In this week’s classic Story Collider episode, both our stories are about the thrill of exploration and discovering something new.
Part 1: Ecologist Cylita Guy finds unexpected adventure when she studies bats in the field.
Cylita Guy is a PhD candidate and ACM SIGHPC/Intel Computational and Data Science Fellow in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Toronto. Broadly interested in zoonotic diseases and their wildlife reservoirs, Cylita’s research focuses on bats and their pathogens. Using both field surveys and computational methods she is investigating why bats seem to be good at carrying viruses that they sometimes share with humans, but rarely get sick from themselves. When not in the field catching bats or at her computer analyzing data, Cylita looks to help others foster their own sense of curiosity and discovery about the natural world. In conjunction with the High Park Nature Centre Cylita has started a Junior Bat Biologist program to engage young, future scientists. She also works as a Host at the Ontario Science Centre, educating the public about diverse scientific topics. Finally, Cylita’s hilarious field exploits are featured in a general audience book titled Fieldwork Fail: The Messy Side of Science! In her down time, you can find your friendly neighborhood batgirl chasing her next big outdoor adventure.
This story originally aired on The Story Collider's podcast on November 24, 2017, in an episode titled "The Bats and the Bees: Stories about winged wildlife."
Part 2: Maija Niemisto is a director of education on the Clearwater, America’s environmental flagship. But when a stranger comes to the side of the ship, it heralds a discovery about her city and herself.
Maija was born to a family of musicians in the heartland, far from the sea. Minnesota was her first hailing port. School, university and adventures took her to Finland, Wisconsin and Lebanon. After receiving her B.A. in International Relations and Environmental studies, she followed the smell of sweet salt air and ran away to see the sea aboard her 28-foot sloop. In 2008, the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater appeared on the horizon and she jumped at the chance to combine her interests in music, sailing, teaching, science, water ecology, environmental advocacy and pumping the bilge.
This story originally aired on The Story Collider's podcast on January 29, 2012, in an episode titled "A Step Off the Boat."
Episode Transcript
Part 1
When I started my PhD, I made one thing abundantly clear. Under no circumstances did I want to do any type of fieldwork. Now, this always surprises people, like how can you be an ecologist and not want to work hands-on with the animals you study? The truth is, guys, fieldwork is hard. Hours are long, animals don’t cooperate and situations can be dangerous.
Cylita Guy shares her story at Burdock in Toronto, ON in April 2018. Photo by Chelsea Humphries.
But despite this, five months into my PhD, one of my supervisors calls me into his office and he tells me that he wants me to work with a postdoc on a project examining the behavior of bats living in an urban park. As much as I reminded him that this was the last thing I wanted to be doing, he told me it was a wonderful, career-building opportunity, which was his way of saying I didn’t really have a choice.
So I started to think of all the ways that I could fake excitement for doing the one and only thing I didn’t want to do in my degree. But you know what? Over the next few months, Krista, my postdoc partner, and I started to get ready for the project. I actually did start to get kind of excited. I found myself thinking, “Hey, I can totally do this whole fieldwork thing.” And that incurable optimism lasted me right up until my first night in the field.
It was like all of my worst nightmares had come true. We got rained on, I would sit in the dark for hours and catch nothing, equipment broke, I had to deal with people trying to sell me drugs and steal my stuff, I couldn’t adjust to nights and, to make matters worse, the project wasn’t even working. I wasn’t getting the usable data that I'd hoped for. I absolutely hated it.
Now, near the end of the summer, Krista and I found this colony of bats living in the chimney of a four-story house with a split roof. So we decided that to capture this colony, Krista was going to get on the upper section of the roof, about four stories up, and my job was going to be to hold the ladder and provide moral support from the lower section of the roof about three stories up.
So Krista and I get into position no problem. After about an hour or so, she's handing me down a bag full of thirty bats. Now, I don't know if you've ever wondered what a bagful of bats looks like… I’m guessing probably not until this point in time. But together, the bats formed a mass about the size of two fists put together. All individual parts of that mass were kind of squirming, trying to claw their way out of the bag, making a ton of noise as they did so. The worst part about a bagful of bats, though, is that they smell so incredibly bad. But irrespective of the stench, the trapping had been a success.
So now it comes time for Krista to get down from that upper section of the roof. I assume my ladder-holding position. She slowly begins to lower herself down to the first step of the ladder and then she misses.
Cylita Guy shares her story at Burdock in Toronto, ON in April 2018. Photo by Chelsea Humphries.
Now, as I saw Krista come tumbling down from the upper section of the roof I thought to myself, “This is it. I’m gonna die, she's gonna die, and like all of my worst fieldwork nightmares will come true.” Spoiler: I’m here talking to you today so nobody died.
I managed to soften most of Krista’s blow using my body, and then as she hit the deck and started rolling towards the edge of that lower section of the roof, I lunge forward, grabbed her by her belt just before she went over the edge. Like I said, fieldwork can be dangerous.
This near-death experience had reaffirmed for me why I wanted no part in it. No, thank you. I was done. So Krista and I we decided to skip discussing what had happened and just get on with processing our bats.
When I talk about processing, for every bat that I capture, I have to collect information on things like age and weight and sex, as well as give everybody a microchip so that I can tell them apart later. We decided it would be best to take our bats back to Hyde Park and process them in one of those big shelters full of picnic tables.
So we start processing and it’s not going that great. None of our bats are cooperating. To be honest, I can’t really blame them because if someone showed up at my house, threw a bed sheet over me as I was trying to leave, and then poked and prodded me while shining a bright light in my face, I'd probably be pretty pissed off too, to be honest. But to complicate matters, it was also getting insanely cold. Not only was I freezing but so were my bats.
Now, when bats get cold, they go torpid. Torpor is kind of like this mini-hibernation strategy that lots of small mammals use to save energy. Torpid bats are slow and sluggish, which means when you try to release them, they try to fly, can’t, and then kind of just go thud on the ground.
So for every bat that we process I had to somehow warm them back up. The best way to warm up a torpid bat is to take that torpid bat, put it in a little cloth bag with all its other torpid friends, and then take that cloth bag full of bats, put it down your shirt, preferably in your armpit.
You're all laughing like you think I’m joking. I’m being serious. That is like our standard operating procedure for warming up bats.
So that’s how the next few hours went. Every bat that we processed went in the bagful of bats, back down my shirt.
Then all of a sudden we start hearing these voices getting progressively louder. They're hooting and they're hollering and are clearly quite inebriated. All of a sudden, this group of seventeen-year-old kids comes into our view. Before I can even think about hiding, one of the girls calls out, “Hey, what are you guys doing over there?”
I will never be able to adequately describe to you the sheer panic I experienced as these twelve drunk seventeen-year-old kids descended on my picnic tables. All I could think was that one of these kids was going to get bit. I was going to have to drive them to the hospital, explain to a public health official why we needed rabies vaccine, and then I was probably going to get sued by their parents.
I thought about my fancy twelve-hundred-dollar radio receiver going missing. I thought, “You know what? I think these kids are drunk and high enough to like try pit-tagging each other, try microchipping each other.” It has happened before. But you know what? None of that happened.
The kids asked what we were doing and they asked if they could watch, so I told them, “Sure, so long as you don’t touch anything.” And for the next hour and a half, these twelve, drunk seventeen-year-old kids sat and watched me process bats and asked me some of the most insightful questions I've ever been asked. It was crazy. I didn’t think that they could do that. Okay, well, eleven of the twelve did. The twelfth was like passed out on the floor. I digress.
They were so incredibly excited to see science being done and their excitement was infectious. Everything was going so well, right up until the cops showed up. Next thing you know, we've got these headlights being shone on our picnic tables and this voice gets on a bullhorn telling us that we have to disperse because the park is closed. The kids grab their stuff and, with rushed thank-yous and goodbyes, they took off into the darkness.
Then this big, burly police officer gets out of his car, comes over to Krista and I and asks what we’re doing, so I explain. Looking skeptical, he asks if he can see one of these so-called bats. Like who makes up something like that? Really?
Anyways, Krista obliges. She pulls one of the bats out of the bag. Shows him. He seems satisfied but also slightly terrified, which I did not expect from a man his size.
He then looks back at me and all of a sudden his eyes start getting really, really big. Then, in a very serious voice, he leans in and he says, “Ma’am did you know that your shirt is moving?”
I looked down at my shirt, I look back up at the police officer and I said, “Of course. I've got twenty-five bats down there and they're starting to warm up.”
I need you all to understand that at that point in time my response seemed perfectly normal but, retrospectively, I understand how crazy I must have been sitting in the park at 1:00 a.m. with twenty-five bats down my shirt for no apparent reason whatsoever. The police officer took off pretty fast after that.
Cylita Guy shares her story at Burdock in Toronto, ON in April 2018. Photo by Chelsea Humphries.
So 3:00 a.m. rolls around. For the record, just when you think things can’t get any more exciting, they always get more exciting at 3:00 a.m. Krista and I are left with a single bat to process when all of a sudden we hear this growling in the bushes behind us. I'd like to say that in those next moments Krista and I acted accordingly, but instead we both screamed, jumped up on the picnic table and held onto each other.
We unanimously decided, “No. This is not for one night. I’m done. We’re out.” Lucky bat number thirty got to go free without any processing. Krista frantically begins packing up all the field equipment. I then sprinted over to our car and turned on the headlights in the hopes of scaring off whatever was in the bushes. I then remembered that I still had like twenty-nine torpid bats down my shirt, because you forget those sorts of things in that kind of situation.
So I cranked the heater in the car, I put the bats under the heater and within minutes the bag was squirming. I ran out, I grabbed the bag, I ran out to the center of the main road going through the park and I began to release the bats one by one telling them to be free. I think that if there had been bystanders, it might have looked a lot like the scene from the Wizard of Oz where I was the Wicked Witch of the West telling my pretties to fly. “Fly, my pretties. Fly!”
I really do think that the ridiculousness of that night is kind of what kept me going. It showed me that I could handle a lot and still have a really good cathartic laugh about it later. Since that night, I've done a second summer of intense fieldwork. It was hard, but I have some really cool data to show for it. Along the way, I've had a lot of other hilariously ridiculous experiences but none quite as ridiculous as the night of the colony.
As for the girl who didn’t want to do any fieldwork in our PhD? I’m currently trying to figure out how I can get myself down to Panama next summer to work with exotic species. Turns out fieldwork kind of was my thing. It only took a near-death experience, twelve drunk teenagers, one police officer thinking I was bat-shit crazy, and a Wizard of Oz moment to help me realize it. Thank you.
Part 2
On one particular day onboard Clearwater, we were actually having some mechanical issues, which happens from time to time. The vessel was in Yonkers. We had a group of students that came down and they were expecting to go out sailing. Of course, on this day we couldn't. But, luckily, it was a great group of students and so we decided to keep them on board and do our Science Education Program dockside.
The group came on and we split them up into little groups. They went from a learning station to a learning station doing all these great scientific inquiry experiments.
There was a group over on one side that was looking through microscopes at copepods and dinoflagellates and other kinds of plankton. And there was a group of students on the other side of the vessel looking in the tank to see what kind of fish we'd caught and figuring out what they were using a dichotomous key. And there was another group on the other side of the vessel that were doing reverse titrations to see what the levels of dissolved oxygen were in the river that day.
Essentially, they were going about the vessel doing all these scientific hands-on experiments. The take home that we were trying to drive into each kid's head was that this River used to be a really dirty place. When Pete Seeger and his friends came out and decided to clean it up, they built this vessel that they're on right now.
It's a great story of this individual who's changed the course of the world, basically. And each of them, we want to encourage. Each of these kids are special little snowflakes and someday they can change the world too.
So, what made this day different than others was that the kids were actually really great, for one, and they're eating it up. They're doing science experiments. They love it. But they're not really buying the message that the river's cleaner than it was because they keep saying, “It kind of smells bad, miss. It smells bad today.”
And I'm like, “Oh, no. It used to be really dirty but, today, it's gotten so much better than 40 years ago.”
And they're like, “No. I mean, this is fun but it smells really bad.”
The other thing that was different about being on the dock instead of out in the middle of the river is that the public, instead of coming to the banks of the river and seeing us majestically sail by, they can actually come right up to the boat and kind of look at us while we're standing there.
And this one guy walks down and he's kind of an older gentleman. He's a little hunched. He might have a lazy eye and make a little bit of a limp. He's about to come and talk to the kids and so I kind of swoop in.
A lot of people come up to the vessel and they want to tell us about their personal experience with Pete Seeger and like what he's done for their lives and all this stuff, so I'm expecting to be like a great listener and hear what he's got to say about Pete.
But this guy was a little bit different. He's really agitated, actually. He's really riled up. He's talking about the same thing the kids were talking about, that this water is like really, really dirty. It's coming out from over here. He points up the river about 100 feet, not very far away at all, to where the Sawmill Creek comes flowing out of Yonkers and into the Hudson.
And he's saying like he's told everyone about this. He's told the authorities. He's told the city officials. Nobody's listening to him. He knows where it's coming from and no one will help him. And so he's really excited because Clearwater's in town and we're seen as this vessel that’s really environmental flagship of America. So people imagine us sailing along and in our wake things are like green and clean and we're swooping into town and we're the saviors, essentially.
So I listen to him for a little while and I start having this internal debate where I'm trying to figure out if he's crazy and if maybe I should do what I sometimes do on the boat when I don't want to talk to a passenger. Like you grab your knife and you put it in your mouth and you go and you pull in something really important, but we're not sailing so I can't do that right now.
And the other thing is he's kind of right. This isn't normal for the river. It really doesn't smell like this anymore. It has gotten a lot cleaner.
Then the kids start to perk up their ears and they're kind of gathering around and listening. I was just telling them like we all have to care and we all have to do something. Now, they're like, “Yeah. Yeah.”
So then he says, the older gentleman says to me, “You have to help. Come with me. I'll show you.”
The kids are sort of in a circle around and their mouths are gaping open. And they're like, “Uh‑huh. You have to help.”
And so, with a little bit of reluctance, I take a step from the boat onto the dock and then I start to follow him.
He takes me from the dock over to the Sawmill Creek where you can see that it's foul. It smells like someone vomited in there, like it's pretty bad. And we walk up the creek, under the railroad tracks and into Yonkers. All this time, he's like waving his arms around and telling me about how the creek used to flow like this, but now it's all been paved over.
So he's kind of taking me back in time to the way it used to look. The creek now goes in these culverts underneath the city of Yonkers. You can't even see it.
Then he gets to a point where he's like, “Well, the creek used to flow this way but, really, the shortcut is over this hill.” And I look up at this hill. Who knew there were mountains in Yonkers. I mean this is pretty significant.
So I started walking up the hill, plodding along behind him. I start to wonder like, “I wonder if I'm being kidnapped right now.” I could see the headlines, you know, “Sailor is abducted and mysteriously gives no fight.”
So we walked to the top of this mountain and there's a school up there. We walk through the schoolyard and there's kids. I'm like, “Okay. This is kind of okay. There's kids.”
Then we go down the other side and he points to where you can see the creek again. There's trees around it and kind of steep embankments down to it. So we walk over to it and like scramble down all the way to the water.
He points. He's like, “There it is.” And there's this pipe coming out of the side into the stream and all this yellow, thick, kind of milky, foul water is pouring out of it. And just above that, the creek is really clean. It's clear and looks nice.
He's like, “That's not all.” So we climb up and he shows me where there's a road and an overpass that looks kind of like an old railroad trestle. There's water pouring out of that too and it's the same foul‑smelling water.
So I'm having another one of these internal debates where I'm like, “Okay. Great. He's kind of legitimate. I'm not getting kidnapped. This is good.”
“And also, this is terrible. Look at this stuff pouring out of here. How can this happen?”
So I start to go into my like wilderness first responder medical training mode and like this is an emergency.
I look around like are there any live wires? Does he need a tracheotomy? Can I splint something? And everything seems to be fine.
Then I remember like part of the medical training I've had is if you're not really that far from help, you should probably just call for help.
So what I did next that I'm actually kind of embarrassed about, I actually called 9‑1‑1. I can't believe I did that. And I started talking to the 9‑1‑1 responder and she's like, “Where are you?”
“I'm in Yonkers.”
And she's like, “What's your emergency?”
“It's pollution.”
Meanwhile, the gentleman that I followed out into the woods kind of sidesteps away from me.
Eventually, she calms me down a little bit and tells me the police aren't coming. But I think when the police can’t come and help you, that is the wilderness. So I'm like, “Well, we gotta figure something out.”
So we sit down and we're looking at this foul, putrid water pouring out of this pipe and I remember, actually, I know somebody that I could call that would be a lot more helpful.
So there's another vessel, another boat on the Hudson that we worked with sometime. It's called the Riverkeeper. Their captain, John Lipscomb, does these trips up and down the Hudson where they monitor to see if there's anyone polluting and, if they find someone who's polluting, then they sue them. This is the perfect person to call right now. Why didn't I think of that?
So I call him and he said, I mean he is a really receptive audience. He is like, “Yes. We just did a transect across there. We were testing for enterococcus,” which is a bacteria that is found in human intestines, “and it's a good sign that there is sewage in the water when you find it.”
He said a couple days ago, they'd gone past Yonkers and they found high levels of this enterococcus but they couldn't figure out where the bacteria was coming from. I found it.
So he's giving me a mission. I love missions. I'm so excited. It's like CSI Yonkers. Like I'm all about this.
So I'm supposed to get three samples of water, so I get these bottles and I fill the samples with water. And I'm supposed to take pictures of everything I do. So I'm taking pictures of the water pouring out of there. I'm taking pictures of my watch to show what time it is. I'm taking pictures of my face, like I'm filling it up. He recommends I let the authorities know, which I don't think is a good idea. I tried that.
So I gathered these samples. I take all these pictures and then I head back to the boat with this guy.
We get back there and the kids are just wrapping up their program. They were wondering where I went because they're kind of excited to see what happened. I came back and I showed them the samples and I explained what we were going to do. We're going to send these samples off to the lab to incubate for 12 to 18 hours and then see if there's any enterococcus in it and that would be like the evidence to figure out who is doing this.
So they're excited. I don't know what's going to happen and they don't know what's going to happen, but we'll find out someday.
The next morning, it's one of those beautiful fall Hudson River days where the leaves are just starting to turn and there's a good wind. The kids show up and we can go sailing today because our mechanical issue has been resolved.
We pull away from the dock, which is a relief to everyone because that stench has been hanging around the boat all night where we all sleep on board the vessel. So we pull out in the middle of the river and we hoist the sail. The kids are hauling on the halyards and get the 3,000‑pound mainsail up in the air. It's just one gorgeous day.
Then over on the horizon we see the Riverkeeper boat coming down. I'm like, “This is awesome.”
I show all the kids and they're like, “Yeah, this is so cool.”
And then he comes right next to us and I'm, “Ahoy!”
And he's like, “Ahoy!”
Well, nobody really said ahoy but what he did say, though, Captain John Lipscomb was like, “Those samples, there was more than 24,196 colonies of enterococcus in those 100 milliliter bottles.”
I didn't really know what that meant either, so don't feel bad.
What he said was it's 400 times the legal amount that can be in the water, so this was something serious was going on.
And he wants the pictures. He's got to put together this whole case. So I scramble down below decks and upload all the pictures onto this flash drive.
I'm scrambling back up on deck and I remember that everything on the boat eventually falls in the water. So I go back down, I put this flash drive in a plastic bag and then I wrap it with tape and then put another plastic bag around it and then some more tape and then I put a bunch of stuffing in it so it'll float in case it falls in the water and more tape, another bag until, finally, I have something that's like roughly the size of a football.
I go back up on deck and he comes up alongside and I loft this football‑sized precious package out into the river. Miraculously, it lands right in the cockpit of his boat. I can feel like my superhero cape kind of waving a little bit. I don't think the kids were actually cheering but, in my head, you know.
So he goes off and so then what comes off all this? Using the pictures and those dirty water samples, they were actually able to pin the polluter on the city of Tarrytown. The municipal sewage plant was dumping this and it was making its way undetected into the abandoned Croton Aqueduct that goes through all these urban places and then comes down to Yonkers and then made its way into the Sawmill Creek and then down into the Hudson.
This is one of those classic examples of environmental injustice where this affluent town was sending their waste downriver to a lower income community. It really raised a lot of voices.
So Clearwater and Riverkeeper and then local press all started coming together in unison and speaking out against this. The result was that Tarrytown stopped dumping and made a very public apology for what they did.
So my first time being an environmental superhero went pretty well, actually. But if it hadn't been for those kids that day that were standing around with their mouths agape looking at me like every individual can make a difference, without them I don't think I ever would have taken that first step off the boat and into the wilds of Yonkers.
Thank you.