MAN: You don't suspect any problem
in such a beautiful environment.
WOMAN: If it affects any animal, it can affect us.
MAN: We're facing a situation
that may be an emergency.
MAN 2: Something is wrong in our water.
MAN 3: Something's happening in that water.
WOMAN: How much time do we have?
I think we really have to speed up the rate
at which we're conducting these investigations.
EDWARD NORTON: It's like something out of science fiction.
Unsettling transformations are sweeping across the planet.
And clue by clue,
investigators are assembling a new picture of Earth.
They suspect we've entered a time of faster global change
than any human being has ever witnessed.
Where are we headed?
What can we do to alter the course?
In this confusing era, only one thing is certain:
These are Strange Days on Planet Earth.
Captioning sponsored by THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION
Sometimes clues come from the strangest sources.
Animals may be trying to tell us something.
21st century signals from ancient creatures.
And it's happening all around the planet.
Researchers are scrutinizing a handful of alarming signs:
a frog with scrambled organs, a ravenous horde of starfish,
a species of whale with an aberrant rate of illness.
On its own, each of these events is disturbing.
But what if the problems aren't isolated?
What if changes that appear unconnected
are all actually linked beneath the surface?
Considered together, this growing chorus of animals
might be trying to tell us something bigger--
something about the health of our planet.
To decode the message,
researchers from a gamut of specialties
are combining forces to define new areas of science.
And our investigation of this pioneering work
begins with a simple observation.
All the animals examined in this episode live in the water.
So, that's our first clue:
Follow the water.
MAN: God, if we had a helicopter here.
I bet there's little pools between all of these hills.
Oh, what's this?
All right.
Let's go check it out.
Looks like it could be good.
NORTON: It's an out-of- the-way place.
But biologist Tyrone Hayes believes this marsh
may contain clues about dangers
that many of us could be facing.
Hayes is searching for one particular creature
he thinks will tell him about the health of the water.
And he is just one member of a research army.
(speaking French)
Investigators around the world are uncovering signs of trouble
in rivers and in water all the way down to the sea.
Some of the more disturbing problems
can't be seen directly.
But evidence is turning up
practically everywhere.
Right in front of us, John.
We've spent the last decades
trying to clean up rivers
and control what pours off our shores.
In many places, water appears cleaner than it has
in generations.
Have we been fooling ourselves?
A good place to pick up the trail of water
is in the middle of continents, in marshes and ponds.
They're right along here.
It's here that Tyrone Hayes is on a frog hunt.
He's looking for the northern leopard frog--
an animal whose numbers are plummeting in some places.
I saw one.
Right here. Right there.
Put your net on the other side of where I am.
ay. Ok
HAYES: As a scientist and as a citizen,
I care about the frog in part because the frog tells me
something about the environment.
I realize it might be difficult to get everybody to care...
to get people to understand
that the frog is telling you something about you.
WOMAN: There, there, there!
Go, go, go, go!
NORTON: The leopard frog is not the only such animal in trouble.
At least 20 frog species have vanished worldwide.
And many surviving populations are crashing.
Today's decline is puzzling.
Frogs have flourished
for about 200 million years.
But now some of these escape artists
may be meeting their match.
At first glance, the leopard frogs look healthy,
but Hayes has discovered anomalies
inside their reproductive organs.
Some male leopard frogs have eggs
growing inside their testes.
They are hermaphrodites.
The frog spends all of his important
and critical developmental stages in water,
and then it transforms into this organism
that crawls out into the air.
Stop, stop, and let it stop.
Okay, I think he's under here.
But it's basically an aquatic organism.
We can always let it go, in case we miscounted.
Come here.
NORTON: The water, Hayes believes,
is where he must look
to find out what is causing the deformities.
On this quest, Hayes is following
a surprising lead.
U.S. farms produce
about one trillion ears of corn every year.
This bounty means more food for more people.
But it can't be achieved
without manmade chemicals.
We know such substances
often have unintended consequences,
but the details can still surprise us.
Hayes suspects that one of the most popular weed killers
used on cornfields, Atrazine,
may be what's harming his frogs.
Atrazine, which is usually sprayed before planting,
doesn't stay inside corn,
but rain and wind can spread this chemical...
into frog territory.
st. WOMAN: Okay, maybe you do n't have to do that fa
s. HAYES: Guys, you gu ys are big wimp
Where does the roa d go from here?
Oh...
Fork in the road-- should we take it? Ah!
NORTON: Hayes first came to the case when he was hired
on an animal safety study for Atrazine's manufacturer.
Ain't no water.
Hayes parted ways with that project
and now he continues his research with other funding.
Did we see any frogs?
This means summers on the road,
because leopard frogs
are spread over much
of the northern half of the continent.
If we could get something right here where the corn starts,
that would be really key.
What we're trying to do is
big in the sense that, you know,
some people might pull out a plot
and say, "This is my field site,"
or maybe some people would pull out, you know,
a couple square acres and say, "This is my field site."
I pull out a map of the U.S.
and say, "This is my field site."
Let's go there.
So we take 9 all the way up to 6.
Wait, let me write it down.
On your Palm Pilot? Yep.
(train horn blaring)
NORTON: Hayes has been uncovering a pattern.
The deformed frogs he's collecting
come from waters containing Atrazine.
Frogs from clean water tend to be healthy.
No.
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
Is Atrazine really the cause of the problems?
To answer this question,
Hayes has been running experiments.
He raises two groups of just-hatched frogs
in his laboratory
at the University of California, Berkeley.
The groups are the same, except one has Atrazine in its water.
Male, 35.
WOMAN: Male, 35.
Male. Male.
The answers come when Hayes and his students
dissect the frogs
and prepare cross sections of the reproductive organs.
Hayes sees a clear result.
Most of the frogs raised in pure water are healthy,
but many of the male frogs raised in atrazine
are hermaphrodites.
HAYES: I was blown away.
I went through everything again,
and these hermaphrodites, in every case,
were always atrazine-treated.
NORTON: Hayes's work on developing frogs is confirming
that atrazine can cause the male hormone testosterone
to turn into the female hormone estrogen.
This extra estrogen can cause males to grow eggs
and even develop ovaries.
Hayes fears that these abnormalities may pose a threat
to the future of this species.
Finding a new potential factor
in the decline of leopard frogs is a breakthrough,
but the more important discovery
may be about chemical dosages in general.
HAYES: With atrazine, though, we're talking about
effects of .1 micrograms per liter.
That's the weight of 1/1,000th of a grain of salt
that causes this hermaphroditism.
It's unbelievable, the doses that we're looking at--
.1 part per billion.
NORTON: The frogs' sensitivity was remarkable,
but Hayes went on to discover a bizarre twist.
While tiny doses caused deformities,
larger doses werelessharmful.
Big amounts may trigger the body's defenses,
while small doses can sneak in under the radar.
Hayes's results raise doubts about chemical safety laws
and regulations, which often assume
that a bigger dose is always worse.
It's no surprise, then, that Hayes triggered debate
when he presented his work to a federal panel.
HAYES: First of all, I wanted
to thank you for the opportunity
for our team to address the panel today...
NORTON: Atrazine's manufacturer strongly disputed
Hayes's findings.
Their scientists came up with different results
using different methods.
MAN: At this point in time, a risk assessment
is not feasible or possible.
NORTON: The Environmental Protection Agency
found Hayes's work inconclusive and recommended further study.
But meanwhile, a growing body
of independent scientific evidence
is supporting Hayes's conclusions
that atrazine can harm animals.
(phone dialing)
And Hayes is finding additional allies.
MAN: We have some college students here,
and they're doing water samples throughout the area,
and they were asking me if it would be all right
to go up there and just take some water samples.
If you get them cowboys mad, ugh.
Okay, thank you.
WOMAN: What's the verdict?
You're-you're okay. Thank you very much, Bob.
ay. You have a wonderful d
NORTON: People in farm communities
are starting to offer help.
HAYES: We got everybody's blessing,
I think, so...
Nobody's gonna bother you out there, so...
Oh, thanks very much.
HAYES: So, if we can tell you that something that you're spraying
on your crop runs off into the water
and causes your frogs to develop abnormally,
then I think that's not just a concern
for the animals that are in that pond,
but also for, you know, the people
that are living in that environment.
That water is the same water that we're drinking.
You can't live without water,
and you can't grow food without water.
And if what you're putting in the food
is ruining the water, then I think we've got think
a little bit about that cycle.
Oh, there's one right there.
Oh, there's another. Okay.
Right here. I see it.
NORTON: Hayes is finding problems in America's marshes.
But consider this: Water doesn't stay put.
From marshes,
water works its way down into rivers, collecting
synthetic chemicals from an ever increasing area of land.
No one's exactly sure what's in the water now.
We've formulated over 75,000 compounds
and put them into useful products--
medicines, pesticides, household goods--
but with so many substances in the water,
the possible combinations are endless.
The question, then, is, what happens when living things
take in not just one chemical, but many?
The scary thing is that
we've just started asking that question.
One man's quest to discover the consequences
of chemical cocktails begins here.
(man speaking French)
This river looks pristine...
a wilderness far from the nearest city.
But biologist Robert Michaud
is learning that remoteness is no guarantee of purity.
(man speaking French)
(speaking French)
MICHAUD: The St. Lawrence carry...
essentially, all the mistakes we've done
over the last decades.
All the contaminant we have been dumping,
and we are still dumping, from the large city
along the St. Lawrence, are carried down this water.
NORTON: Rural areas also feed the St. Lawrence.
Synthetic chemicals in the region's marshes
end up here.
(speaking French)
Michaud has spent two decades
trying to understand the impact of chemicals
on some of the river's most mysterious creatures.
Hidden in this black water
is a small population of white whales.
Ta-dah!
Wow.
Belugas.
(Michaud speaking French)
(whales singing)
The whales are known as the "canaries of the sea"
because of their songs.
(whales continue singing)
Michaud and his colleagues believe that each pod
has its own dialect, its own melodies.
(singing continues)
In the Arctic,
a legend tells of the time
when we understood the whales' songs.
(singing continues)
We could speak to them,
and they could speak to us.
But over time,
this knowledge was lost.
Michaud is now trying to reopen the dialogue.
(men speaking French)
(shutter clicks)
MICHAUD: The story of tracking whales
is essentially a story of being patient
to gather all these little...
bits and pieces of information that you need to put together
to have somehow an image of their lives.
(Michaud speaking French)
MICHAUD: She's a hot mama.
All information that we've collected
suggests that these animals are in trouble.
(speaking French)
NORTON: Belugas here have one of the highest cancer rates
of any wild animal studied.
To gather clues about their health,
Michaud and colleagues use a dart gun
to collect tissue samples.
(speaking French)
(gunshot)
Hey-hey! Yes!
(speaking French)
Dozens of chemicals have been discovered
in the bodies of the St. Lawrence belugas.
Some dead belugas are so full of toxins
that they technically qualify as hazardous waste.
MICHAUD: We know they are exposed
to an extraordinary mixture of contaminant.
But we still don't know
what are the exact impact of contaminant
on these animals.
(whale singing)
NORTON: Michaud's hunch is that chemical mixtures
may be causing the cancers.
But investigating the effects of chemical combinations
takes a special set of skills...
and well-trained,
healthy belugas.
She's such a good whale.
Yeah, she is a very good whale.
Pathologist Sylvain DeGuise's research has the potential
to change how we decide what's safe,
not just for whales but for people as well.
Nice job.
Yes, yes.
And that's it.
All right, into the lab.
DeGUISE: We're doing something that is very nontraditional.
We're shaking the boundaries
of what people are comfortable with.
For the last 30 years, we've been looking
at chemicals individually to decide if they're toxic or not,
and then assume that that's the answer.
Now what we're doing is,
we're looking at chemicals when you mix them together,
and we found really, really interesting things.
NORTON: DeGuise tests the belugas' sensitivity
to chemical cocktails
by looking at the response of their immune cells--
cells that fight infections and help fend off cancer.
He doses these cells with combinations
of chemicals often found in belugas.
DeGuise now adds bacteria to the chemically treated cells.
Immune cells that are healthy
will multiply and engulf the bacteria.
But if the immune cells
have been harmed by chemicals,
their reproduction will drop dramatically.
DeGUISE: We found that
if two chemicals individually are not toxic,
when you mix them, they may become toxic.
They may not be safe anymore.
We're kind of shaking
what we've accepted for 30 years.
NORTON: Traditionally, chemical effects have been studied one by one.
But DeGuise is convinced
that this approach has caused us
to overlook dangerous mixtures.
To make matters worse,
thousands of synthetic chemicals in the world
mean a staggering number of combinations.
DeGuise and his colleagues have found
that in a whale's body,
the consequence of one of these pairs
may be an increased risk of intestinal cancer.
DeGuise's discoveries call into question
how we assess chemical safety.
He believes that studying combinations
is now the task.
If so, we more or less
have to start from scratch.
DeGUISE: If we decided to test
80,000 chemicals
and then all the possible combinations of those,
that would be practically impossible.
It's very stressful
to discover problems that are bigger than your answers.
Then again,
I'd rather raise questions than be comfortable in silence.
(whale singing)
NORTON: The barriers that separate us from wildlife
are thinner than many of us believe.
The water that animals rely on
is part of a single, interconnected system,
the same network that provides ourdrinking water.
What are chemical cocktails doing tous?
Do our homes protect us from chemical dangers?
What's getting inside?
And through which pathways?
Epidemiologist Shanna Swan has spent most of her career
investigating the effects of chemicals found in tap water.
SWAN: Unraveling the effects of the myriad of chemicals
to which we are exposed every day
is an extremely difficult task.
But I think that our default assumption,
the thing we should assume
until it's disproven, is that if it affects... any animal,
it will affect us.
That's what my baseline assumption is.
We're not exempt.
We're not privileged.
NORTON: Swan and her team
have already found evidence of our vulnerability.
They discovered high miscarriage rates
in women who drank tap water
with elevated levels of chlorine byproducts.
SWAN: The result of that study was that the regulatory agencies
have lowered the permissible levels
of those chlorination byproducts.
NORTON: Swan is now turning her attention
to the reproductive health of men.
In one groundbreaking study, Swan compared men's semen
from fertility clinics in four cities:
New York, Minneapolis,
Los Angeles and Columbia, Missouri.
By counting the number of active sperm,
Swan and her team found one place stood out.
It wasn't the result she was expecting.
Up front, I would have guessed that semen quality
in New York and Minneapolis and Los Angles
would be poorer than the great...
(laughs): rural... Midwest,
uh, where things seem cleaner.
So we were very, very surprised with our results.
What we found was that semen quality
among men in Missouri was extremely low.
So, the next step in this detective story
was to ask why.
So I looked for factors that might explain
the difference between a big city
and this rural center that we were located in.
NORTON: Does this region have heavy industry?
Swan found it had less
than the other places in her study.
Was it air pollution?
The area had the least smog of all of her sites.
She was looking for something the region had in abundance
that the others in her study didn't.
It was all around her.
Farm chemicals.
If these chemicals were the cause,
Swan should be able to see a sperm quality difference
between men with different exposures.
So, Swan ran a second study.
All of the men seemed fit.
But in one group, those who had been exposed
to a combination of farm chemicals
had a higher risk of having unhealthy sperm--
higher than could be explained by adding up
the individual risks of each chemical on its own.
Although controversial,
Swan's findings add to a growing body of evidence
linking chemical cocktails with men's reproductive health.
For Swan, the next mystery was how these men were exposed.
(tires screeching, engine revving)
We can inhale chemicals, ingest them
or absorb them through our skin.
But most of the men didn't work with chemicals directly.
So what was going on?
Swan realized that all the men shared one thing:
tap water.
Furthermore, Swan knew that many water treatment plants
were not designed to remove farm chemicals.
So, it was possible that men in Missouri
were getting these toxins right in their own kitchens.
A cornucopia of chemicals rs our homes,
and not only through tap water.
Hundreds, if not thousands,
of manmade chemicals are found in the food we eat...
...in our carpets, fabrics and detergents...
...in our cosmetics.
Through our plumbing,
these compounds flow out into the world.
And that's where they can affect lives beyond our own.
SWAN: We just have to increase our awareness
that everything we do matters and be a little more mindful
about what we're introducing into our environments,
into our houses and into our bodies.
NORTON: Swan knows that some chemicals
are held in the body for a lifetime,
but many others are eliminated naturally
once we stop taking them in.
So, reducing the number and amounts of toxins we encounter
could help us.
But until the testing and filtering of tap water
for chemicals becomes widespread,
how can we reduce the toxic burden of the next generation?
Swan and researchers like her believe
the best approach may be to keep the chemicals
from entering the water in the first place.
Given what they've shown us
about the dangers in the water...
...many researchers suspect that plants and animals
may offer solutions as well.
Some living things have remarkable powers
to counteract synthetic chemicals.
Can we use these natural allies to help us remove poisons
from the soilbeforethey are flushed into creeks and streams?
For one scientist, the quest to remove toxins
from the environment is linked to a family tradition.
There's one waitin g for me right there .
I can just feel it .
Oh, Daddy, yeah, right.
Little sunfish!
I'm gonna go get his daddy over here.
Let's try and get a crab...
We don't have any crabs, Daddy.
Yeah, we do. We have more clams, I guess.
(laughs)
Dad, let's catch a clam.
(chuckles)
How would it bite this?
NORTON: Geneticist Richard Meagher
has fished this lake for 20 years.
But now he and his daughter
must return their catch to the lake.
That's because some of the fish
are contaminated with a toxic form of mercury.
MEAGHER: I feel very exasperated
to find out that this lake has mercury-contaminated fish.
Probably 90% of the fish in that lake are safe to eat,
but you don't know which ones you're getting
when you pull them out of the lake.
NORTON: Mercury from industry seeps into the lake.
At the bottom of the food chain,
bacteria can transform this mercury
into a highly toxic form called methylmercury.
As tiny organisms feed,
they take in the methylmercury of their prey.
The next predator gets a more concentrated serving.
And so on up the food chain.
The mercury concentration in top predators
can be over ten million times greater than in the water.
Good one. Good one . Bring it in slow.
Get-get the net, Dad.
Just swing it up h ere and I'll get it.
Okay, swing it over to me.
Yeah.
Meagher believes he can cut off the chain at the bottom.
He wants to harness nature itself
to prevent methyl mercury from getting into our water.
Meagher is a pioneer in a new scientific field
that uses plants to clean up environmental messes.
MEAGHER: When I first thought about it, I was just hoping to clean up
certain particular kinds of pollutants.
And plants had all the capabilities that I needed
to extract things from the soil.
Plants really evolved
to extract nutrients from the soil.
And we're going to use all that machinery,
that incredible 100 million miles of roots per acre
that a plant can generate,
to extract toxins like mercury from the soil.
NORTON: Some plants have a natural ability for handling toxins.
Ferns can survive in arsenic-laced soil;
alpine herbs in zinc;
mustard plants in lead;
clovers in motor oil.
But Meagher knew of no plants
that can withstand large amounts of methyl mercury.
He was, however, aware of bacteria
that process mercury.
Could he bestow this talent on plants?
Adding bacterial genes to plants was a simple idea,
but its execution and persuading the skeptics took years.
MEAGHER: I thought someone was going to come along and say,
"There's amazing science going on in here.
Here's some money."
That just didn't happen.
We had a terrible time.
I-I have people say, "Oh, you're a charlatan.
Plants can't do things like that."
NARRATOR: But Meagher persevered.
After two decades of trial and error, he succeeded
in getting mercury-eating genes into plants.
One of his plants stores mercury in its leaves.
Another emits it in less harmful form as vapor.
If Meagher's technology is adopted,
large amounts of a toxin will never have the chance
to enter the water.
Mercury is only Meagher's first target.
Other poisons are already in his sights,
as are the bacterial genes
that will become part of his next arsenal.
MEAGHER: So, for me, we just started.
I've got hundreds of genes in mind.
We've got maybe 20 we've worked on already.
We are having a very high success rate.
I think you're seeing the birth of a new field.
There's no reason that the environment
can't be ten times cleaner.
NARRATOR: Meagher hopes to play a part in getting us to a day
when people can enjoy this lake
as much as he did with his father.
MEAGHER: I don't think without the help
of a lot of very high-tech solutions, we're going to do it.
I think we are going to survive by using every trick we've got.
Thanks to new technologies,
we can now start cleaning up invisible toxins in our water,
and maybe just in time,
because more is at stake than we imagined.
Much of this water ends up in coastal zones.
And here, chemicals may have the power
to set off a cascade of events that will threaten
not just individual species but entire ecosystems.
Can we use what we're learning to protect our coasts?
And if so, where do we begin?
Not far from the shore,
farmer Vince Vitale grows sugar cane.
Vitale is one of many farmers around the world
who are becoming increasingly aware of what flows
from their fields.
(dog barking)
VITALE: I've lived here all my life in Ripple Creek,
where my grandfather and my father had farmed before me.
I grow sugar cane like just every other farm
in this district does.
NORTON: To grow cane, farmers like Vitale must use herbicides,
fungicides, insecticides and nitrogen fertilizer.
Many of these synthetic chemicals end up in rivers.
Joining this runoff is manure from herds of cattle.
VITALE: I think farmers never had the intention
of causing problems to the environment,
but unfortunately, we didn't know any better.
But we are now coming to realize that there is a problem.
NORTON: Vitale knows that once runoff from his farm
and thousands like it enters the river,
it's a short run to the sea.
Only a few miles from Vitale's farm is the Great Barrier Reef.
It's the world's largest expanse of tropical coral,
a vast living structure stretching for more
than 1,200 miles off Australia's coast.
Recently, ominous changes have been taking place here.
Marine biologist Katharina Fabricius is wondering
if farms like Vince Vitale's
are linked to what some consider
one of the reef's gravest threats.
Could chemical runoff be triggering
repeated and massive outbreaks
of a destructive starfish called the Crown of Thorns?
NORTON: As outbreaks go, this one may appear sluggish...
but speed up time,
and the Crown of Thorn's true destructive power is revealed.
For the third time since the 1960s,
scientists have noted that the reef is under siege.
Fabricius wants to solve the puzzle
before the next outbreak starts.
NORTON: Fabricius has zeroed in on a single chemical
from farms like Vince Vitale's as a major culprit.
This chemical is nitrogen,
found in artificial fertilizer and manure.
Tropical storms flush it from fields
into creeks and rivers.
On the reef, nitrogen acts as fertilizer.
It can help spark the growth of algae
that are just the right size to be eaten
by Crown of Thorn larvae.
In this way, Fabricius believes,
more starfish larvae can survive to adulthood.
The nitrogen theory is controversial.
No one has yet made a convincing argument
that Crown of Thorns outbreaks are linked to nitrogen.
Fabricius and her team take on the case.
They want to know where the nitrogen ends up.
So we're going to be here for the whole day
and probably most of tomorrow.
NORTON: It's no easy task:
More than two dozen rivers, including Vince Vitale's,
flow into a long stretch of coastal waters
swirling with complex currents.
All the river discharge data are available.
We should be able to go back in and download those data.
NORTON: But with her colleagues,
Fabricius calculates places on the reef
that would have had high nitrogen levels
after a big storm.
Which means if the larvae are still in the water column,
they really have a lot of food available.
NORTON: Did the most recent Crown of Thorns outbreak start
where nitrogen was most concentrated?
NORTON: Fabricius and her collaborators
must search enormous swaths of reef.
Eventually, they discover that the starfish distribution
corresponds to outbreaks that began years earlier
at the nitrogen hot spots.
This finding, along with other work by Fabricius,
has given the nitrogen theory
perhaps its most credible foundation.
We are beginning to understand the delicate interplay
of chemicals and their power to alter living systems.
Nitrogen fertilizer is one of the great triumphs
in the history of food production.
But only recently have we started
tracking its unintended consequences.
Given our growing awareness
of the reef's extreme sensitivity to nitrogen,
can we reduce the flow?
Vince Vitale is ready to take action.
(speaks Italian)
Which means, "When the water starts to touch your backside,
you'll learn to swim."
And I think that we're all starting to learn to swim now,
because the water's touching our backside.
Things are... are disappearing
that we didn't think would disappear.
Things are changing
and we don't like the changes.
And we need to get up and start swimming.
NORTON: Vitale hopes to find a solution by looking back to a day
when less runoff came from the fields.
This is what much of Queensland looked like
when his grandparents began farming here in 1880.
Trees and marshes then served as a natural barrier
that kept runoff from flowing into the river.
Today on Vitale's land
and around most fields in this area,
farmers and ranchers have cleared trees
right up to the riverbanks.
Only a thin band of trees remains--
not nearly wide enough to sop up farm chemicals
before they reach the water.
Sometimes the most complex problems
have the simplest of solutions.
Vitale has decided to replace some of his cane
with new trees.
If more farmers follow Vitale's lead,
they could help safeguard the health of the reef.
VITALE: I could have probably made myself an extra...
maybe a thousand dollars,
$1,500 dollars on a year if I had a good crop here
on these two-and-a-half acres.
But I'm prepared to let that go.
And to me, it's just a little
shot in the arm for, um, the effort I put in there
to go down there and walk among my trees
and say, "I've created this. I love this."
And it's... hey, it makes me feel good.
And feeling good is a good thing.
A person might live longer that way.
NORTON: Farmers like Vitale are starting to make progress
keeping chemicals out of rivers.
And such efforts are all the more important,
given recent discoveries
of problems far beyond coastal waters.
According to one school of thought,
toxins are diluted to safe levels
by the time they reach the open ocean.
But are the creatures that live here
really protected from chemicals?
In the past decades, researchers have become aware
that sharks, blue fin tuna, swordfish and killer whales
all have toxins in their tissues.
Where are they being exposed?
To find out, marine biologist Tierney Thys
is trying to discover where
open-ocean animals spend their time.
Thys is part of the largest
oceanographic project in history--
the Census of Marine Life.
Tag team, tag team.
This is Sunspot. How do you copy?
THYS: Okay, Sunspot, you are going eight miles out, heading 270.
Here's our GPS coordinates-- we're at 30...
NORTON: The Census aims to chart nothing less than
which creatures live where,
what they're doing, and most critically,
where they may be encountering dangerous chemicals.
The animal Thys is studying for the Census is the Mola mola.
This slow, gentle fish is found
in every tropical and temperate ocean.
It can grow to 5,000 pounds on a diet mainly of jellyfish.
For over a decade,
Thys has been observing mola from the water.
But she's about to adopt more sophisticated surveillance.
THYS: What's so exciting is that
now with this huge collaboration,
we're coming up with the technology
to allow us entry into this...
into this enormous living space.
NORTON: Thys is using new tracking devices
that will record a fish's travel diary
for up to one year.
Tag team, tag team, Sunspot.
I've got a fish over here that you're, uh,
12 o'clock, 12 o'clock.
And it's ten boats. 12 o'clock, ten boats.
s. 12 o'clock, ab out a hundred yard
Okay.
NORTON: No one yet knows precisely which toxins are in Mola mola.
These animals have long been thought
to spend most of their lives far from the coast,
far from the sources of runoff.
MAN: It's five boats.
Okay, that's good.
You're turning good.
NORTON: But the tags could reveal the true pathways of this fish.
Okay, I still don't see it.
12 o'clock, two-and-a-half boats.
Right in front of us, John.
Man, you're right on top of the fish.
I see it. I see it, yeah.
It's at the surface.
Straight ahead, straight ahead, straight ahead.
And stop.
It's just giving me a few high-five right now.
THYS: What these tags allow us to do
is essentially travel with these animals
into the places that are most important to them,
into the places that are vital to their livelihood.
NORTON: Census researchers are charting the travel habits of animals
once widely believed to live primarily in the open ocean:
Mola mola, notuna,
salmon sharks and blue whales.
Surprisingly, each of these species is now being found
to spend considerable time in near-shore waters.
THYS: We would think that the oceans, being so enormous,
would buffer the life that lives out there.
But, in fact, what the tags
are revealing is that these animals
spend a lot of time close to shore,
right in close proximity
to our runoff, to where our pollutants enter the water.
NORTON: While we can't yet restore entire oceans,
the good news from the Census
is that there's something we can do.
We are locating the particular places where open-ocean species
approach our shores to feed.
That's where we can concentrate our clean-up efforts.
Yay, that's great.
The tag's well-positioned, not interfering with the fin.
Number Two!
Tag team, tag team, Sunspot.
I've got a mola 2:30 heading from the boat
and five miles. Roger.
This really is the best part of being a biologist.
I actually am incredibly optimistic.
The tags are allowing us to listen to the animals.
They're telling us what's important to them.
They're another window into the impacts that we're having
on the oceans, on the planet.
NORTON: Water's path may twist and turn,
but the destination is always the same: the ocean.
Rivers spill off the shores, creeks flow into rivers,
and marshes and ponds feed the creeks.
Reliant on this liquid network are creatures large and small.
By listening to these animals, we can hear messages
about our water, our health and the health of our planet.
SWAN: I think we're finally learning to take our cues from animals.
I'm basically an optimistic person,
so I believe we can do better,
and I think we will do better.
DeGUISE: I think everything starts with awareness.
As a society maybe we want to invest more in our safety
or in the safety of the planet.
(cheering): Yay!
HAYES: One of the things that I would love
is to have people demand better water.
VITALE: A lot of people have not seen what's so obvious to me,
right there in front of them in that river.
To me, it's a holy place.
The river and this water,
and the fish and the birds and everything.
To me, it's just, the reason I live on this, on this planet.
Text: WTC-SWE