Benjamin Thompson

speaker

746 appearances 10 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 2 Sep

Benjamin Thompson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 10 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 5.

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We're heading back to the Amazon for some newly discovered things, things that are new to science.

But in this case, it's not archaeological remains, it's insects.

And this is a story I read about in nature based on a presentation

at the Brazilian Society for the Advancement of Sciences annual meeting.

So this is still preliminary data, but some of the numbers involved are quite something.

That's absolutely right.

And yes, you're right across the board there.

Generally speaking, very, very small, although we'll get to some that are pretty big in a bit.

And well, the Amazon, the lush rainforest, has a huge amount of biodiversity, as we know, and most of it is unknown, it has to be said.

But now hundreds of scientists in Brazil are collaborating on this epic project to count every species of insect in one

expanse from the ground to the canopy.

And I think this is where this maybe differs from other examples of projects because trees in the Amazon can be, you know, pretty big, right?

And they're looking at different layers, as I say, from the ground to the top.

Mm, yeah.

And what they've done in this instance, they've deployed three arrays of traps.

Okay.

Now each array consists of five mesh traps in a vertical stack, if you can imagine that.

So one's at the floor and one is about thirty meters, so about a ten-story building height above it, and there's three more of these in between.

And when an insect flies into one of these traps, it's

Funnelled into a collecting bottle and they then are collected in ethanol, preserving their DNA for analysis.

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