Tiny Matters
Take a dive into the genes, microbes, molecules and other tiny things that have a big impact on our world with Tiny Matters. Join scientists Sam Jones and Deboki Chakravarti as they take apart complex and contentious topics in science and help rebuild your understanding. From deadly diseases to ancient sewers to forensic toxicology, Sam and Deboki embrace the awe and messiness of science and its place in the past, present, and future. Tiny Matters releases new episodes every Wednesday and is brought to you by the American Chemical Society, a non-profit scientific organization advancing chemistry and connecting the broader scientific community. Tiny Matters is produced by Multitude.
Tiny Matters
Pesticides across history and learning from millions of years of plant-insect warfare
On January 27, 1958, newspaper editor Olga Huckins sat down to write an angry letter to a friend. Olga and her husband owned a private two-acre bird sanctuary, and the previous summer the government had sprayed the pesticide DDT all over that two acres to control the mosquitos. She saw wildlife, particularly birds, getting sick and dying. The friend Olga sent the letter to was none other than Rachel Carson, who would go on to write the book Silent Spring, exposing the dangers of synthetic pesticides, including DDT, and helping push forward the modern environmental movement and the creation of the US Environmental Protection Agency.
Today on the show we’re going to talk about the history of pesticides and their deployment, and how researchers are working to develop more effective, safer pesticides. We will also take a fascinating dive into the coevolution of plants and pests, specifically insects, and what we’re learning about the effectiveness of pesticides based on hundreds of millions of years of plant and insect evolution.
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On January 27, 1958, newspaper editor Olga Huckins sat down to write an angry letter. She and her husband were living in Duxbury, massachusetts, a small town south of Boston. There they had a private two-acre bird sanctuary and the previous summer the government had sprayed the pesticide DDT all over that two acres to control the mosquitoes. In her letter Olga wrote quote it killed about a dozen of my darling half-tamed birds and I claim it's willful trespassing over private property where such lethal showers were not needed or wanted, and it is inhumane, stupid, undemocratic and probably unconstitutional. What Olga likely didn't know at the time was how big of an impact this angry letter would have, because the friend she sent it to was none other than Rachel Carson the Rachel Carson who would go on to write the book Silent Spring, exposing the dangers of synthetic pesticides, including DDT, and helping push forward the modern environmental movement and the creation of the US Environmental Protection Agency.
Speaker 1:Welcome to Tiny Matters, a science podcast about the little things that have a big impact on our society, past and present. I'm Sam Jones and today I'm joined by guest co-host Ariana Remmel, who's a journalist and audio producer based in Little Rock, arkansas. Ari, welcome to Tiny Matters.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 3:I was an organic chemist before becoming a journalist, so I've always loved covering stories about the molecules that shape the world around us and, as an amateur naturalist, I'm especially intrigued by the ways that plants and animals, including humans, use chemical compounds to influence their environments, so I'm really looking forward to chatting about a deeply fascinating topic pesticides.
Speaker 3:Today on the show, we're going to talk about the history of pesticides and how they're deployed, and how researchers are working to develop more effective, safer pesticides. We will also take a fascinating dive into the coevolution of plants and pests, specifically insects, and what we're learning about the effectiveness of pesticides, based on hundreds of millions of years of plant and insect evolution on this planet. We'll start with the past not millions of years ago, but thousands when some of the first examples of pesticide use, at least that we know of, popped up. There's evidence that around 4,000 years ago, people in the southern region of Mesopotamia, modern-day Iraq, used sulfur dust to control insects, although whether it was to repel mites from infecting people versus bugs from destroying crops is up for debate. Around 3,200 years ago, it's believed that people in ancient China used compounds made of mercury and arsenic to control body lice.
Speaker 1:Both mercury and arsenic are heavy metals that can severely disrupt insect growth and be deadly, but of course, they're also very dangerous for us humans and other animals, which, you'll learn, is somewhat of a theme in this episode. It was in the late 1800s that we see the rise of more modern pesticides and just to clarify, pesticides are a super broad category and include things like insecticides and fungicides.
Speaker 4:The first real use of pesticides began in 1885 in France. There were grapes being grown and the farmers were concerned that some of them got stolen, and they put copper sulfate into some water to sprinkle over the vines, hoping it stopped people picking the grapes.
Speaker 1:That's Graham Matthews, an entomologist and chemist at Imperial College London. When I say Graham's CV is long, I mean long. He has been in the field since 1957.
Speaker 4:As far as I'm concerned, it's been a fantastic career because I've seen so many countries and I've learned a lot. You know, I couldn't think of anything better way of living than doing all I did.
Speaker 1:Graham has lived and traveled all over the world witnessing the advancement or sometimes lack of advancement, of pesticides and their use, which we'll talk about soon. But first let's get back to those grapes. The chemical mixture sprinkled on the grapes left a chalky residue that ended up doing a lot more than just discouraging passersby from stealing a bite.
Speaker 3:It was in 1885 that French scientist Pierre-Marie Alexis Millardet, of the Academy of Sciences at Bordeaux, france, discovered that this mix of copper sulfate and the mineral lime was, in fact, very effective against a horribly destructive fungus that was killing grapes in France. The way this concoction works is it stops the fungus from germinating, meaning the spores that it uses to reproduce will no longer grow.
Speaker 1:The Bordeaux mixture, as it's called, is still used today, mainly applied once a year in the wintertime, and the mixing proportions that Millard came up with in 1885 haven't changed over the past nearly 150 years, which is pretty incredible. Yeah, I would say so. So Graham told us that around the same time, farmers in the United States were facing issues with the Colorado potato beetle, which sounds kind of cute but is actually the worst.
Speaker 3:Oh, it is a really nasty bug and a major potato pest.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So people were coming up with ways to kill it, including a broad-spectrum insecticide called Paris green, made of copper arsenate that was dusted onto potato leaves. Of course, arsenic is not something you want to be exposed to. In fact, if you listen to our episode from April titled Arsenic Radium and a Locked Room Cyanide, mystery Poisons and the Rise of Forensic Toxicology, you might recall that arsenic was a very popular poison for centuries, referred to as the inheritance powder. But here's the tricky thing Without using that arsenic back in the 1860s and 70s, people likely would not have produced enough potato crops and may have starved to death.
Speaker 3:So an arsenic-based pesticide was in fact the lesser evil.
Speaker 1:Exactly so. Although a lot of what we'll talk about today will paint pesticides in a less than glowing light, it's important to state up front that without pesticides, there would be a huge drop in agricultural production and some serious public health implications.
Speaker 3:Would it be incredible if we could produce everything sans pesticides? Absolutely, but given the scale and complexity of our modern food systems, it's just not feasible to remove pesticides from global agriculture, at least not right now. What's more, pesticides are an important tool for controlling insect-borne disease outbreaks, such as malaria, dengue fever and Zika virus, which is all to say that today's pesticides do still play a big part in making sure people remain healthy and fed around the world. Okay, so, with all of that in mind, let's go back to where the episode started with a particularly problematic pesticide, ddt. Ddt, or dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, is considered the first of the modern synthetic insecticides. It's a carbon-based molecule that works by opening up sodium ion channels in neurons, causing them to fire randomly, leading to spasms and death. I hadn't realized this, but DDT was first synthesized way back in the 1870s, but it took a while for it to be recognized as an insecticide.
Speaker 4:But in 1939, the Swiss company Geige they recognized this and started manufacturing DDT.
Speaker 1:The Swiss company JR Geige patented DDT in 1940, after chemist Paul Hermann Mueller discovered DDT's insecticidal properties. In 1948, mueller received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for this work. Ddt is maybe best known for its use in World War II, when troops were dying of malaria that was being spread by mosquitoes. At that time, the insecticide pyrethrum was used, derived from chrysanthemum flowers, but Japan was the major supplier and because it was part of the Axis powers alongside Germany, us Allied troops had to look for something else. That thing ended up being DDT, and we would be remiss not to mention that DDT has been credited with saving millions of lives.
Speaker 4:When World War II finished, the use of DDT expanded quickly to cover malaria-infected areas. For example, in Sardinia in 1946, ddt was used as a malaria protection for 75,000 people, and in America the use of DDT quickly spread to controlling pests of cotton. Before long. Aircraft were then used to spray crops like cotton where there was a big insect problem. But the use of DDT was effectively stopped after. Rachel Carson in 1962, wrote a book called Silent Spring.
Speaker 3:Not long after Rachel Carson received that letter she visited her friend Olga on her property and one morning, following an evening where a plane spraying DDT had flown overhead she went out into the estuary. There she was met with dead or dying fish, crayfish and crabs. But if you've heard about DDT before, there's a good chance. It was in the context of the bald eagle. In the 1960s, evidence began to emerge that DDT was thinning the eggshells of these eagles. They would break long before the chicks could hatch and this caused the bald eagle population to plummet by 1967,.
Speaker 1:The bird was endangered and of course, it was not just birds and fish and crustaceans that DDT ended up being bad for. In humans, it's an endocrine disruptor and has been linked to reproductive harm, impaired neurodevelopment and cancer. Plus, because it dissolves easily in fat, it will accumulate in the body and stick around for a while. So in 1962, rachel Carson's book Silent Spring exposed the health hazards of DDT and that, along with the ongoing research that was only adding to concerns surrounding DDT, led to a 1972 ban on the compound's use in agriculture in the United States.
Speaker 3:And two years earlier the Environmental Protection Agency was created, right Yep in 1970.
Speaker 1:And in fact, in the EPA's archives I came across a 1985 entry about the birth of the EPA, where the author wrote, quote EPA today may be said without exaggeration to be the extended shadow of Rachel Carson. So in 2004, DDT was banned worldwide under the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants. However, it's still used occasionally during malaria outbreaks. And just going back to the bald eagle for a sec, the resurgence of this bird after DDT was banned has been incredible, and I know, Ari, that that's actually really evident where you live, right, yeah, the recovery of the bald eagle is probably one of the most famous conservation success stories.
Speaker 3:As I mentioned before, I'm a bit of a naturalist and I spend a lot of time watching wildlife along the Arkansas River, where I live. I actually see bald eagles flying overhead pretty frequently nowadays and I love pointing them out to other folks on the trail because it's just mind-blowing to think that these iconic raptors were on the brink of extinction just decades ago. But let's get back to Graham. Although he has spent a lot of time thinking about and working with pesticides, Graham's major focus has been pesticide application, as in how you put pesticides on crops. It may sound simple, but it's really not.
Speaker 3:There are a huge number of ways to do this. There are backpack or knapsack sprayers that use a handheld nozzle. There are agricultural drones. Number of ways to do this. There are backpack or knapsack sprayers that use a handheld nozzle. There are agricultural drones, boom sprayers that can be mounted on tractors and pulled through a field, and many others. And where the pesticides are applied also varies. Will you only spread pesticide along a fence in the soil, in specific spots on the plants themselves? It's actually a really complex world it is.
Speaker 1:And if you're like me and don't know much about this topic or at least I didn't before working on this episode you might think but does it really matter how or where pesticides are applied? And the answer is yes, for more than one reason. The first is worker safety. In the 1950s, following graduation from Imperial College, graham traveled to Africa where he saw farmworkers using knapsack sprayers pointing the nozzle in front of them, which meant that they were walking directly into a lot of pesticide. Graham and his colleagues developed a sprayer that had a nozzle coming off the back, called a tail boom, which helped protect worker health. So that was a win, of course, but if you look at the number of incidents today, with field workers being poisoned by pesticides, it's clear that some employers are blatantly ignoring the risks that come with pesticide application.
Speaker 4:Very recently in India, the farmers growing cotton suddenly had a big invasion of pests very late in the season when the plants were very high and they were using just an ordinary knapsack sprayer. But they held the lance more or less with the nozzle at the same height from the ground as their head, so they were walking straight into the spray and, in consequence, the chemical they were using was very, very toxic.
Speaker 3:At least 50 farmers died from July to October of 2017, and more than 800 farmers in the district where the pesticide was used were admitted to the hospital. A year later, it came out that they were using a pesticide containing large amounts of diaphenturon, a highly toxic compound that blocks cells from producing energy. So, in addition to the health risks of the pesticide itself, it's also incredibly important to consider the other ingredients that go into the final mixture that's actually applied to plants. Early in Graham's career, while in Africa, he saw that pesticides were being dissolved in water and then sprayed on crops, and he was worried about what would happen to that water-based spray treatment when it rained. So we set up an experiment.
Speaker 4:So I created a mechanism of being able to put artificial rain from a tank down onto plants. I was able to show quite clearly that the rain washes off the spray from the plants and it goes down into the soil. When you lose some of the chemical, it gets sort of used to the fact that there is a toxin there and it manages to change and become a resistant to that particular chemical.
Speaker 1:Graham wanted to find a way to make the pesticides stay on the crops, possibly slowing down how quickly insects or other pests would become resistant to it, while also reducing the amount of pesticide needed, because if it stuck around, you wouldn't need to apply it again and again, and again in one season.
Speaker 3:A real win-win.
Speaker 1:Definitely, and what he settled on was no longer applying a water-based mixture of pesticides that would just wash off in the rain. Unfortunately, very few people would listen. But then, in 1967, Graham moved to Malawi, where he lived for about five years. While there, he was approached by a farmer who said that they didn't have enough water to be able to adequately apply pesticide to their crops. Graham discussed options with a colleague who suggested something called a rotary atomizer.
Speaker 4:So you feed the liquid onto a disc that is rotating at speed and it throws the liquid off from the rim of the circular disc as it rotates.
Speaker 1:To me a rotary atomizer kind of looks like a massive version of a handheld milk frother yeah, I can see that.
Speaker 3:So Graham and his colleagues ran trials with this rotary atomizer in Malawi and, very importantly, instead of using a ton of water, they mixed the pesticide with a much smaller amount of oil and, not so much to Graham's surprise, it worked. The pesticide oil droplets were much better at sticking around when it rained. So from the 1970s to mid-90s, multiple African countries took up this technique that allowed them to use far less pesticide, but in 1995, there was a transition back to a water-based spray. Graham told us pressures from the chemical industry played a significant role and because climate change is increasing the frequency of heavy storms and floods, he worries the situation could become dire.
Speaker 1:And in addition to rethinking their application, we really need safer pesticides to begin with rethinking their application.
Speaker 4:We really need safer pesticides to begin with. Nowadays, people are beginning to respect the need for getting much safer chemicals, but because there's been very little development of that, there's a move towards using biologicals.
Speaker 1:Biologicals are naturally occurring compounds derived from living things. As opposed to synthetic pesticides like DDT that accumulate in the environment, biologicals are generally considered much safer due to their ability to degrade into harmless compounds. In agriculture, many products are now being developed that either contain or were derived from microbes. For instance, the biopesticide metarizium is used to control devastating locust infestations that threaten food security in Central Asian countries, including Uzbekistan. The metarizium acridum fungus produces a molecule that can penetrate a locust's body and use the animal's own nutrients to reproduce.
Speaker 3:Yuck. Well, that's intense. In other news, companies are also looking into using insect pheromones called simiochemicals, which mimic the signals insects use to navigate, to reroute them away from crops. And of course, there's also work to create genetically modified crops that deter insects. There are already some available, but unfortunately resistance is emerging.
Speaker 1:And that's actually not surprising, right? Because insects have, for millions of years, found ways to adapt to the protective chemicals that plants throw their way. We reached out to Diler Haji to learn more about that. Diler is a PhD candidate at the University of California, berkeley, interested in the genetics behind plant and insect coevolution. So what exactly is plant-insect coevolution?
Speaker 2:It connects to this hypothesis that was generated in the 50s and popularized through the 60s and 70s, called the escape and radiate hypothesis, and it's the idea that insects evolve mutations that help them overcome the chemical defenses of a plant, and once the insect population adapts to that plant population, the plant in turn evolves new mechanisms to defend itself. And so the escape and irradiate model is that when these new mutations evolve, they allow insect populations to escape the defenses of the plant and then become more diverse on new plant species, basically because it's kind of a defenseless zone at that point until the plant evolves its own countermeasures.
Speaker 3:To ask questions about plant-insect coevolution. Dallaire used a species of fly called Scapdomyza flava, sometimes called a leaf-mining fly or wasabi fly, because it eats a variety of mustard plants, including the one that wasabi comes from.
Speaker 1:That's very fun. Yeah, I know Great name.
Speaker 2:So it eats a whole assortment of different kinds of mustard plants in nature, and one of the questions we had was if a population of this species is being exposed to so many different chemical environments, how does that population adapt to the diversity of chemical environments?
Speaker 3:Dallaire told us that these plants create something called a mustard oil bomb, which turns out to be a clever bit of chemical engineering. It's got two components. The first are sulfur-containing compounds called glucosinolates and the second is an enzyme called myrosinase. These compounds are stored in different parts of the plant tissue and don't come into contact unless the leaf is damaged, like when a hungry fly takes a nibble. That's when they react together and produce compounds called isothiocyanates, which are really toxic to insects but pretty tasty to many humans.
Speaker 2:You can think of them as what you taste, in the kind of spiciness of arugula. I always go back to arugula because I love arugula.
Speaker 1:I'm also a big arugula fan, and the popularity of mustard plants for food is part of what makes wasabi flies such a troublesome crop pest, because the wasabi flies actually have their own detoxification proteins that allow them to shuttle these toxic compounds right out of their bodies. And they're not the only insects who have adapted to diffuse a mustard oil bomb. Aphids, for example, have a sneaky adaptation to keep glucosinolates and morosinase separate.
Speaker 2:They won't even detonate the mustard oil bomb. They have these piercing sucking mouth parts that'll just maneuver between the cells so that the two things never meet and detonate. So there's so many different examples just within this one system, and I think that is an interesting part of the story too. There's predictability in that, like, some insects find the same solution, and there's also divergence, where some species find totally different solutions.
Speaker 1:Last year, dallaire was an author on a study that found that in many cases, solutions. Last year, dallaire was an author on a study that found that in many cases, insecticide resistance relates back to something called GABA. Gaba stands for gamma-aminobutyric acid. Gaba receptors, which are proteins that stick off of neurons, have compounds also called GABA that bind to them. That is a lot of GABA, I know it's a lot. So, to recap, a molecule called GABA binds to its GABA receptor on neurons, stopping or slowing their activity.
Speaker 3:Ah, okay, much better.
Speaker 1:So because this binding slows down neural activity, it has a calming effect which is great at a certain threshold, but too much of it can be deadly.
Speaker 2:We knew from the insecticide research that insects in insecticide environments evolve mutations in their GABA receptor in response to a very specific insecticide called dildrin.
Speaker 3:Dildrin is a synthetic pesticide that was primarily used in the US from the 1950s through the 70s until the EPA banned its use in 1987. And, at the end of the day, it was found to be more toxic to humans than it was to insects.
Speaker 2:It was found to be more toxic to humans than it was to insects. Researchers back in the 70s and 80s showed that if you treat populations of flies with Dildrin, you end up selecting for mutations in the GABA receptor that create very resistant animals. So you can give these animals Dildrin and they'll be just fine.
Speaker 3:It turns out that resistance came down to one tiny DNA mutation that altered one amino acid in the GABA receptor protein. That alone was enough for insects to become resistant to dildrin.
Speaker 2:It turns out that that same mutation evolved in a bunch of different insects, over 300 million years of evolution, that have never experienced insecticides, and the reason why they're evolving it is because they're interacting with chemicals that do a lot of the same things.
Speaker 3:These chemicals are called terpenes. Terpenes are naturally produced by plants and bind to insect GABA receptors, so, in turn, evolution selects for insects with GABA receptor mutations that make them immune to these terpenes, in the same way they become immune to dildrin.
Speaker 2:We did find in our paper on this that there's multiple instances of resistance evolution across the insect tree of life. So think of like the age of the dinosaurs, right? And as the insects were diversifying, so were the plants.
Speaker 1:Dallaire expects to find many more examples of this kind of thing, where pesticide resistance mirrors resistance to natural products produced by plants. And, lucky for Dallaire and his colleagues, insects are pretty easy to genetically analyze and modify. For instance, dallaire told us that researchers in his field engineered monarch flies to eat milkweed. Milkweed is actually super toxic to these flies and really to most animals, but it's not toxic to monarch butterflies. By introducing just three genetic mutations seen in the butterflies into these flies, the researchers gave the flies the ability to eat a lot of milkweed enough to probably kill an elephant First off, okay wow.
Speaker 3:But also this work is so important for the agriculture world. It could potentially help researchers predict which biological pesticides will and won't work before they're even developed, and what scientists learn from plant-insect coevolution could reach even beyond that.
Speaker 2:You can really get to the bottom of molecular processes by looking at these kind of natural interactions out in the wild, right, and so designing or like figuring out drugs that you know are able to modulate and affect proteins in ways that are beneficial to humans. Evolution has already kind of figured out a lot of these solutions. So, in terms of designing drugs or finding new drugs or something like that, there's like great potential in studying insect plant interactions, and there's so much diversity out there, right, so it's just a vast, wide open space that is good for discovery.
Speaker 1:Are you excited for your first Tiny Show and Tell? Very, very excited to participate in this process. Well, I'm happy to go first. I feel like that's the only fair thing to do in this situation. I'm not going to, you know throw you in the deep end.
Speaker 3:I really appreciate you taking one for the team here.
Speaker 1:Okay. So, ari, today I want to share a study with you that caught my eye. So researchers at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research in Kansas City which, side note, is actually where I worked as a lab tech before going to grad school Didn't know that. Yeah, so they're using this fish called the African killifish, and they're using it because it can regrow its tail when it's damaged, and so they want to ask questions about regeneration Cool cool.
Speaker 1:In regenerative medicine there are a million questions. Some of the big ones are how does an animal know how much of something to regenerate right Like if there's an injury? How does it know just to regenerate part of its tail versus its entire tail? And then, of course, there's always the question of what genes are involved in this process, what corresponding proteins to those genes are involved in the process and in what sequence of events.
Speaker 1:So the team studied tissue dynamics during regrowth of the killifish tail using a number of methods. They used fluorescent imaging to track the movement of different cell types in the tail, like live movement of these cells, which is very cool. And then they also used CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing to get rid of a gene that is known to modify a network of proteins and other molecules around the injury, and this is called the extracellular matrix, which, if you took high school biology, I'm sure you heard that term at some point. So what they found is that, without this gene, all of a sudden the killifish didn't know how much tissue was lost and they would more quickly regenerate even more tissue than what was needed. This brings in the question of whether extracellular matrix response could be modified some way.
Speaker 1:Of course you know we're talking about translational science. The goal is to bring it to humans at some point to increase regenerative growth after an injury, let's say a spinal cord injury. So it's all very complicated. I just gave you like the 10,000 foot view, but it's cool to see how researchers are trying to tease apart all of the factors that are involved in this really tricky process and how timing affects things, how you know which cells are moving to an area affects things, to really try and figure out what to target or focus on next.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I feel like the extracellular matrix is kind of overlooked and it's kind of neat to see the apparently very important role that these materials play in helping these animals understand just how much of their body is missing. As a side note, I used to keep aquaria as a child and I did have some killifish that were some of my favorites.
Speaker 1:They're beautiful, very cool. You probably weren't a sadistic child going around and chopping off their tails.
Speaker 3:Oh, absolutely not.
Speaker 4:No, no, no.
Speaker 3:But they do have very lovely tails. I just had no idea that I was keeping a model organism as a small child, so mine is also kind of on the critter beat. What I want to show to you today is not necessarily a new study, but it is a tool that I use pretty regularly this time of year because, as we are recording, it is fall, and for me that means fall bird migration. I am, as I mentioned in this episode, big fan of birds, big fan of being outside, and there are a number of different bird species in North America that, twice a year, are doing these gigantic migrations. In the spring, they're typically moving from the south, farther north, to breeding grounds, and now that they've made all their babies and the insect populations are dropping because it's starting to get colder, they're moving back south to their wintering grounds, sometimes in southern parts of the US, but other times as far as Central America or even parts of South America, and so what that means for me in Arkansas is that there are a lot of migratory bird species that are just passing through on their way south. You're in like the perfect locale. So what I want to say is that everyone is in the perfect locale. It's just a matter of knowing when to go look for these birds, and so that's the tool that I'm going to bring to you.
Speaker 3:It's a tool called BirdCast, which is a platform online that's run partially through the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in addition to a number of other partner organizations, but during migration season, what they do is make a dashboard that kind of works as like a weather prediction, but for birds migrating so cool this time of year.
Speaker 3:Every day I'm checking the birdcast forecast, because it actually does have a lot to do with weather forecasting, because they are using data collected by radio towers that are also kind of figuring out what the weather is going to be like. Because early on in this technology, which was being used to kind of detect not just rain clouds but also fighter jets and planes and stuff, the technicians realized that they would have these what were called angels, these like sort of nebulous clouds that would come across their radar screens, but when they actually sent out planes to look what was there, there wouldn't be anything, and we now know that those were birds, birds and other migratory flying animals like insects and stuff, and so nowadays, ornithologists have taken advantage of our extensive radio tower system in the US to be able to also monitor how these organisms are moving through the sky. And what that means for me as a birder is not only a nice little fun factoid to share at parties about birds and radio towers.
Speaker 1:Or tiny matters, or tiny matters.
Speaker 3:Yeah, exactly, honestly, this is the height. What a beautiful experience to be able to share this with y'all today. But it also means that the technology has advanced to the point where, on any given day during migration season, you can go to birdcastinfo and get a sense of, with a heat map of, just how many birds are moving overhead. So, as I'm looking at the dashboard right now, there's a prediction that that tonight more than 304 million birds will be moving across the US, so I can go out tomorrow morning and have a decent chance of maybe finding a nice migratory species to add to my life list.
Speaker 1:So cool. I love that and we will absolutely include that link in the episode description so people can go check it out. Excellent, first tiny show and tell.
Speaker 3:Thank you. Thank you so much. Thanks for tuning in to this week's episode of Tiny Matters, a production of the American Chemical Society. This week's script was written by Sam, who is also our executive producer, and was edited by me, arianna Remmel and by Michael David. It was fact checked by Michelle Boucher. The Tiny Matters theme and episode sound design is by Michael Simonelli and the Charts and Leisure team.
Speaker 1:Thanks so much to Graham Matthews and Dallaire Haji for joining us. A reminder that we have a newsletter Sign up for updates on new Tiny Matters episodes, video clips from interviews, a sneak peek at upcoming episodes and other content we think you'll really like. I've put a link in this episode's description. See you next time.
