Wetlands! Wetlands! Wetlands!

9:39Chuck Bryant:Lowenstein. You're sure it wasn't Bobby Jim? I think it was Lowenstein. Was it his, oh, his shrink's, his shrink girlfriend's name?

9:46Josh Clark:Yeah, Babs.

9:47Chuck Bryant:Okay. Yeah, I don't remember. I think it was Lowenstein.

9:50Josh Clark:All right. So anyway, tidal marshes, yes, Prince of Tides. They, obviously, it's because they're tidal, they're going to come in and out with the high and low tide. And like you said, they're generally saltwater. And the salt marshes are very nutrient-rich, and they do have a lot of diversity, but obviously only the kind of things that can tolerate the salt as far as plants and animals go.

10:13Chuck Bryant:Which is a pretty short list, really, because salt is not conducive to life. Instead, there are some plants that have figured out how to deal with salt, but most of the time when you're looking at salt marshes, you're looking, the plant life is basically grasses of some sort.

10:31Josh Clark:Right.

10:32Chuck Bryant:There's also freshwater tidal marshes, which they are either connected to the saltwater marsh, but they're far enough inland that the saltwater doesn't make its way in there. So it's a freshwater marsh, but it's still affected by the tides. And then I had no idea about this. And I used to vacation on Lake Erie, but apparently the Great Lakes are so big that they have tides themselves. You didn't know that? I had no idea. I even knew that. I'm a dum-dum when it comes to the Great Lakes. Well, Chuck, I think you got me beat big time. Well, in this case. Because I could know a million other things about the Great Lakes, and if you knew that one thing and I didn't, you had me beat.

11:13Josh Clark:Yeah, I knew that. And so that means that they do have those tidal marches. The Florida Everglades are another good example. And, boy, Florida just, there's a lot of different types of wetlands in Florida.

11:26Chuck Bryant:Well, there's a lot of coastline.

11:27Josh Clark:Yeah, a lot of coastline and a lot of interior. wetness.

11:32Chuck Bryant:Yeah, we have a lot of wetlands around our place in Florida for sure. And there's mangroves and all sorts of stuff that we'll talk about.

11:39Josh Clark:Well, we're at mangroves. I love those things.

11:42Chuck Bryant:So mangroves, I think they at least deserve a short stuff because they're one of the most amazing plants of all time. But they're a type of coastal wetland themselves, a mangrove forest. Or if you've never seen a mangrove forest, they're these kind of, they have a growth habit for the shrubbery on top of like the hair that Oompa Loompa has in the original Willy Wonka, the good one. And the trunks split out into these cool, like, long roots and legs that stick up out of the water. And they form this huge tangle, this riot of, like, shrub, woody shrub. And they do all sorts of amazing things to help the aquatic life and us humans as well up on land just by being present.

12:35Josh Clark:Yeah, they're really cool looking. and this is another good one, sort of like the origami that if you're able and you're sitting still to look up a lot of these things as you go because these mangrove forests, it looks like a shrub that's like, I really want to be a shrub, but I don't want to get wet. So I'm just going to dip my legs in a little bit.

12:56Chuck Bryant:Yeah, that's really great.

12:58Josh Clark:It's just very cool looking. And again, just the adaptability that these mangroves really want to live where they live, even though it's not very suited for them. And they've become suited for it. Right.

13:10Chuck Bryant:If you've been sleeping on mangroves, welcome to reality.

13:14Josh Clark:Well, that's a T-shirt if I ever heard one.

13:16Chuck Bryant:Yeah. I could use a little work, but there's the beginnings of one in there.

13:20Josh Clark:You also got your inland wetlands. These are not coastal. In this case, we're talking about swamps and marshes and bogs and fens, F-E-N. And marshes, a lot of these you'll find near rivers, near streams, lowland depressions, and they might periodically fill up depending on rain, what's going on, or different types of flooding that might happen. And they can be a few inches deep. They can be several feet deep.

13:48Chuck Bryant:Yeah, most of the non-tidal inland marshes are ephemeral wetlands. Yeah. So they're dry a lot of the year. They might fill up seasonally. They might fill up with the rain. They might fill up with the nearby river flooding. It's like my backyard. And they, oh, really? Is that right? Yeah, it doesn't drain well. I've got a drainage problem. Okay. To you, it's a problem. To nature, it's wonderful. Because we like things that drain really quickly and dry, and then we can walk on them, and the grass is fine. But there's a lot of, like, benefits to things that take their time. Like there's something called a vernal pool, which is a kind of non-tidal marsh, an ephemeral wetland.

14:31Chuck Bryant:And it's basically just like, say, a stretch of woods that's a little bit depressed there so that when it rains or a river floods, it fills with water. And because the underlying bedrock or clay is not very porous, it takes a while for that water to go through. But that water is also not going further downstream. So it prevents flooding from being as bad as it could because a lot of the water collects and stays there. And it also slowly recharges the groundwater. And because it does get dry, it can't sustain fish, which makes it a really great nursery for things like newts and salamanders and frogs, things that fish eat their eggs.

15:09Chuck Bryant:But since there's no fish, this is like a really great place for them to get a good foothold and a brand new life.

15:17Josh Clark:You've also got your prairie potholes. This is one you should definitely look up. These are usually in the upper Midwest of the United States, the Dakotas, Minnesota, maybe, Wisconsin. And these are where glaciers, ancient glaciers, left these big depressions in the landscape. And they fill up sometimes during rain, during the spring, during snow melt. And they're not small. Like I heard prairie pothole and I got a vision in my head. But if you look it up online, they're beautiful and just they're very large, though, and they're kind of interconnected. just these big round holes scattered through like a big open area full of water.

15:53Josh Clark:And these are great for migrating birds because that could be a stopover that they might not have had had those potholes not been there.

16:03Chuck Bryant:And when they're flying over the Dakotas, they say, look, I see Van Nostrand's house. Our buddy, Van Nostrand. And then there's also, we said that wetlands occur in all different kinds of climates. They also occur in the desert. There's something called Playa Lakes, which are these depressions that apparently no one has any idea exactly how they formed. It could have been from erosion. It could have been from an ancient sinkhole. But there are depressions that are deep enough that when the seasonal rains come, the water is held in there. And just like the prairie potholes, it's very useful for migratory birds to stop over at.

16:41Chuck Bryant:It really plays a huge role in this ecosystem where there's almost no water. And now all of a sudden there's water and it's in this nice little lake. So let's all go gather there and have a social hour. But responsibly, six feet apart. That's right.

16:55Josh Clark:Okay. I think we should take a break. And we will talk a little bit about inland swamps right after this.

17:13Josh Clark:What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. NLP, aka Neuro Linguistic Programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology. Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain.

17:49Josh Clark:It's about engineering consciousness. Mind Games is the story of NLP. its crazy cast of disciples, and the fake doctor who invented it at a New Age commune and sold it to guys in suits. He stood trial for murder and got acquitted. The biggest mind game of all? NLP might actually work. This is wild. Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

18:24Josh Clark:All right. So inland swamps, we promised to talk about that. These are, for my money, some of the coolest areas in the country because I think I talked about it at some point. But I took a very special, fun trip many, many years ago to the Okefenokee Swamp and did one of those canoe trips where you have to rent. You know, there's no place to stop in the Okefenokee Swamp. If you're like, I think I'll camp here, it's like in the water. So they had these camping pads built up, essentially just decks that are like six feet above the water. And you have to reserve those. They're not just wide open for anyone because there's nothing else out there.

19:05Josh Clark:So you have to reserve them for specific nights on these specific pathways or, you know, paddleways. And me and a couple of buddies did it one year, and we canoed from deck to deck. And it was amazing, like one of the coolest trips I've ever taken.

19:21Chuck Bryant:That is very cool. Was Ned Beatty with you?

19:24Josh Clark:No, but you do wake up surrounded by alligators. It's a little creepy. Yes, alligators are very creepy. Like you wake up on that pad and pee off the dock, and they're growling at you.

19:35Chuck Bryant:Yeah, and you do not want to get too close because they can move faster than you think.

19:39Josh Clark:Yeah, they can. It was a lot of fun, though. But not for the faint of heart because, you know, you don't realize until you get out there, A, how bad the sun is going to beat you up because there's no shade. And B, how tough it is to paddle all day long without like, you know, let me get out and stretch my legs. Right. I mean, there is no getting out. You just go and go and go. And by the time you finally reach that janky deck, it is like might as well be the Plaza Hotel, you know.

20:09Chuck Bryant:Oh, nice.

20:11Josh Clark:But what I'm talking about in the case of the Okefenokee, I thought it was a forested or a bottomland hardwood swamp. You'd think. From reading this, but apparently it's called a non-riverine swamp forest. Right. And that is a forested swamp that fills up from non-river sources, basically rain or groundwater.

20:30Chuck Bryant:Right, right. So what would make a forested swamp, like a bottomland hardwood swamp, is a proximity to a river that floods its banks or that is just so big it kind of spills over into some of the surrounding land. And that surrounding land is swamp. I want to look that up, though.

20:47Josh Clark:I'm not quite sure Dave's right.

20:48Chuck Bryant:Well, it's, okay. So it's either river fed or groundwater fed or precipitation fed. And if you're talking bottomland hardwood swamps or a river fed swamp, there's usually also a shrub swamp, which is a transition or buffer zone between the forested swamp and, you know, somebody's backyard, which is, it's just dominated by shrubs. But it's all the same thing. It's all freshwater swamp.

21:14Josh Clark:Yeah, I think, I bet you anything that Okefenokee has several different types of these would be my guess. Because there were full-on lakes that we paddled through. Yeah. So that would be my guess. And I also think if I had a country band, we would be the Bottomland Hardwood Swamp Rats.

21:30Chuck Bryant:Oh, that's a good one. Not bad, huh? That sounds like an all-star band, you know?

21:34Josh Clark:Oh, sure, yeah.

21:36Chuck Bryant:So another kind of wetland that you're going to find all over the place, especially in Europe, which when I think of bogs and fens, I think of Europe. Same here. plenty of them in the United States too. But bogs and fens are kind of their own thing. Bogs in particular are very unique as far as wetlands go because not only are they anaerobic, which by definition a wetland is anaerobic soil, they're like very little nutrient and very high acidity. I've heard like the kind of acid that is put out by the peat that's created in the bog has the same acidity roughly of vinegar. Oh, wow. So there's like a, yeah, it's really, really acidic stuff.

22:19Chuck Bryant:And yet some plants prefer it. Like you can grow cranberries and blueberries in a bog. Sure. You can preserve a body from the Iron Age forward in a bog. Did we ever cover that, the bog bodies?

22:32Josh Clark:I feel like we did. It might have been one of our video things on YouTube.

22:36Chuck Bryant:Maybe mummies. Because I think, if I remember correctly, our mummy episode covered more than just Egyptian mummies. They covered like Inca mummies. And the bog people. I'm sure we did. We saw some of them when we went to our UK trip. We got to visit some of those cats like firsthand, like right there in that glass. Right, you know, all you have to do is smash it with a hammer and it's yours. You got a bog person. Yeah. Or at least whatever you can grab, like a bog ear. Right, it just crumbles in your hand. But I was looking, I was like, okay, why are the bogs so great for preservation? Part of it, from what I understand, is that acidity, that the bodies are actually pickled.

23:18Chuck Bryant:But another part is the aerobic life is so devoid there. There's just anaerobic bacteria, and they don't decompose nearly as well as aerobic bacteria. So the decomposition doesn't set in, and the remains are pickled. So, like, you can preserve a body in a really great state.

23:38Josh Clark:Yeah.

23:38Chuck Bryant:For a very, like, Tolandban, his whiskers are still intact on his face.

23:44Josh Clark:Yeah.

23:44Chuck Bryant:Like, that was the level of preservation. And he was sacrificed into a bog, which is a very specific kind of wetland.

23:50Josh Clark:Yeah, and a fen, like I said, it's F-E-N. It's sort of like a bog in that it is a peat, peaty wetland. But they're a little bit different than bogs. The water supply doesn't come primarily from rain, and it comes from the ground. So it's going to be less acidic because I don't think we mentioned, I know it's partially because of the peat, but the acidity also comes from the fact that there's acid and rain that fills up these bogs.

24:20Chuck Bryant:Right.

24:21Josh Clark:But not the case in a fin.

24:23Chuck Bryant:No. No, because that groundwater is able to kind of dilute it a little bit. So they're much more nutrient-rich than a bog is. So they're going to have a much wider, diverse range of plants and animal life.

24:35Josh Clark:Yeah, and I love that this next section from Dave was called Other Fun Types of Wetlands. Yeah, mudflats. Yeah, you got your mudflat.

24:43Chuck Bryant:It's another good country band. My favorite are seeps. These are just gorgeous little pieces of nature, if you ask me. If you have a spring that comes up out of the ground, it spills over into the ground. So the surrounding ground is a wetland and it's called a seep. That's right. It's where gnomes, like, go and shower.

25:02Josh Clark:Yeah. And it's not, like you said, it's a spring, so it's not like a creek. No. It's actually coming up from the ground. You ever drink from a natural spring?

25:13Chuck Bryant:I did when I was a kid, and I think my mom fired the babysitter that, like, took us to drink from a spring. Yeah. She was like, what are you doing? It was either a spring or, like, a river in Ohio. No. Either way.

25:25Josh Clark:Two very different things. If it was a Cuyahoga River, then you're in bad shape.

25:29Chuck Bryant:It was on fire while we were drinking.

25:31Josh Clark:But, I mean, we have creeks. If you're listening, you've never been to Atlanta. Atlanta has creeks all over the place. Like all of the in-town neighborhoods just are riddled with creeks. They're just sort of out of view. But we have a creek, you know, 120 feet from our house. Sure. Which might have something to do with our drainage. Who knows? And it's spring-fed? No, it's just, you know, just a part of the Atlanta. Probably all comes from the Chattahoochee at some point.

25:58Chuck Bryant:Sure. So, Chuck, if that creek behind your house started meandering in a different direction and left a body of water where it originally flowed, it would be an oxbow lake. But if you were in Australia and you were calling it this proper aboriginal name, you'd call it a billabong. A billabong. Which I had no idea. What does that have to do with surfing?

26:19Josh Clark:Oh, I think they just probably co-opted the name and it became more associated with surf and surf gear than its true meaning. That doesn't seem right. No, let's take it back.

26:31Chuck Bryant:But that's what an Oxbow Lake is in Australia among the Aborigines. It is a billabong, which is great.

26:38Josh Clark:A billabong, that was some, like, along with OP, was one of the prime T-shirts to have when you were a kid in the 80s.

26:46Chuck Bryant:Oh, yeah. If you were cool. I had this amazing OP long-sleeve blue shirt that I wore with my parachute pants. Yeah, those were the best. My British Knights. I remember those long-sleeve OP shirts. Yeah, they're good. Gorgeous. So, Chuck, one of the things we've been talking about is the kind of the characteristics that make a wetland a wetland. And it's not just the fact that the soil table or the ground is either flooded or almost completely flooded up to the surface level with water. That's not the entirety of it. Like different wetlands are characterized by how that water gets to it. Like we said, you know, some kinds of swamps are fed by groundwater.

27:30Chuck Bryant:Others are fed by precipitation. Some are tidal. So there's a whole group of scientists out there that are called wetland hydrologists. And what they study is how that water gets into a wetland to create a wetland, what happens to it while it's there, and then where it goes, and how all these things kind of interact to form this very unique ecosystem.

27:52Josh Clark:Yeah, and we talked early on about the kind of soil, hydric soil, is saturated with water. And so if it's saturated with water, it's not going to have nearly as much oxygen. And usually oxygen and soil are in these little tiny air pockets.

28:08Chuck Bryant:Remember we talked about it in our soil episode.

28:10Josh Clark:Yeah, exactly. And in the case of a wetland, then those air pockets are going to be filled with water or just collapsed altogether. And then you've got your anaerobic condition. But if you're a plant, you need CO2 and oxygen. and you'll get a little bit of that from photosynthesis in the leaves, but the roots are like, what about me down here? I need oxygen too. And if it was an aerobic soil, like we talked about in the soil podcast, the roots can get it from those air pockets. But in wetlands, they have to really, really adapt to become hydrophytic or water-loving plants in some pretty amazing ways.

28:47Chuck Bryant:So I just have to say that this is like a lifelong mystery solved and solved in like the simplest way possible. Like it's anaerobic because there's water there instead of air. The air can't be in there because the water's there. Ipso facto anaerobic. I just think that's brilliantly simple. Yeah. Did you get that intuitively? Because I never did. I always thought it was something mysterious. Like we're talking about a whole different type of soil or something else. No, I think I got it. Okay. Well, I've been around for 44 years and wondered it until just now. Well, I'm 49, so I might have learned that in the last five years.

29:24Chuck Bryant:So the plants that we're talking about, like you said, the roots still need oxygen. So they've said, okay, well, I really like it here. I like this wetland area. This is a pretty amazing place to live. I'm going to change so that I can stay here. And some of the ways that plants have adapted, well, one good example is a cattail, right? Cattails are pretty much synonymous with marshlands. Yeah, they're beautiful. They're that long, thin stem with like a big, fat thing on top, like a hot dog that's ready to be roasted on the fire.

29:56Josh Clark:Yeah, I grew up with those. I don't know if it was a southern thing, but they can be decorative items in the home. And I grew up, I feel like, with a lot of cattails in vases and stuff.

30:06Chuck Bryant:Okay, so that and wasps' nests?

30:10Josh Clark:Yeah, hornet's nests, yeah.

30:12Chuck Bryant:So cattails have this thing called erinichima. No, I've got it. Erinichima. Erinichima. Erinichima. I think I got it. Anyway, they're like these channels that basically direct air from the leaves and the stem and every other part of the cattail down to the roots. It says, here you go, roots. Here's some oxygen fresh from the leaf. Yeah. So that cattail can have as much roots as it wants down in this anaerobic soil. It doesn't matter because it's getting its oxygen from the air through the leaves.

30:49Josh Clark:Yeah. One of my favorites is the speckled alder. You just look up a picture of that, and they have these enlarged pores called lenticels, and they allow for the passage of oxygen directly into that wood. And if you look up a picture and you see those, you go, oh, that's what those are. That's what those are for. They look like someone took a knife, and they're just tiny little horizontal slits all up and down the alder. I got you. And they're breathing, basically.

31:17Chuck Bryant:Yeah. That's creepy as heck, but it's really neat, too. Little mouths, little slitty mouths. So the grasses that we talked about growing in salt marshes, just like an iguana sneezes out excess salts as part of digestion, things like cord grass that grow in these salt marshes, they actually excrete salts through their leaves. So they can sit there and intake all the nutrients they need from this selenic environment and still not get overloaded with salt. It's just pretty amazing that they can do that.

31:52Josh Clark:Yeah, and then to me, maybe the most amazing, and this is where the mangroves kind of come back in, although the mangroves apparently utilize all these to stick around. But the bald cypress, they grow in those forested swamps where there's always water. and they are deciduous conifers and they grow this root structure that they call a knee. It's a pneumatophore, but like a knee on your leg is how it's spelled. And they just sit above the waterline and take in oxygen. And that's what those, I guess, mangroves, mangroves. There's a Soul Train joke in there somewhere. It struck me as like a terrible jam band's name.

32:29Josh Clark:The mangroves. Yeah. God, you're right. Yeah. That play somewhere in Florida probably. Probably. But the mangrove uses, like I said, a lot of these tricks. And I think certainly when you see those roots, they're using those knees.

32:45Chuck Bryant:Yeah, which is basically it's a way to get oxygen from the surrounding air down to the roots. The mangroves do it. The bald cypresses do it. Mangroves have all those adaptations, different species. They can do things like excrete salt. They can draw oxygen in from the environment. They have channels where they can pump oxygen from one part of the plant to the other. The one that gets me, though, I'm just fascinated by bogs. So we said that it's an acidic, anaerobic, nutrient-depleted environment, and yet there's still plants that live there. And one of those plants, or one kind of plant, is carnivorous plants.

33:24Chuck Bryant:They get their nutrients not from, like, the soil, but from eating bugs.

33:27Josh Clark:Yeah, those are cool.

33:28Chuck Bryant:So they can just live there, like a pitcher plant or a Venus flytrap or something like that. that.

33:33Josh Clark:Yeah, those are nature.

33:35Chuck Bryant:Wasn't Venus Flytrap one of the DJs on WKRP? That's a great DJ name.

33:40Josh Clark:Yeah, he was a great DJ. All right, so let's take our final break and we'll talk about why wetlands are important and what you can do to help them do their thing right after this.

34:01Josh Clark:What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. NLP, aka Neuro Linguistic Programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology. Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain.

34:37Josh Clark:It's about engineering consciousness. Mind Games is the story of NLP. its crazy cast of disciples, and the fake doctor who invented it at a New Age commune and sold it to guys in suits. He stood trial for murder and got acquitted. The biggest mind game of all? NLP might actually work. This is wild. Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

35:13Chuck Bryant:Okay, Chuck, so just the fact that wetlands are as amazing as they are means that they should be saved. But there's also like a lot of benefits that we figured out. Like you said, the 50s to the 70s were a really rough time for wetlands in the United States because we were filling them in for cropland, for real estate. And even previous to that, we filled in a lot of marshland in the U.S. and built cities over them. Like, D.C. was built largely on marshland. The fact that mosquitoes tend to live in wetland areas kind of justified filling in a lot of the wetlands because we were dealing with malaria at the time.

35:54Chuck Bryant:So it made a lot of sense. Get rid of the mosquitoes' habitat, you get rid of the mosquitoes. And it worked, but we've paid a heavy price for it because over time we've realized these wetlands provide some really important benefits to the local ecosystems and, in turn, humans who live around them.

36:10Josh Clark:Yeah, I mean, helping flood conditions is a big one. They are big, big natural sponges when it comes down to it. And flooding would be way, way worse. And we still have floods, obviously, but it'd be way worse if we didn't have wetlands. They'd be far more destructive if they weren't around to soak in that excess water and then kind of slowly trickle it to the water table below. And the same is obviously true of hurricanes and big storm surges. The wetlands basically operate as big storage tanks for water.

36:42Chuck Bryant:Yeah, I saw somewhere, I can't find it now, but like, oh, there it is. An acre of wetlands can hold up to about a million and a half gallons of water. Yeah. Just one acre. So you've got to think, like, that water's staying put there, and it's not flooding some human habitation instead, which is a good reason to keep wetlands around just for that buffer area or to slow down the surge, like you were saying. I also saw that we found out the same thing goes for beaver dams that they build. They're like a temporary artificial wetland, and they provide a lot of the same functions that natural or other, I guess, naturally occurring or growing wetlands provide too.

37:22Chuck Bryant:And I think we should do a whole episode on beavers, okay?

37:25Josh Clark:Oh, totally. I'm way into beavers.

37:27Chuck Bryant:So water filtration is another. I'm getting you back for the Oregon. anything. So water filtration is another big service that wetlands provide. I don't remember where we talked about this, but we talked about it recently where the water, oh, I think it was water treatment plants. The water's brought in and it's got all the sediment and gunk and muck and it's cloudy and turbid. And then it slows down. They slow it down, like running it through some grates or whatever. And as it slows down, the sediment that is making the water turbid and polluted and everything has a chance to settle the bottom.

38:08Chuck Bryant:Well, wetlands provide that same function naturally. So when you have a bunch of like polluted water basically come through there, it slows down when it hits all those mangrove roots or tree trunks or whatever it is. And it gives it a chance for that sediment to fall to the bottom. It gets sucked up by the tree roots and stored in the trees. Or the microbial life can break a lot of that stuff down too. And there's definitely a limit to where you can very easily overload the wetlands' ability to filter the water. But if you gave it like a manageable supply, that is a major service that it does, is it cleans our water.

38:49Chuck Bryant:They call wetlands the kidneys of the earth.

38:52Josh Clark:Yeah. And they've even done studies where they tried to, I guess, sort of monetize what an area of wetland might do if it were a treatment plant. And there's one in South Carolina called the Congaree Bottomland Hardwood Swamp. These are just all country bands.

39:09Chuck Bryant:For sure.

39:10Josh Clark:They said that that is basically equivalent to about a five million dollar water treatment plant just sitting there being a wetland doing its thing. Thank you, nature. Pretty amazing.

39:22Chuck Bryant:I saw that beavers provide the dams that they build that end up being temporary wetlands. Somebody estimated it's worth about a hundred grand if a human tried to build an artificial one, which we do. If you just let beavers do their thing, they will do the same thing for free. That's right.

39:43Josh Clark:You don't have to pay them a hundred grand. Nope.

39:46Chuck Bryant:There's also, because there's so much going on in a wetland, there's so much life, they kind of form like these metropolises for all sorts of different types of animals on all the way up the food chain, including plants, animals, microbial life, worms, fish, larger predators like dolphins and alligators. And all of them are sitting there providing food for us. If you like gator tail, buddy, you better preserve those wetlands.

40:19Josh Clark:Yeah. Dave points out here that the commercial fishing industry in the U.S., 75 % of the fish and shellfish harvested here had fish that at least had a temporary home in the wetlands. And that recreationally, if you're a recreational fish person, fisher person, then 90 % of the U.S. fish catch is at least the breeding ground lies in the wetlands for those fish.

40:46Chuck Bryant:And the same thing goes for birds, too. They're enormously important habitats for birds. some permanent but also migratory too because if you're flying along and you're a bird and you are a water bird and you need a place to land not only are you looking for water but you might really enjoy a swamp because it offers protection from predators it offers a port in the storm it's just an all around valuable thing for birds too

41:11Josh Clark:yeah I mean imagine flying from Canada to Texas and you're going over Oklahoma and you're a little tired You look down and you see one of those, which ones were those, the prairie plias? No, the prairie potholes. Prairie potholes?

41:30Chuck Bryant:Yeah.

41:30Josh Clark:Oh, man.

41:31Chuck Bryant:What a sight. Aren't you describing a scene in Jonathan Livingston Segal? Probably so.

41:39Josh Clark:So the point is we need to take care of our wetlands because they are a threatened, diverse, very useful place all over the world, especially here in the United States. And if they are threatened and if things happen, there are going to be all kinds of bad things, you know, vegetative damage, the plant life just being maybe wiped out altogether.

42:05Chuck Bryant:Storm surges being way worse, flooding being way worse. It especially helps to see the value in them if you consider them a buffer zone between us and the hardest ravages of nature.

42:19Josh Clark:Yeah, and like you mentioned, pollution, there is a limit. But they do absorb and mitigate levels of water pollution. And they just can't take too much of us, you know?

42:29Chuck Bryant:Right, exactly. Which, man, if there's anything that characterizes humans in the 20th and 21st centuries, it's too much of us.

42:37Josh Clark:Yeah.

42:38Chuck Bryant:You know what I mean?

42:39Josh Clark:What can we do, though? Besides donating to wetland projects, we can definitely do that.

42:44Chuck Bryant:You can definitely do that. There's some good ones out there. I believe Ducks Unlimited is one of them. The Wetlands Initiative, Natural Resources Defense Council, Wetlands International. But apparently in the United States, something like 75 % of wetlands are on privately owned property. And in the United States, we have, I mean, private property is one of like the fundamental tenets of American society. So if you say, I want to fill in this wetland and kill off these beavers, you're allowed to do that. Whether that's a good idea and whether that's going to affect other people, that's a different story.

43:22Chuck Bryant:So if you own private property with a wetland on it and you're doing just fine with that wetland, leave the wetland alone. It's very important.

43:31Josh Clark:Yeah, I guess this is where it gets a little tricky in definitions because in plenty of places there are restrictions on building near water like this. Sure. I guess I just don't know. Like you can't build in a flood zone. You can't. I mean it depends on where you are, but in Atlanta you can't. And then with all these creeks and streams in Atlanta, they have what's called stream buffers.

43:56Chuck Bryant:Sure.

43:57Josh Clark:50 foot, 75 foot, 100 foot, and I think 25 is the lowest. And for these, you have to get variances to do anything, which your neighborhood has to approve. And I talked to a guy that apparently anything under 75 feet is pretty tricky to get approved. So I don't know if they're wetlands or not, but there are restrictions on stuff like that.

44:18Chuck Bryant:Okay, so that brings up the next point of what you and I and everybody else can do, which is vote for people to local elected office who part of their platform is protecting wetlands. Yeah. Like all of those buffer zones, all those variances and all those prohibitions, those came from Atlanta city councils over the years that decided that wetlands needed protecting. You don't find those everywhere. But once they get put in place, they usually don't get repealed very easily. So if you make preserving wetlands part of like what you're voting for, that would have an impact for sure. And whatever you're voting for, just vote.

44:56Chuck Bryant:Okay? Vote. Especially locally.

44:58Josh Clark:I know everyone, the presidential elections are always the big sexy votes, but local politics matters even more almost sometimes.

45:07Chuck Bryant:Yeah, I vote for all of it. Take an interest in your society. Yeah. Okay? Well, you got anything else about wetlands? Nope. I don't either. This is a good one. I'm pretty happy with it. And since I said that, everybody, it's time for Listener Mail.

45:26Josh Clark:Yeah, I'm going to call this the first SY5K. Oh, yeah. Did you see these?

45:32Chuck Bryant:Yes, man. Congratulations to everybody who took part.

45:35Josh Clark:Yeah, so what happened was some Stuff You Should Know listeners got together and put together a 5K, Stuff You Should Know 5K. And we got periodic updates from Aaron Huey Mizell, or Mizell, not sure how you pronounce it. I'm going with Mizell. But this is the final email about how it went. Hey, guys, want to let you know that the SY5K is over. It was so nice to look at everyone's pictures and hear what episodes of stuff you should know they listened to. Because that was the idea. I imagine some people might have fudged that and listened to Marc Maron or whatever. That's not like they're disqualified.

46:13Josh Clark:I think a lot of us have suffered from a lack of human connection at this time. And the silly little virtual event gave us something to bond over. I don't think I would have tried this with any other group of people. The Stuff You Should Know Army is wonderful and it speaks volumes in regard to you guys. The tone that you set in your podcast, interesting and funny, carries over into your fan base and has created a little lovely corner of the Internet. I totally agree, Aaron. And the same can be said of the Movie Crush page. Very, very good people. Not snipey or rude and going after each other on Facebook, which is kind of what Facebook seems to be all about.

46:47Chuck Bryant:Oh, yeah. It's like a garden paradise over there on the SYSK Army page.

46:53Josh Clark:Yeah, it's great. Now, I'm not suggesting that you made these people wonderful, but the average Stuff You Should Know Army member is like that. Interesting, funny, and willing to participate in a virtual 5K with a complete stranger. And they love Stroop waffles. I even bought 13 Stuff You Should Know stickers to send out to some people as prizes. It's just a little thing, but everyone that I've been in touch with has been exceedingly kind. This is what we need right now, these small human connections. A podcast to listen to and laugh with. A walk, run, bear chase to do virtually with a bunch of near strangers.

47:24Josh Clark:And a Stuff You Should Know sticker to put on your fridge or on your laptop. If you get a chance, go to the event page and scroll through some of the posts. They're delightful. Like the woman who did our 5K at three months postpartum and crushed it. Nice. Or the dad who pushed his adorable daughter in her stroller on the 5K while listening to his favorite episode, which was Spam. We had first-timers. That was a good one. Yeah, it was a good one. We had first-timers, people recovering from injury, runners and walkers, so many smiles and stuff you should know t-shirts. Sign off for now. I'm just writing to tell you it was a success.

47:52Josh Clark:We might even do it again with love. And that is, again, from Aaron Huey Mizell. And that is great. Aaron, thank you for doing this. And that really does speak to the quality of our listeners in every single way.

48:06Chuck Bryant:Indubitably. Yeah, thanks a lot, Aaron. It's good to hear from you. And to everybody who participated in the SY5K, you are the champions, our friends.

48:18Josh Clark:Even if you listen to Marc Maron.

48:22Chuck Bryant:But maybe not what Chuck just said. That's it. Okay, well, if you want to get in touch with us like Aaron did and do something interesting, we want to hear about it. You can write to us in an email to stuffpodcast at iheartradio.com.

48:45Josh Clark:Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

49:00Josh Clark:What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. Mind Games, a new podcast exploring NLP, a.k.a. neurolinguistic programming. Is it a self-help miracle, a shady hypnosis scam, or both? Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

49:40Josh Clark:This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.