A magical world at the ocean’s edge

In coastal California, researchers grapple with potentially losing a landscape they love. Guests: Rebecca Johnson, Director of the Center for Biodiversity and Community Science at the California Academy of Sciences; Peter Roopnarine, Curator of Invertebrate Zoology & Geology at the California Academy of Sciences For show transcripts, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unxtranscripts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ For more, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unexplainable⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ And please email us! ⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠ We read every email. Support Unexplainable (and get ad-free episodes) by becoming a Vox Member today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/members⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Help us plan for the future of Unexplainable by filling out a brief survey: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠voxmedia.com/survey⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

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• 1:13Speaker 02

  All right. I am at the California Academy of Sciences. It is in the middle of a park, so I'm surrounded by trees that are, I guess, evergreens. I can't really see it because it is 5:04 AM. Full moon, not particularly overcast. I think that Rebecca might be here. We will see. Yes, Rebecca. She has a bumper sticker that says, "I break for wildflowers."

• 1:56Speaker 03

  Hi.

• 1:57Speaker 02

  Hi, good morning.

• 1:58Speaker 03

  It's so nice to see you in person.

• 2:00Speaker 02

  It's so nice to see you in person.

• 2:01Speaker 03

  How are you?

• 2:01Speaker 02

  Thank you for driving me out.

• 2:02Speaker 03

  Sure. Thanks for getting out so early. Okay, so I'll take you kind of to my favorite rock intertidal reef, which is called Pillar Point Reef. Oh, wait, this is so beautiful. Which is in San Mateo County, south of San Francisco, about 45 minutes. This is the Pillar Point mark.

• 2:20Speaker 02

  And you can see into the bay.

• 2:23Speaker 03

  And yeah, I often am there like five in the morning. Kind of beautiful foggy light.

• 2:32Speaker 02

  Oh, wow, wow.

• 2:35Speaker 03

  When you walk out to Pillar Point, you have to walk about a half mile, um, like along a dirt road. And you pass like a little har- it's on a harbor.

• 2:45Speaker 02

  Are those seagulls or pelicans?

• 2:49Speaker 03

  And so there are like mud flats and like other little parts that you have to keep on walking. And as you turn west, you just see this like

• 2:57Speaker 02

  Oh, wow.

• 2:59Speaker 03

  Huge beach with this huge expanse of kind of flat. It looks like flat rocky seaweed covered area. There's some big rocks off to the west. Called Sail Rock. You can see that one looks like a sail a little bit. The white, white one.

• 3:19Speaker 02

  I see it.

• 3:19Speaker 03

  It's like guano.

• 3:25Speaker 02

  All right, should we go in?

• 3:27Speaker 03

  We'll go further.

• 3:32Speaker 03

  When you go tide pulling, and especially if you're going as the tide is dropping, like you want to go out as far as you can then and not get distracted by all the little stuff that you see as you're walking out.

• 3:44Speaker 02

  What?

• 3:45Speaker 03

  But I always tell people this, but I always break my own rule and I get distracted.

• 3:50Speaker 02

  Oh, and it's moving.

• 3:52Speaker 03

  It's amazing.

• 3:53Speaker 02

  Oh, it's so cool. So this is this white, it looks like a little daddy long legs.

• 3:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's like the daddy long legs of sea stars.

• 4:01Speaker 02

  But it like, it has these tiny little white arms that are like dancing and contorting.

• 4:12Speaker 03

  You head out onto the rocky reef and as you head out there, you know, it's covered with algae, like seaweeds, all different species of seaweeds. There are some that are big and fleshy and iridescent. And there are some that are like little, um, I don't know, they look like little scouring pads. And then at Pillar Point, especially in the spring and summer, there's this one species that's called, um, sea sac.

• 4:36Speaker 03

  And it looks like tiny little fingers of a glove, like puffed up, but they're green.

• 4:41Speaker 02

  Stepped on one.

• 4:43Speaker 03

  Sometimes you pop some of them, but it's okay. Like you just keep walking.

• 4:48Speaker 03

  You know, as you're walking, you are walking on seaweed and animals. You used to be really careful. And then as you just keep walking, it kind of gets more and more like deeper pools, more habitats.

• 5:04Speaker 02

  Ooh.

• 5:07Speaker 02

  What is this?

• 5:09Speaker 03

  Oh, that's a slug. It's just out of the water.

• 5:12Speaker 02

  It's so orange.

• 5:16Speaker 03

  And then, um, my favorite place at Pillar Point is this place that we call the Nutabrake Pool.

• 5:22Speaker 02

  Oh wait, there's two nutabrakes, I think.

• 5:24Speaker 03

  And you'll see little nutabrakes, our sea slugs.

• 5:27Speaker 02

  Oh, wow.

• 5:29Speaker 03

  Kind of crawling along.

• 5:31Speaker 02

  It's the pink one.

• 5:33Speaker 03

  Is it really?

• 5:33Speaker 02

  Yes. So pink.

• 5:37Speaker 03

  And if you're like still and careful, you might see...

• 5:40Speaker 02

  Third one.

• 5:41Speaker 03

  There's a third one right there. Four different species, five different species, just like in that one spot.

• 5:45Speaker 02

  Fourth one, wait, the fourth.

• 5:47Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 5:48Speaker 02

  Oh my god.

• 5:49Speaker 03

  They're just everywhere. It's just like...

• 5:51Speaker 02

  Oh my god.

• 5:52Speaker 03

  These colors, right? There are like pink sponges and tunica kits and...

• 5:56Speaker 02

  Amphipods.

• 5:57Speaker 03

  There's something called an octocoral that's bright pink.

• 6:00Speaker 02

  I feel like I'm seeing all these celebrities.

• 6:03Speaker 03

  So it's just like this like mosaic of colors and worms and other things and it's all right there.

• 6:10Speaker 02

  Ooh.

• 6:11Speaker 03

  So for me, it's just like this place that you don't have, you can just stand there and you can see so many different things without even really looking that hard.

• 6:21Speaker 02

  Well, thank you, Pillar Point.

• 6:26Speaker 02

  Appreciate it. Okay, be very careful not to step on anything.

• 6:36Speaker 02

  The first time I ever went tide pooling, I was maybe 10 or 11 at a summer camp. We woke up at 4 a.m., crawled out of our sleeping bags, pulled on like two pairs of jeans, so one over the other, and these thick wool socks before hiking out to a little rocky cove. And when we got there, the tide was way out and still receding, actually. And in its wake, it had exposed this whole world of rocky pools, which is what a tide pool is, right? A little pool of water full of creatures that are normally hidden away beneath the waves. And as we scrabbled out over these slippery

• 7:20Speaker 02

  rocks to explore and look and touch, I remember being cold and wet and completely enchanted. It was like realizing that magic was real.

• 7:35Speaker 02

  Rebecca Johnson gets it.

• 7:36Speaker 03

  It's magical in so many different ways because if, okay, I'm standing at this Nudibranch pool at like six in the morning now on some like foggy Thursday, you know, another day, 12 hours or six hours later, I would be underwater. Like, I wouldn't be able to see any of that. So you also have to go at the right time. If you go a different time, it's still a beautiful beach and there's sandy, you know, but you don't see any of that. It's completely hidden to you. So it's like you get this little peak, this little like window, and that's one of the things I love the most about it.

• 8:12Speaker 02

  Rebecca is the only person I've ever met who's arguably more gone for tide pools than I am. She is the director of the Center for Biodiversity and Community Science at the California Academy of Sciences, and she's been studying tide pools for decades. The spot that she took me to, Pillar Point, she has been visiting it for around 30 years.

• 8:33Speaker 03

  I mean, it's one of the places in the world that you can like at a low tide, walk out onto a rocky reef and see like hundreds of species of invertebrates all really, really concentrated.

• 8:47Speaker 02

  But the reason I'm here, talking to Rebecca and exploring tide pools with her, is that this enchanted place is at risk. Like so many ecosystems around the world, it is being hit by a lot of different changes all at once.

• 9:04Speaker 02

  I wanted to understand what those changes meant, right? And how researchers like Rebecca figure out what the future of an ecosystem might look like. But I also wanted to understand how they deal with the possibility that that future might be grim. These tide pools are part of the reason I am a science reporter. They were part of my realization that science fact is as amazing as any science fiction. And so, this is unexplainable. I'm Byrd Pinkerton. And today on the show, I talk to someone who loves these tide pools as much as I do, to try and understand how to process a rapidly changing world.

• 10:04Speaker 03

  Oh, my gosh. Okay. So, what is the story?

• 10:09Speaker 02

  For Rebecca, the story really started about a decade ago, around the time when a wave of marine heat spread up the California coast and then just kind of stuck around for a while.

• 10:22Speaker 03

  You know, we have programs that we had been running for years then that brought people to the tide pools to make and share observations of all the different things they saw. And they started seeing some changes.

• 10:37Speaker 02

  They started seeing a lot more of one particular animal, this sea slug called the Hopkins Rose newtbrank.

• 10:44Speaker 03

  It looks like a little, I don't even know, like a little coush ball, you know, those little coush balls, but bright pink.

• 10:50Speaker 02

  These pink sea slugs aren't usually all that common at these tide pools that Rebecca studies. But when the warm water came.

• 10:57Speaker 03

  It became like the most common thing. It was like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds on the reef.

• 11:01Speaker 02

  And that wasn't the only weird thing that was happening. Even before the heat wave really hit, other disturbing reports had started coming in from up and down the coast.

• 11:10Speaker 03

  People that were diving in Washington State and further north and some places in California started reporting this like weird thing that they were seeing in starfish. They were seeing white lesions on starfishes. And they were seeing not only these white lesions, but they were seeing the starfish kind of like disintegrate in front of them. Like, they would see it one day with these lesions. They'd come back the next day and it was like almost dissolved and then almost gone. So people started to see this and started to report it and document it. And a lot of it was documented by amateur divers. And then it was reported by scientists who went out to try to verify this. And very quickly, it was pretty apparent that this sickness, whatever it was, was in

• 11:55Speaker 03

  lots and lots of species along a huge stretch of coast.

• 11:58Speaker 02

  Wasting isn't unheard of in sea stars. It does happen, but it doesn't usually happen to so many different species in such a huge geographical area all at the same time. The exact cause was hard to pin down. There were a lot of theories. And one researcher told me that they actually only recently figured out the infectious agent that was probably involved. But scientists also drew a connection to the warm water, saying the stress of the heat could have made things worse. Ultimately, though, huge numbers of sea stars wasted away. Some places lost over 90% of their stars. And the spot that Rebecca has been visiting for decades, Pillar Point, that was hit hard, too.

• 12:42Speaker 02

  At one point, she decided to drive out for a visit.

• 12:44Speaker 03

  My colleague Allison Young and I, we were like, OK, like, this is a pretty good low tide. Look, let's just go see what we can see. And we went out to Pillar Point, and there were no starfish. It was just like the most bizarre feeling. I was still at this place that was like spectacularly beautiful, covered with algae, covered with seaweeds, all these other invertebrates are there. But like, there's just something kind of off about it. It's like going to a familiar place and something being wrong. You know, it's like going into your room if somebody had like moved your stuff like all slightly, right? And you're like, what's wrong with this room? Right?

• 13:28Speaker 03

  So it has that like disconcerting, like unsettling feeling. And for us, I mean, at that moment, when we saw all these stars that had disappeared, like, we didn't know what was going to happen. And they like play this huge role in maintaining these ecosystems. And so to have them just gone, it was this moment of like really deep uncertainty.

• 13:57Noam Hassenfeld?

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• 17:35Speaker 05

  Flavors are there, it's very clean, it's very, um, classic. Classic oceanic.

• 17:42Speaker 02

  When Rebecca looked out at her familiar tide pools and saw that the sea stars were mostly missing, she was worried because she thought a big change like this might throw that tide pool ecosystem she loved out of balance. And that was, it turns out, a pretty reasonable concern, because it is exactly what happened to another ecosystem, one that is not very far away distance-wise from some California tide pools, but can seem like kind of a different planet, almost. To get there, you have to move a little ways beyond the Rocky Intertidal into water that's maybe 50 to 100 feet deep.

• 18:25Speaker 02

  And that's where you can find the California Kelp Forest.

• 18:31Speaker 02

  Imagine, if you would, golden brown kelp. It can be massive, sometimes 100 feet tall. And these are called kelp forests for a reason. Ideally, there's sort of lots of kelp growing together, like trees almost, with sunlight kind of filtering through them in green and gold. Also, like a forest, these places are full of a huge diversity of animals. So in this case, everything from sea lions to octopus to abalone. Now, on land, in a forest, right, you have grazers, herbivores like deer, and you have predators, like wolves, that eat those deer. So a herd of hungry deer can decimate trees and undergrowth by eating everything.

• 19:16Speaker 02

  But some wolves can keep them in check, right? And keep the ecosystem healthy and balanced. The same is true for the California kelp forests. They have grazers, animals like the purple sea urchin, which is a spiky, purple pincushion that eats a lot of kelp. And then they have a very important wolf that keeps the pincushions in check, which is the species of sea star known as the sunflower sea star.

• 19:41Speaker 03

  Sunflower stars are amazing. I mean, they're gigantic. Imagine, it's like as big as like a car hubcap, maybe?

• 19:49Speaker 02

  The ones I saw as a kid were so big, you had to hold them with two hands.

• 19:53Speaker 03

  They have tons of arms, like 20, in the 20s, 22, 24. Some people think that they can like count them and there's consistency, but I'm actually not sure. They're really beautifully colored, like they have a lot of variation, but they're generally like purply with some pinks, sometimes a little more orange. And they are voracious predators. They eat tons of stuff. And they're pretty indiscriminate, like they eat lots of different things.

• 20:21Speaker 02

  Including grazers like urchins. But because they're sea stars, they also fell victim to that sea star wasting sickness that I told you about. In fact, they were one of the hardest-hit species.

• 20:35Speaker 03

  This lack of the sunflower star in the kelp forests, especially in Northern California, along with the warming waters, because remember, we have warming waters, right? Led to the increase of urchins. And the urchins then ate all the kelp. And the warming water didn't help kelp because kelp don't really want warmer water. So in many places, you have these urchin barrens where it's like mostly urchins. We've lost a lot of kelp forests along the Northern California coast.

• 21:06Speaker 02

  The transformation from dense, diverse kelp forests to urchin barrens is just one example of what can happen when things get out of balance in an ecosystem. So again, it makes sense that Rebecca was worried when she noticed that the stars were missing from her tide pools all those years ago. She didn't know exactly what could happen, but she was afraid that such a big change could have real consequences for the tide pools. Ultimately, though, while some species like the sunflower sea stars have not bounced back in California, other species like bat stars and leather stars and ochre stars, they have made a comeback. And the tide pools have not met the same fate as so many of

• 21:51Speaker 02

  the California kelp forests, right? They have not been turned into some equivalent of urchin barrens. What worries Rebecca is that as more things change, something else might disrupt the tide pool's balance. She's worried, for example, about the hungry, hungry grazers that have gobbled up the kelp forests. They still need something to eat. And she says that she's been seeing more of them coming into the tide pools.

• 22:19Speaker 03

  They've come into the inner tidal and they're eating their like, you know, not first choice food, but they're eating the kelp, the inner tidal kelps.

• 22:27Speaker 02

  That could affect the ecosystems there. And meanwhile, temperatures are still warming over time, so tide pool ecosystems are still changing, which is having its own effects.

• 22:38Speaker 03

  Things are shifting their ranges, like ranges are moving north. We don't actually know what happens when they move north. You know, we don't know exactly what those changes will lead to for nudibranchs, for cnemesis, for sponges, for other encrusting things. Like, we just don't know all the like downstream effects of that.

• 22:59Speaker 02

  Part of Rebecca's job is predicting what comes next for these ecosystems. But that's hard, right? It's hard because it's hard to nail down cause and effect in the ocean. It's hard to tease out exactly what the effects of the marine heat wave were, or what the effects of ocean acidification are, or sea star wasting, or changes in predators, or any number of different factors that can potentially shake up an ecosystem. But also, it's hard to make sense of how big a deal any given change might be, right? These ecosystems have bounced back from some pretty big blows in the past. Like fur traders wiped out stellar sea cows, which is a species that helped shape the kelp forests.

• 23:44Speaker 02

  And then sea otters, an important predator, they were also hunted close to extinction. Things like sea star wasting and heat waves have also happened before. So sometimes stuff, big or small, just changes, you know? And how do you know what changes might be okay ultimately?

• 24:06Speaker 06

  That's a good question. And I've spent a lot of my career studying exactly that. And literally what I study is the question of why do ecosystems persist as long as they do?

• 24:22Speaker 02

  I met up with Peter Rupenrein in his office, full of bookshelves and fossilized shells. He is a paleontologist at the Cal Academy of Sciences who studies how ancient ecosystems were affected by things like dramatic climate change. And he's trying to figure out how that might relate to ecosystems today.

• 24:41Speaker 06

  If you look in the fossil record, one of the things that's really remarkable is that ecosystems can last a very long time, millions of years. Species will come and go in those ecosystems. But what makes ecosystems, so the types of species, what they do, who they do it to, and so on, that doesn't change. That can last for millions of years.

• 25:03Speaker 02

  It's kind of like a baseball team.

• 25:07Speaker 02

  The team's always going to need pitchers and shortstops and outfielders. But a specific pitcher can retire. The sea otter is leaving Northern California.

• 25:17Speaker 04

  Because it's been hunted almost to extinction.

• 25:20Speaker 02

  The team might hire another pitcher or just have one of their other star pitchers step up.

• 25:25Speaker 04

  The sunflower sea star will be taking over more of the pitching. Look out for its famous five armed curve ball.

• 25:31Speaker 02

  But Peter's research also looks at the moments when ecosystem teams fall apart.

• 25:36Speaker 06

  They do eventually come to an end.

• 25:39Speaker 04

  And that's the ballgame.

• 25:44Speaker 06

  They tend to come to an end during major events in Earth's dynamic. So things like volcanism, you know, the size of Siberia, an asteroid hitting the planet, you know, really extreme, extreme changes.

• 26:02Speaker 02

  Too many changes and you just can't play baseball anymore.

• 26:08Speaker 02

  So Peter can't know exactly what the future holds for California's tide pools or its kelp forests or any marine ecosystem. But he is worried.

• 26:19Speaker 06

  You know, the, the thing that many of us lose sleep over is that, yes, these things that we love, we treasure, we could be staring down the barrel of changes that we're not really imagining yet. And as you pointed out, I mean, the world is different. My world, I, I grew up, I'm from the Caribbean and I grew up there loving the ocean. I still remember my first time on a reef. It, I was really little and it blew my mind and I think it changed me forever. So I share that experience with you. But my parents, you know, my, my mom was from Jamaica. My dad was from Trinidad. They described things that I never saw.

• 27:04Speaker 06

  And so that, that's interesting. That's always been a little bit disturbing. But there's still beauty out there. And nowadays, I just wonder, well, you know, we can still find beauty in a kelp forest that has too many urchins and no sea cows. We still find them beautiful. We get that sense from them. How long is that going to persist? I think that's a question that everybody should be asking themselves very seriously, because I've only very recently come to the answer that, yes, I do think we're looking at potential endpoint for some of these systems.

• 27:53Speaker 02

  And yet, he keeps doing his research, hoping that it will be helpful. And so does Rebecca.

• 28:00Speaker 03

  I wouldn't be out here if I didn't have hope that what we're doing can make a difference.

• 28:06Speaker 02

  There are lots of people who are still trying to do something. There is a collaborative, large-scale program to try and rear sunflower sea stars in captivity and potentially reintroduce them to the ecosystem and restore a baseball star. The California State Government has partnered with nonprofits and commercial fishermen to try and clear urchins and restore kelp. There are researchers studying the genomes of sea stars that did recover from sea star wasting to see what could be learned about what made them resilient. And Rebecca has projects with a community science app called iNaturalist.

• 28:42Speaker 03

  I don't know if you know about iNaturalist.

• 28:44Speaker 02

  It basically lets people ID plants and animals. So anyone who goes to the tide pools can upload all the life forms they see. And those photos with locations and timestamps, they can help Rebecca and her team figure out how populations are changing or model the future of this ecosystem. And even potentially serve as a warning system if there are big die-offs again, so scientists can try and intervene earlier.

• 29:12Speaker 02

  As one researcher told me, no one person can protect marine ecosystems alone. But she at least takes heart in all the different people contributing to the effort. And Rebecca, for her part, wants to get as many people excited about the tide pools as she can.

• 29:30Speaker 03

  You're like, okay, well, here I am. How can I enjoy this place, teach other people about this place, bring people to this place so they love it and they can bear witness to that change?

• 29:42Speaker 02

  She brought me to her favorite place, Villar Point, to show me the nudibranch pool and the brittle stars and a clam that squirted a massive stream of water right at me. Just treasure after treasure.

• 29:56Speaker 03

  Not a rock, but look.

• 29:58Speaker 02

  Wait, it's not a rock?

• 29:59Speaker 03

  It's a sponge.

• 30:00Speaker 02

  It's a sponge?

• 30:01Speaker 03

  You feel it. It looks like a rock. I wish people...

• 30:05Speaker 02

  And when we spotted other tide pools, Rebecca brought over some nudibranchs to show them too.

• 30:09Speaker 03

  I couldn't resist picking them up to show you. They're amazing. So this is them out of water, their sea slug. That's gorgeous.

• 30:20Speaker 02

  Walking around with Rebecca, I felt the way I felt as a kid, just happy to be alive and outside.

• 30:26Speaker 03

  There's also a great blue heron hunting. Do you see it? It's like straight ahead of me.

• 30:32Speaker 02

  It made me realize that, right now, there are still brightly colored sea slugs up the coast of California.

• 30:41Speaker 03

  But also, we got some snails.

• 30:43Speaker 02

  There are still crabs and clams and urchins and sea stars. And we can still hold them in our hands.

• 30:51Speaker 03

  Oh, like, there's these tiny, tiny shells, like iridescent shells. And we've been just like walking across that. Yeah, I was walking right over it.

• 31:01Speaker 02

  We can still explore the tide pools and share them with each other.

• 31:05Speaker 03

  In the midst of climate change and like, a future that is going to be hotter and harder and more difficult for people, like, you have to have joy. And you have to just still have this quest to understand how things work.

• 31:26Speaker 03

  And how things are changing. And also being like, hey, what are the things we can do? What are the things that we have control over? Like, I struggle with it. I feel like marine systems especially are like pretty complicated to think about restoring, to think about like, what do you actually do out here?

• 31:50Speaker 03

  How do you protect things?

• 31:55Speaker 03

  But that's just like, you can't stop doing that because then you've kind of lost everything.

• 32:15Speaker 02

  Okay, I promised my editor that I would sit and think about the tide pools for a few minutes, so I'm gonna sit and

• 32:25Speaker 02

  I'm gonna sit and think.

• 32:46Speaker 02

  It's closer to 8:30.

• 32:50Speaker 02

  The sun has come up completely, but like, the weather is kind of gray. And I'm just sitting

• 32:58Speaker 02

  on like a rock that's sort of covered in iridescent algae, which is literally its name, but also it is quite iridescent.

• 33:16Speaker 02

  So, when I, okay, the camp I would go to every year,

• 33:21Speaker 02

  the camp that actually brought me out here, was um

• 33:26Speaker 02

  Kind of granola, like we would sing, we would sing a lot of songs around the campfire, like old classics. And there's this song that I feel like keeps coming to mind as I work on this story, which is, it's a song about like loving crawdads and like fishing for crawdads and everyone loves crawdads. And then at the end of the song, it just makes a sudden shift where they're suddenly singing about like,

• 33:57Speaker 02

  "What are you gonna do when the lake goes dry?" And the song repeats, it goes, "What are you gonna do when the lake goes dry? What are you gonna do when the lake goes dry? What are you gonna do when the lake goes dry?" "Sit on the bank and watch the crawdads die. What are you gonna do when the crawdads die? What are you gonna do when the crawdads die? What are you gonna do when the crawdads die? Sit on the bank until I cry."

• 34:26Speaker 02

  I don't know. As a kid, I was always like, "What the heck are these verses?" Like, this is such a fun song and now it's so sad.

• 34:41Speaker 02

  And now I'm just really glad those verses are in there, because yeah, I don't know. This is such a fun song,

• 34:51Speaker 02

  but it's also a little sad.

• 34:56Speaker 02

  Anyway, I found a hermit crab.

• 35:02Speaker 02

  Rebecca, look at this hermit crab.

• 35:07Speaker 02

  Like, look at the shell.

• 35:08Speaker 03

  Oh my gosh, the shell is amazing.

• 35:09Speaker 02

  What kind of shell is that?

• 35:11Speaker 03

  I think it's an Epitonium, it's called.

• 35:15Speaker 03

  It's all covered with coral and algae, so it would be like...

• 35:18Speaker 02

  Oh, that's why it's like...

• 35:25Speaker 05

  When the lake go dry. I said on the bank, what you gonna do? Honey, oh, baby.

• 35:36Speaker 05

  Tell my girl that three foot down, honey. Lord, Lord. Tell my girl that three foot down. Lord, Lord. Tell my girl that three foot down. I would tell more, but you ain't none of mine. Honey, oh, baby.

• 36:00Speaker 05

  Lord, Lord. What you gonna do when the lake go dry?

• 36:05Speaker 05

  Lord, Lord. What you gonna do when the lake go dry? I said on the bank, what you gonna do? Honey, oh, baby.

• 36:26Speaker 02

  If you want to contribute to Rebecca's iNaturalist project, please look up Snapshot Cow Coast. We will link to that in the description as well. Meanwhile, this episode was produced by me, Byrd Pinkerton. It was edited by Jorge Just with help from Meredith Hoddinott, Matt Collette, and Paige Vega. Noam Hassenfeld made the music. Christian Ayala did the mixing and the sound design. Kim Slaughterback checked our facts. Julia Longoria is the fact that some frogs have little spade-like feet that help them burrow. And I am always, always, always, always grateful to Brian Resnick for co-creating the show.

• 37:10Speaker 02

  Thanks also to Drew Harvell, Ashley Kidd, Lauren Schiblehut, Kylie Love, Nat Lowe, and Chloe Davis for taking the time to speak with me for this story. Thanks to Megan Ely for all her help in organizing things. And thank you forever to the late, great Michael Rossman and to Lee Temkin, who changed my life.

• 37:33Speaker 02

  The 1939 recording of the Krav Maga song that you heard was from the American Folklife Center. If you have an ecosystem that you love, someplace in the world that makes you happy to be alive, please tell us about it. Tell us why you love it. Tell us if it's changing. Write in. Send us a recording of it if you can. We are at [email protected]. If you want to support the show and help us keep making it, please join our membership program that is at vox.com/members. You can get ad-free podcasts, among other perks, and you also get unlimited access to Vox journalism. Also, if you sign up because

• 38:14Speaker 02

  you love Unexplainable, please tell our bosses. They love that for us. You can also support us by leaving us a nice review, perhaps, on your podcast platform of choice, or a rating, or just by telling people in your life to listen. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we're off next week for the holiday, but we'll be back in your feed on July 14.

• 38:56Noam Hassenfeld?

  Support for the show comes from Sonos. No matter how much you know about frequency response or harmonic distortion, the thing that's going to make you fall in love with a speaker is how it makes you feel. And Sonos has that it factor, you know? It's this seamless system that makes things sound good in every room. That obviously takes some serious engineering, but it also takes a big-picture understanding of how and why we actually listen to things. The birthday playlist, the new TV show, the exciting new game you just got. And for the nerds out there, Sonos does have amazing frequency response and extremely low harmonic distortion. Visit sonos.com and build your system. Sonos. Love the sound. Feel the system.

• 39:45Speaker 04

  At Edward Jones, we believe rich is more than caring about the latest and greatest. It's also taking care of what gives your life meaning. That's why your dedicated financial advisor meets you where you are, with personalized financial strategies that help protect what matters, so you can preserve your progress while creating a path forward. The key to being rich is knowing what counts. Let's find your rich, together. Edward Jones. Member SIPC.