Host: How worried should we be about hantavirus? It's a question that's been everywhere since a cruise ship outbreak that's been linked to at least 11 cases, including one Canadian and three deaths so far. And it makes sense. Six years after Covid threw everything into chaos, people are concerned about what kind of damage another virus could cause.

Host: So what do we know about hantavirus?

Dr. Fahad Razak: Well, it's been around for centuries, but the first documented outbreak happened in the 1950s during the Korean War. 20 years later, scientists linked it to wild rodents. And it turns out, though, that one type, the Andes strain, can also spread person to person. And that's what caused the cruise ship outbreak.

Host: So we would classify as zoonotic.

Dr. Fahad Razak: Yeah. Zoonotic. Correct. Hantavirus does not spread from person to person, only from a mouse, a rodent, for example, to humans. The Andes virus version can spread to humans and humans from human to human. But it's in this unusual circumstance of intense, prolonged personal contact, like a cruise ship. Everything we know about hantavirus and the Andes strain suggests that it does not have pandemic potential. It doesn't spread easily through the air. Importantly, people who are minimally symptomatic can't spread it forward. So one of the big challenges with Covid was that people didn't really have symptoms, but they were already spreading it to others. So you could have a lot of spread. We also don't have a virus that rapidly mutates like Covid. It's very stable, so it doesn't develop those new variants that we struggled with.

Host: True or false. If you get bitten by a tick, it is best to leave it as is.

Dr. Fahad Razak: Definite false. So in fact, we know that getting that tick off your body sooner helps reduce the risk that you will develop illness like Lyme. So this is why we say immediately after coming in from outdoors. This is when you do that tick inspection. If you see a tick, then removing it with a pair of tweezers, pulling it straight out, cleaning the area with alcohol and then checking to see if you get an infection afterwards.

Host: Could you start by giving us a little background on how you ended up on a farm in Nova Scotia, farming in your blood.

Naturalist Amelia Thomas: My family, for generations, like hundreds of years, were farmers. And then my dad was the first one who said, I don't want to live on a farm. I want to live in the suburbs. So I sort of grew up this suburban child who desperately wanted to be a farmer. And so I sort of brought home as many animals as I could from everywhere that I found them. My poor parents, you know, pigeons that I found or, you know, stray cats and rabbits and guinea pigs, anything I was sort of allowed to bring in. And then and I'm a journalist. So we worked sort of all over the world. I've worked in lots of different places. And finally a couple of years ago, I managed to settle down and buy a farm. So it was a bit dilapidated. But yeah, now we have our. Nova Scotia really reminds me of the kind of farming communities that my grandparents lived in, you know, in Wales in the 1970s. And 80s reminds me of that. It's still very old fashioned, strong community.

Host: I'm going to start with one that I didn't think would be in the realm of animals that you would kind of consider, but cockroaches in fruit flies, something that you mentioned quite early, not exactly on many people's favorite lists, but what did you learn about them?

Naturalist Amelia Thomas: It's actually the stuff that I learned was pretty mind blowing. I took took to people who are working with these animals that, you know, these tiny little creatures that we think of as identical and learnt that actually they have individuality. So I talked to a neuroscientist from Oxford University who said that even if you clone fruit flies, they act differently to each other, and you would expect that their behaviour would be identical, right? Because they seem to be identical. But no, their brain wiring means that they act slightly differently from each other. So they have individuality. They have many things in common with us, which I didn't realize. Like they have memories. You they remember bad things, good things and act accordingly. They get dopamine rushes. So like we do, you know, when we're feeling something good, they dislike bitter tastes like sweet things. Some prefer things to others. So some will fly like two ascent, whereas others will fly away. Some will choose to sort of always go left if they're put in a maze and some will go right and that sort of over, you know, you can put them in different situations and they'll still act according to their kind of rudimentary personalities and cockroaches. Yeah. This cockroach researcher that I spoke to in Japan said the same thing about cockroaches. So that was really stunning, was even these tiny creatures have things in common with us.

Host: Let's go to Montreal, because that's where you learned about some chimpanzees that were at a sanctuary there. What did they teach you?

Naturalist Amelia Thomas: That's right. So the there were a series of experiments in the 1960s and 70s, where researchers tried to find out. And those have since shifted. We don't really do that anymore. But they were trying to find out if you could teach animals a human language. So they took a group of chimps from babyhood and taught them American Sign Language, and they just wanted to know, can a chimp not sort of just ape like a word, but can they can they use those words, you know, in situations, in string them together? And that's what they found that they actually could. And they can. Not only that, but probably the most amazing thing I found out about the chimps is that they can make up words in American Sign Language for things they don't have a word for. Like what? Like. So like Fanta would be like Coke. That is orange. No. Yeah. Amazing. Or Thanksgiving turkey, they called it. One of the chimps called it bird meat because they didn't have a word for turkey. So they've since stopped doing that because the scientists sort of, as they realize how complex and involved and emotional the chimps inner worlds were, through this understanding of language, they decided to stop with those experiments. So those chimps are now retired in a sanctuary just outside of Montreal. And I went to meet them, saw this firsthand. They even signed to themselves when they're reading as if they're like talking out loud.

Host: Talk to us about why it's important for us to listen to animals and what we lose when we don't. And there was this line in your book that you say, you know, animals are biology, but they also have biography. And I think that will stick with me in terms of, you know, looking at individual animals as an individual, but what do we lose and what do we gain?

Naturalist Amelia Thomas: Yeah. So the naturalist Jonathan Balcombe said that that, you know, they don't just have biology, they also have biographies. Well, you know, we tend to often commodify animals in today's society. You know, with factory farming, we often don't really have a relationship to many animals except for our pets in our house. So if you listen better to the natural world, there's a there's a sounds cape ecologist called Bernie Krause who says, you can hear extinction better often than you can see it. So listening to the natural world can give us clues as to the health of an environment. Ecosystem. Obviously, there are also at home. There are benefits for our pets and for us in listening, you know, our health goes up. You know, if we have good relationships with our pets, they also benefit too. And I think that listening better to the natural world and to everything around us makes us, first of all, feel less disconnected. You know, we are part of nature. We're not it's not we're not this Descartes sort of Cartesian idea of us and them anymore. We are part. We're all us and we're all in this together. So, you know, in terms of the environment, ecologically benefits for farmed animals, listening benefits everybody.