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Hi, everybody.
Chuck back again with another edition, I believe number eight, in our Think Spring playlist.
And today, you're going to be learning all about wetlands.
Because the name of the episode is Wetlands!
Wetlands!
Can you tell we love wetlands?
I think you will too.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works.
Hey and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh and there's Charles and Jerry's over there and this is Stuff You Should Know the dripping wet edition.
In these wetlands.
What?
I knew that you would not get that.
Is that a Seeger reference?
Oh, gosh.
Why do you have to say Seeger when you always mean Springsteen?
Was that Springsteen?
Yeah, it's Badlands.
Oh, okay.
Baby, these wetlands were born to run?
Sure.
Run water.
I don't like myself anymore.
Run water.
That was a great save, Chuck.
Thanks.
So we're talking wetlands.
I have to say we have to give a shout out to Tom Peterman, the foul-mouthed wetland biologist, who keeps asking us to do this episode.
Oh, is that where this came from?
Mm-hmm.
It was a Tom Peterman suggestion, although I had already wanted to do it anyway, so...
Yeah, I mean, we love our earth sciences, man.
This one was, I was just smiling from ear to ear researching this.
Can you imagine watching a blacksmith forge something in a wetland, in a flooded woodland?
No.
That's nirvana right there.
It really is.
So we're talking wetlands, everybody.
And Dave Roos helped us put this one together.
It was a good one.
And Dave likes to pop in jokes every once in a while.
He does.
And he said, what makes a wetland wet?
Water.
And then he says in all seriousness, that's basically it, that the water has to be largely present, at least some parts of the year, in the soil in such amounts that you would call something wetland.
I mean, think of the name, wetland.
It's about as earthy a term as science gets.
Yeah, and he front-loaded this with a few stats and I won't go through all of them, but I'll go through a few.
That kind of— are instructive as to why I love wetlands so much.
Here's one.
Although wetlands make up only 5 of the land surface in the United States, they are home to 31 of our plant species.
Not bad.
One-third of America's threatened or endangered species live only in wetlands.
I would propose that that's slightly misleading.
I think they're endangered because they live in wetlands, and wetlands are endangered, as we'll see.
Hmm.
Think about it, Chuck.
I don't know.
I took it more as.
Like they're all hiding out in the wetlands because it's a terrible place to hide out.
No, it's not bad because it's got 31 percent of the plant species.
I mean, it's a pretty rich, biodiverse area to live in if you're an endangered species.
For sure.
All right.
You say tomato, I say tomato.
We'll have to hear from Thomas Peterman, the foul-mouthed wildlife or wetland biologist, who can let us know.
What does he say?
Like, do effing wetlands already.
Yes.
That kind of thing?
Yeah.
I like this guy.
I think that's an exact quote.
Yeah, he's my kind of dude.
So another stat that I thought was pretty interesting that just kind of needs to form the basis or the undercurrent of this whole episode is that.
So we keep talking about the US?
There's wetlands found all over the world, of different types and varieties and different climates and different continents every continent except Antarctica.
But in the United States in particular, we have a long history of filling in and and draining wetlands for other purposes.
Yeah.
So much so that let's see.
I believe I don't know how much we've lost, but in the 1600s the lower 48 states were covered with 220 million acres of wetlands, which is 11 of the total surface area of the lower 48 states.
And I think starting in the 50s, we were doing away with wetlands at a rate of about 60000 of those acres per year.
Yeah, and it's gotten better since then.
But yeah boy, up until the Clean Water Act, it was just like hey, you know what would look great there.
A resort.
Right.
With like three golf courses and a bunch of tennis.
That's been such a driving force.
Like it's like looking at land or ecosystems and being like, are humans making money off of it?
No.
Well, then drain it and repurpose it.
Set it on fire and repurpose it.
Stop it from burning and repurpose it.
Like if we can't make money off of it, it can't possibly be useful.
And luckily, since the environmental movement really started in the 70s, we've realized that That's not necessarily true.
Even if you are just a heartless dummy, there's still a lot of benefits that humanity is given from things like wetlands that seem problematic or nonproductive, you know?
Yeah, that was one of Dangerfield's big lines in Caddyshack.
It was, uh, golf courses and cemeteries are the two biggest wastes of prime real estate.
That's a good one.
So let's talk about wetlands.
You said that they are only – some of them are only wet for short periods, sometimes when there's snow melt or just rain.
Yeah, those are called ephemeral wetlands, which is a cool term.
That's a great term.
Some are wet all the time.
And the key parts of being a wetland or the key characteristic – is that it's either permanently or periodically flooded or wet, and that the soil is called hydric soil and is dominated by anaerobic processes, meaning it loves water and the plants there love water.
Which is weird, because you used another word that shouldn't really jibe with plants, and that's called anaerobic, which means there's very little to no oxygen present.
And we'll explain why later.
But the fact that there are plants means that those plants have adapted to the wetlands.
Yes, and it makes them hydrophytic in nature.
We'll talk about those plants later.
It's.
Another thing I love about wetlands is just that it really underscores the remarkable evolution that something will go through to survive.
Very cool stuff.
Very, very awesome.
Yep.
So there's also – so you hit upon something.
Like they're not necessarily wet year-round.
Right.
Right?
So there's a whole bunch of different types of wetlands or wetland environments that fill those – that check those boxes.
Right.
One of the ones that most people think of when they think of wetlands are coastal wetlands like marshes.
And a marsh is basically like this area between inland and the ocean.
It's like a transition zone, a buffer zone.
And because of its proximity to the ocean, it's usually salty, or at least brackish, which is a mixture of saltwater and freshwater.
And one of the ones that really comes to mind.
If you're thinking coastal wetlands, you're thinking marshlands, and you're thinking tidal marshlands probably, especially if you're a Pat Conroy fan.
What was the name of her character that he repeats over and over in a whisper?
I think I remember, Chuck.
It was Bobby Jim.
Bobby Jim.
This is one of those scream at the pod player moments.
Was it in the Prince of Tides?
Yeah.
Lowenstein.
Was that it?
Lowenstein.
You're sure it wasn't Bobby Jim?
I think it was Lowenstein.
Was it his—oh, his shrinks?
His shrink girlfriend's name?
Yeah, Babs.
Okay.
Yeah, I don't remember.
I think it was Lowenstein.
All right.
So anyway, tidal marshes, yes, Prince of Tides.
They—obviously, it's because they're tidal.
They're going to come in and out with the high and low tide.
And like you said, they're generally saltwater.
And the salt marshes are very nutrient-rich, and they do have a lot of diversity, but—
But obviously, only the kind of things that can tolerate the salt as far as plants and animals go.
Which is a pretty short list, really, because salt is not conducive to life.
Instead, there are some plants that have figured out how to deal with salt.
But most of the time when you're looking at salt marshes, you're looking.
The plant life is basically grasses of some sort.
Right.
There's also freshwater tidal marshes, which they are either connected to the saltwater marsh, but they're far enough inland that the saltwater doesn't make its way in there.
So it's a freshwater marsh, but it's still affected by the tides.
And then I had no idea about this.
And I used to vacation on Lake Erie, but apparently the Great Lakes are so big that they have tides themselves.
You didn't know that?
I had no idea.
I even knew that.
I'm a dum-dum when it comes to the Great Lakes.
Well, Chuck, I think you got me beat big time.
Well, in this case.
Because I could know a million other things about the Great Lakes and if you knew that one thing and I didn't, you had me beat.
Yeah, I knew that.
And so that means that they do have those tidal marches.
The Florida Everglades are another good example.
And boy, Florida just, there's a lot of different types of wetlands in Florida.
Well, there's a lot of coastline.
Yeah, a lot of coastline and a lot of interior wetness.
Yeah, we have a lot of wetlands around our place in Florida for sure.
And there's mangroves and all sorts of stuff that we'll talk about.
Well, we're at mangroves.
I love those things.
So mangroves...
I think they at least deserve a short stuff, because they're one of the most amazing plants of all time.
But they're a type of coastal wetland themselves, a mangrove forest.
Or if you've never seen a mangrove forest.
They're these kind of – they have – a growth habit for the shrubbery on top of, like the hair that Oompa Loompa has in the original Willy Wonka the good one.
And the trunks split out into these cool like long roots and legs that stick up out of the water.
And they form this huge tangle, this riot of, like shrub, woody shrub that, And they do all sorts of amazing things to help the aquatic life and us humans as well, up on land, just by being present.
Yeah, they're really cool looking.
And this is another good one, sort of like the origami, that if you're able and you're sitting still to look up a lot of these things as you go.
Because these mangrove forests, it looks like...
It looks like a shrub that's like, I really want to be a shrub, but I don't want to get wet.
So I'm just going to dip my legs in a little bit.
Yeah, that's really great.
It's just very cool looking.
And again, just the adaptability that these mangroves really want to live where they live, even though it's not very suited for them.
And they've become suited for it.
Right.
If you've been sleeping on mangroves, welcome to reality.
Yeah.
That's a t-shirt if I ever heard one.
Yeah.
I could use a little work, but there's the beginnings of one in there.
You also got your inland wetlands.
These are not coastal.
In this case, we're talking about swamps and marshes and bogs and fens, F-E-N.
And marshes.
A lot of these you'll find near rivers, near streams, lowland depressions, and they might periodically fill up, depending on rain, what's going on or different types of flooding that might happen.
And they can be a few inches deep.
They can be several feet deep.
Yeah, most of the non-tidal inland marshes are ephemeral wetlands.
Yeah.
So they're dry a lot of the year.
They might fill up seasonally.
They might fill up with the rains.
They might fill up with the nearby river flooding.
It's like my backyard.
Oh, really?
Is that right?
Yeah, it doesn't drain well.
I've got a drainage problem.
OK, to you, it's a problem.
To nature.
It's wonderful because we like things that drain really quickly and dry, and then we can walk on them and the grass is fine.
But there's a lot of like benefits to things that take their time.
Like there's something called the vernal pool, which is a kind of non-tidal marsh, an ephemeral wetland.
And it's basically just like say, a stretch of woods.
That's a little bit depressed there, so that when it rains or a river floods, it fills with water.
And because the underlying bedrock or clay is not very porous, it takes a while for that water to go through.
But that water is also not going further downstream, so it prevents flooding from being as bad as it could, because a lot of the water collects and stays there.
And it also slowly recharges the groundwater.
And because it does get dry, it can't sustain fish, which makes it a really great nursery for things like newts and salamanders and frogs things that fish eat their eggs.
But since there's no fish, this is like a really great place for them to get a good foothold and a brand new life.
You've also got your prairie potholes.
This is when you should definitely look up.
These are usually in the upper Midwest of the United States, the Dakotas Minnesota, maybe Wisconsin.
And these are where glaciers, ancient glaciers left these big depressions in the landscape.
And they fill up sometimes during rain, during the spring, during snow melt.
And they're not small, like our prairie pothole, and I got a vision in my head.
But if you look it up online, they're beautiful and just.
They're very large though, and they're kind of interconnected.
Just these big round holes scattered through like a big open area full of water.
And these are great for migrating birds because that could be a stopover that they might not have had had those potholes.
Pothole's not been there.
Mm-hmm.
And when they're flying over the Dakotas, they say, look, I see Van Nostrand's house.
Our buddy, Van Nostrand.
And then there's also, we said that wetlands occur in all different kinds of climates.
They also occur in the desert.
There's something called playa lakes.
Which are these depressions that apparently no one has any idea exactly how they formed?
It could have been from erosion.
It could have been from an ancient sinkhole.
But there are depressions that are deep enough that, when the seasonal rains come, the water is held in there.
And, just like the prairie potholes, it's very useful for migratory birds to stop over at and really plays a huge role in this ecosystem where there's almost no water.
And now all of a sudden there's water and it's in this nice little lake.
So let's all go gather there and have a social hour.
But responsibly, six feet apart.
That's right.
Okay.
I think we should take a break and we will talk a little bit about inland swamps right after this.
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All right.
So inland swamps, we promised to talk about that.
These are, for my money, some of the coolest areas in the country, because I think I talked about it at some point.
But I took a very special, fun trip many, many years ago to the Okefenokee Swamp and did one of those canoe trips where you have to rent.
You know there's no place to stop in the Okefenokee Swamp.
If you're like, I think I'll camp here.
It's like in the water.
So they had these camping pads built up, essentially just decks that are like six feet above the water.
And you have to reserve those.
They're not just wide open for anyone. because there's nothing else out there.
So you have to reserve them for specific nights on these specific pathways or, you know, paddleways.
And me and a couple of buddies did it one year, and we canoed from deck to deck.
Very cool.
It was amazing, like one of the coolest trips I've ever taken.
That is very cool.
Was Ned Beatty with you?
No, but you do wake up surrounded by alligators.
It's a little creepy.
Yes, alligators are very creepy.
Like you wake up on that pad and pee off the dock, and they're growling at you.
Yeah, and you do not want to get too close because they can move faster than you think.
Yeah, they can.
It was a lot of fun, though.
But not for the faint of heart, because you know you don't realize until you get out there A how bad the sun is going to beat you up because there's no shade and B how tough it is to paddle outdoors.
All day long without like, you know, let me get out and stretch my legs.
Right.
I mean, there is no getting out.
You just go and go and go.
And by the time you finally reach that janky deck, it is like might as well be the Plaza Hotel, you know.
Oh, nice.
But what I'm talking about.
In the case of the Okefenokee, I thought it was a forested or a bottomland hardwood swamp.
You'd think.
From reading this, but apparently it's called a non-riverine swamp forest.
Right.
And that is a forested swamp that fills up from non-river sources, basically rain or groundwater.
Right, right.
So what would make a forested swamp like a bottomland hardwood swamp is a proximity to a river that floods its banks or that is just so big it kind of spills over into some of the surrounding land and that surrounding land is swamp.
I want to look that up, though.
I'm not quite sure.
Well, okay.
So it's either river-fed or groundwater-fed or precipitation-fed.
And if you're talking bottomland hardwood swamps or a river-fed swamp, there's usually also a shrub swamp which is a transition or buffer zone between the forested swamp and you know somebody's backyard, which it's just dominated by shrubs.
But it's all the same thing.
It's all a freshwater swamp.
Yeah, I think I bet you anything that Okefenokee has several different types of these would be my guess.
Because there were full-on lakes that we paddled through.
Yeah.
So that would be my guess.
And I also think if I had a country band, we would be the Bottomland Hardwood Swamp Rats.
Oh, that's a good one.
Not bad at all.
That sounds like an all-star band, you know?
Oh, sure.
Yeah.
So another kind of wetland that you're going to find all over the place, especially in Europe, which when I think of bogs and fens, I think of Europe, but apparently there's plenty of them in the United States too.
But bogs and fens are kind of their own thing.
Bogs in particular are very unique as far as wetlands go because not only are they anaerobic, which by definition a wetland is anaerobic soil, they're like...
Very little nutrient and very high acidity.
I've heard like the kind of acid that is put out by the peat that's created in the bog has the same acidity roughly, of vinegar.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, it's really, really acidic stuff.
And yet some plants prefer it.
Like you can grow cranberries and blueberries in a bog.
Sure.
You can preserve a body from the Iron Age forward in a bog.
Did we ever cover that?
The bog bodies?
I feel like we did.
It might have been one of our video things on YouTube.
Maybe mummies.
Because I think, if I remember correctly, our mummy episode covered more than just Egyptian mummies.
I think it covered like Inca mummies.
And the bog people.
I'm sure we did.
We saw some of them when we went to our UK trip.
We got to visit some of those cats like firsthand, like right there in that area.
And that glass, you know, all you have to do is smash it with a hammer and it's yours.
You got a bog person.
Yeah.
Or at least whatever you can grab, like a bog ear.
Right.
It just crumbles in your hand.
But I was like, okay, why are the bogs so great for preservation?
Part of it, from what I understand, is that acidity, that the bodies are actually pickled.
But another part is the –
The aerobic life is so devoid there.
There's just anaerobic bacteria, and they don't decompose nearly as well as aerobic bacteria.
So the decomposition doesn't set in, and the remains are pickled.
So, like, you can preserve a body in a really great state for a very – like, toland band –
His whiskers are still intact on his face.
Yeah.
Like that was the level of preservation.
And he was sacrificed into a bog, which is a very specific kind of wetland.
Yeah.
And a fen, like I said, it's F-E-N.
It's sort of like a bog in that it is a peaty wetland.
But they're a little bit different than bogs.
The water supply doesn't come primarily from rain, and it comes from the ground.
So it's going to be less acidic because I don't think we mentioned.
I know it's partially because of the peat, but the acidity also comes from the fact that there's acid in rain that fills up these bogs.
Right.
But not the case in a fen.
No.
No.
No, because that groundwater is able to kind of dilute it a little bit.
So they're much more nutrient rich than a bog is.
So they're going to have a much wider, diverse range of plants and animal life.
Yeah, and I love that this next section from Dave was called Other Fun Types of Wetlands.
Yeah, mudflats.
Yeah, you got your mudflat.
It's another good country band.
My favorite are seeps.
These are just gorgeous little pieces of nature, if you ask me.
If you have a spring that comes up out of the ground, it spills over into the ground, so the surrounding ground is a wetland and it's called a seep.
That's right.
It's where gnomes, like, go and shower.
Yeah, and it's not, like you said, it's a spring, so it's not like a creek.
No.
It's actually coming up from the ground.
You ever drink from a natural spring?
I did when I was a kid and I think my mom fired the babysitter that like took us to drink from a spring.
Yeah, she was like, what are you doing?
It was either a spring or, like, a river in Ohio.
Well, two very different things.
If it was the Cuyahoga River, then you're in bad shape.
It was on fire while we were drinking it.
But, I mean, we have creeks.
If you're listening, you've never been to Atlanta.
Atlanta has creeks all over the place.
Like all of the in-town neighborhoods just are riddled with creeks.
They're just sort of out of view.
But we have a creek, you know, 120 feet from our house.
Sure.
Which might have something to do with our drainage.
Who knows?
And it's spring fed?
No, it's just, you know, just a part of the Atlanta.
Probably all comes from the Chattahoochee at some point.
Sure.
So Chuck, if that creek behind your house started meandering in a different direction and left a body of water where it originally flowed, it would be an oxbow lake.
But if you were in Australia and you were calling it its proper aboriginal name, you'd call it a billabong.
A billabong.
Which I had no idea.
What does that have to do with surfing?
Oh, I think they just probably co-opted the name and it became more associated with surf and surf gear than its true meaning.
That doesn't seem right.
No.
Let's take it back.
But that's what an Oxbow Lake is in Australia among the Aborigines.
It is a billabong, which is great.
A billabong.
That was some, like, along with OP was one of the.
Prime t-shirts to have when you were a kid in the 80s.
Oh, yeah.
If you were cool.
I had this amazing OP long-sleeve blue shirt that I wore with my parachute pants.
Yeah, those were the best.
My British Knights.
I remember those long-sleeve OP shirts.
Yeah, they were good.
Gorgeous.
So Chuck, one of the things we've been talking about is the characteristics that make a wetland a wetland.
And it's not just the fact that the soil table or the ground is either –
Flooded or almost completely flooded up to the surface level with water.
That's not the entirety of it.
Like different wetlands are characterized by how that water gets to it.
Like we said, you know, some kinds of swamps are fed by groundwater.
Others are fed by precipitation.
Some are tidal.
So there's a whole group of scientists out there that are called wetland hydrologists.
And what they study is how that water gets into a wetland to create a wetland, what happens to it while it's there and then where it goes, and how all these things kind of interact to form this very unique ecosystem.
Yeah, and we talked early on about the kind of soil, hydric soil, is saturated with water.
And so if it's saturated with water, it's not going to have nearly as much oxygen.
And usually oxygen and soil are in these little tiny air pockets.
Remember we talked about that in our soil episode.
Yeah, exactly.
And in the case of a wetland, then those air pockets are going to be filled with water or just collapsed altogether.
Right.
And then you've got your anaerobic condition.
But if you're a plant, you need CO2 and oxygen.
And you'll get a little bit of that from photosynthesis in the leaves.
But the roots are like, what about me down here?
I need oxygen too.
And if it was an aerobic soil, like we talked about in the soil podcast, the roots can get it from those air pockets.
But in wetlands they have to really really adapt properly to become hydrophytic or water-loving plants in some pretty amazing ways.
So I just have to say that this is like a lifelong mystery solved, and solved in like the simplest way possible.
Like it's anaerobic because there's water there instead of air.
The air can't be in there because the water's there.
Ipso facto anaerobic.
I just think that's brilliantly simple.
Yeah.
Did you get that intuitively?
Because I never did.
I always thought it was something mysterious, like we're talking about a whole different type of soil or something else.
No, I think I got it.
Okay.
Well, I've been around for 44 years and wondered it until just now.
Well, I'm 49, so I might have learned that in the last five years.
So the plants that we're talking about, like you said, the roots still need oxygen.
So they've said, OK, well, I really like it here.
I like this wetland area.
This is a pretty amazing place to live.
I'm going to change so that I can stay here.
And some of the ways that plants have adapted, well, one good example is a cattail, right?
Cattails are pretty much synonymous with marshlands.
Yeah, they're beautiful.
They're that long, thin stem with like a big fat thing on top, like a hot dog that's ready to be roasted on the fire.
Yeah, I grew up with those.
I don't know if it was a southern thing, but they can be decorative items in the home.
And I grew up, I feel like, with a lot of cattails in vases and stuff.
Okay, so that in wasps' nests?
Yeah, hornets' nests, yeah.
So cattails have this thing called arenicuma.
No, I've got it.
Arenicuma.
Arenicima.
I think I got it.
Anyway, they're like these channels that basically direct air from the leaves and the stem and every other part of the cattail down to the roots.
It says, here you go, roots.
Here's some oxygen fresh from the leaf.
Yeah.
So that cattail can have as much roots as it wants down in this anaerobic soil.
It doesn't matter because it's getting its oxygen from the air through the leaves.
Right.
Yeah, one of my favorites is the speckled alder.
You just look up a picture of that and they have these enlarged pores called lenticels and they allow for the passage of oxygen directly into that wood.
And if you look up a picture and you see those, you go, oh, that's what those are for.
They look like someone took a knife and they're just tiny little horizontal slits all up and down the alder.
I guess.
And they're breathing, basically.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's creepy as heck, but it's really neat.
Little mouths, little slitty mouths.
So the grasses that we talked about growing in salt marshes, just like an iguana, sneezes out excess salts as part of digestion things like cord grass that grow in these salt marshes.
They actually excrete salts through their leaves.
So they can sit there and intake all the nutrients they need from this salinic environment and and still not get overloaded with salt.
It's just pretty amazing that they can do that.
Yeah, and then to me maybe the most amazing and this is where the mangroves kind of come back in, although the mangroves apparently utilize all these to stick around but the bald cypress, they grow in those forested swamps where there's always water and they are deciduous conifers and they grow this root structure that that they call a knee.
It's a new metaphor, but like a knee on your leg is how it's spelled.
And they just sit above the waterline and take in oxygen.
And that's what those, I guess, mangroves, mangroves.
There's a Soul Train joke in there somewhere.
It struck me as like a terrible jam band's name.
The mangroves?
Yeah.
God, you're right.
That plays somewhere in Florida, probably.
Probably.
But the mangrove uses, like I said, a lot of these tricks.
And I think certainly when you see those roots, they're using those knees.
Yeah, which is basically, it's a way to get oxygen from the surrounding air down to the roots.
The mangroves do it.
The bald cypresses do it.
Mangroves have all those adaptations, different species.
They can do things like excrete salt.
They can draw oxygen in from the environment.
They have channels where they can pump oxygen from one part of the plant to the other.
The one that gets me, though, I'm just fascinated by bogs.
So we said that it's an acidic... anaerobic nutrient depleted environment and yet there's still plants that live there and one of those plants or one kind of plant is carnivorous plants they get their nutrients not from like the soil but from eating bugs yeah those are cool so they can just live there like a pitcher plant or a Venus flytrap or something like that yeah those are nature wasn't Venus flytrap one of the DJs on WKRP that's a great DJ name yeah He was a great DJ.
All right.
So let's take our final break and we'll talk about why wetlands are important and what you can do to help them do their thing.
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Okay, Chuck.
So just the fact that wetlands are as amazing as they are means that they should be saved.
But there's also a lot of benefits that we figured out.
Like you said, the 50s to the 70s were a really rough time for in the United States because we were filling them in for cropland, for real estate.
And even previous to that, we filled in a lot of marshland in the U.S. and built cities over them.
Like, D.C. was built largely on marshland.
The fact that mosquitoes tend to live in wetland areas...
Kind of justified filling in a lot of the wetlands because we were dealing with malaria at the time.
So it made a lot of sense.
Get rid of the mosquitoes habitat, you get rid of the mosquitoes.
And it worked.
But we've paid a heavy price for it because over time we've realized these wetlands provide some really important benefits to the local ecosystems and, in turn, humans who live around them.
Yeah, I mean, helping flood conditions is a big one.
They are big, big natural sponges when it comes down to it.
And flooding would be way, way worse.
And we still have floods, obviously, but it'd be way worse if we didn't have wetlands.
They'd be far more destructive if they weren't around to soak in that excess water and then kind of slowly trickle it to the water table below.
And the same is obviously true of hurricanes and big storm surges.
The wetlands basically operate as big storage tanks for water.
Yeah, I saw somewhere, I can't find it now, but like, oh, there it is.
An acre of wetlands can hold up to about a million and a half gallons of water.
Yeah.
Just one acre.
So you got to think, like that water staying put there and it's not flooding some human habitation instead, which is a good reason to keep wetlands around just for that buffer area or to slow down the surge, like you were saying.
I also saw that we found out the same thing goes for beaver dams that they build.
They're like a temporary artificial wetland and they provide a lot of the same functions that natural or other, I guess naturally occurring or growing wetlands provide too.
And I think we should do a whole episode on beavers, okay?
Oh, totally.
I'm way into beavers.
So water filtration is another – I'm getting you back for the origami thing.
All right.
So water filtration is another big service that wetlands provide.
I don't remember where we talked about this, but we talked about it recently where the water – oh, I think it was water treatment plants.
Yeah.
The water's brought in and it's got all this sediment and gunk and muck and it's cloudy and turbid and then it slows down.
They slow it down, like running it through some grates or whatever.
And as it slows down the sediment, that is making the water turbid and polluted and everything has a chance to settle at the bottom.
Well, wetlands provide that same function naturally.
So when you have a bunch of like polluted water, basically come through there that it slows down when it hits all those mangrove roots or tree trunks or whatever it is.
And it gives it a chance for that sediment to fall to the bottom.
It gets sucked up by the tree roots and stored in the trees.
Or the microbial life can break a lot of that stuff down too.
And there's definitely a limit to to where you can very easily overload the wetlands ability to filter the water.
But if you gave it like a manageable supply, that is a major service that it does is it cleans our water.
They call wetlands the kidneys of the earth.
Yeah, and they've even done studies where they try to, I guess, sort of monetize what an area of wetland might do if it were a treatment plant.
And there's one in South Carolina called the Congaree Bottomland Hardwood Swamp.
These are just all country bands.
For sure.
They said that that is basically equivalent to about a 5 million water treatment plant just sitting there, being a wetland doing its thing.
Thank you, nature.
Pretty amazing.
I saw that beavers provide the dams that they build that end up being temporary wetlands.
Somebody estimated it's worth about 100000 if a human tried to build an artificial one, which we do.
If you just let beavers do their thing, they will do the same thing for free.
That's right.
You don't have to pay them $100,000.
There's also because there's so much going on in a wetland, there's so much life.
They kind of form like these metropolises for all sorts of different types of animals all the way up the food chain, including plants animals, microbial life worms fish, larger predators like dolphins and alligators.
And all of them are sitting there providing food for us.
If you like gator tail, buddy, you better preserve those wetlands.
Yeah, Dave points out here that the commercial fishing industry in the US 75 of the fish and shellfish harvested here had fish that at least had a temporary home in the wetlands.
And that recreationally.
If you're a recreational fish person, fisher person, then 90 of the US fish catch is at least the breeding ground lies in the wetlands for those fish.
Yeah.
And the same thing goes for birds, too.
They're enormously important habitats for birds, some permanent, but also migratory too, because if you're flying along and you're a bird and you are a water bird and you need a place to land, not only are you looking for water, but you might really enjoy a swamp, because it offers protection from predators.
It offers a port in the storm.
It's just an all-around valuable thing for birds, too.
Yeah, I mean, imagine...
Flying from Canada to Texas, and you're going over Oklahoma, and you're a little tired.
You look down and you see one of those, which ones were those, the prairie playas?
No, the prairie potholes.
Prairie potholes?
Yeah.
Oh, man.
Yeah.
What a sight.
Aren't you describing a scene in Jonathan Livingston Siegel?
Probably so.
So the point is we need to take care of our wetlands because they are a threatened diverse, very useful environment place all over the world, especially here in the United States.
And if they are threatened, and if things happen, there are going to be all kinds of bad things.
You know vegetative damage, the plant life just being maybe whitened out, wiped out altogether.
Storm surges being way worse, flooding being way worse.
Yeah.
It especially helps to see the value in them if you consider them a buffer zone between us and the hardest ravages of nature.
Yeah.
And like you mentioned, pollution, there is a limit.
But they do absorb and mitigate levels of water pollution.
And they just can't take too much of us, you know.
Right, exactly which man.
If there's anything that characterizes humans in the 20th and 21st centuries, it's too much of us.
Yeah.
You know what I mean?
What can we do, though?
Well, apparently— Besides donating to wetland projects, we can definitely do that.
You can definitely do that.
There's some good ones out there.
I believe Ducks Unlimited is one of them.
The Wetlands Initiative, Natural Resources Defense Council, Wetlands International.
But apparently in the United States, something like 75% of wetlands are on privately owned property.
And in the United States we have.
I mean private property is one of like the fundamental tenets of American society.
So if you say, I want to fill in this wetland and kill off these beavers, you're allowed to do that.
Whether that's a good idea and whether that's going to affect other people, that's a different story.
So if you own private property with a wetland on it and you're doing just fine with that wetland, leave the wetland alone.
It's very important.
Yeah, I guess this is where it gets a little tricky in definitions, because in plenty of places there are restrictions on building near water, like this sure uh, i guess i just don't know like um, you can't build in a flood zone, you can't?
I mean, it depends on where you are, but in atlanta you can't, uh.
And then with these all these creeks and streams, in atlanta they have what's called stream buffers sure um, 50 foot, 75 foot, 100 foot, and i think i think 25 is the lowest.
So, And for these you have to get variances to do anything which your neighborhood has to approve.
And I talked to a guy that apparently anything under 75 feet is pretty tricky to get approved.
So I don't know if they're wetlands or not, but there are restrictions on stuff like that.
Okay, so that brings up the next point of what you and I and everybody else can do, which is vote for people to local elected office who, part of their platform, is protecting wetlands.
Yeah.
You don't find those everywhere.
But once they get put in place, they usually don't get repealed very easily.
So if you make preserving wetlands part of like what you're voting for, that would have an impact for sure.
And whatever you're voting for, just vote, okay?
Vote.
Especially locally.
Let's just take a second to say that.
I know everyone.
The presidential elections are always the big thing sexy votes but uh, the local, uh politics matters even more, almost sometimes.
Yeah, i vote for all of it.
Take an interest in the in your society yeah okay, uh.
Well, you got anything else about wetlands?
Nope, i don't either.
This is a good one.
I'm pretty happy with it.
Uh, and since i said that everybody, it's time for listener mail Yeah, I'm going to call this the first SY5K.
Oh, yeah.
Did you see these?
Yes, man.
Congratulations to everybody who took part.
Yeah, so what happened was some Stuff You Should Know listeners got together and put together a 5K, Stuff You Should Know 5K, and we got periodic updates from Aaron Huey Mizell, or Mizell, I'm not sure how you pronounce it.
I'm going with Mizell.
Mizell, but this is...
This is the final email about how it went.
Hey, guys, I want to let you know that the SY5K is over.
It was so nice to look at everyone's pictures and hear what episodes of stuff you should know they listened to, because that was the idea.
I imagine some people might have fudged that and listened to Marc Maron or whatever.
They're disqualified.
I think a lot of us have suffered from a lack of human connection at this time, and the silly little virtual event gave us something to bond over.
I don't think I would have tried this with any other group of people.
The Stuff You Should Know Army is wonderful and it speaks volumes in regard to you guys.
The tone that you set in your podcast interesting and funny carries over into your fan base and has created a little lovely corner of the internet.
I totally agree, Aaron.
And the same can be said of the Movie Crush page.
Very, very good people.
Not snipey or rude and going after each other on Facebook, which is kind of what Facebook seems to be all about.
Oh, yeah, it's like a garden paradise over there on the SYSK Army page.
Yeah, it's great.
Now I'm not suggesting that you made these people wonderful, but the average stuff you should know, Army Bimmer is like that.
Interesting, funny, and willing to participate in a virtual 5K with a complete stranger.
And they love Stroopwafels.
I even bought 13 Stuff You Should Know stickers to send out to some people as prizes.
It's just a little thing, but everyone that I've been in touch with has been exceedingly kind.
This is what we need right now, these small human connections.
A podcast to listen to and laugh with.
A walk, run, bear chase to do virtually with a bunch of near strangers.
And a Stuff You Should Know sticker to put on your fridge or on your laptop.
If you get a chance, go to the event page and scroll through some of the posts.
They're delightful.
Like the woman who did our 5K at three months postpartum and crushed it.
Nice.
Or the dad who pushed his adorable daughter in her stroller on the 5K while listening to his favorite episode, which was spam.
We had first timers.
That was a good one.
Yeah, it was a good one.
We had first-timers, people recovering from injury, runners and walkers, so many smiles and stuff.
You should know t-shirts.
Sign off for now.
But just writing to tell you it was a success.
We might even do it again with love.
And that is, again, from Aaron Huey Mizzell.
And that is great, Aaron.
Thank you for doing this.
And that really does speak to the quality of our listeners in every single way.
Indubitably.
Yeah, thanks a lot, Aaron.
It's good to hear from you.
And to everybody who participated in the SY5K, you are the champions, our friends.
Even if you listen to Marc Maron.
But maybe not what Chuck just said.
That's it.
Okay well, if you want to get in touch with us, like Aaron did, and do something interesting, we want to hear about it.
You can write to us in an email to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.
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