James Stewart
speaker
4,486 appearances
22 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 3d ago
James Stewart’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 17 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 3.
Appearances
In real terms, water samples essentially contain trace amounts of DNA from fish, frogs, even land mammals from upstream.
So scientists can vacuum river water through a filter and then do DNA sequencing or PCR.
This is called environmental DNA or eDNA.
It's like fishing for genes.
You pull up the filter and see whose DNA is there.
And in 2026, they put this theory to the test.
Caitlin Ramosa, an aquatic ecology and conservation scientist at Texas A&M University and her colleagues developed a portable eDNA protocol to map Amazonian manatees.
Now these creatures were known to inhabit the region but were very hard to observe directly due to the murky water and their elusive behavior, making them perfect for this study.
So what she and her team did was filter water along the Amazon for 13 days, taking samples without even using a freezer, by the way.
These are a special preservative.
And amazingly, they still recovered manatee DNA.
They found manatee genetic material at multiple sites in the central Amazon.
What this means in short is you could essentially sit there on a riverbank, collect a couple of water samples and later find out what elusive animals live upstream.
It's a game changer.
The Amazon includes territories of indigenous peoples in voluntary isolation, some of which have never come into contact with the outside world.
As such, you might have noticed when we reference the LiDAR articles, we do not name precise coordinates of sensitive sites.
We must treat indigenous communities as living homelands, not just adventure backdrops for us to sit here and make videos about.
So to wrap things up, what's hiding in the Amazon?
The question I posed at the start.
Not a single lost metropolis, not a single myth, but a layered reality.
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