Racing Extinction

I was reading

The Financial Times,

and it was a little, tiny,

two-paragraph story that said,

"Mankind may be causing

a mass-extinction event."

It was, like, buried on like

page six or seven.

And l thought,

"This is how humanity

is dealing with the issue.

"They're not dealing with it."

Check your cellphone.

If you get anywhere near this

place, he scrambles the signal.

Louie, man ,

how are you?

Just curious, how many cameras

do you have on you right now?

You mean, like,

on my table or--

No, no. On your body.

On my body?

Less than seven,

but probably more than two.

Okay, so,

we're doing an order here.

One hat cam,

two buttonhole cameras,

sports bra, one bottle cam, 5. 1 1

tac shirt with the vibration .

-Whenever you're ready.

-Oh , yeah .

So you're rolling right now,

so you can get the entrance.

And make sure, of course,

the straps are gone.

Okay.

Your reservation's

in ten minutes.

All right.

So, we ate Codfish.

Kobe beef and also

some sweet shrimp.

I was raised on it.

She brought me here.

Yeah .

We try to be

adventurous, yeah.

I started eating it

like ten years ago.

l've been having sashimi

a lot at my grandpa's.

-Oh , yeah .

-We would go out.

Thank you .

This is a special

tamari soy sauce from the chef.

l don't know.

Yeah, three pieces. We got it.

It's a bingo.

The owners and chef of one of

America's trendiest restaurants. . .

. . .are facing federal charges

tonight,

all because of what they

put on customers' plates.

An endangered species.

And behind the undercover sting,

some movie makers

who went right back to work.

We're making

our own road here.

Pretty big, the side

of the skull here, yeah.

I did four stories

about extinction for

National Geographic magazine.

You go to these

beautiful landscapes.

There's dinosaurs

from horizon to horizon.

And you think,

"That was so far back then,

"what if it's going on right now

and everybody's missing it?"

Each year,

about one in a million species

should expire naturally.

In the next few decades,

we'll be driving species

to extinction...

...a thousand times faster

than they should be.

It's difficult to estimate

precisely how many species

we're gonna lose.

In a hundred years or so,

we could lose up to 50%

of all the species on Earth.

I remember thinking,

"This is the biggest story

in the world."

It's like we're living

in the age of dinosaurs,

but we can do something

about it.

A friend of mine just

reported up in that area.

Roger.

The blue whale

is the biggest creature

that ever lived on the planet.

Bigger than any dinosaur ever.

Just like dinosaurs,

they're going extinct.

It's coming in hot!

There it is!

Look at him.

Back in the days of whaling,

they were hunted

to near-extinction,

down to about two percent

of their population.

Now they're getting decimated

by shipping traffic.

Go for it.

He's coming up to the right.

To the right.

My hope is that

if you can show people

the beauty of these animals,

there's a chance

to save these things.

One of the cool things

about a blue whale

is that it has the loudest song

in the animal kingdom,

but you can't hear it,

because it's below

our threshold for hearing.

We look out at the world through

these eyes and these ears,

and you think, "Oh, that's it.

"That's everything

that there is to see."

But there's this hidden world

on almost every level.

What I want to do is

get people to see it.

We get off the boat,

and this fisherman comes up

to our interpreter

and says, "Can you give me $500?

"I found this buoy.

There's a $500 reward.

"lt needs to be returned

up to America."

And I said, "Just a minute.

"Let me take a look

at this buoy."

And I look at it, and it says,

"Return to Chris Clark,

Cornell Bioacoustic laboratory."

I said, "I know this guy."

Chris had been pioneering

new ways to record whales

for 30 years.

He basically proved

that these animals

could hear themselves

across oceans.

And so, to me,

finding that buoy

was like finding a message

in a bottle.

We built these

recording systems.

We dropped them in the ocean,

and they record continuously.

Whales and dolphins

and anything that's out there...

we try and record.

So, the first time,

I knew there was a blue whale

singing nearby.

l could see it on the display,

but I couldn't hear it.

So what do you have to do?

You have to speed it up.

And still, the hair goes up

on the back of my neck,

and it just, like-- It's like,

"Damn! That's fabulous."

As we listen more and more

around different parts

of the planet,

whether it's frozen Arctic ocean

or the deepest jungles

of Central Africa,

the whole world is singing.

Clicking and grinding

and whistling and thumping.

But we've stopped listening.

The Cornell Bioacoustical Laboratory

has the largest repository

of animal sounds on the planet.

They've been collecting them

since the 1 930s.

You can think of it as a museum,

just like there could be

bird skins or, you know,

beetles tacked up on a wall.

So there's this range of sounds

from the largest animal

ever to live on this planet

to the tiniest, little insects.

This is a song recording

of a male 'o'o singing

on Kaua'i.

These birds mate for life,

so he would be singing

a duet with his mate,

where he sings, and then

she sings back and forth.

Here comes the male's song.

There's no response.

Here's the male's song again.

That's the last male of a species,

singing for a female

who will never come.

He is totally alone.

And now his voice is gone.

In the brief lifetime

of this collection,

70 years or so,

many of the species that

were recorded are now extinct.

So the repository

is a living example

of the massive rate

of extinction that's happening.

There's been five major extinctions

in the history of the planet.

There's the Ordovician,

the Devonian,

the Permian...

...there was the triassic-jurassic,

...and then the K-t extinction,

...the one that killed

the dinosaurs.

It's very difficult

to comprehend deep time.

You know, 4.6 billion years

of Earth's history.

But if you take, say,

the history of the Earth

and try to squeeze it into

a 24-hour clock,

where does man fit

on that clock?

A few seconds before midnight.

That's it.

We're the new kid on the block.

What we're seeing now...

...is called the anthropocene,

the new epoch.

Anthropocene means

the time of humans.

It's when the impact of humans

is leaving itself as a mark

in the fossil record

of the future.

65 million years ago,

there was an asteroid

that struck

and caused the dinosaurs

to go extinct.

When it comes to

the sixth extinction event,

we have no problem

identifying the cause.

Humanity has become the asteroid.

We're on that tipping point now,

where it's either...

too late or just the beginning

of a movement.

So, there's two pieces

of whale and one piece of horse.

At the Hump restaurant,

we knew that they were

selling whale meat.

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