Critical Mast

Hey, this is Outside In, a show where curiosity and the natural world collide. I'm Nate Hedgie. Step into a forest alone and it can feel like silence. Not that it's actually devoid of noises. There's the wind in the trees, birds, maybe the plunk of an acorn falling onto the trail. But every so often, one of those quiet bits of atmosphere can grow louder. Until you can't help but notice that something very strange is going on around you. Today on the show, what happens when a small thing, the humble acorn, goes from scarce to plentiful. This is an episode about and inspired by a mysterious ecological phenomenon called masting. From baffling squirrel behavior to an explosion in babies named Oakley. We have three stories. All about the different ways a sudden surge in abundance can trigger unexpected consequences. The thing that sticks out my memory is seeing them crawling up my dress. You can't really brush them off because they cling. Stay tuned. Up next is Brett Flair and his new band. Dropping hits every week. Find the new slots. From the producers of Baby Reindeer comes Alice and Steve exclusively on Disney Plus. Meet Alice and Steve. When Alice's daughter starts to date Steve, things start to unravel. Alice and Steve, a Hula original series streaming June 8 exclusively on Disney Plus. 18 plus subscription required to tease and seize a play. Have you ever had the urge to sneak behind the cordoned off areas of a museum? Or roam the halls after closing time? The Smithsonian's flagship podcast, Side Door, will sneak you behind the scenes of the world's largest museum and research complex. Come learn about the ghosts that supposedly walk the museum halls after dark. How a train robbery gave rise to criminal forensics. Why leeches are actually the coolest thing ever. And how to get away with murder in the Arctic. Maybe. You'll discover stories of history, science, art, and culture you won't find in a display case. You can listen to Side Door wherever you get your podcasts. Or find us online at si.edu. This is Outside In, a show where curiosity and the natural world collide. I'm Nate Hedgie. Today, we've got stories about and inspired by MASTING. Now, if you don't know what MASTING is, don't worry. Our first story from producer Felix Poon is one of the strangest, most memorable introductions to the subject you could ask for. Here he is. Do you absolutely love talking about fall foliage? Or are you kind of sick of it because you've been doing it for so long? So I've been doing this over a dozen years now. And it's really exciting because every year is different. Jim Salji is a high school science teacher. But he also has a side gig as one of New Hampshire's go-to foliage forecasters. As millions of visitors clog up the highways to go leaf peeping, Jim drives around the state, snapping photos and reporting conditions on TV. Jim, I'm so curious, based on everything you know, what is your forecast for this year? This year it's going to be a little more of a patchwork. We've had a lot of drought. But a few years ago, just before the leaves began to turn, people started asking Jim about another very different phenomenon. So it was late summer and there was a very high squirrel population. Squirrels are incredibly common in New Hampshire. But in the summer of 2018, things were getting out of hand. People were out kayaking or boating in the middle of Lake Winnipesaki. There would be a squirrel trying to swim to an area where it had more food. It was so bad, people were calling into newsrooms. What is with the swimming squirrel? Is it a sign of the apocalypse? Mostly though, you saw them on the roads. We are talking dozens to hundreds every mile. Every few feet in some areas, there was another carcass. It was just staggering numbers. So are your students asking you about it? Absolutely. Yeah. How would they ask you about it? Mr. Salji, why are there so many dead squirrels? What is up with all these dead squirrels? Why are the squirrels everywhere right now? I wasn't with NHPR then, but my colleagues who were all remember talking about it. It was like the weather, except it was flattened squirrel carcasses. So I've tried to find exact numbers or photos that verify the level of carnage. But it's not like there's a department of roadkill that was counting the victims. What I do have are lots of pretty horrible and maybe exaggerated anecdotes. Here's some comments on a Reddit post from a few years after. The squirrel corpses were like little speed bumps there were so many. Ankle deep on the shoulders of the road. My traction alarm went off. I could feel my tires slipping in squirrel entrails. Today, this story is legend in New Hampshire. And it's even been dubbed the Great Squirrel Apocalypse, or sometimes Squirrel Mageddon. It was a tragedy unfolding in front of us, but I think people respond to tragedy in a variety of ways. And there were jokes made. A local brewery, deciduous brewery, had a pair of beers that they released. It's called Fast Cars and Dodging Squirrels. For a lot of people who witnessed it, all these dead squirrels seemed to come out of nowhere. But the conditions that led to the Squirrel Apocalypse actually started long beforehand, with something called a mast ear. So evolutionarily, the trees have created this strategy where they go through cycles where they stress the animals that would feast upon their seeds by producing low number of seeds. And so animals like squirrels populations would go way down. A mast ear is just the opposite. When trees collectively go into a reproductive overdrive. Trees vary, but in a mast ear, a single oak tree can produce thousands of acorns. Thousands. From a single tree. Imagine that, but across an entire forest. And it overwhelms the current population of squirrels and mice and other animals, so that the seeds can stay and germinate and reproduce the forest. Mast, by the way, is an old English word for the seeds of trees, so basically the fruits and nuts. These boom and bust cycles in the forest, they can ripple through ecosystems in dramatic ways. Take beach trees in New Zealand. During a mast ear, the beach trees put out more nuts, but also more flowers. And the first thing that happens is you get a big increase in native caterpillars, which are feeding on the flowers. This is Dave Kelly, a professor of biology at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. The mice and rats start increasing in the spring because they're feeding on caterpillars that are feeding on the flowers. From there, the predators take notice, like stoats, a type of weasel, and their populations start to rise. The rats are preying on the mice, the stoats are preying on the rats and the mice. The stoats and the rats both prey on birds. Which is a big deal, because a lot of the birds getting killed are endangered species. I mean, not only eating adults of the smaller birds, but also they'll clean out all the eggs and chicks. These ripple effects don't just stop after one year. A research paper from Switzerland, for example, found a jump in lime-infested ticks two years after a mast ear. That's because first, there's a boom in mice, then there's a boom in ticks. And finally, as everything is settling back down, a higher risk of Lyme disease in humans. But just as the trees giveth nutrients during masting, they also taketh away. What led to the squirrel-pocalypse actually started with a rare double mast ear. In both 2016 and 2017, the forests of New Hampshire were littered with acorns. Rural populations exploded. And then in 2018, tumbleweeds. Here's Jim Salgie again. Every crop failed. There was no food in the forest. And that's when the squirrels really started to get desperate and crossing every imaginable barrier to try to find food. I mean, that really seems like a squirrel horror story. I could not imagine anything worse for the small animals in a forest than having a huge population after two years of feasting and no food to be found anywhere. When I first heard about the great squirrel apocalypse, it seemed to expose this pretty brutal side of nature. Like these trees starved an entire generation of squirrels. Squirrels that only existed because those same trees fattened up their parents' generation. And now they're faded to dash across multi-lane highways, break into people's homes, and swim across lakes just to survive. I mean, what is this, the Hunger Games? Or Squid Game? Or Squirrel Game? But that doesn't have to be how we look at it. Trees feed the squirrels. When the squirrels, when they bury nuts and forget about them, sometimes plant new trees. I would say that it's about balance and reciprocity. This is Lauren Spears, executive director of the Tomaquag Museum and a citizen of the Narragansett Nation. And she says, maybe this story is about us humans being brutal to the squirrels. The imbalance is the human influence, whether that's cars, whether that's construction and building, and displacing the natural environments in which animals and plants grow. And then there's the question of climate change. Research suggests that temperature is one important factor that signals to trees when it's time for a mass year. But new studies show that rising global temperatures can cause what some scientists are calling a massing breakdown. While some trees are unaffected, other trees are massing too often, while some others aren't massing enough. We don't know yet what ripple effects that could have, but as far as we can tell, it's probably bad news for forests. So at the end of the day, all those dead squirrels weren't a sign of the apocalypse. It was just the opposite, in fact. They were a sign that nature was working as intended. Seeds come in in abundance at times when there's a need to ensure that there are more of these plants growing, these trees and fruit trees and nut trees, etc., are in the ecosystem. And to have these nut trees available for the future generations of all people, all animals, the plants themselves, that keeps us in balance. So this fall, if you find yourself looking at the leaves, drinking a pumpkin spice latte, or cold pint of dodging squirrels IPA. Take a moment to meditate on massing. As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, the creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn. And as commenters put it on Reddit, never forget the great squirrel apocalypse of 2018. That was producer Felix Poon. If you're a big fan of Nature-based podcasts, you might have noticed something strange going on in your feed. That's because this episode is part of a playful exercise in community podcasting. I guess maybe I should say pod-masting? Six different shows, each producing their own MASTING-inspired episodes, and then dropping them all at the same time. Yes, I know, we are very nerdy, but what do you expect? If you want to crack open some of these other audio acorns, you can find a Spotify playlist in the show notes, or you can just search critical MAST wherever you get your podcasts. So stay tuned, we've got some more nutty stories still to come after the break. Summer always changes how I get dressed. I want pieces that feel lighter and more breathable, things that are easy, right? But still feel put together. And that's why I keep coming back to Quints. They focus on high quality essentials that feel and look amazing, think breathable linen and soft organic cotton, well made basics, but without the luxury markup. It is that rare balance where everything feels elevated, but still effortless. 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I am Nate Hedgie today with stories from the world of masting, but trees aren't the only species that rely on overwhelming numbers to outmaneuver the opposition. And whereas some prey species might have a field day when food suddenly becomes abundant, human beings have a habit of finding ourselves flat footed. This story comes to us from Marina Hainke. It's been almost 30 years since David Wilson and Claire Addis got married. Long enough that a lot of the details start to get fuzzy, but they can remember picking out the venue. I don't know why we thought about inviting so many people. You have a big family, but we were looking at all kinds of places that weren't really us. All the options were either too expensive or too stuffy. That was until David's cousin offered up his house in New Jersey. And it was kind of a, like a huge mansion kind of house, like really just bonkers. They made it a backyard wedding, bought a huge yellow tent in case it rained and rolled a basketball hoop onto the driveway where kids could play. The morning of the big day, David got there early. I think I brought the wedding cake over. And that's when he saw them covering the pathway. Leading up to the house were hundreds of thick winged insects. It was like snow almost. There was that many. It was 1996 in Westfield, New Jersey. And the cicadas of Brutu had just woken up from a 17 year long nap. The thing that sticks out my memory is seeing them crawling up my dress. You can't really brush them off because they, they're. Just like Velcro. They cling. In case you've never seen one, cicadas are a rather chunky bug. Summer between a grasshopper and a fat dragonfly. They are black in color. They have orange wings and they have red eyes. So they look like something out of a sci-fi movie. This is Deanna Beasley, a biology professor at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga. While most cicadas follow an annual life cycle, a very special subset aren't so regular. Periodical cicadas emerge every 13 or 17 years, depending on the species. Groups of those species are called the broods. There's 15 of them spread across mostly the eastern part of North America. Brutu, the one that David quickly began to sweep off the sidewalks, had already been busy for quite some time. So what's happening is the nymphs are baby cicadas or underground. They're rooted onto the trees and feeding off of the trees. And that's pretty much it. They're just getting bigger and bigger and bigger. Weddings, graduations, whole childhoods happen inches above these feeding nymphs. Then more than a dozen years later, those insects head to the surface. And then they climb into the canopy if there is a canopy for them. And it's the males that are singing. Deanna is not talking about a few dozen bugs here. If conditions are right, 1.5 million cicadas can emerge from a singular acre. One of those acres was a mansion like house in the suburbs of New Jersey. As David and Claire's wedding came to a start, the insects were impossible to ignore. Yeah, I don't think we had any preparation for there being cicadas. Were they buzzing? Were they making noise? Oh, yeah, yeah. I don't really remember cicadas singing, but they most have been. We had like a bagpiper. I mean, it was a noisy affair. Well, that's pretty scurvy. There's home video from David and Claire's wedding. It's true that you can't hear the cicadas over the bagpipes. But you can see a guest tilt back his head and eat one. Whoa. That $10,000 is more than ours. Cicadas make their impressive hum by vibrating a hollow chamber at the tip of their bodies, a bit like beating the world's tiniest drum dozens of times a second. An emerging brood can hit more than 100 decibels. That's louder than a lawnmower and full throttle. Cicadas also have a pretty instinctual drive to move upwards, all in pursuit of a tree's canopy. Yeah, they were like crawling up the chairs while the surface was going. And during the toast, they started climbing in between the layers of Claire's dress. Incredibly, the couple doesn't exactly remember what they did about them. I imagine I asked David to help me kind of pick them out because he's very gentle with animals and like wounded birds will land on his hand. And that's probably what happened. I probably asked him to help, you know, put them in a safe place. This sudden influx of cicadas really, it's another form of masting. So in terms of predator defense, they don't really have any, except to just emerge in these really, you know, large numbers. You see, cicadas are pretty bad flyers. They're not fast and they're terrible at defending themselves, especially right after they get above ground as they squeeze their way out of their baby skin. So when the brood emerges after all those years, they're gobbled up left and right by birds, rodents, family dogs. But eventually, you know, prayers just like, I can't look at another cicada. It's just no more cicadas, please. This is a strategy called predator satiation. Enough cicadas will survive to eventually reproduce. Up in the treetops, cicada females saw tiny slits into brands and lay millions of eggs. And then when they hatch, they'll just fall out the branch and into the soil. It'll take them some time to actually make their way down to the roots of the tree. But they have 17 years in some cases, so they have time. As you might imagine, this whole production, which lasts about six weeks, leaves a mark on the environment. It's mostly a positive one. You could think of that cicada emergence as a huge, nutrient pulse in the environment. Usually following a cicada emergence, you might see, you know, fledglings are larger in size, right? You may see overall nutrient quality of the soil is improved because when the cicadas die, they return to the earth. For David and Claire, it would make perfect sense to have less of a positive space on cicada's role in the environment. Maybe even some dread around these uninvited wedding guests. But that was not the case. I haven't gotten married yet, but I know I'm going to kind of want everything to go well on that day. Was there a part of you that was like, this is not supposed to be happening right now? No, no, no. It just, I mean, it's sort of perhaps a human instinct to think that everything is about us. But it almost felt like a blessing. I mean, it's like, I don't know, I don't know. Things about us, but it almost felt like a blessing. Honestly, they're lovely, you know, they're, and they're not threatening. They're can't hurt you. I don't know everything about that. They kind of felt like magical and that just felt like a part of that. These days, wedding planners actually advertise all kinds of tips to avoid cicada related interferences. But 30 years on, David and Claire really remember Brutu as a joyful and curious side note to the day. And I believe it. There's another scene in their home video, a couple of girls running around with a big plastic tub full of live cicadas. Maybe the bride and groom's calmness about the bugs was a little contagious. Or maybe there is something a bit magical about these irregularly appearing insects. After all, their scientific name is Magisa Cata, straight from the Greek word for magician. I've never felt a negative thing or heard a negative thing about them being there. Yeah, I mean, it sounds like that's what you're saying is you're like, people, people don't remember it like that at all. We're vegetarians and the only complain I heard that day was there was no meat. That story was produced by Marina Hainke. And by the way, the most recent emergence of the cicada brood in New Jersey happened in 2021. But David and Claire missed it. They had a wedding to go to. Our last story about a mysterious masting trend among humans comes from producer Justine Parody. This spring, Amelia Pruitt became a mother. Yeah, so I just had a little baby girl in June. And thank you. Yeah, it's been a fun entrance to parenthood. Like so many, Amelia felt the gravity of the many choices involved in becoming a parent. Among the first, selecting a name. I mean, it's a weighty process because in some ways we as a society don't necessarily label you just based on your name, but that's also kind of the oftentimes only thing that you're represented by. I mean, even thinking about like, if you get a headstone someday, you get a name and a date. Like that's like. Baby names are not only big decisions, but big business too. Or at least big content generators. There are books you can buy, Instagram accounts populated with baby named carousels and subreddits filled with indecisive parents asking strangers on the internet to weigh in. But for Amelia, this one wasn't actually a tough choice. So Lucille is my middle name, my grandmother's middle name, and then my great-grandmother's name. By picking a family name for her daughter, Amelia was opting for a somewhat traditional route. But Lucille was also appealing because it's not a super common name, although that can change. Yeah, I mean, I was born in 1994 and there were no amelias around at that point. I don't even know if it ranked on the name list. But lately, something shifted. And that's because Amelia the name has been steadily climbing the charts. Oh, Amelia's top 10. Oh, Amelia's top three. Oh, Amelia's been top three for a long time now. Like when Amelia's at the grocery store, she sometimes hears someone calling her name. She'll look up and realize they're not talking to her. It's a little sad going from the loss of that kind of positive uniqueness. I always joke, like, oh, I guess everybody will just think I'm 20 years younger than I actually am. You've probably noticed this kind of thing yourself, an elementary school classroom full of Jadans, or suddenly it seems that every other celebrity is named Olivia. A mysterious synchronicity reminiscent of, oh, I don't know, an extraordinary windfall of acorns in the forest. It can make a person wonder if something's in the air for humans too. Why does this happen? Why does a name, dare I say, masked? Since I was about eight or nine years old, I've been buying what to name the baby books. This is Cleveland Evans. He's a professor emeritus of psychology at Bellevue University in Kansas. He writes a newspaper column on the topic of names for the Omaha World Herald newspaper every other Sunday. Keeping up with what the babies are being named and trying to figure out why, you know. Cleveland says that in another era, naming babies was a little more systematic, like in colonial New England. First son is named after the father's father, the second son is named after the mother's father, you know, third son is named after the father himself, and then they started into the mothers and fathers brothers. But today's American culture is much more colorful. A lot of people are having smaller families, and the country is more diverse in almost every way. So what motivates parents when they're picking a name now? After decades of study, here's Cleveland's theory. The general thing is that everybody's looking for a different but not too different name. Different, but not too different. That could be challenging because parents can inadvertently get inspiration from the same places thinking they found something unique. It could be a figure in pop culture, TV, movies, and these days, video games. A hundred years ago, that might have more often meant novels or newspapers. They were naming kids after presidents. When Herbert Hoover was first elected, the name Herbert is way more popular than it ever was before in those two years of 28 and 29. And then the crash happens and the name crashes. So you have all of these Herbards who are 95 right now, very few younger. But today, new parents have a source of information that previous generations did not have. The Social Security Administration, baby nameless. In the 1990s, Michael Shackleford was an actuary working at the administration. And he realized that they were just sitting on a huge amount of data. And maybe they should make it available to the public. He may have also had personal motivations here. His own name, Michael, had been the number one name for boys almost without interruption since the early 1950s. He hated having a common name and having, you know, 10 other mics always in his neighborhood. And so he wanted to make the list so that people could avoid the common names. And I think his bosses in Social Security first thought he was crazy to take his time doing this. But when he finally finished the program, it quickly became, I think, about the most popular, you know, page on the Social Security website. So it's not just baby books anymore. Now parents can run their top contenders through this massive, easily accessible public data source. They can find inspiration there, perhaps from the less popular names on the list, or avoid the ones at the very top. And by the way, in 1999, the year after the release of the first Social Security nameless, Michael dropped out of that number one spot for the first time in over 30 years. Edged out by Jacob. In a forest, trees grow at different paces. Take the paper birch, a species which shoots up quickly at first, but then its growth rate declines as it ages. Meanwhile, the white oak grows slowly and gradually, and it can live for centuries. Maybe you can tell where I'm going here with this metaphor. A name trend can work the same way. What does tend to happen is that the quicker something becomes popular, also it tends to be the quicker it goes down. Two names came to mind, Natalie and Nevea. Nevea, it's a N-E-V-A-E-H is the most common spelling, and it's the word heaven spelled backwards. Before the year 2000, Nevea was quite uncommon. There were like eight girls named Nevea in the whole country, and then one of them happened to be a girl who was born to a rock singer named Sonny Sandoval, and he was on the MTV show Cribs. This is Nevea right here. That's heaven spelled backwards. She's my first, she's six months old. And it just absolutely exploded. Definitely a well into the top 100, and then it started going down again really quickly. And Natalie was a very long, slow rise, you know, and ended up in the top 25. And I think a lot of people never even quite realized it had gotten as common as it was because its rise was so long and slow, and then its stage, you know, at the top for several years longer than Nevea did. But there's another name trend that's made headlines recently. And this is actually what got me thinking about this story in the first place. I'm talking about the Oakley phenomenon. Last year, the baby name website, Nameberry, published an article titled The Reddest and Bluest Baby Names. Gracing their list of the top 25, quote, Reddest girls names of 2023 were several variations of oak based names, different spellings of the name Oakley, one ending in LEY, another like the Jeans, LE. There was also Oak Lynn coming in at number two. This list got a spate of news coverage. Cleveland got interviewed by NPR because he'd noticed the trend in his research over a decade ago. He thinks the origin has to do with a specific and powerful force in baby naming culture. Mormons, or Latter Day Saints. As often happens, the LDS people are like an early warning system for things that are going to get popular. Brooklyn, Brittany, Jaden, and now Oakley and Oak Lynn. The Mormons almost have this idea now that they are people who give their kids unusual names. There are a few reasons that Mormon families might be on the leading edge of baby name trends. It might have to do with the fact that historically they often had big families, lots of kids, lots of names. Even though they're on the lookout for unusual names, they're usually on the lookout for things that will appeal to the culture as a whole. So what it means is that they're going to find things first. The inspiration for Oakley might have come from a couple different places. Maybe Annie Oakley, a famous American sharpshooter. Or maybe it's a riff on a top five name from the 90s, Ashley. Because that wave of Ashley's are at the point where they're starting families. Ashley, of course, is also a name rooted in the name of a tree. And Cleveland says the roots of both go way back to medieval England. The word Lee, spelled L-E-I-G-H, is actually an old English word for woodland clearing. So a person who lived by the meadow with ash trees might have become William Ashley, the guy near the glade of Oaks, William Oakley. Whether that is the intent of 21st century parents is, I imagine, doubtful. But regardless, the meaning is there. And it's kind of amazing that a relationship that some of our ancestors might have had to a far away landscape can cast such a long shadow, almost imperceptibly, in our language. But back to the reddest and bluest baby names. Cleveland is a bit skeptical of that framing. He says there are a lot of factors at play here. Education, religion, history, geography, you name it. It's easy to see a correlation, but a lot harder to prove causation. And even when you think the reason behind a name is obvious, you might be surprised. This is years ago now I was on an airplane and a cross-country flight happened to be sitting next to a woman who's had a little girl named Trinity. And I asked her if she named the child that because of the religion's meaning. And she said, oh no, we're Mormons, we don't believe in the Trinity. So it just sounds cool. Maybe it was the Matrix. Yes. There's all sorts of ways people find the different, not too different thing we're looking for. Yes. Producer, Justine Parity. That is it for our MASTING inspired stories today. If you want to check out some of the other podcasts, also dropping their MASTING episodes this week, check out the Spotify playlist. There's a link in the show notes. Or just type in the name of the episode, Critical MAST Wherever You Get Your Podcasts. I'm Nate Hedgie. This episode was reported, produced and mixed by Felix Poon, Marina Hanky, and Justine Parity. It was edited by our executive producer, Taylor Quimby. Our staff also includes Jessica Hunt. Rebecca LaVoy is NHPR's director of on-demand audio. Voiceovers in this episode were from Nick Capodice, Rebecca LaVoy, and Kate Dario. Special thanks to Maria Marcheva, Rebecca Rowe, and David Needle. And everybody who spoke with us about baby names, especially Emma Welch and Carl and Lira Keller. Music in this episode from Blue Dot Sessions, O.T.E. Beaumole and Arthur Benson, Outside In is a production of NHPR. Have you ever wondered why Reese Witherspoon founded Hello Sunshine, or where Kevin O'Leary got his start? Or even how Alex Earle became the most accessible founder to someone who may not even consider this space? Enter the Founder Mindset, the new podcast from Harvard Business School Foundry, hosted by me, Reza Satchu. As a leading educator in entrepreneurship, I've built multiple high profile companies and mentored thousands of students and founders through the realities of starting and scaling ventures. 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