1942. Europe. Soldiers find a boy surviving alone in the woods. They make him a member of Hitler's army. but what no one would know for decades. He was Jewish. Could a story so unbelievable. be true I'm Dan Goldberg I'm from CBC's Personally Toy Soldier available now wherever you get your podcasts This is a CBC Podcast.
Hi, I'm Bob MacDonald. Welcome to Quirks and Quirks. On this week's show, black gold, understanding ancient indigenous trade in obsidian. It's actually the sharpest known natural material, so you could have an edge. Literally one molecule thick. And winter was coming and then went again. How the Earth's big chill triggered the bloom of life. When the snowball Earth existed, the oceans were starved of nutrients.
and then all of a sudden this chemical cocktail comes in. It basically would have stimulated life at that time. Plus, the horrifying habits of the bone collector caterpillar, dolphins pee to communicate, scientific sampling with traffic, and how scientists found fish came to know them. All this today on Quarks and Quarks. It's like something from a horror movie.
A creeping, carnivorous creature that in a macabre attempt at disguise and intimidation covers itself with the dismembered remains of the dead. It's been named the Bone Collector Caterpillar, for obvious reasons. And perhaps thankfully, it's extraordinarily rare. Confined to just one island, and scientists have found only about 60 of them.
Dr. Daniel Rubinoff has been studying these caterpillars for much of his career. Dr. Rubinoff is a professor of entomology and director of the University of Hawaii Insect Museum. Hello and welcome to our show. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. Well, describe this bone collector caterpillar. What's it look like and where would I find it?
Finding it would be tough. It's only in the Waianae Mountains on the island of Oahu, here in the Hawaiian Island chain. And describing it is quite a mouthful. I guess the way I think about it now, it's as if you magnetized a tiny silk case, except instead of attracting metal, it attracted bits of bug. And so it ends up coated with... various bits of insect part that are jumbled across it. Really? Insect parts? Is that why it's called the bone collector?
It is. And there's a bit of irony there because we are entomologists and we do know that insects don't have bones. And there have been a few people who... we're upset by that but you know they call them sea cows and they're not cows and they call them hot dogs but they're not made from dog so it feels like there is some leniency here to have a little bit of fun with the common Okay. So how does it stick these insect parts to the outside of its body?
All caterpillars have silk glands. And in this situation, the caterpillar uses the silk, which is sticky when it first comes out, to attach the various insect parts across the case that it's carrying. So you might think of a caddisfly if you're familiar with them in streams, or if not, perhaps something like a hermit crab where it's disconnected home that it drags along with it. And when this caterpillar finds bits of insect that it can use, it will pick them up.
size them up, maybe chew on them a little bit just to get it right, and then find an empty spot on its case to tie them down. Where does it actually live? What's its habitat? It is only found in what we would call dry to mesic forest. in the Waianae Mountains of Oahu. And that's a very restricted range. It's about 15 square kilometers. And so we're quite concerned about its long-term persistence because that's not a lot of space to rely on.
Within the forest, I like to say it's all the places you don't want to stick your hands. So in tree hollows, in rotting logs, and under rocks are the places that these caterpillars live, and they are dependent on spiderweb. for their existence. And I should say, actually, the spiders have to be there too. So they are cohabitants of spiders. They eat the prey the spider has caught and maybe not finished or mostly finished.
And because they're wearing these silk cases and covered in dead insect parts, and in fact, the shed skin of the spider itself, the spider doesn't seem to recognize them as prey. You might think of it a little bit like a clownfish hiding in an enemy. These guys do that, except in this case, the caterpillars are also relying on their landlord, the spider, for food. Oh, so they live on the spider's web, sort of like a tenant, and the spider doesn't mind them being there or doesn't recognize them.
Right. I don't think the spider has much of a choice, but in this case, I'd say it's not a sheet web like a lot of people think of, you know, strung between, say, two bushes. This is under a rock, so it's a cobweb. It's in a rotten log, so it's more of a tripwire situation that the spiders have set up. And when insects bumble through it, it signals the spider to rush out and grab them.
So it's not that it's super sticky. And in fact, if you get a chance to check out our website, you might see some pictures. You can't hardly see the web because it's covered in wood bits and termite frass. But the webs are there, and I think they operate just as much as a signal as a snare for the prey that the spider is seeking. So what does the caterpillar actually eat?
Whatever it can get. So they aren't picky. They'll eat bits of sort of drying up bug jerky that's inside the pieces of bug that they come across. And then they'll take the rest. And again, put that crunchy bit on the outside of their case. But in captivity, they're very happy to eat live insects if they can catch them. The truth is, though, they're very, they're bumblers, is the way I put it. And so there's not a lot they can overtake.
So we have to give them little Drosophila, little fruit fly pupae in the lab and they crawl up and just chew on them and then eat them alive. But the pupae can't move. So that's sort of an easy picking. The other thing we've seen them eat is each other. And we have a video of a larger one coming across a smaller one and chewing through the case and eating that little guy alive in his own home.
Wow. So they're opportunistic then. It's kind of like a tenant you have in your house that goes in and raids your kitchen. Oh, yeah. It's worse. And Andy's his brother too. So there's that. What advantage does this give the caterpillar covering itself and all these body parts from inside? So I think it's the only way they survive. The spider would gladly eat a juicy caterpillar if it came across one. And being hidden in a silk case is probably not enough because the spider might probe that.
But the silk case that the caterpillar is living in is now covered with the shed skins of the spider and last week's dinner all at once. And so a spider... might detect emotion from this caterpillar rush up to it but what it's going to feel and taste because remember these are pretty dark environments so we're working with taste and probably uh touch It's going to taste its dirty laundry and last week's dinner and think, oh, this isn't food. Something just settled down.
So I think it's really crucial for these caterpillars to constantly be maintaining their cases and adding things to them and keeping themselves well covered because otherwise... they could be eaten. And you can sort of imagine in the process of natural selection, the caterpillars that get lazy get pulled out of the gene pool pretty quickly. All the caterpillars have this tendency to be very meticulous about always looking for little bits of bug to put on their case and attaching things.
Wow, very clever freeloader. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think of it as a rather risky business. I think they are in their keep. I mean, it's not like they just hang out. They are constantly maintaining stuff. And to be fair, I think most of the time what they're eating is stuff the spider is largely done with.
I can't imagine they're going to challenge the spider for any food. So it's after the spider is finished and there's sort of a dead or dying insect, they'll crawl up and chew through and eat what they can from it. So they're really more opportunistic. It's always amazing how islands have their own evolutionary path. Oh, it is incredible. And especially here, I feel like the bone collectors, Hawaii is consistently producing these evolutionary...
anomalies that you couldn't even imagine. And I think that's what makes it such an interesting place to work. And I think it also has a lot to teach us about how evolution functions by looking at these crazy things here. Dr. Rubinoff, thank you so much for your time. Oh, it's a pleasure. Dr. Daniel Rubinoff is a professor of entomology at the University of Hawaii. If you have a dog, you might be familiar with their tendency to urinate to mark their territory.
Other creatures like lions and bears communicate important messages with urine as well. But this is less common in marine mammals, for the obvious reason that pee in water tends to dissipate quickly. which is why it was so puzzling when a group of Canadian researchers working in Brazil noticed male river dolphins flipping onto their backs to pee into the air. oftentimes apparently aiming the stream towards other male dolphins. They documented this not once, not twice, but 36 separate times.
The surprising discovery was made by a team led by Dr. Clariana Araujo Wang. She's a researcher with the Botos do Cerrado Research Project in Brazil and an instructor at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario. Hello and welcome to Quarks and Quarks. Thank you for having me. First of all, tell me about these river dolphins. What are they like?
So, yeah, they don't look like your typical marine dolphin that you often see on TV. For example, they don't have a dorsal fin. They have more like a dorsal ridge.
And they have a very long beak, a very long rostrum. And they also are very flexible. Their body is very flexible because they can swim in very shallow waters and also among the... flooded vegetation in the rivers and they tend to have some pink coloration on them so not all of them are pink but usually males are scarred and then they have all these pink patches. on their body so they kind of look pink too. Well, they live in rivers, so what kind of environment do they live in?
live exclusively in rivers, in freshwater. So they live in different rivers, lakes, and small tributaries of the main lakes, main rivers in Brazil, and actually in other countries in South America too. And they can go in very, very small little creeks that you wouldn't think you would see dolphins. And you would see them in Brazil in very small little creeks and sometimes in very shallow waters too. Boy, how big are they compared to the dolphins that we're more familiar with in the ocean?
So males are usually bigger than females. They can reach about two and a half meters in length. So they are pretty big. Well, tell me about this aerial urination. What's going on there? What's it look like? Yeah, so we were really shocked when we first observed because it wasn't something we had heard before. Like no other dolphins are known to do this. When we first saw, we were really shocked. Just like, what's going on? And then...
We started seeing more and more often as we were doing our normal field work, our data collection. And then we started realizing, OK, something's going on here because it's not just like a once. in a lifetime thing it's like they were doing this very often so Then, as we collected more data, we also observed that sometimes other males would come and...
pursued the urine stream of the urinator. And that was even more shocking. Well, what does the urinator actually do? So, the urinator, he will... flip the belly up and he'll start urinating and actually another individual so another male will come closer to this urinator and the other male will then put his beak into the urine stream. Yeah, he's peeing out into the air and the other male will come and kind of chase the urine stream.
Okay. So what do you think is going on with the other dolphins? I mean, do they have a good sense of taste or smell for urine? Yeah, so no, not really. But that's one thing we are still, of course, getting more data and trying to better understand. But we think there's a social component to it just because. These animals, they are known to have some male dominant behaviors. And we think sometimes with this, males are trying to maybe advertise their social position or they're trying to convey.
some message or communicating somehow, but we are still not sure how and if that's really what is behind the behavior. Are these dolphins particularly social? Not really. So they don't form like a very tight social groups as we've seen other species of dolphins. You see large aggregations, but they are temporary only when they are feeding in a common area or they are socializing. And so usually the most stable social bonds between a mother and a calf.
and usually don't see long-term social bonds for these species. So what's the significance that it's only the males that are doing this behavior? Yeah, like I said, we are still trying to better understand the context of the behavior. We do think there's a social component. But also these species, they have other social behaviors that are male dominant. So that's why we think...
there's some sort of advertising social position with this behavior. For example, these species, they also do what we, it's called object caring. It's a sexual social display when the dolphins, they will... grab with their mouths sticks or rocks or leaves different objects in their environment and they will lift out of the water with their mouths displaying for females
So that's a known behavior for these species too. Everywhere where these species occur, in South America, in Brazil, different parts have been observed very frequently too. So we think because of that, and like I say, because they have this... behaviors that are more male dominance, we do think their urination could also be linked to some sort of social display.
So these male dolphins like to lift heavy things to show how strong they are and pee into the air just to show off. Yeah, seems like. Are there any other marine animals that urinate into the air like this? So before actually doing this, I had personally had never heard of it. But then once I published some preliminary results during a conference, I talked to a few colleagues and some of them kind of mentioned,
I've seen once or someone mentioned it. I also heard of someone that saw once another species of dolphin doing it. So I have heard of very few opportunistic cases, but not as frequent as we have seen, and also not with the receiver, the other male pursuing the urine. So what are you going to do next to understand this behavior more? Yes, so we are hoping to continue collecting more data. So we're just trying to secure final funds to continue the research.
Hopefully, we will try to just better understand the social structure of the animals that are doing the behavior. See if it's always the same animals or if there's some structure around this behavior. Dr. Adarujo Wang, thank you so much for your time.
Thank you. It was my pleasure. Dr. Clariana Araujo-Wang is a researcher with the Botos do Cerrado Research Project in Brazil and an instructor at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario. 700 million years ago, our blue marble of a planet was completely white, entirely encased in ice. It was a period known as the Snowball Earth, when massive global glaciers formed, and as they ebbed and flowed, they ground into the earth below like giant bulldozers.
In a new study of minerals from sediment from Scotland and Ireland, scientists were able to piece together how the snowball Earth set the stage for a transformation of Earth's natural system. including geology, climate, ocean chemistry, and the evolution of life itself.
Dr. Brandon Murphy was part of the team that made the discovery. He's a professor of earth sciences at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. Hello, Dr. Murphy, and welcome back to our program. Hello, Bob, and thank you very much for having me. Can you just describe what the Earth would have been like 700 million years ago? Well, very different from what it would appear to be today, or what it is today. 700 million years ago...
If you go back in the time machine, you sort of have to consider the Earth's modern geography as one snapshot in a continuous action movie. And so 700 million years ago, the Earth looked totally different in its geography than it does today. There was a supercontinent called Rodinia that was in the last stages of splitting up, creating new oceans.
And it was a time of major upheaval in the Earth that basically paved the way for a really exciting phase in Earth's evolution. So how much of the Earth was frozen? Well, according to the Snowball Earth hypothesis, pretty near it all, including the ocean.
So if you think about the water cycle or the hydrologic cycle that kids would learn about in school, that would have been totally shut off. Wow. You mean frozen right down to the equator? Frozen right down to the equator, yeah, and across the oceans as well. Well, how did you use sediments to piece together what was going on in our planet back then?
Well, first of all, the areas that we're working in were worked on for 100 years before, so they were well documented that there was a sequence of sediments that spanned this Snowball Earth interval. from 700 to 580 million years. And so as a consequence of that work, we were able to target specific layers that we knew were in and around the glacial deposits. So I set them to lay down like sort of pages in a book in sequence from bottom to top.
and although they may get distorted over time you can sort of usually figure it out and get back to the original sequence of layers So there are well-documented glacial deposits during that interval that were the times of the snowball Earth. And so we could target the layers in and around those snowball intervals, the layers during the glacial deposition and also the layers immediately above them. So what were you looking for during this time of the heavy glaciation?
We were looking for what the glaciers would actually do to the continents during that time. What we expected to occur was that the glaciers would erode deeper and deeper into the continental masses. And so when the glaciers eventually melted, a lot of that loose material would have been released and injected into the ocean. like a chemical cocktail. A lot of it would have gone like particles but a lot of it would have been dissolved in the water as well.
Well, what kind of minerals did you find in the sediments that told you what was going on then? Well, we used a mineral called zircon, which is very hardy, very resistant and can record the extent of continental weather. And we were expecting to find that what the glaciers would do is they would sort of, if you like, burrow down deeper and deeper into the continental masses, exposing older and older material for it to erode.
And so we'd expect the zircons, which are very resistant to change over time and faithfully record the time at which they crystallized, we were expecting them to record that information. And indeed they did. So what we were able to do was we were able to say that, oh yeah, the glaciers were indeed plucking down deeper into the continental land masses and exposing older basements. And so when the glaciers receded, you could imagine if the water cycle was turned off.
Life in the oceans, because there was only life in the oceans at that time, and life was predominantly single-celled at that time. So the only life in the oceans you can imagine if the water cycle was turned off, it would basically be starved of nutrients coming from land. It would only be getting nutrients coming out of the cracks within the ocean floor. So when the glaciers melted, all of a sudden that loosened material was injected very rapidly like a chemical cocktail into the ocean.
Well, can you paint me a picture of how the glaciers would have carved up the earth below during this time? Really, the base of the glaciers are where all the action is. That's basically an interaction of meltwater permeating down to fractures in the rock. And because the glaciation was so intense, you would see the meltwater penetrating deep down into the rock itself, and the freeze-thaw cycles would have broken the rock down, weathered it into smaller and smaller pieces.
and so you'll have a rather deep rubble beneath the glacier itself. And so once this material that the glaciers had dug up got into the oceans, what was the effect? Well, highlight one particular mineral, which is a mineral called apatite. It contains an element called phosphorus. And phosphorus for many people is a limiting nutrient for life in the ocean. It's in DNA, for example. And so continental weathering is the main supply of phosphorus to the oceans because its presence in appetite.
And so you could imagine it's sort of like when the snowball Earth existed, the oceans were starved of nutrients. And then all of a sudden, they were under stress. And then all of a sudden, this chemical cocktail comes in, rich in limiting nutrients of life. And so it basically would have stimulated life at that time.
Oh, I see. So the glaciers are like bulldozers that dig up the earth and all these nice nutrients. The glaciers melt. The water runs into the ocean, basically fertilizing the ocean. Is that what happened? Exactly. So what effect did that have on life in the ocean? Well, life started to diversify. And some people think that the connection is not thoroughly made, that this was sort of the underpinnings of what would become the Cambrian explosion, which is...
20 million years after this interval, and that's when life forms really radiated. And so by the end of these glacial intervals, life in the oceans was multicellular, far more diverse, far more complex than it was just 100 million years earlier. This whole process that you were looking at, the Earth transitioning from snowball Earth to the glaciers retreating to the geology of it, changing the chemistry of the ocean, the life in the ocean.
What's it like for you as a geologist to see all of these effects happening at the same time? It's fascinating because what it does is it breaks down the artificial barriers between the scientists. We're talking about geological processes. cycling chemicals, feeding the biosphere, and all of them obeying the laws of physics. All right. You're absolutely welcome. Thank you for your interest.
Dr. Brandon Murphy is a professor of earth sciences at St. Francis Xavier University. I'm Bob McDonald, and you're listening to Quirks and Quarks on CBC Radio 1. and streaming live on the CBC News app. Just go to the local tab and press play wherever you are. Coming up later in the program, fish are friends, not food. how scientists discovered ordinary fish could come to know them. In the beginning, you don't really know if the fish are going to come.
you see a little glitter from like tens of meters away. and it's coming quickly, quickly, quickly. And then you realize that it's a fish which is targeting you and who's swimming as fast as he can towards you. I'm Dr. Brian Goldman, host of the CBC podcast, The Dote. Each week, we answer health topics in a smart and sometimes counterintuitive way you won't hear anywhere else. Like, what's the least amount of exercise I can do to get the benefits? Which psychedelics can improve my mental health?
And how can I check for cancer if I don't have a family doctor? Top experts help me bring you what you need to know in plain language in about 20 minutes. Find The Dose on the CBC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts. Dr. Paul George and his group study antimicrobial resistant bacteria.
These are bugs that have evolved the ability to fight off antibiotic drugs and chemicals. Understanding these bugs, where they occur and where they're spreading is vital, both for human health and for agriculture. But his team had a problem. To get as comprehensive a picture as possible, they needed to sample air across the entire country. No easy feat. But they had a plan. You see, it turns out that there are air sampling devices crisscrossing the whole country on a daily basis.
They're called cars. More specifically, they're the air filters in cars. Admittedly, car air filters were not designed as collectors for microbes, but it turns out they do that pretty well anyway. Dr. George is an assistant professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Microbiology at Laval University. Hello and welcome to Quirks and Quarks. Hi, thanks for having me. First of all, why did you think to use car air filters in your research?
That's a great question. Actually, this work is part of a larger project looking at the distribution of antimicrobial resistant bacteria in the air. One of the big issues with capturing bacteria in the air is that there's a lot of air and our methods of capturing them are pretty limited. Oh, so you're using cars as collectors of your samples. Exactly. Yes.
Where were the air filters from? These air filters came from 51 cities across Canada, from coast to coast to the far north. And they come from mechanics and municipal government fleets. Is this the first time that CAR air filters have been used to study microbes in the air? No. This idea actually was inspired by collaborators in China who had used this method before.
And so when the director of this project, Professor Carolyn Duchesne, also at Laval University, wanted to look at getting a wider reach of. airborne microbes in the environment, she discovered this paper and decided that this was the sort of golden ticket to work on for us because it allows us to sample the... ambient air that people are exposed to on a day to day basis.
where they are, where they're living, and allows us to sort of get a better picture of what's happening in the outdoor environment. What did you think you might be able to capture with the air filter? So the idea was that we want to capture sort of a representative sample of the environment that people are exposed to on a day-to-day basis.
What's really interesting with studying bacteria in the air, these bacteria and other microorganisms are often attached to particulate matter like soil or plant matter. And when we capture sort of a... an aggregate sample like this, we can really get a representation of the whole environment.
because once these particles go into the air, they mix. And so we can see sort of local patterns coming from a city where we might have lots of tree cover and parks versus... as well as sort of built up areas that all mixes together and gives us a representative sample of that area. So when you looked at these in close detail, what did you find inside the filters? So we found a lot of bacteria, which was exciting. And we also found that these bacteria carry antimicrobial resistance.
Now, were there differences in different parts of the country? Yes. So that was one of our hypotheses, is that we were expecting to see different regional differences. in the microbial communities and the genes that they carry based on a suite of environmental factors. So obviously, if we think about Canada going from coast to coast, we have the mountains out west and the big forests, we have the prairies.
We had the Great Lakes and the more built up agricultural hubs along the St. Lawrence River and then the Maritimes. What kind of difference did you see? We saw some pretty interesting trends that were related to... Probably a mix of the environment and the agricultural activities that we observe in different regions.
So for example, in Quebec, we saw a higher proportion of resistance genes against sulfonamides and macrolides, which are two major antibiotic groups that are used in pig and poultry raising. And in comparison, when we looked at other areas, like, for example, the prairie provinces, there was a strong signal from tetracycline gene.
which are used in cattle raising, but also are quite common in soils and in grassland soils particularly. So it's not too surprising that these would be quite prevalent in the prairies. You mentioned that you had samples from both coasts. What about like BC and the Maritime? Yeah. So there's one thing that came up there that was really interesting was that we had a strong signal of beta-lactamase resistance genes. So those are type of antibiotics that's quite common.
It's hard to drill down into that data, but it sort of suggests that there might be some sort of effect from the ocean. So these genes might be present in the ocean, whether through natural processes or... pollution. And it might be that on the two coasts, we see this signal. It's also interesting to see that it was present in the far north, but obviously in the territories we're quite limited with what we can say is coming from.
human or natural sources. So it's just that antimicrobial resistance is natural in the sense that we can have it in the environment. naturally. A lot of the antibiotics that we use come from interactions between fungi and bacteria in the wild, if you will. So the fact that there are resistance genes in areas like the territories and the high Arctic.
isn't necessarily in itself a terrible sign of pollution. But at the same time, it's important for us to understand what this sort of background versus what the anthropogenic, what we're adding to that environment is. Wow. So what does this tell us about how these resistant microbes are moving through the environment? Well, it's really interesting because for a long time, there's not been a lot of research on...
the air as a sort of vector for the transfer of antimicrobial resistance genes. It's a It's a difficult environment to sample and it's not as well characterized as, say, transmission through groundwater or seeping into waterways. This is really interesting because it shows that we're able to harness. pretty large network of innovative sampling to cover such a large area as Canada. Well, do you think there are other applications that analysis of car air filters might work for?
yeah absolutely we're really interested in trying to use these types of filters to look at changes in bacterial communities in response to So comparing year over year change. In this paper, we only talk about bacteria, but there's obviously fungi that travel long distances by spores in the air. So that would be something that we'd be interested to in trying to leverage this type of method. And you have a lot of cars on the road doing that sampling for you.
Absolutely. In total, we had near 477 filters that were usable. We also had others that we couldn't use. So there was a lot of support and a lot of potential there. Dr. George, thank you so much for your time. Thank you. Dr. Paul George is in the Department of Biochemistry and Microbiology at Laval University in Quebec City. There are over 40,000 archaeological sites in Alberta, each telling its own tale about the history of the area and the people who used to live there.
And in just over 500 of these sites, researchers have found artifacts made of obsidian, a volcanic rock that was prized by indigenous people to make tools and weapons. But there are no volcanoes in Alberta, which means this obsidian must have traveled a long, long way a long time ago. which is why archaeologists like Timothy Allen are using modern technology to peer into this obsidian to learn where it's come from and where it's been.
And in a new study, they've been able to trace the journey of these artifacts over 3 million square kilometers to a single source near northeastern Idaho. Mr. Allen is a project archaeologist with Ember Archaeology in Edmonton and a researcher with the Alberta Obsidian Project. Hello and welcome to our program. Hi, Bob. Thanks. Pleasure to be here. Well, first of all, tell me about Obsidian. What grabs your interest about it?
Yeah, so obsidian is really interesting when you find it at an archaeological site because... Since the prairie provinces in Canada do not have a volcanic history, you know that that artifact has been transported a really long distance away from its geologic source. So what do these obsidian artifacts look like?
So sometimes they can be stuff you would recognize, so like arrowheads or spearheads. But most of the time, what we find is really small chips. So this is when someone was resharpening an artifact, and we call those flakes. I think I held a piece of obsidian in my hand once, and it felt a lot like a piece of glass. Yeah, so if there's any Game of Thrones fans out there, they talk about dragonglass in the series. So that's what we're talking about. It's like a natural volcanic glass that occurs.
after a lava flow has cooled really quickly. So it looks just like glass. It's really, really reflective. and it breaks really, really sharply. It's actually The sharpest known natural material, because when you break obsidian, it breaks down at like the molecular level. So you could have an edge literally one molecule thick. So it's incredibly sharp.
And in modern times, we actually still use obsidian. Sometimes obsidian blades are used for things like brain surgery or like surgery on arteries because it cuts so cleanly because it is so sharp. Well, what made it so useful for indigenous people? So for indigenous people, it's really, really easy to create really interesting shapes with it. You can nap it or break it in really predictable ways.
It's also really striking to look at. You know it when you have it in your hand, when you have Obsidian. So I think these aspects of it made it really prized for Indigenous people. And we can tell that it was really important to them because of how far it traveled. These things can travel upwards of 1,000 to 1,500 kilometers from their geologic source. So clearly, it was really, really important to pre-contact Indigenous peoples. Well, tell me about the artifacts that you've been working with.
Yeah, so we worked with a collection of artifacts from archaeological sites across Alberta, so about a thousand artifacts so far. And then a couple summers ago, I did a project where I flew out to Regina and some really great people that I work with out there helped me analyze all of the obsidian that was found in Saskatchewan, to our knowledge at least. And so I analyzed about 200 artifacts there made of a Pisidian. And then I've done some other projects.
with people from manitoba and the vast majority are those flakes that i was talking about so just little pieces of obsidian. But what we're most interested in is projectile points, because projectile points can tell us approximately how old an artifact is, because those styles have changed over time. And so based on the style of the arrowhead... you can tell how old that obsidian is. So what ages have you come up with so far?
So for this study we analyzed one really really old artifact which is a fulsome point, a fragment of an obsidian fulsome point, and that artifact is about 12,000 years old. And we analyzed other artifacts all the way up to right before European contact, about 500 years ago. Wow. Well, how did you go about tracing these obsidian artifacts back to their original source? Yes, we used this technique called x-ray fluorescence, which emits x-rays onto the surface of an artifact.
those x-rays interact with the atoms on the surface of where we're analyzing. And then those atoms send a signal back that's diagnostic of the elements within the object to give us a readout of what the geochemistry of the obsidian is. And then we take that information and then compare it to... data we've collected from different volcanic sources, and we can establish a link between the artifact and the volcanic source and rule out all others.
So where did the Canadian artifacts come from? So the vast majority of the ones that we were looking at and the main source that we looked at for this study were from Bear Gulch, Idaho. which is this really huge obsidian source in northeast Idaho. That accounts for about 60% of all of our artifacts that we find in Alberta, at least. Between that source and Yellowstone National Park, a source there.
About 60% of obsidian comes from those two sources. So that was a very important place to Indigenous people. Well, what does that tell you about the indigenous people of the time were doing? Because it's quite a walk from Idaho up to Alberta. Yeah, if you think from Edmonton, I think it's about 800 kilometer walk or so. So it's pretty far. What that tells us is that these places were really important to Indigenous people. They obviously went there really often.
There's a lot of other examples of Indigenous people traveling really far distances in order to meet for really important events, conduct ceremonies. If you think of things like bison jumps. for planes people, bison jumps were really important events that people would travel all over the province to meet. So then the obsidian was a trade item? Yes, it was definitely a trade item. We can't really tell how many times a piece changed hands before it ended up at an archaeological site.
But I suspect many pieces that we find had changed hands many, many times before they were ultimately deposited at an archaeological site. people were far more interconnected than we kind of give them credit for, Indigenous people specifically. And Obsidian can help us understand just how interconnected Indigenous people were before European contact.
Mr. Allen, thank you so much for your time. Thanks, Bob. Appreciate it. Timothy Allen is a project archaeologist with Ember Archaeology in Edmonton. Researchers studying animals in the wild often deal with chaotic conditions. For example, for years, a group of marine researchers off the coast of France were continually being pestered by certain fish who kept getting in the way of their experiment. until they decided to turn this interference into scientific research.
which is how this team discovered that fish could learn to recognize individual humans. A remarkable and surprising cognitive ability from animals we thought were, well, a little simple. Producer Amanda Buckowitz tracked down the researchers behind the experiment to find out more. By the end of the season, we went on a night dive just to celebrate.
who were being followed by one or two of the fish. And they were crazy because at some point they were so close to my mask and just looking at me and being like, where's the food? Where is the food? I'm Katinka Zoller. I'm a researcher at the Max Planck Institute in Constance at the Behavioral Evolution Group. I'm Maëlan Tomasek. I'm a PhD student at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and at the University of Clermont-Auvergne in France.
So all I'll be is sending... teams of scientists every year, so always supervised by Alex Jordan, our supervisor, and we are sending teams every year in Corsica to investigate several aspects of fish behavior and cognition. We go dive every day and we investigate different fish species there. The first time I went to Starrizo Research Center, I was amazed by how immersed this station is into nature.
So it's super beautiful to see that you're super close to the ocean and it's not really difficult to be underwater and actually observe how life is in that habitat. So for years, our team is going to the same location and each year we want to conduct experiments with fish and most of the times they involve food rewards. And they found out that sometimes fish species were just starting to following them.
And it was especially the divers that were carrying food. And it was actually the species of brim, so two species of brim, that were following them because they wanted to steal the food. One of our team members, Zoe, so her job was basically to take a little bit of food reward with her and then go diving while other people of our lab would do experiments. just so that fish would eventually follow her and then not follow the other researchers that would actually do their experiments.
They were totally annoying because they were always following the divers and stealing the food so it was very annoying and for years we were just thinking about it as an annoyance. But yeah, this year, so last year, my supervisor said, OK, let's turn annoyance into science now and let's try to investigate this thing. So it started that we first kind of asked the question, can fish even learn to follow a diver? Do they want to? Are they curious enough?
Are we worthy of their attention? We didn't know all of that in the beginning. So we kind of took it step by step. We started the first phase of the experiment with me as the training diver just trying to observe what fish were around how are they behaving towards me are they scared do they show curiosity and they actually did show a lot of curiosity the fish were approaching me out of their own will, even in the first minutes where I didn't even start to feed them.
But also I learned a lot with just sitting there. I was. observing how they react, which fish are there, which species are there, how do they interact with myself. And I was wearing very obvious clothing items like a red rash vest, like a mesh bag, was carrying food. And once I started feeding them, I just started feeding them on the spot. Then I went a bit away and tried to lower them with the food. and then eventually I swam away for about 50 meters in the distance.
and only then I was feeding them, and then I could see that some fish were indeed following me from start till end. They were, all of them, sea breams, but we worked with settled sea breams and black sea breams. It was crazy and also a bit surprising to me that within a couple of trials, I could remember distinct features about fish. I saw fish that had little nips in their tails. I saw fish that had little scars.
Once you see the physical differences, you also see the behavioral differences. And some are very curious. Some only approach you if it's two or more fish, if they're in a group. I was like, okay, well, I'm going to start calling that fish by a name. So it's easier for me to identify. Our regular participants of the experiment were Bernie, Alfie, Kazi, Julius, Geraldine. I think I'm missing one. Left hump. I joined Katinka underwater for the second phase of the experiment then.
We wore our usual dive gear. So it was classic wetsuits, but we had small differences. So for instance, mine had a little bit of blue. Hers was more a bit of yellow and white. And of course, we had differences in our appearance with our body shape, our hair, and also the way we were behaving.
for phase two we both dive down underwater we both carry food in a sealed bag that won't let smell come out We arrived there and we just hover there for a few minutes because we are waiting for the fish to arrive. In the beginning, you don't really know if the fish are going to come. Especially me, the first time I was, okay, are the fish coming or not? And then... you see a little glitter from like tens of meters away. In two seconds, they came from everywhere.
Once we waited a few minutes, we separate. So we dive in opposite directions for 50 meters. In the end, we can't actually see each other anymore. And the fish have to take a decision about which diver they will follow. Of the two divers, one was always giving food. So Katinka was always giving food. So she was the correct diver to follow. And I was the very bad one. If you followed me, you didn't get any food, even though you made this effort.
And then when we separated for the first time, it was crazy to see the fish being... Why are they getting away, both of them? And you see that, okay, some starting to follow Katika, some starting to follow me. The more we did the experiment, the more certain they were of the decisions and the more they were following Katinka. After, let's say, two, three trials, which is already actually not a lot.
You could see that once they followed the wrong diver, they could remember, okay, well, the other one must be the right diver then, the one that rewards me with food. And so we could see quite quickly a change that they would more follow the rewarding diver than the non-rewarding. Once we knew that the fish could recognize...
Katinka and could tell Katinka and me apart, there was still a big question that remained, which was, okay, how do they recognize the good diver? On which cues are they basing their decision? And it's important because it tells us what kind of information are fish sensitive to? What information will they give priority to? In phase three, we tried to answer the question what cues they were relying on to distinguish the two of us.
So we decided to wear exactly the same dive gear. So from top to bottom, we wore the same things. And we could see that they were struggling to tell us apart. Underwater, when we were parting ways, it was literally heartbreaking because they were turning on the spot to look at both of us and swimming towards Milan, turning around on the spot, looking at me and being like... Okay, well, this is the diver that looks exactly the same. What am I gonna do?
Yeah, we tried this experiment 30 times and in the 30 times, they didn't know which diver to choose. They were choosing maybe randomly or out of desperation. This study reminds us that fish are not just fish. So fish are individuals just like any other animal is. And fish can be intelligent in their own way. And it doesn't always need to be in the same way as humans are intelligent. As a scientific point of view, it changes the methodology that we were using before in animal research.
Especially when we were investigating cognition, so the intelligence of fish, we were not really doing it in the wild. We were almost always doing it with fish in tanks in captivity. Actually, you could go in the wild every day and you could find the same individuals that are coming every day and that are willingly interacting with you. which sets the ground for a very good interaction between the researcher and the animals. And it's sometimes exactly what you need to do research.
The reaction to the paper is insane from my perspective. I mean, that's my dream, to be talking to people about how intelligent fish are and how it felt to be underwater with the fish. But I never in the world would have thought that it would go crazy like this. A lot of people reacted to the paper in a very, very nice way. And I think it really tells a lot about people.
The story that we're giving is beautiful. I mean, it's almost like a Disney story. People are loving it. People are kind of asking for this because I think this is like a breath of fresh air a bit. And I think people are asking for this connection with animals. So I really think our research is part of this continuum of going back to the wild and going back to nature and taking time to appreciate. all of the wilderness and all of the nature that we have around us.
That was PhD student Melon Tomazek. and student Katinka Zoller, both from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Konstanz, Germany. And that's it for Quirks and Quarks this week. If you'd like to get in touch with us, our email is quirks at cbc.ca. or just go to the contact link on our webpage at cbc.ca slash quirks, where you can read my latest blog or listen to our audio archive.
You can also follow our podcast, get us on SiriusXM or download the CBC Listen app. It's free from the App Store or Google Play. Quirks & Quirks is produced by Rosie Fernandez, Amanda Buckowitz, and Sonia Biting. Our intern is Megan Foster. Our senior producer is Jim Levins. I'm Bob McDonald. Thanks for listening. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca.