93 | Rae Wynn-Grant on Bears, Humans, and Other Predators

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll | Wondery

Society & Culture, Physics, Philosophy, Science, Ideas, Society

4.8 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 20 April 2020

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Human beings have a strange fascination with dangerous, predatory animals — bears, lions, wolves, sharks, and more. The top of the food chain is an interesting and precarious place to live; while you might be the boss of your local environment, you also depend on the functioning of an entire ecology. Rae Wynn-Grant is a carnivore ecologist who studies how large predators migrate, feed, reproduce — and especially how they interact with humans. We talk about the diverse social structures of different species of carnivores, how they find mates, and how they diversify their diet. And of course we discuss how humans and other locally-dominant species can live together peacefully.

Rae Wynn-Grant received her Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolution from Columbia University. She is currently a Fellow with National Geographic Society working on carnivore conservation in partnership with the American Prairie Reserve. She maintains a Visiting Scientist position at the American Museum of Natural History, and adjunct faculty positions at Columbia University and Johns Hopkins University. She appears in National Geographic’s Born Wild: The Next Generation, premiering on April 22.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll.
0:03.9	And today, hopefully everyone is staying safe, staying healthy, still under lockdown, quarantine,
0:10.1	social distancing, and so forth. What we're offering you today is a chance to be
0:14.4	distracted a little bit by one of humanity's favorite things to be distracted by.
0:19.6	Lions, entiers, and bears. Oh my, mostly bears to be perfectly honest, but what we're going to
0:25.5	be talking about are carnivorous animals, predators in the wild, and both how they hang out,
0:32.2	and how they hang out with human beings, how they interact with us, and how they should interact
0:35.9	with us. So my guest is Dr. Ray Wynne Grant, who is a large carnivore ecologist. She studies,
0:42.8	again, bears are her favorite thing, but also lions and other large predators, and tries to figure
0:48.8	out what their behavior is out there in the wild, how far they go when they go for walk,
0:55.4	walking, their mating habits, stuff like that. As we will learn, as I learned, this is not a
1:00.9	gorillas in the mist, or Jane Goodall hanging out with the chimpanzees kind of situation.
1:06.4	Basically, you don't want to hang out with the bears. You don't want to live with the bears.
1:10.8	Berner Herzog movies, notwithstanding, you want to touch the bears just enough to put a collar on
1:17.2	them, trace them, see where they're going, and then let them do their thing. But it's an important
1:22.3	thing because we want to be able to live in harmony, or as close as we can come to it, with the
1:28.4	wildlife around us, and some of that wildlife is dangerous. Some of that wildlife is big and has
1:33.6	claws and teeth and can hurt us. We want to protect that as well. So we need to understand it
1:38.4	scientifically, and that's what we're talking about today. The other thing to mention is that
1:43.4	Ray is going to appear on a TV special. I'm releasing this podcast Monday, April 20th. Wednesday,
1:50.2	April 22 is of course, Earth Day. And for Minescape fans, it is also the birthday of Ariel and Caliban
1:56.8	by cats. But that is a coincidence that Ariel and Caliban were born on Earth Day. More importantly,
	...

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