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hello and welcome to technically speaking where scientists and engineers come together to chat about the common interest shared knowledge and satisfy some curiosity I'm Antonia and I'm joined by Ellie and Laura to talk about things that come from animals, why some of them are so expensive and what are we doing with them. So, Ellie this is something you've reported on in your job as a science communicator, what was it
that you were talking about? Well it's quite interesting really so ages ago my colleague Rachel wrote an article about uh scorpion venom and whether it was the most expensive uh animal produced product in the world and I think it was last episode or episode before we got the Sidetrack as we usually do talking about horseshoe crab blood and how uh that's really expensive so I thought it deserved its own episode so we can delve deeper into quite what is going on with
all these things yes I definitely remember the blue crab blood that we just had to discuss more yeah we couldn't let that one slide so Laura what Peaks your interest about these things well again it was that episode where Ellie mentioned the most expensive Animal product for research purposes I think and I said it's not an area that I work in but I am really intrigued so there's loads more science that I know very little about and I would like to know more and know what the
environmental impact is if we're using what was essentially you could say as a natural resource but something that was probably here before we were that's a good point yes is it there for us to take so should we start with what could be the most expensive thing from an animal the hrew crab blood so as you said before it's icy blue it's not red we were all uh led to believe uh necessarily and it's icy blue because it's got uh these very fancy things in called Amboy and instead of white blood
cells to fight infection they have the ambio sites they are really useful to phological companies and in the sort of production of vaccines because they're really good ad dictating bacterial toxins and then they trigger when they find something that shouldn't be there they like make these clots around the bacteria and so when you take it out of a horseshoe crab you can then use it int your vaccine and if there's anything that's in the vaccine that shouldn't be
in there these clots will form and then I think that's how that they go in then and can extract them and make it super super sterile and super clean I guess for use in humans it's a pretty wild process and if you Google it there's absolutely mad pictures online of like rows and rows of horseshoe crabs like being propped up with like little straws coming out of them essentially and filing all this icy blue liquid into vials yeah it's absolutely nuts and I think there was a few stats banded
around about how much it actually costs but I think it's worth something like $155,000 a liter US Dollars wow so you can make quite a decent living just from collecting a few crabs and selling them to research pharmaceutical companies well I think you probably need quite a lot of infrastructure to make that happen I don't think you're going to be extracting the blood yourself I'd say I don't know what I don't understand is whether they're farming them themselves
or if they're going out into the world and scooping them out of Earth oceans I don't quite know where they're getting them from but it did say uh that apparently they only take 30% of their blood and then they put them back in the ocean oh I'd read up to 50% and they some of them they do it by stabbing them in the heart oh yeah it makes me think I would you survive that but then crabs are different to people I feel very few things are going to be survive being
stabbed in the heart I suppose we we have pain receptors that might tell us oh that's too much and it is said that do fish feel pain so would would the crabs feel the pain or they just a bit woozy CU they've only got 30 well they've only got 70% or 50% of their blood or is it enough to kill them in this article that I was reading it said that 10 to 30% of the crabs don't survive the like blood harvesting process um and then it's also been suggested that the females that do
survive in get returned to the wild readed less because presumably they're less they're not feeling so hot uh and then that might hamper their recovery so yeah probably it's probably not great to be a crab that's had its blood taken out realistically but I think they don't they don't necessarily all die but going back to the thought about whether they're farmed or or how how do we retrieve them this NPR article Laura found about the process suggested Fisher uh Fisher people Fisher just Fishers I
think I call them Fisher folk Fisher FK Fisher folk makes them sound like like mermaids true people in the fishing industry there we go would pick them up and then take them to the companies that Harvest them I mean pharmaceutical supply companies I suppose and then sometimes they'd get them back sometimes they just get it sounded like it's one of those things there isn't a set of Regulation that these creatures fall neatly into they're not really captured by Fisheries regulation or general like
animals for research legislation that sort of thing so like when I was a researcher you have to use an ethic statement if you were applying for research and I always said well there are no ethics to consider because I'm not working on animals or people but presumably if you're actively researching something on the animals you need to do it in a responsible way but not so much if you're just harvesting a part of the animal than putting your back which is a very gray area because
obviously you are having some impact act on them because like Ellie said 10 to 30% don't survive afterwards don't think you could just say oh yeah it was fine we we sent them back to the ocean I find it really crazy that there isn't legislation that simply says all natural biological resources should be managed the populations are sustained because to me if that is a resource you want to keep using you want to make sure you can continue to use it so to me it seems
really obvious but this is in the United States isn't it so they seem less inclined to focus on environmental concerns sometimes I think yeah apparently there was concern that they were over harvesting them which is not a surprise when it comes to the fishing industry and pharmaceutical but I don't yeah I don't know it's still a weird one because surely there must be a standard of the like do they have to have a certain size do they have to grow to a certain age or weight or or volume and
also if you're releasing them back how do you know you're not picking up the one that you just put back in the ocean two weeks ago like has it regenerated enough blood uh to still be useful so I think it's it's quite an interesting one something else that I find incredibly silly about this whole thing um is that there's a synthetic version that was made I don't knowbe 10 years ago possibly thinking how research Works um so they it's it's a recombinant molecule
which essentially means they take DNA from the creature and then they use that in a bacterium say to then produce these amibo sites I assume um that was um accepted by by the European Union in 2017 as a suitable alternative to extracting blood but other places seem much less inclined to take it off I wonder how it like varies on expense because if you've got the infrastructure to allow you to harvest the blood from these crabs and you've got it all set up switching then to a completely different
method probably is not going to do your profit margins any good however if it's very expensive to do the whole let's capture the crabs and take their blood Maybe switching to synthetic in the longer term is a better idea yeah you would think lots of things are produced from recombinant DNA so it should be relatively straightforward and that NPR article that Antony mentioned did say that I think it was a company in the European Union said it actually turned out to be cost effective and led to
improve quality of the drug products they were making oh so if it's better then let's go for that and the poor crabs can be left alone yeah as opposed to people see natural resource as just simply there not making money and they could be making money off it well that's true how many people in the fishing industry would lose out because they couldn't Farm crabs to keep the pharmaceutical industry in BO um what's the word I'm looking for supplied there is also the aspect that maybe why Europe
was more interested is because these horseshoe crabs that were being collected or harvested were from the Atlantic uh Coast yeah yes they came from the United States they had further to go yes oh so maybe they were paying to ship them across or something so was more sort of vested interest in making their own Supply well that's already quite depressing Ellie um yeah I've started off on a strong one haven't I but to be fair if you've ever had a vaccine you could well have horseshoe
crabs to thank for your now immunity and your clean vaccine so really we owe the crabs I should say and maybe we should push harder for synthetic uh products instead of crab blood in the future and and also I imagine if it's a synthetic product we actually have more control over what the Ambia sites look like and what the rest of the content in in that product looks like versus just collecting a bunch of a natural product the crab blood and then having to refine
it to exactly what we want it to be yeah absolutely I would also wonder if some the labs that are making the um the drugs could all just synthesize the amyes themselves using the recent DNA because a lot of vaccines are made using more combinant DNA see where I'm going with this and they do a lot of purification of the the vaccines and whatever anyway to filter out any of like the unreacted product maybe depending on how the vaccine is made so if I were a drug manufacturer
that's what I'd be doing yeah I think I'm with you there I think that's probably it's probably a better long-term solution because potentially like all of these things are we just going to wipe out the crabs eventually and then we're going to be really stuffed uh if we've got no alternative yeah cuz there are migratory birds that rely on eating their eggs as they migrate up and down the US and possibly other places or the Americas so you're disrupting bird species what KnockOn
effect does that have if they're affecting populations across the globe because of how they migrate yeah I mean as we all know the ecosystem is very connected so you start messing with one part of it there's always knock on effect fact to something else and if we yeah Wipe Out the birds what are the birds you know contributing often a lot of bird droppings end up in the ocean which feeds other species it's all linked it's a big web so I say leave the crabs alone let's move on Technology's
got significantly further than when they started this so I'm sure we can uh process a synthetic altern is much better I had another thought and I just wondered do you know if crabs aren't like the bottom of the the food chain they eat other um aquatic Li are they also accumulating heavy metals like what Earth yeah species do oh oh quite possibly I couldn't tell you yes or no for sure but probably probably microplastics as well because that seems to be in everything nowadays so what if
this isn't a sustainable alternative because we were already polluting oceans as well yeah cuz the ambio sites were they specifically for bacterial but toxins I guess heavy metals don't count in the same way cuz it's like a what do you call it because you always have Trace well I don't know about the anatomy or physiology of a horseshoe crab but you always have Trace Amounts of metal in the system anyway don't you so maybe it's not too bad and the toxins are proteins right and they're quite
large molecules which will probably have Metals in them depending on what they're made of uh I should also say that we have been calling them horseshoe crabs and they are called horseshoe crabs but they are not in fact crabs another fun zoology uh Quirk they're not even members of the cation family they are actually related to spiders uh and they're called chalat Chell oh God the bloody Latin with his things chelat uh which includes arachin and scorpions so there you go they're not
even crabs in the first place and that's probably what made it even more of a nonprotected area because they're not even a fish or vertebrae they're they're an in vertebra they're in their own thing of arthopods going back to what you were saying about you probably got horseshoe crabs to thank for being able to receive um vaccines that are free from various toxins we've actually got spiders to think how many people how many people did think accept the vaccine
if you said yes spiders help make that oh very few I expect but I do think it's funny that this is like stuff that's been going on for so long like under the radar like obviously people knew but like the average person and even me with like zoology Science Background I didn't know this until recently so weird we've been using horseshoe crab blood for 30 years yeah something like that so yeah it's a long time and I think on the topic of other vertebra not Verte what was that
what was that Latin phrase that you use I'm going to make you say it again I'm going to get better at this chat Chata I'm going to write it down I'm sorry everyone this starts with a CH that's all you need to know and there's another one that we were going to discuss because it's also quite expensive yes so like I said the horses crabs belong in this order but they are closely related to arachnids and scorpions so we're moving on now to scorpion venom so we've had HHO crab
blood and this is scorpion venom and apparently a few hundred micrograms will fetch you about $200 so probably not quite as expensive as the horseshoe crab blood but still not to be sniffed at if you're looking to make your Millions no W there rumors on the internet that you could get like millions of dollars potentially for Scorpion benom which I just thought even if you knew nothing about it it just seems crazy and not true but people apparently believe what I mean people do
believe a lot of crazy stuff that they read on the internet I think it's well it's like the horseshoe crabs isn't it like if you find a few realistically you're not going to make millions of dollars and if you start breeding scorpions to milk them for their venom I don't don't think that that's really going to be the Cure C your bank account however it is worth a lot because of its use we're going back to the farmer industry scorpion venom is particularly rich in proteins and peptides and that
boosts the capacity to like block or rearrange iron channels in the body which is getting a little bit uh more biology than I know about but apparently they're promising candidates for Venom derived drugs so we could be making scorpion venom pills I guess if you manag to rearrange an iron Channel what happens I couldn't tell you to be completely honest but I do know that they are looking at scorpion venom in uh Pharmaceuticals for things like epilepsy and treatment of autoimmune diseases
like multiple sclerosis so Mass I couldn't yeah the actual how it works I can't tell you but apparently those are the applications for it so I think some of the drug applications directly relate to interrupting iron channels I found a really helpful overview article in the biom medicine's journal from a few years ago it's even got a very helpful diagram of all the different applications that different parts of the Venom could have so yeah you mentioned um immuno responses anti-cancer antifungal
antibacterial anti many different things and for some all of the good anties yeah for some of them it sounds like you can block particular iron channels um that are involved in sending pain signals so you get offer pain relief a you wouldn't think that from scorpion venom would [Laughter] you they can also block iron channels in tea cells and he's a part of the immune system um so it can supress their function by preventing activation of certain genes I think so that's one way
that they' act as a immunosuppressive which would help I I would assume for autoimmune diseases yeah that makes sense and it feels like autoimmune diseases I want to say are becoming more common or seem to be more apparent like more allergies more un undescribed undescribed unlike specified things sort of like irritable bowel syndrome it's a syndrome because we don't really know what causes it some people say it might be linked to an autoimmune response so you know it it sounds weird but is
scorpion venom going to be treating all the things we don't really all the syndromes we don't really understand I mean I don't know potentially I guess so I always see lupus lupus seems to be everywhere at the moment especially like in relation to celebrities so I don't I couldn't say for sure that they're using scorpion venom to treat lupus but that's what it said that the treatment of autoimmune diseases was uh one of the possible applications so who knows yeah
this journal article said that there was only one Venom component that made it through to clinical trial so it wasn't mean used to treat anyone at the time of writing which is five years ago and I think clinical trials take quite a long time so I suspect things haven't moved on a massive amount I don't think it's been used to treat anyone yet there's an awful lot of research which is what makes the Venom Vol because there's an awful lot of research to go out from the
sound of it because it can treat so many different things potentially I guess then comes the question say some someone has a pet scorpion how are they going to harvest that for the drug testing industry well this is a thing because I again was concerned about how they were getting the venom out of scorpions and apparently uh one of the people that we spoke to at work uh was interviewed for our online magazine and he said that he goes uh to Europe to milk the Scorpions
of people that keep them as pets so it's like very I guess ethical uh much more ethical than the crabs I would assume his people keep their scorpions in the same way that I keep my rats and my dog that are very well looked after yeah that's what I thought and he's also uh he seems like a lovely person because he said I share it with other researchers for free so he's not charging for the uh Venom that he's collecting if people want to do scientific research which I
feel like is a good thing absolutely yeah and this is a thing a small amount of Venom can go an awful long way in research so you don't need much of it to get a lot of use out of it from what it sounds like yeah I think it's like tiny tiny amounts there was also a thing that said um that they were working towards making a synthetic alternative and like sequencing the DNA to find out how to like make it artificially as well so it could be the future that'd be nice yeah
but it sounds like if there people's pets presumably they're not being harmed otherwise people would be not volunteering their beloved scorpion for this yeah exactly I think also it's like a having like a trustworthy source of a Venom like if you want it for scientific research you have to sort of fact check where it's coming from I guess so it's not like you know if it's from a sick scorpion it's probably not any good yeah do some medical checks on the Scorpion
and ask about its diet and uh it B movement what had been up to you recently before you um do the milking which I think from what I'd read a quick Google search suggested they can either use electricity to stimulate the Stinger or they can just squeeze it after holding the Scorpion quite firly in yeah I'm imagining a bit like snakes when they you know when they like put the fangs through like a film on a Jam Jar uh but I've actually never seen it done for a
scorpion so I couldn't tell you for sure though there is uh some suggestion that the amateur Venom extraction business is having negative impacts on wild scorpion populations but maybe that's more for people that are like trying to farm uh scorpions sort of in an amateur way and then sell it to Big farmer rather than just having a few that you keep as your lovely pets well what a problem for for those almost like poaching really because they're not going to be looking
after the Scorpion after they've milked it they're just kind of going ah it's not my problem it's just out in the wild is yeah so there's some suggestion that they're like uh this sort of interest in scorpion venom has then put pressure on wild populations because people think oh I can make bare dollar from this and then they're going out and sort of catching scorpions that they shouldn't be doing would they would it would it be a dangerous job because you know getting
stung isn't great so i' you know will they get a taste of their own medicine for for daring to do this I think actually scorpions get a lot of bad press there are some very dangerous scorpions but I think a lot of them are it would hurt but you wouldn't die you would be fine if you got St though maybe I shouldn't say that maybe I should put everyone off and say that they're all really deadly and you absolutely should not go flouring around looking for scorpions I
know I feel like they maybe know that through experience if they're used to scorpions being in their environment anyway I'd also read that you can just wear PE PE like they can't really sting through leather or vinyl so just you know wear jeans leather trouses into somewhere would tough gloves wear gloves and you might make millions from scorpion venom but maybe not because as I say a little bit of venom goes a long long way in research so it really is not worth it you still need to find someone
to sell it to and prove that it's a Pure Source and all that sort of jazz it just doesn't seem worth it to me no I don't think it is I don't think there'll be many people out there really looking to buy it however I am very impressed at something that is essentially toxic and has seems to have many different actions or many different components to the Venom once you separate all that out can actually be really useful for medicine I think that's a great way of looking at
it yeah yeah absolutely and I think we can get it from people that are happy to volunteer their pets and are looking after their scorpions well and not damaging wild populations then perhaps it's not so bad I feel like it's better than the crabs anyway yes and as Antonia says when it gets to the point that there's a drug to develop doing it in in a synthetic way rather than constantly milking scorpions I think is the best move yes absolutely so we've talked a bit about liquids for Science and
particularly Pharmaceuticals um what other expensive animal derived products are there well this one is an interesting one because you probably have heard of the pangolins being the most trafficked mammal in the world and there's a good reason for this because they are apparently worth around 35,000 per kilo of Pongal in scales and it gets even interestinger if that's not a work but you know what I mean even more interesting uh because these scales are then made into powders and used for a
variety of ailments including cancer uh none of which seem to have any true scientific backing so this is what we would call uh traditional medicine shall we say which I can see the value in if the patient is considered to be being treated so that you know their whole body so I'm being treated so I'm getting better and they somehow overcome a illness are you saying they've taken it and that and they seem to also be getting better yeah kind of like the placeo effect yeah well you know yeah if
you can sort of convince your body that it's being treated so it kind of gets better on its own I have no idea how like the power of Hope yeah yeah yeah lots of Studies have this perable effect don't they they give someone a pral they give someone the actual drug and this see is a difference this is quite an expensive Placebo though well yes yeah really expensive it's interesting as well because they are also eaten but they think the scales fetch a much higher price than the meat
and they're never fresh scales are not what people are after they always want them to be dried or roasted and apparently they can be cooked in a variety of things including oil butter vinegar and the urine of boys to cure all sorts of I'm not sure what's worse medicine made from spiders medicine made involving human Ur So where are people getting the pangolins from are they being trafficked from the natural habitat which is I don't remember where they're from yeah
so there are eight species of Pangolin and four of them live in Asia and four of them live in Africa and this is like a real problem so this is full trafficking this is not done legally I think now it's illegal uh for all eight species they are protected by international law there are trade band on the Import and Export of this sort of thing however there is still a black market for this and it is enormously enormously profitable and apparently according to the David sheeper Wildlife
Foundation a pangalan is taken from the wild every four minutes for this sort of Black Market in what do you want to call it products animal products which unless they're um very prolific and quick to breed and don't have any other predators that are helping keep their population under control is probably not a good thing apparently between August 2000 and July 2019 895,000 pangolins were trafficked though that is likely an underestimation of how many were shipped
across the world that's a lot yeah it's a heck of a lot and that's also that's also quite the market based on no scientific evidence yeah well that's the thing it's this sort of idea I guess of culture almost of you know things that persist it doesn't necessarily need to be backed up by science to make it wealthy it's demand and Supply isn't it that's like a lot of human activity isn't it there's no scientific basis for doing this we're going to do it because we've always done it what
we do things here you've got to wonder though whether there are scientists that are concerned about this that are actively trying to demonstrate that there are better medicines out there or just that this is not a great practice because of the impact it has on the natural world yeah well apparently according to one of the museums in Liverpool the practice of using uh pangin scales for like medical cures um has been happening since at least 480 CE so you can see that this is like
super ingrained in the culture of those countries and changing that is very difficult also I think from a western perspective we see a lot of animals as like oh we should protect that or we have you know like the most pets out of any country we have a very sort of caring nature towards animals whereas a lot of other countries don't have that attitude in the first place and we'll see an animal much more as a resource that they can get meat or medicine or whatever from so I think changing those
cultural attitudes is incredibly difficult yeah I've got I guess you got to find a way of trying to make other behaviors more desirable like if you make it really really easy to get medicine in some other way that's proven to work and you can show to people that it works maybe that helps yeah I should I would like to believe that it does I guess maybe also now people are using them like a longside like it's not one or the other it could be could be both you know like why if
you feel unwell take an ipren but then also have some tangling scales you might as well you know cover both bases You' got it to hand just in case yeah head your bests but you think making it an illegal product would put people off and go ah maybe there's a reason why we have decided this is not a good thing to do yeah I it's funny isn't it I think it's a bit like Ivory because Ivory was made illegal but the demand for it is still so high so it's like where is it coming
from why why does this persist when you know now perhaps necessarily you didn't always know that it was killing the elephants or that the pangolins are suffering because of this maybe you could be forgiven for not knowing that but I think as Technologies evolved as the internet's evolved you can find out you know where stuff is coming from so yeah I think people have less of an excuse now now why they still use these products I'm also thinking yeah how much of these cultures that use traditional
medicine sort of blocked from science because my grandma kind of uses traditional medicine she believes in the hot and cold theory of Chinese medicine but she still uses modern medicine as well so it's only for mile ailments that she would say oh I'm going to make a soup of some weird vegetable stuff that's supposed to do supposed to balance out the the hot and cold but I'll also take the medicine from my hospital I think that just demonstrates how ingrained some of these things can
be it's like you know when you get a cold and people say oh take chicken soup or um lots of lemon juice or drink plenty of fluids or have yeah just have lots of vitamin C yeah there isn't any scientific basis to say that any of those things are likely to work yet we still do them it's comforting yeah it's comforting I think that it's definitely about the chicken soup like back when I ate meat I feel like if you had a cold I'd be straight down Co-op getting hindes chicken soup and a crusty bread
roll like it makes you feel better regardless of if it's actually curing your illness but in the case of vitamin C I read it's you have to have a higher level of vitamin C all the time rather than just taking it when you're real yeah I've heard the same thing that it's more preventative rather than oh I'm Ill now I'll do it it's too late then I wonder wonder if it's like there was a grain of truth that somewhere in the pangalan scale there was something valuable but they couldn't figure it out
cuz they didn't have the technology to identify it was a particular molecule or chemical and so they just take the whole scale eat it and that was what worked yeah there's a lot of Western medicine that still does that it's like they observe the effect of a particular treatment and they don't really know why they don't the biochemistry they just know that it works they do like nobody knows how anesthesiology works that feels worrying and yet yeah J happens all the time
H I did not know that we didn't know how it worked I will cave at that I've not looked into this is is what I've been told so there are probably different versions of that truth as well obviously trafficking pangolins for no scientific benefit is terrible but there must be other conservation challenges we've met because of valuable animals right yeah I mean we've not really touched on just eating animals so recently there was a abolutely ginormous blue finin tuna and
it's sold for $1.3 million uh at Tokyo Fish Market L of money for a dead fish it's a lot of money for a dead fish and it's massive like I think people underestimate how Big Tuna are because this is 680 oh no 68 lb or 276 kg of fish so at least you're getting I guess bang for your buck yeah what's about 300 kg several people's were a small motorbike I'm trying to think what equ a bear a small bear is an elephant it's probably more probably over baby elephant must be more than that I had to
put this into perspective cuz I was like how much fish are we getting for that 1 million pound like that's the conversion rate from $1.3 so normally you pay about £10 per kilo of tinned tuna if you're buying a tuna oh like sabes yep if you buy buying a steak so the the pink bright red pink stuff £18.75 for a kilo that seems quite a lot yeah but I suppose you only buy like 300 grams 500 gr yeah you buy like what yeah enough for a two people and this one that was sold at the market was £3,600 per
kilo as much as the pangin scale or more than pangin SCS yeah it's wild isn't it that something like one fish could set you back so much money is just absolutely mindblowing to me is this one of those things like if you're in the club you recognize the value or something you're prepared to pay more for something you know how people pay stupid amounts of money for Handbags and things like that uh is it the like experience to say that you're eating blue fin tuna is like equivalent to
being like I just spent £5,000 on a Chanel hbag yeah so there's this Prestige of owning why you'd want to own it I don't know um but owning this ginormous presumably quite powerful difficult to catch creature that's been killed I think they were selling it to make food though yeah absolutely yeah yeah they're selling it for for the meat which apparently is a rich and buttery taste yeah what's the markup on that going to be though to make it profitable given what Antonio just say yeah how
much you foring out in a restaurant for a blue fin tunate let's say you pay I don't know even like10 for a piece of ngiri you know some sushi how much more amazing would this blue fin tuna have to be for you to have it to pay that amount of money could you even would your taste buds even be able to sense that difference I'm going to say that mine could not mine definitely couldn't I've tried this with many different things really fancy wines whatever else I can't tell the
difference I think if you like it it's fine exact but something like this I'm not paying what is it $3,000 per kilo just to eat this Ive tuna but you were talking about uh conservation challenges and apparently over fishing has decimated the Pacific blue fin tuna population reducing it by 97.4% so that probably adds to the price that it is in fact especially hard to come across I feel like this is leading to another episode about fishing and how detrimental it is to the Environ oh you
accused me of being depressing at the beginning if we get into to fishing that is everyone's going to be weeping by the end the estate we're doing to our ocean no one really uses fish as the poster CH for conservation it's because people don't care about fish this is my bug bear people care about pandas cute and fluffy things okay pangolins they're pretty adorable when you know they're alive but fish very few people can get on board with thinking that a fish is
cute and therefore it's not getting the attention it deserves and also people like eating fish you know it's popular Everyone likes fish and chips at the seaside true it is more of a treat for me though um and I live by the sea I don't eat fish that often I still care about the fish I think there needs to be more films about fish there have been quite a few anyway haven't they Finding Nemo and uh cartoons about sharks not Jaws obviously not I was thinking shark tail yeah
sharktail the one where they do where they work at the fish Car Wash I enjoy that one at the car wash [Music] yeah and Angelina Jolie was there and who else was in it was Will Smith in it I think he was I remember it being a very weird film that's about it is that sharktail I might have to watch that again I think that's a great film it was a great comfort film yeah there need to be more fishy films out there to make you aware of how cute and how vital fish
are yeah to life on Earth we used to be fish I guess going back to our episode about um C pream explosion Ellie oh we used to be blobs in the ocean in the good old days do you think that that cute film's makers care more about over fishing or the environment I think popular culture is hugely influential think of a like what's the one about the killer whales kept in captivity black black fish black free Willie is that too old you think a newer one this is a documentary rather
than a cute okay uh Kids film but yeah that like put enormous pressure on Disney World and Orlando parks and all of that sort of thing to release those whales so yeah maybe there is some uh you know fish documentary slash film to inspire us all to care about over fishing I hope so there's definitely like David aen episodes about the oceans that have like you know like behind the scenes and they tackle some of those issues I think that's a good place to leave it we've talked about fishing
films and we started off with horseshoe crab that isn't a crab blood so I think what we've learned is that there are different things we can get from animals and they can be very useful in medicine or developing medicine and there are also some which are not at all useful for medicine and we just eat them anyway and that has environmental problem or conservation problem so hopefully we can keep developing some synthetics to replace that and the communic ation
about the issues we cause on the planet I mean yeah it's a constant struggle isn't it to communicate that but um hopefully we'll find another topic and we won't talk about environmental sustainability again but we probably will because everything has we definitely will yeah yeah of course we will something we all care about it is it is but for now we'll draw this conversation to a close thanks for listening the views expressed in this podcast belong entirely to the person
that said them they did not represent any industry or organization if you enjoyed listening to these views it would really help us out if you could rate US leave a review and tell a friend this podcast was sponsored by no one but if you're interested in funding us to continue to have Frank discussions about science and engineering please get in touch [Music]