Hi there, I'm Frank Graff.

You'd be surprised what you can learn about birds by studying their poop.

What lives in your sink?

And watch the world's fastest backflip.

Unusual Science, next on SciNC.

- Quality public television is made possible through the financial contributions of viewers like you, who invite you to join them in supporting PBSNC.

- SciNC is supported by a generous bequest gift from Dan Kerrigan and the Gaia Earth Balance Endowment through the Gaston Community Foundation.

(upbeat music) ♪ - Hi again and welcome to SciNC.

Birds are difficult to study, but it turns out scientists have discovered they can learn a lot about where bird populations are going by what they leave behind.

Producer Evan Howell explains.

(upbeat music) - Okay, we got a few more chairs, a banding box.

- When does a research project call for an extra level of dedication?

Well, we need to know more about these guys.

And it's not just about getting up early.

It's about doing anything you can to find answers.

- We're gonna have to stay back and just kind of be in Cogito.

- Lindsay Addison, a band of volunteers have been banding birds called Black Skimmers since 2018.

She's recently taken another step to find out more about these colonies that dot the coast, including here at Wrightsville Beach.

It's all because over that time, Addison has developed a special understanding about where they go, how they live and what they eat.

But she's looking for more.

While banding birds uniquely identifies individuals for the rest of their lives and helps researchers better understand their behavior, Addison knows there's data that may be hidden, very hidden.

So she's added another component.

- This year we are also collecting poop.

This is one of a few species we're collecting poop from, but we wanna find out what they're eating.

- That's right, they're collecting the poop of these birds.

The way they do it is through what's called DNA meta barcoding.

Addison and her team have partnered with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology who will take the samples and analyze them.

They'll isolate those samples and match the poop with the known genomes and other data from fellow black skimmers.

- And basically we collect poop samples from a relatively clean surface, so not a lot of contamination.

If you guys ate tuna for breakfast, please sanitize your hands before touching the poop.

- They wanna get about 40 samples today and add those samples taken from other days and other locations as far away as Cape Lookout to the north.

There's a bigger reason for this research.

- The number of nesting pairs that we've been counting in the state through our censuses has been decreasing, so that's one of the reasons we're interested in learning more about them through the banding and through the diet study by collecting poop samples.

- Conducting research outdoors like this has challenges.

Since it's like herding cats, they need to create their own lab space on the beach out where there wasn't one before to keep their research subjects safe, and Addison has created a system with a few parts.

- So the way that we catch these birds is we're gonna put up the drift fence on either side, and that's just gonna prevent the chicks from just taking off and running way down the beach because they're basically completely, they scatter.

- One of those parts is actually catching them, which is, yes, more difficult than you might expect.

- Once you put a chick in the bag, you can't set the bag down because-- - Addison says they need to be careful not to injure the chicks, so what they do is use paper bags where they place the chick to bring them over to a children's playpen she brought that will serve as kind of a waiting room.

- And while they are waiting for banding, they are going to stand around and stare at the other chicks and probably do a little bit of pooping.

We might.

- These chicks are pretty fast, so catching them safely with a net is a challenge since this process is a bit hectic.

[upbeat music] ♪ ♪ [chirping] - Gather up the wings.

And there's a little skimmer chick.

[chirping] We have a lot.

- Now for the fun part, getting the samples.

- So that's, we want gritty bits.

- The birds have pooped on cardboard the volunteers have laid out.

Addison and her team carefully take up those samples and put them in labeled vials so they can match the poop with the bird that made it.

- Hey, Marlene, do you want to scribe?

- Once they get enough samples, they continue with the banding work.

With an adhesive, a numbered band is placed on the chick's leg.

- One, two, five, four.

Zero, four, six, nine, or six, nine, one.

Is what's on the-- - Three, 51.

- One by one, they measure head size, weight, and any other data they need.

- And we take a few feathers so you can, you can actually determine the sex of the birds with DNA work.

The base of the feathers have a little bit of DNA in them so you can, you can identify, you can determine the sex.

- Addison says what they can also do with the DNA is determine whether the bird is feeding in fresh or salt water.

She says the fish these birds eat are small and travel in schools near the surface.

- The abundance and distribution of fish is affected a lot by ocean temperatures.

And so obviously with climate change, you could have dramatic shifts in prey availability and species composition that can affect the health of seabird colonies.

- Once they finish their work, it's time for the birds to head back.

They hope the experience wasn't too stressful for their subjects.

Addison will need to wait some months before the data gets back from the partner lab at Cornell.

But in the meantime, she and her trusty band of volunteers look forward to the next trip out.

Meanwhile, she now does her work with the black skimmers is pretty unusual.

- I feel like this is the culmination of a general familial scatological sense of humor.

Poop jokes are funny.

- There's a lot of truth to the phrase out of sight, out of mind.

Think about it.

When you wash something down your sink, you don't think about it again.

But scientists at Duke University have discovered a whole world of organisms, good and bad, living in your sink.

(water splashing) Chances are you don't think much about your sink.

It's one of those out of sight, out of mind places.

Turn the water on and wash the dirt and grime and food waste all away.

It turns out you should think about your sink because there's a lot that lives in it.

- Microbes really like a couple of things and two of the primary features that they really like is moisture and food.

And that particular environment is very conducive to allowing microbes to survive and colonize and actually expand.

- And no matter where the sink is installed, bathroom, kitchen, laundry room, laboratory, wherever, the sink is nirvana to this microbe.

Meet Bacillus velizensis.

- And depending on how we operate those sinks, the types of things that we put down the sinks, that will lead to different types of microbes surviving and growing in those particular spaces.

(gentle music) - And if you think you do a great job cleaning the sink, well, there's a catch.

- We utilize antimicrobial soaps.

We utilize a lot of different reagents that will clean and kill particular microbes.

And so what happens is microbes that are actually more dangerous that may carry antibiotic resistant genes, for instance, or are more virulent are able to survive and outcompete the good microbes will be enriched in those particular spaces.

So while cleaning has some advantages, it may also have some negative consequences.

- Researchers at Duke University's Shared Materials Instrumentation Facility are studying the microbiome of the sink.

In other words, what lives in your sink.

It's part of a larger research project looking at how the microbes in what's called the built environment, the place where people live, work and play, interact with people.

After all, Americans spend 90% of their time indoors.

- In those spaces, there are microbes everywhere.

They are on the surfaces, they are in the water, they are in the air.

And so our center is really focused on understanding how those microbes and the humans that occupy those spaces intersect.

- People and the built environment, things are always moving, things are always changing, bacteria is always growing.

It's not a matter of where, it's a matter of when.

- And researchers have discovered that every time you use the sink, microbes take advantage of tiny water droplets to enter the environment.

- We turn our faucets on and water comes down the faucet, there will be a certain cloud that is generated.

So you can think about a biological cloud.

And so those organisms that were in that one location may spread and then through our own touching of those particular surfaces, we can spread them into other places.

- While most microbes either help human health or have no effect on human health at all, there are some pathogenic microbes that can make us sick.

That's why scientists in the Sink Study sample the entire sink to find out what's living there.

- And I'm gonna go not only the surface of my sink, but also just that initial beginning of the drain.

Because I wanna know not only what's living right on that surface, but what's living right underneath.

So I'm gonna go under our little plastic liner.

- So far, their Sink Study shows that it's not only the cleaning solutions that determine what microbes live in the sink, just how the sink is used also makes a difference.

- When we talk about in the kitchen, food, or different foods liked by different bacteria.

So I'm actually creating a food environment for a preference of different bacteria that can grow.

- Scientists have also discovered that while microbes live all over the sink and the drain, the highest concentrations of bacteria are found in the P-trap.

That's the curved pipe underneath the sink.

- It is essentially where water will remain even when you're not using the sink.

And that stagnant area is where a lot of microbes like to accumulate.

Bacteria live in kind of two forms, planktonic.

And if you think about those as plankton in the ocean, they're free floating and going everywhere.

And then there's the biofilms, which you feel kind of a slippery spot on the bottom of your shower.

And that is a bunch of bacteria which have produced these sticky, tough substances that adhere them to surfaces.

So right here in the P-trap is a perfect spot for them to form biofilms.

So here we have kind of a model test bed that we have.

We have three sinks in parallel and three P-traps that we can sample from.

And here we can monitor how biofilms grow, the stages they go through, how one microbe can slowly take over a kind of a community.

- And scientists have also found the microbes in the P-trap don't just stay there, they can climb up the pipe.

- While they start in the P-trap, they'll also move up the tailpipe and all the way up to the drain.

And so, you know, from cleaning your sink or your drain or your faucet, that there are microbes that grow.

So you'll see pinkish or black or white, different colors of microbes in those different places, also around the sink basin and the drain cover.

- The question then is how to build a better sink.

- So we're looking at the importance of materials and material characteristics on bacterial attachment.

We're thinking about attachment because it's the first stage in biofilm formation.

- We're really wanting to figure out what are the best approaches for managing the microbiome in a way that leads to beneficial organisms, accumulating and limiting the spread of those particular pathogens.

And so that is thinking about what are the products that we utilize to clean our sinks and what are the effects of those on those microbiomes in those sinks.

What are the materials that we utilize to construct those sinks and how those may lead to particular attachment of organisms.

But it could also be just thinking about the architecture of your sink, thinking about the types of faucets that we utilize, where our drain covers are.

So we're really interested in thinking about all of that in a holistic way.

- Olympic gymnast might amaze you, but wait till you see what entomologist Adrian Smith at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences shows us.

- There's no other animal on earth that can do a back flip faster than these can.

These are globular springtails.

And these shots I captured by filming at nearly 11,000 frames per second.

They complete their full body rotations in under one one hundredth of a second.

And this species can reach a rotational rate of 368 flips per second.

And the flips don't stop once they get off the ground.

Here you can see a full trajectory where the springtail flips 21 times in a span of just 0.15 seconds.

Over the last four years or so, springtails have been one of the things I've been studying.

So I thought with this video, I could show you some of that research and some of what we've learned about how these incredible organisms work.

If you look in an older insect book, you'll find springtails classified as an order of insects.

But this isn't the case anymore.

Today, we classify them as hexapods.

We know that they diverge from the arthropod lineage before insects did.

There are more than 9,000 described species and they come in all sorts of body plans.

Ecologically, a lot of them can be found in the soil and leaf litter where they feed on decaying material and microorganisms.

I've been working on the globular ones you see here.

For a size scale, you'll see my finger come in and scare this one into jumping away.

For a speed scale, here are the frames before and after it jumps, captured on a normal camera.

You can see the motion blur tracings of it flying through the air during the 1/60th of a second the image was being formed.

The process of capturing their jumping behavior look like this.

I filmed them using a variety of high-speed cameras and close-up macro lenses.

Most of the jumps were off of a flat acrylic platform covered in a layer of masking tape to give the surface a little texture.

From sequences captured at just over 40,000 frames per second we were able to visualize the movement of their jumping appendage or furca as it flips down underneath their bodies to launch them into the air.

On average, it only takes them 1.7 milliseconds to take off which is about 100 times faster than a blink of an eye.

In that time, they've accelerated their bodies at an average of just under 1,600 meters per second squared which is about as fast as a flea.

To try to see if there are any movements directly preceding the release of a jump, I filmed these sequences from below.

I wasn't able to visualize their latch release system but these views did confirm something that I'd been seeing with the side views which was that the tips of the furca, not the whole length of it, was what they were using to push off the ground.

Looking at the furca under a scanning electron microscope, we saw that the tips or the end segment which is called the mucro are lined and serrated backward pointing spikes in the side that interacts with the ground.

Clearly, gripping the ground with this part is essential to how they take off.

And you can see what happens when it tries to grip a smooth surface in this shot on the right.

In the middle of the push off, the tail can't grip the glass platform and slips out from underneath the body.

Part of our research involved using micro CT scans to understand how they're powering their jumps.

We found that they're likely using a series of abdominal plates and rods as springs to build up and release energy required for a jump.

Next, we pulled the camera back to look at the full jump trajectory.

At their shoulders, these globular springtails are only about a millimeter tall but vertically, their jumps can take them beyond 60 millimeters into the air.

Of course, not all jumps go straight up and there's a fair amount of spread in how high they go with most jumps reaching around 30 millimeters in height.

All the way up and down, these springtails never stop spinning.

They do between 14 and 29 backflips and an average jump is doing just over 20 backflips while in the air for just 161 milliseconds.

Filming their jumps from above, we tracked how far horizontally and in what direction they go.

Surprisingly, all the springtails jump backwards.

Even when we trigger their jumps by touching the backs of their bodies with a paintbrush, the response jumps, which you see in yellow here, were also never in the forward direction.

The 90 degrees of space directly in front of them seems to be totally unreachable when they jump off a flat, solid surface.

This is totally different from other globular springtails that jump off water.

They do fast backflips through the air too but all the aquatic ones I've ever filmed only jump in a forward-facing direction.

We're currently working on a follow-up study about what determines how jumps are oriented.

The last part of describing their jumps is the landing.

Now, sometimes they do this.

They hit the ground, bounce, and tumble away.

And sometimes they end up back on their feet but sometimes they end up stranded on their backs.

We found out that they also have a more controlled landing strategy, which you might have noticed in these shots from earlier.

On the right is an example of an uncontrolled bounce and on the left, the springtail seems to immediately stick its landing.

And that's actually what they're doing.

In this footage, as a springtail approaches, you'll see two long tubes sticking out the bottom of its body.

You'll see it use these as a sticky anchor, attaching them to the ground and dampening the bounce, allowing it to immediately get back on its feet.

That structure is called the colifor or ventral tube and it's usually retracted into the body.

Here you see it extended in a different species of springtail.

It has functions for self-grooming and water balance.

And when the species we studied uses it for landing, they avert the tube in midair and hope for the best.

In this landing, you'll see the tube stretched out but they don't catch when it hits the ground and the springtail bounces and tumbles before coming to a stop.

So from launch to landing, that's what's involved in a globular springtail jump.

Other researchers have described a bit of this before, but our work is the first complete view of what these organisms can do.

My favorite part about this research is that all the springtails I studied and the ones you see in this video, I found living within the leaf litter in my own backyard.

I just scooped up a bit of the soil and the leaves on top, sifted it out and there were the springtails amongst the other animals living in the leaf litter.

It's mind blowing to me that such extraordinary creatures, ones that do something that no other animal can do, are right there, right outside our own door, waiting for us to notice.

- There's a new species of dinosaur.

Jess Hoyt from the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media explains.

(upbeat music) - The sun peaks over mountains as paleontologists from North Carolina search the high desert of Utah for bones of creatures that disappeared millions of years ago.

At the start of another long day, the fossil hunters work under a hot sun using picks and brushes to unearth buried treasures.

- My name is Haviv Avrahami.

I am a PhD student at North Carolina State University.

- Avrahami has joined other paleontologists in this remote site in the hope of discovering dinosaur bones.

Scientists use many tools to exhume these ancient animals.

- But if we're lucky, we'll dig in and we'll find what's preserved of an entire fossil site.

Sometimes that's one animal, sometimes that's multiple animals of the same species.

Sometimes if we're really lucky, it can represent a multi taxonomic bone bed, which basically means a little pocket of multiple animals preserved at the same time in the same location.

We'll stumble upon an area where there's a little bit of fossils coming out of the ground, almost like the beginning of a tap spring.

We don't always know what's gonna be under there.

Sometimes when we dig in, there's nothing left.

It's all eroded.

Maybe we're a few thousand years too late and all the bones have been eroded out and all that remains is a few tail bones or maybe nothing left in the bedrock.

- Researchers from the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences have been digging at the site for 15 years.

To safely transport bones, often encased in rock, back to base camp, they coat their treasure in plaster.

They will remain in plaster until scientists in Raleigh remove the fossils from their temporary bed.

- When we bring it back to the lab and we clean up all those fossils, that's when the hard work starts.

That's when we have to identify if there are features on it that are unique.

- In the museum lab, technicians peer through microscopes using an arsenal of tools to separate bones from rock and sediment.

- My name's Lisa Herzog and I am the paleontology operations manager at the museum here.

- Herzog and other scientists in the lab compare these newly found fossils with other dinosaurs in both the museum's collection and in other institutions.

They're looking for various features in the bones to place the fossils in an evolutionary timeline.

- It can be the way their skulls and their faces are designed.

And of course, in paleo, we always look at the present as a key to the past.

- Herzog played a large role in the Utah dig that uncovered a trove of bones.

- It's really uncommon to find bones in such good condition, particularly in this formation that we are finding stuff in.

So a specimen like this one here that was preserved partially intact is an indication that there was rapid burial.

So there wasn't time for scavengers to come in and pull it apart and separate the bones.

- A lot of times with fossils, we only find a few bones and sometimes even if we find a full skeleton, a lot of the bones have been disarticulated from each other.

It's almost like a wine bottle that's been smashed and then all the pieces scattered around.

- Paleontologists rarely find a pristine skeleton, but the North Carolina team found numerous well-preserved fossils of the same species 99 million years after the animals died.

In this case, most of the dinosaurs' bodies stayed together, but only fragments of their skulls remained in the rubble.

- We didn't know what the original skull looked like.

We had to reconstruct it.

- Avrahami used 3D scanning technology to create a computer model of the broken skull.

The scanning software allows Avrahami to depict the intricate shapes of bones without damaging them.

It's like a puzzle, discovering how each piece fits together.

As the research team analyzed their data, they realized they had found an undiscovered species.

Meet Fo'na Herzoghe.

Avrahami named the dinosaur Fo'na after a mythological figure celebrated by his native Pacific Islander ancestors.

Herzoghe, after his good friend and mentor, Lisa Herzoghe.

- I've been to Guam once for my grandpa, when my grandpa died.

And so being able to kind of give something back to the island, to give them the honor of a dinosaur named after an aspect of our culture, because this is actually not just the first time a dinosaur has been named after Chamorro mythology.

It's actually the first time a dinosaur has been named after any aspect of Pacific Island culture.

So we dove into the pre-colonial mythology about a brother and sister spirit named Fo'na and Pontan.

Then when Pontan died, he gave up his spirit and Fo'na, the sister, used her powers to create the parts of the earth.

- Finding Fo'na helped bridge a link with a much younger dinosaur, known to museum goers as Willow.

- For me, that was a really aha moment.

It was that moment of like visually seeing, I'd spent months collecting this data, processing it, verifying that it's true.

It bridges the gap in our understanding of how these animals evolved across millions of years.

- And that's it for SciNC for this week.

I'm Frank Graff, thanks for watching.

(gentle music) ♪ - SciNC is supported by a generous bequest gift from Dan Kerrigan and the Gaia Earth Balance Endowment through the Gaston Community Foundation.

- Quality public television is made possible through the financial contributions of viewers like you who invite you to join them in supporting PBSNC.