Wolves, water, and global weirding

What do wolves, waste-water treatment plants, and the Gulf Stream have in common? This episode, that’s what! It’s that wonderful time when we comb through all your wonderful questions and call up some scientists to help us answer them. Some of the more unlikely things that get brought up include dinosaur pee, abandoned shopping carts, and wolves preying on cheese curds. 

Here’s what’s on the docket:

Featuring Eric Odell, Alice Ren, and Sri Vedachalam. Title images courtesy of NASA, Mark Kent, pike JO, and Dallas Floer Photography (CC BY 2.0)

Editor’s note: A previous version of this episode incorrectly pointed to dog saliva as having a lower pH, and being less acidic than human saliva. It is true that dog saliva has a lower pH, but that means it is more acidic, not less.

If you’ve got a question for the Outside/Inbox hotline, give us a call! We’re always looking for rabbit holes to dive down into, and we’re currently looking for questions on the theme of “smell.”

Leave us a voicemail at: 1-844-GO-OTTER, or send a voice memo to outsidein@nhpr.org.

CREDITS

Host: Nate Hegyi

Reported, produced, and mixed by Taylor Quimby, Justine Paradis, and Felix Poon

Editing by Taylor Quimby.

Executive producer: Taylor Quimby

Rebecca Lavoie is NHPR’s Director of On-Demand Audio

Music by Blue Dot Sessions, Baegul, Hatamitsunami, and King Sis.

Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

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.

Taylor Quimby: So, Nate, important question. Yes. Do you let your dogs lick your face? No, never.

Nate Hegyi: I have an aversion to dog saliva.

Taylor Quimby: You have….You have three dogs, and they do not lick your face?

Nate Hegyi: I don't know if Christine's going to hate me for this, but she will let Gilly, one of our dogs, lick her feet. You know, like, what do they call it? Misophonia… when you hear a certain sound, and It creates a rage inside you that you don't understand. The sound of a dog licking Christine's feet is one of those sounds that I'm just like… “Stop it!”

[mux]

Taylor Quimby: Why is she licking her feet? Like are they sweaty? Is it the salt? Is she, like, rubbing peanut butter on her toes?

Nate Hegyi: [laughs] No!

[mux swell]

Taylor Quimby: So I absolutely let my dog, like, slobber all over my face. It would be very difficult not to. it's like what she wants to do all the time. Um, but I have this funny thing that'll happen where it's like, if I'm on a walk and she, you know, smells a big pile of mushy dog poo or like, horks down some, like, moldy old piece of bread we find on the boardwalk... I'll get so disgusted and I won't let her kiss me for, like, a few hours.

Nate Hegyi: Well, yeah, at the very least, if she's, like, going to town on some other dog's poop, you need to stay away.

Taylor Quimby: Yeah, but then, like, you know, I’ll give it a few hours or like, the next morning and it's like, uh, it's gone now.

[mux]

Well, just so the reason I'm asking about this is because we got an email from a listener named Anne Barker. Um. No joke. Who asked why is dog saliva slimy? And human saliva is not as slimy.

Nate Hegyi: Is human saliva not so slimy? I guess it's not as slimy as a dog's drool.

Taylor Quimby: No, but I actually had the same thing. I was like, I don't know, human saliva can be very slimy. And I will say that slimy saliva in either human or a dog can be a sign of, like, dehydration.

Nate Hegyi: Um, interesting. Don't babies have, like, slimy saliva?

Taylor Quimby: Yeah. I mean, if you've ever been spit on, it's pretty… It's pretty goopy.

Nate Hegyi: I'm not looking forward to that part of having a kid.

Taylor Quimby: Well, I basically looked into this, and I can't point to one thing. But I can say that dog spit is a little different than ours. Dog saliva has a lower pH, apparently quite a bit lower. So it is not as acidic. Um, it has a higher count of antimicrobial enzymes and proteins. For some of these reasons, dogs are less likely to get cavities than people are, but more likely to get gingivitis.

Nate Hegyi: Oh that's interesting. It also makes sense as to why when they're when they've hurt themselves, you know, like if they cut their paw or something, they're always licking their paw.

Taylor Quimby: Yes. Although I will say every article about this specifies that you should not let your dogs lick your wounds clean. That is not actually good medical advice.

Nate Hegyi: Why would I do that? Oh my gosh, that's… I would never do that.

Taylor Quimby: But if there is one reason that dog saliva is probably thicker, it's because dogs hork down their food without chewing as much as we do. And, um, you know, so one of the main jobs of saliva is to lubricate the eating process and the throat. And so, you know, they need a, like, a pretty slimy spit. 

Nate Hegyi: Oh yeah, I just gave my dog a bunch of curly fries yesterday that I didn't want to eat and literally watched her just inhale them in, like, five seconds.

Taylor Quimby: Like a heron. Like a stork, just like [makes horking sound].

Nate Hegyi: Exactly. 

[mux]

I'm Nate Hegy here with producer Taylor Quimby, and this has all been our side door entrance into today's episode where we take your questions about everything from dog saliva to wastewater treatment and more.

Taylor Quimby: And in honor of that opening little bit, Nate, I think we should skip the usual theme in favor of another great mailbag segment from history. Tell me if you recognize this… [they sing] “Here's the mail, it never fails,iIt makes me wanna wag my tail, when it comes I wanna wail.. Maiiiiil! 

Nate Hegyi: Blue's Clues. Right? 

Taylor Quimby: I wasn't sure if you were gonna recognize that.

Nate Hegyi: I do. 

Taylor Quimby: So I want to start us off with, uh, one more canine question, but a much wilder one. Um, and this is a question that you chatted over with producer Justine Paradise. Hello.

Sarah: Hello Outside/In team. My name is Sarah, and I'm calling from Golden, Colorado, and I had a question for you. They just released, uh, this past winter. Wolves, uh, for the first time ever, uh, in Colorado. But they released them in the winter. And I was wondering if there's a reason why it seems like they wouldn't have food or sort of the resources they would need. Um, and I know when they released wolves in Yellowstone back in the day, that was also in winter. So I assume there's a reason, but I don't know what it is. Thanks.

Nate Hegyi: So essentially Justine, she's asking like, why did they release the wolves in winter? Right?

Justine: Yeah. I think this is a really interesting question! Nate, you actually live in wolf country, in Montana, right now, right?

Nate: I do.

Justine: This is a pretty big issue in the West, right?

Nate: Yes, it can be very contentious. Ranchers say that wolves will kill their cattle. The anger is so palpable that you’ll see bumper stickers that say “Smoke a pack a day.” They really don't like wolves. 

Justine: That says a lot. So for context, wolf populations have rebounded in some states, but in others, they’re still effectively extirpated, like in Colorado. In 2020, voters there approved a state ballot measure to restore and manage a gray wolf population in the state. And, last year, as part of that program, wildlife officials captured 10 wolves in Oregon, and they brought them to Colorado.  To learn more about why they move wolves in winter, I called Eric Odell, the wolf conservation lead at Colorado Parks and Wildlife. 

Eric Odell: For one thing, capturing wolves is much easier in the winter. If there's snow on the ground, that is very obviously helpful for tracking animals to find out where they are. It keeps them cooler. The cooler temperatures are really good because we don't want the animals to overheat. 

Justine: And another reason is that wolves are social animals, right? 

Nate: Yeah.

Justine: So wildlife officials are actually taking that into account when they relocate them from one state to another. 

Eric Odell: At that time of the year, that's the natural time when wolves would naturally disperse from their packs. And so we take advantage of that to kind of mimic that behavior. 

Nate: Wow, all things I would have not thought about, by the way. I would have just thought food.

Justine: Obviously, it would still be kind of stressful to be a wild wolf and then suddenly get captured and moved thousands of miles.

Nate: Very much so.

Justine: So, they do avoid capturing wolves that are under a year old that would probably have a harder time adapting. They’re kind of inexperienced. They also try to avoid capturing the breeding individuals within a pack, which you can imagine can be pretty disruptive for a pack.

Nate: Yeah.

Justine: And what’s kind of wild is that, because there are less than a couple hundred wolves in Oregon, wildlife officials actually know them pretty well. Breeders are typically the ones in a pack who have already been captured and radio collared. So you can often pick them out, even from a helicopter.

Nate: OK, so if you can see their collars, you’re like, "We’re not going to take those ones." But if you see pretty big ones without collars, "You’re going to Colorado."

Justine: Eric told me the whole process of capturing and moving the animals takes a little less than 24 hours, because they actually do it by plane.

Eric Odell: They were very, very docile, very calm. There was no scratching, no biting at cages, nothing. They were almost silent throughout the whole time.

Justine: On their first release day in December, they transported a group of five animals. Some were a little cautious at first, but after a little coaxing.

Eric Odell: The crates were open, the animals ran out of the crates and right up a hill and within a matter of less than a minute, really, they were out of sight. 

Justine: So it’s been about six months since these wolves were released in the height of winter, and so far, only one has died, killed by a mountain lion.

Nate: That’s nature!

Taylor Quimby: Is that nature, Nate? Wolves versus mountain lions.

Nate Hegyi: It's pretty badass nature. It's cool nature. That's like the kind of nature that that I would have gotten really excited about in third grade.

 

Taylor Quimby: I was very surprised to read after I worked on this segment with Justine. So few states have wolf populations over 1000. Do you know what they are?

Nate Hegyi: Um, Montana? Idaho? Uh, Minnesota. That's my guess.

Taylor Quimby: Well, the big one is Alaska. Alaska has, like, all the wolves, basically.

Nate Hegyi: Oh, of course, Alaska.

Taylor Quimby: And in Montana, fish, Wildlife and Parks estimates that in 2022, there were just over a thousand wolves in the state. But there's some debate over how that number is reached. And some scientists think it's a pretty dramatic overcount.

Nate Hegyi: Really? Wow.

Taylor Quimby: So they might not actually be on the list.

Nate Hegyi: I think we had more until a couple of years ago until, uh, some rules changed in Montana. Um, and that brought those those numbers down.

Taylor Quimby: Yeah. I saw Alaska, Minnesota, Idaho and maybe like, Wisconsin's like right on the edge. Oh, interesting.

Nate Hegyi: Yeah, that is much hate towards wolves in Minnesota and Wisconsin.

Taylor Quimby: I actually think that they just have a longer history of protection too. So it's less controversial because it's not a change.

Nate Hegyi: And less less predation. You don't have you're not grazing cattle and sheep over wide, you know, swaths of land like you do out west.

Taylor Quimby: The wolves aren't like carrying away cheese curds.

Nate Hegyi: Yeah, yeah. Exactly, exactly. They're not like snipping off stalks of corn.

Taylor Quimby: Ah, it's got our potatoes again.

Nate Hegyi: Hey, this is Outside/In. I'm Nate Hegyi here with producer Taylor Quimby. And today we are answering your questions. Now we've covered the Blue's Clues portion of the show, and now we're moving on to, like what? Water related questions? Like, what's the theme here, Taylor?

Taylor Quimby: It is very unconnected. Wolves and water and dogs. Dog… Wolf…

Nate Hegyi: W's.

Taylor Quimby: We're moving on. So this next question came to us from Instagram listener SK7242, who I believe was one of the robots from the latest Star Wars reboot. Uh, and they want to know, quote, “what if the Gulf Stream shut down?”

 Nate Hegyi: Ooh, I’ve thought about this a lot actually Taylor.

Taylor Quimby: You have??

Nate Hegyi: Well yes, because I not-so-secretly love the movie The Day After Tomorrow, the climate change disaster film from 2004. It’s one of my favorites. And in it, the Gulf Stream “shuts down” and Europe, which is at a very high latitude, just freezes over. And I’ve always thought, if it did shut down… would northern Europe just turn into a tundra?

Taylor Quimby: Would there be an overnight ice age?

Nate Hegyi: I don’t know! I’m fascinated. What did you find out?

Taylor Quimby: OK. The Gulf Stream is a deep ocean current that runs up from the Gulf of Mexico, alongside the East coast of the US for a little bit, before veering across the Atlantic ocean towards Europe.

But what makes the Gulf Stream super important is it’s role in regulating temperatures.

So as you point out - if you pull up a map, you’ll see that London, England and Calgary, in Canada, are basically the same latitude.

Nate Hegyi: Right! And Calgary has very cold, long winters. England is kind of more like Seattle.

Taylor Quimby: And the reason is all that warm water brings lots of warm water, up from the Gulf Stream, over to Europe.

So if somebody did just turn it off like a faucet… things would definitely get very weird. There would be huge consequences for fishing and the shipping industry.

And to your point, Europe would get way, way colder. We’re talking two to ten degrees Celsius as you go further north from places like Germany into Scandinavia.

I will say, the good news is that the Gulf Stream is definitely not going to “shut down.”

Nate Hegyi: I thought I read a study recently that the chances of it shutting down in the next 100 years is quite high…

Taylor Quimby: Hmm, well hold that thought.

Alice Ren: The Gulf Stream totally disappearing is not going to happen, so you don't need to worry about it… but there are more nuanced changes in the amount of heat that will flow northward that may actually be important and that may impact us.

Taylor Quimby: So this is Alice Ren, she’s an oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. And she told me that scientists have been documenting changes to the Gulf Stream for some time.

Alice Ren: We found that it had warmed in the past 20 years by about one degree Celsius… The Gulf Stream is also shifting closer to the coast, only about ten kilometers in the past 20 years.

Taylor Quimby: But fears of a full “shut down” are very overblown. You see, the Gulf Stream is connected to this bigger cycle of ocean currents that sort of runs in a big clockwise circle around the Atlantic ocean. It’s called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC.

Nate Hegyi: AMOC! I’ve seen that acronym before.

Taylor Quimby: Yes! And there is a study that showed that the AMOC is weakening. But after this study came out, a lot of news stories kind of conflated the AMOC and the Gulf Stream, and generally just exaggerated the findings of the study to somewhat apocalyptic levels.

Nate Hegyi: I read those news articles and I was thoroughly hooked by them.

Taylor Quimby: Well, it’s scary.

Nate Hegyi: It is scary! And, you know… The Day After Tomorrow.

Taylor Quimby: But the IPCC has had to make pains to clarify that, no,the gulf stream is not going to shut down. To me, the big takeaway is that our climate systems are interconnected in all of these surprising ways. And this is why we stopped saying “global warming” right? Because rising C02 emissions don’t have this linear effect on our temperature, they could lead to cooling in other parts of the world.

Nate Hegyi: Right. Global weirding.

Taylor Quimby: "Global weirding." I like that.

Nate Hegyi: I think that’s an accurate term for what’s happening.

[mux]

 

Taylor Quimby: Okay, so, uh, we've got one more question, Nate. Um, and this one also kind of touches on global weirding. Another w wait, what?

Nate Hegyi: Another “w.” We have weirding, water, wolves.

Taylor Quimby: Oh, you're talking about the theme. Yeah. Maybe that's why we can name this episode. Because I'm really struggling to come up with a name for it. Yeah.

Nate Hegyi: Weirding water and wolves. 

Taylor Quimby: All right. So, so one more question also touches on global weirding. And it was tackled by producer Felix Poon. 

Felix Poon: Hey. So we got a question from Jeannie in Burlington, Vermont.

Jeannie: My question is about wastewater treatment plants. I'm curious more about how they work in general.

Felix Poon: And on top of that, you know, Vermont, where Genie is from, got some pretty major flooding last year, and she was wondering if these facilities are vulnerable to climate change, like more extreme storms and sea level rise.

Nate Hegyi: That is a very stinky problem. If so, uh oh.

Felix Poon: To understand how waste treatment plants work, I spoke with Sri Vedachalam, a water and climate policy specialist. And, you know a lot of cities and towns combine wastewater (from our toilets and sinks) and stormwater (from street gutters, sewers, and open drainage canals). So Sri says the first step is to filter out all of the stuff that shouldn’t go into the plant.

Sri Vedachalam: Imagine a big screen that simply blocks out big pieces, maybe some boulders some rocks, plastics. These pipes are huge. Sometimes there are shopping carts, I mean, literally.

Nate Hegyi: I always see the ubiquitous shopping cart in a river or a ditch. So these filters stop them and other unseemly things.

Felix Poon: The second step, Sri says, is to add a whole bunch of bacteria into the water, which eat the poop, transforming it into a kind of nutrient-rich sludge that falls to the bottom of the water. And some facilities actually sell or give this stuff away to farmers as fertilizer.

Nate Hegyi: That seems like actually a pretty climate-friendly solution.

Felix Poon: Yeah, and the water is 99% clean at this point. So the third and final step is to disinfect it with ultraviolet ozone or chlorine to kill off bad bacteria, viruses and parasites. After that, they discharge the water, usually into a river. And as gross as it sounds, this water is tested and generally clean and safe to drink. Like, cities downstream from water treatment plants do end up using this water for their own drinking supply.

Nate Hegyi: Las Vegas uses that water pretty much in this full almost closed-circle recycling program that allows them to be able to have drinkable waters coming out of the taps in the middle of the desert.

Felix Poon: I mean, you know, Las Vegas right? What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Quite literally.

Nate Hegyi: Quite literally.

Felix Poon: But you know, it’s not just Vegas. This is how it’s always worked, across the planet, like water on this planet is billions of years old.

Sri Vedachalam: Maybe millions of years ago, it came out of a dinosaur, you know, maybe that's the pee of a dinosaur. Who knows. That's the process. It's all old and recycled in some way or the other.

Nate Hegyi: Okay so we know how these wastewater treatment plants work. But going back to that question, are they threatened by climate change?

Felix Poon: Yeah, so there are a few ways in which they’re vulnerable to climate change. One of them is because of their very design.

Sri Vedachalam: They rely a lot on gravity. So because of that, they end up being located in the lowest spot in the city topography.

Felix Poon: So this means they’re vulnerable to flood damage and even power outages. Worst case scenario they’d have to stop treatment temporarily, which means untreated wastewater ends up in our waterways.

Nate Hegyi: Oh, not good.

Felix Poon: There’s not much we can do about this besides build barriers around the treatment plant, or build new plants on higher ground. And then the other thing is because a lot of our systems have combined wastewater and stormwater, every time there’s a superstorm it super multiplies the volume of our waste, and treatment plants can’t keep up, so wastewater will go untreated into our waterways. And obviously because of climate change, there’s more superstorms. And in fact, one-third of all wastewater systems in the U.S. are at risk of flooding if a big storm hits, according to an AP report.

Nate Hegyi: Wow.

Felix Poon: So agencies and utilities are trying to separate wastewater systems from stormwater systems.

Nate Hegyi: I hope that we figure this out soon because if we don’t, we’re gonna be in one stinky pickle.

So that is it for today. But remember you can send us your questions and we might just answer them on a future episode of the podcast. Right now we are looking for questions on the theme of smells.

Taylor Quimby: Things like why are smell and taste so connected to senses?

Nate Hegyi: Or what's the best way to get the smell of a skunk out of your clothes?

Taylor Quimby: Or what does Teen Spirit really smell like after all, are not good. Yeah, actually, I can answer that. I have a pre-teen. I know exactly what it smells like.

Nate Hegyi: You can send a voice memo with your question to Outside In at nhpr.org, or by calling our hotline one 844 Go Otter. If you're new to the show, you can also subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, or wherever you like to listen.

Taylor Quimby: It smells like Doritos and not wanting to take a shower every day.

Nate Hegyi: Yeah, yeah, I remember when you just didn't want to take a shower.

Taylor Quimby: It's so confusing. Every morning I'm like, why is this even a debate?

Nate Hegyi: This episode of Outside In was produced, recorded and mixed by our executive producer Taylor Quimby, along with Justine Paradise and Felix Poon. Rebecca LaVoy is NPR's director of On Demand Dog Stories. She's got a ton of dogs, and they're always barking, and she's never bothered by it. I've always appreciated that about her.

Taylor Quimby: Music in this episode came from blue Dot sessions bagel, tsunami and King sits.