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hello and welcome to technically speaking where scientists and Engineers come together to chat about a common interest share knowledge and satisfy some curiosity I'm Laura and I'm joined by Ellie and Jasmin to talk about wildlife, how human activity affects it and whether we should be helping it now. Ellie you're a zoologist and you've worked on some wildlife filming in the past so do you have a fun fact about wildlife habitats to share with us?
I'm sure I could think of quite a few I think because you mentioned my filming past it'd be quite nice to mention one of those so I worked on a show called secret life of the zoo and they had lots of habitats obviously for lots of their animals and the one I like the most was the elephant pool at Chester Zoo because it is unsurprisingly a baby elephant deep if not even deeper I never tested it myself but I saw several times the baby elephants playing in there and
being fully submerged which I didn't didn't realize was possible that doesn't necessarily mean it's a baby elephant deep but I can't imagine them like crouching down so I imagine the water is just that deep or deeper uh and it was absolutely adorable and a highlight of the experience can elephants swim yes or are they too oh okay not too unwieldy fair enough cuz I just have this image of these baby elephants just kind of swimming around when they're sort of um
snorkeling with their trunks yeah they did that that was so cute I mean baby elephants there's a few things cuter to be honest and them playing together in the water squatting each other being snorkel just adorableness all around so I'm guessing think it was deliberate to make it that deep like chess do you actually thought about how these animals interact in the wild and what do they need I would have thought so because it's like they care so deeply about their animals and you obviously have to
Plum it in and like takes many millions of pounds to build that sort of thing so I'm sure there would have been a consultation at some point potentially even with other zoos though I don't know for sure about how deep the elephant pool needed to be no I am wondering now why do baby elephants necessarily need to do that but than they enjoy it it makes them happy I think it's happiness yeah I mean I guess they don't need an elephant pool but if you got the capacity to put an elephant pool in why
wouldn't you it makes the visitors happy too so then it's winwin all round exactly if it's as entertaining as you say then everyone wins yeah and it's kind of reminds me talking about zoos there was something in the news recently in the UK about an escaped capybara called cinnamon that I think she escaped from a zoo she did I love her there's been so many zoo animals in the news recently and cinnamon is she's up there top tier but they have caught her she's
fine she's back with her family yeah and got to wonder why she did that like it was just instinct to go for a Wonder or was she really unhappy or was she trying to find a mate or something but I guess we might get into that when we get on to talking about what zoos and artificial habitats are about and whether they're Jasmin you're not a zoologist so what's your interest in this so I have a really big interest in giant pandas and giant pandas are one of the species where
there is a lot of human interference especially around how to conserve and increase the population in the wild I consume so much Panda content in my social media when you started saying the word consume I did not expect it to go that way when you finish the sentence but I I don't necessarily know a lot about pandas uh so could you give us a fact about pandas and their habitats to start us off they're on the more medium small size of bears and they're pretty heavy fully grown adults
easily weigh over 100 kilos they're different to other bears in that they are predominant vegetarian specifically they eat bamboo so bamboo makes a really big chunk of their diet so they spend a lot of time eating because bamboo is really not nutritious at all I have heard this and it does make me wonder if they really like eating bamboo but it's not healthy then why do they keep doing it and should we really be helping them it is healthy for them for a panda bear to
have good good health and digestion they need to eat bamboo there's really different types of bamboo like leaves and stalks so like it is good for them CU they've developed the enzymes and their good needs to eat bamboo oh okay it's literally all they eat right it's not like some species are like oh yeah they mostly eat salmon yeah it's over 90% of their diet they will eat other stuff so in the wild they will scar so they will eat any animals that they've just like found dead but in captivity
they will eat stuff like fruits and vegetables as well as a very specific type of cake that is made for pandas that's basically steamed flour eggs and honey a little Panda cakes that sounds tasty I mean if you're eating bamboo all day anything's got to be better hasn't it surely they're sick of it by now yeah but they really enjoy eating it so you they were clusters endangered but are they not so much now is that right yeah they're not classified as endangered now
so in 2016 they were officially classed as vulnerable according to the um icn's red list and in 2021 the Chinese authorities also then downgraded the classification to vulnerable from uh endangered and where's that because of human intervention yeah it was basically because of human intervention so ter of like population numbers in the 1980s so were estimated to be around 1,000 pandas in the wild but today I say today in like the latest count which I think was in 2016 they're up to
1,864 so nearly a 100% increase in population so what was involved in making them just vulnerable it was a mixture of um not destroying the habitat but also there were some programs in China to basically breed pandas and then release them into the well to also help boost population numbers but that's only limited cuz you can only release so many pandas into the wild were they ever hunted I never remember this about pandas were people hunting them for food pandas are not Hunters so pandas are one
of the few animals who were never used in Chinese medicine cuz Chinese medicine uses lots of different animals different insects right and actually interesting fact is cuz the panda bear is the National Treasure or one of the National Treasures of China so if you are caught poaching or killing a panda it Bears a really heavy sentence in 2015 there were three men I think who were convicted of killing a panda and they I believe they were given a 10-year prison sentence
depending on the circumstances um you could actually be given a license sentence in prison or even a death penalty for killing a panda W I mean I don't think anyone could bring themselves to kill a panda I mean unless I was being viciously attacked and it was self defense cuz they got big tea are they at all aggressive like if you encountered them in their habitat doing what they do and they didn't like you would they have a goatey panda bears are naturally very Territorial and they're
solitary they also don't recognize humans so this is a big difference between pandas in the Wild versus pandas in captivity is pandas in captivity are like used to humans because they have daily interactions with their care Akers or Nannies as we call them in China but while pandas they do not know humans and so if they see a human and you try to approach the panda bear the panda bear will try to like scare you away by charging at you they are heavy and they
have a really sharp sharp claws they're really strong cuz they eat bamboo so a panda bear could easily M human if it wanted to okay see I have an image in my head of a panda going oh what the hell's that oh I don't like that go away also easily just run away from you yeah I was imagining male hand is like more territorial but I still would choose to believe that they wouldn't attack me and I could just watch them quietly I think if they realize that you're not going to
do anything to them they're just like okay this thing that looks weird and just walk away you're calling me weird jine am I weird to a panda it sounds like pandas don't appreciate equality and diversity really you don't look like me no they also don't see very many things on their day-to-day life because they're so solitary oh okay and territorial this is more sad than I expected for the pandas like I'm glad they're not endangered anymore but they're living their sad solitary lives
just eating one food source I'm not coming back as a panda it's not happening Pand in captivity maybe because they're really pumped that's true some get massages they get massages is that safe and why yeah they going to this Panda bar are they really stressed cuz the panda likes it so this is mostly for female pandas who have had Cubs so they get really stressed when they're trying to raise their kids to help the mother Panda cope with with raising her kids they'll give her massages that's
unexpected they get treated better than humans most women it's like yeah child birth is perfectly normal natural thing even though it's one of the most risky things a person can do yeah and uh pandas when they've given birth like they're given like 24hour like they have multiple nannies essentially so like the if the panda mother will let the humans take the baby the humans will actually look after the baby while the mom naps and eats I can't believe there's Panda
child care that's unbelievable living in some sort of facility Zoo maybe not be so bad then if you've got an artificial habitat you've got around the clock caras maybe it's a good thing I mean there are artificial habitats like all across the world that we've created to help like different wildli well aren't there because there's artificial wreaths uh to help like marine species recover from all the horrible things we've done to their habitat in the name of fishing
and trolling and digging up the bottom of the ocean I like the sound of this I've been to a few and although I get that they're very good at educating the public about nature and conservation I just don't really like wandering around seeing all these animals in captivity even though they may be better there so what about this artificial re then which I've also not seen cuz I'm not a diver no I'm not a diver I'd like to be a diver but it scares me a little bit yeah
they've done loads of studies on artificial reefs and all sorts of things there was one where they helped Marine populations recover and they did a survey pre reef and there were about 44 species and then post Reef increasing as much as 193 species after one-ear deployment all living in that area so they really provided them with somewhere to live and make their little fishy homes I guess ah so they increased the um at least the diversity I guess maybe you wouldn't necessarily know if it's
total population in gree if it's just more species yeah presumbly it would be just because if you've only got 44 species even if you've got loads of those species to have even more species surely it's going to increase total population and then after 2 years it was 237 species so a big wi around I feel for artificial reefs so how did they go about constructing it these um it was researchers that were doing it it was researchers and they constructed 500 cylindrical shaped artificial reefs and
then they put them in about 1 and A2 km Square in Vietnamese Coastal area and that was to provide an alternative Habitat to recover natural resources that had been lost due to in fishing that sounds like some science I would like to do rather than being in a lab doing stuff with glasswar and Petri and whatever else getting out into the wild and learning to dive presumably is part of your job to go scuba diving and doing Marine surveys does sound like quite good fun yeah and you mentioned the
decline was because of fishing so I presume one reason for doing it was to improve the catch from Fisher folk I guess I don't want to say fishermen Fishers I think is what we're going for for just gender neutral so then they'd have more income coming in and again everyone wins as long as you don't start over fishing I suppose yeah I think the problem was that people realized you could make money out of fish and then obviously classic went overboard with over commercialization and then just
destroyed the habitat and then obviously you don't have any fish anymore so that is clearly a bad idea um but yes I suppose inevitably if you boost population numbers and you boost where they're living then I guess you might be able to boost local economies from then having more catch again or you could do the nice thing which is like Eco tourism and take people's COA diving which I think might be better but I appreciate that you have to make a living somehow
yeah I wonder about that though tourism also has its down sides doesn't it like it puts too much pressure on local resources and tourists can just be scruffy to be honest and leave litter everywhere yeah well I mentioned before about the uh how cinnamon was like part of those internet animals and it's like you guys have heard of moodang yeah the baby hippo the tourists are going to see her in Thailand Thailand and yeah throwing things at her to make her move so yeah tus are bad yeah why are they
going all that way to see one particular hippo why that hippo and not other is a baby pygmy hippo and she is an icon an internet sensation there's a makeup tutorial based on mudang so you can her peachy skin tones she's also a meme just for her facial expressions she's like constantly screaming and biting her Z yeah so people just decided to make her famous to essentially make more money it wasn't the intention it was just her one of one of her Keepers just decided to
like post about her on social media and then because she's cute she became really famous cuz it's similar with some panda bears because there are some that are like viral celebrities I think social media's got a lot to answer for in this because they would never it does like there were never celebrity animals that weren't like in shows when I was a kid I don't remember them just being famous for being themselves some zoos like do have like a celebrity animal I
think in the Japanese Zoo there was like a Fame celebrity gorilla because he liked to play with his children basically animals that do funny stuff become celebrities so I feel like in that context of zoo animals being made into celebrities we're kind of saying that those artificial environments aren't necessarily very beneficial for them if people are throwing things at them to make them do something I mean that is bad I mean like I was saying before when I worked on secret life
there are a lot of artificial habitats that are very good and the keepers put a lot of time and energy into making them as good as they can be for the species that live there and it is a like commonly held fact that species in captivity live longer than species in the wild and that might be because they're not being eaten by other animals but it's also because they get vetenary care and dentists and don't have to fend for themselves every day there's actually a study that I was looking at
80% of all the mammal species they studied including carnivores live longer in captivity which was especially true for smaller species with shorter lifespans and higher mortality rates in the wild so it might not be a perfect solution but it does help for sure and it helps conservation massively I think the same also applies to um house pets a house cat who doesn't leave the house will live longer than a cat that's allowed to go outside just because there's more dangers well I suppose you
take out the risks right if you go outside you could be killed by a dog or you could be hit by a car or get into a fight with something else that has to be the ultimate artificial habitat because a cat left in the wild or it wouldn't look like a house cat anyway cuz I guess they've been adapted from people taking them into to use them to do things that sounds wrong use them to cat mind exactly that was the original Point wasn't it that there was a a benefit to the two species
living and working together and they've gradually became pets same like dogs used to be used for hunting and various other activities that were co- beneficial and now my dog just kind of lies on a chair having a nap I love the idea that Laura's house is the ultimate artificial habitat it doesn't have to be a rugged wild environment because also for a dog obviously they've been through domestication right they're not expecting to be living in Alaska like the wolves or anything like that so it
is slightly different the way most pets have been bred they wouldn't really be able to survive in the wild anyway the ones that got like lots of fur that would get really matted there wouldn't be a lot of benefit to having that in the wild I don't think yeah exactly we've definitely bred them to suit our lives but there are artificial habitats within like people's Homes and Gardens uh like bug hotels bird boxes in their Gardens like that counts as an artificial habitat for sure yeah so you
were talking about artificial root and we kind of then went back onto talking about zoos I don't think we've really discussed in a lot of detail the ideas behind what counts as an artificial habitat you could say that me just chucking a lot of sticks on the floor in my garden with an artificial habitat cuz they wouldn't be there otherwise but is that particularly beneficial depends if anything moves in there is a suggestion that you should make log piles in your
garden for like mice and wood lice and insects so yeah I guess in a way that is an artificial habitat that could benefit something uh but if you're just literally putting two Twigs together then probably not like a pigeon making a nest I mean maybe if the pigeon then lays an egg there maybe you have benefited somewh have I but I feel like as a scientist that cares about conservation you would want to figure out the best way of Designing a habitat for the particular species of
interest and that will vary from animal to animal and I was reading a study from a few years ago about Garden birds and how it's possible that all the bird feeders that people have in their Gardens might have a detrimental effect because certain species are using the more than others which has a knock on effect for The Wider species I think they specific like blue tits and they were going out and potentially taking other habitat from birds that aren't as bossy as they are I find this odd
because they're definitely bottom of the chain in my garden yeah they'll hang around waiting for a gap on the feeder because there are gold finches and sparrows that are just mean yeah I was going to say the robin rules the roost in my garden he bullies all the other yeah Robins are super territorial I've never seen that with any of our Robins they all seem to get along that's very unusual all right I've got the weird [Laughter] one yeah it's a funny one Garden Birds I
think it's almost I was going to say domestication but it's too far gone isn't it because people feed birds because they think it's nice and it does help them uh but then there's the thing about overreliance and then are you altering the ecosystem too much and all that stuff but birds are in Decline like we've had terrible losses of birds so I think maybe we should be doing all we can to keep them happy well this is the reason that I started doing it and I kind of feed them fairly sporadically
they don't get used to relying on this one food source because if we go on holiday for 2 weeks then some might die and that's not necessarily a bad thing because something will eat them they're part of a food chain but I still don't like the thought of it no I don't like the thought of it either I work near kenson Gardens and in there a lot of people feed the birds especially the parakeets um but because a lot of the like nuts and other stuff that people try to feed the birds ends up on the
floor it attracts a lot of rats so that's why there's always signs around the park saying don't feed the birds oh and I guess there aren't necessarily a lot of predators for rats in an urban area there Urban foxes but you had rats didn't you Laura we've had wild rats coming into the garden I also have pet rats they're very different what artificial habitat did you create for them for the pets yeah they're in a cage that has the right bar spacing and is big enough for them or whatever else and
uh in the evening we put up this massive play pen and there are loads of boxes and things for them to explore in the pens they can spend hours running around if they want uh the girls that we had I had them from about four weeks old I think they ran around like crazy the boys that I have now that I have had since they were eight months old they're rescue rats they don't really do much you got all this like jungle gym equipment for the rats and they don't care yeah squirrels definitely don't
like socializing they're always fighting over food or trying to run away from someone else if they think another squirrel is trying to take their food uh there was a news article about a squirrel on a train recently was gray squirrel so I'm not particularly excited by it cuz they're invasive to the UK but I did wonder why was it on that train where was it going yeah was it trying to travel somewhere else to find some food or was it just looking for a warm place
it couldn't find somewhere I reckon it didn't have a concept of the fact that the train would then transport it from one place to another I reckon it was an accidentally wandered on situation you also sometimes get pigeons wandering onto trains but I can see a pigeon being used to being around people and kind of being stupid enough to just accidentally end up there but a squirrel seems like it has more intent to me from the ones I've seen in the past you it's planning
a nice day trip I mean some of them used to people feeding them aren't they cuz I used to do this in the park in grenwich down London but I can't see them being that used to being around people so I maybe it was looking for somewhere warm for the night for some reason the ones in kindergarten are definitely used to humans like if they see a human that's giving out food they all come up to you and take the food from your hands yeah I think some are very habituated I guess
the question is should say especially gray squirrels that aren't meant to be in the UK and create problems for the native red squirrels I mean realistically if we were being true conservationists we'd shoot all the gray squirrels some people do do that as well that is very dark it is dark I mean they shouldn't be here and they have almost wiped out the populations of red squirrels in the UK which is now like maybe three or four populations still going in the UK but it does seem very
cruel that we would have to wipe them out to get the Reds back and there are different ways of doing it aren't they like um there's a contraception drug I guess that they put on food I've heard about this being developed so that the gray squirrels won't be able to procreate but it shouldn't affect the Reds I've not heard that but I like that as an idea to just sort of slowly Weedle out the population you'd have to get so many squirrels to take it surely that's
not scale appable well if everyone's feeding them oh maybe we'll start with Jasmine's Kensington population yeah start with those I saw like at least 12 when I went for a walk earlier today I do see squirrels probably every day oh I don't see as many around here I live in a rural area we definitely have Reds though that's better there you go I wonder what the difference is it can't just be Urban environments well probably availability of resources other species I guess London is a very easy
place to get food well this is the kind of the theme of the episode isn't it humans have had such a big effect on the natural world by getting rid of lots of habitat through uh building houses and farming activities because um I think there's a statistic when we were talking about bird population declines that Farmland birds have decreased in population numbers by about 60% since 1970 which I think is quite scary and that's because of changes in farming practices yeah that is scary well you
think how much farming would have evolved in that time as well like it's all about how much money you can make how much land you need people are taking out hedro like that's a big problem so they can obviously make bigger land areas for crops and stuff if you've got a huge tractor you don't necessarily need a hedro in the middle and then you've destroyed an entire habitat in one F swoop which is awful but there are subsidies and things like that like the government does provide like uh what
they call it like nature friendly farming there's like an official term for it uh where you leave like a strip all along the edge of your field or you leave the HED R in and something like that um but I think that also points out how Reliant we are on the natural world as well if our food comes from the environment around us whether it's intensively farmed or not you still have to have that interaction with it so you can't just do whatever you want and expect things to be okay you can't also
blame Farmers either because they're just trying to make a living like it's not their fault that you know they need to grow this land like we're all eating it we're eating the food that they make we still need to feed everyone so it is a very different delicate balance of like well we want the birds and we want the animals to have a home but also we still need to grow crops and we need to make a living and the the garden bird study that I was reading that talked
about specific I think it was Willow tits and Mar tits whose populations could be affected by the slightly mean blue tits maybe there'll just be more specific feeders for those types of birds they can also survive as well I guess you'd have to look in detail at the different needs that they have like how their beaks are adapted to pick different foods or how they make use of different habitats for nesting yeah it's all interrelated isn't it like the ecology if we've destroyed the habitat
and then they've got no let's say they eat insects or whatever a idea then you can see see how then not thriving but if we can replace some of that with these artificial things even if it's just a bird feeder in your garden then at least you're contributing in some way like we know the populations are going down at least we're doing something about it and I also wonder I used the evolution takes quite a long time right so the I'm going to keep mentioning these Marsh tits I
don't know a lot about them but they obviously exist for a reason they obviously they're related to Blue tits but they've differentiated in some way they specialize in something the blue tip doesn't how long did it take for that adaptation to become embedded and for them to become a new species and how long would it take them to then adapt to what humans are doing I wouldn't know to be honest I would say thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years if not
potentially even longer than that uh to be a new species entirely but having said that you can have small subpopulations that become genetically distinct quicker because of not having so much inflow and outflow of genes and then generationally blue itps what they live like Max 10 years probably something like that that's my best guess so then you would see changes even albeit very slowly in the population but you still need years and years and years to make it work right blue tips tend to
live for around 3 years however the the longevity record is 10 years and three months according to BBC Wildlife magazine to ear was spot on with Max 10 years yeah so it sounds like you're saying that human behavior um or human activity is making change much more rapidly than Evolution could go up so there's pretty much a need to either think very carefully about any future activity or as we talked about with having artificial habitats to work to undo whatever changes we've made well
it's like when you go back to the artificial reefs and fishing a lot of people now have realized how damaging that is and there are laws in place there are Marine protected areas where you can't fish people are coming around to the fact that actually completely destroying the oceans is quite a bad idea but again in terms of changes slow is also slow in a human world right we might know these things but getting that into policy getting that into governments getting people to care is
very very difficult especially when it might impact profits which seem to be the one thing that people do care about I feel like there needs to be something that changes that so you hear that a lot and I don't necess know how true it is but I feel like there should be something where profit is intrinsically linked to making the world a better place that would be nice wouldn't it if we could uh push that agenda instead of let's use up all the Earth's resources
and destroy all the habitats but I mean it is a balance and I keep saying this but the world is not the same as it was however many hundreds of years ago we do have many more people we do have much more technology we do need infrastructure and then on top of that yes we need to keep the species alive like even as a conservationist I can appreciate that most people's priority is themselves and the human race versus is all of these species that are going extinct but we should do more and we can
do more and things like Wildlife friendly farming should be more of a priority we don't have to use these massive Industrial Systems to get the food that we need no see I would quite like to imagine I like well I do imagine the future where walking down the street It's Not Unusual to see a red squirrel or a particular type of bird it's just common you don't stand there going oh my God look at that that bird is amazing I've never seen one of those before it's
just common that we live with Wildlife maybe not pandas I guess unless they do get used to meeting us no they're very solitary yeah but you'd like to think if you went for a remote hike in the Chinese Countryside you could come across a panda like if you went hiking in America you could come across a black bear yeah I think if I saw a panda I'd probably just like look at it and then walk away I would die trying to cuddle it it's smothered death by a panda what a way to go I'm joking with I would
leave it well alone respect the panda absolutely think that's probably quite a good place to leave it on that um positive future outlook so I feel like I summed this up briefly about five or 10 minutes ago we basically saying that humans have done terrible things to the Earth we've said this before and we we kind of need to maintain a balance with nature because we rely on it so much and it's a nice thing to be involved with so if there are ways to make nature part of
our normal day-to-day life than we should but it also sounds like more research is needed to understand exactly what that looks like and we could end up with highly specialized products you can buy for any species you might want to encourage into your local environment thank you very much for listening we'll see you in a few weeks for another episode and if you like this please check out our back catalog and we would very much appreciate it if youd leave us a bit of a tip in our tip jar the link
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