Australia Archives - When We Talk About Animals

Ep. 50 – Australian Biologist Danielle Clode on the Extraordinary World of Koalas

In late 2019, amidst record-setting heatwaves and droughts, bushfires swept across the Australian continent. The severity and scale of destruction wrought by these “Black Summer” blazes was unprecedented, burning more than 40 million acres of land, releasing over 700 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, and killing an estimated three billion animals. Amid the smoke and devastation, one animal in particular became the face of the fires’ toll — a face almost synonymous with Australia itself — the koala.

Author Danielle Clode poses with a koala munching on a eucalyptus leaf. Photo courtesy of Danielle Clode.

The fires killed and injured more than 60,000 koalas and incinerated the highly flammable eucalyptus forests on which koalas depend, leaving the species already beleaguered by habitat loss, infectious disease, and myriad other threats, even more at-risk.

Koalas, masters of sending their throaty, guttural bellows across long distances, soon became messengers to the world about the devastation that our actions are bringing to many other species. Heartbreaking images and videos of the large-nosed, fluffy-eared marsupials went viral around the world – koalas sitting in laundry baskets in rehab centers with singed fur and burned paws, koalas cowering and silhouetted in burning trees against apocalyptic orange backdrops, koalas sipping from the water bottles offered by firemen and good samaritans. Koalas evinced both the toll of climate destruction, but also humans’ capacity for action and compassion for non-human animals. Yet, as our podcast guest has written, for as visible as they are and how much they have to teach us about ourselves and our world, there’s so much we don’t know about these unique, often misunderstood creatures.

Ep. 37 – Monica Gagliano on plant intelligence and human imagination

Are plants intelligent? Can they think and feel? Can they communicate, learn, and solve problems? Throughout history, most Western philosophers and scientists answered these questions with a resounding “no.” Plants, despite having evolved so successfully that they account for about 80 percent of the world’s biomass, have long been treated as inanimate, silent, and unaware. In ancient Greece, Aristotle situated them below animals and just above minerals on his hierarchy of the perfection of living things. In this primitive yet still dominant view, plants are considered passive objects that form the backdrop to our active lives, rather than highly sensitive organisms with intelligence and agency of their own.

For centuries, indigenous healers and shamans around the world have learned from listening to plants. After conversing with plants in dreams and visions during a visit to the Peruvian rainforest, Dr. Monica Gagliano returned to her university inspired and began a series of groundbreaking and highly imaginative experiments on plant communication. “The plants themselves are the teacher,” she says. (Photo courtesy of North Atlantic Books)

But on the cutting edge of modern science, this orthodoxy is being questioned by scientists — including our guest Dr. Monica Gagliano — who think that plants are radically more sophisticated and sensitive than we’ve been giving them credit for. These plant researchers are willing to imagine the possibility that plants have senses like ours: the ability to hear, smell, see, taste, and feel; capabilities like learning, memory, and social networks; as well as entirely distinct ways of interacting with the world, such as detecting and responding to vibrations, electromagnetic fields, and chemical signals. Thanks to this growing body of work, we now know, for example, that some plants can hear the sounds of animal pollinators and react by sweetening their nectar; that plants can send airborne, chemical messages to warn each other of dangerous pests; and that plants can exchange carbon and signals through the fungal “wood wide web” connecting their roots. This new understanding of plants as active, information-processing organisms with complex communication strategies has led to the exciting and controversial field of “plant cognition.”

Dr. Monica Gagliano is an evolutionary ecologist whose daring and imaginative research has expanded our perception of plants and animals. Persevering against the scientific establishment, she pioneered the field of “plant bioacoustics,” the study of sounds produced by and affecting plants. The results of her groundbreaking experiments suggest that plants may possess intelligence, memory and learning, via mechanisms that differ from our own. Gagliano is a research associate professor at the University of Western Australia, and is the author of Thus Spoke the Plant. Her work has been featured by Michael Pollan in The New Yorker and on the RadioLab episode, “Smarty Plants.” She is currently based at the University of Sydney.

The plants used in Gagliano’s experiments, such as pea seedlings, rescued the scientist in her. “I was prepared to do something else,” she tells us, “but the plants were like, ‘Oh, not so fast! We’ve got some work for you. And you can take a sample, you can take a leaf, you can take whatever you need and that doesn’t kill us. So why don’t you work with us.'”

Ep. 36 – Rebecca Giggs on the world in the whale

YaleUniversity · Ep. 36 – Rebecca Giggs on the world in the whale

*“A whale is a wonder not because it’s the world’s biggest animal, but because it augments our moral capacity.”* – Rebecca Giggs (Photo by Leanne Dixon.)

In her genius debut book Fathoms: The World in the Whale, writer Rebecca Giggs introduces readers to blue whales that exhale canopies of vapor so high that their blowholes spout rainbows, to spade-toothed beaked whales that are so rare they’ve never been seen alive, and to sperm whales whose clinks are louder than the heaviest space rocket ever launched from Earth. In prose so deft it ought to be called poetry, Giggs describes scientific research on how whales shift the chemical makeup of our atmosphere, how they respond to solar storms that migrate vast unseen geomagnetic mountain ranges, and how a bestiary’s worth of fantastic creatures flourishes in whale carcasses as they sink to the ocean floor.

“Every species is a magic well,” E.O. Wilson wrote. “The more you draw from it, the more there is to draw.” But, as Fathoms illuminates, there’s more than just mystery and wonder in the wells these days. Animals’ bodies and lives are polluted with reminders of ourselves. Into these magic wells, we have dumped our plastics and our poisons. As one example, Giggs describes a sperm whale that washed up dead on Spain’s southern coast. In its ruptured digestive tract, scientists found an entire flattened greenhouse that once grew wintertime tomatoes, complete with plastic tarps, plastic mulch, hoses, ropes, two flower pots, and a spray canister. The whale had also swallowed an ice cream tub, mattress parts, a carafe, and a coat hanger. And that was just the obvious human refuse. Toxins build up in whale blubber over years such that the concentration of pollutants in some whale bodies far exceeds that of the environment around them. We have turned the world’s largest animals into hazardous waste. ‘‘Would we know it,” Giggs asks, “the moment when it became too late; when the oceans ceased to be infinite?”