This video was sponsored by KiwiCo.
Hi, this is Kate from MinuteEarth. And today, we’re doing something a little
different. All of us on the MinuteEarth team have plenty of strong opinions - including how
we feel about our own videos! So here, three of our writer-directors will each share one of their
favorite MinuteEarth videos and explain why it’s at the top of their list - maybe it’s the awesome
analogy, maybe it’s the storytelling style, maybe it’s the particularly prodigious puns.
I’ll start: I LOVE “Why Poor Places are More Diverse”, the brainchild of our great writer
Peter. It is totally counter-intuitive that greater numbers of species grow where soils
are...well...dirt poor. But this video so cleverly explains why poverty drives
diversity not only in the natural world, but elsewhere on our planet too. Take a look.
A soccer-field sized patch of forest in frigid Alaska has about 40 different species of plants,
compared with about 70 in temperate England and 300 in the Amazonian rainforest. These
biodiversity differences hold true for entire countries, too: England has 1500 plant species,
while tropical Guyana has six times that many. The super-diversity of tropical rainforests is
only equalled in one other type of ecosystem on Earth: scrubby fire-prone shrublands that
grow in western Australia and southern Africa. These shrublands may not look as majestic as
tropical rainforests, but in a given area, they’re home to similarly stupendous numbers of species.
Which doesn’t necessarily mean that the rainforests and shrublands are easy
places for plants to live. In fact, both ecosystems owe their enormous diversity,
in part, to the fact that their soils have critically low supplies of nitrogen and especially
phosphorus, nutrients plants need in order to grow. The plant world’s leading biodiversity
hotspots are, quite literally, dirt poor. Logically, it seems like richer soils
should support more species. But in nature, as in human society, ‘plenty of resources’ doesn’t
necessarily translate into ‘everyone gets plenty’. In meadows, forests, and wetlands around
the world, we consistently find more or bigger plants but fewer species where soil
nutrients are highest. The fastest-spreading species soak up most of the extra nutrients,
which lets them keep growing super fast, which lets their roots suck up so much water,
and their leaves snatch up so much sunlight, that other, slower species actually get LESS of those
resources than otherwise. So in rich soils, slower species die out while the fast-growers win big.
On the other hand, poor soils don’t provide enough nutrient capital for fast-growing plants to build
their massive infrastructures and take all the resources. So poor soils inhibit the greedy and
allow everyone else to scrabble by. We see this pattern in human society also - there’s a far
greater number of businesses – mostly small – in poor countries, while fewer bigger
companies dominate in rich countries. But crummy soil isn’t the only thing that helps
super high diversity blossom; for example, beaches, mountaintops, and other places frequently
ravaged by harsh weather or catastrophic events have poor soils AND few plant species. The other
major prerequisite for hyperdiversity is time. On most of the planet, glaciers regularly bulldoze
away ecosystems and grind up mineral-rich rock, creating new soil perfect for growth but
not diversity. However, our high-diversity rainforests and shrublands have spent millions
of years beyond the reach of the ice sheets, leaving their residents plenty of undisturbed time
to evolve a wide variety of ingenious strategies for surviving nutrient poverty – strategies
that have allowed for the development of tall, diverse, rainforests in wet poor soils and
scrubby, diverse, shrublands in dry poor soils. The human landscape also seems to follow a
similar pattern, with the highest cultural and linguistic diversity as well as the greatest
number of businesses in climatically stable places where humans have been the longest
and where economic resources are scarce. So in some ways, the poorest places on
earth are actually (also) the richest. That ending blows my mind every time. It’s
incredible how similar the processes that shape the world around us are to those that shape
who we are. But that’s enough philosophizing from me - here’s David with his pick.
Thanks Kate! My favorite MinuteEarth videos are the ones that totally make me rethink the way I
think about everyday stuff. And every time I go to the store, I think about this awesome video - also
written by Peter - about the relationship between beer and biodiversity. Now, whenever I'm in the
beer aisle and I look at a cute local microbrew, I think about it as a cute little plant
trying to survive in a mean jungle filled with big breweries that are trying to get it. Go
watch the video, enjoy, I'll see you at the end. In the local shop, next to major beer brands,
you might find microbrews with crazy names like Wild Skunk Ale, Fiddlehead Fuel, or Mudsucker
Stout. While the big-brands run TV ads starring sexy skiers or tough guys with trucks, their small
competitors have to scrabble for attention from the store shelf. That’s because, much like a small
shrub or fern beneath the tall trees in a forest, microbreweries live in the shadows of
their larger corporate competitors. And, surprisingly, many species and businesses
that eke out a living in the shadows of giants employ similar strategies to succeed
in their respective dog-eat-dog worlds of intense competition for limited resources.
The winners of this competition in the forest or beer business, as defined by sheer volume, are
those that capture the most resources - sunlight in one case and consumers’ dollars in the other.
The mechanics differ - big trees capture sunlight by being tall, while large brewers earn billions
of dollars of profits by having a broad reach, attracting customers with low prices,
large advertising budgets, and mild flavor. The outcome is the same, though - by capturing the
most valuable resources before they reach others, dominant trees and companies exclude
weaker competitors who employ the same tactics. But there are trade-offs to any
strategy, and being the best on average rarely works in all cases and conditions.
That’s how understory ferns and microbreweries can succeed - by specializing in
conditions the “big guys” are not so good at: the so-called empty niches.
In deep shade, a fern can make a healthy, if modest, living by avoiding direct competition and
investing prudently in just enough photosynthetic machinery,, to make a profit from the faint
sunlight reaching the forest floor-- leftover light not worth the extra effort for the big
trees to capture up above. Ferns can even thrive on a photosynthetic income that’s inadequate
for the small offspring of many tall trees, and thus the humble fern coexists with the tall
timber above by competing on its own terms. Similarly, microbrews, which invest in being
odd, trendy, and strongly flavored, can persevere by attracting aficionados not swayed by the
marketing and lower prices of larger breweries. Sure, fewer people fall into this category,
just as fewer beams of sunlight fall through the canopy onto the forest floor, but where there
are resources, there’s potential to survive. And survival is the goal of both ferns and
firms, so it’s not really that surprising that both nature and the economy, driven by the
same kinds of competition, give rise to niches and diversification, to canopy and understory
in the forest, and in the supermarket aisle! Have you guys ever noticed that canopy
sounds like can o’ pee? At any rate, I’m off to try to go find some
Fiddlehead fuel. Julián, you're up next! Thanks, David! One of my favorite videos is
Kate’s “How We Evolved To Browse The Web.” We humans think we’re all that – and from the
perspective of our command of global resources we certainly are – but as this video points out,
some of the things we do that seem uniquely human, like hunting for memes on the internet, are not
so different from how our fellow animals behave. Kate did an excellent job of looking at human
behavior through a zoological lens, check it out. Hi, this is Kate from MinuteEarth. Let’s find
some cat memes! This site looks good - yeah, there’s some funny kittehs and some
great cattos on here! But, well, hmm... the pickings are definitely getting slimmer.
Maybe we should try another site? But that means we have to FIND another site! And we’re
already here… so, should we stay or should we go? Well, it turns out that online, we forage for
information just as, say, a chickadee forages for fruit; it has to choose which tree to visit and
decide how long to nom there before abandoning it and finding another. Ecologists already have all
sorts of models to describe how animals forage. And it turns out that one of these models, which
explains how animals move between patches of food, also predicts how humans move between websites:
both you and the chickadee will forage in one place until the rate of reward you’re getting
there drops below what you think you’re likely to get elsewhere. This calculation is subconscious,
of course - you’ll just notice the tree is getting bare, and move on. It’s a matter of spending your
time and energy in a way that gets you as much reward as possible...and that’s something
foraging animals - and humans - do all the time. For instance, we’ve found that chipmunks that
take longer seed-gathering trips bring back bigger hauls than those that take short ones.
That makes sense: it’s only worth spending lots of resources if you can score big. And a study of
more than 400 robberies in the Netherlands found that the farther burglars travel to commit their
crimes, the more expensive their loot tends to be. Researchers have even found that the longer
we search for a romantic partner, the more likely that relationship is to last; perhaps
a bigger investment leads to a better payoff. We probably optimize like animals because we
are animals, and in fact, we share critical decision-making circuitry. For instance, monkeys
have special neurons that seem to track the rate of reward the monkey is getting in a patch - when
it drops too low, the neurons send an electrical signal to the monkey, who switches to a new patch.
We also have these neurons - and there’s evidence to suggest that lots of other animals do too;
they were likely so critical to making good food-finding tradeoffs in the distant past that
they were passed on over lots of generations. This kind of shared machinery may help
explain why we behave like our non-human kin. Of course, most of us humans now find
ourselves evaluating how fruitful websites are much more often than how fruitful fruit trees
are, and the stakes of wasting your time on dumb cat memes are far lower than wasting your
time searching for sustance. But it’s not just web surfing...at what point do you move on from a
lame TV show, or ditch the long line at the DMV, or give up on a job - or even a relationship -
that you’re not that into? It turns out that the constraints - and the underlying machinery - that
guide us in these everyday scenarios are likely the same as those that guide animals...which means
that deep inside, we’re all a little bird-brained. I’d like to personally thank your neurons
for staying with us, and they chose wisely – here’s Henry’s with his choice.
Awesome Julián. One of my favorites is “Why is it Hot Underground?” written
and narrated by our former team member, the excellent Emily Elert. What I love about
this video is it starts with a simple question, then takes us on a journey with lots of
tantalizing false turns and dead-ends (including some that people STILL get confused by - silly
radioactivity) and then it culminates in a truly modern explanation of our planet’s thermodynamics
(spoiler: it’s not like a baked potato). Way back in the Middle Ages, miners began to
notice that the deeper they dug into the earth, the toastier it got. Who knows what they made
of the heat, but the physicist Lord Kelvin - of temperature fame, naturally - had a theory: Earth
started off hot, and has been cooling down ever since, like a baked potato pulled from the
oven. What’s more, Kelvin was confident this idea would allow him to calculate the
age of our potato – I mean, planet... Imagine pulling two recently-baked potatoes
out of a freezer - one that's been in there for just one minute, the other for half an hour. The
minute-old-one would still feel like a hot potato, while the half-hour frozen spud would have
cooled well below the skin — you’d have to poke all the way to the center to feel its
residual warmth. And so in principle, you can tell how long ago a potato was cooked just by
feeling how warm it is right beneath its surface. Which is exactly what Kelvin did - except with the
earth. And scientific rigor. He took temperature measurements from the mines, put them into
his calculations and, got... 20 million years. Which is, of course, very, very wrong — somehow,
the hot temperatures just under Earth’s skin made it seem, to Kelvin, that our planet was
pretty much fresh out of its cosmic oven, when we now know that it’s four and
a half THOUSAND million years old. Kelvin’s error is usually attributed to the fact
that he didn’t know about radioactivity, which creates a ton of heat in Earth’s core and helps
keep the planet warm. But heat from radioactive decay moves so slowly through solid rock that
taking radioactivity into account only improves Kelvin's estimate by… pretty much nothing.
Kelvin’s real oversight was in thinking of the Earth like a baked potato — a solid lump through
which heat slowly diffuses. Earth’s mantle — the thick layer between the crust and the core —
is mostly solid, but it isn’t rigid. In fact, the rock closest to the molten outer regions of
the core gets so hot that it becomes slightly more pliable, like warmed candle wax. And like
the hot air above a candle, the warm rock rises in convection currents - over millions of years -
spreading heat more evenly throughout the planet. This stirring carries tremendous amounts of heat
from the core to the crust, fueling volcanoes, maybe helping to drive plate tectonics, and
heating mineshafts to temperatures that make Earth seem like it’s fresh out of the cosmic oven.
Even though it’s not. Alright, thanks Kate, David and Julián for
the trip down memory lane. And stay tuned, our illustrators are going to be doing
the same thing, coming up soon. Bye! Speaking of our favorite stuff, the MinuteEarth
team are big fans of KiwiCrates - boxes that come right to your door each month with everything
your kids need to do fantastic projects. David’s two little MinuteEarthlings
already have monthly subscriptions, and this month my 2- and 4-year
olds got a chance to try them out. Let me tell you, over the last nine months it has
not been easy to keep these kids occupied...but with their KoalaCrate and KiwiCrate, they were
not only occupied for an entire hour - they were happy AND they were learning stuff all about
STEAM, from rainforest ecology to what goes on in the deep sea. Now I’m thinking that they just
might each get a subscription as a holiday gift, since it would be fantastic to have that
glorious hour every single month. Check out KiwiCo.com/MinuteEarth50 or click the link in the
description below for 50% off your first month of ANY crate. Thanks to KiwiCo from this happy
mom and these happy kids! Thank you, KiwiCo!
Hi, it's Julián from MinuteEarth! I'm going to be posting our videos here on Reddit when they come out.