From Sky news.

This is connections.

I'm Raquel.

Stephen.

And for the past couple of weeks, there has been an intense investigation going on in Rochester.

It has involved scouting for locations, careful placement of buckets, nets and tools, and digital video.

The location, the Genesee River, the Seneca Park Zoo called on David Lynch fogger and a team of environmentalist for the project called One Cubic Foot.

And the name of the project is exactly what it sounds like.

Liz Wagner and his team placed the one cubic foot frame into the Genesee River and observes everything that moves in and out of the frame over a one day period.

The idea is to document and celebrate the different kinds of life that can be found in any one cubic foot of nature.

Today, we're going to learn about one cubic foot and about what's living in the Tennessee River.

We have several guests joining us in studio for this conversation.

David Lynch Wagner, himself the freelance photographer and contributor to National Geographic and other publications.

We have Chris Meyer, curator and chair of invertebrate zoology at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History.

We have Tom Snyder, the director of programing and conservation action of the Seneca Park Zoo Society, and Pamela Reed Sanchez.

She is the president and CEO of the Seneca Park Zoo Society.

Thank you all for joining me for this conversation.

And like always to our listeners, you're welcome to join in with on this conversation.

Call us at 1844295 talk.

That's 1-844-295-8255.

Or at (585) 263-9994.

Or you can email us at connections at six I dawg or comment in the chat section in our YouTube channel.

Are you ready to talk about this one cubic foot project?

We sure are.

Thanks for having us.

Thank you for being here.

Now, David, I want to start with you.

This is the second time the one cubic foot team has traveled to Rochester.

I believe the first time was ten years ago.

Correct.

So it's been a decade.

Exactly.

It's been a decade.

And.

And this is the first time that you guys have partnered with the Seneca Park Zoo.

Society.

What brings you back to Rochester?

Oh, correction, ten years ago, we partnered with ten years ago.

Okay, so ten years ago, you had park partnered with the Seneca Park Zoo Society.

So what brings you back to Rochester again?

And specifically the Genesee?

The invitation from the to, ten years on to take a look and see what's changed.

There's been a great piece of news about the river that it was being delisted from an environmental, a list of damaged and degraded places in there because of recovery efforts.

It's being removed from that list of places of special concern.

So now it's going.

But it's it's recovering.

Yes.

You know, like all things surrounded by a lot of people, they don't recover on their own, and it requires a certain amount of vigilance.

Yes.

To keep things from slipping away again.

So we're just trying to keep the focus on, you know, helping out nature and it's in our own best interests.

You know, it is our front and our backyard and everything else we have anything to do with.

Really?

Yes.

It's those for our listeners who are may not be familiar with the One Cubic Foot project.

Can you can you tell us what this is and how this is developed, and what is the significance about the one cubic foot?

Why not 2 or 3?

What can you tell us about this?

Well, it's a manageable size, piece of biological diversity.

You mentioned, you know, that we that we photograph everything that passes through the cube in one day.

Not possible.

There's so much life.

You know, a dozen flying insects pass through it.

You know, within a minute.

Certainly.

I could never keep up.

So it actually takes about two weeks to accomplish one.

So it has to do with, sort of scrutinizing it and making lists and then acquiring those creatures and photographing them.

And then after about two weeks, we we are able to build a representation of the amount of life that would be present over the course of a normal day, but it actually takes weeks to make that happen.

Oh, wow.

So how do we where how do we decide which spot is perfect for this?

Chris is laughing here.

It must be.

Well, I see a lot of work.

I, I placed it over the place, that.

We did it ten years ago.

The idea was just to go back and put it in the same spot.

That same spot no longer exists, because the water level in the river is about 18 to 24in lower.

So we'd be hanging it in the middle of the air, which, you know, there still would be plenty of life there, but it would be different life because we last time we had it.

Part of it in some in some brush at the edge of the the river, it was sort of what seemed like looking back, sort of high.

High water level event.

And now it's sort of seemed like a low water level event.

So it's a different you can never step in the same river twice.

And now I had it placed and then I asked and Chris got here a couple days after that and ask him what he thought and he, and he said, oh and he just sort of moved over about two feet to include a different habitat type because I had water, I had sediment and air.

I had some little brambles coming in, and he just moved it over into the sort of the rack, the, the, the detritus that piles up right at the edge of the, you know, the high water mark.

So now we get and I think, I think maybe with that two foot gesture he doubled that diversity.

Yeah.

Chris, can we can you talk about why placement is so important and why moving it over just two feet?

Being such a stickler.

Why is that important for this project?

Well, I mean, I'd like to think of, our work with, one cubic foot.

It's like a lens through which we're building a representation of place.

Right.

So.

And this is it's it's, it's a challenge.

And to David's point about why one cubic foot, it's it's sufficiently large that it's representative, but not so large that it's overwhelming.

So that's really important.

If you get too small, it doesn't represent all of the pieces in the ecosystem.

And so, when we've done this with school groups and other things, I challenged people to think about, like, if you are an alien and came to this planet and you only had this detector and it was just one cubic foot, where would you place that to try to capture the most different kinds of animals and creatures as you could.

And so thinking about that as a, as kind of a, a portal that you're going to try to capture every like a Richard Scarry, what do people do all day and busy, busy world.

So having different representations of water and air and vegetation and a little bit of the soil or rack line, every little pieces has different, actors in it.

And we want to capture the most diversity that we can.

So all those edges of little things are within this one cubic foot.

And those edges are really important to capture the greatest breadth of, of characters.

So, so, Chris, why should we care about biodiverse our city?

And what is biodiversity is a nice word, isn't it?

What is it?

That's it's it's the diversity of life.

It's in a nutshell, it's it's, it's really important.

And, I use, if anybody's played the game.

Uno, you know, or crazy eights.

You know, you think about, biodiversity as a hedge against change, so things change.

You have different cards in your deck to adapt to change.

And so, those creatures all are playing a role in this ecosystem.

And, and by documenting all those pieces and actors, you try to start to figure out their roles and their connections.

You know, we're here at connections, which is a nice little segway, you know, so it's their connections to each other and their connections to the natural world and to us.

And so that diversity is really important in understanding their role and function and how they work and how they work with others in that ecosystem to make it whole and, you know, and functioning.

Yeah.

You mentioned Uno because some people play it differently.

But so you can see when you and David come together like, okay, we're going to play it.

Are you playing it with your tools or all fours on top.

All right.

The drawer for a while.

Yeah.

It's very important you know.

So but again you don't want a deck of all red, you know, you.

Because if it goes to yellow, you're going to need to have that yellow card in your deck.

And biodiversity is much the same way.

You know, it's fine for the period of time, but if it gets a little colder or if you introduced a pathogen or if you that that diversity is really important, it's at all levels, not just say, different species, but even within a species, it's genetic variation as well is really important to be able to adapt to change.

And and biodiversity.

Is, is that, that kind of secret sauce that keeps us, able to withstand change in our, in our world all around us?

Is it is it common for you, for this project to visit the same place multiple times?

This is the first time we've ever visited the same spot.

Wow.

And just step back.

Tiny bit when we say, you know why?

One cubic foot.

It's like, well, it's it's it's a, it's a it fit in your lap.

You can put your arms around it.

It's kind of a it's it's in our scale.

If you stand with your feet side by side and look down, that's about a 12 inch square that you're occupying with your feet.

You know, it's like it's.

And, you know, I came up with this idea and I was working for National Geographic at the time, and my editor said, you know, we're an international magazine.

What about one cubic meter?

And I just, I hesitate and I said, Todd, you don't even want to hear the budget that that would what that would actually mean, because one cubic foot is a lot smaller than one cubic meter.

And as far as the Seneca Park Zoo.

Right.

Why did the society feel as if this was important and why now?

Oh, there's there's thank you for asking that question.

You know, ten years ago when we brought David in and it was really the beginning of our being more involved in the community and recognizing that, our, our job is to inspire people to connect with nature, to fall in love with the living world, and so that they want to act on its behalf so that they want to take action.

And we have been working at the zoo for decades, long, much longer than I've been there to do things like repatriate lake sturgeon and river otter.

And now that the river's healthier, is it a good place for them?

So we we brought David in and Chris and Sarah in in 2015 to sort of do this biodiversity assessment, connecting people to the river.

I always say this river runs right through the city, and so many people have never been to it.

They don't know how what an important environmental resource it is.

We think about it as an economic asset for sure, but we don't think about the migration route, the number of species that use it.

So, so we brought them in and had an amazing time and found a river teeming with life.

And more work has been done by the community, by industry, by nonprofits, by a government sector to continue remediation of the lake.

And we see success.

We see river otters are back.

We see the lake sturgeon are spawning.

But but what about the small things, the things that occupy those small spaces?

Is it different?

And now that it has been delisted from the EPA's Area of Concern list, that really means that it is on all of us to keep this river healthy.

And anyone who's really walked down to the river, and we do.

Tom's team does community cleanups on the river quite often.

It's in constant need of cleaning.

We don't treasure it.

We we use it, but we don't take care of it.

And so the idea behind this project is to have people understand how much life is out there that we're responsible for, and we can take better care of it.

Yeah, yeah.

And and Tom and I know you probably want to piggyback off of what Pamela said, but from a conservation aspect, why is this so important?

Well, I will still, kind of go off from what she said.

You know, it's it's all about the story for us.

Yeah.

Right.

And to be able to connect people with a story that that is intimate to them and, and close and, and something that is very Rochester in the story is something that is the place of the zoo.

You know, you can come and you can see all of this diversity at the zoo.

You can learn about all of these things worldwide and some local at the zoo as well.

But, we have tremendous parks and, green spaces and, and, you know, the river, as Pamela said, running through Rochester.

So, it really just makes sense for us to look in our backyard and really pay attention to what's there.

You know, we have we're a transportation hub here.

We've got the Erie Canal coming through.

So we have all of these, areas, the invasives and different things that that could, you know, push the river back towards that, that, AOC, listing, every day that we have to pay attention to, and as we look at biodiversity, we can find what we're finding in the cube.

And as David's taking photos of that, and we can find things like a caddis fly that needs oxygenated water or an air breathing snail that does better in some polluted water.

And we can start telling that story through the actual wildlife and biodiversity that we find.

And, that's accessible for people specifically when you have a phenomenal photo, that it's on this white background and, and, you know, he, he makes them seem almost like, like they have a little personality, you know, and his in his photos.

And that art really breaks down the barrier, which is something that Pamela brought to the table.

And, you know, I was I was science and science when I met her.

And it's kind of like, I don't know, our own.

But you start seeing how people react to David's photos, and that really opens the door for the discussion and to hear the story.

So I think that's really crucial is that, you know, I am not a scientist, I love nature, I'm out and in as much as I can.

I don't know the names of anything, you know, but you don't need to know the names of them.

What you see is these beautiful creatures that the amount of detail on a dragonfly's wing, it's just extraordinarily beautiful.

And David's art brings that to life and pulls people in and they want to learn more.

They want to know more.

And if all they ever learn is it's that it's a dragonfly.

And they don't know that it's an eastern amber wing.

Cool.

Because it doesn't know our name either.

Doesn't matter.

You can love something and not know every aspect about it.

Yeah.

You know, the, Robin Wall Kimmerer, amazing indigenous, environmental scientist at ESF says, Caucasian people have a tendency to learn about nature while indigenous learn from nature.

And I think that we can get so much from just being still and learning from it and not having to know everything about it.

And the other thing that Tom said, you know, we talk about conservation for so many people, it's a construct about you come and you see that African elephants are endangered or snow leopards are endangered.

You think of conservation as something that has to happen not in our own backyard, but someplace over there.

But it has to happen right here.

We have to be responsible for it here.

And David, when did you touchdown.

When was this cubic foot placed?

Was it a week ago?

You, Yeah, a week.

And so we have discovered some stuff since since then.

Right.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

And before we get into what we discovered, the technology used, it's like from this one cubic foot.

What else is being used to capture the life passing through?

I'm going to let Tom do it.

Yeah.

So Pamela's also got some other people.

That are sample sizes of the same, but the sampling methods are greatly expanded.

Well, yeah.

So we're, you know, again, we're very lucky to be a community center here in Rochester and have a whole lot of community partners.

So we actually have, three different professors, right, that are over doing contextual work around the cube.

I think that's probably the the biggest difference from our standpoint of what what we're doing this this time as opposed to the first time.

And I was very short on the job, so I didn't really know the process or anything like that.

And as we've done this a couple times, you start to learn that, you know, so we really want context around the cube as well.

And to do that, we have Tony Artichoke from our city has put out Audio Mouse, which is a remote sensing hyperspectral audio recorder, which can get everything from very low frequencies all the way up to bats.

And we put those out and have those recording 24 hours a day.

We have some of those underwater as well.

So we can listen to see if there's fish making sounds underwater, or what does it mean when there's boats going by.

How often do we hear anthropogenic sounds and human sounds?

Christy Tyler and her, department over at RIT is doing microplastic, collections there, so we can actually get some counts on microplastics on the river.

Al Barnes is doing Edna, which is, you know, collecting water and filtering out all the genetic material and looking at what species could be there, which is different than what we did before as well.

So we actually were creating a list of what should be in that cube before David even showed up through technology, which is pretty, pretty cool.

And are we close to what we listed now?

What are we?

I wish these facial expressions are amazing.

Are we close to what we listed were, you know, we got, Oh, she also has an interest in, amphibians and salamanders.

And she knew right where to look in the cube.

And she found a frog.

A leopard frog.

And she found two different kinds of salamanders that we hadn't with that we didn't see last time.

So she, in one afternoon added, you know, species count plus three.

Yeah.

And they're all three of them.

Beautiful.

So that was that was a joy.

And Chris, how significant is that finding new species?

Well, I think I think it's, it's indicative of, change, you know, like you like to the point that it's going to be a little different.

It's always a little different.

But it's fun to revisit some old friends that we had from ten years ago.

I kind of see this as, like, reading a sequel, like it's the same characters, but then they throw in some new, interesting wrinkles in the in the sequel.

So we're seeing that same narrative, but it's the next story.

And and what new characters do they bring to the table?

And these the salamanders, the frog.

It makes you think about, you know, every species tells a story.

And how do those narratives in our are how are they interweave and how does that expand your concept of of this place and also grounds you in, in having an interest in a sense of wonder in that, in that, in that, in that narrative.

Yeah.

And Chris, have you ever discovered like a whole new species with.

Yeah.

So, yeah, I'm a, you know, at working at the Naturalists Museum at the Smithsonian.

I consider myself a biodiversity accountant.

You know, it's my job to to kind of calculate the currency of that change from the diversity of the life.

And part of our job is to describe new species.

And that's why, I mean, just natural history museums exist, and we are the library of life.

And we keep records of that.

And when we did this ten years ago, and we, analyzed all the creatures that we found, something like what was it, 216, I think we took 216 photos, 120 ish species.

Some are right on there.

And and it was, 10% of all those, we didn't have very confident records of and in some cases, a particularly and it's not surprising like we knew the frogs and the amphibians, but the some of the midges, the, the little, larvae, which are, we don't have matches for and they're likely there's 2 or 3 under scribed species that are in this cube.

And the fun part that we do also is that we're taking a little piece of tissue and then doing the DNA sequence.

So we get a barcode for that.

So that when we do environmental DNA, we can match those license plates up with the drivers that are going through or have shed particles and if we get different life stages, we can match them up with the adults.

And so we can match these larvae up to the adults by using this DNA record, which is a very unique way of making connections.

So we kind of we have these larvae that don't have an adult match right now.

Oh, so now now it's you're now it's your face.

So what does that mean?

That new creatures are about developing?

I think about I would I would not be about 10% I would you know on you know one out of ten might be a new thing and we're going down to very small things too.

So again, these small larvae images, we have very small, mites, like aquatic mites, and that's part of the fun is when you look at that cube and you look at it, from, you know, three feet away, you see one thing.

And if you look at it from a foot away, you see another thing.

And if you look at it through a microscope, you see a whole new world, a kaleidoscope of activity that's under there.

And, and that diversity in that, that that activity underpins healthy ecosystems and shows up in, in they, they feed, each trophic level as you move up the food food chain.

And so they're really important that healthy, underpinning of this ecosystem is really important.

And that's documenting that's important in how it's changing.

So and Pamela, I've heard that rumor has it that we're involving the public in the project itself.

How are we doing?

Well, this past weekend, on Saturday, when the weather was so beautiful, we had our naturalist out, and somebody from the state parks Department who was down talking about the project at Turning Point because the cube is placed somewhere near Turning Point Park.

We're going to keep its exact location private, so people could come and learn about the project and they could also come to the zoo.

We've been set up at the zoo.

We've had naturalists, speaking there, and people can come and speak to David, and.

And Chris will be there, this afternoon.

Tomorrow, Wednesday, a good part of Thursday.

So people can just come to the zoo and find us in the pavilion.

And I know you mentioned a lot about the artistic elements of this, right?

Science and art.

How does that work together?

David?

I was trained as a commercial advertising photographer.

I started in retail, photographing chrome toasters and I came along pillows and.

Well, actually, the chrome toaster is a very good lesson in like, it's just like a shield bug, right?

Yeah.

I mean, these are carry.

Yeah.

And then I, was around a natural history museum for a while, and then the Nature Conservancy, somebody asked me to help on a project photographing endangered species for the Nature Conservancy.

And.

It was like.

You know, I used the same photographing umbrella.

Because I used to work for Richard Avedon and the the same umbrella that was used to light a portrait of Brooke Shields got damaged, it got bent.

So I was, you know, I was allowed to take it home and then three weeks later, I was using the same umbrella to photograph a, San Joaquin cat.

Fox in Bakersfield for the Nature Conservancy.

So it's like.

And it was like, it's a portrait, you know?

You know, it's the same thing.

And so that was that was a sort of awakening.

But it took eight hours sitting with the fox before the fox was willing to, acknowledge us and sit for its portrait.

Yeah.

Whereas, the model, you could just ask her, you and how does that work when you with this particular project and how many images can you make in typical session?

Well, I tend to have kind of a heavy finger because of digital nowadays, which is a its own problem because then you have to look at all of it.

And when it used to be film, it was like film was expensive.

So it was like, you know, it made you, but you can do things now that you could never do before, you know, like, you know, really sort of risky setups with really small things.

They're moving really fast.

And, and then you get to check and see if it worked.

Yeah.

Right away.

So that's what it's really quite helpful.

So I take a lot of pictures and I throw a lot of pictures away.

I think I took a picture of, leopard frog the other day.

I it's like 400 pictures of it, and five of them are good.

Oh, come on, that's they're all good.

I only need one now.

How does how does capturing a lot of life in a small space kind of raise awareness about environmental issues and conservation and.

Well, I'm kind of amazed what the numbers end up being sometimes.

The fact that, you know, if we were actually to account for all the little aquatic creatures that are present over the course of 24 hours, even know that right now in the during the sort of low water event, the flow is very small.

But even even the wake of a boat kicks a couple of liters of more new water in there.

And if you go down to the really small stuff, there could be there could be thousands of creatures in a liter of water.

So the numbers just go through the roof and that's and that's not they're not insignificant just because they're small, because that's the base of the food chain.

That's that's where everything comes from.

That's.

Yeah.

I think, you know, when we excuse me, we had, sorting trays out at the zoo on Friday night at Zoo Brew.

You know, when there's all it's adults 21 and over.

And we were there working and people would come up.

And first of all, we this is a wonderfully scientific, geeky community.

And the number of people like their science happening.

This is so cool.

And so people would come and learn about it and get really excited about how much life they were seeing.

And then our campers did the same project, you know, last Friday morning, and they didn't want to stop sorting the animals, because the more you look, the more you see, people are fast of all ages, are fascinated by this project, whether it's by discovering how much life that we normally would walk right by.

Don't see it when we're swimming in the lake.

And then to see Dave is sort of bring it to life.

These very tiny things bring it to life in these magnificent portraits.

It just it brings you into wildlife in a way, nothing else.

Ken would also say that the collages that you do, you know, you do.

You do collage image with basically everything that we find or close to that, and everybody that comes up and sees, you know, a two foot long print with hundreds of animals in it.

And, and it's a very easy way to contextualize.

Wow, this all use that space.

And that to me is always a really cool moment when people come up and you can kind of see their get recognition of what that means, right?

Very quickly.

And coming back ten years later, are we seeing a lot of differences or a lot of similarities in this one cubic foot?

There's a lot of common there's a common theme because it's a similar habitat type in in a similar place.

And we're in the thick of it.

We don't really know yet.

It's, you know, it's going to take a bit to really be able to answer that question, but we, we, we have started taking the we have a print of the collage, like Tom said, and and we're that we're using that as our, as our as our list.

And we're writing.

Oh yep.

Saw you last time.

Saw you ten years ago.

So you ten years.

So we're about halfway through that in documenting those creatures that are on that, that we are recognizing again.

But again, we have these new characters that are coming to the story and that that are new to to the narrative.

And that's, that's the fun part at discovery.

And finding new is tremendously exciting.

And I, you know, I hope that sense of wonder and excitement is contagious as we do this.

And we've seen people interact.

You know, it's been wonderful to be set up at the zoo there and have people walk by and find stuff.

You're like, oh, I haven't seen that.

That's great.

So and we talk about discovering something new.

Is there anything that any creature that has evolved that you see?

Oh, I feel like a scientist.

Evolution is is sloth.

I feel like science and and well, you know, it's it's a good it's a good question.

I mean, I think we're continually evolving evolution didn't stop.

It's it's always happening.

And and I think actually one of the things that, you know, I think a hot topic in science now is how quickly things can evolve is, and whether that's, we can think of microbes and very small things that have very short generation times.

We've turn.

But I think that we're finding that that other creatures have the capacity to evolve, rather quickly as well.

So, I don't know if we have enough longitudinal data to look from.

Certainly not through this one cubic foot, but in this area, I think with changing seasons and changing, timing of, of, how the temperature is changing a little bit.

We're starting to see some, some probably changes in intolerances or, but it's would be hard to say.

I think it's also the, the visual, which is the only thing that I'm formally trained in the, the spot from ten years ago, you can't see it from where in your because from the river anymore.

Because it's that I said, you know, 25ft thick bank of hybrid and non-native vegetation that is covering it.

So it completely it's that section of the bank has been completely altered by this new plant, which is, a hybrid between the North and the South.

Species, subspecies.

Variety.

I'm not.

It's botany.

They use different terms.

But there's a northern population in the southern population of cattails and in, in the Genesee River.

Right now it's a hybrid between the two of them.

So that's, you know, one of them's moving south, one move north, they get together, and now they're different than, you know, the edges getting mushy.

And they're thriving.

You know, is that invasive since they're both native?

It gets complicated, but it did change the place.

I mean, evolution has changed through time, and the community is changing.

So things are constantly evolving for sure.

And I think for me, one of the things that I took away from the first visit, from the things that we found, it kind of got brought back up to the top for me is resilience.

You know, we really we find a lot of biodiverse in a river that has a long history of pollution, whether it's agricultural, industrial, urban, whatever that is.

So, yeah, that's, to me, a part of the common theme that allows us to really, teach it in a way that people get, you know, we've all had to be resilient in our lives, and that's a commonality with that.

So as we move from this project into a citizen science project where we can get people out on the river or their backyard or the little crack in the sidewalk that has grass in it or whatever they can look at, you know, those are those are the things that will connect them.

And, and that's, that's such a good point that the if, if all we did was do this project and documented everything and we didn't use it to inspire people to go turn over the leaf litter in their own backyard to see what's there and, and be discoverers themselves.

Then we would fail because that's really what we want to do, is use this as a launch point for education programs, for community science programs, to get people, as I said, to just go out and look and be still with nature.

When you start turning over a rock or a twig and it's amazing how much life is, is there?

You found a freshwater sponge?

The first, right?

That's right.

First rock.

I turned over is a freshwater sponge.

How about that?

So we're going to take a quick little break, because we do have some citizens that want to join in on the conversation.

So stay with us.

We were talking about the one cubic foot project in the Genesee River right here on WXXI.

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And we're back with Side Connections today.

We're talking about the one cubit cubic foot project in the Genesee River.

Ten years later and they're back.

David Lynch Varga, the freelance photographer and contributor to National Geographic and other publications.

We have Chris Meyer, the curator and chair of invertebrate zoology at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History.

Tom Snyder, the director of programing and conservation action of the Seneca Park Zoo Society, and Pamela Reed Sanchez, the president and CEO of the Seneca Park Zoo Society.

And we did have a caller, Tom from Brighton.

But he he wanted to ask about, whether or not any Kodak chemicals in the water is affecting the environment of the river.

Are we noticing any of this?

Well, I mean, that was part of the remediation plan, right?

I mean, there's there's decades upon decades upon decades of of things that have been going into that river.

So I think it would be naive for us to say that there weren't still repercussions to that.

But I think I think largely when you look at the de-listing of the AOC, right.

Or the area of concern, that means that that this river and this, this habitat is basically equal to, to the habitat around it.

Right.

And so I think that we have taken some tremendous steps in that, there may have been some, some, you know, some of the, some of the reeds that David is talking about, the invasive you know, those weren't there ten years ago.

And we have done the silver nitrate remediation in the river since then.

And they finished that.

So, whether that changed the environment and allowed them to come in, I think it just, shows the complexity in the layers, that you have to pay attention to and that, okay, it was delisted, but that doesn't mean we can forget it.

And as Pamela said, you know, when I think ten years ago, we did find that there were some species that thrive in water, that has silver at it, and it will be interesting to see if we have those still, if we have as many, we don't really document how many we get.

But but, how many different species are there that do well in silver water?

What we also found ten years ago is, is species that really need clean, oxygenated water.

Plenty of that.

So that's going to be an interesting and that's going to take us a few months to get there and know those results.

But, we hope to learn that the answers to that and I'm seeing that is Tom from Brighton on the line.

Okay.

He actually did call back.

I guess I didn't then say well enough.

Tom from Brighton, you are on WXXI outside connections.

You have a comment for our guest?

Yes.

Thank you guys for all the work you are doing.

With our river.

And thanks for bringing up the codec or the chemicals in the river.

I my question was a little more specific.

There's there's a legend out there that a roll of exposed film was actually developed, just by placing it in the river for, for a day or so, just about 30 years ago.

And I think the Times Union may have actually printed a grainy, picture that, that resulted from that.

Has anybody ever heard that before?

I was just curious.

Thanks a lot, guys.

Thank you, thank you.

This is this is David.

I haven't heard that particular story, but I think that might be an urban legend because, as far as processing film and, printing paper, the developer is only about a quarter of the different kinds of chemicals.

And the last three are in order, are there in order to cancel the, the developing process, because you need to you need to fix it.

You need to stop it.

You know, you need to stop it.

Then you need to fix it in time.

So I'm not sure you could process a roll of film in the river.

I would like to say to the, as we were planning that the original, 2015 survey, I did get an email from Kodak and from read, the, asked me to reach out to them, so I did, and, I wasn't quite sure, you know, what what the response was going to be, knowing that we were going to come in and take all of these photos and barcode animals and really, you know, possibly show all of that through the wildlife.

And I will say they were wonderful.

They offered us a space on their property to actually have David take photos.

We were going to do it at the zoo because we wanted outreach.

But they were wonderful and really wanted to know what we were finding as well.

And I just thought that that was really great, to to see the employees and the staff at Kodak being like, yeah, we know, we know there were some bad times here, but, we'd really like to support this and see what happens.

And, Tom, can you explain what what barcoding is for?

I will send it over to Chris.

Take it over.

Chris.

Sure.

Yeah.

So, we use the term DNA barcoding.

And so that is, the fact that all living animals have, DNA and, like, we learned a lot with Covid and how you can test wastewater for shed DNA and look at whether Covid exists in certain dorms or whatever.

So all animals are shedding DNA.

So they it's like the dust of species, the dust in your houses from animal molts and your dander and all that stuff, and that has DNA in it.

So the DNA, a DNA barcoding is, is a way that we can focus.

We have, many, many, many bases of Jesus T's and seas in our DNA.

But if we focus on a region that is kind of clicking at the right speed, that gives you species level signal, and we sequence that little part, it's like the license plate of a car.

We don't need the whole blueprint.

If we know that the license plate can identify the driver.

So we create a phonebook or a registry of DNA barcodes by sequencing just a little portion of the DNA that can tell one species from another.

And so by doing that, then we can focus in on that and track and census communities using shared DNA so we can do it.

Noninvasively Nondestructively, you know, taking filtered water, or and now you can take aerosol samples and run it through filters and get bats and mammals and birds and migratory species, and there's DNA all around us.

And so by doing the DNA barcoding, we build this again like that, that license plate registry for all the drivers in an ecosystem.

And we can also track traffic.

We can look at the guts of species and see who's eating whom.

And we can look at, like we mentioned before, the larvae to the adults.

So we can make these connections using the DNA barcode in ways that we would have never been able to do before.

And I think that's a very exciting, avenue towards better understanding ecosystems.

And I have a note here that, your team originated this in, in Canada.

Well, there's a, there's a group out of, the University of Guelph, the Barcode of Life database hosts a database of, key, all species.

So when you it's a portal that you can they register all those license plates.

And so anybody in the world can contribute to that and then just builds this knowledge.

So like for that that midge larvae we could put that in there and see if anybody's found an adult for that thing has it shown up in a trap somewhere else.

So it's a way of making connections across time and space at a global scale.

So and with Guelph being so close to to here in upstate New York, a lot of material has been done, which is why it was so surprising to find that, you know, one out of every ten things were not in their database when we did this ten years ago.

Yeah.

So so is there a chance that you'll find something totally new in the Genesee River?

There's a chance.

Yeah, I think there's always a chance.

I think that's that's what I think.

That's the goal.

Yeah I think yeah.

That's one of the goals for sure.

And I again, I think that that's part of what makes it so fun is that you don't have to go someplace exotic or, you know, distant to explore and discover.

I think you can find new things right outside your backyard.

And I think, you know, we can demonstrate that, you know, every year there's a handful of species described from the state of New York, you know, maybe, five species a year.

I forget exactly what that number is, but you can find new things all the time.

And for and for my, zoo people.

Where can the public go and see these images and and find out more about these events?

So one of the great things that the this team brought to the table as well, and you have this wonderful, wonderful Barcode of life database, you have all the science in biology, wonderful images.

We put them up on iNaturalist, which is, you know, a pretty well known app that people can use and go out and snap their own pictures and, and, there's a very large community there that through visual cues of those animals in the photos, which again, we have great images where you can count legs or antenna or anything like that.

You can go on and help identify them on iNaturalist, and then we can blend that with the Science and Barcode of Life database.

So we have project, pages on a naturalist that they can get through our website.

And and yeah, and if you just search for one cubic foot project in and, iNaturalist, all our projects will come up, including the one that we did in Madagascar in 2016.

And I know there's been a lot of talk about, the educational aspect.

Can someone create their own one cubic foot, David, or is there copyright infringement?

No, it's a it's an idea.

You can't copyright it.

And or it's a title.

It can't copyright those either.

I made a little series of videos.

If you go to one cubic foot.com.

And if I've just made a mistake, it's one cubic foot, dawg.

But I think it's one cubic foot.com.

Yeah.

That's correct.

It's a series of 16 little five minute, two minute tutorials about how to do your own one cubic foot.

And so you could start there.

There's a book, world and one cubic foot.

University of Chicago Press, which is technically still in print.

If you buy one, you might be buying the last one.

We.

Good luck.

The, Seneca Park Zoo has done some community outreach things.

We also have a landing page on our website.

If you go to Seneca Park zoo.org and then just search for one cubic foot, you'll get lots of information.

Yeah.

And and the museum has a site as well.

The Smithsonian has a website as well for one cubic foot.

And how to do that.

Yeah.

And if someone does create their own one cubic foot, any advice on the perfect place?

If you want to use your foot, you want to mix.

You want a mix of things and and and bring them back.

You know, you don't necessarily have to go out and do it in wild nature.

I mean, you're going to get a you're going to get more stuff there.

But, you know, the grass and the crack on the sidewalk, if you look, if you look closely, there might be 3 or 4 species there.

You know, it's not just grass.

If you look closely.

I mean, I love those little, the little, the little places where life finds, you know, a place to hold on, a place to exploit, a place to make a living.

So it would be better.

It's going to be a more.

There's going to be more diversity if it's not, the less stepped on, the better.

You know, old growth forest would be superior to an apple orchard.

Hedgerow would be better than in the middle of the cornfield.

The edge of, like, Chris when I went, wandered into the reeds and he said, that's kind of a desert in there.

And it's not like a cornfield.

It's, So at the edge, you know, down to where there's a little water, a little soil, little bramble.

And I would say, if that's a little bit too much for somebody, they can come to us at the zoo and we'll be doing plenty of these over the next couple of years, out and about wherever we can.

So they can always reach out to us and we'll we'll guide them along.

We've gotten good training from David and Chris.

Yeah.

Now team the we hear a lot about people saying like, leave nature alone, right.

Don't touch it.

How do you balance the need to keep human hands off nature?

But it also the desire to understand and appreciate the other world.

Yeah, well, what I do is if there's a paved path, I stay on it.

If there's a little trodden trail, I stay on it and I just make short little forays.

If I want to really see what's underneath the rock, I turn it over.

But I turn it back over, put it back where it came from.

Softly, And.

I think just, you know, trying to.

And try to move the world with a soft touch and that that pretty much applies to the treatment of your friends and the treatment of creatures you don't know yet.

Yeah.

I would also say there's, you know, in New York, we have we have laws here with DC and and so we have collection permits for all of this.

Right.

And it all goes through the state and gets approved.

And we have protocols that we need to follow while we're doing this.

And of course we do these anyways.

But it's not just about going out and grabbing everything you can.

Right.

Which is, haphazard and can be very destructive.

So we're we try to be very thoughtful about, the entire process.

Well, in this year, if we know we've already photographed it from 2015, we don't collect it.

We don't take it because we don't need to.

Yeah.

And Chris, I'm I really I'm really interested to hear your perspective on, what David answered on the perfect place for someone to put their one cubic foot, I think because you were the two foot, two foot away.

No, I you just look it over, look and watch and think about just little.

You know, if I moved it over there, I'll get some more leaf litter and that leaf litter, like David saying, if you peel over that leaf litter, you're going to find a whole new that's a whole new chapter of life in the in that space.

So, there are little cues like a few more, more plant, more diversity of plants is going to get more diversity.

So diversity begets diversity.

And so if you see slightly different things just kind of edge it over and you'll you'll get a whole new, cast of characters.

I think that was probably the most interesting thing to me, the, the first time that we came through, because we were Pam and I really had no idea what the process was, and I think we probably spent seven days or so doing little tiny circles in the boat from Lower Falls, either side, up and down, up and down, just nonstop.

And I probably on like day 4 or 5, I was like, what is this guy doing?

You know, but when you see it in its totality, you understand the reasoning of, of really being thoughtful in that approach and, and finding all of these things in these cues that they're talking about.

And, they're not all over the place either.

You know, they're, they're is, the best one cubic foot site in the river for sponsoring biodiversity.

And hopefully we got it close to it.

I mean, there has to be.

Right?

So we hope we got we put it in a good spot because we're going to spend a lot of time looking at it.

And we have seen we have seen spotted sandpipers down there.

We've seen different birds using this space.

We've heard blue heron, you had your you got a night crowned heron I think the other day, because David does time lapse photography as well.

We leave the cube alone so that there aren't humans around it.

And then looking what has what is the camera caught that didn't want to come when we were there.

So that's been really helpful.

Yeah.

This is this is amazing to me and for and for the two of you that were that were oblivious to the whole process.

What have you learned through all this?

Well, I think it's really it's altered the way we approach the work that we do at the zoo over the last ten years.

It's altered the way, I mean, there are in the summertime you will come and you'll be able to do these sorting at the cubes.

We do, education programs around this.

It's really about getting people to see, you know, when you come to the zoo, you see the large animals.

And that is great.

And they represent their species well, but it doesn't give you the whole story about an ecosystem.

So finding ways to talk about the small things that are so integral to the food lab to make food web, to make life at our size possible.

I remember we replicated this with Genesee Community Charter School after they left the last time, and we literally had kindergarten through fifth grade and vertically integrated.

So we had one kindergarten, one first, one second all the way up through, and we put the cube out and like for 20 minutes, they sat there and looked and collected and did things.

So I was like, oh my gosh, we're on.

We're really on to something with this, right?

It's together.

It is accessible.

Right?

So when David said that it fits in your lap, it's just it's not overwhelming.

And David, to wrap it up, where are you?

Where are we off to next with our one cubic foot?

You know, I'm not sure.

Chris was talking about the he has these things called arms, autonomous reef monitoring structures, and he's got a bunch of out in the world.

And I just have to figure out how I could figure out how to go with them because they're they're little nine inch cubes.

So they've sort of, like, really close to the same scale.

But he has some that he's pulled up that have 2000 species on them.

Know.

Oh it's getting good.

Thank you guys for joining us on this episode of connections with us.

Thank you.

Appreciate it.

One cubic foot right here on WXXI.

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