Death
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My grandfather's death was sudden and traumatic. His support of the Zimbabwean liberation struggle had caught the attention of the Rhodesian military, and he was assassinated with a landmine while striving. After his death, my grandmother, who already had five children and was heavily pregnant with another, had a lot to take care of. All relatives needed to be informed.

You see, in our culture, we believe that a human being's funeral can only proceed when the whole family is united. When preparing for the funeral, my grandmother chose objects to place within his casket: his favorite blanket, his suit, his wedding ring. But she also had another hard choice to make. Now that my grandfather had died, my grandmother had to decide whether or not she would marry his brother.

You see, in parts of Zimbabwe, custom dictates that a widow should wed her deceased husband's brother as a way of remaining integrated and supported within her community. As a newly single parent with six children to look after, the road ahead definitely looked difficult. But for my grandmother, death did not signal the end of her vow to my grandfather. She strongly believed that she would see her husband again when she too passed on.

So, despite having a big family to provide for, my grandmother broke this tradition and chose not to marry. After my grandfather was buried, my grandmother planted a water lily on his grave, its stems stretching beneath the soil to a few inches above the ground. She explained to my 14-year-old father, "This is to help Baba's soul find its way to the surface."

For many Zimbabweans, the grave is not a permanent place. And on the anniversary of my grandfather's death, our family celebrates his life by sharing a meal, playing music, and telling stories. I'm Rutendo Shackleton. And I'm Sebastian Echeverry. And this is the BBC Earth Podcast.

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This episode is all about death and its role as a part of life in the natural world. We'll be attending the post-mortem of a cheetah, chatting to TikToker Mamadou about our planet's deadliest animals, and delving deep into the number one destination for the dead, the soil.

Rutendo, I think it's really beautiful how your family celebrated and still celebrates your grandpa. Those traditions to bring back memories and keep him alongside you in some way. You can really feel the love that's there in the family. Yeah, for sure. It's definitely been a helpful process of understanding death and grieving too. I learned so many new stories about my grandfather whenever we take time to remember his life and it keeps...

keeps me really connected to someone I unfortunately didn't get to meet.

But I'm also aware that this isn't how everybody goes about these things. And Sebastian, I think you likely hold a different view. Yeah, it's interesting. I think for me, I'd say that death is the end or maybe an end. You know, when I die, when I pass away, me, my consciousness, my experiences, they stop. And at least that's all I expect to get.

But I gotta say, that doesn't make me appreciate your process any differently or any less. I mean, honestly, it made me think a lot about how I'd want to be remembered. I'd want it to be a celebration. And I love how your grandmother planted a flower on top of your grandfather's grave, his resting place, you know, where he's buried. There's something really soothing to me about that connectedness between death and nature. ♪

It's interesting, right? Burial is this almost global custom. When things pass away, we bury them. That's where most terrestrial life ends up, whether it's human or animal. And at the same time, though, if we think about it from a different perspective, that's where we go to find new life, right? Seeds sprouting out, eggs hatching, little critters crawling around. Rutendo, you're about to hear me get very excited about

Because I got to talk to a soil ecologist. His name is Frank Ashwood, and he's from an organization called Forest Research. And of course, the first thing I had to ask Frank is, what is soil? Frank's going to tell us all about it, but he has just one condition, that we do not call it dirt. Okay.

The first thing to say is soil is a really complex living thing. But the main thing that makes soil soil and gives it the sort of nice brown color and sponginess that we love is the life, is the organic material in the soil. But there's also like a lot of

Dead animals or dead life? Yeah, it's a funny one with soil because there could be no life in soil without death. So the organic material in the soil is decomposing plant and animal remains, basically. It's all of the start of life in soil comes from trying to get all the carbon and the nutrients back out of the decaying plant and animal material. So basically soil is...

like this graveyard for every living thing on land. - Yeah, we all go back to the soil, yeah, from whence we came. - So the life in soil comes from the absorption of nutrients like carbon from dead matter. How does that actually happen? - So if we take, for example, a leaf breaking down, you've got some organic material there which is alive and then it falls off the tree, it's dead, and then it immediately starts to get worked on by all of the organisms in the soil.

Who's working on it? Give me some names. Yes, earthworms jump straight in and feeding on that leaf litter. So they'll drag it down into the soil. They'll chew it up. It passes through the guts of an earthworm and it's immediately broken down into small bits. Bacteria and fungi will live in earthworm guts and they'll get sort of inoculated into the leaf litter. It'll pass back out the other end of the earthworm.

into the soil primed for microbes to start breaking it down. So the most important thing is those nutrients are in a chemical form that are actually available to plant roots again. So they'll immediately pick it back up and it'll get recycled back through into the plants. Some will also get eaten by other organisms and there's just this whole food web in the soil.

So the nutrients that were locked inside dead matter, they get chewed up, digested and spread about by all the living things in the soil. These nutrients are then available. They're used by other soil dwelling organisms to sustain their lives. But who are these organisms that we're talking about?

So yeah, if you just took a teaspoon of healthy soil, in that teaspoon of soil you probably have over a billion organisms. Whoa, okay. Yeah, and so at the top end you've got what we call the megafauna. So those are rabbits and mice and, you know, moles and things like that. Sure. Go down a size range and we immediately get to the macrafauna.

we call them. And so that's anything that's larger than two millimeters in body width. Okay, so that's still the cutoff for being kind of big is already very small. It's already very small, yeah. So you go from really big to like still pretty small by most standards, yeah.

Then we get down the next size range and this will start getting very small now. So this is the mesophauna and they're smaller than two millimetres in width. And these are things like springtails, mites. You've got things like pseudoscorpions, which are like tiny little scorpions without a tail. So they just inject their prey with digestive enzymes with their pincers. There's this whole diversity of organisms at that level that we just would, I'd love to be able to just spend my time researching them more.

Very cool, but I bet we can find even smaller life in there, right? Yeah, so we go down even smaller and these are things that, so the microbes, you can't see them with the naked eye, that's the way we kind of categorize them. So you've got nematode worms there, which are the most abundant organism on the planet. Okay, hold on, that's a fact drop. Yeah. In terms of just like sheer numbers of them. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, so it's estimated that one in every five animal on the planet is a nematode worm. Wow. Is that, so that's in terms of number of individuals or like number of species? Number of individuals, yeah. You've got things like protists for like little single-celled organisms.

swimming around in the water pores within the soil and you've got lots of things swimming around in there so tardigrades water bears yeah yeah they're cute and then smaller than that are the microbes true the true micro so you've got the fungi and the bacteria and just a huge diversity of those i mean they're the really important ones for releasing a lot of the minerals and the nutrients from organic matter so they're really heavily involved in decay so like fungi

are really important for breaking down plant material. They're just amazing at it. The amount of diversity in, you're saying like a little scoop of soil, I'm getting more species diversity than if I went to the zoo. Oh, hugely. Yeah, yeah. Soil is one of the major biodiversity reservoirs we actually have on Earth. And it's really poorly explored as well. It's called like the poor person's rainforest.

You don't have to go to the bottom of the ocean. You don't have to go to the rainforest to see new things. You can go into your back garden and flip over a rock and you're probably going to see something that you just never knew existed. Oh my gosh, Sebastian. I love this conversation. I love that you got to speak to Frank about soil because growing up,

I was that kid who would go to my back garden, play with earthworms, walk around outside barefoot and just get stuck into the soil. Like one of my favorite things was digging up, it wasn't my mom's favorite thing, but I would go into her flower beds because that's where, you know, the loose soil was. That's where all the good stuff is. That's where the good stuff is. And I'd take out the rocks, dust those off, and then I'd find the bugs and look at,

the different bugs and bath time was never fun for me after that. I think maybe your mom just needed to view it as you going to this like wildlife park, right? Because like that's kind of what I got from Frank is that soil is this super accessible way for almost everyone in the world to learn and find life all around them.

I didn't grow up thinking about soil that way. I didn't play very much in the soil. I didn't like to, like, dig in stuff. But I kind of wish I did, because I had this idea that I'd have to, like, travel really far away to see cool animals...

But I could have just been digging in the soil beds with a magnifying lens or something. As long as you've got like a park or a little garden, you can really get in there and see all that cool life and see what's going on. You're right, because sometimes we take that for granted. And it reminds me of what my high school art teacher used to say, is that, you know, with these large, beautiful art pieces that...

People like Monet created, yes, the larger picture is beautiful and gorgeous, but the uniqueness of it is only seen when you go really close and you start to see the individual strokes, the mixing of the colors, how he's layered everything. And that is the same with what Frank was talking about. Just like artwork, no two soils around the world are exactly the same.

They all have something that makes them special. But one thing that all soil does is it plays this vital role on our planet. It's recycling, it's decomposing, and it's actually the biggest holder of carbon in the entire world. Wait, are you serious? Yeah, there is more carbon in the soil than in the atmosphere or in any above-ground habitat, like even more than in trees. So protecting soil is actually really important to our fight against climate change.

When we're thinking about soil, we're looking at the power that organic waste matter can have in its decomposed state. But what about the recently deceased? What can we learn from them? So I'll fill you in a bit on the history. So this is Christine. She's a 10-year-old northern cheetah, the last of her group at Whipsnade Zoo. So she's a 30-kilo cheetah.

She's probably the size of a big dog, maybe like a Labrador. So my name's Simon Spiro. I'm the wildlife pathologist for ZSL London Zoo and Whipsnade Zoos. And my job begins after the animals die. She has, like all cheetahs, a very beautiful face and body.

My job is extremely varied. I never know when I come in in the morning what I'm going to be presented with. Some days it's a small fish or a colony of ants. Other days I may be presented with a lion or tiger. Recently one of our elderly cheetahs at ZSL Whipsnade Zoo was euthanised due to complications with old age.

And that worsened over the weekend. So as an elderly animal, the decision was made to euthanise her so that she wouldn't be in pain anymore. Obviously, it's very sad every time an animal dies. We have very dedicated keepers who know each animal individually. But we're all professionals and each death is a massive opportunity to understand this animal better and the wider species. She's had long running problems with mobility. She's had a problem with her right hip.

Even though we knew what had killed her, the purpose of the post-mortem was to see if there was anything we'd missed over her life, if there were any diseases that she'd been affected by that we'd never noticed, to check she was healthy and to gather samples for further scientific research to understand this species. So we'll start by weighing her and then we'll do an external examination where we'll just look at everything on the outside.

To begin the internal examination, we have to stabilise the carcass. So a post-mortem examination requires us to examine every tissue of the body, inside and out. So I start with my knife right under her chin and then cut back down the ventral midline, so right down the middle of the belly. There's not very much blood. That's because her heart isn't beating, so there's nothing to pump the blood out.

While some people might find the idea of a post-mortem a bit gruesome, the information that comes out is invaluable and is shared all over the world, with vets in the field working with wildlife to researchers in science labs trying to understand the basic biology of these animals. I'm now going into the abdomen itself. I'll start by cutting down the midline and then just behind the last rib I'll open up either side. It's quite a big fat pad there by the liver.

Bladder's full, there's a good amount of abdominal fat, there's food in the stomach and I can see her ovaries here, some follicles as well. We have our first finding. If you could take a note please Ethan. We've got in the ventral midline of the abdomen, we have a small amount of mild haemorrhage

During post-mortem we collect numerous samples. Every organ will be preserved in formaldehyde and this is for microscopic examination. So in a few days time I'll take those organs and the formalin will have fixed every single molecule exactly in place so it won't rot, it won't change form and then I can look at those tissues down a microscope to complete the post-mortem examination.

So post-mortem examinations are as old as the zoo. ZSL was founded in 1826 and we've been doing post-mortems ever since. This is our main formal in archive where we have dozens and dozens of small pots each containing tissues from an individual post-mortem. This one contains a toque gecko.

This one, a black-naped fruit dove. A surprising fact is that there's actually more animals under London Zoo than in it, as we keep samples of every post-mortem ever performed in our basements. Or the liver of a slender loris with what looks like some parasite cysts in it.

Inside our maze-like basement, there are hundreds of thousands of tissues in thousands of pots, each representing an individual animal post-mortem. It's not for everyone, but I really love it down here, surrounded by all the history. I'm always excited about what I might find.

Here is a whole preserved yak foetus, 285 days gestation. It's crazy to think that each of these 10,000 pots represents an individual animal and an individual post-mortem from any time in the last 100 years. And here's a coffee jar filled with hairballs from a reindeer. So we've got the microscope slides back from the cheetah. I'm here looking at a slide with samples of liver, spleen, kidney, lung and ovary.

When we were doing the post-mortem, I was a little concerned about some yellow lumps and little yellow nodules in the lungs. And if I look closely with the microscope, I can see that those nodules are made of individual cells called macrophages filled with fat. This is a disease called endogenous lipid pneumonia, something that doesn't trouble me at all, but that I do find very commonly in cheetahs.

So, looking at these tissues on a cellular level, we can see that even though her bones and joints were causing her a lot of pain and discomfort in her old age, her kidneys at least were exactly as healthy as we thought they were. We can be confident that there were no nasty surprises that we hadn't diagnosed or that we weren't aware of. So here, looking at the spleen, we noticed a few white lumps, and if I zoom in,

to the cells, I can see that those lumps are composed of fat cells and tissue that makes red blood cells. So this is a type of tumour called a myelolipoma, which is an incidental finding. It's a very common finding in cheetahs. So I'm very happy to see that it was what I suspected and not anything more sinister. All the information we glean from death helps us better care for and understand animals in our zoos and populations in the wild.

The information and the samples we take are shared with researchers, vets, conservationists, form the basis of thousands of scientific studies, and influence the decisions made by people working with these animals all across the world. Why get all your holiday decorations delivered through Instacart? Because maybe you only bought two wreaths, but you have 12 windows.

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All Simon had to say was ventral midline of the abdomen and mild hemorrhage of the subcutaneous space, and I was hooked. That, by the way, means that he found a small amount of bleeding in the space under the skin down the middle of the cheetah's belly. Just in case anyone was wondering. Yeah.

Yeah, thank you for clearing that up because I did not necessarily put that together. And it's pretty rare for us to get this insight, you know, because most postmortems are usually done in a very confidential space. Yeah, I can believe that. I'd never heard anything like this before for, you know, a zoo animal just, you know, in crime shows or something like that for a person. It's not something that I was necessarily even aware that actually happened.

But it was surprising. Maybe comforting isn't the right word, but it felt strangely comforting to listen to Simon do the postmortem. I personally really, really struggle with the death of animals. It's like really upsetting. I get very emotional. It's just hard for me to even think about. But here, you know, Christine's death was the start of this kind of new process that ended up being an exploration of her life. It

makes her death feel at least a little bit meaningful in a new way. Yeah, I totally felt that as well. Another thing that struck me was just how useful collections of postmortem samples and archive collections in general can really be. You know, they're incredibly accessible, and that matters a lot.

There are a lot of really great scientists and scientists in training that might not be able to go out and do field research for a ton of reasons, like disabilities, child care, safety concerns, or just plain lack of funding. But these dead specimens are...

kind of like soil, like a rich ground for new discoveries to grow. And like soil, they're right there waiting for anyone to show up and study them. And it goes without saying that those people who do collect these samples have a huge obligation to do so in a way that will let us learn the most about the animals and with the least amount of collecting and suffering as possible. And I feel like we just heard a really powerful and respectful version of that practice.

Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more. One of the main causes of death for wild animals is death by predator. If you're an impala, there's no greater reminder of your own mortality than coming face to face with a strong, agile, and hungry leopard.

TikTok star Mamadou Ndiaye knows a whole lot about deadly animals. He's built a huge audience of over 14 million followers by sharing his brilliant takes on animal behaviors. And he's even written a book about animals that will end you.

But ironically, Mamadi's life as a wildlife TikToker all started out with him losing his job. I downloaded TikTok April 15th, 2020, and I ended up getting laid off April 16th of 2020. Oh, wow. Ouch.

I was by far the youngest person there. I was the newest one. I was only working there for about three months. And a lot of our work was based in New York, which became like the epicenter for the virus. But then, you know, I suddenly had a lot of free time and nowhere to go. Mama D, you are literally the reason why I joined TikTok, because my sister kept sending me your videos and being like, yo, yo, this person, you've got to follow this guy.

So she was sending me all these elephant videos that you were doing, like why baby elephants are a vibe. Yeah. I absolutely love that one. And jaguars are disrespectful. I totally agreed with that one, Mamadou, because I've been telling people that jaguars are the ultimate apex predator that we should be thinking about. Not lions, not tigers. It's jaguars.

I will die on that hill with you and I can spend the rest of this time we have here talking about it because I've felt this way for years. Yeah. No one's listened to me until I had this platform. They climb trees. They are terrestrial and they can swim and they can hunt on all

It's a triple threat right there. They are the avatars of the apex predator world. I tell you, if they weren't naturally like, they didn't have a natural aversion towards humans, we might actually be in a lot of trouble. Yeah. There's one video that I love that's animals that look dangerous but aren't. Because as a spider scientist, I deal a lot with people, you see something that looks scary and then we immediately feel like that thing's going to come kill me.

but it's so wonderful seeing someone like you that has such a big platform, take a step back and see what the animal can actually do. Yeah. I like using both sides of it. Cause there's a lot of animals that still got, got a negative stigma, mostly from Hollywood, but,

And sometimes it can escalate to them being persecuted and they just get like their population suffers for it. An example would be like the aye aye, the primate from Madagascar. They like really freaky. They have the long middle finger. And there used to be this, I guess, urban legend that if it stuck its middle finger at you, that means you're condemned to death. Now, if I say that like on TikTok, it might sound like, OK, that's just a legend. But like people would actually like hunt them and kill them. And then like the environment almost fell apart because of it, at least in Yellowstone.

So it's like, you know, you want to kind of raise awareness. But at the same time, there's also animals that don't look dangerous. But they could be. Yeah. Those are also fun to talk about, too. So how do you make sure that when you're making a video that you're being true to what the animals are really like? What kind of research? Where are you getting your research? And where do you look for information?

things to make sure that you've got the facts. I try to use multiple sources. I never depend on one because even those can be wrong. But the whole misinformation, that's always tough. When you're also being entertaining at the same time, I'll often exaggerate or I'll give you human traits to animals, where I say orcas are just bullies or whatever. You have to try to find that balance where you're not delving so much into the hyperbole, where you're taken away from the educational aspect. But in terms of misinformation, you always want to cross-check yourself.

But also be able to admit when you like get things wrong because that's going to happen no matter how thorough you are. That's so important. Yeah.

Was there any one animal that stands out to you as your favorite? And like, what about them makes them special to you? Elephants have always been my favorite animal. Yes! There's nothing else like it. They're incredibly intelligent. They have emotional intelligence. They have the ability to empathize. They can grieve. Just everything about them. Also, the babies are cute. So that helps too. You've made Rutendo very happy. I'm so glad. You've made me so happy. And you know what I like about elephants?

People don't realize how, like, rude they actually are. Yeah.

They have an attitude. If a bird's in its way, it's going to swat the bird out the way. If a baby is really upset, it has a big tantrum that the entire savannah can hear. You've made me so happy. I'm beaming. It's funny you even mentioned that because right before this, I was working on a video, like a long form video for YouTube. And the opening scene is a girl recording an elephant and the elephant slapping the phone out of her hand and then trying to steal it from her. They can be jerks when they want to be.

What made you first become interested in nature? I loved Animal Planet as a kid. My parents were like really strict. So basically I wasn't allowed to watch TV on weekdays, but I could watch Animal Planet because technically, you know, it's educational that and Discovery Channel. So I was kind of like my loophole. So I would like watch Animal Planet all the time. And then I went to a zoo and then I told my mom, yeah, I'm going to be a zookeeper now. Wow.

And when you were really getting into it, you know, what inspired you about the natural world? What things about that, like, got you excited? I don't know. I think it was just interesting seeing the way things worked and how everything's, like, connected. I remember researching the idea of keystone species, like, when I was maybe six or seven, because I thought it was, like, really cool how, like, you take one animal and everything, like, falls apart. And you kind of respect, like, every animal has some type of role, even, like, mosquitoes or, like,

Like cockroaches, things that you would kind of you'd think that you'd want gone, but like you realize like the world that would actually be worse off if we didn't have them. So things like that I found interesting and also just animals in general, just like different adaptations that they have, how they're able to survive things that we can't. I just always found that really like captivating. What I love the most is that...

Your parents were so strict that they actually pushed you into something that you loved anyways, you know? Like, I don't know. Do they take credit for that inspiration? Because I know my parents do. My mom never forgets to remind me.

It was like, yeah, remember, this all started because I got you zoo books. And I was like, yeah, you're probably right. Yeah, and now you're expanding into books, which is awesome. Do you mind just telling us about your book, 100 Animals That Can F-ing End You?

The title is pretty much what it is. A hundred animals that are dangerous. Some have the ability to kill humans. Some can mildly injure you, but they're all, they're all have these adaptations that help them like in whatever, like a ecosystem they're in. They're kind of like my TikToks, but in written form, but I guess I can go in more in depth than I can in like a 60 second TikTok video. Awesome. And now can you please leave us with one last little treat? Can you give us like an animal fact that you just absolutely

absolutely cannot stop thinking about i don't know why this one freaked me actually i do know why and i'll explain why uh so like there's this like island malagas island and about 60 000 uh cape ganets will nest there free from predators and everything nice but the thing is because of overfishing what they used to do was one ganet would like stay with the chick while the other one would go out and fish but since there's less fish now both will go and leave the chick and it

That normally would be a problem, but the pelicans somehow found out. So now these pelicans will fly over to these islands and then just walk around. And if you've seen the video, it looks like they're walking through a supermarket. They'll grab chicks and just swallow them whole completely. And it freaked me out for some reason when I saw it.

And then they'll fly back to their own chicks, their own pelican chicks, regurgitate the half-digested baby birds that they just ate. And then the baby pelicans kind of like grow up off of that kind of stuff. Oh, my Lord. All right. Well, now that image lives rent-free in my head. Thank you, Mamadou. Thank you. You're very welcome. You know, it was honestly kind of emotional learning about Mamadou's story. It reminded me a lot of my own and my childhood.

I will say I think pelican spiders are still cooler, but those images are going to stick with me. Yeah, I was today years old when I found out that pelicans did that. And you know what? I really hope that Mamadou's book, A Hundred Animals That Can End You, has at least two chapters dedicated to jaguars. They have an amazing hunting skill set and are just so fascinatingly deadly.

The cold hard truth of it all is that although death ends life, it also supports life. It provides opportunity, knowledge, and really often nourishment.

But what does that sound like in the natural world? Well, you're about to hear a very literal example of this as captured by sound recordist and audio producer Jennifer Jarrett. She collected this audio with remote recorders from a safe distance. Wise move.

It's summertime in Yellowstone, mating season, and two grizzly bears aged around seven years old, one male and one female, are about to have dinner. It's date night. They've encountered the carcass of a bison. Insects buzz around. Magpies chirp and swoop overhead. They're all guests at this buffet.

It's the circle of life and death, people. The BBC Earth podcast was hosted by me, Rutendo Shackleton. And me, Sebastian Echeverri. Our interviewees were Frank Ashwood, Simon Spiro, and Mamadou Ndiaye. With many thanks to Jennifer Jarrett for our bison carcass and bear soundscape, and to ZSL and Whipsnade Zoos.

Our producers are Jeff Marsh and Rachel Byrne. Our researcher is Seb Masters. The podcast theme music was written by Axel Cacutier, and mixing and additional sound design were done by Peregrine Andrews. The production manager is Catherine Stringer, and the production coordinator is Gemma Wooten. The associate producer is Kristen Kane, and the executive producer is Debra Dudgeon. The BBC Earth podcast is a BBC Studios production for BBC Earth.

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