The Wild Episode

The Neon Flying Squid is one of those animals that lives up to its cool name: a squid that can actually fly. And we're not talking just gliding - time to talk jets and rockets ... Subscribe to the show to make sure you don't miss any future Wild Episodes, and e-mail your comments, corrections, suggestions or feedback to help make those future episodes better! You can also follow the show on Facebo...

The most numerous purely terrestrial animal in Antarctica is almost certainly the nematode worm Scottnema lindsayae . An astonishingly resilient little creature that goes places almost no other animal can, and probably rides the wind to get there ... Subscribe to the show to make sure you don't miss any future Wild Episodes, and e-mail your comments, corrections, suggestions or feedback to help ma...

The Red-Crowned Crane is a hugely charismatic, properly iconic bird, with symbolic importance in much Asian art, culture and myth. So here's me trying, in a way, to use it as a symbol of something else ... the state of the natural world, for want of a better description ... Subscribe to the show to make sure you don't miss any future Wild Episodes, and e-mail your comments, corrections, suggestion...

The Emperor Scorpion ( Pandinus imperator ) is one of the biggest, most impressive and fearsome-looking scorpions in the world. So why is it described online as '... very good with children ...'? Subscribe to the show to make sure you don't miss any future Wild Episodes, and e-mail your comments, corrections, suggestions or feedback to help make those future episodes better! You can also follow th...

To fill an unanticipated, COVID-related gap in the schedule, this is a rebroadcast of an episode from the first year of the podcast - one that mysteriously became unavailable in the podcast feed a while back. Hopefully it sticks around this time, though no promises since I don't know what went wrong with it the first time round. The northern fulmar ( Fulmarus glacialis ) is one of the commonest se...

The Pig-Nosed Turtle of New Guinea and northern Australia really does have a pig-like nose. But this is one of the most unusual, distinctive turtles in the world, so there's a whole lot more going on than just that ...  Subscribe to the show to make sure you don't miss any future Wild Episodes, and e-mail your comments, corrections, suggestions or feedback to help make those future episodes better...

Fenyes's strepsipteran ( Caenocholax fenyesi ) is one of the most extraordinary insects in the world. A parasitoid living a deeply strange life - twice over, in fact, since males and females both get up to some remarkable stuff but are wildly different in both form and behaviour ...  Subscribe to the show to make sure you don't miss any future Wild Episodes, and e-mail your comments, corrections,...

The Tri-spine Horseshoe Crab ( Tachypleus tridentatus ) is one of four living horseshoe crab species (probably, marginally, the biggest). Animals that have survived, superficially very little changed, for hundreds of millions of years. They've come through multiple mass extinctions, but are still facing new and unexpected challenges today ... Subscribe to the show to make sure you don't miss any f...

Colugos (often called, entirely inaccurately, flying lemurs) - there are two officially recognised species at the moment - are more dramatically and completely adapted to gliding than any other mammal. They've essentially turned their entire bodies into one big gliding surface. Extraordinary animals which also, as it happens, have extraordinary teeth ... Subscribe to the show to make sure you don'...

First in a series of listener-suggested shows! The Wasp Mantidfly ( Climaciella brunnea ) is a stunning little insect with some amazing stuff going on. Mimicry, convergent evolution, phoresy, egg predation, hypermetamorphosis and much, much more.  Subscribe to the show to make sure you don't miss any future Wild Episodes, and e-mail your comments, corrections, suggestions or feedback to help make...

The Great Slaty Woodpecker ( Mulleripicus pulverulentus ) is probably the biggest woodpecker in the world. A spectacular inhabitant of Asian forests that's haunted, perhaps, by the ghosts of two even bigger woodpeckers ... Subscribe to the show to make sure you don't miss any future Wild Episodes, and e-mail your comments, corrections, suggestions or feedback to help make those future episodes bet...

The Greater Argonaut ( Argonauta argo ) is a very unusual octopus, that travels the oceans in an exquisite papery case. And many of its secrets were uncovered by a very unusual (for her time) woman - the remarkable Jeanne Villepreux-Power - one of the 19th century's leading scientifically-minded naturalists. Subscribe to the show to make sure you don't miss any future Wild Episodes, and e-mail you...

The Stoplight Loosejaw ( Malacosteus niger ) is a pretty extraordinary fish: a jet-black denizen of the twilight zone, armed with some of the strangest and most spectacular jaws in the animal kingdom and a surprising superpower: it's one of the very, very few creatures down there that can both generate and see red light. Subscribe to the show to make sure you don't miss any future Wild Episodes, a...

The Giant Hummingbird ( Patagona gigas ) is, by a long way, the biggest hummingbird in the world. It's about twice the size of the next biggest hummingbird - the most extreme version of a kind of animal that's already pretty extreme ... Subscribe to the show to make sure you don't miss any future Wild Episodes, and e-mail your comments, corrections, suggestions or feedback to help make those futur...

The African Death's-Head Hawkmoth ( Acherontia atropos ) is a big, striking moth loaded with grim symbolism and superstition. But we're mostly interested in its very unusual vocal abilities, its very unusual diet, and its surprising connection to ... potatoes. Subscribe to the show to make sure you don't miss any future Wild Episodes, and e-mail your comments, corrections, suggestions or feedback...

The Armadillo Lizard has a fantastic scientific name - Ouroborus cataphractus - which connects it to ancient mystical symbolism and ancient heavy cavalry. In fact, it shows that in Nature, everything's connected. Everything in this case being armour, speed, sociability, predators, prey, climate, geology. And a high speed police pursuit.  Subscribe to the show to make sure you don't miss any future...

The Nemertean egg predator Carcinonemertes errans may be the most patient, persistent and committed predator ever covered on the podcast. A tiny marine worm that lives, in huge numbers, only on the exoskeleton of the Dungeness crab, and feeds on only one thing: crab eggs. Millions upon millions of crab eggs. Subscribe to the show to make sure you don't miss any future Wild Episodes, and e-mail you...

The Black-Headed Duck is the only duck that's a brood parasite: it lays its eggs in the nests of other species. But unlike every other bird in the world that does this, it causes its host species negligible harm - because of what its ducklings do as soon as they hatch ... Subscribe to the show to make sure you don't miss any future Wild Episodes, and e-mail your comments, corrections, suggestions...

The Orca ( Orcinus orca ) is one of the most famous animals on the planet - but there is some very unusual and kind of mysterious stuff going on with orcas, and a lot of it may be connected to their astonishing predatory abilities ... Subscribe to the show to make sure you don't miss any future Wild Episodes, and e-mail your comments, corrections, suggestions or feedback to help make those future...

The Rakali, aka the Australian Water-Rat , ( Hydromys chrysogaster ) is a pretty remarkable rodent. A carnivorous, semi-aquatic rodent that's native to Australia: a bit like the Australian version of an otter, it seems to be better than many Australian predators at dealing with the invasion of the poisonous cane toads ... Subscribe to the show to make sure you don't miss any future Wild Episodes,...

The Yellow-Bellied Sea Snake ( Hydrophis platurus ) is probably the most widespread snake in the world and, arguably, the most marine of all living marine reptiles. It has cut all ties with the land, and mastered an environment no other sea snake quite has: the open ocean. Subscribe to the show to make sure you don't miss any future Wild Episodes, and e-mail your comments, corrections, suggestions...

Electric eels (three species, in the genus Electrophorus ) are famous animals, and have been for centuries. That doesn't mean they've given up all their secrets to science, though: recent research has revealed they're even more extraordinary than we knew. Plus: how to use horses as bait when fishing. Subscribe to the show to make sure you don't miss any future Wild Episodes, and e-mail your commen...

The European Beewolf ( Philanthus triangulum ) is a big, striking wasp. A specialist predator of honeybees, with many tricks up its sleeve: chemical and biological warfare tricks, including symbiotic bacteria, embalming and poison gas. Subscribe to the show to make sure you don't miss any future Wild Episodes, and e-mail your comments, corrections, suggestions or feedback to help make those future...

The Colossal Squid ( Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni ) is the biggest invertebrate on Earth - a truly enormous mollusc that weighs as much as a bull moose. Yet much about it remains deeply mysterious. It is a hidden wonder of Nature, hidden away deep in the Antarctic Ocean ... Subscribe to the show to make sure you don't miss any future Wild Episodes, and e-mail your comments, corrections, suggestions...

The olm ( Proteus anguinus ) is a very unusual animal: a large cave salamander, with an extraordinary life and an interesting history of research, that comes in (at least) two very different forms: the white olm and the black. Subscribe to the show to make sure you don't miss any future Wild Episodes, and e-mail your comments, corrections, suggestions or feedback to help make those future episodes...