Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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This week on The Science Show, we head up to far north Queensland again, where science thrives in the tropics. And ask the question, can insects like house crickets feel pain? Find out how throwing crumbs to local bird life might change how they evolve. And why the shrinking Y chromosome, and sex chromosomes in general, are trouble.
MUSIC
Today's Science Show has some surprising musical associations. It also has strong links with the Deep North around Cairns. This song, for instance, arrived last week from Jane Younghusband, all about someone you know.
So David Attenborough is always there On the periphery, orange sharp focus, I see him everywhere. Up a mountain, in a tree, diving deep down in the sea. He shares his never-ending love of creatures, great and small. Oh, creatures, he loves them all.
Sir David Attenborough, our gentle guide Reminding all who listen to stay focused on the things we can't deny Turtle, whale, orangutan Could be made extinct by man he shares His never-ending love of the creatures Great and small Oh, the creatures
While he loves them all While we're looking blindly at the smaller picture We can't see the forest for the trees He's there closing in on the specific issue Quietly insisting that we seize this chance to be
Science Show listener Jane Younghusband in Cairns with a tribute to David Attenborough. Now 100 plus a few days. And Bill, it's interesting how many scientists are deeply involved in music in various ways. This week you met Professor Jenny Graves at La Trobe University and she has composed a whole oratorio, a secular follow-up to Haydn's creation.
And now she has a new book and news, I hope, about my disappearing Y chromosome. Yes. Robin, I don't know about yours specifically, but yes, the human Y chromosome is a shadow of its former self and it has been in the news lately.
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Chapter 2: What recent changes has the IOC made regarding sex testing at the Olympics?
And it was opened by Michelle Simmons, Australian of the Year and quantum computing fame. And there was a standing ovation. It really worked wonderfully. So how did this latest performance in the last few days work?
It was just so great to see these kids from this very multicultural school in Sydney. They're kind of our sister school to our school up in Cape York. They had hosted our music children at the op when David took them to the opera house for a music event that all these children were performing at. So this relationship with Haberfield is five years old now. Yeah.
And Richard Gill thankfully sent David on this mission to mentor our music teachers and students up at our school. So it was just so fortuitous that we had this opera guy in David who would then write this musical for us. And we have it on offer. Instead of doing The Lion King or Oliver...
You can do E equals MC squared at your school if you approach Old Australia and Cairns, who are on the web, of course.
Yes, Noel Pearson is director of the Cape York Partnership, good to great schools, north of Cairns. So much science going on up there, and yes, 46% of Australia is in the tropics, which is why Susan Lawrence is so busy with international connections, looking after the forests in the north. She's Professor of Tropical Ecology at James Cook University in Cairns.
Could you take me to the Dane Tree and go to the place where you've got this huge crane and whether you actually go up in it?
Yes, we do have a wonderful crane and it makes it one of the most unique rainforests in the Southern Hemisphere. And I do get to go up in it and it's the most glorious experience. And tell me what happens? Oh, can I first tell you that as a rainforest biologist who spent their life in rainforests, we look at the forest always from the bottom and we're missing out on where most of the action is.
And so when you get up in the crane and you start to see the rainforest from above, it completely changes your perspective of how that forest is functioning.
And you see the canopy there. And when you look down, what are you actually looking for? What do you see as a scientist?
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Chapter 3: What is the significance of the disappearing Y chromosome in human evolution?
Or when we're working up there, we generally can be up there for a couple of hours at a time. Some people get seasick. I've never experienced that. But I think when you're writing a lot of notes and it's moving, perhaps that's why.
For those who don't know this area, how big is the Daintree Forest?
It's quite a hard one to answer because you've got to work out where you're going to cut it off. So the Daintree National Park itself was the largest lowland rainforest national park. And so that was 50,000 hectares. But that's now continuous with parks that go up almost to Cooktown and then south past to Port Douglas.
That's a size, yes.
So it's probably 150,000 hectares.
And what's its health like? Because you're involved with restoration.
Okay, so we've had a long history of deforestation in the region that started with logging in the 1890s and then that led on to an expansion of agriculture for dairy predominantly and other kind of crops. And that's really focused on the flatlands and on the very good agricultural soils. So we've lost a part of what could have been the most productive part of that ecosystem.
North of the Daintree River, there hasn't been a lot of deforestation, but predominantly we're focusing on some in the Daintree, but also in the uplands and lowlands to the south.
And what do you do to restore a forest on that scale?
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Chapter 4: How does the SRY gene influence sex determination in humans?
smacking your funny bone and you're going to go, oh, and you hold your arm to your body.
Oh, that's really annoying.
Chapter 5: How can genetic exceptions affect athlete categorization in sports?
That hurts, but like, I'm okay. It's, you know, we can get over it. I'm just frustrated. So that was the level of discomfort that we were trying to introduce to our crickets. And that's pretty well what we saw, we think.
And what that tells us is that these are very unlikely to be kind of hardwired robotic sort of reflexes, the kinds of things that for a long time, we thought that's all that insects were really capable of. And so instead that starts to suggest that there's something more going on. And we think it's reasonable at this stage to think that that something more might be feeling. Why crickets?
I think there are two broad reasons. Crickets are an excellent system for this kind of question. One is that crickets are a very old group of insects. They're members of an evolutionarily ancient group. So they arose quite early in the tree of life.
So if we do find cool, interesting capacities in these insects, it suggests that similar abilities might be also present in all of the other millions of species of insect that we see today. The other reason is because crickets are kind of like the cow or the pig of the insect world. So they are heavily domesticated the world over.
And we rear them, we farm them in their hundreds of millions, and that's projected to grow very, very rapidly into the future. We use them for things like aquaculture, so feeding to fish, and as alternate sources of protein.
So it makes sense as a bit of a priority that we'd like to know if they do have welfare interests, if their lives can go better or worse for them, because we're interacting with them at a massive scale.
But the crickets that you used in your study... What happened to them after the tests were done and finished?
So we are mostly a behaviour lab. So we work with these whole animals and we ask them all sorts of questions and watch them behave. So these particular crickets, once they did the kindness to participate in our experiments, they just lived out the rest of their lives for a month or two, had all the food and water they wanted, had access to...
their buddies if they needed it in our cages in the lab and they lived out the course of their natural lives. And that's something we've actually always done because I can't do it unless it's absolutely necessary. We just actually find it too hard to euthanise insects.
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Chapter 6: What are the implications of testing for genetic variations in athletes?
And, of course, we've got the white cockatoos, which know how to open wheelie bins. They copy each other and learn from each other. Adaptation.
Yes, exactly. Those are strong selection pressures in terms of having a really big effect on the environment. And so we really should try to understand how are we affecting populations, how are we affecting biodiversity of the whole ecosystem.
And you can tell that by taking your knowledge and going from the cities out into the wild. And doing a comparison, like Darwin did.
Exactly. How are they behaving and how do they look and what's their morphology in the wild? And how can we compare that to what they're doing in the cities?
Pamela Yeh, Professor of Evolutionary Biology at University of California, Los Angeles.
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Chapter 7: What challenges exist in understanding sex chromosome complexities?
And so back to Cairns, northern Queensland, and another reminder of the essential ability, knowing how to look at something and see a pattern or structure that most might miss. Here's a leading archaeologist at James Cook University.
Ariana Lambrides. Greek. My dad is Greek and my mum is Scottish, but my name is principally Greek.
Well, Scottish is almost Greek, isn't it?
They might agree to disagree on that one.
One problem, Arianna, and I found this when I was looking down a microscope, supposing to see what other people saw in that kind of haze or blob of something, whatever it is. I could never differentiate, and they could do so almost immediately. Now, I find the same sort of thing when I look at samples. Your wonderful rooms here are full of drawers of samples of parts of fish.
Now, I can't tell one from the other, but then you've got to add another difficulty of trying to work out whether it's got ancient human associations. When you are just walking around on a coastline or somewhere like that, how do you actually differentiate between what's important and what isn't?
Well, for us as archaeologists, we're interested in people's relationships with those fish. So we're looking at ancient campsites, middens. These are accumulations of shell and bone and stone. And these are places that people return to over thousands of years. So this is the kinds of signatures that we're looking for to give us that really rich record of people's interactions with fish.
While I do like walking along the beach and collecting shells that that roll in from the waves. We're not necessarily going there, though of course you can recover archaeological remains from submerged archaeological sites, and that's a whole other story, but we're looking for very specific contexts to be able to find these remains.
Where recently have you been walking to look?
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