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 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 10 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 5.
Appearances
She was impressed, by the way, that the research team went about coming to this conclusion.
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but although this catfish cancer may have joined a very short list of other transmissible cancers there is a lot to learn about it
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These are some of the things that Julie and her colleagues are working to find out.
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Tumour cells are spread between Tasmanian devils, mainly via biting.
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For dogs, it's sexually transmitted, while bivalves are thought to ingest cancer cells that are just floating through the water.
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Julie thinks that it could be passed on when the catfish come together to spawn, but that's a theory that needs investigation.
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and there are many more things to figure out besides.
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Like, what are these tumours doing to the fish?
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Transmissible cancer in dogs can be fought off by the immune system, while transmissible cancers found in Tasmanian devils are usually fatal.
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And the questions keep on coming.
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Where did this cancer come from?
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Although this work has its beginnings with Lake Memphremagog anglers back in 2012, there is a paper from 1925 that describes black tumors on brown bullhead catfish in a different area of the northeastern U.S.,
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Canine transmissible cancer is a disease that's thousands of years old, while in Tasmanian devils it only came about a few decades ago.
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So what's the situation here?
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It could be that it's been around for a long time in the catfish, but suddenly, and for whatever reason, its incidence has shot up in this location.
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Julie and the team have cast their net wide to look for it in other places, and they do have some evidence that they found it in other locations.
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Julie's paper appears to have solved the mystery of what is causing widespread melanomas in brown bullhead catfish in Lake Memphra Magog.
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But it has spawned a number of other mysteries that now need to be solved.
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Right now, you could count the number of examples of transmissible cancers on one hand, but they may be more common than we think, says Hannah, who you heard from earlier.
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Hannah Siddle from the University of Queensland in Australia there.
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