Feral by Design | The Biomimicry Podcast

The Goat Brigade: Reducing Bushfire Risk, One Chew at a Time

Goats are being hired to reduce wildfire and bushfire fuel, and in NSW the Rural Fire Service has even dubbed its hazard-reduction herds the “Goat Brigade”. But this sto

Looking for Lions, Finding Termites: Attention by Design

What happens when you give someone a way of looking, without telling them what to find? Pia takes one small part of her octopus-inspired innovation method out of the off

How Termites Taught a Building to Keep Cool (Eastgate Centre)

Eastgate Centre in Harare, Zimbabwe, is one of biomimicry’s most famous buildings. Designed by architect Mick Pearce and inspired by termite mounds, its passive cooling s

How Mosquitoes Inspired Painless Needles (REVISITED)

Last week, we looked at the biology behind GLP-1 medicines like Ozempic and Wegovy. This revisited Season 1 episode looks at the other half of that moment: the needle its

Ozempic's Secret Weapon: What The Gila Monster Taught Us

What does Ozempic have to do with a venomous desert lizard that spends most of its life underground? This story starts at 3am with a unicorn saying the word chocolate fi

Knowing When to Stop: 3 Things Worth Stealing From an Ant

In 1971, a temp agency ran a print ad for the perfect worker. She never took a vacation. Never asked for a raise. Never got sick. Never stopped. They called her the Never

What’s Your Risk Taking Profile? Lessons From the Great Tit

A three-year-old turns a stolen maxi pad into a bird, a plane, and a crown - no hesitation, no second-guessing. Three completely different uses for one object in about fi

Leave It To Beavers: The London Underground Flooding Fix

London has just rehired an employee it fired four hundred years ago. No severance. No apology. Just an awkward, "Come back. We clearly can't do your job without you.

After Injury: Making the Invisible Visible

A 14-year-old boy suffers two brain bleeds in a freak accident at school. He comes home and sleeps 21 hours a day. To everyone watching, it looks like the world has gone

The Tree Canopy Effect: Systems Thinking From a Wine-Soaked Laptop

Red wine meets MacBook. Laundry floods. Toilet leaks. All within 24 hours. Somewhere between staring at flood-damaged laundry cabinets and Googling "how much liquid can

Too Fast To Think: What Sloths Teach Us About Mental Fatigue

A homemade billy cart hurtles downhill through a suburban intersection. A keynote slide turns into an entirely new workshop framework. A conference room applauds the remo

Too Fast to Be Legal: The Shark Skin Scandal

Bob Hawke looks down the camera and says: any boss who sacks an employee for not showing up today is a bum. A nation stops. Beer is raised. A boat wins. A jacket becomes

The Firefly Concept: Dementia Behaviour Pain or Panic?

A man raises a glass for two people he's loved for sixty years. A woman stands in a car park, looking up at the sky, saying, "I don't know what you're tryi

Moral Vertigo: When Distant Wars Don't Stay Distant

A friend cancels a trip. Petrol prices climb. A flight route disappears. None of it looks broken, but something doesn’t quite behave normally anymore. It's April 20

When Defensiveness Enters the Room: The Electric Fish Method

I could feel them shut down.  What happens when you feel yourself shift and can’t quite stop it?  Weakly electric fish navigate murky water by emitting a constant field

What Is Biomimicry? (In 4 Minutes)

Most people have heard the word biomimicry. Very few actually know what it means. This short field note explains how the ideas in Feral by Design work - how scientists

Bird-Safe Glass: What Spiderwebs Taught Us About Windows.

Nature has notes. Apparently, sometimes she delivers them in person. This one arrived as a stunned kingfisher on Pia's porch tiles, moments after flying full-tilt i

Wombats, Mange & How to Break the Cycle of Recurring Problems

Why do some problems keep coming back, even after you thought you'd fixed them? It's like scratching the wrong itch. This episode came from noticing a place wh

How Cuttlefish Could Redesign Beach Safety

 A swim that went wrong.  A lifesaver’s eyes locked on mine.  And a question I couldn’t shake. Most beach safety systems are built for calm moments. But danger rarely sh

Snowflake Logic: The Case for an Imperfect Christmas

The second episode in the Feral Festive Special drifts into unexpected territory: snowflakes.  This episode isn’t biomimicry — snowflakes don’t behave — but the pattern t