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
What did you find?
So what role are the tom and teller fungi playing in their partnership with the trees?
Do we have an understanding of what they're doing?
This close partnership between Pisonia and Tomatella fungi is important.
The fungi can survive the extreme conditions created by the seabirds as they nest and drop guano down to the ground, recycling the nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium to make it available for the trees.
And what about those metre-wide equipment-stealing crabs?
They're part of this intimately connected web too.
Coming up, fungi's critical role in the survival of our ecosystems.
So Toby, how does this knowledge that you're building on Palmyra, how does that really help you with restoring the biodiversity there?
The Personia trees have an intimate, interdependent relationship with the Tomentella.
If you want to restore the trees, you have to think about the fungi.
It's a principle that could be applied across all kinds of restoration projects.
It also reveals how important fungi are for keeping existing ecosystems thriving.
Scientists from Toby's organization, Spun, have now created a global map of mycorrhizal fungi so that the health of these networks can be monitored and restored.
And so presumably this means we should be putting more effort into protecting and conserving fungi.
Toby, thank you very much.
Thanks again to Dr. Toby Kears.
You can read about the Spun team's new global map of fungi networks on theguardian.com.
And that's it for today.
This episode was produced by Madeline Finlay.
Showing 1301–1320 of 2,123 · page 66 of 107
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