Geo (Gio) Rutherford

So Baikal is lucky.

We're really lucky because it's in Russia.

It's in Siberia.

It's in the middle of nowhere.

It's actually hard to get to.

And we're lucky because it has a very unique ecosystem where 80% of the species that live in Lake Baikal are endemic to Lake Baikal.

So they can only be found at Lake Baikal.

We're talking about the Baikal amphipod, which is like this weird crustacean.

We're talking about the golem yunca fish, which is one of these deep sea fish, but it's not a sea fish.

It's a lake fish.

It's like lives at the very bottom of Lake Baikal underneath all that enormous pressure.

We have the most famous, I think, is the Baikal Nerpa, which is a seal.

But like their ancestors, like we can still connect them to their Arctic ancestors, not at Lake Baikal.

These seals, we have no idea how they got there.

They've been there for some two million years.

They've evolved to live at Lake Baikal.

And luckily, their population is doing well.

I think that's something that we can't really say about a lot of things in the world right now.

But luckily, the Baikal Nerpa is doing pretty well.

The Baikal Nerpa.