The Blindboy Podcast - Venom, Bites, Snakes, Scorpions, Pain

Episode Date: March 13, 2024

Dr Michel Dugon and Dr JP Dunbar are experts in venomous creatures. Michel runs the Venom lab in the University of Galway, where he researches the effects of venom and its potential medical applications Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Bola bus, you croppy onas. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. This week I'm chatting to two incredibly interesting guests. They are experts in venom. Dr. Michel Dugan works in the Venom Lab in University of Galway. He's a zoologist who specialises in the evolution and development of venom systems. And I'm also chatting to Dr. J.P. Dunbar. Michelle and J.P., they work up in Galway in the Venom Lab, which is a world-leading research centre into venom. Venom that's produced by spiders, snakes, scorpions, jellyfish, snails. They study this venom to understand what it does to the human body when you're bitten. Not just to develop anti-venoms, but to understand what venom is and what it does. So that it might lead to medical discoveries.

Also they're interested in invasive species in Ireland, venomous creatures in Ireland, such as the false widow spider, which has exploded in population in the past 10 years and looks like it's here to stay. These two lads are doing the main body of research in Ireland around false widow spiders. We had an utterly fascinating chat in Galway.

I have a bit of a sore throat because I've been gigging too much of a hoarse throat. But we had a fascinating conversation in Galway where I got to explore my curiosity around venom and snakes and scorpions and centipedes and all sorts. So here's my chat with Dr. Michel Dugan and Dr. J.P. Dunbar from the Venom Lab in Galway. So ye lads are like experts in venom. You're experts in the venom of animals that do venom. I didn't want to say insects there because many different animals have venom.

The first thing I want to ask is, and this pertains to the conversation we had backstage, we were speaking about, so all three of us on this stage had a shit time in school and all three of us ended up finding passions that were really good at and sticking with it and kind of succeeding in those passions even though society says we shouldn't um i'd like to speak about that like how did you get into venom and what was what was your childhood like you can go first michelle all right so we're gonna try and make it not too too long but uh you know that weird kid at primary school that you'll find in a corner kind of eating the ants? Yeah.

That was me. I think some of them actually recognize themselves in that too and the thing is that you know I was pretty good at school and all but never completely fitted and in my environment school wasn't

super valued either either 16 years old started to work in factories 18 years old just fucked off to southeast asia to actually escape all that and try and and find something that i'd be good at and i ended up being very good at teaching french which is not really surprising considering my accent. And I did that for a while in Vietnam, in Indonesia, in Malaysia. And my hobby was actually to spend time in the jungle, meet tribes people and take pictures of weird creatures. And then I started to be interested in venomous snakes.

And at one point I had 55 venomous animals in my apartment. But at this point, you're just a lad from France who's collecting snakes in Vietnam and bringing them to his gaff. Yeah. And I thought something was maybe wrong when I realized that actually I had 22 vipers in my living room

and a couple of pythons in my bathroom Like how it was this before the internet? It's no that was what that was 2002 2003 so beginning of the internet, but let's say Like how to fuck like This is what I'm trying to figure out is like if I went into into the jungle and found a snake, which I wouldn't do, but if I did, I'd be like, oh, fuck, I've got a venomous snake. I'd go onto YouTube and I'd find out like, what do I put the snake in?

What does the snake eat? How did you, as a lay person who just has a curiosity, how did you know what to do with those snakes in your apartment well you actually start to do pretty weird things you well you spend a lot of time with books uh first but you also spend a lot of time uh learning from tribes people and you find that absolutely fascinating and you learn malay because you're in malaysia and that's what tribes people speak so well sure then you're going to do that as well and there is a whole new world that opens up when you're really really fascinated by something

What was the tribes people relationship with the snakes? Oh usually they, a complicated one they respected them, they didn't want to deal with them too much but in the jungle nobody is better than tribes people

to actually spot the wildlife they're absolutely incredible and i was that awkward white guy trying to follow them in the jungle and they were just like looking at me 50 meters back going he's trying his best and they were incredible at catching things um I remember a chat with a penguru, the chief of a village in a very remote part of northern Malaysia, where I explained that I'm looking for vipers. And the guy casually explained to me that, oh yeah, just a few weeks ago he got

beaten by one on his head. What happened to you? He said, oh, that means, oh, I had a headache. Is that your only relation, the only thing that comes out of you being beaten by a viper? And yeah, of course, they were using a lot of traditional remedies. And also because probably there is not much flesh on top of your head, the fangs did not deliver much venom and all.

He got bitten by a viper to get rid of his headache. He actually just got a headache. That's all he got out of the bite, which is incredible. I've been bitten by vipers. That's not just a headache. It hurts a lot more than that. So they were incredible. And when you say, what I'm fascinated here is indigenous knowledge about the snakes,

what were they using snake venom for medical applications? So they were actually using a lot of plants to cure snake bites and scorpion stings and centipede bites and a lot of ailments. Essentially, that's all they have, the natural resources around them. So you imagine there is 40,000 years anyway of knowledge for those people living in those environments. Their understanding of that environment is incredible. It's something that we have massively lost in Europe,

in the Western world as such. But there are so many resources out there that we as scientists still could dive into are so many resources out there that that we as scientists still could dive into just a little question there because i'm fast fascinated about this in in my own work as a writer but did these people that the malaysian tribes people did they have a system of writing or was was it was it oral yeah as far as i know for the tribes people as such it's all oral tradition so they have stories. Because something, here's something I find fucking fascinating about Ireland,

because we have an oral storytelling tradition that's thousands of years old. And, for instance, okay, so within Ireland, we have a tradition around holy wells. Now, before these were Christian, these were pagan wells. So just natural springs that pop up around Ireland. And these wells, for thousands of years, there'd be stories, mythology. Like, for instance, down in Kerry, there's a place called Glaun na Gaelte,

which means Valley of the Mad, the Valley of Madness. And if you look at Irish mythology around this area, people who had, I don't know, severe depression, schizophrenia, for thousands of years, they would go to this area in Kerry, and they would live near the well, and they would drink from it, and they would eat watercress. And these people would feel happy in this valley, the Valley of Madness. And then 20 years ago ago they studied the water and they found it contained a lot of lithium you know what i mean and lithium

is still used today for people with bipolar disorder people with schizophrenia so what you have there is indigenous knowledge and storytelling going back thousands of fucking years that actually does have some scientific rigor to it and that's what i'm asking you about the the malaysian people did they have stories valuable things about scorpion centipedes and this had an applicable um an application for their health so i don't know about the stories really as such definitely they learn from each other generation after generation. There is no doubt about this.

Their ability to survive in what is otherwise a very hostile environment is very, very impressive. But definitely there is something about the animals, for example, because in some of the tribes, you have many different groups of indigenous people. And among some of the tribes, you have many different groups of indigenous people. And among some of the tribes, actually, you can see that men are wearing animal totem as tattoos on their body. So there was an old man, for example, we used to call him in Malay as well,

a pachekumbang, which means granddad beetle, because he had a beetle tattooed on him. The chief of one of the villages, who was one of my friends, had a snake. So there is definitely an intimate relationship with those animals, and then the spirit of those animals as well, and what they represent. And this is very important. What's definitely essential, what I've learned there, it's also that you really need to take care of what the relationship people have with the spirit in the forest.

I made the mistake one day of taking a leak middle of the night against a tree. I don't know how many spirits I upset that night, but definitely all the villagers. I had to make amends. And they were very nice. They explained to me that actually I can't do that. So they actually told me that, no, no, I need to pray and ask for permission before,

and I need to thank them after that nothing happened to me. So it is, for those people, the material and immaterial world that you were speaking about just earlier, are really intertwined. They're the same. They're both sides of the same sheet. And therefore, by respecting the natural world around you, you also respect the supernatural world that is superimposed on it. Because what you're saying there is fascinating.

I have a theory, something I think about a lot. I believe that folklore and mythology exists in the human animal as a way to keep us in line with systems of biodiversity. Because if you think there, you know, there's spirits in the forest, and you don't upset these spirits, you're gonna have kind of a

regenerational attitude with the land it's it's not something to be exploited like even in Ireland up until the 1600s in Ireland it used to be illegal to kill a white butterfly but it was illegal to kill a white butterfly because people believed that a white butterfly contained the soul of a dead child so you didn't fuck with butterflies similarly bees in ireland were considered to belong to the goddess bridget and they said that that bridget lived in the other world and anytime there was a misty morning she would tend to the bees in the other world and they would float through the mist and then pollinate the flowers and that was the ancient ir Irish explanation for how can these amazing insects go to a flower and then an apple appears.

But what you get there is don't kill bees, don't fuck with bees, don't fuck with pollinators. The mythology keeps you, you respect the land in a regenerative way. And if you look at what colonization does, colonization removes the culture and the land, and the goal of any colonizer is to exploit and extract from land.

I find that fascinating about, there's probably a really good reason why you shouldn't piss in the forest. But you know what I mean? More so than upsetting the spirits. The best stories always survive when you don't have writing, and they carry a good kind of message,

whether you know it or not. But Michel, how did you go then from, so you're just some mad French bastard in his apartment, with vipers, how do you go from being that dude, to then becoming like an expert in it, and studying it academically, and going to college?

Well, so at the point where I had 55 or so snakes at home, I realized that something wasn't quite right. And that's obviously, I had to make a decision. I can't work 12, 13, 14 hours teaching French per day and at the same time take care of all those animals. Most people would have actually dropped the animals and continued with their good paying job. I did the contrary. I left my job and I kept the animals and I took over a reptile park. And then that gave me the opportunity to actually spend even more time in the jungle where I found new species of lizards, new species of snakes, and I contacted British researchers who came over, described them. And then they said, look, you have so much experience like in the jungle.

Do you want to actually turn that into academic experience? Do you want to join our masters in ecology? It's like, I have barely a pass, you know, degree that I did by distance learning while working full time. I have no background in science. No, no, you have the field experience. That's enough. And I did.

And I actually did very well because I was super interested. You followed your passion. Exactly. And after that, so I came over here in Galway to actually do a PhD to study and understand the evolution of the venom system of giant centipedes. Of course, something that everybody has in their mind. So I spent three years studying that. It took me three years to understand that the rest of the world didn't give a flying fuck about it. But that really showed me that

actually I could do stuff that other people couldn't do if I'm really driven. And then weird things started to happen. I started to visit schools with the animals. I ended up having a TV show on RTE Junior showing animals like that as well. And now I have a lab and I have a research team and I travel to different places around the world teaching people how to extract venom, what to do with this venom, try to teach people the ecology and the evolution of those venomous organisms. So it's fantastic. Do you ever find yourself Michel, going to an area that has venomous animals and then

the indigenous knowledge is gone and you find yourself teaching a community who should know how to deal with scorpions, do you find that? Yeah, we actually find that more and more. Now, for example, we are doing quite a lot of work in Morocco about scorpion stings and John as well was involved in this. And it's actually very interesting because you see that there is a big discrepancy between what should be done and what's actually done. And you realize as well that some of the indigenous knowledge has been lost, particularly in big cities. And that because of all the

stuff we leave behind in big cities, scorpions tend to leave off the insects that feed on our scraps. Wow. So they're like varmint. Yeah. And the first studies to be written on this wasn't in Morocco, it was in Brazil, where they actually realized that in Sao Paulo, for example, massive megapolis, that actually over there,

scorpion sting are the major new contributors for the past few years of tropical disease in the town. And it wasn't the case before. But having 20 million people in a city with slums all around it, those people live in conditions that are not great. Therefore, you end up with insects around. Scorpions are predators of those insects. Those scorpions are seriously bad. But they find loads of food in that environment. So they're like cats if they could sting you and kill you. It's pretty much that, yeah.

And you can't pet them either. Well, cats is the same thing. Cats, like if you look at the African wildcat, And you can't pet them either. Well, cats. Cats is the same thing. Cats. Like if you look at the African wild cat, which is the descendant of the house cat that we have today, they're like solitary living in Africa. And only when those cats decided to live near humans to kill rats, they started to be social and stuff, you know?

So scorpions are like that a bit. Yeah, they now live in high density in this new habitat, which is the urban and suburban habitat. And of course, they're in close proximity to human beings. Human beings do not know what to do with those scorpions because those scorpions came in

not from Sao Paulo, but from the trade in fruits and food from the Amazon basins. So those people that emigrated from everywhere to settle in Sao Paulo two, three generations ago have lost their understanding of those organisms. Those organisms have come in number in the past 10 years and they don't know how to deal with it.

Wow. And people are dying. Yeah, in larger and larger numbers. So it is now the major cause of death due to tropical disease in the Sao Paulo state. Fucking hell. So it's very weird. And we're seeing patterns like that. So in North Africa as well, where you can have big cities and species of very dangerous scorpions settling, particularly in urban habitats. Where normally they wouldn't live, but they find a particular micro-niche,

a micro-environment that we've created. We created that artificial environment. And they love it. And they can live in very high numbers there because we're making so many little holes with our cables or pipes. Wow. That for them, it's an apartment building too.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there can be loads of them. And that, of course, has an impact. JP, tell us about your own story. Yeah, I kind of was doing okay in school myself until I kind of got to about the last two years of primary school and then I kind of started to slow down. I drifted into a secondary school

and I just started to get into i drifted into a secondary school and i just started getting into trouble i think yeah before my junior cert i was in three different secondary schools uh suspended all the time always in trouble just couldn't settle you know i found out like in my later years that i i've dyslexia but we didn't really know much about that yeah yeah teachers didn't really understand you're just a troubled kid exactly standing in the corner most of the time now so life kind of went on i started collecting you know snakes a bit like michelle except it was in dublin i had about 20 30 snakes i had crocodilians in the house and uh come on now you'd fucking crocodiles in dublin was that allowed? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Go away out of it.

In Ireland, you need a license for cattle and dogs. That's it. And a TV. And if you don't have the TV license, you'll go to jail. But you can do what you want with crocodiles. But yeah, so like in a lot of sense if you've... But how big were they like? Well I got it as a baby.

Okay. A little baby and it grew. So the caimans, a lot of the caimans, most of the caimans species in South America, they don't grow too big. They're the guys with the slender beaks or is that a gharial? That's a gharial. Okay. But these guys in South America like there are some caiman species a fully grown adult wouldn't get bigger than this

coffee table. Okay, yeah, yeah. Still kind of big. It's big enough like it can chew your hand good but I kind of was really interested in collecting. I started breeding bow constrictors and I had about probably 70 snakes, like

Michelle, about 70 snakes at one stage at home and I was actually thinking, I need to try and figure out how to make a living out of this. My wife was actually reading something, I think it was Cosmopolitan or something, where somebody was talking about turn your passion into your job so you don't have to work for somebody in a factory

you know. So I was like, I need to do that. So I started buying kind of really interesting snakes like I was paying two grand for these albinos uh importing them from America and I was going to set up this breeding facilities like nearly everyone who gets into snakes has that idea my eight-year-old son now we got his first corn snake last week and he's already talking about this business he's going to build you know but i am yeah i i happen to be emailing this guy because i was keeping anacondas in my house as well and i started emailing this guy i used to watch on national geographic wow boom one day i got an email inviting us down on an expedition in south america and i was like right i'm there so a few months later did you

you got palsy with him and he just said this this fella here in Dublin seems like he'd enjoy this yeah wow and the so myself my wife we we uh headed on down to Venezuela and we went into the swamps there uh it's a fair play to your wife so she's into it too like? Yeah well when I first met her she wasn't. Like did she go into the swamps as well? Yeah by the end of it she did, well at the start she was getting in but by the end of it she was catching her own, she was actually trekking her own anacondas, she was finding trails, trekking them, catching them by the head and wrestling them. How big are these like? Anacondas in the Llanos, the swamps in Venezuela, kind of max out about 17 feet. In other parts of the Amazon, where they've got deeper water,

they've got a lot more vegetation to cover them, and they can kind of stalk and take down much bigger prey. They can reach the sizes of about 25 feet. And why were you doing this? Most people don't realise, but venomous snakes kill about 140,000 people every year. They're listed by the World Health Organisation as a neglected tropical disease at the highest category. So that's interesting.

So a venomous bite is considered a tropical disease. It took a long time to get it. It took a long time to get it. It was a big battle to get it. Because it doesn't sound like a disease. No, but it fits the profile of it. Wow. The disease has come from impoverished communities or rural communities in the tropics.

A lot of times it's in the countries whose governments spend the least on health care and so on. So it fits the same profile of all these other neglected tropical disease it's the same demographic the same people who are affected by dengue fever hiv malaria they're the same people affected by snake bite and because they're living and working in snake infested environments and you know and what benefit did that do to to because that's mad there for me me, like to consider a snake bite as being a tropical disease, like malaria, I go, okay, that makes sense. What was the benefit there of a snake bite now or any venomous attack being considered a tropical disease?

What did that do to help people or funding even yeah so once it's recognized by the who it immediately gets put onto a program where it gets a huge amount of funding supports and everything so that was a big game changer immediately after that the welcome trust in england and made available 80 million pounds for research into snake bite so i'm assuming then this release of funding helps the likes of the Venom Lab and that's because the other question as well, right? And it's a pretty obvious question.

What the fuck is Galway doing? Why the fuck in Galway are you studying Venom? Why? Well, it is a very good question and I'm trying to convince a lot of the Irish funders that actually it is something,

you know. Because it's a bit mad, like. Oh, yeah. Try and convince, like, Science Foundation Ireland that researching scorpion stings in North Africa is really important for Ireland. But there are actually many aspects. So let's start with the first one, which is kind of a human one. If, you know, we are living here in an environment that

is incredibly safe compared to many, many other parts of the world, we have the resources to actually do research and help people directly on the ground. For the scorpion thing, to give you an idea, there is about 3,200 people who die from scorpion stings in the world every year but over 90% of them are kids below the age of 13. So it's a lot of children. By doing this and by Ireland being involved in this

basically Ireland shines internationally a lot more than it would just through its size and population. So we are capable of doing great things here in Ireland. I just thought of an idea that you could say to the, no, sorry, the history of monasteries in Ireland, right? No, seriously, this is going somewhere, no, you can say this to the, you can say this to a government minister, to anybody, this will fucking work.

this to the... You can say this to a government minister, to anybody, this'll fucking work. Seriously, there's a reason Ireland's called the land of fucking saints and scholars. When the Roman Empire collapsed in Britain, right, and Patrick came to Ireland, St. Patrick, snakes are involved now. In Britain, right, and a lot of Europe, when the Roman Empire collapsed, what was being lost was the ability to fucking write. The Latin alphabet was being lost. Rome was collapsing. Ireland fucking kept it. And if you look at the history of Ireland from about 500, 600, 700 AD, Irish monasteries went to England. They went to parts of Europe, and what they brought with them was not just Latin, but Latin translations of Greek medical manuscripts.

So we actually have done this before. So you can say that when you're talking to them. We're doing what the monasteries were doing, except it's in the context of biodiversity, the context of biodiversity. So it's about... Because I'm always trying to say this about Ireland and Ireland's role in wider biodiversity, right, and climate collapse. Some people say, Ireland doesn't even have that big a footprint, who gives a fuck? We have a massive cultural footprint. People celebrate St. Patrick's Day all around the world and we can take this green

holiday and change it from being about fucking getting rid of snakes to helping people who are bitten by snakes. That kind of makes sense, doesn't it? Sorry, Michel. I'll remember that. We'll write a grant application. I'll remember that. We'll write a grant application.

We'll convince them. No, but this is definitely one of the first things. It's true. When you think about it, imagine that cultural shine compared to some other nation of the same size. Ireland is hitting well, well, well above. We're tiny.

But super influential all around the world. The second thing is Venom is an incredible resource to produce medication because Venom evolved independently in over 100 lineages of animals always for the same goal, to actually kill and deter predators, enemies, prey, as quickly and as efficiently as possible.

So why reinventing the wheel when actually you have literally tens of thousands of species out there that have evolved over the past 400 million years or 500 million years for the oldest venomous group to actually paralyze prey we can use those products to actually produce new therapeutics too but we need to understand those organisms and the compounds that are present in that venom for example the new generation of anesthetics that are non-opiates, one of the first products, it's actually now on sale. You can, you know, the hospitals use it.

It's called Prialt, and it's made out of the venom of a particular marine snail. Wow. The thing is that for people that are intolerant of any kind of opiate products, 30 years ago, the possibilities for them to go into, you know, for surgery were actually very limited and in some cases incredibly painful because nothing would work. Now we have a product that comes from the venom of a small snail about, you know, maybe four inches long that has evolved the venom over probably 250 million years to paralyze fish bigger than it almost instantly.

Because the fish is fast, the snail is slow. So the snail has to be able to take it down within half a second. Well, we have harvested that product and made an anesthetic out of it. So this is what scientists... Is it a snail or a snake? A snail. A snail? Yeah, a snail. A venomous marine snail? Yeah. Wow. So there are plenty of products like this.

Do you know what it reminds me of too? And this again is the Irish connection. No, seriously, I'm trying to help you here, but... Bachelism. Bachelism is a type of food poisoning. And you get it from pork products that I think it's when they decompose when there's no air. And botulism, like, when you get botulism poisoning, you lose the ability to use your muscles and stuff. But botulism is Botox. But all of the Botox in the world is made in mayo. That's a fact. You know that, don't you? You know that. But all of the Botox in the world is made in mayo. That's a fact.

You know that, don't you? Yeah. You know that? Yeah. Is this kind of not what you're trying to do, except not with botulism, but with venom? It's actually the same thing, botulism. So it's... Botulinum toxin.

Yeah. The botulinum toxin comes from a microorganism, not a venom, but a poison, a toxic substance produced by a bacteria, by a bacterium. In the case of that anesthetic, Prialt, so it's a snail. In the case of some medication for heart disease or for strokes, we're actually using blood thinners that are based on viper toxin. Wow. So there are already products like this that a lot of people use that are based on viper toxins. Wow. So there are already products like this that a lot of people use that are based on venom. But we know, for example, that spiders alone,

just spiders, not snakes and all this, spiders alone most likely produce in excess of 10 million different peptides, so little proteins, with potential therapeutic application. 10 millions. Now, you'd think 10 millions. We need to have a look into this. Yeah, but in reality, only about 2,000 of them have been studied so far. The potential is huge, absolutely huge.

But, of course, when you're trying to sell a venom project in Ireland, imagine that the person reading that, you know, at, I don't know, the governmental official reading this, what is that person doing here? Like, you know, go and work somewhere else. So that's why it's important for you guys to come on to a podcast like this. Because it is, like, if you're talking to some politician, they may not have this type of, this way of thinking or this way of linking things.

So this is a way to educate people. This is actually important, not only for the health of the world, but, you know, when it comes to the Irish government, you have to go, how can we make money here that isn't just allowing corporations to avoid tax? Do you know what I mean? It is actually a big issue, but that then after would bring a lot of questions about the academic system as well, like, you know, a search and the competition that goes in the academic system. It's something that very few people actually understand is that money for research is a constantly competitive process.

So if I want my research to be funded, I'm going to spend six weeks, two months or more writing applications that are 70, 80, 100 pages. And this will be reviewed by scientists that I don't know because it's a completely anonymous thing. They're going to grade every aspect of my proposal. That's going to go to other people that then, depending on strategy, political importance, and things like this, will decide if this gets funded or not. So through that process, of course, it makes it quite difficult. And this is why you will see in Ireland a lot of research, really in pharmaceutical research or in bioengineering, being funded, while some other research that may be more fundamental

or that would have further application after 10, 15 or 20 years being pushed aside because it doesn't bring money in the short term. And that is very short-sighted because what are we going to do in 20, 30 years' time? All the pipelines that are used now are based on fundamental research that was done 30 years ago. And the research that you're doing is very much about failure. It's about we don't fucking know, we just want to look.

And we can't tell you if it is we think. We can't tell you if this will be effective. We think it might, but we have to be curious here and you've got to fund us to fail. So this is exactly that. So for the moment, I have, for example, one student who's looking at the antibacterial potential of scorpion venom. And

by doing this, the advantage is that so, of course, we have an application here. Hopefully find the next generation of antimicrobial agents because otherwise infections, bacteria that are causing infections, are evolving much, much faster than any other organisms. And they are becoming more and more resistant to any kind of medications we have. So by 2050, bad news, guys. We're pretty

much screwed. We're speaking about 40 to 50 million deaths that will go to probably 80 million deaths per year around the world due to bacterial resistance globally and that might just continue to increase so we need to find new solutions venom may or might be a solution but we need to try first

but the pipeline is going to take 20, 30, 40 years so I have one student working on this but the application that will come out of this, the medication at the end, that is, he'll be almost retired when that will come out. But maybe, maybe his initial work right now, just 200 meters from here in my lab, might actually have an impact on that

for the next generation in 40 years. So we need to think long term. that short-sightedness of research funding is it's not specific to ireland but it is an issue really let's take a little break there now from that fascinating chat with dr michelle dugan and jp dunbar so that we can have an ocarina pause. I'm in my home studio. I don't have an ocarina, but what I do have is I've got a little weird percussion instrument that sounds a bit like a croaking frog. So I'm going to play this. I don't know what it's called. And then you're going to hear an advert for something. I don't know what you're going to hear an advert for. Here we go. custom glass shower experts. We offer a range of options from full enclosures to steam sauna showers. Enjoy the elegance of a custom glass shower for a low affordable price.

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based on kindness and soundness it also means that advertisers can't come in and start dictating the content or telling me what to speak about. Because that's what they do. And that's what has television and radio destroyed. So advertisers can fuck off. They have to advertise on my terms. I can do whatever the fuck I want. I've complete creative freedom. If I want to speak to two lads about how much they love Venom, then that's what

we're going to do this week. That's what we can do. And it doesn't matter if anyone listens to it or not. So long as I'm genuinely passionate and curious, and a few of you are listening and enjoying it, that's all that matters. You can also support the podcast by recommending it to a friend or following me on Instagram. Blind by Ball Club. Before we go back into the conversation. Just want to tell you about a couple of live podcasts that I have coming up. My big giant tour of England, Scotland and Wales is happening in April. Starting on the 21st of April.

I'm in Newcastle. Then I'm in Glasgow. That's sold out. Then Nottingham. Then I'm in Cardiff, Brighton, Cambridge, Bristol, and my biggest ever gig in the Hammersmith Apollo. A lot of those gigs are sold out now,

but come along. My live podcasts are a tremendous crack. I love doing them. And then after that, I'm over in Vicar Street, Vicar Street in Dublin. And the 18th of. The 6th.

I think the 6th is June is it? Yeah that's June. 18th of June I'm up in Dublin. In Vicar Street. A nice summer gig. In Dublin. I want to take it handy on the gigs this summer. I've done a fuck load of gigs there.

I've been aggressively on tour. For the past two and a half, three fucking months. I've been on tour since November. I thoroughly enjoy the gigs. But the travelling that's associated with touring and the bizarre bedtimes, it does take it all. As you can tell from my voice, I sound like the devil rubbed his balls on my tonsils. all as you can tell from my voice sound like the devil rubbed his balls on my tonsils roaring and shouting on microphones and doing sound tests in venues and not sleeping his heart on the vice but let's get back to this chat because we speak about fucking false widows invasive species climate collapse biodiversity collapse did you have a lovely pint? They've got fucking San Miguel on taps. I didn't

know about that. No, it's grand. I got a San Miguel already. Is San Miguel common here on tap? I wonder, is it anything to do with the Spanish thing in the Armada? No? You can't get enough of the Nimerick. I usually don't. I ruin my night if there's San Miguel on tap. So we were talking before we came out, right, about the importance of, we said, the research that you're doing and then people learning about it and understanding it. And I would imagine that the discovery of the false widow spider in Ireland is quite helpful to you guys. Can you tell us about the false widow spider in Ireland is quite helpful to you guys.

Can you tell us about the false widow spider, its presence in Ireland? You know about false widows, yeah? It's the first spider in Ireland that can bite you, is it? Well, there's a few species that could potentially bite you, but nobody's really, we don't have a history of people complaining about spider bites in Ireland but the false widow spider is it's a close relative to the black widow and it's first documented in Ireland in the late 1990s

and since then there's been quite a few sightings of them around the country Like they're everywhere I find them like four times a year in my house. Well, the surveys that we've been doing now, we're finding them literally in almost every county.

And in Dublin especially, like, they're in their millions. There's so many of them. I lived in Dublin, like, ten years ago, and I remember when the false widow started happening. I remember learning how to identify I remember when the false widow started happening I remember learning how to identify the difference between a false widow and what's the native

Irish one is it an orb weaver they look quite similar because I didn't want to be killing the native spider but if I see a false widow I do kill it is that quite there's no official stance on it but they are as far as I'm concerned, they're invasive.

If I find anything invasive, I try and kill it. No, but it's a good idea. Biodiversity, lads. If there's a fucking wolf spider... What are those big ones called? The huge ones.

They live in my gaff. I leave them alone. I feel sorry for them because i know what they're doing they um do you know like you'd be sitting in your house in like august and then it's like what the fuck is that you're supposed to be you're supposed to be over in morocco what are you doing but them ones they're native aren't they and what i found out from collie uh collie ennis who i've had on the podcast a few times from the Critter Shed when they walk around the house it's a horny male right

and he's harmless but he's massive he's after having a wank punching his own sperm and now he's walking around with his cum fists looking for a smaller female spider she's gonna let him not

even have sex that's the thing she's just gonna lay some eggs and he's gonna punch his comment or eggs and then she'll kill him so I feel sorry for them so I'm like alright buddy you can live here freaking me out you can hear him but I'm like I'm alright i'm all right with you but if i see a false widow i'm like you might bite me and also you're not really supposed to be here so i will kill a false widow what's incredible is everything you just said is actually true that's it i'm beside fucking academics like um when i'm beside academics they have to be thinking,

if this fella talks out of his fucking arse, I better correct him. I look bad at my job. But that is all true, yeah. It's true. How they make, as you said, the comb gloves and stuff, it's just mad.

The first time I learned about that, I was like, that can't be true. But it is. It's a a characteristic characteristic of how we determine between uh identifying males from the female spiders because the pedipalps in the front of the males they have like big swollen palps they're like boxing gloves and uh yeah so when people often complain about the spiders are getting bigger this year they're like what's going on here so they they first of all we see most of

them during the breeding season and from around august up until november and it's usually the horny males coming in looking for females because our houses are in the middle of land and they'll go through the back garden to get through yeah or if they're already in the house they're on a mad hunt for females they are they will fear nothing they're just obsessed to get in there so if you get in the way they'll they'll they'll climb on you just yes and but all they're interested in is females and because they are a bit silly like it's like man it's the fucking living room floor like i've had there was a mouse here last week and he fucking knew how to use the the scarting board at least they'll come straight out and go what's the crack where's the nightclub

they do yeah yeah they're oblivious to the danger and they uh that's it they're going on most likely when they get there they're gonna have a dance and they get eaten but at the end of it but i i love learning about that because it is i stopped fearing him at that moment because now they have a personality and a mission and it's kind of funny. So I'm like, all right, I know I'm a bit freaked out. Go and do your thing, you're grand. And one fella, and this is what I loved about being kind to these spiders, I fucking stepped on him by accident. I accidentally stepped on him and took off two of his legs.

And I was really annoyed with myself because I don't like hurting him but he came back next year with his missing two legs still out going why? listening to Tiesto but tell us about the false widows because these are new spiders in Ireland

but also they tend to get a lot of tabloid headlines and people overreact and they're terrified of false widows like there are no spiders in Ireland, but also they tend to get a lot of tabloid headlines and people overreact and they're terrified of false widows. So the false widows were getting a lot of bad press over the years, especially in the UK. And Michelle was one of the first people to really comment in Ireland on false widows and the bites because actually even in Ireland,

people's deaths were being attributed to it in the media. And we were thinking, you were thinking that can't be true like you know a lot of people we knew in the scientific community, in the arachnology community were actually kind of saying no they're not causing bacterial infections their venom is actually antibiotic

antimicrobial activity so that will actually kill the bacteria and there it's a neural neurotoxic venom so it's not going to cause all these necrotic symptoms generally the harmless distant you know but we were thinking how do we know this because nobody's actually started yeah so I joined Michelle's lab specifically to study the false with a spider here in Ireland for my PhD research.

What did you find out about, like, do we need to be freaked out about false widows? No, not really, no. But what we did do was kind of lay down some facts against the fiction. They're not like mad killers. Nobody's ever died from them. But they do have quite a potent neurotoxic venom. Wow. Very similar to black widows.

Maybe, if you want to say, not quite as dangerous. But you have to remember, black widows are the back garden spider in nearly any country that's warmer than Ireland. Thousands of people a year are bitten by black widows. Probably more than 70% of people bitten by black widows don't even need to go to a gp but we've documented a number of cases of false widows steatol and nobilis and already like quite a few out of only a handful of cases people have had to get medical assistance in some cases hospitalized treated with morphine and the pain debilitating

pain so bad and is that from the bite or from we'll say sepsis or a dirty wound like dirty at the site of the wound in some of the cases specifically from the neurotoxic venom so they have a very potent um they're fucking consort no but like i mean i didn't know this well they have a venom that's very similar to black widows. You see, the false widow name makes you go, ah, fuck off. Yeah, the name, yeah. So it's easy for them to be demonized as well. So we try to kind of, like, when you read some of the tabloids and you see absolute trash about them, you just go, ah, here.

But if a journalist contacts us and asks us to comment on one of our studies or whatever, we go, you know, there's some of the articles in the news that are actually us talking, giving some, you know, pretty much just laying out the facts. And that's it. It's not really like misleading or scaremongering.

But if other, what happens is, if you give comments to the Irish Times and they publish that. They only go for the scary bits. Sometimes, yeah, but then other papers take from that and they put their own twist to it and our names are dragged into that as well. That's unhelpful, I'm guessing, for what you're trying to do, is it?

It's actually, it can be really, really bad. I remember the first article I saw in the press that I saw about my research, speaking about 10 years ago on the noble false widow. And it ended up being in a tabloid, not a big article, but they've managed to get the species wrong. They managed to get my name wrong. And the picture of the spider they've put there was actually a big ass Australian huntsman. Okay, Yeah. And you go like, there's nothing right there. And you actually asked me questions.

Where did the communication break down between me telling you facts and you writing this crap? And that was impressive. Of course, then after we learned as well, like, you know, how to deal with that and how to be really straight on some of the facts and so on. So it's not the case with all articles. But we have to be very careful with what we say and how we say it because if I say, for example, oh yeah, the noble false widow is invasive and it is. 50% of all spiders we could find in Dublin at the moment,

outside on railings and walls, are false widows. So a species that arrived 30 years ago, less than 30 years ago, in 1997, 1998, now represent 50% of the whole density of spiders in Dublin. That's fucking mad. It's mad. And what I'd like to ask about there is, when I'm speaking about false widows there, naturally what all of us are thinking is,

is it going to bite me? Is it going to bite me? What's much more important, what I consider, is what is the impact on biodiversity? Absolutely. And this is the big point. And you see on one side, of course, when we are writing an article saying, here we present 15 bites by the noble false widow in Ireland. Here are the symptoms.

This is what they can do to people. This, of course, is only to a minority of people and so on. But it's important for people to know that, of course. This can turn into scaremongering very easily, depending on what the media are going to do with it. On the other side, if now I write a paper saying that, yes, 50% of all spiders in major urban centers around the island are now noble false widow, and this is dramatic for the native biodiversity, this doesn't get the same. While what is actually more dramatic and more important for our environment as a whole

what will ultimately have a bigger impact on us as a species is the second case. It's the biodiversity problem not the few bites and that's something we need to work on. Because something that really concerned me about the

false widow was we have a native Irish lizard. And I've seen one once in my whole life. They exist. They don't want to be found. But we've got a fucking lizard and it's Irish and it exists. And you guys found, I don't know if it was you specifically, but a false widow killed one of these lizards. And that broke my heart.

Yep. And the funny thing was, there was an article in the Irish Times and it went through the media and everybody's reaction on social media wasn't, oh my God, a false widow's boy that killed a lizard. Most of the reaction was, what? We have a lizard?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And yeah, so we've a lizard that's widespread across ireland and now we are great and not being seen yeah and now we have this uh spider that was actually documented uh actually catch one and kill him and eating it and we've since then um documented and published reports on the same species in the uk catching uh and predating on bats and also pygmy shrew. And native animals have a purpose within a system of biodiversity and like I don't fully know how important the native Irish lizard is but it's been there a while so it probably is and it's just one of these things like I was speaking about Collie earlier and Collie says that he's obsessed with frogs because he considers them to be an indicator species.

If he looks at frogs and the health of a frog, that tells him a lot about the system of biodiversity around it. And I just don't think it's, like, taking it back to don't kill white butterflies, they're native. I don't think we should be killing native Irish lizards because they serve some purpose within a system of biodiversity. And what collapses when they go? It's really this. If you think an analogy, we're going to go back to the Irish thing there.

Think about the dry stone wall. You have like thousands of kilometers of dry stone walls here. Each stone is there. You could think each stone is the same. It's just a stone that's part of a wall. You kick one of the stone there, and you're going to see that a section of 10, 15 meters of wall is going to collapse.

And that is breaking your wall. And now your wall is not a wall anymore. Now it's become porous. Now things can pass from one side to the other. The same thing is true with species. You can't just say, ah, sure, we just get rid of that one species. It's not just that one species.

When you knock that species, a whole section of this biodiversity is going to collapse as well. And this is essential. Imagine that this is a massive, huge Jenga tower. And what we've been doing for the past hundred years, or something like this particularly, it's removing the pieces of the Jenga faster and faster and faster.

And we know that the tower is wobbling, and it's wobbling more and more. At some point, that tower is going to collapse. We don't know which piece will make the tower collapse. But if we have any sense, we'd actually think that maybe it's time to stop moving all those pieces. We should actually stop removing pieces of that massive Jenga and consolidate the tower again. And maybe even eventually put back pieces where we can. But no, we still continue to pull pieces and say,

oh sure, it's going to be grand. It won't. One day that massive Jenga tower is going to collapse, and then our environment will be gone. It will be too late to actually preserve anything. The tower won't be there anymore. And that's really, really important. I love how, as a Frenchman, you've learned it'll be grand. Because it's more than just the thing is what it'll be grand. It's not just a saying. I think it'll be grand is very useful on an individual basis.

It can keep you calm. But if you get a lot of Irish people together agreeing it'll be grand, fucked. That's when shit goes wrong. When all of the Irish people are saying it'll be grand, Fucked. That's when shit goes wrong. When all of the Irish people are saying it'll be grand, then bad things happen.

We were talking about something backstage and I fucking adored this because this is like the beginnings of a hot take. But have you noticed recently like the restaurant industry is kind of collapsing a bit? Like restaurants are closing everywhere, right? And it's becoming really expensive in the past two years to run a restaurant. So what's happening,

what you're seeing a lot of is like little vans, like a vintage van, all of a sudden selling chips. And the reason this is happening everywhere is it's cheaper to have a van than it is to have a restaurant. So now there's an explosion of vans all over Ireland just selling chips and tacos. Yum, yum. But tell us what is happening now because all of these vans are getting imported. Well, there was one interesting case a few years ago. I got contacted by some guys looking to identify a spoiler.

So they had imported this vintage van, a Volkswagen, from California. It was sitting on the property just outside Dublin for almost a year. And he started to remove the engine and this black spider fell on his hand and he thought it was very unusual looking. So I had a look at it

and you could see a very clear red marking on his underside, like an hourglass. So I was quickly able to tell that it was a black widow spider. So I headed out to him and he had seen another one and it was on the web. When you opened the door, it had a web built in there, you could see it. But he took a video to show me, but he tried to get it and it escaped so I went looking for it but we couldn't find it but we had the one he had kept aside and he was a bit too nervous to go working on it so he kind of like just put aside went to work on some other ones so uh but he literally exactly a year later um to the week i think it was he contacted me he said john i went back working on this van again and

i think i found a spider um it was in the same place anyway uh so i i went straight out um and we caught alive i had in my house for a good while and so it was another black widow spider and what was interesting about this is like we also we we we've documented uh this isn't something that we we would talk to a journalist about for the obvious reasons uh but there was a case of a spider uh black widow spider that was found in a bunch of grapes from the local supermarket uh the woman opened it up and it ran out and she panicked but it had an egg sack and all that but in the case of the

spider in the vintage van basically it survived the journey from California and then almost two years in Ireland that's the concerning bit but the thing is shit comes into Ireland all the time,

but I'm assuming it dies. I'm concerned about the fact that this thing is alive. That's not supposed to happen, is it? Well, it's not that there's rules that it should or shouldn't, but we tend to think that it's not a big deal,

that it won't happen or whatever, but they do happen. Like the false widow is from the Canary Islands, is that correct? Yeah. And just a question, do you think the false widow would have survived in Ireland 80 years ago? We don't know. Is it a climate change, rising temperature thing? Possibly. Contribution, maybe? There is a contribution. Most likely, maybe not so much climate change yet,

but change in habitat and habitat structure on the island. Island, eight years ago, must have been incredibly different. And the Noble Falls widow is found so far in island, only in urban and suburban habitats. Okay. So there is... The microclimate of the city is a little bit warmer for us. Exactly.

There is what we call the island effect. So the island heat effect, where essentially because of the artificial surfaces, we have a buildup of heat during the day and the release of that heat at night. And what happens so is that the cities tend to be slightly warmer and also act as a windbreak. So you end up building

a micro-habitat right there that may be just sufficient for an invasive species or for a foreign species, an alien species, to actually come in and settle in. And then just explode in terms of populations and survive only in that kind of environment.

So this is what's happened with the noble false widow. So you won't find them in the local bog yet. But that's the yes. How does that happen? Are you looking? And I imagine once the false widow starts going out into the wild of Ireland, then things are fucked. There's evidence

that they're they have been found in kind of more natural settings but not widespread in natural environments but in parts of the uk and other parts of europe they're they start off in the urban parts and then they once they reach a recurring capacity they can kind of burst out we have to assume as well like just natural evolution the ones that can survive I don't know in Donabate or something like that or just outside of Dublin

those ones the ones that can survive are the ones who will have kids and then you're looking at 10-20 years and all of a sudden you've got a false widow that's a little bit better with temperatures. I mean, isn't that how it works? That's natural selection. It's what happens with every species.

If they have just that little bit of ability in their genes to survive some sort of different environmental condition a bit better than this population and that they have a chance to mate and transmit that ability to the offspring, well, then you have a potential invasion there. And that doesn't take a very long time to develop, does it? I mean, you're just waiting for that mutation.

It can happen. Well, if you think about the UK has them reported since I think it's 1879. So that was only a handful of specimens for almost nearly 100 years and then boom. So something could have happened

there. There's other researchers who think it's probably related to a genetic mutation that probably occurred from a population in, for example, England. Wow. The Brits are back. Okay.

So back to this, like the fucking Black Widow. Yeah. Are we talking about one spider or like how concerned are you about a community of spiders to me this is just exciting because it's it's great you know to get something cool and interesting i don't particularly have a concern that we're going to have the same impact that we have had from false wooded spiders. But it's possible. So in the paper that we described the occurrences of these,

the ones that we found from California were the ones that are potentially dangerous, that have the capability to cause a fatal bite. The one that ran out, the grapes, is a more kind of cosmopolitan general species. Not quite as known to be quite as dangerous. Medically significant, but not known to

kill many people. But this particular black widow has been found widespread across the world now. Just like the false widows, it's really establishing. And it's been found here before in ireland the the one that will kill you do the one that is not particularly as dangerous as they okay yeah yeah they can still put you in hospital like you know they're not nothing but not quite but they have also the ability to adapt quicker to these types of

climates so we think in ire in Ireland, maybe if they get into somewhere that was like a greenhouse or somewhere and they could survive the conditions, then they could potentially... As I understand it right now, correct me if I'm wrong, an animal is particularly venomous or dangerous if that animal lives in an environment where it doesn't see a lot of predator or doesn't see a lot of prey.

Is that right? If it's really isolated and only has one shot, then that shot has to be the best. That can be the case, yeah, for some organisms, definitely. Imagine a scorpion in the desert. imagine a scorpion in the desert. That scorpion might encounter one prey every few months and it can't let that prey escape. This is a matter of life or death. So you end up with actually a scorpion that will kind of, through evolution, go in overdrive in terms of toxicity. Instead of just killing the prey, but that kill might take a minute or two minutes, it will produce a venom that will completely destroy the central nervous system of the prey within seconds.

And it needs that, that extremely potent venom to ensure its survival. So you see that in some organisms. And that explains why some organisms are so, so, so incredibly toxic. It explains Australia a lot as well, because Australia is massive, but not a lot there. Yes. And then you have the other thing as well, which is unfortunate for us. We are not natural prey, and often we are not natural predators of a lot of those organisms. So the effect of the venom is kind of a byproduct on human beings. So a venom that has evolved to actually kill cockroaches, for example, go back to scorpions,

may be good at killing cockroaches and incredibly good at sending human beings in hospital. It's not the main reason for it. It's just a byproduct. It's just no luck sending human beings in hospital. It's not the main reason for it. It's just a byproduct. It's just no luck for human beings. But it's not the main driver of it. Originally, it was just to kill cockroaches. It just happened that human beings are super sensitive to that toxin too. What concerning species do you guys ever see arriving into Ireland via, I don't know, the fucking supermarket or someone's luggage?

What can you think of? I think garden centres are probably a more concerning import point for invasive species. Wow. One of the big things, for example, garden centres, one of the worries I have with this, One of the big things, for example, garden centers, one of the worries I have with this, and it's an experiment that I'd like to try at some point using a technology that's fairly modern called environmental DNA, where we can actually find DNA, little samples, molecules,

if you want, floating in a room or in water or in a sample of soil. We can identify so specific organism from those tiny little residual DNA strands. And it would be to actually use this to see what kind of organisms arrive in the samples of soil and plants that come an island. And one thing that I would be afraid of, it's, for example, fungal disease that can wipe out whole population, for example, of amphibians. There is a particular fungal disease like this

that is wiping out populations of frogs and salamanders in many parts of the world. If this arrives in Ireland, over here we have three species of amphibians we have species of newts and two species well one species of frog, one species of toad they could be wiped out very very easily by this particular fungal infection and you wouldn't see it, you wouldn't see the fungus

as such physically in the plant soil or whatever is important, you'd need to actually do DNA checks there. You don't know that it's there. Something similar is already happening, I believe, with our native crayfish.

Did you hear about that? I don't know what it is, but it's something that's coming in on boats and it's destroying our native crayfish. So we have actually invasive crayfish already here. Oh, there's them as well, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the ballast of boats in general.

So essentially when you have a big boat, often what they do is that they load parts of the boat at the bottom with seawater or fresh water in order to actually be more stable when there are empty things like this. Wow. And that means that they carry metric tons of water from one part of the world to another. And of course, that way, you import as well all the organisms that are in this water. Oh, my God.

And you don't know what they're going to do. So in Ireland, we have even the zebra mussel, for example. That's it, yeah. Zebra mussel comes from the Caspian Sea, I think, originally. Came in the ballast of boats. And it lives in fresh water. What it does is that it filters water in lakes and rivers at an incredible rate and eats all the phytoplankton.

The problem is that that phytoplankton was the food for a lot of little bugs living in the water. Native species. And those bugs were the food for all the fish. And that means that because of that muscle, well, the whole ecosystem in freshwater is collapsing

now. And that explains the disappearance as well of some salmon, you know, sea trout, trout, and so on. One mussel is causing systemic collapse. Yep. One mussel brought from the Caspian Sea through the ballast of some barge that navigated through different canals and rivers

and then the North Sea and went through the UK and then Ireland, and there we are, ecological collapse. Is anything ever done, like, would it ever be a situation where, with that mussel or with the false widow spider, that the government goes, we have to kill him? I think... And is that a controversial question

that you don't even want to answer? Do you know what I mean? No, no. I don't know. Because I'm thinking, Jesus, this sounds shit. What do we do about it? Like, that's what I'm thinking. If there's an official stance that we should,

you know, if something's evasive, it should be terminated immediately. I'll happily get a hammer. No problem. And I think... is that your job? it's a very are you going to be the person but are you going to be the person

who gets the phone call when the false widows need to be killed? I don't know I don't know I think I think to put some context

to things as well that you know the false widow is something that a lot of people seem to be interested to learn about.

But we've only documented one lizard in the UK, one bat and so on. So we don't know how many animals they might be eating. We don't think false widows are the biggest threat to lizards. Could just be a fluke. Could be. We suspect that the whole genus and even black widows are actually quite regularly eating the small vertebrates. But I think

other animals are... Actually, there's two invasive species I've actually found in my own garden that kind of concern me. I used to have... I still do occasionally see them. Little pygmy shrews in my garden. And recently the great white tutu shrew is being

documented in the face of an island. And I'm finding, the last couple of years, I was telling you, I'm finding them everywhere in my garden. I'm even catching them in mousetraps. So that to you says, right, there's lots of these. And the other one is the New Zealand flatworm I'm finding in the last few years

in my garden. What's he now? It's a worm that you get and again a lot of people think maybe stuff coming over and luggage on the holidays and stuff. Garden centres are probably one of the important points of injury for these for even false widows probably

but these New Zealand flatworms they're predatory worms so when they come into your garden they start targeting earthworms and they're predatory worms. So when they come into your garden, they start targeting earthworms and they kill them. But the problem is they, because they're predators, they don't do the same job. They're not taking over. They don't make hummus.

No, exactly. So they're not doing the same job, you know, taking over, doing a better job even. So then you get shit fucking soil. So if you then, in a doomsday scenario, you end up with these New Zealand flatworms killing earthworms and then all of a sudden you can't grow crops.

Yeah, because your soil ends up being completely compacted and it's not aerated anymore. It's a worm here that arrived in the 1970s it seems from Belfast. And it's present in many, many environments now throughout Ireland. We think that overall anyway, invasive species,

but the data is from 2005 or something like this, cost minimum, minimum, at least over a quarter of a billion euros every year to the island economy, at least. And that was almost 20 years ago. So it must be a lot more now. So it has a huge impact. What is done for it? Not much.

Now, the thing is, it's not just Ireland's fault. Ireland's not great in terms of regulations. Anyway, you've heard with John and his crocodilians at home. But it's not just Ireland. And if we take the example of the US, if I remember well, it's less than 2% of all containers that are actually checked for potential invasive species or anything. Less than 2%.

There is over 98% of those containers that arrive that are never checked. So we need to understand that invasive species is the byproduct of globalization. We are the reason why it's happening. I am the reason why it's happening when I actually want to eat grapes from Chile and I want to eat, I don't know, I'm buying a new TV or anything or a computer that comes from the other side of the world.

So it's part of it. It's a choice we've made. It's actually a choice we've made. So yeah, now there is very little we can do with many of those species, but we should try and limit the damage as much as we can. What's the worst thing you've ever been bitten by? There's been a few painful instances,

not just one, but I think the worst one, what could have been the worst one, was actually a viper bite. So I was in the jungle in Malaysia on my own in the middle of the night looking for snakes in the jungle, as you do, because it's a very clever thing to do. I was going up a river and I was looking up for snakes in the jungle as you do because it's a very clever thing to do and I was I was going up a river and I was looking up for snakes because they tend to be on branches just above the river so it gives you kind of a highway in the jungle to to really go faster so

I was looking up with my light and all looking for snakes and of course that means that I wasn't looking down and of all the chances I had I actually stepped on a viper so the the viper actually beat me just actually on the left leg but just just on at the level of the tibia and it just went then back into the water kind of disappeared I couldn't see with the light and all. So then you're like, okay, I'm three hours from home. What am I going to do now? Because viper bites, normally that stinks. So I thought, sure, the only thing I can do is walk back home.

Walk back to the car and then drive. So I walk back and I thought, actually, I'm not feeling too bad. I'm not feeling like passing out. Should be all right. So I get to the car. I drive back home. And I'm like, you know what? It could be a lot worse. It's painful. But I'm not feeling like dying. Like, you know, it's not going to happen. Let's go to bed and see in the morning. Je sais. Regarde, j'avais 24 ans et je ne suis pas très brillant. Et puis je me réveille le matin, mes pieds sont tous assis, le dos, vraiment, vraiment assis, avec du bleu noir qui commence à apparaître. Donc je commence à avoir une sorte de apparition vraiment brûlante.

Et je me dis, c'est pas bon, mais je ne me sens pas trop mal. So I start to have kind of really bruising appearing. And I'm like, that's not good. But I don't feel too bad. It's going to be okay. Yes. You see, I wasn't living in Ireland at the time or anything, but I already knew that it's going to be grand. And I waited. And at about 4pm

everything up to my upper thigh was swollen blue black and I started to have those kind of weird skin eruption with like lymph and blood oozing through and I'm like this is really not getting any better

and it's getting very close to a particular part of my body that I would need. Yeah. I better go to the hospital. And I did. And I end up in hospital and lovely, lovely people, they had a great laugh when they saw me coming. They knew who I was because I was the guy in charge of the reptile park. So they knew immediately. And so they had a great laugh. They looked at it and all this.

They treated me. And actually, they didn't know that I spoke Malay. So they didn't know that actually I understood them laughing, saying that I was a stupid white man. Which I was. And no, it was okay. I actually lost most of the skin on my leg in the following days. Can you explain from a venom perspective what happened?

So yes, of course. It's actually those vipers have an hemotoxic venom. So it's a venom that actually changes the properties of your blood. So on one side, it will aggregate the platelets. So you know those little things that normally repair your blood vessels and all this? Well, they turn you into a kind of hemophilic person. So at the same time, you have all those platelets that are aggregating somewhere. That can produce a blockage.

If this is in your brain, you can have a stroke and die from that. At the same time, so your blood is getting very, very thin. And then you have other enzymes in the venom that start to break down the walls of your veins and arteries. And the platelets can't repair that anymore. So that means that the blood that's already very thin starts to ooze through all the blood vessels. And that's that the blood that's already very thin start to ooze through all the blood vessels. And that's what was happening on my leg. Now, where I was very lucky is that because the bite was on the tibia, the snake most likely didn't have a chance to

inject a lot of venom because it hit the bone. And that means that, in fact, I got very light effects. And that means that my internal organs, my liver, my kidneys, my lungs, did not suffer much from the effect of that. Otherwise, what would have happened is that my liver would have started to bleed as well, my kidneys would have turned into mush, and my lungs most likely would have started to fill up with water as well. How long would all this take with a decent bite well with vipers it's actually a fairly low process so that would have taken a

fair few hours to a day and a half um so so that's not fun but that didn't happen so i i was very lucky uh a cobra bite would actually take you down a lot faster because it's a neurotoxin that will actually destroy your central nervous system. It will end your, basically, your ability to move your muscles. And when that happens, one of the first symptoms, one of my staff at the time got beaten by a cobra, a king cobra. And one of the first symptoms was actually the eyelids dropping because those muscles could not be controlled anymore. Then he started to drool a lot because the muscles that are controlling the saliva glands were not contracting anymore. And then he started to have trouble speaking because all the muscles of your face and the tongue and so on. And he lost consciousness quite rapidly.

And then he was in a coma and then after that the enzymatic activity of the venom kicks in and that eats parts of the flesh so it destroyed most of the muscle mass on his arm as well while he was in a coma and then he recovered needed reconstructive surgery remain for the following years with two paralyzed fingers on one hand, one paralyzed finger on the other, with seizures sometimes, all this due to that neurotoxicity. So it's not just the bite, it's what can happen as well after. And when we speak about pain, the most painful bite was actually a giant centipede.

So centipedes are those kind of, I don't know if you're familiar with centipedes, it has lots of legs, as the name can suggest. In the tropics, so in islands, a centipede is like two and a half centimeters, three centimeters an inch and it won't do anything to you. In the tropics they can reach over foot in length, they're super fast and they are known to take down snakes and lizards and birds and mice and stuff like that, even tarantulas and scorpions. I had one in my bed.

I saw it, tried to squash it. It beat me, obviously. That wasn't very bright either. Damn, I wasn't bright at that time. And the pain is incredible. It's the equivalent of someone hammering, in my case, my hand every time I had a heartbeat. And I wondered if it was just me and in fact no, some other people really say that it's like breaking a bone again and again and again and again for hours on end. So I was lucky.

For me, it was super painful for about 20 minutes or so. Very painful for about two hours. And it started to go down after that. So I had it easy. Some people have those symptoms for days. Some people have those symptoms for days. Opiates do not work well to alleviate the pain because some of the toxin of giant centipedes binds to the same pain receptor as the opiate would.

So that means that even if you take an opiate, it just bounces back on the receptor. It doesn't work. Is it a real pain or is it a false signal of pain? It's actually very interesting because that goes down to a fundamental question of what is pain. And at the end of the day, pain is just like a tiny little receptor in your body somewhere that starts to fire up

tiny, tiny electrical currents transmitted then by chemicals from nerve to nerve to your brain that associate that with the worst thing possible and so this is chemically induced by the venom and once again this is how a giant centipede will defend itself against a big predator basically it will bite and just release that venom and the predator would be in such pain that it forgets all about that centipede and the food it represents and focus only on the pain. So you imagine centipedes 425 million years old.

That's what we know centipedes for. Super ancient. 425 million years of evolution to induce pain in potential predators. When you're on the receiving end of it, it feels like a sledgehammer every time you have a heartbeat. The other night, I was interviewing a neuroscientist, Professor Kevin Mitchell, and I said, I'm going to speak into you lads. And he said that as a neuroscientist, which studies the brain and also the nervous system,

that venom was actually hugely important to his field. Why is that? Because with venom, you can actually trigger a very specific type of nerves. And this is something we are discovering for the past 20 years or so. As I was mentioning to you earlier, I just wrote actually part of a big European review on the topic. I was just focusing on what we call the potassium channel, which is one type of nerve that we

have. But we have others. We have the calcium channel. We have the sodium channel. We have, yeah, several like this. So this is just one that is associated with pain. And some of those pain receptors that function with a potassium-yield channel were discovered only through spider venom. And we actually understand very specific aspects of the human nervous system

by just using isolated nerves and by putting little fractions of venom there and seeing what happened with those nerves. Do they actually still transmit that current? Do they stop? Do they stay closed or open? Imagine that they function just like a switch. When you're switching on and off a light,

the same thing happen. So do they keep the switch on or off? And we can study all that with venom. So a big part of my work, which I love, is actually to go to different places and speak to people like that and explain the evolutionary perspective of this. They understand, those scientists understand things that I don't understand. But I can tell them why those organisms are doing it, why they've evolved those abilities. And it's beautiful to see what then those people are capable of doing. Paris in December, a Portuguese researcher who used the equivalent of millions of computer hours using supercomputers based in China, in Europe, in the US, to actually reconstruct exactly what

one toxin of a snake would do to a particular calcium channel of a human nerves in the first few femtoseconds. It's incredible. So he had all that in a 3D view on the screens and all. And we spoke then after after his presentation and we realized that I didn't know anything about that field but he didn't even know what that particular snakes looked like. Wow! Our field is so separated. We actually need each other in order to come and understand really how it functions and why.

And I find that beautiful in science. It's not one person in isolation. We're a network. I'm going to open up some questions to the audience now, actually. Can we bring the house lights up slightly? Is there house lights? There is. Does anybody have a question about anything?

We've got a yonder. Is the floating microphone around the place? There's a question over there. And 2000s R&B singer Usher has kindly come along to hand out the microphone. Thank you. It's really interesting. But I was wondering, how do you extract the venom? And also, how do you test on those little channels that you're talking about? Do you test on animals to do that or on humans?

And does it hurt the spiders or the snakes to extract the venom? It's a very good question. We actually often get that as well from the students, you know. So what we do is that we have in my lab a venom extraction platform that we use on arthropods, so not on reptiles. We don't do snakes or anything like this. We do it on scorpions, spiders, centipedes. And basically what we do is that we use electric current to contract the muscles that are located around the venom glands,

and then the venom comes out of the fangs or the sting and so on. But because an electric current would be painful, like, I don't know if you've ever been tased, but it hurts. And of course, even if there are no regulations, particularly on the welfare of a spider or scorpions, there is no point to hurt an animal for no reason. So we actually anesthetize them first. We anesthetize them using CO2 because they are not feeling CO2 like we do. We actually kind of suffocate if we breathe CO2. Arthropods, because of the way they breathe, it does not function in the same way. They don't breathe

actively. So it's not similar. So we expose them to CO2. They go to sleep. We do the venom extraction then. And then after we make sure that they wake up in good condition. So one of my students is actually very good at doing CPR for spiders and scorpions, making sure that they're well ventilated, that they recover well. So this is how we do. Then for the nerves, we actually don't test in my lab on nerves as such. But for those who do, usually those nerves are either extracted from human tissue, things like this. Or in some cases, they can be grown artificially as well if it's just one part of a nerve that we need.

And then we use microscopic clamps on each side. So it's under a big microscope You just have your nerve fiber You put a clamp on each side and that is linked to a computer and then we can send a tiny electric current on one side and see if it's recovered on the other side or not and We can see also the percentage of the current that is recovered so we can apply for example. I don't know a toxin from that snail I was speaking about earlier, that marine snail,

put just that extract there and we'll notice, for example, that the switch is off and that current doesn't pass anymore. Then we can use another product to reactivate it. And that's what we can do with a patient then. Anesthesia, no pain at all, and then give another product to reactivate it. And that's what we can do with a patient then.

Anesthesia, no pain at all, and then give another product, and then the nerve mechanism and message is restored. Snakes are so much easier. You just get them to buy the jar with some cling film. Any other questions yonder thank you um so it's just kind of in relation to how long does it take um an invasive species to maybe become you know a native species? Because we talk a lot about survival of the fittest, and is that not kind of a natural selection? Hedgehogs.

Yeah. I know in terms of caterpillars and stuff, you had millions and millions of years, but is it a case where we don't have that much longer for invasive to become part of? One of the big issues with this, it's actually when we speak about invasive species,

it's usually human-induced. And one of the big things is that what would happen over the course of hundreds of thousands of years, of millions of years, colonization of islands, the colonization of the Pacific Islands, for example, by animals, is a process that took a long, long time. But now, with a modern civilization, we actually do that in a matter of years. And this is where

actually there is, I think, a big issue. We put an animal that does not belong to a particular habitat, sometimes in fairly large number, in an environment where its population can explode, and then that organism will start to compete with other organisms that never encountered any of its kind before, and not gradually. We pass from zero to 100 within a matter of years, and adaptation does not occur then.

And we don't have that co-adaptation between species. We just have one wiping the other one out. And that, I think, that is human-driven. And that's something we don't master. It's something we don't understand yet, the implications of this. And it's usually dangerous when we don't understand the implications of something. I'm going to go for one more question, because I'm conscious of the curfew. Yander there at the end.

Hello, you had a wonderful Jenga analogy about taking pieces out and putting pieces back in. wonderful Jenga analogy about taking pieces out and putting pieces back in. In your field of work, what have you done or what would you like to do in that vein? So for example, in flora, I know that you can use mushroom spores to regenerate soil. So what ways can you put Jenga pieces back in? I think that one of the big thing and then that that brings another conceptual issue it's with animals often it zoos conservation conservation on one side so try and protect really certain environments education try and avoid conflict between human beings and wildlife and then when

this anyway is going to pot well then we need to actually have areas that are kind of sanctuaries where we can continue to breed, even if it's artificially, some of those species to try and have basically the equivalent of an ark, a place where we can maintain species, even if in the wild they're screwed. A good example of that is the axolotl, a cute little salamander organism. Those guys live only in lakes and little streams around Mexico City and Mexico Valley. Now, the thing is that Mexico City has grown so much that all their habitat, all their natural habitat has been covered. Their natural habitat is gone. In the wild, we thought 10 years ago that they were extinct. In fact, recently, a few years ago, 3-4

years ago, they found a population in a park in Mexico City just at the edge of what they thought was a drain and a little pond in a park. And in fact, that drain was an underground river that was covered to build housing estates. So they found a few wild specimens found in a park, and in fact that drain was an underground river that was covered to build

housing estates. So, they found a few wild specimens still there, but there are millions of axolotls in captivity. The population is not at risk. The wild population is decimated. This is a possibility, but otherwise, I don't know. We'll see what engineering can do. Otherwise, I don't know, education for snakes, it can do, otherwise education for snakes, it's also

a big thing, like try and avoid conflict yeah I just agree with everything you say alright, that was a tremendously enjoyable chat with Dr. Michel Dugan and J.P. Dunbar

Dr. J.P. Dunbar thank you to the lads for a wonderful evening and a fascinating chat follow the fantastic work they do up in the University of Galway with the Venom Labs I'll catch you next week possibly with a hot take

and I'll have a more rested voice in the meantime rub a dog genuflect to a wanking spider, hiss at a minnow. Alright, dog bless. Rock City, you're the best fans

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