Speaking with a professor about the evolution of plants, terraforming planets and extinction events

Professor Jennifer Mc Elwain joined me for a chat about Paleobotany ahead of Science week 2025 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Cheers to fall savings at Whole Foods Market, home of higher ingredient standards. This Halloween, share chocolates and candies, made without that spooky high fructose corn syrup. Throwing a party? Make it easy with a Berry Chantilly Cake. Ready to cook pizza? No antibiotics ever chicken wings. And sushi made fresh daily. Fall gatherings never tasted better. Save through November 3rd at Whole Foods Market.

• 0:28Speaker 01

  Hey, it's Hannah Burner from Giggly Squad, and the holidays are around the corner, which means I'm officially entering my Hostess Hannah era with Arm & Hammer Hardball Cat Litter. You guys know I love cats and fostering, but when I'm hosting, I do not want my house smelling like cats. I want people focusing on my hosting skills. That's why I love Arm & Hammer Hardball Cat Litter. It delivers long-lasting odor control and forms compact clumps that make cleanup easy, so that's one less thing I need to worry about when people come over. Be guest-ready with Arm & Hammer Cat Litter. Find it now at Walmart or Amazon.

• 1:02Blindboy Boatclub?

  Wish upon a pinprick, you whispering Vincent's. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. If this is your first episode, consider going back to an earlier podcast to familiarize yourself with the lore of this podcast. I'm looking out over a navy, limric city from my office window. It's only half four and things are getting dark. Fairly soon, there'll be a curtain of bastard rain, which is a dense mist. A dense, freezing mist. There's very little sunlight. Even in the daytime, everything's purple. And sunsets aren't powerful anymore.

• 1:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  They're kind of pink. Because in November, the earth is tilting at a queer angle. So the sun, the sun has to pass through more atmosphere and it just, it scatters more blue wavelengths. So that's why the sky is, not even the sky, the general vibe is, is purple and blue. And there's very little bird sounds. You're not hearing the sounds of birds chirping anymore. The starlings are gone. They're gone off for their winter roast. And everything is about decay. The leaves are on the ground. The trees are all spindly and silhouetted. And there's an icy chill coming in. We'll have that in a couple of

• 2:27Blindboy Boatclub?

  weeks. And just a few days back, it was Halloween, which comes from the much earlier Irish seasonal celebration known as Samhain. And we can see this written down in the 11th century, in the 10th century, but the story goes is that there's a cave up in Roscommon called Onigat Cave. And this is the Helmut. It's a portal to the other world. The veil between our world and the other world is very thin. And horrible monsters and demons, or whatever you want to call them, escaped from this cave. And they maraud the land and strip it bare that night. And then the next morning, everyone wakes up and everything's gone. There's no

• 3:12Blindboy Boatclub?

  leaves. Things are laid bare by frost. There's no insects. There's no animals. And that's, that's really what Halloween is. It's a big story about, about winter in the absence of writing. It's a story about ecology, about biodiversity. And I love that it still rings true. I love that I can look out on the 4th of November and see the land stripped bare by winter. Because as dark as it is, as ugly as it is, as unpleasant as it is, it's what's supposed to happen. It's necessary. And I love the challenge every single year

• 3:54Blindboy Boatclub?

  to find meaning in all that darkness. Because this is a tough time of year. It's a tough time of year for our mental health. A lot of people, myself included, don't respond well to that lack of sunlight, to the ugliness, to the ugliness that's out there. It is, November is not aesthetically beautiful. You have to really search for that aesthetic beauty.

• 4:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  If you get a bit of snow and frost and it twinkles, fair enough, that's aesthetically beautiful, but I'm looking out at underpants right here, lads. The shriveled up testicles of God. That's what November is. But I have a choice in that. I could allow myself to be depressed by how bleak everything is, or I could see it as a challenge, a challenge to find meaning and beauty in it. And that's what I do every single year. And there's loads of meaning and beauty in winter. And one of the best ways to access that beauty, it's through science. It's through understanding what winter is. It's through understanding

• 4:56Blindboy Boatclub?

  ecosystems and biodiversity. This week's podcast is, it's my annual Science Week podcast, which I've done, I think every year of this podcast, I've done a Science Week podcast in November. And every Science Week, I get to speak to an expert in their field about an area that they're very passionate about. And it's a wonderful privilege. And that's why I love doing Science Week. But this year's Science Week 2025, it's running from the 9th to the 16th of November. It's the 30 year anniversary of Science Week. So Science Week has been going for 30 years. And there's just, there's loads of free events up and

• 5:38Blindboy Boatclub?

  down Ireland, right? In libraries, colleges, schools, for everyone. It's about accessibility and democratizing science. It's not just for little kids who might become scientists, but it's for adults like me, who are just curious, curious people, who want to learn and find out about the world around them through the language of science. So wherever you are in Ireland, I guarantee you that there's going to be a Science Week event near you. It'll be free. It'll be fascinating. And if you're struggling with November, it will give quite a lot of meaning to November. There's an entire week in November where

• 6:19Blindboy Boatclub?

  there's free science events for you to go to and engage with while we all wait for things to get a little bit Christmasy. Let's be honest. All right.

• 6:29Blindboy Boatclub?

  We're all waiting for things to get a small bit Christmasy. We want Christmas lights and Christmas songs, that artificial injection of merriment that we need at the end of November and December because it's bleak. But right now, we've got nothing because Halloween just happened and we're waiting for the Christmas stuff. So you've got Science Week, okay? You've got Science Week right now. So that's starting on the 9th. And my Science Week guest this year is Professor Jennifer McIlwain from Trinity College up in Dublin. And Jennifer is a paleobotanist. She's a world-renowned expert in paleobotany. She's published a book called The Evolution of Plants.

• 7:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  She's been involved in incredibly important research on plant evolution and also how, how plants have changed our atmosphere over the years and have terraformed Earth. And the theme of this year's Science Week, because it's the 30th anniversary, is then, today and tomorrow. And paleobotany is perfect for that theme because it shows how plants changed the planet in the past, how they record atmospheric change today and how they can guide climate action for the future. So myself and Jenny chatted about paleobotany, ecology, biodiversity. We had a wonderful, wonderful chat.

• 7:58Blindboy Boatclub?

  And most importantly, and I try to do this every single Science Week, I'm speaking to an expert, a professor, someone who has dedicated their life to research in paleobotany. And I just have to be mindful around that, that, because I didn't have a great time in school, I have to be mindful around it, that to approach this situation with playfulness and curiosity and to ask the silly questions, to ask the silly questions. The wit, the stuff that I got killed for in school, asking too many silly questions. Well, now I'm an adult and silly questions have value. There's no such thing as a silly question. I think what silly is.

• 8:40Blindboy Boatclub?

  Not asking the question you'd like to ask because you're scared of looking stupid. That's what silly is. That's silliness. There's no such thing as silly questions. So anyway, here is the wonderful chat that I had with the incredibly sound professor Jenny McElwain.

• 9:01Speaker 03

  So, paleobotany is the study of fossil plants and we have different paleobotanists. Some people kind of look at shallow time over the last few million years. I study what I call deep time and so I look at study fossil plants all the way back to about 450 million years ago.

• 9:22Blindboy Boatclub?

  So, one thing I'm very curious about, right, is mass extinction events. And there's something I'd love to run by you because I would need to know if it's just some bullshit I heard on the internet, right? I was looking at, so I heard that all the coal that we are burning today, all this coal that's caused so much damage to the environment and released so much carbon, that this coal started during a giant extinction event of trees like 390 million years ago. And that's, these trees couldn't decompose because fungus didn't exist that could decompose them. Is that a thing that happened?

• 10:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, it is, absolutely. So, yeah, we know that there were at least five of these events called mass extinction events and it's when an extraordinary number of species on earth go extinct and we try and understand what happened. But the one you're talking about happened at the end of the Devonian and this was a time, if you can imagine, Ireland was actually in the southern hemisphere and we had some of the oldest fossils on earth and today you can find them in near Kilkenny, in Kiltorken. They were called Archaeopterys hibernica.

• 10:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, basically, the extinction of those trees brought in these new forests, which were called the coal forests or the coal swamp forests of the Carboniferous. And for basically fifty, sixty, seventy million years, these forests grew. The big, huge trunks fell down into the swamps because it was really tropical, wet, swampy. And it's, there's a hypothesis or this theory that the fungi weren't around to decompose those giant, big trees made up of lignin. So what happens over time is that slowly, instead of being oxidized back to the atmosphere and the carbon that being, that was taken up goes back to the atmosphere.

• 11:31Speaker 03

  And these giant peat swamps grew and grew and grew, locking up huge amounts of carbon. And what we, what we've done as humans is that we, we've burned that carbon that took fifty million years to take up, and we've done it in a hundred years. So we've caused this kind of, this imbalance, which is the kind of fundamental reason we have climate change now.

• 11:56Blindboy Boatclub?

  I've, I've, I've described that before as we're haunting ourselves with the ghosts of trees. That that's, it's, it's, this stuff was supposed to stay down there and we've brought it back up as coal. And just another kind of general, simple question about, about paleobotany.

• 12:17Blindboy Boatclub?

  We, we know the word paleontologists from Jurassic Park and stuff and.

• 12:23Speaker 03

  And friends.

• 12:24Blindboy Boatclub?

  And friends, of course, as well. Like, would you ever, like, I know that dinosaur poo, right, is coprolite, fossilized poo.

• 12:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:32Blindboy Boatclub?

  Would you ever end up looking at a fossilized dinosaur poo because there might be a bit of a leaf in it?

• 12:38Speaker 03

  Oh, God, yeah.

• 12:40Blindboy Boatclub?

  Is that like, that's when your job comes in?

• 12:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, but I hope it's more glamorous than just poo.

• 12:46Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yes.

• 12:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, actually.

• 12:50Speaker 03

  I'll give you a great example. So, um, grass. So if you think of our lawns all over the world, the great grass savannas of Africa, the great grass steppes of Siberia. And that plant is actually, the whole family is very recent. And, and the first find of grass in the fossil record was about sixty five million years ago. It was in a dinosaur poo before dinosaurs went extinct at the Cretaceous Tertiary Mass Extinction.

• 13:20Blindboy Boatclub?

  Like, bones take, you know, bones are gonna take a bit longer to decompose.

• 13:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:26Blindboy Boatclub?

  A leaf, a leaf will decompose in a matter of weeks. So your field, you're trying to look for the fossils of things that are supposed to decompose and disappear really, really easily. Like, how does something like a leaf even end up being?

• 13:41Speaker 03

  A fossil?

• 13:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah, like, like, what's going on here, like?

• 13:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, it's a really good point. So I suppose, yeah. And, and we realise that at the moment, like, walking through autumn leaves is nothing nicer, you know, putting the wellies on and going through the leaves. But literally in a month, where are they? They're gone, they're decomposed. So to be a fossil, to become a fossil, um, a plant has to drop one of its parts, a flower, a leaf, a twig, a trunk. Um, and it has to be covered really quickly by something, um, that will stop it from decomposing. And in the natural environment, what that would be, would be, um, a river bursts its bank and it puts sediment over everything in the forest floor. So you're basically just capturing

• 14:29Speaker 03

  that moment in time. Or a volcano will go off and ash will cover all the leaves on the fossil floor, uh, on the, sorry, on the forest floor. So something that would cover it and take it out of, um, so actually being eaten and ending up in a copperite, a dinosaur poo, or, um, that would also stop it from being decomposed. So any of those kind of events, that, that's, and then as a paleobotanist, I, I will kind of work in the field, we'll use a hammer and a spatch, um, and a chisel. And if there is a fossil leaf there, when you crack it with the hammer, it's like opening a book. And the fossil appears because it

• 15:12Speaker 03

  makes a line of weakness, um, in the sediment. And you just crack it open and the fossil i- is there.

• 15:19Blindboy Boatclub?

  And just, so let's just say we take a big giant lump of coal.

• 15:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  Now, that coal, that's a fossil of sorts, right? We know that that coal was once a tree, but I suppose what I'm asking you is, I don't, coal isn't a very well preserved tree, is it? Like, is a lump of coal still useful to you as a paleobotanist?

• 15:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, kind of, it's kind of difficult. So, okay, the coal is black, but in the coal, now and again, you get these things called concretions, and they're like a big, light grey egg. And the coal miners used to go mad at these things because they'd ruined the coal production. You'd have to stop. And, and what it is, it's like a mummified forest floor. And it's been formed because the coal, which was a peat swamp, you imagine a forest in a, in a peat, just like in the Midlands in Ireland, and a wave of seawater will wash into the swamp because it's right by the coast. So now you've got salts, you know, you've got sodium and chlorine and the salt elements.

• 16:31Speaker 03

  They interact with the swamp waters and they form these kind of mummified floors, and full of twigs and leaves and cones and anything, insects, anything that was on the forest floor. So we can actually study those, they're called concretions or coballs, and, and we can get a really incredible picture of what was growing, what the environment was like. We can even use it to reconstruct what the climate was like and what the atmosphere was like. But the coal itself, the black coal itself, is actually hard to work with. And the only things we could really look at in fossils are tiny little fragments of leaves or the pollen and the spores that plants produce.

• 17:12Blindboy Boatclub?

  I'd said this to you before, right, but I, I know. Some of your work was about how earth was terraformed effectively by plants.

• 17:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:23Blindboy Boatclub?

  And last year, when we had the Aurora Borealis in Ireland, and I could see the Aurora Borealis up in the sky in Limerick for the first time in my life.

• 17:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:33Blindboy Boatclub?

  I went out for a walk and it was night time and I was looking up in the air going, oh my God, it's Aurora Borealis. I can't believe it. But as I was walking, I went past this old shopping centre. It was a Celtic Tiger shopping centre that hadn't, it had been left alone since 2007. And as I was looking up at the sky illuminated by the streetlights, a stork flew past me.

• 17:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:56Blindboy Boatclub?

  But the stork, I was like, that stork looked like it had green socks on or green shoes. And I went, no, no fucking way. Like, that's not possible. That's not like, I saw, I know, I definitely saw what I saw. But like, there has to be a rational explanation. A stork was not wearing boots or socks. So I ended up going on Google Maps and looking at this particular Celtic Tiger shopping centre. And what I found was where the foundations were, over the course of about 15 years, there was a rainwater lake had just formed, a very, very unhealthy lake. It's in a concrete foundations and it was bright green. So what had happened is the stork had gone into this green Celtic Tiger foundation lake.

• 18:39Blindboy Boatclub?

  And on its legs was actually cyanobacteria. And I only learned about cyanobacteria in that moment. Like, I was really happy because I'm like, I can't believe I'm actually after finding a rational explanation for a stork with green socks. But then I ended up down the cyanobacteria rabbit hole. First off, I was disappointed because chances are this, it's not very healthy for the stork. It's quite poisonous to the stork. But then I learned. That cyanobacteria is one of the most important organisms in the history of life as we know it. And this bacteria, I don't know how many million years ago you'd know, created oxygen. Can you tell us about that, about the great oxygenation event?

• 19:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, it is incredible. As soon as you started talking about, yeah, the cyanobacteria filled lake, yeah, it made me think about, just imagine the earth when there's nothing green on it. So just a bare earth with no soil, no, no plants, no algae, nothing green. No, and this was earth before complex life evolved on land. And

• 19:53Blindboy Boatclub?

  Was there what you'd call life even before this greenness? Was there stuff there that was alive?

• 19:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, so there was microorganisms. We have billions of years of just bacteria and new bacteria and just very simple organisms, but they're not multicellular like we are or like most, most organisms on earth. But the cyanobacteria were so important, they're actually some of our first evidence for that life had evolved. And they appear in these structures, which are like these sediment towers, and they're called stromatolites. Today, you find them in, very rarely on earth, in places like Shark Bay in Australia. And what the cyanobacteria do is they trap sediment in a kind of a nice shore, like seashore

• 20:43Speaker 03

  type environment where there's a muddy shore, kind of like Dublin Bay. And they would, they'd form a layer of green slime, like the green slime of the storks boots. And then a layer of sediment would build on top, and then a layer of green slime. And they basically build these towers. And the reason paleobotanists are really interested in them is that they're the first evidence on earth of photosynthesis.

• 21:07Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 21:08Speaker 03

  And these little cyanobacteria would take in carbon from the atmosphere, use the sun's energy, convert it into carbohydrates, and build these whole little communities. But the byproduct is oxygen. And over a long geological time, oxygen went from basically zero percent. So we would have all died in that atmosphere to suddenly you start to get trace levels of oxygen. And this production of oxygen in itself caused an extinction event of all the organisms that were anaerobic. They basically couldn't survive with oxygen around. But it was so important for where we are today in this world full of life, animals, plants,

• 21:52Speaker 03

  fungi, because we need oxygen for survival.

• 21:57Blindboy Boatclub?

  So is it fair to call that terraforming? Is when the cyanobacteria created a photosynthesis and oxygen, is that terraforming?

• 22:10Speaker 03

  I think it is because my definition, well, like not mine, but I would say the definition of terraform would be transformation of the earth. And of course, it's used in science fiction, but.

• 22:23Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah, because I'm just thinking of Mars. That's what I'm thinking about is, is like even, I think it was over the summer. NASA, now I know, I know NASA always release this type of information, but NASA found stains on a rock in on Mars, which they say may suggest ancient bacteria. That's what it might suggest. They're very excited about these stains on a rock on Mars. And is there, this is a really ignorant question, but I have to ask it, right? And I hate asking this question about anything.

• 23:01Speaker 03

  And I probably won't be able to answer, but let's see.

• 23:04Blindboy Boatclub?

  Your thing is looking into deep time, millions and millions of years into the past, right? And some people would say, what's the point? How is it relevant now? And one practical application I can think of is if you're studying how earth was terraformed, a lot of people are thinking, what if one day we need to go to Mars and try and make oxygen happen in Mars? And that makes me think that the work that you're doing is highly relevant when it comes to trying to apply that now.

• 23:33Speaker 03

  No, no, I don't think so. So, well, I kind of think there's two answers. I think science.

• 23:41Speaker 03

  Is important to understand the world without any application. Like, I do fundamentally believe that, that I just want to understand the past. I want to know how I got here, how the world ended up like this. So I think that the kind of pursuits of of truth and understanding, I think, is really important. But then there's the other side, the applied side. And and actually, a lot of a lot of paleobotanists

• 24:10Speaker 03

  have been on these various Mars teams, moon teams, exploration of other planet teams, because the kind of science we use, I it's not my area. But the science we use to try and and prove, or was that little dot life? Or was that a bubble? And which is a biogenic, so it's not biotic. We'd use things like, you know, chemistry, carbon isotopes. And and the kind of tools you use to understand a fossil plant would be the same tools that Martian scientists would use to understand, okay, is that was that water? Was that sediment evidence of running water?

• 24:54Speaker 03

  Or or was that structure or that smear? Was that really potentially a bacteria or something else? So in that way, there is a there is a crossover between astrobiology and paleobotany.

• 25:10Speaker 03

  But they're typically, the paleobotanists who study these type of things are really, they really are deep time. So they'd be working between, you know, 2.4 billion years ago, the Great Oxidation Event, and maybe the evidence of the first land plants about 550 million years ago. And I my my kind of science comes in after that. So I'm kind of shallow in a way, 550 million years to the present day.

• 25:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's what I want to know. Yeah, because we're we're thinking about this, like, deep time. Wh- wh- when, where is your jurisdiction? At what point do you? I mean, and again, it's the wider question. And I ask this to every single scientist I speak to is the sense of knowing where your lane is and how difficult that is when when you that you're working effectively within biodiversity. You're looking at ancient plants, but we know that ancient plants had a relationship with the atmosphere, with the sun, had a relationship with animals. And you knowing when to stop.

• 26:09Speaker 03

  Oh yeah, that's a good question.

• 26:11Blindboy Boatclub?

  How do you know when to stop? I mean, how do you put a shutter on your curiosity going, I'm looking at a flower here that's millions of years ago and I want to know about what pollinated this before bees existed?

• 26:22Speaker 03

  Yeah. Gosh, that's a really good question, actually. And I think, in a way, scientists, we are very lucky because we do have freedom in our careers to decide where to put the, where to put the barriers, you know, so we, we have freedom to define what we want to do and what questions we want to ask. Now, obviously, it's, you have to be able to fund your work with, you know, funding agents and, and grants and, and, but, but I suppose the questions we ask are very much determined by, um, our passion and our curiosity. And then, but we have to make

• 27:05Speaker 03

  it relevant as well because we can't, you know, so that there's kind of two sides to science. There's that basic fundamental science where you're asking, you're just letting your curiosity drive you. But then, you do have, if you're using public money, you also have to make it relevant. So we kind of as scientists, kind of, we kind of balance that. And I, I don't think you could make a, deliver a public good or something of relevance and something applied unless you had that fun, that kind of innate curiosity that's driving you to ask these kind of crazy questions. Like, what, what was happening 400 million years ago? And if I understand something about how soil was made in the early Earth, will it help me to say anything about the future or today?

• 27:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  Okay, let's have a little pause now. A little Ocarina pause in the chat with the magnificent Professor Jenny McElwain. I don't have an Ocarina this week. Let's not get into that, but what I do have, instead of playing an Ocarina, I'm going to hit myself into the head with a book, The Collected Poems of Patrick Cavanagh, who was a magnificent poet from Manahin.

• 28:22Blindboy Boatclub?

  Brilliant book about Kavanaugh. There's a brilliant biography about Kavanaugh. Brendan Behan and Flann O'Brien and their drinking days up in Dublin. It's called Dead as Darn, it is by Anthony Cronin. Wonderful book, but Kavanaugh was a serious poet.

• 28:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  I don't want to get too much into Patrick Kavanaugh because I won't stop talking about him. I'll do a Patrick Kavanaugh podcast at some point, but right now, let's just read a little bit. Do you know what? No, I'm going to hit myself into the head with his book. And then you're going to hear some adverts for some bullshit. I don't know what you're going to hear an advert for. I'm going to hit myself into the head with Patrick Kavanaugh's collected poems. And then afterwards, I might read a little bit of one of his poems. How does that sound? All right.

• 29:15Blindboy Boatclub?

  See, it's one of these fucking new Penguin classics, you know, where they don't even bother putting a decent cover on it. So very papery, very rubbery, a very flaccid book. And you'd think hitting yourself into the head with the floppy books, that's far worse than hitting yourself into the head with a hard book. I'd take a hard book any day. Floppy books, see they pick up speed, it's the spring.

• 29:44Speaker 00

  Cheers to fall savings at Whole Foods Market, home of higher ingredient standards. This Halloween, share chocolates and candies made without that spooky high fructose corn syrup. Throwing a party? Make it easy with a berry chantilly cake. Ready to cook pizza? No antibiotics ever chicken wings and sushi made fresh daily. Fall gatherings never tasted better. Save through November 3rd at Whole Foods Market.

• 30:12Speaker 01

  Hey, it's Hannah Burner from Giggly Squad and the holidays are around the corner, which means I'm officially entering my hostess Hannah era with Arm and Hammer Hardball Cat Litter. You guys know I love cats and fostering, but when I'm hosting, I do not want my house smelling like cats. I want people focusing on my hosting skills. That's why I love Arm and Hammer Hardball Cat Litter. It delivers long lasting odor control and forms compact clumps that make cleanup easy. So that's one less thing I need to worry about when people come over. Be guest ready with Arm and Hammer Cat Litter. Find it now at Walmart or Amazon.

• 30:46Speaker 04

  At Lowe's this Veterans Day and every day, military members, veterans and their spouses get automatic MyLowe's Rewards Silver Status Benefits. Plus, 10% off eligible purchases with no annual limit. It's one way we honor and give back to those who have served and still do. Learn more and verify now at Lowe's.com/military. 10% discount can't be combined with another offer. Exclusions, terms and conditions apply. Loyalty program subject to terms and conditions. Details at Lowe's.com/terms. Subject to change.

• 31:19Speaker 00

  Cheers to fall savings at Whole Foods Market, home of higher ingredient standards. This Halloween, share chocolates and candies made without that spooky high fructose corn syrup. Throwing a party? Make it easy with a Berry Chantilly Cake. Ready to cook pizza? No antibiotics ever chicken wings. And sushi made fresh daily. Fall gatherings never tasted better. Save through November 3rd at Whole Foods Market.

• 31:47Speaker 01

  Hey, it's Hannah Berner from Giggly Squad and the holidays are around the corner, which means I'm officially entering my Hostess Hannah era with Arm & Hammer Hardball Cat Litter. You guys know I love cats and fostering, but when I'm hosting, I do not want my house smelling like cats. I want people focusing on my hosting skills. That's why I love Arm & Hammer Hardball Cat Litter. It delivers long-lasting odor control and forms compact clumps that make cleanup easy so that's one less thing I need to worry about when people come over. Be guest-ready with Arm & Hammer Cat Litter. Find it now at Walmart or Amazon.

• 32:20Speaker 04

  At Lowe's this Veterans Day and every day, military members, veterans and their spouses get automatic MyLowe's Rewards Silver Status Benefits. Plus, 10% off eligible purchases with no annual limit. It's one way we honor and give back to those who have served and still do. Learn more and verify now at Lowe's.com/military. 10% discount can't be combined with another offer. Exclusions, terms and conditions apply. Loyalty program subject to terms and conditions. Details at Lowe's.com/terms. Subject to change.

• 32:54Blindboy Boatclub?

  All right, that was the Ocarina Pause. I hit myself into the head with the collected poems of Patrick Kavanagh. You'd heard some adverts for some stuff. Let's read a little bit of Kavanagh, his poem Stony Gray Syle, from the 1940s. When is that poem from? That's from the 40s, I believe, yeah. I'll read you a little excerpt.

• 33:23Blindboy Boatclub?

  Stony Gray Syle.

• 33:26Blindboy Boatclub?

  You told me the plough was immortal. Oh, green life conquering plough, your mandrel stained, your coulter blunted in the smooth lee field of my brow. You sang on steaming dung hills, a song of coward's brood. You perfumed my claws with weasel itch, you fed me on swinish fowl. You flung a ditch on my vision of beauty, love and truth. Oh, Stony Gray Syle of Monaghan, you burgled my bank of yoot. And I love that poem. It's just, it's just Kavanagh. Kavanagh walked, like he, I don't

• 34:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  want to get into Patrick Kavanagh too much. He was a bog or poet. He was a poet from fucking Monaghan in the 30s and 40s. And he walked to Dublin barefoot. And the kind of middle-class posh people in Dublin, they treated him like a noble savage, like he wasn't even human. He was this bog creature. And that poem is him, him going to Dublin and seeing like a city and like multiple pubs and pints and women and having crack and going, fucking Monaghan, Monaghan, I stayed in you too long. Why didn't I come to Dublin

• 34:52Blindboy Boatclub?

  10 years earlier? I don't want to be getting into Paddy Kavanagh. There's a bronze statue of him up in the, I think it's the Grand Canal up in Dublin. It's this lovely statue because it's just, it's a bench. It's a bench and sitting on this bench is this green bronze statue and that's the statue of Paddy Kavanagh. And when I was a young man...

• 35:15Blindboy Boatclub?

  When I was about 23 and I'd be writing skits for fucking RTE.

• 35:23Blindboy Boatclub?

  And didn't think I was good enough, couldn't believe, couldn't believe I was on television writing comedy, couldn't believe it.

• 35:31Blindboy Boatclub?

  I used to go and sit beside that statue of Patrick Kavanagh and when no one was looking, I'd suck his bronze hat. I'd try and suck inspiration out of his bronze forehead and it tasted like sucking a giant cane. I loved it.

• 35:48Blindboy Boatclub?

  Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page, patreon.com/theblindbypodcast. If you enjoy this podcast, if this podcast brings you mirth, merriment, entertainment, distraction, whatever the fuck has you listening to this podcast, please consider paying me for the work that I do. This podcast is my full-time job, this is how I earn a living and this podcast is only possible because of listener funding. So all I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month, that's it. And if you can't afford that, if you don't have that money, don't worry about it. You don't have to pay, you can listen for free because the person who is paying is paying for you to listen for free.

• 36:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  So everybody gets the exact same podcast and I get to earn a living. It's a wonderful model based on kindness and soundness. Patreon.com/theblindbypodcast. And if you are becoming a patron, first off, become a paid patron. Don't press that free patron button that just gives Patreon your data. And also, if you're signing up, don't do it on a, on the iPhone app because Apple will take 30%. Do it on a browser somewhere. I'll write a couple of gigs.

• 37:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  I just did my last gig of the year there at the weekend, Halloween night in Meath. Really wonderful gig. Meath is a beautiful place. So I've no more gigs this year. I don't want to be doing live podcasts in November and December, and the main reason is because of Christmas parties. Office Christmas parties, if they come along to a live podcast, can be really, really destructive. I've had it once or twice. So the best thing for me to do, I just don't gig in November or December. But I will be gigging from the end of January 2026 onwards. So if you'd like to get some tickets as a little Christmas present for a friend, please do.

• 37:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  On the 23rd of January, I'm in Waterford in the Theatre Royal, wonderful Waterford. Then up to February, what is that, the 2nd of February? I don't know the exact date, right? But it's in February, I'm in Vicar Street. I'm in Vicar Street. Is that a Wednesday night? Fucking great. Wednesday night gig in Vicar Street there at the start of February. That gig there is nearly sold out, I have to say. So if you do want to come to Vicar Street, my Vicar Street gigs are fantastic. Beautiful, lovely. I always do them midweek. I do them on the days that no one else wants. I take Tuesdays and Wednesdays. No one else wants those days. I want those days because it's a nice quiet gig. Then on the 12th, I've got Belfast, the Waterfront Theatre.

• 38:35Blindboy Boatclub?

  That gig is also nearly sold out. So if you want to come and see me in Belfast at the Waterfront Theatre, get your tickets. Galway in glamorous, glamorous leisure land. Let's go. 15th there is Galway in leisure land. Then Killarney, I'm in the Eye Neck on the 28th of February. I have a complicated relationship with the Eye Neck. I keep coming back. What's my complicated relationship with the Eye Neck? Lovely place, lovely venue, lovely staff, but.

• 39:05Blindboy Boatclub?

  The dressing room. So that gig in the Aineck in Killarney, the dressing room is just too far away from the stage. And it would mean me having to walk through the foyer of the hotel that's attached to the venue with a plastic bag on my head. And I don't do that in case there's tourists in the foyer who don't know who the fuck I am. And they're just, they just think I'm in ISIS. They're like, oh, I'm in the hotel. Why is there a man here? And he's got a plastic bag on his head. This is, this is strange. I've had screaming Austrians, I've had Austrian people scream at me in hotel foyers while I'm on the way to my gig in the hotel. So the Aineck, yeah, the Aineck there in Killarney's got a hotel

• 39:46Blindboy Boatclub?

  attached to it. And the dressing room, it means me walking through the foyer. So I say, no, I'm not taking that dressing room. So I end up in a, in a literal broom closet, like a Dracula, like, like a vampire. When I do that Aineck Killarney gig, I, I stand in a broom closet for an hour with the door closed. And that's my dressing room, which I don't mind, to be honest. I quite like it. I like the humility of it. But, um, yeah, I'd rather stand upright in a broom closet for an hour than risk Austrian tourists screaming

• 40:28Blindboy Boatclub?

  at me because they think I'm in ISIS. So that gig is, is the Aineck in Killarney, is it? Then I went Carlo in March. Am I just finding that out now? Should we go to Carlo? Why not? What's the worst that can happen? Cork in March as well, in the Opera House there on the 26th of March. Fuck's sake. Limerick in April at the University Concert Hall. Limerick, get your Christmas tickets for that, please, Limerick, my own hometown. And then fuck it, look, a huge tour of England, Scotland and Wales in October 26. It's a long way away, but still, some of those gigs are actually selling out already and it's

• 41:08Blindboy Boatclub?

  a year away. Brighton, Wales, Coventry, Bristol, Guildford, London, Glasgow, Gateshead and Nottingham. 2026, October. I'm coming and I cannot wait. Those gigs, you'll see them on fan.co.uk forward slash blind by for the UK gigs and then for the, the other gigs.

• 41:35Blindboy Boatclub?

  Theblindbypodcast.ie, which is my own website, which is liable to crash if too many people go there, I'll be honest, all right. Now, let's get back to the chat about paleobotany with the utterly fascinating Professor Jennifer McElwain.

• 41:52Speaker 03

  Does that answer it? I'm not sure I answered your question.

• 41:54Blindboy Boatclub?

  It does. I'm trying to figure out, we'll say, what the questions I'm trying to ask is,

• 42:01Blindboy Boatclub?

  like, soil, even soil, for instance. So soil isn't a plant, right? But how much of soil is your business? Ancient soil?

• 42:12Speaker 03

  Yeah. So I suppose my speciality is the atmosphere. So how plants-

• 42:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  But the atmosphere isn't plants.

• 42:20Speaker 03

  Exactly. So, yeah. So I, if we want to understand the power of living plants mainly, to change atmospheric composition, to change oxygen, to change carbon, to actually come up with some solutions for greenhouse-driven climate change, you have to understand how plants terraform, how they change the atmosphere, and the habitability of the earth in the geological past. So, so we know, like, from studying, from the time of the first land plants came on earth, there was no soil, it was bare rock, but little things like mosses and liverworts and green slime and lichen and all these mad organisms that kind of

• 43:04Speaker 03

  are half fungi, half plant, half algae, they began to break down the bare rock and build an early crust. And then that crust became a shallow soil. And then that shallow soil became a deep soil. And now suddenly you've got a whole new habitat.

• 43:23Blindboy Boatclub?

  Like, like, just, if you're talking about that early, early, because that's, I didn't know that. I didn't know that early soil was organisms breaking down rock. So if I was to hold this early soil in my hand, what would be the equivalent that I'd find now? Because I'm assuming it's not like brown, like the earth we have now.

• 43:42Speaker 03

  I think the, the equivalent, to kind of get your head in the frame, I think would be, look at a wall today. So go on a walk, look in an old wall, a nice old granite wall, and look what's growing on it. How do those plants, green-

• 43:56Blindboy Boatclub?

  Or gravestones.

• 43:57Speaker 03

  Or gravestones, exactly. How do they do it? How are they living? Okay, they've got carbon in the atmosphere. They've got sunlight energy, but they need all these other things to live and they're just extracting it directly from the rock.

• 44:12Blindboy Boatclub?

  So are you telling me if I look at a gravestone and I see lichen on that gravestone, that that's, the roots of that are taken from the, like the limestone or what granite or whatever it's on?

• 44:23Speaker 03

  Yes, but it doesn't have roots. So it's doing it even more spectacularly. Another good analogy would be a desert environment. So that's really harsh. Not many things can live there. But often if you go hiking in a desert environment, they have signs up saying, you know, stay on the trails. And you're probably thinking, why? What's the, I'm not going to do any damage if I come off the trail. But you will, because if you dropped a little drop of water onto a desert crust, what looks kind of brownie, yellowy, suddenly would rehydrate and you'd see a diversity of organisms that can basically eke out an existence. And they're things that would have been around in the earlier 500 million years ago and kind of

• 45:08Speaker 03

  changed, made elements there, like, you know, that we need to grow and we need in our diets, nutrients, basically. They'd make them biologically available.

• 45:20Blindboy Boatclub?

  Are they dormant in the desert?

• 45:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 45:23Blindboy Boatclub?

  For how long?

• 45:25Speaker 03

  Well, some things are incredible. Some plants, they're called, it's called poe kilo hydri. So they have the capacity to completely dehydrate down to less than 5% water. And how do they do that? Because if you put a piece of lettuce in the freezer, it will, and you rehydrate it, it's just mush. But these organisms have the capacity to dehydrate and then rehydrate without bursting all their cells. And they can do it for, I think probably the oldest is maybe on the order of Maybe thousands of years, but most things can do it for hundreds of years. Even if you go to the Burundu actually in County Clare. And you look at the ferns in the Greys, there's, you know, the kind of cracks.

• 46:07Speaker 03

  Sometimes you look at them and they're brown and they're not dead, they're just dehydrated. And when it rains, they will rehydrate and they've got this capacity.

• 46:17Speaker 03

  And that's really interesting. That kind of takes you back to space travel.

• 46:20Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's immediate, what I was thinking about. I was thinking about if we were to bring food in space and you might be travelling for a long time, then you'd need to be looking at these things that can live for nine hundred years, dehydrated.

• 46:32Speaker 03

  Exactly, yeah. Well, I think what's incredible, I mean, I talk to my students about this, you know, in teaching. If you walk into a garden centre and you're faced with a wall of packets of seeds. That is incredible because in every packet is a dehydrated living organism with all the potential. Once you put it, even if you put it in a, on a saucer and add water or on a place, it will germinate. Now, there's not, we don't have the equipment in animals, you know, you don't have, you can't go into a shop or into a.

• 47:10Blindboy Boatclub?

  I think the closest thing is you don't remember sea monkeys, do you?

• 47:14Speaker 03

  No.

• 47:15Blindboy Boatclub?

  They're a form of brine shrimp that were sold, they were sold as ties when we were kids. But they're a type of brine shrimp that were, you could keep them in a packet like seeds. They would lay dormant for years and years on the shelf and then you put them into the, a little tank. They were for kids who weren't allowed to have fish tanks. And then they would emerge as tiny little life forms, these tiny, tiny little brine shrimp. And that's the only thing I can think of that is, is like an, uh, alive and moving around. That's close to seeds, that's the only thing I can think of.

• 47:50Speaker 03

  But I suppose it's really interesting as a scientist to, you know, it's, it's kind of really.

• 47:57Speaker 03

  It seems a bit out there and, you know, why are you asking these questions? But it is really fascinating to understand how do they do it? You know, how do these plants that live in the most extreme environments, you know, the top of a mountain, low oxygen pressure, or at the edge of an Antarctic seashore with freezing temperatures and high salinity? How can they survive? And if you can understand that, you know, for the living world today, then you can apply that knowledge when you're studying fossils in the past and you can begin to kind of build up the story. Gosh, how did, how did plants transform Earth from, you know, an environment, an environment

• 48:39Speaker 03

  that was just filled with bacteria and, you know, simple, single-celled organism to actually oxygenate the atmosphere and build soils and build habitats and engineer, you know, this bare earth to something thriving that then allowed other organisms, you know, to follow and to, you know, to produce what we have today, this incredibly biodiverse world.

• 49:05Blindboy Boatclub?

  I heard that trees, trees caused an ice age. Is, is that true?

• 49:10Speaker 03

  It's a two-way thing. So partly, yes. So living things shape the atmospheric composition and the atmosphere will affect what living things can thrive. So a lot of what I do is studying the interaction between the atmosphere and plants. And so, you know, how could trees cause an ice age? Well, if there's, if trees are locking up lots and lots of carbon, like they did in the Carboniferous, and it's, it's partly because maybe there weren't fungi to decompose that

• 49:51Speaker 03

  lignin in the wood, but it's also partly because it was really wet and hot time. And these swamp systems were just over the whole world. So if you've got loads of trees sucking up loads of carbon and that carbon isn't being released back to the atmosphere. Then you can bring the carbon dioxide level so low that when it rains in the Arctic and the Antarctic, it it will freeze and it will never thaw. And that's an ice age. But I I don't think trees alone did that. But you need you you need a lot of trees and a lot of swamps to definitely contribute to causing an ice age, but not alone, because there there's other factors as well that are important.

• 50:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  If you if you were given the power tomorrow, okay. Um, and like, because we know at the moment, like, the the climate is warming, okay. The it's it's really, really hot and it and it's dangerous.

• 50:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  You using only, we'll say, natural methods, what would you like to see change in the world tomorrow if we were to cool the place down or to improve things?

• 51:02Speaker 03

  Oh, it's a hard question. Well, I think I think the power of biodiversity is incredible because we do know that in in in pristine wilderness areas, and the soils and and the vegetation itself in those really undisturbed ecosystems hold more carbon than any ecosystem where there's been a a human intervention.

• 51:32Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's mad. Why is that? So you mean a soil whereby you have a diverse, so loads and loads of insects, a very diverse ecosystem, that soil will hold more carbon?

• 51:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:44Blindboy Boatclub?

  Why? As opposed to, we'll say, I don't know, a a field full of grass that a man has planted, that a human has planted?

• 51:50Speaker 03

  As soon as you disturb a natural environment, you you're going to you're going to lose lose things from us. And if you if you lose some biodiversity, then you lose some of the capacity of the biodiversity in the soil, which is doing all that good work of actually locking up carbon. And actually, what we know from the data is that we know we've added loads of carbon to the atmosphere, burning fossil fuels, burning coal, Western industrialization. And, you know, we're we're really trying now to to to stop that. But what's extraordinary is that one third of the carbon that we have released has been taken up by the oceans.

• 52:29Speaker 03

  And one third of the carbon we've released has been taken up by living ecosystems on land, like, you know, bogs, swamps, forests, grasslands, huge amount in grasslands, natural grasslands. So what we do understand is if you maintain and you restore biodiversity and nature, you maintain its ability to act like a sponge and take up carbon. So it's kind of like a win-win. If we have these policies that are positive for biodiversity, then we're also going to have a positive for climate, because these areas are going to be the ones that suck up carbon.

• 53:12Blindboy Boatclub?

  So even something like, like I know the All-Ireland Patonator Plan has been a really good success. My buddy Colly, Colly who you might know because he works up in Trinity, Colly Ennis.

• 53:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, Colly Ennis, yeah.

• 53:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  Colly, oh god, Colly said something to me about six months ago, which was the first piece of good news I've ever heard around the climate. He was looking at the amount of patonators. And basically, this year, in a month, he had seen more patonators than he'd seen in the entire previous year. And he didn't like, he doesn't have the data to go, this is exactly why. But his hunch was definitely, we're seeing the results of this All-Ireland Patonator Plan. We're seeing the results of local councils going, do you know what? Leave that roundabout alone or plant some natural wildflower, some native wildflower. And.

• 54:07Speaker 03

  It's been so positive.

• 54:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  I had a little patch up my back garden, I'm talking six feet.

• 54:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:13Blindboy Boatclub?

  And I planted proper native wildflower. Like, I didn't just get, I know sometimes when you go to the garden centre and get native wildflower, that it may not be native to here, it could be native to Poland or wherever it came from. But I got native to Limerick wildflower.

• 54:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:32Blindboy Boatclub?

  And just in that six feet of garden, a year later, I was seeing insects that I'd never seen in my entire life.

• 54:39Speaker 03

  You're absolutely right, and Colly's right. I think the All-Ireland Pollinator Plan, which was, you know, developed by the National Biodiversity Data Centre and also Jane Stoudt, our VP of Biodiversity in Trinity, that has been so positive for biodiversity and also the follow-on no-mow May policy.

• 55:01Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 55:01Speaker 03

  And such a simple intervention, don't mow your grass or plants, a high diversity of wildflowers. And it's, you know, through their hard work has really been adopted and the buy-in from councils all over Ireland. And I think people are becoming familiar now with basically going past a roundabout and initially probably thinking, oh, that's messy, that's looks unkempt. And realising, actually, no, this is so positive for biodiversity. Like in Trinity, we had a no-mow policy in the front. Sorry, this bit of a noise. It just started mowing outside.

• 55:44Speaker 03

  But we had orchids that came up in front square that

• 55:52Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 55:53Speaker 03

  turned out to be exceptionally rare. And these orchids had obviously been in the soil with their fungal partner.

• 56:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  Were they indigenous?

• 56:01Speaker 03

  No, no, actually, it turns out even more exciting that they are a new, an expansion probably of population of orchids from Wales that is now also present in Ireland. And we're actively studying those. But that was really extraordinary, this really rare orchid that comes up. Because we're not mowing the ground, not mowing the grass there in Trinity for a month.

• 56:29Blindboy Boatclub?

  Just actually, because I used the word with the indigenous there, and I want to know about what that means in terms of plants and biodiversity. Like, I went on, I went on a sycamore tree rabbit hole there two weeks ago, because sycamores are everywhere in Ireland. And I was shocked to find out that, like, they're not from Ireland, that sycamores have been in Ireland and the UK, I think it's about 500 years, I think they came over with the monasteries.

• 56:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 56:57Blindboy Boatclub?

  And what I ended up finding out was, sycamores, they're from very high mountainous regions in Europe.

• 57:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  And in the sycamore's natural environment, it has to, there's a lot of competition. It grows in large forests and it's very opportunistic. If a bit of sun comes through, the sycamore will grow. But basically because of, because its environment is so tough, that's why it needed the, the samara, the spinning seeds that could travel for a long distance, that sycamores come from a tough environment. But then, when the sycamore came to Ireland, it didn't have the threats to it, to its existence that it had in its indigenous environment. So when it came to Ireland, it thrived completely. Same with the UK, it thrived.

• 57:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 57:48Blindboy Boatclub?

  But then I learned that the sycamore would now be considered native. It's, it's, it's part of the crack out there. It's, it was once invasive, but now it's not. However, the, the amount of biodiversity that a sycamore holds, it's, it's nothing compared to when, when it's in its indigenous environment, that sycamore is full of biodiversity, whether it be fungus or different insects or mammals that live in the tree. But then when it comes here to Ireland, it only supports maybe 15 or 16 species.

• 58:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:20Blindboy Boatclub?

  And that completely changed how I'm like, oh, wow. I thought when I see sycamores, it's like, oh, lovely, I'm out in nature. And now I realise, no, this was once invasive, now it's native. But you're actually seeing a bit of biodiversity collapse when you see a sycamore, as opposed to a, an indigenous oak that would have once been there.

• 58:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, so in a way, it is like, what is native, what is, what is invasive, what is non-native but not invasive, it's, it's quite complex. And I suppose we use a human construct for all of it because, you know, nature doesn't necessarily respect political boundaries and we're an island, so we, we can kind of maybe more easily define what is native than other places. But typically, to be native, like we have over 1,200 species of plants, vascular plants, and then at least, at least 800 mosses in the native Irish flora.

• 59:20Speaker 03

  You you have to, as a plant or an animal, you have to have been evidence to be continually present in Ireland um of since the last ice age. So over about the last ten thousand years. Yeah, to be classified as native. And then we have two distinctions. We have species which which are, you know, they may be only recently arrived or arrived a thousand years ago. So technically, they're not native, but they're also not invasive. So they're not damaging the local.

• 59:53Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 59:53Speaker 03

  Environment, the local habitats.

• 59:55Blindboy Boatclub?

  What would stick out to you there is a big example of that now. What jumps out as this one is not indigenous, but it's it's doing grand.

• 1:00:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, the one that comes to mind is probably a bit obscure. So in all the hedgerows, we have this plant called Alexander. It's one of the earliest plants that um comes out in the hedgerows all over Wicklow, Wexford. It's it's really smelly.

• 1:00:15Blindboy Boatclub?

  The Normans, was it the Normans?

• 1:00:16Speaker 03

  It was it was, I think it was monastic.

• 1:00:19Blindboy Boatclub?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:00:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, but it was came in as a cooking, you know, we used to cook it like a celery. And

• 1:00:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  Oh.

• 1:00:26Speaker 03

  it isn't now a native, but it's accepted. And now it's kind of part of the natural flora. But then we also have plants and animals, of course, which are non-native and they're invasive. And they have, you know, they thrive so well because they haven't got a natural predator or a natural fungus that would keep keep them under check. And they are damaging to our local biodiversity. And we have programs, obviously, to try and keep those under check.

• 1:00:55Blindboy Boatclub?

  Can I tell you what one thing there that might interest you? I've I've so I was looking loads at at uh two things. First off, uh giant hogweed, right?

• 1:01:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:01:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  One thing I found fascinating about giant hogweed is, like, I'm I'm not a big fan of giant hogweed because it's it's legitimately dangerous, you know?

• 1:01:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, it is, yeah.

• 1:01:15Blindboy Boatclub?

  It it can blind kids and stuff. Uh but I went on to. Biodiversitymaps.ie, I think that's the name of the website.

• 1:01:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:01:23Blindboy Boatclub?

  And I looked at the pattern of giant hogweed in Ireland. And I'm like, this fucking map reminds me of something else. It was the map of the plantations.

• 1:01:35Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:01:35Blindboy Boatclub?

  The plantations after the 1500s. So, so I started referring to, to giant hogweed as Protestant footsteps. Because if you look at the, the literal plantations, that's everywhere where the giant hogweed was. And then, and what it is really is it's a map of wealth.

• 1:01:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:01:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  So where you had the Protestant Ascendancy and the, the gardens, they were the ones who fetishised this giant hogweed. And that's why you see that pattern. And then another one, and I found this really fascinating, I started looking at Japanese knotweed.

• 1:02:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:02:05Blindboy Boatclub?

  And so Japanese knotweed, again, which is a big problem, that comes from volcanic soils in Japan.

• 1:02:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:02:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  And it loves volcanic soils. And in those volcanic soils, there's heavy metals.

• 1:02:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:02:20Blindboy Boatclub?

  There's lead and, and mercury and stuff that comes out of volcanoes. And the Japanese knotweed grew in an environment where it can tolerate these otherwise toxic metals. But if you look at where the Japanese knotweed is thriving, I, I refer to this as Thatcher's footsteps and Reagan's footsteps. Everywhere where Reagan and Thatcher shut down industrial areas. So it's in the Rust Belt of America.

• 1:02:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:02:50Blindboy Boatclub?

  Also, the east end of London, where you used to have petrol works, gas works, anything with heavy metals in the soil.

• 1:02:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:02:57Blindboy Boatclub?

  When Reagan and Thatcher got rid of the industry there, you were left with toxic soils. And that's where the Japanese knotweed appears to be thriving.

• 1:03:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's incredible.

• 1:03:07Blindboy Boatclub?

  The Japanese knotweed thinks it's in volcanic soil, but it's, it's not, it's, it's, they had petrol works here.

• 1:03:14Speaker 03

  It's amazing. You often get invasive plants following, yeah, really harsh industrial landscapes. Also, you see them along the railways.

• 1:03:23Blindboy Boatclub?

  Oh, really, do you? So there's other ones?

• 1:03:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:03:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  Sycamore is a railway one too, actually, yeah.

• 1:03:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, so often, I thought initially you were going to say it maps along the railways in Ireland. But isn't it incredible, really, that there are?

• 1:03:37Speaker 03

  Again, I know I'm biased about plants, but isn't it amazing that, you know, there are some plants that can live in the most toxic environments?

• 1:03:45Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:46Speaker 03

  And they can thrive there and we call them phyto remediators. So they can actually clean up the soil. And what they do is they'll, they'll take up all those horrible metals and mercuries. And they'll put it, they'll compartmentalize it. So they put it somewhere in their cell, which isn't toxic to them. They'll use that as a anti herbivory defence. So anything that eats them will be killed or poisoned.

• 1:04:13Blindboy Boatclub?

  Really?

• 1:04:14Speaker 03

  Yes. So they can use these heavy elements to their own benefit. So they're not eaten. They compartmentalize it so they can thrive. And they, we actually have a lot of plants that can be used to clean up these industrial sites. And so what you do is you grow the plants and you harvest the plants and incinerate them.

• 1:04:33Blindboy Boatclub?

  Go away. So the people are doing this?

• 1:04:35Speaker 03

  Yeah. And you can actually also use plants for, it's called phyto mining. So you know, we have this big issue now with rare earth elements. If we want to, you know.

• 1:04:46Blindboy Boatclub?

  Oh, go away. They can use plants to get like all these things that you have to dig into the earth like.

• 1:04:51Speaker 03

  Lithium and silicon. And, you know, so you can, there are plants which will take up these rare earth elements. They're tiny trace amounts in the rock. The plants get them. They often use a fungal partner and they break down the bare rock, take up these elements and use them for their own purposes. But there is a potential to actually use these plants now for phyto mining. And probably not as, it's going to yield as much as industrial mining, but it's a lot less harsh on the, on the environment.

• 1:05:24Blindboy Boatclub?

  Just another point that relates to that because what I want to ask you next is, because like I want to ask you about how, how maybe mythology or folklore might work alongside what you're doing and what just jumped out at me there is. So the Schlievmiss Mountains down in Kerry, okay?

• 1:05:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:05:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  Just beyond the Schlievmiss, there's this area called Glanagelt. And Glanagelt means Valley of Madness, okay? And if you, in Irish mythology, this place pops up, and I'm talking stories that could go back a couple of thousand years. In Irish myth, this was a place where people went if they suffered mental illness of some description.

• 1:06:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:06:05Blindboy Boatclub?

  There used to be, like King Sweeney, King Sweeney used to hear bells and think that he was a bird. And then finally, he found peace living in the Valley of Madness, right?

• 1:06:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:06:15Blindboy Boatclub?

  Down in Kerry. And this stayed and stayed in the mythology for years and years and years, right up until the seventies. People who would have had bipolar disorder would visit the Valley of Madness in Kerry. And they would eat the watercress or they would drink from the well that's there. And then in the nineties, they studied the water in the well and it had a shitload of lithium.

• 1:06:37Speaker 03

  I was just gonna think, is it lithium?

• 1:06:38Blindboy Boatclub?

  It was lithium. They found lithium there. And the watercress specifically, this watercress was taking lithium out of the water. And then when people were, and lithium is used today, if someone has bipolar today, they would literally be prescribed lithium. So it's, it's an example there of that story was there in the mythology. People knew it already, they just couldn't express it in a scientific way.

• 1:07:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:07:05Blindboy Boatclub?

  But because you're dealing with, like, do you ever find anything from mythology or folklore? Which would help the work that you're doing in trying to understand ancient or older plants?

• 1:07:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, in my work, not at the moment, but I think it is so important. So like if I ever give, you know, a walk and talk, a botanical tour or I would always try and, you know, read the books on the Irish folklore, the historical references on how these plants were used medicinally, culturally, in food, in divination, you know? It's so important because I think it connects us to the past. And I think you're absolutely right that, you know, in a way, botany was the, it was the early medicine.

• 1:07:58Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:00Speaker 03

  So.

• 1:08:02Speaker 03

  It's absolutely our loss if we don't actually use these old cultural references and knowledge and incorporate them into modern science and and use it as a guide to, you know, test hypotheses. Is there lithium? Can we use a X-ray to test the levels of lithium in these in these watercress plants? And that means it's also in the rock. What was the rock? You can work with the geologist, you can, you know. So if you're studying what's called economic botany, so plants that have an economic value, so medicine, anti-cancer, you know, something for mental health, then the great source

• 1:08:45Speaker 03

  of information is actually to go to the the cultural references. Like, for example, in in in herbarium in Trinity, we have like five hundred thousand dried plant specimens. The oldest specimens in the collection were from seventeen seventeen twenty eight, and they were collected by a man called Threlkeld. And he was the first, I think, to record the Irish names of all of the the plants. And he he found the plants in the markets with from the plant women. And they would bring up the plants from, you know, their land up to market in Dublin. And in the Irish name is often, as well

• 1:09:28Speaker 03

  as the place, there can also be the use. And that links you back to folklore. Yeah. So I think it's it's really important on so many levels, you know, to use this this knowledge in multiple languages, because often you need to access it through the the Irish language, rather than what we would typically use in science, you know, it should be the the formal scientific name in Latin or Greek.

• 1:09:52Blindboy Boatclub?

  Because the other thing, too, is is I was thinking of how somebody, somebody working in myth and folklore, or even just the names or the language, could consult with you. I mean, what's jumping out immediately for me is. Like, I know that, so Mayo, Mayo means plain of yew trees. And I know that dairy means an oak wood.

• 1:10:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:10:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  So they're in the names of places in Ireland are referring to forests that effectively no longer existed.

• 1:10:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:10:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  But sure, of course, the best person to go to is you, I mean, to yourself, I mean.

• 1:10:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. So what you can do is, you could, for these places, like Dara, Mac Dara, you know, all of these

• 1:10:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:36Speaker 03

  associations, you could actually take a core of peat, or you could take, find a little hollow of sediment in a limestone pavement. And you take a core and often use a kind of a piston, and the core could be maybe one metre long or five metres long. And it gives you a record of sediment from anywhere between the last thousand years and the last 10,000 or 15,000 years. And then what we do, and lots of my colleagues as well around Ireland, around the world, you would take a little bit of sediment. You'd put it into horrible acid, hydrofluoric acid, hydrochloric acid, and you'd extract out the pollen.

• 1:11:19Speaker 03

  And because we, we know what the pollen of an oak looks like, and we know what the pollen of a pine looks like, and the pollen of a sycamore. You can actually reconstruct the history of the place. The forest, were they open, were they closed, were they dominated by oaks? When did beach come in? Is it native? And the whole vegetation history of that place can be reconstructed.

• 1:11:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  And you can, and people as well, I'm assuming, like.

• 1:11:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:11:46Blindboy Boatclub?

  Again, taking it back to myth and folklore, if I read the Lauer Gavala Aire, and that's written maybe 1500 years ago by monks. And it's, it's their version of the history of Ireland, but they mention, I mean, they're using myth. They're saying the first people came from somewhere around Spain. And that's just a story we have in a book that's 1500 years old, but I mean, would you not see plants from Spain then that could, do you know what I'm getting at?

• 1:12:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:12:15Blindboy Boatclub?

  Do you ever see like, do you ever, do you ever look at the record and go, why is there a bunch of plants here from this other part of the earth? And does this tell us about human migration to Ireland a couple of thousand years ago?

• 1:12:25Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, that's so interesting. So the, the thing that comes to my mind is, is the strawberry tree and it's, um, it's kind of related to heather and it's got little white flowers and it's got these, it's quite unusual. It's got these red round fruits that look like a round strawberry. And the name in Latin is called Arbutus unido and unido means only once, because if you eat, you know, it looks lovely, you eat it, but you only eat it once, it tastes horrible. But strawberry tree occurs in the west of Ireland, native, we think it's native, but maybe it wasn't. The only other places it occurs are in Portugal and Spain. And how did that happen? How do we have what this

• 1:13:10Speaker 03

  is called a disjunct distribution? So a tiny little pocket in Ireland and then the closest population, Spain and Portugal. Now, one of the hypotheses, which is really intriguing and compelling, and this is by a, a Bostonist in, in Galway, Micheline She Sceppington, she suggests that the strawberry tree was introduced as a plant that was in maybe a beer or an alcohol or in somehow associated with alcohol from Spain and Portugal. And it's a linker to people who came to the west of Ireland. And so that's one theory. Now, there's other theories that this, this strawberry tree is there, not because of

• 1:13:54Speaker 03

  the people, but because it's a relic from the Ice Age. For some reason, there must have been this little microclimate. Uh, most of Ireland was covered in a giant ice sheet 18,000 years ago, but for some reason, this little strawberry tree survived in a population. And so there's two theories and they're quite different, but we can use science to test those. And that would typically be, we'd use genetic methods and that would go to a whole other department like genetics or maybe, um, plant science genetics to test those different theories.

• 1:14:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  Here's one for you. Um, so there's this bog body called Clonycaven Man, right? Founded two thousand and three and they reckon Clonycaven Man is, we'll say, two thousand years old.

• 1:14:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:14:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  But the big thing with this bog body is that he had hair gel, right? Two thousand year old hair gel.

• 1:14:43Speaker 03

  Hair gel, okay.

• 1:14:44Blindboy Boatclub?

  Hair gel, yeah. And the hair, it's, the hair gel was made from resin. And they know that the resin comes from trees that were in the north of Spain. So that told us, okay, first off, this person was wealthy.

• 1:14:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:14:57Blindboy Boatclub?

  And it told us so much. And secondly, he was, whatever was going on, we now know that two thousand years ago, this Ireland probably had some type of dealing with Spain.

• 1:15:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:15:07Blindboy Boatclub?

  Like, is, would someone come to you with that resin? Because resin is trees.

• 1:15:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, so.

• 1:15:13Blindboy Boatclub?

  Is that your job?

• 1:15:15Speaker 03

  So they wouldn't come to me, but they'd definitely come to a botanist. So a botanist who is trained in genetics. So there's loads of great botanists in Ireland, all the institutions. And who would, who would be able to, let me think, what would they do? If they could extract ancient DNA, so they could also go to a geneticist. And they, knowing the G N A, DNA, you could build a picture of the DNA types. They're called haplotypes and sometimes they're distinct. There's a Spanish type and there's a, there's an Irish type and there's a Welsh type. And you can basically build the map doing the genetics of the ancient DNA and work out, okay, where, where did that resin come from?

• 1:15:59Speaker 03

  And another way to do it, if you couldn't do DNA is, is you would maybe look at the chemistry. And sometimes certain trees, well, always, they, they have a very different chemistry. And if it was a very rare tree that you know today, or even in the past, only occurred in a very small population, you might be able to link it back to that chemistry. So typically what we would do is we'd use, you kind of work in a, a team of lots of different scientists, multidisciplinary team. And you'd probably try and answer the question using all the different specializations.

• 1:16:35Blindboy Boatclub?

  Um, one thing I'd love to ask you too is, and I want to find out if this is, if this is real or not, is I've often referred, heard Ireland referred to as, we're actually a rainforest, that this country is, is a mid Atlantic rainforest, which is weird because I'm looking around and I'm like, I don't see any fucking forest.

• 1:16:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:16:54Blindboy Boatclub?

  Like, are we really a rainforest and humans have just gotten rid of all the trees?

• 1:17:00Speaker 03

  So, we do have rainforest, um, and really, how do you define a rainforest? Well, you have to have at least, at least 2,500 millimeters of rain a year. So we, we definitely have that on the western seaboard. And then there's two types of rainforest. There's the tropical rainforest that most people are, are kind of familiar with. You know, we've heard about it, we've read about it, some have been lucky enough to be in it. But then we have another type of rainforest that's called a temperate rainforest.

• 1:17:30Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:30Speaker 03

  And that would be, um, not in the tropical latitudes, so not in the low latitudes, but, you know, latitudes of about 40, 50 degrees north and south, mainly north. And so Irish latitudes. So there's little slivers of, of temperate rainforest on the west coasts.

• 1:17:50Blindboy Boatclub?

  But that are left.

• 1:17:51Speaker 03

  Of America, think of like Seattle and, uh, the Oregon and the west coast of Ireland, the west coast of Scotland. And these are usually coastal strips where you've got, you've got moisture coming off the ocean, um, and as soon as it hits land, it rains out. And by the time it gets further inland, there's not as much precipitation. So, rainforests are kind of restricted climatically to basically strips. But a big question is, how, we know today, we only have a remnant. So it was much more extensive in the past.

• 1:18:32Blindboy Boatclub?

  And when you say past, like when, like when, when?

• 1:18:35Speaker 03

  Pre, pre-human change of the landscape, so.

• 1:18:38Blindboy Boatclub?

  Is that pre-Ice Age?

• 1:18:40Speaker 03

  No, no, I think even more recent, so it would have been much more extensive, like

• 1:18:46Speaker 03

  five thousand years ago, four thousand years ago. So what you see when you look at the record of, you know, those sediment cores I was telling you about, you can see evidence of weeds of crops and you can see the pollen of those weeds suddenly appearing. So things like, you know, ragwort and I can't think of any others offhand that appear. But you also get evidence of fire, so you'd find charcoal, so you can actually see the signature of man's intervention on the land, you know, when we start to become a more arable agricultural culture. And then, you know, the landscape changes and to the forest detriment.

• 1:19:32Speaker 03

  But it's a difficult question because there's always a balance, isn't it, you know?

• 1:19:35Blindboy Boatclub?

  Off, off the top of your head, like, what areas of Ireland do you know of that would have definitely been dense forest that now are not?

• 1:19:44Speaker 03

  Well, that is a really interesting question and actually, we are, we, there's lots of active science projects on this at the moment, but you said the word dense and

• 1:19:56Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:57Speaker 03

  That's really interesting because how you could have, let's say, we know the species that should, they're in a, in a temperate rainforest, okay, X, Y, Z. If you see them in pollen, does that mean it was a dense rainforest? So what we are doing at the moment is we're trying to work out, I've got people in the lab and other colleagues, and we're trying to get an indicator of the density of a forest and we're using light as a guide. So we want to try and work out, was the canopy closed or open? You see the species, we think there was a rainforest there, but we're not really gonna know until we can reconstruct, was it dense or is it just open?

• 1:20:40Speaker 03

  Because you need to be dense to be a temperate rainforest.

• 1:20:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  Because even.

• 1:20:46Blindboy Boatclub?

  Like, if you, if, like, this is something I heard again, and again, anything to do with mythology that's going back this far, it's all guesswork because the monks wrote it down, okay? But we do know, we'll say, pre-Christian Ireland, so before 1500 years ago, when Patrick came over, we didn't have towns or cities. Instead, we had all of these petty kingdoms. And one theory is, because you kind of go, Ireland's a small country. Why did you need to have 30 or 40 different kingdoms? Like, could people not just get together? It's pretty small. And one theory is, it was so dense with forests that pockets of people were kind of isolated.

• 1:21:28Speaker 03

  Yeah. So we definitely had forests over much of Ireland, way more extensive than today. So today, you know, I should know this, it's like 1%. It might be-

• 1:21:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's pretty bad, yeah.

• 1:21:43Speaker 03

  It's really low. Maybe it's 10%. It's actually 10%, but we have only 1% of native forests left.

• 1:21:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  But how then do you assess the, I suppose I'm trying to get at this indigenous versus,

• 1:22:01Blindboy Boatclub?

  this is pretty recent stuff, we're talking a couple of thousand years.

• 1:22:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:22:04Blindboy Boatclub?

  Therefore, are we not living in a very barren, even though I can look out the window and I can see a lot of green, are we not living in a very barren, unnatural country full of human intervention? Human intervention? Are we not supposed to have a hell of a lot more?

• 1:22:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, so our, definitely, as in all over the world, we have not valued our biodiversity. And, you know, 15 species have gone extinct from the Irish landscape of plant species, for example, so they're gone. You know, most people have no memory of them.

• 1:22:45Blindboy Boatclub?

  How long are you talking about? What's the most recent you can think of?

• 1:22:48Speaker 03

  In the last, in the last human generation, the last two human generations.

• 1:22:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:22:51Speaker 03

  15 species.

• 1:22:53Blindboy Boatclub?

  What one are you most upset about?

• 1:22:56Speaker 03

  Oh, there was, oh, which one? Well, I, I actually have never seen any of them live. I've only seen them dry, all of these. And actually, I've done some kind of little artworks on these, you know, trying to think about them, you know, um.

• 1:23:10Blindboy Boatclub?

  And, and was it like a Victorian? Did some Victorian pick them up and decide to dry them? Are you going back that far?

• 1:23:15Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 1:23:16Blindboy Boatclub?

  Twenty century?

• 1:23:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, no. So we have back to the, just in the fifties, sixties. So a lot, you know, the, why, why have they gone extinct? It's mainly land use change. So drainage has impacted a lot of them. And things that love wet environments, you know, as soon as you dry a bog, as soon as you dry a wetland, then it's losing its habitat. And

• 1:23:42Speaker 03

  improvement, we call it agricultural improvement. So that's, you know, enriching the land with nitrogen. And ironically, nitrogen is really good for your crops. And because crops are bred to really use the nitrogen and thrive. But high biodiversity ecosystems where you get loads and loads and loads and loads of species, these are actually the poorest environments. So our old, old meadows, the old practices, pre-industrialization would have been much more positive for maintaining biodiversity. You'd maybe get twenty, twenty-five species of grassland species. And in a one meter squared plus, whereas today we have one. So, but there's, there's really amazing examples in Ireland of

• 1:24:28Speaker 03

  trying to take on these more historical practices of maintaining biodiversity, because it's good on so many levels. You don't sacrifice your productivity, you boost your biodiversity, you boost the nature value, and you also capture much more carbon in the soil. So it's kind of.

• 1:24:44Blindboy Boatclub?

  Farming practices now? So, so incentivizing farmers for a bit of rewilding or a few meadows?

• 1:24:51Speaker 03

  Yes, yeah. And it, it, it isn't even, um. It isn't even rewilding, you know, it's it's more leaving space for nature and but it's really important also, I mean, this is getting well outside my comfort zone of topics. I'm much more comfortable talking about fossils from three hundred million years ago.

• 1:25:10Blindboy Boatclub?

  We can take off the academics hat for a little bit and just go for a bit of opinion.

• 1:25:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, but there's a lot of simple solutions, but absolutely farmers have to be paid for these, you know, so.

• 1:25:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  Of course, yeah.

• 1:25:21Speaker 03

  For all land use, it's so complex and this, you know, we need, we need to feed the world, but we can't do it at the cost of biodiversity. So for every plot of land, you have this, this tension of, of multiple possible uses.

• 1:25:39Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:40Speaker 03

  And, you know, it, it isn't a black and white issue, you know, it's really complex. But so I think some of these demonstration farms, which are all over Ireland, like Bern Bjo and all of these examples where it's nature biodiversity positive farming practices. And that's, it's a multiple win, win for productivity for the farmer, win for nature, and also win for kind of carbon and keeping carbon in the ground.

• 1:26:10Blindboy Boatclub?

  And does it mean like, okay, you're growing your turnips over here and you've got a field of cows over there, but this field here, you're just gonna leave it be?

• 1:26:20Speaker 03

  Not even that extreme. I think it can be the hedgerows and the.

• 1:26:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:26:26Speaker 03

  Buffer zone between the hedgerow and, you know, so rather than leaving a really tight, tidy clipped hedge, where the, the productive crop goes right up to the, the hedge margin, you just leave a buffer strip and that buffer strip is left to your unmode or it's planted with multi-species swards or it's planted with meadow or you introduce a lot of native Irish meadow plants into it. And there, then you've got this great margin, which is providing all food for all these insects. Which are then pollinating your crop.

• 1:27:07Blindboy Boatclub?

  Of course, yeah.

• 1:27:08Speaker 03

  You know, so it it it can be really small pockets, but that's a loss to the farmer. So why should we expect the farmers to do that? So you you have to pay them for the loss of their crop. So all of that is so complex. And and there's lots of great science centres, right? Research Ireland centres who are who are tackling this problem now and trying to address what? What is the best way we can use land and using our scientific knowledge and considering all? All the all the stakeholders.

• 1:27:39Blindboy Boatclub?

  I'm gonna ask you one last question, um, cause just it it pertains to hedgerows. Uh, so my buddy, Mancon Megan, who recently departed Mancon.

• 1:27:48Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, so sad.

• 1:27:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  He used to, I know, it's it's a terrible loss to all of us. But Mancon used to work with an organisation called Home Tree and they were basically trying to plant native forests.

• 1:28:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:28:03Blindboy Boatclub?

  And one thing that Mancon used to say to me, which fascinated me was he wouldn't simply just plant an oak. He wouldn't simply just plant a a native Irish oak. What he used to do was he would look amongst hedgerows. He told me, he said, the best way to find a little pocket of untouched, actual native Irish woodland is you'll find bits of it in hedgerows. And I said, what are you doing in the hedgerows? And he goes, I'm trying to find not just like a little bit of an oak or or a little bit of a tree that I can plant. I want the mycelium that's in the soil. So he was looking in hedgerows to find soil mycelium as well as the plants, as well as the trees.

• 1:28:48Blindboy Boatclub?

  Um, is is, cause I'd never thought of that. I'm like, oh, yeah. How does that come into it? Like, i- is that?

• 1:28:56Speaker 03

  It makes a lot of sense.

• 1:28:56Blindboy Boatclub?

  Would you agree with what he's saying?

• 1:28:58Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, absolutely. Because, you know, you plant trees, it is not a forest. Think of what is a forest? When you can walk through a forest, a really old forest, you don't just see trees, you see, um, anemones, you see, uh, bluebells. You you hear birds, you know, so the planting of the trees is the kind of the engineer of that forest. But then you've got all of these other things hidden, like all the fungi underneath. So hedgerows are actually, it's argued that they're kind of like the vestiges of our past landscapes. Some hedgerows in Ireland are so old, they're hundreds of years old. And the higher the number of species you find in them, it's usually a good indicator that they're really, really old.

• 1:29:41Speaker 03

  I think they say one species per hundred year, maybe it's ten year, I can't remember exactly.

• 1:29:46Blindboy Boatclub?

  And it makes so much sense because no one has any business with a hedgerow. It's just an old boundary and it's an ancient fence.

• 1:29:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:29:56Blindboy Boatclub?

  And no one has bothered to go near it. Yeah.

• 1:29:59Speaker 03

  It's a super highway for, think of all the animals that use the hedgerows to get to forest fragments. And but plants do that as well. You know, we think of plants as immobile, but they are moving. You know, an oak tree will shed its acorn and that acorn may be two metres away. And then that tree will grow and that acorn will move another two metres. So it's slowly moving through the generations. So that's a brilliant thing that Mankon did. If he, if he took the acorn with the soil, then he's taking the fungi, the mycorrhizal fungi that will make this lovely symbiosis with the tree. And it'll extend its whole root network out to extract those elements from the rocks that we kind of talked about earlier.

• 1:30:42Speaker 03

  So, yeah, it's much more likely you will make a true forest or woodland by, by doing that.

• 1:30:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  Is ancient fungi your business?

• 1:30:52Speaker 03

  Not really. So ancient.

• 1:30:53Blindboy Boatclub?

  I know, it's sort of, you, you, so you, you have to stop at mushrooms.

• 1:30:59Speaker 03

  Well, you know, some of the fossils I've seen, like, I, I once looked at this really early land plant and it's called Rhinia and it's from a famous fossil locality in Scotland. And I was looking at its stomata. So this thing is so old, it has no roots, no leaves, just a basically little stalk. But it has stomata, these breathing pores that take up carbon dioxide. And coming out of the stomata were loads of fungal mycelium, like the threads of fungi. And that was four hundred million years ago.

• 1:31:35Speaker 03

  And I'd never seen that in the living plants, you know, usually stomata open and close just to taking gases. You don't usually see loads of my fungi erupting from us. And of course, scientists who've worked on it since, who are experts in fungi, they've worked out that, you know, we always talk about plants, they're so important to terraform Earth, but they couldn't have done it without the fungi. They absolutely could not have done it. So arguably fungi probably even more important, but the partnership, the symbiosis between the plants and the fungi is really key.

• 1:32:07Blindboy Boatclub?

  The one thing, just I promise this will be the last one, but it harks back to the first ever question, uh, cause I didn't, I didn't ask you this. So when we were talking about that, that ancient extinction of trees, that ancient extinction of trees.

• 1:32:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:32:20Blindboy Boatclub?

  Where, um, which is now coal.

• 1:32:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:32:23Blindboy Boatclub?

  I heard that the lignem in the trees, which took the carbon from the atmosphere.

• 1:32:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:32:29Blindboy Boatclub?

  The reason that did not decompose was because the fungi hadn't evolved yet that could decompose it. Is that bullshit?

• 1:32:38Speaker 03

  No, it's actually, and I didn't answer it when you first asked me, uh, it, it's a, a leading scientific hypothesis.

• 1:32:48Blindboy Boatclub?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:32:49Speaker 03

  And if you look at the modern data, so some people study evolution by looking at genetics, the genes in the living things today, and they build an evolutionary tree for the past millions of years. According to those guys, they accept this. They think that's true. Now, the other way of looking at evolution is you look at fossils, you look at what was present then, and you build up an evolutionary tree by building up that picture. And the fossil peoples don't agree. They think it's wrong. So I would say the, the question is still kind of an active area of science, and it's really intriguing. Did we get coal swamps which formed coals, which we then burned and changed the climate because

• 1:33:33Speaker 03

  there weren't fungi to decompose them? Or was it just climate at the time? And I think it's still an active area of science.

• 1:33:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  Is it fair to say that at one point, trees were like the plastic of now? That trees were these things that couldn't decompose, like, like plastic?

• 1:33:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, because lignin, lignin is wood. And like in all paper mills, it's the bane of the paper mills. It's chemically really, really, really difficult to break down. And actually, i- if we did not have the fungi today that were, that could break down wood, we would be, we would be neck deep or above our heads deep in undecomposed trees.

• 1:34:17Blindboy Boatclub?

  Wow.

• 1:34:18Speaker 03

  So.

• 1:34:19Blindboy Boatclub?

  And there'd be fuck all carbon because they'd all be stuck down in the earth.

• 1:34:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, and then we'd have higher oxygen. So, you know, so I suppose we have to try and capture some of this basic understanding. And, you know, to come up with solutions for climate change i- in the future. But that's a whole other conversation. But yeah, yeah, lignin is the plastic of the natural world. It would, it's so resistant to break down that there's just a particular fungi, just some, and bacteria that can break it down. And that totally makes sense because if you think you grow to, you know, fifty, sixty metres tall, you have to be mechanically really strong. And the side, the drawback is it's going to be hard to break it down once that tree falls.

• 1:35:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  Okay, Professor Jenny McIlwain, I could talk to you for hours and hours. I don't want to take any more of your time, but I just want to say thank you so much. That was a fascinating conversation.

• 1:35:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, thank you so much as well. That was great fun.

• 1:35:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  Thank you for your time. Professor Jennifer McIlwain, Professor of Botany from Trinity College. That was great fun. I hope you enjoyed that also. Go to scienceweek.ie, engage with whatever they have going on in your local area. It's an entire week. There's cracking events. I love that it's in November. And it's one of the best, it's one of the best, I don't know, but I call it a festival. You could call it a festival, a festival of science and knowledge and curiosity. But it's one of the best festivals in Ireland. I'm calling it a festival. Scienceweek.ie and I'll catch you next week.

• 1:36:01Blindboy Boatclub?

  What a hot take. I have a few things bubbling away.

• 1:36:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  In the meantime, rub a dog genuflect to a swan and blow kisses at a little snail. Dog bless.

• 1:36:29Speaker 04

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