Paramount Importance

Professor Kate Sanders has built her career trying to understand one of the ocean’s most fascinating and misunderstood groups of animals: sea snakes. Based at Adelaide University, Kate’s research explores their evolution, diversity, sensory biology and conservation, helping uncover how snakes made the extraordinary transition from life on land to becoming fully marine predators.
Sea snakes evolved relatively recently, yet have developed an incredible suite of adaptations for life underwater. Kurt and Kate explore how they breathe, dive, hunt, reproduce and experience their underwater environment, including their elongated lungs, ability to absorb some oxygen through their skin and the sensory systems that allow them to detect the world around them.
The conversation also dives into some of the stranger sides of sea snake biology, from species with highly specialised diets to snakes living and hunting at surprising depths, and how quickly evolutionary changes can occur.
But there is also a worrying side to the story. Some sea snake populations have disappeared from places where they were once abundant. Kate discusses the unexplained declines at locations such as Ashmore Reef, the critically endangered short-nosed sea snake, fisheries bycatch, climate pressures and why simply finding and monitoring these animals can be so difficult. They also explore new tools such as environmental DNA, and what sea snake evolution might teach us about how species respond to a rapidly changing ocean.
For an animal often reduced to little more than its venom, sea snakes have an extraordinary evolutionary story that we are still only beginning to understand.
Host: Kurt Krispyn
Guest: Professor Kate Sanders, Adelaide University
Podcast: Paramount Importance
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Dr Stephanie Mason is an evolutionary biologist at The University of Western Australia researching how magpies learn to communicate, and what their calls could reveal about the evolution of human language. Her field research followed 11 young magpies over 200 days, tracking how their social relationships shape the development of complex call sequences.
She joins Kurt Krispyn to explore magpie alarm calls, neighbourhood “dialects”, lifelong vocal learning and the difference between birdsong and meaningful communication. How do young magpies learn to combine sounds? Why do neighbouring groups communicate differently? And what can a magpie that laughs like a toddler teach us about vocal learning?
From surprising mating behaviour to the reasons behind swooping, this conversation offers a fascinating look at an Australian icon hiding in plain sight. Hear examples of their calls, learn how researchers investigate their meaning, and discover what we still haven’t decoded.
Host: Kurt Krispyn
Guest: Dr Stephanie Mason, The University of Western Australia
Podcast: Paramount Importance
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Dr Damian Thomson from CSIRO has been working on reef systems at Nyinggulu since 2007, giving him a powerful long-term view of what has changed, what has been lost, and what still may be possible for Western Australia’s coral reefs.

Joining him is Dr Jenny Shaw from the Western Australian Marine Science Institution, who helps take us behind the scenes of the WA Reef Regen Program — a major new effort to support coral and reef regeneration along the Western Australian coastline.

After the devastating 2024–25 marine heatwave and coral bleaching event at Nyinggulu, scientists, Traditional Owners, government, philanthropic partners and local communities came together to trial reef regeneration across coral spawning events in Exmouth and Coral Bay.

This conversation explores what actually happens when corals bleach, why reefs are so important for biodiversity, coastlines, fisheries, tourism and culture, how baby corals can “swim” and choose where to settle, and what it takes to attempt reef regeneration while dealing with cyclones, closed roads, difficult logistics and a very small biological window.

It is a powerful conversation about science, urgency, collaboration and realistic hope for the future of Western Australia’s coral reefs.

Host: Kurt Krispyn
Guest: Dr Jenny Shaw, Western Australian Marine Science Institution
Guest: Dr Damian Thomson, CSIRO
Podcast: Paramount Importance

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Professor Jessica Meeuwig AM is one of Australia’s most important voices in ocean conservation. Recently appointed a Member of the Order of Australia for her significant service to marine conservation and research, Jessica is the inaugural Wen Family Chair in Conservation at The University of Western Australia and Director of the Marine Futures Lab.
Her work has helped pioneer the global use of midwater BRUVS, baited remote underwater video systems used to study life in the “big blue”. This is the vast open ocean that covers most of our planet, but remains hidden from view. Through this work, Jessica and her team have transformed how scientists count, measure and understand open-ocean wildlife, from sharks and tuna to the smaller pelagic species often missed by traditional fisheries data.
In this episode of Paramount Importance, Kurt Krispyn sits down with Jessica to explore why the open ocean matters to all of us, how scientists study wildlife in one of the hardest places on Earth to monitor, and what that research can tell us about sharks, tuna, fisheries, shifting baselines and marine parks.
This is a powerful conversation about the hidden life of the open ocean, the difference between real protection and “paper parks”, and why the ocean still has an extraordinary ability to heal if we give it the space to do so.

Dr Naima Andrea López is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Marine Futures Lab at The University of Western Australia and a shark researcher specialising in the ecology and conservation of hammerhead sharks. Her research led to the identification of Australia’s southernmost known recurrent aggregation of critically endangered scalloped hammerhead sharks, found remarkably far south in Perth’s metropolitan waters. Using drones as a non-invasive way to study these animals, Andrea has spent years investigating when they arrive, why they gather and what their presence in southern waters could tell us about a changing ocean. She also leads Hammerhead Hub, a citizen science initiative connecting fishers, divers, drone pilots and other ocean users directly with hammerhead shark research.

In Episode 51 of Paramount Importance, Kurt Krispyn sits down with Andrea to explore the remarkable biology and conservation of hammerhead sharks. They discuss why hammerheads evolved their distinctive head shape, how scalloped hammerheads can dive beyond 1,000 metres and effectively “free dive” into cold, deep water, and why groups of juvenile scalloped hammerheads are now repeatedly aggregating off Perth.

Andrea also explains the evidence behind their southward range shift, why these coastal aggregation sites may be important for the species, and why numbers at known locations appear to be declining. The conversation explores fishing pressure, marine protected areas, gaps in species-specific catch data, the ecological role of large sharks, and the striking reality that scalloped hammerheads are critically endangered globally yet can still legally be caught in Western Australia.