Tell us, I guess, a bit about the significance of these moths and what role they play in the alpine ecosystem, because you and myself, some of the listeners, they may be hearing stories about Sydney couples bickering at night over who's gonna get up to shoo away the moths [laughs] in their bedroom, but these moths are actually important, right, for certain animals and I guess broadly for us.

Well, if you imagine, uh, just in terms of weight, if you imagine that is, is nutrients which have been harvested and grown on the lowlands, and then en masse fly to a really fragile, in places nutrient-sparse, uh, alpine country, and they bring with it all of that nutrient.

It's a massive transfer of, of nutrients, so the energy of life.

And so quite famously, they, uh, feed for, um, [lip smack] mountain pygmy possums.

There's only about 2,000 of those beautiful little critters left.

But also for all the birds, all of the small mammals, uh, in, in the alpine regions, but also just for the landscape.

When they, when those that die up there, they carpet the landscape, they enrich the soil.

So I guess just tell us, I mean, how bad has the population collapse been, and do we actually know what caused it?

So Nick, can you just run us across why have people been so critical of David Attenborough?

There are a handful of significant voices in the climate movement who say that having created this awesomely effective tool for communicating, um, the beauty but also the significance and the fragility of our natural world, he then failed to use it to, to illustrate the two crises, uh, that have, that have challenged the natural world, the first being just the, the sheer destruction of natural world through our resource extraction, through the expansion of our, of our towns and cities, and our, our gathering of energy.

And that has led to an extinction crisis.

And then secondly, and more, more recently, the climate crisis.

They say that having built this enormous audience, having built, um, aGod likes not fair.

But having built this staggering reputation and won the trust of people across the world, he then should have deployed it faster and harder to defend the natural world.

Um, George Monbiot, who is a, a, a famous, uh, environmentalist and a writer for The Guardian, he said that it was a betrayal.

Mm