[gentle upbeat music] [bright upbeat music] - Hi there.

I'm Frank Graff.

How a new state park could save an endangered fish.

University students find a new way to measure the universe.

And meet the bison.

Yes, they used to live in North Carolina.

Coming up on Sci NC.

[gentle upbeat music] - [Announcer] This program was made possible by contributions to your PBS station by viewers like you.

Additional funding for the Sci NC Series, is provided by GSK.

[bright upbeat music] ♪ - Hi again and welcome to Sci NC.

Have you ever looked closely at a really detailed map?

Oh, I know everybody has a phone for a map, but, check out what a detailed map shows you.

Really cool places like Buffalo Creek.

It's a waterway in Ashe County.

There's Buffalo Ford in Randolph County and the town of Buffalo in Cherokee County.

Makes you think that buffalo might've lived in North Carolina.

Well, the folks at the North Carolina Zoo say, they did.

- Historically there have been buffalo or bison, which is the more correct term for them in North Carolina.

They actually spanned across most of the United States.

There's what's called the bison belt which spans from Alaska and Canada down throughout the U.S., down into Mexico and then over onto the east coast of the United States.

There would have been a very large population here, out west where there are those really large spans of prairie habitat.

You would have seen extremely large numbers of them.

We would have had some prairie area in North Carolina.

These animals would be perfectly suited for that.

They're also suited for slightly woodsier areas especially the elk, but the bison would be in areas similar to that as well.

So this could be the Midwest prairie area but North Carolina as well, because you would have had both of these animals here in North Carolina cohabitating.

So Annie here is our smallest bison.

We refer to her as our tea-cup bison.

She's the same age as our other young bison but she's significantly smaller when they're standing next to each other.

She's pretty cute.

So bison can range from the upper hundreds up to as much as a ton for a male, which is about 2000 pounds.

Females would be up around a thousand pounds for a very large female.

So, we do have a large female out here.

Lucy, she's actually pretty low on the totem pole though.

They do have a matriarch, a hierarchy led by females in their bison society.

So even though Lucy is the largest of our bison she's actually pretty low ranking.

[gentle upbeat music] - You'll find buffalo, bison on farms in North Carolina these days but out west, buffalo are being re-introduced.

Our story is from overview, a series PBS North Carolina produced, for PBS digital studios.

[gentle upbeat music] - [Narrator] To you and me, these look like trucks and well, technically that's true.

But on this patch of Oklahoma Prairie, they're more like oversized sheep dogs, except the creatures they're rounding up, are a little bigger than sheep.

They're bison.

Using four by fours to chase bison might seem like a weird new sport but what's happening here could actually be the key to resurrecting a lost ecosystem.

A long time ago in the heart of the north American continent, existed a vast sea of tall grasses and millions of bison.

This tall grass prairie stretched from Canada to Texas an area encompassing 14 present day states.

But then, stop me if you've heard this story, Europeans came with their guns and plows and both the bison and the prairie disappeared.

As little as 5% of this original prairie exists today.

The largest remaining protected area of tall grass prairie in the entire world is here in Northeast, Oklahoma.

This 40,000 acre expanse, is known as the tall grass prairie preserve.

From horizon to horizon, it's all grass.

- These grasses are, they're what we call perennial grasses.

So they live year to year and there've been reports of perennial grasses living as much as 50 years.

- [Narrator] Sam Fuhlendorf studies grassland ecology.

eastbound the soil and plant communities are surprisingly complex.

Some of these grasses roots reach 15 feet deep making them a crucial piece of Earth's carbon storage biosphere.

And there's more biological diversity here per square meter than in some tropical forests.

- [Sam] We've tried to understand the way this system would have operated historically and restore it as closely as possible.

- [Narrator] Before it could be preserved, the prairie had to be restored.

You see it, didn't always look like this.

Not long ago, this was a cattle ranch.

Ranches prioritize economics over ecology, which in practice means, putting as many animals on the land as possible for as long as possible.

That can lead to destructive overgrazing.

So how did this, turn into this?

It started with this.

- These grasslands evolved with grazing, principally by bison.

And so if you're trying to put Humpty back together again, you start with some of the bigger pieces, more important pieces.

Bison were the primary historical Grazer.

Boom, let's put those guys back.

- [Narrator] Bison were reintroduced to this preserve in 1993.

Since that time, the original herd of 300 has grown to upwards of 2000 animals.

These bison love eating grasses and forage for up to 11 hours a day.

- [Bob] They are essentially a stomach with four legs.

- [Narrator] You'd think all that eating would destroy the prairie but these grasses evolved to cope with the grazing of migratory bison.

In fact, they're actually healthier for it.

Grazing bison keeps certain plant species under control and allow others to flourish.

- [Bob] They are kind of ecosystem engineers.

And so that's one of the principle reasons we bring them back and re introduce them to these native prairie's.

- [Narrator] This preserve is managed by the Nature Conservancy.

Today, Bob Hamilton and his team, are bringing in the herd for medical checkup.

[upbear music] Dogs could get injured, so instead, they use trucks to lead the bison into the corral.

- You have to always be watching for the ones that are trying to cut and turn and blow past you.

Hey!

Hey!

- You can have 300 of them go on and all of a sudden, one cows tries to dart out and then the rest of them try to follow.

And so you just, you never know it looks like you're in control, but you're not.

- At point sometimes, your and your vehicle are in the middle of this squirrel.

Yeah, it's just chaos.

Like a little bison bomb goes off.

They're really driving behaviors is this herd instinct.

They wanna be with other bisons.

They have this very synchronized movement.

And so it's, it's like, you're moving a big organism.

So as you're moving them, this will synchronized turning, it's like a schooling fish.

- [Narrator] And these 2000 pound patients don't care much for exams.

Hey bud.

It's okay.

We all get nervous going to the doctor.

Who's my brave little guy.

- Team, team.

We're looking for any kind of injuries.

Are they still in good shape?

Are they stable?

If everything goes well, the animal is only confined for about 45 or 50 seconds.

Boom.

Then they're kicked out and you're onto the next one.

They are kind of a quintessential wild creature.

They've never been domesticated.

And one of our policies is to respect as best we can, the wildness of that species.

Our responsibility, as I see it to the bison is to maintain their health and kind of their proper impact on the prairie.

- [Narrator] And bison aren't the only thing these prairie need to survive.

They also crave fire.

Bob's team burns as much a third of the preserve each year.

That may sound like a lot, but it mimics the ancient seasons of fire that were once common on these prairies.

- [Bob] These native prairie's have evolved with fire.

If you remove fire from the prairie, it fairly quickly converts to a Woodland.

- [Perry] People think fire destroys stuff, but in some of the cases of landscapes like this, it that eliminates the dormant vegetation and it allows the new growth to do better than it would if the old growth I've been there.

It kind of cleans the slate periodically and allows the prairie to truly express its growth and really be highly productive and very well suited to a bison.

- [Narrator] prairie is thriving once again.

Proof that the recipe of wild bison plus seasonal fire actually works.

But okay, let's get real for a second.

We can't return all the Midwest to prairie or restore bison to their former glory, but the biggest benefit of this experiment could be a bit of new found insight.

By understanding how natural systems work, we can use that knowledge to restore them.

Here on the prairie, it turns out that the species of Grazer might not be as important as the way they graze.

- [Bob] If you manage cattle in a more wild type environment, you can get a lot of the same ecological impacts as you can with bison.

- [Perry] Catalogs almost never managed that way.

So it's like bison are allowed to be bison and so that's what makes them really different from cattle.

- [Narrator] So allowing cattle, to be a little more like bison could be one key to restoring damaged grasslands around the world.

- [Bob] We do control the world now.

And so, it's ultimately our decision on whether if some of these ecosystems are gonna persist or not.

If we were to lose the prairie, we would lose an important part of our collective history, open spaces is freedom.

[bright upbeat music] - [Announcer] Do you want to explore more cool science facts and beautiful images of North Carolina?

Follow us on Instagram - From the Great Plains to the great beyond.

Students at High Point University decided to look at satellite data in a new way.

And they totally changed how astronomers measured distances in the universe.

[soft upbeat music] - The main thing we're trying to find are pairs of stars that orbit one another that are so close that one day they might collide or transfer mass, and then potentially blow up as what's called a type one-A supernova.

Type one-A supernovae are some of the brightest objects we can see in the universe.

And they all basically blew up with the same luminosity, the same overall brightness.

Such that if we see one blow up in the sky and we see how bright it looks to us, we know how far away it is.

So there's sort of like rulers, spread out through the universe and they help us make measurements of the most distant objects in the universe.

So we're trying to sift through thousands and thousands of stars to look for signatures of binaries that we care about.

And traditionally from the ground, you might have to stare at a single star for three, four or five hours before you know, whether it's interesting.

That's just not practical for us, that would take decades.

But if you go to space and you know in advance, which targets are more likely to be interesting targets or variables, then you can save an awful lot of time.

We've developed a method to kind of find strong candidates for variable stars using data from your European Space Agency Satellite called Gaia.

- [Interviewer] What is that?

- [Brad] So Gaia observed millions of stars in the sky.

And for each star, it measured its brightness with an error bar, like how precise it knew the brightness.

Well, it turns out, if you have two stars that are perfectly identical except one is a variable, it changes its brightness ever so slightly and one is not, Gaia would have measured a bigger uncertainty for the brightness of the variable star.

So by looking at something as boring as aerobars, we've been able to sift out the stars that are most interesting.

[gentle upbeat music] So before we had five, 6,000 targets, we wanted to look at.

It would take way too long.

With Gaia we can say, out of those five or 6,000 there are four or 500 that have aerobars that look way too big.

There's something up with those stars.

So we fed those stars to NASA and ask them to observe those objects with their tests spacecraft.

And it turns out about 95% of the stars we thought were interesting variables, in fact are.

So it saves a lot of time.

- [Interviewer] So tell me about the test space graph.

What does does that do?

- Test was originally designed to stare at a series of stars and monitor their brightnesses to look for planets blocking light from their background stars.

Test is generating light curves, brightness measurements for thousands of objects.

So we can just pull those light curves down from the satellite, analyze them and then search for the binaries that we care about.

Binary star systems that are so close together, they orbit once every couple of hours, right?

Earth takes a year to orbit the sun once completely.

I'm talking about two stars that orbit one another once every few hours at speeds that are tremendous, hundreds of miles per second.

So for one of these pairs of stars, we found that they're so close together.

One will transfer mass to the other one and that star happens to be what's called a white dwarf.

And for white dwarfs, if you add just enough mass that thing can explode as a type one-A supernova.

And we found one system in our galaxy, in our backyard that will do that a few million years from now.

- [Interviewer] I'm sure NASA was excited about this.

- Oh yeah.

I mean, it's a great efficient way to use their satellite, it's ancillary results from what they were expecting to get.

For the supernovae, we need to know exactly how bright they are when they blow up.

And until recently, we've only ever caught the supernovae after they've exploded.

[tensed upbeat music] No one has ever found the binary star system that will generate these before they explode.

And that's what we have found recently with this test project.

So right now we see the two stars are safely orbiting one another.

And from modeling the system, we can tell how long it will be before they mass transfer and roughly, how long it would be before they blow up.

So by studying that system now, we have a much better idea of what the explosion would look like.

[bright upbeat music] - [Announcer] Wanna take a deeper dive on current science topics?

Check out our weekly science blog.

- Two rivers, the Mayo and the Dan converge near the towns of Mayodan and Madison.

It's in the Piedmont region of North Carolina.

Not far away, officials at Mayo River State Park, are working to protect the river and the fish that inhabited it.

Students from the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media, explain.

- [Female Narrator] Roanoke logperch rules the bottom of the Mayo river.

The endangered darter survives in only five river systems in North America.

The name of the species, percina rex means king of the perch fish.

But in recent decades, the logperch has fallen from its throne and onto the federal endangered species list.

The main culprit, the construction of dams.

- Dan's prevent the logperch for moving up and down rivers.

And it kind of bottlenecks the genetic flow from one population to another population.

[water burbling downstream] - [Female Narrator] Dams used to power textile mills and supply drinking water for towns along the Mayo River.

The mill is gone but the dam now generates hydroelectric power for the town of Mayodan.

Still the dam presents an impossible barrier for the Roanoke logperch.

- Yeah, in the case of the Mayo and in the Dan River, logperchs have gotten below the dance but they can't get above the dance to get back to where they naturally occurred.

- [Female Narrator] That keeps the Roanoke logperch from swimming upstream, to 16 miles of river bordering Mayo River State Park.

It's a different story.

Five miles downstream, where the Mayo River on the left, joins the Dan on the right, near the town of Madison.

Not faraway, contractors have lowered a dam that kept Roanoke logperch from swimming up the Dan River.

In place of the dam, a series of six fish ladders, help the logperch go upstream.

In the fall of 2020, community leaders celebrated the completion of the first of the fish ladders [group of people celebrating] all part of a multimillion dollar project, financed by state and federal agencies and conservationists.

- This is a great project.

Preserving our resources like the Dan River and providing our residents with another park, another avenue to explore the Dan River.

This is gonna be great, not only for Madison and Rockingham County, but I think for the entire state region as well.

- [Female Narrator] The project will allow kayakers to float downstream and fish to go upstream.

To accomplish that, front loaders dropped boulders into place to provide a kind of staircase for the Roanoke logperch.

Each line of rocks provides a ladder.

Pools of water between the rocks allow fish to climb one step at a time opening 50 miles of upstream river.

[stream water burbling] Eight miles away is another habitat where the Roanoke logperch once thrived and what is now, Mayo River State Park.

There, officials have developed a master plan, a blueprint for the parks development over the next 20 years.

- It protects a lot of the riparian habitat, the buffer along the river.

And I really think Roanoke logperch could be the centerpiece of their master plan moving forward since they had so much land protection on the Mayor River.

And the mission of the State Parks is to conserve and protect our natural resources.

- [Female Narrator] Natural resources found within the Mayo River have always sustained local people.

This series of rocks, set in an upside down V, in the middle of the river, forms a fish trap that once provided food.

- Native Americans used them first after their populations decline, colonial populations took over the operation of fishing veers and use nets.

And we have local folks have told us this was an operation at least till the 1900s.

- [Female Narrator] Local residents no longer need the river for food but downstream towns still depend on the river for a different life-giving resource.

- [Brad] Communities here are dependent upon to rivers for drinking water to this day.

The town of Mayodan draws water from the Mayo River for drinking water.

The town of Madison draws water from the Dan River for drinking water.

Not only do we want people to enjoy the environment but we wanna protect the environment as well.

Through the years of seeing how some species like birds and mammals get a lot of attention like the megafauna, like lions and tigers but things in the water that people may not necessarily see unless they're snorkeling or fishing for, don't really have a voice.

And I really see myself as given these critters the voice in the world.

[stream water burbling] [bright upbeat music] - [Announcer 2] Hey, parents, teachers, and homeschoolers, looking for lesson plans?

You'll find free interactive ones about all types of science covered by Sci NC online.

- Think for a second, about how you jump.

It's most likely using the muscles in your legs and feet and then pushing off the ground.

Well, not so, the click beetle.

As researcher, Adrian Smith at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences shows us, this insects jump is spring loaded.

[gentle upbeat music] - This is a click beetle that's stuck on its back.

It's kicking its legs, but can't quite get enough leverage, to flip itself back over.

But that's okay, it doesn't have to.

It's an insect that's famous for using its body in a spectacular way to get off the ground and back on its feet.

One thing I really like about the click beetle jump is you can see what they use to make it work.

They have a little latch that's right here on their bodies.

That they use to load and release the energy they use for a jump.

I only recently found out about this but when I did it immediately when on my list of things I needed to film.

But before I show you that footage, I think the best way to understand what that latch is doing, is to actually look at how a mousetrap works.

Mousetraps are spring loaded devices, but just as important as this spring is this part here, the latch.

This little lip keeps the energy of the spring loaded and ready to go.

And when it slips, that's the point at which the stored energy of the system is released and the fast movement of the trap can happen.

For a click beetle, their latch is on the underside of their body, between the front and middle legs.

It's a single peg that catches on a corresponding lip and holds the front of the body in place while their spring is being loaded.

There are around 10,000 different species of click beetles and they all use a version of this peg as a latch.

The latch allows the beetle to load an internal spring that, when it's released, rapidly flexes the front of the body and throws the beetle into the air with it's head rocking back and forth recoiling from the rapid movement.

Here are two closeups slow motion shots that show the Beatles setting the peg latch in place, as they prepare for a jump.

The click and a click beetles name, is from the snapping sound that's often produced when the peg releases and the thorax flexes.

In this sequence captured at 3,200 frames per second, the rapid flex of the beetle, sends it accelerating off the ground at 2,150 meters per second squared, which is pulling 219 G's.

other click beetles have been measured, accelerating up off the ground at 380 G's.

It's pretty cool that the latch is so visible on these beetles.

And other spring loaded animals, ones that move a leg or a mouth part really fast, the latch can be really hard to see or even internal.

It's more common to see evidence of the spring being loaded or released.

Like here are two trap giants about to snap.

Their head capsules are actually part of the spring and you can see them release and pop back into form, when they snap, if you watch here and here.

This is the closest I can get to capturing a click beetle spring.

After the peg latches locked in place, the beetle can start loading the spring.

If you look here under the latch, you can see part of that process as the body deforms while the muscles and the thorax contract, right before the snap is released.

Of all the spring loaded and insects I filmed, I think click beetles stand out as one of the most unusual.

Without using any appendages, they throw themselves into a wild spinning, high flying jump.

Why they evolve such a powerful and unique jump is actually unclear.

When threatened, they're quick to play dead and when they do jump, they don't seem to be able to control the orientation of their body and their landings are far from graceful.

So I'm super happy that I got to film these beetles and see what they do in detail.

I think they're pretty amazing.

I should say that all the beetles that are in this video I just grabbed from my yard.

They're really common insects.

So it's likely that you can go outside and find one too.

♪ [gentle upbeat music] - And that's it for Sci NC for now.

I'm Frank Graff.

Thanks for watching.

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Visit us online.

- Additional funding for the Sci NC series, is provided by GSK.