Summary
This week, a court in Kenya sentenced four men to either a year in prison or a fine of £5,800 for trying to smuggle 5,000 ants out of the country. The contraband included highly-valued ants like the giant African harvester ant, and it’s believed these ants were intended for exotic pet markets abroad.
But all this talk of ant smuggling got the Unexpected Elements team feeling antsy to talk ants!
We learn about the earliest ants who lived among dinosaurs, ants that can sniff cancer, and ants who were sent into space!
Then we take a turn from ants to anteaters and talk to Mariella Superina from the International Union for Conservation of Nature about the different adaptations and skills needed for anteaters to successfully eat ants.
Plus, we discuss plant smuggling and ant wrangling, both unexpectedly dangerous ventures.
All that, plus many more Unexpected Elements.
Presenter: Marnie Chesterton, with Leonie Joubert and Godfred Boafo Producers: Alice Lipscombe-Southwell, with Imaan Moin, Robbie Wojciechowski and Minnie Harrop
This programme does not relate to the Ant Antics Ltd company or Ant Antics Foundation CIC.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Oh, hello. You have chosen a BBC podcast, but before you listen to it, we thought you might |
| 0:04.7 | like our podcast too. You might. You might. It is called Sightracked with me, Nick Grimshaw. |
| 0:09.2 | And me, Annie Mack. And we talk about the week in music. All the news, all the cultural |
| 0:14.0 | happenings in the UK and beyond. And great guests. And it's on BBC Sounds. Yes, where you can |
| 0:19.7 | also enjoy lots of playlists, music mixes and |
| 0:22.6 | live radio, everything from my six music breakfast show to Radio 3 Unwind. But obviously start |
| 0:29.2 | with our podcast, sidetrack. Obviously. Obviously. So if you like music, listen on BBC |
| 0:33.7 | Sounds. So this week, I went to the Royal Botanianian. on BBC Sands. |
| 0:45.6 | So this week I went to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew on the outskirts of London, home to hundreds of species of trees, for the unveiling of their newest edition, a digital tree. |
| 0:53.5 | It was more than 20 foot high, about six metres. It was this |
| 0:57.9 | plinth and it was stood next to its organic copy, a magnificent oak, more than 200 years old. |
| 1:06.0 | While I'd rather stare at a real tree than an on-screen representation. |
| 1:16.9 | What the digital version could do was make visible all the processes we humans can't normally see. |
| 1:21.3 | The gases swirling around, the sugars flowing through the roots. |
| 1:27.2 | You could even interact with it, wave your arms, and you could waft clouds of water vapour around the tree. |
| 1:34.3 | But the most impressive bit was on the back of this monolith, 2,300 names, |
| 1:38.2 | all the other species that live on the oak, |
| 1:40.7 | hundreds that would die without it. |
| 1:46.0 | So this single tree, the real one next to the plinth with thousands of names, |
| 1:55.4 | contains multitudes, fungi, wasps, moths and ants, and suddenly, in my head, an oak tree transformed into a village. I'm Marnie Chasterton from the BBC World Service. This is Unexpected Elements. |
| 2:17.3 | This is the science programme inspired by the news. |
| 2:21.5 | Each week we take a story from the news and we use that as our launch point, jumping off |
... |
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