The Wild Episode

04/07/2025

The Giant Clam has a secret trick that enables it to grow faster and bigger than any other bivalve mollusc in the world ...

16/06/2025

The Giant Armadillo is easily the biggest living armadillo, equipped with the biggest claw on Earth. And the fact of its size means it is significant - valuable - to a surprisingly wide variety of other animals ...

03/03/2025

New episodes of the podcast should be starting up again next week.

Just to say, that info plus quite a bit of Wild Episode-y content goes out on the Wild Episode Substack, completely free - everyone can get regular goodies as well as updates: photo-based stuff about gorgeous or amazing animals, occasional summaries of new discoveries from the animal kingdom, that sort of thing. You just have to enter your e-mail and it shows up in your inbox. Check it out if you're interested: https://thewildepisode.substack.com/

Kind souls who want to support the podcast and keep it going have the option to become paying supporters there, and there's bonus episodes and stuff as a thank you, but it's entirely optional.

A substack for The Wild Episode podcast. A collection of wonders and curiosities from the Animal Kingdom, mingling Nature, history and science. Click to read The Wild Episode, by Brian Ruckley, a Substack publication. Launched a month ago.

30/12/2024

To celebrate the end of the year (in slightly random fashion), some coverage of the UK's most awesome bird over at The Wild Episode Substack. Thanks for listening in 2024, everyone, and hope you have a good New Year and a positive 2025.

Have some amazing photos to start your week

20/12/2024

The Wild Episode : Ochre Sea Star : The Keystone Experiment

02/12/2024

New podcast episode out tomorrow, in the meantime: new photo post over at the Wild Episode Substack, celebrating some mildly eccentric but fantastically capable predators:

Have some amazing photos to start your week

18/11/2024

New photo post at the Wild Episode substack: surprisingly beautiful fish with surprisingly science fictional jaws ...

Have some amazing photos to start your week

04/11/2024

New post at the Wild Episode substack on some notable recent reports from the natural world - the biggest 'predatory event' ever witnessed, the highest altitude predatory event ever witnessed and more ...

Max Altitude Predation, Max Scale Predation, Two Animals Become One ... and more.

01/07/2024

The story of the amazing Sumatran Rhino, closing living relative of the extinct Woolly Rhinoceros: its extraordinary voice and its journey through the twilight of the natural world.

13/06/2024

The Cookiecutter Shark is famous for its gruesomely efficient parasitic attacks on whales, seals and big fish. But that is only a part of the story when it comes to this extraordinary, and extraordinarily bright, shark ...

23/05/2024

The Giant Barrel Sponge: one of the simpler animals on Earth yet grows to enormous size over a crazily long life (we're talking maybe thousands of years!), exerts a big influence on reef ecosystems and, unlike a great many animals in our oceans, seems to be thriving ...

09/05/2024

The Aldabra Giant Tortoise is an amazing survivor of a lost time - very recently lost - when giant tortoises dominated many of the islands in the Indian Ocean. Aldabra Atoll is the only place in the world you can still see great herds of tens of thousands of these huge reptiles.