Pod Insights Stuff You Should Know Wetlands! Wetlands! Wetlands! About this episode It’s time to get jazzed up for some Earth science of the waterlogged variety. Join Chuck and Josh as they tour some of the most interesting ecosystems on the planet and learn why we need to stop destroying them post haste.
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1:41 Speaker 02 Hi, everybody. Chuck back again with another edition, I believe, number eight, in our Think Spring Playlist. And today, you're going to be learning all about wetlands, because the name of the episode is wetlands, exclamation point, wetlands, exclamation point, wetlands, exclamation point. Can you tell we love wetlands? I think you will, too.
2:06 Speaker 04 Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works.
2:16 Josh Clark? Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Charles and Jerry's over there. And this is Stuff You Should Know, the dripping wet edition.
2:27 Speaker 05 In these wetlands.
2:32 Josh Clark? What?
2:32 Speaker 05 I knew that you would not get that.
2:34 Josh Clark? Is that a Seeger reference?
2:36 Speaker 05 Oh, gosh. Why do you have to say Seeger when you always mean Springsteen?
2:40 Josh Clark? Was that Springsteen?
2:42 Speaker 05 Yeah, it's Badlands.
2:44 Josh Clark? Oh, okay. Maybe these wetlands were born to run?
2:48 Speaker 05 Sure. Run water.
2:50 Josh Clark? I don't, I don't like myself anymore. Run water. That was a great save, Chuck.
2:55 Speaker 05 Thanks.
2:56 Josh Clark? So, we're talking wetlands. I have to say, um, we have to give a shout out to Tom Peterman, the foul-mouthed wetland biologist who keeps asking us to do this episode.
3:07 Speaker 05 Oh, is that where this came from?
3:08 Josh Clark? Mm-hmm. It was, uh, Tom Peterman's suggestion, although I'd already wanted to do it anyway, so.
3:14 Speaker 05 Yeah, I mean, we love our earth sciences, man. This one was, I was just smiling from ear to ear researching this.
3:20 Josh Clark? Can you imagine watching a blacksmith forge something in a wetland, in a flooded woodland?
3:28 Speaker 05 No. That's Nirvana right there.
3:31 Josh Clark? It really is. So, we're talking wetlands, everybody, and, um, Dave Ruse helped us put this one together.
3:38 Speaker 05 It's a good one.
3:39 Josh Clark? And, uh, Dave likes to pop in jokes every once in a while, and he said,
3:42 Speaker 05 He does.
3:43 Josh Clark? He said, um, "What makes a wetland wet? Water." And then he says, "In all seriousness," that's basically it, that the water has to be, um, largely present, at least some parts of the year, in the soil in such amounts that you would call something wetland. I mean, think of the name, wetland. It's about as earthy a, uh, a term as science gets.
4:06 Speaker 05 Yeah, and he, um, front-loaded this with a few stats, and I won't go through all of them, but I'll go through a few that, uh, kind of... Are instructive as to why I love wetlands so much. Uh, here's one. Although wetlands make up only 5% of the land surface in the United States, they are home to 31% of our plant species.
4:28 Josh Clark? Yeah.
4:28 Speaker 05 Not bad. Uh, 1/3 of America's threatened or endangered species, uh, species live only in wetlands.
4:35 Josh Clark? I would propose that that's slightly misleading. I think they're endangered because they live in wetlands and wetlands are endangered, as we'll see.
4:42 Speaker 05 Hmm.
4:44 Josh Clark? Mm-hmm. Think about it, Chuck.
4:45 Speaker 05 I don't know. I took it more as...
4:48 Josh Clark? Like they're all hiding out in the wetlands? Cause it's a terrible place to hide out.
4:51 Speaker 05 No, it's not bad because it's got 31% of the plant species. I mean, it's a pretty rich, biodiverse area to live in if you're an endangered species.
5:00 Josh Clark? For sure.
5:02 Speaker 05 All right. You said tomato, I say tomato.
5:04 Josh Clark? Well, we'll have to, um, hear from Thomas Peterman, the foul-mouthed wildlife or wetland biologist who can let us know.
5:11 Speaker 05 What does he say? Like, "Do effing wetlands already?"
5:14 Josh Clark? Yes.
5:15 Speaker 05 That kind of thing?
5:15 Josh Clark? Yeah.
5:17 Speaker 05 I like this guy.
5:18 Josh Clark? I think that's an exact quote.
5:20 Speaker 05 Yeah, he's my kind of dude.
5:22 Josh Clark? Uh, so another stat that I thought was pretty interesting that will, will just kind of needs to form the basis or the undercurrent of this whole episode is that, so, and we keep talking about the US. There's wetlands found all over the world of different types and varieties and different climates and different, um, different continents, every continent except Antarctica. But in the United States in particular, we have a long history of filling in and, and draining wetlands for other purposes.
5:48 Speaker 05 Yeah.
5:49 Josh Clark? So much so that, um, let's see, I believe, I don't know how much we've lost, but in the 1600s, the lower 48 states were covered with 220 million acres of wetlands, which is 11% of the total surface area of the lower 48 states. And I think, starting in the 50s, we were doing away with wetlands at a rate of about 60,000 of those acres per year.
6:13 Speaker 05 Yeah, and it's gotten better since then, but yeah, in the, boy, up until the Clean Water Act, it was just like... Hey, you know what would look great there? A resort.
6:23 Josh Clark? Right.
6:23 Speaker 05 With like three golf courses and a bunch of tennis.
6:26 Josh Clark? That's been such a driving force. Like it's, it's like looking at land or ecosystems and being like, are humans making money off of it? No, well then drain it and repurpose it. Set it on fire and repurpose it. Stop it from burning and repurpose it. Like if we can't make money off of it, it can't possibly be useful. And luckily, since the environmental movement really started in the seventies, we've realized that that's not necessarily true. That even if you are just a heartless dummy, there's still a lot of benefits that humanity's given from things like wetlands that seem problematic or non-productive, you know?
7:01 Speaker 05 Yeah, that was one of Dangerfield's big lines in Caddyshack is Al Servick. Was golf courses and cemeteries. Two biggest wastes of prime real estate.
7:13 Josh Clark? That's a good one.
7:14 Speaker 05 So let's talk about wetlands. You said that they are only, some of them are only wet for a short period, sometimes when there's snowmelt or just rain.
7:22 Josh Clark? Yeah, those are called ephemeral wetlands, which is a cool term.
7:25 Speaker 05 It's a great term. Some are wet all the time. And the key parts of being a wetland or the key characteristic is that it's either permanently or periodically flooded or wet. And that the soil is got, it's called hydric soil and is dominated by anaerobic processes, meaning it loves water and the plants there love water.
7:49 Josh Clark? Which is weird because you used another word that shouldn't really jibe with plants and that's called anaerobic, which means there's very little to no oxygen present. And we'll explain why later. But the fact that there are plants means that those plants have adapted to the wetlands.
8:04 Speaker 05 Yes, and it makes them.
8:04 Josh Clark? Those anaerobic conditions.
8:05 Speaker 05 Hydrophytic and we'll talk about those plants later. It's another, another thing I love about wetlands is just that it really underscores the remarkable evolution that something will go through to survive.
8:17 Josh Clark? Very cool stuff.
8:18 Speaker 05 Very, very awesome.
8:19 Josh Clark? Yep. So there's also, so but you hit upon something like they're not necessarily wet year round.
8:27 Speaker 05 Right.
8:27 Josh Clark? Right? So there's a whole bunch of different types of wetlands or wetland environments that fill those, that check those boxes. One of the ones that most people think of when they think of wetlands are coastal wetlands, like marshes. And a marsh is basically like this area between inland and the ocean. It's like a transition zone, a buffer zone. And because it's, because of its proximity to the ocean, it's usually salty or at least brackish, which is a mixture of, of saltwater and freshwater. And one of the, one of the ones that really comes to mind, if you're thinking coastal wetlands, you're thinking marshlands and you're thinking tidal marshlands probably, especially if you're a Pat Conroy fan.
9:12 Speaker 05 What was the name of her character that he repeats over and over in a whisper?
9:18 Josh Clark? I think I remember Chuck, it was Bobby Jim. Bobby Jim.
9:23 Speaker 05 This is one of those scream at the, at the pod player moments.
9:27 Josh Clark? Was it in, was it in the Prince of Tides?
9:29 Speaker 05 Yeah. Lowenstein, was that it? Lowenstein.
9:33 Josh Clark? You're sure it wasn't Bobby Jim?
9:35 Speaker 05 I think it was Lowenstein.
9:36 Josh Clark? Was it his, oh, his shrinks, his shrink girlfriend's name?
9:39 Speaker 05 Yeah, Babs.
9:40 Josh Clark? Okay. Yeah, I don't remember.
9:42 Speaker 05 I think it was Lowenstein. All right. So anyway, tidal marshes, yes, Prince of Tides. They, obviously, you're, it's because they're tidal, they're going to come in and out with the high and low tide. And like you said, they're generally saltwater. And the salt marshes are, are very nutrient rich and they do have a lot of diversity. But obviously only the kind of things that can tolerate the salt as far as plants and animals go.
10:07 Josh Clark? Which is a pretty short list, really, because salt is not conducive to life. Instead, there are some plants that have figured out how to deal with salt. But most of the time when you're looking at salt marshes, you're looking, you're, the plant life is, is basically grasses of some sort.
10:24 Speaker 05 Right.
10:25 Josh Clark? There's also freshwater tidal marshes, which they are either
10:31 Josh Clark? Connected to the saltwater marsh, but they're far enough inland that the saltwater doesn't make its way in there. So it's a freshwater marsh, but it's still affected by the tides. And then I had no idea about this. And I used to vacation on Lake Erie, but apparently the Great Lakes are so big that they have tides themselves.
10:51 Speaker 05 You didn't know that?
10:52 Josh Clark? I had no idea.
10:54 Speaker 05 I even knew that. And I'm a dumb dumb when it comes to the Great Lakes.
10:57 Josh Clark? Well, Chuck, I think you got me beat big time.
11:00 Speaker 05 Well, in this case.
11:01 Josh Clark? Because I could know a million other things about the Great Lakes. And if you knew that one thing and I didn't, you had me beat.
11:06 Speaker 05 Yeah, I knew that. And so that means that they do have those tidal marches. The Florida Everglades are another good example. And boy, Florida, just there's a lot of different types of wetlands in Florida.
11:19 Josh Clark? Well, there's a lot of coastline.
11:21 Speaker 05 Yeah, a lot of coastline and a lot of interior wetness.
11:25 Josh Clark? Yeah, we have a lot of wetlands around our place in Florida for sure. And there's mangroves and all sorts of stuff that we'll talk about.
11:32 Speaker 05 Well, we're at mangroves. I love those things.
11:35 Josh Clark? So mangroves.
11:37 Speaker 05 Beautiful.
11:37 Josh Clark? I think they at least deserve a short stuff because they're one of the most amazing plants of all time. But they're, they're, they're a type of coastal, coastal wetland themselves, a mangrove forest. Where if you've never seen a mangrove forest, they're these kind of, they have a growth habit for their, the shrubbery on top of like the hair that Oompa Loompa has in the original, the original Willy Wonka, the good one. And they're, the trunks split out into these cool, like, long roots and legs that stick up out of the water. And they form this huge tangle, this riot of like shrub, woody shrub. And they do all
12:22 Josh Clark? sorts of amazing things to help the aquatic life and us humans as well up on land, just by being present.
12:29 Speaker 05 Yeah, they're really cool looking. And this is another good one, sort of like the origami that if you're able and you're sitting still to look up a lot of these things as you go, because these mangrove forests, it looks like.
12:42 Speaker 05 It looks like a shrub that's like, I really wanna be a shrub, but I don't wanna get wet. So I'm just gonna dip my legs in a little bit.
12:50 Josh Clark? Yeah, that's really great.
12:51 Speaker 05 It's just very cool looking. And again, just the adaptability that these mangroves really wanna live where they live, even though it's not very suited for them. And they've become suited for it.
13:03 Josh Clark? Right. If you've been sleeping on mangroves, welcome to reality.
13:08 Speaker 05 Well, that's a T-shirt if I ever heard one.
13:10 Josh Clark? Yeah, it's a little, it could use a little work, but there's, there's the beginnings of one in there.
13:14 Speaker 05 Uh, you also got your inland wetlands. These are not coastal. In this case, we're talking about swamps and marshes and bogs and fen's, F E N. And marshes, uh, a lot of these you'll find near rivers, near streams, uh, lowland depressions. And they might periodically fill up depending on rain, uh, what's going on or, or different types of flooding that might happen. And they can be a few inches deep. They can be several feet deep.
13:41 Josh Clark? Yeah, they're, most of the non-title inland marshes are ephemeral wetlands.
13:47 Speaker 05 Yeah.
13:48 Josh Clark? So they're dry a lot of the year. Um, they might fill up seasonally. They might fill up with the rains. They might fill up with the nearby river flooding.
13:56 Speaker 05 It's like my backyard.
13:58 Josh Clark? And they, um, oh, really? Is that right?
14:00 Speaker 05 Yeah, it doesn't drain well. I've got a drainage problem.
14:03 Josh Clark? Okay. To you, it's a problem. To nature, it's wonderful. Because we like things that drain really quickly and dry, and then we can walk on them and the grass is fine. But there's a lot of like benefits to things that take their time, like, um, uh, there's something called a vernal pool, uh, which is a kind of, uh, non-title marsh, an ephemeral wetland. And it's basically just like, say, a stretch of woods that has, that's a little bit depressed there so that when it rains or a river floods, it fills with water. And because the underlying bedrock or clay is not very porous, it takes a while for that water to go through. But that water's also not going further downstream. So it prevents flooding from being as bad as it could, cause a lot of the water collects and stays there.
14:46 Josh Clark? And it also slowly recharges the groundwater. And because it does get dry, it can't sustain fish, which makes it a really great nursery for things like newts and salamanders and frogs. Um, things that, that fish eat their eggs. But since there's no fish, this is like a really great place for them to, to get a, a, a good foothold and a, a brand new life.
15:10 Speaker 05 You've also got your prairie potholes. This is one you should definitely look up. These are usually in the upper Midwest of the United States. The Dakotas, Minnesota, maybe, Wisconsin. And these are where glaciers, ancient glaciers, left these big depressions in the landscape. And they fill up sometimes during rain, during the spring, during snow melt. And they're not small. Like, I heard prairie pothole, and I got a vision in my head. But if you look it up online, they're beautiful. And just, they're very large, though, and they're kind of interconnected. Just these big, round holes scattered through like a big, open area full of water. And these are great for migrating birds, because that could be a stopover that they
15:53 Speaker 05 might not have had, had those potholes not been there.
15:56 Josh Clark? Mm-hmm. And when they're flying over the Dakotas, they say, "Look, I see Van Nostrand's house." Or Buddy, Van Nostrand. And then there's also, we said that wetlands occur in all different kinds of climates. They also occur in the desert. There's something called Playa Lakes, which are these depressions that apparently no one has any idea exactly how they formed. It could have been from erosion, it could have been from an ancient sinkhole. But there are depressions that are deep enough that when the seasonal rains come, the water is held in there. And just like the prairie potholes, it's very useful for migratory birds to stop over at, can, really plays a huge role in this ecosystem where there's almost no water.
16:39 Josh Clark? And now, all of a sudden, there's water, and it's in this nice little lake, so let's all go gather there and have a social hour. But responsibly, six feet apart.
16:47 Speaker 05 That's right.
16:48 Josh Clark? Okay.
16:49 Speaker 05 I think we should take a break, and we will talk a little bit about inland swamps right after this.
17:07 Speaker 06 First thought is like, wow, how are we going to do all this?
17:09 Josh Clark? Hey, this is Josh and Chuck from Stuff You Should Know.
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18:12 Josh Clark? Sure.
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20:15 Speaker 05 All right, so inland swamps, we promised to talk about that. These are, for my money, some of the coolest areas in the country because I think I talked about it at some point, but I took a very special, fun trip many, many years ago to the Okie Pinokie Swamp and did one of those canoe trips where you have to rent. There's no place to stop in the Okie Pinokie Swamp. If you're like, I think I'll camp here. It's like in the water. So they had these camping pads built up, essentially just decks that are like six feet above the water. And you have to reserve those. They're not just wide open for anyone because there's nothing else out there.
20:55 Speaker 05 So you have to reserve them for specific nights on these specific pathways or paddleways. And me and a couple of buddies did it one year and we canoed from deck to deck.
21:07 Josh Clark? Very cool.
21:09 Speaker 05 It was amazing, like one of the coolest trips I've ever taken.
21:12 Josh Clark? That is very cool. Was Ned Beatty with you?
21:14 Speaker 05 No, but you do wake up surrounded by alligators. It's a little creepy.
21:19 Josh Clark? Yes, alligators are very creepy.
21:21 Speaker 05 Like, you wake up on that pad and pee off the dock and they're growling at you.
21:26 Josh Clark? Yeah, and you do not want to get too close because they can move faster than you think.
21:30 Speaker 05 Yeah, they can. It was a lot of fun, though, but not for the faint of heart because, you know, you don't realize till you get out there, A, how bad the sun is going to beat you up because there's no shade, and B, how tough it is to paddle all day long without like, you know, let me get out and stretch my legs.
21:49 Josh Clark? Right.
21:49 Speaker 05 I mean, there is no getting out. You just, you just go and go and go. And by the time you finally reach that janky deck, it is like, might as well be the Plaza Hotel, you know?
22:00 Josh Clark? Oh, nice.
22:02 Speaker 05 But what I'm talking about in the case of the Okefenokee, I thought it was a forested or a bottom, bottomland hardwood swamp.
22:09 Josh Clark? You'd think.
22:09 Speaker 05 From reading this, but apparently it's called a non-riverine swamp forest.
22:15 Josh Clark? Right.
22:15 Speaker 05 And that is a forested swamp that fills up from non-river sources, basically rain or groundwater.
22:21 Josh Clark? Right, right. So, what would make a forested swamp like a bottomland hardwood swamp is a proximity to a river that floods its banks, or that is just so, so big it kind of spills over into some of the surrounding land and that surrounding land is swamp.
22:37 Speaker 05 I want to look that up, though. I'm not quite sure Dave's right.
22:39 Josh Clark? Well, it's, okay, it's, so it's either river-fed or groundwater-fed or precipitations-fed. And if you're talking bottomland hardwood swamps, that's, or a river-fed swamp, there's usually also a shrub swamp, which is a transition or buffer zone between the forested swamp and, you know, somebody's backyard, which is, it's just dominated by shrubs. But it's all the same thing. It's all a freshwater swamp.
23:05 Speaker 05 Yeah, I think, I bet you anything the Okefenokee has several different types of these, would be my guess. Because there were full-on lakes that we paddled through.
23:13 Josh Clark? Yeah.
23:15 Speaker 05 So that would be my guess. And I also think if I had a country band, they would, we would be the bottomland hardwood swamp rats.
23:21 Josh Clark? Oh, that's a good one.
23:22 Speaker 05 Not bad.
23:22 Josh Clark? That sounds like an all-star band, you know?
23:24 Speaker 05 Oh, sure. Yeah.
23:26 Josh Clark? Um, so another kind of wetland that you're gonna find all over the place, especially in Europe, which when I think of bogs and fens, I think of Europe, but apparently
23:34 Speaker 05 Same here.
23:35 Josh Clark? plenty of them in the United States, too. But, um, bogs and fens are kind of their own thing. Uh, bogs in particular are very unique as far as wetlands go because not only are they anaerobic, which by definition, uh, wetland is anaerobic soil. They're like, mm, very little nutrient and very high acidity. I've, I've heard like the kind of acid that is put out by the peat that's created in the bog has the same acidity roughly of vinegar.
24:07 Speaker 05 Oh, wow.
24:07 Josh Clark? It's like a, yeah, it's really, really acidic stuff. And yet some plants prefer it, like you can grow cranberries and blueberries in, in a bog.
24:15 Speaker 05 Sure.
24:16 Josh Clark? You can preserve a body from the Iron Age forward in a bog.
24:20 Speaker 05 Did we ever cover that, the bog bodies? I feel like we did. Maybe it might've been one of our, uh, video things on YouTube.
24:27 Josh Clark? Maybe mummies. Cause I think if I remember correctly, our mummy episode covered more than just Egyptian mummies. I think it covered like Inca mummies and
24:35 Speaker 05 And the bog people.
24:36 Josh Clark? I'm sure we did. We saw some, then when we went to, uh, on our, our UK trip, we got to visit some of those cats like firsthand, like right there in that, in that glass. Right? Like, you know, all you have to do is smash it with a hammer and it's yours.
24:50 Speaker 05 And you got a bog person.
24:51 Josh Clark? Yeah.
24:52 Speaker 05 Release whatever you can grab, like a bog ear.
24:56 Josh Clark? Right. It just crumbles in, in your hand. But I was looking, I was like, okay, why, why are the, the, the bog so great for preservation? Part of it, from what I understand is that acidity, that the bodies are actually pickled. But another part is the, the, um, aerobic life is so devoid there. There's just anaerobic bacteria and they don't decompose nearly as well as aerobic bacteria. So the decomposition doesn't set in and the remains are pickled. So, uh, like you can preserve a body in a really great state.
25:28 Speaker 05 Yeah.
25:29 Josh Clark? For a very, like, Tolland Band. You could, his whiskers are still intact on his face.
25:34 Speaker 05 Yeah.
25:35 Josh Clark? Like, that was the level of preservation, and he was sacrificed into a bog, which is a very specific kind of wetland.
25:41 Speaker 05 Yeah, and a fen, like I said, it's F E N, it's sort of like a bog, in that it is a peat, peaty wetland, but they're a little bit different than bogs. The water supply doesn't come primarily from rain, and it comes from the ground. So it's not, it's gonna be less acidic, because, I don't think we had mentioned, I know it's partially because of the peat, but the acidity also comes from the fact that there's acid and rain that gets filling up, that fills up these bogs.
26:11 Josh Clark? Right.
26:12 Speaker 05 But not, not the case in a fen.
26:13 Josh Clark? No. No, because that groundwater is able to kind of dilute it a little bit. So they're much more nutrient-rich than a bog is, so they're gonna have much, a much wider diverse range of plants and animal life.
26:26 Speaker 05 Yeah, and this, I love that this next section from day was called "Other Fun Types of Wetlands."
26:31 Josh Clark? Yeah, mudflats.
26:33 Speaker 05 Yeah, you got your Mudflat, it's another good country band.
26:36 Josh Clark? My favorite are seeps. These are just gorgeous little pieces of nature, if you ask me. It's, if you have a spring that comes up out of the ground, it spills over into the ground, so the surrounding ground is wetland, and it's called a seep.
26:49 Speaker 05 That's right.
26:50 Josh Clark? It's where gnomes, like, go and shower.
26:53 Speaker 05 Yeah, and it's not, like you said, it's a spring, so it's not like a creek.
26:58 Josh Clark? No.
26:58 Speaker 05 It's actually coming up from the ground. You ever drink from a natural spring?
27:04 Josh Clark? I did when I was a kid, and I think my mom fired the babysitter that, like, took us to drink from a spring, yeah, who, she was like, "What are you doing?" It was either a spring or, like, a river in Ohio, and, uh, either way.
27:16 Speaker 05 Two very different things. If it was like a Cuyahoga River, then you're in bad shape.
27:20 Josh Clark? It was on fire while we were drinking.
27:22 Speaker 05 But, I mean, we have creeks, if you're listening, you've never been to Atlanta, Atlanta has creeks all over the place. Like, all of the in-town neighborhoods just are riddled with creeks, they're just sort of out of view, but, like, we have a creek, you know, 120 feet from our house.
27:37 Josh Clark? Sure.
27:37 Speaker 05 Which might have something to do with our drainage, who knows?
27:40 Josh Clark? And it's spring-fed?
27:42 Speaker 05 No, it's just, you know, just a part of the Atlanta, probably all comes from the Chattahoochee at some point.
27:49 Josh Clark? Sure. So Chuck, if that creek behind your house started meandering in a different direction and left a body of water where it originally flowed, it would be an Oxbow Lake. But if you were in Australia and you were calling it this proper Aboriginal name, you'd call it a Billabong.
28:06 Speaker 05 A Billabong.
28:07 Josh Clark? Which I had no idea. What does that have to do with surfing?
28:10 Speaker 05 Oh, I think they just probably co-opted the name and it became more associated with surf and surf gear than its true meaning.
28:19 Josh Clark? That doesn't seem right.
28:20 Speaker 05 No, let's take it back.
28:22 Josh Clark? But that's what an Oxbow Lake is in Australia. Among the Aboriginals, it is a Billabong, which is great.
28:29 Speaker 05 A Billabong, that was some, like, along with OP was one of the prime t-shirts to have when you were a kid in the 80s.
28:37 Josh Clark? Oh, yeah.
28:37 Speaker 05 If you were cool.
28:38 Josh Clark? I had this amazing OP long-sleeved blue shirt that I wore with my parachute pants.
28:44 Speaker 05 Those were the best.
28:45 Josh Clark? My British Knights.
28:46 Speaker 05 I remember those long-sleeved OP shirts.
28:49 Josh Clark? Yep, they were good.
28:50 Speaker 05 Gorgeous.
28:51 Josh Clark? So Chuck, one of the things we've been talking about is the kind of, the characteristics that make a wetland, a wetland. It's not just the fact that the soil table or the ground is either flooded or almost completely flooded up to the surface level with water. That's, that's not the entirety of it. Like, different wetlands are characterized by, by how that water gets to it. Like we said, you know, some kinds of swamps are fed by groundwater, others are fed by precipitation, some are tidal. So there's a whole group of scientists out there that are called wetland hydrologists. And what they study is how that water gets into a wetland to create a wetland, what happens to it while it's
29:36 Josh Clark? there, and then where it goes, and how all these things kind of interact to form this very unique ecosystem.
29:43 Speaker 05 Yeah, and we talked early on about the kind of soil, hydroric soil, is saturated with water, and so if it's saturated with water, it's not going to have nearly as much oxygen. And usually, oxygen and soil are in these little tiny air pockets.
29:59 Josh Clark? Remember, we talked about it in our soil episode?
30:01 Speaker 05 Yeah, exactly. And in the case of a wetland, then those air pockets are going to be filled with water, or just collapsed altogether. And then you've got your anaerobic condition. But if you're a plant, you need CO2 and oxygen. And you'll get a little bit of that from photosynthesis in the leaves, but the roots are like, what about me down here? I need oxygen too. And if it was an aerobic soil, like we talked about in the soil podcast, the roots can get it from those air pockets. But in wetlands, they have to really, really adapt to become hydrophytic or water-loving plants in some pretty amazing ways.
30:38 Josh Clark? So I just have to say that this is like a lifelong mystery solved, and solved in like the simplest way possible. Like, it's anaerobic because there's water there instead of air. The air can't be in there because of the water's there. Ipso facto, anaerobic. I just think that's brilliantly simple.
30:56 Speaker 05 Yeah.
30:56 Josh Clark? Did you get that intuitively? Because I never did. I always thought it was something mysterious. Like, we're talking about a whole different type of soil, or something else.
31:04 Speaker 05 Hmm, no, I think I got it.
31:06 Josh Clark? Okay, well, I've been around for 44 years and wondered it until just now.
31:12 Speaker 05 Well, I'm 49, so I might have learned that in the last five years.
31:15 Josh Clark? So, the plants that we're talking about, like you said, the roots still need oxygen. So they've said, okay, well, I really like it here. I like this wetland area. This is a pretty amazing place to live. I'm going to change so that I can stay here. And some of the ways that plants have adapted, well, one good example is a cattail, right? Cattails are pretty much synonymous with marshlands. Yeah, they're beautiful. They're that long, thin stem with like a big fat thing on top, like a hot dog that's ready to be roasted on the fire.
31:47 Speaker 05 Yeah, I grew up with those. I don't know if it was a southern thing, but they can be decorative items in the home. And I grew up, I feel like, with a lot of cattails in vases and stuff.
31:57 Josh Clark? Okay, so that and wasps' nests?
32:00 Speaker 05 Yeah, hornets' nests, yeah.
32:03 Josh Clark? So cattails have this thing called arinichema. No, I've got it. Arinichema.
32:13 Josh Clark? Aranaquima.
32:16 Josh Clark? Aranaquima. I think I got it. Anyway, they're like these, um, these channels that basically direct air from the leaves and the stem and every other part of the cattail down to the roots. It says, here you go, roots, here's some oxygen, fresh from the leaf.
32:30 Speaker 05 Yeah.
32:31 Josh Clark? So that, that cattail can have as much roots as it wants down in this anaerobic soil. It doesn't matter because it's getting its oxygen from the air through the leaves.
32:40 Speaker 05 Yeah. One of my favorites is the speckled alder. Uh, you just, uh, look up a picture of that and they have these enlarged pores called lenticils and they allow for the passage of oxygen, uh, directly into that wood. And if you look up a picture and you see those, you go, oh, that's what those are. That's what those are for. They're, they look like someone took a knife and they're just tiny little horizontal slits all up and down the alder.
33:04 Josh Clark? I got you.
33:05 Speaker 05 And it's, uh, they're breathing, basically.
33:07 Josh Clark? Yeah. That's creepy as heck, but it's really neat.
33:11 Speaker 05 Little mouths, little slitty mouths. So, um, the, uh, the grasses that we talked about growing in salt marshes, um, just like an iguana sneezes out excess salts as part of digestion, things like cord grass that grow in these salt marshes, um, they actually excrete salts through their leaves. So they, they can sit there and intake all the nutrients they need from this salinic environment, um, and still not get overloaded with salt.
33:40 Josh Clark? It's just pretty amazing that they can do that.
33:42 Speaker 05 Yeah. And then to me, maybe the most amazing, and this is where the mangroves kind of come back in, although the mangroves apparently utilize all these to stick around. But the bald cypress, uh, they grow in those forested swamps where there's always water and they are deciduous conifers and they grow this root structure, um, that they call a knee. It's a pneumatophore, but like a knee on your leg is, is how it's spelled. And they just sit above the water line and take in oxygen. And that's what those, I guess mangroves, uh, mangroves.
34:15 Speaker 05 There's a Soul Train joke in there somewhere.
34:17 Josh Clark? Yeah, it struck me as like a terrible jam band's name.
34:20 Speaker 05 The Mangroves?
34:21 Josh Clark? Yeah.
34:21 Speaker 05 God, you're right. That plays somewhere in Florida, probably.
34:25 Josh Clark? Probably.
34:25 Speaker 05 Uh, but the Mangrove uses, like I said, a lot of these tricks. And I think certainly when you see those roots, they're using, uh, those knees.
34:36 Josh Clark? Yeah, which is basically it's a, it's a, it's a way to get oxygen from the surrounding air down to the roots. The mangroves do it, the bald cypresses do it. Mangroves have all those adapt adaptations, different species. Thing, they can do things like excrete salt, they can draw oxygen in from the environment. They have channels where they can pump oxygen from one part of the plant to the other. The one that gets me though, I'm just fascinated by bogs. So we said that there, it's an acidic, um, anaerobic nutrient depleted environment. And yet there's still plants that live there. And one of those plants, or one kind of plant is carnivorous plants. They get their nutrients not from like the soil, but from eating bugs.
35:18 Speaker 05 Yeah, those are cool.
35:19 Josh Clark? So they can just live there, like a pitcher plant or a Venus flytrap or something like that.
35:23 Speaker 05 Yeah, those are neat, nature.
35:26 Josh Clark? Wasn't Venus flytrap one of the DJs on WKRP?
35:29 Speaker 05 Yeah, it's a great DJ name.
35:30 Josh Clark? Yeah. He was, he was a great DJ.
35:33 Speaker 05 Uh, all right, so let's take our final break and we'll talk about why wetlands are important and what you can do to help them do their thing, right after this.
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38:05 Josh Clark? Okay, Chuck, so just the fact that wetlands are as amazing as they are means that they should be saved. But there's also like a lot of benefits that we figured out. Like you said, the 50s to the 70s were a really rough time for wetlands in the United States because we were filling them in for cropland, for real estate. And even previous to that, we filled in a lot of marshland in the US and built cities over them. Like DC was built largely on marshland. The fact that mosquitoes tend to live in wetland areas kind of justified filling in a lot of the wetlands because we were dealing with malaria at the time. So it made a lot of sense. Get rid of the mosquito's habitat, you get rid of the mosquitoes.
38:49 Josh Clark? And it worked, but we've paid a heavy price for it because over time, we've realized these wetlands provide some really important benefits to the local ecosystems and in turn, humans who live around them.
39:02 Speaker 05 Yeah, I mean, helping flood conditions is a big one. They are big, big, natural sponges when it comes down to it. And flooding would be way, way worse, and we still have floods, obviously, but it'd be way worse if we didn't have wetlands. They'd be far more destructive if they weren't around to soak in that excess water and then kind of slowly trickle it to the water table below. And the same is obviously true of hurricanes and big storm surges. The wetlands basically operate as big storage tanks for water.
39:34 Josh Clark? Yeah, I saw somewhere, I can't find it now, but is that like, oh, there it is, an acre of wetlands can hold up to about a million and a half gallons of water.
39:43 Speaker 05 Yeah.
39:43 Josh Clark? Just, just one acre. So you've got to think, like, that water's staying put there, and it's not flooding some human habitation instead, which is a good reason to keep wetlands around, just for that, that buffer area, or to slow down the surge, like you were saying. I also saw that we found out the same thing goes for beaver dams that they build. They're like a temporary, artificial wetland, and they provide a lot of the same functions that natural, or other, I guess, naturally occurring or growing wetlands provide, too. And I think we should do a whole episode on beavers, okay?
40:17 Speaker 05 Oh, totally. I'm way into beavers.
40:19 Josh Clark? So, water filtration is, is another...
40:26 Josh Clark? Is it, I'm getting you back for the origami thing.
40:28 Speaker 05 Yeah, alright.
40:29 Josh Clark? So, water filtration is, is another big service that wetlands provide. I don't remember where we talked about this, but we talked about it recently, where the water, oh, I think it was water treatment plants.
40:42 Speaker 05 Yeah.
40:42 Josh Clark? The water's brought in, and it's got all this sediment and gunk and muck, and it's cloudy and turbid, and then it slows down. They slow it down, like running it through some grates or whatever. And as it slows down, the sediment that is making the water turbid and polluted and everything, has a chance to settle to the bottom. Well, wetlands provide that same function naturally. So when you have a bunch of, like, polluted water basically come through there, that it slows down when it hits all those mangrove roots, or tree trunks, or whatever it is, and it gives it a chance for that sediment to fall to the bottom, it gets sucked up by the tree roots and stored in the trees, or the microbial life can break a lot of that stuff down, too. And there's definitely
41:27 Josh Clark? a limit. To where you can very easily overload the wetlands' ability to filter the water. But if you, if you gave it like a manageable supply, that is a major service that it does is it cleans our water. They call wetlands the kidneys of, of the earth.
41:44 Speaker 05 Yeah, and they, they've even done studies where they tried to, I guess, sort of monetize what an area of wetland might do if it were a treatment plant. And there's one in South Carolina called the Congaree Bottomland Hardwood Swamp. These are just all country bands.
42:01 Josh Clark? For sure.
42:01 Speaker 05 Is, they said that that is basically equivalent to about a $5 million water treatment plant, just sitting there being a wetland, doing its thing.
42:12 Josh Clark? Thank you, nature.
42:13 Speaker 05 Pretty amazing.
42:15 Josh Clark? I saw that beavers provide the, the dams that, that they build that end up being temporary wetlands. That, that somebody estimated it's worth about a hundred grand if a human tried to build an artificial one, which we do. If you just let beavers do their thing, they will, they will do the same thing for free.
42:34 Speaker 05 That's right. You don't have to pay them a hundred grand.
42:37 Josh Clark? No. There's also, because there's so much going on in a wetland, there's so much life, they kind of form like these metropolises for all sorts of different types of animals on all the way up the food chain, including plants, animals, microbial life, worms, fish, larger predators like dolphins and, and alligators. And all of them are sitting there providing food for us. If you like gator tail, buddy, you better preserve those wetlands.
43:11 Speaker 05 Yeah, it's, Dave points out here that the commercial fishing industry in the US, 75% of the fish and shellfish harvested here had fish that at least had a temporary home in the wetlands. And that recreationally, if you're a recreational fish person, Fisher person, then 90% of the US fish catch is at least the breeding ground lies in the wetlands for those fish.
43:38 Josh Clark? And the same thing goes for birds, too. They're enormously important habitats for birds, some permanent, but also migratory, too, because if you're flying along and you're a bird and you are a water bird and you need a place to land, not only are you looking for water, but you might really enjoy a swamp because it offers protection from predators, it offers a port in the storm. It's just an all-around valuable thing for birds, too.
44:04 Speaker 05 Yeah, I mean, imagine flying from Canada to Texas and you're going over Oklahoma, and you're a little tired.
44:13 Josh Clark? Mm-hmm.
44:14 Speaker 05 You look down, you see one of those, which ones were those, the prairie pries?
44:17 Josh Clark? The, no, the prairie potholes.
44:21 Speaker 05 Prairie potholes?
44:22 Josh Clark? Yeah.
44:23 Speaker 05 Oh, man. What a sight.
44:25 Josh Clark? Aren't you describing a scene in Jonathan Living since Eagle?
44:28 Speaker 05 Probably so. So, the point is, we need to take care of our wetlands because they are a threatened, diverse, very useful place all over the world, especially here in the United States. And if they are threatened and if things happen, there are going to be all kinds of bad things, you know, vegetative damage, the plant life just being maybe whitened out, wiped out altogether.
44:57 Josh Clark? Storm surges being way worse, flooding being way worse. It especially helps to see the value in them if you consider them a buffer zone between us and the hardest ravages of nature.
45:11 Speaker 05 Yeah, and like you mentioned, pollution, there is a limit, but they do absorb and mitigate levels of water pollution and they just can't take too much of us, you know?
45:21 Josh Clark? Right, exactly, which, man, if there's anything that characterizes humans of the 20th and 21st centuries, it's too much of us.
45:29 Speaker 05 Yeah.
45:30 Josh Clark? You know what I mean?
45:31 Speaker 05 What can we do, though?
45:33 Josh Clark? Well,
45:33 Speaker 05 Besides donating to wetland projects, we can definitely do that.
45:37 Josh Clark? You can definitely do that. There's some good ones out there. I believe Ducks Unlimited is one of them. The Wetlands Initiative, Natural Resources Defense Council, Wetlands International. But apparently, in the United States, something like 75% of wetlands are on privately owned property. And in the United States, we have, I mean, private property is one of like the fundamental tenets of American society. So if you say, "I want to fill in this wetland and kill off these beavers," you're allowed to do that. Whether that's a good idea and whether that's going to affect other people, that's a different story. So if you own private property with a wetland on it and you're doing just fine with that wetland,
46:20 Josh Clark? leave the wetland alone. It's very important.
46:24 Speaker 05 Yeah, I guess this is where it gets a little tricky in definitions because in plenty of places, there are restrictions on building near water like this.
46:34 Josh Clark? Sure.
46:35 Speaker 05 I guess I just don't know, like,
46:38 Speaker 05 you can't build in a flood zone. You can't, I mean, it depends on where you are, but in Atlanta, you can't. And then with these, all these creeks and streams in Atlanta, they have what's called stream buffers.
46:48 Josh Clark? Sure.
46:49 Speaker 05 50 foot, 75 foot, 100 foot, and I think, I think 25 is the lowest. And for these, you have to get variances to do anything, which your neighborhood has to approve. And I talked to a guy that apparently anything over, anything under 75 feet is pretty, pretty tricky to get approved. So I don't know if they're wetlands or not, but there are restrictions on stuff like that.
47:10 Josh Clark? Okay, so that brings up the next point of what you and I and everybody else can do, which is vote for people, to local elected office, who part of their platform is protecting wetlands.
47:20 Speaker 05 Yeah.
47:21 Josh Clark? Like, all of those buffer zones, all those variances and all those prohibitions, those are, those came from Atlanta city councils over the years that decided that wetlands needed protecting. You don't find those everywhere, but once they get put in place, they usually don't get repealed very easily. So if you make preserving wetlands part of like what you're voting for, that would have an impact for sure.
47:45 Speaker 05 Yeah.
47:46 Josh Clark? And whatever you're voting for, just vote, okay? Vote.
47:49 Speaker 05 Especially locally.
47:50 Josh Clark? To say that.
47:51 Speaker 05 I know everyone, the presidential elections are always the big sexy votes, but the local politics matters even more almost sometimes.
48:00 Josh Clark? Yeah, I vote for all of it. Take an interest in the, in your society.
48:04 Speaker 05 Yeah.
48:04 Josh Clark? Okay? Well, you got anything else about wetlands?
48:08 Speaker 05 Nope.
48:09 Josh Clark? I don't either. This is a good one. I'm pretty happy with it. And since I said that, everybody, it's time for listener mail.
48:18 Speaker 05 Yeah, I'm gonna call this the first SY5K.
48:23 Josh Clark? Oh, yeah.
48:23 Speaker 05 Did you see these?
48:24 Josh Clark? Yes, man. Congratulations to everybody who took part.
48:27 Speaker 05 Yeah, so what happened was some Stuff You Should Know listeners got together and put together a 5K, Stuff You Should Know 5K. And we got periodic updates from Aaron Huey Mizel, or Mizel, not sure how you pronounce it.
48:42 Josh Clark? I'm going with Mizel.
48:43 Speaker 05 Mizel, but this is, um, this is the, the final email about how it went. Hey, guys, want to let you know that the SY5K is over. It was so nice to look at everyone's pictures and hear what episodes of Stuff You Should Know they listened to, because that was the idea. I imagine some people might have fudged that and listened to Marc Maron or whatever.
49:02 Josh Clark? That's not, like, they're disqualified.
49:05 Speaker 05 I think a lot of us have suffered from a lack of human connection at this time, and the silly little virtual event gave us something to bond over. I don't think I would have tried this with any other group of people. The Stuff You Should Know Army is wonderful, and it speaks volumes in regard to you guys. The tone that you set in your podcasts, interesting and funny, carries over into your fan base and has created a little lovely corner of the internet. I totally agree, Aaron, and the same can be said of the Movie Crush page. Very, very good people, not snipy or rude and going after each other on Facebook, which is kind of what Facebook seems to be all about.
49:39 Josh Clark? Oh, yeah, it's like a, a garden paradise over there on the SYSK Army page.
49:45 Speaker 05 Yeah, it's great. Now, I'm not suggesting that you made these people wonderful, but the average Stuff You Should Know Army member is like that. Interesting, funny, and willing to participate in a virtual 5K with a complete stranger.
49:56 Josh Clark? And they love stroopwafels.
49:58 Speaker 05 I even bought 13 Stuff You Should Know stickers to send out to some people as prizes. It's just a little thing, but everyone that I've been in touch with has been exceedingly kind. This is what we need right now, these small human connections, a podcast to listen to and laugh with, a walk, run. Bear chase to do virtually with a bunch of near strangers and a Stuff You Should Know sticker to put on your fridge or on your laptop. If you get a chance, go to the event page and scroll through some of the posts. They're delightful. Like the woman who did our 5K at three months postpartum and crushed it.
50:27 Josh Clark? Nice.
50:27 Speaker 05 Or the dad who pushed his adorable daughter in her stroller on the 5K while listening to his favorite episode, which was Spam. We had first timers.
50:35 Josh Clark? That was a good one.
50:35 Speaker 05 Yeah, it was a good one. We had first timers, people recovering from injury, runners and walkers, so many smiles and Stuff You Should Know t-shirts. Sign off for now, but just writing to tell you is this a success? We might even do it again with love. And that is again from Aaron Huey Mizell. And that is great. Aaron, thank you for doing this. And that really does speak to, to the quality of our listeners in every single way.
50:58 Josh Clark? Indubitably. Yeah. Thanks a lot, Aaron. It's good to hear from you. And to everybody who participated in the SY5K, you are the champions, our friends.
51:11 Speaker 05 Even if you listen to Marc Maron.
51:15 Josh Clark? But maybe not what Chuck just said.
51:21 Josh Clark? That's it. Okay. Well, if you want to get in touch with us like Aaron did and do something interesting, we want to hear about it. You can write to us in an email to [email protected] .
51:37 Speaker 04 Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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