The Glow Below

A call to oceanographer Edie Widder about a fish with a very odd immune system quickly becomes something else: a dive into the deep sea, into a world of brilliant light. But down there, the light doesn’t behave like light -- it sparkles and glows, but also drips, squirts, and dribbles. Today, find out how creatures make the light and how they use it, from hunting and hiding to maybe even … talking. And hear about a series of mysterious moments where Edie goes from studying the creatures to becoming one of them. EPISODE CREDITS: Hosted by - Molly WebsterReported by - Molly WebsterProduced by - Maria Paz Gutierrezwith help from - Molly WebsterFact-checking by - Diane A. Kelly LATERAL CUTS (Other Radiolab episodes you may like): Octomom - https://radiolab.org/podcast/octomom The Darkest Dark - https://radiolab.org/podcast/the-darkest-dark EPISODE CITATIONS:Documentary - Coming soon, there’ll be a new doc about Edie’s life and work studying bioluminescence in deep sea creatures. According to Edie, “A Life Illuminated”, contains some of the best deep sea bioluminescence footage ever recorded. It’s from our friends at Sandbox Films, and director Tasha Van Zandt.https://www.sandboxfilms.org/films/a-life-illuminated/Books - Edie Widder wrote a memoir! Go read, “Below the Edge of Darkness: A Memoir of Exploring Light and Life in the Deep Sea”.https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/564185/below-the-edge-of-darkness-by-edith-widder-phd/Videos - It’s not in the episode, but a few years back, Edie’s fame reached new heights when she captured footage of a never-before-seen Giant Squid … here’s the story, and video.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krDdv9KLmuM Articles - A look at some glowing shrimps.https://zpr.io/3jyHWi7VFBw5A photogallery of different types of deep sea glow, from different types of deep sea creatures, including one of counterillumination, which Edie talks about in the episode.https://zpr.io/hdFFsArGjhau Signup for our newsletter!! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)! Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today. Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [email protected]. Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

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• 0:24Speaker 01

  Wait, you're listening?

• 0:28Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  All right.

• 0:30Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 0:31Speaker 01

  All right.

• 0:32Speaker 02

  You're listening to Radiolab. Radiolab. From?

• 0:37Speaker 01

  WNYC.

• 0:38Speaker 02

  See?

• 0:39Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 0:44Speaker 03

  This is Radiolab. I'm Molly Webster. I'm going to open up the show today with deep sea explorer and oceanographer Edie Widder.

• 0:51Speaker 04

  I'm still here, ready to go.

• 0:53Speaker 03

  Why don't you tell me how you bumped into our friend?

• 0:57Speaker 04

  Our friend, the giant squid?

• 0:59Speaker 03

  No, our friend, the anglerfish.

• 1:00Speaker 04

  Oh, the anglerfish.

• 1:01Speaker 03

  I'm here for the smaller anglerfish.

• 1:02Speaker 04

  Got you.

• 1:03Speaker 03

  I called Edie because I wanted to talk to her about anglerfish and this kind of weird thing I'd heard about their immune systems and how they mate with each other.

• 1:12Speaker 04

  I wanted to be, but never.

• 1:13Speaker 03

  But then Edie wooed me with a story that had to do with none of that, about being a grad student in the 80s, working on the back of a boat, and pulling sea creatures out of the deep.

• 1:24Speaker 04

  I was going to sea on ships with a scientist who had developed a way to bring animals up from the deep sea alive. So, they usually come up dead when you bring them up in the net because of temperature changes. They're basically cooked alive.

• 1:41Speaker 03

  Oh, wow.

• 1:42Speaker 04

  So, he had developed what was called a thermally insulated closing caud in that went on the end of a net. And so, you'd bring them up and they'd still be alive. So, you know, they'd be swirling around in that tub and you'd have to plunge your hand into this icy cold water and your hand would go completely numb. And one of the first animals I pulled out was this bright red shrimp, about the size of a hamster, and it was squirting neon blue light out of tubes on either side of its mouth. And it pooled in my hand and then dripped between my fingers back into the tub.

• 2:17Speaker 03

  Really?

• 2:17Speaker 04

  It was astonishing.

• 2:20Speaker 03

  What was it like to hold dripping light?

• 2:25Speaker 04

  I can't describe it any other way. I mean, it was cold light and it was brilliantly blue. If you're fully dark adapted, bioluminescence can look very bright. And it went on glowing in the water and then kind of swirled around and disappeared.

• 2:40Speaker 03

  Wow, I can't even, because I didn't, I guess I always think of light or something that creates light as like in a container, you know, like almost like a light bulb has a border. I never think of it as like oozy.

• 2:55Speaker 04

  Oh, for me, it was revelatory. I just couldn't believe that all of this existed. And, you know, at that time, you could pick up a marine biology textbook and find no mention of bioluminescence.

• 3:07Speaker 03

  No way. Oh, really?

• 3:08Speaker 04

  Yes. It's not that they didn't know about it. It just didn't think it was very important.

• 3:16Speaker 03

  After that experience, Edie spent the next 40 years, and counting, because she's still going, chasing the light, diving into the ocean over and over and over again in search of creatures that glowed like the shrimp. How many times have you gone down 3,000 feet in the ocean?

• 3:36Speaker 04

  I stopped counting after about 300.

• 3:39Speaker 03

  300?

• 3:41Speaker 04

  I'm in the hundreds, definitely.

• 3:42Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 3:43Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. So many things I've seen from submersibles that I'm pretty sure nobody's ever seen.

• 3:50Speaker 03

  Edie has plunged into the unknown in a way that few people on the planet ever have. And so I very quickly abandoned my sort of angler fish interest, and I just followed her into the deep, into a world of brilliance and color where light suddenly comes to life.

• 4:16Speaker 04

  My first open ocean dive was in the Santa Barbara Channel. I was testing this diving suit called WASP that was developed by the offshore oil industry for diving on oil rigs down to 2,000 feet.

• 4:27Speaker 03

  Is it like you're in like an astronaut's suit that you can like control?

• 4:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's exactly like an astronaut's suit. It's got a Plexiglas bubble for the head, Michelin Man arms, no legs for walking on the bottom, just a pod with thrusters that are attached to it. And you control the thrusters with foot switches on the bottom of the suit. It's like being in a fishbowl, but the fish are on the outside and the people are on the inside.

• 4:55Speaker 03

  You're the fish?

• 4:56Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 4:57Speaker 03

  Wait, your first like big dive was in this like Marshmallow Man suit?

• 5:01Speaker 04

  Yep. But that first dive was just to be to 800 feet to make sure I wasn't going to have a claustrophobic meltdown.

• 5:09Speaker 03

  Oh my God, you are so gutsy.

• 5:13Speaker 03

  Did you get nervous?

• 5:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 5:14Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 5:15Speaker 04

  I was nervous.

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  It was an early evening dive and they lowered me off the back of the ship and...

• 5:27Speaker 03

  I'm just imagining kind of an ungainly splash when you hit the water.

• 5:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's about right.

• 5:36Speaker 04

  And they got down to 800 feet and I turned out the lights.

• 5:47Speaker 04

  And I was instantly in the center of this fireworks display.

• 5:56Speaker 04

  And I was just blown away by how much light there was all around me.

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  Just sparkles and glows and squirts.

• 6:04Speaker 03

  Squirts?

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  Squirts.

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  All of it, different shades of brilliant, brilliant blue.

• 6:12Speaker 03

  Oh, blue?

• 6:13Speaker 04

  All blue.

• 6:15Speaker 03

  Oh. Wow, I was imagining yellow.

• 6:17Speaker 04

  No, blue is the color that travels farthest through seawater, and so most of it by far is blue.

• 6:23Speaker 03

  Hmm, and is it pointillistic glowing? Like, is it dots, or is it like

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  Some of it's dots.

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  Long, streaming things?

• 6:30Speaker 04

  Some of it's like a little smoke cloud, or it can be a little cloud of particles.

• 6:36Speaker 03

  That's so cute.

• 6:37Speaker 04

  The weirdest thing for me, though, was that when I turned on the lights, there was almost nothing in the water column that I could identify as a potential source for all this luminescence that I was seeing. But you couldn't see it with the lights on.

• 6:52Speaker 03

  Hmm, you have to turn the lights off to actually see what you want to see.

• 6:58Speaker 04

  Right.

• 7:00Speaker 03

  And could it all have been the same thing? Or do you think it was many different things?

• 7:05Speaker 04

  That first dive, it was many different things. But I was just overwhelmed by how much luminescence there was. And my brain was racing as they pulled me up, because I just thought, you know, this is so important, but how the hell do you study it if you turn on the lights and there's nothing there?

• 7:30Speaker 03

  And why did you think it was so important?

• 7:33Speaker 04

  Because it takes so much energy to produce light, to use that much energy, so critical to life, that, I mean, there was no question this had to be about life or death. There have been experiments that have been done that have found, for example, if you starve bioluminescent copepods, they will give up the ability to make eggs before they give up the ability to make light.

• 8:00Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 8:01Speaker 04

  Because they use their light for defense in that particular case. And so they can't live without their bioluminescence.

• 8:11Speaker 03

  Wait, so yeah, tell me about the different ways these animals use bioluminescence.

• 8:16Speaker 04

  So, one way is to find food. So, a lot of them have like fish and squid and shrimp that have built-in light organs next to their eyes that they use like flashlights to be able to see in the dark. There are animals that have oddly shaped light organs that allow the male to find this female of his species to mate with, so to attract a mate. There's animals that will use every light organ they've got, which may have many different functions, but they'll flash like crazy if they're caught in the clutches of a predator because their luminescence is functioning as what's known as a bioluminescent burglar alarm. It's meant to attract the attention of larger predators that may attack their attacker and therefore

• 9:00Speaker 04

  afford them an opportunity for escape. And then there is a huge amount of it that's used for camouflage, something that's called counter illumination. A lot of them will produce bioluminescence from their bellies that exactly matches the color and intensity of sunlight filtering down from above to camouflage their silhouette. And if a cloud goes over the sun and dims the sunlight, they dim their bioluminescence.

• 9:25Speaker 03

  That quickly? They can respond that quickly?

• 9:28Speaker 04

  Absolutely. The cookie cutter shark, which is one of my favorites, produces bioluminescence from its belly. It's the most perfect counter illumination pattern you've ever seen because it's the light organs are so small that it just completely disappears. It's the perfect cloaking device.

• 9:45Speaker 03

  But like, if the sun is passing over and then a cloud passes over the sun, like, how does it sense like the right amount of light shift that must occur and then quickly adapt it?

• 10:00Speaker 04

  Well, that's-

• 10:01Speaker 03

  Like, how can it read the light?

• 10:03Speaker 04

  That is an excellent question. So, some of them actually have a light organ above their eye that they can see. They can see that light organ relative to the background light to be able to adjust to exactly match. Some of the others, we're not sure how they do it because they don't seem to have a sensor system or feedback like that.

• 10:22Speaker 03

  Edie just kept going back again and again to how much we don't know about the deep sea, like how light is used, how light is made. And then she had so many cool weird stories about like these convoluted, almost Gothic light organs.

• 10:40Speaker 04

  There is one type of anglerfish known as the bearded sea devil.

• 10:46Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 10:46Speaker 04

  It's got a luminescent lure on its forehead to attract food, the way most anglerfish do, but it's got a chin barbel on its chin. And the absolutely insane thing about this is not only that it's got these two completely different light organs on its head, but the one coming out of its chin is intrinsic chemistry, luciferin and luciferase. But the one coming up out of its forehead is bioluminescent bacteria.

• 11:17Speaker 03

  The anglerfish literally has kind of a bobble that comes out over its forehead and has bioluminescent bacteria tucked inside of it.

• 11:27Speaker 04

  Right.

• 11:28Speaker 03

  Where does the bacteria come from? Like, does it find the fish early in life? Or is it like birthed with the fish?

• 11:35Speaker 04

  Well, a lot of these bioluminescent bacteria are available in ocean water. And so it's thought that they pick the bacteria up from the environment. But the weird thing about bioluminescent bacteria is bacteria glow all the time. Because their light output is linked to their, what is basically their breathing, their respiratory chain. So as long as they've got enough oxygen, they just go on glowing. So some of these anglerfish control the light output by just controlling the amount of oxygen.

• 12:07Speaker 03

  Huh.

• 12:08Speaker 04

  I mean, it's different in different fish. Some of them do it by having a mechanical shutter that just covers the light organ.

• 12:14Speaker 03

  Almost like an eyelid?

• 12:15Speaker 04

  Yes, there's some flashlight fish that have an eyelid that closes up over the light organ to be able to block out the glowing bacteria. There's others that roll the whole light organ back into their head, like the headlights on your Lamborghini.

• 12:34Speaker 03

  What?

• 12:35Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 12:36Speaker 03

  Wow, I really, this is so, I just think of light as like so passive in a way. Like, the fact that it's so active and alive feeling.

• 12:48Speaker 04

  That's exactly right. I've always taken bioluminescence as an indicator of life. And I think it's got a lot to tell us about life in the ocean.

• 12:57Speaker 03

  Like, what?

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  Where it is?

• 13:00Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 13:01Speaker 04

  How the carbon pump is functioning, you know.

• 13:05Speaker 03

  But like, those are, but even more than that, it feels like almost the idea of having another eye on my body that is searching around and reading the environment and then changing what I look like to match that environment. It feels like superintelligence.

• 13:30Speaker 04

  It's super evolution.

• 13:35Speaker 05

  We'll be back in just a minute.

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• 15:28Speaker 01

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• 16:02Speaker 04

  I have one answer for a question you didn't ask.

• 16:04Speaker 03

  Ooh. Oh, please tell me. I love those.

• 16:07Speaker 04

  Is how did bioluminescent bacteria come to be?

• 16:10Speaker 03

  Oh, my God. This is Radio Lab. I'm Molly, and we are back with Edie.

• 16:14Speaker 04

  Because this was a hotly contested topic when I was a graduate student, because the conundrum was that a single bacterium does not produce enough light to be seen by any known organism. So how could there be a selective advantage to producing light? How could it ever be selected for? Well, there were some experiments done a few years back by some Polish scientists where they had light-producing bioluminescent bacteria and a dark strain. And they mixed them together. And when they grew them in a dish, the dark strain always overgrew the light strain because it takes energy to produce bioluminescence. So further questions about, you know, what could possibly be the selective advantage

• 16:57Speaker 04

  when it's energetically costly to produce light? But if they irradiated that dish then with UV light, then suddenly the thing flipped and now the light-producing cells had the advantage and they overran the dish. And it turned out the reason was an enzyme called photolase that repairs DNA damage from UV light, which happens in the upper ocean. And so the light produced by a single dinoflagellate was enough to activate this light-activated enzyme called photolase. And so the selective advantage had nothing to do with vision initially.

• 17:40Speaker 04

  It had to do with protection against UV light.

• 17:45Speaker 03

  So hundreds of millions of years ago, there were these tiny cells out in the ocean and they glowed. And even though no one could see it, it made a difference because it let them heal their DNA that was damaged by the sun. But as these creatures went deeper and deeper into the ocean, the sun started mattering less and the glow started mattering more. They could use it to lure and to lie, to hunt or mate or survive.

• 18:19Speaker 03

  And it's into this world that Edie goes, basically just to observe and study it, until one day, almost by accident, she becomes a part of it.

• 18:31Speaker 04

  In 1985, I got to pilot a single-person submersible called Deep Rover. And what I discovered with that, which was a major breakthrough in understanding the nature of the visual environment in the deep sea, was if I trimmed the sub out to neutral buoyancy and just made it as dark as I possibly could, I had black tape, so I blackened out any little indicator lights. And I waited. And I waited. And I waited. Nothing. Just as black as black you can imagine. But if I activated the thrusters, there would be these vortices of lights swirling up out of the thrusters

• 19:15Speaker 04

  and particles streaming back over the sphere and just light all around me.

• 19:25Speaker 04

  With later dives, I discovered that I could also stimulate it by turning the lights on and off. I think it was probably one of the pilots that alerted me to it originally, where you just flick the lights on and off and everything surrounding you seems to come on in unison.

• 19:46Speaker 04

  And then fade out in unison. It's a phenomenon we call the flashback phenomenon.

• 19:54Speaker 03

  And how long is the flash that you put out?

• 19:57Speaker 04

  It'd be on, off, on, off. And on the second flash, you are surrounded by all of these things lighting up. We actually don't know what is flashing back at us, which makes it even more intriguing. But I think what I'm seeing with the flashback is bioluminescence in marine snow. Marine snow are all of these particulate organic matter that filters down through the ocean and is the base of the food web in the deep ocean. So plankton photosynthesizing at the surface die. And as they sink through the ocean, they often are described as looking like marine snow, these flocculent white particles.

• 20:42Speaker 04

  And some marine snow is bioluminescent.

• 20:47Speaker 04

  And it seems to be bioluminescent because of bacteria. And so when you bump the particle, you're introducing oxygen into the marine snow environment and you create light.

• 20:59Speaker 03

  I see.

• 20:59Speaker 04

  I think the reason that the light stimulus works is because there are cyanobacteria also in marine snow and you're activating photosynthesis, which produces oxygen.

• 21:12Speaker 03

  And do you think it's all marine snow that's doing the flashback? Or there are other creatures that are also doing it?

• 21:17Speaker 04

  It's mostly the marine snow. We would occasionally see something identifiable like a tamopterid worm. That was particularly recognizable because it's yellow, looks like, almost looks like gold. It's so beautiful.

• 21:32Speaker 03

  Edie doesn't know for sure what's happening, but she thinks that the flashback is a natural phenomenon, that it's actually something that's happening between the deep sea creatures when she's not there. So a fin brushes the water and mixes in oxygen and it gets bacteria to light up. Or a light on a fish's belly flashes and it makes photosynthesis happen. And again, the world comes alive. And Edie believes that this back and forth with light is not accidental, but that it's purposeful.

• 22:10Speaker 04

  The bacteria glow in order to be eaten. They want to be eaten, excuse the anthropomorphism, but it is to their advantage to be eaten because then they are reintroduced into the food-rich environment of a fish gut.

• 22:25Speaker 03

  And that when she does that flashback with the creatures in the deep sea, in a sense, she's become one of them. So her submarine thruster is like a fin or her flashlight is like a lure. And in those moments, she's become part of the dance.

• 22:44Speaker 04

  It's just such a remarkable feeling. I Not a poet. But there's no question, I feel a tremendous sense of awe. Very often, the feeling of, you know, I want to stay here, I want to understand this. I mean, that's, that's key to who we are as human beings is, you know, we were, we were born as strangers in a strange land. We don't know anything when we're born and our survival on the planet has been to explore the world around us and share that information. And I think that there's something very innate in us that responds to that. And the others that I have shared it with have had the same experience.

• 23:25Speaker 03

  That's, I, I don't have a ton of experience with bioluminescence, but I always have, but one story always sticks with me, which is, and I've never seen this happen before, but I grew up in a kind of rural Ohio, in farm country, and we had a pond. And my parents sold the property that we grew up on. And my very last night at the property, I went out for a walk at night, like I loved walking around in like the woods and listening to night creatures and stuff. And so I went for a walk and I walked down to the edge of the pond.

• 24:05Speaker 03

  And the whole edge where the water met the soil was all lit up.

• 24:12Speaker 04

  Glowing?

• 24:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was like all bioluminescing and I've-

• 24:16Speaker 04

  That had to be bacteria.

• 24:19Speaker 03

  And like, where would it suddenly come from?

• 24:21Speaker 04

  Well, something organic in the water, but it's, that's still, it's surprising. You don't see that very often. Wow, that's, that's an interesting story, actually.

• 24:32Speaker 03

  It was so beautiful and I actually went back inside and woke my parents up and, and they, we all marched down to the pond and just stood there and like looked at this glowing.

• 24:44Speaker 04

  See, now there's a mystery that needs to be solved. I can't tell you for sure what that was, but-

• 24:51Speaker 03

  It's so powerful.

• 24:52Speaker 04

  I think it's interesting that people that have had interactions with bioluminescence sometime, often rank them as their most meaningful lifetime experiences that they carry with them throughout their lives. It's interacting with, with life.

• 25:10Speaker 04

  It's life illuminated. And there's this interactivity to it where you're making things happen. You know, you're in a bioluminescent bay and you run your hand upside your kayak and, you know, off of every fingertip, you've got sparkles. It's like being Merlin.

• 25:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, there is like a deep communicate. It almost feels like you're like saying something to each other that...

• 25:37Speaker 04

  It's a form of communication. I've somewhat provocatively tried to claim several times that it may be the most common form of communication on the planet. Partly depends on how you define communication, but...

• 25:48Speaker 03

  And what do you think you're communicating? And what do you think it is communicating back to you?

• 25:55Speaker 04

  I'm most focused on what it's communicating back to me. I have no idea.

• 26:00Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 26:02Speaker 04

  Actually, there have been a few times when I've communicated with luminescent animals and in one case, there were some deep sea shrimp that I was getting a great response out of, and I had no idea what I was saying, but I was pretty sure it was something sexy.

• 26:18Speaker 03

  Why?

• 26:20Speaker 04

  Because that was the kind of response you'd expect from a crustacean that was responding to a...

• 26:26Speaker 03

  Titillated.

• 26:26Speaker 04

  Yeah. It was putting out a string of dots in the water.

• 26:31Speaker 03

  A string of glowing dots?

• 26:33Speaker 04

  Glowing pearls, yeah.

• 26:35Speaker 03

  And that's what it does when it's like turned on? When it's like, hey, come hither?

• 26:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 26:39Speaker 03

  So you do believe that there's like some sort of messaging in the light?

• 26:44Speaker 04

  Oh, there can be, yes. And definitely, some of these animals have pretty elaborate displays. And I think they're communicating something important, but we have done so little actual observing that we, most of it's guesswork.

• 27:08Speaker 03

  And so you, when you're like down there flashing, you're like, I'm gonna flash three times and I don't know if in shrimp language that means something. We'll just see what happens.

• 27:18Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 27:22Speaker 04

  Best job in the world.

• 27:53Speaker 03

  This episode was produced by Maria Paz Gutierrez, with original reporting and production help from me, Molly Webster. I want to thank Dr. Edie Widder, who is the CEO and senior scientist at the Ocean Research and Conservation Association. If you're interested in seeing more of Edie's work, it just so happens that there is a documentary that is soon to drop about her. It's currently making the rounds at festivals. It is called A Life Illuminated. It's by our friends over at Sandbox Films and director Tasha Van Zant. And Edie says it has some of the best underwater footage of bioluminescence ever recorded. But you know what? If you're too impatient to wait for that documentary, if you just want to go see it all.

• 28:37Speaker 04

  You can totally do that, you know?

• 28:39Speaker 03

  Wait, how?

• 28:40Speaker 04

  Oh, there's, there's commercial operations.

• 28:42Speaker 03

  Like, how deep do they go?

• 28:44Speaker 04

  Uh, 2,000 feet.

• 28:46Speaker 03

  Are these gonna cost me like my, like, uh, like $50,000?

• 28:50Speaker 04

  That might be right, yeah, something like that.

• 28:53Speaker 03

  Okay, okay, well, I'll work on that public radio team.

• 28:58Speaker 04

  Good luck.

• 29:00Speaker 03

  If you are interested in more deep sea stuff, Radiolive has got the content for you. I would say go check out Octomom, which is about an octopus and her brood of eggs. It also happens to feature a diving buddy of Edie's. And then we also produced something called The Darkest Dark, which is about darkness. And it features a former mentee, now colleague of Edie. Because apparently, nothing happens in the deep sea that Edie Widder doesn't know about. I don't actually know if that's true. But for now, I will just say, thank you so much for listening. This is Radiolab. I'm Molly Webster. Goodbye.

• 29:54Speaker 03

  Hi, I'm Basit Kari and I'm from Somerset, New Jersey. And here are the staff credits. Radiolab is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser. Soren Wheeler is our executive editor. Sarah Sandback is our executive director. And our managing editor is Pat Walters. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Blum,

• 30:20Speaker 02

  W. Harry Fortuna, David Gabel, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Niasambandam, Matt Keelty, Mona Madgavkar, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sarah Kari, Anissa Vitsa, Ariane Whack, Molly Webster, and Jessica Young, with help from Rebecca Rand. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Anna Pujol Mazzini, and Natalie Middleton.

• 30:52Speaker 02

  Hi, I'm Maddie and I'm from Frederick, Maryland. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

• 31:15Speaker 06

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