Life On The Brink – Details, episodes & analysis

What a title hey?
Apologies for this episode being a few days late, we're both still getting a handle on keeping this podcast running while now working full-time! 

But enough of that, it's time for Episode 18! Our guest on this episode, Dr Emily Roycroft, was supposed to be studying the family tree of eight species of extinct Australian rodents. She then realised one wasn't actually extinct. Listen in to hear that story, and whether this mouse will go extinct for the SECOND time. 

Follow Life On The Brink
on Instagram: instagram.com/lifeonthebrinkpodcast
and via our website: lifeonthebrinkpodcast.com

Follow Emil
on Twitter: twitter.com/emily_roycroft

Produced by Gabriel George & Alex Bezzina

Theme music by Kyle Morley

Episode Cover Image: Shark Bay Mouse. LAWLER.

Season 2 is heerrreee! 

Sorry for the delay! Gabe ended up getting and starting a new job since our last episode. So, to preserve what's left of his sanity, we thought it'd be best to push the start of our new episodes back by a week.

But Episode #17 is worth the wait! We're bickering about bettongs with Caitlin Weatherstone. We talk about why the northern bettong is balancing so close to the edge of extinction when other bettongs seem to be managing okay, hear hairy stories about being evacuated in a tiny helicopter during a 10-minute gap in the tropical rain, and learn about how Alex actually helped Caitlin try to discover unknown bettong populations a couple years ago!

And no we aren't going to start the episodes back at #1 again. Partly because it'd get confusing, but also because saying we have 17 episodes sounds way cooler. 

And sorry some of the audio from me (G) sounds a little funky - had a tech breakdown and had to use our backup recording!

Follow Life On The Brink
on Instagram: instagram.com/lifeonthebrinkpodcast
and via our website: lifeonthebrinkpodcast.com

Follow Caitlin  
on Instagram: instagram.com/wildsearch/

Produced by Gabriel George & Alex Bezzina

Theme music by Kyle Morley

Episode Cover Image: Northern bettong. STEPHANIE TODD/JCU/WWF-AUS.

Welcome to the first of four episodes on ELASMOBRANCHS (rays & sharks)! Over the next month, we've got two full episodes and two little bonus episodes headed your way. We know we only just started out fortnightly schedule but we just can't help ourselves!!

Episode 10 of Life On The Brink is all about the world of the ocean's wanderers: MANTA RAYS!

We're focussing on the reef manta ray, the slightly less massive of the two manta ray species. Our guide through their big blue world is Asia Haines, a manta biologist who works with the citizen-science group Project Manta to understand the manta ray populations along Australia's east coast. She talks about the world's only pink manta ray, why no one has ever seen a manta ray give birth in the wild, and what it's like to swim belly-to-belly with a wild manta ray.

Follow Life On The Brink
on Instagram: instagram.com/lifeonthebrinkpodcast
and via our website: lifeonthebrinkpodcast.com

Follow Project Manta
on Facebook: facebook.com/ProjectMANTA

Produced by Alex Bezzina & Gabriel George

Theme music by Kyle Morley

Episode Cover Image: Inspector Clouseau, the only pink manta ray in the world. ASIA HAINES.

...is tigers are wonderful things! However we can't verify whether their tops are actually made of rubber nor their bottoms made out of springs. 

Episode 9 of Life On The Brink is full of tiger talk and more Tigger from Winnie-the-Pooh references!

Hear how hard it is to count one of the world's most elusive big cats, and how Arjun once came face-to-face with a wild tiger in a 15-minute standoff. This episode is a big one, full of stories, ways anyone can help conserve tigers, and high-brow questions like 'Where did the tiger actually get its stripes?!'.

Follow Life On The Brink
on Instagram: instagram.com/lifeonthebrinkpodcast
and via our website: lifeonthebrinkpodcast.com

Follow Arjun
on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ArjunGswamy

Produced by Alex Bezzina & Gabriel George

Theme music by Kyle Morley

Episode Cover Image: Wild bengal tiger. 

Get ready to meet the cutest most baby-dragon-looking-est lizards we've somehow never heard about before on Episode 8 of Life On The Brink!

Reptiles are so often overlooked in conservation and these cute critters are a perfect example. They live in family groups and make houses out of logs complete with outdoor dunnies. What's not to love?! In the episode, we hear how the incredible Holly Bradley started off in research keeping honey possums warm, moved on to sloth tracking in the Costa Rican jungle, and now is taking on the challenge of relocating entire populations of endangered Western spiny-tailed skinks before new coal mines wipe out their current habitat. 

Follow Life On The Brink
On Instagram: instagram.com/lifeonthebrinkpodcast
and via our website: lifeonthebrinkpodcast.com

Follow Holly
On Instagram: instagram.com/holly_sydelle/

Produced by Alex Bezzina & Gabriel George 

Theme music by Kyle Morley 

Episode Cover Image: Western Spiny-Tailed Skink. HOLLY BRADLEY.

Welcome to the first Life On The Brink bonus episode!

Launching Life On The Brink has been a very humbling experience. The response we've seen so far blew us away, so we kept pushing weekly episodes out so you could get to know who we are and what this podcast is all about. But we've now kicked into our on-going fortnightly release schedule to maintain the standard we want to keep (and, to be honest, to stop us two from burning out too quickly). But that doesn't mean you won't hear from us in these "off weeks". We'll still be popping up in your feed with bonus episodes like this one, mini-series we have in the works, and major updates to our previous stories.

For today, we have some bonus content from our third episode featuring southern brown kiwis and biodiversity ranger Denis Stojanovic. When editing down the episode, we had to leave a whole raft of Denis' stories on the cutting room floor! A bunch of those stories were about another of New Zealand's strange rare birds starting with 'k': the kakapo. So for this episode, we stitched those cuts back together so you also get to hear his stories about tracking kakapos and meeting the famously kinky kakapo Sirocco! 

Follow Life On The Brink 

on Instagram instagram.com/lifeonthebrinkpodcast 

and via our website: lifeonthebrinkpodcast.com 

Follow Denis

on Flickr: instagram.com/viv.fox

Theme Music by Kyle Morley

Production by Alex Bezzina & Gabriel George

It's time to float like a migrating butterfly for Episode 7 of Life On The Brink!  

Insects make up more than 90% of species on this planet, and yet we know so little about them. In this episode, we unravel the complete mysteries of butterfly migration with Ph.D. candidate Shawan Chowdhury. We hear how Shawan fell into the world of butterflies as a student in Bangladesh's capital city Dhaka, how following the butterflies landed him in a world of leeches, and how the guy who failed eight out of 12 classes in 7th Grade went on to study a Ph.D. 

Follow Life On The Brink
on Instagram instagram.com/lifeonthebrinkpodcast
and via our website: lifeonthebrinkpodcast.com 

Find Shawan
on Flickr: flickr.com/people/125106066@N02/

on his website: shawanchowdhury.wordpress.com/

Theme Music by Kyle Morley

Production by Alex Bezzina & Gabriel George

Episode Album Image: Caterpillar of the common mime swallowtail butterfly. SWAHAN CHOWDHURY.

Episode 6 is bringing us back-to-back bird episodes woo!!!

This edition of Life On The Brink takes us on the incredible journey of the world’s largest migrating shorebird from Australia all the way to China and features Professor Richard Fuller as our guide. Get ready to learn all about these goofy birds, their marathon journey, their enormous pecs, and how to protect an animal that crosses international borders like it's a competition.

Follow Life On The Brink

on Instagram: instagram.com/lifeonthebrinkpodcast/

via our website: www.lifeonthebrinkpodcast.com

Theme Music by Kyle Morley

Production by Gabriel George and Alex Bezzina

Welcome to the world of songbirds for Episode 5! 
Episode five of Life On The Brink features the regent honeyeater and Dr Ross Crares. In this episode, we learn about how researchers figured out regent honeyeaters are singing the songs of other species because there aren't enough older mentors for them to learn their own song from, listen to the sounds of young regent honeyeaters singing the songs of other bird species, and hear a brutal assessment on whether or not these birds are going to survive.  

Follow Life On The Brink
on Instagram instagram.com/lifeonthebrinkpodcast
and via our website: lifeonthebrinkpodcast.com 

Follow Dr Ross Crates
on Twitter https://twitter.com/CratesRoss

Theme Music by Kyle Morley

Production by Alex Bezzina & Gabriel George

Episode Cover Image: Regent honeyeater. ROSS CRATES, PhD.

Time to give the big blue some love on Life On The Brink number four! 
This is episode four of Life On The Brink featuring the green turtle and marine biologist Melissa Staines. Melissa is a PhD candidate at the University of Queensland who researches the effects of temperature and rainfall on sea turtles with support from the World Wide Fund For Nature in Australia (WWF Aus).
In this episode, Melissa talks about a bloody, shark-filled SCUBA-diving incident that pushed her towards studying sea turtles, a day in Papua New Guinea that sounds straight out of a Disney movie, and explains how we figured out it takes sea turtle hatchlings 30 years to return back to lay the first eggs of their own. 

Follow Life On The Brink
on Instagram instagram.com/lifeonthebrinkpodcast
and our website: lifeonthebrinkpodcast.com 

Follow Melissa Staines
on Instagram instagram.com/melissa.staines

Theme Music by Kyle Morley

Production by Alex Bezzina & Gabriel George

Episode Cover Image: Green sea turtle hatchling. MELISSA STAINES.