Joe McCormick

speaker

4,706 appearances 10 recordings 1 series first heard Sep 2026 last heard 2d ago

Joe McCormick’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 Sep 2026 with 10.

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Stuff To Blow Your Mind · From the Vault: The Wallace Line, Part 2 · 22 Sep 2026 podcast

So to quote the authors, quote, here, analysis of more than 20,000 vertebrate species with a model of geoclimate and biological diversification shows that broad precipitation tolerance and dispersal ability were key for exchange across the deep time precipitation gradient spanning the region. voice-verified

Sundanian, meaning Southeast Asian lineages, evolved in a climate similar to the humid stepping stones of Wallacea, facilitating colonization of the Sahulian, meaning Australian, continental shelf. voice-verified

By contrast, Sahulian lineages predominantly evolved in drier conditions, hampering establishment in Sunda and shaping faunal distinctiveness. voice-verified

So, in other words, the islands in the transition zone here are typically full of tropical rainforests, like you would find further up on the Malay Peninsula and the Asian mainland. voice-verified

New Guinea on the same tectonic plate with Australia is also dominated with tropical rainforest, so animals adapted to Asian tropical rainforests would find generally familiar and tolerably wet climates throughout most of the islands that formed these stepping stones leading to Australia and New Guinea. voice-verified

And once they reach Australia. voice-verified

There would be different conditions, the the continent would be much drier, but they could have more evolutionary time to adapt by colonizing the islands along the way, uh or by landing in the friendly climate of New Guinea. voice-verified

Meanwhile, animals adapted to the dry climate of Australia would have a quite difficult time finding hospitable conditions along the humid stepping stones. voice-verified

And once you get to the Asian mainland, it's still just humid and dominated by tropical rainforest. voice-verified

So because the transitional islands in between were more easily tolerated by the Asian animals, more Asian animals flowed into the land mass. voice-verified

masses of the Australian plate than the other way around. voice-verified

And I thought that was really interesting because it voice-verified

I don't know i if it often occurs to us to think when we think about like voice-verified

Animals dispersing from one region into another, we think about the the sort of end stage reach like they start here and then they end up here, but the the place that they're having to move through as they migrate also plays a big role in whether that migration can take place at all. voice-verified

Hm, yeah, that's a great point. voice-verified

I was trying to think of a good analogy, and this doesn't exactly work, but to grossly oversimplify, what if there were a highway suddenly opened across the Atlantic Ocean between Great Britain and the United States, and you could cross it by car? voice-verified

Do you think you'd have more people crossing one way or another? voice-verified

I mean, in reality, there would be a lot of things influencing this, but you could imagine that which voice-verified

side of the highway you have to drive on on the highway going in between might determine a lot about who decides to make the journey more often. voice-verified

Like if you gotta be if you gotta be on the left side of the road, I can imagine a lot of Americans saying, I I'm not driving that far on the left side. voice-verified

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