Art, Science, and Alpine Potatoes

The cutest animal in Glacier may be at risk of disappearing, but it's hard to study an animal that lives under rocks, high in the mountains. How can we understand the hidden parts of the world around us?

Headwaters is created by Daniel Lombardi, Michael Faist, Gaby Eseverri, and Peri Sasnett.

Glacier Conservancy: https://glacier.org/headwaters Frank Waln music: https://www.instagram.com/frankwaln/ Stella Nall art: https://www.instagram.com/stella.nall/

The cutest animal in Glacier may be at risk of disappearing, but it's hard to study an animal that lives under rocks, high in the mountains. How can we understand the hidden parts of the world around us?

Headwaters is created by Daniel Lombardi, Michael Faist, Gaby Eseverri, and Peri Sasnett.

Glacier Conservancy: https://glacier.org/headwaters Frank Waln music: https://www.instagram.com/frankwaln/ Stella Nall art: https://www.instagram.com/stella.nall/

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TRANSCRIPT:

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Lacy Kowalski: Headwaters is supported by the Glacier National Park Conservancy.

Michael Faist: [to Lucas and Alyssa] Do either of you have a particularly good pika impression?

Alyssa Quinn: Lucas does.

Lucas Moyer-Horner: I do. I can give it a try. "Eep! Eep!" Eh. Kind of like that. The thing is, there's different "eep" dialects.

Michael: [to Lucas] How interesting.

Lucas: Even within the park, sometimes you'll hear one that sounds like it has a hoarse voice and or one that you sort of assume must be a really young one, because it has a really kind of a meek and high pitched eep. And then others are pretty strong eeps. But but they're all eeps. They're not whistles like the rodents do.

Michael: Pikas are the cutest animals in Glacier National Park. No contest.

Lucas: Pikas are lagamorphs. So the order group of mammals that they belong to called lagamorphs includes rabbits and hares. Pikas are about the size of a Idaho potato, classically, is how folks like to describe them, and it fits well.

Michael: They're like little fuzzy Idaho potatoes. I mean, even their poops are cute.

Lucas: Pikas’ poop is the only one that is almost a perfect little sphere and pretty much the size of a peppercorn. So if you see tiny little peppercorns, that's for sure going to be like poop.

Michael: [to Lucas] I've heard people joking about using old pepper grinders as they're like a collection container.

Lucas: Seems dangerous. [both laughing]

Michael: This is Lucas.

Lucas: My name is Lucas Moyer-Horner. I'm an instructor with the University of Utah, and I'm also a pika researcher.

Michael: And Alyssa Quinn.

Alyssa: You can call me Alyssa. I am a writer of primarily fiction, and I am currently an assistant professor of creative writing at Kenyon College.

Michael: The two of them have spent a lot of time in the mountains looking for pika this summer, and they're also a couple.

Lucas: The very first time we met was me giving a bear safety talk, and Alyssa was in the audience.

Alyssa: Yeah, and I thought he gave a very good bear talk, like the best bear talk I had heard. So I was like, I need to get to know this guy.

Michael: [to Alyssa] Bear talks can be convincing. Life-saving advice.

Alyssa: He gives a very calm bear talk, which was reassuring. [both laughing]

Michael: Lucas and Alyssa came here this summer because of a mystery. Pika might be in big trouble. If you search for them online, you'll see headlines like this: "pikas disappearing from parts of the West;" "the world's cutest mammal on the brink;" and "the American fur ball being threatened by a warming climate." But if you search for pikas in the mountains here, I'm not quite sure what you'll find. That's why Lucas and Alyssa are here, to help us learn more about what's happening to pika in Glacier. [theme music begins to play] But I wanted to talk to them because they argue science alone isn't enough to understand pika or the threats they face. And so, if not science, what else could help us? [Headwaters theme music plays, with flutes and drums, as pika "eep" sounds play]

Michael: You're listening to Headwaters, a show about Glacier National Park and how it connects to everything else. I'm Michael. In this episode, we're exploring how science and storytelling can shed light on the American pika. And my guides are Lucas and Alyssa.

Lucas: I think that one hike we did where we walked through some talus was the only time I tried to find a hay pile. And I was lucky enough to find one.

Alyssa: Yeah, we saw two... We saw two pikas together, which was a very rare occurrence. Yeah, that was exciting. So, yeah, they just flock to you now.

Michael: As you'll hear, Lucas and Alyssa come to a love of Pika from different spheres of the brain. Lucas's lens is science, while Alyssa brings the mind of a writer. For a few months this summer before work pulled Alyssa elsewhere, she helped Lucas conduct pika surveys. [to Alyssa] Was this your first time surveying pikas this summer with Lucas?

Alyssa: Yes, it was.

Michael: [to Alyssa] How'd you like it?

Alyssa: It's very fun. It's very hard work. It's.... Yeah, I definitely was a blob, I slowly de-blobbed over the course of the summer, but now I'm back to blob-ifying again until next summer. The... It's exhausting because you hike these sometimes very massive peaks, and that's fun. You get to the top. It's gorgeous. You're excited, you've hit the peak, you're kind of ready to turn around and head for home, but instead you have to spend multiple hours up there doing the survey. And that can be really strenuous, too, because you're clambering over these giant boulders up and down, up and down, and trying to keep track of where you've been.

Michael: Our story starts back in 2007, when Lucas, then a PhD student, led the first large scale pika study in Glacier.

Lucas: Our extent of our research is the entire park. So the 1 million acre Glacier National Park is where the surveys take place, and we try to cover as many different patches as we possibly can.

Michael: That word "talus" describes a hillside of loose rocks and boulders, and are the only places that pika live.

Lucas: Basically, they can only be found where there are piles of big rocks. They use the spaces between those rocks as a refuge from extreme temperatures, whether it's too hot, too cold. And they also can use those areas to escape from potential predators.

Michael: So the first step is to identify where this talus or pika habitat is even found.

Lucas: Yeah, I think I've probably covered around two thirds-ish of the park. That's been one of the ongoing efforts was to get up high on ridges and peaks to try to look and see where talus occurs in the park.

Michael: Once they know where the talus is, they'll visit each patch and look for pika.

Lucas: And we're looking for any signs of a pika. So that could be seeing a pika, hearing a pika finding a pika's hay pile, or finding pika scat.

Alyssa: We sometimes go by the Pika Poop Patrol because we are also collecting pika poop.

Michael: Pika poop is currently being used by other researchers studying pika genetics to see how different pika populations are connected to one another. It's not Lucas's project, but he and Alyssa are helping out.

Alyssa: Yeah. How many Ziploc gallons of books are full of poop now? In the cabin?

Lucas: In the cabin? I think we're up to four.

Michael: That's four gallon sized bags of peppercorn sized poops.

Lucas: Conveniently pikas, they're active during the day, so we can survey for them during the day and be more likely to see them and hear them. And they also are solitary and defend their territory from other pikas. So that means if you find if you see a pika, you know that there's not going to be another pika within about a ten meter radius of that pika.

Michael: This summer, 15 years later, he's surveying the same spots all over again to monitor how they're doing and see how pika populations have changed over time.

Lucas: So we'll go to the GPS location where this survey started 15 years ago, and then we'll attempt to survey the same part of the patch that they did. Hopefully the entire patch.

Michael: Alyssa has experienced this work firsthand in the field, and she's also created some of her own written work based off of Lucas's research. Like a poem titled Ochotonidae, the Latin name of pika.

Alyssa: So the poem is a cut up poem, which is a poem that takes an existing text, in this case, I took Lucas's paper "Predictors of current and long term patterns of abundance of American pikas across a leading edge protected area." Catchy title.

Lucas: Thank you. [laughing]

Alyssa: You're welcome. I took that article and I cut out a bunch of pieces of language from it and then rearranged those pieces to form a new poem. And I allowed myself to change capitalization and punctuation. But no, no language.

Michael: The poem spans several pages, many of which look like Alyssa took white out to most of Lucas's paper. The few scattered words left behind tell their own story.

Alyssa: His is longer. [all laugh] Mine has a lot of whitespace. There's small phrases, words and phrases sort of pasted across the page, separated by large gaps.

Michael: We asked if she'd read an excerpt for us.

Alyssa: Here we go. [subtle synth music plays] "We acknowledge that scale and size are efforts to avoid division by zero, to minimize the error of man made structures, julian date, observer bias, train tracks. And finally, we acknowledge that our ability to identify patterns has been extremely null, especially in centuries made of days."

Michael: This isn't the only piece Alyssa has written about pika, and she'll read a short story for us later in the episode.

Michael: [to Lucas] Lucas, are you much of a writer?

Lucas: No. As you can tell from the title of the paper that they used. [all laughing]

Michael: The two of them approach this topic from such different vantage points, but each helps the other see their own work in a new light.

Alyssa: It's the absolute best thing in the world to have him around and to have his very different perspective sort of constantly there. There are times when he'll sort of drop a piece of knowledge that he has that I'm like, "You knew this thing all along and you haven't told this to me yet?!" Like this amazing sort of biological factoid that you have just been sitting on for years.

Lucas: It's exciting. It's like new perspectives on life and interactions and networks, and it can kind of sort of reinvigorate my interest in my own investigations and science that I'm doing, think about things in new ways, and I think that can help your science be better science. As a scientist who part of my work is looking at the effects of climate change, and it can sometimes seem like, you know, you're writing your notes in your diary as the Titanic is going down. About, you know, just how big the hole is and what caused it and all these things. Art has opportunity to be much more impactful.

Michael: Alyssa and Lucas are both driven by a concern for pika, as these little potato shaped animals grapple with climate change. And each of them approach their work with scale in mind, knowing that their results, whether in research or creative writing, are driven by the scope of their project.

Lucas: And so, you know, it really depends on how much you're zooming in or out, what it is you're observing, and what types of questions you're asking.

Michael: Alyssa mentioned this specifically with her cut up poem.

Alyssa: One reason I wanted to try this was to think about what it might-- since I'm interested in scales of space and time, so what happens when you zoom really far out or really far in? And so I wanted to try doing that to a paper. What would a zoomed out version of this paper look like?

Michael: So to understand the threat climate change poses to pika, I wanted to start with the big picture. We know what pika are, but what are their lives look like? [to Lucas] On a social level, Why do you think pika are so endearing to people?

Lucas: Why are pikas so cute? You know, humans seem to really like baby animals, and I feel like pikas, when they're fully grown adults, still seem like they're little babies. So that's [laughing] that's my analysis. And they're mammals, so they're fluffy.

Alyssa: I think people also like this image that they are hard working. They work all summer to collect this hay and to store it. Um, and that seems industrious to us. It seems like they they really, you know, deserve to survive the winter if they work that hard. I think it's easy to kind of attach that-- that meaning onto them as well.

Michael: That industriousness Alyssa mentioned? They have to do so much work gathering hay all summer because they don't hibernate over the winter, like so many other mammals here.

Lucas: They are going to stay awake and survive in other ways during the winter, unlike rodents who love to just sleep, you know, two thirds of their lives, which is a pretty cool approach too. Pikas, since they can't hibernate, have to collect food to make it through the winter. And so that's what a haypile -- that's the primary purpose of a haypile is they'll collect vegetation, store it, usually under a sort of a big airy rock where it can dry out, and then presumably just hang out underneath the snow, which is really good insulation, and eat their haypile during the winter.

Michael: [to Lucas] Yeah. One way I've heard it described as an analogy to try to communicate how much food pika are setting aside is that if they were as big as we were, they would be collecting the equivalent of several school buses worth of food every year.

Lucas: Right.

Michael: If you see pika frolicking through rocky hillsides, it's usually because they're collecting plants to eat or trying to pillage their neighbors hay piles, despite the fact that they're related to most of their neighbors. If you hear them make their telltale "eep," it's a predator response.

Lucas: So I mentioned, you know, the kindly pika neighbor that warns they're cousins and mom and dad and other relatives that live nearby by eeping. But the problem with eeping is that that alerts the predator to your individual presence. So you're really endangering yourself by warning your neighbors. So a pretty altruistic move. But there's been studies where people have introduced like images and stuffed predators to see how pikas respond. And most often the one predator that they did not eep in the presence of was the weasel.

Michael: [to Lucas] Hmm.

Lucas: And so the thought there is that weasels are such good predators on pikas that it's not worth eeping, because it's going to get you. [bpth laugh]

Michael: But besides being cute, busy, and altruistic pika are known for being extremely sensitive to heat.

Lucas: Yeah, pikas just can't handle getting warmed up very well. The thought then is well, pikas will avoid being active above the rocks when it's hot outside because it'll cause them to overheat. And if that is the case for much of the summer, then they might not be able to collect enough vegetation to survive the winter under the talus for their haypile.

Michael: Around the time of Lucas's first study, researchers observed pika elsewhere in the U.S. were disappearing at lower, warmer elevations.

Lucas: And so that was one of the initial kind of alarm bells saying, hey, perhaps there's some impacts here of temperature on pikas.

Michael: [to Lucas] So pika have a really limited ability to thermoregulate like we can sweat when we're hot, dogs can pant, but pikas have to live in an environment that can keep them cool. So higher elevations or staying under the rocks when it's hot outside. And changes to the temperature outside could affect where they're actually able to live, right?

Lucas: Yes.

Alyssa: I would add that they are considered ecosystem sentinels, meaning that they can sort of indicate the status of an ecosystem affected by climate change. Temperatures get above a certain level, I think, lucas It might be 68 degrees?

Lucas: Yeah.

Alyssa: A pika is going to begin to experience physiological stress. And also if it gets too cold in the winter due to, for instance, a decreased snowpack in the mountains caused by climate change, then the pikas don't have enough insulation when they're under the rocks. And so they can also die of cold. And so thinking of pikas as ecosystem sentinels, it's been interesting for me because that means that they're not only an animal to study, they are like a metric, like mercury in a thermometer. And so they're a way of reading an environment as well.

Michael: I've always thought of science as a tool of illumination. Lucas's research is like turning the light on in a dark room by taking a census of pikas in Glacier. He'll reveal how they're doing, shining a light on the big picture. But when you zoom in and look closely, there are still places that light doesn't reach. [synth beat begins to play]

Alyssa: It's pretty easy to begin to forget what your object of study is. I mean, you're engaged in these sort of daily routines of surveying and, you know, looking for these signs and following these procedures. And at least I found myself, like, forgetting that there is an actual sort of living being somewhere on the end of of this data.

Michael: From a professional academic distance, the consequences of pika decline can feel abstract. Reading scientific papers that quantify their demise, my first thought is that one day I might not be able to see them anymore. Not the difficult reality of what happens to a pika who can't take the heat.

Alyssa: And so, yeah, I do hope that that is something that art can bring to the table. [synth beat finishes playing]

Michael: Alyssa channeled these thoughts into a short story called Detection Probability, which I asked her to read for us.

Alyssa: All right. Detection Probability. The day before they declare their love, he takes her up a mountain. They are looking for Ochotona princeps, the American pika, which he conducted research on years ago, before his grant ran out and his postdoc ended and he took the job here, teaching section after section of freshman biology. She wants to see a pika very badly, because she is in that stage of the relationship where she is hungry to lay claim on all that happened to him before she entered his life, desperate to be able to imagine his life in all its distant invisible weaving, right up until the point it crisscrossed her own. She is twenty-nine and he is thirty-three and she thinks of the many years they existed on this earth simultaneously but without each other, traveling their untouching paths. It is difficult to give reality to his life before her, difficult to infuse it with solidity. The other night, in bed, she flipped through an entire photo album while he poured her bourbon and fed her spoonfuls of chocolate ice cream and she said, Who is this? Where is this? What year is this? Now, on the mountain, he says: “Look in the shady spaces under rocks. And keep an eye out for hay piles.” They climb over talus in the sun. They are at an elevation of 8,000 feet, on a south-facing slope in the American west. Near them but out of sight are several ground squirrels, one hoary marmot, a black rosy finch, two Clark’s nutcrackers, 300,000 worker ants, fifty-seven miller moths, thirteen checkerspot butterflies, and one wary wolverine. Also nearby but out of sight are several hundred pieces of colored microplastic, a floppy hat lost long ago, an oxidized Coca Cola can, and a rotting map of the region, its pages waterlogged and warped so the contour lines ripple up in waves, rising like topography, like some ragged paper range. “I can’t see anything,” she says. Tonight, after coming down the mountain and driving through the summer dark back to town, they will lie next to each other in his bed and each will want to say the words—I love you—but they won’t. Each will want to say it but instead they’ll lie in silence trying to imagine what the other one is thinking. They’ll steal glances at each other, struck suddenly by the other’s opacity. Who is this person lying naked next to them? Who is this stranger? Is there a mouth behind those lips, are there eyes behind those lids, are there organs below the skin of this stomach? And they will feel suddenly that the months they’ve known each other are nothing, nothing at all, that this person still remains dark and impenetrable as the interior of a mountain. And they will fall asleep this way and dream strange dreams which in the morning they will pretend they have forgotten. All of this will happen but not yet. “I can’t see anything,” she says. “I’ve seen them here before,” he says. The pika they are looking for is in fact on the far side of the mountain, three thousand feet higher up. The sun is hot, hot, hot these days and the alpine air is thin and ragged with the heat. The pikas are migrating higher and higher to survive. He knows this is the case elsewhere but for some reason he doesn’t think about it happening here. They continue looking under the same rocks. Three thousand feet above them, a pika carries a mouthful of vegetation back to its hay pile, which lies drying in the sun. A stockpile for winter. When temperatures drop, the pika will burrow underground to be insulated by snow, emerging only to retrieve its secret hay. But this year the winter will be warm. There will be very little snow, and the paradox of this is that there will not be enough insulation to protect the pika. Huddled underground it will grow still, then even stiller, then turn to a corpse from the cold. The hay will go soggy in the warm and early spring, will begin its years of slow decay. All of this will happen but not yet. “We might be too low down,” he admits. He’s explained to her about pikas’ sensitivity to climate, their migration to higher elevations. The problem, he said, is that mountains are cone shaped. The higher up you go, the less space you have. She imagined all the plants and animals of the alpine ecosystem being drawn upward as if by a magnet, growing increasingly condensed, until they reached the peak and ran out of room. She imagined them clustered there at the top, tangled up in each other, fur and leaf and blossom and wing, and then she imagined them lifting off the mountain, rising up off the earth, streaming into the air and away. A kite string of flora and fauna, floating higher and higher, piercing the atmosphere, scattering into space. “I’m sorry we didn’t see any,” she says as they climb back into the car and head for home. “Next time,” he says. The sun is sinking in an orange flare. “Tell me again about your summer of research,” she says. He tells her. She tries to imagine it. The sun sets and now it is night. Alyssa: This is fiction, just so everyone knows.

Michael: [to Alyssa] Okay. [all laughing]

Alyssa: This is clearly not us at all. [synth beat plays to mark a transition]

Michael: We often turn to art to see the world from a new perspective. And Alyssa's story challenges common thinking that the best way to comprehend something is from a bird's eye view -- at an almost impersonal distance. But by blending the fates of pika and the people studying them, Alyssa closes that gap.

Alyssa: The real shared thread is the limits of knowledge. Whether we're trying to know another person, or trying to know a nonhuman species who hides beneath rocks. We are always limited in our ability to know the other, and we have to rely on imagination to know anyone or anything. And so the characters in this piece, they are unable to access the pika because climate change is messing things up. And so it's not that the world doesn't quite work the way that they've learned it works, and they are also, to an extent, unable to access each other even as they are falling in love. There is this perpetual distance that they are aware of and trying to crack open, and that that sort of dark center that lies at the core of of all things essentially is the connection between the two.

Michael: Science tells me often and in painful detail about waves of heat crashing around the pikas' shrinking mountain islands. Despite that, the pikas' suffering is invisible to me. I hear them eep as I hike up the mountain. And maybe someday I won't anymore. Alyssa's story lingers on moments that research often seems to ignore. Describing the suffering felt by pika that's implied by these studies, but that's easier to look away from -- applying what we've learned through research to a story that's personal, intimate, even. In the end, Lucas and Alyssa suggest that truly understanding what's in store for Glacier's pika, or reckoning with the impact of climate change on any living thing, demands searching for the story beyond your experience -- asking how the big picture is felt on a small scale, and using science and creativity in tandem.

Alyssa: It's been said by many people that the climate crisis is in part a crisis of the imagination. We lack the capacity to think long term. We lack the capacity even to think to next week, let alone decades from now. So again, these questions of scale that we are not particularly good at conceptualizing. And so I think that literature and hopefully, you know, innovative literature, literature that's trying new things, can help us to strengthen those imaginative capacities. I don't want to put too much on the back of literature. [chuckles] That's a lot to do to save the world. I think there's other smaller things that it does, too, such as just articulating the griefs that a lot of us are feeling right now. [somber synth music begins to play] Navigating a world where we see so many things we love falling away and just giving voice to that experience, I think is also a valuable task that that fiction can accomplish. [synth beat continues to play]

Peri Sasnett: Headwaters is a production of Glacier National Park and is supported by the Glacier National Park Conservancy. We could not make the show without them. You can learn more about what they do at Glacier.org. Headwaters is made possible with help from Lacy Kowalski, Melissa Sladek and so many people throughout the Glacier community, especially the natural and cultural resource teams. We're grateful for all of you. Our music this season is by the brilliant Frank Waln. The show's cover art is by our sweet friend Stella Nall. Check out Frank and Stella's work at the links in our show notes. Special thanks this episode to Lucas Moyer-Horner and Alyssa Quinn, along with Kylie Caesar and the Crown of the Continent Research Learning Center, for introducing us to their work. Besides sharing this episode with a friend who might appreciate it, you can help us out by leaving us a rating and review in your podcast app. Thanks for listening.