(Conversation recorded on June 14th, 2024)
Show Summary
If plants are considered the lungs of the Earth, cycling CO2 into oxygen for animals to breathe, then animals act as the heart and arteries, spreading nutrients across the Earth to where it’s needed most.
This is the metaphor that today’s guest, conservation biologist Joe Roman, uses when describing his work studying how animals such as whales, otters, salmon, and midges provide vital ecosystem services, and how destruction of their populations – caused by modern industrial systems – affects the livability of the entire planet.
How has human activity drastically altered the balance and mass of species, and subsequently their ability to spread nutrients across the biosphere? What consequences must we face when biodiversity is diminished and nutrients are no longer dispersed as equally, leaving ecosystems with either extreme concentrations or scarcity of essential minerals, such as nitrogen and phosphorus? If we could “re-wild” diminishing species into their native habitats and aim for zero human-caused extinctions, how would this support a more resilient Earth for future generations of humans and animals alike?
About Joe Roman
Joe Roman is a conservation biologist, marine ecologist, and “editor ’n’ chef” of eattheinvaders.org. Winner of the Rachel Carson Environment Book Award for Listed: Dispatches from America’s Endangered Species Act, Roman has written for The New York Times, Science, Slate, and other publications. Coverage of his research has appeared in the New Yorker, Washington Post, NPR, BBC, and many other outlets. He is a fellow and writer in residence at the Gund Institute for Environment at the University of Vermont. His latest book is Eat, Poop, Die: How Animals Make Our World.
Show Notes & Links to Learn More
00:00 – Joe Roman Works + Info, Eat, Poop, Die, Eat The Invaders Blog
03:20 – Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge
06:10 – Midges in Iceland and their connection with the grasses and the sheep
07:11 – Nitrogen, Phosphorus
08:08 – Wild mammals are 4% of all biomass
09:28 – Chris Doughty, Global nutrient transport in a world of giants
09:33 – North American Pleistocene Megafauna
11:35 – Guano, Alexander von Humboldt
13:30 – Megafauna’s importance for long-range nutrient transfers
14:10 – High concentrations and deficiencies in nutrients across ecosystems
14:47 – Haber-Bosch
15:35 – Guano’s importance to agriculture in the 1800s
16:28 – Modern bat populations, bat guano
17:03 – White Nose Syndrome
17:26 – Decline of insect populations
18:10 – Humans use 30-40% of Net Primary Productivity
20:26 – Pee-cycle
20:49 – Night Soil
21:12 – Surtsey Island
26:07 – Ocean fish populations could swifty bounce back from overfishing
26:43 – It doesn’t take a lot to regenerate an ecosystem
27:05 – Denmark’s release of elephants in a nature preserve
28:27 – Intermediate Disturbance Hypothesis
30:15 – Importance of animals to a forest
31:45 – 70% drop in animal population since 1970 as of 2018
33:28 – Increase in whale populations
34:28 – Warming of ocean and effects on animal populations
35:21 – Lifting baselines to address the consequences of conservation success: Trends in Ecology & Evolution
36:42 – Whale Pump
37:17 – North Atlantic Right Whale
38:11 – Biological Pump
38:48 – Jim McCarthy
39:37 – Sir David King + TGS Episode
40:33 – Whales and carbon sequestration
42:33 – Lynx and Snowshoe Hare population links
43:24 – Daniel Pauly + TGS, Gill Oxygen Limitation Theory
44:11 – Whales need to eat 2-4% of their body weight in the summer and fast in the winter
48:52 – Aleutian Sea Otters and Nuclear Testing
49:18 – GreenPeace
50:44 – Trophic Rewilding
53:27 – Whale Fall Communities
55:15 – Plastic pollution, PFAS
55:52 – Rice’s Whale
56:33 – Everglades whale washed up killed due to a credit card sized piece of plastic
57:36 – Bird deaths from plastic consumption
1:02:30 – Velvet worm
1:04:32 – The White Tailed Deer is the most abundant species by biomass
1:06:47 – John Fullerton, Regenerative Economy
1:07:26 – Planetary Boundaries, Peak Phosphorus
1:09:14 – Cicada hatching and nitrogen/phosphorus nutrient flows
1:10:53 – 2021 Cicada hatching
1:11:21 – Change in views of cicada hatching
1:14:39 – Vermont amphibian road crossings
1:15:20 – Animal Underpasses and Overpasses, reductions in mortality
1:19:22 – Josh Farley + TGS Episode part 1 and 2, Ecosystem services: The economics debate
1:30:10 – Elevated human caused extinction levels
