(birds chirping) (water burbling)
-: Hey bear!
What are you guys doing out here in the field?
Me, I'm actually looking for something.
And no, it's not a bear, a bison,
or a wolf, or anything like that.
I'm actually looking for something small,
and well, now that you guys are here,
would you mind giving me a hand, taking a look?
Let's see.
No that's not it.
(audience laughs)
No.
There it is, do you see it?
Do you see the small beetle over there?
That's what I'm looking for, it's a tiger beetle.
And okay, I can already hear you thinking,
why in the world is she looking
for a silly beetle, when you're in Yellowstone,
and there's so much other cool stuff?
But, actually this beetle is really awesome.
This beetle is so awesome, because first of all,
it's living on top of a super volcano, okay?
That's really cool.
Second of all, it lives near thermal features,
with a pH of 2.2 like sulfuric acid,
temperatures of 65 celsius, which is about 149 Fahrenheit,
some are radioactive, and then we have toxic heavy
metals such as arsenic so, mind blown.
How are these guys alive?
It doesn't make any sense because everything else
should die under such conditions.
But for some reason,
I mean it's pretty obvious, they don't need our help.
They're doing just fine over here.
Bow-chicka-wow-wow.
Anyway, moving on.
How are these beetles alive?
To me that's my main question, I'm so intrigued by it.
So in 2006, my advisor went to Yellowstone National Park,
and he found these beetles.
Fast forward 10 years later, I come into play.
So I went to Yellowstone national park,
and I was looking for one,
10 years later, are these beetles still there?
Two, where exactly can we find them?
And then three, what kind of
environment are they living in?
So, I drove around the entire park,
stopped at every thermal feature that was accessible
to the public, and I looked for these Tiger beetles,
and wouldn't you know it,
I found them at five sites.
So, jumping up and down, I was really
excited because, yes!
Now I can start my doctoral research and then I look over
and I see all these tourists looking at me like,
what is wrong with this girl?
Made a fool out of myself,
and probably making a fool out of myself now,
but you know, if you're excited about science,
you don't really care.
So now that I had found the beetles, the next step came.
Doing observational work.
What time do they become available?
What time, available?
What time do they become active?
When do they become inactive?
What types of behaviors do they have?
And, what kind of environment
are they actually living in?
So a really cool way to recognize
these tiger beetles is they're predators.
And they run really fast, and they stop.
They run really fast and they stop.
Because they run so fast,
that their eyes can't catch up with them.
So they literally turn blind as they're running,
so they have to stop and look, where's my prey?
When you're out in the field, and you see something
run, stop, run, stop.
It's probably a tiger beetle.
After I got my first data about these tiger beetles,
it was time to put together a permit
so I could actually work in Yellowstone.
And if I can just grab this here.
It took a little bit less than a year
and 40 pages later, back and forward
with the park to actually get approved to work there.
So a lot of blood, sweat and tears went into this,
but needless to say, I was really happy
when I finally got approved.
And, other than the scientific content,
you know, what do I want to study,
why do I want to study it,
and how am I actually gonna do it?
Yellowstone was very adamant about
putting in a safety protocol, because you may have heard,
it's very dangerous in Yellowstone.
And deaths do actually happen.
So we have to make sure that we avoid that at all costs.
So part one, thermal features.
So Yellowstone is on top of a hot spot,
so that means that certain areas are
thermally active, others are not.
Just one earthquake can totally change it.
So an area that's thermally active one day,
can be not active the other day, and vice versa.
Because it's active some of the soil
could be eroded away underneath,
so soil that looks perfectly fine one day,
but you step on it, you fall through,
and you burn yourself, you could die, very dangerous.
So part of the protocol is this little guy,
and we have to test the soil, move around.
It looks stupid, but it's for your safety.
And make sure that the soil is very sturdy,
so that you can walk on it.
Another way to test this is an infrared gun.
So I look at the temperature of the soil,
and if there's one spot that all of a sudden
is really hot, avoid that area.
Just don't go there.
And there's other tricks that we know
where to go, and where it's safe.
And the second part is, wildlife encounters.
And I'm sure you've heard about grizzly bear
attacks and deaths, it happens.
So a couple of the things we do is,
we're always in groups of three.
It's been shown when you're in a bigger
group than three, hold that, two,
bears are likely to avoid you.
So we're always with three,
we carry this little guy, our bear spray.
To be honest I don't know if it would actually work,
I mean if it wants to kill you, I'm sure it will.
But you know, it's nice to have.
And then we always have one person on watch,
so when we're working, there's someone
else that's always looking around,
to see that there's no wildlife nearby.
And then lastly we have to put
something in about tourists.
Now tourists are not gonna kill us, but
you'd be surprised how many tourists think,
oh, these people are working over there,
so I can go there too!
Yeah, that's not the case.
We know where to go, how to get there,
and there are a lot of areas that you shouldn't go,
and they don't know that.
So part of our permit, and why I'm looking ridiculous,
is so that tourists know that we're official.
We have to put a permit on display,
so they know that we're actually working there for a reason.
And then we also need to have someone
on watch to make sure that these tourists
are not trying to avoid us.
Uh, avoid us, come towards us.
So we've had a couple of incidences where
tourists would bother us when we're trying
to work and recording data, because I'm observing
these beetles, and they'll ask questions
and well, I just lost all that data.
But, there was one instance where
one tourist actually saved our lives.
So I'm recording these beetles, I'm sitting down,
I'm looking at the beetles, so you'll hear me loudest.
But I want you to pay attention on what's
happening in the background, okay?
-: Running, stop running,
Stop running,
-: Stop.
-: Running.
-: Oh, shit thank you!
Hey bear!
-: Yeah, let's slowly back away guys.
Yeah, so one person in our group wasn't
paying attention and wasn't doing their job.
Because there was a bear right behind us.
So thank God the tourist saw and notified us.
But to be fair,
it wasn't an attacking grizzly bear.
There you go.
It was a little black bear cub.
I was really angry at one of my undergraduate
students for not following protocol, moving away
and he took this picture instead.
But obviously right now I'm
really happy he took that picture.
And then it came to the research.
So like I said we did observational work,
did pH, did soil samples,
water samples, to look at what the environment is,
what the toxins are.
And it turns out, regular tiger beetles,
when it gets too hot,
they will run into shade,
they will bury underground, or they'll do
something like stilts, where they lift
their body up off the ground to cool off.
Our beetles, they did not care,
they didn't do any of this behavior.
And, they're faced with a lot higher temperatures.
So what's going on there?
And then, toxicity was a thousand times
higher than the EPA threshold.
It would kill us, but it doesn't kill them.
So part of what I'm gonna be continuing to do,
is have a colony in the lab,
and actually see when they die.
So it sounds a bit, you know, questionable.
But you know, biology is use a couple, to save a lot.
So then lastly I want to end by saying that,
Yellowstone National Park was really
the first time I felt like a real scientist,
because rather than being told what to do,
I had to come up with my own questions,
I had to drive by myself in the park,
and look for these beetles,
had to put a permit together,
and then now I'm taking undergraduate students with me
in the park and I'm delegating and showing them,
the ropes of research.
So with that, I'd like to thank my advisor for giving this
opportunity for me to grow as a scientist,
and to improve myself everyday.
But now I gotta go find beetles, so bye!
(audience applauding)