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Science Talk

Animal Migrations Track with Wikipedia Searches

Science Talk

Scientific American

Science

4.2644 Ratings

🗓️ 6 March 2019

⏱️ 3 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

By analyzing nearly 2.5 billion Wikipedia page views, researchers found species searches reflect seasonal animal migrations and plant blooming. Christopher Intagliata reports. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

Understanding the human body is a team effort. That's where the Yachtel group comes in.

0:05.8

Researchers at Yachtolt have been delving into the secrets of probiotics for 90 years.

0:11.0

Yacold also partners with nature portfolio to advance gut microbiome science through the global grants for gut health, an investigator-led research program.

0:19.6

To learn more about Yachtolt, visit yawcp.co.j.jot.com.j. That's y-A-K-U-L-T-C-O-J-P.

0:28.4

When it comes to a guide for your gut, count on Yacolt.

0:33.7

This is Scientific American's 60-second science. I'm Christopher in Taliatta.

0:39.1

Every spring, migratory birds flood back to where they breed,

0:43.1

and that migratory behavior is accompanied by some human behavior.

0:46.7

In English language Wikipedia, the page views for migratory species like the indigo bunting

0:53.0

or the Baltimore Oriole tend to peak in the

0:56.1

spring when those birds arrive in the United States on their breeding grounds.

1:00.4

John Middermeyer, a conservation biologist at the University of Oxford in England.

1:04.6

It's this incredible thing where you can see in people's online behavior and how they're using

1:09.3

Wikipedia. You can actually see the fingerprints,

1:12.1

if you want to say, of the arrival of the birds. And not just birds. Mittermeier and his team

1:17.0

surveyed nearly two and a half billion Wikipedia page views for 32,000 species across 245 languages,

1:25.2

and they also saw variable search rates for insects, ferns, horsetails, and flowering plants.

1:31.0

And the online searches for birds, at least, seemed to correlate with real-world data on migration times.

1:37.0

The researchers also found that Lithuanian Wikipedia pages, for example, had more seasonality than pages in Thai or Tamil, probably because seasonal

1:46.0

differences increase with latitude. The finding is in the journal plus biology. Mittermeyer says

1:52.4

search data like this could someday be useful to conservation biologists. In areas that are hard for

1:58.2

biologists to survey or to reach, maybe we could be using

...

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