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GROUNDED Live - 2026: Jake Robinson - How Does Landscape Change Affect Our Health?

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Welcome to a new season of GROUNDED Live. This season features presentations recorded at GROUNDED Festival 2026, held over two memorable days on Yan Yan Gurt West Farm in Victoria, Australia. Each episode captures the ideas, stories and practical knowledge shared by the farmers, researchers, chefs, practitioners and thinkers who came together to explore healthier landscapes, healthier food systems and healthier communities.

In this presentation, microbiologist Jake Robinson explores the surprising connections between the health of our landscapes and the health of the people who live within them. Looking beyond the visible world, Jake explains how microbes shape ecosystems, influence human wellbeing and remind us that caring for nature is also an investment in ourselves. 

GROUNDED Festival is a cross between a farming conference and a food festival, held on a different farm each year. Every festival is unique, celebrating the people, landscapes and food of its host region through an inspiring line-up of speakers, local producers and hands-on learning.

With multiple stages running concurrently, GROUNDED brings together science and technology, ancient wisdom and fresh thinking. It provides a respectful place for lively discussion, an audience as interesting as the speakers, and an excellent menu of local food, drinks and music, all on a beautiful, regeneratively managed farm.

Each year, we record many of the presentations and make them freely available as the GROUNDED Live podcast. We hope you enjoy the conversations.

Thanks for listening, and if you enjoy this episode, we'd love to welcome you to a future GROUNDED Festival.

SPEAKER_02

G'day there. I'm Matthew Evans, and I'm the founder and curator of the Grounded Festival. And what follows is the Grounded Podcast. Now, this is the audio that we capture from the speakers in the tents live on the day. It's unedited, and I hope you enjoy it. When we think of looking after landscapes, looking after our farms, we think maybe about water, we think about soil fertility, we may think about yield and maybe even nutrient density, things like that. But it goes further than that. And what we do to our landscapes actually has an impact on human health. So we've got Jake Robinson, who is originally from the UK and now based in Adelaide, who is essentially specialises in the biome, the aerobiome, the microbiome of everything. And he's going to tell us why landscapes and how we treat them can affect our health.

SPEAKER_09

Okay. We're definitely packing it in today for day two at Grounded. In the Iron Bark Tent now, we have the pleasure of welcoming Jake Robinson, who brings a different but incredibly important lens to the conversation. Jake's work explores the connection between microbial ecology. I'm going to try and make sure I don't mess up my words today. Ecosystem restoration and human health. Something that's obviously gaining more and more attention and also we're gaining more and more knowledge around this globally. So today, Jake is going to unpack the way we shape and manage landscapes and how that can directly influence our well-being. And it's a powerful reminder that the work happening on farms doesn't just stay on farms. It flows out into the communities and the society more broadly. So without wasting any more time, can we please welcome Jake?

SPEAKER_01

Thank you. Cheers. Thank you everybody for turning up today. So just a quick more uh little bit more on my background. So I'm a microbial ecologist and a restoration ecologist. So the first part means I study microbes in the environment, so things like bacteria, fungi, and viruses and how they shape human health, and mostly in beneficial ways. So most of my work focuses on the kind of beneficial side of microbes, as there's plenty of people doing all the disease aspects. And then the second part means I develop ways to restore damaged and degraded ecosystems. So I studied lots of different things. I'm not sure if you can see that very well, but I'll try and speak it out as much as possible. So I studied ecology, ecosystem health, uh social research, and applied neuroscience, and I have a PhD in microbial ecology. So that is to say, my work is very uh interdisciplinary, as you'll probably find out in the talk. So I'm currently based at Flinders University in South Australia, and I have published three books which are available in the store if you want to check them out. Okay, so firstly, I want to ask you a question. So don't worry, there won't be much um audience participation, but just a quick question. Uh, what are the first things that spring to mind when I say the word tree? So anybody want to shout something out? What just shade, oxygen?

SPEAKER_08

Yes, recycling, firewood, excellent. Habitat, yes, mycorrhizal.

SPEAKER_01

Okay, yeah, we're getting into that side of things. Mental health, okay, all sorts of things, excellent. Um, so these are some of the things many people say. Beauty, did anyone think of that? When you think of a tree, beauty. So simply looking at a tree and other theatres in the natural environment and can have a real biochemical uh effect on your body. So just looking at something, light enters the eyes, uh, interacts with the visual cortex, and then various parts of the brain talk to each other. Um, and then eventually a special chemical called acetylcholine can be released from what's called the vagus nerve. So this is the long nerve that connects our brain to the rest of our bodies, um, our several organs in our bodies. Um, and this chemical, acetylcholine, can essentially bind to receptors in the heart called M2 receptors, and these are responsible for kind of controlling the pace of your heart. Um, and so they can slow the heart rate down simply by looking at something, and that has a biochemical reaction in the body. So just to just to show that, you know, simply looking at trees can be quite um profound. Um, some people say green, so you know, chloroplasts are responsible for the greenness in trees. And actually, chloroplasts are descended um from microorganisms as well, so we wouldn't have trees unless we unless we had microbes. Uh, timber, so someone said firewood, so many people think of the resources that trees provide. Um, and then woodlands, so you can think of trees as a collection of um organisms within a community. But do the following spring to mind? A complex and diverse community of life that has senses and memory. Anyone think of that? Maybe. What about this one? A holobiont, a host plus trillions of microbial partners working symbiotically to form a functioning ecological unit. Who got that one? Yes, you got that one. I knew you did. Um or a conglomerate that is biologically connected to the surrounding environment or and socially connected to uh humans. So these are some of the things I think of. You got that one. Uh these are some of the things that I think of when I think of trees. So the first part of this talk, I just want to argue that um a forest or a landscape, any landscape, is as invisible as it is visible. I'm not sure if you can see this artwork, probably not very well. This is my very dodgy artwork. Um, but when you're out in nature, uh you'll see, you know, trees, everything you see with the visible eye. So trees, animals, you might see soil, grass, etc. Um, but if just imagine you were able to wear these kind of space age goggles that allowed you to see the microscopic world. And if you could do that, you'd see something like this. To describe it, essentially there are microorganisms everywhere, all over plants, inside plants, inside animals, all over animals, in the soil in particular. So the soil is one of the most biodiverse habitats on the planet. And the soil actually feeds much of the air, um, the microbes in the air that we're exposed to every day. And we call that the aerobiome. So, actually, the least accurate part of this image is the big empty spaces in the middle, which is the air. So, microbes are absolutely everywhere. And if you can see that, if you're lucky enough to see it now, this would be a more accurate representation of what the world would look like if you had those space age goggles on. So the microbes are omnipresent. Again, you might not be able to see this, but I'll describe it. So, air isn't empty, it's an ecological highway carrying invisible life between soils, plants, and our bodies. If you're lucky enough to see this on the screen, you'll see that there are particles all over the place. So just imagine that you're you're continuously swimming in clouds of microorganisms wherever you are. I forgot I added this music, it's quite epic. So when you're walking through a park, the trees are essentially vectors for microbes, they're pumping microbes out into the environment as as well as the soil. So it's a hidden life of our ecosystems. So microbes are absolutely everywhere. I'll stop this now for those who can't see it. Um, so much like you can view yourself, everybody here can view yourself as a walking-talking ecosystem. You can view trees and plants and you know, food plants, animals in much the same way. And we call this a holobiont. So it's a host plus those trillions of microbes that kind of work together. Now I want you to imagine a five-ton tree, just an average tree. And so in a five-ton tree, it has around 6.1 trillion living cells. So these are the metabolically active cells in the tree. These are the tree's own cells. But only about 1% of a tree is living at any given moment. So, you know, the entire heartwood isn't really alive, it's not metabolically active. So it can be struck by lightning or it can be rotted away by fungi, etc. And then the tree is very still much alive. I want to skip over that one. But now I want you to think of the tree as a five-ton holobiont. So a recent study showed that um in a tree trunk there are more than one trillion bacteria. And if you take into account the roots, the flowers, the leaves, etc., then there are between 15.1 trillion and 115 quadrillion bacteria alone, just in one single tree. And together these form that holobiont. So a tree, but apply this to anything, uh, any kind of plant. A tree is actually between 68.75% and 99.9% microbial. So you've probably heard that you are yourselves more microbial than you are human. The same applies to trees, even more. So if you were able to extract the microorganisms from one single tree and line them up in a row, they'd be able to circle the entire perimeter of the Amazon rainforest 1,500 times over. So mind-blowing numbers. And you might say, okay, and so what? It's really interesting. And I would say, it's awesome, that's so what? What do you mean? And you might say, okay, apart from it being awesome, so what? Well, there's this concept here that I developed called food webs in food webs, or also known as nested food webs. So I published this paper a couple of years ago. And so this is the idea that we have traditional ecological food webs where we have primary producers, so the plants, and then we have herbivores that feed on those, and then predators that feed on those, and they form these kind of complex chains of trophic interactions. Um, but if you were able to zoom into one of the nodes, again, you might not be able to see it, sorry, um, then you have a population of a given species in that ecosystem. Now imagine you could zoom into one of the nodes of that population, you have an individual of that population. So it could be any one of you, it could be a tree, it could be a food plant, it could be a cow, etc. If you zoom into that individual, you have an entire new food web inside them. So every single individual has an invisible microbial food web where bacteria, fungi, viruses, protozoa, et cetera, they're all exchanging nutrients and competing and interacting with each other, much as organisms do in the visible world all around us. Um, but importantly, the dynamics of that invisible food web inside everybody, inside every plant, um, shapes the health and the behavior of those individuals. And so it affects the dynamics of the wider ecosystem. So the example on the screen was a rabbit, but it could be a tree, for instance. And I mentioned yesterday, every 48 hours, half of all the bacteria on the entire planet are killed by phage viruses. So that's just an example of a predator-prey dynamic that occurs in the invisible world. So it's kind of a parallel to, you know, you can think of a lion hunting down an antelope. In this invisible world all around us, there are similar dynamics and interactions. And then you might say, okay, that's really interesting, but so what? Uh there's a couple of papers here. Again, you can't see them, so I'll describe them. The first one is in Nature Reviews Microbiology, it's a recent one, and it talks about forests and other ecosystems as enduring lots of new kinds of stresses, you know, pollution and climate change, etc. Um, but importantly, the response of these forests to these changes is largely mediated by microorganisms, in particular fungi and bacteria. So that just highlights the important role of the microbiome in how these ecosystems respond to these novel stresses. And then the second paper talks about microbial inoculants. And I know this is quite popular in the agricultural world. So my background's more in restoration ecology, and we're kind of catching up to the idea of using some microbial inoculants. There's obviously lots on the market that are, you know, developed by cowboys. Um, but some of our research is showing that there are beneficial effects of inoculating trees with um symbiotic microorganisms in um recognition that a tree is not an individual, it's a kind of, as I said, a hollow bion. So you need to consider the entire um the entire system. And so this paper shows that if you um if you source and collect microorganisms from cold and dry and warm regions and then inoculate trees, they're more likely to uh better adapt to warmer conditions when you expose the trees to those conditions. So it suggests that you know, in climate change situations, if we're trying to restore an ecosystem, we might be better uh planting the trees alongside microbes that are already well adapted to those conditions, if that makes sense. Because those microbes play key roles in keeping the tree healthy and um able to tolerate those stresses. Again, this is all about just illustrating the importance of viewing the symbiotic relationships between the visible and the invisible world. And this highlights that this headline is the trees in our cities are dying, a sick microbiome might be to blame. And so there are parallels between human health and ecosystem health, which makes complete sense. I view human human health as an ecological concept. You know, we're just another species in the ecosystem, so those same principles apply in our bodies. Um, but you know, obviously it affects uh organisms in ecosystems as well through the microbiome lens. So this uh this um study highlights that. Um, but the same thing can apply in food systems as well, and interestingly, these symbiotic relationships um can likely shape human health as well. So the symbiotic relationships between trees and other plants and the microorganisms can have an effect on human health. Um now I'm gonna just talk about zoonotic diseases for a moment now. So this gets a bit kind of morbid for maybe 10 minutes, and then I'll come back around and it'll be nice and positive again, and I'll end on a high note. Okay, so zoonotic diseases, zoonotic diseases or zoonotic diseases, whatever you like. Um so these are diseases that jump from uh non-human animals into animal, into humans, sorry. And we've lived through lots of plagues and pandemics over the years. Uh these stretch back to a few thousand years ago. Before then, we the concept of a pandemic simply wouldn't have existed. It wouldn't even have entered the mind when will the next pandemic happen, um, simply because we didn't live in crowds until a few couple of thousand years ago. Um, so these are also known as crowd infections. Um and they've they've taken lots of lives over the years. So 200 million people died from the bubonic plague or the Black Death. One second, and I'll get you the bubonic plague now. Here it is, Yacinia pestis. Don't touch it. No, so Yacinia pestis, this is a rod-shaped bacterium that causes the plague, and actually, sadly, it's it's taken many lives over the years. Um, so smallpox as well, 56 million. There's this interesting one called Coca-Litzli in the 16th century. Um, and this took 17 million indigenous people's lives in Mexico. So this was brought over by the Europeans, and then recent studies suggest it was actually Salmonella, which I found quite strange. Um, and then more recently, we've lived through more flu type pandemics, and there are various reasons for this, um, uh, particularly in terms of how we've changed landscapes and ecosystems. And then we've obviously lived through the COVID-19 pandemic. The official figure was 7.1 million people died, but it was more like 15 million, some people think, in the first couple of years. And then there's this idea of disease X. So this is a placeholder term given by the WHO, the World Health Organization, for the next pandemic. It's essentially um what the next pandemic will be. They know it's coming, they don't know what it is. Um, so COVID-19, six years ago, would have been known as um disease X. And so all of this stuff is described in my new book, The Nature of Pandemics, um, which is actually quite a positive book. It's quite a solutions-focused book, so don't get too down. Um, so zoonotic disease outbreaks are increasing in frequency and diversity. So, this is a really uh key point. And a lot of this is to do with landscape change. So there are several key reasons why zoonotic diseases are increasing in frequency and diversity, including the illegal wildlife trade. So this is kind of self-explanatory. Wildlife should be kept in the wild and not, you know, transported around the world and put in um hot pots and made clothes out of, etc. Habitat destruction, this is a key one. Now, this has a dual effect. So habitat destruction puts us into closer contact with disease vectors, um, but it also stresses out the animals that carry various pathogens. Um, and when they're stressed out, their immune systems become weakened and they're more likely to shed viral particles out into the environment. I'll talk a bit more about that later. Um, climate change is also changing the distribution at which uh various pathogens and disease vectors can survive. And agricultural intensification, so really high-intensity agriculture, this is a key one for zoonotic disease outbreaks, um, obviously cramming in animals in lots of closed confined spaces, and it's creating the ideal conditions for various pathogens to evolve rapidly and jumps between species. Um, chemical pollution, I'll give an interesting example of that in a moment. And then urbanization and globalization. So we are ourselves now the kind of super vectors of diseases, we're traveling around the world, we're living in crowded conditions, etc. What have vultures got to do with it? I hear you ask.

SPEAKER_00

Excuse me.

SPEAKER_01

Uh so in The Nature of Pandemics, my new book, I dedicate I dedicate an entire chapter to vultures. They're one of the most fascinating birds on the planet, I find. They're a bird of prey. Um, they play key roles, ecological roles, in you know, uh cleaning up carrion dead bodies, essentially. And their gastrointestinal systems essentially act like a dead end for various pathogens. So they actually play a key role in preventing the spread of zoonotic diseases um to humans. Um in India in the 1980s, there were around 40 million um of these gyps vultures flying around. So everywhere you looked, you would probably see a vulture. Fifteen years later, their population had declined by 95%. So one of the fastest declines of any vertebrate species um on the planet. So staggering numbers. Um I interviewed a really interesting conservationist called Vibu Prakesh. He was a hilarious guy. Um he he laughed a lot as he was explaining as he was explaining this to me. It was kind of, you know, laughter was his medicine, I guess, because it was a really morbid topic. Um, but he says he asked the villagers, uh the local villagers, their key reason that they thought they weren't seeing any vultures anymore. And the number one reason they gave was the Americans are vacuuming them out of the sky. He was laughing as he was telling me. I wrote this in my book. I thought, really? Okay. Um But um there's a really sad story, but a really important story. So the decline of the vultures um meant that there were lots of dead bodies lying everywhere, in particular cows. And you might be asking, why did the vultures decline? I'll get to that now. Um, so farmers in India were using something called diclofenac. You some of you might use it over here for controlling inflammation in your body. Um, diclophenac is extremely toxic to vultures, but they were giving it to their cows to prevent lameness, essentially to prolong the life of the cows. Now, the cows were just dying eventually of natural causes, but their bioaccumulation of dicchlofenac in their body meant that when the vultures were consuming the dead cows, they were essentially consuming the diclofenac and dying. Um, the villagers weren't seeing any of them because they kept returning to their treetops. They they nest in treetops and then they were simply dying in their trees. So um, a couple of years later, they were doing tree surveys and they noticed lots of dead vultures in all of the trees. Um what's this got to do with diseases in humans? So during the 1990s, this huge decline in vultures um led to a boom in feral dog populations. So there was lots of dog food for all the dogs, essentially, all over the place because the vultures weren't clearing it up. Um, this boom in feral dog populations led to more dog bites between humans and dogs. Um, and then there's a huge rabies outbreak. So thousands of people died, and it cost the Indian economy billions of dollars. And this was all because we've, you know, we've given our cows um this chemical diclofenac. And the kind of important story, isn't there, behind this of, you know, we really need to consider the ecological um cascade and implications of the things that we do in our landscapes. Anything else to say on that point? One interesting point um is there's a group of people called the Parsis. I think they originate um from somewhere around Iran, and they've moved to India, and their uh their um their uh what am I trying to say? Their funeral ceremonies are very different to Western kind of ceremonies. So um they leave their dead on these towers called the towers of silence. And essentially the vultures play a key role in um decomposing their bodies, so that's how they they say goodbye to their dead. And because of the population of vultures declined, they no longer were able to um say goodbye to their dead um family and friends in the same way. So they've had to adapt their practices, they've created these huge mirrors that essentially direct the sunlight onto their bodies. Um so burying their bodies is um not a good thing in their culture. So that's an interesting thing from a cultural perspective as well. Now there's this really important concept in disease ecology called the dilution effect. I'm sure some of you might have heard of this, and the importance of diversity in our landscapes. So if you work in a food system or as or in ecosystems, um, this dilution effect is really important to consider. It's a bit annoying because you probably can't see this very well. Again, I'll try and explain this as much as I can. Um, so there's within this concept, there's this idea of host competency. So this refers to an animal, um, an animal's ability to support and host a particular pathogen. Okay, so if it's a highly competent Animal, it means its immune system is very welcoming to the pathogen and it essentially lets the pathogen live in the animal's body. If the animal has low competency, its immune system saying, get out, mate, you're not you're not welcome here. Okay. So in a nice diverse ecosystem, you have a relatively low abundance of highly competent hosts. So you might have one mouse that's a very highly competent host, and all the other species don't kind of want the pathogen inside it, so their immune system kicks it out. Now, in an ecosystem that we've degraded and destroyed, there ends up being a higher relative abundance of highly competent hosts. So you might have the same number of animals, but more of them are those highly competent hosts that support and welcome those pathogens. Importantly, this is an example of Lyme disease in America. And the Lyme disease is caused by the Borelia Bergdorphi bacterium. And it is injected essentially into humans by ticks. So in a thriving ecosystem where we have a low relative abundance of highly competent hosts, we might only have one in five of those ticks that carry this borelia bergdorphi bacterium. Because it's only able to pick it up from that one particular animal. It's still feeding on all of the others. So that's where the dilution effect comes in. And so this means there's a relatively low infection risk in humans. When we degrade ecosystems, the relative abundance of those highly competent hosts increases. That means there's more of these pathogens kind of floating around in the animals. That means you might have the same number of ticks in the ecosystem, but four out of five of those ticks now carry that Barelia bogdolpry bacterium, which increases, um, it leads to a higher infection rate in humans. So this is just a really important example of how we change our landscapes, and this can lead to these downstream effects in humans. I can talk more about this early later because it is quite a complex topic. Um, so just a few statistics on zoonotic diseases across the world. So um malaria still takes 600,000 lives annually, AIDS or age-related disorders, um, 630,000, the flu, 470,000 deaths annually. This fluctuates year by year. TB, so quite an ancient disease, tuberculosis, again caused by another bacterium. 1.2 million people still die of TB annually. And measles, again, this fluctuates 140,000 a year. So we've got these statistics here. Now I'm going to talk about fungi, because many people don't really think about the the implications or the the uh the threats of fungi, fungal diseases. So 3.8 million people a year die of fungal diseases. And this is really isn't discussed, is it? You'd hardly ever hear about this. Um it's kind of mind-blowing. Um so what do you think these two figures refer to? So one is 98.5%, and it's talking about viruses, bacteria, protozoa, and then 1.5% for fungi. What do you think that might relate to? Any ideas? Ooh, straight on the money. Uh so less than 1.5% of infectious disease research funding is directed to fungi, um, even though they're responsible for all of these deaths. So many of these are secondary infections, so you can already be ill, and then essentially your immune system is weakened, and then fungi kind of move in and finish you off, unfortunately. Um, so fungal diseases in terms of growing food and crops, so fungal diseases uh destroy 30 to 40 percent of global crops annually. I I that blew my mind as well. So around half of those is when it's when the crops are in the field still, and the other half is when the crops are in storage. So we really need to think about fungal diseases more and more. There's this idea of cross-resistance, though. So many farmers are using fungicides, so things, chemicals that kill fungal pathogens on their crops, and some of them are called azoles. Um and but importantly, in humans, we also use something very chemically similar to control fungal diseases in humans. And there's this idea of cross-resistance. So a fungus in an environment has been treated with the agricultural chemical and it becomes tolerant, resistant to that chemical. Um, then if a human gets a fungal disease and then we're treating them with a very similar drug, then that can have um really important health implications. So there's this idea of cross-resistance. Has anyone seen the series The Last of Us? It's a zombie. Yes, one person fleece. Come on, admit it. Um so this is this is HBO series. It was based on a computer game, I think, called The Last of Us. The idea is that a cordycept's fungus is essentially it's got an important message about climate change, actually. So climate change is happening, it's become warmer. Um, the fungus is um more able to tolerate warmer conditions, so it's uh invades the human body and then takes over the human body's brain and then turns everybody into zombies and they start eating each other, etc. Um, I've dedicated an entire chapter to fungal diseases as well. And the first part of the chapter is actually fictional, so it's in the kind of realms of this Last of Us kind of series. Um, but global deaths from fungal diseases have doubled in a decade, a new study suggests. And a lot of this is due to us being able to detect these diseases more. Um, but some of it is due to, you know, we're seeing a huge global mega trend of immune disorder rises, arise, sorry. So our immune systems are becoming weaker, which allows fungal diseases to come and um affect the human body. So, what about the zombie part? You're like, that was quick. Tell me more about the zombies. Um, how likely is that in humans? Well, I've actually um I've actually interviewed a few mycocological pathologists kind of people, so people that study fungal diseases, and they're really concerned about the evolutionary rate of fungal pathogens because it is getting warmer. But this whole story originated in nature. Sorry, I should have put a trigger warning. If you don't like uh fungi bursting out of ants' brains, look away now. So this is a real true story in nature. So this is a cordyceps fungus and a carpenter ant. Um, and so essentially the spores of the cordyceps fungus are floating around in a forest, and they land on an unsuspecting ant's body and invade the ant's body. Uh, they they pump out various metabolites, little chemicals in the ant's body, and they essentially hijack the ant's brain. So it chemically hijacks the ant's nervous system and rewires its behavior, causing the ant to climb up a tree. Now it hijacks two important systems in the body called um gravitaxis and phototaxis. So gravity refers to gravity, uh, photo refers to light and taxis. You can think of movement, so you can think of taxi, for instance. So it chemically rewires the ant's brain to move towards light and up and down in a tree. Once it reaches a certain altitude in a tree, the fungus fills up the mandibular region of the ant and it essentially causes the ant to bite down onto a leaf. And this is known in the industry as the death grip. Um, but essentially it reaches a certain point, the ant bites down onto a leaf, the fungus knows that it's the right kind of altitude, and the cycle continues. Once the ant's bitten down on the leaf, the cordyceps fungus essentially erupts from the ant's brain. So this is a very real thing. Uh ringer, ring of roses and bats with white noses. This is a really important story about bats, would you believe? Um, so 2006, this story began in North America. And uh some cavers were doing their thing, they were going through caves, and they noticed some ant uh some bats, sorry, on the walls with white noses, and they took a photo. They thought, this is a bit strange. Why these bats all got white noses? Um then they probably stored it on their hard drive, didn't really think much of it until the next year when some wildlife biologists were doing surveys of caves across New York State, and they noticed 10,000 dead bats all across the floors. So really horrible stuff. Um and this was the very first case of what's called the white nose syndrome in North America. So the there was a press release, it was out in the media, this must have triggered a memory of the cavers, and they thought, oh that's got something to do with the photo we took. They handed the photo into the authorities, and this was the first known record. So it's a again, it's a fungal disease, and it affects it causes lesions in the uh the bats' wings, but the main way it kills the bats is uh it wakes them up too early from hibernation. So bats have what's called um brown adipose tissue. It's highly dense with mitochondrial cells, so the kind of the body's um energy um batteries, as people call them, powerhouses of the cells. Um they use this brown adipose tissue to wake up from hibernation when the time is right. But because the fungus covers the uh bat's face, it it disrupts their breathing and makes them wake up too early from hibernation. So they essentially use up that brown adipose tissue fat reserve too early. And when they go back to sleep, they simply can't wake up again. So really sad story. The epicenter was, as I said, in New York. Um, a year or two later, it spread across all of America. And it kind of jumped from one coast to the other to begin with, rather than filling in the middle of the uh of the North America. And we think this is due to cavers kind of transporting the spores throughout the caves unsuspectingly. Um so this is a really important reason why we need to disinfect things um when we're walking through ecosystems. So uh a similar story is uh, I guess, Kitrid fungus. Um I can talk more about this later, actually. But I used to be a consultant ecologist and we used to do pond surveys for newts and other amphibians. Um, and we used to create these bottle traps that we put in the ponds. So the newt would sort of swim into the bottle trap, not be able to swim back out. We'd release them afterwards, but it's a good way of kind of counting how many newts are in a pond. But there's some very slack practices in um ecology. So some people used to use the same bottle traps in different ponds, and you can start to see how this can spread contamination around. So it's a kind of similar story here. Now, the white-nosed syndrome fungus causes up to 100% mortality in bats. So, where did it come from? And how did I've already mentioned how it kills bats, but it came from Europe. So we've basically transported it over from Europe to North America. Um, the European bats had co-evolved with this fungus, and so they've created, they've um evolved a level of resistance or tolerance to this fungus, much like we uh, you know, we live with the common cold, etc. But if we then move to another country that's never been exposed to these diseases, then it can have devastating effects on the human population. So the same sort of things happened here in bats. And in my opinion, I think we should care because of their intrinsic value. So I think biodiversity has an intrinsic value, but it also obviously has an instrumental value. And this one's a nice, uh, an important case study in a food system context. So again, the populations of bats decline significantly due to this white-nose syndrome fungus. Um, but bats play a key role in ecosystems. They they control agricultural pests, for instance. So little insects that feed on the crops. So bats play a key role in keeping them in check. Because their populations had declined, there was no longer this kind of natural biological control agent in the ecosystem. So farmers had turned to using increased levels of pesticides to control these pests by something like 40% in these regions where the bats were affected. Um and then a cool study showed that um, well, it's cool in its science, obviously not in its uh results, but um showed that this increased use in pesticides led to an 8% rise in infant mortality, human infant mortality in those areas. I assume from pesticide drift, etc. So this is a nice illustration of how you know if we change something in the ecosystem, it can have all of these ripple effects um into humans um down the line. And there are several studies now, so I don't know much about pesticides, so afterwards don't ask me questions about what the pesticides are. But there's lots of studies now that link pesticides to um congenital malformations and infant mortality, et cetera. So we need to be talking about this a lot more. Um, solutions and rays of hope. So the last part of my book, The Nature and Pandemics, is all about solutions. There's something like six or seven chapters that talk about these solutions, and it's all built around this idea of one health. Um, and I'll be starting a new lab soon uh that's all focused on the one health concept. So, how human health, um, animal, non-human animal health, and ecosystem health are all interconnected. Now, this triad, this one health triad, has its problems because it kind of separates things out unnecessarily. So humans are treated differently to animals where humans are an animal. Humans and animals are part of the environment as well, so it's not the perfect um conceptual model. But we're working on improving it. Uh, another example of that, so this is a grey um uh flying fox, grey-headed flying fox in Adelaide. I took a photo of. So they've moved over from Queensland, and they've moved over from Queensland because we've converted much of their natural habitat um into other urban and um agricultural uh areas. Now, importantly, again, this is kind of hard to describe because there's a bit of a graph on the screen, but importantly, in a thriving ecosystem, uh the bats have enough resources to keep them happy and healthy. But when we start degrading the ecosystem and removing those resources, such as flowering trees for the bats, then we have what's called allostatic overload. So the total energy needed exceeds the total energy available in the ecosystem because we've got rid of their fruiting trees. So then they start to find new places to live. And that's why they've come from Queensland over to Adelaide, essentially. Um, so protecting bat habitat is imperative because when their habitat is under threat, they're more likely to come into contact with humans as they search for better places to feed and live. When their habitat is under threat, they're also more likely to be stressed, as I mentioned earlier. Stress alters the balance between the host and the virus, and this imbalance can lead to an increase in viral replication and shedding. So this is the mechanism by which uh viruses are released from an infected host into the environment. So this all comes from us changing landscapes. So we need to consider these implications as well. So that was all kind of negative. Now I'm going to end on a uh positive note and talk about our invisible friends. So I discussed much of this yesterday, so sorry if this is a bit of a refresh from yesterday. So who considers themselves to be independent? Put your hand up. One person, and you fleece would be fleece is definitely independent. Uh well, humans are literally incapable of doing anything by themselves. So we all depend on the microbial communities that live in and on our bodies, in our skin, in our airways, in our guts, etc. So these microbes carry important genes, so bits of DNA that encode for various functions that allow our body to be healthy and thriving. Um we're essentially this meat taxi plus the invisible microbiome, and combined with this, I guess we're a complete human. So we're not this individual entity really. And in fact, we all depend on the hundred trillion microorganisms that currently live in our bodies. And this refers to bacteria. So if you were there yesterday, you'd know that you all have 380 trillion viruses inside you at any given moment as well. Okay, so let's meet a few microbes. We have fungi, that's a penicillion, that's done good things, saved lots of lives. We have viruses, so these are the ones that live inside you. Uh they essentially control bacteria, so again, the same predator prey dynamics that occur in the visible world also occur in your microbiome. We have bacteria, um, and we have all sorts of others. This one's a naughty one, Pseudomonas. And this one's a goodie, this one lives in your gut. Sorry. Uh so we have all sorts of microbes living in and on us. Um, if you can see the screen, the top one is the bacteria phage. So this is like a spider space lunar land where it lands on bacteria, drills a hole into it, and inoculates its genetic material into it so it can proliferate. Uh, the one in the middle is a Geobacter bacterium. So this lives deep down in the mud below, you know, grasses and trees, etc. And this lives in anaerobic conditions, so where there's no oxygen. And this can generate its own electricity through these little protein nanowires that come off its body. The top right one is known as a tardigrade, some of you probably know that one. Also known as a moss piglet or a water bear. Some people find them cute. Um, you probably don't have them living in you, though, they're moss and lichen specialists. But if you do, we probably need to see a doctor. Um, this is just talking about the scale. So we know the diversity in the numbers. So this is talking about the scale, the size differences of microbes. So I think we kind of standardize the size of microbes. Yeah, they're all pretty small. We can't see them, so we think they're probably roughly the same size. Again, you can't see this, but there's a little speck on the screen that represents a virus. And the big one here represents a bacterium. And the largest bacterium is 37,500 times bigger than the smallest virus. And you're thinking, wow, that's a lot, is it? I don't know. But let's put that into context. So this is exactly the same as comparing a single poppy seed, so a little speck on the muffin, with a blue whale. So the size difference is enormous, even though it's in this invisible world that we can't perceive. And a blue whale is all of these animals combined. Some snappy statistics about your microbiome. So uh you have 1.3 times more microbial cells than human cells, 150 um times more microbial genes than your own genes. And if you could extract the microbes from one single person's body, they would be able to wrap around the entire perimeter of the earth two and a half times. Mind-blowing numbers. Now I'm just going to talk about immunology. I did touch on this yesterday again. Um, so Tari Hartela, friend in Finland, he says we are protected by two nested layers of biodiversity. The first layer is the microorganisms of the outer layer, so in the animals, the soils, the waters, the plants. And then the second layer is the microbes of the inner layer, so the human gut, the skin, and the airways. And the our bodies are colonized by microbes from the outer layer. Again, I don't like using the word colonized, it's just the scientific term that we do use. Um, so we are this walking-talking ecosystem of life. Everyone here is emitting a million biological particles from their body every single hour. So you're all carrying around your own distinct microbial cloud, but you're also ingesting and inhaling millions of microbes every single day. And Professor Graham Rook, he's an immunologist from London, he likens the human immune system at birth to a computer system. So he says at birth we already have the hardware in place, which is analogous to the cellular structures of our immune system. He says we also have the software in place as well, which is analogous to the uh genes that encode for various functions that allow our immune system to work properly. But the one thing our immune systems lack at birth is data. And the data he's referring to, much like a computer needs data, our immune system needs data and in the form of exposure to microorganisms. So the data is the microorganisms. And we need this for three key reasons. And the first one is relating to what we call the adaptive immune system. So being exposed to as many microbes from our environment as possible from a young age, in particular the first couple of years of life, I can talk more about that afterwards, um, is really important because it essentially allows our adaptive immune system to build up a tiny repertoire, an army of immune cells that remembers what we've been exposed to. Um, and kind of cook makes a kind of cookbook, a recipe book of how to deal with them. And so the next time we come into contact with pathogens, we are able to mount a much more efficient immune response. Um, the second reason is what we call innate immunity. The innate immune system is also known as non-specific immunity. And that's because it will essentially attack absolutely anything that tries to invade the human body without proper regulation. Um, so it will normally attack things like uh innocuous things like dust or pollen or animal hair or even our own body cells, and that's what manifests as an autoimmune disorder. So without regulation, that's what will happen. And the Graham Rook suggests that the regulation happens through what's what are called old friends microorganisms. So they're called old friends because we've co-evolved with these microbes over thousands of years and they've kind of shaped and they regulate our innate immune system. But because we're kind of shutting nature out of our lives now, we're becoming less exposed to these old friends. And so what we're starting to see is a rise in immune disorders, and we think all of this is linked. Um, the third reason is a concept in ecology called the competitive exclusion principle. Now, this is the idea that having a diverse microbiome, a well-established ecosystem where all of the organisms kind of know each other and they know their place. Um, this means that those well-established organisms are more likely to outcompete any opportunistic pathogens that try and invade the body. So any strangers that try and say, I want to have some of your those resources in your body. So these well-established microbes essentially say there's no room for you here. That's known as the competitive exclusion principle. So we have adaptive immunity, so the tiny armies of immune cells, innate immunity, and this kind of competitive exclusion. And a recent study suggests it's more like there's no room at the dining table. So essentially, one of the mechanisms involved is microbiome diversity protects against pathogens by nutrient blocking. So those well-established, friendly microbes that live in your ecosystem are consuming the nutrients that would otherwise be available for those opportunistic pathogens. So what we see is a in general, there's a few caveats, but in general, the higher microbiome diversity correlates with a higher colonization resistance. That's why it's really important to eat lots of diverse foods and have lots of diverse exposures in your ecosystem to help improve that internal ecosystem as well as on your skin as well. So we're constantly falling apart every day at a microbiological level, but we're also constantly rebuilding ourselves back up and also interacting with our. Environments all of the time. And that's why the quality of our natural environments is a key determinant of our health. So this is the old friends and biodiversity hypothesis, the idea that we've moved away from more ancestral, diverse ecosystems towards more mechanized, urbanized environments, and we're less exposed to those microbes. And we think this decline in biodiversity leads to a microbial deprivation and an imbalance in the human body, and therefore a higher risk of inflammatory diseases. How much time have we got left? One minute. I'll zoom through these. So there's a few studies that um highlight uh that basically explain this or support this evidence. So, how do we know microbiome loss affects the human microbiome? So this isn't this population study in America between the Amish and the Hutterites. Essentially, the Amish are practicing more traditional hands-on practices, they're more in touch with the biodiversity around them. The hutterites have moved towards modernized practices, so they're less exposed to those soil microbes and the plants, et cetera. And we see key differences in their immune disorders. And the hutterites have a much higher prevalence of immune disorders. And scientists have linked this to the microbiome. I'll just whiz through that. Um, and then there's this idea of biodiversity intervention studies. So we're shutting nature out of our lives, it's having an impact on our body and our physiology and our mental health, but we can do something about it by bringing biodiversity back in. It's a kind of simple solution, really. But the same goes for farming um environments as well. So um planting with diversity is probably good for uh the biodiversity of the land, but it's probably also good for the people that work in those farming environments. Again, we can discuss that in a bit. I think I'm running out of time. Um and then this is just to say that spending time in nature should be a really multi-sensory experience. So we're engaging all of the senses, and this can have various health benefits. I mentioned one at the beginning through that acetylcholine um mechanism, simply by looking and enjoying nature and seeing the diverse fractal patterns. Um and yeah, so restoring natural environments restores what we call their salutatic potential. This is essentially the opposite of pathogenic. So their health health-promoting potential, making us and our environments more resilient to diseases. Thank you very much. Happy to answer questions.

SPEAKER_08

Thanks so much, Jake.

SPEAKER_09

Sorry to wrap you up in a speedy manner, but I do know there's obviously going to be questions and conversation after. So we've got 15 minutes for questions. Um yeah, we'll get some raise your hands nice and high. Thanks, Madeline. Someone over here in the front row. Just wait for the microphone if you could, please. Thank you.

SPEAKER_05

Uh to drag this back to I suppose farming, um I'm a plant breeder and seed producer. Um and I'm trying to develop adaptive plants, plants that are better adapted to the locations they're in. Sure. Um and I generally focus on genetics, but if um should I be focusing on the microbiome? Is that how plants are becoming more better adapted to the things they're in?

SPEAKER_01

I think you definitely should be focusing on that. Again, this this whole idea of the holobion is it only really started in the 1990s with Lynn Margulis suggesting it, and it's kind of developed rapidly over the last 20 years because we've developed cheaper and more accessible DNA sequencing methods. Um so it is quite a new concept. So people really aren't thinking about it enough. But as I say, we should be viewing a plant as not just the the plant with its genes, but also the microbes and their genes as well. And so we developed this concept called um climate-adjusted microbiome provenancing. So it's a kind of similar thing to plants. So you see like climate-adjusted plant proven provenancing. Um so now we're thinking more about provenancing in terms of the microbiome and how they're well adapted to those kind of different conditions and then pairing them up with the plants to see if it has that kind of beneficial synergistic effect.

SPEAKER_05

So, should I be selling dirty seed rather than clean seed?

SPEAKER_01

Potentially, yeah. I mean, we need to do more in experiments. So, one of the things I would suggest for people working in the industry is to run embedded experiments themselves because research is quite lagging behind, to be honest. So, if you can embed some experiments within your land and try some different things out, maybe working with some researchers, then you can try and answer more context-specific questions. Um, there obviously there are the general things that we can suggest, but obviously it depends on your your context and your environment. So I'd suggest um trying to run some embedded experiments. Thanks. Good question there, thanks.

SPEAKER_06

That was highly illuminating, but I'll just start off with a ridiculous comment. Oh, it's not did you toss a probiotic at me for any reason? And if so, was it kept well nourished or refrigerated beforehand so that it's used? But no theory follows to what this document said. Um, with holobions, yeah, will that actually define how we classify a species?

SPEAKER_00

Oh, that's a good one, yeah. So then yeah, sorry, I'll let you finish.

SPEAKER_06

And secondly, when he was talking about climate adjusted seed, yeah, my way of doing so, and I do re-veginal farming, yeah, is my idea of climate adjusted seed, as we've just come out of three cool wet years, which of your plant individual plants for each species you want to grow did best, and they're your cold, wet, climate adjusted.

SPEAKER_08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06

And now we're coming into pot. So once again, observe nature around you for your seed rather than grab something from 500 mile away.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, that's a good idea. Um, so what was the first point? Uh, do do I need to respond to that?

SPEAKER_06

Species where the hollow biopsy. Oh, right.

SPEAKER_01

That one, yeah. Um, yeah, so I think so. So I think the idea of species is quite blurry anyway. Like the boundaries are quite blurry. Even Charles Darwin thought it was a strange concept. Um, because you know, you can you even at the kind of the the visible organism level, you can graft one tree onto another, for instance, quite you. So then is that then one species or two? Um uh but yeah, I think it will redefine what it means to be a species or an at least an individual. So looking at individuals, we shouldn't be just viewing ourselves as this the thing that we can see. Obviously, we should view ourselves as this um meta-organism, if you like. Um so yeah, I think that probably will redefine how we think about things to a certain degree. I think it's quite useful to have species um it's um from an organizational perspective. Um the second point. So, what was the question in the climate adjusted thing? It was what Yes.

SPEAKER_08

Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_01

So you're thinking from a microbial perspective, would you do the same thing? Or yeah, right. Well, I think it's a good idea. Again, I think ex uh it's such early days that we need these embedded experiments to see what works best. Um the the climate adjusted microbiome provenancing thing is literally just being suggested this year, so it's like incredibly new. Um so we really need to do those experiments to find out. But um, if we don't have to kind of travel 500 miles to collect some microbes, obviously that would be much better from a logistical perspective. Um so yeah, good thinking, but I don't think we have the answers properly yet. Nice thinking though. I can chat to you after if I thank you, Jake.

SPEAKER_09

We're just gonna switch microphones, please.

SPEAKER_08

Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_04

Um I love bats. And um I just wanted I thought it was really worth mentioning that um so I live in Kolak and people really hate on the bats in that region um in an in the urban setting. Um I think it's really worth mentioning that um the grey-headed bats are incredible pollinators. Yes. Um they fly up to 50 Ks a night and they shove their little fairy faces into the the buds and the fruit and then they crap it all out and it all goes on. And particularly while we're having a big decline in our bee population, um, I think that real value adding for the bats really, I just couldn't help it.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, no, so saying that out loud.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, it's they're they're real strong contributors. Yes, I agree. Cheers.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, so um I completely agree with that. I probably should have mentioned that. So bats play a key role in ecosystems as well, not just kind of controlling so-called pests, but um especially the the fly the fruit bats, they play a key role in uh spreading seeds across the ecosystems and pollinating various plants as well. So we really do need them in the landscape.

SPEAKER_08

Any other questions? Thank you, Jake, for a fantastic presentation.

SPEAKER_00

Um the vultures and whether there's any recovery program or if they found a solution to sort of counter the issue.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. Yeah, good question. Um so I spoke to Vivi Prakesh actually late last year after the book was published. Um, and he says the the good news is the populations have stabilized, so there's no more declines anymore. The bad news is their life cycles are so long that it's going to take quite a while for them to recover, so lots and lots of years essentially. So there's kind of good and bad news. There's there's definitely a conservation program going on now. Dicclif and act's been banned from I I think all of India, but some people probably still use it, you know, unofficially. Um, so there's those kind of jewel effects. We're stopping to use the the the thing that's causing the issue, but also the populations are stabilized. Um obviously we've got to wait a lot longer until their populations bounce back, but people are working on it, yeah. Um there's similar issues across the world as well. So Bitclerfinette's being used in Spain and it's affecting their vultures, I think. I don't think they've banned it yet.

SPEAKER_05

So yeah. Thanks. Good question.

SPEAKER_07

How are we going? We've got a bit of time. Hi, um, I'm Clem. I work with Hatesbury Landcare and I live in Nellangul. And I had the wonderful experience of um acquiring um blastocystis, um, which is a ended up with gastro for three weeks, but it's an interesting um microbe, I get microbe, I guess, because um it was a bit unclear whether or not um it's good or bad, right? So I was I just was wondering about are there good microbes that turn bad? Or and also um about sort of microbial dormancy, um, because I think there was a near gap in which I acquired it. But um and I was thinking about that in regards to we talk about seed dormancy, but are there like microbes that you know how how can they can they be activated at you know different time?

SPEAKER_01

Good question. Um so the first one can kind of good microbes turn bad? Um yes, so there's there's what's called commensal microbes, and many of them kind of live without causing any harm in our bodies, um, and we kind of provide them with nutrients, etc. Um, but in certain conditions, they can switch to being pathogenic. So if we're taking antibiotics or if we're exposed to pollutants, or if we're stressed, or if our immune system's compromised, this kind of indicates to some of those pathogens that they can uh kind of mount a group-based response and team up, and then they do become pathogenic. Um, so there's this idea of um, is this relevant? I'm not sure. Maybe. So this idea of um a kind of inverse-shaped, U-shaped dose response curve in biology where being exposed to a lowish level of microbes is potentially bad for us. Being exposed to a high level of those commensal microbes is also bad for us because it has that pathogenic effect. So we kind of need this sweet, middle, sweet spot of exposure. Um, so that's just another mechanism to explain that kind of good turn to bad um idea. Uh, the second question, well, what's the second question?

SPEAKER_07

Around microbial dormancy.

SPEAKER_01

Oh, yeah. So yes, it's the various microbes can lie dormant in the human body, which is really interesting. And that kind of tricks us when we're doing sequencing sometimes because we don't always detect some of the microbes that are present. Um, and they can be in really low numbers as well, so they don't show up on the sequencing results. Um, I don't know too much about how you kind of rejuvenate them or bring them back to life, but presumably they do kind of spring um spring back to life in certain conditions. So it might be through your diet or various exposures in nature. Yeah, probably a similar concept. So um the idea of I guess the idea of a lot of my work is to show that humans are not really separate from nature. So much of the same principles that apply in nature apply in the human body. So we really need to kind of, I guess, stop putting that um boundary between the two. Um, so if you think of something uh as in nature, it's likely to happen with the same ecological principles in the human body. We've just sort of separated ourselves and created this social system that we're different, so then we need this uh completely different way of um looking after ourselves. Um yeah, good question. And regen, yeah. I mean a similar kind of concept. There are sort of like seed, seed bank kind of style microbes lying in the soils that yeah, I'm sure would come alive in the right conditions if you treated the soil right with various organic matter and stuff. So it's really key to provide a diversity of organic matter in the soil. Again, similar to the human body, a diversity of organic matter in our prebiotic plants, etc., uh brings our ecosystem inside that together. And the same kind of principle applies in soil. So yeah, lots of parallels. Good question.

SPEAKER_09

Okay, we've got two minutes, so one question.

SPEAKER_08

Thanks.

SPEAKER_03

Sorry to keep doing this because I can't help myself.

SPEAKER_09

As long as you keep yourself to two minutes, I leave.

SPEAKER_03

It's in relation to that last question around dormancy. So very interesting trial published a couple of years ago where they showed that eating fermented foods could increase the diversity of the gut microbiome in humans. But it wasn't the microbes that were in the fermented foods that um grew in abundance, it was ones that they think were just dormant and in low numbers in the individual human that seemed to suddenly come up and become more diverse. So I suspect it's probably the same with farming too. So if you have biofertilizers that have got a fermented aspect to them, maybe that's going to be a similar principle.

SPEAKER_09

More research needed is the key.

SPEAKER_01

More research needed, but there are key principles that do apply across kind of humans and ecosystems. Yeah. Yes.

SPEAKER_09

I feel like we need to reorganize the uh organizational chart for species on Earth and just stick microbes at the top.

SPEAKER_01

Well, yeah, microbes are uh kind of across the whole the whole chain and the whole pyramid. So it's funny how we create those energy pyramids with microbes at the bottom. They're actually involved in the every single level.

SPEAKER_09

So all right. Can everyone join me, please, and give an iron back? Thank you to Jake Robinson.