Comedy of the Week - Nature Table

Episode Date: June 17, 2024

In this first episode of a new series, ducks’ super vaginas and a meteorite that’s the key to how life on Earth started wow the team.For this new series of Sue Perkins’ ARIA-winning ‘Show and Tell’ wildlife comedy, Team Nature Table have recorded at the Natural History Museum, Kew Gardens – for some botanical specials – and London Zoo.Starting the series off, we’re at the Natural History Museum. Sue is joined by special guests: comedian Desiree Burch, science writer Jules Howard and the NHM’s curator of meteorites Dr. Natasha Almeida.Our varied subjects include: Dogs, a meteorite that can explain how life started on Earth, Ducks’ vaginas (with Sue studying one up close courtesy of a VR headset) and moon rock.Nature Table has a simple clear brief: to positively celebrate and promote the importance of all our planet’s wonderfully wild flora and fauna in a fun and easily grasped way... whilst at the same time having a giggle.Hosted by: Sue Perkins Guests: Desiree Burch, Natasha Almeida & Jules Howard Written by: Catherine Brinkworth, Jenny Laville & Jon Hunter Additional material by: Christina Riggs & Pete Tellouche Researcher: Catherine Beazley Executive Producer: Richard Morris Sound Recordist & Editor: Jerry Peal Music by: Ben Mirin Production Coordinator: Sarah Nicholls Producer: Simon NichollsAn EcoAudio certified production A BBC Studios Audio Production for Radio 4

BBC Sounds music radio podcasts. Thank you. Well, hello, I'm Sue Perkins and welcome to a special botanical episode of Nature Table coming to you from Kew Gardens. Nature Table, coming to you from Kew Gardens. Now, the world of plants is full of incredible facts. For example, did you know a mature cedar tree can provide enough wood to make 300,000 pencils, while an immature one can use those pencils to write the word bum? We're coming to you from the George Rall Laboratory Lecture Theatre here at Kew Gardens.

The botanical gardens at Kew are home to a giant cycad, which is the world's oldest pot plant and under it the world's oldest spare key. And with me to run our eyes over some of the fascinating things that nature has to offer, then wipe our eyes clean and pop them back in, we have comedian Lucy Porter and bringing us gifts to peer at like a couple of shopping centre Father Christmases on Non-Uniform Day, Ethnobotanist James Wong and Forensic Botanist Dr Mark Spencer. Now Lucy, let's start with you and welcome back by the way, always a pleasure to have you here. Oh, such a delight to be here.

As this is a botanical special, I'd like to pose the question, if you could be any plant what would you be and why? Actually I would be a plant that is right here at Kew and I'm gonna have to ask James for the proper name of it the big stinky plants. Titan arum? Titan arum. Oh that's the one you can see that flowers very infrequently and smells for miles. It has evolved to attract carrion so it looks and smells like rotting meat, can be detected from, I think, three miles away. And I just identify with that.

We came to see it when it flowered on one occasion, and it was, you know, it doesn't flower very often, which I'm good, I'm lazy, and it's really, really stinky. And yet people flock to see it. And its Latin name means deformed penis. Mark, welcome to Nature Table. Now you've got a PhD in the evolution of plant pathogenic fungi. Indeed.

So with that in mind, would you rather be able to grow moss or burp seeds? I'm absolutely going to go for burping seeds. I would too. So tell me why we should be burping seeds. I think I'm a bit of a vulgarian anyway and it just feels a bit more like my personality to spout forth, you know, the things I care most about, which are fungi, plants and things like that. So if I could actually start a conversation by... blech!

And belching out a fabulous set of seeds and encouraging people to scoop them up and plant them and things like that or enjoy them, then why not? LAUGHTER James, welcome back, my lovely. Now, you're an ethnobotanist and an all-round plant geek. So let me ask you this.

If I could cast a spell, turn you into a plant, which one's it going to be? I think I'd have to go for something like the upas tree. It's this beautiful, evergreen, Southeast Asian tree. It's planted for shade, makes incredible timber, and it's also used to make poison darts to kill enemies in warfare. And I kind of think it's like me, because it's kind of beautiful, superficially wholesome, but when you get up close, really toxic.

LAUGHTER APPLAUSE Well, listen, let's head to the table and get this botanical show-and-tell on the road. Now, James, as an ethnobotanist, I think it might be good to just remind people of what exactly that term means. I describe us as the only botanists with social skills.

Because we have to talk to people. So it's about plant use. So whether that's food or medicine and lots of angry botanists in the audience right now, we're not like those taxonomists that are real weirdos. We're the only people who can make eye contact and roughly string a sentence together. What have you brought for us? So I've brought for you a plant that looks kind of, you know, every day, but it's actually been mutated by exposure to atomic radiation. What the actual? And in fact, loads of plants like that.

Like, there's a beautiful image coming up here of a African violet that's also been exposed to atomic radiation And you can see on neither of these have tentacles and are about to sack New York Yes, I'm concerned at the proximity to me right now. How do they go with the explosion? What's their half-life? So currently neither of them are radioactive, but many generations ago Yeah There was some plant material that was exposed to this radiation to elicit a phenomenon called radiation mutagenesis and it's basically a form of plant breeding. Most plant breeding looks,

it sort of scours the world and tries to find novel traits but sometimes novel traits are hard to find particularly if the wild ancestor for the crop is endangered or extinct and if you wanted to create new and exciting crops with new properties, just drop an atomic bomb So there are some ways to do that So like they used to be or there still is a phenomenon called atomic gardening and there are actually atomic gardens Where they have a bunker that's made of concrete It's lined with lead deep underground and inside that is a substance called cobalt 60 which is radioactive it's released through a trap door and this big totem thing all the scientists have to then run and get out

and then around this area there are concentric circles of different types of plants almost like a dart board the plants that are closest tend to get wiped out i completely killed no shit show then there's the next zone where they kind of end up with horrible deformities that aren't really useful to anyone. And then in the final zone, the plants can create mutations, some of which are useful. Try and sell to me what these mutations can provide of benefit to the human race. If you think about the context of when this first started out, there was this attitude

post-war that the power of the atom could be used for peace. And there was a lot of discussion about, now we've had victory over terrible oppressors, we could use the atom to have victory over famine. We could create incredible new crops that had disease resistance, that had size. And in the middle of the 20th century, we were going to face a global famine because the population was increasing dramatically and our food production just wasn't keeping up with that so there was a desperation for any kind of technology to really solve these problems and this actually provided a really useful solution there are thousands of crops

that you probably already use today that would derive through radiation mutagenesis. Loads of the house plants we have came from them. It's a really important tool in a breeder's toolkit. Spider plants. Spider plants, spider plants. If you've used toothpaste, mouthwash, eaten a mint, or had chewing gum today, the menthol from that almost certainly came from a variety of mint.

Todd's Mitchum peppermint. Almost all of the mint oil in the world comes from that almost certainly came from a variety of mint. Todd's Mitchum peppermint. Almost all of the mint oil in the world comes from that. That was created through radiation mutagenesis. That's why it makes your teeth so white. Most of the houseplants that we, the cool and weird, if you like the variegated monster. Can't bear them. Probably created through radiation mutagenesis. I want to know a bit more about the Atomic Garden Society.

Is it a membership system? No. Do I get a badge? Is it some kind of, you know, it's a merch? All of that. This was a society that was around in the UK between, I think, the late 50s, right up until the late 60s. And what you did was you would sort of subscribe,

get a membership, and then you would get free, atomically energized seeds. So these seeds that were exposed to cobalt 60. You can actually do this yourself really easily if you're friends with a dentist. I've made friends with dentists just to do this. You can keep stuff in their x-ray machine. The x-ray radiation mutates seeds and that's how you go. Well you don't need to be to be friends with the dentist, just next time you're going for a check-up... Yeah! I'll just take my houseplant in and when they run out of the room I'll just pop it into the machine. None of my plants grow at all so this would be, you know, just blast it with a load of x-rays.

We need more radiation to sort your house pom-poms out. Yeah! James, thank you for introducing us to your minty fresh radioactive plants. APPLAUSE Now, Mark, explain to us what a forensic botanist is. I use my knowledge of plants to help police solve crime scenes and work on crime scenes, so I mainly work on murder investigations. But I have also done little bits of work for HMRC

on tax brackets as well. Ooh. Take him to the old Mel and Burn hymn. I love the fact that you working on murder cases got ooh. Ooh. From our audience. And then we want the rights to, when it becomes a Sunday night cosy crime.

Yes. It's so perfect. What do British people love? Gardening and murder. Absolutely. Now what have you brought for us, my lovely? Well, this is probably my pet plant when it comes to crime scene work and forensics. And it's probably the thing I most use when helping police

solve one particularly challenging part of crime scene work here, which is how long has that dead body been there? I have brought a bramble stem. Ooh, okay. Well, the audience love it. I'm relieved. But the reason I've got it here is actually because brambles are really tidy and organised. People think of them as messy things that trip you up when you go on woodland walks, but actually they have a growth pattern and behaviour

which is really, really helpful in understanding how long somebody's been dead. So imagine somebody's murdered you, you've been lying there on the ground, possibly, or in a shallow grave. This is the entertainment slot on Biggsy. Three, five, 10 years, and you've been waiting for somebody to find you.

And then along comes, quite often, for example, a dog walker, a road worker, somebody like that, a teenager, you know, doing naughty things in bushes, and they stumble across you. And you will have brambles and other plants growing over and around you. And this is the secret of their absolutely wonderful tool. For me, brambles lock you into the landscape

because they have, despite this external messiness, a growth pattern where they have long, whippy stems, this floppy bit I've got here in my hand, which grow rapidly in the first year. Then at the end of the year, they root and they form a loop and you are locked in underneath them. Now, the next year, that same shoot produces side branches and flowers and fruits and you get nice pretty brambles and blackberries and you like them. The same year more stems are

coming through so each bramble plant has this kind of generally a two-year cycle of growth pattern which means over a number of years if I get there in time and the police haven't knocked around with the body I can look at the bramble stems next to the person's remains look at the base of their stems and count the number of stems, look at the rates at which they degrade and provide an estimate of how long somebody's been there for. That is amazing. Wow.

Has anyone ever said to you that your joy for this subject is really infectious but you perhaps shouldn't apply that same degree of zeal to a graveside. I don't know, people are often like, oh my gosh. See what I said about botanists and social schools? Yes, it'll get worse. It'll get worse. One thing is I actually kind of specialize in the botany of despair and gloom.

A lot of the work I do is frankly around climate change and invasive species, and rather surprisingly, my forensic work is my happy place. And that's not frivolous. It's actually really meaningful because actually as a scientist I feel a great deal of concern around climate change and the way things are going. This is something where I can help and contribute. I can actually work with people who are dedicated to solving serious crime. I can help provide resolution to family and friends and help them understand what happens over. So even though I'm working with somebody's remains under often tragic circumstances, it's an honour to actually be in that

community of people and help work to solve these crimes. So that's why it is actually something I feel joyful about. That's amazing. It is amazing. It's an extra... I never thought or planned to do it. I come from a taxonomic background and museum collections. I actually was a former student here at Kew and then the Natural History Museum down the road. And I never thought, oh I'm going to become a forensic botanist. I pretty much literally got a call one day from a police force saying, Dr Spencer, can you help us? We have a dead body. And I thought, oh, okay, well, we've got nothing else on today.

And off I went. So I went from kind of, you know, putting museum specimens, barbarian specimens into cabinets. So a few hours later, looking at heavily decayed human remains, which the police officer said to me, this is the worst one I've had in 17 years. And I thought, I cannot tell this man this is the very first time I've ever done this in my life. So I braved it through. Well, there's a couple of quick questions I want to ask. Firstly, can you use plants to link someone to a specific scene? If the body's been moved, can you use any kind of botanical material?

So a couple of years ago, I had a case with a man who killed another person, hid them in a field many miles from the home. Police were pretty certain they got the right person in terms of the suspect, but they weren't able to prove that they were actually been at the location where the deceased remains were found. They had mobile phone data, they had car number plate recognition data, which put them in the general area, but not in the place. The botany evidence in form of a piece of foliage found from underneath the suspect's car placed them within about 10 metres of the person's body.

Which was pretty much the sort of perfect satisfactory, this is how it works. And I have to say, myself and the detective, when we went and visited the scene, slightly embarrassed to say, but we did do a little dance on the right side. We were very, very excited. Do you have to go to court? Do you have to stand up and flourish your bramble and go, this is it? Yes. Mark, that was incredible, thank you. Who knew the bramble could go, this is it! I agree, yes. Mark, that was incredible, thank you.

Who knew the bramble could be so extraordinary? Fascinating. APPLAUSE I love coming here to Kew. It's a beautiful, extraordinary place. And I go for relaxing strolls through the grounds before being tempted to sneakily pick something. Maybe a flower,

maybe a staff member's brain, sometimes just a pocket or two. But today we're gonna go for the staff member. Is Brie Langley here? Hey Brie, you're a botanical horticulturalist here at Kew. So what have you brought in for us today? I'm gonna talk to you about my favourite plant, the water lily. So we've put up a photo here of a giant water lily, Victoria. It's from the Amazon rainforest. And just to put it in scale, that bud is probably about the size of your head, Sue. Wow. Yeah.

I've got, legendarily, a massive head. And then you can see in the middle there, there's a kind of crown of really thick plasticky bits. And those kind of form a, like a dance hall. I'm going to keep it PG. We're going to call like a dance hall. I'm gonna keep it PG. We're gonna call it a dance hall Times right Oh Full-blown orgy Really so what's going on in there? So

This flower opens up at night. It smells beautiful Yeah, and it heats up so it's nice and warm and cosy, and all of these nocturnal huge beetles travel towards the bud, and they are allowed in because the bud opens up just for them, and they go in and have sexy times. And the... With the bud?

Well... Or with each other and then bits fall off? With them... like with us? Really, really am a lay person, I don't know if you've noticed. Do they do with each other and bits fall off? Bits always fall off but I do it. Precisingly with age I find that is an issue. So they have sex with other beetles, and in doing so, they bring in pollen from one of the other plants. They've got sporey legs. Exactly. And all of the dance floor, if you like, is the female sticky surface.

So it's just taking in all of those semen, basically, and that will be drawn down and made into seed. The flower even provides food to keep them going all night. You see just above this, along the roof if you like, there is a lot of kind of yellow dustiness. That's just fake pollen that the plant provides purely to keep those beetles going. So the flower closes over the beetles. It doesn't allow them to exit for 24 hours until the flower has turned bright pink, lost all of its scent, become male, and it releases.

So we've got the dance floor, we've got the buffet there, they come in, you know, sweet smell, sweet smell, close the doors. Sexy times, weird legs, pollen, fake pollen, real pollen, sexy legs, brush, brush, brush. Male. Yeah, so, I mean. It's amazing. Do you know, what's coming out of this for me is I bloody want to be a Beatle. Just it. I am out.

I get out again tonight. Yeah. You're going to get locked in and there's going to be snacks. Collins, I'm ruling that, Gath. It's a great life. Thank you. That was amazing. Thank you so much for bringing your board. Thank you. So as Beethoven, Thank you so much for bringing your board to the table. Thank you. So as Beethoven, Strauss and Vivaldi said when planning

who to invite to their dinner party, let's get back to the table. Oh. James, what else have you brought along today? So I've brought along this packet of beautiful morning glory seeds. Now, it's been a while since I've seen morning glory. Yes.

What does it look like when it's fully, you know, grown? Okay, so it's a plant from the Amazon. It is a climbing plant that produces these beautiful trumpet-shaped flowers. It looks a lot like bindweed that you may be familiar with, but like a really sexy, beautiful version of it. So multiple colors. It's grown a lot in the tropics and it's grown as a bedding plant in the UK. And this particular one, I would say if you see one packet in your teenager's bedroom,

it's like, oh my gosh, hair toss, I'm such a great mom or dad. I've done really well bringing up some wholesome children. If you see probably 20 packets of that, maybe not so much. Because the seeds are a ritual hallucinogen. Give us that packet back, please. I think I'm a beetle. I've just taken some. So they basically work very much like LSD does. They contain the naturally occurring equivalent of LSD, which is synthetic, called LSA. Works in a really similar way. Just taking notes.

And I'll tell you all the downsides in a little bit, but I'll show you the good stuff to start off with. So it's been used all over Latin America for thousands of years before LSD was created and before psychotherapy was created as a sort of form of psychotherapy. And there is actually some really quite compelling evidence, and it's a small amount, but it's growing and it's quite solid, the small amount that we have, that it can potentially reduce symptoms of things like Parkinson's, that it could potentially be used to treat very severe migraines. And certainly outside of this particular plant, lots of... Oops. Parkinson's, that it could potentially be used to treat very severe migraines, and certainly

outside of this particular plant, lots of, oops, there we go, someone's already on them. You know, it could potentially have lots of applications for mental health, for helping reduce drug dependency, and it's an interesting sphere. The one thing I would say about it, before get too excited is that it has a lot of downsides. And outside of a clinical setting, those downsides, hate to be a party pooper, we know that only about a quarter of the plants that are of the morning glory family

actually contain any of these psychotropic substances. And it's because we've just found out it's actually not the plant at all. It's a fungus that lives in the plant. It's symbiotically and it's passed down the plant at all. It's a fungus that lives in the plant. It's symbiotically, and it's passed down through the maternal line. So only about a quarter of plants produce it. Sometimes the side effects just kick in

and there's no benefit, there's no high. So you get like vomiting, diarrhea, ridiculously high blood pressure. You get taken to the ER, like lots of reports in the US, particularly of teenagers taking the wrong thing. And to get over those symptoms, what people do is they administer them by enema, because you can't throw up if it's never been in your stomach. I'm not sure a hallucinogenic enema is really on my list of things to do.

I do it because I've got no boundaries. In a clinical setting, administered properly and you know... Carefully, lovingly. Carefully, in the right circumstance, they show a lot of problems. Would you do it? But I'm such a control freak, I could never do that. You can't! No, I literally have a pint and a half and I'm crying and confessing every day.

I look at hallucinogens and stuff and I'm like, I've seen the side effects. People release prog rock albums. I have to say, you know, from my own personal experience, clearly there are health risks and downsides of people. And, you know, frankly, in my youth, I knew people who died from abuse of drugs. But I went through a process of actually coming to terms with myself and my own identity and sexuality, actually partly through Tating Magic Mushrooms. And one of the best nights was actually the night I turned into a pond in Oxford.

I grew water lily leaves and water plants and goldfish swimming through me. And it was quite the most beautiful time of my life. Does this happen while you're lying in a pool over on vomit and diarrhea? No, I wasn't lying. I think you don't know. My friend said apparently I kind of slumped to the floor sedately,

lay back and grinned for about two hours. Do you think we'll ever get to a point where we can use hallucinogens in a controlled and measured way that works for everyone and there'll be something that can be prescribed? The tricky thing is there's been so little research and it's actually very difficult to get permission to do that research. And of course people are different. And even in the same people, if you look at LSA, people say that the drug has completely different effects depending on context. So if they're chilled out and watching a film, it has a completely different effect to if they're at a rave for example.

So it's just really difficult but we can say that it's very promising. James, thank you for your morning glory. APPLAUSE So, Mark, what else have you brought in for the old table de nature? This is a posidonia ball or a seagrass ball. And it is the dead leaves of this fabulous glorious wonderful plant Poseidonia oceanica. So why should we love this beautiful but but if I may say very nondescript plants. Oh I'm not having that. I think one of the things about plants again is as

human beings are terrible at appreciating plants despite the fact they are the most fabulous and important set of organisms on the planet that keep everything else going. In amongst the kind of Cinderella plants, you know everybody gets excited about trees and lovely things on land, seagrasses are some of the most important things on the planet keeping you all well and healthy and happy and beautiful. This is a meadow under the sea. They are amazing scientifically because they are the only flowering plant group to have actually returned to the sea and out of fresh water which is physiologically extraordinary because living in salty

water is very very difficult. It makes me quite angry. I've got all my plants and it's like, you know, I'm listening to gardeners' questions and they're like, oh you can water it not too much or a little bit of baby bi do this, do that. And then these bastards just go, just salty water. Yeah, yeah. I mean absolutely, you know, they are most odd. And this thing is incredibly important for helping create habitats in coastal areas. You can see looking at it, it's just a lovely place

where small little fish, little crustaceans, baby crabs can all hide in. So these are incredibly important nurseries for our fisheries. But they are fundamentally important also for coastal protection. Sea grasses along with mangroves and other coastal plants provide protection in storm surges and other things from human society in low-lying areas from all sorts of damaging storm. And frankly, things are getting worse with storms and things like that, so these things are increasingly important. There are many things I love about them. Don't they absorb like three times more carbon than tropical rain?

And that was the next one I was going to say. Oh sorry. No, let's play bat and ball on this. So basically these have huge potential as we, here's a point of irreversible change in our planet's temperatures and ecosystems. They are fundamentally at risk as well though because they are massively important carbon sequesterers. They're locking carbon into the seabed because they're rooted into the bed and running around.

And so they're really important for keeping carbon. But they're being more and more at risk because our oceans are getting more acidic because of all the carbon docks that we're putting out. And they are struggling. Human beings doing terrible and stupid things to them, like dredging their habitats, polluting our rivers with sewage, and killing these plants in these off-sourced areas. So in many parts of the world, they're

a fraction of their former abundance and they're really, like mangroves, really, really at risk globally and consequently helping put ourselves more at risk. So they are massively important for our well-being. You're absolutely right. You know, one can be dazzled by, you know... Big blousy things. Exactly, big blousy things. Who's not to be dazzled by that? But the density and silent magnificence of seagrass,

you've won me over. You converted, Lucy? I'm completely converted. I love the way that he loves his grass. And then in his forensics, he loves plants that grass people up. Bye, you know him? He deserves a grove. that grass people up. Oh, my God. You're very, very preserved to grow. And apparently, one of the brilliant things about seagrass is it does all of its, as you say,

its photosynthesising while underwater. So not only can we see the bubbles of oxygen as they form, but we can hear them. And this is a genuine audio recording of that happening. BUBBLES RUMBLING Oh, I've got little bubbles there. Reminds me of the time I was in a hot tub with Mary Berry. Fewer blue jokes and way less tequila.

But, Mark, thank you for enlightening us on these sub-aquatic wonders. Thank you. Well, sadly, we are out of time and I have been gobsmacked by the three of you. Thank you to my amazing guests and to the experts and staff here at Kew Gardens. I'm off to high five the Palm House but thank you for listening. Goodbye. Nature Table was hosted by me Sue Perkins and featured Lucy Porter, James Wong and Mark Spencer. It was written by John Hunter, Catherine Brinkworth and Jenny Laveille with additional material by Christina Riggs and Pete Toulouse. The researcher was Catherine Beasley, the music was by Ben Mirren, the producer was Simon Nichols.

And this was a BBC Studios audio production for Radio 4. Thanks for listening to the Comedy of the Week podcast from BBC Radio 4. If you want more, check out the Friday Night Comedy podcast featuring The News Quiz and Dead Ringers. Friday Night Comedy podcast featuring The News Quiz and Dead Ringers. From BBC Radio 4, Britain's biggest paranormal podcast is going on a road trip. I thought in that moment, oh my god, we've summoned something from this board. This is Uncanny USA. He says somebody's in the house and I screamed. AHHHHHHHHH

Listen to Uncanny USA on Beepsy Sounds or wherever you get your podcasts. If you dare.