WEBVTT

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I remember when I was
eight or nine years old,

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taking this very solemn oath.

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When I grow up...

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I want to do something
that protects trees.

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Something that pays them
back for this sanctuary

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that they gave to me as a kid.

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There are these deep disturbances

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that happen to people
throughout their lives,

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starting maybe when
they\'re eight years old.

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The trees were there as my witness.

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This was 2010.

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There\'s a really funny story about this.

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So I heard, I knew
that I was in Playboy,

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I was written up as one of the 20

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\"Meet Professors Who are
Reinventing the Classroom\"

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So they interviewed me and
they had this little piece here.

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So I bought a stack of them
at the checkout, and I said,

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\"I\'m in this Playboy!
I\'m in this Playboy!\"

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And she looked at me and she said,

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\"Yeah, and I\'m Michelle Obama.\"

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[laughing]

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Like in my wildest dreams.

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Isn\'t that hilarious?

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Okay, that\'s done.

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That\'s done.

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Oh my God.

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Here they all are... Wow.

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These are all my lab notebooks
from 40 years of field research.

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Yeah, I\'m remembering each
tree we got, like this was \"Figuerola\"

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Oh my God, here it is!

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This is the discovery of
canopy roots, right here.

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Observation: At the crotches of
many trees are clumps of roots

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It shows a truly mutualistic relationship.
It\'ll be hard to prove, but exciting.

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That is correct,
it was exciting! [laughing]

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I can\'t believe I found exactly
when I found canopy roots!

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There they are.

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So the tree was putting
out roots into this soil

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that is created by the decomposing
mosses that live on top.

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This tree can actually get nutrients
and water from the very mosses

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and soil that it itself supports.

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But when you\'re up a hundred feet
and you see root systems, you go,

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\"what the heck is
going on with this tree?

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This is so cool!\"

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And I also then climbed trees in New Zealand,
tropical rainforests in Costa Rica

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and discovered that lots of
different tree species do this.

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So now we\'ll put the curtain
of charity back on top.

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-[Narrator 1] The combination
slingshot fishing pole

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is Nalini Nadkarni\'s own invention.

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-[Narrator 2] Nalini\'s a tropical biologist

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who\'s brought mountain climbing
techniques to do her research.

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-Hooray

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-[Speaker] She\'s a professor of
biology at the University of Utah,

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published more than 120 articles,

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been featured on IMAX, and appeared
on Bill Nye, the Science Guy.

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-[Nalini] I feel really as proud of Treetop Barbie
as I do about all those academic awards,

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because it might make it more okay for
a little girl who was the little Nalini

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to think, \"I could be a scientist.\"

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Each time I go up there,
it\'s this sense of newness,

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of seeing the world in a different way.

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-[Peter Sagal] Professor Nadkarni ended up
founding a whole new school of biology.

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She joins us now. Nalini Nadkarni,
welcome to \"Wait... Wait... Don\'t Tell Me!\"

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-[Nalini] Thank you very much.

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-[Peter] You\'re very welcome.
It\'s great to have you...

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Whoa, I can see forever!

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-[Speaker] It\'s really my
great pleasure to introduce

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the \"Queen of the Rainforest Canopy,\"
Dr. Nalini Nadkarni.

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-[Nalini] What I invite you to do is to
envision for a moment your favorite tree.

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What are the values that
made that tree special to you?

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[Attendees discussing]

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-[Attendee] What\'s your favorite tree?
-[Nalini] It\'s a tree in Costa Rica

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that I\'ve climbed many, many,
many times. It\'s a strangler fig,

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and it has this huge trunk, and then
the branches just go out so far,

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they just stretch and stretch
completely horizontal, and you just think,

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\"how can a tree support such long,
heavy branches?\" But it does.

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It\'s a very strong tree.
And it\'s just filled with epiphytes,

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just filled with mosses and
orchids, and it goes on forever.

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-[Attendee] Sounds beautiful.
-Yeah. How about you?

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-[Nalini] It is so great to see you guys.
-[Attendee] So great to see you.

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-Hi. Hi.
-Hi.

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-My name\'s Indira.
-Hi Indira.

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-And it\'s just so cool to see
someone that looks like me.

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-[laughing] So are you from India?

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-No, my dad is, my dad\'s from India,
-Your dad is. Same with my dad.

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-and my mom\'s white.

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-[Nalini] No kidding.
So we\'ve got similar things.

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-[Indira] Yeah, and it\'s just so amazing to
-[Nalini] Yeah. Oh, that\'s great.

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-[Indira] see you be
somewhere that I want to be.

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-[Nalini] So what are you interested in?

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-[Indira] I\'m really interested
in soil science.

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-[Nalini] Oh, okay. Great.

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-[Indira] Whether it\'s like in
forests or in agriculture...

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-[Nalini] July 3rd, 2015.

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I was doing field work
in the Olympic National Park,

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in the temperate rainforest
with some graduate students.

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It was a beautiful day, it was clear,
and we had a prearranged place,

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where I\'ve worked and done
research for decades, literally.

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Have climbed trees hundreds
and hundreds of times.

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For two of them, it was the first time
they\'d ever gotten into the canopy.

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Supported by a rope no thicker
than your pinky finger.

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You are really out there in
this three dimensional volume.

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So I went up this tree about 50 feet,

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and as I was leaning over
the branch and looking out,

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trying to figure out where I
would put my next sample...

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Suddenly I was not feeling the
tension of that rope holding me.

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And then I fell.

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I had four operations in four days.

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My doctors did not know
whether I would walk again.

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Nine broken ribs.
Five exploded vertebrae.

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I had ruptured my spleen.
Breaks in my pelvis in three places.

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I had a broken fibula.
I lacerated my left lung.

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And probably most critical, I cracked
my cervical vertebrae number two,

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which is known as the killer vertebrae.

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If it had been another few
millimeters, that would\'ve been it.

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I was in the hospital
for like two months.

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When I was in the ICU,
I experienced these hallucinations

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that made me doubt my
own intellect, my own sanity.

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The most troubling thing
that I could doubt.

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I knew who I was.
But, if I couldn\'t go running,

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if I couldn\'t write another grant
proposal, if I couldn\'t climb trees,

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who would I be? What would I be worth?

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It was like a super identity crisis
happening overnight.

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I hadn\'t really stopped the
way this fall made me stop,

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to be forced to confront, maybe
for the first time in my life...

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Well Nalini, who are you?

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We grew up in suburban Maryland,
just outside of Washington DC.

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My father was from India,
a scientist, a Hindu.

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My mother from Brooklyn, New York,
of Russian parentage, an Orthodox Jew.

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And you know, in Indian families,
and also I think in Jewish families,

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there\'s a real value that\'s
placed on boys instead of girls.

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So I know that my parents
wanted me to be a boy,

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because they actually hadn\'t
picked out a girl\'s name.

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I think I always felt like I had
to somehow accomplish things

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just to get some small
amount of attention.

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And I think when I look back on it,

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that was probably the root of
this journey that I\'ve been on,

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which is like riding this
bright red arrow, where,

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if only I could achieve
something more, something fancy,

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or do something important
or something worthwhile,

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then I would be somebody in my family.

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The outside of the house
always looked really good.

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The kids are well behaved,
Dad has a great job,

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but there were these sort of incongruities
about the inside of the house.

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I think my mom would not break the
picture that this was a great marriage,

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this was a great family.

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I think there was this underlying
core that really was broken.

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There was something really
deeply wrong there.

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And, you know, I\'ve lived with secrets
from my childhood that I knew

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I had to keep enforced because otherwise
there would be terrible consequences.

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Like that long childhood secret
that none of us should hold.

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\"Be quiet, don\'t talk.

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You do not have the right to refuse.\"

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You know, I knew my mom
was sleeping on the couch,

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and my dad would call me
down from the third floor bedroom.

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He would tell me to shut the door.
My dad would always say,

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\"Don\'t ever tell anybody
about this. And if you do,

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I will stop loving your
brothers and your sisters.\"

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I knew it was bad, but I thought it
was something I did that was wrong.

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None of us should hold that.
None of us should hold that.

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Where was that picture of me?
That little Nalini.

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That\'s her.

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You know, those maple trees that
she used to climb after school...

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They were dependable.
You could trust them.

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They didn\'t have any harsh words to say,
and they didn\'t have any expectations.

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If I didn\'t climb them one day,
it didn\'t matter.

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I wish that she knew
that people loved her.

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Cause I think she didn\'t know that.

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Okay.

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Most of us, including myself,

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go through life just like doing
stuff and not understanding

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\"Why did you do that?\"

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Yes, I\'m walking again.
I\'m running again.

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I\'m doing research again.
I\'m doing public engagement again.

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But, the threads of those disturbances can
continue to precipitate other disturbances.

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Even though it\'s been seven years
since I fell out of the tree,

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I\'m still not quite sure what that
identity of the new Nalini is.

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That \"Third State Nalini.\"

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It\'s neither the original state,

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nor is it the severely disturbed state,

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but it\'s some third state that may not be
better or worse than either one of them.

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Okay.

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Hi, Amy.

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-[Amy] How are you?

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-I\'m fine.
-[Amy] Thanks for talking to me today.

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-Good, good. Thanks.

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-[Amy] So in terms of
possible research questions

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you could be asking or that you have

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recently asked, can you just

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give me like two or three?

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-[Nalini] Sure. So one of the questions I\'m
asking now are the effects of disturbance,

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physical disturbance,
on canopy plant communities.

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And I do a series of
stripping experiments.

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I will just cut off stems and leaves in order
to understand responses of these

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plants to disturbances of various kinds,

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from physical stripping
to climate change.

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-[Amy] Sure.
-[Nalini] Hold on one second.

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-[Amy] Okay.

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-[Nalini] This is the \"Master Caster,\"

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-[Nalini] which I invented about 30 years ago
-[Amy] It looks like a fishing rod.

00:14:29.451 --> 00:14:30.619
-[Nalini] and I just go...

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and I\'m not going to do this here because
I\'m in my lab and I have glass windows

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over there. But anyway, I pull back,
I aim for the branch. I let this go,

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and hopefully it goes up
and over that branch.

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Then I\'m going to sit in
my seat harness like this,

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and see how it\'s holding my weight?

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I\'ll stand up in my seat harness and
move the jumar up as I stand up.

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And I don\'t know if I\'m out of the
picture yet, could you move the uh...

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-[Director] Yes.

00:14:54.268 --> 00:14:55.185
-Just back a little bit?

00:14:55.477 --> 00:14:56.312
-[Director] Yes.

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-[Nalini] And then you
just stand up, sit down,

00:15:03.986 --> 00:15:06.655
all the way up to the top
of a 200 foot tall tree.

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-[Amy] Okay, this is the most interesting
perspective I think I\'ve ever seen.

00:15:11.160 --> 00:15:14.747
-[laughing] Oh, that\'s so funny, Amy.

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-[Amy] Great, well,
that\'s everything that I had.

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-[Nalini] Okay. Well, good luck
with the rest of the article.

00:15:19.710 --> 00:15:21.378
-[Amy] Yeah, I\'ll send you
a link when it\'s up.

00:15:21.378 --> 00:15:24.006
-[Nalini] Okay, great.
Thanks, Amy. Take care, bye.

00:15:29.887 --> 00:15:32.181
So now I\'m coming back to Monteverde.

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We\'ll be climbing up into the
canopy to find out, \"what grows back\"

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after that kind of a disturbance.

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-[Nalini] Oh no.
-[Keylor] It\'s \"Keylor\"

00:15:49.365 --> 00:15:50.699
-[Nalini] Wow.

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This was one of our trees.

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So we just lost three plots. Oh dear.

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Now, if \"Figuerola\" goes down, I\'m going to
have to have a national day of mourning.

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Oh my gosh.

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I set up the plots two years ago,

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so they\'re ready to be censused.

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Just enough.

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I got my field assistant,

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who knows exactly where the plots are.

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So actually at this point,

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there is absolutely no pressure from
the outside to actually do this.

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He\'s a lot faster than we are.
It takes a lot of strength to do it that way.

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You know when you watch a
documentary of scientists in the field,

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and they always know exactly
what they\'re doing next,

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\"Okay, send up this piece of
equipment. Okay, do this, do this.\"

00:17:15.159 --> 00:17:17.619
It\'s like how often
that just isn\'t true.

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Like, \"Oh no, we forgot the tags.
Oh, hey, are the tags down below?

00:17:23.375 --> 00:17:26.170
No, I don\'t see them.
Oh, oh, they\'re up here in my...\"

00:17:27.463 --> 00:17:29.590
There\'s so many stupid mistakes.

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It\'s definitely getting harder.
You know, just,

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I\'m not as strong as I used to be,
and that\'s kind of awful to realize.

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Okay.

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[Nalini laughing]

00:18:24.353 --> 00:18:25.771
Well, I\'m moving up.

00:18:31.652 --> 00:18:32.444
Hoo!

00:18:39.368 --> 00:18:40.327
Fantastic.

00:18:49.795 --> 00:18:51.088
You really see the canopy now.

00:18:52.673 --> 00:18:53.674
Okay, muy bien.

00:19:15.362 --> 00:19:20.075
I feel great. I feel like I\'m
back home again. It\'s weird.

00:19:20.909 --> 00:19:22.911
I thought I\'d be a lot
more scared, but I\'m not.

00:19:24.163 --> 00:19:28.167
Maybe it\'s because it\'s \"Figuerola.\"
Like, this is such a homey place.

00:19:29.126 --> 00:19:30.752
You sort of forget how high up you are.

00:19:50.355 --> 00:19:53.025
All right. Oh yeah.

00:19:54.151 --> 00:19:55.360
That is so fun.

00:19:59.948 --> 00:20:00.782
It\'s pretty amazing.

00:20:02.951 --> 00:20:03.702
Even now,

00:20:04.411 --> 00:20:07.664
40 years after I did those
initial stripping experiments,

00:20:08.832 --> 00:20:12.127
I can still see the imprint
of those disturbances.

00:20:12.169 --> 00:20:19.343
Elaphoglossum. Pleurothallis.
Clusia. Disterigma,

00:20:19.384 --> 00:20:20.761
this is in the blueberry family,

00:20:21.178 --> 00:20:22.262
one of my favorite plants.

00:20:22.804 --> 00:20:25.974
Although these canopy plant
communities appear to be

00:20:26.266 --> 00:20:30.604
lush and vibrant,
diverse and functional,

00:20:30.896 --> 00:20:35.150
they are actually quite fragile and quite
vulnerable to physical disturbance.

00:20:38.779 --> 00:20:43.659
It is actually very rare for
any system after a disturbance

00:20:43.784 --> 00:20:48.080
to revert to its former state.
It doesn\'t happen in nature.

00:20:48.580 --> 00:20:50.207
It doesn\'t happen in human lives.

00:20:52.542 --> 00:20:56.296
I feel like I\'m getting somewhere
closer to that \"Third State Nalini,\"

00:20:57.923 --> 00:21:02.719
but she\'s still a bit mysterious to me.
Still hasn\'t quite gelled yet.

00:21:10.560 --> 00:21:14.481
And I imagine I\'ll be working on this,
you know, for the rest of my life.

00:21:23.073 --> 00:21:24.908
You see, when I was little,
climbing trees...

00:21:27.244 --> 00:21:30.205
You know, in those maple trees I used
to climb to get away from my father...

00:21:32.165 --> 00:21:33.917
The trees were there as my witness.

00:21:36.795 --> 00:21:38.088
I love that little Nalini.

00:21:40.757 --> 00:21:44.594
I haven\'t always loved the adult Nalini,
but I do love this little one.

00:21:53.228 --> 00:21:56.064
Maybe that was the little
Nalini\'s first journey, was saying,

00:21:58.191 --> 00:22:00.319
\"This tree is so solid
and so supporting.

00:22:03.405 --> 00:22:04.656
That\'s where I want to be.\"

00:22:11.246 --> 00:22:12.080
Oh man.

00:22:19.504 --> 00:22:20.339
There\'s the rope.

00:22:38.774 --> 00:22:42.152
Still up there, seven years later.

00:22:53.705 --> 00:22:55.207
Mosses are so beautiful.

00:23:16.812 --> 00:23:18.313
I\'m just going to lie down.