Rhythm
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I struggle with rhythm. I'm fine on my own, I can get into a groove when I'm humming a song to myself, but as soon as I need to coordinate with anything going on outside of my head, like playing an instrument, it all goes terribly wrong. But in high school, I once tried to get past that and pushed myself to the limits of my ability to groove.

My high school let us pick our gym class, and in what was probably an attempt to look cool, I took ballroom dancing. I wasn't the worst in the class somehow, but that was the biggest rhythmic challenge of my life. We had a final exam. With a partner, we had to choreograph a dance, in my case a cha-cha, and perform it in front of the whole class.

My partner was probably, definitely annoyed at the sheer number of times I messed up in practice. But we passed the class. I really wish I could say that the power of music stayed with me, that my life was transformed and I went on to dance my ass off and become kick-ass at all rhythm games. But that would be a lie.

I can't throw down sick dance moves like the jumping spiders that I study, but they're still really fun to watch. Every animal out there has got its own rhythm to its life, and maybe my groove's just a little bit different. I'm Sebastian Echeverri. And I'm Rutendo Shackleton. And this is the BBC Earth Podcast.

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LinkedIn, the place to be, to be. In this episode, we're talking about rhythm. From the chimps that each have their own drumming style to the plants that follow the cycle of the moon. And we take a behind-the-scenes look at BBC Nature series Frozen Planet 2.

I think you do have rhythm. I think it's just the world that is out of sync with you. Yeah, that's right. It's just like Principal Skinner in The Simpsons. It's not me, it's the children that are wrong. I like the way you think, Rotendo. Honestly, just like with plenty of other things, though. As I grew up, I learned that, yeah, it's okay to not be great at everything.

Plus, I think being autistic and having ADHD probably has something to do with my rhythm situation.

Having challenges with sound and time processing is a pretty common symptom of those things. Though that doesn't mean that I'm still not low-key jealous of y'all musical people out there, though. But you know, you really do have rhythm inside you. I'm talking about the magic of the human body and all the perfectly timed systems that control it. Like the myocardial rhythm, the natural rhythm of your heart.

You got me there. That cardiac rhythm is not something controlled by my brain. It's the muscles themselves that know how to keep my heart beating in time. But I think that the thing that you're getting at, if I'm right, is this really interesting thing where wherever we look across nature, everything is governed by all sorts of rhythms.

You know, starting from even a planetary scale, you've got your yearly seasons and the daily turning of the Earth, and you can see those effects right down to something as small as single-celled bacteria, many of which have a circadian rhythm to their activity. Right, that means that they respond to a cycle of light and dark over a 24-hour period. Exactly. All of life has its rhythms.

But sometimes, you know, just like me, we're not exactly all on the same beat. Take the daily cycle of light and dark. Most of the animals we see are diurnal. They're out in the day just like us humans. But there are plenty of nocturnal creatures that come out to explore the world in the night. Like bats and owls. Or, you know, scorpions.

But for a lot of life on Earth, it's got to be all about that sunlight. Especially if, you know, you're a plant. You've got to have that photosynthesis. And it's not just photosynthesis. If you want to attract pollinators like bees and wasps, which so many plants depend on, you always need to be ready in the sunlight when those insects are most active.

Well, almost always. As one team of researchers, led by Kristina Bollander, found out when they went searching for plants under the light of the moon. Ephedra feminia, it may not be the prettiest of plants, I have to say. It's rather inconspicuous. It's greenish with very pale red cones, very small cones. And you wouldn't look twice as it may be if you were just passing by.

That's Kristina Bollender. She led a research team who were fascinated by an otherwise fairly unremarkable plant called Ephedra femenia. Kristina knew that this species was pollinated at night. Ephedra femenia is night pollinated by nocturnal moths. They produce a pollination drop that is secreted outside of the cone.

So the insect will go to the male cone and eat the drop and then get pollen on their body. And then it will fly to the female, eat a little bit of the drop there and deliver the pollen grains. And then this drop will evaporate and the pollen will sort of pull inside of the cone where it will need to go to fertilize the egg.

My study is about the pollination mechanisms and to investigate how these plants reproduce and how they are pollinated. But what the team had been unable to pin down was exactly when Feminia is pollinated.

We spent a lot of time and a lot of effort planning the trip from Stockholm to Greece where every year we just came at the wrong time. There were no pollination drops and no pollination drops, no pollinators to study. We just became very, very frustrated. Like, why didn't these plants...

just go into fertile period, what happened? Everything seemed perfect. The temperature were right, the cones seemed ripe, everything seemed perfect, but there were no pollination drops. Ah, we were so frustrated. We even discussed that we had bad luck with the moon this year, that it was so pitch black at the field site when we were to go and do our nocturnal studies.

And then we started to read up literature and we saw all these papers about how insects use the moon to navigate. And then we went through all old pictures from our last other field trips and then we started to discuss like, wait, wait a minute, what if the moon has something to do with it?

Since the plants weren't in pollination phase, we just had a lot of time. We went back in the data as far back as 1910, when the first description about Ephedra femenia is written. That was when they had a brainwave. They looked at past data recording the times when femenia pollination had occurred.

and compared it with records of the lunar cycle, which no one had done for at least 100 years. And they made a discovery that changed everything. And it all seemed, it speaks the same language. It is the night of the full moon in July that these plants go into pollination phase. The full moon happened just a few days later, so we just had to wait.

Our field site is a couple of kilometers outside the nearest village. When we drove there at the night of the full moon, we were so excited. We were walking down a small path down to our field site and as we came to the plants, oh yeah, they were glittering like diamonds in the night. It's very beautiful.

The lunar light will reflect in this pollination drop almost like a glass diamond. This night it was just flooding out of their pollination drops. It was an incredible scene basically and when we realized that the full moon was what the plants had been waiting for. It was just a eureka moment to me and Katarina and the moment I think

Some moments in life you just never forget and this is for me and Katarina one of those moments we will never forget that night. It was the lunar cycle that was determining when the plant would release those sweet pollination drops for the moths to collect. And the reason why that happened is fascinating. For pollination to happen, the pollinators need to find their way to the plants.

And that's not easy in a pitch black night with these inconspicuous greenish plants.

Other angiosperms or flowering plants that it's pollinated by night, they are often white to stand out in the night and they often have a very strong scent to attract pollinators. But this Ephedra femenia, it has no scent at all and it's definitely not white. The only way for the pollinator to see these cones in the night is through these glittering pollination drops.

If it's not a full moon night, it's pitch black and you can't see anything. So the reflection of the moonlight in the drops is needed for the pollinators to find their way there and deliver the pollen.

Okay, I gotta say, I have never related to a plant so much in my entire life. What do you mean? So just like Ephedra Femenia, these full moon activated were-plants. Were-plants? Like werewolves? Just like them, I too am a nocturnal creature living in a diurnal society.

If I was left alone to my own devices, I would probably go to sleep around 3 or 4 a.m., wake up at maybe 11, noon or so, and just shift a whole portion of my life into the night. It is quiet. There are no meetings. There's no one to bother you. It feels like anything is possible.

Did you know there's actually a word for plants who follow the moon? And that word is selenotropism. Seleno meaning the moon and tropism meaning turning towards. I had no clue this was even a thing until I looked it up. And yep, in a scientific paper, well, okay, it was like a paragraph because you could get away with that being the sum of your research back then. Dating back to, if you can believe it, 1883.

someone observed growing plants turning towards the light of the full moon. Whoa, so Victorians knew about this too.

Which makes a lot of sense because, I mean, that was the most gothic time in history and the period that gave us Dracula and werewolves and people lurking in graveyards doing strange things. It's exactly the time you would expect to find studies about the pull of the moon. Yeah, it kind of totally checks out. Though, of course, people have been looking up at the night sky since way before recorded history and noticing what's going on up there.

The moon has this huge pull, literally, on our planet. Its gravity affects the cycles of the tides and the patterns of the seasons, really setting the rhythm of life on Earth. Yeah, and tempting wereplants out to play. Did you ever have a favorite book when you were growing up? I read a lot when I was a kid. Reading was my escape. And the science fiction fantasy section at Barnes & Noble's was my jam.

I am unfortunately burdened with way too much residual knowledge about the Star Wars Expanded Universe. What? That's cool, though. I mean, it's cool, but it's also just, it has no application anymore. I did not read the Star Wars Expanded Universe. I did have a favorite book, though.

Around the age where I was just learning how to read, my favorite book was Hand, Hand, Fingers, Thumb by Al Perkins. And it was a book that my mom used to read to me and how I practiced my own reading. And it was all about a group of monkeys with great rhythm. Give me some of the highlights of famous lines from this piece. Let's see. Um...

One hand, two hands, drumming on a drum. Dum-diddy, dum-diddy, dum-dum-dum. You know, I was going to be sarcastic, but that's low-key a little catchy. And that is how I learned to read. And you know what? There's a good reason that I mention this book. Not only is it, you know, it's my favorite and I like talking about it, but it is because chimps are great drummers.

Okay, I am taxonomically obligated to clarify that chimps are apes and not monkeys, though. They don't have tails. No, no, no. I know. You're right. But the illustrations in the book definitely looked more like chimpanzees. They had no tails. But I think

the word monkey sounds better rhythmically for a children's rhyme book. All right, I'll be fair. They're both primates. The vibes are similar. I get it. You know, sometimes we got to make compromises to stay on rhyme. Yeah, it's that poetic license, the creative license. And chimps are fans of drumming.

Most chimps, and especially most of the chimps that I work with, live in rainforests. And they are very visually dense environments. You've got lots of undergrowth. Often if there's a chimp even three or four meters away from me, I can't always see that they're there. That's Kat Hobater from the University of St. Andrews, who has spent several years studying chimpanzees in the Budongo Forest in Uganda.

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But at the same time, they're also really acoustically dense environments. So, you know, you think of the kind of, you know, beautiful, peaceful nature outdoors. No, there's constant noise going on and it's in the insect hum and you've got bird calls and you've got all of the calls of the other monkeys that they share the forest with, let alone the chimps themselves, which can be very, very noisy as well. Chimpanzees drum on the buttressed roots of trees.

That means if you're a chimpanzee, you're able to send signals over really long distances and be able to keep in touch with the other individuals, either in your community if you want to be able to share information, but also letting individuals in nearby communities know that you're there and this is your territory.

Chimpanzees will use their drums in a couple of different ways and the one that's perhaps the most obvious is that they drum when they produce these big displays. Sometimes the females but most often the big males will show off this big beautiful show of strength where they're throwing kind of bits of sticks and logs around and then incorporating these big drums as a sort of finale to that kind of display.

He drummed on two trees and displayed now he's going up a tree. But what they also do with their drums is they use them when they're travelling. And that's in much more of a sort of finessed kind of way. So, you know, you'll be walking through the rainforest, perhaps with a couple of other individuals, and the chimps will stop. And then they'll produce perhaps one of these pant hoots, these very long distance vocalisations. And at the end of that pant hoot, they'll produce a big drum. Screams

And then typically what you see is they'll sit down and they'll wait. And it's really obvious that they're listening to see who's around, who's going to answer back. If you do get a call or a drum in the distance, they sort of cock an ear towards it. So you know they've been trying to find out who else is around and where they are. Oh!

I've been lucky enough to work with chimps for a really long time now, but I never work in the forest alone. I'm always working with a great team of field assistants. My name is Mugisha Steven. I do chimp tracking and I get the long-term data for the project.

He knows all of the chimps. He knows them not just when he sees them, but he knows what their voices sound like and he knows what their drums sound like. I can recognize from the individual who drums, Christine usually beats like... And the one for Alf, he likes calling a lot. When he's joining, he comes and drums on the tree with two beats. And then he joins up the tree.

It's just something that he's learned by spending a lot of time in the forest. But when I first came in, then we started talking about, okay, well, how do you know? What is it about Talisker's drum that tells you that that's Talisker? And together we could sort of, you know, think about how we could start to describe this, how we could unpick what was going on. And so Vester Eliottieri, who was my master's student at the time, came along and was really keen to help us try to unravel this puzzle. ♪

You wake up pretty early at 5am and then you set off for the chimps at 6am and the walk to get to the chimps, which were pretty far away, was for me one of the best moments because you could just feel the forest waking up so you could start hearing all the birds call and all the animals starting moving.

After a bit, you started hearing pant-hooting in the distance and when you did, you followed the pant-hooting. And yeah, when I found the chimps, I chose an individual to follow and I followed him throughout the day. - Oh, pant-hoot drum double beat in the climatic space. He's traveling towards the others that are coming. -

And I got particularly excited every time a chimpanzee called Tristan drummed because he had the greatest drumming style because he was delivering these very long drumming ballads very very fast. I realized that I could also tell who was drumming from the structure and the way they were drumming. Half pantoude drumming, traveling context.

When we looked at this drumming, one of the things we noticed after being able to detect these individual signatures was there was one other really important difference, and that is that the individual signatures were there in these travel drums, but they don't seem to be there in the display drums.

And that's really interesting for a couple of reasons. The main reason is it suggests that this is something that they have some control over. So chimpanzees are also, you know, they have voices that we can recognize just the same way you can recognize your family and friends' voices from each other. But they don't have control over that. You know, it's very difficult for us to change what we sound like in our voice.

with your drumming because it's your rhythm you get to choose potentially how you produce that and so being able to choose when you do reveal your identity and when you don't gives chimps much more flexibility and much more opportunity for perhaps occasionally not letting everybody know where you are or what you're up to

From chimpanzee behavior, this makes total sense because when you're displaying, then first of all, you're probably displaying to the individuals that can see you anyway. They're right there. They know who you are. You don't necessarily need to add that signature.

but you also want to make sure that you don't accidentally reveal that you're displaying to a higher ranking individual that's kind of hidden around the corner somewhere because that could get you into a lot of trouble with the hierarchy and social politics whereas when you're travelling you almost certainly do want to let other individuals know where you are and what kind of direction you're moving in so

So not only do we see this difference between the two contexts, but it also really matches very nicely what we know about chimpanzee behavior and chimpanzee politics. A lot of this was really cool, but I am the most impressed with how the team working with these chimps could tell them apart. I tried when we were listening to it,

No clue. But Mugisha knew them so well, he could tell who it was just by their drumming pattern. That's really impressive. That does happen when you start to work closely with animals, especially like one specific species. ♪

It happened to me when I was working with the elephants at Chester Zoo. Now, no elephant looks the same to me just because I spent so much time with them. And it's even happened to my husband when he was working on a dairy farm. I swear to you, Sebastian, he knew these cows. ♪

by name, well, technically by number, like by their ID numbers. And he would be like, oh yeah, cow number 458 loves to have like her chin tickled before she goes into the parlor. You know, stay away from cow number 130 because she's really sassy kind of thing. Really touching that he spent the time to learn all of their names and

I tried when I was doing my PhD with my jumping spiders, but it was a lot harder to keep track of them. It is interesting how when you know when you work with animals up close,

you can kind of start getting a sense of the rhythms of their daily life. Like with my jumping spiders, when it was getting later in the day, I could tell that they were kind of getting tired and like, they just kind of wanted to go back and go to sleep. And you really get a sense of that through their experience, you know, both the rhythm, their natural rhythm and that of the routines that we've kind of made for them.

What we keep coming back to is that everything on Earth is governed by rhythms and cycles, right? And it happens everywhere, not just among the animal kingdom, but entire ecosystems have their own rhythms that we can observe. And those rhythms shape the lives of the animals that live in them. One of the most fascinating places that we see those rhythms unfold is

is in the ebb and flow of the ice in the Arctic Ocean. Rachel Scott is a producer on a major series from the BBC Natural History Unit, Frozen Planet 2. For millennia, the Arctic has always frozen over in winter and then gradually melted through spring and summer. That's happened very reliably for many, many, many years, like a beating heart at the top of our world.

And animals have relied on that regular seasonal rhythm to be able to migrate or feed or mate. So, for instance, it could be polar bears that use the sea ice to hunt on. It could be harp seals that use the sea ice to give birth on or

It could be skeleton shrimp that wait for the sea ice to disappear because hidden within the sea ice are its food, plankton that are frozen through winter and then get released as the sun melts the ice away. The challenge that these animals are having in more recent years is that the heartbeat's quickening up. This regular rhythm is now going out of kilter.

In some areas, the sea ice is retreating a good 40 days before it used to. And so for any animals that are reliant on the sea ice still being there, such as polar bears hunting, they now have to change their behaviour quite significantly.

For instance, we filmed on an island called Wrangel Island at the end of the Arctic Ocean film. And it's always had a high population of polar bears, but now it's home to likely the greatest population of bears on the planet. And some polar bears have to swim for over 10 days straight, swimming over 400 miles to get to this island.

And the sea ice used to come back fairly reliably every September, but it's not coming back until well into October. So these bears, a lot of them are very, very, very hungry by the time the ice comes back. And the younger bears in particular sometimes don't make it.

The effects of climate change were very obvious through our whole production. Our series producer worked on the original Frozen Planet and gave us her research notes at the start of filming. And it was amazing just to see how things had changed in the 11 years since the original Frozen Planet 1 started.

Our influence is having a massive impact in the Arctic and the rhythms up there, but also the rhythms of the Arctic are having a huge impact on us.

We were filming in communities where you would normally be able to get from one community to another by travelling over the sea ice on dog sled or on skidoo. Whereas now we had to go out on kayaks and boats and just really, really brought it home how quickly things are changing, how quickly the rhythms are changing in the Arctic.

I knew from the very start that it would fundamentally be a film that would have climate change as a big message all the way through. And so my team and I worked really hard to find stories that were also joyful and gave hope to help to counterbalance those harder stories, but also just to show people how magical and amazing life is in the Arctic.

And equally, the dancing polar bears at the start of the film, we had no idea we were going to get that before we went up there. We were up there trying to film bears hunting.

during spring and our camera operators had this three hour window one night where they observed two bears coming together. They thought, oh, you know, these are young bears. They're probably not sexually mature yet, but they're quite likely going to fight because there was prey around the area. And instead of fight, they played.

They rolled around and then they went to find this area of smooth ice and they ice skated and danced and played for two, three hours. I'm so pleased that we managed to capture these moments of joy and of hope because this is the Arctic as it should be and hopefully we can keep it that way. I love this idea of thinking about the Arctic ice as this almost like a beating heart thing

ebbing and flowing with the seasons and all the life that depends on that process. It's not just about the total amount of Arctic ice. Rachel's stories show how you really need the whole cycle of freezing and then thawing for all the animals that evolve to live in that rhythm.

And it's the fluidity of it, isn't it? Yeah. There's the harp seals and the polar bears who need the ice to be solid. But later on, the skeleton shrimp need it to melt so that they can find food. Those skeleton shrimp, by the way, they look wicked awesome. If you have not seen them, look up a photo right now. They genuinely look like a shrimp wearing a skeleton costume for Halloween. It's fantastic.

But yeah, what we heard here is that it's all perfectly balanced in this seasonal rhythm. Ideally, that's the pattern that we would see every year, right? But we heard from Rachel it's been disrupted so much, even just in the course of filming this one series, they can tell that the rhythm of the Arctic has changed so much.

I can't stop thinking about how that compares with the moon. I know that sounds a little strange, but we learned at the top of the episode about these plants that tie their entire reproduction to this steady beat of the lunar month, of the full moon. And it can really feel like the moon is this metronome that keeps, like, really consistent, perfect time for life on Earth.

But I learned recently that that is not the case. The moon is actually slowly moving further and further away from us and taking longer to orbit the Earth. Right now, it's moving away at something like four centimeters per year. But because that's such a slow change of pace, life has been able to evolve pretty easily to rely on the moon.

Unlike with the Arctic, where things are moving, they're changing so quickly that life is having trouble keeping up. Alright Tendo, there is one more rhythmic sound that I want to make sure we get to. And that is the drumming of a woodpecker. When I go walking in the park, I love hearing them because it lets me spot the bird so easily. I hear that tap tap tap, tap tap tap up in a tree.

And it carries for a while. So I know exactly where to look and there I can spot the woodpecker. Yeah, they've got such a distinctive way of like tapping on the bark. It's hard not to notice it. I mean, we used to have them outside our window when I was growing up in South Africa.

Woodpeckers tapping is really rhythmic. You know, when I was doing my homework, I'd hear it through the window, and I'd actually get into it. It would be like the soundtrack to my algebra homework, you know? For the woodpeckers, when they're not making beats for you to study to, what they're doing when they're, you know, pecking wood is they're trying to find bugs to eat that live inside that tree bark, sometimes.

because that's also a way for them to talk to each other. Those sounds that they make are a form of communication. In fact, some researchers think that the speed of a woodpecker's drum beat actually shows off something about their health. If you can drum at a faster beat, that means you've got better motor function, you're in a better condition.

Different species have these different drumming patterns, and males use their drumming to compete with each other for territory and nesting sites. So as we play out on these great spotted woodpeckers signaling from tree to tree, take a listen and see if you can notice the difference between them. And remember, everything on Earth has got its own rhythm, even you.

The BBC Earth podcast was hosted by Rutendo Shackleton and me, Sebastian Echeverry. Thanks to Christina Bollender for the story about the wereplant Ephedra femenia.

And special thanks to Dr. Chris Hales, who provided the woodpecker sounds, courtesy of his website, wildechoes.org. The story about chimps drumming featured Kat Hobater, Vesta Eluteri, and field assistant Mugisha Stephen, with additional recordings by Viola Komodova. And thanks, of course, to the chimp drummers, Tristan, Alf, Ben, and Ila.

Our producers are Jeff Marsh and Rachel Byrne. Our researcher is Seb Masters. The podcast theme music was written by Axel Kakoutier and mixing and additional sound design was by Peregrine Andrews. The production manager is Catherine Stringer and the production coordinator is Gemma Wooten. The associate producer is Kristen Kane and the executive producer is Deborah Dudgeon. The BBC Earth podcast is a BBC Studios production for BBC Earth.

My dad works in B2B marketing. He came by my school for career day and said he was a big ROAS man. Then he told everyone how much he loved calculating his return on ad spend.

My friend's still laughing at me to this day. Not everyone gets B2B, but with LinkedIn, you'll be able to reach people who do. Get $100 credit on your next ad campaign. Go to linkedin.com slash results to claim your credit. That's linkedin.com slash results. Terms and conditions apply. LinkedIn, the place to be, to be.