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I'm Anouche Zomarodi. And we're going to start today's show by going back in time.
To meet a girl named Mary Anning.
Where do I begin with Mary Anning? Let me tell you. So Mary Anning.
This is way back in 1811, 1812.
This is Dean Lomax. She was just 1112 years old.
And walking on the beach with her older brother Joseph at a seaside town called Lyme Regis here in the UK.
Lyme Regis is known for its harbor, its fishing, its shipbuilding, and its craggy beachside cliffs.
And that is where Mary grew up.
You imagine these really tall, what today we would consider Jurassic Cliffs.
That were just constantly crumbling away, being eroded and smashed by the waves.
And as a result of that constant erosion, you'd have rocks falling down that would contain fossils.
And not only would you have the fossils preserved in the cliff face itself, you'd get them on the foreshore.
So you'd have young Mary Anning and her family looking for these things.
They were often found in the remains of shellfish like animals, like ammonites and bullet shaped belemnites.
And it kind of was a case that was kind of comrade of shine.
Whatever the weather, they would be out there collecting these things.
It became for the family, it became massively important for their survival.
Important because their father Richard had recently died.
They were already quite a poverty-stricken family, but the fact that Richard passed away when she was so young
and let them in so much debt they had to find another way to survive.
And so to make ends meet, Mary and her brother would dig out, carefully clean,
and sell fossils to gentlemen scientists visiting the coast.
Because at this time, paleontology was really in its infancy.
And people had began to question kind of what came before, you know,
the story, the Bible and things like that, and people had began to try to work out if animals were on the planet before.
You know, was the age of the earth a lot older than they thought.
And one day, Mary and her older brother Joseph,
they made a remarkable discovery that would change the world of paleontology.
And to a large extent, the world, as we know it today,
they found the remains, they found this gigantic skull over a meter long with a massive,
what we call, sclerotic ring, this giant ring of bone inside the eye socket of this animal,
which we call an ichthyosaur.
ichthyosaur, Greek for fish lizard.
Now ichthyosaurs are a curious group of animals.
For one thing, they look somewhere between a dolphin and a shark, but kind of reptilian.
Some of them were the top of the food chain predators in the oceans.
They had these giant jaws, massive teeth easily.
Some of them up to about 8 centimeters, 10 centimeters long.
They're often misidentified as swimming dinosaurs, but they're not dinosaurs.
They're entirely different group.
They lived entirely in the ocean, whilst the dinosaurs were walking on land.
Prior to this discovery, people didn't know what ichthyosaurs were.
There wasn't even an official name for them yet, which is what made Mary's finding so important.
That skull, four feet long, was attached to a much, much longer skeleton that Mary discovered months later.
It was the very first complete ichthyosaur skeleton ever unearthed.
This discovery was that important and that it complete and so different to anything else,
that it caught the attention of the gentlemanly scientist of the day, who were really eager to study this fossil.
Mary Annnings spent the rest of her life uncovering fossils.
She discovered the first ever pleasiosaur remains.
The first, terisaur fossil found in England.
She even pioneered the study of coprolites, basically fossilized poop.
Today, she's considered the mother of paleontology.
It's quite amazing, because in her lifetime, often many people, usually men, would never give her the credit,
for what she discovered and the science that she was doing at the time.
She really was a scientist.
People traveled from far and wide to come and see her in her little, as one person put it, her little dirty shop in line,
and she just filled with fossils.
Centuries later, there are still so many biological mysteries yet to be solved.
From better understanding those ancient reptiles that swim and prehistoric seas,
to the anatomy of bugs living in our own backyards right now.
So on this episode, animal enigmas, the chance findings, near-death experiences,
and long hours of observation, that it takes to piece together nature's puzzles.
For paleontologist Dean Lomax, Mary's discoveries had an especially significant impact.
So Mary Anning was my real childhood hero growing up.
I remember quoting that she'd found the ectosaur and the pleasiosaur,
and really sparked the imagination of so many people at the time,
and that's really what it did for me.
Today, Dean is maybe the go-to ectosaur expert,
sometimes studying the very fossils that Mary Anning first unearthed.
And in 2021, Dean had his own big discovery,
but it didn't happen in a museum or while walking on the beach.
It started with an email.
Alright Dean, so what was so special about this email?
Yeah, so in 2021, I was sitting at my desk typing away,
and I thought, oh, what could this be?
Because I got to be honest, Manou Shah,
I get lots of emails and messages on social media from people who say,
hey, we found this dinosaur, we found this fossil,
and often it just turns out to be an odd shaped rock.
So I was like, okay, I had a quick read of this email,
I was like, okay, interesting, and then scroll down, and then I was like,
oh, okay, this changes things.
So in the attachment was a couple of images of some fairly large,
sort of dinner plate-sized vertebrae,
so parts of the spine of what I immediately recognized as ectosaur vertebrae.
Dean Lomax continued his story from the TED stage.
After speaking to fellow marine reptile expert Dr. Mark Evans,
we decided to visit the site in February,
where the ground was literally frozen right beneath our feet.
After spending so much time meticulously removing
the Jurassic clay from around the skeleton,
we were blown away because we revealed what appeared to be
a gigantic skeleton unlike anything ever found in Britain before.
Clearly, this was a big deal.
Well, we had to be very quick to contain our excitement
because due to the dumb wintery conditions,
and the fact that this was a super fragile skeleton,
it meant it wasn't the right time to collect this ectosaur.
So unfortunately, might seem a little bit counterintuitive,
but we had to re-berry the ectosaur,
and then waiting for what felt like millions of years.
In six months, we were back on site,
but this time with a superb team of paleontologists.
We spent 14 and a half days altogether,
and this was also working very long hours from sunrise to sunset,
to remove the skeleton out of the ground.
Oh my gosh, waiting for six months, then digging for two weeks.
After all that, what did you and your team uncover?
What did this ectosaur look like?
Well, what we managed to do at this point was reveal the entire thing.
We have probably 98, 99%, maybe even 100%,
when we can analyze it fully of the entire skeleton.
And this animal is, you're talking 10 meters long,
so over 34.
It represents the largest, most complete skeleton of any
prehistoric reptile ever found here in the UK.
Of course now, fully uncovered,
it's time to literally get this Jurassic giant out of the ground.
Much easier said than done when you're dealing with such a complete
and very heavy fossil wing several tons.
The first port of call was to create a trench all the way around the skeleton.
And the reason for that is that we needed to get right on underneath the skeleton
so that we could begin the process of plaster jacketing.
We use these protective plaster jackets that essentially care for and secure the bones
and the surrounding matrix so that we can take them out of the field
and into the lab so that we can analyze the fossil and the matrix
and work out what's going on.
After various challenges on site,
we finally managed to remove the entire skeleton after dissecting it into several more manageable blocks.
And this was an interesting moment for the team because it's quite an emotional moment
because we'd spent an invested so much time and energy into this 60-store excavation
that this moment captured that final piece where we're removing this
from its final resting place, 118 million years ago.
So what happens next?
What do you do with a fossil like this?
But once you got it out of the ground, the next thing then was for the entire skeleton
to go to our colleague Nigel Locke into his lab.
He'll be the person who will be cleaning the entire skeleton now.
So what he'll have to do is flip the entire thing over
and then we'll see the underside because the underside should be in theory
the best preserved side because that's what was laying down in the seabed.
So no animals could scavenge that, you know?
And I really hope we're going to have an impressive beautiful set of teeth
with maybe a big eye sitting there staring back at us.
I can't wait for that moment.
Yeah, what is that going to happen?
We're hoping that the cleaning phase should be completed in somewhere between 18 to 24 months.
So once it's fully cleaned it, allow me and my team to do all the...
If you like the CSI of this animal, why did it die?
How old was it?
Do we have something in there in the stomach contents?
Is there its last meal?
Is there any embryos in there?
And you know, things like that is what we're trying to work out.
But above all, once it's fully cleaned, it's all being agreed that it will return to Rutland.
And we should say Rutland is nowhere near the coast.
It is in the middle of England.
Right, exactly.
We know 100% not only because of our giant Rutland sea dragon,
but we also have the remains of shellfish-like animals called ammonites
and bits of corals and sea creatures called krynoids.
All these types of animals we know that we're living in a marine environment.
And so this indicates that roughly 180 million years ago,
this area was deep underwater.
What do you think Mary Anning would have made of this incredible find?
I think Mary would have been quite thrilled to have seen that a discovery of these creatures
that she'd been collecting for so long had been made in somewhere quite unusual
for Jurassic fossils like this in Landlock Rutland.
For Mary, knowing for well that her kind of legacy that's so intertwined with iqthesaurus
continues right to this day, and we still can make such remarkable discoveries
she would be overwhelmed with that.
That's Dean Lomax.
He's a paleontologist and visiting scientist at the University of Manchester.
You can see his full talk at TED.com.
On the show today, Animal Enigmas.
I'm Manouche Zamorodi and you're listening to the TED radio hour from NPR.
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It's the Ted Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manouche Zamorodi.
And on the show today, Animal Enigmas.
The quest to solve some of today's biological mysteries.
Including how insects pee.
I have a beautiful backyard.
You know, we could finally have like a nice house with backyard for the kids and the dogs to play.
And of course, the southeast, because of its nice weather, has so many, so many different types of bugs, basically all year around.
Saad Bommala is a professor at Georgia Tech.
And he researches all kinds of insects, including those in his backyard.
We have an old water fountain feature.
And every day as I walk out my three year old son and I will kind of peek into it.
We'll see tiny flies that are both flying in the air, but then they land on the water surface and skim and glide.
We walk amongst the grass and see lots of tiny insects that are hopping.
And now it's spring. So we'll observe these carpenter bees.
And you can see these fine shavings of wood as these bees are digging in.
I don't know, it just goes on and on.
We should point out Saad is not your typical bug and animal researcher.
Yeah, I'm trained as a chemical engineer on paper. All my degrees are in chemical engineering.
I didn't even know I love bugs till my young adult life.
And I slowly started to look at them through this lens of physics and mathematics and engineering.
I just realized there are so many puzzles.
It sounds like you see the world very differently than most of us who would be worried about finding a tick between our toes
or swatting at mosquitoes.
It's a wonderland, it's a lab for you just waiting for experimentation.
Just what you said isn't I feel so lucky because I had like wool in front of my eyes.
And one day it struck me that the entire world is your lab.
Like the Amazon Rainforest is your lab.
The backyard is a lab. That's where science happens and all you need is this perspective.
And it changes everything and you can do science 24-7.
Saad Bama continues from the TED stage.
I love bugs.
I think of them as nature's tiny engineers because they come up with the most extraordinary and incredible solutions to life problems.
And I just love observing them because they're so full of surprises and curiosities.
Today I'm going to tell you a story about one of nature's most extraordinary engineers that pushes the limits of fluid mechanics and bioengineering
and arguably solves their number one problem.
How insects pee.
Sit back and relax. You're in for a treat.
A few years ago my student, Elio Chalida and I observed this tiny insect having a private moment in our own backyard in Atlanta.
And we couldn't believe our eyes. This insect was peeing for hours and we had never seen anything like this.
So I observed this bug and it was flicking droplets. It was very fast. You could hardly see it. But you could feel it on your hands and it would make you question yourself whether it was just raining under a tree. That makes sense.
So you were standing there in your yard looking at a tree and you could see even though it was really quick and really small, you could see it flicking something.
And because we all carry a beautiful scientific instrument in our pocket. So I just had pulled up my iPhone and you can do two great things.
I can buy a $5 magnifying lens and put it in front of my camera. And so now you've got essentially a pretty decent microscope especially for bugs.
And the second feature is you can switch to slow motion and this is remarkable.
So I recorded a video and I was like, hey, there's something happening. There's a droplet at its butt and it's flicking it.
And you know, I said, all right. Challenge accepted bug.
Saad needed to figure out how the insect peed.
Right. So this was a glossy winged sharp shooter, a homolydisc of a trepennis. And these are sap feeders.
And it's, you know, a system you have to think about feeding an excretion. What goes in must come out.
Hence the pee, which of course plenty of insects do.
Lots of insects pee and they do it in so many different forms and they do it on the fly. They do it while sitting.
And most of them pee more or less like us, you know, in streams.
Yeah, it's amazing.
But the glassy winged sharp shooter is the only one that flings little pee missiles. And Saad had a hunch that complex physics were involved.
So he and his student, Elio brought these sharp shooters into the lab.
So we take our high speed cameras and we measure them.
And then I tell Elio just to ask a simple question is how fast are these droplets moving?
We realize that this insect forms a droplet of pee and then it flings them at extreme accelerations of 40 G forces.
That's 40 times faster than the sprint of a cheetah. These insects are really packing a punch from their butts.
And we wanted to under.
We wanted to take a closer look at this flicker.
So we took a look under a microscope at its business end. And this beautiful structure has a scientific name.
It's called a butt flicker.
And this is what we discovered.
We realized that this insect had evolved springs and latches just like a catapult so that it could efficiently hurl its droplets of pee repeatedly at these high accelerations.
Now, we wanted to measure the speed at which this flicker was moving and the droplets.
So we measured the speed of both the droplets and the flicker. And this is where we made a puzzling observation.
The speed of the droplets in air was faster than the flicker.
So if you take a ratio of that, we were expecting it to be 100% but turns out that the speed of the droplets are about 150 to 200% faster than the flicker itself.
Wait, wait, wait, wait. Why didn't it make any sense? What was puzzling you? Like personally, I would have said, wow, he has a butt flicker as you call it on his body.
That's amazing enough. But then what was it that made you think like, huh, there is a mystery to be solved here.
Right. So as a scientist, we're greedy because the butt flicker was great. Okay. So we know something about the anatomy.
And it's flicking it. Okay, that's great. But wouldn't be amazing if we could unravel much more interesting physics.
And so the speed mismatch was bothering us because if Yankees picture throws a baseball and they'll say, oh, it's going at what 100 miles an hour.
At some point, the pictures, fingers had to be traveling at 100 miles an hour because if I throw a baseball at say 30 or 40 miles an hour and in midair, this baseball is now moving at 100 miles an hour faster than my fingers or arm, that doesn't make sense because where does that extra energy come from?
And we expect that energy balance to match the things cannot move faster than the object that propels them.
Unless like it would say has an extra bit of force added.
Precisely. Or some storage of energy somewhere in that process that was unclear to the eye at first glance.
So to solve this puzzle, we went back and looked at our videos. And we realized that unlike a baseball that's rigid, these tiny droplets are squishy.
And we had a aha moment. We were wondering if this insect is storing energy to do the surface tension just before launch.
And to test this, we did naturally what any of us would do. We converted our kitchen tables into a lab.
So now we're going to place droplets on a speaker to squish them at high speeds. And this is what we discovered.
We realized that water that flows in our faucets like a liquid at these tiny scales, do you do surface tension with the right timing can get a kick, store energy.
And if you time it just right, you can launch these off at extremely high speeds just like a child on a trampoline.
Okay, so kids on a trampoline and they're jumping. And if they get their timing just so they can catch a bigger bounce.
And so with your analogy, the butt flicker is like a trampoline. And the kid is like the droplet of pee, getting a turbo charge.
Right. And so the droplets were actually acting like a liquid spring. And so maximizing this can allow us to really fly far off.
So explain how that's happening here, Todd. I think you need to walk us through the butt flick as it were.
Sure. So the droplet is rested and cradled in this gorgeous butt flicker. It's about 100 microns in diameter.
It's the most beautiful pee you've seen. Right. It's this gorgeous drop perfectly spherical. And then it cocks its butt flicker because it's got this tiny, resilient spring. And like I've catapulted maybe by 10 or 15 degrees more.
And then it starts to rotate. And as it rotates, you can observe the droplet squish because of surface tension. And the flicker will reach the end of its trajectory. And then the droplet takes off just like a tiny, tiny spherical elastic rocket.
And this whole thing happens in 100 milliseconds. Oh wow. Your blink of an eye is like maybe 200 milliseconds. So it's faster than the blink of an eye. The fact that it's doing all of this is baffling.
Yeah, but you solve the mystery. I guess the question is though, what does this tell you about the evolution of this bug?
That nature has had far more time to thinker than us. But there are two reasons. So these are xylem sap feeders. You know, that's what this particular shop shooter feeds on.
And xylem is just 95% water. It just has a few minerals. So they have to glug 300 times their body weight.
So the reason they are drinking so much is because they need energy, right? But they have to come up with an energy efficient way to excrete this. And if they made jets, it would be 4 to 8 times more expensive energetically.
And because they're living on this frugal diet, every every part of their energy extraction ways is trying to minimize how much energy they waste.
These things are tiny. They're smaller than my pinky. In fact, surface tension that enables them to store energy in these droplets to launch is actually an impediment because gravity doesn't matter.
And surface engine sticks these droplets to their bodies. So they actually have to flick these droplets away. It's actually very difficult for these tiny bugs to be. And that's why I just love studying bugs.
This tiny engineer has figured out a survive on barely just watered through this nylon fluid. And it's figured out to do so. It has to drink a lot and pee a lot.
In that sense, it's not so different from other engineers. I know on a Friday night at a bar. But to do so, it's figured out this. It has to evolve the scatterpooling structure and fling these droplets at high speeds.
I'm just trying to get in the head of the listener here, so there will be people who think that's so great. So thank you so much for this illumination of how these bugs pee.
But really in the grand scheme of things, why should we care?
Yeah, why should we care? So this is how I live my life. And maybe I'll change it in the future. But I have two halves to my life. And one is all about organisms.
And the other half, I actually put on my engineer's hat and we build $1 hearing aids. We built a 20 cent paper centrifuge for malaria diagnostics.
We've just spun out a company using barbecue lighters for mRNA vaccine delivery to make it accessible to four billion people who still don't have access to it.
And that's the engineering part. I love it too, right? I think it's important and I use taxpayer money and try to do good and we train to students how to do frugal science.
But there is a joy and the other half where we just study bugs and the application there is just makes...
It's the joy of discovering things. The application is making other people be able to appreciate nature. You know, holy smokes you can look at insects and study fluid dynamics. To me, we need more of that.
That's a good enough application for me because if you solve a puzzle, it's just such a great advance for humanity.
That's Saad Bommla. He's an assistant professor of biomolecular engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His student, Elio Chalita, just officially got his PhD on the Sharp Shooter.
To watch Saad's full talk, go to Ted.com.
On the show today, Animal Enigmas. Stories about elusive, mysterious and even dangerous species like the King Cobra.
I've got King Cobra from the roof. You know, I climbed up the roof. I've carried like two meters, three meters King Cobra, caught King Cobra from the wells.
This is Gowery Shankar.
From cheese, climbed up the tree, balancing. I mean, are you crazy, Gowery? This is what's going through my mind right now. What's going through yours?
I'm... I'm calm. I'm very calm. I'm kind of king cobra's.
Gowery is calm because he's a herpetologist. He lives and works outside of Bangalore, India and clearly loves his job. I live in the forest. My field station in Anagumbe, the internet is really bad.
And if you have a guest, his obsession is the majestic King Cobra.
For me, it's a beautiful animal. One of the longest venomous snakes in the world. King Cobra can grow up to five meters. The maximum record is six meters, 10 kilo snake with speed.
And an attitude, the king like size, act with venom.
And the special thing about the King Cobra, they specialize in eating other snakes. They don't eat rodents, they don't eat frogs, no mammals, nothing. They just specialize eating other reptiles, particularly snakes.
Meaning King Cobra's act as exterminators, which is especially important in India because...
For 60,000 people die every year in India due to snake bites. Compared with these other venomous snakes, King Cobra bites are very, very, very low. They are not dangerous.
They are as gentle as a puppy or a cat in your home because they don't want to bite you. Given a chance, they just move away from you.
Not everyone knows this. In many places, the King Cobra sparks deep fear. They just kill them with the spears or even the knife or sometimes people have guns, they shoot them.
So, Gauri has made it his mission to study the behavior of King Cobra's and educate as many people as possible about when to leave the snake alone.
Or to call someone like him to take it away.
Whenever there is a snake, when people call to check with them, where exactly the snake is within the house or outside the house.
If even about 100 meters from the house, we don't capture it. If it is in the kitchen, bathroom, sometimes the snake will be twice the size of the room.
So, it's very dangerous for me. I need to gently bring him out, put him in a King Cobra bag.
You don't pick up the snake by the end of its tail and shove it in there.
I do that. Oh, do you?
Yes, that's how I do. Just hold a snake by tail and I have a hook. So, I need to direct him towards a pipe or the bag where I place the bag and bag him.
Gotcha.
And then you take your Cobra in a bag out into where it usually lives.
Exactly. Yeah. From the village, we take them away about 2 kilometers or 3 kilometers and release the snake back into the wild.
So, they are able to live peacefully with the King Cobra. Very peacefully, very peacefully, with this huge, so-called dangerous snake in the world.
Amazing. They quite exist.
Gary has successfully rescued about 400 King Cobra's.
About 400 times. I think no one in those world has done so many King Cobra rescues.
But there was this one time when things went horribly wrong.
So, I was shocked. How did I get bitten?
How a near-death experience upended what people have assumed about the King Cobra for 185 years.
On the show today, Animal Enigmas.
I'm Anush Zomerodi and you're listening to the Ted Radio Hour from NPR. Stick with us.
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Today on the show Animal Enigmas.
We were just talking to herpitalogist Gauri Shankar about his mission to study and rescue King Kopras.
You'll find very few people like me where there's a combination of both the scientific mentality
and at the same time be a good snake handler.
Mostly a good snake handler.
About 15 years ago there was an incident when Gauri was called to a village to remove several snakes.
I had three King Kopras in one place.
This was happening right in the middle of the village.
I was in prepared like I had one King Kopra bag.
The first two snakes I managed to put them on the bag and the third one was in a small bag which is very very tiny.
So I tried to squeeze them in. That's when he beat me through the bag.
Through the bag.
Through the bag he beat me.
Wait so there's there is no like if you are bitten by a King Kopra that's that pretty much.
That's it. King Kopras have neurotoxic so they will shut down all you know system.
Your heart will eventually stop pumping blood and the whole system will shut down.
The only hope Gauri thought he might have was a vile of anti-venom from Thailand
that had never been known to work in India.
But he thought why not try.
With that hope I carried the anti-venom went to the hospital.
As a scientist I just wanted to record everything.
I have that data with me every five minutes I was telling what was happening in my body.
I said look no one has this kind of data of a King Kopra bite in India.
Please in case if I die try to publish this you know this is avatess.
And I was writing it down.
That's what I was thinking as a scientist.
You find my life.
Oh my gosh so you were excited actually despite the terrible situation that you were in.
Yes. Yes. Yes.
The anti-venom from Thailand seemed to do nothing.
Gauri could feel the venom from the snake bite seeping throughout his body.
Complete swelling and lot of allergic reaction painful.
And I say painful so it was like that kind of a burning thing.
But despite being an agony Gauri didn't die.
It turns out that the cobra bag had sort of protected him by stopping the King Kopra's fangs
from completely sinking into his flesh.
He didn't inject enough venom to kill me.
There's what about venom once there that got into my body.
Which put me off for three days in the hospital.
But I survived.
In the haze of his pain Gauri started thinking why didn't the anti-venom from Thailand work?
And why was developing an anti-venom for King Kopras in India so hard?
For over 185 years it was assumed that there was only one King Kopra species.
But maybe not.
The entire Southeast Asia from India all the way to Philippines is one species.
But the antivenom doesn't work.
So that means there should be different species.
So that's when I came up with this thing.
Okay, let me work on their genetic part.
I need to figure out whether they're different species or one species.
Herpetologists had suspected there were different kinds of King Kopra species.
Because some have different stripes.
But no one proved it.
So I took that as my PhD project and then started working on it.
I collected over 200 samples across their distribution from India all the way to Philippines.
What did you do next?
To put it in a very simple way, I wanted to figure out how different these populations are.
For the general public to understand what is this genetic variation.
After eight years of researching the genetic variation of King Kopras,
Gower approved there are four King Kopra species.
So that's the difference we found.
Where I declared to the world that it's four species, it's not one.
So you set the snake world, snake studying a scientist world on fire.
But why do you think that people living in your community throughout India,
throughout Southeast Asia, need to know about this that there are four distinct species of King Kopra?
That's a very good person.
See, if people knew the different species, they could have come up with an antivenom.
Just imagine a number of people in Southeast Asia.
Every small island, people are co-existent living with these dangerous snakes.
They work in the paddy fields or the agricultural land. They do get bitten.
So what if they think, okay, the island King Kopra antivenom will work for us?
No, it doesn't work when born.
It might not work in Sumatra. It might not work in Luzon.
So to mitigate human animal conflict, we have to understand whether they're different species.
Or even if you want to conserve them or protect them, you have to know which species you're protecting.
It's really important to understand how different these populations are.
Why do you think that the King Kopra has remained such a mystery for so long?
It's a huge sized snake and people have so many stories or myths.
They just want to keep away from this snake.
Even the scientists, for example, the researchers, nobody wants to work on them because it's quite dangerous to work with them.
Even the people who handle cobras and crates and other snakes,
they are afraid of this species because of the sheer size and the venom and the attitude.
But for me, I love them. I love the species. I love the way they behave.
And the way he moves is a majestic animal. If I don't know,
one issue should come and see the King Kopra in the wild and you'll fall in love with this animal.
That was herpithologist, Gary Shankar. You can watch us talk at TED.com.
For our last story, we're heading to Brazil and the world's largest tropical wetlands known as the Pantanal.
Why do I keep coming back to the Pantanal? Wow, this is a wonderful question.
First of all, because I love it here, it's a phenomenal place that everybody should get to see at least once in their lifetime.
This is Patricia Medici. She's a conservation biologist.
You have to see this place. It's wildlife everywhere.
You can probably hear the birds around me, here, high assing macaques all over the place,
chabero stalks, and four species of deer, two species of peckery.
So we have to cool mine this part of the Pantanal.
And there's another animal that keeps Patricia coming back to this region.
It roams the flood plains at night, covering vast distances,
munching on leaves and fruit.
It's a large animal, the largest terrestrial mammal in South America.
It can weigh up to 250, 300 kilos. It's half the size of a horse.
Looks a little bit like a rhino with a proboces, a bit of a flexible trunk.
So they're big. They're big, big, big.
This big brown fuzzy mammal with a short trunk and long forehead is a taper.
Specifically, the South American lowland taper.
And if you don't know what a taper is, you're not alone.
So some people think that they're related to elephants, some people get confused when they see tapers.
They think they're giant antiters, some people think that they're big, that they're capybars.
So lots of people who still don't know what a taper is.
Even the noises the taper makes can be mistaken for other animals.
Yes, they have a very large repertoire of vocalizations.
But it's funny, I always laugh because if you listen to their vocalizations, they sound almost like a bird.
So it's little whistles and little clicks that the babies do.
If they want to make sure that they can locate their mom, it's just weird.
That such a large animal sounds almost like a little bird.
This is taper paradise. This is tapers as they should be.
The pantanal is an open lab for us.
Athresia has dedicated her life to studying and protecting tapers.
But tapers can be tricky to track down and weather can make getting to the pantanal difficult.
So when Patresia had an opportunity to head back into the field recently,
she was not available for an interview.
But she recorded some audio postcards for us instead, because she really, really loves tapers.
The moment that made me feel like tapers were amazing was when I found out
how important they are for the maintenance of biodiversity.
Their herbivores and 50% of their diet consists of fruit.
And they eat the fruit. They swallow the seeds and they're wide-ranging animals.
They move a lot.
And when they do that, they defecate, of course.
And they disperse those seeds through the habitat.
So tapers are known as the gardeners of the forest.
I think that's just really, really special. That's just incredible.
That an animal can have that kind of a role in shaping and maintaining diversity.
Tapers are mostly found in tropical forests, such as the Amazon.
And they absolutely need large patches of habitat in order to find all the resources they need
to reproduce and survive.
But their habitat is being destroyed. And they have been hunted out of several parts of their geographic distribution.
Here is Patricia Medici on the TED stage.
If you think about it, the extinction of tapers would seriously affect biodiversity as a whole.
I started my taper working in 1996. Still very young, fresh out of college.
And it was a pioneer research and conservation program.
At that point, we had nearly zero information about tapers, mostly because they're so difficult to study.
They're nocturnal, solitary, very, very elusive animals.
And we got started getting very basic data about this animals.
But what is it that a conservationist does?
Well, first, we need data. We need field research.
We need those long-term data sets to support conservation action.
And I told you, tapers are very hard to study.
So we have to rely on indirect methods to study them.
We have to capture and anesthetize them so that we can install GPS colors around our necks and follow their movements,
which is a technique used by many other conservationists around the world.
And then we can gather information about how they use space, how they move through the landscape,
what are their priority habitats, and so much more.
Ultimately, we conservationists, we must be able to apply our data, to apply our accumulated knowledge to support actual conservation action.
Right now, 2015, we expanded our taper conservation efforts to the Brazilian Sejado,
the open grasslands and shrub forests in the central part of Brazil.
Today, this region is the very epicenter of economic development in my country,
where natural habitat and wildlife populations are rapidly being eradicated by several different threats,
including cataranching large sugarcane and soybean plantations, poaching, roll kill, just to name a few.
And somehow, tapers are still there, which gives me a lot of hope.
But I have to say that when you drive around and you find that tapers along the highways,
and signs of tapers wandering around in the middle of sugarcane plantations where they shouldn't be,
and you talk to kids and they tell you that they know how tapers meet tastes because their families poach and eat them.
It really breaks your heart.
The situation in the Sejado gave me the sense of urgency.
I am swimming against the tide.
Maybe realize that despite two decades of hard work trying to save this animals,
we still have so much work to do if we are to prevent them from disappearing.
We have to find ways to solve all these problems.
What changed between 2015 and now is that instead of putting a lot, a lot of energy into studying the ecology of tapers
in all these different sites, we decided to shift the focus and start applying that information
into really, really trying to solve those problems.
We could talk a lot about tapers, roadkill and the highways in the state of Matogrosa de Su,
here in Brazil.
And since then, we have been using all the data we collected during the monitoring of the highways
to develop roadkill mitigation plans for the most critical highways in the state of Matogrosa de Su.
If we think hunting, which is another threat, we have been focusing on spreading the word about,
you know, hunting is illegal, it's a crime, you can go to jail, and so on and so on for the different threats.
But Patricia says she'll never stop studying tapers.
She's still gathering data, still has so many questions about them,
which is why she keeps going back into the field.
This is it, this is where we're going to get the data we're still missing.
I like to say this is the place where we come to think, you know, we check trucks in the morning,
we collect samples, we monitor the animals, but we also spend quite a bit of time seeing in our lab,
you know, crunching data and thinking and discussing and organizing what we have
and what we're still missing. And so this is where we actually, we do good science,
this is it, this year in the Pantanal.
I have a pact with tapers.
I know in my heart that taper conservation is my cause, this is my passion.
I'm not alone, I have this huge network of supporters behind me,
and there's no way I'm ever going to stop.
I will continue doing this, most probably for the rest of my life.
And I'll keep doing this for Patricia, my name's Sake.
One of the first tapers we captured and monitored in the Atlantic Forest many, many years ago,
for Rita and her baby Vincent in the Pantanal,
and I will keep doing this for the hundreds of tapers I've had the pleasure to meet over the years
and the many others I know I will encounter in the future.
This animal is deserved to be cared for.
They need me, they need us.
And you know, we human beings deserve to live in a world where we can get out there
and see and benefit from not only tapers, but all the other beautiful species.
Now and in the future.
Thank you so much.
That was Patricia Medici.
She is a conservation biologist and founder of the Lowland Tape Conservation Initiative.
You can see her full talk at Ted.com.
Thank you so much for listening to our episode on Animal Enigmas.
This episode was produced by James Delahousi, Matthew Cloutier, Fiona Gehrin,
Harshana Hadda, and Andrea Gutierrez.
It was edited by Sona's Meschkinpor and me.
Our production staff at NPR also includes Rachel Faulkner White, Katie Montellone,
and Lane Kaplan Levinson.
Beth Donovan is our executive producer.
Our audio engineers were Neil T. Vault, Quasile and Gile Moon.
Our theme music was written by Romteen Arablui.
The winners at Ted are Chris Anderson, Michelle Quint, Alejandra Salazar, and Danielle Belorezzo.
I'm Anouche Zamorodi, and you've been listening to the Ted Radio Hour from NPR.
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