Land Between Two Rivers; 310; The Seekers

Funding for the following program is provided by the Kenny Lindstrom Foundation a charitable trust Mason City Iowa and by friends of I Will public television. Oh. You mean you're. You're. You're. You're. Young Minds love to pose the question. Why. It's not always a ploy to irritate adults it is often genuine curiosity. It wasn't until it was wind blown it wasn't. Flying down there. This being carried by water. It was blown. Onto the.

Bus because glass is wind blowing dirt. Well I was left over from the from the from what they were doing waters. Along in the winter when the glaciers froze again and there was not a flood waters. The same that way when they're you know let's go get you. Yeah there is a lot of dirt left not you know if you have some dirty rider and you dump it in your driveway hoping you know there will be some dirt left in your

driveway right. Yeah right whatever. For most of us the time of innocent inquiry passes with the passing of youth. This is not the case with the seekers among us. They are eternally investigating forever searching for solutions to their many questions some of these inquisitive children grow up to be scientists. I have the distinction of having written the first description of copulation a certain species of California as well famous by about three people who read the paper. These crabs the same thing. They subjects that scientists choose to focus their inquiring minds on can seem obscure even irrelevant to everyday life. And quite often investigations do not generate practical results. They remain open ended and inconclusive. It is only the solvers of puzzles the

seekers that person here who make sense of the nonsense surrounding us. I just have to ask the question. If I were a crayfish. Well what I do or what I need to have to survive in a stream and survive in a pond. And that would exclude the other species but not me. There were several reasons why I could think that a stream crayfish adapted to living in flowing water completely oxygenated always present not drying up freezing solid with continuous flow bringing food. All these things make it a relatively happy environment for crayfish compared to the rather grim circumstances of the pond. So I could see where the stream species could be excluded from the pond. Vice versa seemed quite ridiculous. So what would you propose that they might have and. That the plan crayfish could handle history for a book to shoot at the

Little Sioux of three boards along. I put a couple of boards in front to front the writer and I covered the bottom with gravel and stuff and I would release a crayfish facing upstream in the front and I would watch it tumble down stream until it landed and held on. Now I measured that distance and that was tolerance of water flow. And I tried it at slow speeds at medium speeds at high speeds which I could change by the baffle arrangement in the front and it was like I just several thousand of these species. Not a darn bit of difference. The stream stream crayfish were no better holding on in the stream that about great fish were there so I have a remarkable pile of data showing nothing. That's what science is a lot of that sort of thing. Then I said maybe how about the substrate of not you know and so I made a huge tank in the laboratory. I mean tanks several meters long.

I made three parts mock bottom gravel bottom and Rocky rubble bottom and I had one of those flashes of inspiration that scientists are supposed to have and I seldom seldom get them right if you put in half and half. You know as though this were a real environment that they might suddenly forced to share a nature such as the upper Plaza Little's which is what started me on this and which I saw in nature. And so there I put him in and the next morning I put in twenty of each twenty stream crayfish were no rocks twenty five crayfish when I'm mad. So I stayed up and watched them. And the stream animal kicked on animals out of the rocky ground forcibly in violent fights and they ended up on the way to any crayfish would be an inferior environment for soft silk. And in other words a place to hide is paramount in the

psychology. I have four thousand four hundred ninety two tension. You see that that convinced that convinced me it was some years of work by then one summer just to this one summer I was doing the streams faces. I did thousand animals and got nowhere but except I did the negative data where the significance there's no difference. That's the truth which is what you want in the first place. If you try to disprove it you are the you're the district attorney and you are vigorous and if you're only the defense attorney you're trying to protect your client. And that doesn't lead to the truth. So if you can prove the district attorney Ron you have proved your point but you have proved your client right. That's a better way of putting sense of I think the way we work. It's called disproving

the null hypothesis. What starts out as childish curiosity leads the seekers among us to inescapable conclusions conclusions which add to the storehouse of knowledge collected by humans. It is not the seeker's task nor in most cases is it the seekers desire to determine what value these answered questions have for human beings. The quest to solve the riddle to answer the question why is enough for them. One of the questions as to why this where one developer that silky. With that

sticky silk is the question of. Why why this why the stickiness. Why don't you just civility in-circuit the web get tangled a bit. And. Capture. Insect story devolving. To try to. Avoid. The spider predator. So one of the most beautiful hooks of incense the butterflies. Started evolving those nice little scales on their wings. Probably as a defense against insect webs. So when they fly into the swab they could kind of tumble out of it. The scales would get caught but they could break free at all scales would break loose and they could kind of tumble out of the web and fly free. They may lose a few scales but. They're perfectly intact and the able to. Go around living. So spiders have made things sticky or. Or they made things wrong or we can find out in. Tropical areas like southern Florida and all around the

world. The real. Programs which have developed what we call rider phenomena. They. Have a huge rider with this sticky spiral going through it. All the way down maybe 20 feet in some cases for the furball of business. And these are often at dump openings between trees so. That the butterfly or MAF is flying. Along and it decides to dart into the forest. They'll go through one of these openings but the spiderweb will be there. In the smog can hit the web. And it starts tumbling out trying to get free losing its. Scales all along the way. And pretty soon it just keeps tumbling down this reptile as the scales are used up and then it gets down to this. World. The last part you are blab. The spider sitting there waiting for nails that. Has a great meal. So we see in nature this constant back and forth kind of pattern. The spiders will develop something. The insects will try to find a way around. The spiders or 12 new patterns to try to make sure they can capture some incidents.

Sometimes the marriage of riddles and puzzle solvers gets a helping hand from the outside world monkshood may not have been a primary concern of Paul Watson and Margaret Coogan Roeser. But when the plant was put on the federal List of Threatened Species and a study was ordered they unleashed their natural curiosity hoping to waylay crucial questions that might answer vital concerns about the health of this plant. Even though we've been working our monkshood probably collectively you and I for what six years now I guess we still don't know everything there is to know about it then.

As a the community type though is rare and very rare it deserves our utmost protection it's probably found nowhere else in the world except for here in Iowa and a few places in Minnesota certainly expressed as it is here. That's right. Now the folk wisdom was me if you read the recovery plan for instance the folk wisdom or what everybody always said is that monkshood needs cold temperatures has to have its feet in the cold. If you read it over and over and over again that's what you read. But when we grew it in the laboratory it liked warm temperatures better it grew more optimally in when the air temperature in the soil temperature were about the same and. I mean I'm sort of baffled to really say exactly what it is. My observations indicate that it's got to be somewhere where it can remain moist even when it's in direct sunlight. And these are also the

places it it occurs had to have been there 18000 years ago when the plant was here so that the plant could colonize and then as the glaciers receded the plant maintained a foothold there were probably other places it was wiped out if we assume that it was widespread back then. So still that open This is probably in part created by the geology with the shallow soils the woody species not being able to maintain a good footing in the substrate which shifts and. And then sunlight seemingly necessary to help promote increased flowering. But interestingly enough the monkshood doesn't have to occur on one of these cold slopes. Yes it can. It can occur on some of them that are considerably less.

Warmer substrate than those that we would usually classify or define as preps be real Jeffrey. Sometimes I think rather than monkshood requiring cold temperatures monks to tolerate school temperatures well whereas others competing or potentially competing species don't tolerate it as well. And so maybe monkshood will find a spot that's fair and ready for its seeds based on the fact that maybe there aren't well here I mean if you just look along the slope even though we've stepped on some of that that here the vegetation is really high here there's a lot of competing stuff to grasses and there are some dandelions and Yarrow and all kinds of other things. But when you look to see where the monkshood are really doing well what's next to these vents where where there aren't many other plants just Moss and that may be its real claim to fame and can't tolerate competition at least as a small individual and if you can find a nice bare spot

on colonised by something else they can can get its roots down can get some sunlight so that it can make some carbohydrates. Starman it's tuber and then mature into a larger individual. But I I wish I could say quietly her tongue controlled laboratory experiments allow scientists to limit variables but sometimes limiting selection hinders resolution of the puzzle. The complex interaction of monkshood with multiple environmental factors might have a bearing on its rarity. This is why scientists being truth seekers must take to the field with their questions. The real test of answers found is in the soil from which they originated. Or you all are digging in here against what is apparently about a ten thousand year old beaver dam. So one thing I would expect coming out of

these settlements here would be in terms of fossil formed the presence of fragments of beetles that are associated Beaver. We never find a hobby at all complete with legs but we might find a couple of the wing covers or the head in the thorax attached together. It helps when we can do that otherwise where we're left to the job of trying to take all these pieces. The effect is much like taking a modern Beale stepping on it crushing it. Mixing it with with a frank with fragments from thousands of other beetles and then taking these as pieces of pull of the puzzle and trying to put it back together again. At least these pieces can represent in terms of beetles any of about 100000 species of beetles in North America. So it's there's quite a bit of detective work involved. Thank you. Oh yeah that's right there is a good one. For. This movie I want to run you down in a bar clear earlier. Yes.

Canceling flights there for an hour to clear. Your. Ears. True. Thank you. For. All you got I'm excited now. Oh I'm there actually might be something worthwhile on this site and remember. That Craig's family Dick Baker I benison myself and the rest of the crew here are trying to do is we're trying to reconstruct through as many ways as possible. The vegetation on the buyout of history I wyl over the past twenty thirty thousand years and this is just one of a series of spectacular sights that are present throughout this portion of the state. One of the things that we definitely know from these insect studies in Roberts Creek so far is that the water quality in this creek over the past 10000 years far exceeds that that you can find there today. I don't. Want to be the dominant be you know I've been

finding so far in the sediments arm is it represent or is it are from the family Almaty which are general indicators of very high water quality conditions trout stream type of conditions. And if you look at this stream today terms of the overall appearance of what we're standing in here this is far from being a trout stream today. So a little bit about the influence of man here over the past hundred years. I guess the bottom line is that we'd like to find out as much as we can about how climates have changed over the last 15000 years. If we can understand that we have maybe a chance in figuring out the future changes in climate and we have a better understanding of present weather and climate changes. If we look at just the basic history comedic history of oil in the last 15000 years it's a stunning 15000 years ago we have ice advancing

into the state and then advancing this far south of the city of Des Moines. President vetoed a Moen vote for 14000 years ago and I'm 39 and. That's a pretty pretty substantial change in climate. And then that ice began to to receive as the clothes from the pillar began to warm. We have basically in an interglacial period and we are in fact beyond the warmest point of that in the glaciers were on the down swing side of that and if we look at long term climate records like I used to find in the deep ocean basins and so forth there have been a whole sequence of these upswings and downswings and the interglacials often last maybe only ten or fifteen thousand is well were 10000 years into this one and it looks as though we're headed at least towards a vastly cooler period even though it may not go directly into glaciation. That's going to change the whole

economy of the state the whole agricultural production you can't grow corn in one. What normally is a pine forest. We find just and that's what we're probably headed back to if it if these trends continue that we see beginning today. Science fiction or science fact the seekers among us are gathering answers which will help us to predict with greater accuracy the future of our planet. But it all begins for the seekers with a question nagging curiosity that yearns to sort out the wheat from the chaff among the variables. That is why more traditional techniques of research under controlled conditions that yield focused precise observations are the norm. However it's still necessary to intuit the proper questions on which to base the experiment in order to gather useful information.

I guess the underlying thing that tickles most scientists is that. You know there's got to be an explanation for everything. But the question is why and that's the gorgeous question not something that you're going to answer by saying hey that's the way they're made. I used to teach in my classes that the way things out there nature are the way people are at a cocktail party. If you're at a cocktail party and a hundred people there and there was a long table full of salads a long table full of meat and shrimp dip been all sorts of fancy things over in this corner of the big fireplace over here's an open window. What I'm suggesting is an environment in this room with all kinds of different variables in it different kinds of food different kinds of temperature. If you took a picture from a camera every minute and at the end of an hour showed what happened. It would be a movement of people in this room until there'd be a cluster of people by the shrimp dip a handful over here by the salads. Nobody by the open window

because it's too drafty. Nobody buy the fire because it's too hot. Some distance from the fire it's just right. Some distance between your open window and the fire let's say. So there would not be a random movement of people in there. And yet if you asked any one of them why are you standing right here made an exit. They would have the foggiest idea why they're out there. But they would be responding to environmental cues that they're getting in from them. Well you know I always lectured about this. And then I decided one time I had to try it. So I use nails I use nails from from a saloon near Jemison slewed nice big pond snails. I then said I must test to see if they will respond to the queue of meat of plants and of temperature with three factors of many many potential factors. I could make an arena and test these one in a time that is the classical experiment. One factor at a time. Only if you do it one factor time can you know which is the probability the most

important obviously you have to start with a control the control is a blank arena with no stimuli other than the light and the water. There was no bias in this arena. They went to this side to that side this side this side. The angle this half. And this half this half that wherever I tested one half was the same as the other there was no and errant bias in it. Then I put half of the tank with vegetation. Release the animals in the center and came back after an hour and recorded precisely where they were on the vegetation or in the half that had no vegetation. Then a beaker of boiling water in one corner made it many degrees hotter neck corner than the opposite corner. The monitors around the side monitored the temperature and then I could find where will they be with respect to a temperature gradient for

pieces of crayfish in the corners. Where will they go to those four pieces of crayfish selectively. And then finally. All three together ending up with the predominance in a cooler corner and that's predicted. We saw that when I was alone. The strong attraction to the meat and ignoring the plans at this point. The plants while it did a while they did end up on plants when there is meat. They ignore the plants and go to the meat. Therefore we have one factor which when they're all present is fairly meaningless. The vegetation. We have one factor which is very powerful the meat. We have another factor the temperature gradient which adds to the attraction of the meat. And so this is a synergism a combining of two factors to make one stronger stronger attraction and so they end up there in the combined attractiveness of the cool

corner and the meat. What we have accumulated here are twenty seven hundred facts in my experiments I map twenty seven hundred snails under these very experimental conditions. Each one of those facts is fairly trivial all together. They equal a conception of a theory. Most people mistake theory with guess and fact with truth. And that is the way it's used in ordinary language. The scientist takes a very different view for instance. Newton's theory of gravity as a momentous theory formulated years and years ago of course which states that two bodies attract each other. Now the fact the matter was as the story goes the apple fell that's trivial. But when everything falls. And when two planets are in each other's orbit and when

all of the planets are in orbit around the sun. Newton's theory of gravity applies to all of these. This makes the theory of gravity of monumental importance compared to the trivial fact that things drop on the earth. And I am positive that if you set up an arena like this for any animal I can think of if you took the appropriate stimuli in the environment down and low and put them together one of the time to see how they operate. Put them together to find the synergism so that you would find for any animal some sort of a definition of habitat selection. And that is why an animal or plant is where it is. This is a difference in the in the common use of the word theory as a mere guess. And the scientific use the word theory as something which is the powerful tool of science which allows predictions into other things than the immediate facts to rise to that. To that theory.

Today did we go down the street planner Mrs. Gary. You've been spreading plants growing and testing everything and. They would finally get to put it into practice is. That all your words. Into action. Curiosity killed the cat. Satisfaction brought him back. This childish taunt. May have greater meaning than we imagine. The seekers among us the elect delegated to answer the question why. Are like those cats. The challenges in our future which will require relentless curiosity and unflagging

perseverance to solve. Other problems. Cats encounter. Without curiosity. Without seekers to ask the question. Why. Our storehouse of knowledge will not contain the answers we will need. To continue our prosperous journey into the future. Her. Funding for the preceding program was provided by the Friends of I Will public television and

by the Kenney Lundstrom Foundation a charitable trust Mason City Iowa.