♪♪ We can harness them… ♪♪ …to heal our damaged earth. ♪♪ You can imagine how beautiful it would be when you see detail that you’d never known you could see. We now recognize a powerful ally in nature itself. Scientists believe that through the use of the intellect, and with the aid of instruments that extend the senses, people can discover patterns in all of nature. ESTES: If you lose the wrong ones, if you lose the keystones, you’re going to see very big changes. ♪♪ O0 C1 ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪, Clip | Otters & Orcas: An Alaskan Mystery, Clip | How Wildebeest Saved the Serengeti, Clip | How Starfish Changed Modern Ecology. ♪♪ Power suspects bass might be a keystone holding the community together in the lush, green pools. We were seeing a recovery, an upgrading of the whole ecosystem for the first time. ESTES: When Bob planted the seed of looking at the effect of otters, it naturally occurred to me that the way to do that would be to go to someplace where they didn’t occur and compare that with where they did. Whether it was terrestrial or aquatic, whether it was arctic or tropical, it was all working in the same way. The researchers have already seen labour specialization and vulnerability to drought emerge spontaneously, and they hope eventually to be able to predict flows of refugees and identify potential conflict hotspots. ♪♪ ♪♪ Sea otters are masters of their underwater realm, the kelp forest. And they were looking for somebody to go out to Amchitka Island and work on sea otters. And that expresses the fact that all species don’t have the same impact on the system they’re in. Join these unsung heroes as they tell their unique story of hope… ♪♪ …of how we can preserve life on our planet. ♪♪ The wildebeest in their huge numbers were determining everything else inside the park. Remember we found at Guri that with no predators, the herbivores increased, and the ants literally ate down the forest. It should be maybe 10 feet or 15 feet. ♪♪ New revelations will soon link starfish to sea otters living thousands of miles farther north, in the remote Aleutian Island chain off Alaska. Behavior genetics, the study of the influence of an organism’s genetic composition on its behavior and the interaction of heredity and environment insofar as they affect behavior. ♪♪ ♪♪ ESTES: There’s a sign when you get off the airplane there — ‘Not the end of the world, but you can see it from here.’. TERBORGH: What humans have done is take nature apart layer after later. I’d longed to be in such a place ever since I was a small boy. Using the same techniques, he has also shown that the model describes the expansion of Christianity in the first century AD, and of Mormonism since the Second World War. This keystone has been reintroduced after an absence of 70 years. Then, drawing on all the sources they can find — historical databases, newspaper archives, ethnographic studies — Turchin and his colleagues plot these proxies over time and look for trends, hoping to identify historical patterns and markers of future events. ♪♪ But after two more counts, numbers remain steady at 1.4 million. To test her hunch, she designs her own version of Bob Paine’s starfish experiment. Turchin, P. Historical Dynamics (Princeton Univ. On islands without predatory army ants, hoards of leafcutters wreak havoc. Both large and small marine habitats seem to be held together by single keystones, whose removal is catastrophic. Political instability ensues and leads to collapse, and the cycle begins again. The Lake Erie Nature & Science Center can show you how -- virtually. I had never seen anything like this before. “But we can't tell you how most ordinary people lived their lives.”. In the decade leading up to the revolution, however, the country saw a quadrupling of graduates with no prospects — a marker of elite overproduction and hence, Turchin argues, trouble. BOULEY: And it’s the culmination of months of intense work by teams across international borders, so it’s not a trivial operation. NARRATOR: Their quest pursued over a lifetime was to understand how nature is put together. “Inequality is almost always a bad thing for societies,” he says. ♪♪ NARRATOR: Yellowstone’s trees thrive because of wolves, just like Serengeti’s trees thrive because of wildebeest. NARRATOR: These findings were revolutionary, a new insight into nature. You remove predators, then it leads to the deterioration of the whole system. ♪♪ That indicates that the starfish have been preventing the mussels from taking over. If you give nature a chance, it comes back. ♪♪ POWER: We split the green pool into two halves. Throw away the starfish, and the biodiversity collapses. Skip to Article. And that was sort of the beginning of the rest of my life. ♪♪ BOULEY: It’s like a wave of teeth… ♪♪ …that just flush out animals, on termite mounds, through grasslands, through forests, and they chase until they tire down their prey and strike. ♪♪ Two weeks later, I was on my way to Amchitka Island. PAINE: This magnificent array of organisms. So Bob christens them a ‘keystone species.’. ♪♪ NARRATOR: Having nearly been wiped out by the fur trade, sea otter populations are recovering and spreading out across the Aleutian Island chain. “We're doing what can be done, as opposed to aspiring after what can't,” says Daniel Szechi, who studies early-modern history at the University of Manchester, UK. The deer have reached plague abundance. ♪♪ And then there are many more predators because there’s more food for those, too. For the best commenting experience, please login or register as a user and agree to our Community Guidelines. The dogs force the plant eaters to stay vigilant and keep moving. ♪♪ POWER: When I was a child, I was severely myopic from who knows what age. NARRATOR: Introducing wild dogs is a big undertaking, but it’s paying off. Peace Res. ESTES: I’ve never in my life felt such an excitement. “I'm not afraid of uprisings,” he says. ♪♪ Here, largemouth bass are the top predator. Oxford Suzhou Centre for Advanced Research, © 2019 Macmillan Publishers Limited, part of Springer Nature. TERBORGH: And so our challenge will be to upgrade systems. But all of that is under the control of humanity. What is different is the scale — Turchin and his colleagues are systematically collecting historical data that span centuries or even millennia — and the mathematical analysis of how the variables interact. What is new about cliodynamics isn't the search for patterns, Turchin explains. ♪♪ ESTES: I sat there all night long. And in this little forest, there would be sun fish. But you can look way out there, and there’s no obstruction. NARRATOR: As a naturalist, he’s trained to observe and record, but Bob is thinking more radically. Jim has discovered that sea otters, like starfish, are keystone species. They don’t want a destroyed earth. Our award-winning show features highlights from the week's edition of Nature, interviews with the people behind the science, and in-depth commentary and analysis from journalists around the world. The 2021 Division B events are listed below. Turchin calls this the fathers-and-sons cycle: the father responds violently to a perceived social injustice; the son lives with the miserable legacy of the resulting conflict and abstains; the third generation begins again. ♪♪ Birds came back that had disappeared long ago. It turns out the wildebeest had been decimated by a virus spread from cattle. Goldstone has searched for cliodynamic patterns in past revolutions, and predicts that Egypt will face a few more years of struggle between radicals and moderates and 5–10 years of institution-building before it can regain stability. Based on a book of the same name, The Serengeti Rules had its theatrical premiere at Tribeca Film Festival and has won awards at the 2018 Wildscreen Panda Awards and Jackson Hole Science Media Awards. But Turchin and his allies contend that the time is ripe to revisit general laws, thanks to tools such as nonlinear mathematics, simulations that can model the interactions of thousands or millions of individuals at once, and informatics technologies for gathering and analysing huge databases of historical information. ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ It was a flashbulb moment, as they say, where I just had to be underwater looking at life that way, for the rest of my life. It is from here that he will mull over the concept of keystone species. ♪♪ I’ve never in my life felt such enthusiasm and excitement as I felt at that moment. ♪♪ NARRATOR: Bob’s discovery of a keystone species prompts more questions. But once the virus was eradicated in livestock, the wildebeest started to boom. ♪♪ Then occasionally, a big, larger predator like a pickerel or a perch or a bass goes by. It’s not ants, it’s deer, but out of control, they can lead to the same rather disastrous consequences. ♪♪ ♪♪ Month after month, Paine returns, clearing out starfish. ♪♪ From having watched otters for extensive periods of time, I knew they ate a lot of urchins, but it never really occurred to me until I actually saw a system where otters were gone that the effect was massive. [ Wildebeest whinnying ] ♪♪ We had always assumed that keystones had to be a predator, but we realized that a keystone could actually be herbivores. Paola and her team were going to have to bring them back, reestablish their roles, and resurrect the ‘landscape of fear.’. [ Zebra whinnies ] SINCLAIR: We found the rules — how systems work, how the world works. Just as an epidemic can be averted by an effective vaccine, violence can be prevented if society is prepared to learn from history — if the US government creates more jobs for graduates, say, or acts decisively to reduce inequality. SINCLAIR: We found the rules — how systems work, how the world works. Without them, the leafcutters are 100 times more abundant than they would be on the mainland. I think we’re finally arriving at a much better place, but it has taken that long. For the past 15 years, Turchin has been taking the mathematical techniques that once allowed him to track predator–prey cycles in forest ecosystems, and applying them to human history. But historians are not so sure. And the next time we looked, it was 700,000. ♪♪ Four years later, they had doubled again to 1.4 million. It just immediately occurred to me that this was a phenomenally interesting natural experiment. Choosing appropriate proxies can be a challenge, because relevant data are often hard to find. Therefore, if Turchin's prediction of unrest in the United States around 2020 is correct, Whitehouse would expect the next few years to see an increase in tightly knit US groups whose rituals have a threatening quality but promise great rewards. The human relationship with nature. ♪♪ With the top predator gone, the minnows overgraze the plants. Highly social, they spend their entire lives in the icy water. A small band of scientists has shown us how. AGORA, HINARI, OARE, INASP, CrossRef and COUNTER. TERBORGH: Wolves were reintroduced and began to feed on the elk. In time, the population grows, labour supply outstrips demand, elites form and the living standards of the poorest fall. It was the perfect system so that you could see what the response to removing predators would be. ♪♪ It is absolutely one of the most amazing scenes that I’ve ever seen. The visibility is 100 feet or 200 feet. Instead of asking what the kelp forest does for the otters, Jim now asks what are the otters doing for the kelp forest? Cliodynamics has another ally in Jack Goldstone, director of the Center for Global Policy at George Mason University and a member of the Political Instability Task Force, which is funded by the US Central Intelligence Agency to forecast events outside the United States. Science also assumes that the universe is, as its name implies, a vast single system in which the basic rules are everywhere the same. Such analysis also allows the researchers to track the order in which the changes occur, so that they can tease out useful correlations that might lead to cause–effect explanations. (The elder Turchin's dissident writings about the origins of totalitarianism were among the reasons that the Soviet Union exiled him in 1977, after which he moved his family to the United States.). For example, Johan Schot, a historian of science and technology policy at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and co-author of Writing the Rules … The question of the determinants of behavioral abilities and disabilities has been referred to as the ‘nature … ♪♪ ♪♪ NARRATOR: In just five weeks, on the side without bass, the minnows have reduced the green pool to rubble. ♪♪ Surely such devastation was beyond repair. ♪♪ POWER: Nature could heal itself if a keystone is released. This appreciation is often invoked as evidence of biophilia. PAINE: I knew that I had discovered something important. ♪♪ Yet to succeed, John still has to overcome the same basic challenge Bob Paine had faced 25 years before… ♪♪ …how to remove the predators. One powerful way for groups to cement that identification is through rituals, especially frightening, painful or otherwise emotional ones that create a body of vivid, shared memories. But he thinks that the patterns and causal connections that it reveals can teach policy-makers valuable lessons about pitfalls to avoid, and actions that might forestall trouble. Because the wildebeest were eating up the grass, there was less fuel, and, therefore, less burning. “That's why we are where we are.”. ♪♪ If the otters are having some big effect, I ought to see it. ♪♪ POWER: Humans care. The kelp forest is an important foundation for the coastal ecosystem. NARRATOR: When Tony goes public with his record-breaking results, he thinks this is a good news story. NARRATOR: 50 years ago, a group of scientists set off around the world to unlock the mysteries of nature. But what happens next amazes even Tony. You can’t just get rid of all the bears or eagles from a forest to see what happens. Previous bouts of turbulence were not dominated by any one issue, he says. Tony joins animal counts that reveal wildebeest and buffalo numbers are rising rapidly. Concerted efforts are now under way to fill those holes. ♪♪ SINCLAIR: At that point, we knew that the system had leveled out of its own accord, and there was no damage to the environment. Anecdotal and qualitative evidence suggests that humans are innately attracted to nature. Everybody thought we were being irresponsible. ♪♪ What we need to do is put the starfish equivalent back in. The side lengths and angle measurements of a 30-60-90 right triangle. It’s hard to believe they’re really here. [ Thunder crashing ] But his world view changes the day he encounters Bob Paine, who is visiting Alaska to meet with a student. Science fiction is one of the most popular genres in literature, and certainly the one with the most cultural influence. Periods of rioting and upheaval have recurred roughly every 50 years in US history. 20-plus years later, I’m here in Gorongosa National Park, trying to understand how we can restore balance to this ecosystem. ♪♪ NARRATOR: Unchecked by the otters, the sea urchins have gorged on the kelp. ♪♪ The fate of the natural world is the last thing on the mind of a young biologist when he first arrives in what appears to be a pristine natural wilderness. BetTmann/Corbis (top); Topical Press Agency/Getty (middle); N. BOENZI/NEW YORK TIMES CO./GETTY (bottom). [ Indistinct arguing ] NARRATOR: But Tony believes the cattle disease had artificially kept the wildebeest numbers low. ♪♪ 95% of all the large mammals were wiped out, whether predator or prey. ♪♪ These big, old trees, they’re the last of their generation. I used the line in George Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm.’, ‘All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.’. The starfish alone hold everything together. ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ NARRATOR: Following her passion, Mary Power focuses her studies on fish in the rivers and streams of Oklahoma. Few biologists had paid much attention to the tide pools along this rocky shore. So at that time, I started daydreaming, how could I expand on this? Turchin conceived cliodynamics during what he jokingly calls a midlife crisis: it was 1997, he was 40 years old, and he had come to feel that all the major ecological questions about population dynamics had been answered. There were sea urchins feeding on algae. NARRATOR: They ventured into the wild, from the coasts of Alaska to South American jungles. “After a century of grand theory, from Marxism and social Darwinism to structuralism and postmodernism, most historians have abandoned the belief in general laws,” said Robert Darnton, a cultural historian at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in a column written in 1999. You will be re-directed back to this page where you will see comments updating in real-time and have the ability to recommend comments to other users. ♪♪ NARRATOR: Guri was an area of tropical jungle half the size of Connecticut, flooded by the construction of a new hydro-electric dam. ♪♪ [ Raven croaking ] But how do you test that? Year by year, the plant eaters began to return, growing from small surviving populations. And for some academics, at least, cliodynamics can't come a moment too soon. NARRATOR: After bonding in a protected enclosure, the dogs are released into the park. ESTES: The instant I met him, I thought, ‘There’s no way I’m going to talk to this guy.’, [ Indistinct conversations ] And he said, ‘You want to sit down and talk a little bit about what you’re doing?’, i told him that I was interested in following this notion of how kelp forests could support so many otters.’, He said, ‘It sounds pretty dull to me.’, ♪♪ ‘Why don’t you think about these animals as predators?’. ♪♪ But there is something more in the green pools. Harvey Whitehouse, an anthropologist at the University of Oxford, UK, is overseeing the construction of a database of information about rituals, social structure and conflict around the globe since records began. Basically hadn’t seen any of the Pacific coast ecosystems. So, instead of taking warthog and waterbuck, they’re taking impala and bushbuck and these smaller species that have been pretty safe from predation from lions. For example, the appearance of the natural world, with its rich diversity of shapes, colours, and life, is universally appreciated. But he already sees the warning signs of social strife, including a surplus of graduates and increasing inequality. Based on a book of the same name, The Serengeti Rules had its theatrical premiere at Tribeca Film Festival and has won awards at the 2018 Wildscreen Panda Awards and Jackson Hole Science Media Awards. Social structure, for example, relies on factors such as health inequality — measured using proxies including quantitative data on life expectancies — and wealth inequality, measured by the ratio of the largest fortune to the median wage. 49, 577–591 (2012). The willows and cottonwoods began to sprout along stream-sides. ♪♪ And even where predators are still missing, like the Scottish Highlands, simply fencing off grazing sheep has a dramatic impact. ♪♪ ♪♪ NARRATOR: Little doe Tony realize, at that time, the Serengeti is the midst of a dramatic change. ♪♪ ESTES: It’s critical that we replace species that are central in holding ecosystems together. NARRATOR: The deer plague started as we removed wolves to make room for people. A study explores how membraneless organelles (MLOs) or biomolecular condensates, form and organize themselves. [ Radio tuning ] Bob Paine is a newly-minted biology professor at the University of Washington. Several models have been proposed. That’s why in 2018, after months of complex planning, they attempt to reintroduce wild dogs. He sees the same patterns in ancient Egypt, China and Russia, and says that they explain the timing of last year's Egyptian uprising, which took the regime of then-president Hosni Mubarak by surprise. That has started a devastating domino effect right through the community. In 2008, the organization published a report titled "Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate." POWER: I’d try to go out looking to see how the world works. Swann, W. B. Jr, Jetten, J., Gómez, Á., Whitehouse, H. & Bastian, B. Psychol. TERBORGH: Science can tell us what’s happening when the naked eye can deceive us. Nature Podcast Our award-winning show features highlights from the week's edition of Nature , interviews with the people behind the science, and in-depth commentary and … © 2019 Macmillan Publishers Limited, part of Springer Nature. Grazers eat the plants, and they in turn are hunted by predators. ♪♪ The challenges ahead are formidable and complex, but we are not alone. I stuck my head in the water, and I thought, ‘This is unbelievable.’. Each variable is measured in several ways. [ Wildebeest grunting ] I realized that wildebeest was a keystone. ♪♪ NARRATOR: In Yellowstone National Park, the starfish equivalent is the wolf. The model starts with a series of digital agents representing households and allows them to interact, following rules such as seasonal migration patterns and ethnic alliances. Superimposed on that secular trend, the researchers observe a shorter cycle that spans 50 years — roughly two generations. ♪♪ POWER: Add some bass, and then add maybe a big pickerel or walleye, and suddenly you might have a five- or six-level food chain. ♪♪ Upgrading works on land and in water. Humanity ultimately is the driver of everything. [ Wolf howls ] Everywhere on earth, nature is organized from the bottom up. ♪♪ And he sees the tide pool changing. It is an attempt to show that “history is not 'just one damn thing after another'”, says Turchin, paraphrasing a saying often attributed to the late British historian Arnold Toynbee. One is that they grow in a linear fashion as nonbelievers spontaneously 'see the light'. For extensive information and resources for each event, click on an event title. [ Wildebeest grunting ] TERBORGH: Tony’s work is marvelous. I was totally naive. ♪♪ Tree populations that probably hadn’t occurred since the 1800s. But perhaps revolution is the best, if not the only, remedy for severe social stresses. Turchin can't say who those groups might be, what cause they will be fighting for or what form the violence will take. partner of AGORA, HINARI, OARE, INASP, CrossRef and COUNTER, Political instability may be a contributor in the coming decade, Cliodynamics: The Journal of Theoretical and Mathematical History, Deputy Director of Nanoscopy Center in SLST, ShanghaiTech, Vice Dean for Faculty Affairs in School of Life Science and Technology (SLST), ShanghaiTech University. ♪♪ After we understood that, we coined the word ‘downgrading’ to describe it. The kelp forest and virtually everything that lived here is gone. We can see why these relations should hold by plugging in the above values into the Pythagorean theorem a 2 + b 2 = c 2.. a 2 + (a√3) 2 = (2a) 2. a 2 + 3a 2 = 4a 2 They’re re-establishing the landscape of fear. ♪♪ And among the mussels and barnacles, anemones and snails, a large predator lurks. ♪♪ NARRATOR: But there is still a major piece of the puzzle missing. ♪♪ I’d never seen an urchin barren before going to Shemya. Humans are hyper keystones in the sense that they are all controlling. ♪♪ Her keen eye soon notices a striking difference between some stretches of river and others. “People form the impression that the most profound insights they have into their own personal history are shared by other people,” says Whitehouse, who explored this fusion of identities in an as-yet unpublished survey of revolutionary brigades in Misrata, Libya, last December, along with his colleague Brian McQuinn, an anthropologist at Oxford who studies civil wars. History seemed to be the next frontier — perhaps because his father, the Russian computer scientist Valentin Turchin, had also wondered about the existence of general laws governing societies. TERBORGH: Whether it was terrestrial or aquatic, whether it was arctic or tropical, it was all working in the same way. ♪♪ TERBORGH: When I climbed up and walked into the forest, it looked like a hurricane had been through there. [ Animals squawking, grunting ] NARRATOR: In North American Rivers, And on African plains, they followed their passion to explore. NARRATOR: Jim Estes takes Bob Paine’s keystone discovery to a new level. NARRATOR: Their collective knowledge proved that some animals are more important than others. ♪♪ I didn’t know that you could see leaves on a tree from the ground. ♪♪ NARRATOR: He realizes these tide pools are a complete ecosystem, but in miniature. NARRATOR: This is a story of hope that will change the way you see nature. BOULEY: What we’re demonstrating is these ecosystems are resilient. To Peter Turchin, who studies population dynamics at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, the appearance of three peaks of political instability at roughly 50-year intervals is not a coincidence. ♪♪ Those trees provided more food for elephants, for giraffes, and for many, many bird species. [ Eagle chirping ] Freshwater ecologist Mary Power now wonders if the influence of keystones goes beyond predators simply eating prey. Bass are keystone species just in the sense that Jim’s sea otters or Bob’s starfish are. MAN: Morphological… TERBORGH: Bob Paine was the first one to show it. When Turchin refined the concept of cliodynamics with two colleagues — Sergey Nefedov of the Institute of History and Archaeology in Yekaterinburg, Russia, and Andrey Korotayev of the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow — the researchers found that two trends dominate the data on political instability. Whether it’s howler monkeys or iguanas makes no difference. ♪♪ But can anything be done when a community is not just downgraded, but almost totally destroyed? ♪♪ And he said, ‘You know, I think you’d be perfect for this.’. They study it carefully, they find out why the plane crashed, and that's why so many fewer planes crash today than used to.”, None of these arguments, however, has done much to soften scepticism among historians in general. “We can tell you in great detail what the grain prices were in a few towns in southern England in the Middle Ages,” he says. ♪♪ What he’s observing is a natural reset. They can pry open mussels, devouring them in their shells. ESTES: There wasn’t anyone that argued, ‘I don’t see this in nature,’ not a single one of them. ♪♪ Despite appearances, starfish are skilled hunters. Rev. ♪♪ No one has shown that keystones exist on land. Gintis points out that he is old enough to have taken part in the most recent period of turbulence in the United States, which helped to secure civil rights for women and black people. NARRATOR: Tony determines the growing numbers are the result of a rebound. ♪♪ With little food to eat, predators like jaguars face starvation and abandon the islands. That meant finding fragments of forests without any predators but with everything else still there. NARRATOR: With fewer and fewer predators, plant eaters ravenously devour the trees. All Rights Reserved. TERBORGH: Mary Power’s work in streams, Paine’s work in the intertidal, and Jim’s work in the ocean — They did seem to work in a wide range of aquatic environments.