#350 - Something Scary is Happening to Wildlife in the Everglades | Carlton Ward Jr

Watch every episode ad-free & uncensored on Patreon: https://patreon.com/dannyjones Carlton Ward Jr is a conservation photographer & National Geographic Explorer whose passion for nature was born from the Florida landscape. His mission is to inspire appreciation and protection of Florida’s original nature and culture – the endangered wildness that is often hidden in plain sight but very much needs our attention to be saved. Carlton published Florida Cowboys in 2009 and founded the Florida Wildlife Corridor project in 2010. The Path of the Panther project has been Carlton’s full-time focus since 2016 - It's purpose is to inspire a public and political movement to save the Florida Wildlife Corridor through the story of the endangered Florida panther. SPONSORS https://www.bruntworkwear.com/danny - Use code DANNY for $10 off your ENTIRE order. https://www.amentara.com/go/dj - Use code DJ22 for 22% off your first order. https://clean.ver.so/danny - Use code DANNY for 15% off your order. https://whiterabbitenergy.com/?ref=DJP - Use code DJP for 20% off EPISODE LINKS https://wildpath.com https://www.carltonward.com https://www.instagram.com/carltonward FOLLOW DANNY JONES https://www.instagram.com/dannyjones https://twitter.com/jonesdanny OUTLINE 00:00 - Florida development & cattle ranching 08:31 - finding passion for photography in Australia 16:20 - Carlton's early work with camera traps 21:44 - Florida horses evolution & animals of ancient Florida 31:09 - how North American megafauna went extinct 40:37 - the state of Florida cattle ranching 56:03 - Florida's black bear population living on cattle ranches 01:00:38 - Florida population will grow to 30 million by 2060 01:13:07 - who's fighting against Florida Wildlife Corridor preservation 01:17:55 - the Half-Earth Project 01:28:36 - tagging & tracking marine wildlife 01:32:08 - the Florida panther 01:45:31 - finding ghost orchids 01:51:18 - Carlton's deadliest animal encounter 02:02:31 - how conservationists protect themselves 02:05:44 - Florida panther population 02:16:55 - bringing animals back from extinction 02:22:03 - toll roads are destroying the wildlife corridor 02:27:53 - Florida sugar farms 02:37:07 - importance of the Gulf of Mexico Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:31Speaker 01

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• 1:07Danny Jones?

  How much of Florida is overtaken by development and construction every year? Is there like a stat on that? We know roughly what that is?

• 1:15Speaker 03

  It's hard to say the exact number. We know the population. We know that about 300,000 people move here every year. You know, since I was doing the math recently preparing for a talk. I was born in 1975. There are 8 million people in Florida. You know, now there are almost 24 million people in Florida. You hear the statistic, 1,000 people move here every day. Well, if you do that out across 50 years, you know, we've gained 16 million people since I was born.

• 1:50Danny Jones?

  It's gotta be more than that.

• 1:51Speaker 03

  Well, it was gone from 8 million to 16 million.

• 1:53Danny Jones?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:54Speaker 03

  You know, so it's, and that's, that's a million people every three years, almost.

• 1:58Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:59Speaker 03

  You know, that's

• 1:59Danny Jones?

  Yep.

• 2:00Speaker 03

  Right at 1,000 people a day. So we have, we have been sustaining about 1,000 people a day for my entire life, which is just crazy. And you look at it that way, you know, it's not sustainable, especially if we do it the way we have been, where we sprawl out to accommodate that growth. I mean, state's only 130 miles wide. You know, you cut it in half with development if you keep piling people and rooftops in the way we have been.

• 2:25Danny Jones?

  And there's, and it's How much of the state of Florida is currently developed? Is it like one third roughly?

• 2:34Speaker 03

  Develops such a like continuum, you know, there's like suburban, there's rural sprawl, where you have five acre ranchets, there's, but I'll say that, I mean, it'd be less than a third that's like actually hardened, you know, to rooftops and concrete.

• 2:52Danny Jones?

  Less than a third.

• 2:53Speaker 03

  Less than a third. Excuse me, the state's around 40 million acres. I think it's like 36 million acres of not lakes, you know, like of land.

• 3:06Speaker 03

  Half of that is designated as the Florida Wildlife Corridor now. That's 18 million acres. 10 million acres of those are like public lands, national parks, state parks, parks and preserves. So Florida is like 27% public land already.

• 3:23Speaker 03

  But this land is like places like Ocala National Forest, Everglades National Park, 175 state parks scattered throughout. They're becoming islands surrounded by development and that's what's going to happen without saving the land in between. Thankfully for Florida, there's still a lot of agriculture. And so

• 3:44Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 3:44Speaker 03

  There's, you know,

• 3:47Speaker 03

  I think a sixth of the state is still cattle ranch by landmass. I don't know what percentage is pine forest or timberlands, but it's, it's getting up there. So because of all those working lands, we still have green space.

• 4:00Danny Jones?

  I was blown away. I was listening to, I don't know if it was like an interview slash documentary. It was an older one on the cattle ranching stuff that you did. And I was blown away by the fact that the first cattle was in Florida brought by Ponce de Leon. I had no clue. And this is also the biggest, the biggest state for beef.

• 4:23Speaker 03

  Once upon a time, early on, but I think overall, we're probably like somewhere in the top 20 for beef, but we have six of the top 10 individual biggest cattle ranches in the state still, in terms of cattle production. But you can put more cows on an acre in Florida than you can in Texas because all the rain and the lush grasses. And so the Deseret Ranch owned by the Mormon Church outside of Orlando, if you're headed to the East Coast, basically from Orlando all the way to Melbourne and north is it's a 300,000 acre ranch. That's the highest producing cow calf operation in the United States.

• 5:07Danny Jones?

  Really? I had no idea. That's wild.

• 5:13Speaker 03

  That's the thing about Florida. All this is like hidden in plain sight.

• 5:16Danny Jones?

  Yep.

• 5:17Speaker 03

  Because we don't have the mountains. You can't sit here on the coast and look out in the morning and see this wild corridor. You'll go right by on the highway if you don't stop and pay attention to it. So it's, it's all there, but it's not, it's not so evident to people.

• 5:35Danny Jones?

  It's a crazy thing about Florida is that like, and I'm sure you can attest to this too, but like me, I just grew up driving, doing road trips all over Florida to like surf and stuff and go do different things and just drive right past things all the time that I really like never pay attention to. You know, you can drive through a huge cattle ranch or through like a little town like Yee Haw Junction or like down, you know, through the Everglades and, and never really stop and like considered like what the hell could be going on here?

• 6:06Speaker 03

  You know, I've always been one of those people that kind of wonders what's on the other side of the berm. You know, pull over and go see what it looks like to look down the Kissimmee River from there near Yee Haw Junction. But it really wasn't until I came back to Florida as a photographer and started looking at the cattle ranches that I started actually. Going off the road and seeing all these places and understanding the scope of how much is out there and all these families every day getting on horses and working cows all across the state that they're not even in our minds eye of what the state is.

• 6:44Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 6:45Speaker 03

  But but so important for kind of holding the green space together.

• 6:49Danny Jones?

  So can you explain like your background? How did you come up into? How did you get into photography? Like growing up as a young kid? I think you went to Africa for a little while and then you finally came back. Can you kind of like, like lay that out for people?

• 7:00Speaker 03

  Sure. Yeah. Well, I grew up not far from where you grew up in Pinellas County and here we are in the most densely populated county in the southeast. And so

• 7:12Danny Jones?

  This is?

• 7:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, Pinellas County still is.

• 7:14Danny Jones?

  More than Dade?

• 7:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:17Speaker 03

  Because Dade at least has Homestead. Or I don't know if it has Homestead, but it has, it has a hinterland, you know, it has Pinellas is built out wall to wall, Gulf to Bay. You know, the only green space left are barrier islands that were too inconvenient to develop in a couple of parks, you know, a few parks.

• 7:39Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 7:40Speaker 03

  So there's something about growing up here where I think

• 7:45Speaker 03

  I had, I had one, I grew up here, but I also have a cattle ranch in the family and lots of cousins who are full-time ranchers. We have a smaller ranch that's kind of where those historic family lands were. My

• 8:01Speaker 03

  great, great great grandfather homesteaded around Wachula around the 1850s and I still have a lot of family in that part of the state today. So I, I had this, I mean, I was a suburban kid who went to the ranch for Thanksgiving for Boy Scout camps to learn how to go hunting and So I kind of had one foot in both worlds. And so I'd feel how developed it is here. And then you would go out there and it was so wild and open. And then you would come back here and you'd feel the squeeze. And I think that was kind of in my background, but I didn't, I didn't go to college setting out to be a conservationist or to even study biology.

• 8:41Speaker 03

  I thought I was gonna study physics and go into engineering, or maybe study business and go to law school. I didn't really have it all mapped out, but I studied biology. I studied anthropology. I got really interested, kind of got my eyes opened a bit. I was like, oh, wow. Like, maybe, maybe everything I think of as quote progress is not progress. And I started to really get sensitive to like the conservation issues and learning about the loss of species, learning how they were losing species at a rate like many, many multiples faster than how it has been over history and the loss of language and all the kind of

• 9:22Speaker 03

  other side of globalization. And so I started studying ecology.

• 9:29Speaker 03

  And at the same time, I got into photography, kind of in parallel to that. Like, it was more, I was into, well, it was actually, I went to Australia in sophomore year, really to go surfing. Like, I found a study abroad that took me to the Gold Coast where you have Kira and Burleigh Head and Stradbroke Island and all these awesome surf breaks. And they have a university that gave credits to my school at Wake Forest. So

• 9:56Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 9:56Speaker 03

  Couple buddies and I went to Australia through this AustralLearn exchange program, lived on the beach, surfed every day. And my parents got me a camera to like document my experience. And that kind of opened me up to this. I started to really get into it. Like, we'd go to the outback on the weekend or go explore the Northern Territory or just on the beach. And I started taking pictures. And I had this kind of autofocus Minolta film camera. And then actually, someone broke into our car surfing at Byron Bay and my camera disappeared. And so I went to Ted's Camera Shop where I was getting on my film process. And the guy took pity on me and let me borrow this old mechanical Pentax camera. And that was like my

• 10:42Speaker 03

  It like set me off on this adventure. So we're in the Northern Territory with these waterfalls and crocodiles and Aboriginal natives and so much cool stuff. And I felt like I was in my own little National Geographic assignment with this mechanical camera. And I really loved the process of just capturing the image and sharing it, like bringing that story home, putting it in the scrapbook to show my family. And so when I got back to Wake Forest to college, I was like hungry for more about photography. And they didn't have a journalism class. They didn't have photography. It's a liberal arts college. So I went to the local community college to learn how to process black and white film

• 11:22Speaker 03

  and kind of talked my way on to the photography and yearbook staff at the school. And I shot NCAA sports and you know, Tim Duncan was a basketball player at Wake Forest then. So it was fun to shoot ACC basketball. And so I just was shooting as much film as I could on the, on, on the film, on the school's expense. But at the same time, I'm studying biology, I'm studying anthropology, I'm getting interested in nature. I got, I did a study abroad in Kenya one summer and I was able to like borrow the school's telephoto lens and really start to evolve as a photographer from that point.

• 12:02Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 12:03Speaker 03

  It's kind of, you know, I'm taking you on the long, roundabout version of this.

• 12:06Danny Jones?

  No, this is good. This is fascinating.

• 12:09Speaker 03

  But I really, I didn't know what it meant to be a photographer professionally. And I took some time after undergraduate, I did an internship with the Smithsonian, where I went to the Natural History Museum in DC. And my job was really just to scan slides. This is the beginning of the transition to digital. And I would go to the cold storage facility, get a few thousand slides out, bring them back that week, I would scan them through the computer, color correct them, crop them, put them on disk. I was helping digitize these archives from these photographers who'd been working around the world for the Smithsonian. But it was an amazing place. I don't know if you've been to the National

• 12:49Speaker 03

  Museum of Natural History in DC where they have the elephant in the entryway and whale skeletons hanging in the ocean hall and.

• 13:00Speaker 03

  You walk the back way up to your sixth floor office and there's like drawers of bones and animal skins and it's just like this night of the museum kinda real thing to intern there and all these amazing people. So there's these lectures every Friday in the anthropology department and people from the biodiversity programs would come into the photo lab to scan their slides from their expeditions to Peru. And I met all these amazing people and attended all these lectures and I met this group of folks in the biodiversity program that were just about to start a series of expeditions to Gabon in Central Africa. And so they had just done a whole series of expeditions to Peru and didn't bring a photographer

• 13:41Speaker 03

  with them and were kinda regretting it because they didn't have the tools to tell the story afterwards or not so much. So they planned it from the beginning. So I had this amazing opportunity to go as an intern to a country in Central Africa on the Atlantic coast. In some ways reminded me of home because you're facing out to the ocean over the west.

• 14:01Danny Jones?

  Is that near Namibia?

• 14:04Speaker 03

  It's more north of that. It's right on the equator. It's 80% covered by rainforest still. You have elephants that come down through the forest onto the beach. You have hippos that actually travel and the surf to get from the ponds where they spend the day to the savannas where they graze during the night. It's just wild. Like going down the beach on the back of an ATV, saw a gorilla on the back of the beach. Like, you know, so like, you know, maybe as wild as Florida once was, but like same type of orientation to the sun, same kinda thing, but a totally wild world. And that was such an awesome experience.

• 14:44Speaker 03

  I went on six different expeditions over three years. It turned into a job opportunity and I, my primary function for them was more of like a scientific imaging. I did studio portraits of all the animals they were collecting against black backdrops. So it was.

• 15:06Speaker 03

  You know, I think I photographed 400 different species of birds, frogs, reptiles, and amphibians all alive that they were collecting and keeping some of them for museum specimens. But I was kind of set up a studio in the field for the science purposes of that. But then I also got to kind of tell the story of the place to go with that. And that that was my first kind of entry into that kind of photography. I published my first book called The Edge of Africa, my first Smithsonian magazine story, my first magazine covers, and kind of saw that, okay, this this is possible and kind of moved in that direction.

• 15:45Danny Jones?

  How old were you at that time?

• 15:46Speaker 03

  I was kind of 20, 25 to 28, somewhere, somewhere in that range. I'll pull up a couple of pictures here if I have them.

• 16:01Danny Jones?

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• 17:19Speaker 03

  So here, here's me back then.

• 17:22Danny Jones?

  And this is Africa?

• 17:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm in Gabon in the rainforest. This is an aerial view of what's now the Wango National Park.

• 17:31Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 17:33Danny Jones?

  And this is from like, what was that from a helicopter or something?

• 17:35Speaker 03

  That was from an airplane.

• 17:36Danny Jones?

  Airplane.

• 17:37Speaker 03

  Stuffed in the back of a Cessna one eighty two. But this is some of my early work with camera traps.

• 17:42Danny Jones?

  Yeah, the camera trap stuff is amazing, like.

• 17:45Speaker 03

  One of my role models from National Geographic, Nick Nichols, had been doing camera traps and kind of pioneering with camera traps. He photographed tigers in India. He had photographed all these pictures are impossible to take without a camera trap. So that's what this setup is. There's a Nikon.

• 18:03Danny Jones?

  Basically drill a hole or cut a hole out of a Pelican case, right?

• 18:06Speaker 03

  Right. There's a Nikon film camera in there firing three different strobes that are in these makeshift waterproof housings that I made out of like lantern flashlight casings. And the thing kind of near my elbow on that other stake in the ground is an infrared tripwire.

• 18:23Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 18:24Speaker 03

  And so the animal walks by, breaks the beam, sends a signal to the camera, takes a picture. So that's the theory of it. These are the days of film where you only get thirty six exposures and you don't know what you got until you're back in the United States getting it processed three months later.

• 18:41Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 18:42Speaker 03

  So it's a big mystery. But yeah, here's another, here's me testing one of the camera traps then. And there's a whole lot of failure, but then once in a while it works out.

• 18:52Danny Jones?

  Oh, my God, dude. It's so, the camera trap photos are so different. There's nothing like them because it's, there's no human in there. It's just the animal in the wild, but nothing around. And I don't think people can appreciate that without understanding like the backstory, how that photo was actually taken, right? Like this wasn't like you standing there with a camera and then like the things like looking at you. This is, this is just completely uninterrupted in the wilderness. Except for the flash might like throw a log and like, whoa, what was that?

• 19:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, he probably hears the click. He probably shoots two or three pictures in a row. He probably heard the click and then looks up for, for one more. But this, I mean, this leopard had probably never seen a camera.

• 19:35Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 19:35Speaker 03

  And probably never saw one again. Like this, this is a leopard in the wild in the night stalking down a trail in the rainforest.

• 19:42Danny Jones?

  It would be like us seeing a flying saucer or something like that.

• 19:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, I, I can't even imagine, but the. And the perspective, like this is a wide angle lens. Like if I took a picture of a leopard with basically an iPhone camera perspective from that close, I might not be here to tell you about it. But

• 20:00Danny Jones?

  How close would you say the camera was to that leopard?

• 20:04Speaker 03

  Two feet, three feet.

• 20:05Danny Jones?

  Two feet.

• 20:06Speaker 03

  Three feet. Yeah. I mean, it's walking down a trail, maybe three feet. It's probably a 24 millimeter lens, which is same equivalent to what your cell phone shoots with.

• 20:15Danny Jones?

  Right, right.

• 20:17Speaker 03

  So, yeah, it, you know, I kind of saw what was possible, but then this is, this was 2001 to 2003, I'm doing this work and it was amazing. And I was living in DC and I was working to publish this book, but every time I got on an airplane, left Florida for three months and came home, I was seeing scenes like this.

• 20:41Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 20:41Speaker 03

  And like literally ranches and wild places turning to golf courses and subdivisions

• 20:48Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 20:48Speaker 03

  in real time. And I started feeling this pull towards home because here I am, you know, a white guy from Florida exporting a conservation ethic to an African country. And there's probably a hundred people who would take my job to work with the Smithsonian in Africa. But I didn't feel like enough was being done to tell the story of what was going on here. And I was probably better suited for that because that's where I'm from. So around 2004, I decided I'm going to come back to Florida and try to work as a conservation photographer here. And that, and that's what led me into beginning the ranch project. So

• 21:30Speaker 03

  you know, we were talking a little bit about before, like ranches are this thing that's not even associated with Florida.

• 21:35Danny Jones?

  No, not at all.

• 21:36Speaker 03

  But at the time, it was one fifth of the state by landmass. It's a huge. Proportion of the state and arguably the most pivotal landscape in the state because it's either going to be ranches or it's going to be rooftops.

• 21:50Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 21:50Speaker 03

  You know, if you look at the long-term trends and I don't think people understood what's being lost. So that was my motivation and I was also motivated by my, my own heritage with it because this like this is, that's me and my granddad on our family ranch back in, you know, I was nine or 10 years old or something.

• 22:13Danny Jones?

  That's so cool. I've just like, it's, first of all, it's so rare to meet anybody who was born in Florida, but it's impossibly rare to meet somebody whose lineage goes back from Florida natives as far as yours do. That's incredible. And.

• 22:28Speaker 03

  It's like one in, it's like one in three people were born here anymore by the numbers.

• 22:32Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 22:33Speaker 03

  You know, it's like really, or maybe a quarter, maybe 25% of people were born in Florida. It's a small proportion.

• 22:39Danny Jones?

  Very small.

• 22:41Speaker 03

  And this is a, well, I'll go back to the photo before it.

• 22:44Danny Jones?

  Is it true that the horses in Florida have specifically evolved different than other horses to where they can actually stand in water for days without their, their hooves being destroyed?

• 22:54Speaker 03

  That's, that's my understanding and they, they call them cracker horses, but they're, they're horses that came from the Spanish, the marsh tackies or the, you know, the Andalusian horses and cattle.

• 23:06Danny Jones?

  Mm-hmm.

• 23:07Speaker 03

  But they lived wild in the Florida woods for several centuries and same with the cattle. And so there, I've heard it said that they've adapted where they're, they're less bothered by the insects and they can stand.

• 23:21Danny Jones?

  Thicker skin.

• 23:22Speaker 03

  They can stand in the water all day and they're, they're smaller, they're nimble. I mean, same with the cattle, the, the cracker cattle, they're not going to gain the weight the way that a Hereford or an Angus or these English breeds will when you put them on feed, but they're going to survive on palmettos or in the deep woods.

• 23:41Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 23:42Speaker 03

  And when the early, when, like when my ancestors came to Florida, there's so many different waves of kind of migration into Florida. Most of the original natives here, the Calusa, the Timucan, the Tokavaga, the, all these amazing civilizations of native people were basically wiped out by Spanish disease.

• 24:02Danny Jones?

  Mm-hmm.

• 24:03Speaker 03

  To the point, I mean, I think the last Calusa.

• 24:07Speaker 03

  Passed away in Cuba, like were brought there on display or something awful. But so the the Micasuki Indians, the Seminole Indians who are here today, Florida was part of their territory, but they were Creek people from, you know, north of Alabama and through the southeast who ranged and traded and had a presence in Florida.

• 24:30Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 24:31Speaker 03

  But they really got pushed here during the Trail of Tears, during like the Seminole Wars, during the trying to extirpate native people from, in this really dark history, trying to move native people off the land and push them out to reservations in Oklahoma and so forth.

• 24:48Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 24:49Speaker 03

  The Seminoles pushed into the Everglades.

• 24:51Danny Jones?

  When, when are we talking roughly?

• 24:53Speaker 03

  Seventeen hundreds, eighteen hundreds.

• 24:57Danny Jones?

  And Posteleon came in the fifteen hundreds, right?

• 25:00Speaker 03

  Posteleon came, yeah, fifteen twenty-one was his second voyage.

• 25:03Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 25:04Speaker 03

  And that's when the cattle and horses came for the first time.

• 25:06Danny Jones?

  And the hogs, right?

• 25:08Speaker 03

  I think hogs. And he also, he got a souvenir as an arrow from a Kaluas Indian.

• 25:15Danny Jones?

  A poison arrow, right?

• 25:16Speaker 03

  And went and died of his wounds in Cuba. But horses and cattle stayed and, I mean, I don't know if those exact cattle produced lineages that stayed for long, they may have eaten most of them, who knows? But subsequent Spanish missions kept coming and they kept bringing horses and cattle.

• 25:32Danny Jones?

  And disease.

• 25:34Speaker 03

  And disease. But the cattle naturalized to the Florida woods. And so by the time my ancestors came in the mid fifteen, in the mid eighteen hundreds, and most of the kind of pioneer American, American colonists at that time, cattle had been living in the Florida woods for three centuries.

• 25:53Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 25:55Speaker 03

  And so it was a naturally occurring resource where if you're a, you know, a poor cracker settler moving down into Florida trying to scratch out an existence, you can get some good dogs and a brand and a horse and go round up cattle that live in the woods, make them your own and start to. Build some stability for your family.

• 26:19Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 26:20Speaker 03

  If you, if you read the book of land remembered.

• 26:23Danny Jones?

  No, I haven't heard of it.

• 26:25Speaker 03

  And a friend of mine is about to adapt it for a TV series, but it's, um, it's by Patrick Smith. And it chronicles the life of a early pioneer Florida family all the way up through the generations up into Miami. And it kind of gets into these stories.

• 26:41Danny Jones?

  Oh, interesting.

• 26:42Speaker 03

  It's really fascinating.

• 26:45Danny Jones?

  Do we know what Florida was like before the Spanish came? Like what was here? What kind of animals were here?

• 26:53Speaker 03

  Well, if we go back, they're, they're great fossil records for Florida. If you go back, what I think is really fascinating, if you go back 10,000 years to the end of the last ice age.

• 27:04Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 27:05Speaker 03

  Florida was twice as wide as it is now.

• 27:07Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 27:08Speaker 03

  Because the oceans were 80, 80 or a hundred feet lower.

• 27:11Danny Jones?

  Right. And the shelf went out really wide, right?

• 27:15Speaker 03

  On the east coast, it, it looked practically the same because the shelf is steep.

• 27:19Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 27:19Speaker 03

  But here in the Gulf, where you go fish at the middle grounds, 80 or a hundred miles offshore.

• 27:23Danny Jones?

  Yep.

• 27:24Speaker 03

  That was land.

• 27:25Danny Jones?

  The middle grounds was land?

• 27:27Speaker 03

  Or all the way, almost to the edge, like 80 miles, a hundred miles from the coastline was the edge of the land where it drops off.

• 27:34Danny Jones?

  Wow. Steve, you gotta find an, an image of that or an illustration of that. There's gotta be one online.

• 27:42Speaker 03

  And so if you think about it, at that time, Florida was drier than it is now. We still had woolly mammoths and bison and mastodons, like giant ground sloths.

• 27:54Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 27:55Speaker 03

  I mean, all, all these big, massive animals that lived here, saber tooth cats.

• 27:59Danny Jones?

  Yep.

• 28:00Speaker 03

  But, but there were also people. And so like the early Native Americans were here 12, 13, 14, 15,000 years ago. And there's been this phenomenal, um.

• 28:16Danny Jones?

  Look at that, dude. It's incredible.

• 28:20Speaker 03

  So there would have been people living along that coastline.

• 28:24Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 28:25Speaker 03

  And all of those archaeological sites are deep underwater at this point and mostly lost to the tide. So we don't even get a glimpse, but there's places, if you've been to the rivers, kind of south of Tallahassee, like the Asila River or the St. Mark's River.

• 28:40Danny Jones?

  I haven't spent much time up there now.

• 28:42Speaker 03

  Well, it's a really low energy coastline, like basically the beaches stop in Tarpon Springs and then it turns to kind of a marshy coast up in that corner. Well, there are these incredible underwater archaeology sites in that Big Bend area where there's these rivers like the Asila River, which is a series of sinkholes. And when the water was lower, it would have been sinkholes, like, kind of like the cenotes you see from the Yucatan, where the river would disappear underground and there were watering holes that the animals would go to.

• 29:17Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 29:18Speaker 03

  Well, they found the 11,000 year old mastodon skeleton with butcher marks on the tusks.

• 29:26Danny Jones?

  What?

• 29:27Speaker 03

  And it's on display at the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville. There is also.

• 29:32Danny Jones?

  When did they find this?

• 29:34Speaker 03

  In the past 40, 40 years or so. A guy, David Webb, who ran the underwater archaeology department at FSU, found it. But then they've found, there was a prehistoric bison from 12,000 years ago that had a Clovis spear point in its skull that they found in this place.

• 29:54Danny Jones?

  Oh my God, dude.

• 29:57Speaker 03

  So you've got this completely connected wild continent where apparently the mastodons and the mammoths would migrate. From the Appalachians all the way down to the coast of Florida in the winter and back because they could trace from their fossilized dung or from some index, they could see the pollen and what was left behind. They have this picture of how all these things were fitting together back then.

• 30:26Danny Jones?

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• 31:55Danny Jones?

  22% off your first order. That's A-M-E-N-T-A-R-A.com/go/dj with the code DJ22. It's linked down below. Now, back to the show. Now, do we know how all of those megafauna died? Because it's interesting how in North America, there's no more megafauna, but in Africa, there is.

• 32:20Speaker 03

  I don't, I've heard different theories about it. I don't know what the current thinking is, but I don't think it's any coincidence. It's about the same time that people showed up. You know, because humans.

• 32:33Speaker 03

  We're first coming by water and coming across the land bridge first showing up in the fossil record in that 12,000, 13,000 years ago, about the same time that they went extinct. But it's also the end of the ice age. And so that's when the glaciers started receding and the climate changed. So it's a, you know, it probably, it probably wouldn't be hospitable for a giant furry elephant to live in Florida in this climate.

• 32:59Danny Jones?

  If it was like a rapid climate, like a rapid change and right.

• 33:02Speaker 03

  I'm not sure how fast that happened, but, um, but I do know that people and hunting were a new presence on the landscape starting then too.

• 33:13Danny Jones?

  Have you heard of the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis?

• 33:19Danny Jones?

  It's this theory that geologists and some geologists and climate scientists have come up with that basically around 11,000, 12,000 years ago, that there was some sort of, um,

• 33:35Danny Jones?

  comet, a series of comet impacts. They called the Younger Dryas that happened for about a thousand year period between 11 and 12,000 years ago. And they think they've found evidence of these cosmic impacts in the, the, the ground layer. They found this black matte layer in the ground that they, has like nano diamonds and specific elements that would come from comets.

• 34:04Danny Jones?

  As well as like giant pieces of rocks that were from the northeast, North American ice sheet that would have been like in the northeast above New York, Toronto area. Like, like, I'm talking like 10 ton boulders that they found in the Midwest, like near, um, like Washington, that kind of area. And the hypothesis is, this is just part of their hypothesis is that if this hypothetical comet impact happened, it would have like hit the ice sheet. Uh, sent water flooding through the North American continent and it would have had

• 34:45Danny Jones?

  ice chunks that had giant rocks in them that would have washed across the continent, could have gone all the way across the continent and then melted and those rocks could have settled there. Um, but yeah, I don't know.

• 34:56Speaker 03

  It makes sense. I mean, those, I know a little bit about the, at the Cambian Cretaceous boundary with the extinction of the dinosaurs and the massive asteroid that

• 35:08Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 35:09Speaker 03

  crushed into the Yucatan around that time. And, um, the chief scientist at National Geographic now, Ian Miller, was like a paleo expert and he was explaining to me kind of what happened in the world when that thing hit.

• 35:23Danny Jones?

  Uh huh.

• 35:23Speaker 03

  And he said, I might not get this all right, but the gist of it is all these things had to happen. Like normally the gravitational field of Jupiter protects the earth

• 35:38Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 35:38Speaker 03

  from all these comets and other asteroids. So it's just like a somehow snuck through this asteroid belt and came crushing into the earth. But when it hit, it collapsed the entire, it would have collapsed the entire atmosphere of the earth to touch the surface. It would have hit and liquefied the surface in the crust when it, and it would have made of an explosion backwards. Like when you drop a rock into a puddle of water and the water bounces up, that refractive bounce back would have been three times the size of Mount Everest.

• 36:12Danny Jones?

  Oh my God.

• 36:14Speaker 03

  And a fireball would have raced across the continent that would have hit like Montana within three minutes. So just literally scorched the earth and, and uplifted, I mean, he, he says, you can see it now. You see how the cenotes and all these amazing things around Cancun. It's like the underground limestone got folded upwards.

• 36:42Danny Jones?

  Find a picture of the cenotes in the, uh, Yucatan, Steve. They're incredible.

• 36:46Speaker 03

  So, yeah, I mean, you know, you know that you basically pressed reset for the planet with that particular meteor and, and you know, doesn't surprise me if a comet snuck its way through, you'd have boulders going across.

• 37:03Speaker 03

  All of North America.

• 37:04Danny Jones?

  Right, right. But it's interesting like-

• 37:06Speaker 03

  It could have wiped out all those species too, or contributed to it.

• 37:08Danny Jones?

  Sure, sure. This is the, uh, yeah, this is in the Yucatan. Is this, uh, there's like these underwater things that you can, is that what they're called, the cenotes? When you're, when you're diving in the Yucatan and you see these like honeycomb structures everywhere underwater?

• 37:24Speaker 03

  There, these are freshwater, but they come in, they interface, and it's, I mean, Florida has the highest concentration of freshwater springs in the world.

• 37:30Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 37:31Speaker 03

  So we have a similar kind of karst geology, but there it's has, you know, different and has this history with the meteor impact.

• 37:40Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 37:41Speaker 03

  Changes the structure of a lot of it.

• 37:43Danny Jones?

  Now, do we know like what happened to that, that asteroid when it hit the Yucatan? Did it like go underwater, under the ground? Or did it like just disintegrate into a million pieces? Or like, is there any remnants of it? Like, and when do we, when did we actually come up with that theory that it hit the Yucatan?

• 38:01Speaker 03

  I think they've kind of pinpointed where it was.

• 38:04Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 38:04Speaker 03

  I, I don't know exactly. I mean, I've, I've heard about it across my adult life, but I don't know when it was-

• 38:11Danny Jones?

  It was, I think it was relatively recent that we actually discovered that it hit the Yucatan.

• 38:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 38:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was like in the 40s, I think.

• 38:18Danny Jones?

  40s.

• 38:19Speaker 03

  And they know, they know where it is, and I think they can measure where it hit, and it's, um-

• 38:24Danny Jones?

  But dude, Steve, so I want to show you this real quick. So check out the, uh, the Midwest scablands. The, uh, the scablands that Randall Carlson talks about. So in his Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, he believes that the North American ice sheet was hit by comets. And it basically unlocked this, this biblical flood where he thinks like millions of tons of water were rushing through these scab, yeah, top left, go to the top left, the Washington scabland. So, yeah, blow that up. He thinks that basically millions of volumetric tons of water were rushing through the scab and channeling out these

• 39:07Danny Jones?

  areas in the, um, in the western part of the, the North Americas, North American continent.

• 39:14Danny Jones?

  Um, and he, he does this incredible, um, presentation of like how he believes it all happened and in what series. And it's, uh, it's super compelling. Combined with the fact that they did the black mat, they, they cut into the earth and found that black lap mat layer of the nano diamond particles and the other elements that would have been in those comets. Um, corroborating the time that this would have happened. It's just fascinating.

• 39:39Speaker 03

  It's so interesting. I don't know nearly as much about the rest of the country as I do Florida, but it, it makes sense.

• 39:46Danny Jones?

  Yeah, no, it to- it totally does. But like, you know, just going back to, to Florida to, to before all those ice sheets melted, how wide and how far it went out into the Gulf is, is insane to me.

• 40:03Speaker 03

  And it shows you how much, how much things change over time. I mean, you know, the, the sea is rising now, probably from our carbon and other impacts, but it's not the first time it's risen or gone down.

• 40:15Danny Jones?

  Right. Yeah. It's been a roller coaster.

• 40:17Speaker 03

  But it, you know, whether it's, whether it's happening faster than species can adapt to it.

• 40:23Danny Jones?

  That's a problem.

• 40:24Speaker 03

  And the way we've hardened the landscape, you know, it's not like the, you know, the sea rises, the marsh grasses would shift back, the mangroves would shift back, the pines would shift back. Everything would kind of like move itself gradually uphill. Well, we haven't left that option for much of the coastline. I mean, we've left at best like a few feet before you hit the seawall, you know, it's, and, and then it's, so there are still places north of Tampa, along this area, we're calling the wilderness coast where you still have room for nature to adapt. You still have enough grow open space and green

• 41:08Speaker 03

  space around the Swanee River, around these different river mouths where, you know, you see, you see the palm trees dying off in Chazawitzka. You see the saltwater intrusion, the evidence of the sea rising. But if you give nature enough space, those ecosystems can kind of go up the hill and reappear up the gradient and still sustain the diversity of life and food and biodiversity that's there.

• 41:38Danny Jones?

  So going back to the cattle ranching, the cattle ranching project that you did when you got back from, from Africa. So how has this, the cattle ranches of Florida evolved since then up till now? Like, what is the current state of them? Like, where are they going? What's happening with it?

• 41:56Speaker 03

  Here, I'll show, I'll show another picture here. So this, that's my great granddad, who I never met. That's the summer of 1929. And the young boy in that photo is his sons, that Doral Carlton and Doral Carlton Jr. My great granddad was just becoming Florida's 25th governor at the time.

• 42:18Danny Jones?

  What?

• 42:20Speaker 03

  Like, he was a guy from rural Wachula, grew up with nine other siblings, you know, in, in the woods, and then ended up studying, going to Stetson, going to law school in Chicago and New York, and coming back and being a governor and starting a law firm, Carlton Fields, here in Tampa.

• 42:40Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 42:40Speaker 03

  But the, I, I did get to meet the, the, I think, nine-year-old boy in that photo was my great uncle, Doral Carlton Jr. He started the thing called Cracker Country at the state fair, at the Florida State Fairgrounds, where you can actually go see the house that his dad grew up in.

• 43:00Danny Jones?

  No way.

• 43:01Speaker 03

  And I'm not, I'm not trying to go down a side off-ramp of family history, but I'm, I'm bringing this picture up because I took this in 1999. I did a magazine writing class at the University of Florida when I was kind of in between undergraduate and graduate school. And I did a personality profile on my great uncle. And I went and spent a day with him on his ranch in Horse Creek, and kind of saw the land through his eyes for the first time. And he told me when he was a boy, he would go out with the cowboys, moving herds of cattle, sleeping under the stars for two or three nights at a time, and never see a fence.

• 43:40Speaker 03

  When he was born, there were a million people in Florida. And so across a single lifetime, you go from a million people to 24 million people. You go from a wild, free range place where cattle moved as wildlife in a way as you would to fence laws. And fence laws were coming into place with the advent of the automobile. Because you don't want to have the collision with the car and the motor vehicle. And people are dividing up the land and taking ownership and that was part of it. But so it was a free range situation back then. But ranching stayed an important part of the landscape.

• 44:24Speaker 03

  And it's, I think it's, I'm going to back up a couple of pictures of this.

• 44:31Speaker 03

  Ranching and cattle can be really bad for the environment. And they can also be really compatible with the environment. It depends where you are.

• 44:40Danny Jones?

  Why would it be bad?

• 44:41Speaker 03

  Well, like in Brazil, we're cutting, you know, people are cutting down rainforest.

• 44:46Danny Jones?

  Oh, right.

• 44:47Speaker 03

  Slash and burn rainforest to put in cattle on soils that are not evolved or meant for

• 44:56Speaker 03

  grasslands. And, you know, ecologically, you're, it's a double whammy. I think the environmental footprint of beef can be improved across the board. Like right now, we feed cows corn and it's cheaper to ship a cow to a feedlot in Texas and Oklahoma as a 600 pound calf to eat corn for the next year before being slaughtered than it is to ship that much corn to the cows where they live in other parts of the state. So, you know, we're trucking them and putting them on trains and feeding them corn. And so there's a lot of. Energy that goes into producing a pound of beef and a lot of water that goes into producing a pound of beef.

• 45:40Speaker 03

  But in its simple form and a grass fed ecosystem, a cow is very compatible with the environment. And here where we had buffalo or had, you know, in his, where their historic grasslands and rangelands that supported those kinds of wildlife, the cattle can fit right in. And that's the thing, a Florida cattle ranch can have just as much wildlife diversity as a state park or a national park because of the way the cattle are compatible with the landscape.

• 46:09Danny Jones?

  Wow, that's fascinating.

• 46:12Speaker 03

  So that's this picture. This is Appalachian Cole National Forest, but you have this palmettos and longleaf pine trees and cattle living in that kind of ecosystem. It's not, you have to cut it all down, mow it, fence it. I mean, they can, they can thrive and support the biodiversity and animals like the panther and the black bear and all the different species that live out there.

• 46:37Danny Jones?

  Yeah, this seems like a, a much more natural way to have, I mean, you think about where you live and the food you eat, you want to eat food that's native to where you live. And then when you think about what your food, what your food eats, you would want your food to eat things that are native to where you live, not things that are being shipped from across, across the country. I would imagine it would be better for the cow to eat food that was grown there, the grass or, you know, whatever is native to the environment it lives in, right?

• 47:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure. I mean, cows are made to eat grass and

• 47:12Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 47:13Speaker 03

  We have to give them antibiotics and other things to help them eat the corn.

• 47:17Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 47:18Speaker 03

  But from a production standpoint, they put on weight faster eating corn. There's more nutrients in the corn. They put on more weight. It makes a fatter, more tender cut of beef. So the, the taste is preferred by American consumers. Grass fed beef can be drier, more gamey.

• 47:40Speaker 03

  So there's been an appetite in the market that, you know, set it up the way it is. But if we could adapt a taste for grass fed, locally grown, locally slaughtered beef, then the environmental footprint, you know, I would think drops by orders of magnitude because you're, you're growing an animal that's compatible. You're not having to provide water, you're not having to provide fertilizer and you're gaining a high quality protein without having to put nearly as many inputs into it as we do the way we grow beef now.

• 48:14Danny Jones?

  Now, let me ask you this, if I had a cattle ranch and I had a ton of cattle, what would, is there, other than the fact that majority of society will buy corn fed beef because it's fattier and it's, it's more whatever, it's less gamey. Is there any other benefit or is there any other downside to just feeding them grass?

• 48:39Speaker 03

  And the downside is you're not gonna probably make as much money.

• 48:42Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 48:43Speaker 03

  Because they're not gonna gain weight as quickly.

• 48:45Danny Jones?

  Right, okay.

• 48:46Speaker 03

  So you might take, you might be able to feed them up to slaughter weight on corn and half the time they would take.

• 48:52Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 48:53Speaker 03

  To feed them up to that same slaughter weight, just eating grass. But there's some.

• 48:57Danny Jones?

  That's, I'm sure it's competitive.

• 48:59Speaker 03

  It's a competitive market and it's about the bottom line. But, but there are people who are doing it, like there, I met, I photographed ranches for more than 20 years across Florida now and you meet some amazing people. Some of the, one family I met was raising cows in South Florida because most of the ranches in Florida, they're called cow calf operations. And so all, what, what we produce is, is calves. And then, once that calf grows up to a certain weight, they get shipped off to the feed lot. And so you sell your calves and then they go to eat corn and eventually be slaughtered.

• 49:41Speaker 03

  Some people are kind of closing the circle and keeping the whole life cycle here, here at home and.

• 49:49Speaker 03

  The grasses that grow on the sandy Florida soils aren't the nutrient-rich grass that's going to help them gain weight quickly. So some of them are going up to the panhandle where you have the clay soils and having a different ranch property there. And then they feed the cattle more protein-rich foods and legumes that they can grow and they go eat them straight off the, you know, off the grass, but, and then they're slaughtering them locally. And you can do that and there is a, there are health-conscious people or certain restaurants or certain, you know, created demand for that more premium, low environmental footprint, you know, probably healthier food product, but it's just not mainstream yet.

• 50:28Danny Jones?

  Right. How many ranches are doing it this way in Florida that you're aware of?

• 50:33Speaker 03

  Not very many. I mean, most of it, including my own family, is shipping the cows, selling your calves at the market and they go to the feedlot. There, there is a group of ranchers called Florida Cattle Ranchers who are kind of doing a hybrid where they're not naturally grazing grass through their whole life, but they're feeding them grain and other things that are at least grown in the state of Florida. So up around Chiefland, there's some feedlots where they're, you know, growing corn in the state of Florida, feeding the cow in the state of Florida. So it keeps it a little closer to home.

• 51:10Danny Jones?

  Now, I know it's like this in fishing, but I don't know if it's like this in cattle ranching, but there's no, there's no way that like an outside investment company portfolio could buy a cattle ranch, right? And then put people in there to run it in Florida and like sit in their high-rise in Manhattan and trade, you know, trade it like stock.

• 51:31Speaker 03

  Um, no, I'm pretty sure there, there are at least a few ranches I know of that are owned by out-of-state entities.

• 51:39Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 51:40Speaker 03

  And they hire local crews to run their cows.

• 51:42Danny Jones?

  So there's, there's no laws that you have to be owned and operated, like the people that are running it have to live there, like hands-on?

• 51:48Speaker 03

  I don't think so.

• 51:48Danny Jones?

  No, okay.

• 51:50Speaker 03

  But most often those are real estate plays, you know, like the people who are buying these, you know, if a, and the thing is, it's, it's really hard to keep owning a ranch. Like if you're a, if you're a generational family who has a ranch, you know, first your family grows and the probability of having everyone from the next generation. Interested in ranching versus having the paycheck that could come from selling the land. You know, to even keep enough consensus generation to generation to keep the land is a big battle.

• 52:25Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 52:26Speaker 03

  And then you enter the estate tax. And so if your ranch is worth something more than the estate tax threshold, you've got to sell off some of the land to meet tax obligations of the passing of each generation. And so there are a lot of pressures that are pushing these bigger ranches into smaller and smaller pieces. And the people waiting on the sidelines to buy a ranch aren't other ranchers. It's developers.

• 52:52Danny Jones?

  Real estate people, yeah. God.

• 52:54Speaker 03

  And that's what my motivation in all of this has been conservation. And that's, that's really the solution where state programs like the Rural and Family Lands Protection Program, or the Florida Forever Program can buy the development rights from the rancher. And so every one of these ranches, even the one we're looking at here, this is Horse Creek Ranch in Hardy in DeSoto County.

• 53:20Speaker 03

  They have a development density of say, one house and five acres. That's part of their rights in owning that land. They could develop it at a certain density. And so you can't tell someone, oh, you, you can't develop your land. They'd be taking away value from them. But if they're open to it, you can pay them for those development rights. Take the development rights away. They keep owning the land as an agricultural property in perpetuity, but it'll never be developed.

• 53:51Danny Jones?

  And who pays them for that?

• 53:53Speaker 03

  It's often state programs or federal programs. Sometimes land trusts like the Nature Conservancy.

• 53:58Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 53:58Speaker 03

  But the biggest programs in Florida are either out of our Department of Environmental Protection or our Department of Agriculture.

• 54:03Danny Jones?

  Okay. That makes sense.

• 54:05Speaker 03

  And it's, I think it's one of the most cost-effective ways to save.

• 54:11Speaker 03

  Landscapes.

• 54:12Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 54:13Speaker 03

  Because when the state comes into buy, I mean, we need, we need public lands. We have a growing population and state parks are widely utilized. And there's a real case for public lands for hunting or recreation. But, but we can't afford, nor should we spend all state dollars to buy all these lands. When you can spend a fraction of what it would cost to buy it, to buy the development rights.

• 54:37Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 54:37Speaker 03

  And then it stays protected.

• 54:39Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 54:39Speaker 03

  And it stays in production and stays on the tax roll.

• 54:43Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Yeah, that makes perfect sense.

• 54:45Speaker 03

  So of, of all the land that's being protected in Florida now, I'd say 70, 80% of it is through conservation easements versus buying the land outright.

• 54:55Danny Jones?

  Wow. That's incredible.

• 54:57Speaker 03

  In terms of acres.

• 54:58Danny Jones?

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• 56:26Danny Jones?

  So why is this, in this ranch, it, it looks like it's flooded?

• 56:31Speaker 03

  Um, yeah, that's in the summer. There's a lot of, there's a lot of water on these lands and there, I mean, that's, this is the headwaters of Horse Creek, which goes into the Peace River, which goes into Charlotte Harbor. Um, but by,

• 56:48Speaker 03

  you know, keeping them.

• 56:49Danny Jones?

  So this is south. This is pretty far south.

• 56:51Speaker 03

  This was, yeah, in interior Bradenton.

• 56:53Danny Jones?

  Okay, got it.

• 56:56Speaker 03

  Here, I'll show you a few.

• 56:56Danny Jones?

  Oh, near like Myaca or?

• 56:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, this is not far from Myaca, similar type of ecosystem. Wait, I was gonna show you this guy.

• 57:04Danny Jones?

  Wow. Is that a trap?

• 57:06Speaker 03

  That's a camera trap. That's, um, in 2006, I was taking pictures for my second, um, calendar I did with the Florida Catalans Association. I'd been publishing an annual Florida ranches calendar just to kind of raise awareness for ranches. It's still going. We have one coming out now and it has a forward from the Commissioner of Agriculture in it. It gets given to all the state lawmakers and it just shows that these exist and this matters. But I was visiting a ranch owned by Archibald Biological Station, which is an amazing place. It's like a Smithsonian in the Florida scrub, south of Lake Placid, south of Sebring. Um, and the executive director introduced me to a guy named Joe Guthrie,

• 57:48Speaker 03

  who was a bear biologist and doing his master's degree from University of Kentucky, but he's catching black bears and putting GPS collars on their necks to see how they're using the landscape. And these bears were living almost entirely on private ranches in this part of the state. As you do have a scattering of public lands like Highland Tammyck State Park or Lake Wales Ridge National Wildlife Refuge, but the vast majority of the green space there is orange groves and cattle ranches, private lands, and it's still supporting a black bear population.

• 58:22Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 58:24Speaker 03

  And so that was this story and it opened my eyes to the ranches in a totally different way because here I am in eighth generation Floridian, I have a master's degree in ecology and I have no idea, we have black bears living on cattle ranches. You know, like I knew there were black bears in Ocala National Forest, you know, I knew we had them in the States somewhere, I didn't know they were surviving on ranches, you know, 40 miles from my family's ranch.

• 58:49Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 58:49Speaker 03

  And it was a fascinating story to me, so I really honed in on this as a photographer, started doing the camera trap work, started learning about the science and these bears were telling an amazing story, like one of the bears they caught three years later, named him 34, got his GPS collar in Sebring and then in the summer of 2010, he walked 500 miles in two months and he went from Sebring up to Lake Wales Ridge, across Avon Park Air Force Range, around the Kissimmee Chain of Lakes, near Yee-Haw Junction, up

• 59:32Speaker 03

  all the way through Lakeland to Disney World, spent the night in celebration for two nights. You know, it was like, this is way into poo territory, I'm out of here, but no, he, he, but we can, we can find this map, I don't think I have it in this particular slideshow, but I can dig it up, it shows the GPS points along the southeastern edge of Interstate 4 where the bear couldn't get across.

• 1:00:02Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:00:04Speaker 03

  And so there's 500,000 acres of the green swamp wilderness, not that far on the other side of that road and had the bear been able to reach there, he could have struck out and found a whole new territory or gotten up to Apalachicola, but he turned around, went all the way back south, ended up going as far south and west as Fort Myers and then came back and dropped his GPS collar on a ranch near where he was caught near Sebring.

• 1:00:27Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 1:00:28Speaker 03

  But what the bear showed is that everywhere that was green that he traveled is still connected from the perspective of a wandering black bear. So places like this, this is a cattle ranch.

• 1:00:38Danny Jones?

  God, that's beautiful.

• 1:00:39Speaker 03

  That's the headwaters of Fishy Dink Creek, but entirely on a private ranch or the citrus groves are still safe passage for a bear and.

• 1:00:51Speaker 03

  Pine forest, we have a lot of working forest in Florida, long rotation pine plantations. So all these agricultural pieces connected together make a corridor. And that became the foundation for the Florida Wildlife Corridor Campaign I spent my career advocating for.

• 1:01:07Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:01:08Speaker 03

  But that bear, when you know, when it got to Interstate four, there are very few places left where there's actually green on both sides of the road. He didn't find this place, but he more finds things like this where the, you can really see the new development just pushing out from Orlando.

• 1:01:27Danny Jones?

  God, dude.

• 1:01:30Speaker 03

  So, so this is, this is around 2006, I'm learning about the bears. I'm also learning about the science of wildlife corridors. And this is a map that came out in 2006 called Population 2060.

• 1:01:43Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:01:43Speaker 03

  And Thousand Friends of Florida, Florida Department of Agriculture and University of Florida collaborated on this. And they did a population growth projection to say, okay, we know people will keep coming to Florida. We think the population is going to double to 30 million people by the year 2060. What's that going to look like? And so they did some projections. And so you look at the red, that's the development footprint in 2006. The green, the green space here are the public lands. That's that 10 million acres of public lands that Florida has. Everglades National Park and Big Cypress National Preserve down in the south with the other associated lands.

• 1:02:22Speaker 03

  Makes up about four million acres, which is twice the size of Yellowstone National Park that we have kind of sitting between Naples and Miami.

• 1:02:32Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 1:02:33Speaker 03

  And then other big green swamps going up just north and east of Tampa. You have the Green Swamp, you have Ocala National Forest up the spine of the state. Over in the panhandle, you have Apalachicola National Forest and the other associated state lands, which are about a million acres of conservation there. Further out in the panhandle, that next big green space is Eglin Air Force Base, which has a lot of conservation lands on it. And so pay attention to the red area as they forecast the development through 2060.

• 1:03:09Speaker 03

  And it's kind of a wake up call because you can see the consequence for the green space. Like the Everglades.

• 1:03:16Danny Jones?

  Can you go back one more time and then go forward again?

• 1:03:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:03:20Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 1:03:21Speaker 03

  So this is what they called the, the, um, the trend development. This is what it would have looked like if development continues on its same current pattern.

• 1:03:30Danny Jones?

  Same, the same rate that it's.

• 1:03:32Speaker 03

  The same rate in the same sprawling consumption without really intentional conservation.

• 1:03:38Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:03:39Speaker 03

  And you can see how it renders conservation lands as islands surrounded by development or separated from one another. However, it doesn't have to be that way.

• 1:03:48Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:03:49Speaker 03

  And this was another map from that same time period. Um, no, this is actually a map from 1994. A scientist named Reed Noss at the University of Central Florida published this. Another scientist named Larry Harris from University of Florida had kind of planted the seeds for it. He wrote a book called The Fragmented Forest and it talked about how we need to have corridors connecting up all the reserves so they all function and the species can stay connected.

• 1:04:13Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:04:14Speaker 03

  So this is well established thinking in the science community. When I came on the scene in 2006, this is still relatively obscure science. It's not finding its way into the public conversation. It's not finding its way into the policies. And that's where, um, that's where the Florida Wildlife Corridor idea was born. It, it took the underlying science of the Florida Ecological Greenways Network that wasn't being put in practice politically or, or in people's identity of Florida. And we basically named it the Florida Wildlife Corridor and brought that story to life through expeditions and storytelling.

• 1:04:51Danny Jones?

  Wow. Now, okay, so a wildlife corridor like this, I could see how, uh, it would be really difficult for Florida because it is a peninsula. But do we know, or do we have any idea how not having that corridor, having all these greenlands and these, um, these protected national parks basically siloed from each other? Do we know like how that negatively impacts species and evolution and all that?

• 1:05:16Speaker 03

  Yes. Um, yeah, it's, it's called island biogeography and, and the science of it. Eo Wilson, uh, famous Harvard biologist who.

• 1:05:28Speaker 03

  coined the term biophilia and wrote a book called Half Earth that talks about how much of the planet we need to save for balance, but he, he did a lot of studies here, but basically as the island of habitat gets smaller, more isolated, the number of species decrease. And it's kind of a classic study in ecology and it affects the wide ranging animals first. The bigger your territory, the more, the more it hurts you. So if you're a panther or a bear that needs a lot of territory, you're going to become inbred faster genetically isolated faster, go regionally extinct faster than, than a lizard or some other animal who can still have a high genetic diversity in a smaller patch of habitat.

• 1:06:13Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:06:14Speaker 03

  But it's really not good for wildlife. It's also not good for ecosystems because, you know, rewind the clock just 200 years. You know, if you think about, you know, all the evidence suggests that anatomically modern Homo sapiens that would look like you or me have been on the planet for 200,000 years. And so 200 years of that, that's 0.1%, you know, 99.9% of all human existence, the earth was connected in whole. You know, you didn't have to have a wildlife corridor because everything was connected

• 1:06:53Speaker 03

  in whole and you had pockets of human population interspersed among a wild place, a wild living, connected planet. Well, things that keep nature cycling, things that keep climate stable, things that keep things healthy, like storms and natural fires that burn across the landscape, like once you start to shrink it down smaller and smaller, you can't burn the landscape anymore because the subdivision of the condo next door. Won't let you do it. And the fire is what resets and refreshes the ecosystem. And so you start to have a lot of impacts. And then when it comes to watersheds and the way water flows across the landscape.

• 1:07:35Speaker 03

  In Florida, in the summer, as you know, the whole thing's a wetland. And so the water has to gather and drain and recharge the aquifer and fill back up the rivers. And we've had to, we've chosen to channelize it and put in canals and put in drainage to help it be more useful for human needs. And same kind of thing. So it's, the, the word is fragmentation. And, and the fragmentation definitely affects the wildlife, but it affects the ecosystem as a whole, when it comes to water and resilience and fire and all the different things that need a connected landscape.

• 1:08:11Danny Jones?

  Wow. That's incredible. That's, that's insane.

• 1:08:15Speaker 03

  So this project has been kind of the focus of my career ever since I kind of first spoke the words Florida Wildlife Corridor, um, around 2007, 2008. But in, in, in 2012, the red line depicts the 100 day, 1,000 mile expedition that myself, that bear biologist Joe Guthrie and a fellow conservationist Mallory Demmett and I took, and we, we went for a hundred days and a thousand miles from the Everglades to Georgia to show that you still had a connected corridor through the state. And there is a

• 1:08:51Danny Jones?

  On foot?

• 1:08:52Speaker 03

  On foot and paddling. I hear, here we are, here we are in, um, Everglades National Park.

• 1:08:58Danny Jones?

  That's incredible.

• 1:09:00Speaker 03

  Really naive, uh, idealistic, uh, 30 year old or who's about to, didn't know what I was getting into.

• 1:09:10Danny Jones?

  That's incredible, dude.

• 1:09:12Speaker 03

  It, it, but we, we followed this route, stitching together the public and the private lands. And all those relationships with the ranchers came back into this mission because we crossed and camped on 30 different cattle ranches as we tried to connect the dots through the state.

• 1:09:31Speaker 03

  Um, and so those expeditions, we did a pair of them. We, we came back in 2015 and did another expedition, starting from the midway point of the 2012 expedition and followed the wildlife corridor, the Patrick of public and private lands around the Gulf Coast of Alabama.

• 1:09:49Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:09:49Speaker 03

  To show that the corridor still existed there.

• 1:09:54Speaker 03

  And so that's.

• 1:09:55Danny Jones?

  And so does this, do these corridors still exist today?

• 1:09:58Speaker 03

  Largely, yes.

• 1:09:59Danny Jones?

  Largely, yes. Okay.

• 1:10:00Speaker 03

  And we, we got, um, we led a campaign in 2020, in 2020 and 2021 that helped get the Florida Wildlife Corridor Act passed by the Florida Legislature. There's unanimous bipartisan support for the legislation that designated this as an official priority for the state's conservation programs. And then since then, it kind of re-motivated the land conservation programs.

• 1:10:29Speaker 03

  The Florida Forever program that I mentioned, Rural and Family Lands Protection, they had been making significant investments in buying state parks and doing conservation easements. It was really bipartisan. You know, Florida Forever, its precursor called Preservation 2000 was started in 1990 by Republican Governor Bob Martinez. It was continued by Jeb Bush, Charlie Crist. It's always had bipartisan and conservative support.

• 1:10:57Speaker 03

  But around 2010, with the advent of the Tea Party,

• 1:11:05Speaker 03

  it got polarized and it, it got treated like an environmental extra. And people started saying, well, what, we already have 10 million acres of public land. Why do we need more conservation? Because this story wasn't being told, you know, the fact that we need to keep it connected. So, you know, there was a point in 2014, 2015 where we're spending almost no money on land protection each year, even though development's going full steam ahead and we're losing land way faster than we're protecting it. There's a group of environmental organizations that. Put forth a constitutional amendment in 2014 called the Water and Land Legacy Act

• 1:11:48Speaker 03

  that tried to hold the lawmakers feet to certain investment in land conservation. It said that you're going to take one-third of all the real estate documentary stamped taxes and invest it in conservation. But that legislation was written a little too broadly and included management and some other things in it. And the legislature was frustrated that they're being told what to do with their, you know, limited amount of discretionary part of the budget and decided to spend that money on other existing programs rather than buying more land and protecting more land. And so it even got more polarized because groups like the Florida Wildlife Federation and the Sierra Club are in a lawsuit against the state legislature for not spending the

• 1:12:31Speaker 03

  money on conservation and everything started getting divided into a Democrat, Republican, urban, rural kind of thing. But in 2021, with the Florida Wildlife Corridor story, with presenting the logic of filling in the gaps, you know, you've, you've got all this legacy of conservation, you've got a cattle ranch, if you have a state park here and a national park there and a cattle ranch in between, a lot of people can agree that it'd be great to try to find a solution to help that ranch or keep it a cattle ranch.

• 1:13:05Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 1:13:06Speaker 03

  And people see the logic in it. And by framing conservation in the state through the lens of the Florida Wildlife Corridor, it went from polarized to everybody on, on the same page again. And it had unanimous bipartisan support and all those land conservation programs like Florida Forever that had been cut to zero got funded at full, you know, a hundred million, 200, 300 million dollars a year again. And so since, since the Florida Wildlife Corridor Act in 2021, there's been more than $2 billion of state funds allocated towards the Florida Wildlife Corridor. And there's been now more than 400,000 acres of land just in the past five years that

• 1:13:49Speaker 03

  have been protected through conservation investments and acquisitions. So it's really like, it's really moving again because people can see how it all fits together and understand that this is a really good investment for the future of Florida, no matter what your perspective is.

• 1:14:05Danny Jones?

  Are there any? Who are the biggest opponents of this? Like, are there like, are there any good corporation lobbyist groups? Or, or any, anything like the, any people like this that are, that are pushing back against this idea? Because this is like a general idea that all humans can agree on. Like, like, it's bad to litter and it's bad to kill animals, right? Like, it's bad to, at least, you know, unless you're gonna eat them.

• 1:14:29Speaker 03

  At least make them extinct.

• 1:14:30Danny Jones?

  Exactly. It's about to make other species go extinct, right? So, yeah, who, who would be the, uh, the groups that would be most opposed to this stuff?

• 1:14:41Speaker 03

  I don't think there's anyone that I've met that's opposed to the idea of it. There are some people who are real anti-government mindset, where you don't want to be spending any taxpayer dollars on anything. Other than, you know, you want to, you want to reduce taxes and you don't want to spend public funds on things like land protection. So there are some people who philosophically don't believe in, that the state should be in the business of land protection. But that's a minority. And for the most part, people really understand the value. And if you go back to that constitutional amendment I mentioned in 2014,

• 1:15:20Speaker 03

  whether it got implemented or not, it was a great kind of gut check for people's, how much people care about conservation? Because 75% of voters voted for that water and land legacy amendment.

• 1:15:35Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 1:15:36Speaker 03

  And so conservation initiative, people care about conservation. People want to preserve what they love about Florida. And I think one of the challenges is before the Florida Wildlife Corridor,

• 1:15:51Speaker 03

  there wasn't a connection to what that meant. You know, like, you know, so this gives a framework and a purpose and an identity for trying to achieve it. And this is the other reason why this, I think, is not received the type of opposition that it could, is that this is being done not as a regulatory solution, but as an incentive-based solution. And so it's not like the government's saying to that rancher, "You can never sell that ranch for a development." They're saying, "We want to buy your development rights from you so that you have the option to keep ranching and preserve your ranch."

• 1:16:28Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:16:29Speaker 03

  And keeping it where it's attractive to everybody involved is the way that you can really make strides with this stuff.

• 1:16:37Danny Jones?

  Yeah, that's really smart. Are there, do we know, are there any other states dealing with this same problem?

• 1:16:42Speaker 03

  Every state's dealing with a problem in different degrees. I mean, Florida is like an accelerator for it.

• 1:16:47Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:48Speaker 03

  Because of the population turnover, because of how many people are moving here, and because the state is relatively narrow.

• 1:16:56Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 1:16:56Speaker 03

  You know, if you are, if you are Georgia even, or, or Texas, you know, there's enough space oftentimes that you can have more time before the battle lines get drawn so clearly. But in Florida, there are places like literally if, if you don't save this area in the next 10 years, the state's cut in half.

• 1:17:19Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 1:17:19Speaker 03

  And so it, it kind of makes clear what needs to happen to keep the balance.

• 1:17:24Danny Jones?

  Yeah, that makes total sense.

• 1:17:28Speaker 03

  While we're here on the corridor map, I'll, I'll point out kind of, I kind of went straight into it without giving the kind of Florida Wildlife Corridor 101. But the dark green here are the, or sorry, the light green in the painting are the

• 1:17:44Speaker 03

  existing protected areas.

• 1:17:45Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:17:45Speaker 03

  It's that 10 million acres that we talked about.

• 1:17:47Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:17:48Speaker 03

  That's already protected, but is at risk of becoming islands. The rest of it is called the opportunity area, and those are most often farms and ranches and other green spaces that have all the qualities for water and wildlife to keep a connected landscape, but they don't have protection. They could be a development or a subdivision at any time. And so that's 8 million acres. So there's 10 million acres protected. There's 8 million acres of opportunity area.

• 1:18:16Danny Jones?

  What color is the 8 million?

• 1:18:18Speaker 03

  The 8 million is the darker green in this case.

• 1:18:21Danny Jones?

  Okay, gotcha.

• 1:18:22Speaker 03

  I think, yeah, I should say it on the.

• 1:18:25Danny Jones?

  Okay, on the little key on the bottom.

• 1:18:27Speaker 03

  On the key. There, there are other maps I can share. This is kind of a watercolor version that we came up with. It kind of presents the big idea without getting into kind of pixel peeping of whether your ranch is in or out. It just shows. It shows the concept.

• 1:18:40Danny Jones?

  Clever.

• 1:18:41Speaker 03

  But yeah, this is, this is a universal issue. I mean, I think, here, I'm going to fast forward to the slide I did at the end of my talk.

• 1:18:51Speaker 03

  Last night. This is,

• 1:18:56Speaker 03

  this is a half Earth project. I mentioned that E.O. Wilson. Let me see if I can get it to play.

• 1:19:05Speaker 03

  There's a website we can, I can point you to, but all these green areas are the current protected areas across the earth.

• 1:19:12Danny Jones?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:19:14Speaker 03

  And you can see there's quite a bit of it, but it all is set up in a similar way to what we saw in Florida where those conservation lands could become all disconnected from one another, depending on what happens with the lands in between. If you're in South America and you're a Jaguar.

• 1:19:33Danny Jones?

  Wow, look at the Amazon.

• 1:19:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, Amazon has a lot more protection, but you know, lots of um, need for more protection too.

• 1:19:42Danny Jones?

  Right, I mean, they're not just dealing, yeah, they're dealing with, with other countries coming in there, trying to suck up the resources and monetize it.

• 1:19:50Speaker 03

  Yes, um, and you know, and kind of forever decisions of, you know, clear cutting forest and moving it to a different land use, you're never going to really get it back, or it's much harder to do that. But the, the idea that E. O. Wilson helped popularize, um, and he was an amazing scientist. I had a chance to meet him in 2014. I did an assignment for Smithsonian Magazine illustrating a story about him where they introduced this idea called half earth, where they wanted, all his, all his studies suggested, we need to set aside half the planet's land and oceans for nature in order to stave off the extinction crisis and to sustain balance.

• 1:20:34Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:35Speaker 03

  For the whole planet. And right now, 15% of the land is protected and 8% of the oceans and.

• 1:20:43Danny Jones?

  How much percent of the oceans?

• 1:20:44Speaker 03

  Eight.

• 1:20:45Danny Jones?

  Only eight?

• 1:20:46Speaker 03

  And only 3% have any level of enforcement. So it's like between 3 and 8% of the oceans, depending how you count it. And so the, the idea is that we need to get to half earth being protected in order to stabilize climate, in order to preserve the diversity of life that we share this planet with.

• 1:21:07Speaker 03

  And my belief is that wildlife corridors are the kind of frameworks that are going to help us get there.

• 1:21:13Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:14Speaker 03

  It's not like a top down, someone in the UN tells you what you're supposed to do with your country. It can be Florida identifies its own wildlife corridor, organizes around protecting it, takes federal resources when available to help them. Georgia can do the same thing, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, and move on up the East Coast and you end up with an Appalachian corridor.

• 1:21:39Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:21:40Speaker 03

  It's done state by state.

• 1:21:41Danny Jones?

  Connects the whole country.

• 1:21:42Speaker 03

  Driven by local interest and state by state, country by country, continent by continent, and you could scale up to a like a truly global connected landscape.

• 1:21:53Danny Jones?

  Before we know it, we'll have saber tooth tigers showing up in our driveways.

• 1:21:57Speaker 03

  That's right. Well, yeah, if you get the genetic stuff going along the side.

• 1:22:01Danny Jones?

  Oh, yes. I want to ask you about that, too.

• 1:22:03Speaker 03

  You bring them back, they'll have space, they'll have space. Maybe, maybe we won't advertise on that. Well, these things, these things go in the ocean too, though. So this, this is the work that I'm here, I'll show you this picture.

• 1:22:16Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I was gonna ask, I was gonna, like, 8% of the oceans, the earth is 70 something percent ocean.

• 1:22:22Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:22:23Danny Jones?

  And, you know, a vast majority of it is unexplored. And when you say protect the ocean, you mean the fishing, the fisheries?

• 1:22:29Speaker 03

  Well, it would be identifying an area as a marine protected area and that would either exclude fishing or exclude commercial fishing or intensive fishing.

• 1:22:39Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:22:39Speaker 03

  If you haven't seen it, check out the David Attenborough film Ocean that's on the Nat Geo channel or it's on, it's on Disney Plus under National Geographic right now. It's, um, it changed my perspective about things like trawling for shrimp.

• 1:22:57Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:57Speaker 03

  It's, they put cameras on the, on the trawlers and you see what it does to the ocean floor. And it just helps you, like, it's, it's not out of sight, out of mind anymore. I can't unsee it. Like, I've seen. The destruction that happens from these trawl nets dragging the ocean. I don't know how it's practiced.

• 1:23:15Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:23:16Speaker 03

  If it differs in different countries or different ways, but what they showed is like, oh, my gosh, it's it's not worth it.

• 1:23:21Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Yeah. Are you familiar with the like, the fishing situation on the Gulf Coast, like with the with the quota system and IFQs and all that?

• 1:23:31Speaker 03

  I'm not dialed into it. I know. I know it exists, but I don't know the I don't know the pros and cons or the tensions on it right now.

• 1:23:39Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah, I don't know. I don't know the current state of it either, but it's when I was investigating it like back in 2014, 2015, it was it was pretty gruesome like they they have these these quotas. I think it was in the early 2000s, the federal government set a a limit of 3 million pounds of red snapper per year in the Gulf and in like this specific area of the Gulf. And there was like Derby fishing, right? So all the all the boats could go out and catch as much as they wanted. They would come back after fishing, weigh their weigh and report how much they caught. And a lot of times they would hit the 3 million quota in like October. So November, December, they have to stop fishing.

• 1:24:22Danny Jones?

  So after that started happening, what they did was the federal government created a monopoly with this fishing quota. And what they did was they gave boat owners an allotted amount of of IFQ quota per year. And so if that's red grouper, that's like a dollar a pound. So some of these guys got 100,000 pounds of quota a year. Some guys got 250,000 pounds of quota a year, every single year, just based on previous fishing catch history. And so these these boat owners got the best retirement plan known to man. And now you don't even have to own a boat to have this fishing quota. You can be sitting in Manhattan in a high rise and you can be traded. You can trade this IFQ on the internet like stock. It's insane.

• 1:25:05Speaker 03

  Oh, wow.

• 1:25:05Danny Jones?

  So now the fishermen, the deckhands on the boats who are breaking their fingers, pulling up these fish are getting paid barely anything. This I don't know if this is how it's happening now. This is the way it was going in 2015. And these guys were heroin addicts, pill addicts, drunks.

• 1:25:25Danny Jones?

  They were basically just getting high and running out of drugs and then going to the fish house and begging them to let them go offshore to catch fish for two weeks. So they would have enough money to come back and pay for drugs like they were no one was taking care of them. And they were just getting the scraps because the way this whole IFQ system works where you know, all these people at the top are making the best amount of money.

• 1:25:47Speaker 03

  Right. And they might as well hire Asian immigrants who are, you know, in the country, you know, it's just like it doesn't, doesn't support the local.

• 1:25:56Danny Jones?

  Not at all.

• 1:25:57Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:25:57Danny Jones?

  And in the north, some of the northeast states up in the northeast, it's, the whole fishing community is way different. It's where the boats are owner, they have to be owner operated.

• 1:26:06Speaker 03

  Right. Well, that's and you, you see that in the southeast and I, I think, I don't want to say, take what I said about Asian immigrants out of context, but it's like they're, they'll take advantage of the person who will work for the lowest wage.

• 1:26:18Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 1:26:19Speaker 03

  And whether that's the desperate drug addicted local person on the Gulf Coast, or someone who comes in looking for work that's just a little bit better than what they had in their home country.

• 1:26:29Danny Jones?

  A hundred percent.

• 1:26:30Speaker 03

  Um, you know, and I have a real like appreciation of fishing people and, you know, how hard they work and the people who are connected to the ecosystem. And so I don't like the idea of taking their livelihood away by barring certain types of fishing. But you also have to look at the long term and you want fish to be there for the next generation. There has to be some sort of regulation in place that makes it work. Um, like taking out, take fish like tuna, they're just being obliterated. And the average size of tuna gets smaller and smaller and smaller year after year.

• 1:27:08Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 1:27:09Speaker 03

  Yeah. The bluefin tuna, I mean, it's, and it's because of the high seas. I mean, it's, you cannot, we have our exclusive economic zone that's 200 miles offshore where we can enforce policy. We can exclude other countries from coming in and taking those fish. But you go outside that 200 miles, it's a free for all. And people are flying, you know,

• 1:27:34Speaker 03

  The Chinese do it a lot. You have these factory ships where they go out there. They catch the fish. They process the fish on the ship.

• 1:27:41Danny Jones?

  On the ship.

• 1:27:42Speaker 03

  It's a huge factory and they just go set up 201 miles off the coast of anywhere. And have at it. Or they strike a deal with an African country that says, hey, we're going to give you some broadband or help you build some roads and you let us pillage your coastline. And none of that money comes back to support that country. It all goes back.

• 1:28:03Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:28:03Speaker 03

  Into whoever sent the factory ship there to do it.

• 1:28:07Danny Jones?

  Somebody was telling us, who was telling us about this recently, Steve? Somebody was telling us it was one of the, it was either Mexico or some Central American countries had just loads of Chi, these Chinese factory ships just catching tons of fish. And it was just, it was like hurting their economy.

• 1:28:26Danny Jones?

  I forget who that was.

• 1:28:27Speaker 03

  I think it's, it's everywhere.

• 1:28:28Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:29Speaker 03

  I mean, it's Africa, it's off the coast of South America. It's the, the Southern Ocean around Antarctica. It's a challenge because you have people coming there to catch the, the krill and catch all this abundant life. Well, that, that food is supporting all the whales and all the migratory species and the penguins and everything that needs it. And like how, you can only take out a certain amount before everything else that depends on it starts to decline. And you, and you put a market on it. And like what you're saying, you disconnect that market from the local people.

• 1:29:03Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:29:03Speaker 03

  And you put it in some international exchange, then it's just going to drive it closer and closer to depletion.

• 1:29:11Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:29:11Speaker 03

  Cause there's no checks and balances. There's no reason. They don't care.

• 1:29:14Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:14Speaker 03

  You know, those, those markets are indifferent to whether it's going to be sustainable or the quality of life for the people working on the boats is good or not.

• 1:29:23Danny Jones?

  A hundred percent.

• 1:29:23Speaker 03

  It's all about how these numbers are compared to whatever else we would be investing in.

• 1:29:28Danny Jones?

  Right, right. Hold that thought. I gotta take a leak real quick.

• 1:29:32Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:29:32Danny Jones?

  We'll be right back.

• 1:29:33Speaker 03

  Well, we're talking about oceans. So yeah.

• 1:29:35Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:36Speaker 03

  Where, where do you think I took that picture?

• 1:29:38Danny Jones?

  Uh, let me, uh, offshore of the Gulf.

• 1:29:43Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:29:43Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:43Speaker 03

  Yeah. 30 miles off of St. Pete.

• 1:29:46Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:47Speaker 03

  Right out here.

• 1:29:47Danny Jones?

  I've seen a couple of them offshore here.

• 1:29:49Speaker 03

  That's awesome.

• 1:29:50Danny Jones?

  Yeah, dude, they're, they're incredible.

• 1:29:52Speaker 03

  The scientist, that, there's a guy from NOAA putting a satellite tag on its fin.

• 1:29:59Speaker 03

  And they tagged thirteen of them last May off of them, you know, thirty, fifty miles off of St. Pete and a lot of the tags failed. They're experimenting with some tags that just clip on. And I think some of them fell off, but

• 1:30:13Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 1:30:14Speaker 03

  The ones that are still reporting, one of them went to the Hudson, Hudson Valley off New York.

• 1:30:19Danny Jones?

  What?

• 1:30:20Speaker 03

  During the summer and one of them, one of them went to Bermuda, another one off the Bahamas. So they're, they're gonna try to do it again. I mean, NOAA is in a tough time funding wise with the federal government right now, but if they can cower the funds together to keep the research going, they'll try to put some more tags out this, this spring. If they come, if the whale starts showing up again in May, early June, put some more tags on and see where they go.

• 1:30:49Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I've been following the, uh, the tag, the tagged great whites all around Florida.

• 1:30:53Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Off Osearch or?

• 1:30:55Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Well, now there's an Instagram page I follow. I forget what, what it is, but it shows the updates, like where they are. I think there was one literally swimming right off, like, like ten miles off New Smyrna Beach yesterday or two days ago.

• 1:31:07Speaker 03

  Wow. That's amazing.

• 1:31:10Danny Jones?

  That's crazy how many of them are coming down here.

• 1:31:13Speaker 03

  And here's, um, this is some of the work on the golf project we're doing, but here's researchers from FSU putting a, that's a camera tag they put on a loggerhead sea turtle.

• 1:31:25Danny Jones?

  Does that mess up his swimming at all?

• 1:31:27Speaker 03

  Um, yeah, that one, that one stays on for, for like twenty-four hours and pops off.

• 1:31:33Danny Jones?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:31:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, that kind of tag is short term. There, there's some other ones where they kind of

• 1:31:40Speaker 03

  cement it or epoxy it onto the shell, but it's way lower profile and they'll stay on for

• 1:31:46Danny Jones?

  Keep some more air dynamic.

• 1:31:47Speaker 03

  A couple of years or yeah, you kind of slide, slide through the water.

• 1:31:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, you know, what, what next? What do we want to talk about? I was gonna show you, um, I was gonna show you the Appalachian. I was mentioning how you could have corridors state by state that kind of frame up to a bigger connected landscape.

• 1:32:06Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:32:07Speaker 03

  This is a map of, the nature conservancy has done kind of mapping out these priority conservation areas, and then they have a vision for having a connected corridor up the Appalachians.

• 1:32:20Danny Jones?

  Oh, that's amazing, man.

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• 1:33:22Speaker 03

  And in order, you know, to have success with something like this, you need the big picture story about the Appalachians and why they should be connected. But then you need to have kind of storytelling at the level of policy. And so what I mean by that is there's no governing body of the Appalachians who can implement something like this. It's going to be up to West Virginia, Pennsylvania, all the, all the individual states to kind of create their own solution to support it. So instead of big vision of storytelling, then you also need to have an identified wildlife corridor plan for each state that works together to create a bigger connection.

• 1:34:05Danny Jones?

  Yes, yes, totally. All right, let's talk about the, let's talk about the Florida Panther.

• 1:34:11Speaker 03

  Okay. That's something I can talk about.

• 1:34:14Danny Jones?

  How did this whole thing start for you with the Florida Panther?

• 1:34:18Speaker 03

  So I, I finished, um, I finished the 2015 Florida Wildlife Quarter Expedition. And so here, three years into the expeditions, we trekked 2,000 miles through the state. We've generated a lot of awareness with stakeholders, like people who are connected to that story. But we still haven't kind of broken through to the mainstream with it, or created the political impact of actually getting things protected. So I was looking to try to do more. And at the same time, um, that same summer, right when I got done with the 2015 expedition, I got an assignment from National Geographic Travel, just a digital assignment.

• 1:35:00Speaker 03

  It was a partnership with Visit Florida, I think, to go photograph 10, uh, 10 parks in South Florida. So places like Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary near Naples, or Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge. And when I saw Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge, I was like, I'm gonna dust off my camera traps and I'm gonna get a panther photo. And of course, this is a one-day digital assignment, and I decided to spend two months trying to camera trap a panther for it. So I'm not, not the best business person in that sense, but, um, but it kind of, I was already like wanting to be more engaged or learn more about that story.

• 1:35:41Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:42Speaker 03

  So this is one of the pictures I got. I found this amazing spot. I worked with a panther biologist from the Fish and Wildlife Service, David Schindel, who took me down to the edge of the Fatihatchee Strand in the, in the end of the dry season. This has flooded, you know, more than half of the year. You have these strap ferns and dark peat soils and cypress knees and this, this otherworldly landscape where if I could get a panther in that place, it would be like the Florida panther. Like, there's no denying that that animal is in Florida. It's not, it's not a mountain lion in Texas or California. It is here in the Florida swamps in this uniquely Florida environment. So that's what I was going for.

• 1:36:23Danny Jones?

  And how rare is the Florida, at this point in time, how rare was the Florida panther?

• 1:36:29Speaker 03

  Um, this, I mean, this is only...

• 1:36:32Danny Jones?

  Do we know how many of them were there?

• 1:36:33Speaker 03

  This is only eight or nine years ago, so the numbers haven't changed a whole lot since then, but it's an estimate of 200, um, 200 adults.

• 1:36:44Speaker 03

  There were, there were fewer than 20 Panthers in the 1970s when they were first put on the endangered species list. And the thing about the Panther is it is the last remnant population of the Puma east of the Mississippi River. So the Panther, Florida Panther, mountain lion, Puma, it's all the same animal.

• 1:37:07Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:37:07Speaker 03

  But they were wiped out of existence everywhere east of the Mississippi, other than the Everglades. And it's because the Everglades were so remote, so inhospitable for human development, that the Panthers were able to persist. Because Panthers were persecuted by early settlers. There were bounties on them. People wanted them gone. So they were hunted, they were, you know, perceived in actual competition for livestock, but there was also a lot of fear that drove a lot of that. So people were hunting Panthers on bounties.

• 1:37:39Danny Jones?

  Did they mess with humans?

• 1:37:41Speaker 03

  There's never been a documented case in Florida. I mean, I know of some turkey hunters who probably shit their pants when they woke, fall, fall asleep at the base of a pine tree and woke up and you got a Panther stalking your turkey decoys. But

• 1:37:59Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 1:37:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, no one's ever been attacked.

• 1:38:01Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 1:38:02Speaker 03

  That we're aware of. But so I, how this started for me, I, I wrote a blog about this for Nat Geo, and this is the, this is the Panther picture I got in those two months of trying to get a camera trap. And so I, the blog I wrote was called Cooperative Bear, Frustrating Panther. And, but this, this kind of hooked me because like, there she was. Like, I know she's out there. You know, but, but, but a male Florida Panther has a home range of 200 square miles. So they need a lot of land. That's an area twice the size of Orlando that one Panther will patrol.

• 1:38:40Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 1:38:40Speaker 03

  You know, throughout their defending of a territory and looking for, looking for maids.

• 1:38:47Speaker 03

  In the very best spots, I would see a panther come through once a month, you know, and so trying to get it all right to get the pictures, it ended up being, you know, six year long.

• 1:38:57Danny Jones?

  How many, how many camera traps did you have to build and set up?

• 1:39:00Speaker 03

  I had, um, I started with four. At one point I had as many as like eight or nine going. Um, and then we started adding video camera traps.

• 1:39:11Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:39:12Speaker 03

  Started during the film.

• 1:39:12Danny Jones?

  Incredible.

• 1:39:14Speaker 03

  Started playing 4K, you know, Sony video systems out in the swamp. I tried to do that at scale, but then, but that was fun because in the photo, you get this really decisive moment, but you don't get the sounds. You don't get the whole.

• 1:39:29Danny Jones?

  Oh, you had audio?

• 1:39:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, we had audio.

• 1:39:31Danny Jones?

  How'd you do that through the pelican case?

• 1:39:33Speaker 03

  Um, you get a little, um,

• 1:39:38Speaker 03

  get a little hot shoe type microphone.

• 1:39:40Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:39:41Speaker 03

  Put a Gore-Tex bag over it and then you drill a hole through the pelican and run the, um, three agent stereo plug like down into the camera. This is like a port.

• 1:39:51Danny Jones?

  Um, I'm sure those would get ruined a lot, right?

• 1:39:53Speaker 03

  Everything got ruined.

• 1:39:54Danny Jones?

  Everything got ruined.

• 1:39:56Speaker 03

  But here's, um, here's like, here's what it looked like for me, the first, uh, the first year of trying on this particular spot, another spot I was really excited about. And I was saying, I guess smarter photographer would pick the other side of the log at this point, but,

• 1:40:12Speaker 03

  I'm getting, getting a real gender study here. If you wanted to, if you wanted to know whether it's.

• 1:40:17Danny Jones?

  That's hilarious.

• 1:40:18Speaker 03

  The male female ratio is very clear.

• 1:40:20Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 1:40:21Speaker 03

  In these, um, super cooperative bears again, and then Panthers are just like.

• 1:40:27Danny Jones?

  Tail. Wow.

• 1:40:29Speaker 03

  Just juke me. Um, but the bears were not always cooperative here. Here, it took me a while. Took me putting a camera pointing at my camera to understand why they weren't working when I came back to change the batteries a month later.

• 1:40:46Danny Jones?

  Oh no.

• 1:40:48Speaker 03

  He's like flossing his teeth with my, with my flash wire.

• 1:40:52Danny Jones?

  Things going off?

• 1:40:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, but I'm not getting the picture because it's pointed.

• 1:40:57Danny Jones?

  Oh God.

• 1:40:58Speaker 03

  Somewhere else.

• 1:41:03Danny Jones?

  That's terrible.

• 1:41:04Speaker 03

  Like, what is this? And he's gonna scratch on it. He's a furry animal in the swamp. He's like, that feels good.

• 1:41:13Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:41:13Danny Jones?

  No, they can't get in that. They never like actually damaged the camera, right?

• 1:41:17Speaker 03

  Um, no.

• 1:41:20Danny Jones?

  But they can like, they can obviously mess up.

• 1:41:23Speaker 03

  Mess up all the wires. Mess up. I mean, I, I had, I've, I had a camera. I had a camera stolen at one point. Um, I had one shot.

• 1:41:34Speaker 03

  On the, on the edge of the corkscrew swamp, there, there's a.

• 1:41:38Danny Jones?

  Can you put it on somebody's property or something?

• 1:41:40Speaker 03

  No, it was on the, it was on the Audubon Sanctuary's property.

• 1:41:45Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:41:46Speaker 03

  It was pointed at the fence. I got, I'll, I'll show you the picture I got with it. Um, I got this picture with it, which.

• 1:41:53Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 1:41:55Speaker 03

  And if you look here, this thing placed in the World Press photo of competition one year. But if, if you look here, there's a, one of her kittens is just hidden.

• 1:42:04Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:42:05Speaker 03

  Had, had that kitten just been standing here in the free space? It would have been like next level. But anyway, I'm pretty happy with the picture anyway. But I would, I set the camera on the barbed wire fence to basically show that like, from the perspective of a panther, it's all one territory. So this panther's walking from a cattle ranch onto the Audubon's property.

• 1:42:26Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:42:27Speaker 03

  Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary, if you've never been, is amazing. It's, um,

• 1:42:32Speaker 03

  ancient old growth cypress. It's just, just near Naples and it's a beautiful three mile long boardwalk through the cypress trees. And you can, it's like a window in time. If, you know, cypress has never been logged, 500 year old trees, beautiful.

• 1:42:46Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 1:42:47Speaker 03

  So this is a 220 square mile sanctuary. But remember that a male panther has a territory of up to 200 square miles. And so the only way that panthers survive in that landscape is if you keep. Corkscrew connected to bigger landscapes around it.

• 1:43:05Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:43:06Speaker 03

  And that involves a cattle ranch next door in this case. And the landowner was, I got his permission to put the camera there. It wasn't even on his property, he was pointing in that direction. But I think one of the hunters who was hunting out there didn't get the memo. And it felt threatened by it. I went out there and there's like a, you know, a hole in the side of it and my camera's bodies exploded. And there's like a two, two, three round like.

• 1:43:30Danny Jones?

  Did the, did the memory card survive?

• 1:43:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:43:34Danny Jones?

  Did they get a shot of the guy who shot it?

• 1:43:35Speaker 03

  No, because he, he, he was probably 20 feet away on the other side of the fence.

• 1:43:40Danny Jones?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:43:41Speaker 03

  He smoked it without.

• 1:43:42Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:43:43Speaker 03

  Um, so it's like, well, there's that, add that to the list.

• 1:43:46Danny Jones?

  That's insane, man.

• 1:43:48Speaker 03

  Hurricane Irma did a doozy on him too.

• 1:43:50Danny Jones?

  Oh yeah, opening up, I saw the opening up the cases and just water pouring out of the cases.

• 1:43:54Speaker 03

  Yeah. Um, I'll show you a picture I got. It, um, we didn't. In the.

• 1:44:06Speaker 03

  There's a, there's a scene where I like, you, you, I won't play the video because you've seen it, but I got the.

• 1:44:10Danny Jones?

  No, I won't, I, let's, you can play it.

• 1:44:13Speaker 03

  It's like there is water in this camera box.

• 1:44:21Danny Jones?

  This was right after Irma?

• 1:44:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, like, like 10 days after, because they wouldn't let us in to the Panther Refuge.

• 1:44:27Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 1:44:28Speaker 03

  Because it's all, everything's shut down and we had to chainsaw our way back to get down the roads at this point, but.

• 1:44:40Danny Jones?

  Oh. My camera's cooked.

• 1:44:44Speaker 03

  Irma takes out one more camera.

• 1:44:46Danny Jones?

  What kind of cameras were those?

• 1:44:47Speaker 03

  Slimy in here. That was a Nikon D800.

• 1:44:50Danny Jones?

  Oh, God.

• 1:44:53Danny Jones?

  Now, when that happened, did the memory card survive?

• 1:44:57Speaker 03

  That memory card survived and the, and the, and the cool thing about that one is so.

• 1:45:01Danny Jones?

  That, that, ah, that's like a little bit of a, like a silver lining in your camera breaking.

• 1:45:06Speaker 03

  Well, see, I, I had, I knew the hurricane was coming generally towards that area and I had this decision like a week ahead of time. Like, do I go take all my cameras out or, and, and potentially miss the one panther shot I've been waiting for two years for? Or do I roll the dice and hope they survive and go like raise them up as high as I can? So I decided to leave them in because you never know which, whether the storm's going to come or not.

• 1:45:32Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:45:33Speaker 03

  Well, the storm did come and.

• 1:45:34Danny Jones?

  Last minute, it went like inland.

• 1:45:36Speaker 03

  Right. It just crushed, uh, put a lot of water in a lot of places. So when that, when that camera, before it toppled over, it did like a time lapse of this, all these false triggers from when the storm was really bad. And then there's like a video of like, it's down. But on the card, like buried under all those 3,000 false triggers, I found this picture.

• 1:46:02Danny Jones?

  Whoa. Is that in the rain?

• 1:46:07Speaker 03

  In the rain.

• 1:46:07Danny Jones?

  That's wild.

• 1:46:09Speaker 03

  Jumping over the swamp.

• 1:46:12Speaker 03

  So I was like.

• 1:46:13Danny Jones?

  So this is like right when the hurricane was hitting?

• 1:46:15Speaker 03

  I think this was like a couple of days before the hurricane and just a big thunderstorm that happened in the days before.

• 1:46:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was pretty excited about that.

• 1:46:26Danny Jones?

  That's incredible.

• 1:46:28Speaker 03

  So finally I was like, yes, like the world will see this picture.

• 1:46:30Danny Jones?

  To find one photo like this out of having nine cameras buried in the woods for months on end must make all of it worth it for you.

• 1:46:41Speaker 03

  Yeah. And this is, this is like two years in and I was like half ready to quit because I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I started out on this like trail to glory to get my first National Geographic story on the Florida panther. And I'm like, I've got nothing. I've got nothing because, because I have to show the panther with as much like beauty and power as my colleagues have shown the snow leopards or the tigers in India. You know, it has to stand shoulder to shoulder of all these other cats around the world. It tends to just be like, oh, look at the panther in that picture. It's gotta be a picture like this. And so finally, um.

• 1:47:16Speaker 03

  And so, yeah, I was like,

• 1:47:17Danny Jones?

  That's insane, man.

• 1:47:18Speaker 03

  I was ready to go. Like, I felt, felt the power of the swamp at that point.

• 1:47:22Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 1:47:25Speaker 03

  And so this, this was like, this became like my, my office and my sanctuary for a while. This is a selfie when I was, I got distracted by the ghost orchid when I was down there because I was camera trapping Panthers. But it's part of the fact, I had to strand and there were these scientists from Cuba and different universities around the country who were, who come in in the summer to survey the ghost orchids and

• 1:47:48Danny Jones?

  What are the ghost orchids?

• 1:47:49Speaker 03

  It's this, and I have a picture of it in here, but it's this, um, really elegant, um, white orchid that grows on the pop ash or the pond apple trees and swamps that look like this.

• 1:48:00Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 1:48:01Speaker 03

  Um, and my friend Max Stone had talked about wanting to camera trap them before, but, um, no one conclusively knew what pollinates the ghost orchid. There's this theory that it's the giant sphinx moth, which is kind of like scientific canon. People just, oh, it must be the giant sphinx moth, but no one had proven that. So I had the camera traps and the laser triggers and all this stuff. I'm like, well, we can maybe camera trap a ghost orchid, see what comes in. Well, that turned into a, took three summers of, you know, trying. What these, there's about 2,000 ghost orchids in the wild in Florida. About one in 10 of those bloom each year for a couple of weeks in the summer, in the peak of the summer.

• 1:48:46Speaker 03

  And maybe one in 10 of those get pollinated. So you really have to be, um,

• 1:48:53Danny Jones?

  Wow. Now what's the significant, like what's, what's the, I mean, they look incredible.

• 1:48:58Speaker 03

  They're really cool. They're rare. There's a lot of like lore to them. It's just, it's a, it's a rarity and the beauty of them.

• 1:49:03Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:03Speaker 03

  That's kind of draws you in, but, um, but we finally got this, got the system working and photographed five different moth species probing or pollinating the ghost orchid. There's a Nat Geo story about it. There's scientific papers written about it. It was pretty cool.

• 1:49:21Danny Jones?

  Whoa.

• 1:49:22Speaker 03

  Um, but that's what I'm doing in, in this, that picture I was showing you. I was like, I didn't paddleboard to my normal panther camera trap, but I, but we, the ghost orchid would be growing like, And near that bermilliad, like in that kind of environment. But, but I was really trying to show the Panthers like.

• 1:49:40Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 1:49:42Speaker 03

  In the swamp, you know, because if it wasn't for their ability to persist in an environment like this, they wouldn't be here. Cause we killed them everywhere else, you know, humans killed them everywhere else where we wanted to be. And but because they could survive in the swamp outside the reach of our development. And it's kind of.

• 1:50:07Danny Jones?

  They're kind of like a water hybrid mountain lion, right?

• 1:50:10Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, I mean, it, I mean, a mountain, a mountain lion could do this too, but it's just, it's just because they're adaptable enough. I mean, they live in this, in the Amazon, they live in Central America, they, they live throughout these different areas. And it has, it's, um, I have to be careful about how I'm making this analogy, but it, I don't think it's any coincidence that America's only unconquered native tribe in the Seminoles and the Meksuki also persevered in the Everglades.

• 1:50:37Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 1:50:38Speaker 03

  Because it's like, you can have it.

• 1:50:41Danny Jones?

  You, no one wants to go in there.

• 1:50:42Speaker 03

  The US generals are like, you can have it.

• 1:50:44Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:50:45Speaker 03

  And the Panther, who, who is the, the most, one of the most significant clans and cultural elements for the Seminole people also.

• 1:50:56Speaker 03

  Persevered.

• 1:50:57Danny Jones?

  Wow, man. That's incredible.

• 1:51:00Speaker 03

  And, you know, this one, this is one of, this is one of my favorites. This thing was.

• 1:51:05Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 1:51:06Speaker 03

  There's this trail.

• 1:51:07Danny Jones?

  Why is he, why is he growling?

• 1:51:09Speaker 03

  Just hissing.

• 1:51:10Danny Jones?

  Or her. Why is she hissing? Is it a he or?

• 1:51:12Speaker 03

  I think it's a he. Um, I don't know. I don't, I don't think it likes water. I don't think it wants to be in there.

• 1:51:19Speaker 03

  There's some big ass gators in there. There's a lot going, but this is an old logging trail that goes through the Fatahatchee. This is in Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge, north of I-75. But there's this old logging trail that goes up through this ancient swamp. And it, and it washes out. So there's an area that kind of turns into a pond and then the trail comes back up. So any animal that wants to travel that trail has to go through water through this stretch.

• 1:51:47Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:51:48Speaker 03

  So I've got my camera set up on the other side and there's, there's a video in the Panther film where it kind of jumps over the water. It's at the same place.

• 1:51:55Danny Jones?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:51:57Danny Jones?

  Now, where uh on the totem pole on the hierarchy, where do where do gators match up against Panthers? Are gators more afraid of the Panthers or is vice versa?

• 1:52:09Speaker 03

  I would, I mean, I I would think that the most gators are afraid of the Panther.

• 1:52:14Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:52:15Speaker 03

  I mean, if you're a big enough gator, you're not afraid of much.

• 1:52:18Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:52:18Speaker 03

  You know, if you're like a ten footer or twelve footer, but yeah, I would think that I would think the gators on the menu if you're a small gator. Um, for a Panther.

• 1:52:28Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:52:29Speaker 03

  And.

• 1:52:30Danny Jones?

  I think it's like that in the Amazon, like the caiman and the jaguar.

• 1:52:33Speaker 03

  Jaguars crushed Caymans.

• 1:52:34Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's I mean Jaguars a bigger, stronger animal than a Panther. And they're adapted for hunting them there. But they have, they have, they do have evidence of Panthers eating gators. Uh, it's probably smaller gators. But there's a video in the Panther film where on the same trail, there's a gator, a dry season, kind of like sunning itself on the edge. And it just like scatters into the water and then.

• 1:53:03Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:53:05Speaker 03

  Like 10 seconds later, a female Panther.

• 1:53:07Danny Jones?

  Just cruising.

• 1:53:07Speaker 03

  Cruises by. So that gator is like, I'm out.

• 1:53:11Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:53:11Speaker 03

  And they might be cautious and in in getting the water for anything, but.

• 1:53:15Danny Jones?

  Now.

• 1:53:16Speaker 03

  She looked like the queen in that one.

• 1:53:18Danny Jones?

  Are you ever like freaked out when you're out here by yourself, like trekking through the the the fricking Everglades with all these wild animals around you? Like what like, what's like the sketchiest situation you've been in or like, is there any specific animal you're more afraid of?

• 1:53:35Speaker 03

  Well, I try not to go alone because it's just not a good idea. You know, you mean, you're more likely going to trip and break your ankle or something and then then get eaten by an animal. But like, you know, I try not to go solo. Um, but a lot of times I did. Um, I mean, the most dangerous thing I do is drive my car to get there, you know, statistically.

• 1:53:56Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:53:57Speaker 03

  Um, but I did, I did get inside a gator's mouth once and that was, that woke me up.

• 1:54:04Danny Jones?

  What do you mean? How did you get inside a gator's mouth?

• 1:54:08Danny Jones?

  And what part of you?

• 1:54:09Speaker 03

  Um, my hand and my upper leg groin.

• 1:54:12Danny Jones?

  Oh, no.

• 1:54:13Speaker 03

  But it wasn't. So I was in, I've got pictures of it somewhere, but I haven't really told the story because I don't, it's not something you just put on social media without vilifying the swamp. Oh, yeah. But um, there's, there's one of these spots where we were doing a time lapse pictures of the swamp water coming up. And so I, I set up anchor points on the Cypress knees in three different places where you could put a slider and then do a repeat move, dry season, mid-water and high water. And so in the Panther film, there are a few scenes where you can see the swamp water rising. Mm hmm. Um, so that's, that's how I created those. But I normally, I never go at dawn or dusk to my camera

• 1:54:58Speaker 03

  trap sites because I don't want to ruin the shot. You know, I don't want to show up when the Panther I've been waiting for, for two years is also about to walk through in beautiful lighting. Right. So I try to go in the middle of the day when the lights crap and they're less likely to be there. Well, in this, this case, I was going at dawn to do that slider move so I could get really even lighting. It was like a 40 minute time lapse and I wanted the light to stay the same. So it needed to be before the sun was coming up too high. Um, and at same spot I'd walk through dozens of times. Um, normally you take a machete, you cut a walking stick that's six or seven feet long where you can poke it out at a 45 degree angle in front of you as you walk through the swamp. So you don't like surprise a gator. That's for gators.

• 1:55:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, I just poke it in front of me when I walk and I've never, I never had, I never scared anything off. It's that maybe once, never really had a close run in. So I had left my machete on a swamp buggy on accident the night before and I didn't have it with me. And so I get to the end of the logging tram to go walk off into the swamp, a short distance to get to where the camera trap and the slider setup. And I just grabbed a, like a four foot long walking stick off this, off the ground and like just ceremoniously poking it in front of me as I walk. And right when I get to the deepest part of the swamp, it's like waist deep, black water. It's like a head the size of a garbage can lid. Just like.

• 1:56:25Speaker 03

  On my hand and it was so fast and um I had the walking stick and I had this waterproof backpack on and I had a slider like a four foot carbon fiber slider and a rifle case like so I'm really like loaded down and kind of awkward and I just pull and fall backwards and there's a little bit of current coming around the the edge of the swamp there and I basically present my groin to the gator it pops up and it hits me in the groin like upper lower stomach groin and it was like a toothy punch he didn't he didn't hold on to me you know I didn't have like a I didn't I didn't

• 1:57:06Speaker 03

  have bite marks on both sides of me it was just like bruised hole in my hand and bruising down the tip of my finger and then one hole in my side um like under my belt line like through my skin but just didn't go into the muscle and then like bruising where you don't want bruising right and um and but it didn't hold on and I stood up on in the ended up on its back as it like swam out from under me and it's probably like a nine foot gator from the the look of it or Jesus dude so I was like so it was just like a defensive move it wasn't it was a defensive move maybe I think it probably heard me coming just it was big enough that it probably had its

• 1:57:51Speaker 03

  feet and tail on the ground in four feet of water and just dunked its head under enough where it was just sitting there and I just walked right into it right and it was like bam bam and like kicked my ass real fast and then you were lucky man yeah no had I yeah had it wanted me it would have gotten my arm or worse you know it either ripped my arm off or drowned me or you know something but yeah you know but it didn't so that was like that was like I basically walked into a gator in four feet of water and all it did was bite my hand and you know Crunch my balls, but.

• 1:58:24Danny Jones?

  That's interesting. That's interesting that it didn't try to like eat you or take you because like you hear about the stories of gators eating dogs and people in like suburban areas, right? Like retention ponds or lakes that are like around housing developments or trails and stuff like that. So they've probably become used to those people or animals and hunt them.

• 1:58:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:58:44Danny Jones?

  And this thing's probably never seen a human.

• 1:58:46Speaker 03

  It might not. And, and I don't, unless you're a fed gator, or unless you're a really big gator, like 12 feet, like someone my size or your size isn't on the menu typically. I mean, it's like, had I, had I had a dog swamped in there, that thing would have eaten the dog. But I think it's just me with all my backpack and all my stuff, just, you know, some, some instincts, like not worth it, you know, not return of investment, not worth it.

• 1:59:11Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:59:12Speaker 03

  But yeah, I mean, it's, it's a truly wild gator in a wild place, which is also a safer animal to interact with than a one that's being fed leftover catfish at the boat dock.

• 1:59:22Danny Jones?

  Right. Have you, you know Manny Puig?

• 1:59:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:59:25Danny Jones?

  Have you seen the?

• 1:59:26Speaker 03

  I know of him. Yeah. I've never met him, but he's a wild man.

• 1:59:29Danny Jones?

  He is wild. He, he makes those, you see those tridents over there in the corner? He hand makes those tridents and he makes them for, people buy them for like the art value, but he, he uses them to hunt gators and, and hogs.

• 1:59:43Speaker 03

  Oh, my gosh.

• 1:59:43Danny Jones?

  And I'm like, why are you doing this? Like, why, why do you, what page you decided to create a trident to hunt gators and hogs? And to allow, he did catch a Slappy with him too. He's like, he goes, I got bored with, with guns and, and spear guns. He's like, I wanted to find a more difficult way to catch these animals to challenge myself. Like, okay. He just wants to make shit more primitive and difficult.

• 2:00:05Speaker 03

  Oh, my gosh.

• 2:00:06Danny Jones?

  He's crazy, man. But yeah, he would swim down in those canals and levitate. Like he would swim to the bottom of this like 20 foot canal and like go down and grab the gator under its chin and bring it to the surface. He's like 15 to 20 footers.

• 2:00:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:00:19Danny Jones?

  Dude's a maniac.

• 2:00:20Speaker 03

  No, yeah, I've seen video. I mean, he's, he's been doing it a while. I mean, I was like, I used to be like a Clearwater Beach lifeguard on summers and people were playing videos of that like.

• 2:00:28Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:29Speaker 03

  20 years ago.

• 2:00:30Danny Jones?

  He's been bit by seven different species of sharks. And he said the worst one was a lemon shark bite. He said the lemon shark could have easily taken his whole arm off if wanted to. He's been bit by a mako shark, Caribbean reef shark.

• 2:00:45Danny Jones?

  Uh, what's, what's the, the nurse shark?

• 2:00:48Speaker 03

  I have.

• 2:00:48Danny Jones?

  Oh, no, I'm sorry. He said the nurse shark was the worst.

• 2:00:51Speaker 03

  Really?

• 2:00:51Danny Jones?

  The nurse shark.

• 2:00:52Speaker 03

  You have to work hard to get bit by a nurse shark.

• 2:00:54Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:54Speaker 03

  And he was like trying to tickle it to the surface too?

• 2:00:57Danny Jones?

  He, he's very handsy with sharks.

• 2:01:00Speaker 03

  I mean, I have no aspiration to get by, bit by anything else. I think I'm one and done. I don't need to.

• 2:01:07Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:07Speaker 03

  I don't need any bragging rights on anything else.

• 2:01:09Danny Jones?

  He's a different breed, man. He's from Cuba. He's a, he's a rare species.

• 2:01:14Speaker 03

  Oh my gosh. What does Chris say about him? Did you ask Chris about Manny?

• 2:01:18Danny Jones?

  Uh, yeah, I can't remember what Chris said about him, but, uh, yeah, he thought, he thought Manny was off his rocker too.

• 2:01:25Speaker 03

  I emailed Chris when I got bit by the gator to get his take on it. And he thought it was probably like a territorial kind of thing.

• 2:01:30Danny Jones?

  Yeah. That's what it sounds like.

• 2:01:32Speaker 03

  Yeah. But yeah, that it was, it was interesting. Like I was in shock for 15 minutes. Like I, I dry land was only 20 feet away. So I climbed up, surveyed my wounds. I was nauseous and pale and everything. But then I kind of came back to my senses. My assistant was coming a little bit behind me and she brought like a first aid kit and we went and.

• 2:01:54Danny Jones?

  Oh, so you weren't alone.

• 2:01:55Speaker 03

  She, she was on her way a little bit later.

• 2:01:57Danny Jones?

  Oh, I see.

• 2:01:58Speaker 03

  I was alone, but I just like, you don't have to get up at dawn. Just meet me there to service the camera trap after I'm done with the slider thing.

• 2:02:03Danny Jones?

  Got it.

• 2:02:04Speaker 03

  So she called up to me. We, um, I went the long way around to stay shallow to get to my camera. And I went and went ahead and like wrapped my hand up and did the slider move I needed for the film. And then I called the fish and wildlife service to tell them I get bit by the gator. Cause if I would have called it in right then, they would have made me go to the

• 2:02:23Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:02:24Speaker 03

  urgent care, the ER, leave the property. So I kind of just did what I came there to do. And then I left, but this was like peak COVID.

• 2:02:31Danny Jones?

  And.

• 2:02:31Speaker 03

  Yeah. I think the funniest thing is like, I feel like a character from a Carl Heisen novel. I, I show up to an urgent care in East Naples. I've, I've got pants on that are tethered from an alligator. I'm wet from the waist down. I got a hole in my hand. And I walk in and I feel like I'm kind of expecting the reception's recep-ness is going to at least like. Be somewhat impressed by my damages, you know, and I'm like, she's, what are you here for? I'm like, I got bit by an alligator and she, she doesn't, she doesn't even look up. She's like, take a seat, the doctor will be with you in a minute.

• 2:03:07Danny Jones?

  Didn't even look at you.

• 2:03:08Speaker 03

  I'm like, either this happens like every day here or?

• 2:03:12Danny Jones?

  Poor girl, she needs a vacation.

• 2:03:15Speaker 03

  So I, she's like, have a seat, the doc will be with you in a minute. So I go sit down, the same, the same retired ER doc who like stitched me up when I hit myself a machete a couple of years before, um, comes in, gives me like the tetanus shot and soaks the hand. And it was, you know, in and out, but she, she, she didn't even like give me any, any props at all.

• 2:03:36Danny Jones?

  That's crazy. Sounds like climactic.

• 2:03:39Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:03:40Danny Jones?

  What about snakes?

• 2:03:41Speaker 03

  Never had any trouble with snakes.

• 2:03:43Danny Jones?

  No, that's how Manny actually almost died from a snake bite. He lost his finger.

• 2:03:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I don't, I don't mess with snakes, but I also, you know, it's very hard to,

• 2:03:53Speaker 03

  most people from my understanding who get hurt or killed by snakes, it's, it's, it's in developing countries when you're leaving your bed or your tent at night to go to the bathroom and you step on one, if you're vigilant and you have a light and you look, you're not going to just step into a snake and get bit by it.

• 2:04:11Danny Jones?

  Right, right.

• 2:04:12Speaker 03

  Now they do say when you're hiking, the third person in line is the one that's going to get whacked because the first person who walks by wakes the snake up. You know, the second person walks by, doesn't see it, it like coils and gets ready. And the third person walks by and accidentally kicks the snake, gets it sometimes.

• 2:04:26Danny Jones?

  Wow, that makes sense.

• 2:04:28Speaker 03

  Takes a while.

• 2:04:29Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:31Danny Jones?

  So you only bring a machete to protect yourself typically and a stick?

• 2:04:34Speaker 03

  I mean, the steady machete is more for like bushcraft. I mean, I use it to like cut things back or to dig a hole for the camera trap. I did start after that gator, I did start carrying knives.

• 2:04:47Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:04:47Speaker 03

  Like I got a neck knife and I got a hip knife.

• 2:04:50Danny Jones?

  Okay, no gun?

• 2:04:52Speaker 03

  No, and I'm, you're not allowed to carry gun at these federal properties.

• 2:04:55Danny Jones?

  Oh, no.

• 2:04:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I, on one of our expeditions, I carried a, um, like a little forty five slash four ten revolver in case I came across a python with like, had like a pistol with buckshot basically, but never had to use it.

• 2:05:11Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:05:13Danny Jones?

  God, that would suck to to run into a pissed off panther, though. That was like trying to protect its cubs.

• 2:05:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, no, but it's it's that's not gonna happen.

• 2:05:22Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:05:22Speaker 03

  They they they would see you so far before you see them.

• 2:05:27Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:05:28Speaker 03

  You know, like, they'd be out.

• 2:05:30Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:05:31Speaker 03

  And, um, I mean, I know I can't, you'd have to be.

• 2:05:38Speaker 03

  I've actually been in a panther den with scientists when the mother is like pacing the periphery. And you don't, you don't feel in danger, but there's a group of people. But that's the way, that's the way the scientists from the Fish and Wildlife Commission study the Panthers. They they put of the 200 Panthers, there might be like a half a dozen at any given time. They have a GPS collar or a radio collar and they'll listen for the panther. They usually use radio collars because the GPS collars fail and they don't last long enough. So they they use a regular VHF and they fly an airplane out of Naples three days a week.

• 2:06:14Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 2:06:15Speaker 03

  With VHF listening antennas on the wings and they'll circle, locate the panther, write down the location on the map and do it. You know, they might only have six or seven out there wearing collars at any point. And then, once they get a collar, once they get a female panther who doesn't move for two flights in a row or three flights in a row, it's she's either dead or she's denning.

• 2:06:37Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 2:06:38Speaker 03

  And so at that point, they go in, they use something called a biologist in a box, which is a it's like a VHF listening antenna that's like ping, ping, ping when the panther is nearby. And they hook it up to a cellphone on auto answer and they set it in a Pelican case like maybe 200 yards from the den. And every morning at 5:00 AM, they call it. And if it ding, ding, ding, she's in the den. But if they call it at 5:00 AM and she's not in the den, that means she's still out hunting.

• 2:07:06Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:07:07Speaker 03

  They'll come in, they'll, and then, you know, 30 minutes before sunrise, if she's still not there, then they'll go in and based on the location, go search and try to find the den.

• 2:07:19Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:07:19Speaker 03

  Then they find the kittens and then they'll put little pit tag under their skin like you would do for your dog at the vet. They'll do a health check, figure out the gender of the of the panther kittens.

• 2:07:30Danny Jones?

  What's up, Ben?

• 2:07:34Speaker 03

  And so, yeah, I've been in there when, you know, then someone's always listening. Yeah. Okay. The mom is coming home now. Like, you know, we gotta get out of here. She's coming home. She's coming back from hunting. But I have the most admiration for the female Panthers. I mean, to think about,

• 2:07:50Speaker 03

  you've got three kittens in a den, two kittens in a den that you have to keep safe. But in order to feed them, you have to go kill a deer or a hog, you know, once a week to feed yourself to then have the milk to feed them. And so she's going out hunting all night, killing an animal, and then coming back and taking care of the kittens, which is amazing.

• 2:08:10Danny Jones?

  Wow, dude. Now, how is the population, um, it's growing? Is it growing consistently or is it growing slowly? Or like what is it? How is it still around the 200? Or did you say it was about 200 now?

• 2:08:24Speaker 03

  About 200. I think it's, um, here, I'll show you a map about that. These are some of those kittens that in one of those dens that they worked up.

• 2:08:32Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow, man.

• 2:08:34Speaker 03

  And because, so, so I'll show you, this is the map that shows the Florida Wildlife Corridor and it shows the kind of breeding range of the Florida Panther. So the breeding range is where females and males exist together.

• 2:08:50Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:08:51Speaker 03

  Male Panthers have that 200 mile home range I was talking about. And if you're a male Panther born south of the Cluice Hachi River or south of Fort Myers, that, that territory is pretty full. You know, there's probably a male Panther who has

• 2:09:08Speaker 03

  every, every territory claimed in that part of the state. And so you're going to push north and you're going to swim the Cluice Hachi River and you're going to be on the ranch lands or the other parts of the corridor, further north in the state.

• 2:09:24Speaker 03

  But there are no females documented north of Fort Myers, basically. And so that's a limiting factor. So in order to have a genetically viable, quote, recovered Florida Panther population, they're calling for 600 or more Panthers. In order to have that happen, they need to be spread across three times as much land.

• 2:09:45Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:09:45Speaker 03

  So the only way for that is for female Panthers to keep moving further north in the state and even into Georgia and the southeast to give enough territory. And the big story happened in, this is in the Path of the Panther film, but in 2016, scientists got the first evidence of a female north of the Cluj-Ishaci River since 1973. And so that was like the, um, there's a, there's a black and white picture.

• 2:10:15Danny Jones?

  And why weren't they going north of that river?

• 2:10:17Speaker 03

  Well, it's, the, the females have less incentive to go there because they, you know, you, if you're a female panther, you kind of stay next to or adjacent to the home range of your mother. And so you're moving out and they have smaller home ranges, like 40 square miles. And so they're incrementally filling up that space more slowly than the males are.

• 2:10:37Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:10:38Speaker 03

  Um, this is that first documented, first photo evidence of a female north of the river that FWC got in November of 2016. And the reason they know it's a female, they, they got a track within like 48 hours of that photo. And the female Panther maxes out at like 70 or 80 pounds and a male Panther gets to be like 150 pounds and the tracks are decisively different in size.

• 2:11:04Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:11:04Speaker 03

  And so bobcat is really small, male panther is really big. Nothing else, female panther, nothing else could be that other than maybe a young cub, but either one would be evidence of breeding.

• 2:11:15Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:11:15Speaker 03

  North of the Cluj-Ishaci.

• 2:11:17Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 2:11:17Speaker 03

  So they got this picture and they let me set up my cameras. This is on Babcock Ranch on the state preserve near Fort Myers. Um, and after a year and a half of trying to camera trap in that area.

• 2:11:32Speaker 03

  I got this picture. So that's her. That's that same female panther.

• 2:11:36Danny Jones?

  Now, it's literally impossible for someone to get a photo like this with a camera in their hand with one of these things like there's no chance you're gonna ever have a camera and find one of these things in the wild without a camera. The camera trap's the only way.

• 2:11:52Speaker 03

  You're not gonna get a picture like this. I mean, I, in all my years trying, I did see one Florida panther that I photographed in the wild with a camera in my hands. There's a scene in the film about it. I'm, I'm, I'm.

• 2:12:03Danny Jones?

  I was in tears watching that. I was like, that was so sad.

• 2:12:09Speaker 03

  It's, well, yeah, when the injured, the injured kitten, but yeah, it was, it was, but that's, that's the one time in all the time trying that ever saw. And so you're not reliably gonna get photography of one. I mean, if, if you're saying, if you were like obsessed with getting a picture of a panther holding a camera, I would send you to the Fatca Hachi Strand and I would say, you know, travel up and down Jane Scenic Road. And there's people that do it. Like a guy came to a talk I gave at the St. Pete Museum of History last night who, um, inspired by the film and this work, really made it a quest to try to photograph a panther. And he's photographed a couple, um, on Jane Scenic.

• 2:12:49Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 2:12:50Speaker 03

  One, he said he walked like 20 miles on Jane Scenic and he was on his way back to his car. Like he spent like a certain amount of time with a female panther on the same road and he got pictures of her.

• 2:13:00Danny Jones?

  Wow, man.

• 2:13:01Speaker 03

  Which is amazing. But this, this is the most important picture of my career at the time, because this is the first female panther in my lifetime documented north of Close Hachi River being trailed by two kittens. So this was pretty special and kind of the hope. Like, this is what you need. You need female Panthers further north in the state.

• 2:13:22Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:22Speaker 03

  And it's erasing its time to whether we can, whether Panthers can reclaim that historic territory before the development takes it.

• 2:13:32Danny Jones?

  So the, the kittens stay with the mom until?

• 2:13:37Speaker 03

  About a year.

• 2:13:37Danny Jones?

  Until about a year?

• 2:13:38Speaker 03

  Yeah. They'll, they'll nurse for like the first three months or so, they don't leave the den and they're, they're nursing and then they get mobile and then they can follow her. Um, and then she'll hunt and give them meat and then they'll start to learn to hunt. But it's about a year where they. Branch off and if they're a male, they're going to start getting beat up by other males in the territory. So that's when they have the incentive to really push off and find their own territory.

• 2:14:04Danny Jones?

  And the males are just out looking for new females?

• 2:14:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're looking for food. They're looking for mates.

• 2:14:09Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:14:10Speaker 03

  And they

• 2:14:11Danny Jones?

  But they don't stay, the female, the male doesn't stay with the, with the female mountain lion that it bred with?

• 2:14:16Speaker 03

  No, not, they just keep moving, keep defending their territory.

• 2:14:21Danny Jones?

  Right, okay.

• 2:14:22Speaker 03

  I mean, we did have a, we did have some photography and video in Big Cypress where there is a female and a male feeding together on a deer carcass.

• 2:14:33Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 2:14:34Speaker 03

  And it might be that the female killed the deer and the more dominant male came in and ate, but they seem to be eating cooperatively. So that was

• 2:14:44Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:14:44Speaker 03

  So maybe they were mating and one of them killed a deer and they had a dinner date. I don't know.

• 2:14:50Danny Jones?

  [laughing]

• 2:14:51Speaker 03

  But it was all, there was, there was actually two males that came in. And so first it was like a, a young, a younger male with a female and they got pushed off by like a massive older male that had like worn off teeth because it was so old.

• 2:15:03Danny Jones?

  Wow. How many of the mountain lions that are in Florida right now are tagged with GPS or radio frequencies?

• 2:15:13Speaker 03

  I think, I think maybe like five or six.

• 2:15:16Danny Jones?

  That's it?

• 2:15:16Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, maybe, maybe it's 10 if the, if the National Park Service is doing anything in Big Cypress and parallel to the state agency here, but it's not a lot.

• 2:15:25Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 2:15:26Speaker 03

  But if I show you this map, the, the male Panthers have been wandering the peninsula. There is one killed on the road in Hillsborough County, not that far from the Alafire River. You know, any male panther was born down in the Everglades and they're finding their way up to the north about 12 years ago. There's a hunter outside of Atlanta that shot a panther. And they knew from the pit tag or from some other thing that that panther was born in the Ocala Coochie slough in South Florida. So it had found its way all the way to Georgia. So that's sad that it got killed by a hunter, but it shows you there's still a connected landscape and a panther can find its way from the Everglades to Georgia still. And that means the wildlife quarter is still there.

• 2:16:11Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:12Speaker 03

  And it's still working.

• 2:16:13Danny Jones?

  Yep.

• 2:16:13Speaker 03

  So that's the silver lining of that one.

• 2:16:15Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I saw you had photos of Panthers walking underneath like highways, right?

• 2:16:22Speaker 03

  Yes, yeah, I've got some pictures of that here. Like this is a panther traveling underneath Interstate 75.

• 2:16:31Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 2:16:33Speaker 03

  And that's picking in Strand State Forest on the south.

• 2:16:36Danny Jones?

  A long exposure.

• 2:16:37Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:16:38Danny Jones?

  I can see that that red line is a car.

• 2:16:40Speaker 03

  It's a car streaking by. Yeah, it's probably 10 or 15 second exposure at night.

• 2:16:47Danny Jones?

  Wow, man, that's so, that's so crazy.

• 2:16:49Speaker 03

  That was, those were kind of PTSD looking at this one. Those were hard pictures to do because every light you see in there, I had to provide. So there, there are 14 different strobes

• 2:17:02Speaker 03

  lighting this scene. It's about 200, 200 yards from foreground where this panther is to the background where the

• 2:17:11Speaker 03

  southbound lane of Interstate is.

• 2:17:13Danny Jones?

  Oh, so you're lighting up that far, far back bridge span?

• 2:17:17Speaker 03

  Yeah. So I've got, I've got like a couple hundred yards of ethernet cable carrying flash signal and then three different wireless radio channels hooked up to 14 flashes.

• 2:17:30Danny Jones?

  Good Lord. How long does that take you to set that shot up? And you have to like test it on yourself and?

• 2:17:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, and you test it at night to see it. I mean, it's, it took, it was an iteration to get the lights right, you know, couple months of trying that and then just trying to keep it working. There, there are six lights lighting the foreground. It's kind of like an alleyway of light. But the thing is, I couldn't have any lights going off when the animal was under the underpass because you wouldn't want to discourage its behavior.

• 2:17:58Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:17:58Speaker 03

  You wouldn't want to, you don't want to haze it from doing exactly what it's supposed to be doing is going safely underneath.

• 2:18:03Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:18:04Speaker 03

  And so. Flash would go off a couple of times. Um, and it's, and so this, this, this panther is about a hundred seven, 50, 70 yards away from the, from the road at this point. And it's about to walk down a trail. Um, but these things work. And here's another, this is another, and this one took about five years to actually get, but you got the timing with the

• 2:18:30Danny Jones?

  Wow, that's wild, dude. That's such a cool shot.

• 2:18:37Speaker 03

  And I, I had kind of deja vu when I first saw this location when I was scouting for camera trap sites. In the 2012 expedition, we walked on, on the same path when we were going from Picking and Strand to the Panther Refuge on our way north of the state. So I've got history of that spot.

• 2:18:55Danny Jones?

  What is your take on this, on the colossal bioscience program that's reviving the, uh, what, what was the, uh, what was the wolf, the dire wolf that they revived?

• 2:19:06Speaker 03

  You know, I, I've just read headlines on it. So I don't really know the science of what's going on with it. If it's, if it's the actual genome or it's kind of like a proximate.

• 2:19:16Danny Jones?

  They used CRISPR, I think.

• 2:19:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not totally up to speed on the genetics. I mean, I think it's fascinating. I don't know.

• 2:19:26Speaker 03

  You know, it brings in a lot of ethical questions on how, you know, it could be, it could help you revive recently extinct species and put them back on the landscape potentially, which would be amazing. But then you don't, you don't want to get into a Jurassic Park kind of scenario where you're really meddling with things because that could

• 2:19:45Speaker 03

  throw ecosystems more out of balance.

• 2:19:47Danny Jones?

  Yeah, that's the crazy thing. Like wolves, I know people, I've heard stories of like wolves causing lots of problems for people. Like you don't want to, you don't want to be co-mingling with wolves and the dire wolves are like, like what, three or four times the size of normal wolves.

• 2:20:02Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:20:02Danny Jones?

  So like, I mean, yeah, I, I, I don't know if they've thought that through or how far they've thought that through.

• 2:20:08Speaker 03

  Yeah. Now, yeah, and wolves are, it's a complicated history of wolves. And you know, like, man's best friend is a dog that comes from a wolf. And then there's this, people coexisted with wolves forever. But I think that there's a certain fear and there's also livestock loss that happens for wolves. Whether it's a wolf or a panther or a grizzly bear, we need to have

• 2:20:34Speaker 03

  We need to get to a place where you have the incentives to where having animals like that is a is a um, an asset, not a liability for someone.

• 2:20:45Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:20:45Speaker 03

  You know, because you need to be able to get paid for your losses. You can't expect the farmers and the ranchers to carry the weight of environmentalism for the world without compensation.

• 2:20:56Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:20:56Speaker 03

  But in the case of the Florida panther, I think it's it's kind of a really hopeful example. I'm going to show you a picture.

• 2:21:03Danny Jones?

  Do they take out cattle?

• 2:21:05Speaker 03

  They do.

• 2:21:05Danny Jones?

  They do.

• 2:21:06Speaker 03

  Um, but it's in some places, there's some places have had significant losses, but they're often the ranch that's right on the edge of the Big Cypress National Preserve. Um, but even there, once they started, you know, in calving season, keeping them away from the pastures that are right up against the forest, they really cut their losses.

• 2:21:27Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:21:28Speaker 03

  But if you have like young calves, like it's like a fresh buffet right up on the edge of the Cypress swamp.

• 2:21:33Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:21:33Speaker 03

  It's, you know, you're, you're giving the panther, you're tending the panther.

• 2:21:37Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:38Speaker 03

  So this guy is a hero of mine. He's a rancher named Kerry Lightsey, whose family's been ranching in the Kissimmee River Valley and in Florida for generations. And he's one of the early adapter of conservation easements.

• 2:21:52Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 2:21:53Speaker 03

  They own an island called Brahma Island in the middle of Lake Kissimmee, 3,000 acre island. Um, and they put the whole thing under conservation easement, I think in the 1990s with the Nature Conservancy. So they've been, I think 90% of their land is protected and they've been advocating to the other ranchers to get involved in these programs because it gives them the ability to cash out some of the value of the land by selling the development rights. In his case, he used that to buy more ranches. Over time, sells the development rights from those and he's doubled or tripled his acres, but we're all benefiting because that land's never going to be developed and bears and panthers and other wildlife are surviving there and it's, you know, part of the solution

• 2:22:38Speaker 03

  now.

• 2:22:39Danny Jones?

  Yeah, that's incredible.

• 2:22:41Speaker 03

  I asked him when that first female panther came north of the Cluesshage River, that's where all his ranches are located. I was like, Kerry, the panther's coming back to the northern Everglades. What do you think about that?

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• 2:23:54Speaker 03

  Never forget his answer. He's like, Carlton, the panther is going to have to help us save Florida.

• 2:24:01Speaker 03

  I was like, and he went on to say, it's because it's going to help people understand why we need to save these big areas.

• 2:24:08Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:09Speaker 03

  And so some of the, some of the ranchers in Florida, I think, are further along in their thinking than some of the ranchers out West. Because the development is such a clear and present danger to their future. If you're a rancher who wants to stay ranching in Florida, you know, you have two paths. It's either going to be, or if you're a rancher in Florida, there's two paths. One's going to be selling out for development and one's going to be working with conservation to give you the resources to keep ranching.

• 2:24:38Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 2:24:39Speaker 03

  And they can see that. And so they kind of pull their view back a little bit. They understand that the panther and the rancher, if they can get along, they can help each other. Because people like us on the coast who are interested in saving wildlife are going to support the policies that protect those lands and that can help the rancher get their land protected.

• 2:25:01Danny Jones?

  Right. Now, what about this, the push for development of more toll roads?

• 2:25:08Danny Jones?

  Where does that, how does that fit into all of this? Because the toll roads aren't, I mean, it's obviously a different, a different thing than housing development.

• 2:25:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, a toll road can become a major catalyst for development.

• 2:25:21Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:25:21Speaker 03

  And they can funnel development right into the least developed places. There's a big relationship to those toll roads, to this whole project, really. Because in 2006, when I was just kind of forming my thoughts about the Florida Wildlife Corridor, when I first met that black bear that was living on the cattle ranch, when I first saw that Florida 2060 study that projected the population growth forward, there was also a new toll road being proposed called the Heartland Parkway. And this was, you know, this is 2006. It was, it was like a precursor to what came up in 2019, 2020 with the Amcor's toll roads. But this was going to be a toll road that basically went from Orlando to Naples

• 2:26:07Speaker 03

  through the middle part of the state.

• 2:26:08Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 2:26:09Speaker 03

  And it would have carved open places like our ranch, like Babcock Ranch. Like if you look at the nighttime picture of Florida, nighttime satellite image, basically everything that's dark in that part of the state would have put the toll road right through the middle of it.

• 2:26:24Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:26:25Speaker 03

  And then Governor Charlie Crist vetoed it and it kind of went away, but it didn't go away for long. And so in 2019, 2020, there's, it came back as a proposal called Amcor's, but it included a proposal for a toll road from that same area, Orlando to Naples. It also had one connecting up through the Red Hills near Tallahassee and then a connection point between I-75 and the, and the Suncoast Parkway. But, but that 20, the 2006 toll road was a major impetus for me to start the Florida Wildlife Corridor project.

• 2:27:03Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:27:04Speaker 03

  There's a writer who I really admire from University of Florida, Cynthia Barnett, who wrote a story for Florida Trend, it was a cover story about that toll road to nowhere, the Heartland Parkway, and it's kind of investigative journalism, looking into the motivations for it and why it was there. And in the story, it used the corridor and like, it used the word corridor in five or six different contexts. It talked about.

• 2:27:28Speaker 03

  Highway corridors, multimodal transportation corridors, economic development corridors, broadband corridors, hurricane evacuation corridors, but not a single mention of wildlife corridor. And so that was like, we need to present land conservation as infrastructure in order for it to have a place in the conversation that's making the decisions about this stuff. Cause the wildlife corridor to me is the most fundamental infrastructure, but it's missing from the language, it's missing from the planning conversation. It's just an afterthought. And so that, that sent me to Google to try to see whether Florida Wildlife Corridor existed

• 2:28:10Speaker 03

  as a, as a name, as an identity and snatched up the domain name and was motivated, if this thing comes back around, I want to have the Florida Wildlife Corridor be as real in people's minds as a, as a highway, so that it'll at least have its place in the conversation. And then we can actually decide as a community, what balance we want to achieve. If we're gonna, if we're gonna make a choice to put in a road that ruins the wildlife corridor, at least we'll know it and we'll be talking about it.

• 2:28:37Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 2:28:39Speaker 03

  And so fast forward to 2020, when the Heartland Parkway, or when the new toll roads came out, the EMCOR's toll roads, the Florida Wildlife Corridor was very much in the conversation at that point. So that was really rewarding to see these expeditions, the initial films we had done, the Path of the Panther project had helped kind of put shape to a name, basically naming the conservation opportunity.

• 2:29:05Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:06Speaker 03

  And by giving it an identity, it helped it have a place in the conversation.

• 2:29:10Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 2:29:10Speaker 03

  And then even if the roads did happen, they were going to happen in a more responsible way because people didn't want to mess up the Florida Wildlife Corridor. So there were going to be concessions about, okay, we're not going to have very many exits in these areas. It'd just be a road coming through and we'll do mitigation for the roads that help save land. So even if the road does get built, it gets built in a way that's mindful of the wildlife corridor. It ends up that the legislature and Governor DeSantis threw that one out too, and it's gone away for now. So

• 2:29:39Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 2:29:39Speaker 03

  That happened in, that happened in 2021, the same year that the Florida Wildlife Corridor Act got passed.

• 2:29:45Danny Jones?

  Right. That's amazing.

• 2:29:49Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I don't know. I don't paid so much attention to like the like the the political entanglements when it comes to the wildlife conservation stuff, but I want the one thing I do remember specifically, and you know, I don't know how it doesn't really tie into the wildlife corridor stuff much, but it was when we had the previous governor, I forget his name, the guy who looks like he's from Harry Potter, the he looks he's the bald guy.

• 2:30:15Speaker 03

  Rick Scott?

• 2:30:15Danny Jones?

  Rick Scott, that guy. He there was a bunch of sugar farms, I think, in Florida.

• 2:30:21Speaker 03

  Everglades, yeah.

• 2:30:21Danny Jones?

  In the Everglades, right. And they were doing some specific fertilizer. They were they were like filtering the fertilizer that was getting into the water stream there. And that was getting out into the Gulf, and that was the precipitous to all the red tide that was killing all the fish and everything like that. And from what I understand is that was one of the primary causes of all the red tide in Florida was that fertilizer running through those streams in South Florida. And and he was somehow lobbied by like big sugar to to protect the sugar farms.

• 2:30:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, there the the sugar industry is has has it's politically fascinating, because you you had historically, the Fan Hool brothers, one was Democrat, one was Republican, they heavily supported all sides, and it helps support a a price support for sugar. There's a subsidy that gives a price support for sugar in the United States that helps all that make economic sense. And I'm all about locally grown food and but but there there's an environmental cost to that. And a lot of the Everglades.

• 2:31:30Danny Jones?

  Phosphorus, that's what it was.

• 2:31:31Speaker 03

  It gets it gets polarized, and the Everglades lobby and the sugar like really paint each other. You know, it's they're locked heads on all this. I mean, I think that sugarcane is better suited for that landscape than subdivisions.

• 2:31:48Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:48Speaker 03

  So it's it's a bit of a balance, but the and it's also easy to point the finger.

• 2:31:57Speaker 03

  At the sugar industry for the phosphorus in the ecosystem, but that same river, I mean, they're definitely part of it, but that same water body carries all the phosphorus from everything from Orlando down.

• 2:32:12Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 2:32:12Speaker 03

  You know, like the Kissimmee River comes out of the Kissimmee Chain of Lakes, out of Orlando, out of Kissimmee, out of that whole St. Cloud region of the state, all the way down the Kissimmee River into Lake Okeechobee. Even if no one ever fertilized for the next 30 years, there's enough legacy phosphorus already in the muck of Lake Okeechobee that's accumulated across the past 50 years since they channelized the Kissimmee River and turned it into a drainage canal rather than a mandarin river that naturally filtered out and cleaned itself on its way down to the Southern Everglades. So there's phosphorus in the system, phosphorus from everywhere.

• 2:32:52Speaker 03

  But I think the, the solution that had been organized under Charlie Crist before Rick Scott was to buy a lot of that sugar land and turn it into part of Everglades restoration. And as time went by and his values changed, that deal didn't look very good to the sugar company anymore. And that's what they, that's what they lobbied to get rid of.

• 2:33:19Danny Jones?

  Got it.

• 2:33:20Speaker 03

  Because they decided they didn't want to sell anymore. The, you know, the terms have been negotiated for a deal and they could have been kind of forced to go through with the deal. And you can, you know, some people argue that land is best served to stay in agricultural production.

• 2:33:36Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:33:37Speaker 03

  You know, and others think it should be part of Everglades restoration. So it's, it's, it's, it's kind of a fraught situation.

• 2:33:43Danny Jones?

  Sure, sure. But either way, better to be a sugar farm than to be filled up with subdivisions.

• 2:33:49Speaker 03

  Yep, because you can control your phosphorus coming off of a sugar farm more than you can control it off 5,000 San Augustine or Bahia grass lawns.

• 2:33:58Danny Jones?

  Yes, that's true.

• 2:34:00Speaker 03

  So I think, I mean, I, I tend towards the optimistic, we can all do this together.

• 2:34:05Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:06Speaker 03

  You know, to the point where I'm naive about it sometimes, but I do believe that. Like there is room for the sugar and the Everglades to reform and work together. I, I, I think there's space for all these things still. There's not always going to be that way. We're going to get up to some, if we keep pushing harder and harder on these ecosystems, it's going to be a point where you don't have time or space to recover it.

• 2:34:31Danny Jones?

  But, but we still have a moment. Like Sylvia Earle, who we're doing the film about in the Gulf,

• 2:34:38Speaker 03

  she has a kind of famous quote in the environmental world of saying, "Our decisions in the next 10 years are the most important for the next 10,000." Cause that's where we are as a species. We've just, we, we have the knowledge. We know what we need to do to make really good decisions in most cases, but it's about making those decisions. It's about deciding to preserve that land. It's about transitioning to, you know, a better energy source. And if we keep kicking the can, you kind of miss your moment to do it.

• 2:35:09Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:10Speaker 03

  So it's, it's, it's decisive times, but I feel, I feel encouraged by our progress with the wildlife corridor because like, I think wildlife is unifying. No matter whether you're urban or rural, Republican, Democrat, you know, people are interested and care about wildlife.

• 2:35:29Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 2:35:30Speaker 03

  And if we pay attention to what the wildlife need, whether it's the bear or the panther or one of these whale sharks, they're going to show us what the land needs and what the water needs. And we make the decisions that help their, protect their migratory pathways. You end up saving enough of nature that it's going to serve our needs too.

• 2:35:50Danny Jones?

  Yeah. A hundred percent. Yeah. It's just, it's just this crazy balancing act that, um, you know, can go wrong so easily if you don't, if you don't do it the right way. I mean, but there's, there's plenty of evidence of where, you know, it has gone wrong. I think there's like, Australia is one big place where they like introduced species to like, balance out the ecosystem and it's gone haywire. I know there's a huge problem with like invasive, uh, like pythons and iguanas and stuff in Florida.

• 2:36:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:36:21Danny Jones?

  But there's people who are like every day going out and like shooting iguanas and pythons, trying to.

• 2:36:27Speaker 03

  Trying to keep it, keep it held back.

• 2:36:29Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:30Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, it's, and it, and I think that.

• 2:36:33Danny Jones?

  It's crazy like to zoom out on all of it and to think about how.

• 2:36:39Danny Jones?

  How we are so different from every other animal on this earth, you know, like we're, there's nothing even remotely close to us. Like the closest, the closest ape to us is, is so, is so far. And we're kind of like playing God with some of these, with, with the world and with the balancing of the species and the environment. And I mean, we're trying to do the best we can, but like, there's a lot of moving parts. It's just, it's just, it's just a, it's just a hard thing to grasp sometimes.

• 2:37:11Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, and we're, we're playing God without having the perspective of God. You know, if we were God, we would, we would understand all the domino effect of all of our impacts. So we play God in one little territory.

• 2:37:26Danny Jones?

  Right, exactly.

• 2:37:27Speaker 03

  And the, and the downstream influence of everything we do is not even in our radar.

• 2:37:34Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:37:34Speaker 03

  And so that's the scary part is we're like, we're wielding this massive influence and we don't even do that with the awareness of how much impact we're having.

• 2:37:44Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:37:45Speaker 03

  And while at the same time, like we are so different from every other species, on the other hand, we have like, what, like 80% of our DNA in common of the banana, you know? Or it's like, you know, or, or we are not, our technology buffers us and isolates us from the problems, but it just pushes the can down the road. Like we need the same clean air. We need the same clean environment. We need the same plastic free water.

• 2:38:16Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:38:17Speaker 03

  You know, we need, we need to live in the moment and, and be in the present like animals. You know, your dog doesn't have to see a therapist or do yoga.

• 2:38:28Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:38:28Speaker 03

  You know, it just

• 2:38:29Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:38:29Speaker 03

  is.

• 2:38:30Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:30Speaker 03

  And so, you know, I think, I think like we have

• 2:38:36Danny Jones?

  We're like, we're domesticating ourselves.

• 2:38:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's a good way to put it. And, you know, we're, we need to rewild ourselves as we rewild the planet.

• 2:38:44Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:38:45Speaker 03

  Um, because there, a lot of the answers are there.

• 2:38:50Speaker 03

  I go to the National Geographic Storytellers Summit every year in DC and they have different themes running through it. And a couple of years ago, the theme was fascinating and they're saying, "The future is ancestral." And so they had a lot of Native voices, Native American perspectives. Another year, they were talking about, "You want to change the story, change the storyteller." You know, like, you know, you're not going to send a white guy like me to tell an Amazonian Native story and get the real perspective on it. You train that Amazonian Native in cinematography or photography, or give them the tools to tell their story. It's going to come through with a deep generational connection to the land

• 2:39:34Speaker 03

  and in a voice that we can only like, scratch the surface of.

• 2:39:37Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:39:37Speaker 03

  But there's this, the solutions, so many of the solutions exist within people who still have that relationship to the planet. And there's a lot of listening we could do that could help point us in the right direction.

• 2:39:52Danny Jones?

  Yeah, totally, man. What else are you, what else do you plan on working on in the future? Do you have anything lined up that you, that you're trying to get started or plan on doing here soon?

• 2:40:04Speaker 03

  So, yes. You know, my, my first love, even before the ranches and the Panthers is, is the Gulf. I grew up here, learned to surf in the Gulf, learned to fish in the Gulf. And this is one of those vastly underappreciated wild places. And it's another one that we're all way more connected to than we realize. I mean, the Gulf has the identity of oil fields and overdevelopment to the rest of the world. But people don't think about sperm whales and whale sharks and the beauty and the, you know, 200 miles of protected coastline

• 2:40:44Speaker 03

  between Tampa and Tallahassee and free flowing rivers like the Swanee and the Springs. And so I'm, I'm, I get a lot of satisfaction in trying to bring awareness to that. But it really connects beautifully to the, to the Florida Wildlife Corridor because...

• 2:41:01Speaker 03

  You know, if you followed the situation with the seagrasses in the Indian River Lagoon, the seagrass is dying off, the manatees are starving. It's because it's overdeveloped on that side of the state. Well, the seagrasses, we have the largest contiguous seagrass in the entire Gulf between Tampa and Tallahassee, like the nature coast and the Big Bend coastline. The seagrasses are thriving, the manatees are thriving. And the reason for that, a big reason for that is all the land upstream isn't developed. And so

• 2:41:35Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 2:41:36Speaker 03

  you have what is the Florida Wildlife Corridor along that coastal expedition we did, wrapping around the Big Bend, where that could be the next frontier for conservation, or it could be, excuse me. That could be the next frontier for, you know, large scale conservation, or it could be the next villages. And it's going to be one of the two of those things. And I'm trying to raise awareness for the consequences and the opportunity downstream. Like, we can preserve this unique to the world coastline, where you have manatees and clear seagrasses and spring fed waters. And, um, or we can have a situation where we mess up the water upstream,

• 2:42:21Speaker 03

  like we've done in the Everglades, like we've done in the Indian River Lagoon, and everything downstream will suffer. But we still have a chance to get it right. So I'm, this is where like my Gulf world and my corridor worlds come together. So that's, that's my focus as a photographer and artist is this kind of that stretch of coastline.

• 2:42:38Danny Jones?

  That's amazing.

• 2:42:39Speaker 03

  And trying to tell that story. I've got, my family and I got a 1969 aluminum houseboat that someone converted for outboard motors and a jack plate and run shallow and 37 foot old boat that I keep in Crystal River. But it's a base camp for getting out there and filming and documenting and telling these stories.

• 2:43:00Danny Jones?

  That's incredible, man. Are you, is that going to be a documentary or?

• 2:43:03Speaker 03

  We're making a, we're making a film with Sylvia Earle called Katie Bryden for my team's a director for it, really talented director, and it's called Lasting Hope. It's going to be about Sylvia Earle and her return to the Gulf after 50 years and seeing the opportunity of conservation in that part of the state.

• 2:43:22Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 2:43:22Speaker 03

  And then we're making a series of short films, probably for the National Geographic YouTube. They're going to look at migratory pathways. So looking at the sperm whales off Veracruz in Mexico, looking at the whale sharks, looking at sea turtles and their connections from the seagrasses to offshore and the sargassum. And trying to kind of bring the science and the corridors to bear on what's going on out there, too.

• 2:43:48Danny Jones?

  That's amazing, man.

• 2:43:50Speaker 03

  I'll try to find the, um, a couple of those pictures I was showing you. Like, this is the Finn Holloway River. Like, that's, that's the Gulf. You know, people don't think of that sort of

• 2:44:03Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:44:04Speaker 03

  undisturbed, unbroken beauty on, on the coastline.

• 2:44:07Danny Jones?

  Incredibly. Where exactly in the Gulf is that?

• 2:44:09Speaker 03

  So this is, um, north of Crystal River,

• 2:44:12Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:44:13Speaker 03

  south of Tallahassee.

• 2:44:14Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 2:44:15Speaker 03

  There, um, it's called the Finn Holloway River. It used to be really polluted because of a paper mill that was in Perry.

• 2:44:21Danny Jones?

  Uh huh.

• 2:44:21Speaker 03

  But as that paper mill got cleaned up and has less runoff, um, in this whole, all the, all the pine forests that are upstream from this are relatively benign. You know, a pine forest, you grow trees for 18 years, you cut them down, you plant more trees and it stays green.

• 2:44:37Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:38Speaker 03

  And it stays compatible with the ecosystem. And so my goal is to see incentives for more of those forestry operations to stay in forestry.

• 2:44:46Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:44:47Speaker 03

  If they can stay in forestry and keep making the fiber that we all benefit and do it in a way that works economically, then it doesn't have to go into subdivisions or other uses. And because it's green upstream, it's beautiful and clear downstream.

• 2:45:02Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:45:02Speaker 03

  And so that's, that's kind of the story to tell there.

• 2:45:05Danny Jones?

  That's amazing, man. Could you imagine just taking, ripping an airboat through all that? That's so, so beautiful.

• 2:45:11Speaker 03

  I, I took the, um, I've got some other pictures. I took the houseboat all the way up into the, you know, right into the foreground of there and was flying the drone.

• 2:45:19Danny Jones?

  Oh, oh, this is from a drone. Wow.

• 2:45:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, I spent a week documenting all these river mouths in July, kind of from Steen Hatchie North. Also knocked my lower unit off in Stein Hatchie because I

• 2:45:31Danny Jones?

  No.

• 2:45:32Speaker 03

  misjudged how shallow it was and had to teach myself how to change that and got to be friends with the Suzuki dealer here in Tampa, who hooked me up with one off a test motor and got me back going again.

• 2:45:43Danny Jones?

  That's incredible, man.

• 2:45:45Speaker 03

  But so, yeah, I'm, that's, that's for me as a storyteller, like, that's, that's my backyard. That's the legacy I want to leave is, you know, contributing to more awareness and more preservation of these places. And then there's the global vision for it. And now that I've seen it, it's like a message I feel compelled to share.

• 2:46:07Speaker 03

  I believe the wildlife corridors are these frameworks that we need to scale. And so my, my, my team at Wild Path has a new partnership with the National Geographic Society called Connected Planet. And the theory there is that we're going to get the best state of the science from partner organizations where the best wildlife corridor connections are, where there's an opportunity for positive policy impact, and then make investments in National Geographic explorers and storytellers to tell those stories.

• 2:46:39Speaker 03

  So it's a, it's a new program, but I think that the science is there. And what's often missing is a story to help put that science into action to bring these wildlife corridors to life.

• 2:46:50Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:46:51Speaker 03

  And so I have to check back in, in a year or two and see how that's going. But I see, I see a seed being planted. And it's, it's a model I followed. I mean, the, the, my role models at National Geographic in Gabon,

• 2:47:06Speaker 03

  did an expedition for a year and a half from the center of the Congo to the Atlantic coast of Gabon. Three-part series in National Geographic, and then they convinced the president of Gabon to create 13 national parks.

• 2:47:20Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 2:47:20Speaker 03

  So it's like, science,

• 2:47:22Danny Jones?

  It's a model that works.

• 2:47:23Speaker 03

  storytelling, policy impact. And one of my, one of my role models at National Geographic, Henri Ksala, does this for the ocean. It's called the Pristine Seas Program. And they do expeditions.

• 2:47:36Speaker 03

  Make National Geographic films and sometimes those films are just for the Prime Minister of an island nation who's going to create a marine protected area surrounding all of their waters and they've gotten hundreds of thousands of kilometers of ocean protected and marine protected areas in the past 10 years through this method of expedition storytelling policy.

• 2:48:00Danny Jones?

  That's amazing, man.

• 2:48:01Speaker 03

  And I think that wildlife quarters can actually like bring people together in a common sense way to think about this, like reframe it and think about it in a way that it makes sense to everybody.

• 2:48:10Danny Jones?

  Yeah, 100%. The way you're doing it makes it super digestible and relatable, especially for people that are living in that area.

• 2:48:19Speaker 03

  That's kind of like, that's a graphic of some of the, you know, how you can kind of tie things together. You have room for development, but you also keep the connectivity of nature in mind as you develop.

• 2:48:30Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:48:31Speaker 03

  And stuff in North America, here's some, here's a corridor in the Yellowstone to Yukon that they named this initiative years ago and it's part of the model that we followed just by putting a vision to it, how you could keep a big connected landscape in the Western US, Jaguar Corridor here in South America where you can help tie those habitats together in a connected way, Tiger Corridors in India.

• 2:49:00Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 2:49:02Speaker 03

  It's kind of the same concept applying to the whole planet. Even in the oceans, this is a whale super highways map that the World Wildlife Fund put out.

• 2:49:16Danny Jones?

  That's incredible.

• 2:49:17Speaker 03

  And this is a vision off of Costa Rica and Ecuador between the Galapagos and Central and South America, looking at some really important.

• 2:49:27Danny Jones?

  All the sharks.

• 2:49:28Speaker 03

  Migratory corridors for sharks and other fish. So, you know, that's, that's, that's kind of the world I see that there's, you know, a real opportunity to like rethink how it all fits together.

• 2:49:43Danny Jones?

  It's amazing, man. You're doing amazing work, dude. I'm, that's, that's super impressive. Super impressive.

• 2:49:50Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 2:49:52Danny Jones?

  I appreciate you coming and doing this, man. This has been phenomenal. I've learned so much.

• 2:49:58Speaker 03

  My pleasure, and it's nice to come home to Fanales County for it. I feel like I was like driving to my parents' house, coming to your studio, not too far away.

• 2:50:06Danny Jones?

  That's awesome. Tell people where they can learn more about your work, your website, and then if there's any way anyone can get in touch with you where they can do that.

• 2:50:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, check out our conservation work at wildpath.com. And if you're interested in my art, it's at carltonward.com. I do fine art prints and really like providing art for people. And then, yeah, I'm easy to catch, find by email through there, through the websites. Also, my Instagram's at Carlton Ward.

• 2:50:39Danny Jones?

  Amazing, man. We're gonna have to do a follow-up here in a couple of years.

• 2:50:44Speaker 03

  For sure. Or go out on the boat.

• 2:50:46Danny Jones?

  I'm down. Anytime, anytime you want a tag along, let me know.

• 2:50:51Speaker 03

  That sounds really good. Well, I appreciate you sharing these stories with your audiences.

• 2:50:57Danny Jones?

  My pleasure.

• 2:50:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, we'll keep it up.

• 2:51:00Danny Jones?

  My pleasure, man. Thanks again for your time.

• 2:51:01Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 2:51:02Danny Jones?

  All right. Good night, everybody.

• 2:51:03Speaker 06

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