animals

Thick-billed parrots are adorable green birds with specks of red and orange with calls that sound like laughter. They're the only surviving parrot species native to the United States — and they used to roam from Texas and Arizona all the way down into Venezuela.

Forest fires, deforestation and parrot smuggling have reduced their population drastically in the last century.

The species is now classified as endangered. The only wild population of thick-billed parrots lives in Mexico's Sierra Madre mountains, high up in old growth pine forests.

But this year, there was good news: A census of the thick-billed parrot population in the Sierra Madre showed an increase of 10% over a span of 12 years. The birds are doing better.

So how did the thick-billed parrot survive?

For years, conservation organizations like OVIS (Organización Vida Silvestre) and the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance have been collaborating on a multi-faceted conservation project to save these birds. Short Wave host Regina G. Barber and producer Rachel Carlson dive into the details of that project — and how tiny "bird backpacks" are helping to make it all happen.

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This episode was produced by Hannah Chinn and edited by Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts. Kwesi Lee was the audio engineer. Copyright 2024 NPR

We start off in a cathedral full of animals – hermit crabs, parrots, hamsters, dogs, cats and bunnies – being blessed. We then wonder, do the animals feel grace? What do we really know about what goes on inside an animal’s mind? Do they also experience gratitude, despair or anger? How much emotionality do humans and animals share? And can we measure it? 

We get the story of a rescued whale that may have found a way to say thanks to its rescuers. And then we speak to behavioral scientist Clive Wynne, and head of the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard, Alexandra Horowitz, to decipher the whale’s behavior.

Guests in the episode include: Mick Menago, Tim Young, James Moskito, Holly Drewyard, Clive Wynne and Alexandra Horowitz. 

For more: Read “Inside of a Dog” by Alexandra Horowitz.

Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes: Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neason, Valentina Powers, Sarah Qari, Sarah Sandbach, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger and Natalie Middleton. Production help from Tanya Chawla. Sound mixing by Joe Plourde.

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Dan Blumstein was gently holding a yellow-bellied marmot pup, conducting research, when he first heard one scream.

"I was sort of shocked by this scream and almost dropped this animal," he says. "I had this sort of emotional response to this scream."

Blumstein, a behavioral ecologist and conservation scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, leads one of the world's longest-running experiments on a wildlife population: Yellow-bellied marmots living high in the mountains of southern Colorado.

He's trapped thousands of them for his research, so he's no stranger to their sounds. Over the years, he's heard them chirp, call and even whistle. But the sound of this particular scream — a high-pitched noise almost like a baby's cry — triggered something deep in his gut. And his curiosity.

What is it about screams that make them so universally unnerving?

Blumstein listened to recordings of different animals screaming, hunting calls designed to attract predators, and horror movies. And he found that screams are different from normal alarm calls. Screams are made when a distressed mammal overblows its vocal folds, pushing air through its vocal folds faster than normal. Waveforms of screams are marked with "nonlinear phenomenon" – irregularities in the sound that are alarming and attention-grabbing across species.

Researchers have found that even some animals that don't make vocalizations themselves, like skinks and lizards, act differently when they hear those nonlinear sounds.

Screams signal urgency, Blumstein says. The irregular noise in them is meant to grab others' attention. And that attention has likely helped keep us and other animals alive.

So this Halloween, if you're scared by a neighbor's creepy display of skeletons and spiders, Blumstein says, remember: Fear is natural.

"We are who we are because of who our ancestors were — and not just our primate ancestors, but across the lineage of life," he says. "So I think we should embrace our inner marmot and be happy that we're scared by those things."

Curious about other science powering the human experience? Email us at [email protected] and we might cover your topic on a future episode!

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Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.

This episode was produced by Hannah Chinn. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez and fact-checked by Nathan Rott and Tyler Jones. The audio engineer was Kwesi Lee. Copyright 2024 NPR

More than one-third of all tree species are at risk of extinction, and many wild animal species are, too. With the world's biodiversity in stark decline, delegates from nearly every country in the world are in Cali, Colombia for COP16, the UN biodiversity summit. Benji Jones, environmental correspondent at Vox, discusses the key takeaways from the conference.

Metaphors can help us understand complicated scientific concepts. But they can also have a downside. And, a pair of musicians wrote a concept album inspired by moths—and found that humans have more in common with the insects than they expected.

Here at Science Friday, we’re big fans of metaphors. They can make complicated scientific concepts easier to understand, for both non-experts and scientists themselves. For example, “the big bang” helps us visualize the beginning of the universe. Or we can understand DNA’s role better as a “building block of life.”

But some of these scientific metaphors also have a downside, and can even set research back.

Sam Harnett and Chris Hoff are the hosts of the podcast series “The World According to Sound,” and they sat down with Science Friday’s Director of News and Audio, John Dankosky, to talk about their new project, “An Inexact Science.” They discuss a special two-hour episode that explores how language and metaphor have shaped science, for better or worse.

Before the pandemic, Peter Kiesewalter didn’t think much of moths. Like a lot of people, he’d thought of them mostly as pests. But when his brother Tobi, an interpretive naturalist for Ontario Parks and moth enthusiast, showed him macro photos he’d taken of them, he was blown away. “[They were] absolutely stunning,” Peter says. “The amount of colors and hair were just extraordinary.”

Peter is a Grammy-nominated musician based in New York City. He’s composed music for ABC News, Monday Night Football, and even a “Winnie The Pooh” show. As COVID-19 spread in 2020, work for him and his partner Whitney La Grange, a professional violinist, dried up. So they hunkered down at the family cottage in Ottawa, Canada, along with Tobi’s family. Peter was looking for a new show idea, and when his brother opened up the world of moths to him, he was hooked. “I had to find a way to interpret moths artistically,” he said. “And I started to find connections between them and us.”

That led to “The Moth Project,” a concept album and stage show that combines moth science and visuals with a whole ecosystem of musical genres: 80s pop, funk, classical, covers, even spoken word. Each song ties a stage of a moth’s life (emergence, flight, migration) to a universal human experience. But for Peter, a lot of these songs turned out to be far more personal than he initially thought.

SciFri producer and host of our Universe of Art podcast D Peterschmidt sat down with Peter and Tobi Kiesewalter and Whitney La Grange to find out how this album came together and how understanding moths could better help us understand ourselves.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

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El Museo del Barrio’s second large-scale survey of Latinx contemporary art, Flow States – LA TRIENAL 2024 is on display through Sunday, February 9, 2025. Mark Menjívar, San Antonio-based artist and associate professor in the School of Art and Design at Texas State University, has a piece featured in the show reflecting on the topic of migration through birds. He joins us to discuss before leading a bird walk tomorrow in Central Park at 9:30 a.m.

Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials returns for a new season about tree stumps, squirrels, and more! Plus... an album! Producer Ana González and producer & "Song Bud" Alan Goffinski join us for a special listening party and talk about the new season, plus take calls from curious young listeners.

The heaviest antimatter nucleus to date was spotted in a particle accelerator. It could provide new insights into the nature of matter. And, research indicates different songbird species might intentionally travel together during migration, giving each other a possible boost in survival.

Antimatter is one of science’s great mysteries. It is produced all around us for fractions of a second, until it collides with matter, and the particles annihilate one another. But what is it?

Antimatter is just like matter, except for one thing. Its particles have the same mass as ordinary matter, but an opposite charge. For example, an electron has a negative charge, so an anti-electron—called a positron—weighs the same, but has a positive charge.

Antimatter is a natural product of some types of radioactive decay and cosmic ray collisions, but it can also be made in particle colliders here on Earth. But making antimatter particles this way is difficult and expensive—let alone controlling them enough to create an entire anti-atom. NASA estimates that creating a gram of antimatter would cost about $62.5 trillion.

But why does antimatter matter? It may hold the key to understanding one of the universe’s biggest mysteries: why there’s something rather than nothing. Cosmologists say that during the Big Bang, matter and antimatter should have been created in equal amounts. But everything around us today is mostly matter, meaning either that there was an excess of matter created, or that matter and antimatter don’t quite follow the rules physicists expect.

Recently, scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider spotted 16 instances of the heaviest exotic antimatter nucleus observed to date: antihyperhydrogen-4.

To explore what this breakthrough means for antimatter research, SciFri producer Charles Bergquist talks to Dr. Jamie Dunlop, associate department chair for nuclear physics at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

This season, billions of birds will take to the skies as they flock to their wintering grounds. With so many different species on the move, they’re bound to run into each other. A new study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that this mixing and mingling might not be coincidental.

In fact, different bird species could have their own social networks that might boost each others’ survival.

SciFri producer Kathleen Davis talks with lead author Dr. Joely DeSimone, migration ecologist at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science Appalachian Laboratory, about untangling avian relationships.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

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Shark fishing is alive and well, but the fishermen who do it are increasingly prioritizing conservation. And, an unknown ant was spotted in Manhattan in 2011, and it quickly spread through New York City. We now know what it is.

At an undisclosed beach at 5:30 p.m. in New Jersey, shark fisherman AJ Rotondella and two clients wait for beachgoers to leave. Once the beach is empty, Rotondella cuts up some chunks of fish as bait, and casts lines into the water.

“I shark fish, shark fish, shark fish, eat pizza, and shark fish … that’s pretty much it,” Rotondella said. “Waking up in the morning … wide open ocean, anything could be anywhere at any time. And I think that’s fascinating. No matter how long you’ve done this, you’ve never seen it all.”

He has always loved fishing, and got into shark fishing 13 years ago, when his brother told him they could catch sharks from the beach. They caught two on their first day and could not catch another shark for the rest of the year.

“That really got me interested because I knew it was possible, but I couldn’t do it again,” he said. “I … absolutely obsessed over this.”

But Rotondella had a steep learning curve ahead of him. By trial and error, sometimes staying on a beach for multiple days, he learned how to read the tides, water temperatures, currents, and even phases of the moon to figure out how to track the sharks.

Read the full story at sciencefriday.com.

New York City is home to more than 8 million people. But there’s another massive population below their feet: ants.

In 2011, when surveying ant populations on Broadway and Times Square, researchers got quite a surprise: an unidentified species of ant, which was soon dubbed the “ManhattAnt.” Since then, it has become the second-most populous ant species in New York City.

Earlier this year, the first study on this unidentified species was released. It concluded that this species, Lasius emarginatus, likely hitchhiked from Europe to the US. Though their populations have grown tremendously, it’s unclear how the ants are interacting with New York’s native ants.

Joining guest host Sophie Bushwick to discuss this ant species is Dr. Clint Penick, assistant professor of insect ecology at Auburn University in Auburn, Alabama.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

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A new study suggests that the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs may have originated from the outer parts of the solar system. And, invasive spotted lanternflies often lay eggs on vehicles and shipped goods. Now researchers are training dogs to sniff them out before they hatch.

Around 66 million years ago, an asteroid slammed into the Earth, blasted debris everywhere, plummeted the planet into cold darkness, and ended the age of dinosaurs. (Though birds survived, of course.)

It might be the most famous disaster in our planet’s history, but scientists still have plenty of questions about it. Like, what was the asteroid made of? And where did it come from? A new study in the journal Science offers up some long-awaited answers.

Guest host Rachel Feltman speaks with study author Dr. Mario Fischer-Gödde, a geochemist at the University of Cologne in Germany.

In 10 years, the spotted lanternfly has gone from non-existent in the U.S. to being established in at least 16 states. They’re quite distinct: The adults measure about an inch long, they’ve got striking red and black markings, and are, as the name suggests, spotted. And they’ve got a worrisome tendency to chow down on certain plants, including grapevines, and some fruit and hardwood trees.

Spotted lanternflies are able to spread so effectively in part because they tend to lay eggs on things that travel from state to state: shipping supplies, vehicles, and lumber.

There’s a new tactic to detect spotted lanternfly eggs before they can hatch: training dogs to sniff them out. Guest host Rachel Feltman speaks to two researchers behind this project: Dr. Nathan Hall, director of the Canine Olfaction Research and Education Laboratory at Texas Tech in Lubbock, and Dr. Erica Feuerbacher, associate professor of applied animal welfare and behavior at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia.

Read the full story here.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

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