We Are Nature

Jar of Frogs

• Carnegie Museum of Natural History • Season 2 • Episode 9

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Why is the museum hoarding alcoholic pickle jars? What kinds of research are made possible by the museum’s herpetology collection? How are organisms changing because of climate change, urbanization, and other anthropogenic pressures? Featuring Jennifer Sheridan, Associate Curator of Amphibians and Reptiles at Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Encounter frog specimens from Borneo mentioned in this episode in the exhibition The Stories We Keep: Bringing the World to Pittsburgh.

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Michael Pisano:

You're listening to the Anthropocene Archives, a presentation of We Are Nature. In this special series of stories, we're delving deep into Carnegie Museum of Natural History's 22 million collection items, raiding cabinets and cases, sifting through objects and organisms in search of stories of stewardship, solutions, and scientific wonder. On today's episode, Why the Museum is hoarding 200,000 jars of alcohol, the potential of palm oil polyculture, and investigating into the intrinkage. Grab a headlamp and some muck boots. We're going frogging. I'm your host, amateur amphibian advocate Michael Pisano, and today I'm joined by a professional frog proponent. Please introduce yourself.

Jennifer Sheridan:

I am Jen Sheridan, and I am the curator of amphibians and reptiles at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, and I am a tropical conservation ecologist. So I largely study frogs, mostly in the tropics, and I look largely at how amphibian communities are impacted by climate change and habitat and land use change.

Michael Pisano:

Perfect. I really appreciate you joining us and for bringing us behind the scenes of the Carnegie's Herpetology Collection. And to kick us off, I was wondering if you could just talk about the collection a little, kind of the scope and the diversity of what's represented there.

Jennifer Sheridan:

Yeah, so if you haven't been to sort of the behind the scenes of the herp collection, it it's really for people who kind of know about it, it's sort of infamous or famous because it's in a part of the museum that is referred to as the alcohol house. And people really love this space. It's this really nice, beautiful, kind of old-timey space. And because all amphibians and reptiles, by and large, are stored in 70% ethanol for long-term storage, that's how the alcohol house gets its name. And so we have about a quarter of a million specimens in our care. And like I said, most of them are what we call wet specimens. They're stored in jars and tanks in ethanol. We also do have an osteology collection. So we've got a nice really collection of bones, and that is used. I find this very interesting. I knew it would be used by evolutionary biologists and by paleontologists, but it's also used by what are called zoo archaeologists. So people who study animals that are associated with ancient human cultures.

Michael Pisano:

Is there any sort of like quick anecdote from that or you know, an example of a zoo archaeologist's uh research?

Jennifer Sheridan:

One person that came was trying to figure out what were the bones in basically a pile of ash, like meaning like what had been eaten. Um, so like what had been cooked, and then the bones were discarded at this site.

Michael Pisano:

Gotcha. Awesome. I mean, what a fascinating field of study. Um I wonder what kinds of research get done with the specimens in the alcohol house. Because I think, you know, at uh at a layperson's glance, right, a 70% alcohol solution feels like it would really compromise uh an organic specimen. But what is there for you to study and how do people use that?

Jennifer Sheridan:

So we get a lot of requests from taxonomists who are looking to describe new species, but we also get a lot of people using the collection for things that I really find fascinating. So it turns out that you can detect certain diseases in preserved specimens. So there's something called chytrid fungus, which is very widespread in amphibian communities, and it tends to cause very large population declines. It turns out that that holds up very well in preservative. So there's a lab over at Pitt who's been coming over, swabbing our specimens to look at historical records of when chytrid first showed up here in Pennsylvania. Recently, we've also, just in the last couple of years, had people looking at the gut microbiome. So this is a big new kind of emerging field of study, is different scientists look at gut microbiomes, not just of amphibians and reptiles, but lots of different animals. And it's thought that that gut microbiome can tell you a lot about the environment in which that animal lived. And so people are looking at gut microbiomes, and it turns out that that also holds up very well in preservative in a lot of species. So those are the main kinds of things we've had going on. And then for me, I use our collection to look at impacts of climate change. So I study how body size changes in response to climate, and more recently, how climate and land use combine to impact body size. And so, because our collections, I think our oldest specimen is from 1872. Um, so we have this really wonderful long history of collections. And so, using our collections and augmenting that with collections from other museums, I've been able to look at how body size is impacted by climate change.

Michael Pisano:

Awesome. And yeah, I do want to specifically get into that and some of the other research projects that you are a part of. I do wonder, you know, this is maybe jumping the gun a little bit, and I think we'll get into some more specific examples, but you know, you you mentioned that you are a more of an ecosystem conservation biologist. What is the value of herpetology of looking at amphibians and reptiles in these environments? What can that tell you about the ecosystem or the environment as a whole?

Jennifer Sheridan:

Yeah, so I, you know, I sometimes give this talk about why frogs are so great and why you should love them and care about them the way I do. And one of the things that I love pointing out is that they're very abundant where they occur. So there's a couple of studies that have been done in North America that look specifically at basically how many individual amphibians are there in a given area. And in the Appalachians, it's actually really huge. So they make up, in some places, the majority of vertebrate biomass, which means that if you took all amphibians together and you weighed them and you did the same with all the birds and all the mammals, the amphibians would outweigh those other taxonomic groups. So when you have something like that where it's so massive in that system, that means that whatever happens to that group is going to have a big impact both up and down, sort of the food chain, so to speak, or at different trophic levels. And they also, amphibians in particular, are very sensitive to changes in their environment. And so you've probably heard them referred to as something like a canary in a coal mine, or sometimes scientists call them a bioindicator. And this to me is also really fascinating. So if you look at frogs, for example, across all of the planet and where they occur, they have incredible adaptations to be able to live in deserts and in like there's one frog that can literally freeze and still survive. And so they've got these crazy adaptations, and yet, for any single species, if you change that species' environment or introduce toxins, they're really, really sensitive to that. So I just find that to be really fascinating that they're very, very sensitive, and yet they've been able to live in a huge variety of habitats.

Michael Pisano:

Those are really great reasons. Um, I also wonder uh just kind of seeing how you light up talking about them, what personally uh appeals to you, what excites you about them? Because I think they they fall into maybe the creatures that maybe lack a traditional charisma. Um, what is charismatic about them to you?

Jennifer Sheridan:

Oh my gosh, so many things. This is again, like I sometimes give this talk and I like just like jot these down. So, one, I say this semi-jokingly, but they don't bite. And I studied birds for my masters, and I would get bitten all the time. I studied this tiny parrot in Venezuela, and I would just get bitten all the time, and I just did not love it. And so I love the fact that frogs don't bite, which means that they're safe to handle right. I can very easily teach students how to safely handle frogs and other amphibians, which means that I can get students out into the field and connecting physically with nature. And we know from you know, psychological studies that if you have a physical connection with something, it causes an emotional connection. And so I like to kind of like half-joke that I see frogs as like a wonderful gateway drug to nature, as a way to get students and other people really excited because you can safely get people to be handling these things and you know, creating a connection that they might not otherwise have. Like, you're probably not gonna go out and safely handle wild mammals, right? But I can easily take students out and get them like catching frogs and even little kids, right? Like I have lots of friends who have little kids, and I love taking them out and getting them like excited to find salamanders and frogs and getting them like excited from a young age. And I also just find frogs really cute. Like, if I showed you pictures that I have of frogs from Borneo, they're just so adorable to me, and they have a wonderful variety of color and form and calls. And so all of these things just to me make them so, so charming.

Michael Pisano:

Yeah, and I loved your sentiment earlier about you know it being a gateway into connecting to maybe some of the less apparently charismatic or immediately charismatic. Because a lot of charisma, I think, is it it just takes a little bit of attention, right? And as soon as you understand uh something that you can connect to about their lifestyle or about how they connect to the world around them, um, you know, you start building this web of relationships that I think is so rewarding. But let's get into the collection items that you've brought for us today.

MacKenzie Kimmel:

Today's collection items are submerged in 70% ethanol inside what appears to be a jumboglass pickle jar. The jar's label provides that it holds 34 items, all collected in Malaysia, between July and August 2022. Each of the 34 items has a long, skinny body and long, long legs. Their brown backs fade through beige and ochre gradients into a creamy white belly. In life, each sounded something like this. What are today's collection items?

Jennifer Sheridan:

I have a wonderful collection that I made last year in Borneo, and it was difficult to choose sort of a single item, but I went with what was the most common species that we saw. So this is a ronid, a true frog. So the family Ronidae is a very globally widespread family of frogs. You've probably seen other members of this family in North America, if you've ever seen a frog in North America. So, for example, the wood frog, which is really common here, that's a ronid. So this is something, the genus is Maristogenis, and the species name is a mouthful. It's Orphanemis, and it probably has a common name of I I don't actually know because it like a not many people that I work with in Borneo use common names. So I I tend to abbreviate it with the first two letters of its genus and the first two letters of its species. So in the field I call it Mior.

Michael Pisano:

Ah, that's very cute.

Jennifer Sheridan:

Yeah, and so they they're kind of um sort of typical frog-shaped, so to speak, meaning they've got a relatively long, slender body. This genus is sort of famous for its very, very long legs. Um, and this is something I always point out to students in the field. This is how you can, one of the ways you can tell this genus apart from other members of that family, is these super long legs. They have really interesting tadpoles, this genus does. They have this big giant ventral sucker, and so these tadpoles, the eggs are laid on the surface of a rock in a stream, and it's this jelly mass that adheres to the surface of that rock, and then the tadpoles hatch out of those egg capsules, and then they have, like I said, this big sucker, and so you'll see them in really fast-flowing water in these streams in Borneo. So I chose this because it's really common and it is sort of therefore representative of all of the other things that I was lucky enough to collect. And so, in my work, the the project that I was working on last summer was sort of collecting pilot data for this study that I'm proposing to the National Science Foundation to get funding for, which is looking at how land use change alters the relationship between primary productivity and biodiversity. So, to do that, we had to measure biodiversity in different land use types. And so we surveyed amphibians in primary forest, secondary forest, and agriculture areas. And we would go out onto these streams and we would capture every single frog we could find, and we did what's called toe clipping to mark them so that then we can tell if we see them again on the other nights that we go back, so we get a sense of how many individuals in that community there are. And we measured them, we weighed them, and we sexed them, which you can usually do externally. Yeah, so I chose Marista Janus, an example, to kind of like be the jumping off point for talking about the collections and this Borneo collection and diving a little bit more into that research.

Michael Pisano:

Great, yes, and I think that's what we can do right now. Um, something I do think that would be helpful to set the scene is to just orient us towards Borneo itself. It's a pretty far away place from Pittsburgh. Can you just give us some basic info? You know, uh like where is it? And yes.

Jennifer Sheridan:

Borneo is the world's third largest island, and it is in Southeast Asia. So I first went there out of college. The part of Borneo that I went to, so Borneo is an island that is, I guess, politically divided into three different countries. So part of it belongs to Malaysia, part of it is the independent nation of Brunei, and the rest of it belongs to Indonesia. So I work in Malaysian Borneo in the northern state of Sabah, and when I first was going there, I probably could not have pointed to it on a map until the person who was hiring me like showed me where it was. So if you imagine, if you know where China is and you picture China south of China, you get Vietnam and Cambodia and Lao and Thailand. If you go into the water, sort of southeast from there, you'll see the giant island of Borneo. It's just south of the Philippines.

Michael Pisano:

Excellent. And I'd also wonder what makes it a good place to investigate these types of questions about ecology that you're investigating.

Jennifer Sheridan:

Yeah, so I first went to Borneo right out of college, and I was working as a field assistant to a woman from the US who was doing her dissertation research there. And I was astounded at how diverse the frogs were there. So coming from North America, you know, in any one place, you're probably gonna have a handful of species, especially of frogs, you know, like we've talked about already. Some places have lots of salamanders, like North Carolina has 63 species of salamanders. But most other places in the United States don't have that many species of amphibians. In Saba, there are well over a hundred species of frogs. Um, and so any one place that you go has dozens and sometimes multiple dozens of species. And so it really is a wonderful place for looking at questions of how diversity changes with any kind of factor that you're interested in. And in addition, it's interesting because up until about 1950, almost a hundred percent of the island of Borneo was primary rainforest. So there had been sort of small-scale agriculture, mostly like subsistence agriculture, and there had been a little bit of clearing for rubber plantations, but a lot of the land cover was primary rainforest. And then in the last, you know, I guess it's like 70 years now, but really like since 1980, that development has increased a lot, and you've seen a lot of forest loss since 1980. And a lot of that land clearing comes for oil palm plantation. And so it presents this really sort of nice modern way to look at very recent changes from primary forest to either secondary forest. So traditionally, that those areas have been logged largely selectively, so that means that logging companies for over a hundred years have gone in, taken out the biggest trees, but left like a lot of smaller trees intact. So you have secondary forest where that's occurred. And then again, like I said, you've got this agriculture. And so, oil palm plantation, if you just imagine a monoculture, so just oil palm plants or trees as we sometimes call them, that in an area is largely what the agriculture there is now, large-scale agriculture, aside from like subsistence. So it's a really great, nice sort of almost like a natural laboratory way to look at impacts of land use change because they've been fairly recent. A lot of it has been documented when it has started in different areas, and so you can, you know, attach a time frame to time since disturbance in a lot of ways. And, you know, here in North America, so much of the landscape was changed before people started writing down and really recording in detail when those changes occurred. So it provides this really interesting place to look at impacts of land use change.

Michael Pisano:

Awesome. And that feels like a pretty solid segue back to what you were already beginning to talk about with this collection item and that study. Can you, including perhaps uh a definition of primary productivity, talk a little bit more at length about that particular study?

Jennifer Sheridan:

Yeah, so primary productivity is effectively the amount of energy that a system produces. So we refer to primary producers as organisms that make energy basically from sunlight. So terrestrially, that's mostly plants. Plants take sunlight, turn it into energy. Everything else, terrestrially, by and large, consumes plants or consumes something that consumes plants, and that's how they get energy. If you're looking Animal diversity, the amount of primary productivity in that system will largely predict the amount of animal diversity in that system. So the more energy you have, the more species that system can support. And so what has not really been looked at is how changes in land use affect that relationship. So we've tended to look at this relationship across broad geographic scales, also on finer geographic scales, but we haven't looked to see, well, does that relationship hold up once we change the landscape? So in agricultural systems, agricultural systems, partly because of inputs of fertilizer, they tend to have fairly high productivity, but you don't get a lot of biodiversity. So what is that relationship between productivity and biodiversity in an agricultural system and also in a secondary forest where there's been some disturbance and you know you get sort of species loss, meaning animal species loss in that area as well? What is that relationship between productivity and diversity? So that's what we were going to sort of test out and gather preliminary data on is how do we can you detect differences in that relationship between productivity and biodiversity across land use types?

Michael Pisano:

And what do you hope the kind of outcome or application of some of that data will be? I know it's related to policy and maybe looking ahead at some global system change.

Jennifer Sheridan:

So we know that climate change is causing differences in temperature and precipitation. And we also know that primary productivity is largely dictated by the combination of temperature and precipitation. And so people have used future predictions of temperature and future predictions of temp of precipitation to make predictions of how biodiversity in the future will change with climate change. This study, therefore, is important because if we're saying, okay, well, the relationship that that is based on may not hold. So we know now that, for example, 70% of the Earth's surface has been altered by humans. And so if it is the case that in some of these altered landscapes, the relationship is different than what we thought, then we need that information to be able to make accurate predictions of future biodiversity under climate change scenarios.

Michael Pisano:

Yeah, excellent. And I know you also look directly in addition to this kind of impacts of land use on organisms and systems, um, at the effects of climate change on the similar sorts of systems and organisms. Um, I know one of those studies had to deal with morphology, with size. Um maybe we could start by just talking about that and then also any more kind of broad ways you're thinking about the relationship between climate and the organisms you study.

Jennifer Sheridan:

Yeah, so I got interested in this topic when I was a postdoc in Singapore in 2009. And my advisor at the time had seen a couple of papers come out uh showing basically that warming temperatures, meaning recent climate change warming, climate warming, had resulted in smaller organisms. And the couple of papers that he pointed me to, one was on sheep and one was on fishes. And so he said, you know, I think there might be a pattern here, we should write a review paper on this. And so I dove into the literature on this, and there were at the time, I would say, a large handful of examples that really were indicating that as temperatures are warming, things are getting smaller. And we framed this paper also by putting this into, I guess if you look back at the fossil record, for example, you can look at past periods of climate warming, and you see the same thing happening in past periods of climate warming, is that the fossil record shows that in past warm periods things got smaller and then they got bigger again when the climate cooled after these like rapid blips of warming. This kind of like caught my eye, and I I have since then looked at a number of species with respect to this trend. And this is something where I, you know, I think I mentioned earlier, I utilize our collections as well as many other collections. And this is a really sort of concise way of looking at how organisms are impacted by climate change, because you take a simple measurement, literally, you measure how long they are, what we call the snout vent length, and you can look at how their size is changing in response to climate. We have long records of temperature and precipitation, both here in the US and globally, and so you can see how their size relates to temperature, for example, and precipitation. And more recently, one thing we've been looking at is also land use. And so there's a now a big field of study on how species are impacted, the species size is impacted by climate change. Somebody in Los Angeles at the LA County Museum just sent me a paper showing that humans also get smaller with climate change, which is something that I often get asked when I give talks about this, is what about it?

Michael Pisano:

I was thinking about asking you. Yeah.

Jennifer Sheridan:

And so I I always I told them I was like, I love that you sent me this paper because I'm asked this all the time. And so, yeah, so there's this kind of like again, general shrinkage, but it's it's not universal, which is another thing. So if everything was shrinking at the same time, then you would just maybe have, I like to kind of joke that you just have like a cuter world because everything is just a little bit smaller. But what's happening, as with many things with climate change, is that some organisms are getting smaller, some are not, some are getting bigger, and it's that sort of disruption of the relationship between species that co-occur then that is causing challenges for predicting, okay, what does that mean for the future? For those organisms that are getting smaller, smaller size is potentially detrimental because your body size often predicts how successful you are in competition. How successful are you when competing for a mate, for example? Also in acquiring resources, bigger individuals within a species tend to do better at acquiring resources. Smaller size often also leads to lower reproductive output. So, especially in amphibians and other ectotherms, organisms that get their heat from the environment, the number of offspring they have within a species is largely correlated with body size. So if you have a smaller size and fewer offspring, you risk getting smaller population sizes, and those smaller population sizes are then more vulnerable to extinction. And so there's a lot of implications as to why we care about body size. It's not just that we want to know what's happening, we do, but it has other implications for sort of the persistence of species.

Michael Pisano:

Resilience in general, yeah. I hear that. Do you have any sense? I mean, are there any kind of theories as to why amphibians in particular are getting smaller in relationship to warming?

Jennifer Sheridan:

Yeah, so with um with amphibians in particular, there's something called uh the temperature size rule. And so what this says is that at in the developmental phase, at warmer temperatures, they develop faster. So, in let's think of frogs, just because it's easy, they are by and large, they have a tadpole phase. And if you warm that environment in which they're going from tadpole to a metamorph or a froglet, they'll develop faster, so they'll spend less time as a tadpole. But what happens is that they're they don't grow as large, and so they metamorphose at a smaller size, and that size at metamorphosis largely dictates their size at adulthood. That's one of the reasons why frogs and other ectotherms that have that are sensitive to this developmental temperature that they're getting smaller. For things like mammals and birds that are endothermic, it's largely thought that that's because that they're getting smaller because of just basic thermodynamic principles. So mammals and birds tend to be larger in cold environments because it allows them to conserve heat better. And so you have a, if you're larger, you have a smaller surface area to volume ratio. And so as it warms, A, you don't need to be that big, but B, you might want to be smaller so that you can lose heat more effectively, meaning so you don't overheat. And so for birds and mammals, it's thought to be related to that. Um, whereas for ectotherms, it's largely thought to be driven by this temperature size rule.

Michael Pisano:

Fascinating. So, okay, this kind of tie back the climate and the land use change conversations, which are obviously not happening in a vacuum from one another, right? These are acting together. I think um maybe the oil palm industry is a good place where we can talk about where the twain meet. Um and you know, I guess I want to get a little bit more into the the big picture of that before jumping into maybe some of your interaction with the industry um and your research. But I mean my understanding anecdotally, it's like you see it in many ingredient lists at the grocery store. I forget the statistic, but it's at least half of the things that you see on a typical shelf. Um I think it's the most widely used vegetable oil in the world, right, on the planet. Uh so yeah, what's the story? Why is it so ubiquitous and what makes that I mean, this is a big question, but what are some of the things that make that a problematic fact?

Jennifer Sheridan:

Yeah, so I find this really fascinating. So I'll just start by saying here in the US, it is it's becoming a lot more common, um, but it is still a little bit less common than in other parts of the world. I think in part because the US provides a lot of subsidies for things like corn. And so it's it's easier to find products without palm oil in the US than it is to find products without palm oil in other parts of the world. So you're a hundred percent right that even in the US it's very widespread. But in other parts of the world, it's even more ubiquitous, which is incredible to me. Um, and so one of the reasons why it is so commonly used is because it is highly productive, meaning the amount of oil from a given land area is much, much higher. And I forget what the percentage is, but it's it's miles beyond the production of oil that any other crop can give. And so that is one of the reasons why it is so productive, meaning so prevalent, sorry, uh, because that it just produces so much oil for a given area of land. What's surprising to me is that most oil palm plantations are only about 60% efficient, meaning they could produce even more, but there's some amount of, I guess, like loss of potential production of oil just because of how, like, when you have to harvest them, it's all harvested by hand. So if they sort of improved the efficiency on existing plantations, they could produce even more oil, which is incredible, meaning like it's already ubiquitous and it's already the most productive, and it could be even more so. It is very lucrative for people producing it, but it is also very cheap to purchase. And so it is very common because, for example, where I work in Malaysia, it's pretty much the only cooking oil that people use. It's obviously cheap for companies to buy to put into their processed and prepared foods, because if it wasn't the cheapest, they would buy something else. And so I again like don't fully understand the math of how it is lucrative for the people producing it and yet cheap to purchase. But that is, yeah, one of the reasons why it is so common. It has a lot of challenges, as you kind of touched on, because it is almost exclusively a monoculture. So some crops are grown in conjunction with other crops, um, or maybe like interspersed with primary forest or other kinds of like habitat that animals might utilize. But by and large, oil palm plantations are monocultures, and so it creates a lot of challenges for preserving biodiversity, and it's largely grown in the tropics, and we know that the majority of biodiversity exists in the tropics. Almost all of the palm oil in the world is produced in Indonesia and Malaysia, but it is expanding into Central and South America as well as parts of Africa. It's originally from Africa, but it doesn't have huge plantations there the way it does in Southeast Asia. But that is changing.

Michael Pisano:

Yeah, it's of course complicated and challenging in the ways that our kind of entrenched global systems of production of many things are where there's a social element that has to be weighed against an ecological element. And these things I think are so often studied separately, thought of separately, you know, theorized about separately that it's it's hard to really find a holistic picture that can inform the way forward. Um and I think that can be paralyzing. But I know that there is value, at least in my mind, to um harm reduction and to trying to do things differently, right? And seeing what can happen and what is possible within the frameworks we have now, and what of those frameworks can be removed and replaced with something more just, more ecologically sustainable. Um it is interesting to me um that the the harvesting process is not mechanized. Um that's pretty wild. That feels like an outlier to me when we're thinking about monoculture crops. So I do wonder though, I'm sure that doesn't absolve, you know, this kind of practice of clear-cutting and monoculture planting from having climate impacts. I would be curious a little bit about that before then we talk about maybe um what sustainable palm might look like.

Jennifer Sheridan:

Yeah, the I am also fascinated by the fact that it is not mechanized. I think the only other one I know is rice production, right? Like rice is also harvested by hand, which uh the given how much rice is produced all the time, I do not understand how it is so inexpensive.

Michael Pisano:

How much rice is in my house? That's insane. It's like unbelievable to me. Unbelievable.

Jennifer Sheridan:

Yeah, so I I don't know. I feel like I was just talking to somebody about this. I feel like somebody just told me that, you know, they've oil pump companies obviously have tried to mechanize it, and it's just not possible. So that is fascinating to me. Um, and the only other thing I know, this doesn't relate to mechanization, but just kind of like that plantation design. There are several Malaysian groups, I guess, meaning like students and labs that are looking at well, can how can we basically go from a monoculture to a polyculture within this oil palm plantation landscape? And so they've tried planting other cash crops amongst these oil palm plantations to look at yield and harvest amounts of both of the crops. And they've shown that it's possible to, you know, maintain your level of production and also to have like other crops, but it's just not something that has yet taken large hold in these oil palm plantations. Some of these larger oil palm companies do have um philanthropic arms, so to speak. And so the the largest oil palm producer in Malaysia is Saime Darby, and they have what they call the Saime Darby Foundation. And so the Saime Darby Foundation does a lot of different things, and one of the things that they've done in the last 10 years is partnered with a group of scientists as well as the government of Sabah, the governing body for forests in Sabah, the state of Malaysia where I work, to try to see whether leaving primary forest or secondary forest intact within an oil palm plantation landscape, what that does for both preserving biodiversity and oil palm productivity. And so this is something that is encouraging to me because as an ecologist, I recognize that I am probably not going to be able to convince a large corporation to reduce their profit load, at least single-handedly, anyway. And so anytime a corporation expresses even the slightest interest in doing a study like this, I find it very encouraging. I have no idea are they going to implement these like sort of findings more broadly? But obviously, our hope is that they will potentially, and because that company has so many plantations, both in Malaysia and now in other parts of the world, the hope is that they will be able to utilize the data that scientists are collecting to amend future plantation design to leave, you know, forest fragments intact within this larger landscape, and that that will then preserve a higher amount of biodiversity than it otherwise would have to just totally clear-cut a giant area.

Michael Pisano:

Right. Again, there's this sense of harm reduction. I think something that I'm more familiar with in uh United States kind of agricultural reform is this concept that agriculture doesn't have to be just extractive, but that the ways we grow food can be regenerative. Whatever the case may be, I wonder if there's an analogue there that you're familiar with, or that, you know, you you already kind of just mentioned polyculture as a base. I wonder what you would like to see in an ideal world. You know, what could um growing food and having livelihoods in that part of the world look like uh that is like a more sustainable model, if not a more, you know, a potentially regenerative one?

Jennifer Sheridan:

Yeah, that's a really good question. I feel like historically Borneo has had relatively low population density compared to some other parts of the world. And so they've been lucky enough to sort of be able to do subsistence agriculture and have large swaths of primary forest left intact in that area. And shockingly to me, there are some areas in Borneo where it's primary forest where humans have never lived. And so that is, you know, the Amazon is a totally different story. You know, throughout the Amazon, there's different native peoples that live there and have lived there for centuries. But there are some parts of Borneo where there have never been human settlements, at least as far as like they can tell. And so that's that's really fascinating to me. Again, that like the population densities are low enough that that that is true. An ideal world, I think that's so tough because you know, the ecologist in me wants to see beautiful large swaths of primary forest at different elevations, and also to have, you know, people be have access to healthcare and um, you know, just sort of like basic human rights. I don't know from um because I think partly because I'm not an agriculturalist, I don't have a good sense of how much land would be required for doing, you know, for feeding, for example, the population of Malaysian Borneo and what that would look like. But I do, I am encouraged, like I said, by these oil palm companies at least being willing to consider a slightly different model, and whether that is multiple cash crops in the same area or leaving primary forest or secondary forest sort of intact, different fragments of forest intact in that oil palm landscape. I don't know if we've talked about this, but one of the reasons monoculture is not great for animal biodiversity is because it provides very little variation in terms of structure and environment. So it tends to favor a very small number of species. So in a lot of agriculture, both you know in the tropics and here in the US, you get a lot of rodents, for example, things that like to eat the grains or whatever is the agricultural product. You get then things that feed on rodents, so some raptors, you get snakes and things, but not a ton of things compared to what you would get in the system otherwise. And so anytime you increase the diversity of habitats, so to speak. So instead of just having oil palm trees, if you have other types of trees, those other trees then allow different birds to be nesting in there, for example. Maybe different, maybe it lowers the temperature a little bit, increases the humidity a little bit, and therefore different amphibians and reptiles may be able to survive in that area, for example. So I think anytime we have a more diverse habitat, the better it is for wildlife. And so whether that's again through, you know, multiple cash crops in a given area or one cash crop, you know, oil palm, together with, you know, primary or secondary forests in that landscape, it's going to foster greater biodiversity.

Michael Pisano:

I think a lot of the things we talked about today are very large issues of land use, climate change. Um and so they require some pretty complex and large solutions that include policy and industrial reform and all these big things. But I do wonder how you think uh, you know, lay people can plug into this and maybe be a part of, you know, protecting their small corner of biodiversity or the frogs in their backyard, the salamanders in their backyard. What what would you say for people who want to get started and in being kind of more active in this kind of conservation?

Jennifer Sheridan:

Yeah, I always, you know, I I am a big proponent of like individual choices that you know that individual choices matter. And I think, you know, some people think that you can like argue either side of that. But I really do think it matters for a number of reasons. And so, like you said, I think that if you live in a place where your backyard potentially fosters diversity of any kind. So I have bird feeders in my backyard, for example, and I love seeing the diversity of birds that come through my backyard throughout the year. I love that it changes throughout the seasons, and that's one of the ways that I, for example, connect with diversity in Pittsburgh. I think that that's a really great way for people to do it is to just find whatever excites them or they like in their backyard and kind of like latch onto that. There's, I don't know if you've talked about this before on the podcast, but there's something called iNaturalist. So it's a really wonderful app that allows you to basically find out what it is that you're looking at. If you can take a picture of it on your phone here in the United States, the app will basically tell you what it is you're looking at. And so I think that's another way for people to start connecting with nature. I like to joke sometimes that it's like nature Pokemon, because you can then be finding all of these different species everywhere you look, then, and it can be very addictive. Um, and then I also like to advocate, you know, like I said, like individual choices. So I personally don't purchase products that have oil palm unless there is no other product available, and I need that product. So for example, I don't need to buy candy. So I don't buy candy that has oil palm in it. Um, but if there's like I need dish soap and the only dish soaps that exist um have some kind of like palm oil product, then that may be a place where I make an exception. And even beyond that, I think then voting is a really, you know, no matter what your politics are, just being involved in that process and voting and trying to get people into decision-making positions who are going to be concerned with environmental and conservation issues. So those are the things that I would recommend to people to kind of like get started and and and also visiting the Natural History Museum, honestly, because I feel like it's such a great place, and you get exposed to a lot of different topics there and a lot of different taxonomic groups, and kind of like figuring out then, like that, you know, I didn't really have a natural history museum close to me when I was a kid, but when I was in college, I went to school in Chicago, and going to the Field Museum was an incredible way to see, like, to some degree, diversity of life on earth. And so finding out then what are the things that excite you, what interests you, and kind of like getting into nature through your local natural history museum can be a really great way.

Michael Pisano:

250,000 thanks to Jen for inviting us into the Carnegie's herpetology collection, and to the many amphibians and reptiles therein for inspiring us towards closer connection with nature. We Are Nature is produced by Nicole Heller and Sloan McCrae. It's recorded at Carnegie Museum of Natural History by Matt Unger and Garrick Schmidt. DJ Thermos makes the music, Mackenzie Kimmel describes the collection items, and Garrick Schmidt and Michael Pizzano, that's me, edit the podcast. Thanks for listening.