https://youtu.be/xoIHtO0kooA

Transcript

Intro

When I was a kid, I remember my backyard was full of life. We had a little garden and a pond with some fish and bullfrogs. Every year the pond would fill up with tadpoles and the garden would fill up with monarch caterpillars.

I would have friends over and we'd stick our hands in the pond and let the tadpoles nibble at our fingers or we'd stick our hands in and try to scoop up a bunch of tadpoles in our hands.

I remember learning about butterflies in first grade. How these little caterpillars would eat and eat and eat and then build a chrysalis and go through a thing called metamorphosis to turn into a butterfly. Our classroom had one of those mesh cages full of monarch butterfly chrysalises and we'd come in every morning eager to check on how they were doing.

I was lucky. My parents are still together and they were very involved in me and my brother's school. They say it takes a village, and when me and my classmates started learning about metamorphosis, they chipped in to help by supplying chrysalises from our own garden.

But outside of school, I loved being able to spot one of these chubby, colorful little caterpillars in my own backyard and watch them throughout their life cycle.

My backyard had probably about 40 different species of plants and animals between all the weeds, ants, flowers, fish, frogs, and the occasional bunny. I think that inspired a curiosity in me:

How many species are there?

Is species a good measure of biodiversity?

What even is biodiversity?

Well, it's a broad topic to say the least, but biodiversity is what makes the Earth work. Biodiversity is what filters your water, it makes the weather, and it's carved and shaped the Earth for a period of time longer than we can really conceive of. I can't make you understand the entire topic of biodiversity.

I can't teach you 100%, but maybe I can teach you 1%.

Maybe by asking the question "what can 1% do?" we can begin to understand what the whole picture – what 100% – really looks like. So let's begin with a simple question.

What is a species?

To answer that, let's start by going back way before my childhood with a review of how we got to where we are today. We'll be looking for how we got here, but also any lessons that history can teach us about what makes the bio so diverse.

1% of History

They say it takes a village. In reality, it takes millions of years of geological activity, the right temperature, plenty of carbon, nitrogen, and potassium, and another few million years.

The Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, which is a lot to get through. If we just look at the last 1% of history, that doesn't even cover the latest geological era. So instead, let's take a look at the highlights, the 1%, if you will.

The good news is, you've probably learned this before – If not from school, then from Bill Wirtz.

Life began about 3.5 billion years ago as just genetic code or amino acids floating around in a bubble known as the cell membrane. These organisms just had their genetic code floating around wherever, willy-nilly.

About 2.2 billion years ago, some of these cells decided to clean up their room, and they stuffed all their genetic code into a nucleus: a ball with its own protective membrane.

These eukaryotes still had a problem. Their genetic code was still lame and boring, but they were just too tired to do anything about it. At some point, one of them drank an energy drink, now known as mitochondria, and that changed everything. Some eukaryotes didn't like the taste of mitochondria, they preferred the taste of cyanobacteria, which would later rebrand as chloroplasts.

Now, everyone knows that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell, but that's actually underselling it. In life, energy is everything, so acquiring a new cell part that can just pump out energy was more like an industrial revolution than just a simple power plant. With more energy, these cells could build and maintain a more complex genetic code.

That means they could do more complex things, like unionize!

These cells joined together to form multicellular organisms. Animal, plant, and fungus cells all decided that unionizing was pretty cool, and by about 560 million years ago, there were tons of different multicellular organisms with fundamentally different body plans. Here we can already see tons of actual, observable biodiversity. Animals, plants, and fungi all look radically different from each other, but there are also huge differences between individual species of animals, plants, and fungi.

Now remember, all of this is enabled by the mitochondria and chloroplasts that are providing the cells with energy. Unfortunately, a side effect of drinking mitochondria is that animal cells now have to do this pesky little thing called "breathing." Animal cells need oxygen to produce energy, which is known as respiration.

The good news is, the weather forecast shows there's a whole lot of oxygen coming up right about.. now!

[Old timey newsreel, complete with transatlantic accent]

It's the Cambrian explosion and things are getting wild!

All the animals are diversifying and getting much bigger!

Being bigger means it's easier to eat the things that are smaller!

All of this thanks to photosynthetic organisms that are transforming the atmosphere by pumping loads of oxygen into the air!

As another side effect, oxygen is clogging up the upper layers of the atmosphere with ozone, blocking the sun's UV radiation from reaching the Earth!

What happens next?

We'll just have to wait and see!

[End newsreel]

Plants and animals are abundant on land now, on account of the sun no longer being a deadly laser. It's been 140 million years, and now it's the plant's turn for the spotlight!

We have trees now! A single plant managed to colonize the land, and since then they've diversified wildly. Some of them got tired of elbowing their neighbors to compete for sunlight, and developed a plan that rock climbers would be proud of:

Just go up!

The Carboniferous Period is marked by an explosion of plants on land and abundant forests. Forests change the geology of a region by stabilizing the soil with their roots, and slowing erosion by catching rainfall with their leaves. Additionally, animals colonize the shady new environments formed by forest canopies, and mushrooms and bugs feed on leaf litter from trees and ferns to recycle nutrients throughout the system. Once again, here we see life sustaining other life and transforming the climate.

We've come a long way from life preferring to just proteins floating in a sack. Countless species have come and gone, but in order to bring in the age of the dinosaurs, we need to look at the largest mass extinction event of the Eon, the Permo-Triassic extinction event about 250 million years ago.

Volcanoes in Serbia erupted, and they flooded the oceans and atmosphere with toxic gases. Oceans acidified, global temperatures rose, and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increased by sixfold. These eruptions destroyed hundreds of species. Insects, land vertebrates, and marine species all decimated by 70 to 90 percent.

Here we see that in some cases life persists because of the climate, and in other cases life persists in spite of it. As a wise Jeff Goldblum once said, "Life, uh, finds a way."

Introducing the dinosaurs!

(Jurassic Park theme)

You know the dinosaurs.

After the last extinction event, the biosphere eventually recovered, and we got all kinds of plants and animals, most notably the dominance of the dinosaurs. Among tons of other life, we see the first appearance of early crabs, frogs, salamanders, and lizards.

Some dudes called the Cynodonts survived the last extinction event, but we'll come back to them in a second. Now, the last two extinction events – oh, yeah, we skipped this one, don't worry about it – the last two were caused by volcanic activity, so can you guess what the next one was caused by?

Wrong! Giant asteroid! Boom!

If you got that good for you, you're paying attention.

About 66 million years ago, an asteroid struck the Earth and killed all non-avian dinosaurs. The impact smothered plants and phytoplankton with a cloud of ash and dust that blocked out the sun for probably at least 10 years.

Most of the animals that did survive were lucky. Either their food chain depended on dead plants – which there were now a lot of – or they could go for a long time without eating, like crocodiles.

Remember the Cynodonts? Well, those sneaky little guys survived again, and now they're mammals! As the climate stabilizes, they take over as the dominant family on Earth, leading to primates, leading to humans.

From day one, humans are good at 3 things:

• Working together
• Killing things, and
• Not working together

Our large brains and our ability to work together is a large part of what has made us so successful. The time we live in now is a result of thousands of years of collaborating and iterating on top of previous generations.

But we've always been powerful and destructive. Even early humans were responsible for hunting species to extinction, and when we emigrated from Africa about 50,000 years ago, the fossil record shows most large animals start going extinct in our wake.

We were a large part of it, but we weren't the only ones to blame. After all, this was at the tail end of the Ice Ages. The Ice Ages weren't sudden enough to be considered a mass extinction event, but plants and animals did go extinct whenever they failed to outrun the warming and cooling of the Pleistocene.

Now that we're up to speed, what have we learned? Well, there are two main takeaways here to do with biodiversity:

First, climate is the most important factor that influences biodiversity. Large changes in the life on Earth were always preceded by large changes in the climate.

And second, life affects the climate. The relationship between life and the climate is not one way; plants and animals have both transformed the climate in unique ways, both locally and globally.

Got it? Cool. With all that settled... what the hell is a species?

1% of DNA

Surely defining species has something to do with DNA, right? Can a 1% change in DNA create a new species?

Humans share about 96% of our DNA with chimpanzees, one of our closest relatives. But, we also share about 60% of our DNA with bananas. With the way the evolution branches and species split off from one another, there's a ton of overlap in the genetic code between pretty much all life on Earth.

We're all remarkably similar. So to get at what's different, let's look at what's the same.

There's a lot of basic stuff that we all have in common that you might not think about. At its most basic, it's worth mentioning that all life on Earth is based on DNA. Every living thing uses the same genetic code to build itself – that's amino acids stored as DNA and RNA. Using genetic code as building blocks, everything from frogs to plants to humans share the same basic instructions for how cells divide, how to produce energy, and how to move resources and dispose of waste.

The genome that we share with our fellow animals includes a lot of developmental genes. An example of this is a study where the eye genes from different animals were placed on the embryo of a fruit fly. When the fly matured, it developed an eye at that location. And it was a fruit fly eye, not an eye from the donor animal. This was tested with squids and mice, neither of which have eyes that are remotely similar to the compound eyes of flies. And yet, there seems to be some universal "place an eye here" gene that causes squids, mice, and fruit flies all to develop their respective eyes at that location.

But clearly, not all species look the same, so what's the difference? What's going on when you change 1%?

You may have already pieced together that messing with DNA can have a few different effects. When it goes wrong, there are plenty of diseases and disorders that could be a result of a genetic mutation. Cystic fibrosis, Huntington's disease, and Alzheimer's all have a genetic factor to them.

Cancer is what happens when a cell's DNA changes in a way that it loses its constraints and begins to act in its own self-interest. After all, a cell's primary purpose is to reproduce, so by growing uncontrollably, it must be winning, right? No, obviously not. That cell only exists in the first place because it's part of a larger multicellular organism. An animal or a plant is a system that only works when all of its parts work together collaboratively. When a cell forgets that, it begins to leach resources from its host until the whole system collapses.

And yet, none of that answers our question. A person with cancer or a genetic disorder isn't a different species, so what else?

Another thing that minor changes in DNA can cause is just simply diversity. Every individual looks and acts slightly differently. You might have different color eyes than your parents, your arms are slightly longer, your nose is slightly sharper. It's not just physical attributes either. The way your body reacts to hormones is slightly different, you have a different blood type, you like different foods. All of this is a result of the fact that you're not a clone of your parents, you're a variation on their two genomes.

But you're not a different species from your parents, so what else?

The third thing that can happen from a change in DNA is speciation, or the creation of a new species. We're getting closer! Speciation depends on variation, it's the culmination of a bunch of different 1% changes in DNA across generations.

We learned earlier that climate is the most important factor that influences biodiversity, and that's because it's what drives speciation. In a word, speciation is specialization. Let's take an example.

The medium ground finch and warbler finch are related species. They became different species because the ground finch specializes in eating seeds with its larger, powerful beak. The warbler finch, on the other hand, specializes in eating insects with its longer, sharper beak. The traits and features that they have suit their environment, their climate, and the other animals that act as their competition.

It's like a person specializing into being an electrician versus being a cashier. Both jobs are important, but filling a more generic role like a cashier, you're going to have a lot more competition in the job market. Specializing into being an electrician or a historian or a pet trainer, you're going to have a lot less competition.

Similarly, if these birds filled a more generic role in their ecosystem, they would have a lot more competition. Instead, they do this one specific thing better than any other creature in its vicinity, and so they carve out an ecological niche.

Okay, so that's why speciation happens, but how did the DNA of those two species actually diverge?

That's a complicated subject with a bunch of complicated words like allopatric, peripatric, parapatric, and my friend Patrick. In the spirit of 1%, we're only gonna explain one of them here.

When a population gets large enough, it spreads out over more land. At a certain point, the outer edge of the population might be pushed out into an environment that's different than the one that the core population lives in.

The peripheral individuals, that is, the ones at the edge, reproduce with each other. Some of those offspring have mutations that suit their new environment, and those offspring are the ones that thrive. That's the basic principle of natural selection.

The split happens when the peripheral population mates with the core population, forming a new "middle ring" of hybrid individuals. These hybrids aren't well suited for the core environment or the peripheral environment, so they have a lesser chance of surviving. This middle band of the population dies out, at which point the core and peripheral populations are separated.

The two populations keep adapting to their respective environments, drifting further and further apart genetically. At some point, the two populations diverge enough that they can no longer reproduce with each other.

We now have two distinct species! Awesome!

So, for the last time, what is a species?

1% of Species

I swear, I'm going to define species, but... you'd be surprised at just how tricky it is to define. There are some that would even argue that "species" isn't a thing.

Part of the trouble with defining species is that nature doesn't really care about the lines we like to draw or the boxes we like to put things into. For example, the same species might exist in two wildly different parts of the planet, with lots of geographical separation. That might be two different populations, but it's not necessarily two different species. That can trip people up, including scientists.

A recent paper demonstrated that there can be plenty of variation within a single species that has mistakenly led to the discovery of new species:

We... find that geographic variation has resulted in the over-description of species... We emphasize that explicit tests for gene flow among populations are required to test species hypotheses. Without positive evidence for reproductive isolation, the null hypothesis of any researcher should be variation within a single species.

(Source: Chambers et al., 2025)

If you didn't catch that, that study also gives us a convenient way to define species. A species is generally defined by reproductive isolation. If there is gene flow between two populations, and two individuals from those populations can successfully produce offspring, then they are probably the same species. If you remember from speciation, the split doesn't happen just because those two populations become isolated. It happens when they evolve enough on their own and diverge enough that they can no longer produce offspring with each other.

So there we go! Twenty minutes later, we finally know what a species is!

But species is just the lowest part on a larger system that classifies all life on Earth. Or at least, you know, tries to.

I'm sure you already learned about the taxonomic rank system at some point. That's domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species. So the fun thing is, all these middle bits kind of don't matter. It's all wobbly anyway because... it's hard to draw lines around something that doesn't really care about your pencil. Nonetheless, let's look at a few examples to get an idea of how the taxonomic rank works. There are tens of thousands of species in beautiful Appalachia, so let's go find a few of them!

We got a southern magnolia!

So we've got ourselves a southern magnolia. How does that fit into the taxonomic rank? Well, at the bottom we have genus and species. Biologists use genus and species together to uniquely identify a species. So the scientific name of a southern magnolia is Magnolia grandiflora. That tells us the genus and species.

Moving up the tree, the southern magnolia is in the family Magnoliaceae, Order Magnoliales, Class Magnoliopsida, Phylum Streptophyta, Kingdom Plantae, and Domain Eukaryota.

Here are a few related species to give you an idea of how different species can be related at different levels. For example, look at the Tulip Poplar, which is in the same family of Magnoliaceae, but then the two species diverge at the genus level.

Let's take a look at a completely different species to show off more of the tree.

We have ourselves a good old white-tailed deer.

You can see that characteristic white tail, just a-waggin'.

We found a white-tailed deer, or Odocoileus virginianus.

It's in the family Cervidae, order Artiodactyla, class Mammalia, phylum Chordata, kingdom Animalia, and domain Eukaryota.

Once again, here are a couple related species. You'll notice orcas on there. Orcas are actually related to the white-tailed deer and the elk at the Artiodactyla order. That's because Artiodactyla is (roughly) an order of tetrapods, or four-legged animals, that have lost some, or in the orcas' case all, of their toes. Let's find one more!

We found a friend! Look at him! Look at the guy! Oh, that's so fun!

The Grey Ratsnake, or Pantherophis Spiloides, is of Family Colubridae, Order Squamata, Class Lepidosauria, Phylum Chordata, Kingdom Anamalia, and Domain Eukaryota.

Obviously, there's so much more to the tree of life. We don't have time to get into fungus or arthropods or mollusks, but this is already a lot of information. How do we make sense of all of it?

Well, we know that genus and species together will uniquely identify a species. On the other end, domain separates bacteria from larger organisms. Kingdom separates plants, animal, and fungi. And then phylum is arguably the last "useful" classification when looking at it from a top-down perspective.

Phylum is loosely related to the idea of a "bauplan." Bauplan can give us an idea of approximately how many types of creatures there are.

The word bauplan comes from a German word to essentially mean "blueprint" or "body plan". Some of the groups I mentioned just a minute ago, the arthropods and the mollusks, are examples of phyla. The idea is (roughly) that all the species within a given phylum are all just variations on the same fundamental body plan.

Each larger grouping of animals is tightly confined within an invariant body plan. Insects have six legs, spiders have eight legs, and crabs have ten. Our lineage arose from early four-legged amphibians, and we are stuck in that format as tetrapods. It seems that once a new developmental protocol, such as a three-parted body plan in insects, becomes established, it is virtually impossible to change.

Loss, of course, is another matter; Loss is easy and has occurred often. Many insects have lost their wings. Snakes have lost their legs, while dolphins transform theirs into flippers; but the basic body plan, what German-speaking zoologists called Bauplan, remains invariant.

(Source: Complexity: The evolution of Earth's biodiversity and the future of humanity)

The idea of a bauplan mainly applies to animals. You kind of can apply the idea to plants, but it refers to developmental biology. Plants don't have the same developmental process as animals and, as we saw earlier with DNA, animals, have a LOT of overlap in their developmental processes.

What's remarkable is that despite all the different kinds of creatures on Earth, all animals can be described with fewer than a hundred bauplans. One such bauplan is shared by all vertebrates. That means that trout, giraffe, turtles, and humans all share the same fundamental body plan. In some way, it kind of makes intuitive sense: They all have a spine and four limbs and a face with eyes and nose and a mouth in that arrangement.

But more than just comparing physical attributes, we can compare how these animals develop as embryos. For example, all vertebrates develop what's basically a fish kidney.. And then they do it again at a later stage of development! These are two organs called the pronophros and the mesonophros, and they quickly become reabsorbed as development continues. The mesonophoros becomes the actual kidney in fish and amphibians, but in birds, reptiles, and mammals they quickly atrophy when the real kidney develops.

But that's not it! Did you know that all vertebrates develop gills as embryos? In fish they finish fully developing into the gills, but in humans they mostly disappear.

"Ben, what do you mean mostly?" Well, I mean that all the slits on both sides disappear except for one. That one slit is what develops into your eardrum.

Once again, we're all remarkably similar.

We finally know what a species is, hooray! Now we can start to look at what 1% of species can do. But, like I mentioned earlier, nature doesn't seem to really care about our pencils. Every species crosses these lines to form unique relationships with the other creatures and plants that they share their home with.

Ants work with each other, and they aerate the soil for flowering plants, (slow breath) which are pollinated by bees who feed on the flowers, which are harmed by deer that trample plants as they migrate, and who in turn have their blood sucked by ticks, (quick breath) who are eaten by woodpeckers that help disperse the seeds for trees that they live in — trees whose nutrient intake is bolstered by fungus thanks to mycorrhizae, and then are decomposed by fungus when they eventually fall. (big breath) Slugs and snails eat the fungus, who are eaten by salamanders, whose eggs are eaten by fish who are caught by bears, who also help spread seeds (breath) for trees that have the soil aerated for them by worms that are eaten by birds.

The link between all life on Earth is a run-on sentence. It doesn't start, it doesn't end, and it goes in circles.

And here we begin to see a problem with the very premise of this video. By trying to look at just 1%, we begin to see all the strands that inextricably tie every living thing to every other living thing. We begin to see that they can't be isolated.

We begin to see that we are all remarkably... different. But the relationships we build are what keep everything going.

The relationships we build

(POV: You're on a date, Ben walks up and takes a seat across from you)

Hey, it's so good to see you! No, thanks for meeting me, I'm excited, this is fun! Sorry I was late, by the way, I was going down a rabbit hole, I was learning about some biodiversity stuff.

So you know how species are categorized, right? Yeah, taxonomic rank, yeah! So, kind of like that, the interactions between species can be put into some broad categories.

So, like, the most commonly known are mutualism, parasitism, competition, but there's also amensalism and commensalism. Those are some kind of weird ones, that's where one species is helped or harmed by the other and the other species is just entirely unaffected.

But kind of like the taxonomic rank, there's a lot of nuance to this structure that isn't really captured by these broad categories. Because there's different types of parasitism, right? There's these ticks that suck your blood, obviously, but there's also birds that will, like, lay their eggs in other birds' nests, and have those other birds raise those kids as their own.

There's also other types of mutualism, so there's those, you know those weird little shrimp that clean the teeth of sharks and stuff like that? That's obviously a mutualism, but there's also lichen, which is a symbiosis between fungus and algae.

Frankly, I think it's such a shame that there's just such a common misunderstanding of how flat the natural relationships are in the world. I hear so many people talking, like my buddy Patrick, about "survival of the fittest." But there's so much more to the nature than that! You don't have to be the best at everything to succeed in this world. You can just take resources from others while making them do all the work and call yourself a CEO!

Don't get me wrong, competition does make up a large part of, you know, the natural world, but like, the most consequential relationship that I can think of is a mutualistic one- it's mycorrhiza!

Sorry, mycorrhiza is a mutualistic relationship between a fungus and a plant. So the fungus grows on the roots of the plant and helps it with nutrient intake. The fungus provides the plant with nitrogen and phosphorus, and the plant gives back to the fungus, it gives back sugar so that it can stay alive. That relationship has been around since plants made it onto land, and it affects over 90% of land plants.

Not only that – mycorrhiza is so cool – these fungus also allow the plants to, like, send messages to each other. Plants have fungus internet! That's insane!

Ah, geez, I'm rambling again. I'm sorry, you should have stopped me. I haven't asked you a single question about yourself in all this time! So, what's something that your parents never gave you as a child that you now desperately crave as an adult?

Wait, no, come back!

(End date scene)

Finding a way to measure that complexity and put some kind of number to it is no easy task. We need some way to measure the health of an ecosystem so that we know what helps it and what hurts it.

One way to do that is by looking at interaction extinctions instead of species extinctions. In other words, we look at the roles that a species plays in its environment, the services that it provides to its ecosystem and its neighbors. Modeling shows that in many cases, the extinction of that interaction comes before the true extinction of the specieses [sic] involved in those interactions.

The point of this is that it really focuses on the practical effects and local context instead of just looking at simple population numbers. It's one thing to say, "Save the bees!" but it's more impactful to say, "Hey! The bees pollinate the plants that give you fruit and filter your water, so we need to make sure that they can keep doing that!"

There are about 47,000 species described as endangered by the IUCN. But, it should be clear by now that when one species goes extinct, it will affect everything else. When one species goes extinct, it's possible that other species will go extinct as a result. That's called co-extinction. Similarly, co-endangerment describes species that are at risk of extinction because they rely on another species that's listed as endangered.

An old 2004 study estimates that for every one species on the endangered list, there are 6,300 species that are co-endangered. Similarly, a 2018 study found that models that predict climate-driven extinction but that fail to account for species relationships often produce inaccurate and optimistic results.

Speaking of climate change, what's going on with that?

1% of Humans

One day I got the news that one of our family friends had sadly passed away. I was young enough that I wasn't really close to this person and, I don't know, I was 12? I didn't really understand death. But I went to my dad to ask where my mom was and he told me she was in the backyard.

I went out there, the sun was setting and I found her crouched by the milkweed crying. She was watching the caterpillars and one of them was emerging from its chrysalis. I hugged my mom, and that's all I really remember.

Humans have been around for way less than 1% of Earth's history, and we've only become dominant in the last 10,000 years or so. In that time, we've built the life you live today, for better or for worse.

We live in the Anthropocene, a period of Earth's history that is defined by humanity being a planetary force of change. Despite making up only 2.5% of animal biomass, we as a singular species have transformed the planet in a way that no other species has. We've put a man on the moon, we've cured diseases, we can build housing and grow food to support a population of 8 billion.

And with nearly every step of the way, with every great achievement of humanity, we've taken a step back from the world we were once a part of.

We're no longer subjected to the inconveniences of nature. We don't worry about the weather, we can just check our phones and plan ahead. We don't have to forage and hunt. Most of us don't even have to farm. We only touch a plant when we pick it up from the grocery store – and half the time then it's wrapped in plastic.

Nearly half a million square kilometers of earth are covered in buildings, pavement, and asphalt. That's 169 Rhode Islands or one California. All of this concrete is used to connect our communities while cutting us off from the ecosystems that they're built on top of. As a result of all this, odds are you live in an area that's considered nature deprived, especially if you're in the US and especially if you're not white.

I mean, we're told to make eco-friendly choices as consumers, but your life isn't really changed by choosing to buy organic or by throwing something into the trash instead of recycling. We don't generally get to see the effects that our choices have on the world.

But just because we're often detached as individuals doesn't mean we're isolated from the environment as a species. We like to think that we sit at the top of everything, but if it all comes tumbling down, that just means that we'll fall the hardest.

If we take a step in to get closer again, we can start to see those strands tying everything together.

I don't know if you knew this, but it says here in my notes: we live in the environment. Our entire way of life and our economy is tied to nature. Agriculture doesn't happen without a healthy ecosystem of pollinators, we don't have clean drinking water without healthy soil. Heck, my home state of Florida would just get washed away by hurricanes if it weren't for the mangroves to buffer the storms.

Megacorporations and your legislators know exactly how valuable nature is. Nature's "Ecosystem Services" has a hell of a track list. Pollination, water filtration, land stabilization and storm buffers, not to mention all the things it literally produces like wood, minerals, livestock and fish. And it does all of these for free. If we try to put a monetary value on this, it consistently turns out to be twice the global GDP.

Tony Juniper, in his book What Has Nature Ever Done For Us, talks about evaluating the financial cost of the damage we do to our environment. In 2008 alone, 3,000 companies in the top 1% of the world got effectively a $2 trillion subsidy for damaging our oceans and forests. A lot of the top companies in the world wouldn't be profitable if they had to not set forests on fire. They get to damage our natural environments because it's too expensive to make their products responsibly, and because so far we haven't stopped them.

All this to say, we are entirely connected to and dependent on nature, but it's hard to care about the financials. What about the tadpoles and bunnies and ants in your own backyard? What happens if we take another step closer in?

A closer look

Conclusion

I don't really see any monarch butterflies anymore. I've talked with friends and, like me, they remember flocks of them around when we were kids, but they don't really see them around anymore either.

The monarch butterfly population has plummeted over 95% in the last 40 years. In 1985, there were 10 million, and today there are a few hundred thousand.

They are arguably, effectively extinct, and odds are that we're largely to blame for that. It may have been habitat loss, or the pesticides, or the warmer seasons, but... we're in the Anthropocene. We have a hand in all of it.

We've been mindlessly tugging at these threads, never really understanding how our actions relate to the world around us. But the relationships we build are what keep everything going.

Like our relationships, biodiversity is complicated, it's messy. It's taken me this long to explain just 1%. But this isn't just a story about connection to nature, it's a story about connection. They say it takes a village, but who or what does your village not include?

Do you consider yourself a neighbor to the ants?

To the trees?

To the ducks and fish and turtles?

When God sings with all his creations, will not a turtle be part of the choir?

But just because we're all remarkably different doesn't mean we're not all remarkably similar.

It's so easy today to feel isolated and alone, like the effects you have on the world are miniscule. But the entire history of the planet shows us that your 1% that you contribute cannot be isolated from the other 99%.

They say it takes a village. But from you, all it takes is 1%.

Attributions

B-roll

• Florida Springs footage courtesey of Joseph Ricketts (@josephrickettsphoto)

Music

• swing - GINO DADA (Pixabay Content License)
• Smokey's Lounge - TrackTribe (YouTube Audio Library License)
• Chimes - 808xri (Pixabay Content License)
• Half Past Murder Time - kjartan_abel (CC BY 4.0)
• Jazzy Lounge - Schwarzborg (Pixabay Content License)
• Funky Heatwave - Brotheration Records (Pixabay Content License)
• Simple Step - Slenderbeats (YouTube Audio Library License)
• chill background music - ZHRØ (CC BY 4.0)
• Late Night Radio - Kevin MacLeod (CC BY 4.0)
• Crinoline Dreams - Kevin MacLeod (CC BY 4.0)
• Gonna Be Gone - kjartan_abel (CC BY 4.0)
• Brazilian Bossa Nova Jazz Acoustic Guitar Podcast Music - Denis Pavlov (Pixabay Content License)
• Last Night in March - HD-Studio (Pixabay Content License)
• Hard Boiled - Kevin MacLeod (CC BY 4.0)
• Lobby Time - Kevin MacLeod (CC BY 4.0)
• Night on the Docks - Kevin MacLeod (CC BY 4.0)
• Candy Apple Town - National Sweetheart (YouTube Audio Library License)
• Angel Share - Kevin MacLeod (CC BY 4.0)

Video credits

Ben Rankin - Writing, research, host, editing, graphics

Alexis Parson - Writing, Camera

Logan Bailey - Camera, Editing, Narration

Hannah Ditzler - Interviewee

Joseph Ricketts - Interviewee

Simone Schuster - Interviewee

Special thanks: Amanda Dyar, Gaige Benkert, David Crompton, Laura Eye, Chattanooga Zoo, Reflection Riding Arboretum & Nature Center, Carving Rock Kitchen, Chattanooga Public Library

References

• Burger, W. C. (2016). Complexity: The evolution of Earth’s biodiversity and the future of humanity. Prometheus Books.
• Chambers, E. A., Lara-Tufiño, J. D., Campillo-García, G., Cisneros-Bernal, A. Y., Dudek, D. J., León-Règagnon, V., Townsend, J. H., Flores-Villela, O., & Hillis, D. M. (2025). Distinguishing species boundaries from geographic variation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 122(19), e2423688122. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2423688122
• Clarkson, M. O., Kasemann, S. A., Wood, R. A., Lenton, T. M., Daines, S. J., Richoz, S., Ohnemueller, F., Meixner, A., Poulton, S. W., & Tipper, E. T. (2015). Ocean acidification and the Permo-Triassic mass extinction. Science, 348(6231), 229–232. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaa0193
• Costanza, R., de Groot, R., Sutton, P., van der Ploeg, S., Anderson, S. J., Kubiszewski, I., Farber, S., & Turner, R. K. (2014). Changes in the global value of ecosystem services. Global Environmental Change, 26, 152–158. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2014.04.002
• Crone, E. E., & Schultz, C. B. (2021). Resilience or Catastrophe? A possible state change for monarch butterflies in western North America. Ecology Letters, 24(8), 1533–1538. https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.13816
• Development of the Mesonephric Kidney. (2003). In K. Sainio, The Kidney (pp. 75–86). Elsevier. https://doi.org/10.1016/b978-012722441-1/50008-7
• Health (US), N. I. of, & Study, B. S. C. (2007). Understanding Human Genetic Variation. In NIH Curriculum Supplement Series [Internet]. National Institutes of Health (US). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK20363/
• IEA. (2023, February 22). The world’s top 1% of emitters produce over 1000 times more CO2 than the bottom 1% – Analysis. IEA. https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-world-s-top-1-of-emitters-produce-over-1000-times-more-co2-than-the-bottom-1
• IUCN. (n.d.). The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Retrieved August 5, 2025, from https://www.iucnredlist.org/en
• IUCN. (2025, March 27). IUCN Red List version 2025-1. https://nc.iucnredlist.org/redlist/content/attachment_files/2025-1_RL_Table_1a.pdf
• Judd, E. J., Tierney, J. E., Lunt, D. J., Montañez, I. P., Huber, B. T., Wing, S. L., & Valdes, P. J. (2024). A 485-million-year history of Earth’s surface temperature. Science, 385(6715), eadk3705. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adk3705
• Juniper, T. (with Charles, H. P.). (2018). What Has Nature Ever Done for Us? How Money Really Does Grow On Trees. Synergetic Press.
• Kuang, W. (2019). Mapping global impervious surface area and green space within urban environments. Science China Earth Sciences, 62(10), 1591–1606. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11430-018-9342-3
• Mankikar, D. (2010). Universal Ownership: Why Environmental Externalities Matter to Institutional Investors (SSRN Scholarly Paper No. 2222753). Social Science Research Network. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2222753
• Pfizer. (n.d.). How Genetically Related Are We to Bananas? Retrieved August 5, 2025, from https://www.pfizer.com/news/articles/how_genetically_related_are_we_to_bananas
• Ritchie, H. (2019). Humans make up just 0.01% of Earth’s life—What’s the rest? Our World in Data. https://ourworldindata.org/life-on-earth
• Romer, A. S., & Parsons, T. S. (1978). The vertebrate body (5th ed., shorter version). Saunders.
• Rowland-Shea, J., Doshi, S., Edberg, S., & Fanger, R. (2020). The Nature Gap: Confronting Racial and Economic Disparities in the Destruction and Protection of Nature in America. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-nature-gap/
• Schultz, C. B., Brown, L. M., Pelton, E., & Crone, E. E. (2017). Citizen science monitoring demonstrates dramatic declines of monarch butterflies in western North America. Biological Conservation, 214, 343–346. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2017.08.019
• Spicer, J. (2012). Biodiversity: A Beginner’’s Guide. Oneworld Publications.
• Strona, G., & Bradshaw, C. J. A. (2018). Co-extinctions annihilate planetary life during extreme environmental change. Scientific Reports, 8(1), 16724. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-35068-1
• Tomarev, S. I., Callaerts, P., Kos, L., Zinovieva, R., Halder, G., Gehring, W., & Piatigorsky, J. (1997). Squid Pax-6 and eye development. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 94(6), 2421–2426. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.94.6.2421
• Valiente-Banuet, A., Aizen, M. A., Alcántara, J. M., Arroyo, J., Cocucci, A., Galetti, M., García, M. B., García, D., Gómez, J. M., Jordano, P., Medel, R., Navarro, L., Obeso, J. R., Oviedo, R., Ramírez, N., Rey, P. J., Traveset, A., Verdú, M., & Zamora, R. (2015). Beyond species loss: The extinction of ecological interactions in a changing world. Functional Ecology, 29(3), 299–307. https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2435.12356
• Willmore, K. E. (2012). The Body Plan Concept and Its Centrality in Evo-Devo. Evolution: Education and Outreach, 5(2), Article 2. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12052-012-0424-z
• Wu, Y., Chu, D., Tong, J., Song, H., Dal Corso, J., Wignall, P. B., Song, H., Du, Y., & Cui, Y. (2021). Six-fold increase of atmospheric pCO2 during the Permian–Triassic mass extinction. Nature Communications, 12(1), 2137. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-22298-7
• Zylstra, E. R., Ries, L., Neupane, N., Saunders, S. P., Ramírez, M. I., Rendón-Salinas, E., Oberhauser, K. S., Farr, M. T., & Zipkin, E. F. (2021). Changes in climate drive recent monarch butterfly dynamics. Nature Ecology & Evolution, 5(10), 1441–1452. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-021-01504-1

https://youtube.com/shorts/zNcwfF3wXOQ

Transcript

• The Great Barrier Reef is the largest living structure in the world, spanning 1,400 miles of Australian coast and roughly the equivalent area of Japan. But how did it come to be that way?

• Coral are an ancient animal, they've played a role in shaping coastal seabeds for about 500 million years (Zuravlev, 2001; Lee et al., 2015) -- they're older than trees and they're older than sharks!

• Coral are really a collection of a bunch of individual coral polyps that each help build up the reef.

• SHANE: Basically, coral will suck water into their stomachs, push out all the water and the things in that water that they don't need… except for… calcium and carbonate…and when the ions are squeezed together under their tissue, and all the water squeezed out, it creates a really thin layer of rock underneath it

• Over time, that rock base builds into the reef structures that we see today.

• Going back in time, just before we see apes evolve, the continent that Australia is on finally shifts northward enough to have a tropical climate that can support coral reefs. Thus, the Great Barrier Reef begins about 20 million years ago (Hamylton et al. 2022, pp. 104-107).

• But, it wasn't until about 600,000 years ago that we start to see the reef structures that form the Great Barrier Reef today.

• You see, it's not actually all one reef. Today, the Great Barrier reef is a system made up of over 2,900 individual reefs (Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, 2006). It's not just one huge neighborhood, it's more like a city made up of a bunch of different neighborhoods.

• As sea levels changed during the Ice Age, the Great Barrier Reef tried to keep up and follow the coastline as it moved, but it wasn't always able to and so the reef died out (Hamylton et al., 2022, pp. 124-130).

• The reef we see today started growing around 8,500-9,000 years ago. It was able to build on top of the old structures made by the ancient reefs that were there thousands of years earlier (Hamylton et al., 2022, pp. 124-130; Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, 2006).

• Together, they build a layered cake of chalk that's thousands of years old and still being built today!

• That's the story of why --

References

Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority. (2006). Reef Facts for Tour Guides. Australian Government.

Hamylton, S. M., Hutchings, P., & Ove Hoegh-Guldberg. (2022). Coral Reefs of Australia. CSIRO PUBLISHING.

Lee, J.-H., Chen, J., & Chough, S. K. (2015). The middle–late Cambrian reef transition and related geological events: A review and new view. Earth-Science Reviews, 145, 66–84. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.earscirev.2015.03.002

Strauss, B. (2025, May 14). Prehistoric Life During the Miocene Epoch. ThoughtCo. https://www.thoughtco.com/the-miocene-epoch-1091366

ŽuravlevA. J. (2001). The ecology of the Cambrian radiation. Columbia Univ. Press.

https://youtube.com/shorts/UHB-Kv4LFiY

Transcript

I have some great news! IVF for coral works!

Coral spawning season occurs in late summer, around August, and usually happens a few days after the full moon, but since 2016 coral have had some help from scientists during spawning season!

IVF stands for "in vitro fertilization," and for coral that means taking coral spawn and either fertilizing them in a lab or putting them in pools like these to promote reproduction. Once the offspring are released and attached to the reef, these younger IVF-bred coral are far more resilient to climate change!

There was a huge marine heat wave in the Caribbean in 2023, and the bad news is that about three-quarters of the native colonies of coral were bleached or paled. You see, coral is a symbiotic organism and it gets most of its nutrients (and its color) from algae that live within it, called "zooxanthellae." When a coral is stressed -- say by extreme temperatures -- it might get rid of that algae. And that's what bleaching and paling is.

But 90% of these younger, IVF-bred coral were totally fine! We don't know why yet, but one of the theories is that these younger coral are more exploratory, and they'll try different types of algae, some of which are more heat resistant.

Not only that, but we know that these IVF coral can reproduce in the wild -- because they did for the first time in 2021 in the Great Barrier Reef!

IVF is just one of several ways that scientists have found to help protect and repopulate our threatened coral populations, and it's great to hear that it's working just swimmingly!

If you'd like to learn more about coral restoration, check out my full length video on YouTube, and follow for more cool science!

https://youtu.be/J4mePLG67qs

Transcript

Intro

I'm gonna get the bad news out of the way first so the rest of this video can be fun. I'll be quick, I swear, put 30 seconds on the clock!

Coral are bleaching and dying at an alarming rate due to pollution, warming oceans, and ocean acidification. We've lost about 50% of coral by area since the 1950s, and species extinctions are happening far faster than the natural rate.

While it's a complicated subject, let me be clear: there is no doubt that human activity is largely to blame for these trends.
But that's not news, and that's not what I want to talk about today. I'm going to talk with some of the people who are actually doing something about it, and I want to share some of the cool science that's going into their work to make it happen. So let's get started.

Definitions

Coral are neat little guys because they're not really 1 thing? They look like some weird cross between an animal, a rock, and a plant. And that's 'cause that's exactly what they are!

Coral is made of 3 parts: an animal, a rock, and a plant. The coral animal is a cnidarian, meaning it's related to sea anemones and jellyfish. The animal part is just the jelly-y bit on the outside.

The coral animal builds up mineral and rock to form a skeleton for itself, and that ultimately forms the solid foundation of the entire reef.

For the last part, tiny photosynthetic algae called "zooxanthellae" live inside the coral animal.

They're only… kind of? plants? But what's important is that they photosynthesize, and that ends up providing energy to the coral animal. The zooxanthellae are what give coral their color, and they could give you 32 points in Scrabble even without a double word square wink.

Sexual reproduction

Coral can reproduce in a bunch of different ways, which gives restoration scientists a lot to work with. But most importantly they can reproduce asexually or they can reproduce… sexually. Follow me ;)

Asexual reproduction is awesome! It means that coral can reproduce without sex! There are several ways they can do this, but the most useful to restoration scientists is fragmentation. I talked with Shane Wever from Reef Renewal USA about what that means.

BEN: Shane is the restoration program director for the upper keys. Reef Renewal has been building out coral nurseries and replanting coral for about 5 years now.

BEN: But what does that work look like?

Well a lot of it is diving! They'll carefully break or saw off pieces of coral and then bring those to the nurseries. The nurseries are where the fragmented coral are grown, and Reef Renewal USA's workers or community volunteers will keep a close eye on them.

Shane told me about 2 different types of nurseries that they use

BEN: The PVC trees are exactly what they sound like -- they're tree-shaped structures made of PVC piping. There are two types of these.

BEN: But that's a more traditional approach. The Vertical Rope Nurseries, or VERNs are being used more commonly these days

BEN: What's really cool about these VERNs is that they're able to move with the tides and waves! That's also why they're often preferred over the trees: The PVC trees might break during a storm or rough waters, but the VERNs will move with the water and help buffer out that stress

BEN: Coral restoration isn't easy work -- there are lots of early mornings, long days of diving, and you're kind of fighting against the environment

BEN: On top of the weather, there's also diseases, parasites, and…

BEN: Wait, what's a bleaching event?

Remember the zooxanthellae? The algae that give coral its color? When coral get stressed, they'll get rid of their zooxanthellae. And that's. Bad.

BEN: Yeah, not good. Coral bleaching won't immediately kill the coral, but it will kill them pretty quickly if the stress continues.

The 2023 marine heat wave in the Caribbean was really bad – some coastal temperature sensors reported water temperatures reaching 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

BEN: It can be a tough job, with climate change seemingly working against you. But these guys don't give up.

Sexual reproduction

BEN: Part of the problem with fragmentation is that the offspring don't have any genetic diversity. The new coral are clones of the old ones. You can expect them to perform about as well as the parent coral! The problem is, with the changing climate, the parent coral might not be doing so well.

BEN: That's Hannah Ditzler. She's on the research team for SECORE international.

BEN: SECORE is an organization that's taking a different approach. SECORE literally stands for "sexual coral reproduction," and that's exactly what they're doing.

BEN: This method allows for genetic diversity, and that might give these young coral a better chance at surviving different stressful events.

As a matter of fact, SECORE published a study just last year showing that their IVF-bred coral were far more resilient in the 2023 Caribbean marine heat wave!

I asked Hannah to tell me the story of coming to these findings

BEN: So how does this technique differ from using fragmentation?

Well, fragmentation is pretty simple -- you break off a piece, plant it, and wait for it to grow. Assisted sexual reproduction is a lot more complex, but let's break it down into 4 main phases: Collection, Larvae, Attachment, and Planting -- or CLAP!

applause

FANCY BEN: Oh, thank you so much! Thank you!

BEN: In the collection phase, scientists are monitoring the reefs and can predict roughly when the coral will reproduce.

BEN: These scientists will go out on the water in the middle of the night to monitor for the synchronous spawning event, and when it finally happens, they'll be out there with nets and other equipment to collect the gametes

BEN: Once that's collected, we move onto the Larvae phase. The gametes are mixed together to allow them to fertilize, and then when the eggs hatch, the larvae are put back out in the ocean in what are called CRIBs

BEN: After that, it's more waiting and monitoring development. Part of what they're looking at is the fertilization rate.

BEN: When the larvae get old enough, they turn into planulae. During this phase of their development, they start looking for a place to settle, bringing us to the Attachment phase.

BEN: The planulae are looking for a hard surface to attach to. At this point, they're still in captivity, but they'll settle on a substrate and start growing into the animal/rock/plant combo we all know and love!

After more waiting and monitoring, these new recruits will be ready to outplant

BEN: This technique does come with its own unique challenges and drawbacks

BEN: So in summary: Asexual reproduction is simple and well-proven. It can be done at-scale and it restores biomass quickly, BUT all the new coral are clones. Sexual reproduction is complicated and it takes a long time, but it can also be done at-scale and it's able to restore genetic diversity.

Looking forward

So what does the future look like? Well, there is a lot to be concerned about, but there is a lot of hope.

We're still losing coral, but the rate has slowed down a lot in the last 20 years.

We also got some really good news in 2021, when we saw these IVF-bred coral reproduce on for the first time on their own in the wild.

BEN: With all the good and the bad, how do our experts feel about the fate of coral?

BEN: So the future depends on us, it depends on you. We need to be funding science -- if governments won't do it, we need to be helping with volunteering and fundraising. Shane talked about community-building, getting your local community to care about the local environment and to care for it.

But also… governments do need to be doing it -- contact your representatives and make sure they support funding science foundations. I'm gonna leave a link to 5calls.org in the description below. They make it really easy to contact your representative about about specific issues.

There's so much work being done, and like Shane and Hannah said, we really need to keep it going. I'm really excited to see what we can do together moving forward!

If you'd like to learn more or get involved, there are plenty of organizations in the US to donate to or volunteer with. YOU can be the one to go out on the reefs, dive, and plant new coral, that's so freaking cool! I'll link a few of these organizations in the description below.

Outro

Thank you so much for watching! I had a blast working on this video getting to talk with these experts who are clearly so passionate about what they do. Huge thank you to the teams at SECORE, Reef Renewal USA, and the Tennessee Aquarium for being so generous with their time.

If you'd like to see more of this, you can support me in all the usual ways - like, comment, subscribe - OR you can join my brand new Patreon! I'm launching my Patreon with this video, which can get you early access to videos, a look behind the scenes, and occasionally blog posts about just my video creation process and what I'm working on at the time. Contributions start at $1 a month, and every little bit really does help.

But that's enough of a sales pitch! The link for that is below, along with links to the full transcript and bibliography. Thank you again so much for watching, and I'll see ya in the next one!

Attributions

B-roll

• Diver in coral: Jackdrafahi/Pixabay (Pixabay Content License)

• RRUSA 2025: Reef Renewal USA/YouTube (Used with permission)

• Coral VERN close-ups/boat drone shot: South Florida Reporter/YouTube (Standard YouTube License)

• CRIB footage: Reef Patrol/SECORE (Used with permission)

• Fish swimming on reef footage: Reef Patrol/SECORE (Used with permission)

• Coral reef flyover: RomanDiesel/Pixabay (Pixabay Content License)

• Fish on coral reef: Jackdrafahi/Pixabay (Pixabay Content License)

• Crowd walking stock footage: AlexKopeykin/Pixabay (Pixabay Content License)

• Ocean full of trash: Engin_Akyurt/Pixabay (Pixabay Content License)

• Woman swimming: Aiky82/Pixabay (Pixabay Content License)

• Coral bleaching: Frost Science/YouTube (Standard YouTube License)

• Coral spawning and nursery footage: Shane Wever (Used with permission)

Music

• Russian River: Dan Henic/YouTube Audio Library (YouTube Audio Library License)

• Gonna be gone: Kjartan Abel/freesound (CC BY 4.0)

• chill background music: ZHRØ/Freesound (CC BY 4.0)

• Simple step: Slenderbeats/YouTube Audio Library (YouTube Audio Library License)

• Half Past Murder Time: Kjartan Abel/freesound (CC BY 4.0)

• High noon: TrackTribe/YouTube Audio Library (YouTube Audio Library License)

• Background music: ZHRØ/Freesound (CC BY 4.0)

• Mysterious Things: kjartan_abel/Freesound (CC BY 4.0)

• April Showers music: kjartan_abel/Freesound (CC BY 4.0)

• Mood ring: National Sweetheart/YouTube Audio Library (YouTube Audio Library License)

• Candy Apple Town: National Sweetheart/YouTube Audio Library (YouTube Audio Library License)

Video credits

• Ben Rankin (Host, research, writing, editing, graphics)

• Amanda Dyar (Camera, script review, video review, special thanks)

• David Crompton (Fact checking)

• Shane Wever (Interviewee, Reef Renewal USA)

• Hannah Ditzler (Interviewee, SECORE International)

• Caden McGee (Video review)

• Austin Lord (Video review)

References

Coral Diseases & Health Consortium. (n.d.). Coral Reproduction. Coral Disease & Health Consortium. https://cdhc.noaa.gov/coral-biology/coral-reproduction/

Eddy, T. D., Lam, V. W. Y., Reygondeau, G., Cisneros-Montemayor, A. M., Greer, K., Palomares, M. L. D., Bruno, J. F., Ota, Y., & Cheung, W. W. L. (2021). Global decline in capacity of coral reefs to provide ecosystem services. One Earth, 4(9), 1278–1285.

Goreau, T. J. F., & Hayes, R. L. (2024). 2023 Record marine heat waves: coral reef bleaching HotSpot maps reveal global sea surface temperature extremes, coral mortality, and ocean circulation changes. Oxford Open Climate Change, 4(1). https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfclm/kgae005

Harrison, P. L., dela Cruz, D. W., Cameron, K. A., & Cabaitan, P. C. (2021). Increased Coral Larval Supply Enhances Recruitment for Coral and Fish Habitat Restoration. Frontiers in Marine Science, 8. https://doi.org/10.3389/fmars.2021.750210

Miller, M. W., Mendoza Quiroz, S., Lachs, L., Banaszak, A. T., Chamberland, V. F., Guest, J. R., Gutting, A. N., Latijnhouwers, K. R. W., Sellares-Blasco, R. I., Virdis, F., Villalpando, M. F., & Petersen, D. (2024). Assisted sexual coral recruits show high thermal tolerance to the 2023 Caribbean mass bleaching event. PLOS ONE, 19(9), e0309719. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0309719

NOAA NESDIS. (2023, August 18). Extreme Ocean Temperatures Are Affecting Florida’s Coral Reef. National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service. https://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/news/extreme-ocean-temperatures-are-affecting-floridas-coral-reef

Thirukanthan, C. S., Azra, M. N., Lananan, F., Sara’, G., Grinfelde, I., Rudovica, V., Vincevica-Gaile, Z., & Burlakovs, J. (2023). The Evolution of Coral Reef under Changing Climate: A Scientometric Review. Animals, 13(5), 949. https://doi.org/10.3390/ani13050949

https://youtu.be/neR4ZuuCywE

Transcript

Intro

It's been said that every piece of plastic that's ever been produced still exists. In your home. In an office. On the side of a highway. Neighborhood streets. In rivers that lead to the ocean.

And while it's basically impossible to really verify that claim, scientists estimate that of the 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic that we've produced, 6.3 billion metric tons have ended up as waste. About 9% of that has been recycled, but the rest has been incinerated or just discarded (Geyer et al., 2017)

We've known that this is a problem for a while now, but we're only just starting to realize how much of a problem it is. See, because you and I, we're thinking of straws in turtles' noses and seagulls choking on plastic rings, but there's a more alarming side to the plastic pollution epidemic, and it's reached every corner of the earth.

From your home to remote forests, from the top of mount Everest to the bottom of the Mariana trench, we're finding them everywhere: microplastics

What are microplastics?

To know what we're up against, we first have to define them. So what are microplastics?

Microplastics are any piece of plastic that are between 5 millimeters and 1 micrometer in size. So we're talking on the scale of anything from a pencil eraser down to smaller than a human hair.

Technically, any piece of plastic smaller than 1 micrometer is a nanoplastic, but for the sake of this video, we'll just consider anything less than 5 millimeters a microplastic.

And that's kind of a whole thing -- because we've known about microplastics for a while now, but a lot of research and studies are still pretty new, so a lot of standards and definitions haven't been defined yet.

There is, however, a broad distinction between "primary" and "secondary" microplastics.

Primary microplastics are made to be microplastics. Most commonly, this is used in industrial air blasting. A bunch of tiny microbeads are added to the air to increase scrubbing power. But until the mid 2010s, microplastics were added to your toothpaste as well for the same reason -- mixing in a bunch of microbeads into toothpaste makes it more abrasive and helps scrub your teeth clean.

As a matter of fact, 9 out of 10 cosmetic products have microplastics in them -- shaving cream, hair care, lotions, facial scrubs -- you name it! They don't just increase scrubbing power: small, round, squishy microplastics are mixed in with gels and lotions to make them feel smoother (Plastic Soup Foundation, 2022; Simon, 2022).

Secondary microplastics aren't intentionally small, they're just pieces of larger plastic products that have broken down. Plastic bags, bottles, and packaging shed pieces of themselves as flakes or strands, and then they just… don't go away.

An odyssey of microplastics

And that's the problem. Plastics are bioresistent and biopersistent, meaning there are very few natural processes that degrade plastics

When you try to break it apart, it's like a Minecraft slime: it just breaks into smaller and smaller pieces of itself.

And as they break apart into smaller and smaller pieces, they're tumbling through their environment and they're collecting whatever pathogens and pollutants are there. Like a snowball rolling down a hill, the longer a piece of microplastic tumbles through its environment, the more crap it collects (Enyoh et al., 2019; Simon, 2022).

Scientists have found that microplastic pollution accumulates a wide variety of things: pharmaceuticals like ibuprofen, heavy metals like lead and mercury, and forever chemicals like PFASs. It's such a thriving little cocktail of bad chemicals and microbes that scientists have coined the term "plastisphere" to describe the microbiome that builds on plastic (Picó et al., 2020; Simon, 2022).

A salad full of glitter and plastic

After tumbling through the environment and collecting a bunch of pollutants, microplastic pollution most commonly ends up in our waterways and the ocean, where it then infiltrates the food chain.

In the ocean, phytoplankton form the base of the food chain. Phytoplankton are tiny organisms that photosynthesize like plants to get their energy. Primary consumers like small fish and crustaceans eat the phytoplankton and then predators like larger fish eat the smaller fish and crustaceans.

The problem is that the primary consumers will confuse microplastics for phytoplankton and eat those instead

The first problem with that is that the plastic obviously doesn't have any nutritional value, but it makes them feel full. It's like eating a salad that's partially glitter and plastic beads. It may fill you up quicker, but the plastic will just go right through you. We see fish that eat plastic don't end up growing as large as they should (Simon, 2022)

The second problem is that they're eating a salad full of glitter and plastic beads. It may look pretty, but it's certainly not good for you, especially after those microplastics have accumulated all those chemicals and pollutants that we talked about earlier.

And the third problem is that microplastics entering the lowest point in the food chain work their way up to the highest point. Not only have scientists found plastic in baby fish (Gove et al., 2019) -- which can stunt their growth or flat out kill them -- but we've found them in the excrement and digestive tracts of larger predators, including whales and walruses in the arctic (Carlsson et al., 2021; Lusher et al., 2015).

A concerning picture

But you might be eating your own glitter and plastic bead salad. So much food, including produce from grocery stores and supermarkets, is wrapped in plastic. We know that microplastics get into food through plastic packaging. That is, if it hasn't already been contaminated during its production (Kosuth et al., 2018). This "clean" plastic hasn't had the time to accumulate a plastisphere like plastic pollution, but it can still be problematic because of the chemicals they're made from.

I want to give a disclaimer here: we don't really know the full effects that plastics and microplastics have on our health yet. But there is a lot that we do know, and it paints a concerning picture.

We know that some of the most common chemicals added to plastics -- phtalates and bisphenols especially -- are known as "endocrine disrupting chemicals," or EDCs. These EDCs throw off the hormone balance in humans, and can cause problems with your heart, brain, immune system, reproductive system -- it's a mess (Ong et al., 2020; Simon, 2022; Williams & Rangel-Buitrago, 2022).

We know that we're eating plastics, either because they were in the animals we consumed or because it leeched in through the packaging and production process. (Kosuth et al., 2018; Zhang et al., 2021)

We know that we're drinking plastics, from a 2017 report that found plastic in 83% of tap water samples around the world (Kosuth et al., 2017). That report indicated that plastic contamination was worst in North America.

We know that we're inhaling microplastics in the very air around us. Indoor environments can have up to 1,000 microplastic per gram of dust in the air, and one study estimates that adults inhale about 20 microplastics per day (Zhu et al., 2022).

Whether by inhaling or eating or something else, we know that plastics get into our blood, where they may be leaching chemicals and heavy metals straight into our bloodstream (Simon, 2022; Song et al., 2024; Zuo et al., 2024)

Some scientists have speculated that microplastics could be contributing to the rises we're seeing in cardiac and neurological health issues, although there's no direct link for that right now (Simon, 2022).

The majority of these microplastics in the air come from our clothing -- a significant portion of clothing is made from polyester and nylon, which are plastics.

Doing just a single load of laundry releases tons of microplastic fibers into the air and our sewage systems (Kacprzak & tijing, 2022; Simon, 2022).

But think of how many other things in your home are made of plastic. Even things like flooring, upholstery, and paints are made from plastics, and they shed particles every time you use them.

Outdoors is a lot better, but it's still not perfect. Urban environments tend to have less than 100 microplastics per gram of [dust in the] air, compared to the over 1,000 of indoor air (Zhu et al., 2022). Microplastics in the atmosphere come from countless sources. Wear and tear from our clothing is part of it, but a huge source is tires. As your tire tread wears down, it's flinging millions of tiny particles of rubber into the atmosphere, contributing to the almost 4 billion pounds of rubber microplastics that the US generates per year from driving (Kole et al., 2017).

We also know that a common thread seems to be that exposure is higher for children and babies. Plastic baby bottles are a huge source of this, but children are also just lower to the ground, where dust is being stirred up and settling (Zhu et al., 2022). Not even to mention that microplastics are being passed on to newborn babies from their mothers (Sun et al., 2024; Simon, 2022).

This is getting out of hand, these microplastics are coming from everywhere, we don't know how they affect us yet, how can we stop this?

A way out

So how can we stop this?

The truth is, on a personal level, you just can't avoid exposure to microplastics. But the good news is there are things you can do to reduce your personal exposure.

Cut out single-use plastics as best you can, replace plastic tools in your home with ones made from natural materials like wood, wear long-lasting clothes made from natural materials like wool and cotton, vacuum and clean regularly (Kacprzak & Tijing, 2022). You can get a HEPA air filter to help keep the air in your home clean, or getting an aftermarket filter for your washing machine can help keep pollution out of our waterways.

But all of this is just picking glitter out of the salad, we should really just… stop putting glitter and plastic beads in the salad.

This is going to take global collaboration and policy to really fix.

A geological indicator

Plastic is so ubiquitous in the environment that it's been suggested as a geological indicator of human activity. Plastic production is only set to increase unless something changes, and about half of that new plastic production will end up in landfills or in the environment. That's only going to make our microplastics problem exponentially worse (Williams & Rangel-Buitrago, 2022).

So what policy should we be enacting?

We can incentivize the development of technology as part of the solution. There are already some really cool technologies being developed.

Bioplastics currently make up a tiny portion of global plastic production, but it is a growing sector. Bioplastics are plastics that are made from carbon sources other than fossil fuels, or that are biodegradable (Williams & Rangel-Buitrago, 2022). Of those two, biodegradable is obviously preferred, but even that has its caveats, so it's only really a small part of the total solution.

Another solution is barriers to help filter litter and pollution out of waterways before they reach a larger body of water. A great solution here comes from a Dutch company by the name of The Great Bubble Barrier. They have deployed an incredibly simple solution to pollution filtering. They run a PVC pipe with holes in it under a waterway and then just pump air through the pipes. The bubbles allow fish and ships to pass through, but they catch and redirect floating pollution into collection bins (Williams & Rangel-Buitrago, 2022; https://thegreatbubblebarrier.com).

Another thing would be improving the treatment technology for wastewater and drinking water plants around the world. That could help filter out microplastics from laundry and drinking water. We actually already have the technology to significantly improve treatment in these sectors, but we're just not investing in making it happen, partially because of larger, systemic issues of inequity (Simon, 2022).

But one of the coolest solutions that you may of heard of is "plastic-eating microbes." That's not quite accurate, though -- scientists are genetically engineering microbes to produce an enzyme that breaks down plastic into its parts (Fohler et al., 2024). There are a lot of issues facing this before it can be deployed at scale, but this is one of the most promising options for the future, in my opinion, because the enzyme breaks plastic down so cleanly that it can be recycled with almost no loss in quality.

A call to action

But all of these solutions are at best flex taping together a boat that was sawed in half. What we really need to do is take the saw away from the maniac who's cutting boats in half. We need to decide as a society to hold corporations accountable. In 2022, the US alone just flat-out gave the plastic and oil industry $3 billion in subsidies, but they also undercharged them for environmental costs to the tune of $757 billion (Black, 2023).

And that trend extends globally, resulting in $7 trillion in total subsidies for oil and plastic in 2022 (Black, 2023).

We're at least keeping glitter out of the salad now, but let's stop the people who keep spilling it in.

So we need to be banning single-use plastics, placing restrictions on plastic packaging, hold the plastic industry responsible for the entire lifecycle of their product. The plastic companies aren't just gonna fix the problem on their own, they're too busy making money. So we need to be coming up with solutions or, even better, forcing these plastic companies to solve the problem they've created. They can't just get away with filling up our rivers, ourforests, and our own bodies with plastic.

In a more and more divided world, this is not a partisan issue, so we need to be getting involved in our local and federal politics and pressuring our representatives to pass policies that help everyone out.

Outro

At this point, it's hard to imagine a life without plastic. Even though we got by just fine without plastic 100 years ago, I don't see us going back to that. And after all, plastic has plenty of merits -- plastics have saved countless lives in its various uses in the medical industry, and it's made access to technology more equitable.

But we can't keep doing this. Sustainability isn't about going back to the 1900s, it's about finding a compromise between modern convenience, and not destroying our own health and the planet. We can find a middle ground, but it's going to be a world that doesn't maximize convenience.

Another big barrier to plastic policy that we've found is just lack of public awareness of the issue (Kacprzak & Tijing, 2022). So share this video, talk about microplastics with your friends. If this video made you uncomfortable at just much we're surrounded by plastic, take that and use it to help us change, help us build a more sustainable world.

A lot of this video was based on the book A Poison Like No Other by Matt Simon, so if you're interested in learning more, I highly recommend checking it out. It goes way more into detail than I was able to here. The link for that will be available in the description below

Thank you very much for watching. As always, all references and a full transcript will be available at beanstem.org, linked in the description below. And thank you very much, have a great day!

Attributions

B-roll

• Bubble barrier: The Great Bubble Barrier/YouTube (YouTube license)

• Flex tape: Flex Seal/YouTube (YouTube license)

• Car driving across bridge: AwaisAhmadowii/Pixabay (Pixabay Content LIcense)

• Plastic floating in ocean: Engin_Akyurt/Pixabay (Pixabay Content License)

Music

• Russian River: Dan Henic/YouTube Audio Library (YouTube Audio Library License)

• Gonna be gone: Kjartan Abel/freesound (CC BY 4.0)

• chill background music: ZHRØ/Freesound (CC BY 4.0)

• Simple step: Slenderbeats/YouTube Audio Library (YouTube Audio Library License)

• Half Past Murder Time: Kjartan Abel/freesound (CC BY 4.0)

• High noon: TrackTribe/YouTube Audio Library (YouTube Audio Library License)

• Background music: ZHRØ/Freesound (CC BY 4.0)

Video credits

• Ben Rankin (Host, research, writing, editing, graphics)

• Amanda Dyar (Script review, video review, special thanks)

• Sarah Buckberry (Camera)

• Austin Lord (Camera)

• Laura Eye (Video review, special thanks)

• Nick Bolles (Video review)

• Megan P (Camera)

• Brent Wilson (Script review)

• David Crompton (Special thanks)

• Simone Schuster (Script review, fact checking)

• Caden McGee (Script review, video review)

References

Black, S. (2023). IMF Fossil Fuel Subsidies Data: 2023 Update. IMF Working Papers, 2023(169), 1. https://doi.org/10.5089/9798400249006.001

Carlsson, P., Singdahl-Larsen, C., & Lusher, A. L. (2021). Understanding the occurrence and fate of microplastics in coastal Arctic ecosystems: The case of surface waters, sediments and walrus (Odobenus rosmarus). Science of the Total Environment, 792, 148308. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2021.148308

Enyoh, C. E., Verla, A. W., Verla, E. N., Ibe, F. C., & Amaobi, C. E. (2019). Airborne microplastics: a review study on method for analysis, occurrence, movement and risks. Environmental Monitoring and Assessment, 191(11). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10661-019-7842-0

Fohler, L., Lukas Leibetseder, Cserjan-Puschmann, M., & Striedner, G. (2024). Manufacturing of the highly active thermophile PETases PHL7 and PHL7mut3 using Escherichia coli. Microbial Cell Factories, 23(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12934-024-02551-6

Geyer, R., Jambeck, J. R., & Law, K. L. (2017). Production, Use, and Fate of All Plastics Ever Made. Science Advances, 3(7). https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.1700782

Gove, J. M., Whitney, J. L., McManus, M. A., Lecky, J., Carvalho, F. C., Lynch, J. M., Li, J., Neubauer, P., Smith, K. A., Phipps, J. E., Kobayashi, D. R., Balagso, K. B., Contreras, E. A., Manuel, M. E., Merrifield, M. A., Polovina, J. J., Asner, G. P., Maynard, J. A., & Williams, G. J. (2019). Prey-size plastics are invading larval fish nurseries. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(48), 24143–24149. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1907496116

Kacprzak, S., & Tijing, L. D. (2022). Microplastics in indoor environment: Sources, mitigation and fate. Journal of Environmental Chemical Engineering, 10(2), 107359. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jece.2022.107359

Kole, P. J., Löhr, A. J., Van Belleghem, F., & Ragas, A. (2017). Wear and Tear of Tyres: A Stealthy Source of Microplastics in the Environment. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 14(10), 1265. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph14101265

Kosuth, M., Mason, S. A., & Wattenberg, E. V. (2018). Anthropogenic contamination of tap water, beer, and sea salt. PLOS ONE, 13(4), e0194970. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0194970

Kosuth, M., Wattenberg, E., Mason, S., Tyree, C., & Morrison, D. (2017). Synthetic Polymer Contamination in Global Drinking Water. In Orbmedia.org. Orb Media. https://orbmedia.org/stories/Invisibles_final_report

Lusher, A. L., Hernandez-Milian, G., O’Brien, J., Berrow, S., O’Connor, I., & Officer, R. (2015). Microplastic and macroplastic ingestion by a deep diving, oceanic cetacean: The True’s beaked whale Mesoplodon mirus. Environmental Pollution, 199, 185–191. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envpol.2015.01.023

Maurya, A., Bhattacharya, A., & Khare, S. K. (2020). Enzymatic Remediation of Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET)–Based Polymers for Effective Management of Plastic Wastes: An Overview. Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology, 8. https://doi.org/10.3389/fbioe.2020.602325

OECD. (2024). Policy Scenarios for Eliminating Plastic Pollution by 2040. OECD Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1787/76400890-en

Ong, H.-T., Samsudin, H., & Soto-Valdez, H. (2020). Migration of endocrine-disrupting chemicals into food from plastic packaging materials: an overview of chemical risk assessment, techniques to monitor migration, and international regulations. Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition, 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/10408398.2020.1830747

Picó, Y., Alvarez-Ruiz, R., Alfarhan, A. H., El-Sheikh, M. A., Alshahrani, H. O., & Barceló, D. (2020). Pharmaceuticals, pesticides, personal care products and microplastics contamination assessment of Al-Hassa irrigation network (Saudi Arabia) and its shallow lakes. Science of the Total Environment, 701, 135021. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2019.135021

Plastic Soup Foundation. (2022). Plastic: The hidden beauty ingredient. Beat the Microbead. https://www.beatthemicrobead.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Plastic-TheHiddenBeautyIngredients.pdf

Prabhakar, M. (2020, August 20). Myth Buster: Toothpaste still contains microplastics! Beat the Microbead. https://www.beatthemicrobead.org/myth-buster-toothpaste-still-contains-plastic-ingredients/

Simon, M. (2022). A Poison Like No Other. Island Press.

Song, S., Fransien van Dijk, Vasse, G. F., Liu, Q., Gosselink, I. F., Weltjens, E., Alex, Marina, Bos, S., Li, C., Stoeger, T., Rehberg, M., Kutschke, D., Gail, Wu, X., Willems, S. H., Devin, Kooter, I. M., Spierings, D., & René Wardenaar. (2024). Inhalable Textile Microplastic Fibers Impair Airway Epithelial Differentiation. American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, 209(4), 427–443. https://doi.org/10.1164/rccm.202211-2099oc

Sun, H., Su, X., Mao, J., Liu, Y., Li, G., & Du, Q. (2024). Microplastics in maternal blood, fetal appendages, and umbilical vein blood. Ecotoxicology and Environmental Safety, 287, 117300–117300. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoenv.2024.117300

Thompson, R. C., Courtene-Jones, W., Boucher, J., Pahl, S., Raubenheimer, K., & Koelmans, A. A. (2024). Twenty years of microplastics pollution research—what have we learned? Science, 386(6720). https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adl2746

Williams, A. T., & Rangel-Buitrago, N. (2022). The past, present, and future of plastic pollution. Marine Pollution Bulletin, 176(113429), 113429. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.marpolbul.2022.113429

Zhang, J., Wang, L., Trasande, L., & Kannan, K. (2021). Occurrence of Polyethylene Terephthalate and Polycarbonate Microplastics in Infant and Adult Feces. Environmental Science & Technology Letters, 8(11), 989–994. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.estlett.1c00559

Zhu, J., Zhang, X., Liao, K., Wu, P., & Jin, H. (2022). Microplastics in dust from different indoor environments. Science of the Total Environment, 833, 155256. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2022.155256

Zuo, C., Li, Y., Chen, Y., Jiang, J., Qiu, W., & Chen, Q. (2024). Leaching of heavy metals from polyester microplastic fibers and the potential risks in simulated real-world scenarios. Journal of Hazardous Materials, 461, 132639–132639. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhazmat.2023.132639

Watch the short here: https://youtube.com/shorts/0dUTFR-eCAA

Additional context

This is a very complex topic, and I didn't have the time to research nor write about all of it. If you're here, it means you're probably looking for extra context, so here are the main things I want to clarify:

• The 12.3 billion litres for power generation is a rough estimate. A lot of these tech companies produce some of their own power, and almost all of them technically run on "100% renewable energy" (but that's mostly accomplished through Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs) and other things that make it work on paper, but it's not literally true). It also uses some averages from Jin et al. (2019), some of which have broad data points (namely hydropower).

• All power generation plants and all data centers are different. They all have different means of cooling, which means different rates of water consumption. But my point for this video isn't to get into the nuance, it's to point out that in the big picture, this is a problem and will continue to be for the foreseeable future unless we push back.

• Funny enough, I'm not actually 100% on where I stand with AI. I don't like it under capitalism because it's hyper-exploitative of artists and the environment, but I'm not totally sure if I believe it's "plagiarism." What I do know is that most AI models (that get used) were trained on data without the artists' consent, and I am NOT a fan of that.

• Minor thing, I accidentally referenced the same EPRI article as both 1 and 8 in the video. That's all.

Transcript

• California is on fire again, and this time, part of the blame may be on AI and ChatGPT.

• You may have heard some talk about how AI uses so much water, but how does it do that? Why is the computer so thirsty? I thought water was bad for computers?

• The answer is that water is consumed at multiple steps in the process of plagiarizing the hard work of artists (Wang, 2024)!

• But even before Chat GPT steals my juicy tumblr Supernatural fanfic, water is consumed in manufacturing all the GPUs and other hardware that AI servers need to function.

• Then, once the servers are up and running, most large datacenters have water cooling towers on the roof that consume lots of water. These work by basically transferring the heat energy from the servers into the water and letting it evaporate off (Li et al., 2023; Mytton, 2021).

• Inside the datacenter, the computers turn electricity into plagiarism; and generating that electricity takes water too! Most electricity is generated by steam generators. Fossil fuels are burned to heat water and generate steam. The steam rises and spins turbines to generate power, but then the steam needs to be cooled down. So a lot of facilities use water to cool the water.

• A lot of plants use "once-through" cooling systems, where they pull cool water from a river or lake, but then they release that water back after it's absorbed some of the heat. These systems have high water "withdraw," but they actually have very low water "consumption."

• The steam that's in the loop is considered "consumed," but that's not much because it's in a closed loop, so it's recirculated. Most of the consumption comes from plants that use evaporative cooling-- that's like the cooling towers on the data centers (Jin et al., 2019; Rathi, 2018; Union of Concerned Scientists, 2010).

• But that's just steam generators. Big picture, how much water and electricity does AI consume, and how might that have affected the California wildfires?

• Well, per-request, AI uses about TEN TIMES as much electricity as a regular Google search, and that's only for LLMs like ChatGPT. AIs that generate /images, video, and music take WAY more than that (EPRI, 2024).

• For every watt of electricity used, heat is generated that you need water to cool. That's why energy usage and water usage are so tightly correlated.

• And both of them are growing pretty quickly at every major tech company, with Google leading the way, consistently growing their usage of water and electricity about 15-20% year-over-year (Apple, 2024; Google, 2024; Meta, 2024; Microsoft, 2024)

• It's not hard to draw a line between the rise in AI and these growing numbers, but Google themselves even attribute a lot of this growth to expansion of AI services (Google, 2024).

• Bringing it back to California, we can use math and numbers to estimate that data centers in California consumed about 12.3 BILLION liters of water from energy production alone, so that's not counting server cooling.

• And this comes during a time when water scarcity is increasing and much of the western US is in moderate and severe drought conditions.

• With all that dry air and soil, that's why [loop] California is on fire again…

Resources

Charts

Tech company water consumption per year

Tech company electricity consumption per year

Code

Here's my messy code that I used to calculate the water usage of California data centers

california_gwh = {
    # gwh
    "coal": 4981,
    "gas": 102774,
    "nuclear": 26272,
    "hydro": 32886+4988,
    "geothermal": 13567,
    "solar": 47869,
    "wind": 31399
}

water_per_mwh = {
    # litres per mwh
    "coal": 2220,
    "gas": 598,
    "nuclear": 2290,
    "hydro": 4961,
    "geothermal": 1022,
    "solar": 330,
    "wind": 43
}

def calc_water_consumption(energy_in_twh, state_power, water_rates):
    """
    Take in stats (state_power = power generation sources for a given state, water_rates = water consumption rate (litres per mwh) for each type of generation)
    and TWh and calculate how much water (litres) is consumed by producing that much energy
    """
    ret = {
        "twh": energy_in_twh,
        "total": 0
    }
    energy_in_mwh = energy_in_twh * 1000 * 1000
    
    state_power_sum = sum(state_power.values())
    state_power_prc = {}
    
    for name, value in state_power.items():
        state_power_prc[name] = value / state_power_sum

    wc_per_mwh = 0
    prc_accounted_for = 0
    for name, wc_rate in water_rates.items():
        this_prc = state_power_prc.get(name, 0)
        prc_accounted_for += this_prc * 100
        ret[name] = this_prc * wc_rate * energy_in_mwh
        
        wc_per_mwh += this_prc * wc_rate

    missing_types = (set(state_power.keys()) - set(water_rates.keys()))
    if len(missing_types) > 0:
        print(f"WARNING: {missing_types} are not fully accounted for")
    print(f"{prc_accounted_for:.2f}% of state energy accounted for")

    ret["total"] = (energy_in_mwh * wc_per_mwh)
    
    return ret

def pretty_wc(wc_from_energy):
    total = wc_from_energy.pop('total')
    twh = wc_from_energy.pop('twh')

    print()
    print(f"Calculated values for {twh} TWh")
    
    for name, value in wc_from_energy.items():
        print(f"Litres from {name}: \t\t{value / (1000**2):.2f} million")

    print(f"---------------\nLitres total: \t\t{total / (1000**2):.2f} million")
    
pretty_wc(calc_water_consumption(9.31, california_gwh, water_per_mwh))

Image credits

• House on fire: Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images

• GPU manufacturing: PC Games N

• Steam Turbine Generator diagram: Unknown

• Water towers: SPX Cooling

• Water tower diagram: US Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy

• Drought map: University of Nebraska-Lincoln / NOAA / droughtmonitor.unl.edu

References

(3) Apple. (2024). Apple Environmental Progress Report. In Apple. Apple. https://www.apple.com/environment/pdf/Apple_Environmental_Progress_Report_2024.pdf

(6) California Energy Commission. (2023). 2023 Total System Electric Generation. California Energy Commission. https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/california-electricity-data/2023-total-system-electric-generation

(1, 8) EPRI. (2024). Powering Intelligence: Analyzing Artificial Intelligence and Data Center Energy Consumption. In EPRI. EPRI. https://www.epri.com/research/products/000000003002028905

(2) Google. (2024). Google 2024 Environmental Report. In Google Sustainability. Google Sustainability. https://www.gstatic.com/gumdrop/sustainability/google-2024-environmental-report.pdf

(7) Jin, Y., Behrens, P., Tukker, A., & Scherer, L. (2019). Water use of electricity technologies: A global meta-analysis. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 115, 109391. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2019.109391

Li, P., Yang, J., Islam, M., & Ren, S. (2023). Making AI Less “Thirsty”: Uncovering and Addressing the Secret Water Footprint of AI Models. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.03271

(4) Meta. (2024). 2024 Sustainability Report. In atmeta.com. Meta. https://sustainability.atmeta.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Meta-2024-Sustainability-Report.pdf

(5) Microsoft. (2024). 2024 Environmental Sustainability Report. In Microsoft. Microsoft. https://cdn-dynmedia-1.microsoft.com/is/content/microsoftcorp/microsoft/msc/documents/presentations/CSR/2024-Environmental-Sustainability-Report-Data-Fact.pdf

Mytton, D. (2021). Data centre water consumption. Npj Clean Water, 4(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41545-021-00101-w

Rathi, A. (2018, August 8). You probably have no idea just how much water is needed to produce electricity. Quartz. https://qz.com/1351279/the-hidden-water-footprint-of-fossil-fuel-and-nuclear-power-plants

Union of Concerned Scientists. (2010, September 30). How it Works: Water for Electricity. Union of Concerned Scientists. https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/how-it-works-water-electricity. Updated 9 Nov, 2017.

Wang, Z. (2024, January 22). How AI Consumes Water: The unspoken environmental footprint. Deepgram. https://deepgram.com/learn/how-ai-consumes-water

Check out the full video

Transcript

• Telemachus: If so then, give me chimeras!

• Okay, here ya go!

• These are Chimaeras! They just... have an extra "a" in the name

• Chimaeras are a class of fish that live deep under water. They're related to rays and sharks, and they're perfect to learn about for spoopy month because they're also called SPOOKFISH and GHOST SHARKS!

• Like rays, they have a long, whip-like tail. That snake-like tail might be why they're called "chimeras" -- like the snake tail on the greek chimera

• Dr. Didier: "They're weird looking, they have these strange snouts and sensory systems"

• That's Dr. Dominique Didier. She's studied ghost sharks for just over 3 decades.

• And she helped discover a new species of ghost shark THIS YEAR in New Zealand and Australia!

• Dr. Didier: "We're coming to the conclusion that what we thought was this one, global species, Harriotta raleighana, is probably not"

• Hariotta avia, or the Australia narrow-nosed spookfish, used to be thought of as the same thing as Hariotta raleighana. Then this year, Dr. Didier and colleagues released a paper (Finucci et al., 2024) that discovered that some of the populations near Australia and New Zealand are their own, unique species!

• H avia looks very similar to H. raleighana overall. But the skin color is distinct, as is some of the morphology -- that is, the shape and structure of the body and its parts.

• Genetic analysis also played a role in identifying the new species.

• Dr. Didier: Now we have a lot more evidence, partly because we can do molecular studies to say, "this is probably something new"

• This figure from the study maps some of the genetic mutations between individuals. You can clearly see that the Harriotta avia specimens are very different from the rest of the Harriotta specimens collected.

• Given the morphological and genetic data, the team was able to confidently declare the new species.

• Before I let Dr. Didier go, I had to ask one more question:

• Me: So what's your favorite thing about these weird little guys, about ghost sharks?

• Dr. Didier: "Oh my gosh, there's so much to love about them! I just think they're, like, cool to look at! ... They're ancient, so looking at their anatomy can give us clues to the evolution of vertebrates... Even now, after working with them for these decades, there's still, like, tons of stuff to be done! So that's why I like them, I get excited about all this neat stuff"

• Me: Anything else you want to share for the end of the video?

• Dr. Didier: Coming up, on October 30th, is national ghost shark day! So break out your ghost shark juju and have a great day!

• Thank you so much to Dr. Didier for helping out, check out the link in my bio for references, and follow for more cool science!

B-roll/image credits

• Deep see chimera: NOAA/wikimedia (Public domain)

• Hydrolagus colliei: Linda Snook/MBNMS (Public domain)

• Greek chimera: Carole Raddato/flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

• Harriotta raleighana: NOAA Okeanos/wikimedia (Public domain)

• Spotted eagle ray: John Norton/wikimedia (CC BY 2.0)

• Hydrolagus alberti: SEFSC Pascagoula Laboratory/wikimedia (Public domain)

• Reef shark: NOAA/wikimedia (CC BY 2.0)

• Cute ghost shark illustration: Me

• Hammerhead ghost shark illustration: Zoe McGee

References

• AMNH. (2015, February 26). Type Specimens: An Overview | American Museum of Natural History. American Museum of Natural History. https://www.amnh.org/explore/news-blogs/from-the-collections-posts/just-our-types-a-short-guide-to-type-specimens

• Bottaro, M. (2022). Sixth sense in the deep-sea: the electrosensory system in ghost shark Chimaera monstrosa. Scientific Reports, 12(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-14076-2

• Didier, D., Kemper, J., & Ebert, D. (2012). Phylogeny, Biology and Classification of Extant Holocephalans. Marine Biology/CRC Marine Biology Series, 97–122. https://doi.org/10.1201/b11867-6

• Finucci, B., Cheok, J., Ebert, D. A., Herman, K., Kyne, P. M., & Dulvy, N. K. (2020). Ghosts of the deep – Biodiversity, fisheries, and extinction risk of ghost sharks. Fish and Fisheries, 22(2), 391–412. https://doi.org/10.1111/faf.12526

• Finucci, B., Didier, D., Ebert, D. A., Green, M. E., & Kemper, J. M. (2024). Harriotta avia sp. nov. – a new rhinochimaerid (Chimaeriformes: Rhinochimaeridae) described from the Southwest Pacific. Environmental Biology of Fishes. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10641-024-01577-4

• Halstead, B. W., & Bunker, N. C. (1952). The Venom Apparatus of the Ratfish, Hydrolagus colliei. Copeia, 1952(3), 128–128. https://doi.org/10.2307/1439692

https://youtu.be/LhU6bJpF8Lw

Transcript

• This is a chimera! The chimera is a Greek mythical beast with the body of a lion, a snake for a tail, and a goat's head on its back... for some reason. In Greek mythology, it's a sibling of Cerberus and the hydra. The word has come to mean, in modern times, any creature that's a combination of animals.

• These are Chimaeras! They just... have an extra "a" in the name.

• Chimaeras are a class of fish that live deep under water. They're related to rays and sharks, and they're perfect to learn about for spoopy month because they're also called SPOOKFISH and GHOST SHARKS!

• Like sharks and rays, their skeletons are made completely out of cartilage, and like rays, they have a long, whip-like tail. That snake-like tail might be why they're called "chimeras" -- like the snake tail on the greek chimera.

• There are 3 types of ghost sharks, and they're all distinguished by their snoot! There are long-nosed, plow-nosed, and short-nosed chimaeras (Finucci et al., 2020).

• But all of their snoots are used for sensing electric signals in the water! Even with their massive eyes, there's not much light to see at about 1000 m below the ocean's surface where they live. To make up for that, they have electroreceptors in their snouts that help with navigation, finding food, and avoiding predators (Bottaro, 2022).

• These electroreceptors are called Ampullae of Lorenzini, which... I think I fought that guy in DND once

• DM: As you guys turn the corner, you see the back of a man wearing a large cloak. He slowly turns. His skin is pale and he bears his fangs -- you recognize him: Ampullae of Lorenzini, level 10 vampire wizard! Roll for initiative!

• Players: Aw man! rolling dice

• Player 1: Nat 20!

• Their Ampullae of Lorenzini help them avoid predators, but most chimaeroids also have a venomous spine in their dorsal fin to protect themselves from predator attacks.

• Dr. Didier: "I have probably touched and fondled more ghost sharks than anyone on the planet"

• That's Dr. Dominique Didier. She's studied ghost sharks for just over 3 decades

• She knows to watch for the spines. In fact, she has ahem "personally observed" them (Didier et al., 2012).

• In undergrad, she became interested in ghost sharks when she saw that there wasn't a lot of research on them.

• Dr. Didier: "To find current work, I was delving into work that was published in the early 1900s. And I realized 'wow, there's nothing known about these fish, no one is studying them!'"

• And over the last 28 years, she's helped discover eleven different species of ghost sharks, which is pretty amazing when you consider it's actuALLY TWELVE SHE JUST FOUND ANOTHER ONE

• Dr. Didier: "We're coming to the conclusion that what we thought was this one, global species, Harriotta raleighana, is probably not"

• Hariotta avia, or the Australia narrow-nosed spookfish, used to be thought of as the same thing as Hariotta raleighana. Then this year, a paper that Dr. Didier worked on (Finucci et al., 2024) discovered that some of the populations near Australia and New Zealand are their own, unique species!

• But how do you tell one species from another?

• There are 2 main ways these researchers proved that this is a distinct species. The first one is taking detailed measurements known as morphometrics. For each specimen, the researchers took 64 different morphometric measurements (Finucci et al., 2024).

• Dr. Didier: "I get just piles of fish. I'll go to a museum and just measure all day long measuring and measuring and measuring. We use different things like calipers and forceps, tape measures if it's really big because there's just no device that can capture that whole size. But yeah, that's what we do. And then write it down, put it in our spreadsheets and analyze it."

• Genetic analysis also played a role in identifying the new species

• Dr. Didier: "Now we have a lot more evidence, partly because we can do molecular studies to say, "this is probably something new""

• This figure from the study maps some of the genetic mutations between individual specimens, and you can clearly see that the Harriotta avia specimens are very different from the rest of the Harriotta specimens collected.

• Given the morphological and genetic data, the team was able to confidently declare the new species.

• When a new species is declared, a few things generally happen. Most importantly, something needs to describe the species, pretty much always a scientific paper. In this case, that's obviously that Finucci et al. 2024 paper that provides morphometrics and a physical description. That provides documentation of the unique traits of this species.

• Next, a holotype and paratypes need to be defined. The holotype is the definitive, "name-bearing representative of a new speices" (AMNH, 2015). In other words, this is what peak Harriotta avia performance looks like.

• His name is NMNZ: P.061676. Isn't that cute??

• That's a specimen identifier for the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, so other researchers can identify the actual physical thing in the museum's catalog.

• The paratypes are basically alternates or supplemental to the holotype. They help provide a more complete picture of a species definition, and they might end up replacing the holotype if it ever gets lost or damaged.

• Me: Before I let you go, I have to ask one more question: what's your favorite thing about these weird little guys, about ghost sharks?

• Dr. Didier: "Oh my gosh, there's so much to love about them! I just think they're, like, cool to look at! They're ancient, so looking at their anatomy can give us clues to the evolution of vertebrates, which some people are doing! They're weird-looking, they have these strange snouts and sensory systems. We still know very little about their reproduction, where the little guys are. So even now, after working with them for decades, there's still, like, tons of stuff to be done! So that's why I like them, I get excited about all this neat stuff"

• Me: Is there anything else you want to share for the end of the video?

• Dr. Didier: Coming up, on October 30th, is national ghost shark day! So break out your ghost shark juju and have a great day! ... And they should be on the lookout for "ghost sharks of the world," our upcoming book!

• Thank you so much to Dr. Didier for helping out, check out the link in the description for references, and follow for more cool science!

Attributions

Images

• Deep see chimera: NOAA/wikimedia (Public domain)

• Hydrolagus colliei: Linda Snook/MBNMS (Public domain)

• Greek chimera: Carole Raddato/flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

• Dorsal spine: Halstead & Bunker/Copeia (Public domain I think)

• Ampullae or Lorenzini (pores): Albert kok/wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)

• Harriotta raleighana: NOAA Okeanos/wikimedia (Public domain)

• Spotted eagle ray: John Norton/wikimedia (CC BY 2.0)

• Hydrolagus alberti: SEFSC Pascagoula Laboratory/wikimedia (Public domain)

• Reef shark: NOAA/wikimedia (CC BY 2.0)

• Cerberus: Spencer Curtis/flickr (CC BY 2.0)

• Hydra: Andrew Jian/flickr (CC BY 2.0)

• Plownose chimaera: Devon Bowen/wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

• Cute ghost shark illustration: Me

• Hammerhead ghost shark illustration: Zoe McGee

B-roll

• Te Papa Tongarewa: ehabweb/YouTube (YouTube license)

• Deep-sea chimaera: serpentproject/YouTube (YouTube license)

Music

• Timeless: Slenderbeats/YouTube Audio Library (YouTube Audio Library License)

• Half Past Murder Time: Kjartan Abel/freesound (CC BY 4.0)

• Gonna be gone: Kjartan Abel/freesound (CC BY 4.0)

• Simple step: Slenderbeats/YouTube Audio Library (YouTube Audio Library License)

• Mysterious things: Kjartan Abel/freesound (CC BY 4.0)

Video credits

• Amanda Dyar (Script review, video review)

• Austin Lord (D&D Player)

• Ben Rankin (Host, Research, Writing, Editing)

• Caden Mcgee (Script review)

• Dominique Didier (Interview, Fact checking)

• Jacob Geiger (D&D Player)

• Luke Amonett (Camera, D&D DM)

• Zoe Mcgee (Script review)

References

• AMNH. (2015, February 26). Type Specimens: An Overview | American Museum of Natural History. American Museum of Natural History. https://www.amnh.org/explore/news-blogs/from-the-collections-posts/just-our-types-a-short-guide-to-type-specimens

• Bottaro, M. (2022). Sixth sense in the deep-sea: the electrosensory system in ghost shark Chimaera monstrosa. Scientific Reports, 12(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-14076-2

• Didier, D., Kemper, J., & Ebert, D. (2012). Phylogeny, Biology and Classification of Extant Holocephalans. Marine Biology/CRC Marine Biology Series, 97–122. https://doi.org/10.1201/b11867-6

• Finucci, B., Cheok, J., Ebert, D. A., Herman, K., Kyne, P. M., & Dulvy, N. K. (2020). Ghosts of the deep – Biodiversity, fisheries, and extinction risk of ghost sharks. Fish and Fisheries, 22(2), 391–412. https://doi.org/10.1111/faf.12526

• Finucci, B., Didier, D., Ebert, D. A., Green, M. E., & Kemper, J. M. (2024). Harriotta avia sp. nov. – a new rhinochimaerid (Chimaeriformes: Rhinochimaeridae) described from the Southwest Pacific. Environmental Biology of Fishes. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10641-024-01577-4

• Halstead, B. W., & Bunker, N. C. (1952). The Venom Apparatus of the Ratfish, Hydrolagus colliei. Copeia, 1952(3), 128–128. https://doi.org/10.2307/1439692

There was 1 topic that got cut from the main wetlands video, and that was vernal pools! Vernal pools are a seasonal wetland that are usually about the size of a pond. They dry up in the summer, but over the fall, winter, and spring, amphibians like salamanders, newts, and frogs use them as breeding grounds that are safely isolated from predatory fish. They're super weird and super cool!

Transcript

• Wait, I almost forgot! There's actually a secret FIFTH option for wetlands, and they're really weird! It's like a shiny wetland!

• Vernal pools are halfway between a bog and a seasonal pond. They form in shallow basins that collect rainwater, but they go through phases of being flooded, waterlogged, and dry (Keeley & Zedler, 1998).

• One of the things that makes vernal pools so weird is that the temperature and pH of the water swing wildly throughout the course of the day. The layer of water is usually pretty thin, so conditions can change rapidly based on exposure to sunlight (Keeley & Zedler, 1998).

• Vernal pools flood during the fall from rain and melting snow, and over the course of fall and winter, they play a vital role in the forests around them. You see, amphibians bridge an important gap in the food chain between invertebrates and larger animals (Liles, 2021).

• And every year, all sorts of newts, salamanders, and frogs use vernal pools to lay their eggs for the next generation. Vernal pools provide a safe breeding grounds because they're temporary and they're isolated from freshwater sources that would have fish (Liles, 2021).

• Over the summer, vernal pools dry up and just look like any ol' patch of land. It's then that they're the most vulnerable -- developers who either don't care or just don't know better will come along and build on top of them.

• We're losing vernal pools rapidly: we've already lost over 90% of the vernal pools in California (US EPA, 2024), a state where they used to be incredibly abundant. After all, it's hard to put protections in place for an ecosystem that's only there some of the time.

• Check out the video in my bio to learn more about the other types of wetlands, and follow for more cool science!

B-roll/image credits

• Rainy wetland: mraltamimi/Pixabay

• Golden stag beetle: Fir0002/Flagstaffotos

• Raccoon: Paxson Woelber/Wikimedia

• Construction site: bellergy/Pixabay

• Vernal pools diagram: California State Parks

• Newts courting: Steven David Johnson/stevendavidjohnson.com (NON-FREE LICENSE)

• Wood frog: Steven David Johnson/stevendavidjohnson.com (NON-FREE LICENSE)

• Salamander egg clutch video: Steven Johnson/stevendavidjohnson.com (NON-FREE LICENSE)

References

• Celebrezze, D. (2016, May 27). VernalPoolGuy. Vernalpoolguy.org. https://www.vernalpoolguy.org/archive.php

• Holland, R. F. (2009). California’s great valley vernal pool habitat status and loss: rephotorevised 2005. Placer Land Trust Report, Auburn, California, 23pp

• Keeley, J. E., & Zedler, P. H. (1998). Characterization and global distribution of vernal pools. In Ecology, conservation, and management of vernal pool ecosystems, proceedings from 1996 conference (Vol. 1, p. 14).

• Liles, L. (2021, May 28). The Birth of a Salamander. The Nature Conservancy. https://www.nature.org/en-us/magazine/magazine-articles/vernal-pools/

• Mooney, H. A., & Zavaleta, E. (2016). Ecosystems of California. University Of California Press.

• US EPA. (2024, May 15). Vernal Pools. US EPA. https://www.epa.gov/wetlands/vernal-pools

See also

https://youtu.be/6f4mQb29C4A

(Shrek voice) Get outta my swamp! But is it really a swamp? Learn how to tell the difference between the 4 main types of wetlands: swamps, marshes, fens, and bogs!

Transcript

Hi, I'm Ben, and I'm in a swamp right now! Right?
Or is this a marsh? Wait, what's a bog??

Hi, I'm Ben, and this is definitely a swamp, and let me tell you why!

Swamps are wetlands that are fed by surface water and dominated by woody plants. This here specifically is a mangrove forest because the environment is dominated by these mangrove trees, with their salt tolerant roots and knees.

So, what's a marsh? This! Marshes are also fed by surface water, but they're dominated by grassy, soft herbaceous plants like this.

But there's a secret third option for wetlands. Come closer, closer. Peatlands! Why are you so close?

Peatlands include fens and bogs which are pretty similar. They tend to form in basins that collect rainwater. Bogs only get rainwater and they're very acidic. They're mostly made of mosses and soft squishy ground made from dead plant matter known as peat.

But fens are special. They get additional water from ground water or rivers and that water brings in nutrients that keeps the water from getting too acidic. Fens are dominated by mosses and soft plants like sedges. They're home to a ton of verve species and are better than rain forests at capturing carbon.

If you'd like to learn more, check out my channel for a full video on wetlands! And
follow for more cool science!

Credits

• Amanda Dyar (writing, camera)

• Ben Rankin (host, research, writing, editing)

Music

• Election time: kjartan_abel/Freesound

See also

https://youtu.be/6f4mQb29C4A