Naturebang

Why are some sounds more frightening than others? Are there evolutionary origins behind the things we find scary? And is there anything more blood-curdling than a full throated scream? Becky Ripley and Emily Knight tune in to the sounds that send the shivers down our spines, via a frightened Marmot in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, and a brand new kind of musical instrument known as the 'apprehe...

As our global society becomes ever more mobile, with people migrating across borders and making new homes among strangers, how do we figure out how to fit in? Trust is the glue that holds society together, but trust - as we all know - must be earned. Becky Ripley and Emily Knight take a trip to the African savanna, to see what a mob of dwarf mongooses can teach us about migration, integration, and...

Why do we want the things we want? What really drives us? And how in control of our instincts are we? All questions you might ask the humble cuckoo. This dastardly bird - a 'brood parasite' - famously leaves its eggs in another bird's nest and flies off, never to be seen again. The enormous chick hatches, kills all its nest-mates, then runs its adoptive parents ragged with round-the-clock feedings...

Becky Ripley and Emily Knight get to grips with fatherhood in the animal kingdom by way of the largest land animal on earth, a fully grown bull elephant. Like the majority of mammals, male elephants aren't directly involved in raising the youngsters - that's left to the matriarchal herd composed of grandmothers, mothers and daughters. But you'd be wrong to think that means they don't have an influ...

What is this thing we call "consciousness"? It feels like a non-physical thing that somehow exists as a separate entity to our physical body. We might think of it as being located up in our brain where our internal chatter is generated, but the 'mind' still somehow feels separate to the 'brain'. Then along comes an octopus to complicate the matter. Octopuses clearly have consciousness and high int...

Sex is simple. Or so we're taught; animals can be male or female. But even the briefest glance at the animal kingdom tells us that this simply isn't true. Some creatures have only one sex; some have three; some have none at all. Some animals are two sexes at the same time; some flip flop between them when the time is right. When evolution came to solve the problem of procreation, she did it in a m...

Becky Ripley and Emily Knight celebrate the intelligence of a brainless slime mould. As single-cell protists, with no brain and no nervous system, slime moulds do not 'think' in human terms, but they can calculate and navigate complex systems with incredible efficiency and objectivity. With some help from a few oat flakes, because slime mould loves oats. One species in particular, Physarum Polycep...

Becky Ripley and Emily Knight examine the naked mole rat, a saber-toothed sausage of a rodent, which seems to defy the mammalian laws of aging. It lives way longer than what is expected of a rodent and is now the focus for much medical research as scientists try to understand more about their aging process in the name of human life extension. Of course, we all want to age slower and live longer, b...

Becky Ripley and Emily Knight find out what ants teach us about surviving a pandemic. As social animals, we're particularly susceptible to disease, so perhaps there are lessons to be learned from other sociable species in how we manage this. Ants are one of the most social species on the planet, and it turns out they know a thing or two about self-isolation and social distancing. The story of how...

Naturebang is back. Becky Ripley and Emily Knight are again trying to make sense of what we humans are all about, with a little help from the natural world. And this week, they’re getting lost. Navigating our world is a challenge faced by every creature that moves. From dung beetles mapping the desert dunes, to eels circumnavigating the globe, each finds its own way about with unerring accuracy. H...

Ah, true love. Who can quantify that heady rush, the joy of another’s company, the unshakable bonds between one lover and another? Well, vole experts can. This tiny rodent is not just an anagram of love, it can also teach us a lot about why we fall. And why we sometimes stray. Prairie Voles form life-long monogamous bonds, together until death they do part. Almost identical Meadow Voles don’t, liv...

If you think you’re in control, think again. What invisible forces might be guiding your behaviour, your decisions, your most intimate emotions? Becky Ripley and Emily Knight take a trip into the bizarre nightmare world of the undergrowth, and watch ‘zombie ants’ stumble forward, blindly following the orders of the deadly fungi controlling their brains. Parasites often get the upper hand of their...

Strange things dwell out in the open ocean. Bobbing atop the waves, Becky Ripley and Emily Knight meet one such creature, the Portuguese Man O’War. With its bulbous air-sacs and trailing tentacles you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s a jellyfish, but you’d be wrong. It’s a colony, a society of tiny individual animals, who work together to eat, hunt and reproduce as one. In the Age of the Individual...

The humble sea sponge has been around for over 500 million years. We may think of them as ‘simple’ animals, with no brain, no nerves and no organs. But they have a pretty good party trick up their fleshy sleeves. Push a sponge through a mesh, until all that remains is a cloud of cells. Pour those cells into a tank, and watch as the cells reform themselves, like the terminator, back into a sponge....

Starling murmurations, those swirling, shifting sky-patterns made by hundreds of birds moving in synchrony, are one of nature’s greatest spectacles. How do they avoid crashing into each other? Becky Ripley and Emily Knight delve into the maths behind the movement with some computer modelling to help them chart the flight patterns, and discover the secret. As for us humans, sadly we don’t fly toget...

Becky Ripley and Emily Knight look to the natural world to answer some of life's big questions. Science meets storytelling, with a philosophical twist.