SPEAKER_00 0:41

I've got another one and a team. I've got a dumb episode. And it's a wild of a child. So he dips out for a bit and then comes back again. It's really busy with the whales out here at the moment. You're listening to Word on the Reef, diving into marine science on the Great Barrier Reef and beyond. With Tanya Murphy and Brett Goodban. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Word on the Reef. I'm your host, diver and marine conservationist, Tanya Murphy. And with me, as always, is Cairns Aquarium's marine educator and fish whisperer Brett Goodband.

SPEAKER_02 1:56

Good morning. I hope everyone had a great week.

SPEAKER_00 1:58

In today's reef news update, a clownfish beloved by magnetic island locals has mysteriously disappeared right after citizen scientists posted a photo and tagged its location online, sparking fears of poaching. Amphiprion Percula is the bright orange, white-striped true clownfish species made famous by Finding Nemo. It isn't listed as endangered. However, it is very rare to see them near Magnetic Island. So when one made its home in an anemone at the island in 2022, locals were really excited and named it Island Nemo.

SPEAKER_02 2:35

Nice.

SPEAKER_00 2:35

For four years, marine biologist Lawrence Scheel, who we've had on this show back way back last year, he photographed Island Nemo regularly as she grew up. Then one day, Island Nemo disappeared. According to Mr. Scheel, quote, this Nemo has survived major flooding events, multiple cyclones, multiple heat waves, and bleaching events. When she was taken, there was no disturbance event that would have taken her out. So it turned out well-meaning snorkelers had pinpointed the fish's location when they uploaded a photo to the Citizen Science app by Naturalist. The app automatically blurs the geolocation of endangered species, but the Amphiprion Percula isn't technically endangered on a global scale, so its location was visible on the app. It disappeared immediately afterward, leaving the whole magnetic island snorkeling community devastated. When the snorkelers who posted the picture were contacted, they were understandably pretty distraught, as they are among many ocean lovers who use iNaturalists to help contribute to scientific research and had no idea people could use the data for illegal poaching. What do you think about that, Brett? Have you ever used iNaturalist or anything like that?

SPEAKER_02 3:41

I have, but this really gets the old bald head angry. This does. We should just stop it. But we need yeah. We need to remember that there are people out there that might do this sort of stuff. So we definitely need to be blurring out all of them.

SPEAKER_00 3:53

Yeah, but I've used iNaturalists to help contribute to citizen science, and I don't want people to stop doing it.

SPEAKER_02 3:59

But I think maybe iNaturalists, I hope someone's reached out to them if they could iNaturalists, I know you're listening, because why wouldn't you listen to our show? Right. Please do something about this.

SPEAKER_00 4:08

Well, they should blur the location of all the animals and only scientists who apply.

SPEAKER_02 4:14

If you can prove that you're a scientist, then you get the location. If you don't, then too bad.

SPEAKER_00 4:19

Yeah, so a workaround for me, because I'm going to Fitzroy Island tomorrow, not scrap. Good on your shit. I'm going to do some probably do some underwater photography and some surveying. So this is a really good timing for me to be reminded of this. If I am uploading a picture of a clownfish, I'm going to deliberately misquote the location by a few hundred meters. So scientists will still get the population data. Like they'll know there's clownfish at Fitzroy Island, but they won't know exactly what it's like.

SPEAKER_02 4:48

And this is going to happen a bit more, isn't it? Because people can take iPhones down now. As soon as you take a photo with an iPhone, it has the exact location pinpointing to where it is. So we need to be careful with that as well.

SPEAKER_00 4:58

Yeah, that's true. You have to actively remove that.

SPEAKER_02 5:01

That's right, you have to turn it off.

SPEAKER_00 5:03

Let's get on to today's topics. Today's guest is Stephen Gill. He's been a tour guide, interpreter, and educator in the wet tropics and on the Great Barrier Reef for more than ten years. During this time, he noticed that many people could swim over a reef or walk through a rainforest surrounded by thousands of fascinating little residents who call these habitats home without even noticing them. And if they did notice them, there might be reactions of fear or disgust at what many of us view as creepy crawlies. Stephen realized that thanks to our insular high-tech society, many people have become disconnected from the incredible functions and forms of life that share the planet with us. And it's become his life's obsession to try and change that. And one of the many ways he's changing people's perceptions is through his viral photographs of bugs interacting with Lego.

SPEAKER_02 5:52

Love it.

SPEAKER_00 5:53

He's done a TEDx talk, he's done three tours of Australia performing his amazing gone bugged live educational show. He's been on national TV and now he's finally here on our show. Yay! Pinnacle of your career, no doubt, Steve. Welcome to Word on the Reef.

SPEAKER_01 6:09

Thank you very much for having me.

SPEAKER_00 6:10

It's great to have you on the show. To start off, can you please tell us a bit about yourself and your background?

SPEAKER_01 6:16

I'm a nerd. Um yeah, I think that's pretty much what summarizes it best. So I grew up on Acreage. I grew up on 27 acres in the country in southeast Queensland, and I remember finding brown snakes in the creek when I was pulling up rocks trying to find yabbies and all sorts of things like that. I was constantly surrounded by nature. Um my dad moved to Cannes when I was a kid, so I've been snorkeling at Fitzroy Island since I was six or seven. You know, I've I've been on the reef, I've been in the rainforest, I've been in the forest. I've always been around nature, but I never understood it. And it's so easy to take it for granted when it's just a thing that's always there. Yeah, that's true. And so it wasn't until I fell into tourism that I found out I'd been kind of missing the point for most of my life. I'd yeah, it hit me really hard.

SPEAKER_00 7:04

When did you first discover your passion for talking to people about animals?

SPEAKER_01 7:07

Well, I've always been passionate about talking. Um I mean that wasn't a discovery thing. Oh, well that's a good thing. I'm a talker. Um and so I mean I'd been in hospitality for years and I'd been working in tourism destination hospitality. I'd I'd lived on Dunk Island, I lived in Cooktown, I lived at Uluru a couple of times working there. And so I was always engaged in communicating with people and engaging with people. And I moved to Port Douglas 13 or 14 years ago and got a job at a seafood restaurant that overlooked the water at the Dixon Inlet. And they had Queensland giant gropers would come in looking for food every afternoon at five o'clock because they'd been feeding them for 18 years, which is amazing because at that time I didn't realise animals could learn, remember, and and base their day around it.

SPEAKER_00 7:54

But yeah, so they always show up just before five because they know what time it is. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:58

Which is incredible, and that that fact alone was amazing. But because I was the new guy, they're like, you need to go and feed the fish because nobody else likes it. So I was always out there feeding this fish, and I just started asking questions about why it is here, you know, what is it doing, where does it come from, and I started learning about it. And the feeding was a 15-minute thing. They're like, go out there, dangle some fish frames on a rope in the water. If the groper takes it, pull it to the surface so people can see it splash around.

SPEAKER_00 8:26

And it just attracts people to the rest of the room.

SPEAKER_01 8:28

Yeah, and they used to just have they had sunset specials, and everyone would have a bucket of prawns and a beer and watch this thing happen. But I felt really uncomfortable standing there for 15 minutes, not making eye contact with people. Yeah. So as I learned things about the fish, I started shouting them out across the water. And it was it wasn't easy, but I'm loud, so I can get my voice across a bit of water. So I just started shouting about these fish, and every everything I learned came in, and I'd be out there talking about Epinephilus lanceolatus and its you know, pharyngeal plates, and how they crush the shells of the crustaceans that they eat, and all of this sort of hoo-ha. And I over time started documenting the feeding activity, charting how it reflected solunar activity, and then being able to predict which fish would show up and how many and how they'd behave. And it it got to the point where I could say before I went out there, there's gonna be about three fish, and probably one of them will take the bait and it'll put up a bit of a fight, just based on what the moon was doing, the tide was doing.

SPEAKER_02 9:29

That's so cool.

SPEAKER_01 9:29

Which was stupid, but I you know it it sounds silly even to me, but it just paid off over time, and I just got super obsessed with it. I'd go in on my days off and do the fish feed because nobody else liked it, and eventually I got in trouble for talking about fish too much at a seafood restaurant.

SPEAKER_00 9:46

Um, I understand that people were coming from all over town to watch your famous fish feeding show more like multiple days in a row, and uh somehow, somehow boat skippers and tourism staff and stuff, they would just come back.

SPEAKER_01 10:01

Well, they did, but that wasn't necessarily reflected in the management's views on me making it different than it had been for 18 years. Yeah, right, trying to make a personal connection with the fish while they're serving fish. So I I guess I went down to the marina and I just started applying to boats. I said, Look, I like talking about fish. You talk about fish for a living. Can I come and do what you do? And yeah, that uh I got a job on a boat, started working in reef tourism, had no idea what I was doing. But uh I could talk about Queensland giant gropers for about 15 minutes.

SPEAKER_02 10:31

Yeah, I've got my best mate at the aquarium, Chang. He's our big Queensland groper. It's a beautiful specimen. He yeah, I always spend time with him in the morning. I can I can stand there and wave him over because they recognise you. He is he's a drama queen, he's judgy, and he's got a full attitude, but he's definitely the star of our oceanarium. He's my best mate. But that's the thing. I mean, if you can get away with it, when you're that big, you can be a deep. And that and that's the thing, right? It's like, excuse me, coming through. Yeah. Right? I own this tank, sharks can back off.

SPEAKER_00 11:02

So that's a great story, Steve, of how you found your passion for talking about fish and then went and got a job on the reef. Yep. How did you first get the idea to start photographing animals on Lego?

SPEAKER_01 11:15

Well, I mean, it was a bit of a jump from getting in trouble at a restaurant to that. So the reef company that I work for in Port Douglas is called Calypso, and Calypso have a rainforest tour as well. So I was working on the boats, I was doing a lot of boat stuff, but I had the license to drive the bus, so they asked me if I'd train into the rainforest. And initially I said no because I thought the rainforest was boring. Um I didn't want to do it, and then they took me on a tour, they like made me come on one just to see what it looked like, and I was absolutely flabbergasted at what I'd never learned about the rainforest. You know, I just thought it was boring because when I walk through it, I don't see anything. And then I went with this guy who'd been doing it for years and years, and he was like, Look at this, and look at this, and look at this, and this does this and this does this, and that kind of changed everything. So I got into the rainforest, I got obsessed with the rainforest as well, and then I was working reef and rainforest tours for years, and I got into this sort of bit where I was digging deeper, finding small things, finding intricate connections, and then found myself really disappointed that when I pointed out stuff that was really rare, really endemic, really unique, really important, most people were just like, Oh, it's just a grasshopper, and you're like eyes glaze over.

SPEAKER_00 12:30

Yeah, absolutely. Do you know this grasshopper is found nowhere else?

SPEAKER_01 12:34

And that and then so I I sort of tried to layer that into it. Like you have to build the importance of endemism before you point out the grasshopper, so that by the time you say, that is only here, people at least let you say it without interrupting to point out that it's a grasshopper, you know? Yeah, yeah. Um, because we do, we have all these really rare orthopterans specifically. The caddy dids are phenomenal in the Dane tree, and they're one of the few things you can find quite reliably, but they're also really important for foliar consumption and breakdown nutrient recycling. So trying to point to a grasshopper and having a busload of people just be like, This is boring, where are the crocodiles, you know? And so I was already building this idea that these bugs are important, but nobody cares. And then maybe seven years ago, almost seven years ago, I had this opportunity to photograph a baby death atom. And it was tiny, minuscule snakes. I mean, they're live-born snakes. So the babies just slide out and disappear. They don't even thank their parents. They just famously snakes and their legs just running away. That's it. And so I had this opportunity to photograph this tiny little deadly, fast striking snake, and I was like, How do you how do you show how small this is? And I didn't, I wasn't gonna put my hand near it, didn't want to die. So I just put it on a Lego base plate with a Lego minifigure with a net, and I just thought, you know, everybody knows how big a Lego person is. They haven't changed size since 1978. So it's a pretty good standard scale. Yeah, yeah. And I took the photo and found out two things very rapidly. When I showed people a photo, nobody can remember how big a Lego person is. Every time I like, I'll be halfway through a presentation and I'll be showing all these photos of animals on Lego, and the idea for me, which I state clearly at the start of the show, is because you know how big the Lego person is, you know the relative size of the animal. And normally about halfway through, someone will be, how big is that one? Oh, you know a Lego person, right? You've got to explain it every time. So I've started taking a Lego person to shows now, and I'll just pull the Lego person out of my pocket and go, see this, this is that, yeah. Now, relative to that.

SPEAKER_00 14:48

Is a Lego person like two centimetres tall or something?

SPEAKER_01 14:50

Oh, I've never measured one. I yeah, I just I just take them for it. I can guarantee you will now. Yeah, well I've got some I've got some in the car, so I will absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 15:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:01

So yeah, I I had this snake photo, and I when I showed it to people, they were really interested in the interplay. Like I hadn't put a lot of effort into the story or the photo, but everyone was like, why is she because it was a a female researcher with a net, which is uh I I pull a lot of nostalgia in. She was from the 1997 Adventurers series, it was a big thing for me. I have a daughter, so I women in science. There was a lot of reasons why I used a female with a net, but none of them had anything to do with her wanting to catch this giant, deadly snake. But people wanted to know why is she trying to catch the snake? Why has she got such a small net? Isn't the snake gonna kill her? And then you just realize that you can take a simple photo and just have people be engaged with it. So I started building bigger sets and taking bigger photos.

SPEAKER_02 15:47

And and that's the thing, it just opens up that massive conversation. I mean, I I feel your pain with the insects because we have the giant burrowing cockroaches and that at work, right? And the first thing they do is they walk up and they go, ooh, and I say, excuse me. Excuse me. And then I go through the whole process of how they they decompose and they mulch all that so it doesn't end up on the reef, high nutrient, etc. And they go, Wow, that's pretty awesome. What's that? And so that's three seconds later. Oh, it's a stick insect. Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_01 16:13

Yeah, cockroaches are in. Every single presentation I do. Cockroaches are like my my pinnacle of every tool. Um Tim, Tam, and Slam. Yeah. You could write them to you could write them to school, mate.

SPEAKER_02 16:25

They're here. Tim Tam Slam.

SPEAKER_01 16:26

Tim Tam and Slam. Very good. What is that? Macropeniesthus rhinoceros, isn't it? Yeah, they're amazing.

SPEAKER_00 16:32

We've got to bridge back into marine related stuff somehow. So speaking of arthropods, uh which underwater creatures have you photographed with Lego?

SPEAKER_01 16:43

Not enough yet. I went for the easy targets first, so still work on the wreath. I still do marine science courses with American college students. I still do reef tours, so I have the opportunity every now and then to get out there. So I photographed a couple of nudie branks, a couple of close-up corals, because obviously polyp size is something that's really hard to get people to focus on when you're snorkeling, especially on a bad day. You know, you're out there like you're not sick, but everyone else is a little bit queasy, and you're like, look at the size of the polyps and their tennis. Yeah, and they're just trying to grab the sick bag. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I I went for polyps and corals. It's hard to find anything that's really comfortable staying with Lego in the water. So I don't want to manipulate the animals. I try and avoid that as much as possible, especially when it's a marine thing and it's a wild animal. I need to do it in situ and I want to do it with no impact to the animals. So I've done some uh blue pallet surgeon fish with Dory for finding Nemo. But I what I did was I made a submarine that floats and I tethered it to a dive weight and put it behind the uh little plate coral that they were hiding in. So then I just had to leave them for a while to get comfortable with the submarine that was floating around and then dive down and get a photo from the other side.

SPEAKER_00 17:55

Um They would have been like, what the heck is that?

SPEAKER_01 17:57

Well, they were more worried about me than the submarine by the time I showed up. So they were all a little bit shy about me, but they were okay with the weird bobbing submarine situation.

SPEAKER_02 18:05

Oh, it's just another submarine, girls.

SPEAKER_01 18:07

Just another submarine, absolutely. I mean, you know Dory's forgetful anyway. She does, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:12

Every time they turn around, what the heck is that again? What's a submarine?

SPEAKER_02 18:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:16

Yeah, so uh I've done a Scylla Serata giant mud crab, which is the best photo I've ever taken. But the grail species that I've just managed to find someone who can help me with is a blue line cleaner ras.

SPEAKER_00 18:30

Just a quick note for any listeners who aren't familiar with the blue line cleaner. This thin 10cm fish survives by picking out trapped food particles, dead skin, and parasites from the teeth, gills, and skin of larger fish. Think of Billy Blue Line the Cleaner Rass like your marine dentist, doctor, and beauty therapist. Along with his team of female staff, he establishes his business in an area known as a cleaning station, and client fish queue up for their turn. These large predatory fish allow Billy Blue Line and his team to swim around in their mouth unharmed. Because the cleaning service is so essential for their health, they wouldn't risk it for a small snack. Removing cleaner ras from a reef causes significant declines in the local fish population. So they really are essential to our reef ecosystems.

SPEAKER_01 19:23

When I want to talk about the interconnectedness, the community that is an ecosystem, the cleaner ras is such a central part of that. Yeah. To uniform health, community health, their importance on the reef, the intelligence, the psychology, the understanding that we have about them is critical. And I have gone out with weighted sets and put them in the middle of cleaning stations. And what I found is in the wild, the cleaner asses just move. Nobody's coming to a cleaning station while there's a fake Lego bathroom sitting in the middle of the state. So what I've had to do is find someone who has a cleaner ras that it's already a captive specimen. Because I wouldn't go out and scoop one out of a cleaning station, though, that'd be horrible. But you know, if I can get an aquarium-based cleaner ras and photograph a cleaner ras, then that one photo. And I've made a car wash, obviously. Yeah. You've got to lean on DreamWorks and Shark Tail. Shit, shark's tail. You've got to go with that whole car wash idea.

SPEAKER_02 20:20

The Rastafarian gangster jellyfish.

SPEAKER_01 20:22

So I've just finished building the car wash. I've now got someone who's got the cleaner ass, and now it's just a matter of putting all the pieces together because that is such a big photo. That's going to be a really, really good interval.

SPEAKER_02 20:33

I spend 15 minutes in my Coral C talk every day talking about the three amigos. We've got three. And they do that big run from one side of the coral C tank to the other trying to chase the rays, and then they catch up with them again. They're just incredible little critters.

SPEAKER_01 20:46

They are. And tenacious. It's I get the cheeky. It's funny, like on the one hand, I paint them as this pivotal service and that everybody wants this and needs this. But then you go out in the wild and you see all the fish just happen to swim past a cleaning station and a rass comes up and it's not having a go at it. Excuse me. Yeah. It's like the windscreen wipers at the red lights, you know. Yeah. And you're like, no, no, I don't want that today. You see these fish always like, just go away, Barry. Just leave me alone.

SPEAKER_00 21:17

So they're hawkers, they're hawking their servants. Excuse me, do you want to clean?

SPEAKER_02 21:20

Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_00 21:21

Yeah. I'm just imagining the fish chasing after a ray going, excuse me, sir, do you have a moment to talk about our Lord and Savior Jesus?

SPEAKER_02 21:30

Do you know what? I've actually thought about that in my show once. Right in the middle of it, I just cracked up and then I've looked across at everyone and gone, it's fine. You're doing better than me. Those things come out of my mouth before my brain processes. Well, that's what makes us professional, is being able to dig yourself out of the hole afterwards, right?

SPEAKER_00 21:45

The trick to it is going to a well-placed ad break.

SPEAKER_02 21:49

There you go.

SPEAKER_01 21:50

That's a great segue.

SPEAKER_00 21:59

Now, Steve, I understand Katy Perry comes into this story. How did she play a major role in Gone Bugo and your insect photography going viral?

SPEAKER_01 22:12

Look, it was interesting. So I'd been photographing animals on Lego for a few years by the point that Katie came into my life. And as a tour guide, I was actually really embarrassed about my photos, and I didn't share them with everyone because I was really happy with the art that I was creating, but I was concerned that viewers would have questions about the ethics of it. But I, as an animal lover, had done everything as ethically as possible. But I was really sort of shy and secretive about the photos I was taking. So I had a small portfolio of images that only a few people knew about. And then Katie Perry showed up. And I was working at the time, this was just after COVID had happened, tourism had collapsed for a time, and I was working as a full-time gardener at a luxury resort in Mossman. And Orlando was shooting a movie in the Dane tree. So Katie and Orlando, when they were together, came to stay at our hotel for 10 days. And I didn't know who they were. I just got told not to put my foot in my mouth while I was unloading the bags. Gee, she had a lot of bags. Because they'd come to Australia for a movie, period, you know. So she had, I think it was like 16 or 18 bags with her, and they got me to help move the bags into the room. So I'm moving the bags and I'm seeing these people, and I was talking to this woman about her little girl who's just a little bit younger than mine, who's Daisy, and um just having this mad chat with this stranger. And I did not at any point realize it was Katie Perry, but she had a big hat and she had big sunnies, she was kind of trying to be in the incognito. Yep. So we had a mad chat on day one about travel, about kids, about all sorts of stuff, about the rainforest. And then when I got back to the the head office, they were like, So you you're not gonna tell anyone, you just talk to Katie Perry, and I was like, that was Katie Perry?

unknown 23:54

What?

SPEAKER_01 23:55

And then every day she was just there in the hotel because she wasn't there to do work, she was just there to relax. And so every day as the gardener, she'd just walk past and I'd be like, uh, hey Katie. Um and so You want to have a go at me, whippersnipper? Yeah, just making small for Katie Perry, you know. So by the time that we had a talk about Lego, I'd seen her a number of times, we'd had a bit of a chat, and then I was working on an irrigation of all things, and she was standing on the boardwalk nearby holding Daisy, just waiting for other people. And I wasn't gonna ignore her, but I didn't know what to say. And I'm very blunt, so I just turned to her and said, Do you let Daisy play with your Lego? Because I knew that they had Lego because Orlando during COVID had gone on to like late light TV shows talking about what he was doing during lockdown, and he built Lego. He's been made into a Lego person at least twice, so he had a whole room with Lego sets on the wall, and so I just knew she had that, and just yeah, do you let the kid play with the Lego? Such a smooth entry into a conversation. And she, because we'd already been talking, she went, Oh, we don't let her play with the little stuff because she'll choke, but we do give her the duplo so she gets to play with that. And then she said, Why do you let your daughter play with Lego? And I went, Yeah, absolutely. She said, Oh, so you've got Lego. I went, Yeah, we've got Lego. She said, What do you do with yours? Yep. And in retrospect, she said, because, and then I cut her off. Um because she asked the right question. I think she was gonna tell me that they had a room where they displayed it, but I cut her off and went, oh, you'd never believe it. And I showed her my photos on my phone, and I've jumped up onto the boardwalk and I've got my phone out, and I'm showing her all these photos of animals on Lego, and she loved it. She stole my phone off, she snatched it out of my hand, went through the folder as fast as she could. She's like, This is the coolest thing I have ever seen. And then she ran away with my phone and went into the restaurant to find her assistant and Orlando's kid Flynn and everyone she was traveling with. And she showed all of them I could walk. I was watching, just standing there, like Katy Perry just stole my phone. And I was watching her show these other people these photos on my phone, and then she came back. She's like, This is the coolest thing I have ever seen. And I was like, surely not. She's like, no, this is the coolest thing I have ever seen. I want to follow you in social media. Do you have social media? I was like, no, I I don't. Yeah, what's that? I'm embarrassed about this. I'm not gonna show the world. She's like, I want to follow you. So I had to make an account for Katie. Um, and she So she was your first follower? Well, she should have been, but she was my 20th. I mean, my wife got in first, and then a whole bunch of other people. That's probably safer that way, mate. Yeah, you know, it would look a lot better if Katie Perry was my first. She was my 20th, which really doesn't hit in the same way. No, but uh, it was super cool. So I she workshopped all these ideas that businesses call Gone Bugg because of her, because I didn't have any ideas about it. And she's like, You need a name that sounds like Lego. It's gonna sound like Lego, and I'm like, uh Buggo. She's like, eh, that's I was like, Well, Gone Buggo. She's like, Yeah, you know, that's that'll do. So I went with Gone Buggo because it's gone troppo, there's bugs, and it sounds like Lego, the whole thing was and she's like, You gotta protect yourself as an artist and you gotta copyright everything and all of this great advice. So I went home, made an Instagram, went to work the next day, and somebody else told her before I had a chance to even see her. And so I was just in a garden working, and Katy Perry came into the garden with her phone, went, Look, I'm following you. She showed me her phone screen, and that was sort of the start of it. And then I think I got like 3,000 followers in the first month because Katie Perry was one of them. Nice, just everyone that follows her and anyone that's interested in her because she doesn't follow many things. But yeah, so that's that was where that all started. I don't think I would have a business today if I didn't have Katie Perry at the start of it. Because I never believed in it.

SPEAKER_00 27:48

It just goes to show the power of someone believing in you, and that's a good message for all of us to tell people who have a skill to believe in themselves and encourage them, like Katie helped encourage you.

SPEAKER_01 27:59

The awkward caveat there is lots of other people had encouraged me to do it before her.

SPEAKER_00 28:04

Oh, so you'll do it for Katie, but you won't be able to do that.

SPEAKER_01 28:06

That's exactly what my wife said. She said, I've been telling you to get on social media with this for ages. I was like, Yeah, but it's different. A lot of people did believe in me more than I believed in myself, but Katie Perry had a lot more clout than my friends.

SPEAKER_00 28:19

So the message is don't politely ask people to use their gifts, steal their phone, and forcefully enforce them to use the gifts.

SPEAKER_01 28:27

Basically, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 28:28

All right, well, we need to talk about the environment because the purpose behind your Lego photos is much more than just having a bit of fun, which it obviously is a lot of fun. But what is the deeper purpose behind the Lego photographs and what you're trying to get through to people with?

SPEAKER_01 28:43

You know, we have built ourselves a plastic world at the expense of nature. And photographing nature within a plastic world makes the viewer go, is that right? How do I feel about a little bit of nature in a whole lot of plastic?

SPEAKER_02 28:57

Yeah, it really gets that conversation going, doesn't it?

SPEAKER_01 29:00

Humans in moving into these insular, air-conditioned, fabricated realities, we've detached ourselves from the world that we require to survive at the expense of that world. Yeah, you know, that's very true. You know, we have, especially through agriculture, built an idea about what the world is, what it means, what we can do to it, what we can get from it that isn't necessarily great for the world. And bugs definitely, invertebrates, suffer for that. I mean, in the last 50 years, 75% of all the insect biomass on the planet has disappeared. It's it's astounding. In Puerto Rico, over 95% of all the insects in the national parks have disappeared. There's no agriculture there, they're not spraying pesticides there. In the middle of a protected habitat, almost all of the critical service providers have disappeared, and there will be secondary effects and and feedback loops coming through from all of the lizards and the frogs and the birds not being able to eat anything, and then what we lose in pollination and what you know. We have built ourselves a plastic world at the expense of nature.

SPEAKER_00 30:10

I think a lot of people might have noticed if they've been on the planet for as long as me, that is the less bugs that you get stuck on your windscreen at night. Absolutely. Because I honestly only remember it from when I was a kid getting a lot of.

SPEAKER_01 30:22

They've stopped putting soap in the windscreen washers at service stations because nobody's got anything to clean off these days. Normally it's just fresh water now. I never have to clean my windscreen when I was young and you had to dose it with soap. Yeah. When I found I drove down to Melbourne with one of the shows, or for all of the shows I've driven. But yeah, the whole drive from Port Douglas to Melbourne, I cleaned my windscreen one time and it was dirt. It wasn't the bugs. But the irony of that is every time a bug hits my windscreen, there's a part of me that's happy and a part of me that's very sad because I'm like, I just killed it. But at least there was bugs.

SPEAKER_00 31:09

So there are many reef guides out on the Great Barry Reef, and there are many rainforest guides in the Dane tree, but not so many people are well versed in both, and that's a divide you're bridging. What's the connection between the reef and the rainforest?

SPEAKER_01 31:22

Oh goodness me, what isn't the connection between the reef and the rainforest? I mean, obviously the hydrology would be the most simplistic approach to it. We now know that dimethyl sulfide produced through coral photosynthesis acts as a hydrophilic aerosol, so it oxidizes off the water's surface throughout the daylight hours, converts into dimethyl sulfoxide, and attracts cloud mass. So corals are essentially building cloud mass over themselves, either inadvertently, accidentally, or intentionally, depending on how you want to talk about intelligent design. They put up an umbrella so they don't get sunburnt, which is genius. But that umbrella gets blown away by our southeast trade winds, which pushes it towards land. So you have these dense, moist bodies of air traveling over the coastlines, which are then recondensed through the hydrophilic aerosols that are produced through photosynthesis of land plants, and then the mountain range up here in the north, which changes its altitude and therefore changes its temperature. And as those clouds travel up, they condense, they form on the on the mountain tops, and then you get your clouds stripping. So there isn't a lot of science that I've found to really lock all of that together, but I think one of the easiest anecdotal points that I could refer to to show how important that relationship is, is that when the northern section of the Great Barrier Reef bleached in 2016, we hardly got any rain in the Daintree Rainforest because there was no coral photosynthesis, no cloud seeding, none of that going on. And there was four years following that 2016 period where there was significantly reduced rainfalls because of potentially, although I'm not qualified to say with any authority, but potentially a significant reduction in coral coverage. Then, of course, the rain that would form on the rainforest and the mountaintops is going to gather loose debris, which is the dominant source of nutrition for our rainforest in the rainforest, and have that wash down those water courses, gather in the mangrove ecosystems where it would be broken down in highly saline environments through, you know, the plethora of gastropods, microbiota crustaceans and things in there, and converted into smaller forms of nutrition which would eventually wash out to sea. So you have, I mean, we already know that there's marine organisms that move in land and live in estuary systems and freshwater systems for safety when they're young. But then we also have an understanding that potentially nutrition from the rainforest is somehow benefiting at least the inshore reefs, possibly the patch reefs, and potentially the outer barrier reef when it's close enough to land. And there was, from my experience anecdotally, during that 2016, 17, 18, 19 period, a distinct decline in both ecosystems that I saw lots of parallels in. As the reef was bleaching, as the coral was suffering and struggling and unable to sustain itself successfully, the rainforest went through a desiccation event that led to a lack of new growth, a lack of flowering, a lack of fruiting, which I don't know if anyone's even studying how the insect biomass was affected by four years of no flowers. But what I do know is that I didn't see a flower for four years of day tours in the rainforest while the reef was simultaneously struggling. So we have an ancient rainforest and an enormous reef system that are potentially intricately interwoven. And it's not that it's always been that relationship. Of course, the reef hasn't always been there. The Daintree Rainforest is potentially 140, 160, some people even say 180 million years old. And the Great Barrier Reef has nothing on that. But there have been significant changes in the way the hydrology of the Daintree has worked throughout geological time, and presently it seems like a lot of the rain that makes the rainforest a rainforest still starts on the reef. And a lot of what keeps the reef going the way that we love it and know it in this region would be fed by the rainforest in some way.

SPEAKER_00 35:47

Yeah, yeah. We've talked a lot on this show about runoff in previous episodes. And so, you know, there used to be a lot more rainforest in north and far north Queensland and all of Queensland. And so the nutrient balance that used to come from the rainforest having been deforested and replaced with synthetic chemicals and fertilizers is obviously not a one-for-one replacement. It's causing very different impacts than what the reef was adapted to. So that's why the loss of that rainforest and replacing it with farm chemicals has probably had a bigger impact on the reef than what we already know about or understand. And those relationships have built up over really slow geological time, even though the reef isn't 200 million years old, like the Dane tree, it has been there for thousands of years, so they've slowly built this relationship, and if we break that relationship down in just the space of a few decades with climate change and things, it's too fast for them to adapt to. So it's a really important thing to be aware of. What are some of the funniest or strangest questions you've been asked by guests on the reef?

SPEAKER_01 36:59

I think probably the funniest question I've ever had in marine discussions was a gone buggo presentation in which there was nothing about eels whatsoever. In the middle of a presentation to a class full of kids, one kid put his hand up and said, Why don't eels have genitals? Um and we had to have a talk about the life cycle of what we consider to be the freshwater eels around here, which actually start their lives in the ocean, migrate inland, migrate uphill, and then spend years, you know, maturing in billabongs and watercourses and dams up on the plateaus before finally migrating back out to sea, converting their digestive equipment into reproductive equipment, and then engaging in one fatal reproductive event, which will then give rise to the next generation of eels.

SPEAKER_00 37:50

Oh, which type of eel is that?

SPEAKER_01 37:52

I think it's the long finned or the short-finned eel in this region. But he'd been catching these eels and had wondered why they never had any genitals. And I answered it in great depth without trying to get too graphic because these kids were like nine years old. But it was a fascinating question because it is a fascinating thing. You know, uh conversion of reproductive organs and digestive organs is something invertebrates do. Um moths like the Hercules moth, for example, it eats as a caterpillar and it breeds as an adult, but it doesn't do both things at once. It just converts the equipment from one thing to the other throughout metamorphosis. It's weird for an eel to do it, but it's cool to talk about in a bug show. So I talked about it, and when I'd finished this complex answer about reproductive biology, another kid put their hand up and said, What's genitals? And that, yeah, that was where I called it. I said, you can talk to your teacher about that afterwards.

SPEAKER_00 38:51

While we're on the species of crazy marine life, this show's been going for 70 plus episodes. We've had turtle experts, shark experts, manta ray experts, but there's a plethora of animals that I still don't know about. That eel was one of them. What is one of the most interesting animals that wouldn't have already been talked about on this show or that is underappreciated that you want to tell us about?

SPEAKER_01 39:14

Well, I mean I've already admitted that the cleaner ass is probably my favourite. And I think one of the things that I really admire with the cleaner ras is the utility in talking about fish intelligence and psychology, which is not something that comes into most discussions about marine life. And the blue line cleanerass has been extensively studied and shown to have very versatile processing capacities when it comes to food sources. And so often in my marine interp, I like to quote a quote that is often attributed to Albert Einstein, but he didn't say it, which is that everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its life believing that it is an idiot. And first and foremost, that that quote is used often to talk about specific intelligences in children and the schooling system. I like to change the quote and say that if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, you will spend your whole life believing that it is an idiot. And I think that's an important thing to note. If you think fish are stupid because they can't climb trees, you're missing out.

SPEAKER_05 40:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 40:21

And we do often, or we used to, it's not as common these days, relate brain size and brain size-to-body ratio with intelligence. So to take a tiny fish that must have a tiny brain and talk about how intelligent it is reframes that. But what I like to say to people in regards to that particular idea is all humans have the same or very similar brain-to-body ratio. So if you just bring to mind the dumbest person you've ever met and realize that they had the same brain-to-body ratio as Albert Einstein, you already know that that must be wrong. The size of the brain and the body doesn't equal intelligence. Intelligence is highly variable, highly versatile. And having a tiny fish with a tiny brain that exhibits theory of mind, which is probably the bit that I really, really like with the cleaner rasas, there was a study done that showed cleaner rasas would modify their behaviour based on who was watching them. So cleaner rasas obviously exploit the confidence of other fish. A cleaning station is a safe space where any organism that needs to be cleaned can sit and expose its most vulnerable parts, its gills and its teeth and everything else, and allow these fish access to pick things out of their body that, I mean, you wouldn't let your best friend do it to you, you know, except after a big night. So they go everywhere, they touch everything, they do everything. It's a very confidence-based relationship. Trust. Trust. And the ras knows that if it abuses the trust of the client, the client won't return. And we know that with local fish that will repeatedly visit a cleaning station, the rases are always on their best behavior because if you abuse your clientele, you lose your clientele. But we've also now seen in studies that if the cleaner ras is being watched by a local fish, it doesn't matter who they're cleaning. If the locals can see what they're doing, they are on their best behavior.

SPEAKER_00 42:18

Reputation. They don't want to get a bad review on Google.

SPEAKER_01 42:22

Exactly it. It's theory of mind. The idea that an organism is aware, that another organism is aware of them. So if there's nobody watching and it's a client you can stand to lose, cleaner asses will take a bite of fresh flesh. But if there's somebody watching, even if the client is someone you could stand to lose, you're on your best behavior because you don't want to lose the client that can see you behaving badly. Wow. And that psychology reframes so much because fish are normally just these. I was raised to believe they didn't have thoughts or feelings or memories. Memory like a goldfish, you know. We now know goldfish can remember things for over a year. So most of what we think about intelligence, about cognition, about consciousness, about you know, social behaviour needs to be re-explored through these kinds of connections. And that's why the cleaner race is such a big one for me.

SPEAKER_00 43:19

Yeah, absolutely. And there are humans who don't actually have the capacity to understand what their clients are looking for or um run a business that's successful.

SPEAKER_01 43:31

Yeah, you see lots of branded business vehicles driving very dangerously on the road that seem to forget they have their name and phone number on the side.

SPEAKER_00 43:39

See, you should have taken a leaf from the cleaner ass.

SPEAKER_01 43:41

Remember who's watching when you're uh doing or just always behave like somebody's watching and try not to do the wrong thing.

SPEAKER_00 43:49

Wow, yes, there's been entire books written about the intelligence of fish, the fact that they know what day and time it is, because they'll show up to areas where they know they're gonna get fed.

SPEAKER_01 44:01

Like a five o'clock fish feed.

SPEAKER_00 44:02

Ahead of time, yep. They have many types of intelligence that are similar to humans or completely different because they know things that we don't know about how to survive in the ocean, that's for sure. You said you're you have a very different way of thinking, but it wasn't always appreciated when you were growing up in a school. What advice do you have for other people out there who might be struggling to find their purpose in life or to have the confidence in their ability that they can make a difference?

SPEAKER_01 44:33

Well, I've been doing a lot of multi day trips. With school groups in ecological studies, a bit of reef, bit of rainforest, and a lot of kids feel like they don't fit in. A lot of kids are worried that what they like isn't worthwhile or isn't valuable. And I like to tie what I have learned and what I share about nature into an inspiring, uplifting, motivational thing. And one of the things that is true for nature and ecosystems is that monocultures don't work and that ecology thrives on diversity. Resilience in an ecosystem comes from having a multitude of things that provide a multitude of different benefits that offset each other's negative impacts. In nature, there are things that eat other animals, but then they have their role to play in nature. There are animals that eat plants, but they have their role to play in nature. And in an ecosystem and in all complex ecology around the world, we see that there is a space for almost everything. It just needs to be in the right place. Sometimes it's very hard to find that space, but it's it's hardest to find that space in areas where a monoculture is being pursued. You won't find one random tree in the middle of a paddock filled with sugar cane because the paddock filled with sugar cane has been cultivated to specifically be only sugarcane. But those paddocks then become vulnerable. And agriculture worldwide, industrial agriculture, has proven exactly what's wrong with monocultures. Yeah. Both ideologically and literally, in that you become vulnerable, you become exposed. Society, the future of humanity, requires every weirdo out there to just be themselves, flourish and do what they love and flourish for who they are. I mean, some of the biggest change makers in human history didn't fit in. They were strange people who had strange ideas that upset the status quo, but through doing that made the world a better place. So people who are struggling to find their place, I would say don't try and change who you are to fit into a monoculture, but be true to yourself and be resilient until such time as you can find a place where your strengths are valued.

SPEAKER_00 46:59

Yep, absolutely. But that's another topic I could nerd out on for a whole separate episode. Having learned about syntropic agriculture, which is it's the sort of thing that the traditional cultures did, like the Native Americans, they would grow corn, beans, and squash all together in the same paddock, and it was a huge success because the corn provides a frame for the beans to crawl up. The beans do the nitrogen fixing to fertilize the soil, and the squash leaves shade out the weeds. So they didn't need pesticides, herbicides, or anything by having a diversity of different plants and animals, they actually thrive best together. Whereas now, if we only grow corn by itself as a monoculture, there's a lot more pests and weeds and problems, and and you have to use nitrogen fertilizer because you don't have the beans there to provide it naturally and so on and so forth. So we've we've gotten monocultures to the stage where it's really um really hyper-productive factory line, but it's costing a lot to the planet. So, what changes have you seen on the reef over your time visiting it and teaching people about it?

unknown 48:11

Oh.

SPEAKER_01 48:12

Um So I mean I've been working on the reef for 12 years now. I've been snorkeling since I was a kid. So I've got over 30 years worth of snorkeling in the region, but at least 12 years working professionally in the industry, and and I was present and working on the reef during the 2015-16 event, the 17 event. I've watched the bad stuff happen, and during that period specifically, I personally focused on calling out the elephant in the room with climate change and that negative effect that it had, but also focusing on the silver lining that often got forgotten when we talked about the cloud, which was the resilience, the versatility, the adaptability of the things that were still present. And now one of the things that I find quite rewarding about going back to places that I have watched struggle through adversity is that where there was absolute devastation, there are things attempting recovery. And it's so rewarding to see life be so tenacious and continue to attempt to recover. Unfortunately, those attempts, of course, are always going to be impeded by subsequent events and the frequency of events, but to watch life continue to fight no matter how hard it gets hit, yeah, always gives me hope.

SPEAKER_00 49:31

Yeah. Yeah. I really hope eventually when we get our carbon emissions under control, there'll still be some corals left in the ocean and then they can be the ones to repopulate everywhere again. You know, I I hope that some pockets of the species that we love will be able to remain. But it's really ourselves that will suffer the most.

SPEAKER_01 49:51

That's the truth of everything that we're doing to the environment at the moment. At the end of the day, it's all going to feed back, it's all going to impact us, and life will find ways to recover, but human society as we know it may not. The further we push it, the harder it becomes to maintain a stable relationship with these things. And we are often cutting off our nose to spite our face without realizing what's at risk. So, yeah, it's nice to know that nature is resilient and it's nice to know that nature is willing to fight. But it's just that we need to ease off the pressure, ease off the gas, and understand that we as part of nature need to fight as well alongside them so that we all stand a chance of coming out. The whole world is connected, and we have enough science now to show how you know Saharan dust feeds the Amazon and how the reef makes rain and all of these things. The world is connected, and we are connected to it. And one of the things in all environmental interp that I try and drive home is that you are not separate from this, you are this. We are nature, and nature is us, and it's not like we can kill it without hurting ourselves. The biggest misconception that humans invented was that we were somehow separate from and insulated from what we were doing to the world around us, and preliterate societies felt that, lived that, knew that. Look at the First Nations people and their relationship with the land, it was intertwined, it was interwoven, and the stories that they told that gave voices to the animals and to the landscape made them aware intimately, personally, that it was all part of them and they were all part of it. As soon as humans put themselves up on a pedestal and believed that they were somehow separate and in charge of, we we lost the reins and we started running off the road, and now here we are looking at this thing falling apart. And what people need to reconnect with is the fact that you are nature and nature is you. So my three things that I share, there's three point five, I suppose. One of them is uh insecticides and pesticides. Now, agricultural runoff, but also just domestic chemical use in general. It harms your garden, it harms your local environments, and then it runs off into the sea. And sediment and water quality, of course, on the reef is a massive thing. So what we use at home will impact the reef and the marine environment. So I say to people, stop using broad-scale killing products, especially to solve simple problems. You know, if you have cockroaches in your house, killing every animal around your house just to get rid of that one problem might not be the solution that it looks like when you could have targeted the cockroaches or looked for the root cause of the problem and targeted that instead. Cockroaches are a feedback loop, you know, so if you have less garbage and less food and less habitat, there will be less of them. And if you have more, there will be more. So maybe killing the cockroaches isn't the first place to look. So reducing those chemicals, planting native plants, and I mean that, I mean normally in a garden sense, but of course in all of our green spaces, having more parks, having more wetlands, having more habitat, especially native habitat. Far North Queensland is so fascinated with Southeast Asian and South American plants. And from a gardening perspective, I mean I used to walk people around the resort that I met Katy Perry at and point out how many of the plants were not from Australia and how few of the plants were local because it's just part of our cultural value set that pretty plants equal good plants, and Farnorth Queensland, because of its age, isn't home to what we believe is pretty. Our forest predates bees.

SPEAKER_00 53:55

So everything's not as many flowers then.

SPEAKER_01 53:58

Yeah, so everything that we understand as flowers drawing pollinators doesn't really exist that much in our rainforest. So we don't celebrate native plants because we don't understand them. We're taught that big flowers equal pretty flowers, we plant non-natives, and then we degrade our habitat, which then leads to all of the issues that flow out to sea. And then sustainable choices as a consumer. So buying organic is good, uh, pesticide free is good. Obviously, the pinnacle is the eco-organic sort of aspirations of people who aren't just using non-synthetics, they're actually just not using chemicals, regardless of the point of origin or minimizing that use as much as possible so that the ecosystem sustains itself. So, as consumers supporting the right decisions will instill those decisions higher up the chain. Each of us has the ability to modify the feedback that we get from the world around us. Vote for the wrong politicians, get the wrong political decisions, vote for the right ones, get the right ones. Ask the local politicians to support the reef, and they will. Don't ask them and they won't. It's a feedback loop. And so what we do in our own backyard, it affects the world around us, and here our backyard is gonna end up in the reef. So all of those things tie together.

SPEAKER_00 55:15

Yep, those are some really good steps that everyone, all our listeners, can consider in their daily lives. Be curious, learn as much as you can about the world around you, and share that with other people and use your communication skills. Where can people head for more information and to check out your stuff?

SPEAKER_01 55:31

My website has links to pretty much everything. So if you just go to gonebuggo.com, G-O-N-E, B-U-G-G-O, gonebuggo.com, and then there's links, there's the TED Talk, there's the TV appearances, the social media stuff, the Etsy shop with the merchandise, the podcast, everything through there.

SPEAKER_00 55:49

So yeah, awesome. I think we've got listeners across Australia and the world, and even those locally who might be real interested in going on one of your tours now.

SPEAKER_01 55:58

So they would be so welcome to come. I'm happy to go and do bug talks and walk around the forest or go to the reef.

SPEAKER_00 56:04

Sadly, that's all we have time for today. Stephen Gill, thanks for all your amazing work, and thanks for joining us on Word on the Reef.

SPEAKER_02 56:10

Thank you so much for having me. It's been an honour, mate. Thank you. Awesome.

SPEAKER_00 56:13

And thanks to all our listeners for joining us on Word on the Reef with me, Tanya Murphy, and co-host Brett Goodband. We'll be back next week with more Marine Science Adventures, 10am Friday on Kansfm 89.1. This show is broadcast live from the Kansfm studio, which is on the land of the Gimoy Wallabari Dingy people. We'd like to extend our respect to elders past and present. Have a great week, everyone. Bye.