Let's talk boundaries
It’s time again for our listener mail round up, and this week, the theme is borders and boundaries. We learn what it means to define the “end of an era,” explore how close is too close to a black hole, and discuss the power of animal urine. Plus, we hear the story about the time the U.S. and Great Britain almost fought a border war… because of a pig.
Featuring Eric Salovich, Naoufal Souitat, Dagomar Degroot, and Christine Wilkinson.
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LINKS
U.S. Forest Service /https://www.rawpixel.com/image/3840035/Photo-Image-Person-Bird-Forest
On animal territories:
On land surveying:
New Measurement Data Means New Hampshire's Famed '4000 Footer' List May Be Changing
The Towering Mapmakers: Mount Washington and the Early Efforts to Map the White Mountains
On black holes:
On time and eras:
CREDITS
Host: Nate Hegyi
Reported and produced by Nate Hegyi, Taylor Quimby, Justine Paradis, Felix Poon and Jeongyoon Han.
Edited by Taylor Quimby
Rebecca Lavoie is our Executive Producer
Special thanks to Kathleen Davis
Music for this episode by Blue Dot Sessions
Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio
Audio Transcript
Note: Episodes of Outside/In are made as pieces of audio, and some context and nuance may be lost on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.
Nate Hegyi: This is Outside/In, I’m Nate Hegyi. Here today with producer Jeongyoon Han.
JH: Hey there.
Nate Hegyi: Trivia question for you.
JH: Okay…
Nate Hegyi: I want you to name me all the wars fought between the United States and Great Britain.
[music begins]
Jeongyoon Han: Okay. Uh, the revolutionary war.
Nate Hegyi: Yes!
Jeongyoon Han: War of 1812…
Nate Hegyi: Yes.
Jeongyoon Han: And then the war of… gosh.
Nate Hegyi: Lemme stop. Have you heard of the pig war?
Jeongyoon Han: The pig war? No.
Nate Hegyi: The pig war wasn’t literally a war… but it was a military confrontation between the U.S. and the U.K. that started with the shooting of a pig in 1859.
Jeongyoon Han: Oh no!
Nate Hegyi: It happened on San Juan Island off the coast of Washington State, which at the time was disputed territory between the two countries. There was this American living there… Lyman Cutlar… and he found this pig rooting around in his garden. Eating all his potatoes. So he shot it.
Jeongyoon Han: Uh, it wasn’t his pig?
Nate Hegyi: No. Turns out the pig was owned by an Irishman. And he was not happy. He demanded money… but Lyman argued the pig was trespassing on his land.
They got into a big fight until British authorities stepped in and threatened to arrest, the American, That pissed off all the other American settlers living on the island because they were like, hey, this is our land, you can’t do that… so they asked for U.S. military protection from the British.
[music]
The U.S. sent a boatload full of troops over with some cannons.. then the British sent over 5 warships… stuff was escalating… there was a threat of war. Eventually the U.S. president got involved and was like, hey, we don’t need a war with Britain right now… we’ve already got enough tension as it is here at home - remember this was right before the civil war - so the two countries negotiated into a kind of stalemate.
The Americans built a military camp on one side of the island… the British on the other… and this lasted for more than a decade until FINALLY they signed a treaty.
Jeongyoon Han: That’s absolutely crazy. This did not need to become a full fledged war. The cat I was taking care of goes into other peoples lawns all the time. This feels like too much.
Nate Hegyi: But that’s the wild thing, right? This whole conflict - that could have escalated into a full on war - started with the shooting of a pig and a dispute about an invisible line.
A border.
[music builds]
Nate Hegyi: I’m Nate Hegyi, here with producer Jeongyoon Han, and a whole of bunch of YOUR voicemails and Instagram posts.
We asked for your questions on the subject of borders, boundary lines, and edges - and we got submissions on everything from borders in the animal kingdom, to the freaky light border around black holes
Jeongyoon Han: Which weirdly enough has something to do with spaghetti.
Nate Hegyi: Kind of, but we’ll get there. OK - so without further ado… [beep sound]... let’s open up the Outside/Inbox.
[music continues]
Nate Hegyi: So we opened this story with a pig who met a very sad end and almost started a war… so I figured in memorial of that pig, we should start off with an animal-related question. This one was answered by our editor, Taylor Quimby.
Taylor Quimby: We have a question from Alex on Instagram.
Nate Hegyi: Okay.
Taylor Quimby: Who wants to know what are some of the different ways that different species mark their territory?
Nate Hegyi: Very interesting.
Taylor Quimby: How do you mark yours?
Nate Hegyi: Do you really want to know the answer to that, Taylor? I. When we went camping this weekend in grizzly country, I straight up peed near the tent just in case, because I was like, I want a bear to know that this is people country.
Taylor Quimby: That seems reasonable. It seems like it might be a good idea. So the first thing I learned digging into this question is that it is important to distinguish between a home range and a territory. I did not know this. Lots of animals have a home range where they live, but territory, which is the part they'll actually defend if they get into a tense situation that is often much smaller. Right. So one way to think about it is that maybe the section of Montana where you live is your home range, where they live, but territory, which is the part they'll actually defend if they get into a tense situation that is often much smaller. Right. So one way to think about it is that maybe the section of Montana where you live is your home range, Nate, but your house is your actual territory because if somebody busted in uninvited, you'd probably get upset about it.
Nate Hegyi: I would, yeah. I definitely use some bear spray on them.
Taylor Quimby: But it is also important to say that, you know, we think about a dog marking its territory when it pees, right? Yeah. But really, it isn't just about territory. It's communicating a whole bunch of different stuff.
Christine Wilkinson: Because animals can't just call each other up on the phone or open up their Instagram to see what their friends and enemies have been up to and where they're at.
Nate Hegyi: Peacetagram.
Taylor Quimby: Yeah. So this is Dr. Christine Wilkinson, a carnivore ecologist and researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. And they said a lot of animals, not surprisingly, do communicate with scent. So hyenas, which Dr. Wilkinson studies, they have anal glands that produce a kind of like paste and they brush it onto grass stalks to mark territory. And it's pretty defined boundary like they they really care. But also, you know, there's lots of other senses that we use to do this like sound.
Christine Wilkinson: Super common, one that we all hear all the time. Birds, a lot of birds have and defend territories and they're singing for a number of different reasons. One of them being like, This is where I'm at, Don't come here or come here and mate with me.
Nate Hegyi: Get off my lawn. Get off my lawn.
Taylor Quimby: Go away now. Go away. Now. It is it does change the way you think about bird calls because I always think about them as being so friendly sounding.
Nate Hegyi: Yeah, exactly.
Taylor Quimby: So we got smells. We got sounds. But, you know, sometimes it's a combination of different stuff.
Christine Wilkinson: So, you know, white rhino will make these dung piles that show where their territories are, and then other rhinos will kind of come and and keep pooping on top of that same dung pile until it can be really, really huge. And it becomes also a visual marker as well as a scent marker.
Nate Hegyi: That's just a big sculpture of poop saying, Hey, this is white rhino country.
Taylor Quimby: A couple other neat factoids. There are also territorial fish like clownfish, which will actually keep and defend the same anemone for multiple generations. There are territorial insects, dragonflies. One of the most interesting things I learned is that humans have hacked some of these communication methods in order to try and manage human wildlife interaction, right? So you might know this out in Montana, we use animal urine to try and keep other pests or even members of the same species away from gardens and livestock and things like that.
Nate Hegyi: Huh. I actually did not know that
Christine Wilkinson: Even you can right now go purchase coyote urine on the internet for like 12 bucks.
Taylor Quimby: Hot tip for you there, Nate.
Nate Hegyi: There we go. Gotta get my coyote urine out here.
Taylor Quimby: But again, Nate, I think the important thing is that just like we have layers of subtext to our communications with each other, you know, for animals, marking territory is not a one note operation.
Christine Wilkinson: I think a lot of people think territory and they think keep out. But as we've noticed from all these examples so far, sometimes it means just like showing who you are and where you stand and what you are looking for.
NH: Jeongyoon if you had a little bird song marking your territory, what would it be?
JH: It would be like, uumm, back off please… uuummm back off.
Nate Hegyi: Okay, so obviously animals have bird songs and poop cairns, stuff like that to mark territory… but we humans have fences and property lines. But how do we actually figure out where those lines are?
Taylor and producer Justine Paradise tackled that question.
Justine: This one came from Danielle, in Topsham, Maine.
Danielle: “How does surveying work? With the looking through thing and the tall stick.”
Taylor Quimby: I know exactly what she’s talking about. It looks a little like a tripod, but it’s often yellow. And the other thing, I feel like it looks like a wizard’s staff from the future.
Justine Paradis: Exactly, so say you want to build a fence, or you’re selling your house, and you need to figure out exactly where your property line is… In cases like that you’ll likely call a land surveyor to figure out how a property line on paper actually translates to the real world. And when they get there, chances are they’re going to pull out that looky through thing and the tall stick. –
So to find out how they work, I called a surveyor named Eric Salovich, and president of the New Hampshire Land Surveyor Association.
Eric Salovitch: That little looky thing that is standing on the tripod… That is an electronic distance measurer, also known as a total station.
Taylor Quimby: A total station. You could also maybe call this an absolute unit, would be a good nickname.
Justine Paradis: The other technical term. And the tall stick – that’s called a rod. It’s got a piece of glass on the top – a prism.
Taylor Quimby: Okay, like, the cover of Dark Side of teh moon, by Pink Floyd. Like a glass that separates light into –
Justine Paradis: like a rainbow? Sometimes you hang em in your windows?
Taylor Quimby: Yeah.
Justine Paradis: Yeah. This is a very sophisticated version.
Eric Salovitch: It's pretty fascinating to look into because no matter what angle you look at, your eye stays in the center of it.
Justine Paradis: So the way it works is: your looky through thing, your electronic distance measurer or EDM – it’s got a laser.
Eric Salovitch: So, it's going to shoot the laser from the EDM. It's going to hit the prism. It's going to get reflected directly back to the EDM. That time is measured, how long it takes, and then that is correlated to the distance that you measure.
Justine Paradis: All this equipment is very sensitive. You have to get the height and the angle of the prism just right. These measurements will even be impacted by the weather conditions.
Taylor Quimby: Wow!
Eric Salovtich: …the temperature and the parts per million and stuff and make sure that your EDM is calibrated.
Justine Paradis: And each time, you’re gathering several measurements.
Eric Salovitch: Yeah, every measurement is a 2 or 3 lines of data. You know, the horizontal distance, the horizontal angle, the vertical distance, the vertical angle, the slope distance.
Justine Paradis: And by using all those measurements, and doing a bunch of math, surveyors are able to get really accurate readings on elevation changes, the placement of your property line, all that stuff.
Taylor Quimby: All to give you an answer about your fence line.
Justine Paradis: Well, sometimes, it’s more than that. Actually, land surveying made the news a few years ago for doing this kind of work on a different scale. I know you like to hike, what do you know about the saga of Mt. Tecumseh… ?
Taylor Quimby: Oh, I know it well. Because I’ve hiked this mountain. And it’s on the list of NH’s 48 4000-ft mountains, which many people really care about, because we hike them as a list. And this one was on it, and now maybe it’s not?
Justine Paradis: Yeah. A surveyor in the 1800s, using manual instruments and math, called it at 4003 feet. In 2019, the USGS flew over the mountains in a little airplane equipped with a new type of remote sensing technology, called LiDAR. And they measured the summit at 3,995 feet.
Taylor Quimby: Those 8 feet make a big difference in the minds of many.
Justine Paradis: It’s serious. But when a group of land surveyors hiked up to the summit with their EDMs and their rods – they landed right in between.
Eric Salovitch: And it was 3997ft.
Taylor Quimby: 3997 feet. You could pile some rocks on the top and make it 4000!
Justine Paradis: Just jump.
Eric Salovitch: We actually got to set a brass disk, so it's one of my biggest accomplishments to be a part of a project to monument a 4000 foot mountain.
Nate Hegyi: It’s wild, I am literally sitting at my home in Montana at, where is the compass at? I am at 4,220 feet so that’s 220 feet higher than the mountain Justine and Taylor were just talking about. … so listen Granite staters, if y’all want an easy way to gain that elevation just come over to my house we can drink a summit beer.
Jeongyoon Han: Why go through all that trouble when you can just hang out with Nate?
[music builds and fades]
Nate Hegyi: Jeongyoon can you tell folks how they can get ahold of us if they’ve got a question about the natural world?
Jeongyoon Han: yeah, call 1-844-GO-OTTER, or record yourself on your phone and email it to us at outsideinradio@nhpr.org.
Nate Hegyi: Coming up after the break, we’re gonna get fourth-dimensional… far out… borders in space and time. Stay tuned.
###
Nate Hegyi: Hey this is Outside/In I’m Nate Hegyi here with Jeongyoon Han. We’re talking all about borders. And this next listener question I think was one of the most out of the box questions we got about borders. Jeongyoon you answered this one.
Jeongyoon Han: yeah it was from Gilman in Tucson, AZ:
Gilman: I just wanted to know how close you have to be to a black hole in order to get pulled in by its gravitational pull? Thanks so much!
Jeongyoon Han: So in order to calculate the gravitational pull of anything — including a black hole —first, you need to know its mass. Because the more mass an object has, the stronger its gravity.
Now black holes are different sizes, so let’s just take the closest one to us — Sagittarius A.
You might remember in 2022, scientists released the first picture of a black hole IN OUR GALAXY ever taken, and that was of Sagittarius A.
Nate Hegyi: Didn’t it kind of look like a donut? Like an orange donut?
Jeongyoon Han: Black hole in the middle and then a little ring on the outside? Yeah.
Nate Hegyi: Yeah sounds like a donut! Yeah!
Jeongyoon: Now, Sagittarius is ONLY about 30 times WIDER than our sun. But its mass… is 4 million times bigger. So it’s way, way more dense.
And that means its gravitation pull is…
Naoufal Souitat: about, 3.5/4,000,000m/s² or 361,000 times the gravitational pull of earth.
Jeongyoon Han: This, by the way, is Naoufal Souitat, a space engineer with the Southwest Research Institute.
Nate Hegyi: So how close would you have to be to get sucked in by a black hole like Sagittarius A?
Jeongyoon Han: So that would depend on a few things… but if you were just floating around in space near one, you’d be in big trouble. Black holes are so strong that you’d get sucked in even if you were millions of miles away. There’s actually a technical term for how it happens.
Naoufal Souitat: You're going to get spaghettified.
Nate Hegyi: Spaghettified?!-
Naoufal Souitat: You're going to get sucked in and then you're going to be elongated, like become like a noodle. And that is due to the difference of gravity between your feet and your chest is so huge. And we call it spaghettification.
Nate Hegyi: Okay, so what if I’m not just floating around — what if I’m on a super fast spaceship like in “Interstellar”?
Jeongyoon Han: So say you’re in your spaceship. You’ll have to go fast enough to escape the gravitational pull of a black hole. We call that the escape velocity. And the same thing applies to rockets and satellites in orbit around Earth. In order to get a stable orbit around Earth, for example, the International Space Station has to be moving at about seventeen thousand five hundred miles per hour.
Naoufal did the math, and said that even if you’re a million miles away from Sagittarius A, you’ll have to be traveling at a speed of 596192 miles/hours or to hit your escape velocity.
But if you get too close, it doesn’t matter how fast you’re going — there’s no avoiding getting sucked in.
But on that note, Nate, have you heard of an event horizon?
Nate: [reax]
Jeongyoon Han: So inside that area, the gravity is so strong that even light can’t escape it and so it gets sucked in. And light travels at 186,000 miles… per second.
Naoufal Souitat: So that's very fast. And we don't know if anything outside of light that travels the speed of light and even light cannot escape it once it gets over the event horizon.
Jeongyoon Han: So if you’re that close , you’d have– to be zooming around at a speed faster than light to escape a black hole.
Nate Hegyi: Ok so we are wrapping things up with one last question about borders. Here’s producer Felix Poon:
Felix Poon: So this question is from Emily in Washington DC.
Emily: How do historians decide how to categorize chunks of time? And why is it the further back we go, the bigger the time periods are? Like, the different dinosaur periods were millions of years. In comparison the life humans live today is very fast paced. So, how do we determine the borders between time periods?”
Nate Hegyi: I have never thought about that before, but she’s totally right. Like, the 60s versus the entire Jurassic age.
Felix Poon: Yeah. So, how we categorize time totally depends on who’s doing the categorizing. Geologists for example? They categorize time by looking at changes that they see in the rock or sediment layers.
And so for example, let’s take the end of the Mesozoic era which is when dinosaurs went extinct.
Dagomar Degroot: where at one point you've got tons of microfossils and then you've got a layer of iridium which is brought to earth by an asteroid, and then you've got very few microfossils.
Nate Hegyi: Okay, so they’ve got their own special time scale
Felix Poon: Right. This by the way is Dagomar Degroot, and Dagomar’s not a geologist, he’s an environmental historian. And the way geologists and historians divide up time is pretty different.
Like, geologists literally drive a big bronze spike into a layer of rock or sediment that represents the end of an era and the beginning of another.
Nate Hegyi: Wait, literally? That’s what they do?
Felix Poon: Yes.
Nate Hegyi: That’s fun.
Felix Poon: And there’s a whole process to decide where it goes involving committees and voting and everything.
Nate Hegyi: Wow.
Felix Poon: Whereas historians, they don’t really have to agree. You know the Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age? Right?
Nate Hegyi: Yeah.
FP: Well those are very eurocentric notions of time–not all civilizations go through these ages that are categorized so neatly by metals. Another example, “The Little Ice Age” is this period when average global temperatures dropped by as much as 2 degrees Celsius. Some say it started with big volcanic eruptions in the 13th century. Others say it didn’t start ‘til circulation patterns significantly changed in the oceans and atmosphere in the 16th century. Which starting point you choose just depends on what part of the story you wanna emphasize.
Nate Hegyi: So, wait, though, back to geological ages, what are we in now?
Felix Poon: So technically we’re still in what’s called the Holocene, which started a little under 12,000 years ago. But some are saying we’re already in a new age called the “Anthropocene,” marked by when humans started altering the planet. A group of geologists are saying the Anthropocene began in 1950, and they’re proposing to put a bronze spike at this Canadian lake because there’s geochemical traces of nuclear bomb tests at the bottom of it.
Nate Hegyi: Huh.
Felix Poon: But none of this is official yet, they still have to go through their whole process.
Nate Hegyi: Okay.
Felix Poon: Anyways, to get back to Emily’s question, historians are categorizing all sorts of smaller periods in human history, so if it seems like these historical periods are shorter than geological periods, it’s because they are shorter. Anatomically modern humans have only been around for the past 300,000 years.
And for the vast majority of that time?
Dagomar Degroot: 290,000 odd years. We're all hunters and gatherers
Felix Poon: And then…
Dagomar Degroot: About ten, 11,000 years ago, we had domesticated enough species that we started to be able to live in one place.
Felix Poon: And finally only in the last 200 years
Dagomar Degroot: industrialization changes things again.
Felix Poon: ….so that our population again explodes, our living standards explode.
Some people are even calling the last 70 years, “The Great Acceleration,” because of how fast technology, human population, and environmental changes are happening.
Nate Hegyi: I mean, the older I get, the faster time seems to go.
Felix Poon: I mean, that’s a whole ‘nother can of worms we don’t have time to get into your aging process Nate.
Nate Hegyi: I mean at this point, what is time, you know?
Felix Poon: Exactly
Nate Hegyi: Jeongyoon what would you call your era at New Hampshire Public Radio?
Jeongyoon Han: The exploratory era. The exploring all these random topics like space and black holes and lab mice the next day.
Nate Hegyi: Pretty ridiculous job right? In a good way.
Jeongyoon Han: In the best way.
[music builds and fades]
Nate Hegyi: This episode was produced by me, Nate Hegyi, Jeongyoon Han, Justine Paradis, Taylor Quimby and Felix Poon.
It was edited by Taylor Quimby.
Rebecca Lavoie is our Executive Producer
Music for this episode was by Blue Dot Sessions.
And remember if you’ve got a question about the natural world, give us a holler at 1-844-Go-Otter or send a voice memo to outsidein@nhpr.org
Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio