- [Joleene] Tonight on WPBS Weekly "Inside the Stories," studies show that nearly 40% of Canadian workers experience burnout and mental health struggles.

We'll talk solutions.

And what do you know about he mole salamander?

You might be surprised to know this species has only one sex.

Learn how they cross boundaries to procreate.

Also, singer songwriter Kay Miracle visits the WPBS Studios.

Her personal lyrics and powerful vocals just may resonate with you.

Your stories, your region coming up right now on WPBS Weekly "Inside the stories."

(bright uplifting music) - [Announcer] WPBS Weekly "Inside the Stories" is brought to you by the Daisy Marquis Jones Foundation, the Watertown Oswego Small Business Development Center, Carthage Savings, CSX, the Oswego County Community Foundation at the Central New York Community Foundation, the Richard Shineman Foundation, and the Badenhausen Legacy Fund at the Northern New York Community Foundation.

- Good Tuesday evening, everyone, and welcome to this edition of WPBS Weekly "Inside the Stories."

I'm Joleene DesRosiers.

In a study release just before the pandemic, the World Health Organization called work burnout an occupational phenomenon.

This phenomenon only worsened thanks to COVID, and it's a struggle Canadians and Americans continue to navigate today.

But how do so many of us end up burned out, and what can we do to save ourselves?

(bright soft music) There's no question that the pandemic brought on levels of anxiety in the workplace.

As companies packed it in to send workers home, others shutting their doors completely, a new level of anxiety set in.

According to a study executed by Robert Half Talent Solutions in May of this year, close to 40% of the Canadian working population was burned out.

At first glance, one might think this percentage was inflated because of COVID, but the truth is burnout is its own pandemic, and it's been creating high levels of anxiety at the workplace for years.

It sounds like different people work at different speeds and can handle different workloads.

One of the things you said when we were talking on the phone is that burnout is a phenomenon.

Can you expand on that more for me?

- Sure, burnout's a phenomenon, and really, it's a process that happens, right?

So what happens is as people experience stressors in their job and the negative emotions and the anxiety that goes with that, this builds up over time.

Now, actually, we're pretty good at deadlines.

We're pretty good at one-off stressors and dealing with a busy week or a busy day or a stressful presentation.

We can handle that.

The problem is when those stressful events and experiences accumulate continually over time without getting a chance to break.

- So yours in the "Ottawa Sun," there was a study that was done in 2021, literally the same result saying 40% of Canadians are struggling.

This is after COVID.

So it tells me this has been something that's been ongoing for a long time.

Can you talk to me about how super important it is that managers and organizations on taking this seriously and perhaps changing things in the handbook so that their employees feel more comfortable and know that there is room for this, for anxiety issues?

- Problems with anxiety and burnout have been something that we've dealt with for a long time, right?

Before the COVID pandemic, it was costing the economy and companies billions and billions of dollars a year.

Some estimates at the low end say that it was costing the North American economy from three to $5 billion a year, and that's minimum.

So just from a dollars and cents perspective, and if we wanna put it together, what that cost is?

And obviously was a problem before COVID.

COVID exacerbated some things.

Some things in certain occupations are frontline workers, for example, healthcare really exploded.

Maybe in other jobs, they got a little more flexible, but it didn't all go away, and there were other things in our life that we were dealing with that led to a lot of anxiety and burnout.

I think companies gotta take the first, the first step they have to realize is that it costs some real dollars and cents, the problem that we're facing and we're dealing with, right?

So there's a real fight we have to battle with.

And that shows up in ways that maybe they might not think about.

So take the employee who goes through the burnout process and gets burned out.

What happens?

Inevitably, they become detached from their work.

They become detached from their colleagues.

Their productivity first decreases and declines.

That's followed by people withdrawing from the workplace.

So now they're late more.

They're absent more.

Maybe they're gonna start taking sick leaves.

That's gonna cost the company.

That productivity just disappears.

That's not replaced.

There's not a person that steps into that, and ultimately, the employee leaves.

- [Joleene] Before the pandemic, upwards of $5 billion was spent replacing burned out and overworked employees.

This cost includes paying out sick time, paying overtime to other employees that pick up the additional work, and finding and training a new employee.

Trougakos says this number could be drastically reduced if employers recognize burnout as a phenomenon and employees stepped up to speak their mind.

- Critically, what companies have to realize is that if they deal with this in advance, if they are proactive in dealing with this, they will be able to circumvent those costs when people are in a tricky environment and maybe those lines of communication are not open.

Part of that is looking for opportunities to open those lines of communication, frame it around you want to perform at your best.

You want to do the best job that you can, and what are ways that you can work with your manager to be more successful, right?

And I think what we have to realize is that when people are overworked, when people are overtaxed, there just comes a point where we're just not effective anymore, right?

We push, and you look at it this way, right?

We know if we had an animal of burden, something like a horse or a mule or a donkey, we wouldn't work that animal until it like collapsed.

That would just be animal cruelty, and people would get in trouble for that.

But yet, we seem to be okay in a lot of times in letting people just take that burden.

And then look for ways to set boundaries.

I think that's another thing that there are times, times and places to get away from work and be able to get the recovery, get the rest, get the reenergization that you need to be successful.

- For WPBS Weekly, I'm Joleene DesRosiers.

Whitewater rafting is huge in North America.

From engagements with friends to team building events, rafting on rough waters is very popular.

But what does it take to lead a boat filled with inexperienced rafters?

Producer Eric Cleary goes inside the story to discover what it takes to get certified.

(soft bright music) (muffled chatter) - [Robert] Whitewater rafting is an adventure that anybody can enjoy.

- [Eric] And those that have gone whitewater rafting say the same thing, and hundreds more discover it each year.

And while it is enjoyable for everyone, how is everyone kept safe as well?

Through the expertise and demeanor of the whitewater rafting guides that direct to rafts.

But how do these guides become guides?

Through a series of tests.

One becomes a certified and licensed whitewater rafting guide.

Robert Peterson of Bob Rafting explains the requirements to become certified.

- First of all, you have to fill out an application with New York state to become a whitewater rafting guide.

These are the requirements.

You gotta have CPR, first aid, water safety.

You have to complete a training program with a company you're gonna work at for every river you're gonna be on, and you have to be the guide in the boat five times on each river, not a passenger but the guide in the raft.

You gotta fulfill the requirements from the company itself, and they'll send a letter in with your stuff.

You gotta send a picture in.

You pay $125, and that's good for five years.

For our requirements, you have to learn to guide a boat.

You gotta learn how to use the guide stick, draw, pry.

You gotta learn the commands.

You gotta learn the safety talk, how to use a throw bag.

Learn how to navigate down the river.

When we hire somebody, the first thing you do when they come in, we wanna know what kind of personality they got.

You have to be a people person.

If you're not a people person, this is not the job for you.

We also look for people that are reactionaries, not a thinking man's job.

You have to be able to respond instantly to a situation, no matter what it is.

It's all in the guide's demeanor.

Usually, we're not on the river by ourselves.

We never send a solo boat.

We always have at least a raft and a safety boater, and how that guide handles the situation can either put his customers at ease or he can make them nervous, so response is the big thing.

- The guides here are amazing, and they really make us feel safe and just make sure we have a really good time, make sure that everyone has equal opportunity to get wet and just enjoy the river.

Our guide was amazing.

This is actually not the first time that I've ever rafted.

This is probably the fourth or fifth time that I've been and the second time that I've been on the Black River.

I would love to go river rafting again.

It was a really good time.

Black River is amazing, and this crew is really good.

- When people show up first thing, the safety requirements for a customer, they show up.

We give 'em a helmet, class 5 life jacket.

We take 'em to the river.

We do a full safety talk onshore, and we show 'em how to sit in the boat, how to handle themselves, and then at the shore, the guides go over the safety talk again.

They do a practice paddle in the river, and then we're off on our adventure for the day.

- This is actually my first time rafting.

Having a guide in a boat, it made it 10 times safer, and the dude was actually funny.

He wasn't strict.

He wasn't no mean dude.

He was actually cool.

He was fun.

He had us do something where we pulled up on the other raft and splashed them.

It was fun, it was fun, and it was way safer having him in there.

If we didn't have him in the raft with us, we would've went overboard every time.

- We pattern our trips around our customers a lot of times.

We don't do anything that's unsafe.

We won't put a customer in an unsafe situation, but we take people from 13 to 99 and everybody in between, and when you come, if you're looking for something specific, I can't give you that.

But if you're looking to have a good time on the river, you come and we can ensure that.

- Would I have a good rafting again?

Indeed, I will.

Yes, I will.

I will do it three times a week if I actually could 'cause it is that fun and then it's that weather, being in that water, (laughs) feel good.

- [Eric] For WPBS Weekly, I'm Eric Cleary.

- Now a little bit of science for you tonight as we talk about the personal lives of salamanders.

The mole salamander only has one sex, female, and in that, they have a leg up on other animals.

(bright soft music) - Are you ready to hear a story about sex that you're not gonna believe?

(soft jaunty music) Humans have such a perception of reproduction that's humancentric, and when that's challenged, it really throws folks for a loop to think of something that doesn't need its own males but crosses these species' boundaries in order to obtain that reproductive material.

What does a world look like with no males or clonal reproduction?

What does that mean from the perspective of these cute little animals?

My name is Rob Ditton.

I'm an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota Morris.

These salamanders are unbelievable.

They're an all-female group of salamanders that can steal sperm from males of other species.

- My name is Katie Greenwald.

I am an associate professor at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, Michigan.

If you think about it, a lineage that's all made up of females can actually grow twice as fast as a lineage that has both males and females.

Numbers wise, that lineage should eventually swamp out, outcompete, and beat a lineage that has evolved to have both males and females.

- [Rob] We sometimes call this the twofold cost of males.

It costs to make males, and males take away resources that could be used for females.

It's still relatively mysterious why sex evolved and how it's been maintained for so long across so many different species across the tree of life.

- [Katie] The reason that we're so interested in these unisexual Ambystoma salamanders is that they are virtually able to flip flop between sexual and asexual reproduction.

These various options in terms of how these offspring are produced is, as far as we know, completely globally unique, and it makes this system a really excellent one to look at when sexual reproduction is adaptive versus when asexual reproduction is adaptive.

(tense music) - [Rob] Imagine you are one of these females.

You come to a wetland in the spring, and you proceed to find a packet of sperm at that wetland that was laid there by a male of a different species.

You require that sperm just to even have eggs, to produce eggs and lay them.

You do so, and most of your offspring are clones of Mom.

They're exactly the same.

They have all the same chromosomes, all the same genetic material.

What makes these animals separate and distinct and interesting is the rate at which those other genomes sneak into the offspring.

- Typical sexually reproducing organisms are getting one set of their DNA set of chromosomes from Mom, one set from Dad, and so all of us have two sets of chromosomes.

The unisexual salamanders, we do sometimes get them with two sets, but it's much more common for them to have three or four sets, and we sometimes even find them with five.

Five tends to be about where they max out.

Ohio and Indiana are the at epicenter of craziness for the complex because there are actually five different sexual species that they can reproduce with that they can breed with the males and then potentially incorporate those males' DNA.

It's not only that.

They have these different potential outcomes but that, even within a single clutch of eggs where those are all siblings, all sisters, you may have actually different types of salamanders being produced.

- It's amazing that they have the scenario of having multiple genomes, but I think what puts it in a perspective is how distantly related these species are that are sharing this genetic information.

If we were to take a sample of my blood and I had a set of chromosomes from my mother, from my father but, in addition, a whole set from the gorilla, from an orangutan, from a chimpanzee, that's the type of evolutionary divergence between these salamanders, but I would be a fully functioning, normal human being.

(branches crack) - You have a salamander in here.

- No!

- Yes.

- What?

- Yes.

- [Katie] Oh, buddy!

(laughs) - [Woman] Pull the trap out of (laughs) first.

- Are you kidding me?

What we're setting up here are breeding experiments where we put the unisexual females in with different types of males, and then we genotype the parents and the offspring to see when the male DNA makes it in.

So, so far what we've been looking at is whether the female has any preference for a male that's from her same pond versus a male that's from a more distant pond, and over the last couple of years, we've been running these experiments and are so far seeing a pattern where the females are more likely to include the male's DNA if he's from the same pond that she is versus a pond on the other side of the reserve.

You could imagine that if you are a unisexual with a lot of blue-spotted DNA and you end up in a pond with a lot of Jefferson salamanders, that's probably a good place to be a Jefferson salamander.

And so as that female, are you more likely then to add some of those Jefferson's genes to your offspring?

In which case, you're able to potentially grab a whole locally adapted genome and stick it right into your offspring without splitting it in half.

(muffled chatter) (soft jaunty music) - So I'm working to establish a collection of these animals that captures their whole diversity across their range, from Kentucky, to Maine, to Minnesota, to Canada.

Some of these people who work for state agencies or wildlife management areas sample these animals every year, help them cross the road, protect them, educate the public about these animals without ever really knowing what they have.

How many genomes does it have, and where do they come from?

And so this is a way that we can answer some of those questions and also ask more basic research questions about their evolution, for instance.

The scenario of having these multiple genomes produces some really confusing results.

So for example, we have studies that show that they can regenerate their tissues faster than sexual species.

At the same time, there are other tests, such as locomotor endurance, where they perform really poorly.

They're very successful.

Across their range, they're often abundant.

Sometimes they can outnumber the sexual species by two to one, three to one at these wetlands.

So we know they're doing well.

We know they've been around for a really long time, but it's really difficult to explain why that is.

- These salamanders really are taking advantage of the system, right?

They're all female, so they don't bear that cost of producing males, but they're occasionally incorporating DNA from other species.

In some ways, it seems like this potentially totally unique evolutionary win-win, which might ultimately let us learn a little bit more about the evolution and maintenance of sexual reproduction.

- They defy all boundaries of what we know a species is.

So it raises a lot of interesting questions about what do we care to conserve, an individual that we know is a blue-spotted salamander or their genetic legacy?

People argue about what a species is, and these animals are so far from that argument that it's it's not even worth having it.

(laughs) (soft jaunty music) - The powerful vocals of Kay Miracle can be heard all over the country.

Her personal lyrics and unique voice will pull you into her original music.

She visited our studios for a session, and here she is tonight with "Could It Be."

(fast-tempo percussive music) - I'm Kay Miracle, and I'm a singer songwriter Americana.

I wrote the song "Could It Be" through the power of a song organization that I have founded, and it was about a woman that was abandoned during a really tough time in her life.

And she was a young mother, and she was left with the what ifs, like, "Did I do this?

Did I cause this?

Am I to blame?"

She had no answers at all, and it was torturing her.

So when we talked, the theme that came up was could it be this?

Could it be that?

And I wanted to write it in a song in a way that she could let go of that and realize that it wasn't her fault and that she was a victim of this, and after the song was done, she literally cried, and she said, "I feel like a weight lifted off my shoulders."

And the funny thing is I've been carrying some trauma myself, and after writing that song, it brought a lot of peace and healing to myself as well.

So I am such a believer in this program, having other songwriters or other artists sit with other people and get their stories and write these songs that come from the heart because when they're believable and they're from a truth, they resonate with so many people.

♪ That you moved on ♪ I'm Kay Miracle, and this is my original song, "Could It Be?"

("Could It Be?")

♪ I once was the light in your eyes ♪ ♪ Ooh ooh ooh ooh ♪ ♪ Love came easy ♪ ♪ We didn't have to try ♪ ♪ Ooh ooh ooh ooh ♪ ♪ But I could see the sun fade away ♪ ♪ Blue skies turned to clouds of gray ♪ ♪ It feels like you've already said goodbye ♪ ♪ Could it be you moved on ♪ ♪ The world we built suddenly gone ♪ ♪ How could I have been so blind ♪ ♪ I know where I've been left behind ♪ ♪ Could it be we drifted apart ♪ ♪ Could it be you had a change of heart ♪ ♪ All I know is there's something wrong ♪ ♪ Could it be that you moved on ♪ ♪ You came home tired again ♪ ♪ Ooh ooh ooh ♪ ♪ The conversation over before it began ♪ ♪ Ooh ooh ooh ooh ♪ ♪ Two strangers sitting it at the table ♪ ♪ Can't you throw me a bone, but you're not able ♪ ♪ Just give me a clue so I can understand ♪ ♪ Could it be that you moved on ♪ ♪ The world we built suddenly gone ♪ ♪ How could I have been so blind ♪ ♪ I know where I've been left behind ♪ ♪ Could it be we drifted apart ♪ ♪ Could it be you had a change of heart ♪ ♪ All I know there something wrong ♪ ♪ Could it be that you moved on ♪ ♪ I know it's easy to stray off track ♪ ♪ One moves forward, the other pulls back ♪ ♪ Your silence fills my head with fear ♪ ♪ We can't move forward looking in the rear mirror ♪ ♪ Oh no ♪ ♪ Oh no ♪ ♪ I'll be sitting on the porch when you get home ♪ ♪ Ooh ooh ooh ♪ ♪ We either talk it out or go to bed alone ♪ ♪ Ooh ooh ooh ooh ♪ ♪ There's no reason for me to stay ♪ ♪ When the man I love has nothing to say ♪ ♪ Unanswered questions lost in the great unknown ♪ ♪ Could it be you moved on ♪ ♪ The world we built suddenly gone ♪ ♪ How could and I have been so blind ♪ ♪ I know where I've been lived behind ♪ ♪ Could it be we drifted apart ♪ ♪ Could it be you had a change of heart ♪ ♪ All I know is there's something wrong ♪ ♪ Could it be that you moved on ♪ ♪ All I know is there's something wrong ♪ ♪ Could it be that you moved on ♪ ♪ Could it be ♪ ♪ Could it be ♪ - And that does it for us this Tuesday evening.

Join us next week for a fresh look "Inside the Stories."

WPBS is so excited to be sharing a cooking collaboration with you featuring Johnny Spezzano of "The Border."

We take you into his kitchen to experience his brick cooking with very special guests.

And four counties are under consideration for the proposed Lake Ontario National Marine Sanctuary.

Oswego and Jefferson County are part of this proposed underwater museum.

Meantime, we wanna tell your story.

If you or someone in your community has something meaningful, historic, inspirational, or heroic to share, please email us at wpbsweekly@wpbstv.org, and let's share it with the Region.

That's it for now, everyone.

We'll see you again Next week.

Goodnight.

(bright uplifting music) - [Announcer] WPBS Weekly "Inside the Stories" is brought to you by the Daisy Marquis Jones Foundation, dedicated to improving the wellbeing of communities by helping disadvantaged children and families, online at dmjf.org, the Watertown Oswego Small Business Development Center, a free resource offering confidential business advice for those interested in starting or expanding their small business.

Serving Jefferson, Lewis, and Oswego counties since 1986, online at watertown.nysbdc.org.

Carthage savings has been here for generations, donating time and resources to this community.

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Additional funding provided by CSX, the Oswego County Community Foundation at the Central New York Community Foundation, the Richard Shineman Foundation, and the Badenhausen Legacy Fund at the Northern New York Community Foundation.

♪ Apart ♪ ♪ Could it be you had a change of heart ♪ ♪ All I know is there's something wrong ♪ ♪ Could it be that you moved on ♪ (soft gentle music)