BBC Sounds, Music Radio Podcasts. Their company's success helped build a nation. The company is such a big part of Korea's economy. But who are the family behind one of the world's tech giants? They often say, look, we built the nation and without us, South Korea as it exists today would simply not be here. Inheritance, Samsung explores the real-life dramas of the Lee family and their company. They are the equivalent of royalty. Listen first on BBC Sounds. It's a much more fasty one. Okay, I will keep my fingers to myself. Which basically I just need to, I'll probably place a bit of food in a couple of locations just here. Yeah. When he comes over, he'll hopefully, you know, use his nose to smell out each location and you'll get a chance to have a look at him. This is Crowdscience from the BBC World Service. I'm Marnie Chesterton and at Bonnarong Wildlife Sanctuary in Australia, it's feeding time for one of the country's last top predators, the Tasmanian Devil. You will notice he's a little bit unsteady on his back legs. That's a situation that does occur with a lot of older devils. Okay. All right, here you guys. Good luck. Just noticed that Jono's wearing some quite sturdy, bite-proof boots. Once bit, innit? Yeah, you are. You're different way, you don't want to encourage them to go for skin. Some of the keepers do wear shorts, I've never fancied that. The devil's bite may scare their keepers, but it turns out it's not enough to keep the species flourishing, as we'll hear later on. Crowdscience always starts with a listener question though, and Bart in Harcourt, Australia is wondering about the future of some of the less loved animals in his country, the invasive species he sees out of his window every day. If I had to sum up my question, it would be, how do we anticipate evolution in animals? That's what I'm curious about. Bart is wondering what the creatures in his backyard might turn into, because in evolutionary terms they're newcomers to the Australian landscape. Because we have so many invasive species here, sometimes I've wondered like, what are they going to turn into in the future? Particularly feral cats and foxes, but also rabbits and stuff. They don't have the same environmental pressures on them that they'd have in their own environment, so they're just sort of running rampant in a lot of the country. So can we predict what they're going to look like or turn into in the future? Australia's flora and fauna have unique adaptations that evolved over millions of years on this island. Interestingly, Bart isn't asking how to protect Australia's native species. It's a much more nuanced question, wondering if the recent interlopers are going to adapt or change much in their new habitats. Foxes and rabbits and kangaroos are the three primary animals that I see on a daily basis. I mean, the kangaroos are rampant, but the rabbits are just unstoppable. That's so interesting because rabbits are just not an animal that I think of as particularly tough or durable. Oh man, they're so tough. Yeah. I mean, they've adapted so well. It's, you know, and foxes have too. Like, they're just very good adapters, I guess. And wild cats too, like feral cats, domestic cats that have gone wild. There's millions of them. So, you know, what are they going to turn into? Where is that going to lead to? So all the invasive animals that live around your house, do you think that they've evolved already? I don't know what their original species is like, like back where they're supposed to be. So it's hard for me to sort of guess, but like the rabbits, for example, they look more like hares. Yeah. So, you know, is that something that's evolved whilst they've been here? And then you see foxes that are like really big, but again, not having a reference point to what they quite unquot naturally would look like. It's hard to sort of gauge. So you want us to find out where these new species that humans have brought to Australia, where they're heading? Yeah. Right. I'm going to go and bother some people that know. Cool. Thanks for letting me ask the question. So Bart wants to know what the invasive species he can see in his yard, animals that have been introduced by humans. So that's cats, rabbits and foxes might look like in the future. Can we tell how they will adapt to the Australian environment? I saw that environment in person earlier this year, including some of its fauna. Into the south-eastern wet forests of both Victoria and Tasmania. And by the way, that was a yellow-tailed black cockatoo. We could just hear it screeching. Just in case anyone thinks we're faking up this interview in Carapac and Cardiff. Sometimes unwanted fauna. There's something crawling up my leg, including disappointingly few icons like platypus. Yes, to some feral cats and quite a few rabbits. How might they be adapting to their relatively new surroundings? And what might they look like in the future? Over at the Australian Museum in Sydney is the chance to get very up close and personal. A sandy Ingleby, manager of the mammal collection, gives me a tour of some of their early invasives, which have been stuffed and put in the cases over the years. And here it's interesting we actually have the culprits. We have a fox here. We have a cat over here. And we have a rabbit over here. And these are three of the most important factors in the decline of Australian mammals. Certainly the fox and the cat have been implicated as the main causes of decline of so many Australian mammals. Probably over 30 species at this point, which is staggering when you think about world extinctions of mammals. In the last, I think this is the 1500s, there's something like 80 mammals have become extinct. And we're responsible now for more than 30 of those, which is really extraordinary. Are you saying we're responsible because we brought the bunny and the cats and the fox? Absolutely. Absolutely. We introduced foxes, cats, rabbits. There's a beautiful shot on one of the book on invasive species in Australia. It's a picture of a fox with a bandicoot in its mouth and it's like, aha, that's like, it's just, you know, it's the image. Jackies. It sticks in your mind. Fun fact about foxes, British people took them to Australia in 1870 in order to hunt them, not even for food, for sport. And the red fox has really taken to its new landscape, eradicating small native mammals in the hundreds of millions each year. And yet it's just been dropped in here, whereas those native mammals have spent millions of years evolving and adapting to this harsh habitat. So Australia poses a number of challenges for mammals. One is that the climate is often very unpredictable. The food supply is often very rough vegetation as well and infertile soils as well. So very low nutrient soils. So resources are limited. Sandy has pulled some examples out from the collection to point out up close how their bodies fit their environment. Obviously, Australian mammals have been here many millions of years, they've adapted in certain ways to deal with all the challenges in Australian environment. So this is a marsupial mole. It's this little silky golden animal, what is it, about 10 centimetres or less in length. Beautiful little thing. Yes. So they have these little spade-like front feet, which for getting through the soil, they don't have any visible eyes. Because you don't need them. Yes, exactly. There's not much of a tail. So is there evolution getting rid of bits that it doesn't need? Yep, don't need it. Get rid of it. So burrowing is one strategy native Australian mammals have developed to cope with the environment. Sandy is about to show us another, a famously Australian adaptation. This little guy, this is the Poteroo. So this is one of the ones that survives in Eastern Australia. I put him out to talk about hopping, because hopping is another great thing that you associate with Australia kangaroos. And it's a way of conserving energy as well. And it's very rare, like lots of small things hop in other places, like small rodents hop in Africa or North America or everywhere. But you don't get large mammals like a kangaroo, you don't get like antelope hopping. So it's very rare for a large animal like a size of a kangaroo to be able to hop. But kangaroos are able to conserve the energy by hopping at low speeds. When they're just starting, it's quite energy, not efficient. But as they get up to a median speed of about 25 kph, there's a certain elasticity in their tissues and it's like a pogo stick. They just go and they can go and go and go and it's really energy efficient at that speed to hop. So that's another... 25 kph is quite fast as well. They can go up to like 60 or 70 apparently or something like that maximum. That's an absolute maximum. I was going to say when I hop, it is not an energy efficient process. No, so that's the elasticity in the muscles. The Australian landscape is harsh, hot and short on lush food. That's given the place Large Hoppers, a great energy conserving way of getting about. It's also given rise to burrowers who hide from the heat underground. And one large burrower, the wombat, has also been shaped by the terrible food options. We talked a little bit about rough vegetation. So this is a wombat skull. And I pulled this one out because I know that the teeth actually come out because it's got no roots. They've got no roots in their teeth. So this is... and the teeth continue to grow like so, so, so, because they get worn down by the really tough vegetation. They just keep growing. So that's another adaptation to rough diets. Oh, I love a wombat. They're just so... I just want to cuddle them. I know. Actually, wombat's got me into zoology in the first place. Really? Yeah, because I lived in Canberra and I was in just earlier high school. And I went back to my friend's house and she had a baby wombat that size called Duchess. And I said to her, what have you got? How did you get that? And she said, oh, my father's a scientist. And I said, oh, where does he work? And she said CSRO. What does he do? She said, oh, he's a zoologist. And I thought, zoologist, right. OK. That sounds so fun. A mental note. Yes. You can get a wombat. We've just seen the adaptations Australian mammals have picked up over thousands of years to suit life on the continent. But there's another Australian example, the Tasmanian devil, that shows us how evolution can happen much more quickly than that. That's coming up. You're listening to Crowdscience from the BBC World Service, the show that evolves according to your science questions every single week. Listener Bart is wondering about the evolution of the fauna that were introduced to Australia about 150 years ago. One animal that offers us clues is a native from the island of Tasmania. I went to meet Jono from Bonarong Wildlife Sanctuary for an introduction. It's a boy. This devil is called Piz. He's incredibly sweet looking. Yeah. So he's sort of like a cross between Paddington Bear and a Jack Russell on these ratty little ears. But pointy nose. He's sniffing around. There he goes, found his food. Working with them, they have all the range of characters that you expect to see in dogs. There's so many different personalities if I can anthropomorphise the situation. Tasmanian devils like Piz may only be the size of a badger, but they are Australia's top predatory marsupial. And despite the devil moniker, they are much loved. So many sport teams use the devil as their mascot. There's nothing like this anywhere else. They're kind of like our own little hyenas or something. Not this bit. Oh no jumping. No jumping, that's not good for your leg. Maybe we can get some arrrrse out of you. Oh don't jump. Don't jump. Oh good arrrrse. What about an arrrrse? So people were horrified when 30 years ago a devastating threat to the devil population emerged. A cancer with 100% fatality. The first known detection of a transmissible cancer in devils was in 1996 in a photograph from Crystal Bars. Andy Fleece, an associate professor at the University of Tasmania where he leads the Wild Immunology Group. It's just a picture of a devil with a facial tumour at that time, but then in the coming years when more people started getting pictures and eventually trapping some devils with these facial tumours, they realised it was all the same tumour. The devils had an outbreak of contagious cancer, which could spread through their bites. And as you've heard, devils like to bite. For food, over territories, devils would bite each other on the face and pass the cancer along. Cancers like this are incredibly rare. And back in his lab Andy explains why. The cancer is essentially a transplant, like it's a tissue from one individual going to another, so it should have to be genetically matched. So if I was to donate a kidney to you, your body would very likely reject it unless we're genetically matched. So one of the big questions is why aren't devils doing that? And part of the answer is that they're fairly inbred. It's a small island population. There's not a lot of genetic diversity at the immune genes. The devil's similar genetic make-up is leaving them vulnerable to this transmissible cancer. Andy and his fellow scientists are working hard on a vaccine, but at the same time, the devils themselves are also fighting back using evolution. Once in a while you find a devil that had a tumor and then you trap it again three, six, twelve months later and the tumor's gone or smaller. So there's a few of these isolated cases, but the genetics that we're looking at with the University of Sydney are suggesting that the devils that are most likely to survive and most likely to beat the cancer are the ones that are actually having reduced diversity at these transplant genes. So it's good for beating devil facial tumors, but you need these genes for fighting out viruses and bacteria and worms and fungi. To break that down a bit, the devils are evolving to avoid the transmissible tumors, but they're doing it by losing genes. Why would that help, I ask Andy? You're goading me here to go into some complex immunology which I've been waiting for, but when you get a transplant, you have to match these major histial compatibility molecules. In humans, we should have six of these class one alleles. So you want to match all six. If you match four and the other two aren't too far off, you're probably okay. So what we think is happening with the devil tumors is that the tumors, if they match one or two, three or four of these, they're probably going to be okay. The devil's immune system won't recognize it. So what's happening with the devil immune system we hypothesize is that the devils are losing some of these genes because then the tumor can't match it. So the tumor loses its ability to say, hey, look, I'm a friend. You don't need to attack me. So the devil can attack and kill the tumor, but then when the virus comes, the devil's lost the ability to say, oh, that's not a friend. So certain devils are evolving to drop the genes or alleles, that's just a term for a certain variant of a gene, that allow the tumor to pass like a deadly transplant among the population. It's a clever evolutionary strategy and it's happening at incredible speeds. Yeah, so it is happening pretty quick and you can see when the tumor goes into a population that didn't have devil facial tumor before, there's pretty rapid genome responses in there. When you're looking at a population, it's rare that every animal in that population will get that change immediately. So you keep some of the old genes that are maybe not as useful, but the one that's really useful comes in most of the population. So the evolution is ongoing and it looks like here some of these alleles are not helpful in beating the tumor, so they're going away or at least becoming less in the population. So if they just go down to a lower prevalence in the population and then they can come back later, that's great. But if they go all the way to completely losing these alleles, then that is a problem long-term and we have to do genetic supplementation to get those alleles back into the population. For now though, the devils are an example of evolution in action and evolution operates on two timeframes. One works over what Charles Darwin called the long lapse of ages and you can go back 160 million years and find the changes that Sandy Ingleby at the Australian Museum was talking about, the burrowing, the hopping. On the other hand, we can see the devils' genetic structure changing rapidly in my lifetime in response to a life or death threat to the population. Listenabart has asked us about the invasive species, the relative newbies to Australia and how they might evolve. Remember, evolution by natural selection doesn't have a plan. It's just the variations within a population that give some of that population more chance of surviving, even thriving, enough to pass on their genes. So what can we say about the evolution of the invasives? How might they change? Are there changes we have seen already? Back to Sandy Ingleby. We are seeing feral cats that are much larger than domestic cats. We have some in the collection, not double, but huge, huge feral cats. It's definitely happening. With the rabbits, from what I understand, and the red-rat-roats, there are changes when they invade dry areas, the desert areas, because they come from the Mediterranean, Spain, France, those sort of areas. So their ears are getting longer, their body shape is becoming more lean in the environment to do with heat dissipation, and their coat colour is becoming lighter as well. So there are slight changes. And also, again, to avoid heat, apparently during lactation, it's common because the lactation demands are so high that animals will eat more during lactation. But with rabbits, they found in the hot areas that they don't increase their food intake during lactation, but they rather rely on body reserves because it's easier to dump heat or to not produce as much heat when you're using fat as opposed to eating more. So there are changes like that happening. So rabbits are becoming more heat adapted and evolving in small ways. Meanwhile, with so much defenceless prey on offer, cats are growing larger. And there's one more invasive species that we ought to mention, one that has also been undergoing rapid evolution as we watch. And that's the cane toad. I think one of the interesting things is that the invasive species are adapting and changing so much more quickly than any of these things that we see in the fossil record. So animals like cane toads in Australia are completely changing their limb morphology, how they look based on kind of their need to locomote through the Australian environment or to move. And so I think the interesting thing for me is that those changes are occurring so much more quickly than we can ever see in the fossil record. I think any animal that's faced with a new environment and new evolutionary pressures is going to change over time. And in Australia, the environment is quite harsh. And so that leads to all of these kind of quite large evolutionary pressures on them. This is Matt McCurry, a paleontologist with the Australian Museum, who definitely qualifies to cover those two evolutionary timelines fast and slow. Yes, he looks at the evolution of extinct animals using the fossil record, but he also has an interest in cane toads because they're evolving so fast. So cane toads are a really interesting example of how animals have changed here in Australia. So they were introduced in the 30s as a means to try and control this invasive beetle that was feeding on the cane here in Australia. They actually weren't very effective at that, but they've caused massive problems here. Massive problems from this massive amphibian, which can weigh well over two kilograms. It's poisonous. It's also a prolific breeder, and guess what? Its eggs and tadpoles are also poisonous. And rather than kill the sugarcane beetle, these toads poisoned its native predators and pets. The 101 toads that came over 100 years ago are now a population of over 200 million as they continue to spread across the country. But one interesting thing is the cane toads have actually changed over time here as well. So as they've moved across Australia, the fastest cane toads have bred with the other fastest cane toads. And so what we see is that the cane toads at the front, where they're moving the fastest on the edge of this invasion, are actually they look very different to the cane toads that are where they were initially introduced. Wow, so pioneering speedy toads. So the front wave of this invasion, it's already sort of evolved from where it started. Yeah, so it's just this impact of them only breeding with individuals that are fast as well that causes them to look completely different. I guess one thing to point out though is like, does that really constitute a form of evolution that's going to be stable over time? So the front line fast toads look and move differently. But Matt says that doesn't necessarily mean that the toads are evolving into two separate species. I think eventually these cane toads can still breed with cane toads that look completely different and end up with kind of this intermediate morphology as well. So while certain parts of that population are changing very rapidly, we don't know if that's going to be a change that kind of is stable over time. The cane toad came from the Amazon Basin region of South America. The foxes were picked up from the English countryside. The modern rabbits come from France and Spain. They've all invaded Australia and seem to have thrived in the decades that they've spent in this new environment. What about the future though? Could they keep evolving, becoming an Australian version of rabbits or feral cats? Here's Sandy again. They've also introduced, they've got a different set of genes to the ones that were in Europe sort of thing. So they will have different mutations. So they will definitely change. We've already seen it, like you say, with the cats, they've just got so big. So there will definitely be changes. On one level, trying to predict evolution is a bit like forecasting the weather. Short term it's more accurate, longer term it's more of a guess. We've seen that when you drop new animals into unfamiliar habitats, you're playing a hubristic game. I still maintain that rabbits don't look tough enough to thrive in the Australian bush, but how wrong am I? Breed fast, die young, burrow underground is a killer strategy for that invasive. And yes, these animals are adapting, evolving to become more suited to their landscape. In the meantime, Australians are spending time and money trying to control these invasive animals, hoping to minimise their threat to native wildlife. But there's a chance that native fauna will adapt too. The whole environment is in flux, as the climate heats. Listenabart asked, will these invasive species evolve? And yes, we've already seen it. We've got more heat tolerant rabbits, giant cats and speedy toads. Thanks for your question, Bart. And over to you for the credits. That's it for this episode of Crowdscience. The question came from me, by Injaja Wrong Country in Australia. This episode was presented by Marnie Chesterton and produced by Margaret Sassel Hawkins. If you have a question about anything science related, send it to Crowdscience at bbc.co.uk. Thanks for listening. Bye.
