not available to all countries but there is a lot Costa Rica can teach others for one thing it’s improved some
10:32 · of its bad spending habits reversing subsidies that incentivize the clearance of land at all costs a lead more countries should follow we should put more money into the protection of nature from governments but the reality is even if we doubled all that money it wouldn’t come close to beating the subsidies that
Is focusing on economic growth the problem?
10:52 · directly cause harm to Nature each year the world spends around 150 billion dollars on protecting nature but around 12 times that on subsidies that harm it some campaigners argue a more radical fix is needed to save the volume of forests necessary to avert environmental catastrophe they say what’s required is a fundamental shift away from society’s focus on profits and growth the problem
11:20 · with GDP is that it measures everything we build and nothing that we protect it’s all beginning to change now people are waking up to the importance of keeping nature going to keep our economy going not everyone supports such a drastic change to economic thinking but
11:36 · most do agree that change is not happening fast enough with the eyes of many global leaders on other challenges the world is facing multiple crises in the midst of all this there is a risk that nature conservation and the climate crisis are demoted in the pecking order but climate change the global climate does not wait for short-term crises to pass foreign
12:12 · bullet that will reverse climate change the world needs to urgently reduce industrial emissions and prioritize policies to decarbonize economies but unless trees are worth more alive than dead deforestation and its Devastation will continue I’m Tom standage Deputy editor of The Economist and editor of the world ahead to read more of our future gazing coverage click on the link thanks for watching and don’t forget to subscribe
Four years ago we flooded a forest - the results are insane
Mossy Earth, 10 02, 2026
Video (16:43)
Description
After 4 years this forest has completely transformed into a proper flooded forest!
🌊 To support our work you can become a member here: https://mossy.earth
MOSSY EARTH MEMBERSHIP
===============================
The rewilding membership that restores nature across a wide range of ecosystems.
🌲 Support a diversity of ecosystems
🐺 Rewild habitats to bring back biodiversity
🦫 Fund neglected species & ecosystems
Learn more and become a member here: https://mossy.earth
🥾 Visit this and other rewilding projects: https://www.mossyearthjourneys.com/
📝 Field notes channel - https://www.youtube.com/@MossyEarth-FieldNotes
🔗 All our links: https://www.mossy.earth/links
💪 OUR PARTNERS IN THIS VIDEO
===============================
BROZ: https://broz.sk/en/
The project was also made possible thanks to the support of the LIFE17 NAT/SK/000621 project.
⏱️TIMESTAMPS⏱️
===============================
0:00 Intro
1:08 Project recap
3:13 Flooded forest
🔎 ABOUT THIS PROJECT
===============================
Over recent decades, large swathes of Slovakia’s wetlands have been lost. They have been drained to make way for agriculture as a result of the construction of dams for hydroelectric power, as well as for timber production. Wetlands are an integral part of the Danube floodplain landscape in Slovakia and draining them to plant trees has detrimental impacts on the environment. Wetlands store large amounts of carbon and are home to a diversity of plant and animal species that are specially adapted to the wet conditions. One of these species is the nationally endangered and endemic Pannonian root vole, which has declined drastically in Slovakia in response to disappearing wetlands. This project will turn forest back into a wetland by digging 650 meters of ditches. This will kickstart a “flood” of change and bring back a healthy functioning, sustainable and wilder ecosystem.
Read more about this project here: https://www.mossy.earth/projects/restoring-wetlands
CREDITS
===============================
This project is managed by BROZ
Filming: Julie Schleiss-Andreassen, Duarte de Zoeten, Adriana Brossmannova and Jakub Sigmund
Writing: Duarte de Zoeten
Editing: Duarte de Zoeten and Lana Piršl
Thumbnail: Duarte de Zoeten, Thomas Hikin and Thomas Berry
Subtitles: Thomas Berry
Transcript
Intro
0:00 · We flooded this forest and the results have been incredible to witness.
0:05 · This project started 4 years ago now and since the return of the water year after year, we have seen the return of this wild ecosystem.
0:13 · A boom of life, a beautiful show of nature’s resilience and its ability to come back if we give it a chance.
0:22 · And this year, we have a lot to show you.
0:25 · From the transformation of the forest and the channels to some sketchy encounters with larger animals and the most impressive display of life I’ve ever seen when diving in this flooded forest.
0:41 · I mean, that is absolutely insane.
0:45 · I think it’s the coolest thing that I filmed in this wetland, in this forest that we have flooded.
0:52 · And we’ve been flooding this for 4 years, so it’s just really incredible to see this.
0:58 · And in this video today, I’m really excited to show you how this place has changed over the years and all the amazing wildlife that now calls this flooded forest its home.
Project recap
1:08 · But first, let’s recap how we got here and why we’re doing this.
1:12 · This project started because of this dam here, which was built in the 90s and rerouted 85% of the Danube’s water away from its floodplain and into a concrete channel.
1:22 · This left all of these forests that used to flood every year completely dry and reduced fish populations by an astonishing 70% among many other issues associated with the loss of these wetlands.
1:35 · And since then, our partners, Broz, have been trying to pick up the pieces and bring back some of these ecosystems.
1:41 · And one of the most important things they achieved was a deal with the relevant authorities to have these simulated floods leave the concrete channel back into the floodplain of the Danube.
1:52 · So in 2022, when we had already worked with them for a couple of years and funded a few different projects, we finally set out to do something bigger and decided to use 40,000 euros of our rewilding budget to fund the creation of the channels to bring water to some really nice forests from where it had disappeared.
2:11 · So I was really nervous that it will work, so we just dig it during the dry season and the water came and suddenly we were here and I was really happy that the maps, as I said in the previous video, that they were not lying, so it was really flooding as we planned, as we wanted.
2:28 · And later on, after a couple of years of successful flooding, money was suddenly required to buy a portion of the land that the government was going to sell, and which Broz wanted to protect, of course.
2:39 · So we quickly put together the required 31,000 euros to do this, and they managed to buy it.
2:45 · And of course, the only reason we had these funds ready to go at such a short notice is because of our Mossy Earth members, who have a monthly subscription with us that funds our rewilding work.
2:55 · So please keep this in mind as you watch this video and the impact that we have made here.
3:01 · This has been done because of our Mossy Earth members, and if you like what you see, then please consider becoming a member at mossy.earth to allow us to do more of this kind of rewilding across a wide variety of ecosystems.
Flooded forest
3:14 · Now, after four years of successful flooding, I was really excited to show you around, but as I was heading into the wetlands, I ran into some trouble.
3:24 · So I’ve just set up camp on top of this log because I was running through these chest-high nettles, and I just kind of kicked down one of them, and literally there was a boar.
3:38 · Just a boar, like straight.
3:40 · And then it just thankfully bolted off, and then three other noises, chaos around me, and they just ran away, and it was so sketchy.
3:52 · That’s the closest I’ve ever been to a boar and getting gored by one.
3:57 · And as I waited, perched on my log for a bit, I did spot a deer making its way out of the wetland after all of that disturbance.
4:04 · And when things quieted down, I went into the wetland.
4:08 · I don’t know if you can hear because of all the wind and so on, but in the background, I can hear the first European fire-bellied toads, which is one of the target species of this project.
4:18 · It’s really, really great to be here.
4:21 · And the wetlands, the flooded area, is as big as I’ve ever seen it.
4:25 · It’s become denser, it’s become really different, and I can’t wait to jump in here and go explore.
4:32 · This wetland is comprised of one channel, which we dug from the nearest existing canal, and the two forests that the water floods.
4:39 · And to properly show you this place, we spent some days here to uncover as many secrets as possible, and we have a lot to show you.
4:46 · So let’s start now with the first forest up here.
4:51 · This place has become quite the jungle here.
4:55 · And it’s just like dead wood everywhere creating these underwater mazes for the fish, for the amphibians, for the insects to grow, and of course all the birds that feed on them.
5:08 · It’s become really this place that’s dense with life, which is really cool to see.
5:14 · On the leaves and amongst the floating debris of the forest, we found snails and other invertebrates, and it has these beautiful mating crane flies, this nettle weevil, or this winter damsel fly.
5:27 · And when we go underwater, we find a whole little world that is quite distinct from other submerged environments, because of how ephemeral it is.
5:36 · The water comes here only a certain number of weeks each year, and that creates some unique characteristics.
5:42 · You see, the rapid advance of the water leaves much of the understory intact and submerged, such as the nettles which dominate here when the ground is dry.
5:50 · And this then forms a protective maze that is ideal for the fish to use.
5:56 · Now, for obvious reasons, they were quite hard to film here, as they have many places to hide, whenever I would put the camera down.
6:03 · So we filmed them in the channels instead, which we will look at in a bit.
6:08 · However, in amongst the trees, we were able to find many fire-bellied toads, and at first I only managed to film one while doing the underwater filming.
6:17 · But later on, Julie was able to capture them more at ease, with some of them even starting their characteristics song, that always fills our ears here and adds a real magical soundtrack to this place.
6:30 · So this here is a tree that I recognized from four years ago, because of the real characteristic little arch down there.
6:37 · It’s one of the ones that has died and is now this wonderful piece of, enormous piece of standing dead work, which is really important for the various insects that can take advantage of it.
6:49 · And where there are insects, there are birds.
6:52 · First, you spot the swallow, always busy, high up above the wetland amongst the trees.
6:57 · But when you look closer, you could also find birds lower down, such as this tree creeper that creeps up and down these trunks in search for food.
7:05 · And then I heard a noise, a very typical one for such a forest, but I only just caught a glimpse of the woodpecker flying towards the lower part of the wetland.
7:14 · And all this deadwood attracts more than just woodpeckers, it also attracts a chicken of the woods.
7:21 · So when they are this soft, it’s really good.
7:24 · Have you ever had the Istragov goulash?
7:26 · Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was not doing goulash, I just mixed them with the ham.
7:29 · It was like, not ham and eggs, but Ham and Istragov mushroom And one of the evenings I was here, I got to try out these chicken of the woods in some tacos at Sigi’s place.
7:41 · So Sigi, how confident are you?
7:43 · I hope so. I hope it’s a good one.
7:46 · 95% chance.
7:47 · 94%.
7:50 · And they were indeed delicious, so I can highly recommend them.
7:53 · But please be very careful whenever you pick mushrooms to eat.
7:57 · This is something else, fallen tree.
7:59 · You know, maybe a beaver. That would be kind of cool.
8:03 · I hope they don’t dam up our channel.
8:06 · And wow, look at this. It’s just such a jungle here.
8:12 · I keep saying that, you know, but it is what it feels like.
8:14 · It feels just overgrown and it’s really nice to see it like this.
8:19 · The transformation here in the channels has been quite impressive.
8:23 · And as usual, please bear in mind that I’m mixing some shots from past springs here.
8:27 · But maybe some of them are from early April, whereas this is late April.
8:31 · So a lot of the greening is just the spring in action.
8:34 · But many new additions here got nothing to do with the spring, such as the nice mix of willows and other water-tolerant species that now border the channel.
8:44 · Some of these were planted by Broz, while others are just natural recruitment.
8:49 · They’re, of course, a species that loves water.
8:51 · I mean, look at the huge willows back there.
8:56 · But it’s still really nice to see that these ones have established themselves well and are now sort of growing here so that this can become more and more like a floodplain forest.
9:05 · Not just the big forest area up there and the big forest area down there, but the channel also.
9:11 · I think the visible roots of the willows are really beautiful and striking with their red color, adding a nice element to the banks of the channel and helping stabilize it further.
9:23 · Then underwater here is where we can easily film the fish.
9:27 · They go about the channel in shoals that sometimes get pretty large, with a few hundred fish in each.
9:32 · Now, I’m unable to tell you the exact species of fish, as they are quite young and hard to distinguish.
9:38 · However, I can tell you how they fit in these forests.
9:41 · Essentially, every year, as the Danube surges after the winter rain and when the snow of the Alps starts melting, the water reaches forests like this one.
9:50 · And for fish, this presents a very timely opportunity to quickly sneak into these forests and reproduce.
9:58 · The young will then grow here in the shelter of the forest where fewer predators can reach them, and then as the water retreats, they will follow it back to the Danube to live out their lives.
10:08 · Places like this are essentially nurseries, and I’m glad we were able to bring this one back, despite all the damage done by the dam.
10:16 · I’m really enjoying my little exploration here.
10:19 · I’ve been seeing all kinds of really cool stuff.
10:23 · I’ve seen a snake swimming along in the water.
10:27 · I think it must have been hunting for tadpoles and maybe fish.
10:32 · I don’t know. It’s really interesting to see it.
10:34 · And also, I’ve saw some really big spiders that are resting on these branches.
10:39 · They’re clearly aquatic. It was dangling with its leg in the water.
10:44 · I’ve, of course, heard loads of birds and seen them fly by.
10:47 · I’ve seen some ducks in the distance that were using the channel before I came and disturbed them.
10:52 · And just a bit ago, right here, that’s why I went to get the camera, I saw what I think is either a shrew or a vole, but a little mouse-like creature.
11:05 · Super, super cute and right along the edge of the channel.
11:10 · It’s so nice and it gives me really the sense of exploration, of discovering this place anew.
11:16 · All this life is here because we brought back the water and that is just so satisfying.
11:22 · There is something really meaningful about restoring a natural process and letting nature play it out from there.
11:29 · That is why I love doing this work and the reason I think so many of you are here also.
11:35 · And if that is the case for you, then maybe you should consider joining us by becoming a Mossy Earth member.
11:41 · Our members fund all our work directly. It is quite simple, actually.
11:45 · Normal people, like you and me, contribute some money every month.
11:49 · In our case, the membership starts at the price of a fancy coffee.
11:52 · And we then put all the contributions together and get on with the rewilding work.
11:57 · There are no ads, no debt, no investors and, of course, no AI storytelling.
12:02 · Just normal people coming together to do some rewilding.
12:06 · And since Matt and I started out in 2017 with 300 bucks of investment between us, we managed to keep our growth organic and balanced, both in how we fund our work and how we grow our teams and impact.
12:19 · So far, we have four teams on the ground doing amazing work restoring coral reefs, bringing back seagrass, meadows, rewilding a whole river basin and turning a degraded piece of land in the Amazon into a living rainforest rewilding lab.
12:34 · And we also work with partners in a dozen more countries, from the rivers of Colorado or the forests we are planting in Iceland, all the way to the anti-dessertification research we are funding in Benin or the flooding we have been doing here with Broz.
12:49 · The common thread is that all our projects are making the landscape wilder and to achieve this, we always try to follow the best available science.
12:56 · Or we test new ideas and then report our findings openly, including our failures, of course, which is really key.
13:03 · So if this is the kind of thinking and the kind of work you would like to support, then please consider becoming a member at mossy.earth The link is in the description. Or you can scan this QR code here.
13:16 · Once I reach the lower forest, I went deeper and deeper and eventually I found more than I had bargained for.
13:26 · I think the camera really does not convey the size of this thing.
13:30 · I’d say it’s at least an 80 kilo creature and it left me in my best caveman mode impression to make sure there were no other boar around.
13:38 · Every time this happens to me, it’s a very primal feeling.
13:41 · So I’m curious to hear if you’ve had any memorable encounters with boar or other large animals.
13:47 · So please leave your stories in the comments for all of us to read.
13:52 · And once I calmed down, I started tuning into the forest here and it was just mesmerizing.
13:59 · The dappled light of the late afternoon reflecting off the water, the droplets falling like rain from the leaves of the willows saturated because of the flood.
14:09 · I really felt I was there in a floodplain forest of old, of the days before the dam ruined so much of the landscape.
14:19 · And as I explored further, I also solved the mystery of the woodpecker I saw earlier which had its nest in a small hole here where it is dutifully raising its young.
14:28 · And it wasn’t the only one as I also found a great tit busy flying back and forth to feed its chicks, safely hidden away in the crack of this willow.
14:38 · And when I reached the place where the forest meets the channel, I changed back into my underwater gear and I quickly ran into a fire-bellied toad that I decided to bother for a few minutes just to try to show you its incredible fire-belly from a different perspective.
14:53 · I mean, what a unique and beautiful animal.
14:57 · And once I let it go back into the flooded forest, it was time for me to dive down.
15:02 · You see, in all these years that I’ve been documenting this place, I’ve got to experience many amazing and wonderful things.
15:09 · I have seen a boom in toads and frogs, a boom in eggs.
15:14 · But somehow I never timed it just right to see what I think is one of the most impressive spectacles on offer here.
15:22 · And bit by bit, as I swam along, it started to unfold in front of me.
15:28 · At first it was just a few stragglers, but soon enough I caught up with a main show.
15:33 · I mean, look at this explosion of life.
15:37 · All of these tadpoles determined to live to become residents of this forest.
15:43 · They’re sticking together to survive snakes and herons, they’re fighting the current and sometimes they’re carefully swimming up to take a breath.
15:51 · And to think that every year now this explosion of life is happening because we brought water to this place.
15:58 · It is just incredible.
16:00 · For me, these fish and these tadpoles are just the perfect representation of what this wetland here has to offer.
16:08 · It’s just such an unusual place to see this bloom of life.
16:12 · And I think it’s really wonderful to see this sheer abundance, especially when it comes to the tadpoles, but also the fish.
16:19 · They’re harder to spot, but they’re everywhere.
16:22 · It’s just really fulfilling and amazing to see this.
16:26 · And if you’re a Mossy Earth member, thank you for empowering us to do this.
16:30 · I hope you are proud of what we have achieved here together.
16:34 · And if you’re yet to join us, please consider doing so at mossy.earth Until next time.
16:42 · Cheers!
How Otters Are Saving Earth’s Underwater Forests
PBS Terra, 08 15, 2024
Video (10:06)
Description
Hidden beneath the surface of our coastal seas are towering forests - of kelp. These underwater ecosystems are as crucial to our environment as their land-based counterparts. We’ll explore them alongside conservationists who are working to restore these threatened habitats. We’ll also meet some adorable sea otters and learn about the role they play in maintaining the balance in this sensitive environment.
Hosted by Joe Hanson from Be Smart, Overview uses stunning 4k drone footage to reveal the natural and human made marvels shaping our planet–from a 10,000-foot view–literally.
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Transcript
0:00 · (birds squawking) (light music) (water moving) This is one of the most important forest ecosystems on earth.
0:10 · Okay, not a forest like you were expecting, right?
0:13 · But trust me, this forest ecosystem is every bit as beautiful and epic as a forest on land, only instead of being made of trees, this one is made of giant towering strands of kelp.
0:25 · (light music continues) But this epic forest is in danger of disappearing.
0:30 · Luckily, an unlikely team of marine mammal researchers, underwater ecologists and algae farmers is fighting to bring this forest back from the brink.
0:41 · Like every forest, this one has predators to help keep it in balance, and one of those predators is really stinking cute.
0:53 · I mean, have you ever seen anything that adorable in your life?
0:57 · (light music continues) Kelp forests are the foundation of this marine ecosystem.
1:06 · Without them, this environment would not exist as we know it.
1:11 · They support over 800 species and provide crucial habitat and food.
1:16 · Kelp forests like this one can be found in cold water regions all over the world.
1:21 · Now, you might be tempted to call kelp a plant, but don’t.
1:24 · Kelp is a type of macroalgae, which means it doesn’t have roots, stems, or leaves like plants.
1:32 · Kelp forests have been a part of these coastlines for more than 30 million years.
1:38 · One of the dominant species of kelp here in California is bull kelp.
1:42 · It’s the trees of this underwater forest, and these kelp forests thrive in part because of animals like sea otters.
1:50 · They’re part of a complex love/lunch triangle between predators like otters, kelp, and underwater plant eaters like sea urchins.
1:59 · Here’s how it all works.
2:01 · Urchins eat kelp, which is fine, so long as someone eats the urchins.
2:05 · Someone like our cute and hungry friend here who can eat up to 15 pounds of seafood a day.
2:11 · An otter’s appetite protects the kelp forest from being overgrazed.
2:16 · The kelp keeps the urchin happy and fed.
2:18 · The urchin keep the otter healthy and fed, and the otter eating the urchin keeps the kelp from being overgrazed.
2:25 · Scientists call this type of carefully balanced relationship between different species a trophic cascade.
2:31 · (gentle music) But here’s the thing.
2:35 · This carefully balanced trophic cascade has fallen apart in Northern California.
2:41 · Otters are fighting for their lives here.
2:44 · European settlers decimated the otter population in the mid 1700s and early 1800s as part of the fur trade, but researchers are trying to bring them back one otter at a time.
2:57 · (gentle music continues) (birds squawking) [Sandrine] My name is Sandrine Hazan and I rescue and rehabilitate sea otters.
3:08 · You get to take care and rehabilitate and release the cutest animal on earth into the wild?
3:13 · I do that.
3:14 · Yes, I have that badge. This is a receiver that’s used to pick up a signal that a released otter would have, so they are implanted with a transmitter that has a specific frequency, and we can pick that up with this receiver. We recently released Otter 956 just out here in the kelp bed, and so we have been tracking her on a daily basis.
3:37 · Let’s cut this joyous otter release footage.
3:40 · (soft music) Why do all this work?
3:51 · Why do all this trouble to to track, you know, one otter?
3:54 · Well, it’s really part of the bigger picture of helping to bring these otters back to their historic habitat. They are keystone species and they really do so much for these kelp forests, keeping them healthy and keeping them balanced.
4:12 · [Joe] After the otter population disappeared, another predator stepped up, sea stars, particularly the Sunflower Sea star, with its dinner plate sized body and up to 24 limbs. They began to dine on urchins becoming formidable urchin hunters themselves, but then a series of events turned hundreds of miles of California coastline, a spiky purple.
4:36 · Suddenly a mysterious marine disease nearly wiped out sea star populations, and then a roving ball of warm ocean water known as the blob rolled through the region causing sea temperatures to rise by two to three degrees Celsius. The trophic cascade fell out of balance. The sea stars disappeared, the urchins went wild, and 96% of the kelp canopy along Northern California’s coastline has disappeared in the past decade. A region spanning 350 kilometers of the coast.
5:10 · (soft music) (waves lapping) (bird squawking) I think we’re ready to go.
5:22 · Got my camera.
5:23 · Yeah, let’s do it. (soft music continues) [Joe] One of the last remaining strongholds of bull kelp is here in Mendocino County in Northern California.
5:32 · We’re kind of left in a situation where there is no natural predator in the sea right now. And so what I work on specifically is trying to find ways where human can temporarily mitigate and help fill that role until we’re able to have some level of apex predator back in the system. (soft music continues) This is our coral reef. This is our great barrier reef for Californians.
5:53 · It’s kelp forests.
5:54 · Kelp and the ecosystems they create are why we have any fish in the ocean. They create food, habitat and shelter for hundreds, if not thousands of organisms, including human.
6:08 · [Joe To understand the extent of the loss, scientists like Tristan have turned to aerial imagery and high resolution mapping, looking at kelp from both below the water and from above.
6:19 · So what you’re looking at right there is the dark green patches, and this was just this past fall, and that’s where, that’s the only area where we saw kelp. And so what we’re focused on now is looking at where kelp has been persistent and it’s survived, so then we can really focus our kelp recovery efforts in a way that’s meaningful, impactful, and then also leveraging persistent kelp refugia.
6:44 · [Joe] One of those recovery efforts involved roping in aquaculture researcher, Andrew Kim and his team to plant lab grown kelp in the waters of Northern California.
6:54 · [Andrew Kim] We’ve developed these methods for being able to grow kelps year round. Being able to put kelps out that are already ahead of the curve and giving them really just a headstart in the environment, I think is a big breakthrough because for an annual species, like the bull kelp, it extends the potential window for them to be reproductive and to put spores into the environment.
7:19 · [Joe] Bull kelp like this regenerates every year growing from a microscopic spore to a huge structure dozens of meters tall. (soft music) This kelp can grow up to 60 centimeters per day, making it one of the fastest growing organisms in the ocean. After three years of trial and error, Andrew and his team are seeing success with new ways of planting their lab grown kelp designed to protect young kelp from predators and harsh conditions.
7:47 · Kind of like you would plant a raised garden bed if you had animals like running through your garden, you could put your seaweed in, in a raised bed and keep it out of the hungry reaches of the urchins. About a month ago, we put out kelps that were about six to 10 inches, and we came back and we surveyed these modules, and in the last month, they’ve grown several feet and they’re already attracting lots of fish.
8:13 · Every time we put kelp out, we’re putting a piece of hope out. You know the hope that it’ll create home for some little fish. It’s a big ocean. We just need to keep working and chipping away. We’re all in this together and we need to keep trying.
8:30 · (soft music continues) Back in the rich marine waters of Monterey, Sandrine is working hard to support otters as the cute, hungry predators fight to retake their place as the keystone species of this ecosystem.
8:44 · Do we have ears on 956 right now?
8:46 · We do, yep.
8:47 · This is her signal and she is somewhere nearby and based on this signal, she is resting.
8:52 · Do you think in your lifetime that otters in the kelp forest will be restored north of here?
9:00 · I hope so.
9:00 · The sea otters are trying really hard to expand their range, and we are doing everything we can to support conservation efforts to help them restore back to their range.
9:09 · It sounds like you take it day by day, otter by otter around here.
9:13 · Yes, very, very much so.
9:14 · 956, wherever you are, I hope that you’re getting lots of good urchin snacks. (gentle music) The kelp forest reminds us of the wonder that’s out there in nature, sometimes literally right beneath the surface. It’s also precious and so fragile. We just have to take it one breath at a time. (gentle music continues)
How Wolves Change Rivers
How Wolves Change Rivers REMASTERED HD - George Monbiot
Sustainable Human, 02 04, 2022
Video (4:11)
Description
Embark on a journey to Yellowstone, where a few wolves did not just roam, but rewrote the rules of an entire ecosystem. Discover how these majestic predators triggered a cascade of life, transforming not only the park’s wildlife but its very rivers and landscapes. It’s a story of how nature’s architects can reshape our world in ways we never imagined.
This video went viral nearly 10 years ago and has been used in countless classrooms and museums around the world to teach people the value that every species brings to an ecosystem. We decided to update the video using HD footage. Re-experience the magic of wolves!
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0:00 - What is a trophic cascade?
0:45 - Conditions of Yellowstone National Park before reintroduction
1:01 - How wolves changed behavior of animals in the park
1:26 - How the changed behavior helped nature to regenerate
2:43 - How wolves change the course of the rivers
Transcript:
One of the most exciting scientific findings of the past half-century has been the discovery of widespread trophic cascades. Atrophic cascade is an ecological process that starts at the top of the food chain and tumbles all the way down to the bottom.
And the classic example is what happened in the Yellowstone National Park in the United States when wolves were reintroduced in 1995. Now, we – we all know that wolves kill various species of animals, but perhaps we’re slightly less aware that they give life to many others. Before the wolves turned up – they’d been absent for 70 years – the numbers of deer (because there had been nothing to hunt them) had built up and built up in the Yellowstone Park and despite efforts by humans to control them they’d managed to reduce much the vegetation there to almost nothing. They had just grazed it away.
But as soon as the wolves arrived, even though they were few in number they started to have the most remarkable effects.
Keep reading: https://www.sustainablehuman.org/stories/how-wolves-change-rivers/#Transcript
Transcript
What is a trophic cascade?
0:00 · One of the most exciting scientific findings of the past half century has been the discovery of widespread trophic cascades.
0:11 · A trophic cascade is an ecological process which starts at the top of the food chain and tumbles all the way down to the bottom.
0:20 · And the classic example is what happened in the Yellowstone National Park in the United States when wolves were reintroduced in 1995.
0:29 · Now, we all know that wolves kill various species of animals, but perhaps we’re slightly less aware that they give life to many others.
0:42 · Before the wolves turned up – they’d been absent for 70 years – the numbers of deer, because there was nothing to hunt them had built up and built up in the Yellowstone Park and despite efforts by humans to control them they’d managed to reduce much of the vegetation there to almost nothing.
Conditions of Yellowstone National Park before reintroduction
0:59 · They had just grazed it away.
How wolves changed behavior of animals in the park
1:01 · But as soon as the wolves arrived, even though they were few in number, they started to have the most remarkable effects.
1:08 · First, of course, they killed some of thedeer but that wasn’t the major thing.
1:12 · Much more significantly, they radically changed the behavior of the deer.
1:18 · The deer started avoiding certain parts of the park – the places where they could be trapped most easily – particularly the valleys and the gorges and immediately those places started to regenerate.
How the changed behavior helped nature to regenerate
1:29 · In some areas, the height of the trees quintupled in just six years.
1:34 · Bare valley sides quickly became forests of aspen and willow and cottonwood.
1:41 · And as soon as that happened, the birds started moving in.
1:45 · The number of songbirds and migratory birds started to increase greatly.
1:49 · The number of beavers started to increase because beavers like to eat the trees.
1:54 · And beavers, like wolves, are ecosystem engineers.
1:57 · They create niches for other species.
2:00 · And the dams they built in the rivers provided habitats for otters and muskrats and ducks and fish and reptiles and amphibians.
2:10 · The wolves killed coyotes and as a result of that, the number of rabbits and mice began to rise, which meant more hawks, more weasels, more foxes, more badgers.
2:21 · Ravens and bald eagles came down to feed on the carrion that the wolves had left.
2:26 · Bears fed on it, too, and their population began to rise as well partly also because there were more berries growing on the regenerating shrubs.
2:34 · And the bears reinforced the impact of the wolves by killing some of the calves of the deer.
2:42 · But here’s where it gets really interesting.
How wolves change the course of the rivers
2:45 · The wolves changed the behavior of the rivers.
2:51 · They began to meander less.
2:53 · There was less erosion.
2:55 · The channels narrowed.
2:56 · More pools formed. More riffle sections.
2:59 · All of which were great for wildlife habitats.
3:01 · The rivers changed in response to the wolves.
3:05 · And the reason was that the regenerating forests stabilized the banks so that they collapsed less often.
3:12 · So the rivers became more fixed in their course.
3:16 · Similarly, by driving the deer out of some places, and the vegetation recovering on the valley sides, there was less soil erosion becausethe vegetation stabilized that as well.
3:28 · So the wolves, small in number, transformed not just the ecosystem of the Yellowstone National Park, this huge area of land but also, its physical geography.
The Florida River Becoming a Refuge for Manatees WILD HOPE
Nature on PBS, 01 08, 2024
Video (15:34)
Description
Crystal River has long been a safe haven for the Florida manatee, but when an invasive algae wiped out the eelgrass that manatees need for food, the community rallied to restore the river and save the animals that call it home.
After an unexpected storm forever changed Crystal River more than three decades ago, Lisa Moore founded Save Crystal River to rally the community to garner funding for a massive restoration project. Sea and Shoreline’s Jessica Mailliez demonstrates the dirty work they do to remove invasive algae and restore native eelgrass. This transformation has allowed Florida manatees to return to Crystal River, but for those living along the west coast of the state, the situation is much more dire.
There, manatees are declining fast — nearly two thousand have died from starvation since 2020 along the Indian River Lagoon. Zoo Tampa has been rescuing as many starving manatees as they can hold, saving them from death and prepping them for re-release into the wild. Fortunately for the manatees ready to return to the wild, they have a safe destination: Crystal River. The strides made in that small community hold promise for a path forward for manatees across the state.
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Transcript
0:01 · LISA: Crystal River was perfect for the manatees.
0:04 · (water swooshing) ♪ When you lose the basis of your ecosystem, which is your plants, everything else goes away.
0:13 · ♪ It just becomes a chain reaction of devastation, and that’s what happened here.
0:20 · We lost it all. Our river basically died.
0:23 · ♪ We are a manatee refuge. They needed food.
0:28 · There was no food for them to eat.
0:30 · ♪ (water splashing) ♪ It’s one of those situations, your house burns down.
0:38 · What do you do? You rebuild.
0:40 · You have to start from scratch.
0:42 · ♪ (water swooshing) ♪ ♪ Growing up in Crystal River was any child’s dream.
0:58 · You could go out on the boat all day long, go fishing, swimming in the spring, and the water was crystal clear.
1:07 · You could see fish all around you, big fish, and they would just swim by.
1:13 · And manatees could come up here.
1:15 · There was plenty of food, and they could bring their young.
1:18 · They would have their babies here, and they would spend the winter here in our springs.
1:24 · Our water’s 72 degrees year round.
1:26 · It was just a great habitat for wildlife.
1:30 · ♪ ♪ NARRATOR: Manatees, also known as sea cows, are herbivores that live in coastal rivers, bays, and estuaries.
1:41 · ♪ Florida manatees will travel as far north as Virginia or as far west as Texas in Summer.
1:50 · But each winter they return to Florida and it’s warm, spring- fed rivers and bays.
1:56 · ♪ Two thirds of the population now relies on the warm discharge waters from power plants.
2:06 · Manatees began taking refuge there over the past 30 years as urban developments swallowed up spring-fed rivers and bays.
2:15 · ♪ There are still a few good natural springs remaining, and one of the best is Crystal River.
2:25 · But this manatee haven was almost lost.
2:29 · LISA: Back in the ’70s, we had a lot of hydrilla, and that kind of filled the river.
2:33 · It caused a problem. It was an invasive fresh water plant.
2:36 · ♪ NARRATOR: The hydrilla depleted oxygen levels in the water and out-competed the native eelgrass, a staple of the manatees’ diet.
2:45 · ♪ Then in the ’90s, things got a whole lot worse.
2:51 · (waves crashing) ♪ LISA: The 1993, they called it, “Storm of the Century” or the “No-Name Storm.”
3:00 · (waves crashing) We didn’t know it was coming, and it blew in so much salt water from the Gulf of Mexico.
3:09 · It inundated all the waterfront homes.
3:13 · NARRATOR: The storm surge pushed loads of salt water into Crystal River’s freshwater system.
3:18 · ♪ LISA: It really affected the water, but nobody knew it at the time.
3:24 · ♪ We were so worried about people that we didn’t know that so much hydrilla was dead and fell to the bottom of the river.
3:32 · ♪ That caused a problem because it started to rot.
3:37 · ♪ NARRATOR: Eelgrass in the river fared better because it thrives in brackish water.
3:45 · But the rotting hydrilla suffocated the grass and triggered an explosion of an invasive algae called lyngbya.
3:55 · LISA: It turned into slime, and then it looked like the surface of the moon on the bottom.
4:01 · It was noxious to animals. It would give people rashes.
4:06 · Huge plumes of nasty algae destroyed the eelgrass.
4:12 · ♪ NARRATOR: Manatees need to eat close to 10% of their body weight in eelgrass every day, up to 350 pounds of it.
4:23 · (water swooshing) The disappearing eelgrass in Crystal River forced manatees to venture out into colder waters where it’s harder to find food and where they risk dying from cold stress.
4:37 · Manatees can’t survive long in waters below 68 degrees.
4:42 · LISA: It had never happened before, and nobody knew what to do to fix it.
4:47 · I had children and grandchildren and I just kept thinking, “We can’t leave it like this.”
4:53 · We know what this river used to be, and we have to fix this.
4:58 · So neighbors got together, friends got with other friends, and we formed Save Crystal River.
5:05 · MARIE: Remember how bad it was? This park was closed.
5:08 · It was probably the only time in my life I wanted to leave Crystal River ’cause it was just terrible.
5:13 · NARRATOR: After watching the lyngbya take over, Lisa and her friend Marie urged the community to tackle the crisis.
5:21 · MARIE: It was 2015 when we went to every school, and we asked them to write a letter about why the river was important to them.
5:33 · They wrote 5,280 letters, and so then we took them to Tallahassee.
5:40 · LISA: I think that was important, showing them that their opinions mattered to the legislators.
5:45 · And it made an impression ’cause they knew that these people cared.
5:50 · NARRATOR: The campaign also opened the government’s coffers.
5:54 · Soon, the community nonprofit had the funding to hire a private contractor to start restoring the river.
6:01 · LISA: One day, somebody told us about a project that was similar to what we needed to have done.
6:06 · They were taking out algae and replacing it with healthy eelgrass.
6:12 · So they came up here, and they said, “We think we can fix this.”
6:16 · ♪ ♪ NARRATOR: Jessica Mailliez works with aquatic restoration firm, Sea and Shoreline to replant the manatees’ eelgrass on behalf of the community.
6:30 · ♪ JESSICA: I guess I first realized that a career working with sea grass and eelgrass would be something that I absolutely loved was when I realized that really everything depends on it.
6:47 · I love the manatees, the turtles, all those charismatic creatures.
6:51 · ♪ NARRATOR: Eelgrass cleans the water.
6:55 · Its roots hold the sediment in place, and it serves as a critical nursery for many kinds of fish.
7:02 · ♪ But for eelgrass to return and thrive, the lyngbya algae had to go.
7:11 · (water swooshing) ♪ JESSICA: It’s a nasty mat-forming algae.
7:21 · It really blankets everything. It blocks out the sunlight.
7:24 · Nothing can grow beneath it.
7:27 · That stuff smells awful.
7:30 · I mean, it is thick.
7:31 · ♪ We have divers that go in and they hand vacuum the bottom.
7:37 · It’s hours and hours, full days, four to eight hours underwater in no visibility.
7:44 · Just feeling around on the bottom and making sure that you remove all of this nasty algae.
7:52 · It’s a dirty job.
7:52 · ♪ We’ve removed over 500 million pounds of lyngbya and detrital muck.
8:02 · ♪ ♪ I think one of the proudest moments for our divers and our dredge crew is being able to uncover those large spring vents.
8:16 · ♪ You start going down, down, down into a hole.
8:21 · And you realize when you start to feel some water gushing out that you just opened up a spring vent that’s been clogged for who knows how many years.
8:31 · ♪ NARRATOR: The vents are like faucets delivering warm water from underground aquifers deep within the Earth.
8:42 · JESSICA: We have cleaned and uncovered over 800 spring vents in the Crystal River area.
8:47 · ♪ (water splashing) NARRATOR: Once the algae is removed, young grasses can be planted.
8:54 · (water splashing) ♪ There’s a lot of river bed to cover, and it’s all done by hand.
9:02 · ♪ Pre-rooted pods are planted every three feet.
9:08 · ♪ (water swooshing) JESSICA: After we plant these, we come back to check on them every single week for the first four weeks, then biweekly after that, and then every single month for a total of 12 months.
9:24 · ♪ NARRATOR: The community’s efforts to remove the algae mats and restore eelgrass have reversed the river’s decline.
9:32 · ♪ Manatees are once again thriving here, and tourism and fishing are both up.
9:39 · ♪ JESSICA: Crystal River is a huge success story.
9:44 · We have some of the healthiest manatees in the state, and this warm-water refuge is also like a salad bar to them.
9:53 · ♪ Last winter, we had our- our highest concentration of manatees in this area reaching over 1,000.
10:03 · ♪ NARRATOR: The numbers statewide have increased significantly over the past 50 years, from a low of just a few hundred manatees in the ’60s, to a high of about 9,000 in 2016.
10:18 · ♪ But since then, the trend has been going down again, and the Crystal River manatees are one of the few populations doing well.
10:28 · ♪ One of the most threatened populations is in the Indian River Lagoon, which is facing a crisis eerily similar to the one Crystal River endured.
10:40 · ♪ JESSICA: The Indian River Lagoon is on the east coast of Florida, and the problem that we’ve seen there is we had gradual sea grass loss.
10:51 · And then a huge brown tide bloom came in and completely starved the grass of all sunlight, and we lost what we were already short on.
11:03 · ♪ (water swooshing) (equipment humming) NARRATOR: The Manatee Critical Care Center at Zoo Tampa is trying to manage the fallout.
11:15 · ♪ MOLLY: We’ve had over 500 manatees come through our doors and over 300 go back to the wild.
11:22 · ♪ NARRATOR: Manatees are here for a variety of reasons.
11:27 · Some have been struck by boats or overexposed to cold water.
11:33 · But increasingly they’re being brought in because they’re starving.
11:39 · ♪ MOLLY: All over the state of Florida, we are seeing a die off of natural sea grasses for manatees.
11:46 · ♪ Manatees on the East Coast, in particular, they’re coming in basically starving.
11:53 · They’re emaciated. They are very ill.
11:56 · ♪ NARRATOR: The zoo tries to save as many patients as possible.
12:02 · MOLLY: Manatees have a pretty slow gestation, which means they don’t give birth that often, about every two to three years.
12:08 · So if you’re losing a lot of adults, that can be really detrimental to the species in the long run.
12:13 · ♪ This year alone, we took in 17 manatees in two months, which is an incredible number.
12:22 · I’ve seen quite a few orphans coming in our doors, and we don’t really know what happened to their mother.
12:26 · But they come in with no wild experience, and so we want to set them up for success.
12:31 · ♪ They have to gain a lot of weight when they’re at the zoo.
12:35 · They eat about eight hours of their day, and so that is a ton of food.
12:39 · ♪ We can give them romaine lettuce and things to get their body condition back up, but we need the natural vegetation in order for them to thrive.
12:48 · ♪ This is natural sea grass that’s been collected from the wild, and today I’ll be putting it in for our orphan calves.
12:55 · ♪ Our goal is to feed it every single day, so that way they’re used to it.
13:03 · ♪ (water splashing) They need sea grasses out in the wild for them to survive.
13:08 · So it’s really important that we’re out there protecting the sea grasses and helping them to grow so that the manatees will be here for many years to come.
13:16 · ♪ ♪ NARRATOR: When the manatees from Zoo Tampa are ready to return to the wild, a destination of choice is the restored Crystal River ecosystem.
13:30 · MOLLY: Crystal River, in particular, has changed and is such a bountiful environment for them that we’re releasing those animals to that space.
13:38 · (group cheering) ♪ NARRATOR: It’s also become a model for restoration elsewhere.
13:45 · LISA: We wanted everybody in the state of Florida who had a problem like this to know what we did, how we did it, how to get others involved, share this information.
13:54 · NARRATOR: Along the Indian River Lagoon, conservationists are taking notice.
13:59 · The region has a long road to recovery, but Crystal River has given them a roadmap for success.
14:05 · ♪ LISA: The Indian River Lagoon is replicating the same kind of process that’s being used in Crystal River.
14:15 · JESSICA: You don’t have to be a scientist to be part of the solution.
14:19 · You can do something as simple as not using fertilizers, pulling weeds by hand.
14:24 · ♪ You can even be a- a responsible boater by being conscious of here you’re anchoring, making sure you’re using grass-friendly anchors.
14:34 · You can help educate the younger generation about the importance of creating a healthy ecosystem.
14:42 · (water splashing) ♪ ♪ LISA: I think my grandchildren and all the children that are growing up now will inherit from our generation a clean, healthy river teeming with wildlife, both above and below the water.
15:02 · ♪ This river is the life that runs through this community.
15:07 · We wanna protect it forever.
15:11 · ♪ ♪
15:31 · ♪ ♪ ♪
The story of Knepp A rewilding success Field Studies
Natural History Museum, 01 11, 2023
Video (8:32)
Description
The UK is one of the most nature depleted countries in the world, but the Knepp Estate in southern England is trying to change that. Over the past 20 years they have set about rewilding the estate, turning it from a degraded farm to a thriving wildlife habitat.
Find out how they are doing this, and why it is helping in the fight against the biodiversity crisis.
See more on exciting projects at the Knepp Estate here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6w4ihPqk5_IYa4WU1n1fNxkRL-d4sKiC
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00:00 Intro
1:50 What is the Knepp rewilding project?
3:03 Is rewilding successful at Knepp?
4:18 Reintroducing white storks and beavers to the UK countryside
5:36 Why is rewilding important?
7:02 What is the future of rewilding?
Transcript
Intro
0:00 · أهلا بالجميع نحن في مجموعتنا من الرخويات اليوم مع الباحثة سوزان ويليامز، وقد اكتشفنا كل شيء عن نوع معين من الرخويات، نوع من الرخويات البحرية يسمى أرنب البحر.
0:12 · الآن، إذا لم تشاهد هذا الفيديو، تحقق منه، الرابط موجود على الشاشة وفي أسفل الوصف.
0:17 · لكن لدينا بعض العينات الأخرى الخاصة جدًا والتي سننظر إليها اليوم أيضًا.
0:22 · ولكن دعونا نبدأ مع تلك الأرانب البحرية سوزان ما الذي نتحدث عنه هنا؟ الرخويات البحرية؟ نوديبرانش، وهي من الرخويات البحرية وهم من الحلزونات البحرية الجميلة جدًا والملونة جدًا.
0:34 · إنهم لا يشبهون البزاقات الموجودة في الحديقة على الإطلاق.
0:36 · إنهم جميلون للغاية وهم متنوعون جدًا أيضًا أرنب البحر هو لقب واحد لنوع واحد من الرخويات العارية، ولكن هناك المزيد، أليس كذلك؟ نعم، لدينا في المملكة المتحدة، لدينا الليمون البحري، وهو لطيف للغاية.
0:54 · ولدينا أيضًا تنانين البحر، التي تعيش في المحيط المفتوح.
0:59 · إنهم يعيشون في أعلى سطح المحيط المفتوح وهم حيوانات مفترسة، سيأكلون الخلايا اللاذعة من قنديل البحر الرجل الحربي.
1:08 · لدينا أيضًا نوديبرانش بيكاتشو، ونوديبرانش شون ذا شيب.
1:14 · أنصحك بالاطلاع على Shaun the Sheep nuidbranchs. ابحث عنه على جوجل، إنه رائع للغاية.
1:19 · إنه، إنه لطيف جدًا.
1:21 · فكم عدد الأنواع المختلفة الموجودة؟ هناك حوالي 3000 نوع مختلف.
1:26 · هذا أمر لا يصدق.
1:27 · وأين نجدها؟ لدينا بعضها في المملكة المتحدة، في المحيط المفتوح. هل هي موجودة في كل مكان تقريبًا؟ إنهم موجودون في كل محيط، من الضحل إلى العميق.
1:35 · إنهم يعيشون على الحيوانات الطحلبية، والشعاب المرجانية الناعمة، والطحالب، والإسفنج.
1:40 · واو، هذا أمر لا يصدق.
1:41 · وهم، كما ذكرتم، جميلون جدًا جدًا.
1:44 · أعتقد أن بعضًا من أكثر الحيوانات الملونة في المحيط، أليس كذلك؟ فلماذا كل هذا اللون؟ حسنًا، إنه سؤال جيد.
What is the Knepp rewilding project?
1:52 · اللون مهم جدًا لبقاء العديد من الحيوانات ومع نطاطات البحر فهي واحدة من أفضل الأمثلة على التلوين التحذيري.
2:00 · تمتص العديد من الرخويات البحرية السموم من الطعام الذي تتناوله، من الإسفنج والشعاب المرجانية الناعمة، ويقومون بحجز تلك السموم داخل لحومهم ثم يقومون بعد ذلك بصنع ألوان زاهية للغاية لتحذير الحيوانات المفترسة المحتملة أنها غير مستساغة وربما سامة.
2:18 · بالتأكيد، من الصعب رؤية بعض الأمثلة لدينا اليوم، لكنها جميلة جدًا، وملونة جدًا.
2:25 · هل هو للدفاع فقط، أم أن هناك استخدامات أخرى لهذا اللون؟ حسنًا، اللون في الأنواع الأخرى مفيد للعثور على رفيق.
2:35 · ربما لا يكون هذا مناسبًا بالنسبة إلى الرخويات العارية لأن عيونها ضعيفة جدًا.
2:39 · يستخدمون حوامل الأنف والدرنات الصغيرة الموجودة على ظهورهم لاستشعار المواد الكيميائية في الماء للعثور على الشركاء والطعام والحيوانات المفترسة.
2:49 · ولكن الشيء الآخر الذي يستخدم اللون في كثير من الأحيان من أجله، اللون والنمط، هو التمويه.
2:54 · وتستخدم بعض الرخويات البحرية الألوان للتمويه.
2:58 · ولدينا مثال مثير للاهتمام بشكل خاص هنا، أليس كذلك؟ هل يمكنك أن تخبرنا قليلاً عن هاتين العينتين اللتين حصلت عليهما؟ نعم، هذه جميلة حقًا.
Is rewilding successful at Knepp?
3:07 · This is a sea cucumber, this is not a nudibranch.
3:11 · This is a nudibranch, this is Phyllidia varicosa.
3:16 · This is a very brightly coloured nudibranch in life, not in our Museum collection.
3:20 · Many colours fade in museum collections, so most of our collection is brown.
3:24 · But in life they’re very colourful.
3:27 · This sea cucumber, when it’s a juvenile and very small and the same size as the nudibranch it has the same colours and pattern, so it mimics these nudibranchs.
3:39 · these nudibranchs sequester poisons from the sponges that they eat so they’re toxic and unpalatable to predators and the sea cucumber just hitchhikes on this benefit by producing this same sort of colour and pattern.
3:51 · Of course, once they get bigger, it’s no longer able to pretend to be a nudibranch and it changes colour and actually sequesters its own toxins as well.
4:00 · It’s incredible, taking advantage of another poisonous mollusc.
4:08 · It’s brilliant.
4:09 · Are there any colours that are particularly rare in in sea creatures.
4:15 · Yes, it’s really interesting.
4:17 · Not all colours are equal.
Reintroducing white storks and beavers to the UK countryside
4:18 · You find that some colours and particularly blue and green are rare colours.
4:23 · So we have some green shells here for you to look at.
4:26 · And you would think that green is a fabulous colour for camouflage.
4:29 · Many snails particularly live in plants and this would be a great colour for hiding, but you don’t find very many green shells.
4:37 · And we think this is partly because green pigments may be hard to make and hard to incorporate into shells.
4:44 · Are there any green nudibranchs?
4:45 · There are. It’s really cool.
4:47 · There are a group of nudibranchs known as sacoglossans and they actually eat algae and they will take up chloroplasts from the algae that is still actively photosynthesising and they’ll incorporate them into their mantle tissues and then they use them to photosynthesise.
5:03 · So they will get energy from these chloroplasts that are photosynthesising just as a plant does.
5:10 · And if they’re in an area at a time when there’s not very much food or it’s a bit dark and it’s not working for photosynthesis, they can then just eat the chloroplasts so there’s benefit both ways.
5:25 · And also from camouflage because the animal is green.
5:27 · So it’s hiding in the plants.
5:29 · They are amazing animals.
5:30 · I had no idea that they were they were so complex and interesting.
5:34 · This has been absolutely fascinating.
Why is rewilding important?
5:37 · Thank you so much, Suzanne.
5:38 · Thank you. Yeah, brilliant.
5:41 · Thank you so much for watching.
5:43 · If you enjoyed that video, let us know in the comments and remember like and subscribe to keep up with our latest videos.
The Surprising Species That Everything Else Depends On IN OUR NATURE
Be Smart, 07 08, 2021
Video (25:55)
Description
“In Our Nature” is a NEW special limited series on It’s Okay To Be Smart!
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Seemingly distant ecosystems, even half a world apart, are connected in surprising ways. In this special limited series, Emily Graslie and Trace Dominguez join me as we explore the universal rules of life that tie together Earth’s living systems. In episode 1, we travel from Africa’s Serengeti plains to the nearly extinct prairies of the western United States to discover the unexpected species that determine the very existence of these places. Can an ecosystem survive without its keystone species? And can we restore endangered human cultures by bringing back a nearly-extinct ecosystem?
Co-hosted by:
Trace Dominguez @TraceDominguez
Emily Graslie @EmilyGraslie
References: https://sites.google.com/view/inournature-ep1-references/home
In Our Nature is a special miniseries produced by It’s Okay To Be Smart for PBS. Stay tuned for more episodes coming this summer, here on our YouTube channel!
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Transcript
Introduction to ecosystems
0:00 · This is a story about lions, and giraffes, and a microscopic little virus. It’s also a story about grass, and fire, and a bunch of these funny looking guys and what all of that has to do with bombs, extermination and restoring ancient traditions and extinct ecosystems.
0:22 · There’s one big idea that ties all of these together, that even in a place overflowing with life, there’s one species that keeps the whole thing from crumbling down. And what happens if we take an ecosystem that’s fallen apart and we add that one key species back.
0:39 · Can we fix it? Trace, and Emily and myself, we’re going to be bringing you a series of stories, featuring some incredible storytellers, some really passionate scientists and a bunch of people who just really care about wild places. We’re exploring the rules of life that connect ecosystems, even half a world apart like Africa’s Serengeti and a Native American Tribal Community in South Dakota. And while we’re at it, we’re going to find out a little more about our place in all of this. Hey, hi, Trace Dominguez Emily Grasley.
1:24 · It is so good to see your faces. I am really excited to tell people about this thing, this thing we’ve been working on, I don’t know what to call it. Well, I guess it all started with an idea that there’s a different way to tell stories about nature that maybe we’ve been doing it all wrong. A way to look at the, Yeah, I feel like when I’m looking at a science story, I tend to get like hyper focused and you get sort of a narrow lens on what you’re looking at, and you have a tendency to miss the other stuff that’s around you, Because really everything in nature is connected to so many other bits in nature. And often in ways that you don’t even expect if you’re not looking, That’s what this is all about.
The Serengeti wildebeest
2:00 · And what we’re going to do is show you how these big ideas, The rules of life Are all connected and how we fit into that. I figured we’d start in the Serengeti. It’s an amazing place, but to tell all the stories that happen in that place, I feel like you need to understand why it even exists in the first place. Wow. Wow. Yeah. That is Jahawi Bertolli. He is this photographer and filmmaker from Kenya.
2:30 · I met up with him out in the Serengeti because he’s been going out there his whole life.
2:38 · I mean, just look at the scope of this. Absolutely incredible. When you think of big drama in a place like the African Serengeti, what’s the first thing that pops into your head. Dung beetles, cheetahs.
2:51 · Those are not the answers I’m looking for. The answer is these guys. No, seriously, you are looking at the most important event on the entire Serengeti ecosystem.
3:05 · It’s eating grass, Joe. I don’t, I don’t. Okay. Okay.
3:07 · I get it will, they are kind of goofy. They got that whole goatee thing going on. They have that funny rear end kind of looks like somebody forgot to finish them, but they might be the reason that the African Serengeti even exists.
3:21 · Um, excuse me. I learned from the documentary Lion King that that is not the case.
3:26 · I don’t know how to tell you this, but, um, your childhood might’ve been a lie. Hey, have you guys ever seen this pyramid thing? It’s kind of a zoomed out way of looking at how ecosystems are organized. So down at the bottom, you’ve got all the stuff that does photosynthesis, the plants and everything like that. And here in the middle, you’ve got the stuff that the plants and at the top, you’ve got the stuff that eats the stuff that eats the plants, Everything at the top that kind of regulates everything underneath it. Right?
Population dynamics
3:55 · That is what I thought, but that is not how the Serengeti works. One thing you got to understand about wildebeests, okay, is just how many of them there are, I mean wildebeests everywhere.
4:07 · Joe, you went to Africa like one time. Okay. Yeah.
4:11 · Jahawi helped. So not far from us, it’s a big herd of wildebeest.
4:15 · Is this all of them? Like all of them, Can you imagine? Not even a tiny bit.
4:22 · Every direction that we look is wildebeests, as far as we can see.
4:27 · Just in this little area, how many do you think there are.
4:32 · Easily at thousands without turning my head. And then in the distance, we see this massive group of zebra, several thousand zebra, which migrate with them. It looks like the horizon is made of tiny black and white shapes, thousands and thousands. I mean, it’s one of those things.
4:48 · It’s just, you can just keep counting. You took all of the zebras and the giraffes and the antelope and the gazelle. If you took the next 12, most abundant herbivores on the Serengeti, wildebeests would outweigh all of them.
5:02 · How is that possible? That’s the big question. That’s what scientists wanted to know. How can this place support so many of those funny looking wildebeests. Yeah. I don’t understand.
5:13 · Well, I’m going to tell you, but to do that, we have to go back in time to when the Serengeti was not like this to the 1950s. So back then nobody really studied the Serengeti and scientists were like, you know, maybe the first thing we should do is just count everything. So they started with the wildebeests and the first year they counted like 250,000 wildebeests.
5:34 · Then a few years go by and all of a sudden there’s 400,000 wildebeests. I would say that’s a lot of new gnus. Emily, I love it. Gnu news, cause with the G love it. Right. And then just a few years after that there’s 700,000. Fast forward a few more years, there’s 1.4 million wildebeests. This is totally weird because based on everything scientists knew up to this point, like large animal populations just don’t do this. I mean sure.
Impact of rinderpest
6:04 · Like fish, rabbits, plankton, they have these huge rapid population explosions, but giant mammalian herbivores, that just doesn’t happen. And actually people started to get worried, like maybe this is too many wildebeests. Sure. The Serengeti is pretty great, but maybe it can’t support all of them, but then they realized something. You weren’t looking at a population explosion they’re were looking at a rebound.
6:27 · Okay. But rebounding from what? Like over-hunting or like an ice-age extinction? How many viruses have humans completely eradicated from the earth? Like in the history of ever? The answer is just two, smallpox and a virus called rinderpest. Rinderpest was this cattle virus. That’s like thousands of years caused civilization level plagues and famines that infecting and killing cattle and other ruminants. Thanks to massive vaccination efforts, the last reported case was in 2001, but if you go back a hundred years before that, rinderpest was accidentally introduced to Africa in the 1890s.
7:02 · And by the 1900s it killed like 90% of the wild wildebeest and Buffalo in east Africa, early to passed the vaccine came the 1950s. And by the 1960s, this virus was basically under control. This virus had been keeping wildebeest populations down for like 70 years. And it wasn’t just wildebeests. When they came back, scientists started seeing a whole bunch of other changes in the ecosystem, changes that were pretty surprising. Are there lions in this part? you know I’m going to want to see some lions.
Regulating the Serengeti
7:37 · Okay. Yes, there are lions in this park, but we’re not done with grass yet. Okay. So one wildebeest doesn’t eat that much, but a million and a half wildebeest eat more than 9 million pounds of grass every single day.
7:50 · And that’s enough to shape a whole ecosystem. You know, wildebeests are quite picky eaters and they basically like short grass, you know? So like now here on the short grass plains, this is perfect for them, but they also like new shoots. That’s like, it’s like a child, like children are aren’t even that picky. Zebra, they’re not so picky. So they tend to actually come through first and clear, clear the way. And then, then the wildebeests can get what they want. Wow, exactly. Cooperative eating.
8:20 · So if you eliminate this virus, you get more wildebeests, more hungry wildebeests means less grass. And because more grass is being eaten, that means less fuel for fires and less wildfire means that more young trees get to grow and more trees growing means more food for giraffes and elephants and birds too. And of course more wildebeests means more food for predators. Hey, now we’re at the lion part, right?
8:47 · Yes. Lion numbers went up and so did hyenas and other predators too. They are the Keystone species of this ecosystem. Ding, ding, ding. He said the name of the episode in the episode! It’s a $6 million word. It’s incredible to think of enormous groups like this, just moving across this land, eating and pooping.
9:12 · I mean, you can imagine the effect on the ecosystem. I’ve seen the migration and then I’ve been lucky enough to see it quite a few times, but I can’t help, but be blown away every time by the sheer size, the number there’s very few places left that can support these kinds of herds. People had always just assumed that a Keystone species had to be a predator, but here you’ve got these funny plant eaters, keeping an entire ecosystem from collapsing. And, in fact, they’re making it better. And today this million and a half wildebeests are the largest herd of plant eating mammals on earth.
Migration and survival
9:47 · The population it’s not still growing. I mean that wouldn’t be sustainable, right?
9:51 · No. I mean, you can’t have wildebeests growing and like slowly taking over the universe, they remain remarkably stable. That’s the next mystery the scientist had to solve. I mean, why? Oh, Trace. There are definitely lots of lions in this part. I was going to say, we’re at the top of the pyramid. We’re getting to the lions. We’re getting predators, its going to be great. Oh and hyenas too. Okay. So a lot of stuff gets eaten in the Serengeti by those guys at the top of the pyramid, the predators.
10:18 · But some animals get eaten more than others. Let’s say you’re something small, like an Impala. Well, chances are, you’re going to die at the hands of something with fang, claws.
10:29 · The pokey parts.
10:31 · They have what scientists call a high prediction rate. But if you’re something big, like an elephant or a giraffe, not a lot is going to mess with you.
10:40 · All right. All that makes sense. But where exactly are wildebeests then cause they’re big, but they’re not elephant. Okay. The answer that Scientists looked at, something that Emily knows a thing or two about bones, dead bones.
10:52 · Oh yeah. Well actually bone marrow to be more specific sick. So here’s the other thing you got to know about wildebeests. They move a lot in the rainy season. The wildebeest are down in these grassy Plains where there’s plenty to eat. But as the dry season begins, the, see a wildebeest moves north this thousand kilometer cycle repeats itself every year. It’s one of the greatest animal migrations on Earth. So, you know, when, when a lot of people think about the migration, they, they think wildebeests cause they call it the Great Wildebeest Migration. But in reality, there’s a lot of other animals that actually go along parts of the migration.
11:32 · I mean, you’ve got Thompson gazelle, you’ve got a lot of zebra. What’s the, what’s the, the advantage of, of them traveling with the migration. If we were zebra and things, it is a part getting to the best grazing. And then you’ve got safety and numbers and lots and lots of eyes. The wildebeests migrate, but their predators don’t. So that helps them get eaten less and moving gives wildebeests access to more food than if they stayed in one place. Migration is why this population is so big, but even a place as vast as the Serengeti, it’s not infinite. Okay.
Bottom-up regulation
12:04 · So when there’s plenty to eat, you know, when the rainy season is happening, well, the bone marrow of those wildebeests is nice and fatty, but in the dry season, when there isn’t as much to eat, bone marrow gets kind of gross. And when scientists looked at the bones of most dead wildebeests, it was pretty nasty inside. So they think that most wildebeests starved to death. Okay.
12:31 · But some of them do get eaten by lions, hyenas predators.
12:35 · Yes. Some lions are definitely having lunch, but predators are not what keeps this population from growing. It’s how much food there is to eat during the dry season. They aren’t regulated from the top down. They’re regulated from the bottom up, scientists call this kind of population limit the carrying capacity. It’s basically how much life and ecosystem.
12:56 · So The grass is regulating the wildebeests and the wildebeests are regulating everything else.
13:01 · Yeah. Yeah. And if there’s too many wildebeests one year, then more of them die, and if the numbers get too low, next year, there’s extra food to go around the numbers come back up.
13:10 · It’s like a boom and bust economy. Yeah, exactly. And what is so amazing to me is that this ecosystem is regulating itself. We’re going to be telling a lot more stories from this place. I don’t think you can really appreciate the Serengeti without understanding why it exists. And if the species at the middle of everything disappears, if their migration is disrupted by climate change or other human development, would this whole place collapse with them? I mean, Serengeti has rebounded once before, but without the wildebeests, could it do it again?
13:42 · You know, there are so many aspects of this story that remind me of the history of bison in north America, bison, bison, are like the national mammal. Right? Right. Yeah. So bison are these Pleistocene giants that have been in North America for over a hundred thousand years. But as settlers arrived between the 1700s in the 1900s, the US Army sanctioned these huge eradication programs targeting the bison, but also in an effort to eradicate the people here, millions of these bison were slaughtered many for just their coats or their skulls.
North American bison
14:16 · And the population went from an estimated 30 to 60 million individuals to just a few hundred in the course of a couple of centuries.
14:28 · That must’ve had some impact on the ecosystem. Yeah. It’s hard to find a comparison and cows graze too, but bison graze differently. They love grasses and they pass on most of the other shrubs. So that increases biodiversity by providing food and shelter for all the other animals. They create these huge wallows in these pits, compact soil.
14:50 · So they’re, microhabitats for resilient plants, bison even impact other soil and plant processes through the ingestion and expulsion of their waste. Love a good poop story. Yeah. Good old species feces note for you. Anyway, I can totally see where 30 million bison pooping would leave a distinct ecological mark, a skid mark. Right. So anyway, there’s a lot of different groups that are trying to reintroduce bison to their historic ranges.
15:16 · But here’s the bigger question that I have, are these restoration efforts more about healing, a landscape and ecosystem or about healing people? I thought we were talking about the biology and like, you know, animals. Right. I mean, but we don’t live in a vacuum, Joe. It’s about both. Okay. You’re right. You’re right. So prairie’s used to be the biggest ecosystems in north America. They covered 170 million acres, 20 times bigger than the Serengeti. That is wow. Right. But by now prairie’s have been so heavily cultivated and developed.
15:52 · They’re one of the most endangered ecosystems in the world, but there happens to be one not far from where I am, outside of Chicago.
Prairie restoration
16:03 · So we are standing in this green field, which is the site of a prairie restoration project between the 1930s and 70s. This area looked nothing like this. We went to Midewin National Tall Grass Prairie. Today, it’s the only federally protected tall grass prairie in the United States. But before it was a prairie, it was something else entirely. We are going to see a war ammunition storage bunker. What is this doing out here? Well, before Midewin was taken over by the US forest service, it was an army property. And it was used during the middle part of the 1900s to manufacture and store military ordinance.
16:38 · They produced them onsite and then they stored them in buildings like this.
16:48 · Whoa. Wow. It is just like a giant cement tube. Yeah.
16:57 · Sounds like a shotgun in there. That’s so cool. And there used to be like 400 of these bunkers. They stored over a billion pounds of TNT. It was a huge operation.
17:07 · So what happened, once they took the bombs and the explosives out of the bunkers? What did they do? So that is when the real work began. They transferred the land from the Army to the US Forest Service in the 90s, but it was pretty polluted and overgrown. So they had to start pulling the invasive species and reintroducing native plants, but they were still missing one key element. We’re talking about bison, right? I mean, the bison are the real environmental engineers here. They are the prairie’s Keystone species, Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.
17:38 · Many of the plants and grasses, the birds and the insects that once called this area home can’t return until the bison do too. But it’s all part of a big experiment at Midewin, trying to understand these plant animal interactions and the model organism was not easy to find. So we got word earlier today that the herd of bison is somewhere in the area. Emily, I was told there would be bison in this episode.
Bison as engineers
18:10 · We just got a call that someone has spotted them over this Ridge. There are bison out there.
18:16 · Yep. You can see them there. They’re kind of just below the horizon there with those trees. Oh yeah. I can see them. They’re pretty far out there. They are far out. Can you ask them to come a little closer? Uh, I could ask him, uh, they, they do what they want though. That’s fair.
18:31 · Okay. So you take this incredibly polluted place and you get rid of the invasive species, bring back the bison and you get prairie. I mean, that’s part of it, but you have to remember that bison didn’t live here in isolation. They lived here alongside people for tens of thousands of years. People that relied on the bison for every part of their livelihood, for food and shelter, ceremonial objects, weapons. The removal of bison was a direct assault on the people. The people who played a major role in the ecosystem to today, there’s a huge effort on part of indigenous nations to reintroduce bison to tribal land.
19:02 · And one of those groups is the Intertribal Buffalo Council. The Intertribal Buffalo Council actually was originated in 1992, a group of people out of native American fish and wildlife services decided why are we not doing something to return Buffalo to our tribes?
Healing land and people
19:24 · That’s Arnell Abold. She’s the executive director of the ITBC. And talking to her, you really get a sense of how passionately she feels about this project.
19:33 · We look at all of our tribes as individuals, but together we’re force, you know, to be reckoned with. There’s so much heartbeat to it. And there’s so much soul to it, you know, and there’s just that real connection to the Buffalo. But you know, our core has always been returning the Buffalo to tribal lands. And in some ways they’re helping with the literal health of their kids. Diabetes is such a big disease on all of our reservations and Buffalo meat, bison meat is one of the most healthy alternatives you can eat. And that kind of puts it back, you know, back into our hands a little bit.
20:03 · If we can do that What have been some of your proudest achievements. When we bring new herds onto tribal land, if you can heal the Buffalo, the land and the people and make that circular connection, imagine the changes that can happen. Maybe they can’t happen today, but we’re seeing positive changes across Indian country, no matter what, maybe it’s just adding three Buffalo onto their lands.
20:33 · That’s a change that’s positive that gives that community something to find a little hope in. It was actually super touching. Not only it restoring the bison is helping the ecosystem. It’s actually helping so many other things as well. Yeah. And you know, it was cool. We were invited to go see the bison on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota. But unlike our visit to Midewin, this, this was really different.
A circular connection
21:00 · The Oglala Sioux that manage the herd in pine Ridge hold a Buffalo dance ceremony once a year, where they sing, they do dances and they honor their spiritual connection to the bison. But when they heard that we were coming, they offered to hold a special Buffalo ceremony just for us as a way of welcoming our visit to the herd. And it was one of the coolest, most touching things that I’ve ever been in.
21:37 · It’s really meaningful because these are first relatives come out. They’re nervous. Look at the ground. They’re going to come in afraid. They don’t know what kind of energy that we carry. Including us in the ceremony. It was a way of demonstrating that we’re bringing good vibes. And then Robert Goodman, the biologist for Oglala Sioux Parks and Recreation took us out to see the herd. There they are.
22:08 · Yeah. I think I even see like a little baby bison out there. How many bison did you say you had here? Today? Probably around a thousand.
22:17 · So when you imagine sort of the historic numbers of like, you know, estimates of 30 million Buffalo on the landscape, do you have some kind of idea for like the impact those numbers would have had? I don’t know. It’s hard to wrap your mind around herds that are majored in square miles. Instead of numbers, Buffalo are kind of known as a Keystone species. They really do impact a lot of other animals like the prairie dogs.
22:41 · They graze down the grass and that takes away cover for the predators of the prairie dog.
22:46 · So they like it. And then the prairie dogs actually, where they’ve cropped it off, they’ve produced different types of plants that the Buffalo liked to graze, so it kind of works back and forth. Antelope are known to rely on Buffalo too. In the winter time when it’s snow is really deep, they can’t push the snow out in forage as well as the Buffalo. So they’ll follow right in Buffalo tracks and grays behind them. And you know, just about all of the species that you think of when you think of prairie species are related to the Buffalo or rely on the Buffalo. Robert told me that the Buffalo will distribute seeds of native plants that get caught in their shaggy coats.
23:17 · And even the hoof prints that they leave behind holds water for prairie birds. So it’s easy to see that with the removal of bison, everything gets out of whack. I mean, that’s amazing to think about, but these are, these are relationships, ecological relationships that have existed for hundreds of thousands of years. I mean, these things have evolved together. They’ve really, um, become to rely on one another in that landscape.
23:41 · You know, at the center of these landscapes, you’ve got such surprising species and in a way, the entire ecosystem is resting on their shoulders. So if we remove them or if they die, then these entire ecosystems can come crashing down with them. And what’s more if we try to rebuild that if we try to put it back together, but we can’t do that without this key piece. But I think this teaches us a super important lesson about how we fit into this.
24:19 · So, you know, we talk about this whole Serengeti ecosystem as this wild place, but we have to remember that humans also played a part in creating this ecosystem. So when you kind of look at this system, it’s not to look at it as a wildlife and two and two opposing sides. They are together, you know, and it’s, and it’s understanding that balance.
24:42 · All of these relationships, all these complex webs that these ecosystems rely on from the largest animal to the smallest blade of grass. We’re not watching that from the outside.
24:55 · We are part of it too. Our species touches this on every level and we can make a real difference for better, or for worse. So yeah, everything is connected by these big ideas. And this isn’t the only idea we have to share with you guys.
25:22 · I’m super pumped to get to the other species that we’re going to cover and all the different stories we’re going to put together. This is going to be so great.
25:28 · The next one is going to blow your mind, put down the tick talks for a minute and join us in the next episode of, In Our Nature.
We Built a Wildlife Corridor Through a City
Planet Wild, 09 15, 2026
Video (11:33)
Description
We’re building floating city wetlands to bring nature back to Bristol.
🌱 Join us to rewild the planet: https://planetwild.com/join/m43
Many cities, like Bristol, were built on wetlands. But to make space for us to live, huge drainage systems were created and the water was removed. This has led to some massive problems: less space for nature, more polluted water, and a greater risk of flooding.
That’s why, in our 43rd mission, we went to Bristol and partnered with WWT to bring wetlands back to the city. For this mission, we’re also joined by sustainability creator @itsSamBentley.
Together, we’re building floating wetlands in Bristol Hardor. We’re also helping develop a miniature “wetland-in-a-box” that enables anyone with a drainpipe to rewild their city.
Special thanks to FLYNN for providing a render of the upcoming “wetland-in-a-box”.
Copyright 2026 FLYNN Product Design - All rights reserved.
Check FLYNN out at https://flynn-product-design.com/
People in the video:
Cameron Nicoll is a documentary filmmaker and the Creative Director at Planet Wild.
Dr. Julia Newth is WWT’s Ecosystem Health & Social Dimensions Manager. She has been part of the organization for over 20 years.
Sam Bentley is a sustainability content creator and climate activist.
Make sure to follow WWT:
IG: https://www.instagram.com/wwtworldwide
Website: http://www.wwt.org.uk/wetland-cities
Chapters
0:00 Bringing nature back to the city
1:06 Why cities lost their wetlands
2:03 Meet our partner WWT
3:25 A special guest: Sam Bentley
3:45 Building floating wetlands in Bristol harbor
5:00 Our support
5:31 Building a “wetland in a box”
7:19 Good nature news from cities around the world
8:59 The impact of this mission
What is Planet Wild?
We’re a global community of people who care deeply about nature and want to help our planet bounce back – one mission at a time.
EVERY MONTH, we work with wildlife pioneers worldwide to
🦁 bring back endangered species
🌊 support oceans and aquatic life
🌳 revive forests and rewild landscapes
EVERY MEMBER can decide how their money is spent, connect with us on our Discord, and collect unique badges for each mission they support.
EVERY MISSION is documented in videos like this. 100% transparency.
EVERYONE can join. The bigger the community grows, the bigger these missions will get!
👉 Become a Planet Wild member: https://planetwild.com/join/m43
👉 Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/planetwild.official/
👉 Follow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/planetwild-official/
Find all sources here:
https://planetwild.notion.site/Mission-43-Floating-Wetlands-Sources-3d769e032b19807dbe46d290c03e8201?source=copy_link
Transcript
Bringing nature back to the city
0:00 · What if there was a way to transform your city from this to this, replacing concrete with flowers and drains with rain gardens?
0:09 · What if we can make our towns resilient against floods, heat waves, and droughts, whilst boosting biodiversity and mental health?
0:17 · Right now, all around the world, people are finding incredible ways to bring nature back into our cities. And we’re here in Bristol to do exactly that.
0:26 · We’re literally kind of surfing on a wetland right now, and I never thought I would say that sentence. (laughs) Pockets of lush green wetlands have been popping up all over the city, and now there’s a plan to create a green corridor along the river’s embankment, and we’re gonna help make this dream a reality.
0:44 · Together with our friend Sam Bentley, we’ll explore just how easily we can upgrade our cities, and what that means for the future of urban environments all over the world. In this video, we’re gonna be checking out loads of genius innovations that are bringing nature back to the city piece by piece. We’re Planet Wild. Welcome to Mission 43.
1:05 · (upbeat music) More than half of the global population live in cities, and many of these places have one thing in common. They were built on water. Basically, where you see a city, there used to be a swamp or a wetland. Then we built huge drainage networks to remove the water and paved over the land so we could live there.
Why cities lost their wetlands
1:28 · Sometimes even burying entire rivers underground, like the Bievre in Paris, the Fleet in London, or the Frome here in Bristol. And predictably, removing all this water has led to some massive problems.
1:41 · Flash flooding. - Flash flooding.
1:43 · Flash flooding in parts of London.
1:44 · Urban heat island effect.
1:46 · Dangerous conditions to be outdoors.
1:48 · [Cameron] Turns out wetlands aren’t just incredibly important for wildlife, but they also keep temperature and water levels stable. You know, the kind of thing we humans really need to survive. And this is why all over the world, people are bringing wetlands back into our cities.
Meet our partner WWT
2:03 · When you start to instal wetlands across the city, whether that’s a small rain garden, a drain pipe wetland, right the way to a lake in your local park, it’s really sort of magical, and everyone in the city benefits from wetlands.
2:16 · This is Julia from WWT, the wetland charity. They’re kicking off a huge effort to turn Bristol into the UK’s first wetland city. By replacing old drainage systems with lush rain gardens, installing micro wetlands in backyards, and anchoring huge wetlands on the river, they’re creating little pockets of biodiversity everywhere. In fact, over the next few years, there’ll be 200 new projects here in Bristol to bring nature back. Just imagine the impact that this would have.
2:46 · It would completely transform public space across the city, creating habitat, absorbing flood waters, filtering toxic runoff, and cooling the city down. And the transformation has already begun. WWT and their partners are creating a wildlife corridor through the city centre, and this is the next piece of the puzzle. We are currently building and planting a futuristic structure called a floating wetland.
3:13 · We’ve got one platform which is 100 square metres and another smaller 16 square metre platform, specifically designed with these miniature staircases to save baby seagulls that are getting stuck in a corner of the harbour. But we are not doing this alone.
A special guest: Sam Bentley
3:28 · Hey, Cam. - All right, Sam?
3:29 · How’s it going? - How’s it going?
3:31 · This is Sam Bentley, founder and host of one of our favourite YouTube channels. If you’ve never heard of him, he reports good news stories from around the world, and is also making a video about the transformation of Bristol. So we asked him if he could help us with our new floating wetlands. This is that, and then this becomes there, and…
Building floating wetlands in Bristol harbor
3:50 · Huh?
3:52 · Okay, okay. This is how it works.
3:55 · Step one is putting all the pieces together and locking them in place. It’s a completely modular structure that can be built to any size, and every element is recycled, recyclable, or biodegradable. The frame and floats are old drinking water pipes that are wrapped in coconut husk, and instead of soil or mud that would just drift away, we’re using buoyant clay pellets as the plant bed.
4:17 · And step two is planting it with more than 20 species of native wetland plants.
4:24 · Mm. - What have you got?
4:26 · Ah, nice. Glorious.
4:31 · So above water, we have this layered planting system that creates an oasis for pollinators and a safe haven for nesting birds. But the real magic happens underneath. As these plants grow, their roots go super deep into the water, creating a refuge for marine life, cleaning the water, taking all those pollutants out, and also regulating water temperature too.
4:50 · There’s potential to instal up to 5,000 square metres of these floating wetlands here in Bristol, transforming the concrete embankment into a thriving nature corridor. So the Planet Wild community is completely funding the construction and installation of these two modules, as well as even more platforms in the future, to make this dream a reality.
Our support
5:12 · You know, with Planet Wild, we do projects all over the world, bringing nature back in different, like, remote, far flung places, but it’s just amazing to see that it can come back in the middle of our cities. So in addition to the floating wetlands, we’re also helping WWT to develop a miniature wetland in a box that can be attached to any ordinary drain pipe.
Building a “wetland in a box”
5:32 · To show you how it works, we’re gonna take a break from the harbour and visit a small garden nearby to build a prototype. We should probably get on with it though.
5:44 · Yeah.
5:44 · - Yeah. (laughs) (whimsical music) So this is a very ordinary drain pipe coming from the roof, and so when it rains, the water goes from the gutter, all the way down here, straight into the drain. But we are gonna catch this water and use it to create a wetland in a box. Well, it’s actually two boxes. The top box acts as a pond where aquatic plants can thrive as it fills up with rainwater.
6:07 · This eventually overflows into the bottom box, a miniature bog that insects and amphibians can call home. So, to make it yourself, you just need to follow these steps. First thing we need to do is make a hole in the bottom. This hole should be covered with a filter, and we use this permeable plant pot. Then add a layer of gravel, a fabric membrane, and a layer of soil.
6:31 · The membrane is there to stop the soil running down the drain. Step two, drill a hole into the side of the top box, allowing the water to flow into the bottom box. Step three, take a deep breath and cut the drain pipe so that the entire structure will be in the perfect position to catch the water. Step four, fill everything with native wetland plants and add a wall of loose bricks. And that’s it. We’re done.
6:56 · And within hours, you’ll start to get insects like dragonflies and damselflies coming back here. Spiders can make their homes in here. Frogs and newts can come and live in here. And it’s just incredible the amount of biodiversity that can come back just with this. The UK actually has 4,000 square kilometres of garden space just like this, and now we can actually start to use some of that and give it back to nature.
Good nature news from cities around the world
7:20 · (dramatic music) We have to interrupt this Planet Wild video to bring you some breaking good news from cities around the world. First up, we’re heading to Seoul, South Korea. For decades, the Cheonggyecheon stream was completely buried underneath a massive elevated highway, but in the early 2000s, the city actually tore that highway down and restored the natural river.
7:42 · Since then, biodiversity has exploded by over 600%, and the corridor is now home to hundreds of species of fish, birds, and insects. Now we’re heading over to the Netherlands where one company has found a way to turn lifeless concrete buildings into green space. Respire use a moisture retaining concrete layer to grow moss directly onto walls. Within 12 weeks, it forms a green surface that survives on rainwater alone, filtering air pollution while naturally cooling the building.
8:13 · Next up, we’re looking to China, where they’re creating huge sponge cities. Instead of using grey infrastructure like concrete pipes to drain storm water, they’re building sprawling urban wetland parks and permeable pavements that naturally soak up extreme floods like a giant sponge. But the ultimate nature city has to be Singapore.
8:33 · By making greenery a core part of their urban design, they’ve turned a dense metropolis into a city in nature, and their waterways are now so healthy that families of wild otters are happily swimming right through the middle of the central business district. You can see from these projects there’s not just one solution.
8:51 · In a city, you have to find little pockets and corners to bring nature back around human infrastructure, and that’s exactly what we’re doing in Bristol. (upbeat music) We’re literally kind of surfing on a wetland right now, and I never thought I would say that sentence. (laughs) This will be the permanent home of our new wetland. For centuries, it’s been a grey wall, but thanks to the Planet Wild community, it will soon look like this.
The impact of this mission
9:26 · This piece was installed just two years ago, and you can see the difference. It’s just, like, full of life. There’s families of birds in there. It’s full of insects. I’ve seen loads of fish swimming underneath. Just incredible what can happen in such a short space of time.
9:43 · And of course, this is just the beginning. You know, these plants will start to establish, they’ll start to grow, and it really will start attracting nature in.
9:51 · We haven’t even finished installing the wetland yet, and there’s this family of swans rocking up and checking it out. It can potentially be their new home. Like, that is just so perfect, so beautiful. (gentle music) Finally, we installed the second platform, and again, the effect was instant. So we literally just installed the floating wetland, and we’ve seen a baby seagull who is stuck in the water use the ramp and climb up onto the platform.
10:19 · And that’s just saved his life. It’s just unbelievable to witness. And that is the beauty of this project. Nature is just waiting beneath the concrete and the asphalt. And once you give it a chance, it’s immediately making our cities more biodiverse, safer, and simply nicer places to live. And because it’s such a simple solution, it can easily be copied around the world.
10:45 · So our funding here is not only transforming Bristol, but it’s also creating a blueprint for future wetland cities everywhere. Thank you so much for making it all the way to the end of the video. I hope you can tell that we put a lot of hard work into the missions and the mission videos, but we really couldn’t do any of it without our community. Right now, we’re more than 27,000 members.
11:07 · We’re actually growing really quickly, which is so exciting. Every single month, we go on a mission to bring back endangered species, to clean up our oceans, and to restore entire landscapes. So if that sounds good to you, you can join Planet Wild as a backup by following the QR code here or the link in the description. Thanks so much for watching, and catch you next time.
We Let Beavers Transform an Old Farm
Planet Wild, 07 15, 2026
Video (13:58)
Description
We’re turning an abandoned fish farm into a beaver paradise
🌱 Join us to rewild the planet: https://planetwild.com/join/m41
Beavers are nature’s ultimate engineers. By building dams, digging canals and keeping water in the landscape, they can turn dry land into thriving wetlands full of biodiversity.
They were nearly wiped out but against all odds, they’ve made an incredible comeback.
Our partner Rewilding Oder Delta is helping secure that return. That’s why we teamed up with them for our 41st mission, and purchased a 20-hectare abandoned fish farm in Poland to turn into a natural beaver paradise.
People in the video:
Markus Gilles co-founded Planet Wild in 2023 and is leading the organization as Co-CEO.
Frauke Bennett is on the board of Rewilding Oder Delta e.V. and heads the department “Nature for the People”.
Make sure to follow Rewilding Oder Delta:
IG: https://www.instagram.com/rewildingoderdelta/
Website: https://rewilding-oder-delta.com/
Make sure to follow Rewilding Oder Delta’s Polish partner Fundacja dla Klimatu i Bioróżnorodności:
Website: https://www.fdkib.com/
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@fdkib
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FDKIB/about
Chapters
0:00 The Great Beaver Comeback
1:14 How beavers transform ecosystems
2:20 Meet our partner
3:01 Our new land for beavers
3:50 The history of beavers
6:45 Our support: Part 1
7:07 How beaver engineering works
11:11 How beavers cause conflict
11:48 Our support: Part 2
13:04 A new relationship with beavers
What is Planet Wild?
We’re a global community of people who care deeply about nature and want to help our planet bounce back – one mission at a time.
EVERY MONTH, we work with wildlife pioneers worldwide to
🦁 bring back endangered species
🌊 support oceans and aquatic life
🌳 revive forests and rewild landscapes
EVERY MEMBER can decide how their money is spent, connect with us on our Discord, and collect unique badges for each mission they support.
EVERY MISSION is documented in videos like this. 100% transparency.
EVERYONE can join. The bigger the community grows, the bigger these missions will get!
👉 Become a Planet Wild member: https://planetwild.com/join/m41
👉 Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/planetwild.official/
👉 Follow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/planetwild-official/
Find all sources here:
https://planetwild.notion.site/M41-Beavers-Sources-39769e032b1980a593ecc70fdec76a30?source=copy_link
Transcript
The Great Beaver Comeback
0:00 · What if there was a surprisingly simple way to more than double biodiversity, boost water quality, and prevent catastrophic floods and droughts?
0:09 · Right now, a movement is taking shape to bring back long-lost ecosystems in record time using the power of beavers. And we thought, “Well, that looks like fun. Let’s try it ourselves.” This place we’re standing at, it used to be a giant fish farm until very recently. And now it’s abandoned and doing absolutely nothing for nature.
0:29 · But that’s going to change big time because the Planet Wild community is buying this entire dried-out piece of land and turning it into a massive beaver playground. A beaver population has already been spotted nearby, and if everything goes to plan, they will transform this barren wasteland into a thriving ecosystem much, much faster than any human construction crew ever could.
0:55 · Join me on a fascinating journey to learn all about nature’s number one ecosystem engineers, the crazy comeback story they’ve had after near extinction, and how they will turn all of this into this. We are Planet Wild. Welcome to Mission 41. (charming music) Everything you see here around me was created by one creature.
How beavers transform ecosystems
1:20 · (upbeat music) Introducing even a single beaver into a landscape creates an explosion of biodiversity far more than what we see with any other living thing. (upbeat music) And that’s simply because they bring water into the landscape, turning dry land into a mosaic of deep ponds, complex canals, and shallow wetlands. These are perfect breeding grounds for fish and amphibians. The wooden dams and the still water attract millions of insects, providing a feast for all kinds of birds.
1:58 · The abundance of water and diverse vegetation also attracts larger mammals like elk, deer, martens, and even wolves. All of this makes beaver wetlands pretty much impossible to replicate artificially.
2:11 · What beavers do can help restore our landscape much better than we can do with our engineering.
2:19 · This is Frauke.
Meet our partner
2:21 · She’s worked alongside beavers for the last 17 years, and she’s part of our friends at Rewilding Oder Delta who are doing pioneering work to bring back Europe’s most iconic wildlife species, including lynx, sea eagles, elk, and even the European bison. But now it’s the beavers’ time. Three years ago, together with their Polish partner, they purchased a piece of land to turn it into a nature reserve and restore its lost wetland.
2:48 · The plan: create a protected area and then simply step back and let the local beavers take the reins. And as I got to see firsthand on my exploration with Frauke, the plan actually worked. But now we have our eyes on a new piece of land just a few miles away that desperately needs a makeover. A long time ago, this was a natural marshland.
Our new land for beavers
3:11 · Then, like with so many wetlands, it was completely drained to be used for agriculture. Years later, the opposite happened. This concrete lock was installed, damming up the drainage water to create a gigantic artificial pond with millions of farmed fish where chemicals, growth hormones, and fish food polluted the water. After all of this, the land is in a pretty bad state, but that’s going to change soon.
3:37 · The beavers are already taking a curious look at this area. I am very sure they already made some plans, what they can do there.
The history of beavers
3:50 · The fact that we even have beavers living here is an absolute miracle. Just 70 years ago, beavers were considered functionally extinct in the wild here in Poland. Today, the population here has grown to over 100,000 individuals, making it one of the largest beaver populations in all of Europe. But this is still a tiny number compared to the hundreds of millions. Yes, hundreds of millions of beavers that used to cover almost the entire northern hemisphere.
4:21 · Just imagine that world for a second. It looked something like this. In fact, studies have shown that the presence of beavers in an area can triple the biodiversity there. And yet we came this close at wiping them out completely. And it was all because of this. In the 1600s, it became super fashionable across Europe to wear hats and coats made from beaver fur. Which style you chose actually said a lot about your status in society.
4:49 · What’s even weirder, beavers produce a vanilla-smelling scent from a gland right next to their butt that people turned into perfume and ice cream. I promise I’m not making this up. And sadly, for these reasons, demand for beavers absolutely skyrocketed. Once the European beaver population was depleted, the fur industry expanded to North America. And over the course of around 200 years, 99.9% of the world’s beavers were hunted and killed.
5:21 · And at the turn of the last century, only 1,200 individuals remained in Europe. The impact on nature was catastrophic. Without beavers and their dams, that complex biodiverse landscape was drained away and with it all the life that depended on it. But there is hope, because in recent decades, beavers have made a remarkable comeback, and it’s largely thanks to some unconventional projects.
5:50 · In 1948, conservationists in Idaho packed 76 beavers into wooden crates, strapped them into World War II parachutes, and literally air-dropped them into the wilderness to restore the wetlands. And the crazy plan actually worked. In Scotland, beavers were completely extinct until a few of them mysteriously appeared in the wild. Nobody’s entirely sure if these beavers were illegally released or if they escaped from captivity, but today, nearly all Scottish beavers are descendants from this guerrilla population.
6:23 · All over Europe, beavers have bounced back in one way or the other from those 1,200 individuals to over 1.5 million. And yet wetlands are still disappearing way faster than beavers can rebuild them. So every piece of land that we can give back to them is a win for nature as a whole. (lively music) That’s why the Planet Wild community is helping to purchase 20 hectares of degraded land and turning it into a gigantic beaver playground.
Our support: Part 1
6:55 · And the best part, we don’t actually have to do anything because the beavers know much better than us how to do it.
7:02 · But how are they actually doing it?
7:05 · Let’s take a look. (playful music) It all starts with the surrounding trees. Beavers love to eat the inner bark of tree branches, but instead of learning to climb up, beavers decided to bring the trees down to them. Using their self-sharpening iron-enforced teeth, they can fell a tree in a single night, strategically cutting the trunk so the tree falls into the water where it can easily be cut up and transported.
How beaver engineering works
7:33 · And because beavers only eat a small portion of the tree, there’s a lot of building material left to create this: dams. And they are really good at them. In Canada, they’ve built a dam twice the length of the Hoover Dam. Just chew on that for a moment. I mean, look at this dam right here. It’s fairly new, and its construction is absolutely remarkable. Like with any good construction site, beavers follow a clear plan.
8:01 · First, they search for a perfect location to maximise the dam’s impact, choosing narrow streams in flat valleys so that even a small dam will flood a large area. Then they start digging big logs into the riverbed and anchor them with rocks to build a foundation. This then gets layered with branches, mud, and leaves to create a sturdy wall. Beavers actually monitor the sound of the water as an indicator of how well the dam stops water flow.
8:31 · If they still hear running water, they must keep building until it’s done. All of this is absolutely fascinating, but one question remains.
8:40 · Why?
8:42 · Why go through all of that work just to flood a valley?
8:46 · Well, take a look at this mediaeval castle. It’s not just protected by strong walls, but by moats of water. Beaver dams create exactly such moats to protect them from wolves and other predators. And right in the middle of it sits the beaver’s lodge like a castle.
9:04 · In German, we actually call them beaver castle, Biberburg, and there is one right over there. (peppy music) The German name really is on point as this thing is built with a multi-room layout and mud-plastered walls that are impenetrable to predators. Beavers enter through a secret tunnel that opens into a lower wet chamber for shedding water. In my anthropomorphizing mind, that’s where they take off their rubber boots and hang their raincoats.
9:35 · From here, they retreat to a dry upper living area where the family sleeps and stays warm, including, wait for it, a built-in ventilation shaft that acts like a chimney. In winter, you can even see steam rising out from the top because their body temperature and the decomposition of the organic walls act like a central heating system while the water below is used as an in-house fridge to keep the food fresh during winter.
10:01 · If they see something that they really like, they dig it up and they transport it closer to their mound, sometimes even in front of the mound, and they stick it into the soil there. So they have their little garden around their beaver mounds.
10:19 · By the way, if you ever encounter a beaver or a beaver lodge in the wild, absolutely don’t approach it. These are wild animals that should be left alone. The only reason why we could get so close was because we were on location with an expert, making sure we would not disturb them. Okay, back to the video. (playful music) We’re back at the fish farm, and we are already seeing the first signs of beaver activity.
10:45 · You can see right here that they have started damming up the old lock again.
10:49 · What did I say?
10:50 · No human construction crew needed. It’s incredible to see how quickly things are happening already. Just a few weeks ago, all of this was just brown. With the beavers coming back and raising the water levels, it’s already turning green again.
11:05 · Seeing how effectively beavers are restoring landscapes, we were asking ourselves, why isn’t this being done much more?
How beavers cause conflict
11:13 · Well, it turns out beavers are a bit too good at claiming land.
11:18 · Beavers are causing problems.
11:20 · Beavers. - Beavers.
11:21 · Beaver…
11:22 · Is causing quite a few problems.
11:24 · As beaver populations expand, they can clash with local communities, blocking drainage ditches, flooding agricultural fields, and chewing down trees that we prefer kept standing. Often this doesn’t go down too well. So if we want beavers to survive, we have to actively help humans to live alongside them. Luckily, Frauke has a plan for that too. We’re going to broker a peace between beavers and humans by planting 9,000 willow trees.
Our support: Part 2
11:53 · Willows are a preferred snack of beavers, distracting them from old-growth trees. They never fully eat them, instead leaving small stumps that quickly sprout again, providing an ongoing food source. In fact, the number of willows will naturally grow over time. On top of that, we’re helping locals to protect their property by providing them with non-toxic anti-bite glue, low voltage electric fencing, and these wire cages to protect valuable trees.
12:21 · In the long run, our 20 hectares of land will positively impact about 400 hectares of surrounding land by hydrating the forest ecosystem, preventing wildfires, filtering the water, and creating a vital stepping stone habitat from the smallest to the biggest species.
12:39 · For me, personal, it’s always joy.
12:45 · It fills me immediately with joy when I see beavers being there, doing what beavers do, and I can fully trust them that they do everything for a good reason. (inspiring music) For centuries, our relationship with beavers was defined by hunting and conflict. But looking at this project, you can see what happens when we finally decide to become their allies. By allowing beavers to return, we aren’t just saving a species. We are letting them save our landscapes.
A new relationship with beavers
13:24 · And if you want to become part of projects like this, join Planet Wild as a backer. Every month we go on a mission to bring back endangered species, clean up our oceans, and rewild entire landscapes. And it’s all community funded. As a backer, you’re directly supporting people at the front lines of nature protection. And you can see your own impact here on our channel. There’s a QR code over here and a link down in the description.
13:50 · See you all again next month, over and out. (chiming music)
What happens when you set a river free BBC News
BBC News, 10 20, 2024
Video (3:37)
Description
Virtually all the UK’s rivers have been physically altered in one way or another – straightened, dammed, dredged or restrained by barriers in some way along their course.
Which is why the National Trust decided to do a radical experiment, to see if it is possible to the ecological equivalent of a complete reboot.
They filled a river in west Somerset in and let it take its own course through the landscape.
Our climate editor, Justin Rowlatt, has been finding out how the project worked out.
Producer: Harriet Bradshaw
Shoot/Edit: Gwyndaf Hughes
Subscribe here: http://bit.ly/1rbfUog
For more news, analysis and features visit: www.bbc.com/news
Transcript
The radical river project
0:00 · like most of the UK’s Rivers the all had been interfered with it had been artificially straightened to keep the land dry but it left little room for nature so here’s the question is it possible to do the ecological equivalent of a complete reboot to reset the river and let it find its own course through the landscape other projects in the UK have re wiggled Rivers using diggers to
0:27 · reconstruct the curves they used to have but here in Somerset The National Trust decided to do something much more radical they completely filled the river in with Earth and rubble and then waited to see what would happen next we went to see the project just after the heavy work had finished a year on and things have
First year transformation
0:52 · changed it really is foggy now it’s absolutely brilliant it is absolutely phenomenal it is just transformed it is green it’s messy it’s noisy you walk through and the insects go up and then you stop and listen and the bird song is just amazing cuz what’s so interesting about this is you didn’t actually know what
Project uncertainty
1:17 · was going to happen did you no it’s like yeah it’s one of the kind of yeah the first projects that really has been done like this on this scale in in England there’s a lot of uncertainty and kind of you know what’s going to happen what’s going to look like is is it going to do what we think it’s going to do um which is both a little bit scary but also you know brilliantly exciting scientists have been using drones to help monitor the
Wetland ecosystem
1:46 · changes the images from the air prompt a fundamental question freed from the constraints of its banks is this really still a river at all you no longer have that single Channel what we think of as a river what you have inste is a complex messy Wetland environment you can’t even see when the original channel was you have multiple flads multiple ponds multiple Wetland areas it is that complex network of different environments which brings the explosion
2:15 · of Life the scientists say they’ve recorded here not just Birds but mammals too including endangered water vs they’d better be careful though because there are predators here too what happens down river The Villages regularly flood so there was a lot of concern about the impact that changes would have and a lot of anxiety in the National Trust team especially when last winter turned out to be one of the wetest on record post restoration we had
Flood prevention results
2:47 · some really significant rainfall events you know unprecedented really the site responded really well we didn’t get any Downstream flooding other villages in and around Somerset you know really badly flooded you know and here in in Alford and Bingington you know no flooding and the data’s back that up now we’ve got from sort of extra and Nottingham universities you know we’ve we’ve we’ve significantly reduced the flood Peak and helped protect Downstream communities from that extreme weather restoring Wetlands is a priority for the National Trust it estimates the UK has lost 90% of its wetlands in the last 100
Future implications
3:18 · years alone River resets like this won’t work everywhere but the results here in Somerset have been so good the trust is already considering sites where it could be repeated Justin roll at BBC News West subet
What Is Rewilding
Bloomberg Originals, 03 29, 2023
Video (1:44)
Description
The environment is in crisis, but a revolutionary new conservation concept offers hope for the future. In this episode of The Future With Hannah Fry, Hannah explores whether rewilding can help heal the environmental wounds we have inflicted on our planet.
Do you want to know what your future holds? A life beyond 150 years old? A world where computers can read our emotions? A planet transformed by unlimited clean energy? Mathematician Hannah Fry will explore these questions and more in the new series The Future With Hannah Fry, debuting on Bloomberg Originals on Feb. 22.
Watch The Future With Hannah Fry on Wednesdays at 8:30 p.m. ET on Bloomberg.com, the Bloomberg app on your connected TV, Apple TV, Roku, Samsung TV.
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Subscribe for business news, but not as you’ve known it: exclusive interviews, fascinating profiles, data-driven analysis, and the latest in tech innovation from around the world.
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Transcript
0:00 · there’s a reason why they call it an ecosystem because when it comes to Nature species are performing this incredibly intricate delicate dance with one another and it is so finely balanced that if you take out just one species it can end up having a catastrophic effect that Cascades all the way down through the food chain a trophic Cascade as it’s known and that is what happened in Utah in the first half of the 20th century a
0:27 · State national Park had a flood of new visitors which had a detrimental impact on the population of cougars that lived there cougars eat dinner and so the deer were quite happy about this town of events their population flourished but deer have a habit of grazing on pretty much everything they see so the knock-on effect was a reduction in the diversity of the greenery around that then had an impact on butterflies and birds and reptiles and so on
0:58 · this incredible delicacy of the complex network of species from one perspective can make it look like it’s quite fragile but actually from another perspective it can really be a strength of an ecosystem because sometimes there are certain species certain keystone species as they’re known which when reintroduced in the right time at the right place time have a positive impact that
1:27 · Cascades both upwards and downwards just by reintroducing one single keystone species
Why This Unusual Pattern May Save the Rainforests
PBS Terra, 09 12, 2024
Video (9:34)
Description
Check out In the Margins on @pbsorigins : https://youtu.be/Y1cJCowMz9M?feature=shared
Check out Roots of Resistance on @pbsorigins : https://youtu.be/rUCrmh58GrU?si=b6HPENjsnEKYPrzK
The Choco region in northwest Ecuador is hosting a groundbreaking experiment to try and help it’s rainforests recover from rampant deforestation. A multinational team is planting small “tree islands” to attract natural seed dispersers. It’s an innovative approach that we’ll take a close look at, from above and within.
Hosted by Joe Hanson from Be Smart, Overview uses stunning 4k drone footage to reveal the natural and human made marvels shaping our planet–from a 10,000-foot view–literally.
PBS Member Stations rely on viewers like you. To support your local station, go to: http://to.pbs.org/DonateTerra *****
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Transcript
The Choco rainforest
0:05 · (light music) Hidden along the equator lies a rainforest like no other.
0:13 · The Choco is a kaleidoscope of life.
0:17 · An enchanting home to an astonishing array of species many found nowhere else on Earth.
0:24 · But like most of Earth’s tropical rainforests, The Choco is under threat.
0:29 · Widespread deforestation for agriculture, logging, and human settlements has pushed this incredible ecosystem to the brink of disappearing.
0:37 · But, there is hope, thanks to these.
Introducing tree islands
0:41 · These are tree islands, small patches of trees replanted within larger deforested areas.
0:47 · Scientists think this groundbreaking idea could change the world’s forest recovery efforts by allowing the forest to regrow itself thanks to one surprising ingredient, animal poop.
1:06 · (gentle music) Here in Ecuador, the Choco Rainforest covers approximately 7,000 square kilometers, nearly one and a half times the size of Grand Canyon National Park.
1:18 · Separated from the Amazon by the towering Andes, The Choco is a world unto itself.
Biodiversity and risks
1:25 · It’s also one of the wettest places on Earth.
1:29 · Some spots receiving upwards of 400 inches of rain per year.
1:35 · It’s also one of the world’s most biologically diverse places.
1:39 · A home for over 800 species of birds, 140 species of mammals, and 9,000 species of plants.
1:50 · Here, inside a 100-meter square, you can find nearly as many tree species as in all of Europe.
1:58 · Rainforests like The Choco are critical for preserving Earth’s biodiversity.
The challenge of restoration
2:10 · These are some of the determined researchers on a mission to save this remarkable ecosystem.
2:20 · (Leighton speaking in foreign language) - They contain more than half of all of the species in the world, even though they occupy a relatively small proportion of the Earth’s land surface.
2:29 · There’s new species being discovered in tropical rainforests every year, including here in Northwestern Ecuador.
2:35 · Every year, an area of tropical forest gets cut down that’s about the size of Lake Michigan.
2:43 · (orchestral music) - The Choco is considered one of the most threatened ecoregions in the world.
2:48 · In Ecuador, only about 2% of the original forest cover remains.
2:54 · As more and more of it is converted to palm oil plantations, countless species of plants and animals are at risk of extinction.
3:09 · (Fernando speaking in foreign language) Fernando is now fighting to restore his native lands.
The power of natural recovery
3:29 · (Fernando speaking in foreign language) But saving a rainforest is not an easy task.
3:34 · Although scientists know what a healthy tropical forest looks like, they still know very little about how to regrow them.
3:54 · (Fernando speaking in foreign language) (light music) At this point, maybe you’re thinking, why not just plant trees?
3:58 · One new tree to replace every old one?
4:01 · Well, the cost, for starters.
4:03 · Additionally, many traditional replanting efforts have focused on replanting only a small number of tree species.
4:10 · But this allows only a few fast growing species to dominate the regrown forest, and it really fails to recreate the complex diversity of species in natural rainforests, which can contain upwards of 400 tree species in an area the size of a Manhattan city block.
4:29 · Regrowing a forest by only replanting a few species is like trying to paint a Picasso with only primary colors.
4:39 · But here, scientists are trying something new, an idea that harnesses the power of nature itself.
4:47 · Instead of planting rows of seedlings in a large scale plantation, the researchers are creating small, strategic patches filled with a diverse mix of native trees.
4:58 · They hope that over time these empty spaces will be filled by the same natural processes that keep healthy rainforests lush and diverse.
5:08 · [Leighton] The idea is that these small patches of trees will kickstart a natural regeneration process.
5:13 · [Joe] And here’s where things get interesting, because the team’s secret weapon is poop. (bright music) The trees planted in these islands produce fruit. In a healthy rainforest, animals act as nature’s gardeners. As creatures like howler monkeys and toucans feast on that fruit, their droppings disperse seeds far and wide, planting new forest with every trip to the bathroom. Up to 80% of tree species rely on birds and mammals to spread their seeds in this way.
Nature’s gardeners
5:46 · When a patch of rainforest falls, it’s these animal gardeners that hold the key to bringing it back to life. Eating fruits, carrying the seeds far and wide, and ultimately, planting the forest of tomorrow.
6:00 · One of the big questions is, what are the best kinds of trees to plant?
6:05 · How many of them do you need to plant and what kinds of spatial configurations?
6:09 · [Joe] The scientists are betting that by planting trees with mouthwatering fruits, they’ll attract a bunch of hungry critters like monkeys, birds, and bats to help this forest regrow itself. Who knew that the key to saving the rainforest could be as simple as a well-stocked fruit buffet. To test the idea, researchers pack half of their plots with trees that produce a bounty of animal attracting fruit, while the other half offer fewer delicious treats.
Measuring success
6:42 · At the same time, we’re also monitoring animal populations to identify what bird species are coming and visiting plots. (Fernando speaking in foreign language) [Leighton] We’d like to be able to connect the dots between what animals are present and what seeds they’re bringing into the restoration plots.
7:12 · [Joe] The project has captured the imagination of the local community.
7:17 · [Leighton] A lot of the success that FCAT has enjoyed is due to the tight bonds that they have with the local communities that are here. (Fernando speaking in foreign language) [Joe] The experiment is still young, but the team is already seeing promising signs. (Fernando speaking in foreign language) (light music) If it works, this approach could revolutionize reforestation efforts not just in The Choco, but in threatened rainforests worldwide.
Future of reforestation
8:08 · Ecological restoration is not a silver bullet.
8:12 · It’s not the solution to all of our environmental problems. In order to prevent mass extinction, we have to stop destroying intact habitats. And restoration can’t do that. But restoration is part of the solution as well. Ecological restoration allows us to build back some of the habitat that’s been lost.
8:29 · [Joe] Only time will tell if their tree islands will take root. But in the battle to save our rainforests, every seed of hope matters, and in The Choco, those seeds are starting to sprout. Hey guys, we’re out here working on the next episode of Overview. But before you go, if you’re a fan of history, we want to tell you about two new series over on PBS Origins.
Conclusion and credits
8:55 · Roots of Resistance is a series which shows how history is often made through defiance. And In the Margins explores the kind of lesser-known stories that they maybe don’t teach you in school. We’re gonna put a link to their latest episodes down below. We hope you consider subscribing too. It helps all of us over at PBS.
Why we should be destroying more dams
DW Planet A, 09 18, 2026
Video (11:51)
Description
Thousands of dams are being destroyed, bringing life back to its rivers. Migratory fish are returning to waterways, habitats are reconnecting, and entire ecosystems are being restored. While many dams remain vital for drinking water, irrigation, and flood management, Europe is
rethinking its relationship with its rivers, one dam at a time.
CREDITS
Reporter: Janek Speight
Camera: Mikel Bereziartua
Video Editor: Markus Mörtz
Supervising Editor: Adam Baheej Adada, Kiyo Dörrer, Michael Trobridge
Fact Check: Jeannette Cwienk
Thumbnail: Em Chabridon
READ MORE
Consequences of Large Dam Decommissioning Project in Europe: The Case of Enobieta
https://addi.ehu.es/bitstream/handle/10810/62662/TESIS_ATRISTAIN_VEGA_MIREN.pdf
Stream macroinvertebrate communities improve quickly after large dam decommissioning
https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1365-2664.14656
Dam Removal Europe Progress Report 2025
https://damremoval.eu/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/DRE-Progress-Report-2025.pdf
IEA Global Electricity Demand Report 2025
https://www.iea.org/reports/electricity-2025
EMBER Global Electricity Review 20206
https://ember-energy.org/app/uploads/2026/04/Global-Electricity-Review-2026.pdf
CHAPTERS
0:00 Intro
0:32 Enobieta Dam
2:41: Global Dam Problem
5:07: Rivers Returning
8:55: Global Balance
10:33: Conclusion
We’re destroying our environment at an alarming rate. But it doesn’t need to be this way. Planet A explores the shift towards an eco-friendly world — and challenges our ideas about what dealing with climate change means. We look at the big and the small: What we can do and how the system needs to change. We’ll take a truly global look at how to get us out of this mess.
Follow Planet A on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@dw_planeta
Transcript
Intro
0:00 · “I’ve been told they’re going to tear this down.
0:02 · So I’m here to find out why.”
0:05 · This is the Enobieta dam.
0:07 · Huge dams just like it can be found around the world and more are being built every year.
0:13 · They provide clean drinking water, irrigation for farming and flood protection.
0:17 · And they’re one of the most important sources of renewable electricity on the planet.
0:22 · But in Europe, something is changing.
0:24 · Environmental groups want to remove thousands of dams just like this.
0:28 · So why do they want them gone?
Enobieta Dam
0:32 · “By the time you see this video, this big chunk of the dam will be gone.”
0:36 · The Enobieta Dam is named after the river it crosses.
0:40 · This wall of concrete was built in the late 1940s to secure drinking water for San Sebastian, in northern Spain.
0:46 · But the dam already looks different to what I expected.
0:51 · “To me and my untrained eye, this just looks like it’s a forest.
0:55 · But what are we looking at here here?”
0:57 · “It’s indeed a forest, but all this was covered with water.
1:02 · Here we had a reservoir which was 30-32 meters deep.”
1:07 · After San Sebastian city council decided to dismantle the dam, the reservoir was emptied in 2019.
1:13 · Arturo Elosegi led the research into how its removal would affect the river, and the Artikutza forest that surrounds it.
1:21 · The dam had operated for around 30 years, but it quickly became clear that there were geotechnical issues with the location.
1:28 · Its storage capacity had to be reduced and there were also issues with iron and manganese contamination in the water.
1:34 · And in 1976, it was abandoned altogether when a new, larger dam replaced it nearby.
1:41 · “So they basically built this massive structure…” “In the worst place.”
1:44 · “It was obsolete almost immediately.”
1:46 · “Yeah, that’s it.”
1:51 · “So we’re now in the former reservoir and it seems mad that only a few years ago, this would’ve been just a tonne of water.”
2:01 · “Here we would be like five meters under water.
2:05 · You can see there these big trees are the ancient ones, and the new ones, which are growing in what was the former reservoir.”
2:15 · Five years was all it took to transform the former reservoir from this… into this.
2:20 · And then something else happened.
2:22 · “The stream started to carve again a channel.
2:26 · And in most of the places, it carved exactly the same channel as it had before.”
2:31 · “So the rivers returned to the exact same place… it knew where to go?”
2:37 · “Yeah. It has memory if you want.”
2:42 · Humans have harnessed the power of water for centuries.
2:45 · Dams have transformed modern life.
2:47 · And hydropower remains the world’s largest source of renewable energy, supplying around 14% of global electricity.
2:56 · In Norway, hydro accounts for 95% of its electricity.
3:00 · Its ability to reliably generate huge amounts of power means demand is still growing, even as wind and solar expand rapidly.
3:10 · But that comes at a cost.
3:13 · Dams interrupt the movement of fish.
3:15 · They trap sediment, alter water temperatures and transform entire aquatic ecosystems.
3:21 · And it’s not just giant hydroelectric dams that can do this.
3:25 · Weirs, culverts, watermills — are all barriers that can disrupt or block a river system.
3:31 · “In Europe there are 1.2 million, at least, barriers.”
3:36 · That’s Kerry Brink, who works with Dam Removal Europe, a coalition of environmental organizations working to restore free-flowing rivers across the continent.
3:45 · “These barriers — and a large part of them are small — are really basically cutting up our river systems.
3:52 · The water quality reduces, water is not flowing in a natural way.
3:58 · So you really get changes in the water chemistry.
4:01 · We have declining fish populations, our freshwater biodiversity and freshwater species are the highest impacted species globally.”
4:14 · Dam Removal Europe estimates that around 200,000 barriers are already considered obsolete.
4:19 · Although the true number is likely much higher.
4:23 · It’s these structures, which no longer have a societal or financial benefit anymore, that they want to tear down.
4:31 · “We are really not wanting to remove the functional barriers.
4:37 · We are truly wanting to remove the barriers that actually have a flood risk, which actually have no purpose.”
4:47 · Across Europe, the push to remove obsolete barriers is gathering pace.
4:51 · In 2025 alone, at least 600 came down across the continent.
4:56 · And the European Union wants to restore at least 25,000 kilometers of free-flowing rivers by 2030.
5:02 · But why does removing them make such a difference?
5:08 · Part of the reason can be seen at Enobieta.
5:11 · Because when the reservoir here was drained, an entire ecosystem returned.
5:20 · “A small stream, in a place like this one, lives from the forest.
5:24 · In the first year, when there was still no forest, the water was quite hot because the sunlight reached it directly.
5:33 · But then the forest was closing and the water gets cooler.”
5:39 · As the forest returned, the food chain started to rebuild.
5:43 · “Especially what you have is leaves.
5:46 · And you see, this leaf is eaten by insects.
5:48 · There are some fungi, microscopic fungi which grow on top of the leaves.
5:55 · The insects start to eat these leaves, they grow, the fish eat the insects.
6:02 · And so everything is fueled by these leaves.
6:06 · The recovery has been astonishing.”
6:09 · But that recovery can only be complete when the dam itself is out of the way.
6:21 · Instead of demolishing the whole dam, engineers and the San Sebastian City Council decided it would be enough to cut out a seven-meter section.
6:29 · The partial removal has limited the amount of concrete taken out, minimizing heavy traffic and construction and overall disruption to the surrounding Artikutza forest.
6:38 · It also helped protect a bat population that had colonised the dam’s internal chambers.
6:43 · And, it was significantly cheaper — costing around €1.6 million.
6:50 · When the removal is finished and the river is reconnected, another big change will occur.
6:56 · The river itself will start to behave naturally again, including how it moves sediment downstream.
7:02 · Upstream there’s a diverse mix of sediment, including cobbles, sand and gravel, which is distributed by the river.
7:08 · But the dam continues to block that natural flow downstream.
7:13 · “What you see here, these are not boulders or cobbles, these are blocks of concrete.
7:20 · Which were thrown here when they lowered the spillway.
7:26 · So this is totally artificial.
7:29 · The new channel will go through there and then new sediments, natural sediments will come.
7:33 · We can see also downstream from the dam, the river habitat was very very poor because all these sediments were retained by the reservoir.”
7:43 · When the river is allowed to pass through again, it will carry a more diverse range of sediments downstream — helping to rebuild banks, the riverbed and the habitats around it.
7:54 · “Everything will change and we’ll have again forest, the sediments will be much more natural.
8:00 · The habitat is something that is created by the river itself when it moves the sediments.
8:05 · And they will be created again.”
8:08 · At Enobieta, removing the dam is helping to restore this forest’s unique ancient ecosystem.
8:13 · But reconnecting rivers have other benefits too, particularly for migratory fish.
8:21 · Which is what happened at Hiitolanjoki in Finland.
8:24 · Three small hydropower dams had blocked movement access for the endangered landlocked Ladoga salmon.
8:30 · Authorities decided it made sense to remove the plants and restore the rivers.
8:35 · “What we’ve seen is straight after the removals, in actual fact, a week or two weeks after the removals, there was footage of these landlocked salmon spawning in the region just upstream of the barrier.
8:50 · So it really is something that you can actually visibly see.”
8:55 · “At this point, it all sounds and looks pretty convincing.
8:58 · Remove the barriers, the rivers reconnect, and nature returns.
9:02 · But it’s not always that simple.”
9:05 · Because while Europe is removing dams that have outlived their purpose, parts of the world are still building them.
9:11 · Much of the Global south still needs to meet growing demands.
9:14 · In the Democratic Republic of Congo only 1 in 5 people have access to electricity.
9:19 · The proposed Grand Inga hydropower project could eventually generate about 42 gigawatts of power — that’s about 15 times the DRC’s current capacity.
9:32 · “In many cases, there are barriers that need to be developed.
9:39 · We do need barriers, but we just want to make sure that the barriers that are there are well functioning.”
9:46 · Meanwhile in India, the issue is more than just electricity.
9:49 · The country of more than 1.4 billion is investing heavily in its dam network.
9:54 · The government says they’re being built to secure water supplies, support agriculture and to help control flooding.
10:00 · But many communities, particularly in the Himalayas, have fought these new developments.
10:05 · They claim that these dams are a threat to fragile ecosystems and disrupt the lives of local residents.
10:10 · And as drought and flood risk increases, questions are being raised about how long some of these new dams and reservoirs can even remain effective.
10:20 · “We need them. We have to survive.
10:23 · So the question is to try to have as few dams as possible and to keep them working for as long as possible.”
10:33 · Some dams will remain essential for decades to come.
10:36 · And new dams will still have to be built.
10:38 · But Enobieta shows us that our relationship with dams needs a major rethink.
10:43 · “Wherever you build something, you have to take into account the whole life cycle.
10:47 · You have to take into account that someday this will be considered obsolete, it will be a danger, a hazard or whatever, and will be removed.
10:58 · When we first started out removing this reservoir, we didn’t believe we would see it.
11:02 · I work in the environment and mostly we give bad news.
11:06 · We look at the environment and we see problems: climate change, pollution, extinction, whatever.
11:14 · And to see something that was barely imaginable some years ago and that’s happened.
11:22 · That’s really a nice thing.”
11:31 · “Are there obsolete dams or barriers close to where you live?
11:33 · And how do they affect your river systems?
11:36 · Let us know in the comments, and if you wanna see more videos like this, you know what to do — hit subscribe.”
Films
Knowledge Keepers
Episode 10 of NOVA (Season 53) - Released: 2026-09-23 - Duration: 00:53:41
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Description
Witness how Native North Americans have generated scientific knowledge over thousands of years.
Transcript
♪ ♪ NARRATOR: From the frozen lakes of Canada’s Barrenlands… FRED SANGRIS: My ancestors learned how to live in one of the most extreme places on Earth.
NARRATOR: …to the parched extremes of Arizona.
ROBERTO NUTLOUIS: Here, we’re working with the earth.
It’s going to be its own natural AC.
NARRATOR: From the rugged coasts of the Pacific Northwest… OCTAVIO CRUZ (chuckling): Rain or shine, we’ll do this!
NARRATOR: ..to the forgotten bamboo forests of Oklahoma.
RYAN SPRING: Really what it is, is an ecosystem.
NARRATOR: Native Americans and First Nations have developed their own approach to science.
KEN THOMAS: It’s just unreal, like, when I think about it, how everything works.
NARRATOR: This knowledge has been forged over thousands of years, built on relationships with the environment, and passed down generation to generation.
SANGRIS: My grandfather was like the history book.
MEGAN BAKER: Indigenous knowledge is accrued over thousands of generations of people who have lived on a landscape and intimately understood that.
♪ ♪ NARRATOR: Today, knowledge keepers fight to preserve this ancient expertise.
CHILD: It looks like lava.
OCTAVIO CRUZ: The youth have to learn, otherwise there won’t be a future– they are the future.
BRYANT DeROY: When you combine Western science with Indigenous knowledge, it can enrich our vision.
NARRATOR: Who holds this knowledge?
Where does it come from?
And how could it transform our future?
SANGRIS: My father was right.
He said, “Everything’s written in the skies.”
NARRATOR: “Knowledge Keepers.”
Right now, on “NOVA.”
♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ (wind blowing) ♪ ♪ NARRATOR: Canada’s subarctic.
Millions of square miles of glacial lakes, vast tundra and extreme weather.
The traditional lands of the Northern Dene people.
SANGRIS: There’s no trees, it’s just… rolling hills and flat.
So everything looks the same.
NARRATOR: Yellowknives Dene Chief, Fred Sangris, is crossing this unforgiving terrain to reach his tribe’s traditional hunting grounds in the Barrenlands.
SANGRIS: We depend on the caribou.
Caribou migration comes from the Barrenlands.
They migrate to this part of the country during the winter and then during spring, they will migrate back.
The migration is about 500 miles.
It’s not an easy trip, it’s a long trip.
(drumming) (drumming and singing in Wiìliìdeh Yati) NARRATOR: The Yellowknives Dene are part of the wider Northern Dene people and have lived in what is now known as the Northwest Territories of Canada for thousands of years.
In temperatures as low as -40 Fahrenheit, they continue their traditional livelihood– fishing, trapping, hunting and gathering.
SANGRIS: My ancestors learned how to live in one of the most extreme places on Earth: the cold North.
And if you want to live in this kind of condition here, you have to learn about the environment.
You have to learn it.
Otherwise, you won’t survive.
NARRATOR: Fred is joined by anthropologist Chris Cannon, who wants to understand how the Dene are able to navigate this featureless landscape without GPS.
CANNON: Most people in the world find their way off landmarks, recognizable features.
But when Fred gets to the Barrenlands, that’s a landscape type that’s really monotonous, and it’s difficult to read.
You really don’t have any reference mark.
It looks very similar, one perspective from the next, especially when the lakes are frozen, they’re covered in snow, the hills are covered in snow.
SANGRIS: Just recently, I traveled with my cousins.
My cousin has a GPS.
He has it on his Ski-Doo.
And so we’re traveling across the Barrenlands the same way.
And I told my cousin, “You pay attention to your GPS, I’m going to use traditional knowledge.”
NARRATOR: This far north, relying on GPS is risky.
Ionospheric disturbances, like the Northern Lights, can interfere with satellite radio signals, reducing precision in location data.
(beeping) And in the intense cold, there’s the danger a GPS unit will break or lose power, a serious problem if you’re out on the Barrenlands, hundreds of miles from home.
What happens if they run out of batteries?
That’s why you got to have traditional knowledge.
CANNON: You can feel that temperature dropping.
SANGRIS: Yeah, it’s going down.
The wolves will come around pretty soon.
NARRATOR: With the temperature plummeting, Fred and Chris set up their tent and wait for the sun to set in the West.
Not a bad tent.
NARRATOR: By placing two sticks in line with the sunset, Fred can record this bearing.
SANGRIS: So when I’m crossing the Barrenlands, this will be my first stick.
This is what my dad and my grandfather taught me.
The second stick, it could be 50 feet, it could be a hundred feet.
Right there, where the sun went down, is the marker.
So now we got to wait for the stars to come out.
CANNON: When the sun’s setting, he’ll put a stick in the ground and then he’ll put that other stick in line with the sun and his first stick.
And so he’s marking that axis.
And he’ll wait for a star to be approximately aligned with those sticks, and then he’ll set off following that star.
NARRATOR: The Dene are able to cross the bleak Barrenlands the same way people have crossed featureless oceans: by looking to the stars.
♪ ♪ It’s a skill developed thousands of years ago, passed on to Fred through stories from his grandfather.
SANGRIS: My grandfather was born in 1869.
He passed away in 1976.
He was well over a hundred.
According to my tribe, he’s one of the oldest living men.
So he was like the history book, the storyteller.
So he was my teacher and I grew up with him.
CANNON: In Western school, we’re just told stuff.
Memorize this– that’s knowledge.
You need to know that, memorize it.
Something like wayfinding with the stars is, you know, you can read about it all day, but if you’re not immersed in it you’re going to make mistakes.
SANGRIS: When I was 18 years old, I wanted to hunt.
So I went north.
My father, he noticed I had a big military watch that I used to show off to my friends, you know?
He said, “Take your watch off,” he said.
I took my watch off and I gave it to him.
He chucked it way out in the snowbank.
(chuckles) I said, “Dad, that’s my watch.
Why’d you throw my watch away?”
“You don’t need it,” he said.
“You got to learn the Dene cultural time.”
So, my watch is way up in a deep snowbank.
I don’t miss it at all.
(chuckles) My father was right.
He said, “Everything’s written in the skies.”
♪ ♪ CANNON: Indigenous people here have had a long relationship in this place.
And they don’t have a compass.
They have the stars.
NARRATOR: This far north, magnetic compasses are unreliable.
And the Dene also have an unusual view of the night sky, which makes navigating a challenge.
CANNON: The perspective of the sky closer to the equator is different.
The stars that you follow are rising straight up off the horizon and going up.
NARRATOR: At the equator, the spin of the Earth makes stars appear to rise and set perpendicular to the horizon.
But at the North Pole, you’re standing on top of the world.
So the stars rotate above you, never crossing below the horizon.
CANNON: If you’re standing right at the North Pole, no stars rise or set, they’re all spinning in a circle.
And so that’s a really unique challenge for navigation.
It’s really difficult to follow stars that are moving sideways.
(indistinct chatter) NARRATOR: So how did the Dene solve this problem?
SANGRIS: We got to go straight that way.
Keep an eye on the star, we just keep going straight.
NARRATOR: The answer lies in Fred’s knowledge of the stars, which is rooted in stories from his elders.
One of the best known constellations in the night sky– the Big Dipper– is part of a larger Dene constellation called Yamoozha.
SANGRIS: Yamoozha was a spiritual person that came to our lives a thousand of years ago.
He was a shaman.
He was being hunted down by the evil one.
So Yamoozha went up there.
He went up there and then, the evil one took his arrow.
Bow and arrow.
He shot him right in the back.
And that’s the one you see in that area where it’s bent.
CANNON: Yeah.
SANGRIS: That’s where the arrow is.
You know, you listen to your elder’s story, you’re always going to remember it.
CANNON: One of the really elegant things of this method is you don’t really have to know star names to use it because it’s any star in line with those sticks that you’re picking up and following.
NARRATOR: Earlier, Fred placed two sticks in line with the sunset to mark the East-West axis.
Now, he waits until a star lines up with the sticks, pointing the way he wants to travel.
But the star itself is moving sideways.
Simply following it would lead Fred off course.
So throughout the night, Fred switches to a second, and then a third star.
CANNON: In a time lapse, you can see the star in motion but in real life, it’s a very slow thing.
The stars move about 15 degrees an hour.
And so if you follow that star too long, you’re going to go sideways.
And so the art of it is knowing when to begin kind of tracking a little bit to the left of that star.
And at what point do you pick up a new star?
(indistinct chatter) CANNON (voiceover): You can’t really read about this and just go do it once every few years.
You have to be using it.
It really has to be a lived thing that you have to be immersed in to, to really be able to pull it off.
And it’s still there for all of us to see.
Until the end of time.
NARRATOR: From the moment his father threw his watch into the snowbank, Fred has lived and learned this land.
He intuitively knows when to begin following a new star and avoid veering off course.
CANNON: Is there a point some time we’ll start to kind of shoot a little left of it?
Yeah.
I will stop and look at it again.
Then I’ll pick that one there.
(engine revving) NARRATOR: Fred is one of only a few elders who can travel these lands without relying on GPS.
But will his knowledge survive?
CANNON: How does this keep continuing on in an age of technology where it’s a lot easier to use a weather forecast or GPS and how do you keep this going?
If you don’t share it, or even talk about it through stories, it will be gone.
Mm-hmm.
Gone, so, I’m sharing the story.
But this, this isn’t the only one.
There’s a lot of other histories, you know?
Hundreds of years from now, kids are going to look at it, are going to say, “I want to do it, I want to live it.”
CANNON: Fred has incredible knowledge that’s been passed onto him very deliberately through elders, through his grandfather, having that immersive time on the Barrenlands.
And in many Indigenous cultures, that’s really kind of a true form of knowledge, is something that’s acquired through direct experience.
NARRATOR: For the Northern Dene of the Canadian subarctic, stories like those told to Fred by his grandfather have guided travelers across barren landscapes for millennia.
It is a form of knowledge intricately connected to ancestral land.
But what happens when a tribe is removed from their homeland?
For the Choctaw in Oklahoma, traditional knowledge has helped them survive in a new home.
Ryan Spring is a cultural research associate for the Choctaw Nation.
He has been working to revitalize rivercane in Oklahoma.
SPRING: When I was first learning about rivercane, the terminology that a lot of academics and scientists would use would be ITEK: Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge.
And I’ve also heard the term “Native science.”
You know, when we think about science from a Western perspective, there’s a certain process, there’s the scientific method.
But with Native science, the knowledge that we have isn’t tested through the scientific method.
It’s tested through generations of passing that knowledge on.
♪ ♪ NARRATOR: The Western scientific method, pioneered during the scientific revolution of the 16th century, relies on observable and measurable phenomena, often using experiments to test hypotheses in a controlled environment.
Native science is also based on observation and measurable phenomena.
But these time-tested insights are developed over generations, and inseparable from culture and environment.
SPRING: The way that our creation stories have always been explained to me is God created us as stewards.
And so when we work in these cane patches and we practice traditional land management, we’re showing respect.
NARRATOR: Giant rivercane, “arundinaria gigantea,” is a type of bamboo indigenous to North America.
It grows in a tall, dense thicket known as a canebrake.
SPRING: Rivercane plays an important role in our identity as Choctaw people, just as stickball does, just as our language, just as our foods.
Rivercane is a cornerstone of our identity.
EVELINE STEELE: You can see these cane stakes going all the way up.
NARRATOR: Part of the reason rivercane is so important is that it is the raw material for Choctaw baskets.
STEELE: And these two have just a slightly different weave.
NARRATOR: Eveline Steele is a basket weaver.
Her family has been weaving for generations.
For the longest time, there were three weavers in Oklahoma and they were my mother, my aunt and her sister-in-law.
I always say, I can only prove that I’m the third generation, but I can think back, it had to come from somewhere.
♪ ♪ NARRATOR: Choctaw baskets were used for storage and trade.
Some were so tightly woven, they could hold water.
The geometric patterns are more than decoration.
Some patterns reflect nature, or the four directions.
Others have spiritual meaning, such as the sacred fire.
Like Fred Sangris in Canada, Eveline grew up learning and living traditions that stretched back millennia.
Now, she wants to pass her knowledge on to future generations.
STEELE: That’s a decent size, but you see that it’s still got the sheath on there?
That has to be completely off, and it can’t be rained off, like, a few days ago.
How many strips does one, kind of, main one get?
This is a good size.
You can get four good pieces out of it.
NARRATOR: The students are collecting materials for their baskets, but at the same time, they are learning how to take care of this ecosystem.
SPRING: You have to understand how to harvest it correctly and how not to damage the canebrake.
NARRATOR: Thinning the rivercane opens up the canopy, promoting new growth and improving the overall health of the canebrake.
Today, more than ever, it’s a vital intervention, because rivercane is rapidly disappearing.
STEELE: When I was growing up, cane used to be abundant.
And they were just kind of growing wild along the rivers.
But it’s not like that today.
NARRATOR: Rivercane once covered an estimated ten million acres of the Southeastern United States.
Today, perhaps 1% survives.
Canebrakes are one of the most threatened ecosystems in the United States.
SPRING: As American settlers moved in, they destroyed the canebrakes, and then they destroyed the land and the soil.
NARRATOR: In the 1800s, the U.S.
government forcibly removed southeastern tribes from their ancestral land and relocated them, commonly referred to as the Trail of Tears.
Over 20 million acres were proclaimed open to settlement.
In the ensuing land rush, Western farming methods devastated rivercane.
The Choctaw understood the role cane played in the environment.
Its roots prevented erosion, keeping the soil in place, and the cane also filtered the water, reducing nitrogen levels.
Without the cane, water quality plummeted, and flooding impacts increased.
SPRING: Over the years, a lot of colonial practices in the United States, agriculture, land management, those types of things has led to rivercane being reduced.
NARRATOR: So how can the Choctaw restore rivercane, and at the same time keep their culture alive?
STEELE: My hope is that people learn from the ground up.
And I mean going out and harvesting cane and then learning to split and peel those.
It’s a lot of work, but it’s very fulfilling.
Like this.
Get as close to the point as you can.
NARRATOR: After collecting the cane, Eveline shows her students how to prepare it.
STEELE: Hold your hand back here.
(voiceover): When I harvest, I harvest no more than 30.
You split it and then you peel each one to get your fibers.
It’s going to take two weeks to do just 30 poles.
It’s really a part of the whole process.
I would go so far to say that if they don’t harvest, split, and peel it themselves, that basket is only partially theirs.
STUDENT: Would you split this again?
STEELE: I would thin it a little bit where it’s thick.
NARRATOR: Eveline’s ancestors carried their knowledge of rivercane with them when they were relocated to Oklahoma.
BAKER: Both her grandfather and her grandmother come from Louisiana.
And they bring their knowledge of basketry to Indian territory.
STEELE: And then you’ll come and do an outside one.
NARRATOR: Megan Baker is an anthropologist and an expert on Choctaw basketry.
STEELE: Same type of basket.
BAKER: So Eveline’s grandmother is bringing over these designs and these practices that I have not seen in Oklahoma Choctaw basketry of that time period.
NARRATOR: Most rectangular or square baskets start at the bottom.
The pattern is counted out as moistened cane strips are woven tightly together.
The simplest is a plain weave, a basic one-over-one pattern.
Changing the numbering creates different patterns and designs.
STEELE: The basket variations depends on that count.
The numbers makes up that style.
NARRATOR: Eveline doesn’t write these numbers down.
She holds in her head a mental map of every move ahead.
STEELE: I have to have, in my mind, the pattern that I want to make because the mathematics really come into play.
It’s something you kind of visualize.
NARRATOR: This basket will take about three days to weave, on top of the time it took Eveline to collect and prepare the cane.
STEELE: It teaches you patience, and it teaches you… …to be careful.
BAKER: She is a repository of knowledge.
Eveline has really helped us revitalize rivercane basketry for Choctaw people.
NARRATOR: Eveline’s students have finished preparing their rivercane, and their baskets are hitting social media.
This new generation of Choctaw basket weavers are building on principles developed over thousands of years to take this ancient practice into the future.
Revitalizing rivercane is both a way to invigorate Choctaw culture, and an opportunity to heal ecosystems that have been pushed out of balance.
SPRING: Rivercane can help with our erosion problems, it can help with water quality, it can help with connecting our people with our culture.
STEELE: It’s important to carry on this knowledge because it makes us who we are as a people, as a tribe.
SPRING: And so in the end, that basket is an archive.
That basket is generations of knowledge.
Generations of Choctaw people learning about the land and the ecosystem.
All that is tied into that basket.
BAKER: Indigenous knowledge is accrued over thousands of generations of people who have lived on a landscape and intimately understood that.
That’s not easily replicated.
Modern science cannot keep up with what Indigenous peoples have known for centuries.
NARRATOR: For the Choctaw, drawing on ancient knowledge has strengthened their connection to their culture and environment.
♪ ♪ But for some tribes, the chain of knowledge has been broken.
In the Pacific Northwest, Coast Salish tribes are fighting to put ancestral knowledge back into practice, before it is lost completely.
(indistinct radio chatter) Nicole Norris belongs to the Xeláltxw First Nation.
NORRIS: I’ve worked in aquaculture for nearly 30 years now, and that’s what brings me back to the beach.
The Gulf Islands are sacred spaces.
I feel exceptionally privileged to be able to come here.
(humming) NARRATOR: Nicole is joined by Ken Thomas, a member of the Penelakut tribe who works in fish and wildlife management.
They are visiting a beach on Russell Island, southwest of Vancouver.
THOMAS: It’s always good to be here early.
NARRATOR: As the tide goes out, rock patterns appear along the shoreline.
What caused these unusual formations?
(helicopter whirring) WOMAN (over radio): There’s one.
NARRATOR: It’s a question that confounded marine geologist John Harper when he did shore surveys as part of an oil spill response-planning program following the 1989 Exxon Valdez incident.
MAN (over radio): There’s another one of these cobble ridges.
There’s sand, then boulders all up along the shoreline.
NARRATOR: He stopped counting at 350, with no idea what they were.
(indistinct radio chatter) Until he asked the First Nations people.
It was their ancestors who built them.
These walls are ancient sea gardens, with some dating back 3,500 years.
They are among the earliest examples of aquaculture in the world.
THOMAS: It seemed like it was a discovery, you know?
“Oh, that’s what these walls are for.”
And we’re like, “Yeah, yeah, they’re here for a reason.”
You know?
Our ancestors put them there.
A horse clam shell… that one.
They’re quite a bit bigger than the butter clam.
NORRIS: A clam garden, or as I call them sea gardens, it is from an eagle eye view, a pile of rocks that makes a wall.
And it changes the slope of the beach to create greater growing grounds for bivalves.
NARRATOR: Clams are found in the intertidal zone: where they can feed during the high tide, and take cover from predators in the sand during the low tide.
Nicole’s ancestors engineered a rock wall to transform the beach.
Over time, sand and broken shell build up, changing the slope and expanding the intertidal zone.
And it’s not only clams that thrive here.
THOMAS: The reason why we call it sea gardens is because there’s more than just clams inside these walls.
They’re habitat for a lot of other aquatic life, like the rock crabs.
As you can see, there’s quite a bit of red rock crab juveniles and there’s some mature ones.
NARRATOR: Nicole and Ken have been working to restore this sea garden, one of hundreds in the area that were driven into ruins.
During the gold rush of the mid-19th century, white settlers removed local First Nations from their lands.
Colonial policies aimed at favoring commercial settlers effectively made it illegal for tribes to harvest clams.
Then, in the 1990s, water contamination from farming and urban pollution led to the closure of beaches across the region.
And for decades, federal agencies did not regularly reassess those pollution levels.
THOMAS: These places were closed because they’re considered contaminated, but reality was, there was no sampling done in the area, so they just said, “Well, we don’t want anyone getting sick, so we’ll just close the whole area down.”
NORRIS: Access was denied to us for about 30 years.
NARRATOR: Today, Parks Canada is working with Coast Salish tribes to monitor these waters and reopen the beaches.
DeROY: Every two weeks in the winter, we come out and grab a sample and send it off to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.
And they’ll analyze the tissue inside these mussels for contaminants.
So that we can ensure that we’re bringing folks out here to harvest, that the shellfish is safe to eat.
THOMAS: Working together with Parks and doing these sampling programs opened up a lot of these areas.
Recently, we have been able to harvest for our communities.
For me, it was a really big step up in a positive way.
NARRATOR: With the beaches reopened, Nicole and her tribe are able once more to harvest these waters.
But how best to maintain a sea garden?
Nicole turned to her elders.
NORRIS: Back when I started in aquaculture, I was a teenager and, um, I learned about all of these things from the elders that were on the beach.
Got one.
NORRIS (voiceover): They were teaching me how to read the beach as to where to find these clams.
And they started to teach me about the substrate.
I’m looking at this substrate here.
We want to make sure that the water can go through here so that it can saturate and filtrate.
What we’re trying to create is substrate that looks like this.
Look at how thick.
We incorporate shell hash into this, and till it in the same way that you would in a garden.
NARRATOR: Adding crushed shells breaks up the heavy sediment, creating a better habitat for young clams.
THOMAS: It’s just unreal, like, when I think about it, how everything works.
Our ancestors are way ahead of their time.
NARRATOR: Western research has confirmed what the Coast Salish already knew.
Sea gardens produce 150% to 300% more clams than non-modified spawning grounds.
DeROY: Indigenous knowledge is the guiding force behind all the restoration practices that happen here.
When you combine Western science with Indigenous knowledge, it can enrich our vision of what’s happening on the beach, and enrich the information that we’re learning from the beach.
NORRIS: It represents a pathway back to our natural way of being.
We’re coastal people.
We eat from the ocean, we eat from the beach.
The greatest peace for my own self is that I have an opportunity to… …steward an area with my own hands.
To prepare a table for my great-grandchildren and my great-great-grandchildren.
(squawking) CRUZ: Rain or shine, we’ll do this!
(laughs) NARRATOR: The practice of restoring sea gardens is spreading across Canada and the U.S.
CRUZ: If you can do a bucket, a bucket would be good.
GERALD HENRY: It sparked us and we’re building a flame that’s gathering and it’s gathering all over the territories.
NARRATOR: But what if instead of restoring an old sea garden, you built an entirely new one?
CRUZ: Rain or shine!
NARRATOR: Octavio Cruz is the Marine Scientific Manager for the Pauquachin Nation.
CRUZ: This is the site of one of the first new clam gardens to be built in living memory.
LYLE HENRY: We’ve been here for thousands and thousands of years.
We had our own system of governance based on respect and honor of the history, of the land and the people.
GERALD HENRY: We haven’t been able to harvest in our beach for pretty well 30 years now, and that’s something that we’ve talked to our elders about and wanted to make a place, a beach harvestable again.
I love this.
Kind of awesome.
CRUZ: This project was brought together in a lot of different conversations, really trying to think about how we can address some of the modern challenges we have in today’s day and age for First Nations, for Pauquachin, for food harvest, using traditional Indigenous methods or Indigenous science.
This was his, like, pen-to-paper sets of ideas, talking about boat traffic was a big consideration and where the clams could be protected between the structures.
So, when we took this on… (voiceover): We built a visual picture of sea garden protocol.
We started from what existed, we learned from our neighbors and then we built our own protocol that was a mix of traditional management ways and then also new ways that we’re still tweaking.
So when you’re building, you infill with the little ones.
And try to cap… …with larger flat cap stones to hold.
There’s no mortar, there’s nothing to stick it together.
These are sites that are meant to keep being maintained and they’ll shift and adjust themselves, like it’s breathing.
And you can see how well it’s holding up.
♪ ♪ NARRATOR: After months of work, the wall begins to take shape.
LYLE HENRY: When I was a child, the beach was always open to people.
We had that respect for each other.
If you were hungry and needed food, you were welcome to come harvest clams.
NARRATOR: Octavio’s hope is that by drawing on the knowledge of their ancestors, the Pauquachin will be able to harvest this coastline for generations to come.
It’s an approach he believes has significant advantages.
CRUZ: I’m a trained Western scientist, and I think I understand the limitations of that methodology and those studies.
I think sometimes we put Western science on too high of a pedestal, in that it might be good for solving one set of variables or one problem.
But oftentimes scientists do get lost in the weeds.
Indigenous knowledge however, is informed by both culture, spiritual practice and science woven together.
There is no separation between those boundaries and the strength of that is that you get a wider holistic view of your place.
NARRATOR: The Coast Salish are keeping the knowledge of sea gardens alive, despite being forcibly removed from the coast.
But the potential of native science goes far beyond simply restoring what has been lost.
ROBERTO NUTLOUIS: It’s true that colonization has happened, but that’s only a small percentage of our history, of who we are as people.
We have thousands of years of ancestral knowledge that really tells us about the power that we have.
NARRATOR: In the deserts of the Southwest, the Navajo are drawing on ancestral knowledge to tackle one of the greatest challenges of our time.
Roberto Nutlouis believes the ideas encoded in a hogan– the traditional Navajo home– could help combat climate change.
Americans have not fully acclimated to this place as a home.
They still treat it as resources to be exploited.
We’re taking too much fossil fuel, emitting it and creating this global ecological disaster.
But hopefully what we see as a disaster is an opportunity for us to seek solutions that will bring us back into balance.
NARRATOR: Somehow, despite the extreme heat of the desert, the ancient Navajo engineered homes that keep cool; built out of wood and earth.
How do hogans work?
(Roberto singing in Diné Navajo) NUTLOUIS: These aren’t just structures.
As we do our blessing songs, we activate them, we energize them, they become a living being.
And so that’s how we see our world, our ecology and we have relationship to them.
(singing continues) (singing continues) NARRATOR: The Navajo, also referred to as Diné, embody a profound cultural bond with their desert homeland.
They’ve lived on this land for thousands of years, developing the knowledge to thrive.
NUTLOUIS: The first two logs are going to come is going to be these two main pillars that, where the regular door is going to come in, but then there’s going to be a beam that’s going to come from here all the way to there.
That’s what those two logs are for.
They’re going to come in like that.
NARRATOR: Similar to the Choctaw management of rivercane, Roberto and his team harvest the logs in nearby juniper forests through selective cutting.
This sustainable process helps open up the forest floor and reduce forest fires, benefitting the ecosystem.
NUTLOUIS: This hogan is a tripod.
So you have three main logs that come together.
That is the main frame of the entire structure.
And each of them have their stories.
We called them Sahdii.
So those are the way the holy people put it together, these main pillars that come together up here, and that’s why they call it the forked-stick hogan.
NARRATOR: The hogan takes on different shapes and styles and is used for different purposes.
Roberto builds four types of hogans: sweat, arbor, male and female.
The male and female hogans are living and ceremonial spaces.
The sweat hogan is used for healing and purification.
The arbor hogan is a communal space used for food preparation and meals.
NUTLOUIS: When you go into these traditional structures, it’s like, wow, very mesmerizing.
You create the octagon shape.
And then you have the hexagon… …the square, …the diamond, then the last one is a rectangular shape, which brings the logs together more closely.
Back in the day we didn’t have screws, so they all interlock with each other, until it closes out up on top, where we can then put the chimney opening.
NARRATOR: Today, Roberto and his team are building a forked-stick, or male hogan.
(indistinct chatter) With the main structure complete, work begins on the plaster.
NUTLOUIS: So go ahead and turn it on.
(pouring cement) We’ll put in the clay first.
Because the clay is the one that acts as the glue.
So we want the clay to mix really well before we start adding the sand.
NARRATOR: The main ingredients are simple: clay, sand and water.
All found nearby.
NUTLOUIS (voiceover): The earth plaster that we cover it on the outside, not only does it blend in with the surrounding environment, it also gives it a thermal energy.
The heat in the winter, the coolness in the summertime, it’s able to retain it.
NARRATOR: Clay has a high thermal mass, meaning it slows the absorption and storage of energy.
During the day, as the clay walls absorb the sun’s heat and slow its transfer, they keep the inside cool.
Then, at night, when it is cold, the heat absorbed by the clay walls is released and the process starts over again.
Through trial and error, Roberto perfected his plaster, and discovered that by adding straw, the hogan requires less maintenance.
NUTLOUIS: We’re adding our own ingenuity to these, uh, ancestral building techniques, and I always tell the community and the youth is that every generation contributes to the cultural evolution.
NARRATOR: The result is soil that naturally regulates temperature shifts, providing a stable, comfortable environment.
NUTLOUIS: Here in the Southwest, it’s getting warmer and warmer.
Folks down in Phoenix, they’re constantly blasting their AC to remain cool.
They’re working against the earth.
Here we’re working with the earth.
It’s going to be its own natural AC.
NARRATOR: Roberto and his team have completed the forked-stick hogan.
The earthen walls allow it to withstand extreme temperatures.
But how well does it work?
In a hogan Roberto and his team built for DEAP Charter School, students are about to find out.
So anybody else, if you want to smudge, come smudge and then we’ll continue.
NARRATOR: Dawnlei Ben and Roshonda Shurley lead the class, exploring the hogan with an infrared camera.
So you see my hand?
Yeah.
BEN: I’m going to put my hand on the wall.
I’m going to hold it here for a while.
SHURLEY: It’s 86.2 degrees right now.
Okay, you ready?
STUDENT: Look at that!
It leaves fingerprints!
STUDENT: Oh, it looks like lava.
You see the handprint?
Yeah.
What is that reading?
78.9.
BEN: So you have your heat energy going into the hogan.
Just like how if your mom or your relatives they hug you, I’m pretty sure you get warm, right?
Yup.
The hogan show us love.
Now proven through science, there’s some energy transfer there.
NARRATOR: The wooden interior of the hogan quickly absorbs and releases energy.
STUDENT: Should we try outside?
BEN: Let’s go see.
NARRATOR: But when they try the same thing outside… BEN: All right, let’s see.
STUDENT: What?!
SHURLEY: It didn’t work.
NARRATOR: …the clay does not immediately heat up.
Instead, the walls slowly absorb and store energy.
It’s the high thermal mass of the plaster that keeps the heat out in the summer.
And seals it inside during the winter.
BEN: Our ancestors didn’t have a thermometer.
They didn’t have the iPad.
But they knew that if they put a mud mixture on the outside, it would keep the cold out.
Isn’t that awesome?
NUTLOUIS: The ancestors and the holy people thought about these things when they were designing this structure.
That it works with the environment, that it’s aligned with the natural laws and the teachings that are embedded in it.
NARRATOR: The hogan is the perfect structure for Arizona’s desert.
But to the Navajo, it’s more than just a building.
NUTLOUIS: Hogans is our cultural compass.
NARRATOR: The design reflects the Navajo worldview, symbolizing the cosmos and Mother Earth.
Specific orientations and structural elements represent sacred beliefs.
It’s a way to embed important information to be retrieved through story.
NUTLOUIS: The structure itself is an embodiment of the universe as well as the Mother Earth.
And in between that, “bita’ neiidá,” is us that live in that.
So the spiraling logs that you see represents the cosmos.
Each of those layers kind of elevates you into a higher consciousness and a higher awareness as they stack on top of each other.
♪ ♪ NARRATOR: Just as Eveline Steele’s baskets are archives of Choctaw knowledge, so is the hogan, embodying deep cultural, spiritual and architectural significance.
NUTLOUIS: If we go back to a simplistic living, there’s beauty in that.
And I think this is what these structures is really about.
It’s so efficient.
You’re not spending so much money to maintain your structure.
You’re working with the natural forces and natural elements.
NARRATOR: It’s a powerful idea that is beginning to spread.
Traditional Navajo hogans, with their focus on sustainability, natural materials and orientation to the environment, are influencing modern sustainable architecture.
NUTLOUIS: Indigenous knowledge is human knowledge.
Every culture has evolved a sense of understanding in relationship to the land and this knowledge is so critical in maintaining a healthy balance with the natural order of things.
♪ ♪ NARRATOR: Through experiments lived out over thousands of years, Indigenous communities developed technologies for wayfinding, agriculture, engineering, forestry and astronomy.
And that science has been passed on through knowledge keepers.
CANNON: It’s really a holistic way of knowing and being in the world.
But it’s not fossilized in time.
It’s knowledge that’s continuous, but it’s also lived, and recreated, and passed on, and remade and personalized.
CRUZ: We talk about expertise as something that’s really stroven for in a Western scientific field, but I actually think the only way to have a wider knowledge base is that there are no experts.
All of us are willing to learn for our whole lives and we pass off every lesson that we have and work together with place, with the environment.
SHURLEY: Western knowledge and Indigenous knowledge, they both intertwine with one another.
And I believe that we are able to learn from both systems.
NUTLOUIS: We need to pick it up.
We need to figure it out and be the solution.
NARRATOR: In Canada, Fred Sangris and Chris Cannon have returned from their trip across the Barrenlands.
And Fred has one last story to share.
SANGRIS: In 1976, my grandfather is about 105 years old, walking with a cane.
It was a full moon, so I said, “Grandfather…”…did you know that that moon over there?
There’s some people that went out with a big plane.”
We don’t have a name for rockets.
So I said, “They went out with a big plane to that moon.”
MISSION CONTROL (over radio) Oh, gee that’s great.
Is the lighting halfway decent?
NUTLOUIS: “They walked around all over”and their footprint is on the moon.
And then they came back to Earth.”
“Eniìyah,” he says, “Eniìyah”.
“Eniìyah” in my language means “awesome, awesome.”
“That’s amazing– plane, radio.
All these new things.”
I want to live another hundred years.”
I want to know where this world is going.”
That’s what he told me.
“I want to know where the world is going.”
In my idea, the way the world is going… …we shouldn’t be going that way.
We need to be more respectful for the environment, with the nature.
CANNON: It’s Dene law.
SANGRIS: Yeah, the Dene law, you know?
You have to live– live, but don’t destroy.
♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪
Ocean With David Attenborough
Duration: 01:01:01 More details on hulu.com
Description
The world’s leading natural historian draws on a lifetime of knowledge to reveal how Earth’s vast, ,interconnected waterways can be restored.…SEE MORE
Rebuilding The Herd Rewilding The Future
Episode 8/13/2026 of Conservation Works (Season 2026) - Released: 2026-08-13 - Duration: 00:27:27
Description
Explore Nebraska’s bighorn sheep comeback, Zoo Schools’ Earth Day event, the beauty of Scotts Bluff.
Transcript
Some Animals Are More Equal than Others Keystone Species and Trophic Cascades
biointeractive, 05 03, 2016
Video (19:28)
Description
The short film opens with two questions: “So what determines how many species live in a given place? Or how many individuals of the species can live somewhere?”
The research that provided answers to these questions was set in motion by key experiments by ecologists Robert Paine and James Estes. Robert Paine’s starfish exclusion experiments on the coast of Washington state showed that removing starfish from this marine ecosystem has a big impact on the population sizes of other species, establishing the starfish as a keystone species. James Estes and colleague John Palmisano discovered that the kelp forest ecosystems of the North Pacific are regulated by the presence or absence of sea otters, which feed on sea urchins that consume kelp. These direct and indirect effects of sea otters on other species describe a trophic cascade. These early studies were the inspiration for hundreds of investigations on other keystone species and trophic cascades, as well as ongoing studies into the regulation of population sizes and species numbers.
Transcript
0:09 · [MUSIC PLAYING] SEAN CARROLL: From jungle to desert, from forest to PLANE from mountaintops to the seashore, the Earth is home to many habitats.
0:24 · And every habitat contains a community of plants and animals each community is populated by different species.
0:34 · And each species is present in different numbers.
0:39 · So what determines how many species live in a given place, or how large each population can grow?
0:50 · The answers to such basic questions about how nature works eluded biologists for a long time, until, on this rocky Pacific shore in 1963, young zoology professor Robert Paine pried a purple starfish off the rocks and threw it out into the bay.
1:07 · And so began one of the most important experiments in the history of ecology.
1:14 · [MUSIC PLAYING] So what brought Robert Paine to this rugged coast?
1:35 · And why was he hurling starfish?
1:40 · The answer takes us back a few years to a classroom at the University of Michigan.
1:45 · ROBERT PAINE: It was a lovely day.
1:46 · The old zoology building at Ann Arbor had a courtyard.
1:49 · And in that courtyard, there was a tree which was beginning to bud out.
1:55 · SEAN CARROLL: Professor Fred Smith asked his students a seemingly simple question.
2:00 · ROBERT PAINE: And he said, class, I want you to think about this.
2:04 · Why is that tree green?
2:07 · And someone said– SPEAKER: Chlorophyll.
2:10 · ROBERT PAINE: Fred said, what keeps the leaves there?
2:14 · SEAN CARROLL: Although technically, chlorophyll is what makes trees green, Fred Smith was asking a bigger question.
2:22 · He was thinking about food chains.
2:25 · ROBERT PAINE: You obviously had producers.
2:28 · They are the energy suppliers to whatever lives off of them.
2:33 · You have consumers on top of that.
2:35 · And we know the herbivores.
2:38 · SEAN CARROLL: The popular idea at the time was that the number of producers limits the number of herbivores.
2:44 · In turn, the number of herbivores limits the number of predators that feed on them.
2:49 · Every level was regulated by the amount of food from the bottom of the food chain going up.
2:55 · But this view didn’t explain why herbivore populations don’t simply grow to the point where they eat all of the leaves on the tree.
3:04 · Professor Smith had discussed this conundrum with two colleagues, Nelson Hairston and Lawrence Slobodkin They proposed a new idea.
3:13 · The number of herbivores must be controlled not only from the bottom up, but also from the top down.
3:21 · ROBERT PAINE: The herbivores had the capacity of destroying the plant community.
3:25 · Trees could be defoliated.
3:27 · And why weren’t they defoliated?
3:29 · And the answer was because there weren’t enough insects around to do that.
3:33 · And that was the role of predators.
3:36 · SEAN CARROLL: The world is green because predators keep herbivores in check.
3:41 · This was a radical concept that became known as the green world hypothesis.
3:47 · Up until that time, no one thought predators had any role in regulating ecosystems.
3:53 · ROBERT PAINE: This class was the first public vetting of the green world hypothesis.
3:58 · SEAN CARROLL: And one of Smith’s students, Robert Paine, would be the one to put this idea to the test.
4:09 · A few years later, as a new professor at the University of Washington, Paine went looking for a system where he could study the role of predators.
4:21 · ROBERT PAINE: I discovered the Pacific Ocean and this magnificent array of organisms which lives along its margins.
4:30 · There it was, spread out in front of me.
4:32 · It was nirvana.
4:36 · SEAN CARROLL: He began by identifying all the organisms.
4:40 · And then he started mapping out who eats whom.
4:43 · ROBERT PAINE: There were carnivorous gastropods feeding on barnacles.
4:47 · There were sea urchins feeding on algae.
4:51 · There was a lot of pattern.
4:54 · SEAN CARROLL: His observation showed that a species of large purple and orange starfish called pisaster ochraceus was at the top of the food chain.
5:08 · Starfish may seem like unlikely predators, but speed time up a bit, and you’ll see deadly hunters.
5:18 · ROBERT PAINE: If a starfish is feeding, you turn it over and you see what the starfish is eating.
5:22 · They’re eating mussels.
5:23 · They’re eating a lot of other things as well, but they’re eating mussels.
5:28 · SEAN CARROLL: So Paine asked, what happens when you remove the predator starfish from a single outcrop?
5:38 · ROBERT PAINE: You have to surprise them.
5:39 · Because a starfish clamps down.
5:43 · It takes a strong wrist and a pry bar.
5:46 · I would then scale them as far as I could.
5:49 · And in those days I could throw a starfish 60 or 70 feet out to deeper water.
5:56 · There were always starfish marching in.
5:57 · So during the summer months, I would drive the 350-mile round trip, hit the area at low tide, do my removal, take other data, and then return to Seattle.
6:10 · SEAN CARROLL: The ecosystem started to change rapidly.
6:13 · ROBERT PAINE: Within a year and a half, I knew that I had ecological gold.
6:18 · SEAN CARROLL: Although the top predator had been removed, surprisingly, the number of species in the rock actually decreased from 15 to eight.
6:29 · ROBERT PAINE: After three years, I think it went down to seven.
6:32 · But then by seven years, it simplified itself.
6:37 · It was basically a monoculture.
6:41 · I had changed the nature of the system.
6:45 · SEAN CARROLL: As the experiment continued, the line of mussels advanced down the rock face, monopolizing almost all of the available space and pushing all other species out.
6:57 · Paine had discovered that one predator could regulate the composition of an entire community.
7:06 · He coined a term to describe the power a single species can exert on an ecosystem.
7:13 · ROBERT PAINE: I know very little about architecture.
7:16 · If you build an arch, you have to get the two sides of it to put pressure against one other.
7:22 · And therefore, at the apex of the arch, you have a keystone.
7:27 · You pull the keystone out, and the structure collapses.
7:38 · SEAN CARROLL: Many predators, like pisaster starfish, turn out to be keystone species.
7:44 · ROBERT PAINE: These keystone species have a huge impact, which extends well beyond to the species they primarily prey on.
7:54 · SEAN CARROLL: Most species do not have large impacts.
7:57 · In other experiments, Paine had removed various species.
8:01 · But that had little or no effect on the ecosystem as a whole.
8:05 · ROBERT PAINE: All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
8:10 · And that expresses the fact that all species don’t have the same impact on the system they’re in.
8:18 · It takes experiments to tease that out.
8:20 · And that’s often not easily done.
8:24 · SEAN CARROLL: Paine’s pioneering experiments and the concept of keystone species sent ripples through the field of ecology and turned thinking about the regulation of communities upside down.
8:36 · ROBERT PAINE: Remove the predator, the system simplifies itself.
8:40 · This is an ecological concept which is general and global.
8:45 · SEAN CARROLL: As Paine continued his studies a little further from shore, he noticed another striking pattern.
8:52 · ROBERT PAINE: There were a lot of tide pools.
8:54 · And some of the tide pools were dominated by urchins.
8:57 · Some weren’t.
8:59 · SEAN CARROLL: In the tide pools with lots of urchins, there was much less kelp.
9:03 · Paine suspected the urchins were keeping the kelp from growing.
9:07 · ROBERT PAINE: And I said to myself, that’s my next round of experiments.
9:12 · SEAN CARROLL: Paine removed all the urchins by hand from some pools, and left nearby pools untouched.
9:19 · Again, the results were dramatic.
9:22 · In the pools where he removed urchins, the kelp started growing almost immediately.
9:30 · ROBERT PAINE: Urchins control the kelp.
9:32 · Therefore, this is a total violation of the green world hypothesis.
9:37 · SEAN CARROLL: The urchins in Paine’s pools were eating all of the kelp.
9:41 · So why was nothing regulating the urchin populations?
9:46 · The answer would come from a fortuitous meeting on a remote island in Alaska’s Aleutian Island chain.
9:54 · There, Paine would cross paths with another scientist.
9:59 · In 1971, James Estes was an ambitious young graduate student.
10:04 · JAMES ESTES: At the time that Bob and I met, I was just beginning to try to think my way through what it was I was going to do.
10:11 · ROBERT PAINE: We met in a bar after a movie.
10:13 · I was just in sea urchins.
10:14 · And Jim, I think, was doing a study on sea otter physiology.
10:24 · JAMES ESTES: I was explaining to him what it was that I was thinking of trying to do, which was somehow understand how an ecosystem like the one in Amchitka Island could support such a high abundance of predators and do that through an understanding of production and efficiency of energy and material flow upward through the food web.
10:46 · And Bob’s explicit or implicit reaction to that was, that’s just not very interesting, and, have you ever thought about what these animals might be doing to the system?
10:59 · SEAN CARROLL: Paine realized if Estes focused on what sea otters were doing from the top down rather than the kelp from the bottom up, he might discover the role otters play in the organization of nature.
11:13 · JAMES ESTES: And so I thought, why not?
11:15 · Let’s go out and have a look.
11:16 · SEAN CARROLL: Paine was suggesting an approach similar to his starfish throwing experiment– remove otters from the ecosystem and test the impact that had on other species.
11:27 · JAMES ESTES: But I don’t think, at that time, that Bob had any perception of how that might be done.
11:32 · But I did, because I knew quite a bit about the history of the otter.
11:37 · They were abundant across the North Pacific.
11:39 · And then the Pacific Maritime fur trade began in 1741.
11:44 · And over the subsequent 150 years, otters were hunted to the brink of extinction.
11:51 · In 1911 or 1912, fur take was prohibited.
11:56 · And a few of those colony survived and served as a seed for the recovery of the species.
12:03 · SEAN CARROLL: But the sea otter recovery was spotty.
12:06 · JAMES ESTES: They had completely recovered from the fur trade at a number of island systems across the Aleutian archipelago, of which Amchitka is a part.
12:15 · There were other island systems where they had not yet recovered.
12:22 · SEAN CARROLL: The experiment was simple– compare ecosystems with otters to those without.
12:28 · He began with his home island of Amchitka.
12:32 · JAMES ESTES: I knew a lot about what Amchitka looked like.
12:34 · I knew that sea urchins were common, but very small.
12:39 · SEAN CARROLL: The next step was to arrange for a dive at nearby Shemya Island, a location with no otters.
12:47 · JAMES ESTES: The most dramatic moment of learning in my life happened in less than a second.
12:54 · And that was sticking my head in the water at Shemya Island.
13:00 · It was just green with urchins and no kelp.
13:03 · And it all sort of fell into place in just an instant, that the loss of otters from that system had completely reorganized that system from which kelps had probably been very abundant before the loss of otters to one in which the sea urchins now had become abundant in the absence of the otters and had eaten all the kelps.
13:25 · SEAN CARROLL: It was a striking demonstration of the green world hypothesis.
13:30 · Sea otters, the predators, were controlling the urchins that fed on the kelp.
13:35 · Remove the sea otters, and the kelp forests disappear.
13:39 · Paine called these cascading effects of one species downward upon others trophic cascades.
13:47 · ROBERT PAINE: Trophic cascade is when you have an apex predator controlling the distribution of resources, and they lead to these cascades of indirect effects– lots and lots of indirect effects.
14:00 · You have fewer sea otters.
14:01 · You have more sea urchins.
14:03 · You have fewer kelp.
14:06 · JAMES ESTES: I expect every coastal species is probably impacted in one way or another by the presence or absence of kelp.
14:14 · Kelp forest fishes depend a lot on kelp.
14:16 · There are birds that feed in the kelp forests.
14:18 · There are invertebrates that feed in the kelp forest.
14:21 · Virtually everything that lives in the coastal zone depends upon that system in some way.
14:28 · SEAN CARROLL: So sea otters are another keystone species.
14:32 · They regulate the structure of this coastal marine community.
14:37 · ROBERT PAINE: The results are unambiguous.
14:38 · Sea otters drive the system from the top down.
14:43 · So the message is clear, and it’s been enormously important in how ecologists tend to view the world.
14:49 · SEAN CARROLL: Estes returned regularly to Alaska to study otters.
14:53 · Some 20 years later, he noticed something strange was happening.
14:58 · JAMES ESTES: We were capturing otters, having a devil of a time catching enough.
15:02 · And that was peculiar, because I’d never had trouble catching otters.
15:06 · SEAN CARROLL: Otter populations seemed to be declining.
15:09 · He tried to think of every possible explanation.
15:13 · JAMES ESTES: And we essentially lined up all of the hypotheses that we could think of that could be causing this population decline.
15:20 · SEAN CARROLL: He ruled out starvation.
15:22 · He ruled out disease.
15:24 · And then a third hypothesis emerged.
15:27 · JAMES ESTES: Tim Tinker, who is a technician, called me one day in the winter and said, you know, I’m starting to wonder if it might be killer whales.
15:33 · And I said, you’re crazy.
15:34 · I mean, this just couldn’t happen.
15:35 · They don’t eat otters.
15:36 · He said, yes, they do.
15:37 · I’ve seen them eat a couple.
15:39 · SEAN CARROLL: But how could he test it?
15:41 · Once again, nature provided an ideal site.
15:45 · JAMES ESTES: We went into a place called Clam Lagoon.
15:47 · It provided us a site that orcas could not get to.
15:51 · We had no problem catching about 30 animals in two or three days.
15:56 · And the fact that that little population did not decline when everything else did the orcas had access to helped me become convinced that it was a viable hypothesis.
16:10 · SEAN CARROLL: Why were the orcas now eating otters?
16:13 · Orcas generally eat whales, not otters.
16:16 · JAMES ESTES: There were a lot of whales around after World War II.
16:20 · After World War II, the Japanese and the Russians started reducing those whales.
16:24 · And by the late 1960s, they had been depleted by 90%.
16:29 · And the full stripping of all these big whales out of the system shocked these killer whales and forced them to broaden their diet and start feeding on these other species.
16:40 · What had happened is that we had taken this three-level trophic cascade, and the orcas had added a fourth trophic level, and it made that system behave just like the theory predicted.
16:53 · SEAN CARROLL: With the orcas eating otters, urchin populations increased, and kelp disappeared.
17:02 · JAMES ESTES: To me, the amazing part of that was the notion that something like whaling, that started in the middle of the 20th century way out in the oceanic realm of the North Pacific, could affect something like urchins and kelp and the coastal ecosystem.
17:18 · It was mind-boggling to even conceive of something.
17:20 · It was almost like science fiction.
17:23 · SEAN CARROLL: To Robert Paine, this was a satisfying confirmation.
17:27 · ROBERT PAINE: And it provided an example of how the concept of a trophic cascade functions in nature.
17:34 · And it’s Jim’s work in the Aleutians which in fact solved the case.
17:43 · SEAN CARROLL: As ecologists explored other habitats with new eyes, they discovered keystone species and trophic cascades in many places.
17:53 · And just as with otters, the removal of predators such as wolves, sharks, and lions has had profound effects on the number and variety of other species and on ecosystems as a whole.
18:08 · These fundamental insights have changed the way we look at the world, and they’ve given ecologists and conservationists a new set of tools.
18:17 · JAMES ESTES: It has turned us from a fundamental view of nature that was bottom-up.
18:23 · More than any other single ecologist, he was the one that transitioned our thinking to the importance of top-down forcing.
18:32 · ROBERT PAINE: Oh, thank you.
18:34 · JAMES ESTES: No, it’s the truth.
18:37 · SEAN CARROLL: But from Paine’s vantage point, humans still have much to learn.
18:41 · ROBERT PAINE: To ignore the fact that there are top down effects is to invite mistakes.
18:47 · One ignores at one’s own risk what role apex predators play.
18:53 · [HOWLING]
Vanishing Act
Episode 6 of Human Footprint (Season 2) - Released: 2025-07-30 - Duration: 00:55:39
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Description
Shane meets species on the brink of oblivion, and the people who won’t let them slip away.
Transcript
(“Ready or Not” by Fugees plays) (Shane) The story of our planet is a tale of equal and opposite forces: Life… (female singer) Ready or not, here I come (Shane) …and death.
We’ve never known one without the other.
(female singer) And take it slowly Ready or not (Shane) From the first primordial cell, to the loftiest tree, to beasts we’ve never known, each species walks its own path… …but they all end in the same place.
(female singer) Ready or not (Shane) Extinction is Mother Nature’s way of pruning the Tree of Life.
(female singer) Ready or not (Shane) And she is a tireless arborist.
Ninety-nine percent of all the species that ever existed no longer do.
(female singer) I play my enemies like a game of chess (thunder, explosions) (Shane) Of Earth’s eight million living species, one has become a force of nature in its own right.
And, ironically, we humans– the only species that can fathom extinction– are driving it faster than any other species in our planet’s history.
What fate awaits the Tree of Life in the Age of Humans?
And can we change course before putting our future in peril?
Welcome to the age of humans, where one species can change everything, and what we do reveals who we truly are.
This is Human Footprint.
(serene music) For most of our history, the world was a pretty scary place.
Colossal predators hunted massive herbivores.
And we were definitely on the menu.
(roaring) Today, there aren’t many places where the land still pulses with the ancient rhythms of giants.
(animals grunting) Where you’re grateful for the safety of a safari vehicle.
People travel thousands of miles to experience Africa’s megafauna, yet these iconic animals are dwarfed by the titans that roamed North America in the not-so-distant past.
(“To Live & Die in L.A.” by Tupac Shakur plays) (engine revving) The sprawl of L.A. feels a world apart from the Serengeti… (Tupac) It never rains in Southern To live and die in L.A. (Shane) But if you want to meet the giants that once ruled this continent, this is the place to do it.
(chorus) To live and die in L.A. (vocalizing) (Emily) This is my favorite critter here.
This is a giant ground sloth.
(Shane) Yeah, what makes this your favorite?
(Emily) It’s a sloth and it was giant.
(laughter) (Shane) Need you say more?
(bicycle bell rings) Meet paleontologist Emily Lindsey.
Her commute through L.A.’s urban jungle helps her connect with the present… (relaxing music) …but when she gets to the La Brea Tar Pits, her thoughts turn to the ancient world.
(Emily) This is called a short-faced bear.
(Shane) The idea that there was an animal this large is deeply disturbing to me.
How much bigger is this than, like, a polar bear?
(Emily) A lot.
(laughter) (Shane) Today, La Brea is almost as iconic as Disneyland or Hollywood, drawing visitors from around the world.
But at the start of the 20th century, people flocked here for another reason.
(Emily) The L.A. basin is the richest oil basin of its size in the world.
In the early 20th century, we were producing about a quarter of the world’s oil.
(Shane) In those days, Rancho La Brea was a rich source of the densest form of crude oil: asphalt.
(Emily) They were digging it up and shipping it up to San Francisco, where it was being used to pave the roads.
(Shane) In some places, finding asphalt didn’t even require digging.
(Emily) And because the other thing we have a lot of in L.A. is earthquakes, there are places where these fissures occur in the ground.
(Shane) Here, the asphalt seeps up to the surface in shallow, sticky pools.
Before long, miners noticed bones– a lot of them.
They assumed the bones belonged to cattle from the ranch they were digging on until a traveling geologist took a closer look.
(Emily) And he was like, “That’s not a cow bone.”
It was the saber of the saber-toothed cat.
Exactly what part of the cow do you think this came from?
(laughing) (Emily) Over time, plants, animals, big, small, get stuck in there.
(Shane) At La Brea, the miners had stumbled onto the world’s largest deposit of Pleistocene fossils– an entire ecosystem sealed in an asphalt time capsule.
Soon, a new kind of excavation was underway.
(Emily) In about two and a half years, they collected about a million fossils.
Whoa.
(rhythmic music) Is, like, this density, like, normal for the pits?
(Emily) Yeah, it’s just bone on bone, on bone, on bone, on bone.
It makes them really challenging to excavate.
So, imagine playing, pick-up sticks.
But every stick is, like, a different size and shape and also fragile and also priceless.
And then, somebody has dumped a bunch of cement on top of it.
(Shane) In the last century, scientists have excavated over five million fossils here, representing 40,000 years of ecological history.
(Emily) This is our dire wolf wall.
So, there’s 400 skulls of dire wolves on this wall.
That represents maybe 10% of the dire wolves that we’ve discovered so far at the tar pits.
(serene music) (Shane) Thousands of apex predators died in the pits, along with the massive herbivores they hunted.
Then, suddenly, mysteriously… the megafauna stopped getting stuck.
(Emily) Through intensive radiocarbon dating, we were able to figure out exactly when they stopped getting stuck, which is a proxy for when they stopped being on the landscape.
So, these are the very last animals of their kind that we know of at La Brea, and in many cases, in all of North America.
This is the last dire wolf.
(Shane) Like, the last.
The last one that we know of.
(Shane) Wow.
(Emily) 13,000 years ago.
The last saber-toothed cat that we know of, 13,000 years ago.
This is a piece of the last American lion.
-13,000 years ago?
-Yeah.
13,000 years ago was a bad year.
So, what happened 13,000 years ago?
Gosh.
(Emily) So, this is a Columbian mammoth and these are one of the species here that we know overlapped with and interacted with the first humans in the Americas.
We find a lot of mammoth kill sites.
(Shane) It takes a brave person to point to one of these things and say, “You hungry?”
(Emily) Yeah.
(laughter) (Shane) Humans are brave.
We’re also smart, social, and skilled at making and using tools, which is why, in the late 1960s, paleontologist Paul Martin proposed an idea to explain these extinctions: the “overkill hypothesis.”
(dramatic drumming music) (Emily) We know that humans are perfectly capable of hunting species to extinction.
(Shane) Before the overkill hypothesis, experts attributed the loss of North American megafauna to the end of the last Ice Age.
But Martin questioned how these animals had survived so many previous warming periods, only to vanish when humans arrived.
Overkill had an intuitive appeal amidst the growing environmental movement.
It was easy to envision us hunting species to extinction.
(Emily) One of the counterarguments is, well, you know, these small bands of hunter gatherers couldn’t possibly have, like, driven all the mammoths to extinction.
(Shane) Megafauna kill sites do exist, but they’re rare.
And it’s not just species that ancient humans hunted that vanished, lots of other plants and animals disappeared in the same timeframe.
So, what really happened?
(Emily) The problem is that when you have two things happening at pretty much exactly the same time, you need a really high-resolution understanding.
(Shane) La Brea provides that high-def view of a long-gone ecosystem.
Emily and her team used radiocarbon dating to determine the precise timing of each species’ disappearance, then compared those dates with data gathered from lake-bottom sediment cores, which record climate and vegetation before and after the megafauna disappear.
(Emily) For about the 2,000 years leading up to that, we were going through some pretty substantial climate change.
(Shane) As the Ice Age ended and the ice sheets receded, the climate got warmer and drier.
(Emily) We have multiple mega-droughts that last decades at a time.
We see half of the tree species start to die off.
So, the landscape is becoming more open and drier.
Megafauna populations are decreasing, and then, about 13,200 years ago, something really remarkable happens.
Everything catches on fire.
(flames hissing) (Shane) How do they know this?
Because fire leaves behind charcoal.
So, the amount of charcoal in any layer of a sediment core is a good indication of how much fire was happening.
(Emily) The first 20,000 years of that core record, there’s, like, essentially no evidence of fire.
There’s very, very little charcoal in that record.
(Shane) But over time, more and more charcoal appears in the cores.
(Emily) And then we see an order of magnitude increase in the charcoal, right around 13,200 years ago.
(flames hissing) (Shane) For 400 years, fires engulfed California again and again, burning its forests into charcoal we would discover 13,000 years later.
(Emily) And when we come out of it, we are in a completely new ecosystem.
The large mammals are gone.
This is when we see the modern flora of coastal Southern California, the chaparral, which is an assemblage of fire-adapted species.
And humans are common on the landscape.
(Shane) So, what caused the fires?
(Emily) We don’t really get lightning here.
We don’t really have naturally occurring fire, and in fact, 97% of wildfires in Southern California today are caused by humans.
The most powerful tool that humans have ever invented is fire.
We use it to cook our food, we use it to keep warm, to have light in the dark.
So, humans are spreading in an ecosystem that is really prone to fire.
It’s ready to go, but there isn’t an ignition source until humans bring it into the ecosystem.
That is a plot twist I was not expecting.
It’s really shown me the degree to which humans can have really large-scale impacts on ecosystems, unanticipated impacts, especially when combined with climate change.
(flames hissing) (Shane) That combination sounds uncomfortably familiar today.
(haunting music) (Emily) Extinctions didn’t stop happening at the end of the Pleistocene.
Scientists usually define a mass extinction as 75% or more of all species going extinct.
Okay.
(Emily) And there have been five of these so far.
And the most recent one was 66 million years ago.
There’s a lot of discussion about whether the biodiversity crisis that we’re experiencing today will result in the sixth mass extinction.
(Shane) If it does, it’ll be the first mass extinction caused by a single species.
In the past 200 years, we’ve pushed more than 900 species over the brink–a rate up to a thousand times faster than the natural pace of extinction.
Nearly 50,000 other species are considered threatened by the IUCN.
And few animals are at greater risk today than the megafauna that survived the end of the Pleistocene.
(birds chirping) The story of one of those species starts where you’d least expect.
(serene music) With more than 650 species– many rare or endangered– the San Diego Zoo offers a window into our planet’s living diversity.
But behind the public exhibits, there’s another zoo with specimens found nowhere else.
(Marlys) So, these are our cryo tanks, this is where we keep the samples, living dividing cells from all of the 11,000 individuals and 1,300 species and subspecies, all in primarily three tanks.
(“Got ’Til It’s Gone” by Janet Jackson, Q-Tip, and Joni plays) (Shane) If the Frozen Zoo had a zookeeper, it would be Marlys Houck.
Her bespoke beaded wine glass charms keep her guests from mixing up their drinks.
(female singer) Don’t it always seem to go (Shane) And that attention to detail pays off at work, too.
(Marlys) So, in there is the liquid nitrogen.
Each one of these vials contains about one to three million living cells.
(Shane) Oh, wow.
Today, the Frozen Zoo is the largest, most diverse, and longest-running cryobank in the world.
But when it started in the 1970s, its ambitions felt like science fiction.
(Marlys) It was started by Dr. Kurt Benirschke in 1975.
He had the idea that because we had this new technology where you could grow cells from skin biopsies that we should do this and bank them because we don’t really know how technology will evolve in the future and what those cells could be used for.
(Shane) The samples here aren’t just on ice.
While many of the animals they came from are dead, the cells stored here are very alive.
(Marlys) If you just take a skin biopsy and throw it in the freezer, it will form ice crystals.
And the ice will pierce the cell membrane, destroy the cell, it will no longer be living.
So, we have to go through this process of adding a cryoprotectant.
It’s kind of like an antifreeze… and then they have to be frozen at -196 °C in liquid nitrogen.
And they’re just resting there without aging.
And then, when we pull them back out, they start growing and dividing again.
That’s incredible.
Marlys joined the Frozen Zoo because of her concern for one species in particular.
(Marlys) When I came, there were probably 60 northern white rhinos.
I never would have thought when I first came that I would be watching the extinction of one of the animals I was working with.
(Shane) But that’s exactly what happened.
So, this box is really special.
Maybe you can read what species?
(Shane) Northern white rhino.
(Marlys) Right, and these are not just any northern white rhino, they are Sudan, the last male of the species.
(downbeat music) Put that on… and then you can just go like that.
You are holding living cells of Sudan, the last male northern white rhino of the species.
What does that feel like?
Really intense, actually.
Wow.
(sighs) -Thank you.
-Yeah.
(Shane) His cells may still be alive, but Sudan, the rhino, died on the other side of the globe, with the whole world watching.
(Zach) I’ve been looking after these northern white rhinos for 16 years now.
I consider these rhinos as my second part of my family.
(“Guess Who’s Back” by Rakim plays) (male singer) Yeah (male singer 2) Once again, back is the incredible (male singer) It’s the return of the… (Shane) Meet Zach Mutai.
(male singer) Smashin’ hits, make it hard He started here as a fence builder, but soon became a ranger, and eventually, a caregiver to the last northern white rhinos.
(male singer 2) Incredible, the incredible (Shane) The day Sudan died, Zach was by his side.
(Zach) I spent, like, nine years taking care of Sudan until he passed away on 19th of March day of 2018.
(camera snaps) (melancholic music) (Shane sighs) That must have been a really intense experience.
Yeah…it was such a difficult day.
It was really sad.
Losing a rhino to me is more like losing one of my family members, and it was really such sad news by losing the last male of its kind.
It really shook the whole world.
(news anchor) The world’s last surviving male northern white rhino has died.
(dramatic music) (Shane) Ol Pejeta is one of the world’s most important wildlife conservancies.
Yet even here, under constant surveillance, rhinos aren’t always safe.
(clicking sound) At the turn of the 20th century, half a million rhinos roamed Africa and Asia.
But wars, habitat loss, and most of all, poaching for their horns caused catastrophic declines.
Driven by false beliefs of rhino horn’s healing powers and its luxury status, illegal markets have fueled a deadly trade.
Today, only 5% of rhinos that existed a century ago remain.
The last wild northern white rhinos were killed in the early 2000s.
In a desperate attempt to keep the species alive, conservationists transported the final captive individuals from a zoo in the Czech Republic to create a breeding program here.
Among them were Sudan and two females.
(Zach) So, this is Najin, uh, the mama, and her daughter Fatu is the other one.
And this is their friend, a southern white rhino.
-Okay.
-Yeah.
She’s a good friend and a trainer for them because these two, they were raised in captivity and they never know how to do all natural things like grazing, socializing, and all other natural activities.
Hi, good girl.
I know.
Have you ever feel and touch a rhino?
(Shane) No.
(Zach) You can just come closer to me, you can just feel.
(serene music) Kind of here, just.
It’s quite soft behind the ears but the rest part of the body is quite rough and thick skin.
(Shane) Yeah.
(Zach) Fatu, no.
I think I just fell in love.
(Zach) Fatu, good girl, Fatu.
(Shane) This is one of the most incredible experiences.
(Zach) Could you imagine that you are watching the last two of their kind?
(Shane) Yeah, that’s… (Zach) And they are being killed only for the two horns and nothing else.
(Shane) Yeah.
(Zach) We have got only the last two in the whole entire planet.
If anything happens and they are gone, there will be no more northern white rhinos species.
I’ve come to realize that extinction is something real, and we have just learned that we are the most dangerous creatures on this planet, yeah.
(rhino grunts) Man, this… this is intense.
And… you can’t help but look at these… just big, beautiful animals and just… like, what… what do we do?
How did we get here?
We are a hell of a conundrum as a species.
One hell of a conundrum.
Just like, we’ve had so many opportunities to correct our actions, like– (rhino farting repeatedly) (farting continues unabated) Wow.
That’s impressive.
(soulful music) Even if there were a male of their kind, Najin and Fatu aren’t healthy enough to have babies.
But that’s not stopping scientists from trying this species alive.
(Dr. Florence) Every experience I have is so surreal.
It’s so amazing to be working with such big animals.
So, you basically have the coolest job in the world.
(Dr. Florence) Mm-hmm.
(laughter) (Shane) As one of Ol Pejeta’s resident veterinarians, Dr. Florence Kang’ethe has a big job.
From health check-ups with the conservancy’s anti-poaching dogs, to wound care with a blind and very grumpy black rhino, her to-do list is long.
At the top of it is saving the northern white rhino.
(“If I Ruled the World” by Nas playing) (Dr. Florence) Today, I had to be here early to do stimulations.
So, that involves me injecting a hormone.
(Shane) Dr. Florence is part of a groundbreaking initiative that aims to bring baby northern white rhinos back into the world.
Using cryo-preserved sperm from deceased males, researchers fertilize eggs collected from the last females to create embryos, which they can implant into surrogate females of the closely related southern white rhino.
(Dr. Florence) It’s sad that we have come to that point where we have to do such efforts, but we’re quite hopeful that soon we shall be talking about a northern white rhino baby running around, yeah.
(Shane) If, for whatever reason, the northern white rhino were to go extinct without a baby coming to be, what will we have lost?
We would have lost the chance to redeem ourselves.
(soulful vocalizing) (Shane) The people fighting to save these rhinos embody humanity’s compassion for wild species, yet this species’ story also reveals our capacity and willingness to destroy them.
And while losing a rare species like the northern white rhino is a tragedy… …losing an abundant species can unravel the fabric of an ecosystem.
(percussive hip-hop music) (Sara) You always like it when you can’t get your arms all the way around it, right?
(assistant) I know, that’s a good sign.
(Sara) Beautiful.
(Shane) This is Sara Fern Fitzsimmons.
Her love of spreadsheets– used for everything from planning family weekends to tracking her hikes– is matched only by her passion for a tree whose ghost still haunts Eastern forests.
(Sara) The American Chestnut Foundation is a nonprofit organization dedicated to restoring the American chestnut back to its original range.
(serene music) (Shane) American chestnuts once numbered in the billions.
They sustained wildlife– from deer to turkey, and black bears to passenger pigeons– and they were the foundation for an entire subsistence culture in Appalachia (Sara) So, I grew up in southern West Virginia, and they called it a cradle-to-grave species because it could be used for cribs, coffins, and everything in between.
(Shane) But the American chestnut can’t do any of those things anymore.
The chestnut blight put an end to all that.
(Sara) The chestnut blight is a fungus.
Um, and it was brought over in the 1800s.
(Shane) The blight hitchhiked here on another chestnut species imported from Asia for landscaping.
And exactly what does the blight do to the tree?
(ripping sound) (Sara) The cambium tissue of a tree is its living layer; a fungal spore can get in, germinate in that tissue.
It completely strangles the tree by eating the tissue around it.
It’s pretty gruesome, actually.
(Shane) It sounds like a horror movie.
It really is.
(Shane) The fungus was discovered in 1904, and it spread fast.
(Sara) By 1950, pretty much the entire range from Maine to Georgia had become infected and all the big trees had–had succumbed.
(Shane) Today, the scale of that loss is hard to comprehend.
(Sara) It’s approximately 180 million acres.
And, in some locations, especially Southeastern Pennsylvania, some areas of Massachusetts and Virginia, it was as much as 50% of the forest.
(Shane) Today, some of those places are still covered in trees… but without the chestnut, it’s not the same forest.
No one alive remembers the forest that was.
Some of its parts remain, but the ecosystem is gone.
For the chestnut as a tree, it’s more complicated.
(Sara) So, the American chestnut is not technically extinct.
But, it’s functionally extinct.
There’s an estimated 400 million sprouts out there on the landscape.
(Shane) But Sara’s using the word “sprouts” in the same way that a zombie “sprouts” from its grave.
(Sara) So, this is a pretty classic oak-hickory forest type.
Back in the day, chestnuts would have covered this forest.
(Sara) Here’s a perfect example of an American chestnut that has died back and then is sending up these new re-sprouts.
(Shane) This definitely isn’t a normal sapling.
(Sara) So, the roots are probably older than the blight.
(Shane) Because chestnut blight doesn’t attack the roots.
(Sara) So, this is still original genetics from when the blight first swept through.
It’ll die back, it’ll re-sprout.
This will continue forever, I imagine.
(Shane) It’s like a very sickly phoenix that keeps rising.
(Sara) There you go.
I like that.
-Okay.
-Yeah.
(birds chirping) (Shane) This little tree– through a series of past lives, each cut tragically short– might have been here longer than the blight has.
(Shane) God, this is weird to look at.
The sprouts rarely get large enough to produce nuts because the blight is never far away.
(Sara) Even when the tree dies, the fungus is still around, just, you know, spewing spores into the, into the atmosphere.
(Shane) But that doesn’t mean the American chestnut is doomed.
Sara and her colleagues are trying to breed a better chestnut– one that can hold its own against the blight.
(Sara) You say, “Well, this tree looks really good, it has really good resistance.
This tree looks really good, it has good resistance.”
And then you have to put that together and see if you can build that up in the population.
(Shane) So, where can you find these genes for resistance?
One strategy is to look for the rare American chestnut that’s doing more than just sprouting and dying.
A new find in Central Pennsylvania might be the biggest chestnut tree in the state.
(Sara) There we go.
Ha ha!
Look at that.
That’s awesome.
So, these two are good and then that one’s, that one’s a dud.
(cameraman) That’s exciting.
It’s very exciting.
We grow the tree up, we take the fungus, we put it in the tree and we say, did it survive?
(Shane) It’s painstaking work, made possible by an army of volunteers.
(man) .3, Sara.
(Shane) Another source of potential blight-resistant genes are Chinese chestnut trees, which evolved with the fungus and are naturally resistant.
Scientists are hybridizing the two species, trying to breed trees that are mostly American, but have the disease resistance of the Chinese species.
Some chestnut researchers are even using genome editing, although the exact genetic causes of resistance are still mostly unknown.
(smooth bass music) The chestnut’s allies aren’t taking anything off the table.
(Sara) It’s not that it’s an American chestnut and it’s got, uh, you know, waving an American flag and has eagles flying over, you know, it’s not that which we are trying to, you know, restore into this tree.
It’s its ecological function.
Can it feed the insects?
Can it produce the nuts that all of our wildlife wants to eat?
(serene music) (Shane) Sara knows that American chestnuts won’t reclaim their former glory in her lifetime.
That kind of success could still be generations away.
But that doesn’t make her, or the chestnut’s other champions, any less devoted to the cause.
(Sara) In this world of instant gratification, I think having something that’s more of a slow movement, I think that that’s kind of refreshing.
(Shane) And it’s the least we can do for a species that’s fighting so hard to keep going.
(Shane) Are there any American chestnuts that existed before the blight that are still, like, adult trees now?
(Sara) We think we know of about four that survived the original pandemic.
Four?
Oh, God.
(Sara) It’s not, so, from an estimated four billion, I mean, those aren’t great odds.
(Shane) But one of those one-in-a-billion trees– surviving despite the fungus growing under its bark– stood alone in a farmer’s field, not far away.
What are we all here for, if not to serve a function?
So, to be functionally extinct, to be around but serve no function… somehow seems sadder to me than just being gone.
You think about forests that contained billions of these trees, and now this is one of a handful of this age.
I mean, yeah, one of four.
When chestnuts vanished from Eastern forests, a whole ecosystem was lost to human memory.
An interdependent web of life, built around a single “keystone” species.
For generations, humans have played a similar “keystone” role on the lands they call home.
But with Earth’s cultures disappearing as fast as its biodiversity… these fading connections leave some species in even greater peril.
(deckhand) To the right of that shiny spot.
Making giant splashing– look at that!
(Giles) Yeah, that’s whales.
Good eyes.
Okay.
Everybody hang on.
(Shane) This is Deborah Giles, or as most people know her, Giles.
She’s been studying orcas, also known as killer whales, for nearly 20 years.
But it’s her newest assistant who might just be the team’s MVP.
(dog barks) (Giles) She’s trying to orient to smell.
(Shane) Okay.
(Giles) And then, as we’re coming into the scent cone, she’ll move to the front of the bow, she’ll start maybe whining.
(Shane) Okay, but she’s basically your poop compass.
(Giles) She is our poop compass.
The tip of her nose is gonna point us at that smell.
(Shane) Okay.
(Giles) And then she’s working for playtime, that’s her reward, is playtime.
(Shane) Aww.
You heard that right.
The hero of Giles’s research is an Orca-poop-sniffing pooch named Eba.
(quirky music) (Giles) We go in and we collect the scat sample off the water.
(Shane) Whale poop can yield a smorgasbord of data with minimal disturbance.
DNA identifies the pooper, while other tests paint a detailed picture of the whale’s diet, hormones, and overall health.
Giles is monitoring these orcas, a distinct population known as the southern resident killer whales– because they’re in deep trouble.
(Giles) So, 70% of the females in this population who are getting pregnant are unable to bring their calves to term.
So, they’re miscarrying or the baby is born alive and dies right away, 70%.
How long is an orca pregnant before she gives birth?
Seventeen months.
(Shane) Wow.
Long time.
(grim music) (news anchor) A mother orca whose calf died after birth is still carrying her baby, 17 days later.
(Shane) The southern residents aren’t the only orcas in the Salish Sea, but they are the most endangered.
(Giles) By far the biggest problem is the lack of prey.
(Shane) Most orcas hunt other mammals, but the southern residents prefer fish.
(Giles) The fish eaters are dictated by what mom says, what grandmother says.
These are matriarchal societies.
(Shane) The southern residents are particularly reliant on Chinook or King salmon, which have declined by more than 90% in the last century.
Without the salmon, orca mothers are starving and many can’t carry their babies to term.
Despite legal protection, the population is still dwindling.
(melancholic music) When I visited, there were just 73 left.
(Ellie) We’re a perfect triangle.
We call orca Quahamitchdon.
So, us, Quahamitchdon, and salmon, we need all three to be able to survive.
(Shane) Quahamitchdon are more than neighbors.
(Ellie) We believe they’ve just put on their underwater regalia and they’ve become Quahamitchdon.
Hmm.
(Ellie) So, they are just members of our family.
(Shane) Ellie Kinley is a member of the Lummi Nation.
(mellow music) When she’s not working on a beautiful flower arrangement, you might find Ellie on her boat– fishing in waters that the Lummi, the orca, and the salmon all call home.
(Ellie) I just love the fact that there is no word for famine or starvation in our language, because we never starved.
(Ellie) A lot of our stories talk about all our creeks and rivers being so full of salmon, you could walk across their backs.
(Shane) Whoa.
(Ellie) We’ve always had plenty from the Salish Sea.
(solemn music) (Shane) But in the past century, dams, pollution, development, and overfishing have decimated the salmon runs, while many Lummi fishers have been displaced from their traditional fishing grounds.
And the Lummi’s underwater relatives faced another threat.
(news anchor) The so-called “killer whale” was the first of the whale family to be successfully kept in captivity.
(Shane) In the 1960s and ’70s, amusement parks and aquariums were stocking up, and the southern residents proved easy to catch.
At least 50 orcas, including babies, were captured for aquariums around the world.
A female named Tokitae was kept in a tiny tank at the Miami Seaquarium, mostly alone, for more than half a century.
For the Lummi, the story is painfully resonant.
(Ellie) The aquarium was the residential school.
She was taken there, and the savage was taken out of her.
She was taught to perform.
It’s the same thing our children went through.
(Shane) Like other indigenous children in the U.S. and Canada, Lummi children were often sent to boarding schools with the explicit goal of forced assimilation.
(teacher) Now, let’s pick up where we left off yesterday, with the English lesson.
(Shane) As Ellie sees it, the Lummi and their underwater family have both suffered the same trauma.
And it’s only by repairing that trauma and restoring their connection to the Salish Sea that both can thrive again.
(Ellie) Family takes care of family.
So, it’s our job to make the Salish Sea healthy enough to provide for us all again.
(Shane) That means rebuilding the legendary salmon runs that once sustained the orca and the Lummi.
(tranquil music) (Ellie) We’re still the biggest tribal fishing fleet in the nation, but we were once twice the size.
What you see is people that aren’t fishing.
There’s a lot of broken people.
-I know where home is.
-Mm-hm.
And when I get there, I know it.
I can just stand on the bow of my boat, and I just feel it.
There has never been a generation in my family that hasn’t fished.
(Shane) Mh-hm…never.
Yep.
(Shane) In the Salish Sea, a culture was born of this place and the creatures who share it.
The erosion of that culture puts species at risk just as surely as the loss of those species diminishes the culture.
Our ties to other life run deep.
It might be why extinction feels so wrong.
But look around, and it kinda feels like humans are just getting started.
Whether by ignorance, apathy, or greed, we don’t have any trouble ending another species’ journey.
Which is why, for some, preventing extinction just isn’t enough.
(Beth) We get drawings from kids every week of pictures of mammoths and dodos and thylacine.
Some of them are good, some of them are not.
(laughter) (Shane) This is Beth Shapiro.
She’s trying to put the pieces of lost ecosystems back together using biotechnology to undo extinction.
Beth is chief science officer of Colossal Biosciences, a startup that’s captivated the world with their goal of reviving extinct animals from ancient DNA.
Sound familiar?
(“Jurassic Park” soundtrack plays) (Beth) There’s no DNA in dinosaurs, we can’t do that.
(Shane) I’m never gonna get Jurassic Park?
-No, I’m sorry.
-Okay.
A flesh-and-blood T. rex is still firmly in the realm of sci-fi.
But Colossal is working on species that disappeared more recently.
(news reporter) At Colossal Biosciences in Dallas, the mission is clear.
(researcher) We are less than five years away from seeing mammoths back on the planet.
(Shane) When Beth wrote her first book in 2015, she was…ambivalent about de-extinction.
(Beth) I thought that… it’s a little far-fetched.
Probably too hard, probably too many technical, ethical, ecological hurdles that need to be overcome.
(Shane) But her perspective has evolved.
(Beth) As we make these advances, we are creating new tools that can be applied to stop extinctions from happening today.
(Shane) High on Colossal’s list is a species I got to know at the La Brea Tar Pits.
(wolf howling) In April 2025, Colossal announced the birth of three puppies, which they described as the first living dire wolves in 10,000 years.
They hailed the achievement as “the world’s first de-extinction.”
But a lot of scientists cried foul.
Were these really dire wolves?
(Beth) It is never going to be possible to bring back a species that is 100% identical in every way, genetically, physiologically, behaviorally, to a species that is extinct.
(Shane) In this case, the team created the so-called dire wolves by cloning cells from modern gray wolves, with DNA edited to give them dire wolf-like traits.
The goal isn’t so much to bring back lost species as it is to create new ones to do the same job.
(Beth) I think it’s about interactions in ecosystems, so, I don’t care what species is there that’s doing this really important role, as long as it’s there.
(Shane) Some of Colossal’s critics say, “Okay…then why dire wolves?”
Their Pleistocene ecosystem is long gone.
(wolf howling) But Beth points out that it’s big flashy species like the dire wolf that make this work possible.
(Beth) It is incredibly hard to raise money to do conservation work.
(Shane) Yet Colossal is doing exactly that.
(Beth) That is new money, tech money, that’s directly going to develop tools that we can use to stop species from becoming extinct, and that is really what I think an incredible benefit of the idea of de-extinction is.
It’s energizing.
(Shane) But not everyone is convinced that de-extinction is a goal worth chasing.
(phone ringing) (Christopher) If we bring them back, can we ensure that they stay alive this time?
There’s no good evidence that we can do that.
(“Born to Roll” by Masta Ace plays) (Shane) This is Christopher Preston.
When he isn’t prepping for mountain bike season, Christopher teaches environmental philosophy at the University of Montana.
He’s thought a lot about extinction and why it matters.
(Christopher) In some ways, what you’re losing when you lose a species is you– you’re losing a thread.
You’re losing a DNA thread that goes back in time over tens of millions of years, sometimes.
If you put an end to that continuous chain back into the past, you’ve lost something really that has philosophical value, and arguably, something that has moral value, too.
(Shane) Our species has proven all too capable of breaking those chains, but we can’t necessarily repair them.
(Christopher) To make restitution to a species, that thing has to be around, but it’s not around anymore.
So, what exactly are you making restitution to?
I don’t think we’re making things right again.
(Shane) But even skeptics understand why de-extinction has gotten so much attention.
(dark music) (Christopher) That word “extinction” has such a central place in the whole environmental discussion.
It’s the worst of all environmental sins, and we all know extinction is forever, right?
And so, if someone walks in the room and says, “Hey, extinction, it’s not forever,” we’re gonna look up, and we’re gonna get excited.
(moody music) (Shane) Will de-extinction become part of our conservation toolkit?
I honestly don’t know.
But what would it look like if it did?
What if someone really did bring back a mammoth?
African elephants are among the woolly mammoth’s closest living relatives.
And a big reason why they’re endangered is that they’re not so easy to live with.
Just ask folks in Kenya who have them as neighbors.
To me, they are good animals,1000 (Shane) David Mwiti has been farming on the edge of Kenya’s Lewa Wildlife Conservancy for 30 years.
(“Jamboree” by Naughty by Nature feat.
Zhané plays) (male singer) I want to see y’all who wanna plan with me Wave your hands across the land If we family Say hot damn (Shane) Most of his neighbors rely on their farms to make a living.
So, when elephants raid their fields, the results can be devastating.
(Shane) Whoa.
(Shane) And hungry elephants aren’t just destructive, they’re dangerous.
-Okay.
-Yeah.
(Shane) But everything’s different now.
(serene music) (Shane) Okay.
(Shane) This electrified fence keeps most elephants out of the village and out of harm’s way.
(Shane) Nearby, an elephant underpass prevents deadly vehicle collisions on the highway.
These huge infrastructure investments are part of a bigger strategy to make human-elephant coexistence possible.
(“Fight the Power” by Public Enemy plays) (male singer) Let’s get down to business Mental self defensive fitness (Shane) Meet John Pameri, head of general security at Lewa Conservancy.
The way John takes care of himself, you’d never know he’s been working here for 30 years.
As human and elephant populations have grown, managing conflict between the two has gotten more demanding.
(Shane) Some elephants cause more problems than others.
(elephant trumpeting) GPS collars allow the team to monitor the habitual troublemakers 24/7.
(Shane) Yeah.
(calm music) (speaking foreign language) That monitoring effort is just one part of a comprehensive security operation that John oversees.
(phone beeping) (Shane) When the call comes in, a human-wildlife conflict team deploys to defuse the situation before it escalates.
The ops room can also rapidly mobilize anti-poaching units.
But Lewa’s strategy isn’t just reactive, it’s proactive, too.
The Conservancy has spent decades building goodwill with the surrounding communities– digging wells, constructing schools, and creating good, reliable jobs, all funded by conservation.
(Shane) It’s been really successful, but also hugely expensive.
If the elephants were gone, do you think farmers, like, would they be upset about it?
Would they be happy about it?
(Shane) It all makes me think again about mammoths.
(deeply percussive music) If we brought them back, could we coexist with them?
-Mmm.
(Shane) Here in Kenya, people are keeping megafauna alive in a fast-changing world.
But it means doing things differently.
(Christopher) I think behavioral change is difficult.
If someone comes along and says, “Hey, I can fix that for you, and you don’t have to change a thing,” that is going to be very appealing.
(Shane) And that might be why de-extinction gets so much attention.
The same day Colossal made its “dire wolf” announcement, critics of the U.S.
Endangered Species Act claimed that de-extinction– not regulations that protect wildlife– could become the bedrock of species conservation.
Could the promise of a techno-fix for extinction change how we value our fellow species?
(Beth) It’s a good question, and I think it assumes both something beautiful about humanity, but also something that’s wrong.
And that is that most people value biodiversity now.
I think most people don’t value biodiversity or think about extinction, and I worry that that’s a problem.
(solemn music) (Shane) Beth might be right about a lot of folks, maybe even most.
But everywhere I’ve gone, I’ve met amazing people taking extraordinary measures to keep species from disappearing.
(Christopher) Humans, unlike other species, can choose to do differently.
If we can put empathy at the center of our world, I think that helps in human relations and it helps in our relationships with the natural world.
So, let’s choose to do something differently.
(Shane) We’re living in a new age of extinction, one crafted by our own hands.
It might be the first time one species has snuffed out so many others.
But we’re also the first of this planet’s creatures to grasp the consequences of our actions and to consider changing our ways.
I want to believe that we can turn the tide, that we can keep wild species from going over the brink, or maybe even bring them back.
If we act thoughtfully, empathetically, and urgently, maybe our species will redefine the legacy we leave on all the others that share our one incredible planet.
(announcer) This program is available with PBS Passport and on Amazon Prime Video
- textbook Conservation planning and priorities
- textbook From conservation theory to practice: crossing the divide