Can these corals take the heat?

Warming waters are an existential threat to coral reefs, and for people who want to restore them. But in the Republic of Palau, researchers are testing out an approach to help restored reefs survive hotter temperatures — before it's too late. To watch this episode on video, find us on Netflix! Guests: Benji Jones, senior environmental correspondent at Vox For show transcripts, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unxtranscripts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠For more, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unexplainable⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠And please email us! ⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠We read every email. Support Unexplainable (and get ad-free episodes) by becoming a Vox Member today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/members⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:39Speaker 01

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• 1:12Speaker 02

  Coral reefs are enchanting, right? Like, a healthy reef is just this gorgeous ecosystem full of strange, beautiful creatures. But I don't think it's any secret that coral reefs are struggling. By one estimate, the world has lost half of its live coral since the 1950s. And my colleague, Benji Jones, has been reporting on this. Longtime listeners of the show will know him from episodes about discovering new species or the economic value of a bat.

• 1:52Speaker 02

  But recently, he went on a reporting trip to Palau to cover a project that's trying to turn things around for coral and is trying to do it fast.

• 2:19Speaker 02

  Benji, thank you for being here.

• 2:21Speaker 03

  I'm so happy to be here.

• 2:23Speaker 02

  It is funny to me that we both went to Palau. Like, anyone who listens to the show knows that I also went to Palau like a month before you went to Palau.

• 2:33Speaker 03

  It's a special place.

• 2:35Speaker 02

  I found it interesting because whenever we've talked in the past, you are like the most cheerful person delivering the most grim news. Like, you always have this exact smile on your face.

• 2:46Speaker 03

  I have no feeling, yeah.

• 2:47Speaker 02

  And they're like, everything's dying. But this, you said, was like maybe a slightly more hopeful story?

• 2:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, I recently went to this island nation in the Pacific called Palau. And I was there to tell a story about coral reefs. And yeah, I feel like it was more hopeful than I've felt in a long time about these particular ecosystems. So I felt good. I felt good. And it was like so much fun.

• 3:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, let's get into it. Like, when I was there, I sort of got a chance to actually snorkel. And it was just, I mean, it was stunning.

• 3:27Speaker 03

  It is literally like the most incredible reef ever. I mean, I'm so glad that you snorkel there so we like can bond over Palau's reefs because they really are so special. And like, out of like a calendar, almost, like the watercolor, like it literally is just so, feels like fake almost. It's so beautiful.

• 3:48Speaker 02

  Looking down through, basically, it was like I put this mask on, put my face in the water, and it felt like, you know, those videos of like people seeing color for the first time, where they'll like put on the glasses? And I was like, oh, my gosh, I'm seeing like color for the first time. I like wanted to cry.

• 4:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, coral reefs are these magical underwater rainforests. They're so full of life. And I've been diving since I was like 15, I think. I love getting to like sink into this other world. And it's like, I want everyone to have that experience because it is so special. And it, it makes me really actually sad that reefs are in such bad shape.

• 4:36Speaker 02

  What's happening to them? Is it just climate change or?

• 4:41Speaker 03

  There are several different problems that reefs are facing. There's like pollution, so like sewage and nitrogen from farmland running off into the water. There are diseases that affect corals. There's overfishing, which is bad for the reef. To what you're saying, climate change today, I would say is like the leading threat that reefs are facing. Like, there was a report that came out in like 2018 or something that said with 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming relative to like pre-industrial times, we could lose 70 to 90% of coral reefs.

• 5:19Speaker 02

  70 to 90%?

• 5:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, and like, so that is, that is truly existential for these ecosystems. And so much depends on them. They're not just cool to look at. They're not just cool for divers and snorkelers and tourists. They're incredibly important for protecting shorelines. They're incredibly important for maintaining fisheries for folks. Like, so yeah, there's like a lot at stake here.

• 5:47Speaker 02

  Why is heat specifically such an issue for them?

• 5:51Speaker 03

  Okay, so.

• 5:54Speaker 02

  Benji's getting into like.

• 5:55Speaker 03

  I hope you're ready for me to tell you about coral polyps because I can talk about this for a long time. So first of all, let's get the basics out of the way.

• 6:04Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 6:04Speaker 03

  Coral is an animal.

• 6:06Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 6:06Speaker 03

  So I like that sometimes they're like affectionately, or maybe not affectionately called rocks, but like they're very much an animal. And not only that, they are a colony of animals. So each individual coral that you're seeing, so like one of those branches, for example, is a colony of little animals called polyps.

• 6:24Speaker 02

  Polyps, like they're, in my mind, they look like little sacks, like little goo sacks.

• 6:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're basically goo sacks.

• 6:30Speaker 02

  Nice.

• 6:31Speaker 03

  Like, like all of us. And like us, they have skeletons.

• 6:37Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 6:37Speaker 03

  And so they're these little like gooey things with tentacles. And they have, they excrete a skeleton. And as they grow.

• 6:44Speaker 02

  Like, if we oozed a skeleton.

• 6:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:47Speaker 02

  And it looked like a giant rock.

• 6:49Speaker 03

  Kind, yeah. Okay.

• 6:50Speaker 02

  Cool.

• 6:51Speaker 03

  Yeah. And like, it is that secretion of the skeleton that creates all this beautiful, this three-dimensional terrain that's so important. So you have the polyp, the coral polyp, this little animal, it's in a colony, they're all genetically identical. So all the little polyps in a piece of coral are genetically identical. They clone themselves over and over and over again when they grow. A coral polyp has this incredible partnership with a kind of algae, a beneficial algae that lives inside of its tissue. And that algae is basically like a solar power plant that generates most of the energy that coral polyps need to survive.

• 7:30Speaker 02

  So like, the algae is basically photosynthesizing?

• 7:33Speaker 03

  Exactly, like a plant.

• 7:35Speaker 02

  Just like a plant does. And then that like photosynthesis creates a bunch of nutrients and it like hands off some of the nutrients to the coral.

• 7:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, like sugar, basically, it's giving to the coral. And the algae in return gets like a place to live near the sun, it can photosynthesize.

• 7:52Speaker 02

  It's paying rent.

• 7:53Speaker 03

  It does, it's giving a lot of its sugar to the coral polyp. So why this matters is because when it gets too hot in the ocean, that partnership between the polyp and their like power plant algae breaks down. Scientists think that the algae might be secreting some kind of toxic substance. And so the coral polyp like ejects the algae. And so that is bleaching. When all those algae cells leave the coral, and then it turns white because it doesn't have algae in it, which gives it a lot of its color.

• 8:25Speaker 02

  Okay, basically, that's why we get these, like, almost, the images that I've seen look like skeletons, like a graveyard of coral essentially. But it's coral, from what you're telling me, like slowly starving.

• 8:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. So it's bleached coral is starving and not dead, but it will be dead if the temperatures don't come back down again. And so basically, bleaching is like a very sick coral.

• 8:53Speaker 02

  What have people been doing about this bleaching?

• 8:56Speaker 03

  So people, people are basically planting coral on reefs that are dying to try to regrow them.

• 9:04Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 9:04Speaker 03

  In the same way that you would plant like saplings or seeds to regrow forests, which people do too, they're doing that for reefs. And there are actually a lot of people who are doing this replanting of reefs or coral restoration, as like scientists call it. I've seen like one source tracking this globally. And there are like 900 plus projects around the world to, to restore coral reefs. So basically, like, there are these like agents all around the world that are trying to rebuild reefs, which is like very exciting, very hopeful, because people really care. It shows you that people really care in the same way that I care because like I love these ecosystems. So people are really trying to help.

• 9:46Speaker 02

  Is it super effective or?

• 9:49Speaker 03

  I mean, so this is like.

• 9:52Speaker 03

  This is the problem.

• 9:53Speaker 02

  Got it.

• 9:54Speaker 03

  This is what I really like, want to talk to you about, which is that because the oceans are getting hotter and hotter.

• 10:00Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 10:01Speaker 03

  If you're putting corals out into that same ocean, they are going to be more likely to bleach in the future just because the oceans are heating up. So it's like, why are we planting trees if the forest is just going to burn anyway?

• 10:14Speaker 02

  Because I remember you doing some reporting a couple of years ago about an effort like this, right?

• 10:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, so in 2022, I went down to Florida with a photographer, Jenny Adler, and we were there to observe a lot of this restoration work in practice. Like, there's this organization called the Coral Restoration Foundation. And like, they do pretty cool work. They have these like beautiful trees, they call them, that they sink underwater. They're like made of PVC pipe, and then they hang corals from them. It was just cool to be diving on these reefs that had been replanted. And so I was like, okay, scientists are like literally regrowing this coral reef, and I'm seeing the results of that. So that was in 2022.

• 10:57Speaker 02

  Uh oh.

• 10:58Speaker 03

  But this was like devastating. So in 2023, there was a record-breaking heat wave.

• 11:06Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 11:06Speaker 03

  That started that summer. And I was like literally cruising over fields of planted coral that was all bleached white.

• 11:17Speaker 02

  Oh, no.

• 11:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was really sad. It was sad because like, I want Florida to have its reef because especially in a place like that, that's really vulnerable to storms, it's so important. 90% of the live coral over the last, whatever, 50 years is gone. So like, being able to replant it is so important. But I was also sad because all these researchers and this organization that had put like blood, sweat and tears into planting this reef were watching their, their work over years. I mean, they had planted like 40-plus thousand pieces of coral. All that work sort of like disappeared, or most of it did, a lot of it did. And so, ah, yeah, I was just sad. Like surfacing with some of the people from that organization, like, they were just like devastated.

• 12:04Speaker 03

  It wasn't just their work that was disappearing. It was also this, like, it represented a challenge to the, the whole idea of restoring coral reefs because if we know that heat waves are getting worse.

• 12:22Speaker 02

  Right.

• 12:22Speaker 03

  Why put coral back out there? Why put all this time and money into planting coral if it's just going to die anyway?

• 12:28Speaker 02

  So is there anything that we can do then?

• 12:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, so that's, that's what I was doing in Palau, was, was meeting with a researcher, was watching a researcher work who is trying to fix this problem.

• 12:43Speaker 02

  More on that after the break.

• 12:51Speaker 01

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• 14:24Speaker 06

  This is an ordinary dollar that's been kissed with Coral Blue Number Two Semi-Gloss Lipstick. Actually, it's Coral Blue Number.

• 14:33Speaker 02

  So, talk to me about Palau, I guess.

• 14:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, so Palau is not like one island, it is 340 islands?

• 14:43Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 14:44Speaker 03

  Not very many of them are inhabited, but they look like they're floating because the bottoms of these little islands, some of them are like only the size of like a house or a bus or something, tiny, but the bottoms of them are eroding. And so it looks like there's a gap between the bottom of, the base of the island and the ocean. And so there are like moments when you're boating through these islands and it feels literally like, I hope you got this reference, like the floating islands of Pandora in Avatar. Call me basic, I don't care. It's a great movie. And it, but like, I could just sort of suspend disbelief for a little bit, like being on the boat, like the hair, like the, the wind blowing through my hair, my not very much hair.

• 15:27Speaker 02

  Luscious locks.

• 15:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. What's interesting about being there for a story about restoration, about coral reefs, is that Palau's reefs are actually, as you saw, they're doing really well. There are a couple of reasons that make it a really good place to study coral reefs. One of them is that there are loads of them. So like, the flip side of it being healthy is that like, there are all these coral reefs, there are tons of populations of coral. So if you want to study coral and study how different corals survive or don't survive under warming, it's a good place just because you have a lot to access.

• 15:59Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 16:00Speaker 03

  There's a marine lab there. That's, you also, I think, went to this marine lab.

• 16:04Speaker 02

  Pickrick, so the Palau International Coral Reef Center.

• 16:07Speaker 03

  You got it, yeah.

• 16:08Speaker 02

  I believe.

• 16:09Speaker 03

  And they have a, they have a wet lab in the back and you can always expect to find big tanks full of sea creatures. And in this case, lots of coral and clams and urchins.

• 16:19Speaker 02

  But you were there to talk to one researcher in particular, right?

• 16:23Speaker 03

  I've known this guy for a while. His name is Steve Palumbi.

• 16:25Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 16:26Speaker 03

  He's at Stanford, and he is really focused on improving coral reef restoration. How can we make this better? Particularly, he's done a ton of work on heat tolerance within corals.

• 16:39Speaker 02

  Heat tolerance, okay.

• 16:39Speaker 03

  So trying to basically identify which coral colonies are going to be more likely to survive should a heat wave come? And can we then use those more heat tolerant corals to rebuild reefs? So instead of just putting any corals out to restore a reef, let's use the ones that are hardier in the face of heat so that they won't die. So there's this whole field of inquiry into why some corals seem to be more heat resistant than others.

• 17:07Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 17:07Speaker 03

  And it's not simple. There is a genetic basis to it. It is rooted to some extent in a coral's genome, in its DNA. That algae that it has this partnership with, that matters too. So certain strains of the algae are more heat resistant than others. So you have to get the right algae to be able to tolerate heat better. And there's also like conditioning, like what did that particular colony experience in the past? Will that make it more likely to be resistant to heat in the future? So there are all these different scientific questions about what is it about these corals that we see surviving heat that makes them survive? What makes them so special?

• 17:44Speaker 02

  I mean, that sounds like a lot of work then, if you're trying to, if you're trying to tease out like the coral and the algae.

• 17:51Speaker 03

  I mean, yes, I think like, there is still a lot of unknown when it comes to the, the basis of heat tolerance. And the problem with that is that like, we don't have time. We don't have time to like pursue just the science to try to figure out exactly what corals are more heat resistant and be perfect about it, like really understand.

• 18:16Speaker 02

  Right.

• 18:17Speaker 03

  The genetic basis, for example, or like, understand everything about the symbiont, the algae in it. And so from Steve's perspective, this guy, the Stanford biologist who's been working in Palau for a while, he's basically like, we kind of know enough right now to make restoration better, to start figuring out which corals are heat resistant and planting them in the ocean. And so Steve is like, okay, what can we do right now to improve the way that we're planting corals so they survive if future heat waves come?

• 18:53Speaker 02

  What does that look like, essentially? What does kind of being like, we know enough to start doing stuff, what is, what is the stuff that he's doing?

• 19:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, so Steve's thing is basically...

• 19:06Speaker 03

  Finding a way to quickly test corals for their heat tolerance before planting them on the reef. And so what he has spent a lot of his time doing is trying to figure out how to create a quick heat test to run corals through that isn't going to take a ton of time and resources. So basically, he will take bits of coral off the wild reef, bring them back to Pickrick, this lab in Palau, and then essentially, put them into picnic coolers.

• 19:39Speaker 02

  Picnic cooler is like the, like, oh, it's a little white thing with a red top.

• 19:44Speaker 03

  Like what you put like fruit and cheese in for a picnic in the park.

• 19:46Speaker 02

  And I'll take it to Prospect Park, yeah.

• 19:47Speaker 03

  So these coolers are outfitted with like aquarium heater, a small pump, and there's some seawater in them. So he puts these little pieces of coral into the coolers, and then essentially, he just turns the temperature up and sees which ones bleach first and which ones stay colorful, indicating that they might have some advantage under warming conditions.

• 20:13Speaker 02

  Interesting.

• 20:14Speaker 03

  And the innovation here is, A, it's pretty simple because it's a picnic cooler, like you can buy that online, and same with the other parts, and it's pretty cheap, but it's also fast. So a lot of like the more traditional or like, a lot of heat tests run for two weeks or a month. And the idea there is that it's supposed to be like better mimicking natural conditions. But what Steve is trying to show is that even if you just have four days, you can heat up the water really quickly in increments. So, yeah, like 30 degrees Celsius is the baseline, and then you ramp up to 34, and then to 35 the next day, and then 36 the next day. Just do that for four days, and then each morning, you check the corals in your cooler and see which ones are still colorful, which ones are not.

• 20:58Speaker 02

  Got it.

• 20:59Speaker 03

  And the ones that are still colorful are the champions. They're the winners in this stress test, in this heat test.

• 21:04Speaker 02

  And so when, once he's figured out, like, this one's extreme, like this one's a champion, this one's maybe like middle of the pack, whatever, what does he then do with those corals? Like, where do they go?

• 21:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I'll just briefly say, he works with this other researcher at Stanford named Courtney Claypack, who does a lot of the like implementation of the restoration. So she's trying to build this project out. But the idea is that because they're still trying to understand how well these tests work, these quick four-day tests work, they are planting all of those corals that they've tested on the reef, including the low heat tolerant ones, the medium heat tolerant ones, and the high heat tolerant ones, and then seeing what happens in the wild.

• 21:48Speaker 02

  What does the nursery look like?

• 21:52Speaker 03

  So like desperate to get out to this one spot on the reef where they had been adding all these heat resistant, according to these tests, these quick tests, heat resistant corals. They're trying to regrow a reef in Palau that, one of the few reefs that's in bad shape, for the local community. The local community, the governor, this guy Sharp, was like, this used to be an amazing fishing ground. We have since lost the fish here. Can you help us rebuild the reef? Asked Pickrick, got in touch with Steve. Steve's like, okay, let's make this the spot of a nursery where a lot of our climate, a lot of our heat tolerant corals can go, so that over time, they might have a higher chance of surviving if there are marine heat waves in the future. So we got to snorkel and see this cool, like, restoration site.

• 22:35Speaker 02

  What was it like? Like, what did the nursery look like?

• 22:38Speaker 03

  We were like a couple miles from shore, but it was pretty shallow. That's like one of the cool things about coral reefs in a place like this. Like, you can be really far offshore, and it's really shallow because the reef has grown up. So, yeah, we jumped in, and on the seafloor, there were a bunch of these metal structures that look a little bit like, sort of like spiders on the floor of the ocean. And they're really common in restoration. You actually attach the corals with like zip ties to those, they're called Mars stars. And I'm snorkeling out over this, this like garden of, of these metal structures covered in coral. And it was just cool because I had known, like, what they had been through.

• 23:22Speaker 03

  Like, the other, the cool thing about this work and why it's different than a lot of like the restoration that I've seen is that there were like 26 different species of coral. So it was like really diverse, and some of them looked like these like green fuzzy mittens. Some of them look like these, that like kind of incredible neon blue, like antlers. Some of them just like kind of lumpy and purple.

• 23:46Speaker 02

  Those are my favorites.

• 23:47Speaker 03

  There were fish, too. There were giant clams there, there were sea cucumbers, there were parrot fish.

• 23:54Speaker 02

  What's next? Do they like take hardy Palauan coral to other places? Do other places do this test? Like, what, what could this teach us for other environments?

• 24:08Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's a good question because we know that like, yeah, this particular reef is not in desperate need of restoration, but so many other ones are. Basically, like, right now, there are already similar projects going on in different parts of the Pacific. So there's one in Maui, there's one in the Federated States of Micronesia, there's one in the Marshall Islands. So they're testing this approach in a bunch of different places. In the future, the idea is that because this is so affordable, and it's pretty straightforward, four days, picnic coolers, et cetera, things you can buy online, anyone can implement this like heat testing protocol into their restoration.

• 24:50Speaker 03

  So basically, like, why don't we just add this one step of like, let's test the corals that you're going to put out so that we don't just, I don't know, roll the dice to see if they have what it takes to survive? So like, let's be more strategic about what we are planting on a reef. Given that it's like, it's not easy. Like I just said, like, this testing approach is easy. It's easy relative to other tests. But like, doing coral restoration is like really labor intensive. I mean, it's like, you have to have boats, you have to have a staff, you have to have the equipment. Seawater like, kind of like erodes, like destroys everything on land. Like, it is hard to like raise coral. And so finding ways to make that easier is like helpful. So the idea is basically that like, other people around the world could do this and just take the winners from those tests to plant.

• 25:34Speaker 02

  So it really strikes me that this is not, it's not just sort of like restoration of the reef as it was.

• 25:44Speaker 03

  Such a good point. Restoration is not a great word for what we need to do because we can't, we're not trying to restore reefs to some former state. Like, restore is like, let's bring back, whereas it is no longer enough to look to like, try to bring what we had back. It's not enough. It won't work. That's what lots of people have tried, and then the coral dies. We now need to like recreate or re-engineer what these ecosystems look like because things have just gotten so bad.

• 26:16Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so when you say this about like, oh, we're, we need to engineer them, we have to just sort of like build a new kind of reef, part of me is like, well, I guess, in the timeframe that we have, like, that's what we have to do. But then there is a part of me that's also like, do we know enough?

• 26:36Speaker 03

  I mean, I love that question. I think we, the simple answer is that we definitely do not know enough to create, recreate any ecosystem. I mean, I think about like, there could be trade-offs, and there's been a fair amount of research on this. So maybe a coral that's really heat tolerant is like, I can resist the worst warming, doesn't grow very quickly.

• 27:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:04Speaker 03

  Or it gets hit by disease and dies more easily. So what are those trade-offs? We have like, scientists have a pretty decent sense that these trade-offs are not so extreme that like you're really hampering the growth of a reef by using just the like heat tolerant corals. But those are questions that like do matter still when you're thinking about scaling up these interventions. I think the reason why it's still worth doing something like this is that we know what it looks like to do nothing.

• 27:32Speaker 02

  Yeah. So this is a hopeful story to you.

• 27:36Speaker 03

  It is. I mean, like, hopeful, A, because it gives restoration hope.

• 27:42Speaker 02

  Right.

• 27:43Speaker 03

  It is potentially solving one of the problems that is plaguing coral restoration, plaguing this grand global effort to regrow reefs. Also, it's a hopeful story to me because Palau is amazing. There are still reefs that are in great shape. It's like thinking of this one particular spot that we went to, which was like, you just, it was like pretty shallow. We jumped off the boat, and we saw at least a couple sea turtles, sharks, and then, at the end of this dive, we came across one colony of coral that was probably the size of a trailer, maybe bigger, maybe bigger, like a small building size, one individual colony of coral, easily 500 years, maybe 1,000 years.

• 28:28Speaker 03

  It's like seeing the like, these ancient trees of like California or whatever. And so, I don't know, that dive in particular, it just like left me feeling very hopeful. And I don't think the message is, okay, like, this reef is fine, like, why are we worrying? It's like, there's something that's still worth saving.

• 28:46Speaker 02

  Okay. Benji, hopeful for once. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I'm hopeful that you'll come on again soon. And if anyone wants to read your article on vox.com, it is fantastic, has so many photos, and I think is a great read.

• 29:07Speaker 03

  Aw, thank you.

• 29:09Speaker 02

  If you'd like to watch this episode and see some of Benji's fantastic footage, you can find our show, Unexplainable, on Netflix. You can also find Benji's excellent reporting on all this on our site, vox.com. This episode was produced by Valerie Shankman and by me, Bert Pinkerton. It was edited by the wonderful Joanna Solotaroff. The video edit was done by Shelby Smith, Valerie Shankman, and Alex Coles, with animation from Karim Karia. Ibrahim Ochik and Joe Nebres were our studio engineers. Christian Ayala did the mixing and the sound design for the podcast. Melissa Hirsch checked the facts. Noam Hasenfeld does our music.

• 29:53Speaker 02

  Meredith Hodnott is the fact that some corals make themselves a kind of sunscreen. And thanks always to Brian Resnick for co-creating the show with me and Noam. If you have ideas about coral you want us to think about, or any other topics you'd like us to explore, we are at [email protected]. If you'd like to support the show and the journalism that Vox does, we would love it if you would become a member. It is very easy to do. Just go to vox.com/members. You will get access to all of Vox's journalism, but you will also know that you are supporting all of Vox's journalism. And for those of you who have emailed to let us know that you signed up because of Unexplainable, thank you.

• 30:36Speaker 02

  Thank you also to those of you who have left us a nice review on your podcast platform, or just told someone in your life about the show. You are all the best. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we will be back very soon with another episode about everything that we do not yet know.

• 31:07Speaker 07

  This episode is brought to you by Born in Roma Fragrances by Valentino Beauty, the iconic fragrance duo. Donna Born in Roma Eau de Parfum is a feminine fragrance featuring juicy black currant, central jasmine, woody cashmerin, and warm vanilla. Its masculine counterpart, Wilmo Born in Roma Eau de Toilette, has notes of fresh violet leaf, aromatic sage, green vetiver, spicy ginger, and mineral salt. Shop at Macy's.com.

• 31:37Speaker 08

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