Ian Sample
speaker
2,123 appearances
29 recordings
3 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 4d ago
Ian Sample’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 — 29 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 8.
Appearances
Toby is a professor at the Free University in Amsterdam and executive director of the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks, or SPUN, an organisation that aims to map and protect mycorrhizal fungi.
When she and her team visited Palmyra, frozen clothes were just one small part of the island experience.
The water also brought something new.
The cacophony of bird calls, equipment-stealing megacrabs and curious sharks make Palmyra sound like an untouched wilderness.
But it's actually an ecosystem that suffered decades of damage.
The introduction of rats, which ate seabird eggs and the seedlings of the native bisonia trees, caused plenty of destruction.
But it was another arrival that conservationists are still tackling to this day.
Coconut palms.
After taking root in the 1850s, they quickly spread across the atolls.
It's been a big problem because the seabirds don't like to nest in the crowns of the coconut palms.
They much prefer pisonia.
Despite the pisonia trees sometimes eating the birds, they're the favoured nesting site.
That makes them a critical part of the island's ecosystem because with a lot of birds, you get a lot of bird poo.
The introduction of the coconut palm disrupted this cycle.
Toby, now these efforts are underway to restore the native Personia grandestries to Palmyra.
And this is where your research comes in, because your team has been looking at a crucial element that has so far been missing, right?
So you were there to map the fungi on the island.
How did you do it?
Right.
And so as part of this mapping, you were trying to figure out what role the fungi is playing in supporting the Pisonia trees.
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