Off Track - Separate stories podcast

Australia is full of weird plants and animals. And Dr Ann Jones is on speaking terms with most of them! Each week Ann explores the most unusual elements of our natural world — the ones that make you go What the Duck?! Like why do quolls have spots? Who farts (and who doesn't)? And how do snakes climb trees? Join Ann alongside experts and ordinary Aussies alike to solve mysteries, smash myths and uncover the bizarre truth about nature down under.

The Off Track adventure has come to an end.

The song calls of Antarctic blue whales are so deep that they're almost infrasonic - you feel them as much as you hear them.

After 35 years, some of the same sleepy lizards are still alive, still with the same lizard partner.

A bilby dreaming story guides a mother with a sick child to an outback town. Decades later, the child returns to repay the favour and look after the bilby.

While all ten crew members of the Blythe Star got out alive after she capsized, not all would survive the ordeal that followed.

This is Australia and the world, as heard by you, the listeners of Off Track.

Nature can be sanctuary, as well as family and guide.

Just under the surface of the ocean, a cacophony of sound awaits.

It's all very well recording frog sounds, but what are they trying to say?

Murray Littlejohn first recorded the moaning frogs of WA on a device made from a gramophone mechanism in the early 1950s.

How can you appreciate the ecological importance of fire, but also fight fires with all your might? 

Just when you thought it might be safe to get back out into nature, you get zapped back to reality.

Can you defend yourself against a predator more than 200 times your size with a costume change?

What's been dumped on our beaches and what's been taken away?

Why are the birds in our neighbourhoods changing?

In a tiny town called Windy, a woman seeks a life of isolation.

This site of huge ecological significance has a violent history.

Melbourne's Yarra river has an unexpected inhabitant, and its bringing joy to people in the locked-down city and beyond.

In the groundwater beneath the Nullabor, there are billions of tiny crustaceans crawling between the grains of sand.