Survivor - Animal Edition: How are some species adapting to a human-altered world?

00:00:45
Dr. Kaylee Byers: So what happens to animals in an increasingly human altered
world? Why do some species survive while others don’t? What are some winning and
losing survival strategies? And ultimately, who will be the sole survivor? You are
listening to Nice Genes!, the podcast that outwits, outplays, and outlasts through the
genomic stories shaping our world, brought to you by Genome British Columbia.

Welcome to a brand-spanking new season, where we are jet-setting off into the future
and exploring the next generation of genomics.
I’m your host, Dr. Kaylee Byers. I don’t know if you’ve been following the news this past
summer, but we’ve had a pretty rough wildfire season. Canada’s firefighting efforts have
escalated to the highest national preparedness level as 582 wildfires burn nationwide. In
fact, the last three wildfire seasons have all ranked among Canada’s top 10 worst on
record. Here in British Columbia, we’ve seen firsthand just how dramatically a
landscape can change. And wildfires can have devastating consequences for both
people and wildlife, destroying homes and communities, disrupting ecosystems, and
putting lives at risk. So for animals living in these increasingly fire-prone environments,
you’ve got a pretty serious survivor dilemma. What do you do when the island is literally
on fire? Should you stay or should you go now? And if you do leave, where do you go?
Are you a Survivor fan? Is this a show that you have ever watched?

00:02:31
Dr. Kendall Calhoun: Only watched a little bit, but I’m not a regular watcher anymore.

00:02:37
Dr. Kaylee Byers: Dr. Kendall Calhoun is an assistant professor in zoology at the
University of British Columbia.

00:02:42
Dr. Kendall Calhoun: And a lot of my work focuses on understanding how climate
change and specifically some of these climate change disturbances like wildfire
influence animal behavior and the interactions between different species, including
people and wildlife.

00:02:58
Dr. Kaylee Byers: Today we’re talking about animals trying to survive in a world that
humans have fundamentally changed. So how did you first become interested in
studying how animals respond to wildfire?

00:03:11
Dr. Kendall Calhoun: Right. I’m from California and wildfire has been such an
unavoidable topic in the field of conservation and ecology. So I was also interested in
how many of the ecosystems that exist in California and a lot of these other places
depend on wildfire. They have been created by thousands of years of people putting fire
on the landscape for different purposes. And this conundrum of having too much of this
thing pushing pretty much the balance that has been existing out of balance is really

interesting to me and trying to understand what the limits and adjustments these
different species need to make in order to adapt to the increasing severity of some of
these disturbances.

00:04:05
Dr. Kaylee Byers: So actually, one part of animal ecology that I’ve spent quite a bit of
my research time looking at, which is part of this survival space, is movement, animal
movement. So why is the ability to move and adjust so important for animals when
they’re facing major disturbances like wildfire?

00:04:24
Dr. Kendall Calhoun: That’s such a good question. I think movement is, in many
cases, one of the strongest behaviors or ways that animals can use to adjust to difficult
situations and adapt in ways that let them survive at least even the initial impacts of the
disturbance, but also adapt to the effects that come after. So for my PhD, we looked at
how a population of black-tailed deer in Northern California were impacted by this big
wildfire in Mendocino County. At the time, the Mendocino Complex Fire was the largest
fire in California’s recorded history. And from our study looking at the movement using
GPS collars on a subset of that population, we were able to show that as the fire burns
into their habitat, the deer basically move outside of the burn perimeter. So movement is
how they literally survive the incoming fire, which is maybe not surprising. Animals that
are able to move or have high vagility, are able to disperse, are going to use that to their
advantage to avoid risk. And I think one of the more surprising things we found is that
after they do move to avoid the initial fire, they return to their original home ranges. So
it’d be like going back home after the fire burns through and they’re adjusting their
movement after the fire for at least the first couple years to then take advantage of the
landscape in ways that help them remain there. And we observed no mortality from the
fire event. So all the behavioral decisions that were made allowed each of the deer we
monitored to survive the fire.

00:06:14
Dr. Kaylee Byers: Well, that’s a feel good story because you could imagine that not
ending super well. So yay. Are there other animals that don’t fare so well in this fire
survivor animal edition?

00:06:30
Dr. Kendall Calhoun: Definitely. So at the same time, we had a camera trap grid
ongoing in the same site, observing how other species are using space and detections
of them over time. And one of the big potentially vulnerable species that we were able to
pick out are western gray squirrel. Western gray squirrels are really arboreal, so they

depend on trees. And after the fire, the detections for many of them in the burned areas
plummeted. And I think this could be twofold. A squirrel is not going to be able to move
as fast or as far as a deer if it needs to. So if the fire’s quick, there might be some
mortality of those squirrels. Secondly, really severe fires are going to burn the trees that
those squirrels depend on. So it’s going to take longer, I think, for squirrels to recolonize
some of the high severity areas that don’t have the habitat that they need, and then
compound that with their relatively limited dispersal compared to deer, this is going to
take more time for them to get back to those areas that are within the interior of that
really big burn.

00:07:44
Dr. Kaylee Byers: So if you were putting together a deck of Pokemon cards, just humor
me while I briefly abandon the Survivor analogy here.

00:07:57
Dr. Kendall Calhoun: I love Pokemon.

00:07:59
Dr. Kaylee Byers: Well, good. I’m going to show you I know nothing about it almost
instantly. But let’s say you’re putting together a deck of Pokemon, right?

00:08:06
Dr. Kendall Calhoun: Yes.

00:08:07
Dr. Kaylee Byers: What are the qualities on that card that would come up for fire type
animals?

00:08:15
Dr. Kendall Calhoun: I think, okay, so movement, as we’ve been talking about. If
you’re really a good disperser, I think that’s a good fire type trait. I think also, as we
talked about, if you can eat insects that are attracted to recent burns, that’s also a good
trait. The cursorial predators, so the predators that are kind of just roaming like a
coyote, we saw that they do really well after fire. So basically non-ambush predators,
predators that kind of hunt by sight.

00:08:49
Dr. Kaylee Byers: They’re wily.

00:08:50

Dr. Kendall Calhoun: Yeah. Generalist, so if you can adapt what you eat on the fly,
that’s also to your benefit because then even if your primary food source leaves, you
can change to something else. Another good trait/ strategy is burrowing. If you can get
deep enough and the fire is fast enough and not hot enough, there’s examples of
species going underneath and just letting the fire pass and then they pop back out.

00:09:20
Dr. Kaylee Byers: I love that. So we have these, let’s say they are winners in a
survivor for fire and animals. At what point do fires become maybe too frequent or too
intense for even these animals to be able to adapt to them?

00:09:39
Dr. Kendall Calhoun: That’s a great question and kind of really what I would like my
research to point us towards, defining some of those boundaries. And it’s really context-
dependent too. So I think that the deer and other species in my study site ecologically
have evolved with fire. So they are adapted to a certain fire regime. What happens
when that becomes more frequent and the effects of fire become less predictable? That
strategy of just staying in place and waiting for things to regrow is not going to continue
to work. In other cases where it might be more so severity of fires is increasing or the
size of the fires is increasing in such a way that it’s exhausting, the ability of trees to
regenerate, then you’re going to lose a lot of potentially bird species that depend on
mature forest to reproduce or to find food, or use as habitat or migrate in. I think it’s
specific to the different situations, thinking a little bit about adaptation. When those
species that co-evolve with those characteristics are unable to adapt to the extremes of
those, I think that’s where we start to see those vulnerabilities really start to come
through.

00:10:58
Dr. Kaylee Byers: When we talk about adaptation on this show, we often mean
adaptations gained through evolution. These are traits that are rooted in genetic
changes and those genetic changes can happen over generations. But what if you need
those wings like today? Sorry, little squirrel friends, that might not be in the cards. So
those animals have to respond to a changing environment by changing what they do,
like moving to safer habitat or changing what they eat or finding safe places to ride out
the fire. And that kind of behavioral flexibility can be a huge advantage when the world
is changing quickly, but just because they can move and get out of the way of the fire
doesn’t mean they’re out of the woods. Can you talk to us a little bit about how these
events can actually exacerbate other human wildlife conflict?

00:11:52

Dr. Kendall Calhoun: Yeah, that’s the project I’m working on right now, trying to get
published. And actually a really good example just occurred after the Palisade fires
down in LA. Have you heard about Barry, the 500-pound black bear?

00:12:09
Dr. Kaylee Byers: No, but I’m about to look up Barry. Okay, let’s see what Barry the.
Oh, B – A – R – R – Y. Okay, 525 to 550 pounds. Oh, look at old Barry.

00:12:16
Dr. Kendall Calhoun: Yeah. So essentially after the Palisade and Eaton fires, a lot of
the habitat was disturbed and also it impacted a lot of people. So people had to leave
their homes as well, specifically for the Eaton Fire. But Barry found his way into
someone’s crawl space underneath their house after that person had to evacuate. And I
think that’s a perfect example of how these potential disturbances are going to force
both people and wildlife to use more and more limited spaces, like literally sharing a
home. So in this most recent study, we’re looking at how human wildlife conflict or
reported conflicts change in response to recent fire events. And specifically we’re trying
to look at this effect for puma or mountain lions. If you imagine, if a puma can’t get the
native prey it would prefer in its natural habitat, it might start looking at livestock or at
least just being in cities or towns at the outskirts looking for food, which might put it into
more direct contact with people. Same with black bears, like Barry. So our work is
suggesting that high severity fires and fire size do influence where and when conflict
happens. So potentially if fires continue to get worse, we might expect that some of
those conflict occurrences will become more frequent.

00:13:54
Dr. Kaylee Byers: These wildlife interactions are something Dr. Calhoun is actively
working on, and he actually sees genomics playing a role in this research down the line.
Using metagenomics, his team can analyze animal feces to track what wildlife are
eating and how their diets and movements change as they move into new areas after a
wildfire. That’s all coming down the poop pipeline. But while some human exacerbated
challenges might be seasonal, others can come on all at once. Sometimes the
environment changes because of one singular catastrophic event, like say a nuclear
disaster.
In 1986, the year of my birth, and thus otherwise an excellent year, don’t look it up, a
reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in what is now Ukraine exploded during a
safety test, releasing a massive amount of radioactive material into the surrounding
environment. The fallout spread far beyond just around Chernobyl as radioactive
material flew to other places like the UK and to parts of Northern Africa. But the area

surrounding the plant took the biggest hit. Thousands of people were evacuated, and
nearly four decades later, humans have largely stayed away, leaving Chernobyl as this
strange radioactive living laboratory where some wildlife have continued to live, roam,
and reproduce, which brings us to this really sci- fi part of the story. Because when
scientists started taking a closer look at these animals, they found some pretty intriguing
clues about how they’re responding to life in a radioactive world.

00:15:41
Dr. Cara Love: When you trap wolves, there are no days off. There are no weekends.
You’re on 24/ 7.

00:15:47
Dr. Kaylee Byers: Coming up, Chernobyl’s wolves, the survival secrets hiding in their
DNA and what they might even be able to teach us about cancer. Stick around. You are
listening to Nice Genes!, a podcast all about the fascinating world of genomics and the
evolving science behind it, brought to you by Genome British Columbia. I’m your host,
Dr. Kaylee Byers, and we want to get more people to listen to the genomic stories that
are shaping our world. So if you like Nice Genes! and want to know what you’re playing
for, hit follow on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your shows. Leave us a review
and share it with your fellow survivors.

00:16:30
Clip: Field audio from Chernobyl exclusion zone.

00:16:31
Dr. Cara Love: Gosh, watching these really makes me want to get back there.

00:16:36
Dr. Kaylee Byers: That is Dr. Cara Love.

00:16:38
Dr. Cara Love: I am a postdoctoral research fellow at Princeton University, and I study
how human environmental change impacts wildlife, wildlife health.

00:16:52
Clip: Field audio from Chernobyl exclusion zone.

00:16:53
Dr. Kaylee Byers: What you’re hearing, that’s field audio taken from her research in the
Chernobyl exclusion zone.

00:17:03
Clip: Field audio from Chernobyl exclusion zone.

00:17:02
Dr. Cara Love: So this is us trying to determine where we are going to go for the day.
When you trap wolves, there are no days off. There are no weekends. You’re on 24/7.

00:17:19
Clip: Field audio from Chernobyl exclusion zone.

00:17:19
Dr. Kaylee Byers: So why wolves and why track them in Chernobyl? This episode, it’s
titled like Survivor, Animal Edition. Are you a fan of the show? Have you ever watched
it?

00:17:36
Dr. Cara Love: Yeah, we definitely grew up watching it. For a while I thought my
brother should be a part of it, so really tried to convince him to apply. I don’t think he
ever did, but…

00:17:44
Dr. Kaylee Byers: What do you think the qualities would’ve been that would’ve made
him very good for this show?

00:17:47
Dr. Cara Love: It’s a great question. I think, yeah, he just has the right personality and it
just looks like a fun experience that he was-

00:17:56
Dr. Kaylee Byers: He’s a schemer. So let’s get right into it. You study animals living in
some pretty extreme environments, including the Chernobyl exclusion zone. So why is
Chernobyl such a unique site to study species?

00:18:14
Dr. Cara Love: Yeah, it’s still one of the most radioactive environments in the world.
When the reactor exploded, it was one of the most catastrophic accidents in
contemporary history, human-driven, hundreds of thousands of people evacuated from
the exclusion zone, creating this 4, 000 square kilometer zone where there’s very little
human activity other than researchers going in and out. And this kind of sets up this

laboratory or this experimental system that we can start to ask questions in this unique
way that we wouldn’t be able to ask in the lab or any other system on earth as we know
it. And I think it really opens up this opportunity for us to ask questions of, what does
chronic radiation exposure look like? Because the World Health Organization shows
that any incremental increase in radiation dose is correlated with the associated
increase in cancer risk. And no matter what the dose is within Chernobyl, it kind of sets
the stage for can we start to look at natural selection and adaptation in a cancer lens
through this really unique system of environmentally induced oncogenesis?

00:19:32
Dr. Kaylee Byers: Well, and you studied the wolves in the Chernobyl exclusion zone.
Why wolves?

00:19:38
Dr. Cara Love: Oh my gosh. Oh, we kind of have to go back a little bit further, I think.
So when the reactor exploded, the wind was blowing, lots of radioactive material was
deposited on the landscape, and the doses can really change depending on where you
are and even in really short geographic scales, this can change a lot. But could we
measure these doses more long-term, more robustly? And my collaborators developed
this GPS collar that we were able to monitor location as well as the radiation dose of
these wolves long-term. They’re big enough to carry these collars. They also have these
pretty big home ranges, so we were able to see where they were interacting with the
exclusion zone. The zone doesn’t have a fence or any physical barrier, so one of the
questions is just do they leave the zone? Do they come and go? And every layer and
question we add on to this from there helped show us that wolves are just this really
fantastic system.
If you think of a wolf that is born into the exclusion zone, we now know that they are
most likely residents for quite a bit of their life. So a pup is born, it lives its life, it’s
exposed to radiation every day, every hour of the day, awake, asleep, it’s exposed to
radiation. But not only that, but they’re eating what is also exposed to radiation. So if
we’re going to ask kind of the extreme question of what is this chronic dose, they’re
exposed to really high levels from internal exposure as well as their external exposure.
And the domestic dog, which is descended from wolves, they are already used as this
really fantastic cancer model for humans. So dogs develop a lot of the same
spontaneous cancers as humans. The immune response to those cancers and the
physiological mechanisms in response to DNA damage are very similar to humans. We
have a really great reference genome to work off of, and all of these are really fantastic
tools that we can then use to translate the wolf data into something potentially a little
more broadly applicable.

00:21:47
Dr. Kaylee Byers: I’ve been thinking about environmental radiation a lot recently
because my cat actually was hyperthyroid, so she went for radioiodine treatment, and
then when they come back, they’re just a little radioactive. And it was interesting doing
reading into that and just how much Canada says is okay for you to be exposed to in a
year. And they often put it into terms of like, well, it’s like a round trip flight in Canada.
And so you wouldn’t think twice about that. And I guess it got me thinking about the
amount of radiation we’re exposed to all the time and not even thinking about it.

00:22:21
Dr. Cara Love: Right. Yeah. I mean, it’s not this novel stressor, right? We’re exposed to
radiation all the time. There’s cosmic radiation, those flights that you mentioned, there’s
obviously the x-rays and the medicinal aspects that we use it for. So it’s something that
we’re exposed to all the time, and I think that’s part of what makes this so cool.
Organisms kind of have the mechanisms to deal with some level of radiation in their
environment already, but when we exacerbate that, what does that mean and what is
the consequence of it, I think is a really cool question. But if you’re thinking about
humans, we move a lot, we eat different things, we smoke, we drink, we do all these
other environmental factors so they can contribute, which makes it also very hard to
look at resistance and resilience. So being able to measure that in a more isolated wild
system where we can quantify a few more of those variables is really helpful.

00:23:19
Dr. Kaylee Byers: Thank goodness wolves don’t smoke.

00:23:20
Dr. Cara Love: Yeah, true. You never know. You never know.

00:23:28
Dr. Kaylee Byers: Well, let’s get into the findings a little bit more specifically. So when
you first started to look at the wolves and how they moved and what was happening in
their genome, what exactly did you find?

00:23:39
Dr. Cara Love: Yeah. One of the first signals that we started to see was in the immune
system. So our immune system is made up of lots of different types of immune cells that
have different functions, and there’s kind of this profile that you expect to see within a
healthy individual. And what we see within Chernobyl is that the profile of all of those
immune cells, the relative proportions of all of them is completely shifted from the

individuals that are not exposed to this elevated radiation stress. And that was our first
signature that there’s some type of physiological stress in the immune system
happening. But another interesting element is that this pattern that we see within the
wolves, this shift in immune blood cell type ratios is very similar to what, say cancer
patients experience when they’re receiving radiation doses. So we might expect that
from the acute medical exposure for humans, but this is chronic and these are
populations that are exposed over and over, and it seems that this is just a persistent
pattern this population is experiencing. And given that we saw this really dramatic shift,
we started to kind of go more fine-grained. Okay, well, let’s look at gene expression and
see if we can start to understand the underlying mechanisms of exposure and kind of
some of the other physiological aspects that radiation might be impacting this population
at this chronic dose. Are they evolving to adapt this chronic stress? So then we go down
to the genome level and start to measure signatures of adaptation and selection within
Chernobyl specifically, and we do see signatures of selection within this population.

00:25:28
Dr. Kaylee Byers: Quick refresher on gene expression. Think of your genes as having
a volume knob. Some get turned down quieter, some get turned up louder, depending
on what’s happening in your body or the environment. Maybe you turn the music off
entirely. Let’s say you have a gene that encodes a certain protein. If the gene is quieter,
less of that protein gets made. If it’s turned up, you get more. So by looking at which
genes are being expressed or turned up in these wolves compared to wolves outside
the exclusion zone, Dr. Love can get a peek at how the wolves’ bodies are responding
to all that chronic radiation. But a change in gene activity is something that can happen
at an individual level. It’s not the same as population level changes where genetic
changes may become more prevalent across animals passed down through
generations. So this is where Dr. Love’s team took their investigation one step further,
looking at the wolves’ genomes themselves and whether certain genetic variants
appeared to be favored in this high radiation environment.

00:26:33
Dr. Cara Love: So if we just think that they’re surviving, it’s not really impacting them
too dramatically, we wouldn’t necessarily see those genomic signatures of adaptation.
We might see signatures of population bottleneck, we might see signatures of
population decline in other ways, but we wouldn’t really pull out these signatures of
selection within the genome that we’re seeing, and that is really what leads us to believe
that there is adaptation happening within this population.

00:27:01

Dr. Kaylee Byers: This is where things get really interesting for cancer research.
Radiation can damage DNA and cause cancer, but it’s also one of the tools we use to
treat cancer. So if these wolves have evolved ways to better cope with that DNA
damage, scientists want to know what their genomes might teach us. One thing I’ve
seen sort of in the coverage of this story is that the work suggests that the wolves have
evolved cancer resistance, but we don’t know that. There’s some signatures here that
are interesting in relation to cancer, but this doesn’t mean that we’ve got these super
cancer immune wolves, right? So can you tell us a little bit about what we know so far
and what you’re still hoping to figure out?

00:27:50
Dr. Cara Love: What we know so far is that a lot of the gene regulation and the
signatures of selection point to some novel pathways and some potentially novel targets
of cancer response. We know that they’re functionally relevant in cancer because of
what we already know in humans and dogs and these other cancer model species, but
the actual functional consequence of the specific patterns that we’re seeing within
Chernobyl, we don’t know yet. These are really complex dynamics, right? Cancer is an
incredibly complex disease. It’s incredibly polygenic. It can have a tremendous amount
of genes that influence the outcome, and we don’t have the key to answering cancer
from the system yet, but I think this system really provides a fascinating opportunity to
come at these questions of cancer biology from different angles that we haven’t been
able to solve yet in the systems that we do have. And by studying these questions from
a population that is adapting, we can start to look at potentially the mechanisms that are
making individuals resilient before they get sick.

00:29:05
Dr. Kaylee Byers: So in survivor terms, the wolves may have found their winning
strategy, genetic variants that help them handle radiation, and those same genetic tricks
could offer scientists clues about cancer, but there’s an important asterisk here.
Surviving one challenge doesn’t necessarily make you better equipped for the next one.

00:29:28
Dr. Cara Love: You were talking about Survivor, right? That puts it in this game mindset
or framework, but for there to be individuals that survive or win in this one extreme
environment, there are also lots of individuals that do not survive or win. And it’s very
possible that this one extreme environment, the individuals that survive are missing
something that those individuals that didn’t survive had, and the ones that didn’t survive
this first extreme thing, maybe they would’ve been actually better suited for the second
extreme event. But that genetic diversity has been lost from the population at that point.
So it’s not forward-thinking. Evolution isn’t forward-thinking, but kind of a response. And

while it’s, I think, a bit hopeful and encouraging, and we learned so much by studying
the mechanisms that allow a lot of these species to respond to these extreme events,
there’s also a lot to be learned about what we lose in these extreme events and how
these systems might be able to perpetually respond to those. Are these populations
eventually losing the ability because they’re losing that genetic diversity over time?

00:30:41
Dr. Kaylee Byers: We’ve been talking in pretty simple terms on this episode. Winners
and losers when it comes to surviving the human-made challenges animals face, but
real life is messier than that. These wolves aren’t the rule. Within the Chernobyl zone,
radiation has taken a toll on bees and other insects. Birds have shown physical
abnormalities and lower reproductive success, and some pine trees simply died. So
yeah, the wolves may have found a way to survive, but that doesn’t mean radiation has
been a win for the rest of the ecosystem. Take Barry, for example. He may have won by
moving away from the fire, but if that move puts him somewhere with more roads,
people, or other dangers, is that really a win? So maybe the question isn’t just which
animals are winning Survivor, it’s what can we do to give more animals a better shot at
surviving the game itself?

00:31:38
Dr. Cara Love: We need to give them a chance. I think the environment is changing so
rapidly and to more and more extreme degrees. And with every story of a survivor
winner or those that are able to survive those extremes fluctuations, there are
individuals that aren’t. And what we’re able to now start to ask is how much does that
impact their ability to survive the next and then the next and then the next? And if we
keep just berating them over and over and over, I don’t know how many of them will be
left at the end. So I think it’s really important to be able to help them in the ways that we
can and also just give them a chance to be able to help themselves. They can find
some really amazing and wonderful and cool solutions to these problems, but we can’t
just keep berating them one after the next.

00:32:28
Dr. Kaylee Byers: Slow down the environmental disaster.

00:32:30
Dr. Cara Love: That’d be great, yeah.

00:32:32
Dr. Kaylee Byers: Yeah, if we could just… That’s easy. No problem.

00:32:35
Dr. Cara Love: We can do that, right?

00:32:35
Dr. Kaylee Byers: No problem.

00:32:37
Dr. Cara Love: Yeah.

00:32:39
Dr. Kaylee Byers: Well, Dr. Love, thank you so much for taking the time to come on
and chat with us today about wolves in Chernobyl and adaptation and survival. We
really appreciate it.

00:32:49
Dr. Cara Love: Thank you so much. It was so fun.

00:32:52
Dr. Kaylee Byers: Today we’ve seen just a few of the ways animals are responding to
a world that humans are changing, from moving to escape wildfires to genetic
adaptation to deal with something as extreme as radiation. And genomics gives us a
way to understand these responses, but it also helps us appreciate that adaptation has
limits. Just because an animal can find a way to survive doesn’t mean we should keep
testing just how much it can take, because in Survivor, Animal Edition, we don’t actually
want a soul survivor. We want everyone to make it. And better yet, we want them to
thrive.
Our guests for today were Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia, Dr.
Kendall Calhoun, and evolutionary biologist at Princeton University, Dr. Cara Love.
You’ve been listening to Nice Genes!, a podcast brought to you by Genome British
Columbia. If you like this episode, go check out some of our previous ones wherever
you listen from. Share us with your friends and leave us a review. You can also DM the
show on social media by going to @GenomeBC.
Be sure to tune in next time and get your flippers out because we’re talking swimmers.
Why has male birth control been so tricky to develop and is the field finally ready to
make a splash?

00:34:11

Dr. Premal Patel: It’s only been in the past few years now that there’s all this research
coming out into oral, hormonal, non-hormonal, and even different sort of injectable
options that are going through trials right now. So it’s coming down the pipeline and
these things are showing promise.

00:34:25
Dr. Kaylee Byers: Thanks for listening. And to quote Jeff, you can grab your torches
and head back to camp.