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Science In Action
A mystery satellite has been jamming GPS in Europe
00:36:03
Scientists detect for the first time an unknown source of GPS interference from space.
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- [00:00]
Roland Pease
This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the uk.
- [00:06]
Todd Humphreys
In Turkey, if you're willing to take a detour, you'll discover the food even social media hasn't got to yet.
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Roland Pease
From Michelin Stars and Wine and Ola to traditional recipes and the home of.
- [00:19]
Todd Humphreys
Baklava in the east, discover the culinary capital of Gaziantep and talk to the locals.
- [00:24]
Roland Pease
Every dish has its own story, flavors, experimentation and tradition.
- [00:29]
Todd Humphreys
Turkia has it all. Plan your detour at go to turkier.com this is the story of the one as a maintenance supervisor at a manufacturing.
- [00:40]
Roland Pease
Facility, he knows keeping the line up.
- [00:43]
Todd Humphreys
And running is a top priority. That's why he chooses Grainger, because when a drive belt gets damaged, Grainger makes.
- [00:49]
Roland Pease
It easy to find the exact specs.
- [00:51]
Todd Humphreys
For the replacement product he needs and next day delivery helps ensure he'll have everything in place and running like clockwork. Call 1-800-granger. Click granger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.
- [01:08]
Roland Pease
Welcome to Science in Action from the BBC World Service with me Roland Pease. Later in the program, the threat that AI combined with recent advances in molecular biology could let bad actors design dangerous proteins and what we can do about it.
- [01:23]
Tessa Alexanian
All of the tools in the study found that we could increase our detection of these AI generated variants by being more flexible rather than looking for exact matches.
- [01:33]
Roland Pease
Also, our fear of wolves may be nothing compared to theirs of us.
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Liana Zanet
Our various experiments around the world on wildlife, including wolves, now is showing that everything is most afraid of humans.
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Roland Pease
A month ago the headlines were full of reports of GPS signals being blocked in in the Baltic regions near Russia in international airline and shipping routes, depriving navigators of critical location data. A flight carrying EU chief Ursula von der Leyen to Bulgaria also had to be diverted because of deliberate jamming of the location network. GPS is the widely used American version of what are more generally called global navigation satellite systems, which send streams of radio data to your phone or RECE to triangulate your position. The jamming in the Baltic is thought to have come from ground based transmitters, drowning the satellite signal. But communications expert Todd Humphries has found evidence that other satellites can also generate interference, deliberate or accidental, that can also dangerously degrade gps. Either way the issue comes down to the weakness of the GNSS signals after their long journey from outer space.
- [02:57]
Todd Humphreys
Exactly so, and under normal circumstances the receivers are sensitive enough to overcome that and to dig the signal out of the noise. But if there's any deliberate or accidental interference in the radio waves, it can easily swamp out those legitimate signals and you're left without any GPS connection. And these deliberate attempts have begun to attack aircraft. In other words, the GPS signals that are guiding airplanes on their final approach or in route have been coming under attack, not just from jamming, where the signals are overwhelmed, but also by spoofing, where you falsely generate signals that look very much like the authentic ones and can confuse airplanes because of that and the clocks inside those airplanes. So yeah, this is a problem. It's a problem of warfare in general in the modern world, because this is the electronic warfare that will, you know, be prevalent going forward.
- [03:55]
Roland Pease
But you're saying in this new research that you've been doing, you think that there may be a satellite or some satellites which are doing the same thing. In other words, these distracting or disruptive signals are coming from outer space, like the GPS GNSS signals themselves.
- [04:12]
Todd Humphreys
Yeah, this is the main finding of my student Zach Clements work over the last five months where he's determined with a high degree of certainty that the interference we've noted since 2019 is coming from space. It's coming from low Earth orbit or medium earth orbit or geostationary orbit. And I think we have settled on it coming from geostationary orbit. And we have only now a small list of satellites that it could be coming from.
- [04:43]
Roland Pease
Give me a sense of how you've worked this out.
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Todd Humphreys
We got a tip some six months ago from a researcher in the UK who said, I know you're interested in interference in general, and I think I might have found something really noteworthy. And that's when my students at Clements began looking into the data that this researcher had provided and then looked into a lot more data, public data in fact, from NASA and other and other institutions, and found evidence that, that many of these so called continuously operating reference stations across the globe that are doing geodetic research or other science with GPS signals have been reporting short but very profound jamming from around the globe. And what was interesting was that the jamming occurred simultaneously across hundreds of these stations, even despite their vast geographical separation. So we had stations in Svalbard and Spain and all the way to, to Moscow and all the way to Canada. So this was obviously not coming from the surface of the Earth because there's no way a transmitter in the surface could affect all those stations at once.
- [05:58]
Roland Pease
I see, so where do you say jamming? So basically these are, I know, earthquake monitoring systems and so on that use gps. They would be continually listening, but they would suddenly lose contact, as it were. For you say what Short period. What do you mean by that?
- [06:17]
Todd Humphreys
Only a few seconds. And they don't entirely lose contact. It's just that the authentic signals drop in their signal power relative to the background noise. So it looks like there's a deafening noise that has arisen, but only for a few seconds and then it's over. And we've located that noise in space.
- [06:36]
Roland Pease
There are thousands and thousands of satellites up there. So you've been looking for the pattern, as it were, of when these outages happen.
- [06:46]
Todd Humphreys
Exactly, Roland. And the pattern that we're looking for is aided by the fact that we have so many of the receivers on the Earth, each one of which is seeing the interference signal at a slightly different power. Some of them are hit by the full blast. These are mostly around the Baltics, Finland, Norway, and others are only marginally affected, way off in the, in the fringes, as I say, Svalbard, down towards Spain and Canada, Greenland. So by putting this pattern together, the timing of the pattern and also the spatial distribution of the pattern, we're able to reduce the number of candidate satellites down to just those that you could count on one hand.
- [07:29]
Roland Pease
And so if you've got those candidates, you said in particular thought it was one in geostationary orbit. In other words, one that sort of hanging over a particular part of the. The equator. Is that right? Which. Can you say what, which one it is?
- [07:45]
Todd Humphreys
Well, yes, this is geostationary orbit, just like you say, they appear to be fixed in the sky from the position of somebody on the Earth. But I wouldn't want to go ahead yet and say which one we think it is because we have a bit more work to do to refine our techniques. We have determined that it must be a geostationary satellite or alternatively Amulnia satellite, because it tends to have a very broad effect over an area. And yet the pattern is similar from event to event. And we've seen something like 72 strong events since 2019. And this tends to have a unified fingerprint. It all looks like the same phenomenon.
- [08:27]
Roland Pease
Molni. I think that's a term for a Russian military satellite. But they're a kind of orbit that sort of very loopy, but it goes close to the. The North Pole, is that right?
- [08:39]
Todd Humphreys
Yes. This is effectively the way that Russians get the same benefits as geostationary satellites. It's an orbit that hangs out over northern latitudes for a long time and then swiftly whooshes around the back of the Earth and goes back up to hang out high over those latitudes. So Russia uses these as not just for military satellites, but for communication satellites, et cetera.
- [08:59]
Roland Pease
In the paper you do mention that there is. Are sort of electrical noise events, so there are unintentional sparkings, as it were, I guess, on satellites. Are you able to rule out that this is unintentional interference rather than some kind of intentional, I don't know, testing of the way that jamming might work?
- [09:23]
Todd Humphreys
It's really hard to know for sure from the pattern we see if this is deliberate. And it's a strange kind of deliberate because the pattern we're seeing since 2019 seems to be a unified one. It's a repeating type of pattern. And I would expect that if somebody were practicing jamming from space, they might innovate, they might do something different as their understanding evolves. Whereas what we see is fairly, fairly constant in the kinds of temporal patterns and spatial patterns. On the other hand, we. We're quite certain that humans are involved in triggering this because the events happen overwhelmingly on Wednesdays and during working hours in Europe.
- [10:05]
Roland Pease
So you're saying you don't think it's a faulty pattern? It's not a faulty satellite that's doing this, but the story might be a bit hard to explain.
- [10:15]
Todd Humphreys
That's right. We think that humans are involved in triggering the event, but they may not be doing it for the purpose of jamming. They may be doing it for some sort of satellite maintenance. And they completely unaware that they're jamming gps, blasting jamming signals across all of Europe when they're doing this kind of maintenance.
- [10:35]
Roland Pease
I presume that people who run the Galileo system and the GPS systems and all these have operations that sort of monitor the quality of the signal and so on. In other words, do you think you may have found something that others may have already found and they're trying to deal with?
- [10:54]
Todd Humphreys
Well, we just had a large meeting of all of the important people in the world of GPS and GNSS two weeks ago, and the room where my student was presenting these findings was full of people curious about it. There were some indications that government officials in the. On the secret side were aware of this, but out in the open it was not known. And I suspect that's because it's a transient phenomenon. It comes and goes within about five seconds, and it's easy to miss unless you know what you're looking for.
- [11:24]
Roland Pease
But I guess the concern is if there was a prolonged burst, this could actually cause absolute havoc for, let's say, planes which are landing.
- [11:34]
Todd Humphreys
That's my interpretation too. I view this as a lucky break, really it's going to give us the understanding we need to recognize a space based jammer as a real threat. But this in particular isn't yet a threat because it comes and goes so quickly. If it had been a sustained burst, then yes, you would see effects on aviation, maritime shipping, on timing across the continents. But this is just giving us a look at what might be in the future. Even though it's by itself not harmful.
- [12:04]
Roland Pease
I mean, is there a way of making these geolocation services more robust? I'm sort of imagining that they're only transmitting on a small number of frequencies, but if you can switch between frequencies more easily or, I don't know, there are other ways because it seems to me we're so dependent on these systems. Now.
- [12:24]
Todd Humphreys
That question how to make GPS and Galileo and others more robust has occupied my mind and many people's minds in my community for the last couple of decades. There are many good ideas. For example, current GPS receivers on airplanes are at least a decade old, if not more, and only use a single frequency of gps, whereas they could be using multiple frequencies of multiple constellations. But the bare fact is that all of these traditional legacy GNSS GPS systems are generating signals that by the time they arrive to your receiver, are very weak. So if we want to overcome this problem of easy jamming, we're going to have to look for much stronger signals. And my own research has led me to believe that low Earth orbit constellations like Starlink and others could be the key to making much louder, stronger, authentic signals that would be harder to jam.
- [13:21]
Roland Pease
Just one other thing. If you've got some suspects in hand for the responsible satellite, I mean, two things. One, could you not, or someone phone up the operators and say, excuse me, what's going on? Alternatively, are there ways of sort of specifically tracking those satellites to see if they're making some kind of radio noise?
- [13:46]
Todd Humphreys
Yes. In fact, some of our collaborators now in Germany are saying that as soon as we're confident about the identity of the satellite, the offending satellite, they're going to point their enormous dish at the satellite and listen for a long time until they get evidence that, yes, that is exactly the one generating this interference. And certainly we could contact the operator. Like I say, it's likely that the operator doesn't even know the extent of the damage they're causing. And we've calculated how much power they'd need to generate this, the enormous signal that we have been detecting, and it's 2,000 watts. If it's a geostationary satellite that's really blasting out. That's, that's, that's blasting it. This is a sizable fraction of the total amount of power that would be available to the satellite. So certainly if this is unintentional, it is definitely something that, that, that causes a big change on the satellite. There's, you know, they're diverting power from the satellite into this band and it's hitting the most popular, the most useful band of all. It's called the GPS L1 band. That's the one that all aviation and maritime shipping uses. That's why this is an important phenomenon.
- [14:58]
Roland Pease
Todd Humphreys, a space radio comms expert at University of Texas, on what could be a growing threat. A year ago, we were celebrating the Nobel Prize given to researchers who'd found ways, using AI, to work out the structures of proteins, the working molecules of life, direct from their DNA codes, and to do the reverse, to design DNA codes that would lead to new synthetic proteins with properties never seen before in nature. We were thinking of all the wonderful new medicines and enzymes that smart people could dream up that would improve our world. Others, more wary, feared the dangerous proteins that could equally be concocted to do harm, for example, as bioweapons and were looking for ways to catch perpetrators before they succeed. The reassuring news in science this week is existing biosecurity protocols can be tweaked to spot the previously unimaginable dangers. Tessa Alexanian of the International Biosecurity and Biosafety Initiative for Science, ibis, took part in the exercise and illustrated for me the kind of protein we might fear.
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Tessa Alexanian
So proteins of concern would be, you know, the most famous one, and the first one that was tested in the very early framing study that you'll find in the supplementary info of the paper, was ricin. Right. So ricin is a toxin that can be derived from castor beans. It's a protein where, if you have some fairly purified version of it, it's very toxic to humans and it has been used. Letters laced with ricin have been sent to people, to politicians in the past. So it's a molecule, a protein that has been used to attempt to do harm to people.
- [16:48]
Roland Pease
And in this synthetic area, what you're saying is it could be, let's say, something a bit like ricin, which you wouldn't recognise, but, but an AI machine could invent for you, and so you want to be able to stop people doing that?
- [17:03]
Tessa Alexanian
Yeah, absolutely. So there's a whole world of protein design where you can get variants. We call the tool paraphrase because you're sort of taking the protein sequence and getting a slightly paraphrased version of it that ought to take about the same structure. And so the way that ricin, for example, works is it. It interferes with a very key protein in your cells called the ribosome that is sort of necessary for basically your whole cellular function. And the way it's able to interfere with the ribosome is because it has a structure that sort of gloms onto the ribosome and gets in its way. And so you can imagine having a slightly different protein with much the same structure that can affect that same toxicity.
- [17:43]
Roland Pease
The front line of all this sort of biosafety is with the genetic code, so that there are companies which will produce DNA for you on order. Effectively, you just send in the sequence and they'll make it. And when they get that DNA back, in principle, they could put it into, let's say, a cell culture or into yeast, and that would make the protein. Have I got that sort of. That's. That's what happens every day in biology labs.
- [18:14]
Tessa Alexanian
Yeah, absolutely. I used to work as an automation engineer at a biotechnology company, and we were constantly ordering custom DNA, and then we would insert it into the bacteria that we worked with. And then, you know, we were producing agricultural chemicals and things. So we'd have those bacteria sitting in a fermenter producing the proteins that we wanted, and then we'd purify them out. And the thing we want to prevent is people purifying out toxins and using them to do harm. There's lots of good reasons to order toxin DNA as well. Right. A huge number of toxins are very useful as pain medication, for example, and there's very active research on antitoxins as well. So some people need detoxing DNA, but for other people, you'd want to ask a few questions before you send them the DNA that could then be inserted into some kind of host cell and produce a toxin.
- [19:01]
Roland Pease
So even before we get to AI protein design, there are safety protocols in there that the industry uses. But your paper is about the fact that it can become much harder if people are not sending in, let's say, the ricin protein, but something that will work like that, but the supplier doesn't know that that's what the intent is.
- [19:22]
Tessa Alexanian
Yeah, it gets harder for the tools to recognize the proteins. And, you know, there was already a big shift in the industry where as synthetic biology took off, you have many more people expressing proteins in cells other than the ones that they would have originated in. And there's this whole process to make that expression work better that doesn't change the protein structure, but changes the DNA structure that you order. So you've sort of reprogrammed the DNA structure a little bit to express more effectively in this cell. It's called codon optimization. And already the industry had to do a response to that where they said, okay, we can't get away with only screening DNA sequences, we have to translate it to protein and screen the protein sequences as well. And I think with all of these new AI tools for designing proteins, we're now in a space where you can't screen just the protein sequence for close matches. You have to expand your screening to think about the sort of space of protein that should fold similarly or that should act similarly. And so all of the tools in this study found that we could increase our detection of these AI generated variants by being more flexible rather than looking for exact matches.
- [20:29]
Roland Pease
I mean, this is a big exercise. You predicted The DNA for 70,000, is that right?
- [20:35]
Tessa Alexanian
Yes.
- [20:36]
Roland Pease
Proteins which if they were made, you might imagine they could be dangerous. And then you said, okay, here are the routine defense mechanisms, here are the routine screening mechanisms. How well do they work?
- [20:50]
Tessa Alexanian
Yeah, and they varied. You know, I think some of the tools were already detecting most, but not all of the of the variants that we thought we should detect. One challenge of this whole study is that we didn't want to produce a bunch of toxic proteins that the world had never seen before. And so we're working off digital proxies. This was sort of an all digital study. There is actually a bit of follow up work that's available as a preprint now where some of the authors worked together with people from the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the US and made the same kind of variants, but of benign proteins to see if they would maintain their functionality. Things like fluorescent proteins do, they still fluoresce. And so we have some follow on research coming out about how good are our digital scores for predicting what the proteins do. But broadly what we found is that it was possible for all of the tools to be patched to sort of respond to this vulnerability. Disclosure. We've called it the first biological zero day.
- [21:45]
Roland Pease
Right. I mean, what's the cost, let's say, of doing the screening? Because presumably the companies who are making this DNA are getting thousands, if not millions of legitimate orders every week.
- [22:01]
Tessa Alexanian
Yeah. And so for all of the screening tools, it's very important to drive the false positive rate down.
- [22:06]
Roland Pease
And in other words, not Make a mistake, not mistakenly to stop something.
- [22:11]
Tessa Alexanian
Yeah, as you said, the order volumes at some of these companies, and it varies a lot. Some companies specialize in producing difficult to produce DNA and they might only have, you know, dozens of clients. Whereas as you said, other companies are sometimes fielding orders for one order for 150,000 sequences, and then they get many of those orders every week. And so in that case, it's very important for some of the screening tools that are available, are able to be very computationally efficient and run very quickly. And I think that's become only more important as more and more people are accessing DNA.
- [22:43]
Roland Pease
I mean, by quickly you mean, as it were, half a minute or half a day because no one wants a hold up.
- [22:50]
Tessa Alexanian
Yeah, it's sort of. So some of the tools advertise kind of milliseconds per reasonably sized sequence. So you should be able to screen that 150,000 sequence order in still a matter of, at most minutes.
- [23:05]
Roland Pease
Okay, so if I can take some lessons from this. In principle, a wicked person could design a potentially dangerous form of protein that we've never seen before. But if they try to, you're saying that with some improvements, the existing software should catch them before they do that, is that right?
- [23:26]
Tessa Alexanian
That's the hope. I can't say that that software is. And there are various pieces of software that do this, including the Common Mechanism, which is the free open source tool that IBIS maintains. Those are not deployed universally. And there's been an increasing push from policymakers to incentivize or push for more adoption of these tools. So in the United Kingdom, there was a screening guidance that was released last year pushing for more adoption of these and more universal adoption of these among synthesis companies based in the uk there's been a long collaboration among synthesis companies called the International Gene Synthesis Consortium. And that was the group that this vulnerability was initially disclosed to. And so those companies have worked together. But as we found at ibis, we're currently working to map all of the synthesis providers in the world. And we found that there are many providers that are not members of this consortium and are not in countries that have frameworks encouraging synthesis. And so their screening approaches tend to be much more ad hoc, of the sort that wouldn't catch this kind of reformulated variant.
- [24:30]
Roland Pease
Tessa Alexanian from ibis, one of the Red Team that's developing ways to protect us from nefarious uses of synthetic biology while allowing legitimate research to speed ahead. A reminder, this is Science in Action from the BBC.
- [24:49]
Todd Humphreys
This is the story of the One.
- [24:51]
Liana Zanet
As a custodial supervisor at a high school, he knows that during cold and flu season, germs spread fast. It's why he partners with Grainger to stay fully stocked on the products and supplies he needs, from tissues to disinfectants to floor scrubbers, all so that he can help students, staff and teachers stay healthy and focused. Call 1-800-GRAINGER click granger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.
- [25:18]
Todd Humphreys
This is the story of the 1. As a maintenance supervisor at a manufacturing.
- [25:23]
Roland Pease
Facility, he knows keeping the line up.
- [25:25]
Todd Humphreys
And running is a top priority. That's why he chooses Granger. Because when a drive belt gets damaged, Grainger makes it easy to find the exact specs for the replacement product he needs. And next day delivery helps ensure he'll have everything in place and running like clockwork. Call 1-800-granger. Click granger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done.
- [25:51]
Roland Pease
Talking of threats, there's sound to set the heart racing at night. A pack of wolves racing through the dark forest, hungry for prey. I'm not sure just what it is about the sound quality that fires off our fear neurons. Maybe it's just something learned from horror movies and grim fairy tales. But I'll tell you what's scarier in a real forest. We've been here before when conservationist Liana Zanet told us the most fearsome sound for wild animals on the South African savanna was human chatter, not the roar of a lion. And she's repeated the experiment in a Polish forest to reveal that wolves intense fear of us is enough to shape the way they live.
- [26:54]
Liana Zanet
Yeah. So one technique that we used in this study is we set up these systems that we designed in our lab. They're called the automated behavioral response systems, and they consist of a camera trap that's connected to a custom built speaker. We attach that to a tree in strategic places. And the idea is that when an animal walks past about 10 meters from the camera, that triggers the camera that starts video. And then about three seconds later, it plays a treatment of any sound that we want. And we're interested in predators, so it would be playing a predator. In this experiment, we did humans, dogs and a control, which was birds. Other places in South Africa, we did humans, lions, dogs, and a control and it just plays a 10 second sound at 60 decibels. So everything is standard, standardized, all the sounds are standardized. And we gauge the animal's responses. And fear, you know, is a pretty straightforward behavioral response to measure because you know that when an animal is running, it is afraid, Right? I mean, it is a universal sort of thing. So. So that's how we measure it. That's. That's one way we measure it.
- [28:12]
Roland Pease
Yeah. And we did talk about your experiments in South Africa at a waterhole, and it showed that humans are more terrifying than lions. But this time you've gone to Poland.
- [28:24]
Liana Zanet
Yeah. We're always interested in figuring out something new about fear, like what can fear tell us about nature? Right. And in this situation, the situation in Poland was fascinating because there was this question, you know, this question that's going around where people are wondering, you know, where wolves are legally protected. They're starting to come back, right? They're starting to come back mainly in Europe and the United States, where they had previously been exterminated from lots of different regions. You know, there's been some legal protection. They're coming back. And so wolf human interactions are on the rise. And, you know, the perception is that this increase in interaction is because wolves are losing their fear of humans. And in the eu, in fact, this perception directly led to the EU Parliament this year voting to reduce the legal protection of wolves from strictly protected. To protect it. Right. But there's no experimental evidence whatsoever that even when legally protected, a large carnivore like a wolf would lose its fear of humans.
- [29:37]
Roland Pease
I mean, they are the, in Europe at least, the archetypally terrifying carnivore.
- [29:44]
Liana Zanet
I know, I know. Well, you know, and it's kind of all in our psyches, right? Like we all read Red of Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf and, you know, and people are afraid of large carnivores, people are afraid of wolves. And the issue is here that people are also afraid of wolves losing their fear of humans. Right. Because fear has its uses. And it's the fear that wolves have of humans that protects us from them. Right. Because they don't want to be anywhere near us whatsoever. And so, you know, it's sort of deep in our psyche. But yet there's been no experimental evidence whatsoever showing that in protected areas wolves lose their fear of humans, even though it has all these implications. Right. For policy and whatnot.
- [30:36]
Roland Pease
But your experiments seem to show that's absolutely not the case.
- [30:41]
Liana Zanet
Absolutely not the case. Indeed. Yes, our experimental results do show that attributing this increase in human wolf encounters to legal protection, allowing the emergence of these fearless wolves in quotes, is absolutely not scientifically supported at all.
- [31:02]
Roland Pease
The videos show, you know, you do this thing of playing some people speaking Polish and the Wolves run.
- [31:11]
Liana Zanet
They do. The results were that wolves were two times more likely to run from humans than our control. And they abandoned the site where the recording was being done twice as fast. And that was true for wolves and their prey as well.
- [31:32]
Roland Pease
I mean, that was a really striking thing. So you've got these videos, you see the wolves at the moment, there's this voice, they sort of look up, look around, and then within a second or so, it seems to me they're running as fast as they can. But also the deer and the boar that are there, they're all more terrified of us than it seems, than they are of wolves.
- [31:54]
Liana Zanet
Yeah. And it was really important to test the prey as well because, you know, we're trying to figure out whether or not wolves have lost their fear of humans, even when legally protected. And so, you know, if wolves sort of, if they've lost their fear of humans, right, then we would expect them to be around during the day, you know, overlapping with humans. And so maybe though, if the prey are fearful of humans, they're going to be nocturnal. Right. And so it's possible that the nocturnality of wolves, instead of having anything to do with fear of humans, has to do with tracking their prey. Right. And so what people find, right, there's quite a bit of correlational evidence showing and Europe wide as well, a continent wide survey has shown that wolves are way more nocturnal when they overlap with humans. Okay. And this is continent wide on the European continent. Now the one exception to that though are wolves in a certain area which are active mostly during the day. And that area happens to be one that has no humans whatsoever. That's the Chernobyl nuclear exclusion zone, because.
- [33:22]
Roland Pease
That'S been sort of effectively rewilded, but because there are no people. So with, so this is so interesting, you're saying that where there are no humans, wolves aren't even necessarily the sort of truly nocturnal animals that we imagine them to be. It's human behavior, it's fear of humans, you're saying, that makes them more, more nocturnal, Right?
- [33:42]
Liana Zanet
It's fear of humans as predators that makes them more nocturnal. Right. So, and that's exactly what we showed in this paper too, that the wolves of this Tukala forest in Poland, they were 4.9 times more nocturnal than were humans. Right? So they're out during the night, they're avoiding humans. And so, you know, the nocturnality that we see of large carnivores, including our wolves, right, what this means is that that nocturnality is because they are trying to avoid the human predator Right.
- [34:21]
Roland Pease
I guess the bit I don't quite understand about this is you talk about the human predator. Are we a threat to wolves? I mean, maybe, you know, hundreds of years ago, but surely they're not being predated now, are they? Then they're not being shot, I suppose, or trapped or.
- [34:38]
Liana Zanet
I know one would think not especially when legally protected. Right. But yeah, I mean, you know, global surveys show that humans kill large carnivores at nine times the rate at which they're killed, killed or die naturally. So humans definitely are super lethal. And our various experiments around the world on wildlife, including wolves now, is showing that, you know, this super lethality means that everything is most afraid of humans as predators. And one of the amazing things that we sort of learned while we were, you know, working on this project is that it's exactly what legal protection means, because it's really incredible that legal protection does not mean not killing stuff, including wolves. What it means the tolerance that people have now of wolves is that they're just not completely exterminating them from huge regions. Right. Like people were doing before. And so humans remain very much sort of super predator of wolves. Right. So to give you a couple of examples, in the eu, when wolves were strictly protected, humans legally and illegally killed them at seven times the rate at which they die naturally. And so this is because people cull them, people manage them, people shoot the problem wolves. Right. And so it doesn't mean that things aren't getting killed, that the.
- [36:13]
Roland Pease
So they are being exposed to human violence constantly.
- [36:16]
Liana Zanet
Yeah. Even in the United States, when wolves were listed as endangered there, 27% of them were legally killed. And then there's all the illegal stuff, too. So it's estimated that 37% were illegally killed. And this kind of thing would be going on in Europe as well in terms of legal, you know, perfectly legal killing, like France, you know, they get rid of 20% of their wolf population every year. Right. So that's like one in five wolves. You come anywhere near a human, chances are you're going to be dead.
- [36:51]
Roland Pease
It is so sobering. I remember having this response when we talked about, you know, the animals in Africa. The idea that a human voice should instill such fear, I. I think it's quite chilling that we could do that.
- [37:05]
Liana Zanet
It is. And, you know, given that there's so many of us, 8 billion of us, you know, it. What it means is that we're having an effect on animal behavior at a. At a massive, massive scale.
- [37:17]
Roland Pease
Liana Zanet of Western University in Canada, whose study was just reported in Current Biology and you can see some of her videos there showing the instant terror our chatter sets off in wolves. It really is sobering. And talking of conservation, we are all saddened by the news of the death of Jane Goodall, whose intensive close up studies of chimp behavior in the 60s and 70s transformed our ideas about the wild and inspired millions. We can't do her life's work justice here on Science in Action, but there will be a chance to hear again her long 2020 interview with Jim Al Khalili on Discovery next week. Also on the BBC World Service Next week is Nobel Prizes Week. More celebration of past contributions to our growing scientific knowledge, which will doubtless keep me running. Peace and producer Alex Mansfield extremely busy.
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Todd Humphreys
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Roland Pease
Beaten path, you'll experience a whole lot.
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Todd Humphreys
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Roland Pease
Cyclists chase the thrill, or Erla, where you can kite surf to your heart's content for exploring on your feet. Hike up to Mount Nemrud or walk in Patara through ancient civilizations that might.
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Todd Humphreys
Reveal the history of humanity itself. Plan your detour@goturkiere.com for a gripping adventure.
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Roland Pease
At the BBC, we go further so you see clearer. Through frontline reporting, global stories and local insights, we bring you closer to the world's news as it happens.
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Todd Humphreys
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Roland Pease
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Todd Humphreys
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Roland Pease
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