The planet is filled with unexpected and magical sounds… all you have to do is listen.

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Beneath the water lies a whole world of sound: snorts, boops, croaks, grunts. Fish, it turns out, have a lot to say, and they’ve been communicating for a long time. In this episode, we take a dive with some of the planet’s oldest vertebrates 

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Special thanks to Lauren Hawkins, Miles Parsons, and Tim Lamont for many of the fish recordings. Clara Amorim and Raquel Vasconcelos recorded the Lusitanian toadfish, Herbert Tiepelt recorded the pikeperch percussionist, and Marta Bolgan provided the “unknown kwa.” Additional recordings came from more than a dozen other scientists, many of whom have contributed sounds to the website Fishsounds.

Here are the fish sounds we used in the episode:

160000_Parsons_Blackspotted croaker chorus

130000_Picciulin_Brown meager_Chorus

180000_Pine_Unknown_Chorus

170000_Parsons_Unknown_Chorus

180000_Dilorio_Unknown_Kwa Chorus

190000_Bolgan_Unknown_Kwa

050000_Tiepelt_Pike-perch_Scrape

070000_Stolkin_Striped Cusk-eel_Jackhammer chorus

180000_Staaterman_Toadfish_Boop-Grunt-Swoop

150000_Casaretto_Haddock_hum

080000_Amorim_Lusitania Toadfish_Boatwhistle_edited

1970_MP Fish_Seahorse_Click

170000_RountreeR_Aplodinotus-grunniens_Drum-Call-Chorus

180000_Rowell_Epinephelus striatus_agonistic

050000_AmorimC_Eutrigla-gurnardus_Growl-Grunt-Knock

180000_AmorimC_Pomatoschistus-pictus_Drum

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For most of our planet’s existence, the Earth was quiet. The boisterous sounds of life we know today are a recent development, one that the growing field of bioacoustics is helping us understand and interpret. In this episode, we travel to Australia to listen to dolphins and meet the microbes that helped usher in life on the planet.

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Humans are born into a wondrous planetary chorus. But today, many of us rarely hear anything other than ourselves. In this season of Threshold, we explore a world teeming with sound and ask what happens when we tune into the life all around us. Season 5 of Threshold, Hark, is coming Tuesday, November 19th.

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In June 2024, the planet hit a terrifying milestone: 12 straight months of global temperatures at or above 1.5 degrees over pre-industrial levels. But even as the impact of climate change becomes more visible and far-reaching, the opportunity to change the trajectory of this global crisis remains possible. Hope is possible. Today, we’re sharing a conversation with writer and activist Rebecca Solnit, a leading voice on the climate crisis and a dogged champion of possibility and promise. 

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In Season 1 of Threshold, we reported on the decades-long fight to get the federal government to transfer the National Bison Range, and the bison, back to the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. In 2020, it finally happened. Stewardship of the herd was returned to the people who had helped to save these animals from extinction more than a century before. It’s one of just a few cases where the U.S. government has actually returned a piece of land to the Native American people it was taken from. Earlier this year, we came back to the Bison Range to find out how things are going for the herd and what the restoration of this land has meant to the Tribes.

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A few weeks ago, Yellowstone National Park released a draft plan for managing bison in the park. In this dispatch, we answer your questions about the plan and what it means for the future of the herd.

Read the NPS plan here

Submit a comment here or mail your comment to this address:

Superintendent, Attn: Bison Management Plan, PO Box 168, Yellowstone National Park, WY 82190

Listen to our first dispatch on the plan here

Learn more about how many bison Yellowstone can support:

The Yellowstone Bison Program’s 2020 Conservation Update (especially “Making Sense of Numbers” on Page 12) 

A paper by other scientists with a different perspective: “Bison limit ecosystem recovery in northern Yellowstone”

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Episode transcript

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Yellowstone National Park recently released a new plan for managing the bison herd. It’s in draft form, and maps out three alternatives for how to manage the herd in the future. Before it gets finalized, the public has a chance to read it and weigh in on which path is best. We talked with Morgan Warthin, chief of public affairs at Yellowstone National Park, to learn what this could mean for the future of the bison.

What questions do you have about bison, bison science, bison history, and bison management? Send your questions to us at [email protected] and we’ll try to answer as many as we can in an upcoming dispatch.

Read the plan here

Learn more about the plans at one of the virtual public meetings:

August 28, 2023 10:30 AM -12:00 PM MT and August 29, 2023 4:00 PM - 5:30 PM MT

What's brucellosis? It's a bacterial disease, primarily occurring in bison, elk, cattle, and pigs.

Learn more about brucellosis here.

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Episode transcript

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A lyrical ode to our atmosphere: the invisible, underappreciated substance that makes all life on Earth possible. 

There are quite a few things working against us when it comes to acting on climate change—not least of them, the simple fact that we literally can’t see the atmosphere, or how we’re changing it. 

In this episode, we take a guided tour of the Earth’s atmosphere to understand the science, beauty, and wonder of our “magical safety blanket.” Our tour is led by a trio of scientists: astrophysicists Dr. Anjali Tripathi and Dr. Hannah Wakeford, and hydroclimatologist Dr. Francina Dominguez. 

Join us in giving the atmosphere its due.

This episode originally aired on February 8, 2022.

Find the transcript for this episode here.

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A few weeks ago, the Biden administration approved the Willow project. It’s a plan to extract 600 million barrels of oil from northern Alaska. There’s a lot of history and politics behind this story, things that tie to issues we’ve reported on in past seasons of Threshold. 

Amy Martin wrestles with this project and what it means for our netzero future in this month’s issue of our newsletter.

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Representatives from nearly every country in the world are in Egypt right now for COP27, the annual climate conference hosted by the United Nations. The overall goal of each COP is to make progress on climate; to get all countries moving in the same direction, toward a decarbonized world, in an equitable way, based on the best scientific information available. But some are now saying that we should abandon hope of holding global average temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial temperatures.

But we don't think that. And here's why.

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