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hello and welcome to technically speaking where scientists and engineers come together to chat about common interests share knowledge and satisfy some curiosity i'm laura and in this episode i'm joined by ellie aneeqa and a special guest katya to talk about different hunting strategies that animals use and maybe consider how this knowledge could be useful to us so to start off with ellie i know you're a zoologist so i guess you know a lot about this please enlighten me
i mean i might be picking it up too much i definitely have an interest in this i find this whole thing fascinating as a zoologist i have come across like quite a few examples that we'll chat about and i just think it's so incredible people don't often realize how the animals have evolved the way they have and how their hunting strategies are so linked with the prey and then the environment that they live in so yeah we're going to discuss some examples that i personally
find very interesting and hopefully you guys will too cool everything's linked that's the first thing i'm learning katya i think you've got a similar-ish story to ellie's you've also got a zoology background i know you produced your own podcast please tell us more about that and how it fits in with your zoology yeah uh thank you for having me first of all this is very exciting ellie and i know each other we did our masters together in wildlife filmmaking um and
obviously it's a very very difficult field to get into so we just thought we'll just make our own podcast so i have i host a podcast with our other friend we did our masters with josh and it's called drunk on porpoise and essentially it's supposed to be a very relaxed upbeat conversation about wildlife and science topics i love it i love the name are you intentionally drunk for every single recording yes and i've been more drunk for some and less drunk for others but i definitely always
have a beer in hand i like it i guess that could lead to some really interesting and varied conversations yeah and also not so many good you'd be surprised how often i lose track of my train of thought that's part of the joy happens to us all the time yeah aneeqa you're definitely not a zoologist so what's your interest in animal hunting strategies so i'm coming at this in two angles so one is that a few months ago a fox family moved into my garden and they
keep leaving eggshells and i keep seeing them with chicken carcasses in the mouth so i want to know what's going on with the foxes how do they get their food are they hunting in bins are they actually going and finding chickens somewhere and killing them does someone have live chickens that they're they're attacking so i want to know more about the foxes that's my one area of interest but then also as an engineer i'm really keen on what we can learn from the different techniques that
animals use for hunting because i'm really into biomimicry i think it's really cool how we can learn from nature and apply it to our lives so i'd be keen to learn more about that as well cool i wonder where you were when you were giving out by a mimicry episode maybe we should revisit some of those in a future material sciencey episode yeah fox is in your garden you live in manchester right is it it's quite a built up area there yeah yeah i think uh you know how at the beginning of covid
like all these goats were taking over city centers i think it's continued but now it's with foxes they're fearless and not nocturnal apparently i always thought foxes were nocturnal but no we have staring competitions quite regularly me and the foxes wow and i've definitely seen them wandering around manchester occasionally when i used to live there and he could hear them in the park at night doing things it could be quite scary than the noises they make if they're fighting they can
be quite high-pitched yeah definitely they also have a like a making screen as well so that's where people often get worried because they like fully scream and it sounds like a human so often people are like oh my goodness was that and yeah it's the foxes so they scream when they're getting it on yeah that doesn't sound quite right but if you looked around your neighborhood and you could see if anyone does have chickens some of my neighbors did in manchester no i don't think
anyone not that i've heard or seen i don't think they have chickens maybe someone was feeding them because i don't know where they're finding that much chicken every day yeah i can answer that a lot of people feed them why do they do that the foxes are not living in their garden i know a lot of people will feed them raw egg like eggs just eat on or chicken if you ever want to go into an internet hole fox groups like i love facebook it gets crazy you'll hear
discussions about like what to feed the foxes and like regular foxes that they come people create entire narratives around these these foxes that live in there yeah and they make a mess in my garden because they poo everywhere they leave the egg shells everywhere and then it's just really disturbing to see them just leave the garden and then two minutes later walk back with like a giant chicken carcass in their mouth wow ah i am was taking the dog for a walk
the other day and it picked up part of a corpse oh i don't know what the animal was originally it was quite well decayed but i had to fish out the dog's mouth but it was like a bit spine still attached to it some decaying skin with some fur still attached and then i had to like hook what i think was a leg out of the dog's mouth i had a dog growing up that always would like roll in carcass is that a thing too they find something dead and they love to roll in it it's just an awful smell
it's weird isn't it what's gross to us is something that they clearly like yeah welcome we have foxes around here so i live in a really rural area but i have seen one a few years ago now i was chasing a rabbit across a science park on a sunday morning and the rabbit kind of ran past me and dived into the bushes and the fox kind of went oh no there's a human it's something bigger than me and so deviated and turned away so i saved that rabbit's life oh you cost that fox it's dinner maybe
i'll have to go around to anika's and get a chicken yeah exactly he got the train to manchester but that is pretty much the most i've seen about foxes and their hunting strategies don't go near the human the manchester foxes seem to have it easy i guess yeah they're chilling they're living a good life eating a lot of food more chicken than i eat i can say that for sure they are not starving no no i think the thing with fox is that they're such like generalists they're pretty
happy-go-lucky like they will have if they need to but if you've got someone that's willing to feed them a whole chicken carcass like why make the effort save the energy and take your lunch for free that's what i would do yeah if someone brought me deliveroo every day i'm not going to cook dinner right right we're always gonna do the laziest option i mean call it lazy call it be conservative whatever you want i'd do that energy saving there we go that's the word i was
looking for energy saving yeah it's tough in the natural world i guess yeah i suppose we do have a few more examples from our can i call you guys tame zoologists channel top gear i'll happily take that title on i don't know if i can commit to it but sure thing and have you guys got any examples of some less urban examples of hunting i probably have the most unurban rural not quite the right word wild uh hunting strategy that i found so this is quite a recent paper and i love this so much so
basically elephant seals hunt in the sea as you might imagine hunt fish but what people don't realize is that in the deep dark ocean it is very deep and very dark so they can't see they're not using eyesight necessarily to hunt and so if they're not doing that what are they doing and what scientists have discovered and this perhaps is the best technique i've ever come across is they put teeny tiny little infrared cameras on the cheeks of seals a adorable be fascinating
and they set them off and seals can't see an infrared so these were infrared cameras because obviously dark so there's no point having a normal light spectrum and they found that the whiskers of seals have a specific motion and they call it whisking in the paper i'm doing handmade intelligence you guys can't see but they have like a specific like imagine like a figure of eight sort of thing and they whisk their whiskers in this motion and that helps them detect changes in the water pressure and
the water movement and then they know where the fish are because the fish are causing the changes which is like mind-blowing wow and also it's the same sort of thing that a land-using whisker specialist aka rat would also do is the same principle of whisking round and round could they hunt this way and do you think like these animals involve this will they eventually lose their use of eyes do they even need eyes light is so incredible to me and there's also videos
of it that you should definitely watch because it's just so cute to see the little cheek of the seal whisking round and round oh just until it's uh to kill its prey it's very cute though it's very cute and also super effective as well like if they didn't have this some of the fish are bioluminescent so like obviously that helps but it's not 100 reliable and obviously like not all the fish that they eat might be bioluminescent or you might on one specific day not see any so if you want
to eat regularly which they often do then you gotta whisk whisper whiskers and feel the vibrations in the water they're not even in the air so cool and i guess that's there must be other currents and things affecting their whisker movement so the seal has to somehow filter all of that out to concentrate on motion from something that's a fish yeah i mean i don't know how they would necessarily do that but i think perhaps if there's more than one seal like can you tell that that is
another seal and not you know a shark or like something you don't want to eat versus your fish like do they have specific ways of doing it i don't know but i just think it's awesome and you can read the paper and discover more because it's really very cool you said this was a very recent discovery this year yeah this year the paper came out 13th of june so not even a month old it's really recent but probably encapsulates like several years worth of research yeah definitely
well they said also that they had 9.4 hours of video data from like the five steels that they studied and i can just imagine like these poor researchers like sat there like watching nine hours of seals whisking like eventually like it's cool but at some point you think not that cool maybe i've had enough now i'm picturing like tiny little gopro like just attached to like little whiskers that's exactly what i'm picturing i mean i know like it's a bit more complex than
that but i'm just like little tiny gopros just like they called it newly developed small cheek mounted video logger with infrared light actually that or like teeny tiny gopro works well i think basically yeah yes who decided that seal whiskers we need to find out more about that let's develop a tiny camera and put it on their faces just for this one purpose right i mean but who knows what else they'll discover like maybe this will trigger like a cascade of other
learning maybe they just thought how do they hunt because it's really dark how do they possibly see or is their eyesight really good but no it's all in the whiskers oh there you go they've said something in the abstract in brackets it said rodents or rats but they called it something else it was something very bizarre so this is the thing that they do so the seals do it but also like well-studied terrestrial whisker specialists also do it which is meaning rodents i just think that's so
funny i love it i love that my pet rat is a whisker specialist [Music] he's doing the same thing as the deep diving seals yeah incredible well apparently rats do have really bad eyesight worse than mine and my eyesight is pretty bad i have to wear glasses for anything it's more than about 20 centimetres in front of my face so you know i can't tell if someone's walking down the street whether they're walking towards me or away from me whether i know them or not because i can't see that well
so my rat's eyesight is worse than mine but they can definitely jump onto things with very good precision like tiny little fancy things that are much taller than them and grab on and climb up and wander around and you wouldn't know their eyesight's that bad so i guess that must have something to do with their whiskers maybe sensing the air currents over that fence because the whiskers do move around a lot yeah it's got to be i'm sure they're to do with like depth perception as well
like not meaning underwater depth but like the way you observe where things are in relation to yourself so if you have good whiskers it helps you realize that what's in front of you is only a meter away or is a jumpable distance whereas if you didn't have that like obviously humans don't have that and some people including myself have terrible depth perception and are really clumsy and i often like in a new place i will walk into windowsills and door frames and hit my arms and showers
because i have no clue how close it is to me and i just fall over all the time are they related to mustaches in any way should we ask a load of mustache owners whether they have better depth perception including myself i'm a proud mustache how do you rate your depth perception uh not great so maybe [Laughter] so it does nothing for us yeah i find it in the car as well like parallel parking is hard for stop but i genuinely have no clue how close i am to stuff like if i
didn't have wing mirrors i would hit many many things i think but no one ever does don't then when you get into a new car you always have to figure out where your reference points are and you're always kind of guessing until you either get it right or get it wrong yeah i wonder if we can adapt the seal whisker technique to like something like a car or maybe a submarine instead of a parking sensor where it beeps when you're closest to it it would be like the same system of like the whiskers
being like oh no vibrations are too strong stop don't reverse anymore submarine is a really cool one i didn't even think of that that would be really credible technology i mean obviously maybe not like to that extent but that kind of that kind of idea but it's like sonar right i think so the whales obviously do that and like like dolphins and that sort of species will do that the seals are not playing that game they're all about the whiskers which obviously then whales don't have so it
makes sense yeah isn't it funny that people realized sooner that certain sea animals use um sound waves to detect things but the whiskers was more of a mystery until now yeah maybe potentially because of that military aspect maybe we like heard their sound waves on our equipment first but you wouldn't obviously hear there's no like radiation coming off the whisker in the same way no something more difficult to discern going on i wonder if there's any use here for drone
technologies um anika you're asking about engineering applications i suspect that trying to fly a drone outside is really difficult it needs to be quite a calm day usually doesn't it yeah what if your drone had whiskers on that could sense what the air currents were at different locations as it's flying it adapts accordingly maybe it's a kind of technology that could be applied to self-driving cars for example i think that would be a really cool application yeah that's a good point
because there were some self-driving cars that crashed because they thought a white van was a cloud or something like that because it looked similar to the the visual sensing technology but obviously if you've got whiskers you don't have that problem with detecting different colours yeah can you imagine that having to report that back all right back to the drawing board we got good how ironic that it was a white van they always get a lot of stick for not being
able to see if you ever tried driving a white van or any van it's not that easy it's understandable that you've got this massive blind spot you just have to go for it but if you've got whiskers maybe i'm totally adding yeah i'm adding to the list of animal traits that i want ellie i don't just want a lamprey mouth tail wasn't it a tail was the last one yeah i still want the tail i still want the jail yeah to help with the clumsiness to help with the depth perception maybe i should go with
the whiskers instead it's a big satellite dish this is where it's headed this is my ultimate goal to become a rat i'll just become a rat or seal [Laughter] i guess there are probably a few more things we can learn from the animal world as well have you got another example that you want to share ellie or catcher i have one i mean we talked a bit about mimicry earlier today when we were discussing it tree ocelots mimicking the sounds of adolescent monkeys in order to lure adult monkeys
into striking range there's a lot of evidence that they do this they have never observed it to actually be successful in terms of actually capturing a monkey for food but it does lure them to the point where they're in the vicinity where they can strike they've just never seen it actually be used successfully but it's one of the first instances of a feline using mimicry to hunt which i think is incredibly fascinating because they call it psychological coming which is scary
enough to begin with because we see it a lot in lots of animals but we've never seen it before or this is the first instance seeing it in a feline ah so these are the small spotty cats they live in the jungle right yeah they've got massive eyes there's a picture on the national geographic website they look really cute i don't know if they are they're absolutely beautiful i think yeah i just think is this psychological cunning like it's so clever to think if
i make a call of a baby monkey the mummy monkeys are gonna be like oh better check that out make sure it's okay and then boom you can catch it that thought process is so intelligent of a creature to be like this is the way i'm gonna catch my tea today yeah that is true but i wonder if they said they'd never been successful in catching prey using this technique i wonder if the prey is like that doesn't sound quite right it might be a baby it might not i don't know i'll
be bit wary here yeah from what i read it was that they can get it in the vicinity they understand that it's like an adolescent monkey but then they can't capitalize on it so they can get them close enough where the monkeys are like okay what's going on but then the monkey realizes just a bit too like soon for the ocelot to actually capture them i mean also what we've all observed right i mean we can only be in the jungle so much observing this so it could happen
when when we're not around um but yeah no i agree maybe there is something slightly off yeah it's avenues to explore see you've now got me wondering catcher with the the premise for your your own podcaster and con porpoise if there are a bunch of ocelots sitting around a bit drunk going you know that noise you made that sounds a bit like a baby monkey can you do that again that's amazing there's them at the pub like when we're all down at the pub and we're like do that impression do your best
accent that's just them they're just you know screwing them out you know what would not put it past them i really wouldn't right there must be some fruit in the jungle that kind of falls the floor and rots and turns into alcohol there is starts to ferment i've done an episode oh yeah i was like if i'm getting drunk the animal kingdom's getting wrong this is totally feasible and that they could be drunk at us a lot sitting around going that sounds just like a
monkey do that again and then all these monkeys going what the heck is that dave is that steve what's he doing i love that idea i know we're not really supposed to anthropomorphize animals but i love that idea that's one of those ones i'm not entirely sure how we could use that in engineering i don't know if you can think of anything anika well getting drunk in the jungle sounding like something else to attract something else that an engineer would find useful that way it took a really
weird turn as i was saying that yeah i spent sort of so much like let's just say magnets in just that you can use something one thing to attract another thing like magnetic forces i can't think of how making a sound that sounds like another sound would be useful like in a modern engineering setting but if anyone else can tweet us because we would love to know yeah yeah i was just thinking mimicry can we can we use mimicry as kind of a jumping off point for anything
yeah honestly i can't think of an application for the sound thing specifically like mimicking someone's sound within engineering but i guess there must be ways that you have to let sensors know that something's there or you know things like that that's the only kind of application i can i was just thinking about have you guys seen man versus b oh mr bean's new show yeah on netflix so they have a coded um alarm that keeps going on and it's voice activated to the woman that owns that property and
she's like a very posh person and so he mimics her voice to turn the alarm off so it's like the same kind of principle that's the good one well done so we can use it to break into people's houses yeah i'm just gonna say nefarious purposes is the only thing i could come up with instead of face recognition you can have voice recognition i guess yeah for certain things that's a really good one actually i've got to say i think there are a few birds around here that
are really good at mimicking human-made sounds like car alarms and mobile phones there is i think it's probably a starling but i think someone's been watching too much star wars because it sounds exactly like r2d2 it does it every single day and it always makes me laugh amazing yeah starlings are notoriously really noisy and good numbers yeah what about parrots because they're mimicking of humans is that a hunting thing i think it's just an intelligence thing more
than anything it's just being able to like copy but also they sort of know like you can teach a parrot this is a triangle this is okay rectangle so they would learn as well like this is a thing rather than just mirroring like a noise that they hear that they have their like vocal capabilities to be like i can make a noise like a caroline let's see what that does so like not like dogs apparently they don't understand what you're saying but how you're saying it
is that correct so parrots are kind of more advanced in that they also understand what you're saying yeah now you tell a dog to sit you could tell a dog do anything the way that you say the tone is more necessarily important than that yeah and the thing like we used to do it with my dog all the time like he was called blue but we called him like biscuit or like silly one or whatever like is it all like come here little bubble it's that sort of thing that you're doing rather than the the actual
name very cool should we move on should we go from the watery one yeah so i see i see the word sharks on my screen who was it that found this one that was me this one was incredibly fascinating to me especially since i'm a huge shark lover and i did not know this was a thing and so i thought oh this must be a really recent study it's from
2015. so i was a little annoyed i didn't know it but essentially white sharks use the positioning of the sun to hunt this was done by charlie houveneers at flinders university in australia and he basically conducted this study where they found that in the morning white sharks were more likely to come from the east to attack their prey and then in the evening more likely to come from the west so they were kind of hidden in the shadow and the sun's glare illuminated
their prey better but also they think the glare on the water stopped the prey from seeing the shark approaching before it was too late so they did a study of like 44 white sharks and they observed a thousand attacks over the course of a period of time um and they found that you know they would they would use the positioning of the sun to determine what angle they came from to attack their prey i wonder if they're like doing this consciously yes on overcast days they
didn't seem to have any set direction they came from but when the sun was shining it was very much clear that they would come from one way so obviously we don't know if it's like this is an instinct thing or an adaptability thing but yeah no i think they do really know that the sun's this way so i'll come with it this way oh that is psychologically sinister isn't it i just have a jaws themed playing in my head now like they've thought about it that's what blows my mind with all of these
creatures like yeah there's the intelligence behind the technique to be like i need to eat i have to feed i'm not just going willy-nilly i'm thinking what's my best chance of success here it's so cool what's my strategy essentially which is incredible yeah it's something you don't tend to think about in um most animals that they've actually taken the time to think what would be the best thing to do here they can't just go for it that's not going to work what else can i do
because they can't afford it right i mean we have that luxury they don't we can go to tesco's exactly a shark could go to tesco if it really wanted to i really really wanted to just a load of elephant seals like in the fish aisle could be bothered to die today guys now that's the movie i want to see maybe that's where anika's foxes are getting the chickens and the eggs from honestly i think they are the volume that they go through is just ridiculous that's funny yeah i was reading um i
think it's a slightly older study about a shark that had migrated i think it was south africa to australia and back in about three months they think she was navigating using the sun she was quite close to the surface of the water and she went in a dead straight line so she must have also known roughly what time of day it was as well because the sun would be moving around as she was traveling i think that's so impressive do you think we could really confuse the
sharks if we took like these australian ones and move them to the uk and split them across the hemispheres and then they'd be like wait hang on what time is it what am i doing which way should i be going where's the sun coming from oh there's no sun at all it's raining a lot up here are we in manchester it's right here we can't hunt oh it's partly cloudy i do wonder if they do it more if you had the same shark species if you studied it in you know like florida versus australia do they do it more
because it's more sunny in australia versus like does the climate affect it much or is it just a shark thing that they know that if it is sunny we do have sharks in the uk don't we not necessarily great whites but there are others yeah apparently whoa i was reading about this just before the show so i think ellie and catcher can tell us more we get quite a few there's like basking sharks that come up sometimes which are awesome are they the vegetarian ones yeah they're vegetarian ones
they don't well they don't eat um like in the same way they're a great white dude i'm sure they're smaller like oh they're smaller like little dog sharks and that sort of thing around the coast as well yeah i think if you want to qualify a shark species but not in the sense where we think about you know the whites and the bulls and the tiger sharks but we do have shark species of some kind i guess i'm not likely to see them swimming around the coastline near me yeah you might see a
basking child if you're very lucky how do they bask do they just sort of come near the surface or is it like seals basking on rocks i don't actually know where they call bastion charm i've never thought about it but i think they just i think because they're so they're very big and quite wide so maybe it looks like they're basking but i i don't know i just know that they have an enormous amount of mouths don't they yeah i'll try and keep an eye out so i've gone out
to the hubba quite a lot and i've very occasionally seen a dolphin wow coming out the water doing the dolphiny thing and i've seen paul poison the harbor once i think it was a i assume it was a mother and a small child but i mean this is like three sightings of sea creatures in over ten years i'm gonna have to spend more time on the harbour foreign and sea shark i think but seals i've seen oh yeah there's loads of seals around the uk not elephant seals but we
have two species common and grey oh if i get that wrong i mean cross but i think that's what we have yeah they're they're awesome i've seen them i think in wales and scotland yeah there's loads of whales like round um tenbi and all those islands stoma island you can see dolphins from school marathon i saw them near m it's closed now but it was a nuclear power station wilfur so that's the link between engineering and they're around formby as well which is not that far from you you can see seals
in for me yeah we're the sharks at will for attracted by like warm water that was being exhausted into the sea or they just did happen to be there i guess yeah i guess so it must have been that there's warm water nearby but i just yeah we saw them um yeah the reason i asked that was because i can't remember where it was but it was a jellyfish blocking a water intake or outtake i assume it was i would take it was meant to be warm water from a power station somewhere else so it was a huge problem
oh wow the jellyfish really liked it but it wasn't causing them any harm they really wanted to be there because it was a favorable environment for them that's crazy jellyfish in your power station water can they give you electric shocks jellyfish are there electric jellyfish as well or have i just seen this in a movie and just made it in my mind that it's real i don't think so okay i mean they're like stingy but i wouldn't think they're not electric like an electric
maybe i'm confusing electric eels with yeah that's where i went as well so maybe i think which is in the name i wouldn't want to be either to be honest jellyfish freaked me out as animals very creepy i don't like it when they're swimming around me i've seen them washing up on the beach quite a lot i don't mind it then when they're not moving it's one of those things where i like want there to be a fence in the way or like a window like i want to observe them but i don't want them to be within
touching distance of them i've always assumed that they're stinger is it an electric current or is it more a chemical sting i'm gonna go chemicals i'm gonna go toxins that are poisonous to humans no because you can you can neutralize it right don't we on it that's not gonna help everyone says that's what you're meant to do oh that's a rumor that's fake news that's friends fault that is from that episode we went to the beach that's where i learned it from it's not a thing don't do that but
if you're in a foreign country potentially go to the lifeguard station because they often have anecdotes and stuff of like common jellyfish they're in the area oh wow so if you get done go there first before you go to a med center so the chemistry depends on the jellyfish different species have different chemistries of stinger ah i'm learning so much from this and we're getting very distracted i guess it's kind of a hunting strategy though yeah everybody hunt because they don't have a
brain so they're just wafting around in the current and then if they you know hit something be it person or prey they will eat it but they're not really hunting because they just are there i think i'd like to be reborn as a jellyfish i've never heard anyone say this like yeah they don't have a brain and they just float around that's my ideal life no stress no worries it's existing in the water column and no one wants to come near me because i have a stinger or whatever it is that i have
i mean the turtles will try and eat you but you could probably probably survive long enough it's what it is i can't really think of where to go from there into herons let's just talk about herons there's another one from you catcher about how herons attract their prey yeah so this is another interesting one because i mean the shark one that's the first instance of like a non-human animal using the positioning of the sun to help them hunt but obviously this doesn't
really count as that but dark herons will like cover with their wings an area of water and essentially the shade attracts the fish which brings them closer to them and then they grab them and i'm not sure why the shade attracts fish but we've seen i've seen it quite a bit you see the videos of it i think herons they look like villains yeah like movie villains also they're the ones that have learned how to bait fish as well so they're like you know how people feed fish bread they'll get the bread
and they'll use it themselves to like lure the fish closer you can see videos of it on youtube and stuff they're like if i feed the fish the fish will come and then i can eat the fish that's a secondary train of thought right yeah that's so fascinating it's like if i get this bread i will use said bread in the water to attract a fish because the fish will come for the bread and then i will eat the fish that's insane levels of thinking right that's truly the heron
must have observed fish eating the bread beforehand and people giving the bread to the fish this whole chain of events going on it's like learnt the like consequence of this you know the bread being in the water and then it's like well if a human can feed the fish bread then i can feed the fish bread and then eat the fish or even sometimes they use smaller fish so you get to catch a small fish first and then the big fish come and then you can eat a big fish that's
wild that's some planning there's planning involved in that yeah they're scheming aren't they that they put more effort and planning into their dinner than i do yeah it sounds like a movie heist it does it's ocean's 11.
ocean's 11. heron edition i'd watch that just the uh seals at the end driving the getaway submarine all right someone get their name on this right now before someone steals it it's called uh i have possibly a really stupid question am i right in thinking that heron's nest in trees yes good in a heron ah which is a pleasing word that makes sense i just assumed because they were quite large that they'd live in nests probably near water kind of like ducks you know they nest on the ground
pretty much but no i saw them landing in trees and thought hang on the top of that tree does not look strong enough to support what looks like quite a large bird yeah and also they nest like uh groups of heron's nests together i think there's a thing egrets definitely do it so like multiple large birds in one tree which is quite incredible really i just got images of like a really windy day and all these big birds going all different directions yeah and also the babies are really ugly
as well like they just they did not look cute are they the ultimate super villains in that case i don't know like sometimes you think you look at stuff and you're like it's ugly but it's still cool but i mean hair and babies are just scruffy until they get their feathers through oh they are cool and very coming i mean even the just like a standard heron hunting technique like where you just stand really still and wait for something to forget you're there it's
like crocodiles in the um in africa like we'll just lie really still under the water and wait and the water will be so still like no ripples whatsoever and then the poor gazelle or zebra comes for a drink and oh plastic ambush yeah get it when you least expect it there's so many great like david attenborough moments of crocodiles getting animals from under the water so what happens if a crocodile and a heron both fishing in the same pond and both have the same
idea who eat two if they're both being really still are they both sitting there going you move first no you move first our other crocodile would eat their hair instead can eat them unlikely but also i feel like crocodiles would just go for it wouldn't they just grab on and hope i i think the heron would just sneak in i think it'd be just the crocodile wouldn't even notice it would be just sat there in the corner and then grabbed the fish and leg it and the herring
gradually fold its wings out into this uh umbrella type shape over the crocodile's face because i always be cloudy today am i in manchester the letters change a shark appears just like falling oh we brought a full circle well done i love what that has this is like one of those scenes is it one of the lion king films where they're all coming down to the water hall and because there isn't a lot of water they're all kind of like allowing each other to drink like what that probably
wouldn't happen in real life that's just a cartoon i mean you do get multiple species at a water hole but it's probably a bit more boisterous yeah some species will go for it like other species of not so keen but it's not yeah it's not the idyllic disney imaginings unfortunately now but are there any engineering applications of this heron's shading technique that you can think of anika you know those things you can get in front of your windows like if you're a
green grocer but people have them in there yeah that's what the word i was thinking it just reminds me of an awning so like if you you need it like to protect your produce if you're you know in a market or something like that i feel a retractable awning could be useful um and it could be good for like temperature temperature control i think that's true having some something to introduce shade especially in warmer climates could be really useful but that's adjustable yeah see i guess i'm
thinking of like new engineering advances from these um things we observe from the natural world but it's more like stuff we've probably been doing quite a while that the animals just also happen to do but we're only observing it for the first time in the last few years really also the thing is as well you have to not be observed yourself like if you want to watch these animals do these things you have to be so minimally invasive that the animal behaves normally so that's potentially why we
didn't know about the seals for so long because we didn't have the technology to put a camera on their cheeks and like the ocelots weren't successful when they were observed but they might have been successful many previous times or since yeah so like as the researcher you can't go in and then disturb the animal doing its thing in the first place because then obviously you won't you won't learn what they're up to and my take away from this is there are so many things that we don't know about the
world that we're in and there are all of these things these animals are doing and we don't get to know about it because as you said you're disrupting what the animal would normally do it's a bit um schrodinger's cat-like you have to observe it and then you affect the outcome yeah and there's probably so much more we could learn from them we talked about some of this in the material science episode that was things that were inspired by nature so there's probably an awful lot more out there
that we can learn from animals but also in the same way the animals have learnt from us as well so like the hair and using the bread or using you know berries that fell on the water is a similar thing but like anika's foxes have learned that people will feed them or have learned that if they climb round the bins at the back of tesco they can get a free meal you know you follow the good smells and see what happens or you know your neighbor once had ten chickens
and now only has one because they've learned that's where the chickens are and they're quite tasty so everything is connected i guess i feel like i've just unintentionally summed up the episode so i guess that's a good place to leave it yeah so if you've enjoyed this episode you can find us on twitter to carry on the conversation please let us know if you think of any applications or any other interesting animal hunting techniques we've not talked about and there are other ways to get in contact
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