Speaking with a professor about the evolution of plants, terraforming planets and extinction events

Speaker 1 Picture this. You're a rising consultant shaping a company's future.
You're an entrepreneur seeing an opportunity and seizing it. Or you're an investment banker advancing the world of finance.

Speaker 1 To get there, it won't be easy, but you never wanted easy. It's not for everyone, but you're not everyone.

Speaker 1 Invest in your tomorrow. Search London Business School Graduate Masters now.

Speaker 3 T'was a cold winter's night and without any heat. I wore bombas socks so they'd warm up my feet.
Yay, my feet cried. These socks are the best.
So cushy and warm, I can finally rest.

Speaker 3 But don't rest, I said. There's more, if you please.
Bombus also makes underwear, slippers, and tees. And for each thing you purchase, they donate one new to someone who needs it so they're cozy too.

Speaker 3 Everybody deserves to feel good all the time. So gift bombas this season.
That's the end of this rhyme. Go to bombus.com/slash audio and use code audio for 20% off your first purchase.

Speaker 2 If this is your first episode, consider going back to an earlier podcast to familiarize yourself with the lore of this podcast. I'm looking out over a navy Limerick City from my office window.

Speaker 2 It's only half four and things are getting dark.

Speaker 2 Fairly soon, there'll be a curtain of bastard rain, which is

Speaker 2 a dense mist.

Speaker 2 A dense freezing mist. There's very little sunlight.
Even in the daytime, everything's purple.

Speaker 2 And sunsets aren't powerful anymore. They're kind of pink.
Because in November, the earth is tilting at a queer angle.

Speaker 2 So the sun, the sun has to pass through more atmosphere and it just it scatters more blue wavelengths so that's why the sky is

Speaker 2 not even the sky the general vibe is is purple and blue and there's very little bird sounds you're not hearing the sounds of birds chirping anymore the starlings are gone they're gone off for their winter roast and everything is about decay the leaves are on the ground the trees are all spindly and silhouette and there's an icy chill coming in.

Speaker 2 We'll have that in a couple of weeks. And just a few days back back it was Halloween, which comes from the much earlier Irish seasonal celebration known as Sowhan.

Speaker 2 And we can see this written down in the 11th century, in the 10th century. But the story goes is that there's a cave up in Ross Common called Onegat Cave.

Speaker 2 And this is the Hellmoat. It's a portal to the Otherworld.
The veil between our world and the other world is very thin

Speaker 2 and horrible monsters and demons or whatever you want to call them escape from this cave and they maraud the land and strip it bare that night and then the next morning everyone wakes up and everything's gone.

Speaker 2 There's no leaves, things are laid bare by frost, there's no insects, there's no animals and that's that's really what Halloween is.

Speaker 2 It's a big story about about winter in the absence of writing. It's a story about ecology, about biodiversity, and I love that it still rings true.

Speaker 2 I love that I can look out on the 4th of November and see the land stripped bare by winter. Because

Speaker 2 as dark as it is, as ugly as it is, as unpleasant as it is, it's what's supposed to happen. It's necessary.
And I love the challenge every single year.

Speaker 2 to find meaning in all that darkness because this is a tough time of year. It's a tough time of year for our mental health.

Speaker 2 A lot of people, myself included, don't respond well to that lack of sunlight.

Speaker 2 To the ugliness, to the ugliness that's out there. It is.
November is not aesthetically beautiful. You have to really search for that aesthetic beauty.

Speaker 2 If you get a bit of snow and frost and it twinkles, fair enough, that's aesthetically beautiful. But I'm looking out at underpants right here, lads.
The shriveled up testicles of God.

Speaker 2 That's what November is.

Speaker 2 But I have a choice in that. I could allow myself to be depressed by how bleak everything is, or I could see it as a challenge, a challenge to find meaning and beauty in it.

Speaker 2 And that's what I do every single year. And there's laws of meaning and beauty in winter.
And one of the best ways to access that beauty, it's through science.

Speaker 2 It's through understanding what winter is. It's through understanding ecosystems and biodiversity.
This week's podcast is

Speaker 2 my annual Science Week podcast, which I've done,

Speaker 2 I think every year of this podcast, I've done a Science Week podcast in November. And every Science Week I get to speak to an expert in their field about an area that they're very passionate about.

Speaker 2 And it's a wonderful privilege and that's why I love doing Science Week. But this year's Science Week 2025, it's running from the 9th to the 16th of November.

Speaker 2 It's the 30-year anniversary of Science Week. So Science Week has been going for 30 years.
And there's just, there's loads of free events up and down Ireland, right?

Speaker 2 In libraries, colleges, schools for everyone. It's about accessibility and democratizing science.

Speaker 2 It's not just for little kids who might become scientists, but It's for adults like me who are just curious, curious people who want to learn and find out about the world around them through the language of science so wherever you are in Ireland I guarantee you there's going to be a science week event near you it'll be free it'll be fascinating and if you're struggling with November it will give quite a lot of meaning to November there's an entire week in November where there's free science events for you to go to and engage with Well we all wait for things to get a little bit Christmassy, let's be honest.

Speaker 2 Alright,

Speaker 2 we're all waiting for things to get a small bit Christmassy.

Speaker 2 We want Christmas lights and Christmas songs, that artificial injection of merriment that we need at the end of November and December because it's bleak.

Speaker 2 But right now, we've got nothing because Halloween just happened and we're waiting for the Christmas stuff. So you've got Science Week, okay? You've got Science Week right now.

Speaker 2 So that's starting on the 9th. And my Science Week guest this year is Professor Jennifer Meckle Wayne

Speaker 2 from Trinity College up in Dublin. And Jennifer is a paleobotanist.
She's a world-renowned expert in paleobotany. She's published a book called The Evolution of Plants.

Speaker 2 She's been involved in incredibly important research on plant evolution and also how

Speaker 2 plants have changed our atmosphere. over the years and have terraformed earth.
And the theme of this year's science week because it's the 30th anniversary is then today

Speaker 2 and tomorrow and paleobotany is perfect for that theme because it shows how plants changed the planet in the past how they record atmospheric change today

Speaker 2 and how they can guide climate action for the future so myself and jenny chatted about Paleobotany, ecology, biodiversity. We had a wonderful, wonderful chat.

Speaker 2 And most importantly, and I try to do this every single science week, I'm speaking to an expert, a professor, someone who has dedicated their life to research and paleobotany.

Speaker 2 And I just have to be mindful around that, that

Speaker 2 because I didn't have a great time in school, I have to be mindful around it, that

Speaker 2 to approach this situation with playfulness and curiosity. and to ask the silly questions, to ask the silly questions,

Speaker 2 the stuff that I got killed for in school, asking too many silly questions. Well, now I'm an adult, and silly questions have value.
There's no such thing as a silly question. I think what's silly is

Speaker 2 not asking the question you'd like to ask

Speaker 2 because you're scared of looking stupid. That's what silly is.
That's silliness. There's no such thing as silly questions.

Speaker 2 So, anyway, here is the wonderful chat that I had with the incredibly sound Professor Jenny Jenny Meccle Wayne.

Speaker 4 So, paleobotany is the study of fossil plants, and

Speaker 4 we have different paleobotanists. Some people kind of look at shallow time over the last just few million years.

Speaker 4 I study what I call deep time, and so I look at study fossil plants all the way back to about 450 million years ago.

Speaker 5 So, one thing I'm very curious about, right, is mass extinction events.

Speaker 5 And there's something I'd love to to run by you because I would need to know if it's just some bullshit I heard on the internet, right?

Speaker 5 I was looking at

Speaker 5 so I heard that all the coal that we're burning today, all this coal that's caused so much damage to the environment and released so much carbon, that this coal started during a giant extinction event of trees like 390 million years ago and that

Speaker 5 these trees couldn't decompose because fungus didn't exist that could decompose them. Is that a thing that happened?

Speaker 5 Yeah,

Speaker 4 it is, absolutely. So, yeah,

Speaker 4 we know that there were at least five of these events called mass extinction events. And it's when an extraordinary number of the species on Earth go extinct and we try and understand what happened.

Speaker 4 But the one you're talking about happened at the end of the Devonian.

Speaker 4 And this was a time, if you you can imagine Ireland was actually in the southern hemisphere and we had some of the oldest fossils on earth and today you can find them in near Kilkenny in Kiltorken.

Speaker 4 They were called Archaeopteris hibernica and

Speaker 4 yeah basically that the extinction of those trees brought in these new forests which were called the coal forests or the coal swamp forests of the Carboniferous.

Speaker 4 And for basically 50, 60, 70 million years these forests grew.

Speaker 4 The big huge trunks fell down into the swamps because it was really tropical, wet, swampy and it's there's a hypothesis or this theory that the fungi weren't around to decompose those giant big trees made up of lignin.

Speaker 4 So what happens over time is that slowly instead of being

Speaker 4 oxidized back to the atmosphere and the carbon

Speaker 4 that was taken up goes back to the atmosphere.

Speaker 4 These giant peat swamps grew and grew and grew, locking up huge amounts of carbon. And

Speaker 4 what we've done as humans is that we've burned that carbon that took 50 million years to take up. And we've done it in 100 years.
So we've caused this kind of this

Speaker 4 imbalance, which is the kind of fundamental reason we have climate change now.

Speaker 5 I've described that before as

Speaker 5 we're haunting ourselves with the ghosts of trees.

Speaker 5 That that's it's it's

Speaker 5 this stuff was supposed to stay down there and we've brought it back up as coal. And just another kind of general simple question about paleobotany.

Speaker 5 We know the word paleontologist from Jurassic Park and stuff and

Speaker 4 friends.

Speaker 5 And friends, of course, as well.

Speaker 5 Like would you ever like I know that dinosaur poo, right, is coprolite, fossilized poo. Yeah.
Would you ever end up looking at a fossilized dinosaur poo because there might be a bit of a leaf in it?

Speaker 4 Oh, God, yeah.

Speaker 5 Like, that's when your job comes in.

Speaker 4 Yeah, but I hope it's more glamorous than just poo.

Speaker 5 Yes, yeah.

Speaker 4 Actually,

Speaker 4 I'll give you a great example. So, um, grass, so if you think of our lawns all over the world, the great grass savannas of Africa, the great grass steppes of Siberia.

Speaker 4 That plant is actually, the whole family is very recent.

Speaker 4 And the first find of grass in the fossil record was about 65 million years ago. It was in a dinosaur poo before dinosaurs went extinct at the Cretaceous-Tertiary mass extinction.

Speaker 5 Like bones.

Speaker 5 Take you know, bones are going to take a bit longer to decompose. Yeah.
A leaf, a leaf will decompose in a matter of weeks.

Speaker 5 So your field, you're trying to look for the fossils of things that are supposed to decompose and disappear really, really easily. Like, how does something like a leaf even end up being

Speaker 4 decomposed?

Speaker 5 Yeah, like, like, what's going on here?

Speaker 4 Like, yeah, yeah, it's a really good point. So I suppose, yeah,

Speaker 4 and

Speaker 4 we realize that at the moment, like, walking through autumn leaves, there's nothing nicer, you know, putting the wellies on and going through the leaves. But literally in a month, where are they?

Speaker 4 They're gone. They're decomposed.
So to be a fossil, to become a fossil,

Speaker 4 a plant has to drop one of its parts, a flower, a leaf, a twig, a trunk,

Speaker 4 and it has to be covered really quickly by something

Speaker 4 that will stop it from decomposing. And in the natural environment, what that would be would be

Speaker 4 a river bursts its bank. and it puts sediment over everything in the forest floor.

Speaker 4 So you're basically just capturing that moment in time, or a volcano will go off and ash will cover all the leaves on the fossil floor,

Speaker 4 on the, sorry, on the forest floor. So something that would cover it and take it out of,

Speaker 4 so actually being eaten and ending up in a coprodite, a dinosaur poo, or that would also stop it from being decomposed. So any of those kinds of events, that's, and then as a paleobotanist,

Speaker 4 I will kind of work in the fields. We'll use a hammer

Speaker 4 and a chisel. And if there is a fossil leaf there, when you crack it with the hammer, it's like opening a book.
And the fossil appears because it makes a line of weakness in the sediment.

Speaker 4 And you just crack it open and the fossil is there.

Speaker 5 And just.

Speaker 5 So let's just say we take a big giant lump of coal. Yeah.
Now that coal,

Speaker 5 that's a fossil of sorts, right?

Speaker 5 We know that that coal was once a tree, but I suppose what I'm asking you is, I don't, the coal isn't a very well-preserved tree, is it? Like, is a lump of coal still useful to you as a paleobotanist?

Speaker 5 Yeah, well, kind of.

Speaker 4 It's kind of difficult. So,

Speaker 4 okay, the coal is black. But in the coal, now and again, you get these things called concretions, and they're like a big

Speaker 4 light grey egg. and the coal miners used to go mad at these things because they'd ruined the coal production.
You'd have to stop.

Speaker 4 And what it is, it's like a mummified forest floor. And it's been formed because the coal, which was a peat swamp, you imagine a forest in a peat, just like in the Midlands and Ireland.

Speaker 4 and a wave of seawater will wash into the swamp because it's right by the coast. So now you've got salt, you know, you've got sodium and chlorine and the salt elements.

Speaker 4 They interact with the swamp waters and they form these kind of mummified floors and full of twigs and leaves and cones and anything, insects, anything that was on the forest floor.

Speaker 4 So we can actually study those,

Speaker 4 they're called concretions or coal balls and we can get a really incredible picture of what was growing, what the environment was like.

Speaker 4 We can even use it to reconstruct what the climate was like and what the atmosphere was like. But the coal itself, the black coal itself, is actually hard to work with.

Speaker 4 And the only things we could really look at in fossils are tiny little fragments of leaves or the pollen and the spores that plants produce.

Speaker 5 I'd said this to you before, right? But I know

Speaker 5 some of your work was about how Earth was terraformed effectively by plants, okay?

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 last year when we had the Aurora Borealis in Ireland and I could see the Aurora Borealis up in the sky in Limerick for the first time in my life, I went out for a walk and it was nighttime and I was looking up in the air going, oh my god, it's Aurora Borealis.

Speaker 5 I can't believe it. But as I was walking, I went past this old shopping centre.
It was a Celtic tiger shopping centre that hadn't, it had been left alone since 2007.

Speaker 5 And as I was looking up at the sky,

Speaker 5 illuminated by the street lights, a stark flew past me.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 5 But the stark, I was like, that stark looked like it had green socks on or green shoes.

Speaker 5 And I went, no, no fucking way. Like, that's not possible.
That's not, like, I saw, I know, I definitely saw what I saw, but like, there has to be a rational explanation.

Speaker 5 A stark was not wearing boots or socks. So I ended up going on Google Maps and looking at this particular Celtic tiger shopping centre.
And what I found was where the foundations were.

Speaker 5 Over the course of about 15 years, there was a rainwater lake had just formed. A very, very, very unhealthy lake.
It's in a concrete foundation and it was bright green.

Speaker 5 So, what had happened is the stork had gone into this green Celtic tiger foundation lake and on its legs was actually cyanobacteria.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 I only learned about cyanobacteria in that moment. Like, I was really happy because I'm like, I can't believe I'm actually have to find an irrational explanation for a stork with green socks.

Speaker 5 But then I ended up down the cyanobacteria rabbit hole. First off, I I was disappointed because chances are it's not very healthy for the stork.
It's quite poisonous to the stork.

Speaker 5 But then I learned that cyanobacteria is one of the most important organisms in the history of life as we know it. And this

Speaker 5 bacteria, I don't know how many million years ago you'd know, created oxygen. Can you tell us about that, about the great oxygenation event?

Speaker 4 Yeah, it is incredible. As soon as he started talking about, yeah, the cyanobacteria-filled lake, yeah, it made me think about just imagine the earth when there's nothing green on it.

Speaker 4 So just a bare earth with no soil, no plants, no algae, nothing green.

Speaker 4 And this was Earth before complex life evolved on land.

Speaker 5 Was there what you'd call life even before this greenness? Was there stuff there that was alive?

Speaker 4 Yeah, so so there was microorganisms with billions of years of just um fire and bacteria and new bacteria and just very simple organisms but they're not multicellular um like like we are or like most most organisms on on earth but the cyanobacteria were so important they're actually

Speaker 4 some of our first evidence for that life had evolved and they appear in these structures which are like these sediment towers and they're called stromatolites.

Speaker 4 Today, you find them in, very rarely on Earth, in places like Shark Bay in Australia.

Speaker 4 And what the cyanobacteria do is they trap sediment in a kind of a nice shore, like seashore type environment, where there's a muddy shore, kind of like Dublin Bay.

Speaker 4 And they would, they'd form a layer of green slime, like the green slime of the stork's boots.

Speaker 4 and then a layer of sediment would build on top and then a layer of green slime and they basically build these towers And the reason paleobotanists are really interested in them is that they're the first evidence on Earth of photosynthesis.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 these

Speaker 4 little cyanobacteria would take in carbon from the atmosphere,

Speaker 4 use the sun's energy, convert it into carbohydrates, and build these whole little communities. But the byproduct is oxygen.

Speaker 4 And over long geological time, oxygen went from basically zero percent, so we would have all died in that atmosphere, to suddenly you start to get trace levels of oxygen.

Speaker 4 And this production of oxygen in itself caused an extinction event of all the organisms that were anaerobic. They basically couldn't survive with oxygen around.

Speaker 4 But it was so important for our where we are today in this world full of life, animals, plants, fungi, because we need oxygen for survival.

Speaker 5 So like, is it fair to call that terraforming?

Speaker 5 When the cyanobacteria created

Speaker 5 a photosynthesis and oxygen, is that terraforming?

Speaker 4 I think it is because my definition, well, like, not mine, but I would say the definition of terraform would be transformation of the Earth.

Speaker 4 And of course, it's used in science fiction. But.

Speaker 5 Yeah, because I'm just thinking of Mars. What I'm thinking about is

Speaker 5 like even, I think it was over the summer, NASA. Now, I know NASA always released this type of information, but NASA found

Speaker 5 stains on a rock on Mars, which

Speaker 5 they say

Speaker 5 may suggest ancient bacteria. That's what it might suggest.
They're very excited about these stains on a rock on Mars.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 is there.

Speaker 5 This is a really ignorant question, but I have to ask it, right? And I hate asking this question about anything.

Speaker 4 And I probably won't be able to answer, but let's see.

Speaker 5 Your thing is looking into deep time, millions and millions of years into the past, right? And some people would say, what's the point? How is it relevant now?

Speaker 5 And one practical application I can think of is if you're studying how Earth was terraformed, a lot of people are thinking, what if one day we need to go to Mars and try and make oxygen happen in Mars?

Speaker 5 And that makes me think that the work that you're doing is highly relevant when it comes to trying to apply that now.

Speaker 4 No, no, I don't think so. So, well,

Speaker 4 I kind of think there's two answers. I think science

Speaker 4 is important to understand the world without any

Speaker 4 application.

Speaker 4 Like, I do fundamentally believe that, that... I just want to understand the past.
I want to know how I got here, how the world ended up like this. So I think that the kind of pursuit of

Speaker 4 truth and understanding, I think, is really important. But then there's the other side, the applied side.
And

Speaker 4 actually,

Speaker 4 a lot of paleobotanists

Speaker 4 have been on these various Mars teams, moon teams, exploration of other planet teams, because the kind of science we use,

Speaker 4 it's not my area, but the science we use to try and

Speaker 4 prove or

Speaker 4 was that little dot life, or was that a bubble,

Speaker 4 which is abiogenic, so it's not biotic. We'd use things like you know, chemistry, carbon isotopes, and the kind of tools you use to understand a fossil plant

Speaker 4 would be the same tools that

Speaker 4 Martian scientists would use to understand, okay, is that was that water? Was that sediment evidence of running water, or or was that structure or that smear?

Speaker 4 Was that really potentially a bacteria or something else? So, in that way, there is a crossover between astrobiology and paleobotany.

Speaker 4 But they're typically, the paleobotanists who study these type of things are really, they really are deep time.

Speaker 4 So, they'd be working between, you know, 2.4 billion years ago, the great oxygenation event, and maybe the evidence of the first land plants about 550 million years ago.

Speaker 4 And my kind of science comes in after that. So I'm kind of shallow in a way.
550 million years to the present day.

Speaker 5 That's what I want to know. Yeah, because

Speaker 5 we're thinking about this like deep time.

Speaker 5 Where is your jurisdiction? At what point do you,

Speaker 5 I mean, and again, it's the wider question. And I ask this to every single scientist I speak to is

Speaker 5 the sense of knowing where your lane is and how difficult that is when you that you're working effectively within biodiversity.

Speaker 5 You're looking at ancient plants, but we know that ancient plants had a relationship with the atmosphere, with the sun, had a relationship with animals, and you knowing when to stop.

Speaker 4 Oh, yeah, that's a good question.

Speaker 5 How do you know when to stop? I mean, how do you put a shorter on your curiosity?

Speaker 5 Going, I'm looking at a flower here that's millions of years ago, and I want to know about what pollinated this before bees existed. Yeah,

Speaker 4 gosh, that's a really good question, actually. And I think, in a way, scientists,

Speaker 4 we are very lucky because we do have freedom in our careers to decide where to put the

Speaker 4 where to put the barriers, you know. So, we have freedom to define what we want to do and what questions we want to ask.
Now, obviously, it's you have to be able to fund your work with you know

Speaker 4 funding agents and grants.

Speaker 4 But I suppose the questions we ask are very much determined by

Speaker 4 our passion and our curiosity.

Speaker 4 But we have to make it relevant as well, because we can't, you know, so that there's kind of two sides to science.

Speaker 4 There's that basic fundamental science where you're just letting your curiosity drive you. But then

Speaker 4 you do have, if you're using public money, you also have to make it relevant. So we kind of, as scientists, kind of, we kind of balance that.

Speaker 4 I don't think you could make a

Speaker 4 deliver a public good or something of relevance and something applied unless you had that fun, that kind of innate curiosity that's driving you to ask these kind of crazy questions.

Speaker 4 Like, what was happening 400 million years ago? And if I understand something about how soil was made and the early earth, will it help me to say anything about the future or today?

Speaker 2 Okay, let's have a little pause now. A little ocarina pause in the chat with the magnificent Professor Jenny McElwain.

Speaker 2 I don't have an ocarina this week. Let's not get into that, but what I do have,

Speaker 2 instead of playing an ocarina, I'm going to hit myself into the head with a book, The Collected Poems of Patrick Kavanagh, who was

Speaker 2 a magnificent poet from Managin.

Speaker 2 Brilliant book about

Speaker 2 About Kavanagh.

Speaker 2 There's a brilliant biography about Kavanagh, Brendan Beaheen and Flanner Brian and their drinking days up in Dublin. It's called Dead as Dorna's by Anthony Cronin.
Wonderful book.

Speaker 2 But Kavanagh was a serious poet.

Speaker 2 I don't want to get too much into Patrick Kavanagh because I won't stop talking about him. I'll do a Patrick Kavanagh podcast at some point.
But right now,

Speaker 2 let's just read a little bit.

Speaker 5 Do you know what?

Speaker 2 No, I'm going to hit myself into the head with his book.

Speaker 2 And then you're going to hear some adverts for some bullshit. I I don't know what you're gonna hear an advert for.

Speaker 2 I'm gonna hit myself into the head with Patrick Havana's collected poems, and then afterwards, I might read a little bit of one of his poems. How does that sound? Alright.

Speaker 2 Oh!

Speaker 2 See, it's one of these fucking new penguin classics, you know, where they don't even bother putting a decent cover on it. So

Speaker 2 very papery, very rubbery.

Speaker 2 A very flaccid book.

Speaker 2 And you'd think hitting yourself into the head with the floppy books, that's far worse than hitting yourself into the head with a hard book. I'd take a hard book any day.
Flappy books.

Speaker 2 See, they pick up speed. It's the spring.

Speaker 2 Oh!

Speaker 1 Picture this. You're a rising consultant shaping a company's future.
You're an entrepreneur seeing an opportunity. and seizing it.
Or you're an investment banker advancing the world of finance.

Speaker 1 To get there, it won't be easy, but you never wanted easy. It's not for everyone, but you're not everyone.
Invest in your tomorrow. Search London Business School Graduate Masters now.

Speaker 6 You've worked hard to build your business.

Speaker 2 Simply Safe helps you protect it.

Speaker 6 With Simply Safe for Business, AI-powered cameras watch over your entry points and instantly alert live monitoring agents. They can deter intruders before they get inside.

Speaker 6 It's protection built for growing companies. 24-7 monitoring, no contracts, and a 60-day money-back guarantee.
To get 60% off your new system, go to simplysafe.com/slash podcast.

Speaker 6 That's simply safe.com/slash podcast for 60% off. There's no safe like SimplySafe.

Speaker 7 We live in a culture obsessed with dieting, weight loss, and exercise. And that can make eating disorder behaviors easy to miss.

Speaker 7 But the reality is, eating disorders are serious mental illnesses that take a major toll on your health and your life. But recovery is possible.
Eating disorders are more common than you might think.

Speaker 7 Chances are you know someone who is struggling with one, or maybe you're struggling yourself. If you're concerned about an eating disorder in yourself or a loved one, I want to introduce you to EQIP.

Speaker 7 Equip is a fully virtual, evidence-based eating disorder treatment program that helps patients achieve lasting recovery at home.

Speaker 7 Every EQIP patient is matched with a multidisciplinary care team that includes a therapist, dietician, medical provider, and mentors.

Speaker 7 And you get a personalized treatment plan that's tailored to your unique goals and challenges. Equip treats patients of all ages and all eating disorder diagnoses.

Speaker 7 It's covered by insurance, and there's no wait list. If you think that you or a loved one could be struggling with an eating disorder, don't wait to get help.
Visit equip.health to learn more.

Speaker 7 That's equip.health.

Speaker 8 Hey guys, let me let you in on a little secret. I've obviously turned staying into bed into an art form.

Speaker 8 It's my happy place, it's my shopping sanctuary, and honestly, it's the perfect place to hang out with all my favorite people.

Speaker 8 So join me and some of the most interesting people I know for shopping, some laughs, and maybe a few secrets, all from the comfort of my bed. The best part, you can watch from your bed.

Speaker 8 My show, In Bed with Paige DeSorbo, returns Monday, November 17th at 8 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on Amazon Live.
Just open Prime Video on your TV and search Amazon Live to cozy up.

Speaker 8 Because why get out of bed if you don't have to?

Speaker 6 Why choose a sleep number smart bed?

Speaker 4 Can I make my site softer?

Speaker 9 Can I make my site firmer?

Speaker 5 Can we sleep cooler?

Speaker 6 Sleep number does that. Cools up to eight times faster and lets you choose your ideal comfort on either side.
Your sleep number setting. Enjoy personalized comfort for better sleep night after night.

Speaker 6 It's our Black Friday sale. Recharged this season with a bundle of cozy, soothing comfort.
Now only $17.99 for our C2 mattress and base plus free premium delivery. Prices higher in Alaska and Hawaii.

Speaker 6 Check it out at a sleepbumber store or sleepbumber.com today.

Speaker 10 Diversify revenue streams and sell your training through courses, communities, memberships, digital downloads, or other learning experiences, all supported on one platform.

Speaker 10 Education might be only one part of your broader business model, but we'll make sure it's running as smoothly as the rest of your operation.

Speaker 10 To learn more about how you can reduce churn and drive revenue with learning, visit thinkific.com. T-H-I-N-K-I-F-I-C.com.
Built for the business of learning.

Speaker 2 All right, that was the Ocarina pause. I hit myself into the head with the collected poems of Patrick Kavanaugh.
You'd have heard some adverts for some stuff.

Speaker 2 Let's read a little bit of Kavanagh, his poem, Stony Grey Soil, from the 1940s.

Speaker 2 When is that poem from? That's from the 40s, I believe, yeah.

Speaker 2 I'll read you a little excerpt.

Speaker 2 Stony Grey Soil.

Speaker 2 You told me the plough was immortal. O green life conquering plough, your mandrel stained, your coulter blunted in the smoothly field of my brow.

Speaker 2 You sang on steaming dung hills, a song of cowards brood.

Speaker 2 You perfumed my claws with weasel itch. You fed me on swinish food.

Speaker 2 You flung a ditch on my vision of beauty, love and truth. Oh stony grey sil of Manahan, you burgled my bank of youth.

Speaker 2 And I love that poem. It's just

Speaker 2 it's just Kavanagh.

Speaker 2 Kavanagh walked like he... I don't want to get into Patrick Kavanagh too much

Speaker 2 He was a bogger poet he was a poet from fucking Monaghan

Speaker 2 in the 30s and 40s

Speaker 2 and he walked to Dublin barefoot

Speaker 2 and the kind of middle class posh people in Dublin

Speaker 2 they treated him like it like a noble savage like he wasn't even human he was this bog creature

Speaker 2 and that poem is him him going to Dublin and seeing like a city

Speaker 2 and like multiple pubs and pints and women and having crack

Speaker 2 and going, fucking Manahan, Manahan, I stayed in you too long. Why didn't I come to Dublin 10 years earlier? I don't want to be getting into Paddy Kavanagh.

Speaker 2 There's a bronze statue of him up in the, I think it's the Grand Canal up in Dublin. It's this lovely statue because it's just, it's a bench.

Speaker 2 It's a bench and sitting on this bench is this green bronze statue and that's the statue of Patty Kavanagh. And when I was a young man,

Speaker 2 when I was about 23, and I'd be

Speaker 2 writing skits for fucking RTE

Speaker 2 and didn't think I was good enough,

Speaker 2 couldn't believe I was on television writing comedy, couldn't believe it.

Speaker 2 I used to go and sit beside that statue of Patrick Kavanagh, and when no one was looking, I'd suck

Speaker 2 his bronze hat. I'd try and suck inspiration out of his bronze forehead.
And it tasted like sucking a giant kine. I loved it.

Speaker 2 Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page, patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast.

Speaker 2 If you enjoy this podcast, if this podcast brings you mirth, merriment, entertainment, distraction, whatever the fuck as you listen to this podcast,

Speaker 2 please consider paying me for the work that I do. This podcast is my full-time job.
This is how I earn a living. And this podcast is only possible because of listener funding.

Speaker 2 So all I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month. That's it.
And if you can't afford that, if you don't have that money, don't worry about it. You don't have to pay.

Speaker 2 You can listen for free because the person who is paying is paying for you to listen for free. So everybody gets the exact same podcast and I get to earn a living.

Speaker 2 It's a wonderful model based on kindness and soundness. Patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast.
And if you are becoming a patron, first off, become a paid patron.

Speaker 2 Don't press that free patron button that just gives Patreon your data. And also, if you're signing up, don't do it on the iPhone app because Apple will take 30%.
Do it on a browser somewhere.

Speaker 2 Alright, a couple of gigs.

Speaker 2 I just did my last gig of the year there at the weekend Halloween night in Mead. A really wonderful gig.
Mead is a beautiful place.

Speaker 2 So I have no more gigs this year.

Speaker 2 I don't want to be doing live podcasts in November and December and the main reason is because of Christmas parties.

Speaker 2 Office Christmas parties, if they come along to a live podcast, can be really really destructive. I've had it once or twice so the best thing for me to do I just don't gig in November or December.

Speaker 2 But I will be gigging from the end of January 2026 onwards. So if you'd like to get some tickets as a little Christmas present for a friend, please do.

Speaker 2 On the 23rd of January, I'm in Waterford in the Theatre Royal. Wonderful Waterford.
Then

Speaker 2 up to February... What is that? The 2nd of February? I don't know the exact date, right? But it's in February.
I'm in Vicar Street. I'm in Vicker Street.
Is that a Wednesday night? Fucking great.

Speaker 2 Wednesday night gig in in Vicar Street there at the start of February. That gig there is nearly sold out, I have to say.

Speaker 2 So if you do want to come to Vickers Street, my Vicar Street gigs are fantastic. Beautiful, lovely.
I always do them mid-week. I do'em on the days that no one else wants.

Speaker 2 I take Tuesdays and Wednesdays. No one else wants those days.
I want those days because it's a nice quiet gig. Then on the 12th, I've got Belfast, the Waterfront Theatre.

Speaker 2 That gig is also nearly sold out. So if you want to come and see me in Belfast at the Waterfront Theatre, get your tickets.
Galway in glamorous, glamorous leisureland. Let's go.

Speaker 2 15th there is Galway in Leisureland.

Speaker 2 Then Killarney. I'm in the INEC on the 28th of February.
I've complicated relationship with the INEC. I keep coming back.
What's my complicated relationship with the INEC?

Speaker 2 Lovely place, lovely venue, lovely staff. But

Speaker 2 the dressing room. So that gig in the INEC in Killarney, the dressing room is is just too far away from the stage.

Speaker 2 And it would mean me having to walk through the foyer of the hotel that's attached to the venue with a plastic bag on my head.

Speaker 2 And I don't do that in case there's tourists in the foyer who don't know who the fuck I am. And they just think I'm in ISIS.
They're like, oh, I'm in the hotel. Why is there a man here?

Speaker 2 And he's got a plastic bag on his head. This is this is strange.
I've had screaming Austrians, I've had Austrian people scream at me in hotel foyers

Speaker 2 while I'm on the way to my gig in the hotel. So the iNeck, yeah, the INEC there in Killarney's got a hotel attached to it.

Speaker 2 And the dressing room, it means me walking through the foyer, so I say, no, I'm not taking that dressing room. So I end up

Speaker 2 in a literal broom closet, like a Dracula,

Speaker 2 like a vampire. When I do that iNeck Killarney gig, I stand in a broom closet for an hour

Speaker 2 with the door closed and that's my dressing room. Which I don't mind to be honest.
I quite like it. I like the humility of it.
But

Speaker 2 yeah, I'd rather stand upright in a broom closet for an hour than risk Austrian tourists screaming at me because they think I'm in Isis. So that gig is the INEC in Killarney, is it?

Speaker 2 Then I'm in Carlo in March.

Speaker 2 Am I just finding that out now?

Speaker 2 Should we go go up to Carlow? Why not? What's the worst that can happen? Cork in March as well in the opera house there on the 26th of March.

Speaker 2 Fuck's sake.

Speaker 2 Limerick in April at the University Concert Hall, Limerick. Get your Christmas tickets for that, please, Limerick.
My own hometown. And then fuck it.

Speaker 2 Look, a huge tour of England, Scotland, and Wales in October 26th. It's a long way away, but still, some of those gigs are actually selling out already, and it's a year away.

Speaker 2 Brighton, Wales, Coventry, Bristol, Guildford, London, Glasgow, Gateshead, and Nottingham.

Speaker 2 2026, October. I'm coming and I cannot wait.
Those gigs, you see them on fan.co.uk forward slash blindby for the UK gigs and then for the other gigs.

Speaker 2 The blindbypodcast.ie, which is my own website, which is liable to crash if too many people go there. I'll be honest.
All right.

Speaker 2 Now let's get back to the chat about paleobotany with the utterly fascinating Professor Jennifer McElwain.

Speaker 4 Does that answer it? I'm not sure I answered it.

Speaker 5 It does. I'm trying to figure out, we'll say, what the questions I'm trying to ask is

Speaker 5 like

Speaker 5 soil, even soil, for instance. So soil isn't a plant, right? But how much of soil is your business?

Speaker 5 Ancient soil.

Speaker 4 Yeah, so

Speaker 4 I suppose my speciality is the atmosphere.

Speaker 4 So how plants...

Speaker 5 The atmosphere isn't plants.

Speaker 4 Exactly. So yeah, so

Speaker 4 if we want to understand the power of living plants mainly to change atmospheric composition, to change oxygen, to change carbon, to actually come up with some solutions for greenhouse driven climate change, you have to understand how plants terraform, how they change the atmosphere, and the habitability of the earth in the geological past.

Speaker 4 So, we know, like, from studying

Speaker 4 from the time that the first land plants came on earth, there was no soil, it was bare rock.

Speaker 4 But, little things like mosses and liverworts, and green slime, and lichen, and all these mad organisms that kind of are half fungi, half plants, half algae, they began to break down the bare rock and build an early crust.

Speaker 4 And then that crust became a shallow soil. And then that shallow soil became a deep soil.
And now suddenly you've got a whole new habitat.

Speaker 5 Like, like, just if you're talking about that early, early, because that's, I didn't know that. I didn't know that early soil was

Speaker 5 organisms breaking down rock. So if I was to hold this early soil in my hand, what would be the equivalent that I'd find now?

Speaker 4 Because I'm assuming it's not like brown like the earth we have now i i think the the equivalent to kind of get your head in the frame i think would would be look at a well a wall today so go on a walk look in an old wall a nice old granite wall and look what's growing on it how do those plants green or gravestones or gravestones exactly how do they do it how are they living okay they've got carbon in the atmosphere they've got sunlight energy but they need all these other things to live and they're just extracting it directly directly from the rock.

Speaker 5 So, are you telling me if I look at a gravestone and I see lichen on that gravestone, that that

Speaker 5 the roots of that are taken from the like the limestone or what granite or whatever it's on?

Speaker 4 Yes, but it doesn't have roots, so it's doing it even more spectacularly. Another good analogy would be a desert environment, so that's really harsh, not many things can live there.

Speaker 4 But often, if you go hiking in a desert environment, they have signs up saying, you know, stay on the trails. And you're probably thinking, why?

Speaker 4 What's the, I'm not going to do any damage if I come off the trail, but you will, because if you dropped a little drop of water onto a desert crust,

Speaker 4 what looks kind of browny, yellowy suddenly would rehydrate, and you'd see a diversity of organisms that can basically

Speaker 4 eke out an existence. And they're things that would have been around in the early Earth 500 million years ago and kind of changed, made

Speaker 4 elements

Speaker 4 like you know, that we need to grow and we need in our diets nutrients, basically. They'd make them biologically available.

Speaker 5 They're dormant in the desert?

Speaker 4 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4 For how long?

Speaker 4 Well, some things are incredible. Some plants, they're called, it's called poikulohydri.
So they have the capacity to completely dehydrate down to less than 5% water.

Speaker 4 And how do they do that? Because if you put a piece of lettuce in the freezer, it will, and you rehydrate it, it's just mush.

Speaker 4 But these organisms have the capacity to dehydrate and then rehydrate without bursting all their cells. And they can do it for,

Speaker 4 I think, probably the oldest is maybe on the order of maybe thousands of years. But most things can do it for hundreds of years.
Even if you go to the Burren, actually, in Anti-Claire.

Speaker 4 And you look at the ferns in the greikes, there's, you know, the kind of cracks.

Speaker 4 Sometimes you look at them and they're brown and they're not dead. they're just dehydrated.
And when it rains, they will rehydrate and they've got this capacity.

Speaker 4 And that's really interesting. That kind of takes you back to space travel.

Speaker 5 That's immediately what I was thinking about.

Speaker 5 I was thinking about if we were to bring food in space and you might be traveling for a long time, then you'd need to be looking at these things that can live for 900 years dehydrated.

Speaker 4 Exactly, yeah. Well, I think what's incredible, I mean, I talked to my students about this, you know, and teaching.
If you walk into a garden center and you're faced with a wall of packets of seeds,

Speaker 4 that is incredible because in every packet is a dehydrated living organism with all the potential. Once you put it, even if you put it in a pet on a

Speaker 4 saucer and add water or on a plate, it will germinate. Now, there's not, we don't have these monkeys in animals.
You know, you don't have, you can't go into a shop or into a.

Speaker 5 I think think the closest thing is you don't remember sea monkeys do you

Speaker 4 no

Speaker 5 they're a form of brine shrimp that were sold they were sold as toys when we were kids but they're a type of brine shrimp that were you could keep them in a packet like seeds yeah they would lay dormant for years and years on the shelf and then you put them into the a little tank they were for kids who weren't allowed to have fish tanks yeah and then they would emerge as tiny little life forms these tiny tiny little brine shrimp and that's the only thing i can think of that

Speaker 5 is like an uh

Speaker 5 alive and moving around. That's

Speaker 5 close to seeds. That's the only thing I can think of.

Speaker 4 But I suppose it's really interesting as a scientist to,

Speaker 4 you know, it's kind of really,

Speaker 4 it seems a bit out there. And, you know, why are you asking these questions? But it is really fascinating to understand how do they do it?

Speaker 4 You know, how do these plants that live in the most extreme environments, you know, the top of a mountain, low oxygen pressure, or

Speaker 4 at the edge of an Antarctic seashore with freezing temperatures and high salinity, how can they survive?

Speaker 4 And if you can understand that, you know, for the living world today, then you can apply that knowledge when you're studying fossils in the past and you can begin to kind of build up the story. Gosh,

Speaker 4 how did plants transform Earth from,

Speaker 4 you know,

Speaker 4 an environment that was just filled with bacteria and, you know, simple single-celled organisms to actually oxygenate the atmosphere and build soils and build habitats and engineer, you know, this bare earth to something thriving that then allowed other organisms, you know, to follow and to, you know, to produce what we have today, this incredibly biodiverse world.

Speaker 5 I heard that trees, trees caused an ice age. Is that true?

Speaker 4 It's a two-way thing. So partly, yes.
So living things

Speaker 4 shape the atmospheric composition and the atmosphere will affect what living things can thrive.

Speaker 4 So a lot of what I do is studying the interaction between the atmosphere and plants. And

Speaker 4 so,

Speaker 4 you know, how could trees cause an ice age? Well, if there's

Speaker 4 if trees are locking up lots and lots of carbon, like they did in the Carboniferous, and

Speaker 4 it's partly because maybe there weren't fungi to decompose that lignin in the wood, but it's

Speaker 4 also partly because it was really wet and hot time.

Speaker 4 And these swamp systems were just over the whole world.

Speaker 4 So if you've got loads of trees sucking up loads of carbon and that carbon isn't being released back to the atmosphere, then you can bring the carbon dioxide level so low that when it rains in the Arctic and the Antarctic,

Speaker 4 it will freeze and it will never thaw, and that's an ice age. But I don't think trees alone did that.
But

Speaker 4 you need a lot of trees and a lot of swamps to definitely contribute to causing an ice age, but not alone because there's other factors as well that are important.

Speaker 5 If you were given the power power tomorrow, okay,

Speaker 5 and like, because we know at the moment, like,

Speaker 5 the climate is warming, okay?

Speaker 5 It's really, really hot and it's dangerous. Yeah.

Speaker 5 Using only,

Speaker 5 we'll say natural methods, what would you like to see change in the world tomorrow if we were to cool the place down or to improve things?

Speaker 4 Oh, it's a hard question. Well, I think

Speaker 4 I think

Speaker 4 the power of biodiversity

Speaker 4 is incredible because we do know that

Speaker 4 in pristine

Speaker 4 wilderness areas,

Speaker 4 the soils

Speaker 4 and the vegetation itself in those really undisturbed ecosystems hold more carbon than

Speaker 4 any ecosystem where there's been a human intervention.

Speaker 5 That's mad. Why is that? So you mean a soil whereby you have a diverse so loads and loads of insects, a very diverse ecosystem, that soil will hold more carbon.

Speaker 4 Yeah. Why?

Speaker 5 As opposed to we'll say, I don't know, a field full of grass that a man has planted, that a human has planted.

Speaker 4 As soon as you disturb a natural environment,

Speaker 4 you're gonna lose lose things from it.

Speaker 4 And if you if you lose some biodiversity, then you lose some of the capacity of the biodiversity in the soil, which is doing all that good work of actually locking up carbon.

Speaker 4 And actually what we know from the data is that that we know we've added loads of carbon to the atmosphere, burning fossil fuels, burning coal, western industrialization.

Speaker 4 And you know, we're really trying now to stop that.

Speaker 4 But what's extraordinary is that one-third of the carbon that we have released has been taken up by the oceans.

Speaker 4 And one-third of the carbon we've released has been taken up by living ecosystems on lands, like you know, bogs,

Speaker 4 swamps, forests, grasslands, huge amount of grasslands, natural grasslands. So

Speaker 4 what we do understand is if you maintain and you restore biodiversity and nature,

Speaker 4 you maintain its ability to act like a sponge and take up carbon.

Speaker 4 So it's kind of like a win-win. If we have these policies that are positive for biodiversity, then we're also going to have a positive for

Speaker 4 climate because these areas are are going to be the ones that suck up carbon so even something like

Speaker 5 like i know the all-ireland patternator plan has been a really good success um my buddy collie collie who you might know because he works up in trinity collieenis yeah colliennis yeah collie

Speaker 5 oh god collie said something to me about six months ago which was the first piece of good news i've ever heard around the climate He was looking at the amount of patternators and basically

Speaker 5 this year

Speaker 5 in a month, he had seen more pollinators than he'd seen in the entire previous year.

Speaker 5 And he didn't, like, he doesn't have the data to go, this is exactly why. But his hunch was definitely, we're seeing the results of this all-Ireland parinator plan.

Speaker 5 We're seeing the results of local councils going, you know what, leave that roundabout alone or plant some natural wildflower, some native wildflower. And

Speaker 4 it's been so positive.

Speaker 5 I had a little patch up in my back garden. I'm talking six feet.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 5 And I planted proper native wildflower. Like,

Speaker 5 I didn't just get, I know sometimes when you go to the garden centre and get native wildflower, that it may not be native to here. It could be native to Poland or wherever it came from.

Speaker 5 But I got native to Limerick wildflower. Yeah.
And just in that six feet of garden. A year later, I was seeing insects that I'd never seen in my entire life.

Speaker 4 You're absolutely right. right and colleagues right.
I think the All-Ireland Pollinator Plan, which was

Speaker 4 developed by the National Biodiversity Data Centre and also Jane Stout, our VP of Biodiversity in Trinity,

Speaker 4 that has been so positive for biodiversity and also the follow-on no-mow May policy.

Speaker 4 Such a

Speaker 4 a simple intervention, don't mow your grass or plant a high diversity of wildflowers.

Speaker 4 And it's, you know, through their hard work, it has really been adopted and the buy-in from councils all over Ireland. And

Speaker 4 I think people are becoming familiar now with basically going past a roundabout and initially probably thinking, oh, that's messy, that looks unkempt, and realising, actually, no, this is so positive for biodiversity.

Speaker 4 Like in Trinity, we had a no-mo policy in the front. Sorry, there's a bit of a noise.
They just started mowing outside.

Speaker 4 But we had orchids that came up

Speaker 4 in front square that turned out to be exceptionally rare. And these orchids had obviously been in the soil with their friends.

Speaker 5 They were indigenous. Were they indigenous?

Speaker 4 No, no, actually, it turns out even more exciting that they are a new

Speaker 4 expansion probably of population of orchids from Wales that is now also present in Ireland, and we're actively studying those. But that was really extraordinary, this really rare orchid that comes up

Speaker 4 because we're not mowing the ground, not mowing the grass there in Trinity for a month.

Speaker 5 Just actually, because I used the word with the indigenous there, and I want to know about what that means in terms of plants and biodiversity. Like

Speaker 5 I went on a sycamore tree rabbit hole there two weeks ago

Speaker 5 because sycamores are everywhere in Ireland.

Speaker 5 And I was shocked to find out that like they're not from Ireland, that sycamores have been in Ireland and the UK, I think it's about 500 years. I think they came over with the monasteries.

Speaker 5 And what I ended up finding out was sycamores, they're from very high mountainous regions in Europe. And in the sycamores' natural environment, it has to, there's a lot of competition.

Speaker 5 It grows in large forests and

Speaker 5 it's very opportunistic. If a bit of sun comes through, the sycamore will grow.
But basically,

Speaker 5 because its environment is so tough, that's why it needed the Samara, the spinning seeds that could travel for a long distance. Sycamores come from a tough environment.

Speaker 5 But then when the sycamore came to Ireland, it didn't have the threats to its existence that it had in its indigenous environment. So when it came to Ireland, it thrived completely.

Speaker 5 Same with the UK, it thrived.

Speaker 5 But then I learned that the sycamore would now be considered native.

Speaker 5 It's part of the crack out there.

Speaker 5 It was once invasive, but now it's not. However,

Speaker 5 the amount of biodiversity that a sycamore holds, it's nothing compared to when it's in its indigenous environment, that sycamore is full of biodiversity, whether it be fungus or different insects or mammals that live in the tree.

Speaker 5 But then, when it comes here to Ireland, it only supports maybe 15 or 16 species.

Speaker 5 Yeah, and that completely changed how I'm like, oh, wow, I thought when I see sycamores, it's like, oh, lovely, I'm out in nature. And now I realize, no, this was once invasive, now it's native.

Speaker 5 But you're actually seeing a bit of biodiversity collapse when you see a sycamore, as opposed to

Speaker 4 an indigenous oak that would have once been so, in a way,

Speaker 4 it is like what is native, what is what is invasive, what is non-native, but not invasive. It's it's quite complex.
And I suppose we use a human construct for all of it because,

Speaker 4 you know, nature doesn't necessarily respect political boundaries. And we're an island, so we can kind of

Speaker 4 maybe more easily define what is native than other places. But typically, to be native, like we have over 1,200 species of plants,

Speaker 4 vascular plants, and then at least 800 mosses in the native Irish flora. You have to, as a plant or an animal, you have to have been evidenced to be continually present in Ireland

Speaker 4 since the last ice age. So over about the last 10,000 years.
Yeah, to be classified as native. And then we have two distinctions.
We have species which

Speaker 5 are, are,

Speaker 4 you know, they maybe have only recently arrived or arrived a thousand years ago, so technically they're not native, but they're also not invasive. So they're not damaging the local

Speaker 4 environment, the local habitats.

Speaker 5 What would stick out to you there as a big example of that now? What jumps out as this one is not indigenous, but it's doing grand.

Speaker 4 Yeah, the one that comes to mind is probably a bit obscure. So in all the hedgerows, we have this plant called Alexander.

Speaker 4 It's one of the earliest plants that comes out in the hedgerows all over Wicklow Wexford it's it's really smelly the Normans was it the Normans it was it was I think it was monastic oh okay yeah but it was came in as a cooking you know we used to cook it like a celery and oh it isn't native but it's accepted and now it's kind of part of the natural flora but then we also have plants

Speaker 4 and animals of course which are

Speaker 4 non-native and they're invasive and they have you know they they thrive so well because they haven't got a natural predator or a natural fungus that would keep them under check.

Speaker 4 And they are damaging to our local biodiversity. And we have programs, obviously, to try and keep those under check.

Speaker 5 Can I tell you one thing there that might interest you?

Speaker 5 So I was looking lows at

Speaker 5 two things. First off,

Speaker 5 giant hogweed, right? Yeah. One thing I found fascinating about giant hogweed is,

Speaker 5 like, I'm not a a big fan of giant hogweed because it's legitimately dangerous, you know?

Speaker 5 It can blind kids and stuff.

Speaker 5 But I went on to biodiversitymaps.ie. I think that's the name of the website.

Speaker 5 And I looked at the pattern of giant hogweed in Ireland. And I'm like, this fucking map reminds me of something else.
It was the map of the plantations.

Speaker 5 The plantations after the 1500s. So I started referring to

Speaker 5 giant hogweed as Protestant footsteps. Because if you look at the literal plantations, that's everywhere where the giant hogweed was.
And then you, and what it is, really is it's a map of wealth.

Speaker 5 So, where you had the Protestant descendancy and the gardens, they were the ones who fetishized this giant hogweed, and that's why you see that pattern.

Speaker 5 And then, another one, and I found this really fascinating. I started looking at Japanese knotweed, yeah.

Speaker 5 And so, Japanese knotweed, again, which is a big problem, that comes from volcanic soils in Japan.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 5 And it loves volcanic soils. And in those volcanic soils, there's heavy metals.
There's lead and mercury and stuff that comes out of volcanoes.

Speaker 5 And the Japanese knotweed grew in an environment where it can tolerate these otherwise toxic metals. But if you look at where...
the Japanese knotweed is thriving.

Speaker 5 I refer to this as Thatcher's footsteps and Reagan's footsteps. Everywhere where Reagan and Thatcher shut down industrial areas.

Speaker 5 So it's in the Rust Belt of America.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 5 Also, the east end of London, where you used to have petrol works, gas works, anything with heavy metals in the soil.

Speaker 5 When Reagan and Thatcher got rid of the industry there, you were left with toxic soils. And that's where the Japanese knotweed appears to be thriving.
Yeah. In

Speaker 5 toxic,

Speaker 5 the Japanese knotweed thinks it's in volcanic soil, but it's not.

Speaker 5 They had petrol works here.

Speaker 4 Yeah, it's amazing.

Speaker 4 You often get invasive plants following

Speaker 4 really harsh industrial landscapes. Also, you see the railway.

Speaker 5 So there's other ones.

Speaker 5 Sycamore is a railway one, too, actually.

Speaker 4 Yeah, so often I thought Anisha, you were going to say it maps along the railways in Ireland, but

Speaker 4 isn't it incredible really that there are,

Speaker 4 again, I know I'm biased about plants, but isn't it amazing that you know there are some plants that can live in the most toxic environments and they can thrive there and we call them phyto-remediators, so they can actually clean up the soil.

Speaker 4 And what they do is they'll take up all those horrible metals and mercuries, and they'll put it, they'll compartmentalize it, so they put it somewhere in their cell, which isn't toxic to them.

Speaker 4 They'll use that as an anti-herbivory defense. So anything that eats them will be killed or poisoned.

Speaker 5 Really? Okay.

Speaker 4 Yes. So they can use these heavy elements to their own benefit so they're not eaten.
They compartmentalize it so they can thrive. And

Speaker 4 we actually have a lot of plants that can be used to clean up these industrial sites. And so what you do is you grow the plants and you harvest the plants and incinerate them.

Speaker 5 Go away. So people are doing this.

Speaker 4 Yeah, and you can actually also use plants for,

Speaker 4 it's called phyto mining. So, you know, we have this big issue now with rare earth elements.
If we want to, you know,

Speaker 5 oh, go away, they can use plants to get like all these things that you have to dig into the earth.

Speaker 4 Like lithium and silicon and, you know, so you can, um there are plants which will take up these rare earth elements. They're tiny trace amounts in the rock.
The plants get them.

Speaker 4 They often use a fungal partner and they break down the bare rock, take up these elements and

Speaker 4 use them for their own purposes. But there is a potential to actually use these plants now for phyto mining.

Speaker 4 Probably not as it's going to yield as much as industrial mining, but it's a lot less harsh

Speaker 4 on the environment.

Speaker 5 Just another point that relates to that, because what I want to ask you next is...

Speaker 5 Like, I want to ask you about how maybe mythology or folklore might work alongside what you're doing. And what just jumped out at me there is.

Speaker 5 So there's the Schlive Mish Mountains down in Kerry, okay? Yeah, just beyond the Schlieve Miss, there's this area called Glaungelt, and Glaungelt means valley of madness, okay.

Speaker 5 And if you, in Irish mythology, this place pops up, and I'm talking stories that could go back a couple of thousand years.

Speaker 5 In Irish myth, this was a place where people went if they suffered mental illness of some description. Yeah, there used to be like King Sweeney.

Speaker 5 King Sweeney used to hear bells and think that he was a bird, And then finally he found peace living in the Valley of Madness, right? Down in Kerry.

Speaker 5 And this stayed and stayed in the mythology for years and years and years, right up until the 70s.

Speaker 5 People who would have had bipolar disorder would visit the Valley of Madness in Kerry and they would eat the watercress or they would drink from the well that's there.

Speaker 5 And then in the 90s, they studied the water in the well. and it had a shitload of lithium.

Speaker 4 I was just going to think, is it lithium?

Speaker 5 It was lithium. They found lithium there.
And the water crest specifically, this water crest was taking lithium out of the water.

Speaker 5 And then, when people were with, and lithium is used today, if someone has bipolar today, they would literally be prescribed lithium. So

Speaker 5 it's an example there of

Speaker 5 that story was there in the mythology. People knew it already.
They just couldn't express it in a scientific way.

Speaker 5 But because you're dealing with

Speaker 5 like, do you ever

Speaker 5 find anything from mythology or folklore which would help the work that you're doing in trying to understand ancient or older plants?

Speaker 4 Yeah,

Speaker 4 in my work,

Speaker 4 not at the moment, but I think it is so important. So, like, if I ever give,

Speaker 4 you know, a walk and talk, a botanical tour, or

Speaker 4 I would always try and, you know, read the books on the Irish folklore, the historical references on how these plants were used medicinally,

Speaker 4 culturally, in food, in divination. You know,

Speaker 4 it's so important because I think it connects us to the past. And I think you're absolutely right that, you know, in a way, botany was the, it was the early medicine.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 4 So

Speaker 4 it's absolutely our loss if we don't actually use these old cultural references and knowledge and incorporate them into modern science and use it as a guide to, you know, test hypothesis.

Speaker 4 Is there lithium? Can we use a x-ray to test the levels of lithium in these watercress plants? And that means it's also in the rot. What was the rot? You can work with the geologists.

Speaker 4 If you're studying what's called economic botany, so plants that have an economic value, so medicine, anti-cancer,

Speaker 4 you know, something for mental health, then

Speaker 4 a great source of information is actually to go to the cultural references. Like, for example,

Speaker 4 in herbarium in Trinity, we have about 500,000 dried plant specimens. The oldest specimens in the collection were from 17

Speaker 4 1728 and they were collected by a man called Threlkeld. And he was the first, I think, to record the Irish names of all of the

Speaker 4 plants. And he found the plants in the markets from the plant women.
And they would bring up the plants from their land up to market in Dublin.

Speaker 4 And in the Irish name is often, as well as the place, there can also be the use. And that links you back to folklore.
Yeah, so I think it's really important on so many levels

Speaker 4 to use this knowledge in multiple languages, because often you need to access it through the Irish language rather than what we would typically use in science, you know, which would be the formal scientific name in Latin or Greek.

Speaker 5 Because the other thing, too, is I was thinking of how

Speaker 5 somebody working in myth and folklore, or even just the names or the language, could consult with you. I mean, what's jumping out immediately for me is

Speaker 5 like I know that, so Mayo, Mayo means plain of yew trees, and I know that Derry means an oak wood.

Speaker 5 So they're in the names of places in Ireland are referring to forests that effectively no longer existed. Yeah.
But you're, of course, the best person to go to is you.

Speaker 5 I mean, to yourself, I mean.

Speaker 4 Yeah, yeah. So what you can do is

Speaker 4 you could, for these places like Dara.

Speaker 4 or Macdara, you know, all of these associations, you could actually take

Speaker 4 a core of peat or you could take find a little hollow of sediment in a limestone pavement and you take a core and often use a kind of a piston and the core could be maybe one meter long or five meters long and it gives you a record of sediment from anywhere between the last thousand years and the last ten thousand or fifteen thousand years and then what what we do and lots of my colleagues as well around Ireland around the world you would take a little bit of sediment, you'd put it into horrible acid, hydrofluoric acid, hydrochloric acid, and you'd extract out the pollen.

Speaker 4 And because we know what the pollen of an oak looks like, and we know what the pollen of a pine looks like, and the pollen of a sycamore, you can actually reconstruct the history of the place.

Speaker 4 The forest, were they open, were they closed, were they dominated by oaks, when did beech come in, is it native? And the whole vegetation history of that place can be reconstructed.

Speaker 5 And you can, and people as well, I'm assuming. Like,

Speaker 5 again, taking it back to myth and folklore, if I read the Lauer Gavala Aaron, that's written maybe 1500 years ago by monks, and it's their version of the history of Ireland. But they mention,

Speaker 5 I mean, they're using myth. They're saying the first people came from somewhere around Spain.

Speaker 5 And that's just the story we have in a book that's 1500 years old. But, I mean, would you not see plants from Spain then that could.
Do you know what I'm getting at?

Speaker 4 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 5 Do you ever see, like,

Speaker 5 do you ever look at the record and go, why is there a bunch of plants here from this other part of the earth? And does this tell us about human migration to Ireland a couple of thousand years ago?

Speaker 4 Oh, yeah, that's so interesting. So

Speaker 4 the thing that comes to my mind is the strawberry tree. And

Speaker 4 it's kind of related to heather. And it's got little white flowers and it's got these, it's quite unusual.
It's got these red, round fruits that look like a round strawberry.

Speaker 4 And the name in Latin is called Arbutis Unido. And Unido means only once, because if you eat, you know, it looks lovely, you eat it, but you only eat it once.
It tastes horrible.

Speaker 5 But

Speaker 4 strawberry tree occurs in the west of Ireland.

Speaker 4 Native. We think it's native.

Speaker 4 Maybe it wasn't. The only other places it occurs are in Portugal and Spain.
And how did that happen? How do we have what this is called a disjunct distribution?

Speaker 4 So a tiny little pocket in Ireland and then the closest population, Spain and Portugal.

Speaker 4 Now, one of the hypotheses, which is really intriguing and compelling, and this is by a botanist in Galway, Micheline

Speaker 4 Skeffington, she suggests that the strawberry tree was introduced as a plant that was in maybe a beer or an alcohol or in somehow associated with

Speaker 4 alcohol from Spain and Portugal and it's a linker to people who came to the west of Ireland.

Speaker 4 So that's one theory. Now there's other theories that this strawberry tree is there not because of the people but because it's a relic from the ice age.

Speaker 4 For some reason there must have been this little microclimate.

Speaker 4 Most of Ireland was covered in a giant ice sheet. 18,000 years ago, but for some reason this little strawberry tree survived in a population.
And so there's two theories, and they're quite different.

Speaker 4 But we can use science to test those. And that would typically be, we'd use genetic methods.
And that would go to a whole other department, like genetics, or maybe

Speaker 4 plant science genetics to test those different theories.

Speaker 5 Here's one for you.

Speaker 5 So there's this bog body called Clanny Cave and Man, right? Found in 2003. And they reckon Clanny Cave and Man is, we say, 2,000 years old.
Yeah.

Speaker 5 But the big thing with this bog body is that he had hair gel, right? 2,000-year-old hair gel.

Speaker 5 Hair gel, yeah. And the hair, it's the hair gel was made from resin, and they know that the resin comes from trees that were in the north of Spain.

Speaker 5 So that told us, okay, first off, this person was wealthy, yeah, and it told us so much. And secondly,

Speaker 5 he was whatever was going on, we now know that 2,000 years ago, this Ireland probably had some type of dealing with Spain.

Speaker 4 Yeah, like,

Speaker 5 is would someone come to you with that resin? Because resin is trees.

Speaker 4 Yeah. So is that your job? So they wouldn't come to me, but they'd definitely come to a botanist.
So a botanist who is trained in genetics.

Speaker 4 So there's loads of great botanists in Ireland, all the institutions

Speaker 4 who would be able to, let me think, what would they do? If they could extract ancient DNA, so they could also go to a geneticist.

Speaker 4 They, knowing the

Speaker 4 DNA, you could build a picture of the DNA types, they're called haplotypes, and sometimes they're distinct. There's a Spanish type and

Speaker 4 there's an Irish type and there's a Welsh type, and you can basically build the map doing the genetics of the ancient DNA and work out, okay, where

Speaker 4 did that resin come from?

Speaker 4 Another way to do it, if you couldn't do DNA, is you would maybe look at the chemistry.

Speaker 4 And sometimes certain trees will always, they have a very different chemistry.

Speaker 4 And if it was a very rare tree that you know today, or even in the past, only occurred in a very small population, you might be able to link it back to that chemistry.

Speaker 4 So, typically, what we would do is we'd use, you kind of work in a team of lots of different scientists, multidisciplinary team, and you'd probably try and answer the question using all the different specializations.

Speaker 5 One thing I'd love to ask you too is, and I want to find out if this is real or not, is I've often referred, heard Ireland referred to as we're actually a rainforest, that this country is a mid-Atlantic rainforest, which is weird because I'm looking around and I'm like, I don't see any fucking forest.

Speaker 5 Yeah. Like,

Speaker 5 are we really a rainforest and humans have just gotten rid of all the trees?

Speaker 4 So we do have rainforest.

Speaker 4 And really, how do you define a rainforest? Well, you have to have

Speaker 4 2,500 millimeters of rain a year. So, we definitely have that on the western seaboard.

Speaker 4 And then there's two types of rainforest: there's the tropical rainforest that most people are kind of familiar with.

Speaker 4 You know, we've heard about it, we've read about it, some have been lucky enough to be in it. But then we have another type of rainforest that's called a temperate rainforest.
And that would be

Speaker 4 not in the tropical latitudes, so not in the low latitudes, but you know, latitudes of about 40, 50 degrees north and south, but mainly north.

Speaker 4 So,

Speaker 4 Irish latitudes. So, there's little slivers of temperate rainforest on the west coasts

Speaker 5 of America.

Speaker 4 Think of like Seattle and

Speaker 4 Oregon and the west coast of Ireland, the west coast of Scotland. And these are usually coastal strips where you've got you've got moisture coming off the ocean.

Speaker 4 And as soon soon as it hits land, it rains out. And by the time it gets further inland, there's not as much precipitation.
So

Speaker 4 rainforests are kind of restricted climatically to basically

Speaker 4 strips. But a big question is how it we know today we only have a remnant.
So it was much more extensive in the past.

Speaker 5 And when you say past, like when? Like when?

Speaker 4 Pre pre-human change of the landscape. So.

Speaker 5 Is that pre-Ice Age?

Speaker 4 No, no i think even more recent so it would have been much more extensive like uh

Speaker 4 5 000 years ago 4 000 years ago so what you see in when you look at the record of you know those sediment cores i was telling you about you can see evidence of um

Speaker 4 weeds of crops and you can see the pollen of those weeds suddenly appearing and so things like you know ragwort and um i can't think of any others offhand that appear. But

Speaker 4 you also get evidence of fire, so you'd find charcoal. So you can actually see the signature of man's intervention on the land, you know, when we start to become a more arable agricultural culture.

Speaker 4 And then,

Speaker 4 you know,

Speaker 4 the landscape changes and

Speaker 4 to the forest's detriment.

Speaker 4 But it's a difficult question because there's always a balance, isn't it?

Speaker 5 You know, off the top of your head, like, what areas of Ireland do you know of that would have definitely been dense forest

Speaker 5 that now are not?

Speaker 4 Well, that is a really interesting question. And actually, we are

Speaker 4 we there's lots of active science projects on this at the moment. But you said the word dense, and

Speaker 4 that's really interesting because how you could have, let's say we know the species that should they're in a temperate rainforest, okay, XYZ.

Speaker 4 If you see them in pollen, does that mean it was a dense rainforest?

Speaker 4 So what we are doing at the moment is we're trying to work out, I've got people in the lab and other colleagues, and we're trying to get an indicator of the density of a forest, and we're using light as a guide.

Speaker 4 So

Speaker 4 we want to try and work out, was the canopy closed or open? You see the species, we think there was a rainforest there,

Speaker 4 but we're not really going to know until we can reconstruct was it dense or was it just open? Because you need to be dense to be a temperate rainforest.

Speaker 5 Because even

Speaker 5 like if you if it like this is something I heard again and again, anything to do with mythology that's going back this far, it's all guesswork because the monks wrote it down, okay?

Speaker 5 But we do know we'll say pre-Christian Ireland, so before

Speaker 5 1500 years ago when Patrick came over, we didn't have towns or cities.

Speaker 5 Instead, we had all of these petty kingdoms. And one theory is because you kind of go, Ireland's a small country.
Why did you need to have 30 or 40 different kingdoms?

Speaker 5 Like, could people not just get together? It's pretty small. And one theory is it was so dense with forests that pockets of people were kind of isolated.

Speaker 4 Yeah. So

Speaker 4 we definitely had forests over much of Ireland. Way more extensive than today.
So with today, you know,

Speaker 4 I should know this. It's like like 1%.

Speaker 4 It might be...

Speaker 5 It's pretty bad, yeah.

Speaker 4 It's really low.

Speaker 4 Maybe it's 10%. It's actually 10%, but we have only 1% of native forest left.

Speaker 5 But how then do you assess the...

Speaker 5 I suppose I'm trying to get at this indigenous versus.

Speaker 5 This is pretty recent stuff. We're talking a couple of thousand years.
Yeah. Therefore,

Speaker 5 are we not living in a very barren, even though I can look out the window and I can see a lot of green, are we not living in a very barren, unnatural country full of human intervention, human intervention?

Speaker 5 Are we not supposed to have a hell of a lot more?

Speaker 4 Yeah, so our bi definitely,

Speaker 4 as in all over the world, we have not valued our biodiversity. And

Speaker 4 you know, 15 species have gone extinct from the Irish landscape, of plant species, for example. So they're gone.
We, you know, most people have no memory of them.

Speaker 5 How long are you talking about? What's the most recent?

Speaker 4 In the last human generation, the last two human generations.

Speaker 4 15 species.

Speaker 5 What one are you most upset about?

Speaker 4 Oh,

Speaker 4 there was. Oh, which one? Well, I actually have never seen any of them live.
I've only seen them dry, all of these.

Speaker 4 And actually, I've done some kind of little artworks on these, you know, trying to think about them, you know.

Speaker 5 And was it like a Victorian? Did some Victorian pick them up and decide to dry them? Are you going back that far? Or are you talking about 20th century?

Speaker 4 Yeah, no. So we have back to the just in the 50s, 60s.
So a lot, you know,

Speaker 4 why have they gone extinct? It's mainly land use change. So drainage has impacted a lot of them.

Speaker 4 Things that love wet environments, you know, as soon as you dry a bog, as soon as you dry a wetland, then it's losing its habitat.

Speaker 4 Improvement, we call it agricultural improvement, so that's you know enriching the land with nitrogen.

Speaker 4 And ironically, nitrogen is really good for your crops because crops are bred to really use the nitrogen and thrive. But

Speaker 4 high biodiversity ecosystems, where you get loads and loads and loads and loads of species, these are actually the poorest environments.

Speaker 4 So, our old meadows, the old practices pre-industrialization would have been much more positive for maintaining biodiversity. You'd maybe get 20, 25 species of grassland species

Speaker 4 in a one metre squared plot, whereas today we have one.

Speaker 4 So, but there's really amazing examples in Ireland of

Speaker 4 trying to take on these more historical practices of maintaining biodiversity because it's good on so many levels.

Speaker 4 You don't sacrifice your productivity, you boost your biodiversity, you boost the nature value, and you also capture much more carbon in the soil. So it's

Speaker 5 farming practices now. So incentivizing farmers for a bit of rewilding or a few meadows?

Speaker 4 Yes, yeah. And

Speaker 4 it isn't even rewilding, you know, it's more leaving space for nature.

Speaker 4 But it's really important also. I mean, this is getting well outside my comfort zone of topics.
I'm much more comfortable talking about fossils from 300 million years ago.

Speaker 5 We can take off the academic hat for a little bit and just go for a bit of opinion.

Speaker 4 Yeah, but

Speaker 4 there's a lot of simple solutions, but absolutely, farmers have to be paid for these. You know, so

Speaker 4 for all land use, it's so complex. And

Speaker 4 this, you know, we need we need to feed the world,

Speaker 4 but we can't do it at the cost of biodiversity. So for every plot of land, you have this

Speaker 4 tension of multiple possible uses. And,

Speaker 4 you know, it isn't a black and white issue. You know, it's really complex.
But so I think some of these

Speaker 4 demonstration farms, which are all over Ireland, like Burn Bio and all of these examples where

Speaker 4 it's nature, biodiversity-positive farming practices, and that's it's a multiple win, win for productivity for the farmer, win for nature, and also win for kind of carbon and keeping carbon in the ground.

Speaker 5 And does it mean, like, okay, you're growing your turnips over here and you've got a field of cows over there, but this field here, you're just going to leave it be?

Speaker 4 Not even that extreme. I think it can be

Speaker 4 the hedgerows and the buffer zone between the hedgerow and,

Speaker 4 you know, so rather than leaving a really tight, tidy, clipped hedge where the

Speaker 4 productive crop goes right up to the hedge margin, you just leave a buffer strip,

Speaker 4 and that buffer strip is left to

Speaker 4 unmowed, or it's planted with multi-species swards, or it's planted with meadow, or you introduce a lot of native Irish meadow plants into it.

Speaker 4 And then you've got this great margin, which is providing all food for all these insects, which are then pollinating your crop. And

Speaker 4 you know, so

Speaker 4 it can be really small pockets, but that's a loss to the farmer. So, why should we expect the farmers to do that? So, you have to pay them for the loss of their crop.
So,

Speaker 4 all of that is so complex.

Speaker 4 And there's lots of great science centers, right, Research Ireland centers who are tackling this problem now and trying to address what is the best way we can use land using our scientific knowledge and considering

Speaker 4 all the stakeholders.

Speaker 5 I'm going to ask you one last question question because just it pertains to hedgerows.

Speaker 5 So, my buddy Man Con Magen, who recently departed Man Con,

Speaker 5 he used to, I know it's a terrible loss to all of us, but Man Con used to work with an organization called Home Tree, and they were

Speaker 5 basically trying to plant native forests.

Speaker 5 And one thing that Man Con used to say to me, which fascinated me, was

Speaker 5 he wouldn't simply just plant an oak. He wouldn't simply just plant a native Irish oak.
What he used to do was

Speaker 5 he would look amongst hedgerows. He told me, he said, the best way to find a little pocket of untouched actual native Irish woodland is you'll find bits of it in hedgerows.

Speaker 5 And I said, what are you doing in the hedgerows? And he goes, I'm trying to find not just

Speaker 5 like a little bit of an oak or a little bit of a tree that I can plant. I want the mycelium that's that's in the soil.

Speaker 5 So he was looking in hedgerows to find soil mycelium as well as the plants, as well as the trees. Um,

Speaker 5 is because I'd never thought of that. I'm like, oh, yeah, how does that come into it? Like, is that it makes a lot of sense? Would you agree with what he's saying?

Speaker 4 Oh, yeah, absolutely. Because you know, you plant trees, it is not a forest.
So, think of what is a forest when you can walk through a forest, a really old forest, you don't just see trees, you see

Speaker 4 anemones, you see uh bluebells you you hear birds you know so the planting of the trees is the kind of the engineer of that forest but then you've got all of these other things hidden like all the fungi underneath so hedgerows are actually it's argued that they're kind of like the vestiges of our past landscape.

Speaker 4 Some hedgerows in Ireland are so old, they're hundreds of years old. And the higher the number of species you find in them, it's usually a good indicator that they're really, really old.

Speaker 4 I think they say one species per hundred year. Maybe it's 10 years.

Speaker 5 I can't remember exactly. And it makes so much sense because

Speaker 5 no one has any business with a hedgerow. It's just an old boundary and it's an ancient fence.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 5 And no one has a super highway near it.

Speaker 4 Yeah. Yeah, it's a super highway.
Think of all the animals that use the hedgerows to get to forest fragments.

Speaker 4 But plants do that as well. You know, we think of plants as immobile, but they are moving.

Speaker 4 You know, an oak tree will shed its acorn, and that acorn may be two meters away, and then that tree will grow, and that acorn will move another two meters.

Speaker 4 So it's slowly moving through the generations.

Speaker 4 So that's a brilliant thing that Mankon did.

Speaker 4 If he took the acorn with the soil, then he's taking the fungi, the mycorrhizal fungi, that will make this lovely symbiosis with the tree and it'll extend its whole root network out to extract those elements from the rocks that we kind of talked about earlier.

Speaker 4 So, yeah, it's much more likely you will make a true forest or a woodland by doing that.

Speaker 5 Is ancient fungi your business?

Speaker 4 Not really. So, ancient.

Speaker 5 I knew it.

Speaker 5 So,

Speaker 5 you have to stop at mushrooms.

Speaker 5 Well,

Speaker 4 you know, some of the fossils I've seen, like... I once looked at this really early land plant and it's called Rhynia and it's from a famous fossil locality in Scotland.
I was looking at its stomata.

Speaker 4 So, this thing is so old, it has no roots, no leaves, just a basically little stalk, but it has stomata, these breathing pores that take up carbon dioxide.

Speaker 4 And coming out of the stomata were loads of fungal mycelium, like the threads of fungi.

Speaker 4 And that was 400 million years ago. And I'd never seen that in the living plants.
You know, usually stomata open and close just to take in gases.

Speaker 4 You don't usually see loads of mice, fungi erupting from it.

Speaker 4 And of course, scientists who've worked on it since, who are experts in fungi, they've worked out that, you know, we always talk about plants, they're so important to terraform Earth, but they couldn't have done it without the fungi.

Speaker 4 They absolutely could not have done it. So

Speaker 4 arguably fungi are probably even more important, but the partnership, the symbiosis between the plants and the fungi is really key.

Speaker 5 The one thing, I promise this would be the last one, but it harks back to the first ever question, because I didn't ask you this.

Speaker 5 So, when we were talking about that, that ancient extinction of trees, that ancient extinction of trees,

Speaker 5 which is now coal,

Speaker 5 I heard that the lignum in the trees, which took the carbon from the atmosphere, the reason that did not decompose was because the fungi hadn't evolved yet that could decompose it. Is that bullshit?

Speaker 4 No, it's actually, and I didn't didn't answer it when you first asked me,

Speaker 4 it's a leading scientific hypothesis.

Speaker 4 And if you look at the modern data, so some people study evolution by looking at genetics, the genes in the living things today, and they build an evolutionary tree for the past millions of years.

Speaker 4 According to those guys, they accept us. They think that's true.

Speaker 4 Now, the other way of looking at evolution is you look at fossils you look at what was present then and you build up an evolutionary tree by building up that picture and the fossil peoples don't agree they think it's wrong so I would say

Speaker 4 the question is still kind of an active area of science and it's really intriguing did we get coal swamps which formed coals which we then burned and changed the climate because there weren't fungi to decompose them

Speaker 4 or was it just climate at the time and i think it's still an act of area of science.

Speaker 5 Is it fair to say that at one point trees were like the plastic of now? That trees were these things that couldn't decompose, like plastic?

Speaker 4 Yeah, because lignin,

Speaker 4 lignin is wood, and like in all paper mills, it's the bane of the paper mills. It's chemically really, really, really difficult to break down.
And actually,

Speaker 4 if we did not have the fungi today that were, that could break down wood,

Speaker 4 we would be neck deep or above our heads deep in undecomposed trees. Wow.

Speaker 5 And there'd be fuck all carbon because it'd all be stuck down in the earth.

Speaker 4 Yeah, and then we'd have higher oxygen. So, you know, so I suppose we have to try and capture some of this basic understanding,

Speaker 4 you know, to come up with solutions for climate change. in the future, but that's a whole other conversation.
But yeah, yeah, lignin is the plastic of the natural world.

Speaker 4 It's so resistant to breakdown that there's just a particular fungi, just some

Speaker 4 and bacteria that can break it down. And that totally makes sense because if you think you grow to you know

Speaker 4 50, 60 meters tall, you have to be mechanically really strong. And the side, the drawback is it's going to be hard to break it down once that tree falls.

Speaker 5 Okay, Professor Jenny McElwain, I could talk to you for hours and hours. I don't want to take any more of your time, but I just want to say thank you so much.
That was a fascinating conversation.

Speaker 4 Yeah, thank you so much as well. That was great.

Speaker 5 And thank you for your time.

Speaker 2 Professor Jennifer McElwain,

Speaker 2 Professor of Botany from Trinity College.

Speaker 2 That was great fun. I hope you enjoyed that also.

Speaker 2 Go to scienceweek.ie.

Speaker 2 Engage with... whatever they have going on in your local area.
It's an entire week. There's cracking events.
I love that it's in November.

Speaker 2 It's one of the best, it's one of the best. I don't know what I call it, a festival.
You could call it a festival, a festival of science and knowledge and curiosity.

Speaker 2 But it's one of the best festivals in Ireland. I'm calling it a festival.
Sciencepeak.ie, and I'll catch ye next week. What a hot take.

Speaker 2 I have a few things bubbling away.

Speaker 2 In the meantime,

Speaker 2 rub a dog, genuflect to a swan,

Speaker 2 blow kisses at a little snail. God bless.

Speaker 11 Hey guys, I'm Patrick Schwarzenegger, the founder of Mosh, which is a protein bar made specifically for your brain.

Speaker 11 Our bars are not only nutritious, but they are absolutely delicious, and they are loaded with up to 13 grams of protein, only 3 grams of sugar, and amazing ingredients that support a healthy brain like lion's mane, ashwagandha, vitamin B12, vitamin D3, and so much more.

Speaker 11 But the best part is every time you purchase one of our bars, we donate to Alzheimer's Research.

Speaker 11 So if you want to find ways to give back to others and fuel your body and your brain, Mosh bars are the perfect choice for you.

Speaker 9 Head to moshlife.com slash pod20 to get 20% off plus free shipping on the bestsellers trial pack or the new plant-based trial pack.

Speaker 9 That's 20% off plus free shipping on either the bestsellers trial pack or the plant-based trial pack at moshlife.com slash pod 20.

Speaker 12 Hey friends, it's Nikayla from the podcast Side Hustle Pro. I'm always looking for ways to keep my kids entertained without screens, and the Yoto Mini has been a total lifesaver.
My kids are obsessed.

Speaker 12 Yoto is a screen-free audio player where kids just pop in a card and listen. Hours of stories, music, podcasts, and more, and no screens or ads.

Speaker 12 With hundreds of options for ages 0 to 12, it's the perfect gift they'll go back to again and again. Check it out at yotoplay.com.
Y-O-T-O-P-L-A-Y.com.