(bright upbeat music) - Welcome to Science Pub, a monthly series, exploring the dynamic and exciting scientific world happening all around us.

I'm your host, Nancy Coddington, Director of Science Content for WSKG Public Media.

Tonight's talk is featuring a scientist who has helped to break glass ceilings, move science forward through her hard work and dedication, and inspires the next generation of scientists.

Tonight's talk is going wild with Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant.

We will journey deep into the heart of the world's most remote jungles, savannas, tundras, mountains, and deserts to meet wild animals in their natural habitats, from lemurs and Madagascar to unlikely tales of giraffes and poachers in Africa.

You never know where the stories are going to take us this evening.

And tonight we're gonna be sitting down with conservation scientist, large carnivore ecologist and nature storyteller Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant.

She hosts a popular PBS nature podcast that takes listeners along her journeys into the animal kingdoms hidden worlds and through action-packed adventures of the wildlife scientists who track them, which includes her.

This is a story not only about the animals, but also about Dr. Wynn-Grant's journey to become a celebrated wildlife ecologist.

For many young men and women, her career isn't something they've even considered, yet insights pulled from her personal journey are inspiring the next generation of scientists and conservationists.

Welcome Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant.

- Hi, thank you so much for having me.

- Well, we are delighted that you are here with us.

I wanted just to start off tonight, how did you know that you wanted to be a scientist?

What first attracted you to being a wildlife scientist?

- I got my start in a really I think both traditional and non-traditional way.

So traditional meaning I got inspired to do this through watching TV.

And everyone watches TV, that's a very American thing to do so that's why it feels very traditional.

But the reason I say this non-traditional way is because I didn't necessarily realize I was being introduced to science when I was watching TV.

I thought it was just entertainment.

It just so happened that my favorite shows weren't cartoons like other kids.

It was the nature shows that I would see on TV and it was my favorite form of entertainment.

So for so long I thought to myself, well, I wanna be a nature show host when I grow up.

And it wasn't until I actually grew up that I realized that I was being introduced to a type of science called ecology or conservation biology, and I realized there was a career track there and I could not just do the things that nature show hosts were doing, but I could do it even more purposefully by learning the science behind saving wild animals from extinction.

- That was great.

Who helped you to discover this passion?

- Goodness.

Again, it was TV.

It was like those classic shows and the hosts on those TV shows.

So we could say David Attenborough who is kind of the legend natural history presenter.

He was one of the people who inspired me.

And so that can be very, very different because often you'll hear people talk about representation.

You need to see people like you reflected in a field to feel like you belong there, or to feel like that's available to you.

And that wasn't really the case for me.

It was people who were really, really different from me like older white men with foreign accents who inspired me to do my work.

But that is the case and so at the same time I find that I am fighting for representation in a lot of this work because not everyone can be inspired by folks so different from them.

- Oh, absolutely, and we're gonna dive into that a little bit later with some of the work that you do with If/Then as an ambassador.

We do have a short video showing some of your work so we're gonna roll that just to kinda queue up some of our conversation tonight.

- Okay, let's do it.

- I'm Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant.

I travel to the most amazing places on the planet tracking, tranquilizing, and studying some of the world's most dangerous and exotic animals.

I'm driven to discover the science that will ensure these animals will survive.

My role as a scientist is to ask questions that haven't been answered.

Each expedition pairs me with a new team in a quest to collect scientific data.

The dangers are real, but with the survival of a species at stake, the risks are worth taking.

Here on my arm, I have a Madagascar boa.

When a new species is discovered, I'm there.

The data we collect today is critical for the future of the species.

When a wild animal encroaches too close to humans, I get the call.

She doesn't thermoregulate at this age so while she's away from her mother we have to snuggle her tight to keep her warm.

Their survival often depends on humans, so I meet with the local community to share my data and advise them on how to coexist with their wild neighbors.

Some say I'm the Indiana Jones of wildlife, but I know better than to be constrained by labels.

So I just think of myself as me.

- I love that video because it just shows the variety of work that you do, which is really vast.

So before we start jumping into that, you actually didn't grow up in rural spaces with a lot of trees and animals to go discover after you watched Sir David Attenborough who I also absolutely adore and love.

So did growing up in an urban environment, did it deter you or slow you down from the goal of where you wanted to go with your career?

- It sure did, and there's an irony here because I was born and lived a lot of my life in California.

So I was born in San Francisco right in the heart of the city.

And so what's ironic is that California is a super wild state, right?

There are deserts, and oceans, and mountains, and valleys, and there's snow and palm trees and lots and lots of wild animals.

In fact, today I live in California again, and I'm studying a population of mountain lions and black bears that live on the California Central Coast.

So although I was kind of locked into a big city as a kid, I wasn't that far away from the wilderness after all.

And a lot of my work later in my career brought me back to my home state to kind of rediscover it in a lot of ways.

But I think that's not unlike so many urban kids or urban adults.

Actually, is that sometimes the urban space will make us feel like that's the whole place and we don't have access to wild places, and natural areas and wilderness, when actually it's usually just steps outside of the city.

So it definitely deterred me.

I absolutely grew up thinking well, to get to the wilderness, you have to go to Brazil, to the Amazon, you have to go to South Africa, you have to go to parts of Asia.

I didn't realize that right in my own home state, there was plenty of wilderness.

- At what point in your career did you actually realize that?

- Gosh, I realized it once I started studying environmental science and that happened to me right in the middle of my college education.

I started off in college pre-med like so many people who are interested in science and then was able to get redirected to environmental science.

I wasn't enjoying the medical track, I talked to a professor who gave me such incredible advice and I will never forget that he said to me, "Seems like you're more interested "in macro-biology than micro-biology."

I thought to myself, yeah, that does make sense.

I don't really care very much what cells are doing, the mitochondria and all of that.

But I do care a lot about what the whole organism is doing and how it's living.

And so with this idea of, okay, macro-biology is my thing, the professor also recommended, look into environmental science.

And as soon as I did that, I realized, oh, environmental science, that aligns really nicely with all of those nature shows that I was watching for so long and loved.

And so once I started an environmental science major in college, they introduced us to what's going on locally.

So I went to college in the State of Georgia, and although I was in the City of Atlanta, our professors let us know, there's wilderness all around us.

There's forests outside of the city, there's rivers, there's streams, there's wild animals.

So I really got reoriented as soon as I dove into environmental science.

But in terms of my actual work and the projects that I actually worked on, I didn't start doing my own science research on wild animals in the United States until probably about, I don't know, seven or eight years into me studying the environment.

So my first exposure to wildlife, and to conservation biology and wildlife ecology was abroad.

It was in different countries and East Africa.

And so it actually took me a long time to come back home and to really do work and dive into the camping, the hiking, the field work right here in America.

- Well, I could see why it would be hard to get you back (laughing) with all the travel 'cause you have traveled extensively for your career.

So I'd like to talk a little bit more about that.

What were some of the places that impacted you most in the work that you did?

- Gosh, like you said, I've been so fortunate to have traveled all over the world.

I've been to six of the seven continents.

I haven't been to Antarctica yet.

I'm still on the fence of whether that's the right place for me to visit.

But where has impacted me most?

I think it probably goes without saying, if you've heard me talk before, listened to any of my stories, my work in East Africa, particularly living in Kenya and Tanzania studying wild animals in those landscapes impacted me a lot.

There was a bravery that came out of me.

There was a lot of humility that I learned.

There were so many different moments that had to do directly with the science research in question, like there was a summer that I kind of lived mostly by myself in the savannas of Tanzania in a tent.

And I remember just really growing as a woman and growing encouraged during that summer.

It was excellent, like nothing bad happened, but it was still pretty intimidating.

And also there were so many cross-cultural interactions that I had with people, and I really owe a lot of my understandings of the social aspects to wildlife conservation and the kind of intersectional sociopolitical needs that have to go along with really good science.

I owe a lot of that understanding to the time that I spent with people, especially people living rurally in those parts of East Africa.

So I would say that that was probably the most impactful part of the world that I've spent time.

- Yeah, it definitely sounds like that.

Can you talk a little bit more about the social aspects because that is I feel such a key factor to so many things when you're trying to do work with another culture and you're working outside of the country that you're in, to take those things into consideration to try to have a longevity or impact with the work that you're doing.

- Yeah, absolutely.

I'm still figuring this out as the world continues to change.

So when I was first traveling to parts of Kenya and Tanzania, globalization was already happening, but there's still some things missing that we have today.

So for example, there wasn't wifi, there wasn't cell connection, right?

So now the places that I used to study in East Africa you can pull out your cell phone, and talk, and email and all, connect with people.

But when I was first going to these places that was not the case.

It was a lot of isolation being there.

But I'm really grateful that I was there at that time because it allowed me to sink in those ways.

And so one of the things that I will echo over and over is the need for a lot of these wildlife conservation projects to have really strong and really pointed poverty alleviation components.

I truly believe that if people are living in poverty or have economic insecurity within the scope of the location of the conservation project, there must, must, must be poverty alleviation factored into the project.

Conservation is much more sustainable if human communities are doing well.

And I didn't just learn that in East Africa, I have learned it every single place that I've worked, especially in parts of the United States.

Often we don't think of rural Americans as being economically unstable but we should because the places that I'm trying to do conservation work and really save wild animals, any place I go, poverty factors into the equation, factors into the effectiveness of the project.

And they didn't teach me that in school.

I'm hoping that it is now being taught when people are learning environmental science, but it was something I really had to absorb on my own.

And then another thing was living in East Africa was really understanding and depending on the knowledge of indigenous groups.

So again, that's a stark difference between working in the United States where often the people and the land owners that I am working with for conservation projects are not indigenous to the land, but in East Africa, the people were indigenous to the land and they had gone through all kinds of upheaval with colonial rule, with oppression, with war, with neo-colonial influences, with Western domination of conservation.

There are a lot of racially based, politically based, economically based, colonial based systems in place that impact people and wildlife living in the same places.

A lot of it is complex, but not necessarily complicated.

So I guess what I'm trying to stress is that I've received a tremendous, tremendous formal education in wildlife ecology, but it definitely doesn't stand up to the informal kind of place based education I've received in every single area that I have done work.

- So in that same vein of talking, because you have to meet the needs of the people right before they're going to take on conservation efforts of animals.

So what are your thoughts around ecotourism?

Did you experience any of that while you were part of what you were doing the research in Africa?

- Yeah, so I wanna totally agree with you Nancy, the needs of people should be of the utmost importance.

And you've referenced my podcast a couple of times, I used this phrase in one of my podcast episodes and it's been pretty controversial.

A lot of people have highlighted it and flagged it and said, "Oh, I don't know if I agree with you."

But what I have said in the podcast is that people are more important than animals, and that takes a lot for a wildlife ecologist to say.

But the idea is that in some places we are actually having to face a choice between protecting human life and protecting animal life.

And I'm saying, we need to protect human life.

Human wellbeing and dignity will set the stage for creating projects that will enhance wildlife safety, but it can't be the other way around.

We don't protect animals and then hope that humans are gonna be okay.

And so that's essentially what I mean when I say humans are more important than animals.

And just to be clear, I work every single day in the protection of wild animals so that's what my job is, but I can tell when something is missing in a project.

So that's really what I'm trying to say and that does feed into things like ecotourism.

So in general, as a concept, I'm super into it.

I think ecotourism is awesome.

I think it's a wonderful way for people to support different landscapes and communities, and also have incredible experiences.

The gift of travel is kind of unmatched and I love a really great grounded community based ecotourism project.

There's always a question about, well, where does the money go?

Does it properly go to communities?

Again, if a community continues to live in poverty, there's obviously some type of mismatch there, but in general, ecotourism can be a wonderful, wonderful solution for for building up equity and justice and really supporting wildlife populations.

- Oh, thank you.

Let's still stay in Africa and talk a little bit about the work that you've done there.

I know that you did some work with big cats, but you also worked with other animals as well.

Can you talk a little bit about that?

- Yeah, I'm happy to.

My more anchored and long-term research projects in East Africa have been with lions, super fun, putting collars on lions to track their movements and understand their habitat selection and a lot of their behaviors.

And so that's work that takes considerable amounts of time but again, it really has deepened my understanding of wildlife ecology and conservation.

But I've also had a couple of opportunities to study primates in different parts of Africa.

So lemurs in Madagascar, which was awesome, and then lowland gorillas in the Congo Basin.

And both of those bits of work took me to the tropics and so that was super different.

I have not traveled across the continent of Africa.

When I do projects, again, it's for like long periods of time in a single place.

So there's lots of parts of the continent that I haven't traveled to.

But being able to add the tropics, the rain forests of Madagascar, the rain forests of Central Africa, was just so different and so challenging in ways that I definitely didn't expect, and also just super different.

Like as an ecologist who studies is terrestrial carnivores, for primates, I had to look up, just the simple looking up for primates in trees was a departure in itself from my typical science.

But it has been eye opening, super fun, really, really challenging, like physically challenging.

I found working in the tropics, very, very challenging so I have a very new respect for my colleagues who do work in the tropics, and just just together a great time.

- So when you're working with lions and you're out also same thing with the lemurs, are you camping while you're doing that?

And if so, can you talk a little bit about that experience?

- Yeah, so I'm always camping.

Whether I'm working in in the United States, in Montana, in Nevada, in California, in Kenya and Tanzania, in the Congo Basin, in Madagascar, I have a tent and little campfire.

It's sometimes a big team, sometimes a medium team, sometimes just me and it's camping.

So I have been camping all over the world for work.

I often joke with friends that I will never go camping for fun because I go camping for work.

So my friends know, don't invite me on a hiking trip or camping trip on the weekend because I get enough of that in my job and I love it, so I just don't wanna pass my threshold and stop loving it.

For now I love it.

But yeah, there is something about camping in places that are totally wild.

For example, I can't recall having ever camped in a campsite, a formal campsite.

It's always hiking in to the middle of nowhere, and pitching a tent and kind of hoping for the best.

So because of that, I've had some close encounters with wild animals.

I've definitely had lions come into the camp, and circle my tent and freak me out.

I've had bears rustle around, grabbing my stuff, eating my food.

I've had super venomous snakes sneak into my tent.

I've woken up with tarantulas right next to me on my pillow.

I have had all of the experiences I think and have lived to tell the tale.

- I'm on the edge of my seat.

So what did you do when you had the poisonous snake in your tent?

- Oh gosh, well, I have a podcast episode about that.

Actually, this is a great place for me to plug the podcast, "Going Wild with Ray Wynn-Grant" from PBS Nature.

And the reason I'm plugging it is because we made an episode that aired on Halloween last fall, and we called it near death experiences.

And as it turns out, it has been the most downloaded episode.

It is by leaps and bounds has surpassed all the other episodes for the season.

Everyone, it goes straight to the near death experiences show.

And so to not spoil that one, there was a whole bunch of different snakes.

So I've had black mambas which are some of the most poisonous.

The one on the screen, I love that one.

That's a Madagascar boa, which is big, and strong and pretty frightening if you find it in your tent, which we did.

But this one isn't a venomous snake, which is why I'm handling it because I would not be handling it if it were venomous.

So black mambas are extremely venomous and I've had them in my tent and I've had to be brave enough to kind of shake them out.

So like pick up the whole tent and shake 'em out and get 'em out of there.

But the closest encounter I had with a snake at least was with a red spitting Cobra.

Cobras have that amazing hood in the back of their head so they kind of come up and they have this hood, and the red spiting cobra has these fangs that spit venom, and they can spit up to six feet or something, and they aim for the eyes of the animal that they're trying to spit venom into.

And if they hit the eyes, then they blind the animal.

And so I hope I'm leaving everyone on the edge of their seat, listen to the podcast episode, but it was not pretty, let me tell you.

- Oh my goodness, yes, that is terrifying.

I was on the edge of my seat as you...

The link for Dr. Wynn-Grant's podcast is in the chat.

We will also share a little bit later as well, but you can go over on PBS Nature and you can find her there.

You can also find that podcast wherever you enjoy podcasts.

- Okay.

- How about poachers?

Did you experience poaching or poachers while you were in Africa?

- Yes, so the answer is yes.

And I'm so glad you brought that up because currently I am teaching a graduate level course at UC Santa Barbara and our focus is kind of using evidence, kind of historical ecology data, to really change the narrative about poaching.

So I have interacted with poachers, it's been kind of scary because they have guns and they do illegal stuff.

But my interaction, I should say my one and only interaction with poachers in the field who had killed an animal, really again allowed me to see firsthand that I had received a bit of a mis-education about poaching.

And so I'm really happy to talk about it here, but essentially the illegal wildlife trade is a huge, huge underground industry globally.

So it is second only to the illegal drug trade.

It's super profitable.

It is big, it is hard to tackle and it's really problematic.

We're losing a lot of amazing wild animal species due to poaching and the illegal trade of wildlife parts.

And with that said, the way that we have been socialized to understand poaching is to really vilify the poachers, right?

The people who are like out there with the guns hurting or killing the animals.

And yet they're not the people who are profiting from poaching, right?

They're not the people who are kind of kingpins, getting mega, mega wealthy from this industry.

They are especially in the content of Africa, typically low income black men from local communities who take on a job because it is the most profitable job available in the area.

And so that is not unlike a lot of the patterns we see with the illegal drug trade, right?

And so I think it's interesting that the wildlife space and the legal drug space have some of those things in common.

By incarcerating a lot of the like boots on the ground people we're not actually reducing the problem, right?

So like incarcerating poachers in Africa isn't keeping elephants alive.

And so I really am hoping that the world is able to start seeing that there are these people in the top driving demand and really profiting off of the industry and if we can really stop them, I think we have a better chance of saving all of these animals.

But definitely sending vulnerable young men to jail is not a useful strategy, and actually I believe causes more harm than good.

- That's a really interesting point of view on this, and we've had several comments of people actually agreeing and appreciating that enlightenment.

And this goes back to that social aspects, right, of what's happening within the towns or in villages of how people are either making ends meet or not making them meet, doing things that they might not necessarily wanna be doing.

- Yeah, absolutely.

And again, I love being able to offer so much of the perspective I've gathered and other colleagues of mine might have different perspectives, but I've probably experienced slightly more poaching and interactions with poachers working in the United States on bears.

And so, again, just as far as the media goes, it's often focused on like young men of color in non-American countries, but there's poaching going on right here in the Western United States.

And so the selling of black bear parts in particular, gall bladders on the black market, is something that is going on.

And so in my work, literally in my PhD dissertation, I have data points that are from bear poaching, and these are like young white men from communities that have economic hardships and they are turning to these opportunities in order to make enough money likely to survive.

And I think that if we're able to kind of articulate this in the American context, Americans might be a little more sympathetic to poachers, right?

Like knowing that people are turning to these illegal opportunities because of financial need, and that would be the same all over the world.

It's not like people grow up saying, "Oh, I wanna be someone who kills elephants illegally."

That's typically not what people grow up dreaming of.

It's something typically done out of a level of desperation.

And so again, I advocate not for the incarceration of any of these people on the bottom, but rather consequences occurring for people at the top, and overall just better community based economic based solutions to supporting people and communities so that we can all then support wild animals.

- Yeah, that's interesting 'cause that's very much the images that so many of us see.

It's not the white men poaching bears here in the United States.

So that is interesting.

Question, why do they poach them for the gallbladders?

- Oh yeah, certainly.

So I know it sounds kind of weird.

It's not something that we're typically taught.

But there are beliefs that different animal parts have medicinal uses, and so there is a belief in the world and I don't think it has been disproven, so it's kind of in between being proven and disproven that the bile in a bear's gallbladder has medicinal properties.

So bile is like something that I don't know, it's kind of like a icky thing when you think of like human bile and our gallbladder, but bear bile is supposed to be able to cure certain ailments, and so it can be sold on the black market.

And I don't say that, so everyone jumps up and goes and poaches a bear, please don't.

But that can just be the beginning of an education on why there is this trade, where the demand comes from, what belief systems are fueling this and maybe some folks out there listening to this can try to figure out some solutions.

- Well, thank you.

We do have a few questions from our audience.

Dr. Wynn-Grant, can you talk a little bit more about your experience with the one health concept and how important that has been with you bridging communities and the wildlife that they coexist with?

- Yeah, again, I wanna just make sure it's clear that I never received a formal education on the socioeconomic intersections with wildlife conservation.

So it's something that I have come to through experience, through place based growth, and then there are a lot of thought leaders out there that I really listen to very, very closely to try to give myself an education these days.

But yeah, the idea is that we need to have a holistic view of the environment, and the environment includes human communities.

And particularly in places where there is a legacy of oppression of people, whether that's through colonialism, whether that's through genocide, or slavery, or some type of really difficult historical oppression, there's often a need to support human communities very, very, very strongly and that can be a clear path towards creating healthy thriving ecosystems.

So you have to have every piece in place, but there's a lot of reason to believe that starting with human communities and making sure that there is wellness and dignity within those communities can directly impact the environment.

One example is this concept of eco-feminism, and the basic idea there is that by supporting and maximizing the rights and livelihoods of women and girls anywhere in the world, the byproduct of that is healthier thriving ecosystems.

So when we have really well supported women and girls and policies in place that protect them, the whole environment improves including the ecosystems.

And so that's just one way that we can see that there are building blocks to this.

And these concepts are I guess, new in some ways, they're kind of new in like the Western kind of discussion, but for many indigenous groups, this was just the way before a lot of those traditions were disrupted.

This was how it was.

So in a lot of places, it's not necessarily a new concept.

It might be a new concept in kind of mainstream American society, but not a new concept in a lot of these wild places with people who were some of the original stewards of the environment.

- How do conservation efforts impact indigenous people who might use animals that are endangered as food in their culture?

Are they vilified or allowed to hunt as some of the indigenous Alaskans do?

- Yeah, great question.

And it depends, it depends on the place.

It depends on the level of advocacy work that is being done there.

It depends on who's in power in these places, right?

So in general, I think it can be very interesting to talk about the concept of an endangered species in certain places, because like let's take parts of Tanzania, for example, where I have spent time.

The species that are endangered are not endangered because Tanzanians have been overusing them or taking too many of the species.

They're endangered because during white colonial rule, these animals were driven to a point of extinction.

So when Tanzanians were in charge of their landscapes, there were plenty of wild animals and the use of these animals, or the hunting, or whatever was very sustainable.

And then during colonial rule, the populations were decimated by hunting, by landscape transformation, by capitalism raging, and the populations declined quite a bit to a point where now when power in some ways has symbolically been restored to Tanzanian people, just the taking of one single animal could be devastating to the population, but that is the same practice that they had before.

So again, I am practicing, and kind of relearning, and re-understanding and trying to re-articulate a lot of the issues that we're facing right now as not being issues of what people are doing today, but what was done for the last 100 years, and really understanding the ecological history of these places, which parts of Africa is very, very closely linked to colonialism, and how it has brought us to the place we are today.

So to me that's just a fascinating concept.

I think that there's a lot of justice work that could be done using this lens.

And I know that there are folks, some really wonderful ecologists, activists, thought leaders out there who are taking these concepts in a much richer articulation than I'm able to give and really trying to drive policy change.

- Well, I think you offered a really nice view of that and bringing it all around, so thank you.

We're gonna shift gears a little bit.

So besides big cats and lemurs, you have done quite a bit of research with black bears.

So we have a short video that we're gonna show that has you out working in the field.

- Hi, hi, hey.

Hi.

Hi, welcome to the... Hello.

Hi.

Hi, so this is one animal, one cub, We'll sex them in a little bit.

- We got a scraper.

- This is number two.

- I wanna get her out.

- Okay.

- And again, we just have to see exactly how many cubs are here with the mother.

It's at least two, it could be three.

- Oh, awesome.

- We gotta keep 'em warm 'cause they've never experienced the real cold.

As soon as we start processing them officially, we'll sex them, weigh them, measure them, get them some type of tag so that when we find them again in the summer, we know who the individuals are.

But most importantly, they've gotta stay warm and we gotta move quickly.

(bright upbeat music) - In this video, you are at a black bear den, you are reaching in, there are some cubs in there.

Can you actually just walk us through what we might have seen?

- Oh, absolutely.

It's the cutest little video, but it is actually just a fantastic little piece because it shows my real science in action, right?

So it's not staged.

It could have failed miserably, but by a miracle it didn't.

And the idea is that as one of the things we all love about bears so much is that they hibernate in the winter, and there is this incredible fact that female black bears all give birth in hibernation.

They all give birth in the month of January.

Like every single black bear that has ever been born in history of black bears in America was born in January.

I just think that is mind blowing and the coolest fact.

And so these mama bears are such heroes, right?

Because when they're hibernating, they're not eating anything, they're not drinking anything, they are giving birth and nursing their young without any resources of their own, and they are growing these babies in the den, in the bitter cold until they're big enough to emerge in the spring time and then go on their way.

One of the things that my colleagues and I do is we do a den check.

So we estimate that at the end of February, the last week of February, all of the bears born that year should be about eight weeks old, which is big enough and robust enough for them to get a little checkup from us, and we go into the bear den.

This image right here shows a mama bear, and she is pulled halfway out of her little tiny den, and she's tranquilized, she's sedated with just a little sedative that knocks her out and that is so she doesn't kill me, which is my number one most important thing.

And we give her a light sedative just with the little, what we call a jab stick, it almost looks like a broom stick.

And so we creep up on the den and the broomstick has just a little syringe on the end and we poke her in the shoulder to give her just little medicine to make her fall asleep.

And then we will check her babies and we will count how many babies were born.

We will give them a little ear tag so we can identify them moving forward.

We will measure their bodies and weigh them, and make sure that they're just healthy as can be, and then place 'em back with their mama.

And the point of this is so that we can really see how they're doing at birth or as close to birth as we can get, and then we hope to find the bear family again about six months later in the summer, to be able to check on how they're doing.

And the idea is that if we see two or three bears being born in the winter, when we check in the summer, we wanna see mama with two or three cubs, the exact same number and hopefully still in great condition.

If for some reason she does not have those cubs or if they are in poor condition, that tells us that something is off in the ecosystem, that something in the forest isn't working, there aren't enough resources, something is failing.

And that will kind of alert us as ecologists that something is off and we need to figure it out in order to protect the bear population.

One of the things I love about studying black bears is that they're doing really well.

Conservation has been working.

In the United States, black bear populations are on the up and up in most places, and so we are almost always finding healthy bears in the winter and then those same healthy bear cubs in the summertime and it is just my absolute, I'm sure it comes as no surprise, my favorite part of field work, the cutest part of field work, just an absolute joy.

- Yeah, that looks pretty, pretty awesome.

I'm a little jealous when I go out there with you in January, Is there a scientific reason that black bears give birth in January?

- We don't know the scientific reason.

It is this pattern.

I can tell you that female black bears have an amazing cycle.

They have an amazing, amazing cycle where they actually have this thing called delayed implantation.

So they will mate in about the midsummer, and although a little embryo is formed, it will not attach itself to the uterus until the mother bear goes through her hyperphasia period in the fall, and hyperphasia is just that period where bears are eating everything in sight to fatten up for the winter.

And so if she gets fat enough, if she gains enough weight and gets enough body fat, then the embryo will implant into the uterus and grow into several cubs.

But if she does not put on enough weight to support a pregnancy, then the embryo will shed and she will not go through a pregnancy that winter, but she will likely stay alive.

And I think that is just such a fascinating fact about these bears that they have almost this like guarantee built into their bodies that they can either support a pregnancy or not support a pregnancy, but their bodies make that decision at the last minute, and it's just, I think, quite miraculous.

And so along with that cycle, once the body kind of decides, "Okay, have we met the body fat threshold?"

Then they incubate for just a couple of short months, and mama bears give birth in January to teeny-tiny little cubs.

Bears are huge animals, right?

So black bears could be five or 600 pounds even, and they give birth to little tiny one pound cubs.

They just slip right out, they're teeny, they don't incubate for that long, and then they just nurse from their mother's body in the den for several months until they leave.

It's just a beautiful process.

- That is really, really neat, very, very cool.

I'm learning so much tonight, I think as well are so many of our viewers.

We do have a question.

How do you administer the correct sedative dosage given the variability of the weight of female bears?

- Oh, sure, yeah.

So we usually have an idea of which bear we're visiting.

So we're not visiting a random bear and that's because in order to know where she is hibernating, she has to have a GPS collar on her.

So likely the summer before hibernation, we have set a trap for this bear, captured her, sedated her again, and put a GPS collar around her neck.

And in doing that, we would weigh her and measure her and really get her size measurements.

And so we would imagine that when we go into the den in the winter, we would know her size and her weight and be able to adjust the sedative dosage because of that.

We always err on the side of too little sedative and usually that's because if she's a nursing mom, so she'll probably be a little bit lighter in weight and we don't want too much of the sedative to go into her breast milk.

But there have been times where we've given too little and she will start to kinda wake up a little on the early side and so we have to inject her just a little bit more.

But there's an equation to all of these and we're pretty good.

Haven't had any mistakes at all.

- I'm sure that's a little hair raising though, when you're in that point of, is she waking up, is she not waking up?

(laughing) It's true what they say about angry mama bears, right?

- Mm-mhh.

- So, women still to this day are often not respected for equal work that they do compared to male colleagues, especially being a woman in science has many challenges.

So have you experienced discrimination in your workplace and how have you overcome it?

- Oh gosh, I have.

I have lots of times in all kinds of ways, definitely in those microaggressions, those ways where you're left wondering like, "Was I just discriminated against "or am I taking this too personally?"

And then in like really macro ways.

So I'm absolutely a woman in a fairly male dominated field, but I am a black woman, so I'm not able to separate...

I only know what it's like to be a black woman.

I don't know what it's like to be any other kind of woman.

And so the intersection of being a black individual in America doing work in America and being a woman at the same time is something that's a double whammy in a lot of ways.

So there can be times that it is stressful, times that it is offensive, times that it is fun, times that it is confusing, kind of runs the gamut.

I will share that in general, I don't know of any other black female bear biologists.

If you are out there please send me a message 'cause we need each other.

So it is possible that I am the only black female bear biologist in this country.

And so you can imagine that it's super isolating in a lot of ways, and can be really difficult.

So I often show up to places where people know that Dr. Wynn-Grant is coming and then when I show up, they say, "Where's Dr.

Wynn-Grant?"

So I get a lot of that.

I get most people aren't expecting me to be me.

So I try to kind of make lemonade with those lemons, and I can use myself, and my body, and my identity as a way to resist societal expectations and really push the needle forward and try to break some glass ceilings.

But at the same time, I'm still a black woman living in America, which operates under systems that work directly against me and my wellbeing and my people that I represent.

So yeah, so there's a lot of difficulty, but I'm glad that I am doing this career, and doing this work and existing at this time rather than any time in the past.

So there's a lot of work to still be done, and it can be difficult a lot of the time, and then in other ways there's a lot of opportunity for me.

And so what I mean by that is being one of the few black women in this space allows me a particular type of attention that I can then use for advocacy work, and I've been really trying to center that, and hone in on that and be responsible with that as well.

- Yeah, that's really great.

So you are also an If/Then ambassador.

So can you talk a little bit about what that is and what that means?

- Yes, I want the whole world to know about the If/Then initiative.

So it is sponsored by the Lyda Hill Foundation, and the whole idea is that there is such a tremendous lack, even in 2022, of female scientists in the media, right?

Media plays such a huge role in our society and our culture, and media portrays women in lots of different ways, but not very often as scientists, engineers, mathematicians, technologists, et cetera.

And partially because of that, we as a society lack a lot of women in science leadership, right?

Like although women are interested in science and often study science, when it comes to moving all the way through the pipeline to leadership levels, we see large inabsence of women there.

And so the If/Then initiative is aiming to transform the media by really pushing the idea of female scientists being real living people operating every day, being really cool, being intersectional and existing in every kind of space.

So in 2019 they launched the If/Then initiative and awarded ambassadorships to over a 100 female scientists and I was so fortunate to be included in that.

It has undoubtedly changed my life and career.

In one way it connected me with, again, more than a 100 female stem professionals who are interested in being in the media, and it has given me tons of opportunities to show up in different spaces that I never thought I would, doing little commercials, or TV shows, or magazine spreads.

I got to do a Marie Claire Magazine spread and put on a fancy outfit and say, "Here I am, and I'm a scientist."

And the program is just getting started.

They did probably the most monumental thing ever done for women in stem by spearheading a statue exhibit, an exhibit of over a 100 life size statues of real living women in stem.

An exhibit that spent time at the National Mall in Washington, DC that was seen by our country's political leaders, just seen by hundreds of thousands of Americans and in particular girls.

They created the If/Then collection.

So if you go to ifthenshecan.org, you'll see a collection of media assets of women scientists so that hopefully no kid will ever say, "I can't identify a female scientist," 'cause they'll have over a 100 of them.

It's just an amazing, amazing program that is really here to change the world.

And it is again, super purposeful 'cause it's not just for kids and girls to feel like they can be scientists one day, but for them to feel like they can be the scientists that can answer the world's most pressing problems, tackle climate change, fix medical phenomena, just really drive our society to greatness by being included, and being empowered and showing up at the leadership level.

- And that is so important.

We had a comment, you can't be what you can't see, and that is so very true.

We actually do have some of those media assets for If/Then collection.

So if anybody is watching tonight and would like some of those posters for their classroom or for after school, you can please email me and I would be happy to connect you with some of those resources.

Role models are so incredibly important.

So what words of encouragement would you give to the next generation of scientists who aren't sure what they wanna do with their future?

- Oh yeah, a lot of my words of encouragement stem from my own experience, so it might not necessarily hit on what everyone young is going through right now.

But when I was in middle school and high school, I tried really hard and I was super interested in science, but I did not get very good grades.

And that wasn't always the case, I eventually started getting pretty good grades as I got into college and graduate school, but definitely as a middle school, high school student, I didn't.

And so there wasn't necessarily an indication that I would grow up to be a scientist, especially a scientist that uses a lot of high level math and statistics, right?

My worst grades were in math and statistics and my second worst grades were in science.

I had and have really amazing parents and they did what parents are supposed to do, which is to encourage your kid to like move towards what they're very skilled in, right?

And at that time I was really good at music, and kind of push your kid away from what they're not necessarily performing well in.

And so I think it was a bit confusing for some people, some of my parents and mentors when I really wanted to stick with science, even though I was getting C's, I was even getting D's sometimes in those classes.

So I like to use that as an example for young people today, and the phrase I've come up with is, really focus on passion more than performance.

I think that if you're not getting very good grades on your science tests, that's not necessarily an indicator that you won't be an awesome scientist.

If you keep at it, you'll eventually get to a place where you're not taking tests, and you're just doing science and you might be doing that really, really well even though the testing part didn't go as well.

That was definitely the case with me.

And so I think passion over performance is really, really important.

At the same time, study for your tests, do your homework, do all those things.

Definitely try really hard.

But I truly hope that our society can get away from discouraging young people when their performance isn't top notch and really encouraging them when the passion is there.

- I love that message because control what you can, which would be perseverance, sticking with something even though it is hard and challenging 'cause you will get there.

We do have a couple questions I did wanna squeeze in.

Janet says she's heard that black bears subsist on vegetation for up to 80% of their diet.

How do they bulk up for semi-hibernation, pregnancy and birth?

- Yeah, Janet, thank you for that question.

I will say, and this is what all ecologists say, it depends, that's like our tagline, it depends.

But black bears are what we call habitat generalists, and so that means they can live in all different kinds of places.

So I studied black bears that live at the beach literally in California, but there are black bears that live in the mountains, and black bears that live in deserts, and black bears that live outside of cities and black bears that live in the swamps of Florida, for example, they're all over.

And different populations of black bears eat different things.

So there are black bears that I have studied in the past that 80% of their diet might be vegetation.

They go for the higher calorie vegetation so they might go for roots and tubers that are super, super high in carbohydrates, and then carbohydrates kind of turn into fat in their bodies, which helps them bulk up for the winter.

But then there are the black bears that live on the coast in Washington State or in British Columbia that every fall get to gorge on salmon, and the majority of their diet is protein and fat from meat.

There are black bears that I've studied in Nevada that take down deer or wild horse calves and eat a lot of meat.

And then there are these Florida Everglades black bears that are eating a lot of fruits, and a lot of nuts and things coming from trees.

So it really depends on where they are, but during hyperphasia, they're always looking for the highest calorie meal.

So even if you take like the stereotype that bears eat honey all the time, well, a lot of the time they're eating honey but they're also eating the larvae of the bees that are in the hive, right?

And those are really fatty larvae.

Sounds disgusting, but it's high calorie foods.

So they have these really amazing ways of meeting their caloric needs.

- Yeah, those little bees have a lot of energy in them.

Are there animals that you have not studied yet that you would like to?

- Ooh, yeah, yes.

Oh, definitely yes.

There are animals that I haven't studied that I'd love to.

I have never studied tigers, and with that, I've never even seen a tiger in the wild.

And so again as that little girl who's watching nature shows on the living room floor, tigers come up a lot and I'm still so interested in studying tigers and seeing them so I hope that that might be in my future.

- Well, I hope so.

So we know that you don't go camping for vacation.

What do you do to decompress?

- That's a great question.

I'm working on it.

I'm really working on a hobby.

I think it was my new year's resolution in 2020 to discover a hobby and now it's been my new year's resolution ever since then 'cause I haven't nailed it down yet.

I do have two young children so I don't have a lot of free time.

My youngest is just 18 months old so I am very busy when I'm not doing my professional job, I am very busy parenting.

But I have a great group of friends that live all over the country, and I love spending time with my friends.

I really, really do.

Often that looks like lying on the couch, eating snacks, talking and laughing, but that is one of the things that brings me the most joy.

I would also say that I do yoga.

I really enjoy yoga, so that's something and I'll never turn down a good brunch.

- (laughing) Well, that's sage advice.

As we are gonna wrap up, I would like to talk about your podcast that you have, you are going into your second season.

It's called "Going Wild with Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant."

What inspired you to start that podcast?

- Gosh, well, Nancy, thank you for asking that.

I have to give credit where credit is due because it was not my idea.

So I, at no point had an idea, "Gosh, I would love to have a podcast.

"Who can I call about this?"

I had been friends with a wonderful producer, a woman named Danielle Broza who works for PBS Nature, WNET.

We had been friends for many, many years through all different job changes and everything, and she always said, "We need to work together somehow, right?

"We need to do some kind of immediate work together."

And I agreed, but it was about half through 2020, so that really terrifying first part of the pandemic, when she said, "You know what, let's create something audio "for people to listen to "that can help them kind of escape lockdown, right?"

"Like really bring them away from the confines "of their house where they're locked down "and expose them to the world."

And over time we developed this idea of all those crazy stories I have from my 15 plus years of studying wild animals in wild places.

And we really curated a list of my top craziest stories, and we started recording them for the podcast and we got a really amazing sound team and it was just a whole production that has really changed my life and we've gotten such great feedback.

So people aren't necessarily locked down the way they were originally, but we're recording season two right now.

We've been recording for a couple months.

So there's some really incredible stories coming your way, both from me and from some awesome, awesome, awesome mind blowing special guests.

So there's a lot to look forward to for season two.

- Ooh, special guests, I cannot wait.

When is season two going to come out?

- Yeah, we are aiming for the fall, so probably right after Labor Day, once everyone's back from whatever they're doing this summer, we will be dropping season two.

- Oh, wonderful, that is great.

We do have links for Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant's podcast.

We also have links for her work in the chat.

I would like to thank you, Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant for being with us tonight.

It has been just a wonderful conversation with you this evening.

- Yes, thank you, Nancy.

This was awesome, and to everyone out there, thank you for your questions, thank you for participating and question everything.

- That's great advice to leave us with.

Thank you so much.

Our next Science Pub is on Tuesday, June 14th, with guest Dr. Fiona Baker on Optimizing Sleep in Women.

Sleep is essential for healthy life.

In women, a range of sleep problems can emerge as we age, including PMS, childbirth and hot flashes that interrupt sleep patterns.

Dr. Baker will share how we can be insomnia and other sleep issues.

The link to RSVP is also in the chat, that's on June 14th at 7:00 PM.

As always, it is free to attend, but please do RSVP your spot.

If you enjoy Science Pub, consider a financial gift to support science, follow the link and support at any level that works for you.

We greatly appreciate it, thank you.

You can watch past Science Pubs through the WSKG app on demand on your smart device and on WSKG's YouTube channel.

Be sure to like our Facebook page for future events and science updates.

I wanna thank our WSKG team tonight.

Our director, Alyssa Micha, our chat moderator, Kristine Kieswer.

Support for Science Pub is provided by the Robert F. Schumann Foundation and from viewers like you.

I'm your host Nancy Coddington.

Thank you for joining us.

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