Wild Inside: The Aphid

Discovery

BBC

Science, Technology

4.3 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 15 April 2024

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The tiny sap-sucking aphid, at just a few millimetres long, is the scourge of many gardeners and crop-growers worldwide, spreading astonishingly rapidly and inflicting huge damage as it seeks to outwit many host plants’ natural defences. With insights and guidance from aphid expert George Seddon-Roberts at the John Innes Centre, Norwich, some delicate dissecting tools, and a state of the art microscope, Professor Ben Garrod and Dr Jess French delve inside this herbivorous insect to unravel the anatomy and physiology that’s secured its extraordinary reproductive success, whilst offering new clues as to how we could curtail its damaging impact in the future.

Co-Presenters: Ben Garrod and Jess French Executive Producer: Adrian Washbourne Producer: Ella Hubber Editor: Martin Smith Production Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth

Transcript

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0:00.0	My name is Mikita Oliver and I'm Lily Allen. In our new podcast we talk about the big issues and the little ones and everything in between in the way that only best friends do.
0:12.0	With brutal, brutal honesty.
0:15.0	We'll be talking about things like early crushes, techno and ambition.
0:20.0	I've had a few celebrity crushes for the most part they've come true.
0:24.0	This me with Lily Allen and McEater Oliver listen on BBC sounds.
0:30.0	This is Discovery on the BBC World Service.
0:35.0	So this is the high containment site where we keep all of our most destructive species that we really don't want escaping.
0:42.0	Oh yeah, let's go in.
0:44.0	Come on then.
0:46.0	It is in fact an inectory.
0:50.0	Maybe not the first place you'd think of finding us
0:52.0	as our quest continues to
0:53.7	uncover the hidden clues to animal survival in the big wild world.
0:58.0	These are just Perspect cages filled with Chinese cabbage which is somewhere that they love to live, to reproduce
1:05.4	and make colonies on.
1:07.2	We've so far in this series been exploring from the inside out animals that are pretty
1:12.2	visible to the naked eye from the largest
1:14.9	marsupial on the planet to a formidable giant raptor but we're now scaling right
1:20.8	down to examine a notoriously tiny pest of landscapes, gardens and greenhouses.
1:27.0	Where are they?
1:28.0	So the shocking thing is they're actually all around us.
1:32.0	They're in that cage right next to you. They're in these cages up ahead here.
	...

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