Pulling Power

BBC Earth Podcast

Jenkins Laura

Society & Culture, Places & Travel, Tv & Film

4.6 • 611 Ratings

🗓️ 24 October 2022

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

We explore the invisible pulling powers of nature through the forces of smell, sound and gravity.

In Greece, desert ants start their lives underground in total darkness. Void of landmarks and sun they initially learn to orient themselves using the Earth’s magnetic field. German scientist Dr Pauline Fleischman reveals how her team discovered the ant’s internal GPS.

A healthy coral reef is a very noisy place, full of the snapping, rasping, scraping and croaking of various vocal species. But a dying reef is tragically quiet, devoid of the life which can no longer survive on it. However, conservationists have discovered a way to pull species back to these habitats with the ingenious use of underwater

speakers.

This sort of catfishing is used by a number of animals, including arachnids. Sebastian and Rutendo discuss one of nature’s more perilous powers of attraction with Kenyan entomologist, Dr Dino Martins. He describes the dramatic mating behaviour of the camel spider, an alluring species with incredible hunting skills.

Humans might find the British dawn chorus a more soothing courtship ritual. But for the birds, it’s an intense competition. Sound recordist Gary Moore tells us why he

thinks it’s one of the world’s greatest wildlife events.

Credits:

The BBC Earth podcast is presented by Sebastian Echeverri and Rutendo Shackleton.

This episode was produced by Rachel Byrne and Geoff Marsh.

The researchers were Seb Masters and Dawood Quereshi.

The Production Manager was Catherine Stringer, the Production Co-ordinator was Gemma Wootton, and the Project Co-ordinator was Linda Barber.

Podcast Theme Music was composed by Axel Kacoutié, with mixing and additional sound design by Peregrine Andrews.

The Associate Producer is Cristen Caine and the Executive Producer is Deborah Dudgeon.

Special thanks to...

Dino J. Martins from the Mpala Research Centre.

Pauline Fleischmann from the University of Würzburg for her insights on ant behaviour.

Gary Moore who recorded and spoke about the dawn chorus soundscape.

Tim Lamont, Tammy Silva, Emma Weschke, Tim Gordon and Eric Parmentier who provided underwater audio recordings for the interview with Steve Simpson from the University of Bristol.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	When I was a kid, my family moved to New York City from Columbia.
0:07.0	We moved into my grandfather's apartment in Jackson Heights, Queens, and he owned a Colombian bakery.
0:14.0	Every morning, he'd get up at like four or five while the whole city was still asleep.
0:26.4	Go downstairs into this room and the walls were just lined with ovens.
0:28.9	And he would start making bread.
0:30.7	There was a whole variety.
0:37.2	There's buniuelo, which is crispy and fried, pan de bono, fluffy, chewy inside, and one of my favorites, pan alignal.
0:42.0	This is like a delicious loaf of bread, crisp on the outside, and then there's just this
0:48.2	river of cheese baked right through the middle of it. Completely irresistible combination.
0:55.9	It's perfection.
0:58.2	And my God, the smell of freshly baked Colombian bread,
1:02.7	it's instinctive.
1:04.4	Like, I smell it, and I have to go get some.
1:07.3	I'm, like, pulled backwards, zip right into the store.
1:12.8	I cannot let that opportunity pass me by. And that sense of being pulled toward something, it's such a strong feeling. But you know,
1:20.2	it doesn't just happen with our favorite food, right? In life, there's a lot of things that are
1:24.9	actually pulling us, pulling animals in all sorts of directions.
1:29.0	Whether or not we understand what's going on at first, we've all been subject to that mysterious pulling power.
1:49.6	I'm Sebastian Atcevery, and I'm Ritano Shackleton.
1:52.4	And this is the BBC Earth podcast. In this episode, we're talking about pulling power.
2:05.9	We've got a coral reef with its own speaker system, some very confused ants, and one of the most famous soundscapes of the British countryside.
2:24.8	Sebastian, I have got this image of you walking down the streets in Queens, New York, and then smelling one of these Colombian cheese rolls, pan alignado.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Jenkins Laura, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Jenkins Laura and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.