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Transcript

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0:01Who are the characters behind science? This is Science Behind the Glass, Illuminating the Human Side. In this podcast, we unveil the human side of laboratories and science. Scientists share personal experiences and we discuss their meanings from different perspectives and fields of research. Welcome to Science Behind the Glass, Illuminating the Human Side. the podcast that unveils the secrets behind people, stories, and misunderstood animals. Across cultures and centuries, snakes have been both feared and revered. For the ancient Egyptians, they were symbols of protection and life. Indigenous from Amazon and Australian stories, serpent spirits gave the shape to rivers and lands. Yet, in Western lore, snakes became icons of sin and shame. creatures to be avoided, not understood. Our guest today is someone who’s reshaping how we see the natural world. Dr. Cristina Znek is a herpetologist, venom researcher, science communicator, and fearless field scientist, whose work bridges the gap between humans and wildlife.

1:12From Australia’s most venomous snakes to its rarest parrots. Cristina has led groundbreaking conservation projects, including studies on dead others, the iconic palm cockatoos, and even global research into how people perceive snakes. Through science, storytelling, and immersive fieldwork, she challenges fears with curiosity and transforms misunderstanding into respect. Cristina invited us to see the intelligence, beauty, and vital role of animals so often cast in the shadow.

1:42Cristina! Welcome to Science Behind the Glass. Thank you very much for accepting this invitation. It’s a pleasure having you here. Thanks for having me. Nice to meet you. Yes, nice to meet you. And to start with the podcast, we want to know where was born that curiosity for snakes? So for me, my obsession with wildlife began when I was a very little girl, as old as I can remember, in fact. And instead of having a dog or a cat as a pet, we had a boa constrictor. It was a very large snake, freaking huge. And my mom was actually terrified that it was going to physically consume me because I was this little girl. But of course, I just was fascinated. And growing up in a very large city, we’re talking millions and millions of people, this is Los Angeles.

2:34I didn’t really have access to much nature. So for me, it was really important to be able to have access on a daily basis inside my own home to observe behaviors that I would never get a chance to do so out in the bush. So after having that snake, fortunately, my parents, they were flexible and accommodated my obsession with reptiles.

3:03And I would just… catch things from my backyard and then keep them for a little while or out in the bush and then feed them, get to learn about them. And yeah, just being able to keep reptiles as pets enabled me to just watch them endlessly and became totally fascinated. And that’s where my love of reptiles and extending on to wildlife thereafter began. Wow, that’s amazing. I don’t think that my mom would have allowed me to have these kind of animals. I’m grateful for them. Yeah, that’s right. Sounds very interesting and unusual as well. And to continue, can you share how working with snakes and birds might change the view that someone has on the interaction between humans and wildlife?

3:56a serious major problem around the world. And where we often focus on these sorts of conflicts is with bears, tigers, leopards, you know, cougars, these sorts of really big, you know, elephants, charismatic species. But actually in terms of interactions with humans, snakes is number one, yet it’s not really talked about. And it’s a very controversial and Sort of sensitive topic because it goes into the realm of people having snake phobia and without having those interactions and really being able to understand the animal at all. And they’re so dissimilar to humans.

4:38It can really. exacerbate this conflict and have this negative perceptions in someone’s mind to the point where it almost just like explodes and they have this terrible overreaction when they encounter a snake themselves because this lack of like knowledge base on snakes as an example for human wildlife conflict it’s it creates this massive void that’s just readily filled by fear -mongering myths and misinformation and so People have this perception in their mind, but it’s actually just the wrong one. And it’s not until they really have some interaction, which is rare with a snake, that they realize that everything that they’ve been told is actually wrong. And that’s what we’re finding with some of my research is really interesting. We might get into a little bit later. Yeah. And that you mentioned is very curious because actually for some cultures, like really ancient cultures and some indigenous communities.

5:38For them, snakes represent life and rivers and it’s a symbol of health. And even the symbol of health is a snake. But then in other cultures, more exactly the Western ones, they change all this perception with the snakes. And then, of course, with colonization, that changed all the narratives. Of course, the incidents didn’t help about it. And as you said, like the… ignorance about it and how we interact with them or why they act in the way they act. That changed also the perception. So I haven’t said that you also investigate the snake venom population and the venom research. What’s the human health connection in your snake work? How does it matter to people?

6:32How we can disentangle this? That’s a really great question. And I guess the first thing that I’ll state is that science and research doesn’t necessarily, in my opinion, have to directly benefit humans in order to be valuable. In fact, there’s been a lot of accidental discoveries when just scientists are allowed to do their work and follow their discoveries and interests.

7:01So, you know, some examples are… x -rays or penicillin or even even viagra so so that’s that’s the first thing i’d like to state now with venom in particular venom is a huge topic and there’s tens of thousands of different you know proteins and peptides it’s not millions right so each snake can have between 20 and 50 different proteins and peptides and each and every one of them will have a very specific target evolutionarily developed over millions of years. And if you think about it from a drug design perspective and drug discovery perspective, that’s what you want out of a drug.

7:47You want it to be targeted and you want it to not have any of those side effects, right? So venom is a really good way to sort of shortcut our discovery of potentially helpful therapeutic drugs or even diagnostic tests. or laboratory tools because they’re biologically active compounds, right? They have the right conformation of shape, series of amino acids that give them that bioactivity of interest. So a perfect example is lupus. It’s a terrible debilitating autoimmune disease that humans get. And in order to start treating this disease, first step is to diagnose it just like any other. In order to diagnose it, currently right now the best way is known is to actually use Taipan venom on the sample of blood to determine whether they’ve got lupus. So it’s that in combination with Echis carinatus, a soil -scale fiber venom.

8:47And it’s because those venoms are sensitive to a drop in something called phospholipid, and that’s in our blood. And that’s what lupus is. attacking the phospholipids in your blood and preventing you from being able to clot properly, which can lead to a whole suite of different types of symptoms, really problematic for people.

9:12But you can start to treat it as soon as you’re diagnosed. And these venoms, that’s just one great example to diagnose diseases is lupus. But, you know, there’s other examples of different venom toxins that have been used as like a scaffold. For drugs currently in existence, a perfect big example is captopril, and that reduces the blood pressure, which, you know, high blood pressure leads to heart disease, which is the number one killer of humans in the world. So there’s actually quite a lot of connections of venom to human health and research in that regard. Yeah, that is amazing. And yeah, actually, rarely this connection between health and the snakes is considered by most people. And in that matter… Continue with that line. You also investigate or research how snakes hear or how they sense vibrations. What those experiments reveal and do you think these results may help to change people’s perception on snakes? I think that the more research in general that we do on snakes. the better off we’ll be because we’re filling a knowledge base that I said before. Otherwise, it’s readily, you know, that void is readily filled by misinformation.

10:37So that’s the first point. And secondly, I just really couldn’t believe that that study had not been done. You know, looking how snakes respond, like as in free moving snakes, not ones that are partially anesthetized with like electrodes in their brain. sort of thing how free -moving snakes respond to airborne sound because of course of course snakes do have ears it’s just internal ears not external ears just think you know not very similar but uh broadly speaking to dolphins or moths and and some of these are you know they can distinguish individualization individualized vocalizations that sort of thing so I had actually studied vocalizations in parrots. And so I was a little bit intrigued in this sort of space.

11:28And then working with snakes, I thought, oh, let’s do this study. So we actually looked at, it was 19 snakes across 16 genera. And so previously, first of all, no one had studied free -moving snakes. In this regard, but also they’d only studied one species. So we wanted to see how it would change, how those reactions would change across different genera, different, you know, groups of snakes. So like Taipans versus Wobblers versus brown snakes versus death adders. Right.

12:03So, yeah, we ran that study. And OK, so what did we found? Well, after several years of working. We were in like 305 different trials. It took us weeks. We had to do it at 27 degrees temperature, which was pretty hot. So all of us as such as indoors were sweating the whole time. But the snakes were happy and they could behave as they wanted. There was a great collaborative team effort. combination of uh of the science arts and industry together a really good example of them coming together um but we found that the snakes responded more similarly to other snakes in their genus compared with other snakes in different genera so a brown snake was more likely to behave similarly to another species of brown snake versus say a death adder And so that was the first big result is that there’s probably like this evolutionary, evolutionarily those snakes evolved to behave in a certain way. And it’s probably to do with whether they’re active foragers, whether they’re ambush predators, you know, the foraging mode. Also how big the snake gets, right? So behavior can change over the course of the snake’s life in terms of how defensive it is. Now, what we found, interestingly, is

13:36that the woma pythons, which get really big, and they’re a semi -arboreal species, live in the arid interior of Australia, non -venomous being python, we found that they actually exhibited a lot of curiosity -type behaviors. So they would go up and periscope, and they would sometimes go toward the speaker as well. And so rather than having sort of defensive behavior like we saw out of the brown snakes, they were more so curious and unafraid of that sound signal. The brown snakes were an interesting point. So the genus Cedonia, it was all or nothing. And that’s really what is mirrored when you encounter them in the bush. They will basically stay in cryptus as long as possible, trying to avoid a confrontation.

14:22They might sort of stand up and hiss and just show that aposematic coloration in the S shape facing up. to try to bluff you out of attacking it. But when you cross that threshold, boom, they decided. And so that’s what we found. They either didn’t move at all, or if they did, they moved the furthest. So that was quite interesting.

14:48And the last one that I’ll touch on, I’ll talk about Taipans. And they were quite spooked. By the sound, they didn’t like it. They exhibited a lot of defensive type behaviors. There was hissing, dropping of the lower jaw, these subtle type behaviors. I was literally, I had to look with binoculars from behind this sort of half wall, just leaning down, not moving, of course, not making a sound. And yeah, they did not like it. They would tend to move away if they did move at all in response to the sound. And the other cool behavior is… It’s called a fixed gaze or a fixation type behavior where they’ll stare at you, in this case the sound, and their body would coil and they would maybe move sideways but still keep their eyes trained on that stimulus.

15:49ready to strike basically so very poor and interesting results what type of sound do you expose in different like types or like ultrasounds or was like a yeah great question so the media would want had we played like some music oh how did they respond to bill joe or you know whatever it was um but from a scientific perspective we could only do so many trials and that song would have or any song would have gone up and down in and out of a lot of different frequencies we wanted to know okay in this frequency can they hear in this frequency and so we did a range of frequencies all at once and it’s called pink noise and you have the same amount of energy throughout all the frequencies and so what does it sound like to a human well it’s like or the higher pitch one so like zero to 300 um not decibels but hertz decibels was the uh the amplitude and we did that at 85 so about like someone screaming would be how loud but anyway and then we did 300 um every 150 we did up to 500 from memory we had three sets of sounds anyway and so the higher up why we got to the that’s kind of what it sounded like and we did have different responses across those sounds And whether they actually felt whether there was ground vibrations as well, because we actually measured ground vibrations at the

17:22first sound. Even though we tried to limit them, they were still there. But sounds two and three, so the next higher up ones, did not have any ground vibrations. And we were still seeing this behavioral changes as opposed to the control when we had no sound. And do you think that this has an effect, like people, like they can’t hear? Like when people is approaching or they may perhaps they can’t like perceive in a better way or people can’t, you know, change their perceptions now that they know that they can’t hear these sounds.

17:53I think so. Like how we interact with snakes. Like, I don’t know about you, but I’ve got 35 snakes personally. And so we now talk to them. And it was really interesting. We even convinced ourselves like we weren’t sure what we were going to find. We think, yeah, they’re more aware and they’re using more senses than what we thought. And whilst I can’t give you any like really direct advice on how to use this in whatever country you’re in, I think it just gives us some helpful perspective. Like in the least, if you want to make a snake aware that you’re there, you know, it’s not just ground vibrations, but you can speak as well. And that could help your cause.

18:38But, yeah, every situation is different, and also different species might react differently to sound. But it’s a starting point, and like always, you need more research. Yes, yes. For example, I’m not an expert in snakes, obviously, but with the spiders, each species have a communication through vibrations, and they can, as you said, they recognize themselves. especially between them, like males and females. So the frequency that they recognize between even closest species, they can tell apart if it’s from one particular species or another one. So it’s like their, I would say, fingerprint. I think we’re just really scratching the surface. on trying to understand animals and animal behavior and animal intelligence.

19:33There’s so much more to it. The more we look, the more we uncover, the more we realize things are much more intelligent and conscious as well. Like, you know, having a like self -awareness is all sorts. It’s just our limitation is our funding for these sorts of research, but also our minds. Like we’re only see the world in our.

19:58umwelt is is a is a german word to describe it but based off of our senses but everything else senses the world in a different way or a lot of things sense the world differently than how we do it you know spiders feeling their little fingers or um you know with a platypus having electromagnetic um you know these receptors and or chemoreceptors there’s all sorts of different ways of um Yeah, perceiving the world. It’s up to researchers to try to put themselves in the shoes of their species rather than through our own perspective of how we view and interpret the world. You’re right. I think that also that will open more like I guess that the bias that we have with animals and then trying to understand them in a better way, not just putting limitations based on. what we perceive, I guess. And you’re also running what you described as the world’s largest survey across 20 plus countries on human perceptions of snakes. Can you tell us a little bit about what is this project about and what patterns have you seen and what any surprises related to cultural differences? Yeah, thanks for this. it’s called under the snake fluent that’s the project and we’ve we’re operating

21:29in over 20 countries so it is the largest human snake conflict study ever undertaken as far as i know definitely definitely published so what we’re doing is we’re looking at snake education events and um we’re looking at how people well We are surveying people at snake education events and we’re trying to work out what are the correlations with people? What is filling their perceptions of snakes and how is that affecting their behavior around snakes? What sort of knowledge base do they have with regards to first aid and just world -type beliefs about snakes and the environment?

22:17Do they think that… They should all be eradicated or that we should be proud that our area has snakes because it’s got to be a functioning ecosystem. So those are sorts of questions that we’re asking people around the world. And we’re targeting that at education events with people who we’ve recruited to be partners on this project. And we wanted to make sure we heavily vetted each of these snake educators to make sure that they were giving. basically good education, evidence -based education about snakes. And the other really interesting part of this work is trying to understand how well snake education events are doing in terms of improving people’s perceptions of snakes. Are they still likely to try to kill a snake after that snake education event? And what different elements about that education event is the best determinant of… the biggest improvement of snake perception because in the end it’s you know snake conservation it’s about preserving habitat and you know a person killing the old snake here or there that to me is not really about snake conservation but really about preventing snake bite for humans like it’s a human safety issue when someone tries to kill a snake out of fear then that’s when they’re basically inviting a retaliatory defensive bite

23:48from that snake. So that’s what we’re trying to prevent is people trying to kill snakes. So a bit of coexistence is what we’re hoping to achieve with that paper. Now, I haven’t answered the end part of your question, but you can chime in there. How do you do the following up to see if the perception of the person changed or the community changed? regarding their snakes. The cool way that we can do this is just by surveying them immediately after the event. So the event’s at least an hour, up to eight hours. Like some events that I was running is venomous snake handling courses, like just on the weekend. We train 15 members of the community on safe and ethical snake handling. And so, you know, as part of this research, I’d survey them before that course and then immediately after. We have a potential to possibly check their perceptions a year later, but we actually haven’t come to that point just yet. We only stopped our data collection in July, just at the end of World Snake Week. That’s amazing.

25:03And actually, I want to ask you, do you see like how do you communicate this with different cultures? Because I imagine that they have different languages. So do you have like differences, of course, in like a communication or someone was like a liaison between you or the team that you were working in that way? the perception was different because when someone explains in your own language is explaining another one yeah 100 this was a real challenge with this type of work being so global in nature and it’s it’s really no wonder that the work hasn’t been done before because it’s been an event of work i’ll tell you and shout out to my project managers um yeah oh and buck huber and Poppy Windham, because without having project managers, I wouldn’t have been able to manage this big project. So one of the things to get to your question, Dr. Linda, is we had to have the survey translated to eight different languages. And that was to enable it to work in all the countries. So in some countries, they were fine with using English. like the Philippines, for example, and all the countries in Europe.

26:25But other ones, like Malawi, as an example, we needed to have that translated. And so our snake educators, we had them lead this as part of their contribution. We weren’t able to pay for any translators. We actually were running this entire project with no grant because no one likes to fund snake research because they don’t like snakes. So same thing with that. sound garden paper, how snakes respond to airborne sounds. That was just all off the back of our money, free time, that sort of thing. Yeah. So our snake educators, we would just have them translate it, but have it, we needed them to collaborate with another person as a, as a gauge of whether they translated it exactly accurately. And once they, once they both agreed upon every word. because that can really affect people’s responses, then that’s the translation that we used. Yeah, I guess that is crucial. And I want to revisit a little bit your behavior studies. You also work with a much more charismatic species, the palm cockatoo.

27:36Yeah. you discover some some tool usage like they use something to to create this percussion or drumming rhythms and how did this project come about and what surprised you the most about it well would you believe me if i told you that the palm cockatoo project came out of snakes it doesn’t seem like right so i won a fulbright fellowship to come from America to study snakes up on Cape York Peninsula with Professor Rob Hindson. And partway through us developing the proposals and things like that, well, I was thinking of grant applications and permits at that stage.

28:21So I was already over here, got the Fulbright, the paper for me to be here. We came to the conclusion that snakes wouldn’t… really be a good umbrella species in any way and they’re really limited on the distribution across Cape York Peninsula, Far North Queensland. But there was this alternative species that really lived across this whole beautiful landscape and was probably in danger but no one had studied enough to determine that and we could probably win grants. So from a practical perspective of the finances but also the conservation. aspect we shifted from green pythons to palm cockatoos so that’s how the palm cockatoo project originally started in 2009 and my obsession with snakes um and conservation yeah so deep down i really wanted to do as best for conservation as most most that i could do for conservation as possible so in terms of how the project began like sort of specifically on Yeah, the topics we needed to look at was basically trying to understand more about this really difficult study species.

29:34And one of the main problems was we couldn’t identify individuals. So there’s so many different demographic parameters we weren’t able to get, which would directly feed into a population viability analysis, which directly feeds into the conservation status. Us being able to predict that the population is likely to go extinct in X number of years, you know, business as usual. we try to identify individuals based on their vocalizations because they couldn’t capture this giant bird they’re like you know 65 centimeters this huge can’t even see the bottom it doesn’t fit in the screen they’re massive things and yeah they probably wouldn’t like being handled either and they would remember it forever because they’re super smart and so you probably wouldn’t be able to capture the bird again lots of trouble And so, yeah, we started out with vocalizations and that quickly turned into the most interesting thing about palm cockatoos being their drumming behavior.

30:26And so I set out to try to observe and video as many different drumming events as possible with this bird. And I failed initially. The first year I didn’t get any. I sort of saw it a few times. They’re such wary birds, hey. They’re super xenophobic. they just fly away. And it just took, I don’t know whether I got better at it over time or whether the birds got used to me, maybe a bit of both, or maybe they just got used to me. And yeah, I did get a real sense of that over time of certain birds that I was, you know, sort of chasing over time would start to accept me. This knew that I was of no harm to them. And that was, that was quite special to be able to really get that sense when, you know, they’re doing, you know, making a stick in a tree and trying to, formula like fashion the drumstick and then instead of flying over in that way would fly directly over my head um because i’m at a hollow like there’s some wild experiences with this massive super intelligent bird to observe that drumming behavior i think i filmed it like 72 times in the end uh yeah over the course of yeah multiple years but on average it would take me about a hundred hours of field work trekking through grass this tall just to get one drumming event on camera. So it was not low -hanging fruit whatsoever. And

31:57that’s probably why, despite it being super iconic and charismatic, just like the poster species for Cape York, why no one had ever succeeded at uncovering the mystery of this drumming bag. And they do this for mating? Well, that’s what I would like to think. And the media loves to say that. Twisting the plot. Yeah. Look, they do it for two reasons. Pair bonding is one of them. And that’s about half the time. And it’s them getting the timing right of breeding and communicating to each other that. They’re ready to breed, that they have enough fat stores, the right hormones flowing and that sort of thing, that they’ve got the hollow, this big old grass tree hollow, vertically piped, that they have ownership of it. You know, a lot of things, a lot of boxes need to be ticked and they can mate and breed just about any time of the year. So they really need a way to signal to each other.

32:56So pair bonding, drumming behavior, that helps with that. But the second major… About 50 % of the time they use drumming is actually for a joint territorial defense. So these old growth tree hollows are super rare in the landscape, especially the ones perfectly suited for this really big bird. You know, sort of by the time they get to that vertically piped stage, they’ve been through so many fires, cyclones, you know, they’re 300 plus years old that they’re super vulnerable to any old fire that comes through.

33:28whether it be small or big. And so there’s like this small window of availability of when a tree might be suitable for them. So they’re rare in the landscape and they’re willing to fight to the death for it. And I’ve certainly watched some epic battles between males. So this whole drumming behavior, coming back to your question, it’s alerting nearby pairs, particularly males, that this territory is taken. This is mine. I have a strong enough bill. I can make this really hard drumstick and bang it up. And you can hear that this is a strength of power for them. You know, like it’s like an army running, you know, going together in unison. You know, it’s very, yeah, it’s intimidating, I suppose, to a nearby male. Like, don’t you dare try to usurp my hollow.

34:24It’s not up for grabs. Wow, that sounds amazing. So cool. Yeah, it sounds beautiful. And the footage must be really nice. Speaking about this beautiful, amazing bird, the palm cockatoo, this work led to a status upgrade and influence in mining environmental assessment. How do you navigate from the data to policy impact? How does Australia go in terms of conservation and fund? Yeah, look, it’s a long… I’ll put it that way to start with. So you’ve got to be in it for the long haul, but you can probably shortcut it by first literally downloading the forms from the government websites to see what exactly it is, like what criteria you need to hit and prove with your species that would satisfy X, Y, Z conservation status. So there’s very particular wording. And unless your scientific paper. comes out and is like robust like meeting those specific criteria you’re not going to get there so i would recommend starting at the end seeing where you’re trying to head even even just beyond conservation status but for instance these um it’s a little bit off topic but uh rodenticides if you are publishing a paper on Trying to get these second generation super

35:57toxic anticoagulant rodenticides off the market because they’re killing non -target species and endangered species and all the rest of it in Australia. If researchers are trying to prove that this is a problem, literally you would download the forms that would prove that this is a key threatening process in the EPPC. So you have to know the process is my point. So the governmental process to get your end result. You know, whether it be that conservation status or list the anticoagulant rodenticides as a key threatening process through the EPVC Act. Literally just download the forms and read those words very carefully. And then that can actually guide your work in how you would design your paper. Do you need to have it wider spread than what it is? Because you need to prove it’s at the national scale. Or, you know, should you study a different species?

36:52Because you need to prove that. um they might go into a higher endangered level or does it already need to be endangered you know that would it would just it would totally change how you’d go about the paper so i’d say start at the end yeah that’s right it’s quite unusual to find scientific papers like um written in in this in this language that that is more more approachable for for stakeholders and that kind of thing and that’s when they say co -design it as well so the stakeholder that you hope is going to pay attention to your paper once you’ve spent years and published it and you’re like here please use my paper you should have started with them two years ago and say uh how should we design a paper so it would be helpful for your management it’s very disconnected the part of the government and the policies working together with the scientists it is we need to get out of our silos yes yes And the idea is that the communication be straightforward and then it goes in both ways, right? And that way it makes more use of small amount of funds, especially in the conservation space. You see it in grants that they’re really looking for co -design projects, ones that are working with indigenous groups, ones that have letters of support. Like I, for instance, applied one year.

38:17Well, two years in a row, the first year I was denied a threatened species grant in Queensland. And the difference between the two years was I didn’t include letters of support the first year. We stated that we had these people on board, and that was the truth. But we actually just didn’t have the letter saying it, and it was just a simple thing. And they’re just finding any way to knock you back. It was basically the same application the next year with a few letters of support, and bang, we got it. The theme ecological grief, loss of species and habitats is increasingly discussed. Do you experience that in your fieldwork and research? How do you cope or channel into that? Yeah, this is very common. And I’ve now been at conferences where they have ecological grief sessions. And one of the big keys that I remember for one of the sessions is to talk about it. and to talk with other researchers of what they’re feeling. Say what you’re feeling.

39:20They need to say how they’re feeling, that sort of thing. So to get to your question, though, I think I put a bit of a bubble around myself in order to protect myself mentally, enable myself to continue going because I know I need to keep fighting that good conservation fight, like no matter what. I just need to keep going. So for me, I think that bubble helps, that’s the best way I can describe it, but prevents the sort of ecological grief from happening. I get very frustrated when things are happening really slowly and I realise, as in conservation outcomes are happening slowly, meanwhile all of the habitat destruction and all these impacts on wildlife is happening so rapidly. So I definitely have a lot of frustrations there. But when I do, like, get… I’m depressed about the state of the planet and the environment. I really, I think of two things. One, this is one of the reasons why I didn’t want to have kids. I didn’t feel it was very suitable to bring children up in this day and age. And so like, it’s not like I’m depressed that my kids are going to have to deal with this.

40:33Yes, it’s sad. You know, other kids and my nieces and nephews, but it just will hit you harder if it’s your own progeny. Right. So I don’t have that. So that’s good. That’s good for me. The second thing I actually. I take a step back and look at it from a geological timeframe perspective. And what I mean by that is, like, I’m a lecturer into biodiversity and conservation. We look at the topic as a whole, including, you know, previous five mass extinction events that have happened.

41:07You know, it’s either from a meteor or a volcano event or something like that. But the crew. mass extinction event. It’s happening right now. It’s the sixth mass extinction event. The only one done by a species and that is humans. But if you look at the recovery of Earth and species, it has happened after each of those mass extinction events. So we’re in one now and recovery will happen. It’s just not necessarily in our lifetime or multiple generations of human lifetime. So there will be, Earth will go on. And there will be greater speciation further along. It’s just the quality of life for humans, and that is definitely going to draw. Yeah, so that perspective, that longer -term perspective, might help some people.

42:01It does for me. It’s still incredibly sad. Like, I don’t want a single species to go extinct. I don’t want another tree to be cut down, you know, like another forest. it just boggles my mind that that’s still happening. I think that is very impressive because actually, yeah, I agree with you and also the one of the followers that I decided not to have kids to have a contribution less consumption and production. And then I was very aware of how we are now, but it’s my personal choice. And also, but I sometimes find it tricky and it’s like, oh, I would like to do more. And then there’s more changes. But then if we fall in this, like, oh, there’s nothing to do and we can’t do absolutely anything else. It’s not going to change anyhow. If we fall in that. way of thinking i don’t think that we are not going to change anything not in the present not in future generations so i think that’s that’s what i said like a really small contribution but doesn’t matter yeah it all adds up and also the ripple effect you know was it john dunn the uh the famous poet no man is an island right no person we should say but uh that’s how he said it that we all impact those around us. And whether it be our family, our friends, our coworkers, and they see how you behave, we’re all part of the social norm. Like we create the social norm. And you

43:33can see, this is why generations are very different. Gen X versus Gen Y, Z, you know, they’re all really different because they’re all influenced in a certain way. And the political arena in which they’re boarded to and the extent of civilization and all sorts of factors. right but um the education about the environment is only ramped up and we’re realizing how much negativity at negative impact that we’re having on the planet and um but yeah people it’s going in the right direction there’s just yeah some some governments and a lot of corruption and big international companies needing to be reined in but on the individual level I think, yeah, people are well and truly more aware.

44:25But I agree with you, Linda. Do what you can. And if everyone does, that’s all of a sudden a big impact. And then if people are sharing on social media, you know, that gets bigger again. And who knows? You could be inspiring a lot of people. Yeah, that’s right. It’s really hard to reconcile these emotions with your work and everything, but maybe other sides of the work can help. For example, as a science communicator and as a science ambassador, you have visited remote places and communities. What is the role of indigenous knowledge or community participation in your work? Look, I’ve worked with Indigenous mobs across Cape York and elsewhere, yeah, for going on 17 years. And it’s been, yeah, an absolute great privilege to do so. And there’s little bits and bobs you get here and there. Some knowledge, it’s for them and they can’t pass on. And you just have to respect that sort of thing. One interesting thing in particular that really stuck with me is talking. with an elder about snakebite and their community, you know, it’s just an interesting thing. How would they deal with snakebite and that sort of thing? Because they didn’t have compression bandages and they didn’t have antivenom.

45:50Could they still survive by what they did? You know, is this something that they did? And yeah, one of these elders said that he would partially, that he would bury a person flat, lay them down and… partially bury them and it sort of makes sense so you’re you’re actually you’re mobilizing the person which we know is really helpful for reducing your heart rate and the blood flow and the venom going all around your body but also a bit of compression you know if you do have a little bit of pressure all over the body then that might be slowing the lymphatic flow of venom and give your body a chance to you know, attack and deal with these toxins in a sublethal dose.

46:33And so, of course, there would have been deaths, but maybe a few more survived because they worked that out. And it’s really good principles too. Like when I, you know, train people on like first aid and our state handling courses, we say, well, look at how the indigenous used to do it. And there’s some principles that we can extrapolate from that, particularly if you’re out in a remote area and you don’t have the ideal scenario. around you you haven’t got i don’t know a sat phone or reception um and if you didn’t have a bandage what would you do you know and and i i tell those stories it’s always it’s always good to if we can yeah incorporate indigenous knowledges from around the world um and hopefully can keep those cultures alive well and thriving you know keep their habitat intact if they’re you know a a hunter -gatherer type society. I think they’re incredibly valuable. We’ll probably only just scratch the surface of the knowledge that they’ve got, you know, in terms of plant extracts and, you know, it’s probably got the cure to cancer and all sorts of things in the plants that they’re using in very specific ways. And, you know, we see that through a lot of the drug design development coming actually from plants and a lot of it’s derived from indigenous knowledge. Yeah, hopefully this, like that knowledge, we can… Like I work together with that knowledge and try to encourage them and empower these communities and work together

48:05for a better science, I would say, and breaking those barriers. Yeah, and not just extrapolate or extract rather, not just extract. That’s a new form of colonization, isn’t it? To just like take the knowledge and not give them any credit for it. You know, that’s happened time and time again. I think we can all agree that’s right. Yes, the importance of bringing together and working together in a project instead of just using the places or their lands or their sites or their knowledge and just publishing or using this or applying for grants. Yeah, there’s some good movements in this space, like in, you know, Bush Chopper for Indigenous Australians. Yeah, there’s some. really big money makers coming out and and they’re you know they’re the ones receiving the grants from government to develop their food product um yeah so yeah hearing and concerns i don’t know if you heard about the we have the director of the center of excellence for in indigenous um environmental futures he shown uh professor sean Om. He was telling us about his experiences. He’s an archaeologist and his experiences with the indigenous communities.

49:31They are working together and they design all the methodologies together. How actually is the other way around? It’s not like a you propose a project. They propose a project and the ways and the methods are completely different to the western side of the… of us, we do the things and actually we learn so much from them. So he was explaining what is the difference and what is the issues that still needs to be addressed.

50:03So yeah, that’s amazing that you have this experience with these communities. And to analyze, we want to know, we want you to, we invite you to give us a message. For scientists, for people, for people that is invested and actually wants to work in the conservation and wants to bridge this rigorous science with public engagement and with a real work impact. What advice would you give them or what message? Yeah, great. Hang out with old people would be one of the big ones.

50:38They know so much. So whether it be indigenous or non -indigenous, for me. um they’re like they’re just my elders right if i want to go learn about birds i’ll just go hang out with these oldies and they just know every call and they have a million stories and there’s so much knowledge there right so really respecting our elders across all cultures to me really big one read lots of books so much knowledge out there just soak it up like a sponge right and like i i would say attend lots of events as well you’re all sorts of lovely in person because you never know who you’re going to meet there, who you’re going to be inspired by that will really fill your cup and keep you going. I think, you know, it’s a difficult space to navigate, to find jobs in, to keep mentally well in. And I think those are really uplifting types of events. So even things like local revegetation groups all around the world, there’s, I mean, even like. Just across Brisbane area where I’m at, there’s all these different community groups where they’re doing local re -veg. And it can feel daunting, all the problems and all the negative impacts happening to the natural world. And to know that you’re weeding that plant and you’re improving habitat and you’re doing what you can, I think that’s really empowering. So that’s what I would, I think, recommend. And if you want… to make good impressions at these types of areas, events

52:09and stuff, and you want to maybe get a job, arrive early. Simple thing, but it goes a long way and you seem dependable and you can have some great conversations. A small little tidbit. That sounds fantastic. Yes. Thank you very much, Christina. It has been a pleasure having you here. Thank you for your time. Thank you for having me. for sharing all your experience, your knowledge.

52:35So thank you for doing all of that. This episode was inspired by Christina’s mission to rebuild the relationship between humans and wildlife. And by the groundbreaking conservation and science communication work she is leading across Australia and beyond. Dr. Christina Stepnick invited us to step beyond fear and into curiosity. challenging the myths around space and celebrating the intelligence, beauty, and ecological importance of animals often misunderstood. From Venom to Birdsong, her work shows how science and empathy can help us to coexist more peacefully with the wild world around us. We are also excited to share the science behind the glass now. lives on a new platform that connects the podcast to all major streaming services via RSS. Just click the link in the description to find us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google, and wherever you love to listen to your podcasts. Science Behind the Glass Illuminating the Human Side is an independent podcast created and hosted by me, Daniel Esguerra, and Linda Hernandez, with the invaluable support of our dedicated technical director. Rafael Giordano, and the original music by our colleague and friend, Bernardo Aguila. Follow us on Instagram, X, Facebook, LinkedIn, and TikTok. And visit our website for more updates and resources. Don’t forget to subscribe and share this podcast with your friends and communities. Let’s amplify these essential narratives

54:05together. And if this episode inspired you, consider supporting us with a contribution via PayPal. Just click the Support Us button on our website. Your support helps us to grow and ensures we continue illuminating the human side of science. Until next time.