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Discovery

Wild Inside: The aphid

Discovery

BBC

Science

4.31.2K Ratings

🗓️ 15 April 2024

⏱️ 27 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

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, Prof Ben Garrod and Dr Jess French delve inside this herbivorous insect to unravel the anatomy and physiology that has 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

Before you listen to this BBC podcast I'd like to introduce myself.

0:03.4

My name's Stevie Middleton and I'm a BBC commissioner for a load of sport

0:07.4

podcasts. I'm lucky to do that at the BBC because I get to work with

0:10.7

leading journalists, experienced pundits and the biggest

0:13.2

sports stars. Together we bring you untold stories and fascinating insights

0:17.5

straight from the player's mouths. But the best thing about doing this at the BBC is our unique access to the sporting world.

0:24.4

What that means is that we can bring you podcasts that create a real connection

0:28.7

to dedicated sports fans across the UK.

0:31.1

So if you like this podcast, head over to BBC Sounds where you'll find plenty more.

0:35.6

This is Discovery on the BBC World Service.

0:40.6

So this is the high containment site where we keep all of our most destructive

0:45.2

species that we really don't want escaping. Oh yeah let's go in. Come on then.

0:50.8

It is in fact an insectory. Maybe not the first place you'd think of finding us,

0:57.0

as our quest continues to uncover the hidden clues to animal survival in the big wild world.

1:03.0

These are just perspect cages filled with Chinese cabbage, which is somewhere that they love to live, to reproduce and make colonies on.

1:12.0

We've so far in this series been exploring

1:14.7

from the inside out animals that are pretty visible

1:18.0

to the naked eye, from the largest marsupial

1:20.6

on the planet to a formidable giant raptor. But we're now scaling right down to

1:26.8

examine a notoriously tiny pest of landscapes, gardens and greenhouses.

1:33.0

Where are they?

1:34.0

So the shocking thing is they're actually all around us.

...

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