Paramount Importance

Dr Claire Greenwell is a highly respected marine scientist, ornithologist and conservation biologist whose research has helped transform our understanding and protection of Australia's seabirds and shorebirds. As Chair of the Australian Fairy Tern National Recovery Team, Claire has dedicated years to investigating the ecology, behaviour and population dynamics of the threatened Australian Fairy Tern. Her research has contributed to conservation strategies and wildlife management across Australia.

From seabirds that can spend years at sea without returning to land, to birds that navigate vast oceans using the Earth's magnetic field and their extraordinary sense of smell, Claire reveals some of the remarkable adaptations that allow these animals to survive.

The conversation explores why seabirds are considered sentinels of ocean health, how their diets reveal changes in marine ecosystems, and the scientific techniques researchers use to study their movements, breeding and survival.

Claire also shares one of the most devastating experiences of her career, when a single roaming cat caused the collapse of a Fairy Tern breeding colony in Mandurah containing 111 nests. What followed became an important example of how scientific research, community involvement and conservation action can help protect threatened wildlife.

Having known Claire for years and collaborated on research together, Kurt explores the fascinating connections between seabirds, fish and the wider marine environment, revealing just how much these incredible animals can teach us about the health of our oceans.

Host: Kurt Krispyn
Guest: Dr Claire Greenwell
Podcast: Paramount Importance

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This production was recorded at the podcast studios in the Media Arts Centre at Murdoch University.

The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the hosts and guests and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Murdoch University.

Any content provided by the hosts and guests are their personal opinions and are not intended to represent the views or opinions of the university, its administration, faculty, or staff.

Professor Kate Sanders has built her career trying to understand one of the ocean’s most fascinating and misunderstood groups of animals: sea snakes. Based at Adelaide University, Kate’s research explores their evolution, diversity, sensory biology and conservation, helping uncover how snakes made the extraordinary transition from life on land to becoming fully marine predators.

Sea snakes evolved relatively recently, yet have developed an incredible suite of adaptations for life underwater. Kurt and Kate explore how they breathe, dive, hunt, reproduce and experience their underwater environment, including their elongated lungs, ability to absorb some oxygen through their skin and the sensory systems that allow them to detect the world around them.

The conversation also dives into some of the stranger sides of sea snake biology, from species with highly specialised diets to snakes living and hunting at surprising depths, and how quickly evolutionary changes can occur.

But there is also a worrying side to the story. Some sea snake populations have disappeared from places where they were once abundant. Kate discusses the unexplained declines at locations such as Ashmore Reef, the critically endangered short-nosed sea snake, fisheries bycatch, climate pressures and why simply finding and monitoring these animals can be so difficult. They also explore new tools such as environmental DNA, and what sea snake evolution might teach us about how species respond to a rapidly changing ocean.

For an animal often reduced to little more than its venom, sea snakes have an extraordinary evolutionary story that we are still only beginning to understand.

Host: Kurt Krispyn
Guest: Professor Kate Sanders, Adelaide University
Podcast: Paramount Importance

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Dr Stephanie Mason is an evolutionary biologist at The University of Western Australia researching how magpies learn to communicate, and what their calls could reveal about the evolution of human language. Her field research followed 11 young magpies over 200 days, tracking how their social relationships shape the development of complex call sequences.

She joins Kurt Krispyn to explore magpie alarm calls, neighbourhood “dialects”, lifelong vocal learning and the difference between birdsong and meaningful communication. How do young magpies learn to combine sounds? Why do neighbouring groups communicate differently? And what can a magpie that laughs like a toddler teach us about vocal learning?

From surprising mating behaviour to the reasons behind swooping, this conversation offers a fascinating look at an Australian icon hiding in plain sight. Hear examples of their calls, learn how researchers investigate their meaning, and discover what we still haven’t decoded.

Host: Kurt Krispyn
Guest: Dr Stephanie Mason, The University of Western Australia
Podcast: Paramount Importance

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Dr Damian Thomson from CSIRO has been working on reef systems at Nyinggulu since 2007, giving him a powerful long-term view of what has changed, what has been lost, and what still may be possible for Western Australia’s coral reefs.

Joining him is Dr Jenny Shaw from the Western Australian Marine Science Institution, who helps take us behind the scenes of the WA Reef Regen Program — a major new effort to support coral and reef regeneration along the Western Australian coastline.

After the devastating 2024–25 marine heatwave and coral bleaching event at Nyinggulu, scientists, Traditional Owners, government, philanthropic partners and local communities came together to trial reef regeneration across coral spawning events in Exmouth and Coral Bay.

This conversation explores what actually happens when corals bleach, why reefs are so important for biodiversity, coastlines, fisheries, tourism and culture, how baby corals can “swim” and choose where to settle, and what it takes to attempt reef regeneration while dealing with cyclones, closed roads, difficult logistics and a very small biological window.

It is a powerful conversation about science, urgency, collaboration and realistic hope for the future of Western Australia’s coral reefs.

Host: Kurt Krispyn
Guest: Dr Jenny Shaw, Western Australian Marine Science Institution
Guest: Dr Damian Thomson, CSIRO
Podcast: Paramount Importance

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Professor Jessica Meeuwig AM is one of Australia’s most important voices in ocean conservation. Recently appointed a Member of the Order of Australia for her significant service to marine conservation and research, Jessica is the inaugural Wen Family Chair in Conservation at The University of Western Australia and Director of the Marine Futures Lab.

Her work has helped pioneer the global use of midwater BRUVS, baited remote underwater video systems used to study life in the “big blue”. This is the vast open ocean that covers most of our planet, but remains hidden from view. Through this work, Jessica and her team have transformed how scientists count, measure and understand open-ocean wildlife, from sharks and tuna to the smaller pelagic species often missed by traditional fisheries data.

In this episode of Paramount Importance, Kurt Krispyn sits down with Jessica to explore why the open ocean matters to all of us, how scientists study wildlife in one of the hardest places on Earth to monitor, and what that research can tell us about sharks, tuna, fisheries, shifting baselines and marine parks.

This is a powerful conversation about the hidden life of the open ocean, the difference between real protection and “paper parks”, and why the ocean still has an extraordinary ability to heal if we give it the space to do so.

Dr Naima Andrea López is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Marine Futures Lab at The University of Western Australia and a shark researcher specialising in the ecology and conservation of hammerhead sharks. Her research led to the identification of Australia’s southernmost known recurrent aggregation of critically endangered scalloped hammerhead sharks, found remarkably far south in Perth’s metropolitan waters. Using drones as a non-invasive way to study these animals, Andrea has spent years investigating when they arrive, why they gather and what their presence in southern waters could tell us about a changing ocean. She also leads Hammerhead Hub, a citizen science initiative connecting fishers, divers, drone pilots and other ocean users directly with hammerhead shark research.

In Episode 51 of Paramount Importance, Kurt Krispyn sits down with Andrea to explore the remarkable biology and conservation of hammerhead sharks. They discuss why hammerheads evolved their distinctive head shape, how scalloped hammerheads can dive beyond 1,000 metres and effectively “free dive” into cold, deep water, and why groups of juvenile scalloped hammerheads are now repeatedly aggregating off Perth.

Andrea also explains the evidence behind their southward range shift, why these coastal aggregation sites may be important for the species, and why numbers at known locations appear to be declining. The conversation explores fishing pressure, marine protected areas, gaps in species-specific catch data, the ecological role of large sharks, and the striking reality that scalloped hammerheads are critically endangered globally yet can still legally be caught in Western Australia.

Professor Nicki Mitchell is one of Australia’s leading experts on how threatened wildlife can survive a rapidly changing climate. A zoologist and ecophysiologist, Nicki is a Professor in UWA’s School of Biological Sciences, Deputy Director of the UWA Oceans Institute and Lead Councillor of the Biodiversity Council.

For eight years, she served on Australia’s Commonwealth Threatened Species Scientific Committee, helping assess which species, ecological communities and threatening processes required recognition under national environmental law. Her pioneering research into assisted colonisation has attracted international attention, including coverage in Nature and The New York Times. She also leads a project believed to be the first in the world to trial moving a threatened vertebrate into new habitat specifically because of climate change.

In Episode 50 of Paramount Importance, Kurt Krispyn sits down with Nicki to explore a remarkable career spanning some of the world’s most unusual and vulnerable animals.

The conversation begins with the tuatara, New Zealand’s extraordinary reptile that can live for more than a century and represents the sole surviving lineage of an ancient group that once lived alongside the dinosaurs. Nicki explains how warmer nests produce males, why females in one isolated population reproduce only around once every nine years, and how climate change could push the population into an extinction vortex.

They explore how species are classified as threatened, what legal protection actually means and why many declining animals remain unlisted simply because scientists do not have enough data.

The conversation then turns to one of conservation’s most difficult questions. How far should humans intervene to prevent extinction? From cooling nests and incubating reptile eggs to moving entire populations towards safer climates, Nicki explains the science, risks and ethics of assisted colonisation. This includes her groundbreaking work trialling new habitats for the Critically Endangered Western Swamp Turtle.

Nicki also shares the remarkable beginning of her scientific career, researching a newly discovered Tasmanian moss frog whose enormous eggs develop inside moss for up to 14 months.

From tuatara and sea turtles to frogs, threatened species policy and world first conservation trials, this episode explores what saving wildlife may require when protecting its existing habitat is no longer enough.

Dr Daniel Jan Martin is an award-winning environmental planner and designer working at the intersection of conservation, landscape architecture and urban ecology. As Lecturer and Co-Head of Landscape Architecture at The University of Western Australia, Daniel is helping reshape how we think about cities—not as places separate from nature, but as living systems connected through water, vegetation, wildlife and people.

In this episode of Paramount Importance, Kurt Krispyn speaks with Daniel about why Perth has become one of the world’s most sprawling cities, how poor planning is creating hotter and less liveable suburbs, and why access to trees and nature is becoming an issue of social and climate inequality.

They explore the extraordinary aquifers hidden beneath Perth, the importance of wildlife corridors, the environmental cost of clearing Banksia woodland, and how smaller homes, greater urban density and better-designed neighbourhoods could help address both the housing and biodiversity crises.

Daniel also explains why planners must move beyond rigid boundaries, learn from Noongar knowledge and design cities for ecosystems, communities and generations that may not exist for another century.

Can a growing city provide more housing without destroying the nature that makes it liveable? Daniel believes it can—but only if we begin planning for the future rather than the next development.

Dr Amanda Ash is one of the people you want explaining parasites.

A Senior Lecturer in Parasitology at Murdoch University and a parasitologist with the Harry Butler Institute, Amanda has spent her career studying how parasites move between wildlife, livestock, companion animals and humans. Her research has taken her from African painted dogs and giraffes to remote communities in Laos, where she has worked on One Health approaches to control parasites that affect both people and animals.

In this episode of Paramount Importance, Kurt Krispyn sits down with Amanda to explore the strange, complex and often misunderstood world of human parasites and pathogens.

They discuss zoonotic disease, Giardia, Cryptosporidium, pork tapeworm, parasite life cycles, wildlife conservation, contaminated water, One Health, and why parasites are not always the villains we think they are.

This is a fascinating conversation with a scientist who has spent years chasing parasites across species, ecosystems and countries — and it might completely change the way you think about the organisms living around us, inside us and between us.

When it comes to Australia’s native bees, few people have done more to bring them into the public eye than Dr Kit Prendergast.

In this episode of Paramount Importance, Kurt is joined by Dr Kit Prendergast, a native bee scientist, conservation biologist, author, taxonomist and award-winning science communicator. Kit has dedicated her career to discovering, describing and protecting Australia’s native bees, while helping shift the national conversation beyond honeybees and toward the incredible diversity of wild native pollinators living in our gardens, bushland and cities.

This conversation dives into the hidden world of native bees, from cuckoo bees that steal nests, to buzz pollination, bee hotels, native gardens, honeybee misconceptions and the urgent need to protect overlooked species. Kit brings a rare mix of deep scientific knowledge, passion and storytelling that will make you see your own backyard completely differently.