Collie Ennis

Because if you live in the desert, everyone wants to eat you, and anything that passes by you that might be a meal, you have to be able to kill it quickly, hence the massive amounts of either poisons or venoms that they carry in their body.

Gila monster, yeah.

It's based on their venom.

And venom has so many uses in general.

I mean, everything from breast cancer to strokes to erectile dysfunction, all sorts of shit that venom can sort out.

And these animals, again, it's kind of like we're kind of putting a human dimension onto what they're worth.

But they're just living their lives.

They're just trying to get by and survive like they have for millions of years.

But

And again, if you're going to quantify it and look at it in a human-centric way, if we get rid of them, if we lose rainforests, if we wreck deserts, if we kind of lose all these important habitats where these creatures have been home for millions of years before we were around doing what we do, we're selling ourselves short with these potential cures for all sorts of stuff.

Yeah.

It is bleak, and when you're kind of trying to do science communication, and I'm talking about the importance of dragonflies, it's hard to get across to somebody who'd be very financially minded.

That would be their foremost thoughts about what's at work.

But you try and get the message across as best you can.

Now, I find the best way...

I reach out to people and I'm doing a lot of work with the Trinity Access Program at the moment, which is a great program where Trinity goes out to less fortunate areas and tells people, look, anybody can go to Trinity and make a go of it if you're interested in stuff.

And when I go out to these communities, I'm...

I'll bring a jar of tadpoles and I'll sit down with the kids and talk and the parents will come in and they'll go, I haven't seen tadpoles in 20 years.

Yeah.

And I go, and I remember there used to be a little pond in the park over there and there was loads of tadpoles and we'd catch them and we'd watch them turn into frogs and you can see that childlike wonder coming back into them in adults.