Lassen Volcanic National Park

It translates into real year-round recreational opportunity for the people who live there.

You've got the Cascade Range up in the north, Mount Shasta, Lassen Volcanic National Park, great hiking, skiing, snowshoeing, some really stunning geology.

Then there's the Trinity Alps, which is more of a wilderness area.

Remote trails, glacial lakes, fly fishing that people travel from all over the country to experience.

And you also serve a lot of students, a population of kids that would not necessarily ever get exposed to anything like this.

I know from my own experiences as an educator in the North Central Valley here, I would have students who had never, ever been to Lassen Volcanic National Park.

which is an hour away from their home, but they'd never been there.

They never experienced anything like that until I took them.

Blame the barred owl for the spotted owl's decline so then the timber industry's off the hook for its habitat destruction at the time that the timber industry wants to get back into those forests and to, and to cut more timber.

So the Fish and Wildlife Service kind of bought the plan by the timber industry, and they produced an environmental impact statement called the Barred Owl Management Strategy to kill up to four hundred and fifty thousand North American barred owls in California, Oregon, Washington, shooting them across 17 national forests and then 14 units of our National Park Service, uh, including Crater Lake National, uh, Park in Oregon and Olympic, North Cascades, Mount Rainier National Parks in Washington, and then iconic parks in California, Yosemite, Redwoods, Lassen Volcanic, uh, Kings Canyon, Sequoia.

And to, to kill essentially about twenty thousand of them a year for the next thirty years as a way to reduce social competition with the northern spotted owl because they're both forest owls.

They both seek those, those craggy old trees with the, um, cavities in them for, for nesting sites.

We had worked on a review looking for what microbial eukaryote, so these are organisms that are like us, but not plants, animals, or fungi, uh, that were found in extreme environments, and saw that amoeba were often sequenced in these environments, but very few had been cultured or had published genomes.

So that's how we got in contact with Gordon Wolfe and then also Ken here, who have done a lot of sampling at Lassen Volcanic National Park.

Before we get into the actual finding, can you explain what an amoeba is?

They can be around the size of our white blood cells or smaller or bigger.

[cash register sound] Here at The Week in Review, we're fascinated with amazing animals of every size, including the very, very small.

This week, scientists in Lassen Volcanic National Park in northeastern California published a study documenting a previously unknown amoeba they discovered in the park's super hot springs.

Prior to this discovery, scientists thought that eukaryotes, that is complex cellular organisms with a nucleus and a cell wall, had a temperature ceiling of about 140 degrees Fahrenheit.

But this new little guy, Incendieamoeba cascadensis, can get all the way up to 147 degrees, hot enough to give you third-degree burns on your skin in a matter of seconds.

Although there are simple single-cell organisms that can live in temperatures up to 252 degrees, well above the boiling point, incendieamoeba cascadensis has a much more complex, vulnerable biological structure, but can still take the heat.

The place the amoeba was found is incredible and well worth a visit.

Lassen Volcanic National Park was originally created by Teddy Roosevelt all the way back in 1907 and is one of the only places in the world where you can find all four geological types of volcano: plug dome, shield, cinder cone, and stratovolcano.

Hmm.

Yeah, and then I brought the show back there and did it at the park again in 2025.

And then actually this year, I did this volcano show at Lassen Volcanic National Park in California.

Oh, wow.

Beautiful.