Australia’s Geology and the Unstoppable Evolution of the Praying Mantis
Mantises across the globe don’t always share a recent common ancestor, meaning evolution saw the mantis as a common solution many times. I for one find the implications of that unsettling—but no matter!
If I were to dismantle my most enduring assumptions about Australia, I’d likely uncover a source code populated entirely with early-career INXS lyrics. For most xennial Americans (b. 1977–1983), I’d imagine Mad Max was the primary reference—present company excluded, as I still haven’t seen it. But my hunch is that regardless of input, my generation has landed on the same felt sense: that Australia is unlike most places we know. So whether you had only a mulleted Mel Gibson desert drag racing to go on or a mulleted Michael Hutchence Dancing on the Jetty, we arrived at the same collective picture of Australia as remote, wild, and untamed.
And from what I learned hosting this week’s episode of Sing For Science with Australian musician Courtney Barnett, the record of this planet’s geologic history bears that out. Though we’d assembled to talk about the manifold delights of the praying mantis, like most great scientists, our guest entomologist Dr. Jessica Ware was able to speak across disciplines, seamlessly moving from the very small (mantis neurons) to the very big (continental drift). I’d asked her to dwell on the latter because my geo-knowledge has a sizable gap between when we were without borders (Pangea) and today.
Here’s how we got there:
Courtney Barnett:
“Mantises adapt to the space that they’re around?”
Jessica Lee Ware:
“Yes, over long periods of time. Mantises are pretty old. So some of them are on all the continents, some of them are on some of the continents. Some of them evolved when the continents were smushed together into a big giant southern continent and a big northern continent—Laurasia and Gondwana. So they’ve moved around.”
Matt Whyte:
“Can you back up? I don’t know, to before the land masses broke apart. What were the names?”
Jessica Lee Ware:
“There was one giant landmass, Pangaea, and it started breaking apart into fragments. Initially it broke into a northern one, Laurasia, which became Canada and Europe and Asia. And then there was a southern one, which was South America, Africa—parts of Australia were attached there for part of it—and Antarctica. And that Gondwanaland was generally south of Laurasia.
And so a lot of times you have taxa that are found in both Europe and North America, but it’s not because they’re moving across the ocean—it’s because they evolved when those two continents were together before they broke apart. And then the species just traveled with the continents as they broke apart into North America and Eurasia.”
Perhaps the most provocative takeaway is that mantises across the globe don’t always share a recent common ancestor, meaning evolution saw the mantis as a common solution many times. I for one find the implications of that unsettling—but no matter!
It looks as though going back 100 million years Australia has always had a rogue quality: breaking from Antarctica in pursuit of sunnier climes, or, say, instituting a mandatory semi-automatic buyback program in response to its first and only mass shooting for 30 years. And if I hadn’t already made my fondness for Oz abundantly clear, know that I can derail most conversations with any Australian in seconds toward INXS. My down-under interlocutors are always polite but don’t exhibit the same hometown hero reverence I’m expecting. (Courtney flashed a warm but narrow smile when I showed her my 1988 Calling All Nations tour program.)
Since I clearly can’t be trusted to stay on topic, I’ll wrap with this: around 50 million years ago, Australia and its undergirding plate started moving north, further isolating itself and evolving plant and wildlife that most Americans would regard as science fiction. Of course, its sensible gun laws and waterproof cash do little to disabuse us of the impression.
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Why Do Tapirs Eliminate in Water?
Turns out, tapirs prefer water for befoulment as a means of avoiding predation. We had to ask tapir expert, Esteban Brenes-Mora, why in our conversation with Costa Rican star Debi Nova.
I make no secret of my preference for the base and profane. So when I learned about the unusual bathroom habits of the Costa Rican tapir while prepping for this week’s episode, I spent most of the interview on the hunt for an opportunity to bring it up. But I came up empty-handed and ham-fisted—Debi Nova, brimming with sensitivity and conversational aplomb, set up field biologist Esteban Brenes-Mora with topics more germane to my show’s format than I could have dreamed: Have you played music for the tapirs? Might their heightened sense of hearing allow for a preternatural experience with melody and harmony?
So, with the now-or-never urgency of a last-second half-court shot, I derailed us toward my pet issue, as it were.
If I had to guess, I’d have thought the water might help them relax—like a makeshift birthing pool of sorts. Turns out, tapirs prefer water for befoulment as a means of avoiding predation. The stream carries their scat away from their dwelling, dispersing the scent downstream so predators can’t easily track it back to where they rest—like a gravity-fed septic system. What’s more, they’re known to use shared latrines, sometimes going in groups. It reminded me of a 19th-century four-hole outhouse seat I found in my father-in-law’s barn, which, in his estimation, was designed so that “nobody has to wait!”
And when you consider the sheer volume of vegetation passing through a tapir in a day—up to 50 pounds of pure plant power—it’s no wonder field biologists like Esteban have ample opportunity to observe them at their most vulnerable.
Because these rhino relatives have such insatiable appetites for vegetation, they’re often described as gardeners of the forest. They carve out paths, disperse seeds across wide ranges, and create openings that allow sunlight to reach the forest floor—supporting regeneration and, in turn, carbon capture. So it’s no great leap to consider the tapir as having measurable effects on entire ecosystems.
But their resurgence isn’t without consequence. When a tapir wanders into a cucumber farmer’s field, the crop can be wiped out overnight—livelihoods undone by the same animal that, at scale, helps sustain the forest. What reads as restoration in one context is loss in another.
Esteban’s work sits directly in what he calls “the duality”—the balance of gain and loss inherent to conservation work. Rewilding isn’t just about bringing animals back—it’s about figuring out how those changes land with the people already there. In practice, that means tracking movement, understanding patterns, and working with local communities to reduce conflict where possible.
And in the case of the tapir, it means attention to the most granular details—the places they move, the paths they cut—and, for me, the pools they find most responsive to a good, honest slam.
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Sing for Science Just Won a Webby
Sing for Science just took home a Webby Award for Best Live Podcast Recording for our episode with Kacey Musgraves and Paul Stamets on Magic Mushrooms.
Sing for Science has been awarded a Webby Award for Best Live Podcast Recording!
The honor recognizes our live taping with Kacey Musgraves and mycologist Paul Stamets, recorded at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville.
The conversation moves from mushrooms to consciousness to the hidden systems that shape how we live—an exchange that reflects what the series does at its best: bringing artists and scientists together in a setting where ideas can unfold in real time.
Stamets describes mycelium as “nature’s internet”—a vast, underground network connecting ecosystems. Musgraves brings that idea back to the human scale, reflecting on how learning reshapes our sense of connection. The result is less a traditional interview than a shared inquiry.
The Webby Awards, established in 1997, recognize excellence across the internet. For Sing for Science, the award affirms an approach that has guided the show from the beginning: pairing musicians and scientists not to simplify ideas, but to expand them.
Since its launch, the series has grown into a platform for conversations that move fluidly between art and research, often in front of live audiences in spaces like the Ryman Auditorium, the New Museum, and the Museum of Science in Boston.
We look forward to seeing you in your city in the very near future.
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A Brief & Partial History of Skinheads In Punk
Being in the punk scene for decades, Dropkick Murphys’ Ken Casey delivered a lesson on punk rock subculture: from the ‘60s to the White House.
Last week on Sing For Science, Dropkick Murphys singer Ken Casey talked with Dr. Phillip Atiba Solomon about the band’s song “Citizen I.C.E.” and how music can push against (or for) dehumanization. Being in the punk scene for decades, Casey delivered a lesson on punk rock subculture: from the ‘60s to the White House.
Neo-Nazi skinheads in the punk scene were once—surprise, surprise—disenfranchised white working-class youth, ultimately weaponized by the far-right UK political party, the National Front. In the late 1960s, skinhead culture emerged in London when Jamaican immigrants introduced young Britons to ska, rocksteady, and early reggae. Ironically, what would later become associated with white supremacy was, at its core, multiracial.
Culture is as fluid as it is porous and as economic strain intensified in the 1970s, political groups began to recognize that youth culture was ripe for exploitation. The National Front seized that opportunity, recruiting within punk and skinhead scenes, targeting young people already searching for belonging. Shows became not just cultural gatherings, but recruiting grounds.
What had been built around shared musical influence and community—the same inclusive inertia that, when left untouched, allows cultures to commingle and blend—was, in part, redirected toward exclusionary politics. Not entirely, and not without resistance in the punk scene, but enough to reshape how all skinheads were seen, both from within and without.
This pattern of fracture and division isn’t unique to one place or one moment, and Casey has had a front-row seat as present-day politics have divided his band’s mostly working-class fan base over the last ten years.
Casey says, “Of course, that spread to America. And you had the real punk rockers and real skinheads who were mortal enemy number one, racist skinheads, because it made them look bad… Our shows in the early days were the meeting spots for those two groups to the fight, and they were also the meeting spots for, sometimes when we were loading in our gear for the Nazis to show up.”
Dropkick Murphy’s new song, “Citizen I.C.E.,” is not unrelated. It’s about systems that create an “us” and “them” mentality. How dangerous things can become when those categories begin to calcify. You don’t have to look beyond punk itself to see how it happens. The history of skinhead culture offers a case study in how music builds community, community shapes identity, and identity can be co-opted.
“Now I say to people when they talk about Nazis in the scene, I go, they're not in the music scene anymore. We're small potatoes,” said Casey. “They're on college campuses, they're in the White House. They don't have to bother with disenfranchized youth in a punk rock show anymore.”
The groups that targeted these youth movements didn’t create something new from nothing. They stepped into an existing network of trust, built through music, style, and shared experience, then repurposed it.
