Learn Australian English in this episode of The Goss where we talk about dogs sniffing out toads, selling your poo, and Australian cockney rhyming slang.

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G'day you mob. Welcome to this episode of The Goss, where I sit down with my dad every single week and talk about the news and current affairs going on in Australia, but also more broadly across the face of this planet. So today we talk a whole bunch about all sorts of different topics. Obviously, we keep talking about the Corona virus and give you a bit of an update on that and fights that have been breaking out in Woolworths across Australia over toilet paper. We talk about how dogs are being used to sniff out cane toads that are invading bushland that was burnt in the bushfires. We talk about Australia's very first poo bank, right.

Get this, you can now be paid $25 to poo for medical purposes. So you'll have to listen to find out more about that. We talk about Cockneys announcing Miley Cyrus as the official rhyming slang for Coronavirus. We also talk about scientists and how they're tracking funnel web spiders using these minute little trackers. And lastly, we chat about a loggerhead turtle and how on earth it ended up coming back to Australia from South Africa after living there for decades in captivity. This is an absolutely awesome episode, guys. It is chock-a-block full of content.

And don't forget, if you would like to get the transcript for this full episode, if you'd like to use the premium podcast player whilst you're listening to this episode to read everything that's said, and if you'd like all the other downloads and the rest of the video for this episode, make sure that you either sign up for the premium podcast membership or academy membership where you'll get access to both of those. Anyway, guys, poke that kookaburra and let's get going.

Dad, welcome to the 11th instalment.

We've passed double figures. We've done well. And we've managed to do this every week. I can't believe it. In fact, I think this is the 11th episode in 10 weeks.

Yeah, possibly, we did a double one, didn't we? So how's your week been?

Busy.

What's the goss?

Busy. I've just come back, hence the all hot and sweaty, I've just come back from a saltmarsh walk with a botanist. Part of the Festival of the Sea at Barwon Heads, which is an annual festival they have of celebrating being on the ocean. But also the estuary there. So they ran a workshop this morning, which was just looking at Ramsar Wetlands, which was a convention from the 1970s, an international convention from the 1970s to preserve wetlands, particularly for migratory wading birds. And as part of that, then saltmarsh areas, which are the sort of borders of those, are obviously going to be protected or at least hopefully preserved as well. So we were looking at a bunch of salt marsh plants, which is always interesting because it's... Being intertidal marine biologist, I've spent my life looking at rocky shores, but it's the same principles but suddenly you've got mud and plants. But that was what today was.

So what do you find so interesting about wading birds? Why are they such a popular bird for bird photographers?

I think there's a couple of reasons. One is that they're bloody hard to distinguish, to tell apart. We've got, you know, loosely speaking, depending on how you define wading birds. But loosely speaking, there's 50 something species in Australia. 35 or 36 of them, I think, are migratory. And they come from... They breed in other parts of the world. One species in New Zealand and the rest of them from the deep northern hemisphere. So Alaska, Siberia...

That's such a weird thing, isn't it, that the distribution is kind of two pockets?

Yeah, they do summer and summer, basically.

Yeah, but that they don't have a continuous distribution where, you know, they're obviously going to fly from somewhere like Alaska to Australia, but they're not really stopping in any other locations for a significant amount of time.

They basically stop to feed for a few days and then go to another place, some of them just fly. There's one species, the bar-tailed godwit, which has been... Using radio and satellite tracking technology, they've tracked a few of them that will fly from Alaska to New Zealand in one stop.

How do they manage that? Because they're so tiny aren't they, as well?

Well, the godwits are reasonably large birds, but some of them are tiny...

Yeah, but they're not pelicans, right. You would imagine, you know, you think of animals in the ocean that go large distances and they don't tend to be anchovies, they tend to be whales, that have huge fat stores.

Exactly. And so some of them, like red-necked stints, which are the smallest species, migratory species that come to Australia, they weigh... By the time they get here, they weigh under 25 grams. So they're the size of a sparrow. They're a little bit bigger than a sparrow, but they're lighter than a sparrow.

That's an ounce, right? Like, so if you had an ounce of gold in your hand, which is, you know, a tiny little thing, think that's the way to the bird.

Exactly. It's five teaspoon fulls of water.

What were they when they left?

They can put on 70 to 80% of their body weight before leaving. So they breed in the tundra, basically. In Alaska and Siberia. And they can put on about 70 or 80% of body weight before they fly over here and they'll lose most of that coming here.

Are they flapping like crazy when they make these things or do they get into wind currents and they just coast?

Well, they apparently they fly from 3000 to 8000 meters high.

Yeah.

So they're not up in the jet stream.

Yeah.

Which aeroplanes tend to fly in.

Well they'd probably suffocate and freeze, right.

They would. Yeah they'd freeze and they'd simply wouldn't have enough oxygen there. But 8000 meters is fairly high.

You get a warning, you got a while to fall before you crash into the ocean.

You do. Yeah you do. Yes.

You take a rest for a few kilometres and just come back up.

But yeah, they're little flapping birds. The bigger ones can glide a fairways.

I just find it astonishing that they can travel such large distances in the air because you would imagine that requires so much more energy than doing it in the ocean or on by land.

I know, I know. It's sort of one of those things... Where you think of it this way, they fly at about 60 kilometres an hour. And if you were to get in your car and drive at normal suburban speed 50 to 60 kilometres an hour and think, "I'm going to drive 10,000 kilometres at this speed non-stop," or maybe two stops for a little feeding refuel in around the Yellow Sea. So Korea and China.

But that's why they're so interesting because they're..?

Firstly they're interesting because they are migratory. So the fact that they're not here all the time. So they're only here over our summer. And well from spring until early autumn. And then because they're... They all look the same. Mostly, you know, other than size differences, they're all little brown mottled birds with a few odd differences because by the time they get here, they're no longer in breeding plumage. They're breeding plumage is easier, much easier to distinguish them. But by the time they get here, they've malted and they're no longer in breeding plumage. So it's just a bit of a challenge to identify them. And I think the other thing, certainly for me, I can't speak for all photographers, but just being down on mudflats and sandy beaches and things, it's a nice place to be. It's a fairly pleasant place to be.

They tend to congregate in areas, too, where you have a lot of different species that you can photograph simultaneously, right. So it isn't just you in the forest and there's a lyrebird and nothing else.

You might or might not see it.

Yeah, these things tend to be...

And they're in hundreds or thousands.

Yeah.

So that in itself is entertaining to look at as well.

I guess the main reason I want to flesh this out a bit to learn about how they migrate is because I want to know more about how they do that, because I have a story later on that we'll get into about turtles and their migration. Large distances. But how do these guys migrate such big distances? Are they using land marks as signals? Are they just, you know, are they using the sun or the moon in order to use celestial or... What would you call it? Yeah, celestial navigation? Or are they doing it with the magnetic... What is it called? The magnetic poles?

Yeah, I think at the moment, my understanding...

Or do we not know?

My understanding of the science is that those are all legitimate hypotheses. Yeah, none of which has ever been proven. So it's a bit of a black box as to working it out because there are... All of those are possible except for a couple of species like the... Some of the bar-tailed godwits that will fly just directly across the Pacific Ocean. So they're obviously not using landmarks as such.

The water.

Yeah. Let's aim for Tahiti.

Go for the next wave.

Exactly. But yeah, it could well be any of those things.

And so we're not... I think anybody is really sure.

Yeah. You wonder how you work that out too, right. It would have to somehow maybe equip them with an instrument that would disrupt something like magnetic waves, which I don't know how you would get ethics to do, and then see do they maintain their course. Can they find their way? If you could put on some kind of electro-magnetic disruptor on their head and there you would have sort of indirect evidence that, okay, well, they're clearly using these waves.

And I think look, when you're doing that sort of gross migration where you're travelling huge distances. You're basically travelling from the polar region in the north to sort of lower temperate zones in the south, the southern hemisphere, basically, you just head north or you head south and then say you... It doesn't mean that you have to track along exactly a route. You're not trying to follow a particular route. You just saying, "Head south," and then there'll be various correction mechanisms, whatever they are, to get you to the spots that you want.

Some of the hardest parts of conserving these sorts of species that have such large distributions or even, you know, broken up distributions across multiple countries or even continents, is that you need to have all of this discontinuous habitat kind of conserved to maintain them, right. Because if they're coming from somewhere like Russia through Southeast Asia into Australia, you need all the places they stop to, to be conserved because if one of those fails and they land there one year, the whole species could go kaput.

And that's certainly happening in... It's the group that we have coming here, because, there's various flight paths around the world of birds migrating large distances. But the East Asia Australasia flight path, which basically goes from that sort of Bering Sea with Alaska and Russia through Siberia, China, Mongolia, down that coast, through Southeast Asia into Australia. There are 21 countries that the birds are potentially going to fly through and land on and China and South Korea have had a lot of urban development going on around the seashores for a long time and reclaiming mudflats because historically people look at mudflats and salt marshes and those things, "Oh, this is just useless and so we'll, you know, we can fill it in, put concrete there." So it certainly can happen where birds will go from one year to the next and they'll stop at mudflats on one time and come back the next year and they land on concrete.

Yeah.

And so if they're exhausted and they're starving to death, they're dead. They can't go on any further. So there's some really interesting work going on in China and South Korea at looking at creating large floating feeding habitat for them, so that if we're going to have humans that are actually taking over the shore, they can effectively create an artificial mudflat that's floating on the ocean.

Really? Wouldn't get disrupted by waves?

It might. But the thing is, if you're doing it in in areas with mudflats, then they're low energy areas in terms of waves. So it's not like you going to put it out on a surf beach. But I only just heard about it. So I haven't seen how much work they've done on it.

At least they're keeping that in mind. I guess the other thing to mention here before we get into the news was remember that funny story I think I shared with you a while back on the Eagles in Siberia? So I think there was a Russian team there who was studying these big arse huge eagles and they put SMS trackers on them that would send messages via the phone line...

That's right.

... To tell the researchers where these birds were. And I think the thing that blew their minds was that they started researching them, wherever it was in Siberia, I can't remember if it was on Russian soil or Mongolia or whatever, but they put all these trackers on something like 24 birds and the researchers went bankrupt because...

International rates on their text messages.

They had no idea how far thousands of kilometres individual birds were flying and their territory was massive. And I think the reason that they got charged so much money was that they went to Iran. And as soon as they crossed the border, the coat of an SMS was like $1.50. And they were getting messages every hour or something for weeks at a time. They had to crowdsource money to pay for the rest of their experiment.

For the rest of their telephone bill.

But I love that sort of story with species like that where people... You see them in a certain location and you imagine that they're just, " Oh yeah, they live here in this neighbourhood," and then they do that kind of research where they find out that things travelled thousands of kilometres or vice versa. I think they found a research... A study recently in Australia showed that feral cats have actually much smaller ranges than was previously expected...

There's just lots of them.

Yeah, they thought that they were transient across the landscape like nomads. They'd just go wherever and eat wherever, you know, maybe make a den when you got to reproduce. But you know, as you would probably expect with leopards or lions, they have a discrete territory that they stick to. And that's, you know, important information with fighting feral species or conserving endangered species.

Well look, for things like cats. they're highly specific in the way they capture food. But they'll eat almost anything that they can get a hold of. And so if they're in a forest area, as an example, they're going to get a lot of food without going very far. If they're out in farmland, depending on rodents and reptile populations and those sort of things that they're likely to capture, they may have smaller or larger territories. Their territory is just going to be really... The size it will be based on how much food they can get access to.

Wow, and it's pretty sad. I think we have anywhere between three to us nine million cats that are wild, that are feral, which is something like two to three times the number of pet cats and they each kill something like three animals a day.

And who knows how many foxes we have as well?

Annually, we're losing billions of... Like we think the bushfires cleared out a billion animals as on estimates, but that's happening annually just from cats alone. And so anyway, getting onto the news, I guess few things here before we get into the deeper stories. Harvey Weinstein has been convicted and got 23 years in jail.

And he says he's been unfairly dealt with, like seriously, Harvey?

Do you find it amusing that both Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby suddenly became disabled when they had to go to court? To face rape charges?

Oh, well, they're not the only ones. There are several examples of those, they pull a "I'm too sick to go to court," and then they end up in court and they still keep up the sick act. Well, do you think this is going to affect people's decisions whether you you're guilty or not?

It's not going to hurt, right? "I'm blind," You know, so Bill Cosby showed up with a cane, I think, saying, suggesting he was blind, looking for the sympathy card and Weinstein had a frame all of a sudden.

Yeah, exactly.

That he'd never been seen outside of prison. Yeah. So good riddance. Enjoy your stay in a jail there.

Yeah, well, he's not going to be coming out.

Well, not until he's 90. So Covid nine[teen]... So the coronavirus, you know...

We have a weekly update on the coronavirus.

Jesus Christ, I'm looking forward to this not being in the news anymore.

Just stay away from Tom Hanks. Hope you get well soon.

So Tom Hanks has got it. And he and his wife both were tested positive for it on the Gold Coast in Australia. And WHO, the World Health Organization, just declared it as a global pandemic. And another article I just saw before was that a coronavirus conference has been cancelled because of the coronavirus.

How ironic is that?

And the toilet paper stuff, did you see the fight that was going on in the... It was a western Sydney Woolworths between three ladies. So it's been going crazy. Even here, like, it was funny because we saw the memes going everywhere on the news and on social media. And you think, "Oh, it's just a few places." And then all of a sudden we went to the supermarket here and I was so embarrassed because I was like, "Well, I've better buy some before it's gone,"

Do I walk down the toilet paper aisle?

Yeah. And it was saying one thing only, one packet of toilet paper only per person. And the same with hand sanitizer, flour.

Well hand sanitizer in one of our local supermarkets, now, if they have it they'll have it at the service desk, and you have to go and ask for it, so they'll give it to you. You won't be able to go and take it off the shelves.

It's interesting that they care. You would imagine that the stores would just be like, "Whatever. Well, so more of it," you know.

Well, thing is, they won't sell more.

It would just keep getting taken out.

Because they'll just sell what they've got and they mostly... They'll be on... The sort of... I think there's two ways that supermarket shelves tend to get filled. One is that there's a sort of an automated inventory that is done by the barcodes as they're going through the tills that the shop will know that they've got, you know, 100 of these in stock, 100 of them out the back of the shop that they can restock the shelves with. And once they sell 100 out of that 200, that'll automatically reorder some. Yeah, but if everybody else is re-ordering, you can't get them anyway.

So you might as well hold onto them and sell them and do the sort of the public good thing, let's say. Because in the end it's in their interest because you don't want those scenes like in that you know Woolworths in Sydney where...

These people are fighting and tearing each other's hair out.

Three people grabbing each other, fighting, tearing each other's hair out and look, to be reasonable, I think the woman who started the fight had a case.

I don't think she started that, though, because it looks like the other two women were...

She started the interaction.

Yes.

There were two women who had a trolley that was literally overloaded and the and the big packets of toilet paper were falling out of the trolley onto the floor. And this woman said, yeah, and there was nothing left. They took everything that was on the shelf.

Yeah.

And there is nothing left there. So there's another woman came along and said, "Look, all I want is one," and she went like one off the trolley. And then she got attacked as yeah, "You're stealing things. These are ours."

It's one of those things where it's like...

"Really? You're taking 20 packs. All I need is 1. I haven't got any."

I know, well they were grabbing her and you know, they got done for assault. I think both of them got charged with assault.

In the end the store staff had to pull them apart and call the police. Which is bizarre.

It's toilet paper, people. Just get a bidet.

What's the chance that you're actually going to run out of toilet paper? The worst that's going to happen is that even if you get it, you're going to be quarantined for two weeks. Maybe three or four. How much does your average family... How much toilet paper does your average family need for a month?

It's very bizarre. And I guess it's one of those things we've covered before where you start seeing other people getting it. You freak out thinking that... Whether or not you get the virus, you're not going to have any for the near future. And so you do it anyway.

Yeah. That's the problem, is that the few idiots who start the panic, they're the crazy ones. Everybody else is actually... It's a reasonable response to saying, "I don't have any. It's running out. I'm going to have to go and get some."

Well I felt so embarrassed going to buy some this week because I was actually out of it. I needed some. And I'm like, "No, no, no," like I felt, "Don't look at me. No one judge me."

"Don't judge me. I've just got one."

"Yeah, I just actually need toilet paper." I know. So there was that. There was a... Well actually let's stay on that topic for a bit. So it seems like the mortality rate is about 3%, but you need to break that down into age groups and I guess health wise, and so it seems like very young people aren't... Like young children are not dying from it and people my age are probably getting sick, but aren't dying from it. And then there's your generation and the generation beyond you that are the more susceptible.

And particularly people who've got respiratory problems. It seems to be that... Because it's a respiratory thing, it just seems to hit the respiratory system. And if you're already got a problem, it seems... Obviously it's going to make it worse.

So how are they dying? Is it just that they're getting things like pneumonia and then their organs just shut down?

I think Pneumonia and... It's a lot of these things. Pneumonia is probably the biggest killer in the world.

Yeah.

But it's a secondary thing. It's not the original infection.

Was it your dad or grandfather that..?

Oh, yeah, my grandfather used to say all the time, "You only ever die of one thing and that shortness of breath." The irony is he died of pneumonia, which meant he'd died of not being able to breathe.

So you worried about coronavirus? Is it starting to become more and more of a fear for you personally?

It's sort of... There's a concern, but I don't know that it's got to worry. It certainly hasn't got to fear yet. Because... Well, firstly, it's sort of inevitable. It is a pandemic. But, you know, if you look at the other side of those figures...

The flu is a pandemic, right?

Yeah, the flu is a pandemic. It's just a pandemic that we just accept and we live with.

And it's stable, right, it's everywhere already?

I think it was the week before last. Worldwide somewhere between 50 and 60 people died of coronavirus. Yeah, a thousand people died of influenza, which is the bigger killer.

That's on like a weekly or something, right? Something crazy.

So, you know, a thousand people a week die of influenza around the world and yet... But we have a vaccine for that so people can choose and we typically get new vaccines every year. People can choose to try and prevent that from happening. At the moment I think the fear with a new virus that comes up is that there's nothing we can do about it. You know... You can... You can wash your hands. Do all of those preventative things. But if it's around, there's a chance you're going to catch it.

I was watching a documentary recently on pandemics, and it's sort of following people working on the frontline to deal with pandemics, but also the flu during flu season and everything and, especially in the US. And there was a small company now that's trying to work on a universal flu vaccine. That's just a one time shot. And it's really cool because what they've done is they've taken, I think, all the flu viruses from present all the way back to something like 1912 and crammed them all into a single vaccine and given it to pigs. But they have to give them seven shots before it starts showing. Yeah. But then after that, they pretty much don't get sick. But their issue is no one wants seven shots.

No one wants to take a series of 7 shots. Presumably they'd be one every couple of weeks for a period to give you a body someday kick in and then have another go and have another go. If you just went there and had seven injections in a row, it would be like just taking seven times as much.

Well no it was a periodic thing.

They take a series.

But it was interesting to see that people are working on that at least. A holistic universal approach to dealing with flu.

This is an example of how much I care. I'm drinking straight out of a bottle that I've just bought from a shop, so I don't know whether this was handled well or not in the shop. Yes, I'm drinking from the cap that was taken off. But, you know, putting things in your mouth, you don't know where they've been.

Yeah. So I was looking at it, too. There was an article that was someone shared. In fact, I think it was my brother in law's parents, who shared it on Facebook about, "Stop saying that only elderly people are dying from it because, you know, everyone knows elderly people. And how do you think they feel?" And it's significant. And I didn't realise... When I was reading that article, I didn't realise it's something like almost 15% chance of dying of you contracted. Which is, what, one in six chance? So if both my grandparents, nan and grandpa, who are still alive, get it, there's a third of a chance and one of them will die. Is that aspect of it frightening?

Well, it is. And you know, obviously, they're always going to be people who are vulnerable. But this is a cohort of people that is age based. It's not... You know, if you've had pneumonia before, you're more likely to suffer from it. So there's a... There are a large number of people that we all know who we would fit into elderly. And obviously I'm falling over the edge into that and I'm cardio-respiratory impaired. So, yeah, there's that element, too. But what can you do in the end? You just try and do the normal, you know, safe practices of washing hands. Don't stick your hands in your mouth or your eyes.

And so what's the Australian government doing at the moment with it? They've... We've had our first case in the A.C.T.. So I think now, as of today, every single state and territory of Australia has the coronavirus. And the government's pledged $15 billion or something in one way or another to fight the issue.

And I haven't seen the breakdown of what that's going to look like.

It looks like they're spending 2.4 billion dollars on a hundred coronavirus fever clinics, as well as a new Medicare item, which is remote health advice. I think that you can call up, but yeah. Do you think this is going to go quickly? Do you think it'll pass eventually?

Well, it won't disappear. There will always be people who will get this now because the virus is out there. We're not going to eradicate it. But how long it takes to pass is going to be an interesting challenge. It's... Clearly it is not a seasonal one. And that's the thing with influenza. Influenza is a winter disease. You don't catch the flu in summer, which is sort of weird when you think about the, you know, the sort of medical physiology that. Clearly in winter, we tend to get a cold. We tend to be more likely to be just a little bit off, health-wise. And so I think you're more likely to get a flu.

I wonder if that's why we call it the cold.

Yeah, maybe it is. A cold disease. It's a disease I get when I'm cold.

And so what else has happened? We've had Italy shut down, be locked down. So they had 60 million Italians told to stay home by Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte. 600 are dead in Italy. And you can only leave, I think, the country, if it's for work, medical reasons, emergency or family needs. And we've just had President Trump of the US. go on TV and say that he's banning, I think, flights from Europe, except for Britain, into the US. Do you think Australia's going to get locked down as well?

Well at least now he's admitting that. Just a week ago he was saying, "Oh, there's nothing wrong with it. Keep travelling."

Yeah.

Look, I have... Australia probably will come to that. I mean, initially we stopped flights coming from China.

Yeah.

Until we were confident that China had it sort of under control in a sense of knowing that they could detect it and test people and so on. But they then opened the border up again.

It's going to be interesting when there's a post-mortem done, right, on what's happened and how it came out of China to see what exactly happened with these animal markets and the bats, the... Whatever they are, those other animals that it may have transferred into and then into humans and then what the government did to kind of sweep it under the rug, right, for the first month, because you wonder how much of that is responsible for the present situation.

Yeah, it's again, it's one of these things where clearly it is highly contagious.

Yeah.

Which is independent of the likelihood of dying from it. It's highly contagious. So if a disease is highly contagious and it is not very lethal, then it's going to spread. And so that's the real problem with it. And yes, there may well have been other things that could have been done more quickly and so on. But yeah, I suspect it got out. And then after that, it was inevitable. This is going to be how long it took to become a worldwide pandemic.

There seems to have been a one two punch, right, For a lot of rural Australia, now, after the bushfires where a lot of tourism is going to have been slashed and people are probably going to be staying home a lot more. I think that prime minister is spending this $15 billion here in Australia to try and stimulate the economy as well, because people aren't going to spend the same way. So what do you think is going to happen with small business owners and the economy in Australia?

I don't know. And that's... This is a sort of Segway into things like the all the donations, the billions of dollars that were effectively donated to the fire appeals. I don't know how much of that has actually gone out. And I don't know that any of it is ever intended to go to people who were indirectly affected, like, yeah, small business holders in areas where tourism has dropped off that... They weren't....

Yeah, it's not like a business burnt down and that they didn't have enough insurance or whatever to claim it. You can look at that and go, "That's a direct effect." And lots of those things we've seen, people are starting to get money coming to them to help them out. But if you're just in a town in the south coast of New South Wales or in East Gippsland, in Victoria or the north coast of New South Wales, which had the fires earlier, people aren't travelling there. They're not going there.

And so your business is just going to suffer. And I don't know how much of those billions of dollars is going to help those people. And the same thing with these sort of billions of dollars that are being looked at for how we cope with the coronavirus. I suspect the majority of that is going to be around trying to prevent it spreading.

Yeah.

And cure it, for want of a better term, rather than dealing with the socio-economic side of it. Hopefully some of it is going to be looking at that.

I think at least what I saw Trump doing in his speech, he was saying that the government in the US is giving out a lot of very low interest loans to... I think fifth... To the tune of $50 billion to the people in these sorts of affected areas to keep their businesses afloat during this time. And there were some businesses in Australia that were worried about it. I think there was a WA cafe that was on the news saying that they're going to offer all of their staff money ahead of time even if they get sick. Just to be able to keep them afloat.

I know that, you know, Scomo, our prime minister, came out last week saying, "Well, if you if you get sick. Quarantine yourself at home and just take annual leave."

Yeah.

Which... And his justification for that was 'everybody should be doing their bit.'

Assuming you get annual leave from your work place.

Assuming you get annual leave.

Assuming you have it racked up.

Exactly. You are an ongoing employee with enough annual leave sitting behind you, you can take two or three weeks off. But what about casual employees? And then he had their ridiculous statement that, you know, the casual pay loading accounts for that. Now that's all very well. But, you know, if suddenly you can't earn any money for three weeks and you've got to pay your rent. Yeah, a lot of casual workers are students, Part-Time Workers and so on. They rely on the cashflow in order to survive. These are not people who just "Oh, I've got... I've been working casually for two years and I've got $10,000 sitting in my bank account. I can afford to not work for a few weeks." It's just not going to happen.

I remember working at a restaurant for three years trying to finish my PhD and it was week to week. There was no... You know, I had no buffer.

It was the same when I was a student.

It's just... I get paid and it could be up and down. I could make $300 a week. You know, $700 a week, depending on how many shifts I was given, how busy it was. How many nights of the week, which nights.

And all the sudden you're going to make nothing for three weeks. "How am I going to pay my rent and feed myself?"

And it turns out, I saw another article about being fined now and facing five years in jail. You could be fined up to $63000 in Australia and face five years of jail on top of that, if you don't self-isolate when you've been asked to.

Yes.

I wanted to ask you, what do you think of the ethics of forcing people to self-isolate in Australia? And obviously, we can compare that with China, where we were seeing images of them just dragging people away from their houses, effectively locking them up in hospitals against their will. Australia, at least you get sort of the choice, you know, though, they'll be like, "We suggest you do this or you'll face these punishments." What do you think of the ethics of both those situations?

Well, I do... I think the ethics of imprisonment, which is effectively what was happening in China, is highly questionable. But if you're unsure, as a government, of what this thing was going to look like, you're going to hopefully go over the top rather than under. So... And we can, in hindsight, look at that and go, "Really? You were actually welding up doors in buildings?"

Locking people inside.

Forget the fire hazard, but locking people inside. On the other side, the self quarantining; Who decides? Who gives the order? Because your employer shouldn't be the health expert unless you happen to work in the health industry. If, you know, you're working for a retailer and you think, "I might have coronavirus," and your boss says, "Well, you've got to take two weeks off." Is that a legal statement that you then have to do it? Or do you have to go off and get tested, and then the doctor's advice says you have to self quarantine for that time?

So I don't think that's clear. The laws... The law, from my understanding, it's an old law. It's not... It wasn't introduced for the coronavirus. It's one that's been on... I don't think it's ever been used, but it's one of those laws that you look at and go, "Did they think this through?" You know, when... Because I'm sure it was one of those ones where, well, somebody who got this rare disease that is contagious and they get told. But all of a sudden, if you've got tens of thousands of people potentially, that this is likely to happen to, the court system won't cope, apart from anything else. So it's a bit of one of those sort of... Yeah, "We're going to hit you with the paper carrot," of saying...

Yeah.

And look, the maximum punishment is always, you know, the scary thing. But it doesn't mean that's what's going to happen. Yeah.

So... I don't know that that freaks me out a little bit more than not having access to toilet paper, but instead being forced to stay home or at least, you know, given the option of facing jail time if you don't.

Yeah, well, Put me in jail for three weeks until I get over it. At least I get house and I get fed.

The next story I had here was dogs being used to sniff out cane toads moving into burnt bushland in New South Wales. Yeah. So the logic here is that we have cane toads is a big issue in... I guess it's northern New South Wales, Queensland, the Northern Territory and northern Western Australia. They've moved from Queensland...

The north coast of Queensland, they move south and...

Across into the western parts of Australia. But the problem was that now that all this bushland has been cleared of, I guess you would call it like undergrowth and everything, right there's no impediment to these frogs hopping much further distances. So they can travel something like a kilometre at night. And the toads are very lazy. So they don't like... They travel along roads or paths. They hate travelling through the bush because lots of, you know, obstacles and obstructions. And so now that these fires have gone through, they've just wiped out the undergrowth, and the problem is now these frogs can just move straight through and, you know, take up residence in these new locations. So they've been using... What was at here?

Two different kinds of dogs. English Springer Spaniels and Cocker Spaniel to hunt these toads down to find them because they have a high degree of hunting ability and they can do the Pluto thing, you know, the Pluto cartoon where he just points with his nose... So apparently they're using those in Richmond Range National Park, right. To try and save the threatened species that are there that are still vulnerable to cane toads.

Yeah, that's an interesting one, isn't it?

Did you remember the spread when you were growing up?

They were introduced before I was...

The 30s, 35 or 38 or something?

But it was... Yeah, they weren't really spreading until probably 1960s when it got out of hand. And ah, these things tend to be exponential. You know, the little thing there sits there and it sits there, and it grows a little bit, grows a little bit and obviously it's related to the exponential growth of the population.

Yeah. Yeah.

An individual toad hopping along a few kilometres to get to a place where it's got better food supply or water to breed in or whatever is one thing but then when you start to rapidly increase the population and that's going to be more of that happening.

And the problem with them too, is that they're venomous or poisonous.

Poisonous.

So yeah, sorry not venomous. They can't inject venom, but they secrete it from parts of their shoulders.

And they've got two patches on the back of their head.

And if you put it in your mouth and bite down, the poison comes out and you pretty much die of a heart attack pretty quickly, right. So most animals, they find snakes and goannas with the cane toads in their mouths dead before they've even had a chance to eat them.

Except some Australian birds, now, have worked out that they can turn them over and even the belly skin is a little bit poisonous but they just rip that off. They don't sort of swallow other things whole.

Yeah, it's interesting to see how many different Australian species, because I think there's birds, there's mammals like rats, even quolls and goannas have work down how to consume these things now, or there's been a shift in, say, morphology of these native species like goannas and the snakes where their head shape has actually reduced so they can't eat the larger cane toads and then get a lethal dose, you know, and so evolution's rapidly changing the environment to adapt to these things. But the other problem with them is that they reproduce ridiculously fast and produce something like 40,000 eggs. And those are poisonous from day one as well.

The eggs and the tadpoles are poisonous as well.

So what... Do you remember there being a big fuss about them spreading initially? Was it something that just started coming up in the news?

From the in the 60s, when I was growing up, you sort of heard about them. But it wasn't a big drama and it wasn't, I think, until the late 1990s that they actually hit the Northern Territory and then rapidly got across into Western Australia. And everybody, you know, so-called experts had always said, "Oh, look, you know, they'll never get further south than Bundaberg or whatever." And all of a sudden they're in Brisbane and then, "Oh, they'll never get into New South Wales because it's just too cold in winter." And by now they're in northern New South Wales.

Yeah, "they'll never get into" was the sort of catch-cry all the time. So you sort of start to hear about that a lot later. But certainly when I was studying biology as a high school student, it was a... It was the stock story of biological control gone wrong.

Yeah.

In the mid 1970s. So by then, it was a well-established thing of "This is out of control."

So is that when we stopped playing God with... Was the cane toad one of those last species that we actually tried to introduce to solve a biological problem or have we done that more recently as well? I'm not obviously familiar with the literature of introducing species and things like that.

Yeah, neither am . It's been a long time since I taught biology.

We've switched to diseases, right?

Yeah, we tend to go into diseases like that because it's very difficult to do authentic experiments, authentic in a sense of field experiments to introduce animals and to control it, to test whether or not... Firstly they're going to have the effect that you hope they have in the case of cane toads, they were brought into eat cane beetles. But cane toads can't climb cane and the beetles live at the top...

And the grubs underground.

Yeah. So that didn't work. And what genius had the idea? Who knows? But maybe Hawaiian cane isn't as tall, which is where they came from.

But it's just such a crazy story too, because he brought over... The guy who went over there, brought over a suitcase of 100 cane toads in some straw on a plane and just released them into a cane field in Bundaberg or whatever it was...

North Queensland.

North Queensland. And then they just, you know, fast-forward 100 years. And now they're a massive problem over a massive range of the continent.

And so that's one of those really hard things to do. So firstly, did they have the effect that you want them to have? And secondly, do they have any undesirable side effects? Like the cane toad has one undesirable side effect. And that is it's awful for a whole lot of reasons. It's... There's just no sensible reason to bring them into a country. But we did.

The next story that I had here was that Australia's first public stool bank is paying people to donate their poo for faecal transplants. 25 bucks.

I hadn't heard that one.

Per turd. So that's in Adelaide. So there was a story on this where you can donate something like three or four times a week. So you could make... If you guys are in Adelaide, you could make up to 100 bucks a week doing number twos.

Yeah. So what are they using it for?

Faecal transplants. So faecal microbiota transplantation.

Okay. So yeah, for people who presumably... There's people who are on things like extreme chemotherapy for cancers and things, which is just wiping out your entire guts.

Well it was I don't think it's necessarily just chemo. I'm sure chemo probably does it, but it was for people who have their gut biome just obliterated from things like antibiotics. There was one woman here who had a transplant that saved her life because she contracted Clostridioides difficile. Yeah, that's C. diff. So she contracted that after having something like 30 to 40 doses of antibiotics over two years to fight a disease that she had and was going to the toilet 20 times a day. You know, had to live in a different room, use a different bed, wear effectively like a nappy. And then three days after she had the faecal microbiota transplantation, she felt normal. And so what's happening, I guess, is that when you have those antibiotics, they don't just kill bad bacteria...

They kill bacteria.

... In your system. They kill everything. And the problem is that... Not having bacteria in your system isn't the problem. But when all of a sudden, like with the bushfires going through a forest, there's no competition. Cats and cane toads can just enter and take over the environment where they weren't before. And it's the same with something like C-diff or other bacteria that are really bad. They can colonise that area and there's no room for the good bacteria to come back.

Yeah, but there's also a lot of bacteria in our gut that is beneficial to us.

Exactly.

Because the... There's a whole lot of food types that our physiology cannot break down.

Well, like fibre in plants, right?

We don't have the right enzymes, whereas the bacteria do. And so in addition to that, the sort of fire and burn, you know, where anything can come in, we're also missing the ability...

To fight disease.

... Well, to digest food that we need.

Yeah, well, and that's why I'm always wary when someone says, you know, you need to take antibiotics. It's like, "Ehh," you know, most people, it seems, want antibiotics today, but a lot of the time because they don't need it, it's overkill. They've got a virus or something. But even if they...

A virus is not going to be affected by antibiotics.

Even if they do need it, it's kind of like, is this life threatening? Because I'm potentially taking a nuclear bomb to my gut and killing all the good bacteria I have there.

I think most general practitioners now are, and certainly most people in hospitals, are really saying we need to test your natural immunity to see if it's going to overcome this first. You don't go, "Oh, I've got a bit of a sore throat. You know, give me some antibiotics." It'll be "Well, let's see how you go for three or four days. You know, if it gets worse in the next 24 hours, let me know."

Well, they have tests, too, that they can do to look at viral load versus bacterial load in your blood and everything like that to try and work out if it's viral...

And sore throats are a classic one because typically they are bacterial, but often they're bacterial diseases that weaken and our normal immune system will get over it in a few days. But, you know, they can take swabs of that and check out and, "Whoops. This one is a nasty one. We'd better do something about it." But, you know, staphylococcus is a huge problem, particularly in hospitals.

Golden staph.

Golden staph, because for decades people were taking antibiotics for things to try and knock it off.

It's living in the perfect environment where it's constantly...

It's almost immune to every antibiotic.

Because it's had it all thrown at it, right?

The ones that survived are immune to everything.

But I found it really interesting. So they have this biome bank, which is the first public store bank in Thebarton in Adelaide.

Thebarton.

And so the stool is used for patients requiring the faecal microbiota transplantation. So FMT. And it has a 90% cure rate for chronic bowel disorders, which I just found astonishing. And what they're doing is effectively they get someone with a healthy gut to donate stool or poo. So they... And they have quite a stringent multi-stage assessment when they do medical history, physical examination, blood and stool test as well before you can donate. But then they take the samples. I think they tend to mash it up, add a lot of saline and glycerine.

just isolate the bacteria that they want.

No, no, no. they literally put it into like a milkshake, into a blender, mix it together, freeze it as it is. And then it's taken from their, thawed out to a hospital and injected into someone's colon as is. So I don't think that they do anything besides that. Yeah. So it's pretty crazy. And that's only started in the last 10 years that that's become...

I hadn't heard of it.

Yeah. Really solid. Cockneys announce Miley Cyrus as official rhyming slang for coronavirus.

I'm not sure what 'official' actually means... I don't think... Correct me if I'm wrong, people out there, anybody come from east London, let me know that there is an official cockney dictionary that you need to apply to get a word of rhyming slang in there.

No, this is actually from the News Biscuit website. So it's a piss take. It's not serious. They're taking the mickey.

Which ironically, is a cockney slang.

And we can get into that in a bit. But so they... The first few paragraphs was something like, "Above a well-known pie and mash shop in London's East End, the annual summit of Cockneys, an oppressed minority group, unveiled their new rhyming slang for their Jerry Hunt of a virus." And I'm assuming that 'Jerry Hunt' is rhyming slang for C-U-N-T.

I presume so. And his brother Michael.

"After after handing out market flyers for a 50% off sale of 'Cor Blimey' trousers and dustman's hats. I don't know what that's slang for. Cockney slang in the UK is probably different from what we would use.

There's an old Cockney song that was about 'Cor Blimey' trousers, which were big baggy trousers and hats. Which is... Most of the cockneys there were, you know, working class manual labour, working outdoors in the streets of east London. And so they were wearing old raggedy clothes and stuff.

The rest of it is we were solemnly... Sorry. "It was solemnly announced that the term 'Miley Cyrus' would be used for corona virus, speeding off stiff competition from 'Egyptian papyrus,'"

Papyrus. No, papyrus doesn't work. I'll stick with the Miley. And then like true Cockney rhyming slang, 'Cyrus' will be dropped. Yeah. So it'll just be "Oh, you got Miley have you?"

Yeah, exactly. That's the interesting thing, right. And we can talk about this in a bit. But I wanted to say to you first, if I were to say something to you, like, "I'm not taking the Mickey or telling porky pies, but the other day, I took a Captain Cook out the window and saw some Jimmy Grants having a Chunder Loo outside the near and far next to their potato peelers who were rabbiting on whilst eating a dog's eye with some dead horse." Would you know what I was talking about?

Mostly.

Yeah. So there's a lot of rhyming slang in there.

And some of that is Australian rhyming slang.

Most of that is. I got that from online and this is something I've never really used, apart from maybe 'Dead Horse' where... Or 'Dog's eye,' where it's 'taking a piss,'

'Dog's eye' is rhyming with 'pie.'

And 'taking the piss' is one, actually. So the examples that I had here was 'porky pies,' which can be chosen to 'porkies,' which rhymes with lies. Jimmy Grant rhymes with 'immigrant.' I assume Jimmy Grant, I don't know if that was a person or not, but that's from the eighteen hundreds. And apparently we get 'pom' or 'pommy' from Pomegranate.

Which is a posh food to eat.

Exactly. Which is why we call English people 'poms' or 'pommies.' 'Dead horse,' 'tomato sauce.' 'Dog's eye,' 'Meat pie.' "Captain Cook," to have a look. What's a potato peeler?

I don't know 'Potato peeler.'.

Sheila.

Sheila? Oh, that's ridiculous. Sheila's already a nickname. So when you start to have rhyming slang for nicknames...

There's some good Aussie sexism in there as well. You know, suggesting that they're the ones peeling the potatoes. 'The near and far?'

'The near and far.' Car?

"I think I'll go have a beer at the near and far."

The bar. Yeah.

'Chunder loo?'

Nah.

"Chunder." So that's an Aussie cartoon character that was named Chunder Loo and it rhymed with 'spew...'

So that's where 'chunder' comes from.

'Taking the Mickey.' Apparently this is from a character that was called Mickey Bliss.

Yes.

Which rhymed with 'piss.' So 'taking the piss' is to joke with someone. 'Taking the Mickey.' And 'rabbit on' about something. So that was from 'rabbit and pork.'

Yes.

Which was rhyming with 'talk.'.

Yeah.

And there was some really interesting ones like Barry Crocker and Stuart Diver.

"Barry Crocker was a shocker."

"And Stuart Diver was a survivor." And so Barry Crocker was, I guess, a...

Barry Crocker as an Australian entertainer, singer, dancer, actor in the 1960s and 70s. He's still around, probably doing the geriatrics... Hey, Barry, if you're out there.

He would have a lot of jokes and everything that were bad and disappointing, apparently.

And again, but it also rhymes with shocker.

Yeah, yeah. Well, they were shockers of jokes.

And then it just became doing a "Bazza".

And Stuart Diver, you want to tell us who he was?

Stuart Diver, this was the one up in Thredbo ski resort where there was a landslide. And he... There was a lot of people got trapped underground and he was the last person taken out alive. And so who he was... He was underground for three or four days with no food, no water, and one of his workmates dead next to him. And so not only does his name rhyme with Survivor, he was a... And he became the celebrity survivor. He was on the talking circuit for a while. He was on TV as a commentator, celebrity for a while of somebody who had just gone through the most awful thing you can imagine and survived it.

So what is Cockney rhyming slang and how to get to Australia?

Well, as we sort of intimated earlier, Cockneys are people who are from the true east London. Small suburban area in the east of London.

Is that that typical, "How's it going there, Gov?"

Yeah, that's it. Yeah. And I suspect that a lot of... Again, you know, working class people in that area of London was, certainly in the 18th century and early 19th century, was just a haven because it was so close to the richer business districts in London. It was a haven for petty thievery, pickpockets and those sort of things too.

Well, to pause you there, too, because I was just doing an episode on corporal in capital punishment in Australia and researching how it got here. Obviously, the transportation of all of the convicts to Australia, a lot of them had actually sort of trumped up charges.

Oh, yeah.

And the issue, I think was that after the industrial revolution had begun, all of a sudden you had things that were much more streamlined and people had less jobs available to them. And so that the lower class turned to crime a lot more frequently. And the upper class in Britain at the time, there was a lot of tension between the two, right. Almost like racism where the upper class hated the lower class and vice versa. And so the lower class would steal to survive, quite often from the upper class, and to sort of try and deal with that, instead of trying to create opportunities for the lower class, they just made 222 other crimes punishable by the death penalty. And then instead of giving them the death penalty, which they still did quite often.

Yes.

To even children, they would commute those sentences to transportation for 7 to 14 years to Australia, yeah. And the reason they came to Australia was because of the war of independence with America where they were previously...

That's something we never really talk about. The fact that America was founded on convicts too.

Well, not founded on convicts. It was free settlers to start with. But they were receiving arms of convicts. And yeah. Look, the war of independence is responsible for the first fleet coming to Australia, because it was a direct response to, you know, "We've had 10 years of not being able to send convicts anywhere. What are we going to do with them?"

And they were building up on ships called Hulks, which were prisons.

Yeah. They were.

And apparently they were absolutely disgusting.

Can't imagine what it was like.

Yeah. So, I mean, I've been reading that book 1788 by David Hill recently too, where it just talks about the conditions being absolutely abhorrent. And the First Fleet, I think had more convicts die before it left than died on the way to the colony because they were stuck in the ships

And despite the fact that Arthur Phillip, who was the man who was put in charge of the first fleet to create, you know... Became Australia or New South Wales' first governor, to create the colony over here, he fought the Navy and the government for nine months to get this thing moving. And they just delayed and delayed and cut his budget and cut his budget. And he kept fighting for better conditions and to get moving to get people out of the hulks. And the government at the time were just saying, "No, no, no, no, no," because they were treating it like, "let's just get rid of some people."

Yeah.

Now, there was some political reasons to come to Australia as well. It wasn't... That was probably they the least likely place to send somebody. It was like sending somebody to Mars, now, as far away as you can possibly get other than New Zealand.

Yeah.

It's about as far away as you can get from England

and there was no way back for the average person. Close to no chance they were never going to make enough money to come home.

No, exactly. They were never going to be able to afford a fare back.

Yeah. And there was actually some really funny stories of some of the convicts who came over to Australia who had been sent to America, I think, or to Africa, South Africa, had been let go by the captain of ships in order to help them survive. Because, you know, the crews, they needed people. They need convicted were let go. They made it back to England in a year after being transported. And despite having been given their freedom, they were like, "You've come back early. So you're actually now going to Australia." Talk about the shit end of the stick.

I know.

So yeah, we had a lot of these East Londoners.

The Cockneys and the Irish were highly over-represented in people who came out in the early period.

And the Irish was because they were Catholics, right.

Yeah. And it was... That was just politically motivated because, you know, England wanted to control Ireland. There was a religious thing so that, you know, the Church of England disagreed with the Catholic Church. And so there was all of that going on. And a lot of the Catholic Irish agitators were just accused of trumped up charges. Because, yeah, you couldn't be executed or transported without committing a crime. And so they just gave them these... And there's all these stories about, you know, stole a handkerchief or a loaf of bread. And how do you prove that somebody did or didn't steal a loaf of bread?

You know, if you're accused of it, then what did you do?

I think some of the saddest stuff is that they did it to children, too. I think one of the youngest children to be convicted was 9 years old and was 12 when he finally got sent out here.

But then back in the 18th century, the law didn't distinguish between children and adults.

Yeah, yeah.

It was a long time later that the law was changed to say that, you know, you can't be tried for an adult crime until you were... The age varies in different countries. But we still have that now. But it didn't happen then. So, yeah, a 3 year old was unlikely to be accused of a crime. A 3 year old pinching a cinnamon bun from the local baker wouldn't have been considered a crime. But if a nine year old did it, they would've said you should know better, it's a crime. And you know, that was a transportable offence so...

That was massively sad, learning about that. But yeah, so we had a lot of them come over and a lot of them obviously were thieves who came over here and they had their own flash language, right, which is a big part of Australian slang today, which was language they used to speak about whatever they wanted to talk about in front of other people so they wouldn't understand.

So they wouldn't be understood by the military looking after them.

Yeah. So that they could name certain things and target people in public and not be understood.

And that was that language. The cockney language. The rhyming slang and the abbreviation of the rhyming slang came from street language. It was... If you like, it was almost the equivalent of what we have now with some of the, you know, like Los Angeles, East Los Angeles, where you've got African-Americans and Latinos who are ostensibly speaking English but you and I listen to it and go, "I can't understand a word of it." Because they have a street language that they can talk within amongst themselves with. But the police aren't going to listen to it and understand it. You know, the people that they... Gangs. Gang language. And the cockneys were the same.

And it's so funny that that initial beginning is probably the seed that led to Australia being so characterised by its slang, right. It's such a big part of our culture now to embrace our differences from other countries and try and show that we're unique. And I think it's something like... Australia has over 5000 diminutive slang terms where you've reduced a word from, say, barbecue to barbie, whereas somewhere like Canada, which is larger than Australia, has like a thousand.

And so it's so funny how it is very much a cultural thing that we got from the very first convicts that came to Australia. And it's kind of just continued and grown.

To the point where we actually create diminutives that a longer by adding E or O to something. We'll create a slang word for something just by adding E or O to it if it can't be shortened, which is just bizarre.

I guess it's just...

Somebody called Rob will get called "Robbo" by his mates for short.

Well, I guess 'Robbo' is short for 'Robert,' right.

Yeah but it's no shorter!

The next story I had here was scientists attaching trackers to funnel webs. The one you sent thought, yeah.

This is sort of regurgitating our funnel web spider story from a few episodes ago.

They come up quite a bit.

They do. Yeah. And facetiously you can look at this and go, you know what sort of spider you're dealing with when they can put a tracker on the back of it and recover them.

So this is pretty cool. So apparently there's loads known about the venom of the spiders, because obviously, you know, if they inject humans...

People die.

... And you want to cure that... And the cool thing about them is if they inject non-prime mates. So if they bite things like dogs and cats, they're actually immune to it.

It'll hurt, but the venom won't affect.

And by free chance...

Vertebrates and primates.

Yeah, that it affects us. Other mammals are fine.

Really?

I know.

So we've got insect physiology apparently.

Yeah. So there was loads known about venom, but very little about the biology. And so Macquarie University, their Department of Biological Sciences near Sydney have a team that want to know more about the life history and reproductive biology of the animal. They want to know about males moving around during the breeding season, how far do they go, what affects their mobility. And so they're putting track is the only weigh, though, 0.15 of a gram on their back. And so they're gluing it to there, and let's see if I can say this right. Cephalothorax . The middle, I think, or is that the head? Not sure if that's the head or not.

Well the cephalothorax is the... Spiders... Insects have three bits to them; the head, the thorax and the abdomen. The spiders, the head and the thorax are fused. And so it's called a cephalothorax.

That's where the legs attach and the eyes are on the front, right?

And the bitey bits.

There was one funny story about how they were tracking one of these spiders, and they ended up finding a broad tailed gecko and that had eaten the spider and the tracker's worth $420 each. So they had so they had a wait for the gecko to poop it out, but it came out in good condition and they could still use it. So I guess that's sort of really all that I had.

Oh, we should finish off with the loggerhead turtle journey. Yeah, we were talking about there at the start. So the loggerhead turtle that was released from Cape Town in South Africa has come all the way to Australia. Travelled 37000 kilometres. So it's 180 kg. It was named Yoshi and it's travelled halfway around the world after living in captivity in South Africa for 20 years. And they were training it before letting it go. For 18 months they were getting it to swim laps of this pool, 20 metres at a time, trying to get it ready to go out for her release. Yeah.

And so she's believed to be obviously Australian because she swam the 37 kilometres pretty much straight...

37000 kilometres.

37000 kilometres straight across the Indian Ocean, over to a nesting site in Western Australia near the Pilbara.

That'd be 3,700 kilometres, not 37. Unless she was doing laps. She went up the coast and around...

She went up the coast around Africa. Yeah. So she did along... The whole track was that.

Your grandmother's cousin, Colin, who's been researching turtles on the east coast of Australia and other places for nearly 50 years now, I suspect, who you've worked with. Part of his research, and other international programs, has suggested that turtles, some turtles that are breeding on the north east coast of Australia... And we don't see them back on the coast of Australia for 20 to 30 years, they migrate across the Pacific. To feeding grounds in Chile, in South America. And then we'll travel back. They're no just hanging around, just offshore.

A big reason for that, though, is when they hatch on the shores here, they go out to the ocean and they want to get to deep water where they get food. And there's also protection. There's no predators out there. And they catch the current all the way over to South America.

Chile.

Yeah. And then... That's several months worth.

They hang around there for a couple of decades.

Yeah.

And for whatever reason, apparently Chile doesn't have the right beaches, they just travel back to Australia.

You would imagine the turtles know for sure if they go back to the beaches where they were born, those conditions are ideal for reproduction, right. So they actually have their feeding grounds... In the case of loggerheads, I think they're eating jellyfish, but also sea grass... It might be the green sea turtles and those... And that's where they breed. But then they can travel thousands of kilometres back to their original home and they often come within a few beaches. So they won't necessarily come right back to the exact location where they were born, but within several kilometres of it. And they nail it.

And that... At the start there, I was sort of wanting to know more about how birds migrate and that we think it's by the magnetic fields of the earth.

Yes.

And they have the same question for turtles and how they manage to come back. And so I think they were saying that, yeah, they were... They could navigate by astronomical cues, which is a hypothesis that has no evidence. The moon, the sun, stars.

Yeah, but again, all you have to do is follow the moon or the sun.

Yeah but what do you do on cloudy nights or what you do when there's a full moon every month?

It's not like you have to get there in a few weeks if you're a turtle. Now, in the case of those migratory birds that we're talking about, they have to fly here in a few weeks so they can't afford to just go, "Oh, I'm just going to spin around in the middle of the Pacific for a few weeks," because they'll starve, clearly. If you're a a turtle, your natural environment is where you are.

And they're insane. So they go away. They can't breed every single year because I think they have to spend a lot of time building up their fat stores again.

Females lay so many eggs, they use up a huge amount of energy.

And just travelling those distances. But yeah, they'll come to the shore, the beach where they were originally born and they may eat a little bit there if they can find some food, but they'll come up every... I think it's two weeks or 10 days to lay another nest of eggs, which will be something like 100 to 130 eggs.

Depending on the species.

Yeah, that's it. And that's their... It's a big mass, right. Like it's quite a ridiculous amount.

The eggs are the size of golf balls.

Yeah. There'll be 100 plus. So it's a bucket. Yeah. So I just thought that was really cool. But the hypothesis they think is that they have magnetic crystals in their head forming from magnetite that are contained within receptor cells in the brain and that...

So they can orient themselves, in their case, across the field, rather than along the magnetic field.

I think so, yeah. And the issue that we had when I was working at Bundaberg doing the turtle research is that it was incredibly important when hatchlings came up from their nests that you didn't pick them up and carry them to the water, but instead let them run down the beach.

So they can orient themselves.

It was thought that that is one of the crucial moments where the... Whatever's happening in their brain with regards to finding their way back to that location, that's where it's getting solidified in those early moments of coming out of the nest. And so it was very cool. But it's interesting that we don't... We still don't know how it is that these animals, after decades of study.

We'll probably never know.

Yeah. Anyway, I guess that's it for today. Thanks so much for joining me, Dad.

Thanks, Pete.

No worries. See you, guys.