Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of My Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb. Like co host Joe, is still out on parental leave, so today I'd like to present a brand new interview episode. Today's guest is Dr Joel Berger. He's a senior scientist for the Wildlife Conservation Society as well as a professor at Colorado State University. He has decades of experience exploring biological diversity around the world and his author of several books, including Extreme Conservation, Life at the Edges of the World from Most recently, he was an author on the paper Species Conflict at Earth's Edges Contests, Climate and Coveted Resources, published last month in the journal Frontiers and Ecology and Evolution. So we'll be discussing that's study its findings, as well as some broader issues in bio diversity and conservation. So without further ado, let's jump right in. Hi, Joel, Welcome to the show. Rob great to be here, Thanks for inviting me in. You bet so. For listeners who are not familiar with you or your work, how did you initially become interested in conservation biology and where has your work taken you over the decades. So I grew up in l A. And that would not be Louisiana, was the l A on the west coast, and a lot of people, a lot of chaos, and I found some respite out in the deserts, in the mountains hundred miles two hundred miles out. So gradually, growing up, I spent more time away from people, um, and that always felt somewhat invigorating. UM. And since then I've spent um what I like to call different edges of the planet. And so that would be the highest latitudes where and hit sea up in the Arctic, the lowest of latitudes, which is down in the Patagonia ice fields where we drop almost to the well basically to Antarctic. But I'm on land in South America. And then what's called the third pole south north south. And then what's referred to as the third pole would be the mountains of Central Asia which rise to twenty nine thousand some feet. So why are extreme environment so crucial to these studies, especially so far as the impact of climate change is concerned. So we know that Earth's atmosphere is warming, and certainly at the edges of the planet is warming anywhere from two to five times faster than it is at the mid section. And so when we think across the realm of environments, if we want to gain some insights into what's going on most rapidly, it is these extreme edge environments. And I tend to focus on the unsunk species mostly that occur in these places. Not species like elephants or rhinos, or lions or tigers or even whales, but species that don't have much advocacy for them. Now, I know that the list of organisms that you've you've studied over the years is pretty pretty long. What are some examples of some of these these creatures? So some of the ones that might be slightly better known, So I go from slightly better known to those that are lesser known. Um So muskoks would be one, and they're um up in the Arctic, and they're they used to roam with wooly mammoth. Wooly mammoths didn't survive. Muskoks have long hair that drape to essentially to their feet and helps to sustain them throughout these long winters. So muskoks would be one from the very north um over in the Himalayan realm. You have a species called talking which are Bhutan's national mammal. They go up to seventeen thousand feet. They have the the remarkable distinction of being preyed on by tigers at low elevation at three or four thousand feet, and then up high snow leopards can take some of their young and attacks, so they have the duality of a challenge tigers and snow leopards. Um If we drop down into the edges of the far southern tips of Chile and Argentina, the Chilean national mammal are called why mole, and it's the most endangered large mammal in the Western hemisphere. Large and they're a type of a deer, but they have a mountain goat nits and so they live in the shadows of glaciers, usually cliffs and very rugged terrain. So those are some examples. I've also worked with black rhinos and the Nama Desert. I've worked with cariboo a little bit in the Arctic. I've worked one of my students is working with what are called large antler munchacks, which is one of the most recently discovered large mammals in the nineteen nineties and the Animal Mountains of Vietnam, and so a number of these species don't have much of a vocal backing. Another one are called saiga, which occur in Mongolia, Kazakhstan and their populations um. The ones in Mongolia are listed is an endangered species. I've also worked with wild yaks up on the Tibetan Plateau at sixteen seventeen thousand feet. So lots of these things are either threatened or endangered, but many of them are not known to the general public, whether we're talking about the public and their host countries or certainly and the North American or US public. The saiga is that is that the one that has a very unique nose or snout. Yeah that's great robbed Yeah. Yeah. Psychos look like part camel, part moose, and part antelope. And they're quite fast and speedy, and yeah, they've got these amazing probosis um that just hang down on wobble. I want to come to the study here that I think we're mostly going to be talking about here, species conflict that Earth's edges, contest, climate, and coveted resources. This was published last month in the journal Frontiers and ecology and evolution. Can you introduce this to the extreme environment that where this takes place and the species observed in the field work. So amongst the iconic and not so frequently seen large mammals again in western North America are mountain goats, which are not even a goat. They're really goat antelope, which are more related to the real antelope that we have over in Africa. But so those are mountain goats, but they live on cliffs and very steep terrain. They have white, long fur and are cold adaptive species. Also, the additional or the other species in which we were witnessing direct interact since between the two were called big horn sheep. Big horn sheep are like sheep, big round, thick horns, and the males smaller, little pointy horns, and the females. And the places where we were working on these stem from Colorado. The Colorado Rockies up to about fourteen thousand feet along about a fifteen hundred mile gradient that puts us into Central Alberta in Canada, areas to the north of bamp and Jasper, and those are a little bit lower elevation, only at about we'll just say, at a lower elevation across the realm of where we were working on these species. We focused mostly on the population in Glacier National Park, but we also worked at in Alberta, also in Colorado areas above tree line is where we were doing our observations, and this came about. I was working with another biologist named Forest Hayes and another one named Mark Beale. Forest is at Colorado State University, giving credit where credit is due. Mark Beale's a biologist where the National Park Service in Glacier and we were looking for grizzly bears and using a spotting scope and looking above tree lined because you don't have trees and so it's easier spot animals. And we kept seeing these white dots, and we were doing our observations from about a mile mile and a half away looking at white dots and those were mountain coats. And at about the same time in two thousand nineteen, we also saw gray dots and these were big horn sheet and one was moving across the mountains from the left to the right and the other one moving from the right to the left, and it looks like a collision path. And then they got to these brown wet soil areas, and that was when we thought this is going to get interesting. I wonder what's going to happen. Both these goats, the mountain goats and the big horn sheep are approximately similar in size, so we didn't know what was going to happen. And so as these animals were moving towards these wet grayst spots, we noted that the goats were eating soil and the big horn sheep would approach, but if a goat got aggressive, the sheep would move off, and so we thought, oh, that's interesting. We did that a little bit that day. Forest Haze and I, who were working together, molded over and we decided the next day we were going to go back up to these high alpine zones and again look and we saw more sheet, more goats. And this went on for a couple of weeks across a couple of different years, actually across three different years, and in Glacier National Park. It was becoming clear to us, in part because we're both scientists and were familiar with the literature and some climate change underpinnings, and we knew that these areas had been under snow when ice and glaciated not that long ago. In fact, Glacier National Park in the last hundred years has lost about eight of its glaciers. So this area where we were watching sheep and goats, we were speculating that these animals were using areas that had been well They had to have been under ice and snow because glaciers were there and precipitating out were minerals and these would be salts, these would be sodium, it would be potassium. And the goats and sheep were interacting over priority of access. And this was These weren't bloody encounters nature too thread and claws tennis And had said over a hundred and twenty years ago. But they were displacements, and they were either passive meaning an animal walks toward another and they leave, where they were aggressive active in which an animal was swinging its head, lowering its horns, or maybe doing some rush charges at the other species. And at the end of the day we had more than about a hundred and twenty interactions, about only seven or eight I think it was seven in Colorado where we saw them actively at the same site at the same time, about a hundred or so up in Glacier, and then another almost twenty in the Canadian site, and what struck us was the consistency. And what I mean by consistency is this goats won something like of the interactions, the sheep just moved off. They didn't want to deal with it. Goats have small, pointy horns. But it may be that the goats just don't give good signals. They just escalate real fast, and the sheep wanted no part of it. Because the big horn sheep. If if my childhood memories of watching um nature documentaries are correct, I mean they're they're pretty fierce looking when you see them engaging with each other in combat. So I imagine it would be easy for at least those of us who are not experts in this, to assume that they could more than hold their own against a mountain goat. The sheep rear up. They have these club like horns, I mean almost like big thick hammers, you know, the size of one's chest, maybe half the size of one's cheffed. Don't want to be exaggerating here, but they rear up and then they charged, sometimes reaching twenty to thirty miles an hour, and they slam into each other's horns, and then they reverberate and so we were expecting, you know, given that they're about the same size, well, if everything else is equal, about half the interactions, we expect the sheep to win, half the goats to win. People who know something about domestic goats, they just laughed at us and said, what's wrong with you? Guys? We knew that. And I'm thinking to myself and actually saying, well, you know, I've spent three decades looking at these animals and these extreme environments, including sheep and goats, and I didn't know it. And maybe scientists are not always the prescient ones in this, but our data were very very clear because lots of times there's nuanced, lots of times there's some counterintuitive results, and we didn't expect this to happen so consistently, and it did across the three sites. Now, first of all, are are both the big horn sheep in the mountain goats in these scenarios and these encounters? Are they both native to the regions or or or is there an invasive layer to this? Yeah? Real good question, rob Um. So big horns are native from essentially parts of north central Canada or central British Columbia all the way down into the deserts of Mexico. So they have a very catholic range, meaning that a wide range of tolerance that they can occur in deserts, they can occur in mountains, they can occur in alpine zones. Mountain coats, on the other hand, are elusively a cold adapted species, and so when Lewis and Clark first arrived here, we'll put it this way, their native ranges would have been from central Idaho, Montana, Washington all the way up into Alaska and the Yukon in a small part of the Northwest territories. So cold adapted they occur in some of the coastal ranges of Washington UM and certainly in Alaska UM. But since different Fish and Game agency states in the US have introduced goats into places like Oregon, where it maybe it's a little controversial because there's some arguments that they were once native there, But we know that they've been introduced into Utah, introduced into Nevada, introduced into South Dakota, and introduced into Colorado and Wyoming. And that's where some of this gets interesting, because different parks manage exotic species differently. The Tetons, for instance, Institute of the program where they would remove the shape of the goats which are introduced or an exotic species in the Tetons, and so they were removed by harvest by shooting in the Yellowstone area. Goats are not abundant in Yellowstone Park, but they're more abundant in the Yellowstone ecosystem, and the Park Service Yellowstone in particular has a different strategy than the Tetons, and it's more lazy, fair, just letting things go until they perhaps know more about it. Olympic National Park over in western Washington, goats were introduced there in the twenties and they've been removed mostly by helicopter removal, so not lethal means, but non lethal means. Now, what are the what were the reasons for introducing the mountain goats to these areas. Goats were introduced by fish and Game departments for harvest, so like in South with Dakota in the nineteen twenties, they were introduced into the Black Hills. I don't remember the years at which they were introduced into Nevada. They were introduced into Colorado in the late forties. UM today with a focus also on bio diversity in addition to big game, there would probably be more studies done about potential impacts of introducing these large mammals. For instance, moose have been introduced into Colorado in the early in mid seventies, it may have been the late seventies. And moose, of course are riperian dependent species, and so they affect willows, they affect cotton woods, and they affect neotropical migrant birds. But when these initial introductions occurred, both for mountain goats, for moose and some other species, there was far less attention on biological diversity and more is providing a resource for people, either for a trophy, animal management, for bringing some trophies home, or for meat meat on the table. So in this scenario again we have we have mountain goats, big horn sheep and the mountain goats are essentially out competing for the same resource. And you mentioned that the goat farmers and people familiar with with with goats lived with goats were not surprised that the goats were winning out here, and and a certain certainly brings to mind examples of invasive or fairal domestic goats taking over various areas and thinking specifically of like the Galapagos islands. Is it? What is it do you think about? Or what is known about like the the sort of nature of the goat, Like what is it about the goats? Um Either it's morphology or it's like tenacity, like what why does it? Why does it win out? Why does it seem to win out in these instances? Provocative question um so. One idea goes as following um so, and I'm going to focus on again big horn sheep and mountain coats. I'm talking about native species and not stepping aside because maybe we'll return to feral species or so. Big horn sheep have an array of ways at which they communicate, and they're very visual, so they have a very diverse behavioral repertoire as to how they interact. Um. Goats are part of a more primitive lineage and their ancestral origins are over into Central Asia as our sheep origins, and then further over into the Mediterranean amidiest But the goat lineage and the mountain goat lineage in particular, the species that are ancestral, they don't have a lot of behavioral diversity. They don't have a lot of signals um and so they escalate very fast, and the escalations are with their horns either a thrust headlow rush, and I'm not sure, and people haven't looked at this, and so this is either wild hypothesis telling to fit with stuff to blow your mind, or it's um maybe some speculate, well, it is some speculations on my part, but without the potential for signaling and recognizing other signals. What we see is that the goats escalate fast, the sheep want no part of it. And I want to point out that these are for what we refer to as a biotic resources, those not of a biological nature. So when we talk about the competition and the behavioral or social interactions between bighorn sheep and between with mountain goats, what we see is that the species are clumped around those dirt patches that I talked about the moist soil, and this is again referred to as a mineral lick, and these are very patchy and distributions, sometimes they may be ten or more miles apart. So the animals go to great length to access these, and the goats just having a more aggressive nature, they don't mess around, and the sheep have somehow figured that out and they back off. So I know this. This probably brings to mind salt licks and and so forth with some of our our listeners, but for many others we might might be a surprise to hear about this conflict over things that are are not food, that are not a biological resource. So, how how rare is this in general a biotic resources being feuded over by organisms? However rare is it in human observation? And how rare do we think this sort of thing is in the wild? So um our paper which you did refer to, and thanks for referring to that, we focused on for a biotic resources, which will describe in a moment. Actually i'll describe them now. We focused on shade because if one's ever watched a dog or a cat, or a horse or a cow or a domestic goat, it's getting warm, the earth is warming up. Shades an important way to try to adjust one's thermal abilities to regulate um So shade was one snow patches, which are disappearing at a more rapid rate at high elevation. Is the second one mineral licks or a third one. And at the outset when I had mentioned we were working at the extreme edges of the planet you think about deserts. So the fourth a biotic resource our water holes springs in the desert, which of course are important because many species need water, not all. So are four a biotic resources. We selected because they're discreet and we could measure them. When is shade available? Are there no shade trees? If there are shade trees, can we observe interactions between different species for access in shade? Do larger species when same for water in the deserts? You know, we have I mentioned and you mentioned rob domestic goats getting loose, becoming feral, and we have certainly in the American West thousands and thousands of feral horses and ferreal burrows, and there are feral pigs, and so our interest was trying to understand the nature of interactions for these very limited resources, what we're calling coveted resources, so mineral licks at high elevation, UH water and deserts shade. We were able to observe a few interactions, and those were mostly over the Kalahari Desert in the Nama Desert where rhinos displaced some antelopes. But we only saw that those interactions very few times. You had asked earlier, how rare is this doing these kind of observations. I think we got lucky and at the outside I said, we were looking for grizzly bears, and so there was a lot of serendipity to what we are doing. But science has a let of serendipity, just like all of us as humans. It's like which is the path we pick their serendipity. Going back though, to minerals at high elevation and the conflicts that we were watching between sheep and goats at some level, as the climate is changing and warming, we see parts of the Arctic where surface the surface structures are being exposed now because we no longer have ice and perma frost, and so the same kind of patterns that we're watching for sheep and goats are not that different perhaps than what we're seeing with the eight countries that have access to the Arctic Ocean and Arctic resources. And we know Russia has over the last ten years either reconstituted or built new military basis in places where that they didn't exist in the past, or fortified those. China now has a cruiser ice breaker that they use in the Arctic, even though they're not an arctic country, and so thinking about mineral resources and access and conflict. UM, maybe there are some lessons that can be learned from sheep and goats. However, the good thing about the sheep and goats is that they're not killing each other over the stuff. I'm not sure I want to think forward ahead of the next fifty years what we might be doing with those resources as humans. So do you think that this, uh, this this scenario, this conflict over the resources, like we can sort of we can hold it up kind of a mirror to human activities and and how we fit into the into the natural world and it's resources as well. So I'm going to answer at two levels. I'm going to point out first and foremost that our observations were over different species competing for a limited resource, and so that is referred to as inter specific or differences between species competing for the um drawing in the analogy for humans, we have certainly different geographies as humans. We live all over the world, we have different cultures, we have different belief systems, but we all have the same fundamental needs. It's usually security, it's food, it's mates, it's shelter, and so as we continue moving beyond the eight billion that we're at now, it's inevitable that we're going to end up competing at some level for some of the same resources. I mean, obviously, even though I'm looking now within species and not between the same patterns, the same competitive interactions at one level, whether it be combat, whether it be bluff, whether it be escalation or de escalation, we see the same things within species of other non humans, or we also see this between species. Fascinating. Yeah, I know that some of the I saw some of the coverage that came out about this study was even referencing mad Max, saying that this is like it's um, it's sheep and goats, but but mad Max. Uh, there's some pretty cool analogies in this. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. People have had some fun with it, and um, I mean, we have enough challenges in the world having some fun, even though I believe I'm a serious scientist, actually I know I'm a serious scientists. But being able to laugh at oneself, being able to you know, try to appreciate the humor or the similarities or the differences, I think it's a good way to go. Oh yes, and if it draws somebody into to look at a study that someone who might not otherwise you know, be interested in it, than all the better. Yeah, just thinking about shade. If I can go a little bit further, so, there have been studies done in Africa of of both primates, some chimpanzee, certainly elephants using shades um to either access minerals or sometimes for cooling. And as are as I know, and I could be wrong, I'm wrong all the time, but as far as I know, UM, we don't know if in fact shade use in these caves results in one species being displaced by another. Um, you know, maybe setting up some camera traps and people are now starting to do that, we may have some better, better insights into those kind of interactions, but for the time being, you know, for my colleagues Mark and Forest Hayes and I uh, it's been observational, even though we use camera traps and other things that we do. Yeah, it's it's this is this is so fascinating and the whole all the details to about like communication between the sheep, communication between the goats, and then this kind of communication breakdown and there and then escalation and by the goats because they are these are not species that are going to normally be in any kind of robust communication with each other. Right, Yeah, you know, I kind of think about it in the way that UM maybe some of your listeners will be able to think about how cats and dogs respond to each other. And sometimes, you know, dogs will have a different I mean, even within breeds of dogs, there are different kinds of communication systems, and so maybe a cat's not going to be reading a dog and the dog has a certain intent or vice versa. Sometimes the signals are pretty clear. Sometimes they're not for us with the sheep and the goats, maybe not as clear than now. In your long career documenting different organisms and different environments around the world, and we we we listed some of them earlier. What sort of perspective on the threats facing the natural world have you been afforded? Like? What? You know? What? What? What? What kind of vantage point has it given you? So I've worked both in UM places that are very remote and then places that are less remote. And in the less remote places, the challenges are mostly how we don't destroy habitats or how we maintain habitats, trying to understand the extent to which restoring species if they've been lost can be a good idea, but the word conservation means people, and it means attitudes, and so there's a lot that has to go on involving people and our ability to be tolerant or to think that we're not the only species on the planet that may be deserving opportunities to live. And then in the remote areas, the challenges are very different their climate challenges. As we watch the edges of the planet come come under a lot of greater variants with storms, well, just like we see in Florida or the East Coast or the West coast, we're certainly seeing that at the edges of the raw edges at the planet as well. We have gas, we have mining, we have mineral exploitation. A lot of that makes some sense, um, but the question really comes down to what do we want the future to look like? What do we want ten years from now? Can we project out twenty or thirty years? And if we can, how do we make that happen? Who has to get on board? So, thinking also about some of the challenges and remote areas and certainly areas beyond the US, one of the remarkable problems that people don't see very much is that there are a lot of feral animals out there, and I think about across the globe, we have something like seven hundred million dogs. And I think about dogs free roaming in places like the Tibetan Plateau. I think about dogs free roaming in the Gobi Desert and impacts on endangered species. I had mentioned waymole, which is the most endangered large mammal in the western Atmisphere down at the tips of Argentina and Chile in the Andes. Free Roman dogs, feral dogs, not native causing lots and lots of issues and problems. And there are a lot of cultural differences based on what societies were in and how we view things. And so some countries choose a lassa fair approach and won't touch it, and other countries will be pretty aggressive and say, let's give some of these native species a chance because they didn't evolve with dogs of coursing predator, uh of coursing feral predator. So so, lots of issues out there in terms of other kinds of challenges that are biological challenges that still fall back in the conservation realm. But would you say that we have we have better tools at our disposal now to aid in these conservation efforts. Is it more about public will or or governmental will? I think when we consider, like the three major challenges in the realm of natural resource, at least I look at three. Climate change, of course is a huge one. A second one I will call biodiversity crisis, because that goes to land degradation, it goes to removing chunks of the planet, it goes to our plastic issues. But so I look at climate change is one, I look at bio diversity, and then I look at will say, one health, one world, one health with disease. We think about COVID, we think about ebola, We think about these other challenges that emanate from wild species or could from wild species. But it's how we're treating the planet. And so your question is do we have new tools? We certainly have much greater recognition of of the issues. And then, of course, as we all know as citizens of the planet, the challenges are how are we going to solve these? And you know, where are we making progress? And we are making progress and in certain places, so where we're making some progress is stunning. And I wouldn't have thought of this about twenty years ago. But we're rewild. In Europe. We've got brown bears coming back into places. We've got links that are colonizing and being put back into places. We've got wolves that are into Germany. We've got an area the size of California that maybe has a couple of packs of wolves. I'm not sure Italy has over thirty five hundred wolves with its sixty million people. UM, so we can look into Europe. In this country, blackfooted ferrets were extinct in the wild. We've now got blackfooted ferrets in a number of Western states and as well as in Canada, as well as in Mexico. Contours were extinct in the wild. We've now got condoors in northern California and southern California. We've got condoors in Mexico, contours in Utah, condors in Arizona. UM, we've got although wolves are certainly polarized. If you go back to the nineteen seventies, the only wolves that we had were in the northern Northern Woods. Now we've got wolves in many of the Western states. Grizzly bears are expanding in Wyoming, expanding in Montana, expanding in Idaho, in Washington, and so you know, we can we can go with birds, we can, you know, pick a wide array of different species, and we're looking at lots of successes and that's because the people demand it. And that's one of the nice things that we see. And for much of this it's not even a partisan issue. We've seen successes because irrespective of political standing, people want bio diversity, they want healthy ecosystems, they want wildlife. Now you're a There are several books that have come out over the years, the most recent of which is Extreme Conservation, Life at the Edges of the World. Can you tell us a little bit about this book? Sure? Um, So Extreme Conservation hits extreme environments and the species that lived there, which must subsist and so they have to have special adaptations. So this book works through thirty three different expeditions that I did to different parts of the world, and so not just one or two, but also working with local people, learning from local people, listening to local people. And so, for instance, we once worked with this convicted felon who is a rhino poacher and his sentence was three years on a conservation project, and so we learned from him and subsequently we brought him to the US to learn from US, and he exported and he's now back in Namibia and he's leading an NGO non government organization. We worked with a fellow named Freddie Goodhope Jr. He had a lot of fun with me. He would say, Joel, my ancestors and I have been here for ten thousand years. You're a newcomer, but we'll keep you warm and make sure or you're safe up here in the Arctic. And so I weave through dealing with the UH the people who I've learned from and how they have perceived in their injustices that have come their way and their successes, but then also the challenges that we've faced as conservation biologists in the magnificent work that's being done in other places. I spent some time on a Russian island called Wrangel Island, where I was arrested by Russian security forces. But the Russian scientists I worked with didn't want me arrested. They wanted to work with me in the field. We had US government and Russian money to look at science, to look at climate change and how to do conservation. And so just like in this country and elsewhere, people are people in my book tries to deal through the eyes of animals, but then through some of the learning that I've done and the challenges of what it takes to have cold feet on the ground working in some of these places that can be quite brew at all excellent. So Joe, for our our listeners out there, if they want to follow you, if they want to learn more about you and your work, where can they go online? They could go to my website And so it's just all the same, um lowercase Joel Burger Conservation dot com. No spaces Joel Burger Conservation dot com. No spaces and actually no spaces just means no spaces. All right. Well, I greatly appreciate you taking time out of your day to chat with me here today. This is this is all fascinating, uh and I know our listeners will greatly enjoy this. Rob Thanks and stuff to blow your mind. What a great show you have. Thank you. Thanks again to Dr Joel Burger for taking time out of his day to chat with us again. The study is Species Conflict at Earth's Edges, Contests, climate and coveted resources. The book is Extreme Conservation, Life at the Edges of the World. And you and check out his website at Joel Burger Conservation dot com. That's j O E L B E R G E R Conservation dot com. That's it for this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. Just a reminder that our core episodes published on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Monday's we do listener Mail, on Wednesday's we do a short form artifact or monster fact episode, and on Friday's we do Weird How Cinema. That's our time to set aside most serious concerns and just talk about a weird film. Obviously, we'd love to hear from everyone out there about this episode, past episodes, or future episodes. Uh so feel free to get in touch with us. Thanks as always to Seth Nicholas Johnson for producing the show, and if you do want to reach out, you can email us at contact and Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio because at the heart Rate, U app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows

Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of My Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb. Like co host Joe, is still out on parental leave, so today I'd like to present a brand new interview episode. Today's guest is Dr Joel Berger. He's a senior scientist for the Wildlife Conservation Society as well as a professor at Colorado State University. He has decades of experience exploring biological diversity around the world and his author of several books, including Extreme Conservation, Life at the Edges of the World from Most recently, he was an author on the paper Species Conflict at Earth's Edges Contests, Climate and Coveted Resources, published last month in the journal Frontiers and Ecology and Evolution. So we'll be discussing that's study its findings, as well as some broader issues in bio diversity and conservation. So without further ado, let's jump right in. Hi, Joel, Welcome to the show. Rob great to be here, Thanks for inviting me in. You bet so. For listeners who are not familiar with you or your work, how did you initially become interested in conservation biology and where has your work taken you over the decades. So I grew up in l A. And that would not be Louisiana, was the l A on the west coast, and a lot of people, a lot of chaos, and I found some respite out in the deserts, in the mountains hundred miles two hundred miles out. So gradually, growing up, I spent more time away from people, um, and that always felt somewhat invigorating. UM. And since then I've spent um what I like to call different edges of the planet. And so that would be the highest latitudes where and hit sea up in the Arctic, the lowest of latitudes, which is down in the Patagonia ice fields where we drop almost to the well basically to Antarctic. But I'm on land in South America. And then what's called the third pole south north south. And then what's referred to as the third pole would be the mountains of Central Asia which rise to twenty nine thousand some feet. So why are extreme environment so crucial to these studies, especially so far as the impact of climate change is concerned. So we know that Earth's atmosphere is warming, and certainly at the edges of the planet is warming anywhere from two to five times faster than it is at the mid section. And so when we think across the realm of environments, if we want to gain some insights into what's going on most rapidly, it is these extreme edge environments. And I tend to focus on the unsunk species mostly that occur in these places. Not species like elephants or rhinos, or lions or tigers or even whales, but species that don't have much advocacy for them. Now, I know that the list of organisms that you've you've studied over the years is pretty pretty long. What are some examples of some of these these creatures? So some of the ones that might be slightly better known, So I go from slightly better known to those that are lesser known. Um So muskoks would be one, and they're um up in the Arctic, and they're they used to roam with wooly mammoth. Wooly mammoths didn't survive. Muskoks have long hair that drape to essentially to their feet and helps to sustain them throughout these long winters. So muskoks would be one from the very north um over in the Himalayan realm. You have a species called talking which are Bhutan's national mammal. They go up to seventeen thousand feet. They have the the remarkable distinction of being preyed on by tigers at low elevation at three or four thousand feet, and then up high snow leopards can take some of their young and attacks, so they have the duality of a challenge tigers and snow leopards. Um If we drop down into the edges of the far southern tips of Chile and Argentina, the Chilean national mammal are called why mole, and it's the most endangered large mammal in the Western hemisphere. Large and they're a type of a deer, but they have a mountain goat nits and so they live in the shadows of glaciers, usually cliffs and very rugged terrain. So those are some examples. I've also worked with black rhinos and the Nama Desert. I've worked with cariboo a little bit in the Arctic. I've worked one of my students is working with what are called large antler munchacks, which is one of the most recently discovered large mammals in the nineteen nineties and the Animal Mountains of Vietnam, and so a number of these species don't have much of a vocal backing. Another one are called saiga, which occur in Mongolia, Kazakhstan and their populations um. The ones in Mongolia are listed is an endangered species. I've also worked with wild yaks up on the Tibetan Plateau at sixteen seventeen thousand feet. So lots of these things are either threatened or endangered, but many of them are not known to the general public, whether we're talking about the public and their host countries or certainly and the North American or US public. The saiga is that is that the one that has a very unique nose or snout. Yeah that's great robbed Yeah. Yeah. Psychos look like part camel, part moose, and part antelope. And they're quite fast and speedy, and yeah, they've got these amazing probosis um that just hang down on wobble. I want to come to the study here that I think we're mostly going to be talking about here, species conflict that Earth's edges, contest, climate, and coveted resources. This was published last month in the journal Frontiers and ecology and evolution. Can you introduce this to the extreme environment that where this takes place and the species observed in the field work. So amongst the iconic and not so frequently seen large mammals again in western North America are mountain goats, which are not even a goat. They're really goat antelope, which are more related to the real antelope that we have over in Africa. But so those are mountain goats, but they live on cliffs and very steep terrain. They have white, long fur and are cold adaptive species. Also, the additional or the other species in which we were witnessing direct interact since between the two were called big horn sheep. Big horn sheep are like sheep, big round, thick horns, and the males smaller, little pointy horns, and the females. And the places where we were working on these stem from Colorado. The Colorado Rockies up to about fourteen thousand feet along about a fifteen hundred mile gradient that puts us into Central Alberta in Canada, areas to the north of bamp and Jasper, and those are a little bit lower elevation, only at about we'll just say, at a lower elevation across the realm of where we were working on these species. We focused mostly on the population in Glacier National Park, but we also worked at in Alberta, also in Colorado areas above tree line is where we were doing our observations, and this came about. I was working with another biologist named Forest Hayes and another one named Mark Beale. Forest is at Colorado State University, giving credit where credit is due. Mark Beale's a biologist where the National Park Service in Glacier and we were looking for grizzly bears and using a spotting scope and looking above tree lined because you don't have trees and so it's easier spot animals. And we kept seeing these white dots, and we were doing our observations from about a mile mile and a half away looking at white dots and those were mountain coats. And at about the same time in two thousand nineteen, we also saw gray dots and these were big horn sheet and one was moving across the mountains from the left to the right and the other one moving from the right to the left, and it looks like a collision path. And then they got to these brown wet soil areas, and that was when we thought this is going to get interesting. I wonder what's going to happen. Both these goats, the mountain goats and the big horn sheep are approximately similar in size, so we didn't know what was going to happen. And so as these animals were moving towards these wet grayst spots, we noted that the goats were eating soil and the big horn sheep would approach, but if a goat got aggressive, the sheep would move off, and so we thought, oh, that's interesting. We did that a little bit that day. Forest Haze and I, who were working together, molded over and we decided the next day we were going to go back up to these high alpine zones and again look and we saw more sheet, more goats. And this went on for a couple of weeks across a couple of different years, actually across three different years, and in Glacier National Park. It was becoming clear to us, in part because we're both scientists and were familiar with the literature and some climate change underpinnings, and we knew that these areas had been under snow when ice and glaciated not that long ago. In fact, Glacier National Park in the last hundred years has lost about eight of its glaciers. So this area where we were watching sheep and goats, we were speculating that these animals were using areas that had been well They had to have been under ice and snow because glaciers were there and precipitating out were minerals and these would be salts, these would be sodium, it would be potassium. And the goats and sheep were interacting over priority of access. And this was These weren't bloody encounters nature too thread and claws tennis And had said over a hundred and twenty years ago. But they were displacements, and they were either passive meaning an animal walks toward another and they leave, where they were aggressive active in which an animal was swinging its head, lowering its horns, or maybe doing some rush charges at the other species. And at the end of the day we had more than about a hundred and twenty interactions, about only seven or eight I think it was seven in Colorado where we saw them actively at the same site at the same time, about a hundred or so up in Glacier, and then another almost twenty in the Canadian site, and what struck us was the consistency. And what I mean by consistency is this goats won something like of the interactions, the sheep just moved off. They didn't want to deal with it. Goats have small, pointy horns. But it may be that the goats just don't give good signals. They just escalate real fast, and the sheep wanted no part of it. Because the big horn sheep. If if my childhood memories of watching um nature documentaries are correct, I mean they're they're pretty fierce looking when you see them engaging with each other in combat. So I imagine it would be easy for at least those of us who are not experts in this, to assume that they could more than hold their own against a mountain goat. The sheep rear up. They have these club like horns, I mean almost like big thick hammers, you know, the size of one's chest, maybe half the size of one's cheffed. Don't want to be exaggerating here, but they rear up and then they charged, sometimes reaching twenty to thirty miles an hour, and they slam into each other's horns, and then they reverberate and so we were expecting, you know, given that they're about the same size, well, if everything else is equal, about half the interactions, we expect the sheep to win, half the goats to win. People who know something about domestic goats, they just laughed at us and said, what's wrong with you? Guys? We knew that. And I'm thinking to myself and actually saying, well, you know, I've spent three decades looking at these animals and these extreme environments, including sheep and goats, and I didn't know it. And maybe scientists are not always the prescient ones in this, but our data were very very clear because lots of times there's nuanced, lots of times there's some counterintuitive results, and we didn't expect this to happen so consistently, and it did across the three sites. Now, first of all, are are both the big horn sheep in the mountain goats in these scenarios and these encounters? Are they both native to the regions or or or is there an invasive layer to this? Yeah? Real good question, rob Um. So big horns are native from essentially parts of north central Canada or central British Columbia all the way down into the deserts of Mexico. So they have a very catholic range, meaning that a wide range of tolerance that they can occur in deserts, they can occur in mountains, they can occur in alpine zones. Mountain coats, on the other hand, are elusively a cold adapted species, and so when Lewis and Clark first arrived here, we'll put it this way, their native ranges would have been from central Idaho, Montana, Washington all the way up into Alaska and the Yukon in a small part of the Northwest territories. So cold adapted they occur in some of the coastal ranges of Washington UM and certainly in Alaska UM. But since different Fish and Game agency states in the US have introduced goats into places like Oregon, where it maybe it's a little controversial because there's some arguments that they were once native there, But we know that they've been introduced into Utah, introduced into Nevada, introduced into South Dakota, and introduced into Colorado and Wyoming. And that's where some of this gets interesting, because different parks manage exotic species differently. The Tetons, for instance, Institute of the program where they would remove the shape of the goats which are introduced or an exotic species in the Tetons, and so they were removed by harvest by shooting in the Yellowstone area. Goats are not abundant in Yellowstone Park, but they're more abundant in the Yellowstone ecosystem, and the Park Service Yellowstone in particular has a different strategy than the Tetons, and it's more lazy, fair, just letting things go until they perhaps know more about it. Olympic National Park over in western Washington, goats were introduced there in the twenties and they've been removed mostly by helicopter removal, so not lethal means, but non lethal means. Now, what are the what were the reasons for introducing the mountain goats to these areas. Goats were introduced by fish and Game departments for harvest, so like in South with Dakota in the nineteen twenties, they were introduced into the Black Hills. I don't remember the years at which they were introduced into Nevada. They were introduced into Colorado in the late forties. UM today with a focus also on bio diversity in addition to big game, there would probably be more studies done about potential impacts of introducing these large mammals. For instance, moose have been introduced into Colorado in the early in mid seventies, it may have been the late seventies. And moose, of course are riperian dependent species, and so they affect willows, they affect cotton woods, and they affect neotropical migrant birds. But when these initial introductions occurred, both for mountain goats, for moose and some other species, there was far less attention on biological diversity and more is providing a resource for people, either for a trophy, animal management, for bringing some trophies home, or for meat meat on the table. So in this scenario again we have we have mountain goats, big horn sheep and the mountain goats are essentially out competing for the same resource. And you mentioned that the goat farmers and people familiar with with with goats lived with goats were not surprised that the goats were winning out here, and and a certain certainly brings to mind examples of invasive or fairal domestic goats taking over various areas and thinking specifically of like the Galapagos islands. Is it? What is it do you think about? Or what is known about like the the sort of nature of the goat, Like what is it about the goats? Um Either it's morphology or it's like tenacity, like what why does it? Why does it win out? Why does it seem to win out in these instances? Provocative question um so. One idea goes as following um so, and I'm going to focus on again big horn sheep and mountain coats. I'm talking about native species and not stepping aside because maybe we'll return to feral species or so. Big horn sheep have an array of ways at which they communicate, and they're very visual, so they have a very diverse behavioral repertoire as to how they interact. Um. Goats are part of a more primitive lineage and their ancestral origins are over into Central Asia as our sheep origins, and then further over into the Mediterranean amidiest But the goat lineage and the mountain goat lineage in particular, the species that are ancestral, they don't have a lot of behavioral diversity. They don't have a lot of signals um and so they escalate very fast, and the escalations are with their horns either a thrust headlow rush, and I'm not sure, and people haven't looked at this, and so this is either wild hypothesis telling to fit with stuff to blow your mind, or it's um maybe some speculate, well, it is some speculations on my part, but without the potential for signaling and recognizing other signals. What we see is that the goats escalate fast, the sheep want no part of it. And I want to point out that these are for what we refer to as a biotic resources, those not of a biological nature. So when we talk about the competition and the behavioral or social interactions between bighorn sheep and between with mountain goats, what we see is that the species are clumped around those dirt patches that I talked about the moist soil, and this is again referred to as a mineral lick, and these are very patchy and distributions, sometimes they may be ten or more miles apart. So the animals go to great length to access these, and the goats just having a more aggressive nature, they don't mess around, and the sheep have somehow figured that out and they back off. So I know this. This probably brings to mind salt licks and and so forth with some of our our listeners, but for many others we might might be a surprise to hear about this conflict over things that are are not food, that are not a biological resource. So, how how rare is this in general a biotic resources being feuded over by organisms? However rare is it in human observation? And how rare do we think this sort of thing is in the wild? So um our paper which you did refer to, and thanks for referring to that, we focused on for a biotic resources, which will describe in a moment. Actually i'll describe them now. We focused on shade because if one's ever watched a dog or a cat, or a horse or a cow or a domestic goat, it's getting warm, the earth is warming up. Shades an important way to try to adjust one's thermal abilities to regulate um So shade was one snow patches, which are disappearing at a more rapid rate at high elevation. Is the second one mineral licks or a third one. And at the outset when I had mentioned we were working at the extreme edges of the planet you think about deserts. So the fourth a biotic resource our water holes springs in the desert, which of course are important because many species need water, not all. So are four a biotic resources. We selected because they're discreet and we could measure them. When is shade available? Are there no shade trees? If there are shade trees, can we observe interactions between different species for access in shade? Do larger species when same for water in the deserts? You know, we have I mentioned and you mentioned rob domestic goats getting loose, becoming feral, and we have certainly in the American West thousands and thousands of feral horses and ferreal burrows, and there are feral pigs, and so our interest was trying to understand the nature of interactions for these very limited resources, what we're calling coveted resources, so mineral licks at high elevation, UH water and deserts shade. We were able to observe a few interactions, and those were mostly over the Kalahari Desert in the Nama Desert where rhinos displaced some antelopes. But we only saw that those interactions very few times. You had asked earlier, how rare is this doing these kind of observations. I think we got lucky and at the outside I said, we were looking for grizzly bears, and so there was a lot of serendipity to what we are doing. But science has a let of serendipity, just like all of us as humans. It's like which is the path we pick their serendipity. Going back though, to minerals at high elevation and the conflicts that we were watching between sheep and goats at some level, as the climate is changing and warming, we see parts of the Arctic where surface the surface structures are being exposed now because we no longer have ice and perma frost, and so the same kind of patterns that we're watching for sheep and goats are not that different perhaps than what we're seeing with the eight countries that have access to the Arctic Ocean and Arctic resources. And we know Russia has over the last ten years either reconstituted or built new military basis in places where that they didn't exist in the past, or fortified those. China now has a cruiser ice breaker that they use in the Arctic, even though they're not an arctic country, and so thinking about mineral resources and access and conflict. UM, maybe there are some lessons that can be learned from sheep and goats. However, the good thing about the sheep and goats is that they're not killing each other over the stuff. I'm not sure I want to think forward ahead of the next fifty years what we might be doing with those resources as humans. So do you think that this, uh, this this scenario, this conflict over the resources, like we can sort of we can hold it up kind of a mirror to human activities and and how we fit into the into the natural world and it's resources as well. So I'm going to answer at two levels. I'm going to point out first and foremost that our observations were over different species competing for a limited resource, and so that is referred to as inter specific or differences between species competing for the um drawing in the analogy for humans, we have certainly different geographies as humans. We live all over the world, we have different cultures, we have different belief systems, but we all have the same fundamental needs. It's usually security, it's food, it's mates, it's shelter, and so as we continue moving beyond the eight billion that we're at now, it's inevitable that we're going to end up competing at some level for some of the same resources. I mean, obviously, even though I'm looking now within species and not between the same patterns, the same competitive interactions at one level, whether it be combat, whether it be bluff, whether it be escalation or de escalation, we see the same things within species of other non humans, or we also see this between species. Fascinating. Yeah, I know that some of the I saw some of the coverage that came out about this study was even referencing mad Max, saying that this is like it's um, it's sheep and goats, but but mad Max. Uh, there's some pretty cool analogies in this. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. People have had some fun with it, and um, I mean, we have enough challenges in the world having some fun, even though I believe I'm a serious scientist, actually I know I'm a serious scientists. But being able to laugh at oneself, being able to you know, try to appreciate the humor or the similarities or the differences, I think it's a good way to go. Oh yes, and if it draws somebody into to look at a study that someone who might not otherwise you know, be interested in it, than all the better. Yeah, just thinking about shade. If I can go a little bit further, so, there have been studies done in Africa of of both primates, some chimpanzee, certainly elephants using shades um to either access minerals or sometimes for cooling. And as are as I know, and I could be wrong, I'm wrong all the time, but as far as I know, UM, we don't know if in fact shade use in these caves results in one species being displaced by another. Um, you know, maybe setting up some camera traps and people are now starting to do that, we may have some better, better insights into those kind of interactions, but for the time being, you know, for my colleagues Mark and Forest Hayes and I uh, it's been observational, even though we use camera traps and other things that we do. Yeah, it's it's this is this is so fascinating and the whole all the details to about like communication between the sheep, communication between the goats, and then this kind of communication breakdown and there and then escalation and by the goats because they are these are not species that are going to normally be in any kind of robust communication with each other. Right, Yeah, you know, I kind of think about it in the way that UM maybe some of your listeners will be able to think about how cats and dogs respond to each other. And sometimes, you know, dogs will have a different I mean, even within breeds of dogs, there are different kinds of communication systems, and so maybe a cat's not going to be reading a dog and the dog has a certain intent or vice versa. Sometimes the signals are pretty clear. Sometimes they're not for us with the sheep and the goats, maybe not as clear than now. In your long career documenting different organisms and different environments around the world, and we we we listed some of them earlier. What sort of perspective on the threats facing the natural world have you been afforded? Like? What? You know? What? What? What? What kind of vantage point has it given you? So I've worked both in UM places that are very remote and then places that are less remote. And in the less remote places, the challenges are mostly how we don't destroy habitats or how we maintain habitats, trying to understand the extent to which restoring species if they've been lost can be a good idea, but the word conservation means people, and it means attitudes, and so there's a lot that has to go on involving people and our ability to be tolerant or to think that we're not the only species on the planet that may be deserving opportunities to live. And then in the remote areas, the challenges are very different their climate challenges. As we watch the edges of the planet come come under a lot of greater variants with storms, well, just like we see in Florida or the East Coast or the West coast, we're certainly seeing that at the edges of the raw edges at the planet as well. We have gas, we have mining, we have mineral exploitation. A lot of that makes some sense, um, but the question really comes down to what do we want the future to look like? What do we want ten years from now? Can we project out twenty or thirty years? And if we can, how do we make that happen? Who has to get on board? So, thinking also about some of the challenges and remote areas and certainly areas beyond the US, one of the remarkable problems that people don't see very much is that there are a lot of feral animals out there, and I think about across the globe, we have something like seven hundred million dogs. And I think about dogs free roaming in places like the Tibetan Plateau. I think about dogs free roaming in the Gobi Desert and impacts on endangered species. I had mentioned waymole, which is the most endangered large mammal in the western Atmisphere down at the tips of Argentina and Chile in the Andes. Free Roman dogs, feral dogs, not native causing lots and lots of issues and problems. And there are a lot of cultural differences based on what societies were in and how we view things. And so some countries choose a lassa fair approach and won't touch it, and other countries will be pretty aggressive and say, let's give some of these native species a chance because they didn't evolve with dogs of coursing predator, uh of coursing feral predator. So so, lots of issues out there in terms of other kinds of challenges that are biological challenges that still fall back in the conservation realm. But would you say that we have we have better tools at our disposal now to aid in these conservation efforts. Is it more about public will or or governmental will? I think when we consider, like the three major challenges in the realm of natural resource, at least I look at three. Climate change, of course is a huge one. A second one I will call biodiversity crisis, because that goes to land degradation, it goes to removing chunks of the planet, it goes to our plastic issues. But so I look at climate change is one, I look at bio diversity, and then I look at will say, one health, one world, one health with disease. We think about COVID, we think about ebola, We think about these other challenges that emanate from wild species or could from wild species. But it's how we're treating the planet. And so your question is do we have new tools? We certainly have much greater recognition of of the issues. And then, of course, as we all know as citizens of the planet, the challenges are how are we going to solve these? And you know, where are we making progress? And we are making progress and in certain places, so where we're making some progress is stunning. And I wouldn't have thought of this about twenty years ago. But we're rewild. In Europe. We've got brown bears coming back into places. We've got links that are colonizing and being put back into places. We've got wolves that are into Germany. We've got an area the size of California that maybe has a couple of packs of wolves. I'm not sure Italy has over thirty five hundred wolves with its sixty million people. UM, so we can look into Europe. In this country, blackfooted ferrets were extinct in the wild. We've now got blackfooted ferrets in a number of Western states and as well as in Canada, as well as in Mexico. Contours were extinct in the wild. We've now got condoors in northern California and southern California. We've got condoors in Mexico, contours in Utah, condors in Arizona. UM, we've got although wolves are certainly polarized. If you go back to the nineteen seventies, the only wolves that we had were in the northern Northern Woods. Now we've got wolves in many of the Western states. Grizzly bears are expanding in Wyoming, expanding in Montana, expanding in Idaho, in Washington, and so you know, we can we can go with birds, we can, you know, pick a wide array of different species, and we're looking at lots of successes and that's because the people demand it. And that's one of the nice things that we see. And for much of this it's not even a partisan issue. We've seen successes because irrespective of political standing, people want bio diversity, they want healthy ecosystems, they want wildlife. Now you're a There are several books that have come out over the years, the most recent of which is Extreme Conservation, Life at the Edges of the World. Can you tell us a little bit about this book? Sure? Um, So Extreme Conservation hits extreme environments and the species that lived there, which must subsist and so they have to have special adaptations. So this book works through thirty three different expeditions that I did to different parts of the world, and so not just one or two, but also working with local people, learning from local people, listening to local people. And so, for instance, we once worked with this convicted felon who is a rhino poacher and his sentence was three years on a conservation project, and so we learned from him and subsequently we brought him to the US to learn from US, and he exported and he's now back in Namibia and he's leading an NGO non government organization. We worked with a fellow named Freddie Goodhope Jr. He had a lot of fun with me. He would say, Joel, my ancestors and I have been here for ten thousand years. You're a newcomer, but we'll keep you warm and make sure or you're safe up here in the Arctic. And so I weave through dealing with the UH the people who I've learned from and how they have perceived in their injustices that have come their way and their successes, but then also the challenges that we've faced as conservation biologists in the magnificent work that's being done in other places. I spent some time on a Russian island called Wrangel Island, where I was arrested by Russian security forces. But the Russian scientists I worked with didn't want me arrested. They wanted to work with me in the field. We had US government and Russian money to look at science, to look at climate change and how to do conservation. And so just like in this country and elsewhere, people are people in my book tries to deal through the eyes of animals, but then through some of the learning that I've done and the challenges of what it takes to have cold feet on the ground working in some of these places that can be quite brew at all excellent. So Joe, for our our listeners out there, if they want to follow you, if they want to learn more about you and your work, where can they go online? They could go to my website And so it's just all the same, um lowercase Joel Burger Conservation dot com. No spaces Joel Burger Conservation dot com. No spaces and actually no spaces just means no spaces. All right. Well, I greatly appreciate you taking time out of your day to chat with me here today. This is this is all fascinating, uh and I know our listeners will greatly enjoy this. Rob Thanks and stuff to blow your mind. What a great show you have. Thank you. Thanks again to Dr Joel Burger for taking time out of his day to chat with us again. The study is Species Conflict at Earth's Edges, Contests, climate and coveted resources. The book is Extreme Conservation, Life at the Edges of the World. And you and check out his website at Joel Burger Conservation dot com. That's j O E L B E R G E R Conservation dot com. That's it for this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. Just a reminder that our core episodes published on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Monday's we do listener Mail, on Wednesday's we do a short form artifact or monster fact episode, and on Friday's we do Weird How Cinema. That's our time to set aside most serious concerns and just talk about a weird film. Obviously, we'd love to hear from everyone out there about this episode, past episodes, or future episodes. Uh so feel free to get in touch with us. Thanks as always to Seth Nicholas Johnson for producing the show, and if you do want to reach out, you can email us at contact and Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio because at the heart Rate, U app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows