The Science Pawdcast

Season 6 Episode 2: Tardigrades, Noses and Baby Bears with Danielle Rivet

• Jason Zackowski • Season 6 • Episode 2

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This episode takes you through a whirlwind of fascinating science and heartwarming tales, starting with the remarkable tardigrades and their ability to slip into suspended animation to survive harsh conditions.

Discover the molecular triggers that arm these micro-animals for survival, and how understanding their cryptobiosis could revolutionize future science.

Switching to our furry friends, we also unravel a UK study's findings on the intriguing link between the length of a dog's face and its lifespan.

The heart of this episode lies in the untamed wild, where Danielle Rivet joins us to share his expertise on polar bear behavior amidst an ever-changing environment. Feel the chill of the Arctic as you learn about the innovative use of trail cameras to study polar bears, revealing not only their behavior but also the unexpected biodiversity thriving in the Arctic.

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Speaker 2:

Hello science enthusiasts. My name is Jason Zekowski. I'm a high school chemistry teacher and a science communicator, but I'm also the dog dad of Bunsen and Beaker, the science dogs on social media. If you love science and you love pets, you've come to the right place. Put on your lab coat, put on your safety glasses and hold onto your tail. This is the Science Podcast. Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Science Podcast. We hope you're happy and healthy out there. It's episode two of our new season and if you're a long time listener or you found us for the first time and you like what you hear, we'd love for you to review us. Wherever you're listening to podcasts, apple Podcasts, good Pots, wherever Give us a review and tell a couple more people to do the same. Alright, that's on the show.

Speaker 2:

This week. In science news, we're going to be looking at tardigrades Yup, the little water bears. They may have figured out why they're so tough, which is Nido Komplito. And in pet science, we are going to be looking at a study that came out of the United Kingdom that looked at the length of a dog's face and how long it lives, and then we all want dogs to live as long as possible. This study is kind of interesting and what it found. Our guest and ask an expert is Daniel Rivet, who studies polar bears. Yeah, you heard that right, polar bears. Okay, the bad joke why is a polar bear such a cheap pet? Well, it lives on ice. I know that's a pretty polarizing joke. On with the show, because there's no time like science time. This weekend Science news, let's break down an interesting new study that was released about tardigrades.

Speaker 2:

What the heck are tardigrades? Well, tardigrades are also known as water bears or moss piglets. They're tiny, they're microscopic, they have eight legs and they're kind of cute. And despite how small they are and how tiny they are, they possess extreme resilience. They're capable of surviving bananas level environmental conditions such as wicked high radiation, freezing temperatures and even the vacuum of outer space. Biologists have figured out why they're so resilient. It's a process called crypto biosis and that's where they enter this state of suspended animation known as ton. That's T U N, and in this state they can desiccate. That means they can dry out, and that's in the state they're. The harsh temperatures don't bother them, and all of the stressors which would straight up murder us. They can ride it out until such time that they basically come back to life.

Speaker 2:

Now Tema chemists found a molecular sensor and this comes from Marshall University. This molecular sensor is responsible for triggering the ton state in tardigrades. Now that molecular sensor is a chemical change, specifically the oxidation of the amino acid, cysteine. Oxidation in chemistry is a loss of electrons. I'm actually going to be teaching this to my high level chemistry kids pretty quick here. It's used in biology too. But Leo the lion is a way to remember oxidation and reductions of Leo. Loss of electrons is oxidation. Anyways signal to send the tardigrades into dormancy and it's a bit of a mystery how they come out of this dormancy. Like, when tardigrades do come out of the ton, they have extremely high metabolisms. There might be a really hungry. They could be actively reversing that cysteine oxidation, repairing the damage that was caused. But it doesn't explain how you can just straight up, stop being alive, die, come back to life with a roaring appetite.

Speaker 2:

To go a little deeper, we've got to get into the chemistry and the team in the study use something called an EPR spectrometer. Without getting too technical, this EPR spectrometer studies Adam and molecules that have unpaired electrons. It was using this instrument that the team of researchers saw that tardigrades, when entering the ton state, had crazy high levels of super oxides. What super oxides are, are there? They're basically oxygen that has an extra electron added and leaves one of their electrons unpaired, very reactive, ready to react with other atoms and form stuff. This type of reactive oxygen is a free radical and it is known to damage a whole host of other things like parts of the cell and proteins. Some critters do use super oxides to send signals, so was it the signal to get it to go into ton? Was the buildup of super oxide what caused the low guys to go to sleep?

Speaker 2:

So the idea was well, let's start stressing out the tardigrades and see what happens. They actually tested various concentrations of hydrogen peroxide, which in low concentrations is not that bad, but it's a pretty good oxidizing chemical itself. And when all the little tardigrades were subjected to hydrogen peroxide they went into ton. They're like Nope, not going to get me, not today. And they just became invisible. They just became invincible. And when the team took away the hydrogen peroxide, the bears woke up out of their sleep, ready to do little bear things. So the link to stuff being oxidized, causing the tardigrades to go into the slumber, that was proven with this hydrogen peroxide.

Speaker 2:

So the team also then focused in on cysteine and blocked the mechanism for its oxidation, and what they found was really interesting. It prevented the tardigrades from going into ton when triggered by things like wicked high salt and sugar. It also really hurt their ability to survive freezing. In the end it's a little tiny piece to a puzzle for a really interesting organism that has the ability to survive things that we wouldn't even be able to think of. We study the animals on earth, the critters that are big and small, because it teaches us a little bit more about ourselves this oxidation pathway to bring on the ton within tardigrades. Of course we can't do that to ourselves, but the idea is that the more we learn about how other organisms deal with, you know, reanimation or the different chemical signals that can bring on really complex biochemical reactions, of course that could potentially be applied to some biotech in the future.

Speaker 2:

When I teach the space unit, my students are always so interested in like space travel, right, like getting from our planet to another planet. I have to tell them that space is really big and we can't move that quickly and it would take hundreds of years. Just like the, just like the movie passengers with Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence and they're like well, we could just go and suspend an animation like what they do, and I'm like we don't have technology for that. There's no way you can just make a person not age and go to sleep for 100 years and wake them up again. I then I bring up that the tardigrades can desiccate themselves and then come back to life. This is really interesting. A little more information to tell my students when this comes up, but the idea is that maybe in the future we could apply some of that tardigrade resiliency to the human race or maybe the crops and the food we eat. That's science news for this week.

Speaker 2:

This week in pet science we are going to be looking at an aging study with dogs. It's a touchy subject because I keep mentioning this over and over again, but our accounts are quite large and and we do see when dogs die and not every dog dies early Some dogs do do die of old age. Cancers and other things might cause your dog's lifespan to be a bit shorter. Every breed has a general relative age. When we got Bunsen, people were like you know, burners don't live that long. I didn't even know that. That was not in the research that I got, they can die quite early. There are different different types of cancers within their line. Very, very sadly, knock on wood, bunsen's quite healthy. So Bunsen's turning seven this year. So he's getting up there in age and beakers still are young, little whippersnapper at three, but really in dog years she's more middle aged.

Speaker 2:

So this study comes from Dogs Trust. It's data scientist, kirsten McGilligan, and colleagues collected and analyzed a whole bunch of United Kingdom sources, including those within breed registries, veterinary records, records, and all of the data from all of these sources was just shy of 600,000. Now, most of this was measurable survey data. It wasn't like how is your dog feeling? Does your dog bark at the moon. It was how long did your dog live and what breed of dog was it and also what shape was its face.

Speaker 2:

And there were some really interesting results from the study and they found a linkage between, obviously, dog breed but also size of nose and canine lifespan. On average worldwide dogs live between 10 to 14 years and there's a variation within that Right. Sadly, some dogs can dive quite early from different disabilities or disorders, diseases, and then you have dogs that live into somehow their thirties, which we saw last year with the oldest dog on earth. I think it was in its thirties, which is bananas to me. So some interesting takeaways from the study.

Speaker 2:

Among purebred dogs, the small breeds with long noses lived the longest at 13.3 years. There was one dog that did the best one dog breed and that was the miniature dashhound, a small dog, long nose. It lived around 14 years. Among the smaller dogs with a flat face, the bulldog was at the other end of the spectrum. They were living less than 10 on average in the study. Popular breeds like border collies and Labrador retrievers, which are in the middle to large you know some Labrador retrievers are large dogs. They don't match that little long nose, small breed profile but they still live pretty good life, averaging around 13 years In the study. The little dogs with the long noses lived the longest. But there were some, really there were some really weird breeds that outperformed the stereotype, the Tibetan Mastiff, for example, which is not a very common dog In fact, and all the guests and all that we've had on the Science Podcast only one guest has had had stories about Tibet's Tibetan Mastiffs. They lived to around 13 years. So even with their flat face and their large body size large body size they're doing pretty good for the average lifespan of a dog between 10 to 14 years.

Speaker 2:

A couple of caveats. This data is only from the United Kingdom, so it's looking at dogs within the United Kingdom, nowhere else. Could there be different data at other places. Sure right, there could be different data in Spain, there could be different data in Australia or Brazil or even Canada, but it is almost 600,000 dogs, which is a enormous sample size. One thing to think about is if you are choosing a purebred dog and you're looking at a one of those flat face dogs, knowing ahead of time that they have less of a lifespan if that's you know, that seems to be the conclusion of this study, but also other studies and general health of those brachycephalic dogs I guess you just become more educated in the choice that you're making to welcome a little pet into your family. Now, bunsen's a big guy and he's got a long face, so hopefully that keeps him kicking for a while. What about beaker? She's kind of little with a long face. Anyways, what do you think? Do you have some anecdotes of your own? What happened to your own dogs? If you're comfortable, we'd love to know.

Speaker 2:

That's Pet Science for this week. Hello everybody, here's some ways you can keep the science podcast free. Number one in our show notes sign up to be a member of our Paw Pack Plus community. It's an amazing community of folks who love pets and folks who love science. We have tons of bonus Bunsen and beaker content there and we have live streams every Sunday with our community. It's tons of fun. Also, think about checking out our merch store. We've got the Bunsen stuffy, the beaker stuffy and now the ginger stuffy. That's right, ginger, the science cat, has a little replica. It's adorable. It's so soft, with the giant fluffy tail, safety glasses and a lab coat. And number three if you're listening to the podcast on any place that rates podcasts, give us a great rating and tell your family and friends to listen to. Okay, on with the show. Back to the interviews. It's time for Ask an Expert on the Science Podcast, and I have Danielle Rivet with me today. Phd candidate Danielle, how are you doing?

Speaker 3:

I'm doing really well today.

Speaker 2:

How are you? I'm good. I'm so excited to talk to you. You're studying something that is pretty unique for the average person to hear. But first, where are you in the world? Where are you calling into the show from?

Speaker 3:

I am currently located in Saskatoon, saskatchewan, in Canada.

Speaker 2:

You're there for your education or do you live there? Have you been around the world?

Speaker 3:

I've kind of been a little bit all over the place, but yep, I do currently live here. I'm attending the University of Saskatchewan. So I am here for my PhD. But I am originally from the States I was born in and grew up in Virginia and then I moved to New York for my undergraduate college experience and then moved to Washington State for my master's and now I'm here in Canada for my PhD. So I've kind of been all over the place and I even did a semester abroad, in Australia.

Speaker 2:

So oh cool, so you're all in on science. You're right at the tail end, right before your PhD defense. Congratulations, by the way, you mentioned that before we started, thank you. Yeah, what got you into science? Were you a science kid? You know mix and potions and gathering bugs.

Speaker 3:

I've always been really, really interested in animals and nature ever since I was a little kid. I remember Jurassic Park coming out in 1993 kind of being like a really big, big deal. I was super into dinosaurs. I wanted to be a dinosaur when I was a kid. So seeing seeing people like you know, dr Ellie Sattler in that movie, laura Dern, or people like Dana Scully and the X-Files, I think that was kind of like a really big driver for me to get into science as a kid. But I've always been into like hiking and camping and just spending time outdoors was one of my favorite things.

Speaker 3:

So I definitely was one of those kids that would go out and, you know, just play in the dirt and bugs weren't scary and whatever animals I saw. That was always something that was really, really exciting for me. So, yeah, like I guess I started when I was young. I wanted to be a marine biologist and a dolphin trainer.

Speaker 3:

Like as many of us actually start out that way, I think yeah yeah, and then, as I, kind of grew up and gone into high school I was thinking more about being a veterinarian maybe, and then by the time I started looking at colleges for undergrad I had decided that doing that probably wasn't something that was was gonna work for me. I get very attached to animals too quickly and I just didn't want to have to deal with kind of the negatives of being a vet, I guess. But I went to SUNY Oswego in New York for my undergrad degree and I was lucky enough to do an honors thesis there looking at River Otter reintroduction in New York State, and SUNY Oswego has a really really nice field station there it's the Rice Creek field station. So that's where I got to do all of my research and I think that's kind of how I knew I'd hit my stride in terms of what I wanted to be doing in the future was just being outside doing field research, you know, working with animals and nature and that kind of thing. So I had such a good time on that project that I decided that field work and wildlife ecology were kind of the things that I wanted to focus on.

Speaker 3:

So when I started looking for grad schools, I was trying to find a lab that was really involved with research on mammals. Mammals are my big interest, specifically large carnivores. I think a lot of us are really interested in large carnivores, predator prey interactions and human wildlife conflict. Those are kind of the things that I'm most interested in and I stumbled upon an opening in a lab at Washington State University, which is an Eastern Washington working with grizzly bears that they have right there on campus. So I went there for my interview and just immediately fell in love with the bears there. At WSU I spent three years for my master's research looking at different types of dietary fat so saturated fats and polyunsaturated fats, and how those affect grizzly bear heart function and their hibernation patterns. So I basically got to feed the bears there very specific diets, kind of like a healthy Mediterranean, like salmon and kind of diet, and then like the Western fast food, super unhealthy kind of diet.

Speaker 2:

Okay, yeah, yeah, yep. What food is like McDonald burgers?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so it was like raw hamburger and literal chunks of beef fat, huge blocks of cheddar cheese, and then all of our bears had, like we had to calculate out their diets just to make sure that they were getting the appropriate nutrition right. So they, all of the bears, were on a kibble, essentially, and so, for the Western diet, I just slathered their kibble in high fructose corn syrup.

Speaker 2:

I bet you they loved that.

Speaker 3:

Oh, they did. They ate it right up. They certainly didn't care. But the main, the main part that I found was that, other than you know, slightly higher blood pressure and a few minor differences in their echocardiograms, bears are just built to be fat. They don't care what type of food it is that they eat. They don't really get these negative health effects like people do from eating bad food. They just get fat, which helps them survive hibernation.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so, it was just really a fascinating process to kind of work through and more of a clinical type study. Obviously bears in the wild don't have access to hamburger and high fructose corn syrup and that kind of stuff, but it was just to kind of look and see, like how bears do what they do and why it's not bad for them.

Speaker 2:

So when you went, you went for an interview and you noticed, did you know? There were bears on campus like can you, am I getting? That right like they there's like where do you think?

Speaker 3:

it's not a zoo.

Speaker 2:

Like.

Speaker 3:

WSU has. They have a lot of animals on campus so they they have. It's a research facility that started, I don't know, probably 30 years or so ago with Dr Charlie Robbins and they brought bears in. Typically it bears that were like problem bears that had been removed from the environment from places like Yellowstone or Glacier. That kind of like fishing game didn't want to have to deal with in terms of putting animals down right. So these bears are bears that were involved in conflict essentially. So it's not a zoo, it's a research facility.

Speaker 3:

But WSU has bears. They've got or at least when I was there they had bighorn sheep. They have a deer facility as well that's got white tails and mule deer and they have. They're very, very involved in pygmy rabbit research, so they have pygmy rabbits on campus as well and so all of those animals are used for research. Specifically you can go and like there's a parking lot there at the Bear Center and you can go sit in the parking lot and watch them. But it's not a zoo, so like they don't let people from the public in very often, but if Charlie's there like he'll come out and talk to people and tell them about the bears and the research that current students are working on and things like that.

Speaker 2:

When you feed how much. The people are gonna wonder how much interaction you had with the grizzly bears. I've lived in Alberta, canada, my entire life. We're very close to the Rockies. Grizzly bears are not super calm animals in a rough time, right, they're dangerous animals. So folks are just gonna wonder, like, what's the interaction with the animals? Were they, were they tame? Were they you know, did you? Yeah, it's you know, like if you're frolicking in with the bears, are you feeding them some? You know, daniel.

Speaker 3:

Right, yeah, so you do get some of those experiences, like I did. I did get to help bottle raise some cubs.

Speaker 4:

Oh, my god what yes?

Speaker 2:

Were they the cutest things in the world? They are adorable.

Speaker 3:

So what we have to do in those situations is we we actually take the cubs when they're about 40 days old from mom, so like right before their eyes open, and so that way it is us that they associate with, rather than their mom in terms of, you know, raising them, because we then are able to use bears that are raised by people for very specific types of research. Right, a lot of the bears that I was working with I was able to get like these clinical results, like we could do blood draws and echocardiograms and things like that on bears that were not anesthetized, so they were wide awake while we were working with them.

Speaker 2:

You're like, come on over here, bear, and the bear's like we would open a door essentially, and they would walk into a squeeze crate and they have been trained so.

Speaker 3:

Once they get into this crate, they've been trained to lie down on their side and stick a paw out through the bars, essentially.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, exactly so. Then you can take a, you can take a blood sample, you can give them injections, you can do all of that kind of stuff without the bear being asleep, because the drugs that you use to knock a bear out, to usually take those types of samples, have effects on their breathing rate and their heart rate, and when you're looking at things that involve heart function, you don't want to have to account for all the things that the drugs are doing. Yeah, so we train those bears specifically to do these types of behaviors to allow us to collect samples without having to anesthetize the bears. So, all of that being said, it's still incredibly, incredibly important to remember that these bears are not tame, they're not domesticated in any way. They're still very much wild animals and they have the same instincts as bears.

Speaker 3:

You know, in Yellowstone and Glacier and Alaska and things like that. Several of the bears actually came from those areas and have already been involved in conflict with people. So you know, one of our bears we got because she sat on somebody's tent, and another bear actually bit somebody. So they were just removed from that ecosystem and, instead of being put down, they were brought to the facility so that we could use them for research purposes and to help educate people on how bears work essentially.

Speaker 2:

So back to the baby bears. So you bottle raised them? Did they like? Did they start to know who you were? Because? Or were there so many different humans in their life? That was just like a person with a bottle.

Speaker 3:

Right, so there are only specific people who like there. There were a couple people who were designated as the ones who actually got to have the the bears in their house, because when they're that young they require bottle feeding every couple hours. So some people actually about to eat them. Yeah, yeah, because there wasn't. Like we can't make somebody stay on campus 24 hours a day, right, right, okay, and they wanted to limit. You know, you don't want 15 different people raising the bears and you know, so we're trying to limit who they have contact with essentially.

Speaker 3:

So there were a few people that got to take them home and raise them until they were old enough to stay at the facility on campus by themselves and not have to constantly be bottle-fed, right. So I think they definitely did get to know us because there was a there's a cohort of graduate students that were there and then Dr Robbins was always there and we had a vet that was always on staff. So, like the people who operate the research facility and then the graduate student cohort were the ones who got to do like the bottle feeding and the interactions with the cubs. So they definitely got to know us. Like, at the time my husband had a diesel Jeep and so when I would pull into the parking lot in the morning, I think some of the bears actually would recognize what certain people's vehicles sounded like, because they were always there and waiting. Like they knew who you were just by the sound of your car coming into the parking lot. So, yeah, definitely more bonds with them.

Speaker 2:

They're not dumb creatures, oh no they're very smart.

Speaker 3:

They're very smart.

Speaker 2:

That is, I could talk to you for like an hour about the baby bears. Were they dangerous? Even though, as cubs Like I've read that before that they like their babies, but they still have like crazy sharp claws they still have teeth and claws, just like every other bear.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, absolutely, and some of them, you know, would get jealous of the others. I actually had one of them. So when you bottle raise bears, milk comes out of the bottle a lot faster than it comes out of mom. Right, so they would finish their bottles really, really quickly. And then what they do is they actually suck on their paws, just like human babies suck on their thumbs or have pacifiers right.

Speaker 3:

So they would. They would suck on their paws and lick their paws and they would like to lean up against us as they were doing that, and they would get jealous if another cub was leaning up against the person that they had designated as that. That's their person for the feeding. So I actually had one cub try to start something with another one that they were jealous of and I just got caught in the middle and she bit my arm. It was a total accident. I was just in the way. She didn't break the skin, but I was bruised for probably two weeks afterwards. So they're still still dangerous, still have sharp teeth, sharp claws. You still need to be very careful.

Speaker 2:

Danielle, were you allowed to take a million photos and videos of this?

Speaker 3:

Oh, yeah, I have folders and folders of videos. Oh my goodness. Yeah, yeah, they were adorable.

Speaker 2:

Okay, one do you. You send me some.

Speaker 3:

Absolutely, I can send you some.

Speaker 2:

Okay, thank you, wow, alright. So if everybody's listening to this and you're like, this is this is a wild story, um, you're now moved. You've moved on to a different type of bear. Yes, what bear is that?

Speaker 3:

I currently work with polar bears.

Speaker 2:

Okay, so going up the food chain from a big bear to the biggest bear.

Speaker 3:

Right, not just the biggest bear, but the biggest land carnivore on the planet.

Speaker 2:

Oh, my goodness, I organized a trip. This is just a little backstory. Most people know this Danielle, who listened to the show. I organized a trip two years ago Three years ago For my colleagues at high school science and we went to Churchill, manitoba, and we went up and saw the grizzly bears or sorry, the polar bears on the tundra buggies, and it was a fantastic experience. So polar bears are just like bananas level, cool and dangerous. Yeah, I have to ask you what are you studying about polar bears?

Speaker 3:

Okay, yeah, so, as you said, working on finishing up my PhD, and my entire PhD project is focused on looking at how changing sea ice and human presence are both responsible for influencing polar bear body condition and polar bear visitation to human infrastructure. So and then we're taking those two things and kind of looking at then what that means for the risk of human polar bear conflict in the Western Hudson Bay area.

Speaker 3:

So I think it's important to mention that all of our research on polar bears is collected by remote trail cameras, so we don't actually have to interact with or handle the bears.

Speaker 2:

Oh they didn't Everything that we do just comes from photographs. Because they would kill you.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, they can. They absolutely can, and you know there are research teams that do handle the bears, but they have a very specific protocol that they have to follow. Okay. And lots of safety procedures to make sure that bad things don't happen. Essentially, Okay.

Speaker 2:

So what have you found out so far?

Speaker 3:

Are you allowed to say yeah, so we've been looking at things like sea ice breakup and freeze updates and how much time bears are actually spending on shore when the ice is gone, because in Hudson Bay Western Hudson Bay the ice disappears basically for the duration of the summer and then doesn't reappear again until the fall. And, historically, polar bears that are in poor body conditions so skinny polar bears are the ones that are most likely to be involved in conflict with people, right, because you know, if they're hungry they're going to be far more likely to approach communities and infrastructure and even people while they're trying to find food. So we also were kind of interested in knowing whether our study sites were serving as attractants for polar bears in those locations and if it mattered, you know like how many people were there and for how long. So, in terms of what we've actually been finding out, it doesn't seem like our study sites, which are the Churchill Northern Study Center, which you're probably familiar with if that's where you went to watch polar bears, and there's three remote field camps in Wapis National Park.

Speaker 3:

So those are our study sites, those are the places where we have our cameras set up, and it turns out that either we don't have enough data, we don't have enough polar bear visitation information to say that these sites are acting as attractants or they're just not acting as attractants.

Speaker 3:

So we're not seeing more polar bears at these locations because of people being present than we do anywhere else, and we're not seeing skinnier bears showing up because of these places acting as attractants, like the bears that we see are in pretty average body condition or even sometimes in really good body condition. We do have a few bears show up that are pretty skinny and that is concerning because that could be, you know, a conflict risk, essentially. But we're kind of not seeing, I guess, what we thought we would, which is really useful information for people at the National Park and at the study center to have, because they need to know what types of activities in those areas are acceptable in terms of human presence and whether or not that's going to bring bears in, because the most important thing should be to keep both people and bears safe.

Speaker 3:

So if you have that kind of information, then you can kind of make better plans to mitigate risk of conflict, because you don't want polar bears and people getting into problems when you're bringing lots of people into a specific area. It's not fair to the people and it's not fair to the bears. So that's kind of where we're trying to go with the information that we've been getting is to help bring about knowledge of how those dynamics might be changing. For example, the skinniest bears in our observed population that we've seen on camera are typically females with really young cubs, which makes sense. She's been in the den all winter, comes out in the spring, hasn't had anything to eat or drink and she's been nursing cubs. So she's not going to be in great body shape and skinny is like.

Speaker 3:

The skinnier bears are the ones who are usually involved in conflict. But in the past we've seen that those bears are typically sub adult bears that don't really know how to hunt just yet, or they're just skinny adult males. So we might be seeing a shift later in this particular area where it's actually females with cubs that might be getting into more risky situations with people just because they're the ones that tend to be the skinniest in this particular population, so there could be like a shifting dynamic going on there, and I think that's something that conservation officers and managers really need to be aware of in terms of future plans for conflict mitigation.

Speaker 2:

So the idea, at least in that area, that it's like the skinny males it's turning out not to be the case that are coming close to those places.

Speaker 3:

Right. Right, because we're seeing a lot of the skinny females with families using those areas around the study center, maybe to stay away from big, scary male bears because there is the risk of infanticide. So when a big, hungry male might come in and kill her cubs, usually that's either done because the male is really, really hungry or he's doing it to bring her back into estrus so that he can breed her and produce his own cubs. So, like a lot of different animals will use these sorts of strategies. Where they stay away from males, that will do that. But frequently that puts them at greater risk for conflict with people, because where people are tends not to be the best, most suitable habitat right.

Speaker 2:

There's also probably less chance of running into a male bear if you're closer to people.

Speaker 3:

Right, and there's a trade-off there, right, so that females are saying humans are worth the risk, as long as I can protect my cubs from the big scary males that are using a different habitat, essentially.

Speaker 2:

Interesting. So you, oh, I have so many questions. You have trail cams for this right. Yes Is most, and they turn on when something walks by. That's the idea.

Speaker 3:

Right, yeah, so we have at minimum five cameras at each of our locations. So we have four study sites, five cameras at least at each of those, and the way that they work is, when an animal passes through a detection band in the camera, it triggers the camera to take three photographs, one right after the other, and then there's no delay period before the next detection can happen. So whenever something walks in front of the camera, as long as it's within the specified like the manufacturer's specifications of angle and distance from the camera, it should take a picture. So we have probably close to a million photographs that we have accumulated since 2011.

Speaker 2:

I was going to say, if a bear hangs around for a while, you might have a whole bunch of photos of that bear.

Speaker 3:

Oh yeah, and we get photos of everything that's out there on that landscape. So we get photos of huge herds of caribou moving through. We have red and Arctic foxes that are on the cameras, wolf packs We've seen. We even get like the little lemmings and the snow bunting birds on the cameras all the time.

Speaker 2:

I love those little birds.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so I mean anything that's out there on the landscape that's moving in front of the cameras. We usually see it, so just all the Arctic wildlife.

Speaker 2:

No Sasquatch, though.

Speaker 3:

No Sasquatch, not that I've seen.

Speaker 2:

Bad for those cryptozoologists that are like sorry, sorry folks, I might have to. I might have to talk to you through email about what, what brand of camera using, because we got a trail camera to take photos of our beaver. We have a beaver that moved into the creek beyond behind our farm.

Speaker 3:

Oh nice.

Speaker 2:

And we got. We got some videos and photos of the guys or the girl because they're the same size, male and female beavers. Yeah, it's, it's so exciting, but we don't have a million photos. I wish we had a million. I wish we had a million photos of our beaver. We'd be really good for our social media accounts.

Speaker 3:

But I mean honestly going through the photos. That is it's the best part of this project, because you get to see so much and it's it's like you're actually there looking at the landscape and and seeing all the cool animals and just everything that that area has to offer. It's fantastic.

Speaker 2:

Very cool. So you've been you've been in on polar bears for a while. Are there? Are there some things that people get wrong about polar bears that you, that you could maybe tell us about? Like some things people think they know but maybe they don't really know.

Speaker 3:

Sure, I think a lot of the information has is there's. There's always new stuff coming out, right, but I guess one of the things that I see people getting hung up on a lot is that they assume that all polar animals exist at both poles. So I think something that I would like to clarify, because this really annoys me when I see it in like winter and Christmas decor. But polar bears and penguins do not live in the same place. You will never see them existing together.

Speaker 3:

Polar bears live in the Arctic, which has its like. The word origins are Greek and the word Arctic actually means bear, and penguins live in the Antarctic, and so the Greek root for that word actually means without bears. So that's the easy way to remember that polar bears and penguins don't live together. They're on separate poles of the earth.

Speaker 2:

Ah, damn you Coca-Cola.

Speaker 3:

And it's a great marketing tactic, but it's just not biologically true.

Speaker 2:

OK, and as for mentioned polar bears, unlike the Coca-Cola, commercials are not generally ones you should get too close to.

Speaker 3:

Right, yeah, and also interesting I don't know if a lot of people know this, but polar bears are actually classified as marine mammals, much like whales, because they spend so much of their time in the water and on the sea ice, which isn't on land. So they're basically in or on the ocean for the great majority of their lives. Their scientific name actually means maritime bear. It's versus.

Speaker 3:

Maritimus. So it just means they're kind of built to be in and around the water. They can actually close their nostrils when they get into the water to swim and they're really good at diving. They can swim at depths up to about 15 to 20 feet deep and they can hold their breath for several minutes. So that's all of those things together kind of make them really good at what they do, which is hunting seals. They need to be able to do those things from the ice and in the water, so they're marine mammals.

Speaker 2:

I have a question about their range. Where can you find polar bears Like? Where in the world? Like you said, the Arctic right.

Speaker 4:

Right.

Speaker 2:

But where can you find? Where would that be in the world?

Speaker 3:

Right. So you can actually find polar bears in the subarctic as well, because Churchill itself is not actually above the Arctic circle, but you can find polar bears in the subarctic and arctic all throughout that entire range. So very, very northern Norway. So, like Svalbard, norway has polar bears. Greenland has polar bears, obviously Canada. So Churchill, that area, western Hudson Bay, all the way up through like Nineveh, up into those northern areas, there there are polar bears. In Alaska there are polar bears all across, like the northern portions of Russia.

Speaker 2:

So any of those areas Okay.

Speaker 3:

Yep.

Speaker 2:

So they're just hanging out up there. They've moved around when stuff froze over to kind of spread out right.

Speaker 3:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

That's the idea.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, there's actually. If you look, there are what we consider 19 subpopulations of polar bears and there's actually a map of the Arctic that shows where all of those delineations and lines and everything are. But I think the most important thing to remember is that when everything is frozen over and that ice is up there, those bears can go wherever they want because they just use that sea ice as their platform for traveling. So those subpopulation lines we use to kind of like keep us on track with which populations of bears we think we're talking about. But it's very easy for them to cross those lines and go into different places when they're when the sea ice is there.

Speaker 2:

So like a Canadian bear can accidentally like wind up in Norway and he was like what's going on?

Speaker 3:

Hey, they have been known to go very, very far from their original home ranges. But usually they do have some sort of site fidelity, so they'll usually come back to the same places year after year.

Speaker 2:

They're not like a weirdo bear that just goes off walking. It's got a.

Speaker 3:

Not usually, but there are the occasional few that do that.

Speaker 2:

That is cool. When you tell people what you study, danielle, are they just like real, did they just want to know more? Or they can't believe it. Like this is. I've talked to Marine biologists who study squid, right, and they're like okay, squid, you know squid, but like when? When I, when I stalked your profile and I found out you studied polar bears, or I think I saw a tweet of yours and I'm like oh my God, I've got to find out more about the scientist. Are people fascinated? Like do they want to know more?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, it's actually really funny. My husband always gets super upset with me because when he takes me to meet some of his coworkers and they're like, oh, what do you do? And I start telling them about it, he basically doesn't exist for the next hour because people have so many questions and are so interested and he's like I might as well just not be here. What is your husband?

Speaker 2:

Was your husband do, daniel, if you don't mind me asking.

Speaker 3:

He has a PhD in educational psychology, so he currently works with the university and helps students that are in academic distress.

Speaker 2:

Essentially, Well, that's an important job, yeah, but it's like, okay, I want to talk to the polar bear lady somewhere.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2:

Well, thanks for talking to us about your polar bear research and, of course, best of luck in your upcoming PhD defense. Who knows, by the time this comes out, you might be you might be a doctor, which would be very exciting.

Speaker 3:

Maybe. I hope so.

Speaker 2:

Yeah Well, please tag us when that happens and we'll definitely give you a big boost. On social media, we have some standard questions we ask our guests about on the science podcast, and one is for a pet story. Do you have a pet story you could share with us?

Speaker 3:

Sure, it's really hard to pick one. I have five dogs, a cat and a horse. Oh my goodness Wow.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so we kind of have our own little miniature zoo at our house. But I guess one of the more recent ones that kind of stands out for me is how I got my horse, because I've always been a horse girl at heart, I think ever since I was a little kid. I never had the time or money or opportunity to really be involved in that kind of stuff. When I was a kid I was really busy. I was doing other sports and my parents were just trying to get me to focus on other things like getting through school rather than, oh, we're going to be at the barn every other day for hours and hours. So I never really got the opportunity to do that. When I was a kid I went on a few of those kind of guided pony trail rides.

Speaker 3:

I guess, when I was really little and I collected Breyer's horses, the plastic Breyer's figurine horses, because that was about as close as I could get as a child?

Speaker 2:

Does he have a million? My Little Ponies.

Speaker 3:

Yep, yep, I loved that show when I was a kid too, so all of that kind of stuff. I have really been a horse girl ever since I was probably about four, five or six years old, but I didn't ever really get the opportunity to do much about it until I was an undergrad and I found our campus equestrian club and I started taking writing lessons and I went to a couple of the horse shows with people, which is an experience if you've never been to like just done the whole day horse show experience. Oh my gosh, it's insane.

Speaker 2:

You have to love horses for that.

Speaker 3:

Yes, you really do.

Speaker 2:

How you know.

Speaker 3:

Yep, and then, when I was getting my master's at Washington State, I found somebody else that I could take lessons from. So rather than just doing, you know, equestrian club as a, this is a semester experience. It was more like I was taking lessons for two years at that time. And then we moved to Canada for me to get my PhD, and it turns out that one of my husband's board gaming friends his wife has her own horses. So I started riding regularly with her, and the more I rode, the more I felt like I needed to get my own horse, because, you know, that's just something that's important to me. I want to be working with the same animal all the time and, you know, you really start to form a bond with that animal because there's an inherent amount of trust. That is necessary on both the horse's part and your part as a rider, because it's not the safest thing in the world.

Speaker 2:

No, it's crazy dangerous. It's crazy dangerous. When you look at the statistics, it's like one of the most dangerous things you can do as a yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 3:

And my husband was like, are you crazy? You need a horse. You have three horses over there that you can ride. And I'm like I think I need my own horse. So I started taking lessons again at a local barn here, riding the horse that I was intending to purchase at the time, but that kind of fell through Like the timing just wasn't right. And then within about a year or so, I found a listing for this gorgeous Apollusa Gelding. That was a trail horse up near PA National Park here in Saskatchewan and they were retiring him and they're like we just want to make sure he's going to go to a good home where he's going to have one person, where he's not going to have beginners on him every day, different person, right? And so the next thing I knew we were driving him home in the middle of a January Saskatchewan Blizzard to bring him from PA all the way back down to Saskatoon and I've finally gotten?

Speaker 2:

How far north is that? Like six?

Speaker 3:

It's about two and a half hours, maybe three hours. So yeah, like just kind of fell into it honestly, like I just found the listing for him on I think it was on Facebook at the time and we went up and we talked to the guy and rode the horse, you know, just to make sure that everything was fine, and then we loaded him up in the trailer and drove him home. So, 30 years in the making, I finally have my own horse now, and I've had him for several years.

Speaker 2:

What's his name? Daniel?

Speaker 3:

His name is Applejack, but I call him AJ and he is just. He's so amazing. He has kind of one of those like been there, done that trail horses. He is basically bomb proof. He doesn't spook at things, just very, very calm, super willing, very honest horse and I've learned so much from him. I'm so glad. I definitely think he's. He's probably my heart horse at this point. I know I've only had one, but he's just taught me so much about how to be a better writer, how to trust the process, I guess, because learning to do that for horseback riding is incredibly difficult If you've never had that experience before. You really have to understand that animal and trust that they also know what they're doing to a point.

Speaker 2:

What's AJ's coloring? Like Apollous has had the spotted butt.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, he's got like a white base and then he's got like a coppery brownish red for his spots. So he's more white in the back end with big spots, but his head and his chest and front area are mostly the coppery brown color. Ok, so like your stereotypical Apollousa, then yeah, he's a leopard, apollousa, so he's spotted throughout. He doesn't just have the blanket on the back.

Speaker 2:

Right, well, that's very cool. Horses are so neat. They're just. It's pretty amazing that we ride them. I keep thinking about that. You know, like what other animal do we ride beyond? Like horses and elephants, like, maybe like unwilling cows sometimes, like it's just pretty bananas.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, they're really cool creatures.

Speaker 2:

Does he have a favorite treat?

Speaker 3:

You know what He'll eat just about anything. He's not picky. So I have had him on a probiotic for the last year or so just to kind of like balance his gut a little bit better, and at the very beginning I could not get him to eat it. So I had to go buy this special. It's like a metabolic food. It was just something that was on sale and it's just stuff that you can like scoop up in your hand, and I mixed it with the probiotic and he loves it. I'm not even sure what's in it, I just call it horse crack because, like he goes crazy for it, absolutely loves it, doesn't even pay attention to the probiotic anymore, he just goes to town on it.

Speaker 2:

So what a great story. Well, thanks for sharing a little bit about your horse.

Speaker 3:

Sure.

Speaker 2:

Normally. Normally our scientists and guests share, you know, dogs or cats a little bit more common. Horses are not the most common pet that people would have.

Speaker 4:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

It's the right place to the world though Saskatchewan's kind of, you know, ranchy, oh yeah, so the other standard question we asked our guests about is a super fact. It's something that they know that when they tell people it kind of blows their mind a bit. Danielle, do you have a super fact for us?

Speaker 3:

Oh, certainly, I think their hibernation is one of the coolest things in the world, because when we think about hibernation and bears and other animals that hibernate, so like ground squirrels, right, ground squirrels hibernate, but bears don't hibernate the same way ground squirrels do. Okay, so ground squirrels go through what we call torpor bouts, where their body temperature drops to almost freezing and you can poke and prod at them and they just don't wake up. Right, they're that deep into their torpor bout you can't wake them up.

Speaker 2:

And then as they go through, yeah, you could shake them and they wouldn't do a thing.

Speaker 3:

Oh, yeah, I mean their bodies are almost frozen, right. So like yeah, and their metabolisms are way, way down and everything. So, but like well, go ahead, you have a question? I can feel it.

Speaker 2:

I have read this before that like Joe Trapper in a storm you know like it's a Canadian folk thing that you know climbed inside a cave with a polar bear or a grizzly bear and slept right beside them using their body heat to stay alive and I was like no, the bear would wake up and eat them.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, yeah. So that's the thing though. Ground squirrels hibernate that way, but bears don't.

Speaker 2:

Oh, okay, okay, Okay, sorry, yeah, bears don't.

Speaker 3:

So they'd. And when they hibernate, they don't just go to sleep for months at a time either. Their body temperature still drops from normal, but it's only by a few degrees, rather than going down to like freezing temperatures, and their heart rate drops significantly. So instead of 70 to 80 beats per minute, their heart rate drops to about 15 beats per minute.

Speaker 3:

The breathing slows down, their metabolic rate drops to about 20% of their normal metabolic rate. They're not eating or drinking or urinating or defecating or anything like that, but they're not completely inactive either. So you know, like moms have their cubs during hibernation, so she's she's got to be awake, right Like she's. She has her cubs and she's nursing them. Sometimes they'll get up and they'll move around If it's really really nice. Maybe sometimes they might even like come outside and lie in the sun for a little bit. So they're they're not just completely inactive. So those stories where where you have heard about people like skiers, a lot of times they'll get into trouble because they'll ski over the entrance of a den and they'll wake up bare up. So none of that stuff really changes though with, like, their body temperature and their metabolic rate. They can still just kind of wake up and be like 100% ready to go right then in that moment.

Speaker 3:

But the most fascinating part about it, despite reduced metabolism, despite the fact that they're not moving around a whole lot, they don't experience any negative health effects related to that like period of disuse at all. They don't lose muscle or bone like we would Like if we had our arm in a cast. You know, when you get your cast taken off, you haven't used that arm in forever. So like you're really weak and it just kind of looks weird and you've lost all your muscle definition and everything, that doesn't happen to them at all. And yeah, no, they don't have any of those problems. They don't develop heart disease because of, you know, hibernation and disuse. They don't get atherosclerosis, which is where your arteries get all clogged up and everything. They don't develop any of those problems and they actually shut off half of their hearts during hibernation. So blood is only flowing through one atrium and one ventricle in a bear during hibernation, oh my God. And then, when spring rolls around and they come out of their dens, everything just goes right back to normal and is totally fine.

Speaker 2:

Oh my God, these bears. They're so cool. Do you have colleagues looking into this, because this is wild.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so one of the people that I was working with when I was at WSU for my masters was a resident cardiologist veterinarian at the vet hospital there and she was working on all of the heart function stuff for the bears at the bear center.

Speaker 3:

So a lot of that is her research about how they can shut down their hearts and like they get different information from like echocardiograms and everything. And so because they were actually like going in and doing echocardiograms on bears that were like they'd wake them up and go in and do the echocardiogram during the hibernation season to see how their hearts were functioning during hibernation versus during active season.

Speaker 2:

I bet you they were puzzled with that first bit. They're like, nah, this can't be right. Wow, danielle, that is a super fact. I have another half an hour of questions just for this, but we'll leave that for another time, maybe. Sure, thank you for sharing your super fact.

Speaker 3:

Oh, no problem.

Speaker 2:

We're at the end of our chat. Sadly, I have so many more questions than I'm sure our listeners do, but that's all the time we have. Are you on social media? Can people, can people follow you and find out more about bears and how much you care about them?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, absolutely, I am on Twitter, or I guess it's called X now I can never keep up with all of that. Yeah, yeah, I am on Twitter. My handle is grizzlygirl87. So I tend to post a lot of pictures and stuff like that from our trail cameras. I do also occasionally run a game called Knock Knock who's Bear, which is an identification game. Yeah, so I get photos from the cameras, or sometimes people will send photos to me and I post the picture and have people guess what species it is, and then at the end of a certain amount of time, I go through all of the ways you can identify the specific species of that bear so that you know what to look out for when you're out recreating in bear country.

Speaker 2:

All right, take care, thank you.

Speaker 1:

Okay, it is time for Storytime with me, Adam. If you don't know what Storytime is, Storytime is when we talk about stories that have happened within the past one or two weeks. Dad, do you have a story?

Speaker 2:

Sure Guess what.

Speaker 2:

It started to snow again. We've had crazy weather January and early part of February. It's like it's the coldest place on earth. Then it's almost summer temperatures and all the snow melted and it's snowing again. So I don't know what's going on with our winter. It can't decide what season to be, either murder us with cold temperatures or dose us with giant dumps of snow. But it's been snowing all day today and that's where my story goes, with all the fresh snow after it melted.

Speaker 2:

I think Bunsen was feeling a little sad. I don't know, it's hard to tell. He just likes walks, but with all the white powder on the ground, every time I've taken him on a walk he has been like worming his way through the snow, like an underground gopher, and he has so much fun. He lays in it and he all lay down with him and he'll like push his face into the snow and he'll roll in the snow. And the last time we took him he was actually rolling on his back in the snow and wiggling back and forth, and it wasn't because he was on some gross smell, because he does do that on really gross smells, but he was just doing it, I think, for joy, and it was just neat to see.

Speaker 2:

I was kind of worried near the end of January that our winter was over. I mean, chris is probably super happy with how warm it was and how the snow was all going the way, but it's not like it's super cold or anything, but we're back to having snow again, which is kind of nice, especially for Bunsen. That's my story.

Speaker 1:

All right, I have a story. My story is about ginger. We don't really say a bunch of stories about ginger, but mine's about ginger. Annalisa and I, like, I dug out the switch and we found all the games that we had for it. Mum found all the all the like, some of the games that we had for it. I had half of them and then the other half we found, not because I lost them, but that's, that's, that's beyond, that's besides the point. And Annalisa and I have been playing like Mario Kart downstairs on the switch and it's been a lot of fun.

Speaker 1:

He's gotten angry at me because I'm, I'm, I'm okay at Mario Kart. I'm a lot better at Super Smash Bros. I'm, I'm, I'm pretty good at Super Smash Bros. That's because Mum and not Mum, uh, it's because Duncan, uh and and Dad would destroy me as a kid in Super Smash Bros, and then I would just slowly get better until the point that I could, that I could compete with them, and then, and then I got a lot better.

Speaker 1:

Um, anyway, ginger likes to mess with me as I'm playing with Annalisa. She likes to walk and like for, um, mario Kart. It's two sides, so like, uh, one side is you and the other side is the other person, and Ginger finds a way to walk on my side and put her tail on my side of the screen so I can't see Um. So she likes to mess me up. And then she also likes to nudge into only my hands, not Annalisa and and mess with me that way, um, and she's so cute that you can't really say no to her. So that's, that's how that goes. I think Ginger gets a lot, a way with a lot, because she's really cute, so yeah.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, she doesn't do anything and she tries to escape and we're like aw.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, she's cute. If she was, if she wasn't as cute of a cat, maybe we'd get. Maybe we'd get angry at her, but she's just too cute to be angry with Um. Anyway, that's my story. Mom, do you have a story?

Speaker 4:

I sure do. My story has to do with one of the farm cats. So, uh, jason and I were at the farm house feeding the farm cats and Jason, uh, thought that he would pick up Finn, just the same way that he picks up Ginger, and he was in for a bad time. They, um, are nice to me, but you were a little grabby and Finn let you know that he didn't appreciate that and you got scratched. But you know what's interesting? You didn't puff up like the Stay Puff, uh, marshmallow man, uh, probably because of your exposure to Ginger.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, there's something to that, I bet.

Speaker 4:

I think there's something to that that you're just getting exposed to.

Speaker 1:

Ginger, it was itchy.

Speaker 4:

It was itchy, yeah, but Jason, jason, do you remember Poco?

Speaker 2:

Mm-hmm.

Speaker 4:

Mm-hmm, you just had to look at her and you were the Stay Puff Marshmallow man.

Speaker 2:

That's right. I looked like, uh, my face got all mushed into a mushy ball.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, anyway, uh, that's my story.

Speaker 1:

Ginger just did the dip and sip. She dipped her paw into the into the juice and drank it. Um, yeah, that's it for for Storytime. Thank you so much for listening to my section of the podcast and sticking around to the end. Um, I hope to see y'all on the next podcast episode. Bye-bye.

Speaker 2:

That's it for this week's show. Thanks for coming back week after week to listen to us and remember. A way you can help keep the Science Podcast free is to become one of our patrons on our community, the Circle community called the Paw Pack Plus. There'll be a link in the show notes. We'd love for you to support us that way. One of the perks of being a top dog within our community is you get your name read at the end of the show. Take it away, Chris.

Speaker 4:

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