Transcript of AE 1392 - The Goss: Why are Aussies Being Asked to Hunt Bugs?

G'day, you mob! Pete here, and this is another episode of Aussie English, the number one place for anyone and everyone wanting to learn Australian English. So today I have a Goss episode for you where I sit down with my old man, my father, Ian Smissen, and we talk about the week's news. Whether locally Down Under here in Australia or non locally overseas in other parts of the world, okay.

And we sometimes also talk about whatever comes to mind, right. If we can think of something interesting to share with you guys related to us or Australia, we also talk about that in The Goss. So these episodes are specifically designed to try and give you content about many different topics where we're obviously speaking in English and there are multiple people having a natural and spontaneous conversation in English. So it is particularly good to improve your listening skills.

In order to complement that, though, I really recommend that you join the podcast membership or the Academy membership at AussieEnglish.com.au, where you will get access to the full transcripts of these episodes, the PDFs, the downloads, and you can also use the online PDF reader to read and listen at the same time. Okay, so if you really, really want to improve your listening skills fast, get the transcript, listen and read at the same time. Keep practising and that is the quickest way to level up your English. Anyway, I've been rabbiting on a bit. I've been talking a bit. Let's just get into this episode guys. Smack the bird and let's get into it.

Dad. Do you like bugs?

Yeah. I do.

What bugs you the most about bugs?

Umm..

Has your iPad got a bug in it?

Trying to photograph them. Yeah. Nationwide bug hunt to capture Australia's insects, comma, invertebrate underworld.

Was only a matter of time. We got the bird hunt, don't we? The annual bird..

Yeah, the bird camp, which is actually on at the moment.

So now everyone just needs to grab a macro lens so they can get into the bugs.

Yeah, exactly. But no, this story is, is really just a trigger for talking about that whole idea of citizen science that we now have the ability, and you don't even need a macro lens. Your average modern phone will get a close up photograph of something that's good enough to identify it. And a lot of, there's a lot of, sort of AI stuff around now, that will help identify instantly. Something.

Insects or invertebrates are inherently a pain in the arse.

Exactly.

Quite often, unless they're so charismatic about..

And so what it means is that I don't necessarily, I'm not necessarily going to have the AI built into an app that I photograph a butterfly to know, oh, bang, that's whatever it is. But when I post that to somewhere, to a database, the database is going to have the AI sitting behind it that just generates it and goes, all right, we've got 27 photographs of this species in this location this week. It's never been seen there before. So the idea of, of having in Australia, what, 28 million people, let's say 20 million people who've got access to devices to record and, and the motivation to do this, just capturing evidence of stuff.

Yeah.

Is a scale that you simply can't do on a standard sort of, you know, scientific protocol. So, I think it's a good way of collecting data, and I and you mentioned birds, you know, I for years, decades now, people have been collecting lists wherever they go. And there are, there's one worldwide one, there's another Australian one. But yeah, eBird is a worldwide catalogue database of records of what species people saw. And there's a, a loose trust that what people are recording is accurate. But if somebody comes, somebody posts something and says, yeah, I saw an ostrich in Elizabeth Street, Melbourne, and people go, hmm, I don't think so. And 'show me', and then it'll get rejected pending further evidence.

Yeah.

And so on. So there's a, there's a level of checking that goes on amongst..

I imagine you would have taxonomists or, you know, experts in this field or whatever the insect or invertebrate or bird is, analysing this stuff. Like you would upload the data to a website, it'd have the location data. And then I imagine you wouldn't even have to put in species names or anything now..

That's what I mean. The photograph does, and it'll work it out.

And then those outliers or whatever people might be checking and being like, is this bullshit? Is this not bullshit..

But in fact, it's the outliers that they're looking for.

Yeah.

In the case of the invasive species, because by definition, they're outliers when they first arrived somewhere. So yeah, it's just, it's an interesting sort of idea now that, where we have this just mass communication capability to use it for good.

What other areas do you think will sort of have this same, what would you say, like application of crowdsourcing the photography of things in our..

Well, it doesn't even have to be photography. It's just, it's just record collection and photographs are the easy way of recording and checking. And I used eBird previously. You are far more likely to get a, an approval of a rare sighting if you've got a photograph of it, than just..

Yeah.

I saw this bird. Blah blah blah. Exactly. But then if three other people independently come up with it. Yeah, maybe there's something in this. So.

Yeah.

So it's just, it's not necessarily photographs. It's just recording of these things. And the same thing happened, you know, back in the 90s, early 90s. I wrote the Teacher's Guide to a frog watch program that went on in Victoria of, of actually going out, having school kids go out and, listen for mostly because frogs are really hard to see, particularly during the daytime. They're hard to find. But just listening for frogs and, and writing down which species that they found and sending that back into a statewide database.

I guess that, that equivalent could be like bird calls or frogs, where you just..

Bird calls.

You record ambient noise in the location you're at and just upload that.

Another one is that is commonly seen around us, not necessarily national parks, but viewpoints in Australia is, where the, whoever the property owner and it's typically public land. So national parks or state parks and things will have a, a post with a camera frame on it that you can just put your mobile phone up, take a photograph and send it.

Yep.

So it's that, it's it's sort of landscape monitoring.

Through time, yeah..

Through time that you can. For ten years, you can view every second day. Somebody will be at this viewpoint, go, oh, I'll do that. Click.

Yeah.

And and it's a QR code on the post. So you just post the thing straight to that point.

Yeah.

And then somebody can look over there. Over the last ten years when I, oh, that little patch of forest has just died, you know, we're never going to be there but and go out and check it unless we know and...

I hope they make videos of that. That'll be really interesting to see. You had people literally every single day photographing it, although I guess they could just put a camera out there.

Yeah, but that's expensive.

Time lapse, yeah.

Expensive to monitor and so on. Whereas again, it's the citizen science. If you've got people that'll do that for you who are motivated because they go, oh, this is a cool place to go, I'm going to take a photograph of this anyway.

Yeah.

Why don't I put it on the post. Go click and then oh, send, it takes me two seconds.

Yeah.

So.

What, do you think you're going to get into the bug hunt? Like you're massively into photography. You love the bird side of things. Have you? You've bought a macro lens, haven't you? More recently.

Oh, I do have a macro lens.

Have you gotten into doing as much macro photography? Is it does it have the same appeal or is it not as fun?

I enjoy it, but it's something that I. I don't carry the macro lens with me when I'm walking a lot. Maybe.

Too heavy.

Well, no it's not. It's actually very light, but but, but often I need a, you know, a flash. Macro photography is a fairly specialised thing, but they're not looking for, you know, beautiful photographs. They're just looking for something that'll record whatever you see. But, yeah, a lot of that is, is just phone I think is the whatever you can get with your phone. Because if you're relying on photographers who are carrying specialised equipment with them, then A, they're not going to be- there's not going to be many of them, and B, they're less motivated to send you their photographs. Whereas I think that whole broad citizen science thing is just capture what you can. And the, the reason that they will want photographs is because they're not going to rely on somebody going, oh, that's a yellow crazy ant.

Yeah.

Well, I don't think so. How do you know?

Yeah, exactly. It's hard enough with obvious species, but with things that are kind of like especially insects. I remember doing those sorts of taxonomy classes and you're like, you've got to look at the third spine behind the fourth set of legs or whatever. And you just like, good grief. So yeah, it'll be, it'll be interesting to see where this goes in the future. Do you, do you see other applications of it for wildlife in Australia, or do you think these sort of the main things are these birds and insects, I guess they could do it for herpetology and reptiles. They probably, I'd stay away from the snakes.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. You could. It's it's it's mainly a wildlife or the landscape one we talked about. I think there's potentially a lot of those things that you could do. There's, why not have a a formalised way in a local council? I mean, this would be a good example of one of saying, take photographs every time you see a pothole on a road, record it. You don't even have to take a photograph of it.

Slightly dangerous though.

Yeah. No, but when you're driving, you just. You can come home and go, oh. All right. There was a pothole 400m from the corner of this and have a way of posting it. So I don't need to call the council or look up their website or whatever. It's just a, a broad scale thing that you can push out in your local region on, you know, community web pages and, you know, social media stuff as an example of and that is not citizen science, but it's that, just the reporting of things that it costs the the council in this case for this example, a lot of money and time and effort to go around and just check every road all the time to see if there's damage on it.

Yeah.

You know, those sort of things I think could be, could be better utilised by having a, an easy and formalised way of reporting this stuff. If there's personal motivation in it, like our rubbish bins are a good example. You know, we have three different rubbish bins, one for green material, one for general household rubbish and one for recycling. But if, and our bins get collected weekly, but if our bin is damaged, you can just go onto the council website and literally put in their search engine on their front page bin replacement or bin repair, and it'll pop you straight to a form that you just fill it in. Here's my address. It's the red bin. The lid needs replacing and it's all just done with drop downs. And they go click and it'll pop back and just say thanks for that. Leave your bin out. It'll be fixed the next few days.

Yeah.

And perfect. But there's motivation for me to do that, because I care that my bin lid is broken and I want it repaired.

Yeah.

But just the broader community stuff about, you know, overhanging branches on trees, you know, of trees on roads and those sort of things that, that I said as an example, it just, you know, came up as an idea that, you know, we could, we could formalise that just general community communication stuff a lot more.

Yeah.

To make things easier for people.

Yeah. You wonder if that will happen on a community based level where they'll end up with like sort of groups or applications that the government could roll out for certain areas that would encourage connection between communities. That's one of those big things that I feel like we're lacking these days, is that you don't really know your neighbours. You don't really. Unless you're doing sports or something. You don't really get together and get to interact with a lot of people. So maybe that would be another way of encouraging that, but.

Yeah, but and you know, this is a tangential conversation, but umm..

As is our want.

Yes. This is not alcohol induced where..

I know!

This is the morning. So we're not even drinking beer. Those sort of social media, community bulletin board sort of things, are a great, most of the time, you know, and.

Entertaining the rest of us!

Exactly. But they're really useful. A good example of that is I saw one that came up on the our local one this week of somebody who just posted and said, I left my phone at the beach. Did anybody find it?

Yeah.

And within ten minutes, they'd come back and said, got it!

Yeah.

Somebody had just, somebody had just, somebody had just pm'd them and just said, yeah I picked it up. I've got it.

Yeah.

So whereas yeah, phones are actually reasonably easy to identify who owns them. But whereas, you know, I leave my watch somewhere or, you know, my car keys, I left dropped my car keys and I had to walk home from the beach, you know, or whatever, that sort of stuff. It works really well for us. The downside of it, though, is that there are a minority but significant group of loudmouthed, in a sense, of loudmouth typing fingers.

Yeah.

People who just want to whinge about everything.

Yeah, it is funny.

Like, clog it up with, you know.

People whingeing about pets, about children, about teenagers, about parties and noise. And some of it's warranted, but some of it you just sort of like.

And when the, um, I mean, a roundabout that our local, the busy intersection that we have close by that has had a roundabout on it for years and the council, it's probably VicRoads as well, but I'm not sure whether it's a Victorian state road or a council road. But they put pedestrian crossings just back from three of the corners on it, which made perfect sense because there was no. And there's a bus stop there that is used for school buses. So it was really difficult for kids in particular.

Yeah.

To cross these really busy roads and at least do it safely. And the amount of backlash on that. Not for the crossings.

Yeah.

But it was. Oh, I don't know why we've got that roundabout there. All these people don't know how to use a roundabout. It just blocks up the traffic and we need traffic lights there. And to which there are a whole lot of people who clearly knew what they were talking about, because one guy who came up and said, I'm a traffic engineer, and roundabouts are way more efficient for traffic flow than traffic lights. So pull your head in. And then a whole lot of people came back saying, you don't need to talk to talk to them like that, blah blah..

And that's, that's that's what anonymous mode is for. You chuck Anonymous mode on. And then you just..

You put Anonymous mode and then people just say oh. And people come back and say, if you've got something to say, put your name on it!

There's so many, though, now that it's always like, yeah, okay, Karen, you know.

I know. Yeah.

Anyway, cool. Good chat. But yeah, you guys love to get into the, the bug hunt.

Citizen science. Bug hunting.

Show us your bugs. See you guys!

Bye!