Big astronomical flash imminent and gay behaviour across the animal world
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ABC Listen. Podcasts, radio, news, music and more. This is a kind of health warning. What you're about to hear really is the science show. And at the same time, it isn't. It's a warning about some rude bits in today's programme. And now we start with a fond farewell to the late legend of ABC Radio and Television, Tim Bowden. A star is torn. BOOM!

Good evening. It is, after all, April the 1st, but it's my understanding that the following letter from Doug Farley of Byron Bay, New South Wales, who darkly makes reference to the generally subversive content of ABC programs in general, is absolutely genuine. How many responsible parents, he says, have thought to monitor the morally corrosive nature of the ABC's so-called children's programs?

I admit to only recently recognising the subliminal pornography and anarchistic philosophy which abounds in Mr Squiggle, a show which many children watch without their guardians being aware of its corruptive purpose.

Small wonder we breed a nation of bludgers and deviants when daily our kids are watching and worshipping a lazy slug in sunglasses and a lecherous steam shovel who persists in licking Miss Jane's breasts and displaying the coarsest manner while she offers little or no resistance to his advances.

It's no longer Miss Jane, it's Roxanne, but Steam Shovel obviously hasn't changed his filthy habits. And talking of licentious behaviour, well, not quite, but conduct which at least leaves a little bit to be desired, several letters about the appearance of Oliver Reed on a recent edition of Aspel and Company. Oliver seemed to be, according to several correspondents, exceedingly well fortified for his television appearance. Indeed, even a trifle, shall we say, elephant's trunk.

First, Catherine Schumach of Kincumber, New South Wales. We are feeling mystified by Oliver Reed's inebriated antics. His fellow guests were obviously uncomfortable and even Michael's calm demeanour was apparently shaken. Yes, ABC star Tim Bowden on backchat long ago. He reported science from all over and we shall salute him later in this science show.

A star has gone, in fact two stars. Matt Peacock, once on 7.30 on ABC television, but first on the science show in the 1970s with stunning reports on the asbestos menace. Vale Matt, who died last week. As I said, a star is torn and in the cosmos it's about to happen again. But what could it be, this incredible mystery? Laura Dreesen reports. Astronomers all around the world are waiting.

There are many telescopes out there that are operating on hair triggers, just waiting to immediately swing their telescopes over them because everything happens so fast. Professor Brad Schaefer is an astronomer at the Louisiana State University, and he's waiting for a star to explode. There aren't many things that are once in a lifetime, but the T. coronaborialis nova is one of them. Novi are bright flashes in the night sky. They look like a new star, and they're surprisingly common. We see a couple of them each year.

But what makes this one stand out is that it flashes over and over again, roughly every 80 years. And it's just next door, at least to astronomers, only about 3,000 light years away. Astronomy nerds know T. coronaborealis so well that we gave it a nickname, T. corbor. The last time it exploded was in 1946. So how can a star explode over and over again? And how do we know it's going to flash again this year?

The first official documentation of T. corbeau lighting up the night sky was in 1866, when British astronomer John Birmingham looked up and saw a brand new star. And he looked up and there is Corona Borealis, a very distinctive constellation that's easy to recognise. And it looked wrong. There was this other star, this bright star. It was another jewel in the northern crown. He was even more surprised when the new star faded away after a few days.

So we know it exploded in 1866 and again in 1946. That's around 80 years apart. But looking even further back, the flash might have been spotted earlier. And we can also extrapolate backwards in time. If it went off in 1866...

Well, that's 80 years or 79 years before. That takes you to the Christmas day of 1787.

And back then, another English astronomer called Wollaston was spending his time carefully recording where the stars in the sky were. Deep in his records, he has recorded a star at the position of T-Corpore. And we know it's exactly at the position because, of all things, Wollaston specialized in astrometry of stars in Corona Borealis.

And he didn't just record this new star's position once. He went off and at least four times measured its exact position. And it falls right on top of Tycor Bor. There's nothing else it could be. So Tycor Bor went up on Christmas Day 1787.

So can we hop in our T-core board DeLorean and go even further back in time? We can. Early records show it might have been spotted in 1217 AD.

at a monastery in Germany by the abbot Burchard. He recorded a bright new wonderful star up in the sky that appeared in Ariadne's crown. It appeared suddenly and then declined over the following week or weeks. Burchard called the new star Signum Mirabile. It means wonderful sign.

So our science history detective work means that we have a mysterious star that flashes over and over again. So what the heck is causing T Corp Bore to flash like this? It was only in the 1960s that people started working out what a nova actually is. A nova is like the mini version of a supernova. Instead of a whole star exploding, just its surface layer explodes. In the case of T Corp Bore, astronomers have slowly pieced together what's been happening.

ANOVA is actually a binary system, two stars going around each other, where one of the stars is a relatively normal star and the other star is a white dwarf. A white dwarf is a really small, dense star, about the same mass of the Sun but as tiny as the Earth. A white dwarf is what's left over when a star like our Sun runs out of fuel.

In binary systems like T-Core Bohr, the heavy, dense white dwarf pulls material off its normal star companion. Gases from the normal star fall onto the white dwarf and they pile up on the surface of the white dwarf. They pile higher and deeper, higher and deeper. And over time, the added fuel gets heated up to such a high temperature that even the hydrogen is kindled and it starts burning more.

And once the hydrogen starts burning, it makes for more burning and it's a runaway reaction. And then things get explosive. And so a nova is where you have what is essentially a hydrogen bomb on the surface of a white dwarf. The white dwarf is just blowing away in an inferno. So when T-Corporea goes up, it's safe to call it Hellfire.

Thankfully, all we'll see here on Earth is a tiny flash. You wouldn't want to be anywhere near that. Working backwards through the history of T-Corp Bore's hellfire infernos, astronomers predict it should happen again sometime in late 2024. Capturing the flash this time could also be a key puzzle piece in answering a question that's bugged astronomers for a while.

Even since I've been a kid, what type of star system makes a Type 1a supernova has long been debated and there are many answers going all which ways. Type 1a supernovae are especially important because we use them to answer big questions in astronomy. Professor Brian Schmidt from the Australian National University used them to explore the expansion of the universe and got a Nobel Prize for it. But we still don't know what causes a Type 1a supernova explosion.

T-Corpore represents one possible explanation, because some believe they're caused by white dwarves exploding. And for that whole class of candidate models, T-Corpore is the poster child for them. And so many groups out there think that T-Corpore will, many thousands of years from now, become a Type Ia supernova.

Astronomers will use the upcoming mini-explosion, or NOVA, of T-Core Bore to run some tests to see if it's maybe going to graduate to a full-blown supernova one day. And spotting it could help us unravel the cosmic mystery of Type Ia supernovae. We don't have an exact date for when it'll flash, because we don't know exactly when it'll tip over into explosion territory. This means amateur astronomers will be essential to capture this special moment.

They'll be the first to announce it. There are actually many good Australian amateur astronomers, observers. Actually, there are many of the best in the world. And currently, they are keeping T-Corp Bore under surveillance. The last time I checked, T-Corp Bore is being monitored, oh, roughly once every six minutes.

And Peter Williams, an amateur from the Sutherland Astronomical Society near Sydney, is one of those keeping an eye on it every night. Actually, I've been observing the variable stars for just over 50 years.

Peter got into astronomy by borrowing a pair of his grandfather's binoculars. And the parents gave me a small telescope for Christmas. Every clear night, he heads out and uses just his binoculars and his eyes to measure the brightness of as many stars as he can, much like those early astronomers who first spotted T Corpore. When amateurs do this, they compare a star they're interested in to reference stars that have a nice, solid, well-known brightness.

He's had his eyes on T Corp Bore for a while. And so in any one night, if it's a good night, I can do, say, up to 150 stars. Oh, wow. And T Corp Bore just is one of the stars on the list. Measurements by amateur astronomers are a goldmine for professional astronomers. People like Peter upload what are called magnitudes, which is an old-school measure of brightness, to a database for professionals to use.

And it's these data that helped us to spot the telltale signs of an upcoming T-Core bore explosion. Just before its last flash, its brightness dipped.

The 1946 outburst, before it actually went into outbursts, it dipped two to three quarters of a magnitude. And they observed that dip a couple of months ago. So they're saying, well, this is all going to happen now. It's going to happen now. So now that we know it's creeping closer, over the next few months, amateurs and professionals alike will have their eyes fixed on the night sky. And they're waiting with bated breath to capture this once-in-a-lifetime flash.

Because you've been looking for so long and waiting to do something, then it does something. It is really very exciting. It's just great being part of it all. The difference between an amateur like myself and professionals, I can observe what I want when I want. So when T. coronabros or any other star does its thing, chances are an amateur astronomer is going to be the one that will see it first and report it. And that then gives the professionals the opportunity to go and observe it in detail and find out what's actually happening.

And alongside decoding cosmic mysteries by watching mega explosions thousands of light years away, to Brad Schaefer and to me, it's an astronomy bucket list event to catch T-Corp Boar's hellfire. T-Corp Boar is one of the fun, bright, variable stars. Will you be dragging out your telescope onto your lawn or finding a dark sky site or something like that? Of course, of course, you bet.

One of our ABC Top 5 scientists for this year, Dr Laura Dreesen, Institute of Astrophysics, University of Sydney, with an alert to keep watch for that extraordinary cosmic event as we approach Christmas. I mentioned at the beginning of this extraordinary idiosyncratic science show

that we are mourning the death of Tim Bowden, the cheeky chappy from Hobart who combined so much news and current affairs broadcasting as well as science, and so a reminder of his flair. Before we continue with our usual cavalcade of corporate masochism and a feeling perhaps in a slightly more idiosyncratic mood than usual, a reminder that backchat is only one of a number of avenues used by our consumers to make their views known. Now, this is an example of the ABC phone log.

Our switchboard staff are on the front line of immediate viewer and listener reaction, and I always find it a most interesting document. And our operators have taken to illustrating its front page with some of the more lateral comments to come in. And I've chosen the log of the first week in August as an example. A viewer stated that as Tuesday is the day of the week with the highest suicide rate, the ABC should show more comedies that night.

See what I mean? This next one refers to the compare of Sydney's 2BL Breakfast Show. Female caller wanted to congratulate Ray Taylor on his self-criticism of the ABC. Caller said she agrees with him, we are a dear lot, and she could not do without us. Compare that whimsy with the serious and brave reporting Tim Bowden did say in Antarctica. This short tribute is from Ian Cumming in Berlin.

Ian was the first executive producer of Catalyst on ABC Television, but also with Tim on the ice. It's one of the last great journeys left in the world, a sea voyage to Antarctica. Those were Tim's first words in the TV series Breaking the Ice.

In 1995, we shared that last great journey together in a tiny cabin on the Aurora Australis, rolling through the Southern Ocean, then bashing through the pack ice to spend a mad few days at each of Australia's Antarctic stations, filming in the most difficult conditions on Earth. The shoot was an exhausting race against time and the elements, and Tim was its champion, ready for the adventure.

Eyab sailed for the first time in his life down an icy cliff face and through the nervous excitement exclaimed to camera, "This is one of the great moments of my life." He was nearly 60 years old at the time. Tim had been to Antarctica before and knew how to loosen the tongues of folk who'd spent a year there in isolation. We brought along dozens of bottles of gin, rum and whiskey to make ourselves welcome.

Then with Tim's charming manner, we gathered wonderful insights into the life and work of Australians in Antarctica. We almost lost him when we landed him on top of an iceberg. The chopper flew off to get the shot of him standing alone near the precipice. Only then we saw a giant fissure in the ice, with Tim standing on the wrong side of it. Fortunately, word never got back to the ABC's risk management department.

There were plenty of arguments about what to film and how to do it. The camera and sound recorder batteries would die from the cold, usually in the middle of an interview. Tim handled it all with the utmost professionalism and good humor. When language was a barrier, Tim had the solution. We visited a Chinese Antarctic station where the leader gave Tim a book about their Antarctic endeavors. In exchange, Tim presented a carton of cigarettes and a bottle of whiskey, and the ice was broken.

When we chop it on to the Oster penguin rookery, Tim was visibly upset to find thousands of emperor penguin chicks dying of starvation. He cared for the planet and the natural world and pressed to include the impact of overfishing and global warming in our report. Those two mad months down south and the months of editing that followed are amongst the fondest memories of my television career.

He was a delight to work with a journalism veteran, a man with both an incisive wit and a caring nature. When times were tough down there on the ice, Tim was my rock, always there to back me up. The programs we made were ratings winners. Indeed, breaking the ice was on repeat over the next decade, a testament to a great storyteller. It was indeed one of the last great journeys. Vale, Tim.

Yes, Valet Tim, Ian Cumming speaking from Berlin, and Valet as well to Matt Peacock, whose many reports on the scourge of asbestos featured so strongly in the science show in the 1970s and after. MUSIC

And now we turn, and Tim Bowden would have approved, to gay behaviour in, say, giraffes, penguins, chimpanzees, hyenas, even perhaps lesbian Komodo dragons. Who'd have thought? So we have a special new delightful book. It's titled Nature's Sexual Spectrum, and it's published here by CSIRO and in London by the Great Natural History Museum. The author is Josh Davis, and here he is.

I'm going to start right way back. You have examples of dinosaurs. How can you tell at this distance?

Yeah, well, that's a really good and key question within paleontology. So, mentally, it is impossible to tell the sex of a dinosaur. People have tried, though, and there have been some interesting ideas and some interesting speculations. So, for example, one guy called Franz Nochka tried to look at different sizes in the shapes of skulls and limb bones of things like ceratopsians, the horned dinosaurs, and hadrosaurs, which are those with the massive crests.

And he tried to pair up different sizes as sexual dimorphism within those species. Ultimately, it turned out he was wrong. But what was interesting about it is that now that spurred a whole science and avenue of thought for modern paleontologists who have to consider these sorts of variations within species about whether when they find the bones of an individual,

Is that just a smaller animal or is that perhaps maybe a female representative? As I said, currently we don't know because we effectively have too few number of specimens for most of these species.

But it's interesting because when you think about sexual dimorphism and these differences in individuals, you then start to think about the ways in which these animals might have behaved and the ways in which they might have been when they were living, breathing animals, which can influence how, for example, we name dinosaurs. So one of the examples I use in the book is about a species of dinosaur called Myasaura, which is the first dinosaur that showed sort of definitive parental care, we think, because they found

adult individuals on top of nests with babies in it. And they named it myasaura, which means good mother reptile. But what's interesting about that is that only a handful of dinosaurs have ever been given that suffix, that feminine suffix, saura, whereas most, the vast majority, are given saurus, which is masculine.

And that is presumably because we are associating parental care with a feminine attribute and being female, which in itself is one of the ways in which these biases sort of feed into the science and what we think about and how we perceive these animals. Interesting, isn't it? Let's leap to the present time and the lowland gorillas. I mention this partly because you've studied them yourself. And there is certainly gay behaviour there, and by that we mean amongst males, right?

but also amongst females. And the thing I found really astounding was that sex lasted so much longer, five times longer between lesbian females. How come?

Well, yeah. So what I really enjoy about that example as well is that when females are having sex, they will often do it face to face as well, which is unusual, typically amongst gorillas. When they're having heterosexual sex, they'll do it effectively back to front. So there is seemingly something more intimate, perhaps, when the females are having sex.

And it's also possibly just the fact that they're having sex for different reasons. So historically, we've assumed that the only purpose for sex is reproduction. We know that that now is not true. There are multiple reasons why animals might have sex. So they might have sex for stress release or social cohesion, or it could just be pure pleasure. And that might be practice as well. It could be practice. Yeah. But I mean, it could just be that these gorillas are enjoying themselves. You know, why not?

In other words, if you look at play, play is preparation for doing all sorts of things, including fighting, because sometimes it looks like play.

And sex may also be a preparation for all sorts of things allied to more complicated sex. I think there's been a number of ways in which people have talked about homosexual behaviours and one of them has been talking about them in this association with play or dominance or things like that. I think when it comes to them, there's almost certainly just like a huge variety of reasons and I think it's very difficult to pin it down on any individual cause or effect basically.

Another example in your book, which, by the way, is quite beautiful, because the pictures of the animals and the plants, would you believe, trees even, but there are the giraffes. And you're saying that sometimes among a group of males, there may be 94%.

of homosexual behaviour? Yeah, so drafts are one of the sort of, I guess, poster boys for this book and these behaviours because they have found that in some populations about 94% of all sex is homosexual between male and males. And this is

Probably due to a number of reasons. I mean, part of it is probably down to the fact that giraffes live in what we call sex-segregated societies. So the males will separate themselves when they are adults and form bachelor groups in which you have lots of males together. So they're probably engaging in lots of sex within those groups.

But also it's probably related to the fact that because they live in these bachelor groups and it is a hierarchical system, only the dominant males will be mating with the females. So most males probably only ever really engage in homosexual activity in their lifetimes effectively. No wonder they're not just having fun, but also does it lead sometimes to that kind of neck behavior where they attach each other's necks

and it becomes violent. Yeah, so there's two different behaviours involved here, actually. So one of them is behaviour in which two males were competing and they are sort of smacking their necks against each other in like a very, very violent and very dramatic way. There's another sort of more, I guess, subtle and more, dare I say it, romantic, maybe I'm anthropomorphising there, behaviour in which

Between male and female, they will entwine their necks in a more sensitive manner. And males will also do this with each other. So they'll entwine their necks together. They'll rub their heads against each other's necks in a very sort of gentle, social way. And that's seen as being a form of courting behavior, basically. One example which is simply astonishing, even though one knew, most of us know about hyenas being most exceptional people,

and the females having what is essentially a phallus. It's often erect, and it's as long as the penis in the male. But the fact that birth has to happen through that clitoris...

Seems to me another example of the kind of divine design which is eccentric beyond belief. Yeah, it does seem extraordinary that such a structure would evolve when it does have such high mortality rate within the cubs that are being born and the mothers because it is termed in the literature quite, I guess, reasonably as a traumatic birth phenomenon.

because as the female gives birth, the clitoris and the urogenital canal basically runs through the pseudopenis. So as the female is giving birth, it effectively splits it open. Because there's no cloaca or vagina. There's no vaginal opening, basically. So it all runs through the clitoris. What is interesting about that, though, is the vaginal tissue has...

evolved to form almost like pseudo testes, a pseudo scrotum. So the labia have fused to form what look like testicles, which is also really interesting. And do the females have fun with females together? There is quite a lot of female-female behaviour, absolutely. As you can imagine, considering the females have a pseudo penis, it is quite difficult for them to have sex. So they do this quite complex dance in which the females will retract their

their pseudo-penis and the males will penetrate them that way. So I'm not entirely sure if the females will have penetra-penetra sex with each other, but they certainly do, for example, like mouth each other's pseudo-penis and they will engage in sort of homosexual behaviours in those ways and homosexual courting. There's lots of oral sex in your examples, but also, give me the figures. Having looked at the spread through the various genera, examples in the animal kingdom,

What do the figures tell you? Yeah, I think this is one of the most interesting aspects of it, to be honest. So quite often in the literature, we get the number quoted as about 1,500 different species of animals display some form of same-sex behaviour. But when you start to plot them on the evolutionary tree of life,

It's a huge array. It's a massive spread from everything at one end. So for example, like cockchafer beetles and praying mantises at one side. Cockchafer beetles is a wonderful title for one of your chapters. I know. It's kind of, it's a gift, isn't it?

You can't write this stuff yourself. And you get that one end in the invertebrate side, but then you go through all of it. So then you get these behaviors in fish, you get them in birds, mammals. And so the fact that it is across the entire evolutionary tree, the notion or the suggestion that is limited to just 1,500 species, I think is hogwash, let's say. I think it's most likely to be found

in all species or most species and actually is probably more unusual to be a purely heterosexual species. I'm with Josh Davis at the Natural History Museum in London talking about his enthralling book Nature's Sexual Spectrum

And as ever with animal examples, it's not that simple and straightforward to claim that because, say, about a third of sartorially elegant penguin species, male or female, show homosexual behaviour then, it's no surprise to find plenty of young folk in Melbourne are similarly inclined. Josh Davis puts it this way: So one thing I'm very clear about in the opening of the book

is that this is no way an attempt to justify any of these behaviours because these behaviours don't need any justification. This is simply a way to highlight how diverse the natural world is when it comes to sexual behaviours and biologies. And so what you've also got are examples of plants and also fishes, obviously. With fishes, the change is just dramatic because when sometimes

If the alpha male disappears, a female doesn't decide. She actually changes sex and gender, if you like, at the same time.

to take over the particular role. Is that common as well? Yes, fundamentally. If you're ever lucky enough to go and sort of dive on a coral reef, about a quarter of all the fish that you'll see will probably be some form of hermaphrodite. So these are individuals which have the ability at some point in their life to produce either eggs or sperm, male or female sex cells.

And within many fish, particularly, for example, parrotfish, they will transition from female to male when they reach a certain size or a certain age. But you also get the reverse happening as well. So you get, for example, in clownfish, and that's a really probably well-known example, in which they live in a society in which you have a dominant female and a male, and then you have a hierarchy with lots of lower-ranking males underneath.

And if the larger female dies or leaves or for whatever reason is no longer there, then the largest male will transition and become female himself, herself, eventually. And the next male in the line will then move up and take his place. So, yeah, it's a very common strategy, particularly amongst coral reef fish. And what about lizards? Well, with the temperatures going up,

They tend to determine the sex of the creature. And many people have suggested that amongst tortoises and maybe some turtles, you will have an excess of females and no fertilisation from the male. This is definitely something that scientists are worried about with the increasing temperatures due to the ongoing climate crisis. Many reptiles will have a system in which their sex is determined by the temperature at which the eggs are incubated.

And as temperatures are increasing on average, the eggs are developing at warmer temperatures in the sand, and so they are producing more females. So there's a skew towards female individuals. And yeah, that is potentially incredibly damaging towards their future survival and their populations. But there's also a situation in which, for example, bearded dragons in Australia, in which you get genetically male eggs when they are incubated at a higher temperature.

hatch as female and they produce eggs even though they are genetically male so you're shifting towards potentially having all female species of bearded dragons josh what's been the response generally to your book so far by and large it's been really good actually most people know about for example gay penguins from zoos and that side of things and but i think people are quite often surprised at

actually how prevalent these behaviours are and how diverse they are. It's not just about raising an egg given to them in a zoo, but these animals are out there all the time engaging in these behaviours and people are really interested in that and I think quite often surprised by that. And I think they're also often quite

surprised the fact that there is still an underreporting of these behaviours because we think most modern society, we're okay with queer relationships and all that side of things. So they think that science also reporting on these things equally, but it is not. And I think that is something that has shocked a lot of people. I've talked about how the fact that these behaviours are still being underreported and still we're not getting a full picture of

this diversity. Josh Davison, his book published by the Natural History Museum in London and by CSIRO in Australia. And so given the need to study and report science as it's emerging, not least in insects,

Under this category of queer, though not in a pejorative sense, here's Zofia Witkowski-Blake in Melbourne with their latest ventures. So, first of all, thank you so much. Would you be able to say your name and what you do? Yeah, my name is Laurie and I am a bug enthusiast. Laurie Pavlovich is the artist behind the work Bugs Against the Binary, which was shown at Melbourne Science Gallery.

This artwork was all about challenging conventional notions of sex, sexuality and gender using really cool bugs. Hi! My name is Zofia, and Laurie happens to be a friend of mine from our days at Melbourne's Queer Youth Events. I remember the magical experience of seeing bugs against the binary for the very first time.

You walk in and find yourself surrounded by a circle of six tanks, home to insects whose very biological existence breaks human societal conventions. Snails who have both male and female sex organs. Detachable penis spiders. Yes, that is their real name.

Ultraviolet glowing scorpions, whose enclosures resemble underground queer ballroom runways complete with disco ball and tens across the board. And that's just the beginning. I tracked down Laurie to ask about the inspiration behind the work and also ask: Why bugs? So bugs have been a lifelong special interest for me, which my mother was very thrilled about when I would bring them home as a child.

When I was looking at the theme of Break the Binaries, I was thinking about my own gender being non-binary, but then I was also thinking about how that kind of links in to a lot of my other interests. So I really wanted to create an exhibit that showcased all the different ways that so many different bugs do break the binaries and don't fit into the kind of gender roles and systems and kind of boxes we have within society.

A big comparison between gender and bugs that I used a lot throughout the exhibition when I was speaking to people about it was often people's immediate reaction to a spider or a bug when they see it is just to squish it because they freak out and they're like, "Oh, absolutely not," and they just squish it. And a lot of the time that's just because they don't really understand the benefits of bugs and how much they really, really do for our world. I find as people start to understand bugs a lot more, they get a lot more comfortable with coexisting with them.

And I think it's really similar for trans identities. People who don't understand what it means to be trans and what goes into our identities often react with very immediate transphobia and very immediate "No, absolutely not. That's not right. This doesn't fit in with what I've been told." And it's kind of, yeah, like squishing the spider. But then I have never met somebody who, throughout being open to learning about transness, has not changed their mind.

they always tend to grow and begin to understand more about empathy. And yeah, I've got a lot of friends and family members as well who weren't totally chill with the whole trans thing when I came out but have grown a lot since then and are now massive allies. So I think those two parallels between bugs and people is pretty huge and I found throughout the exhibition a lot of people went in with maybe some

prior feelings about bugs and trans people and came out with their minds changed, which was really cool. I loved Laurie's living artwork, but it wasn't enough just to see it. I had to go deeper.

to really get into the guts of it. The insect guts. And where there's insect guts, there's... Yeah, that's a big thing of poo. Like, see, this is like the entire... Yeah, I'll give you a shot of the next one to pull some guts out. Let me back up for a second. A few days before that clip you just heard, I received a very special package from Laurie. You see, some stick insects had naturally passed away during the course of the exhibition.

And like the die-hard stans who spend megabucks on locks of their idols' hair, I was now holding in my hands two cryogenically preserved celebrity stick insects that had been on display in the artwork. At least, the version of cryogenic preservation that involved a takeaway container and Laurie's fridge freezer. I am sure frozen head king Walt Disney would not have approved of this technique.

These diva phasmids had been seen by hundreds, maybe thousands, but probably not millions of Melburnians, and now they were in my hands. And I was going to do the only thing with them that they deserved after such an epic life. Make them into gay bug art for my girlfriend. I think it's mostly a poo that's a problem, so I won't pull from the...

upper abdomen, but I should pull from the lower abdomen. That was Clarice. Clarice, who are you and why are you pulling out bug-proofing guts? Well, my name is Clarice Sawyer and I'm an insect taxidermist, which means I preserve insects after death. And to do that, you have to take out things that would normally get a bit stinky after a while inside their exoskeleton.

So Clarice and I have been friends since high school and now we're sitting together cross-legged on the living room floor of her Fitzroy share house, pulling out bug guts with tweezers on the coffee table. Clarice has just signed off on the abdomens being free from poo, guts and unfertilised eggs and we've now moved on to arranging the legs with pins in the positions that they'll dry in.

I also have to mention that she's wearing a beautiful multi-coloured 70s gown as she explains all this. So what happens? You pin the legs where you want them. Yeah. What happens then? You just dry them. And then they stay? Yeah, yeah. The exoskeleton is made out of chitin, so there's not really much you have to do in terms of preserving it. Like, there's no chemicals you need to add. The only thing is that if

If you're storing them, especially a lot of them, you should store them with mothballs because that stops museum beetle from getting into the displays. That would be the only thing. It's one of the easiest forms of taxidermy to be honest. You know, it's kind of like a bit of a cop-out, you know. People often ask, oh, is this really considered taxidermy? And I'm, well, I mean, you're preserving dead things, but it's not the whole process that taxidermy is for some other animals.

At Insect Emporium, the main preserved bugs that people like to buy are butterflies. Clarice brings some out now. Two large Tupperware containers filled with layers on layers of them. They look so beautiful laid out like that. There's a whole bunch of varieties all together. The butterfly's wings are closed, so their bright colours are hidden and you can only see their brownish undersides, which are called the ventral side and are used for camouflage.

Oh, so this is a Ulysses here. Took me opening the wings to find that out. So you see when I squeeze on this thorax, it causes the wings to open up. And that's because the hydraulic system that the butterflies use to open their wings is still present in death. So the equivalent of when people pour soy sauce on a squid or something that's recently died and then the tentacle move.

But not really because that's the nervous system, but... and this is hydraulics. It's kind of freaky how you can manipulate the body in the same way in which it moves in real life.

And yeah, sometimes in the hot water, the proboscis actually unrolls a bit. So if you want, you can actually unroll the proboscis so it's like long and pointy, which I've done before for, I think it's called Wallace's Orkmal, which has the longest proboscis in the world and that's an example of coevolution. Clarice is talking here about something called diffuse or gilled coevolution.

When a bunch of species of flowering plants evolve to start offering up their nectar at the end of a long tube, a bunch of species of insects will co-evolve to have a really long, thin mouth to get to that nectar. Charles Darwin was once presented with an extraordinarily long nectar tube on an orchid from Madagascar, a full 30 centimetres long. Upon receiving it, he exclaimed in a letter to a friend...

The insect that could suck it wouldn't be found until after Darwin's death. A Madagascan hawkmoth with a tongue so long it could reach to the very bottom of the nectar tube.

The thing is as well, in death, the wings aren't fully inflated. So I'm not sure if you've ever seen a butterfly come out of a cocoon. But when they come out of the cocoon, they've got to pump up their wings. So likewise, it's not going to be exactly the same, even though we've done our best to do stuff like rehydrate them. So when you said they pump up their wings,

Wings, this is with their hydraulic fluid system? I think so. I think that's how it works. That is so cool. When a butterfly first emerges from its chrysalis, its wings are small, wet and deflated. They're no good at all for flying. In order to expand its wings, the butterfly has to pump a fluid called meconium into them so that they can expand, after which they dry and harden.

It turns out that meconium is the metabolic waste product from the pupal stage of an insect. No entomologist. But the fact that the first thing a butterfly does on the first day of its new life is to pump up its wings with its poo and then poo out the rest of its poo. And that's beautiful.

I think when I started pinning I was scared of touching dead things for some reason like I had a bit of a phobia with- so I would have like not shake your hands and what you have right now

So you can see this is sometimes quite a haphazard process. They're so self-contained like little dried beings. It's not messy, the process. No! So it can be kind of haphazard, like it doesn't have to be like super duper... It's not like dissecting a mammal or something. Yeah. You know, that would be a lot more gross for one thing.

Yeah, I know. Imagine if humans had external skeletons. Imagine what that would be like because we become so different after death. Imagine if you would still be able to sort of see someone as they were when they were alive. Yeah, that would be really interesting. I mean, it's difficult to tell because it...

Insects obviously are less complex creatures than us, but I wonder if they experience any kind of uncanny valley in looking at insects. You can't see, I suppose, from the outside. Many signs of decay. One of my favourite sci-fi books is The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers.

In this book, an alien species described as lobster centaurs have hard outer shells and are as smart and sophisticated as humans, if not more so. The book imagines what cultural differences a species might have if they had bodies like this. One way is that facial expressions are less important.

Another is that males carry their partner's eggs in keratin pouches in their shell until they hatch. Isn't that beautiful? But of course, one of the most famous imaginings of humans inside insectoid bodies is Franz Kafka's short story, The Metamorphosis. The main character, Gregor Samsa, wakes one morning to find himself transformed into a giant insect.

a monstrous vermin, which is often interpreted to be a cockroach. His transformation, his new appearance, garbled speech and new habits of crawling around the walls and ceiling cause him and his family immense distress, and it's ultimately the cause of his demise. The fact that this particular creature was chosen to represent a state of utter alien revulsion

I think shows the place that insects, and particularly pests, occupy in our culture. These creatures whose bodies are so different to ours are at times disgusting and at others aspirational and always a rich and beautiful part of a biodiverse ecosystem and world.

The spiny stick insects have dried and they've been framed and it's time to ring up Laurie and see what they think. I feel like first of all I shall just show you the little artwork that we created with your bugs before I ask you to tell me about it a little bit. So I'll show you, it's right above my head and then I'll send you some pictures of it. Here it is. You really did make it gay. That's the best thing ever.

Thank you. I have positioned the bugs so they look like they're giving each other a big kiss. Would you be able to tell me a bit about the bugs in the frame? Yeah, so those are spiny leaf stick insects. They are native to Australia and the two specimens that you've got in there are both females. The reason that I chose to include them in the exhibition is that

They do not conform at all to the idea of maternal care we have within human society. So the way that they reproduce is they literally just drop their eggs to the forest floor and hope for the best.

and they never see their babies ever. So often keepers will not even realize that they've laid eggs because it's just laid on the floor. They can also reproduce via parthenogenesis, so they don't actually need a man, like at all.

Which is pretty cool. And yeah, when they drop their eggs to the bottom, often ants will pick them up thinking they're seeds. And then the ant storerooms are kind of the perfect place for stick insects to hatch because they take a really long time to hatch and they provide the perfect conditions.

So not only do the mums just completely drop them to the floor and forget about them, but they make an entirely different species of insect raise their kids for them. So besides the tarantulas that we have, the semi-social pygmy tarantulas, she is a very hands-on mum, will stay with her babies for a very, very long time, feed them, etc, etc. It just shows, yeah, a huge difference in the different maternal practices of the bug world.

They do have short lifespans. We did have a couple of deaths, but the amazing thing about that was it meant I got to dissect them and pin them and keep their beauty going even after death. What made you decide to pin them and dissect them and, like you say, keep their beauty going?

Yeah, bugs can freak people out a lot and I'm always keen for them to be appreciated and different people have varying capacities to appreciate them in different forms. Like some people really just cannot deal with live bugs, other people really can't deal with dead ones. So I just wanted to add a bit of variety into the ways that they could be viewed and appreciated to hopefully spark a bit of a passion in some people.

And yeah, the dissection just came with the preservation process because you've got to remove their insides to make sure that they are well preserved. And it was actually a really fascinating process and not something that I was expecting to get out of that exhibition. So that was really awesome. A feature produced in Melbourne by Zafira Witkowski-Blake and Clarissa Sawyer. Taxidermy and queer identity, they call it.

a radically different way of appreciating smaller wildlife. It was pride of place in one of Science Gallery's exhibitions at the University of Melbourne, where now another show featuring science fiction has just opened. Finally, a glimpse of the Science Show next week when we feature some of our young winners. Did you notice how many young Olympic medals we won for science? Vanessa did.

My name is Vanessa, I'm the Executive Director of Australian Science Innovations. We run the Olympiad program with all these fantastic kids. What were the overall results? I think it was four gold and three silver or the other way around? Yeah, three gold, four silver and more bronze.

Every student that went overseas this year got a medal, so I can work this out. Really, every Australian student that went overseas this year got a bronze, silver or gold medal. And you've met our gold medal winner over here, right? You've met our bronze medal grace over here. And how did that compare with some of the other countries? Look, we do punch above our weight a little bit in terms of our population size compared to other nations. Nations like China and Russia typically top the medal tables.

But Australia, across all four of the subjects, generally sit just under those powerhouses. So we're pretty good. Do you think the nation appreciated when they came back in July how they achieved it? Yeah, the unfortunate thing this year was the Olympics. Ah, of course. You get a gold medal in sport, everybody sees you on the telly, they stay up to watch you at night time, don't they?

You get a gold medal in science and you go on to save the world later on. Indeed. If you look at Flory, I was always comparing him to Tom Cruise, who in a movie may save 12 lives and Flory saved 400 million. Yes, right. Okay, so you obviously get it, but not everybody is like you. And what about the prospects for next year?

Look, we've just started to select our students for next year. So 24 come to ANU in January. They come in 24 biology, 24 chemistry, 24 earth, 24 physics. We've only just started to select them. We haven't met them yet. Well done and thank you. Thank you. Vanessa Cates is the executive director of the Australian Science Innovations Group.

And we were at Parliament House in Canberra, where the young science Olympians were sitting at tables wearing their green jackets, having won their medals for us. We shall meet some of them next week. I shall also talk to some students from Northern Australia, including one who's doing so well in her studies that she wants to be our new Federal Science Minister one day.

And then a reprise from one of those, still young as you heard today, but much younger back then, still at school, when she wrote about the first woman to lead physics at Harvard. I'm talking about our enthusiastic insect collector, Zafir, plus a way to make houses from bricks of sugarcane waste with a young PhD student from Nigeria. The Science Show is produced by David Fisher. I'm Robin Williams.

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