Threat
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One of the most threatening scenarios I've ever experienced went down during my semester abroad in college. I'd moved to Japan and was taking classes at Sophia University. Looking to meet new people and make new friends, I decided to join the fencing club. Yup, fencing. That 17th century sport where two people are trying to poke each other's chest with pointy metal sticks.

or as we call those sticks in the fencing world, foils. I was a decidedly non-competitive participant. I was just there for the laughs, good times, and a little bit of exercise. So you can imagine my creeping dread when the club president signed us all up to take part in a tournament. When we got to the venue, I was already nervous. And then I got a look at my opponent's teams.

They all had matching embroidered jackets. I'm talking personalized gear. As I pulled on my worn out, borrowed uniform, I knew I was in trouble. The tough protective cotton did not fill me with much confidence for the threat that I was about to face. And then it was time. I stepped onto the track, saluted my opponent and then the referee, and pulled my mask on over my face.

On guard. Ready? Fence! I went on the attack. It turns out my opponent was an incredibly experienced fencer who had been coached at the highest rated university in Japan. And although I did manage to get a few points on the scoreboard, the threat that I had feared was real. A few quick rounds later and I had been absolutely schooled. But hey, what can I say?

It was threatening, but I gave it a go and I rose to the challenge. And it ended in a cool way. After the match, I walked up and shook my opponent's hand. And as is custom, we both looked at each other, nodded, and said, good game. I'm Sebastian Echeverri. And I'm Rutendo Shackleton. And this is the BBC Earth Podcast. Ryan Reynolds here from Int Mobile.

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This episode is all about threat. We'll delve deep into the power of fear. We'll meet the ex-WWE wrestler and marine biologist, Stu Bennett. We'll journey to Nepal to learn about the fight against poaching. And we'll listen into the underwater bubbles that help scientists combat the greatest threat our planet is facing, climate change.

That was such a great story. I had no idea you were into fencing. And we've talked a lot about ourselves to each other. You've never once mentioned fencing. It hasn't come up. It's really cool. And what I love about this is that it's a very unique example of what a threat can look like.

like. Yeah. You know, a threat by definition is a person or thing that's likely to cause damage or danger. And, you know, it really makes me start thinking about the threats that we stumble across in our everyday lives. So maybe an impending deadline at school or work. Oh, I know that threat very well. Right. Me too. I feel it all the time.

I mean, just trying to cross the street during rush hour can be life-threatening. But, you know, it also got me thinking about my Labradoodle Chilo.

He has this really deep bark. It was something that he just woke up with one day. Puberty hit hard. Overnight transformation. He went from a high-pitched little squeaky, like, furry fuzzball to, like, this deep bark. And when people knock on our door, it sounds scary from the other side. And he sounds as frightening as, say, I don't know, a dire wolf. But once I opened the door...

Chilo meets you with tons of tail wagging, licking, just wanting to get a nice big cuddle off of you. He would not hurt a fly. The threat that people feel when they don't see him is the perception. My Flora, she has the same thing going on. She's pretty small for a greyhound, but she's tough.

basically all legs. And when I'm walking her, people get, I think, threaded because her behavior with strangers is to lock all four of her legs in place, even if I'm trying to move her to the side, and just stand

As people approach, just deeply look into their eyes with her like tiny little greyhound head and bulging giant eyes. It's honestly, I get why people would be unnerved.

But the reality is Flora is pretty much scared of everything. She's a rescue. She did not know how to be a regular dog when we got her and she's still learning. But you know, that's actually super relevant. When anything, be that human or animal, is faced with a threat, they experience fear. And that fear can produce a number of responses.

We caught up with Liana Zanett from Western University, whose research and conservation work asks the question, how does fear affect animal behavior and ecosystems within our world? Everybody can understand fear. It's a basic thing. If I'm doing some fieldwork in South Africa and I hear a lion roar, what do I do? I run, right? That's fear.

Predators will always, always, always scare way more prey than they can possibly kill. And animals respond. If there's a predator around, you're going to want to stop what you're doing. You're going to look for the predator, and that will keep you alive another day. But you can't sort of have your head up looking for predators and your head down looking for food at the same time, right? It's a simple trade-off.

But as Liana says, trying to measure and study fear is not easy.

Studying this in the wild, it can be a little tricky because unlike killing, you know, where you have blood and guts often, you can directly measure it. But fear is something else. Like, it's not like we have instrumentation that we can pull out, you know, and put up to the animal and say, "Well, how scared are you?" So we measure basic things like how much time is the animal spending with its head up attending to something?

Is the animal running? You know, that's the clearest example of fear. Liana's research took her to the southern Gulf Islands, where large carnivores were wiped out from the ecosystem by humans over 100 years ago.

All the time we had been working out on the Gulf Islands, we'd notice the raccoons there. They don't behave like raccoons anywhere else in sort of North America. Raccoons are the classic in being nocturnal, right? They're out at night. But what we were finding on the Gulf Islands is that the raccoons out there would go out and feed mostly along the shore. They like to eat seafood, crabs and things.

They would be out there day and night, whenever they felt like it, is when the seafood buffet was open.

And in this environment, we quantified their sort of vigilance behavior. And what we found is that they spent 59 seconds of every minute with their head down under rocks, flipping them over, looking for food. So if a predator did come, they'd be toast, right? But they don't care because, hey, there's no predators. They're flipping them over. They spend one second of every minute with their head up, breathing or whatever. So they are constantly eating food.

We hung speakers up along chunks of shoreline which broadcast either the sounds of barking dogs or the sounds of barking seals. We did that for about a month. We find that when there's barking seals playing, the raccoons are behaving just like in a predator-free environment. Eating, eating, eating, constant eating. When they hear the sounds of barking dogs, it's a total reversal. They are not constantly eating anymore.

They are not looking under the rocks as much, flipping them over for food. They hardly ever go to shore, and if they do, they have their head up a lot more than they did otherwise. You restore just the fear of predators just by using sound, and all of a sudden they're afraid again. All animals experience fear, including predators. Ruff!

Take a cougar, for example. What could possibly scare a cougar? Cougars are like a top predator, right? And humans generally seem to be afraid of cougars, but we've learned that cougars are way more afraid of us. And so we did an experiment to see whether or not, in fact, cougars really are afraid of people because it seems like almost impossible.

We set a camera trap that's motion triggered. The idea being that when the cat comes to feed on its kill, it triggers the camera, that triggers the speaker, and the cougar either hears frogs peeping, which they shouldn't be afraid of,

or humans talking in a conversational sort of way. You don't get to see cougars very often. You certainly hardly ever get to see them sort of chewing away at their food, so it's pretty amazing. But what's also incredible is that you can see the cougar eating, eating, eating, eating.

The frog comes on, could care less, eating, eating, eating, eating. As soon as the human sound is on, their tail is up, they're out of there. They leave their food. And that's really important because that means they're not eating that food. Over a 24-hour period, the cougars ate about half as much just because they thought that people were around. And it makes perfect sense.

Because humans kill things like cougars at nine times the rate at which they're naturally killed, right? We are super lethal. So fear is a part of life within the animal kingdom and in areas where humans exist near animal habitats. This fear has a huge effect on food chains, animal behavior, and the surrounding ecosystems. But is the impact a good or a bad thing?

Fear can have lots of negative effects on animals, right? They produce fewer offspring. It can result in a decline in the population growth rate. But it is also enormously beneficial because it keeps the animal alive another day.

And what this research on fear is showing is that fear can be good for the environment. Keeping predators in systems means you're keeping a fear of predators in systems, and that can have effects down the food chain for the positive. And it's important to recognize, though, that it does exist and that it is a force and that it does affect all animal life.

I think that that is really key and we need to start writing this more in textbooks because it is turning out to be such a powerful force. So it turns out that fear is actually healthy. Yeah, I mean it doesn't feel great to be afraid, but animals evolve that feeling, that fear, for a good reason. It can push them to take action when they're faced with a threat and prolong their lives.

And this fear can be found in more than just direct interactions between prey and predator. When a prey species stumbles upon just the sign that a predator might be around, well, they're starting to feel threatened, and that fear can have an effect on what they do. This is called the ecology of fear.

And understanding it can be a super helpful tool for conservationists working to protect ecosystems, as we heard in that piece from Liana. Yeah, and you know, Sebastian, not everyone understands that we as humans pose such a scary threat to animals. Just our existence in the world, the sound of us talking, us walking around, the sound of our cars and bicycles can cultivate a fear in

I mean, the cougar left a whole carcass and that's harmful because it means that it didn't have any food. It didn't get enough nutrients inside of itself. So that's just one example of many potential fear responses that can cause harm to animals. All of the data that we have really supports the idea that animals really are more afraid of you than you are of them.

But I guess if we're looking for the scariest non-human animal in the animal kingdom, it would have to be the predator with the highest hunting success rate, right? So let's have a look at some figures. First off, we have the polar bear. That's scary. I don't want to run into a polar bear. They're big and they have caught humans. Amazing.

And when it's out hunting seals, it actually has a success rate of around 10%. Oh, that is definitely less than I expected based on my fear of a polar bear. Yes. Although I assume a seal can move faster than me, especially underwater. So nine out of 10 times, a seal is safe. That's pretty good. Pretty good odds. Yeah.

A lion, the king of the jungle, when it is in search of an antelope or a wildebeest or a juicy zebra, he's actually going to be getting a meal around 25% of the time. That's still pretty low. If these animals were taking a test, they would not be passing. No. I mean, it helps if they didn't sleep 20 hours a day. Yeah.

I mean, they could get that percentage right up. But no judgment here. Rest is important. The feral domestic cat. So this small little predator, which we see around in the streets, it brings home mice and

between 32 and 70% of the time. Whoa, that is way higher than I thought, especially after we've heard about these top predators having such a low score. I mean, people don't realize that they're actually living with a deadly killer if you're a cat owner. That's the life you've chosen. Those things are deadly. But the scariest, most threatening of predators...

Out of all of these that we've mentioned, Sebastian, are you ready? I am ready. I want to know who this is because the lineup so far has been pretty good. It is the very scary, very intimidating, very colorful dragonfly. Wait, are you for real? Yep. 95% success rate when it comes to hunting. What? 95%. These are high achieving predators. I

I mean, you need to be a statistician if it's prey to make sure that you are in the 5%. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Dragonflies, when they are hunting for mosquitoes or midges, can actually anticipate their prey's flight path and predict where they're going to be. So it makes them extremely successful hunters. I mean, if you've ever gotten the chance to watch a dragonfly over a field or a pond,

definitely do it. Their agility is incredible. My dad works in B2B marketing. He came by my school for career day and said he was a big ROAS man. Then he told everyone how much he loved calculating his return on ad spend.

My friend's still laughing at me to this day. Not everyone gets B2B, but with LinkedIn, you'll be able to reach people who do. Get $100 credit on your next ad campaign. Go to linkedin.com slash results to claim your credit. That's linkedin.com slash results. Terms and conditions apply. LinkedIn, the place to be, to be.

Hey, I'm Ryan Reynolds. Recently, I asked Mint Mobile's legal team if big wireless companies are allowed to raise prices due to inflation. They said yes. And then when I asked if raising prices technically violates those onerous two-year contracts, they said, what the f*** are you talking about, you insane Hollywood a**hole?

So to recap, we're cutting the price of Mint Unlimited from $30 a month to just $15 a month. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. $45 upfront payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three-month plan only. Taxes and fees extra. Speeds lower above 40 gigabytes per details. While we are talking about top predators, I do need to mention someone. Stu Bennett, a.k.a. the WWE wrestler Bad News Barrett.

He has a win record of right around 40%. That's better than the polar bear, better than the lion, right up there with those dangerous feral cats, and just about the same as a leopard hunting in southern Africa. But Stu is no stranger to being under threat himself. Certainly the feelings of threat are something that I have felt on numerous occasions during my professional life.

Once I'm out there in the arena, sometimes I stare across the ring at my opponent and he might quite literally be twice the size of me. I'm 6'6", I'm 250 pounds, around 18 and a half stone.

but I'll often be in the ring with somebody who is quite literally double that weight, a 500 pound, seven foot three opponent. And in those situations you stare across and of course it's panic at what this guy who might have been a former world's strongest man, what this man could actually do to my body. What a lot of people don't know about me is that I have a degree in marine biology from the University of Liverpool and to this day that is still a passion of mine.

One particular trip I did was in South Africa to see the great white sharks off the coast of Cape Town. It really was one of the coolest experiences I've ever had. We got a real up-close and personal view of these apex predators in their own environment.

There was one point where a shark, it was kind of swimming sideways past us, but then it suddenly turned and faced us and it was locking eyes with us in this cage. It was, you know, 10 feet away, staring into the black depths of the eyeballs of this great white shark. And you know, if it had a chance, would snap you in two in a heartbeat. But just that moment and that connection with the animal was pretty incredible and something that I'll remember for the rest of my life.

I always had a fascination with biology, specifically marine biology. When I was a kid, my parents would take me on holidays and we'd be in Greece and Spain and I used to be away in the water snorkeling and diving, swimming underwater all the time, just following the fish around. I ended up at one point snorkeling on my own away from the main beach.

Suddenly, I see this four-foot eel dart out and grab a fish that was swimming by and then dart back into its cave. And of course, my initial reaction was one of terror, thinking I was going to be next. I didn't want this thing attacking me. So I got out of the water and looked it up afterwards, and it turned out it looked exactly like a moray eel. So it was quite fascinating getting to witness this moray eel pouncing on its prey and then heading back into its lair.

threats to our oceans and threats to the environment that are caused by human beings and what they're doing to the planet. Now, I'm not some Dave Angel eco-warrior, but I would like things to be done differently in the world.

When I look back to my degree, which was over 20 years ago now, we were being taught in our classes and our lectures about plastic pollution and ocean acidification, global warming, overfishing. These were all literally things that we discussed in our lectures 20 plus years ago. And to me, nothing has changed. And that is a really, really concerning situation.

The younger generation now are far more in tune with our environment than we ever were. People want to be activists. People want to fix problems that have been caused by previous generations. And hopefully as a population, we can start making some positive changes. There is something so cool about seeing this sort of hidden side to someone. I mean, Stu's this...

Kind of threatening, maybe, looking guy. Wrestler, right? He's got this imposing voice and aura. But he's a marine biologist. He loves animals. He's concerned about threats to the world. It's kind of like you're hearing about someone's secret identity. It makes me think that Stu is the real-life Hulk. Biologist by day, and then a super strong...

Brawler, fighter, hero by night. Yeah. I like that. I really like that. He's the real life Bruce Banner. But yeah, I mean, I loved how he talked about how it can be thrilling to be in the presence of the power of a threat. It can be invigorating, but it's also an opportunity to learn.

When he was nine years old, he stumbled across a moray eel being a predator and doing its own thing, you know, catching prey to feed itself. And he did perceive that as a threat before realizing he wasn't in any danger. Like, obviously, when you're young, of course, it could be scary. But that encounter actually sparked fascination for him. He was fascinated.

intrigued to figure out what animal he'd stumbled upon and wanting to know more about it. And he did that when he got home. And this is a prime example of

what a healthy threat can be. You know, we want people to be happy and respectful spectators of wildlife, of the natural world. And he acknowledged that he was afraid, that he did have a fear, but without using that as a decision to hurt the animal. It's that adrenaline rush. You know, it primes us for action when we see something that feels threatening.

But it is up to us what we do with all of that energy. We're journeying to Nepal, a country that works hard to protect its wildlife against the threat of poaching. Kumar Padal from the NGO Greenhood Nepal is part of this anti-trafficking fight. He's trying to prevent it, one song at a time. Nepal is a really beautiful place with the Himalayas and the mainland of Asia.

We are really lucky to have all this incredible wildlife from the Gangetic Dolphin to Snow Leopards, Rhino, Tiger, Pangolins, Red Panda and many species. The problem is we fear that we may lose them very soon due to the poaching that is happening. I grew up in one of the small villages in Nepal-China border region and I have seen the people participating in illegal wildlife trade from my early childhood.

I was always curious to learn why people do it and what are the ways that we can prevent people participating in such acts. I visited prisons across Nepal, interviewing more than 100 prisoners, asking them their motivations.

And at some point I was very angry with them because I really love wildlife. And they were telling me how they post the tiger and how they post the rhino, how they smuggle from one city to another. And hearing those things that makes you feel so angry. But at the same time, so learning deeper why they are doing it, who are they, where they come from and what they know about the consequences of their act.

Sometimes I was thinking, oh, poachers are the very rich people who want to have the rhino and tiger in their house. And then sometimes I was feeling, oh, poachers are the really poor people, maybe, so they're just doing it for their basic food and shelter. So there was some kind of established narratives. What I learned from my prison interview was they knew poaching is illegal, but they didn't know about the full extent of consequences.

Nepal has the strongest wildlife law that involves for anyone who commits the wildlife crime they have to go through the 15-year imprisonment and up to $10,000 fine. There are also other consequences. Like many people who I met inside the prison, they said that their family committed suicide. Some people told me that they couldn't get their children married. Some of their family members changed their religion.

After hearing all the stories that made me realize that we can stop the pushing if we could communicate the full extent of consequences.

In Nepal, traditional folk music, especially using musical instrument sarangi, is used to communicate each other, their feeling.

And historically, it has been used as a way of sharing news from one place to another place when there was no telecommunication, when there was no television. Indigenous Gandharva people were making songs about the news and then they're travelling from one place to another place singing those songs.

We realized that traditional folk music could be one of the effective ways to communicate the dangers of poaching. Then I wrote a song featuring the stories that I heard inside the prison with the sarangi player Dilu Gandharva.

We traveled across central Nepal. We just started to play the music and then people just gathered. So it was very easy to reach out to the thousands of people with this message.

Conservation is not only about having strong legislation, it's about communicating those things to the communities who actually live with wildlife. Many people demonize poacher and I agree that because they do terrible things.

But they're also humans, so we need to understand them and then we need to communicate how better we can engage them in conservation. We can make them understand to value the wildlife. Kumar's in-person, up-close community approach to all of this is really powerful. I feel like it's so easy to miss the human aspect of poaching.

Yeah, these are people that did something wrong, but they didn't do it without a reason. Kumar went out, he listened to their stories and acknowledged their situations. And I think that's what we have to do to actually make meaningful solutions. You know, as humans, what's really hard is if we have a conviction about something and

it's very difficult to sit and listen to an opposing opinion. And more so when you're faced with

A poacher who has committed a crime, who has been killing and trafficking animals, it is very difficult. And I really commend Kumar being able to put himself in that situation and say, right, these conversations are crucial for the advancement of conservation. For real, it is not an easy conversation to have. And it is not easy, like you said, to extend that compassion conversation.

Yeah. And who knew that traditional folk singing could be such a force against poaching? I mean, unlike canvassing people, right? Which often doesn't work. I'm going to be honest with you, Sebastian. This week alone, there was someone who knocked on my door wanting to sell something and they knocked on my door three times in a single day. And I ignored them every single time.

Because, you know, sometimes it's genuinely not the right or appropriate time to have those calls on your door. But entertaining people instead is great.

so magnetic and it has this attractive power where you just can't ignore it. Like when you're in the town square and there's someone busking or there's street performers, you can't help but stop and watch for a bit. It's really important to try and reach people in a way that works for them. Sometimes that can be canvassing, but a song that's definitely more catchy and fun.

We said earlier, a threat by definition is a thing or being likely to cause damage or danger. It is the living example of potential trouble or ruin. Sounds bleak, right? But throughout this episode, we've heard about facing down threats, about how to prevent disaster. Be that Liana turning threat into a force for good and using fear to bolster ecosystems.

Stu having a threatening encounter and learning from it. Or through Kumar investigating what causes the threat of poaching and using that new knowledge as a way to stop it. Now we're going to hear the sound of our planet's greatest threat, climate change. Oskar Glowacki works in the Institute of Geophysics at the Polish Academy of Sciences.

A polar and marine expert, he's recorded the underwater sounds of melting glaciers in the Arctic and Antarctic. It's a sound that we can only hear as a result of the Earth being too warm. It's a huge threat that the entire Earth is facing. But in listening to these sounds and learning how quickly this is happening, Oscar and his team are discovering vital information.

So what we can hear under the water in the Arctic or Antarctic is essentially a sound of melting glaciers and ice caps. When huge icebergs are produced from the tips of glaciers, huge chunks of ice are cracking and impacting the sea surface and we are not only hearing the impact between the ice and the ocean but we are also hearing the air bubbles that are trapped under the water due to the push of this iceberg

And in the case of melting, what we can hear are the explosions or bursts of bubbles that are trapped in the ice. So we are collecting the noise samples to find out how fast the glaciers and ice caps are disappearing. To find out a good way, a better way to estimate that. And it turns out that underwater sounds deliver a very useful information about the melting glacier.

or time-lapse images are giving us just some information on the surface. But underwater acoustics give us this chance to look under the water. The BBC Earth podcast was hosted by me, Rutenda Shackleton, and me, Sebastian Echeverry. Our interviewees were Liana Zanett from Western University, Stu Bennett, a.k.a. Bad News Barrett, and Kumar Paudel from Green Hood, Nepal.

With thanks to Oscar Glowacki for the Glacier Soundscape. Our producers are Jeff Marsh and Rachel Byrne. The researcher is Seb Masters. The podcast theme music was written by Axel Cocutier. Mixing and additional sound design was done by Peregrine Andrews. The production manager is Catherine Stringer, and the production coordinator is Gemma Woodson. The associate producer is Kristen Kane, and the executive producer is Deborah Dudgeon.

The BBC Earth podcast is a BBC Studios production for BBC Earth. My dad works in B2B marketing. He came by my school for career day and said he was a big ROAS man. Then he told everyone how much he loved calculating his return on ad spend.

My friend's still laughing at me to this day. Not everyone gets B2B, but with LinkedIn, you'll be able to reach people who do. Get $100 credit on your next ad campaign. Go to linkedin.com slash results to claim your credit. That's linkedin.com slash results. Terms and conditions apply. LinkedIn, the place to be, to be.