Subscribe: Apples | Spotify
This is episode 4 of the 4 part “Fascination” about Vernal Pool. Watch Episode 1 here, Episode 2 here, and Episode 3 here.
transcript
Christopher Carved: this is Scientific Americanof science, quickI’m Christopher Kaved.
When I started working on this series about Bernalpool and convinced myself that I had to go see it myself, one of the things that surprised me the most was people telling me to go see it.
Chuck Black: This landmark is by far the largest and most pristine concentration of spring pools left in San Diego County, and possibly California.
Engraved: Hundreds of acres of wild land reserves, including more than 1,000 spring pools, are also part of Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, a Marine Corps base outside San Diego. My tour guide was a wildlife biologist employed by the Department of Defense, a man named Chuck Black.
Engraved (tape): … For this story, I never thought I would come to a military base and … find natural resources.
black: yes. yes. Well, many people don’t associate military bases with conservation efforts, but…
Engraved: Indeed, when we think of conservation, we think of the roadless Sierra Nevada or the backwaters of the Mojave Desert.
Here, natural wonders are sandwiched between highways, landfills, and runways. And there’s a reason this military base is the largest spring pond fortress in existence along the Southern California coast. Many others around here have been developed.
black: Flat mesa tops like these were major areas of development in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries.
Engraved: Spring Pond has been turned into farmland, housing, and a shopping center.
black: It’s estimated that more than 98 or 99 percent of the spring ponds that once existed in San Diego are now gone due to development.
Engraved: Across the state, the numbers don’t vary much, with spring ponds considered one of the most threatened ecosystems in the state.
Sean O’Brien: Many people know that 90% of the spring pools have been lost from the Central Valley since European colonization. But what people don’t know very much is that these losses are ongoing. This is not just a historical issue.
Engraved: Sean O’Brien. He is a Senior Wildlife Biologist at his ICF, a consulting firm. And he’s going to do a biological study of the spring water pools before they’re developed, and recommend ways to keep them from harming them.
And he says that there are many factors that threaten spring ponds and their inhabitants today, but one of them stands out.
O’Brien: It is no exaggeration to say that the biggest concern from landslides is habitat loss.
Engraved: A recent study by Carol Witham, a Vernalpool consultant, found that between 2005 and 2018, 9% of remaining Vernalpool habitat in the Central Valley was 76,000 An acre worth wiped out.
And over 90% of those losses were unmitigated. This means that the pool was destroyed without documenting the loss or complying with regulations that required the pool to be saved or restored elsewhere to compensate.
Witham reports that much of the pool has been demolished to make way for vineyards and orchards.
Witham: And there are consultants who make a lot of money helping people do that.
Engraved: Witham explains that much of the habitat loss described in her report is accomplished with a kind of tricky workaround.
Witham: In many cases they at least avoided larger spring ponds and seem to have been planted only around them, not through them. If it’s not gone yet, it will go away in a very short order.
Engraved: Spring puddles tend to be in low spots, exactly where the water pools. It’s also where contaminated water from agriculture flows, which can kill the organisms that live in the pool. is much more difficult, she says.
Witham: This is part of the reluctance of regulators to take enforcement action. Because they didn’t actually enter and deliberately ruin the spring pond at the time they planted the trees, they can’t prove that their activity killed an endangered species. , all activity around the spring pool destroys the spring pool.
O’Brien: You have to look out for these ranchers, too.They see their neighbors put in an orchard and become millionaires, but they’re doing the right thing. , haven’t turned the spring pool complex into an orchard. get money from it. They have no incentive to defend their land.
Engraved: Private Rancher is Vernal Pool’s largest remaining landowner in the Central Valley. To be fair, some ranchers actively protect pools of land through various types of conservation agreements.
But instead, even as Vernalpool is turning into an orchard, O’Brien says the pixie shrimp seem to follow the famous Jeff Goldblum lineage. Jurassic Park …
[CLIP: Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park: “I’m simply saying that life, uh, finds a way.”]
O’Brien: Shrimp hatching can still be seen in these plowed fields. They are indeed resilient creatures.
Shannon Blair: Yeah, I think fairy prawns as a group are fine if you zoom out with a very long field of view.
Engraved: I spoke with Shannon Blair about this. She is a molecular ecologist at the University of Idaho, and as a graduate student and postdoc at the University of California, Davis, Fairley did much research on her shrimp.
Blair: I think the danger of losing spring ponds is that they are not isolated habitats. Protect and support. So if you lose the pond, you lose a lot more than just the pond.
Engraved: But just by looking at the fairy shrimp, she says they survive, no matter what a human can throw at them.
Blair: They lived through the collapse of Pangea. They have survived his KT extinction. They survived the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs. They have survived … multiple Ice Ages, and are still present — as an order, found all over the world: in deserts, in the Arctic … in rocky outcrops. It lives in the lush jungles of South America. They were found on the island.
They represent the ability to survive in very difficult and highly changeable circumstances. And they do it by waiting until things are perfect before re-emerging, changing rapidly and adapting to new environments as soon as they arise.
Engraved: Her point reminded me of something Chuck Black told me as we wandered Miramar’s spring pool.
black: I’ve seen fairy shrimp in the asphalt tying down runway cavities, and they’re about the size of your palm.
Engraved: They can survive in small puddles in rivers RunwayThese are really hardcore.
And I want to stress that today, no one is telling me that I shouldn’t worry, not even that the spring puddles are disappearing right now.
But there may be reason to hope.
black: Luckily they are a very tough species. They withstand disturbances and more. So if you dig a hole that holds water long enough, most plants and pixie shrimp will do fine. So… [laughs]
Engraved: If the remaining spring ponds are not completely destroyed, the extraordinary creatures that call them home may find a way to cling.
for science, quick— Christopher Kaved.
science, quick Produced by Jeff Dervicio, Turika Bose and Kelso Harper. Music by Dominic Smith.
don’t forget to subscribe science, quick Get podcasts anywhere. For more scientific news, visit ScientificAmerican.com.
Subscribe: Apples | Spotify
