Feral by Design | The Biomimicry Podcast

Goats are being hired to reduce wildfire and bushfire fuel, and in NSW the Rural Fire Service has even dubbed its hazard-reduction herds the “Goat Brigade”.

But this story starts with one goat, one sheep and an impossible backyard on Sydney Harbour.

Helen and Will Martin were living at HMAS Watson when the lawnmower essentially admitted defeat. The yard was steep, wildly overgrown and, as Helen put it, “goat country”. So Nelson the goat and Jed the sheep moved in.

Which sounds ridiculous. Until you look at Malibu.

Across fire-prone landscapes, goats and sheep are being used in targeted grazing to eat brush, invasive vegetation and wildfire fuel, including in steep, awkward terrain that can be difficult for people and machinery to reach. In Victoria, the CFA has trialled goats for bushfire fuel reduction too.

What began in Helen and Will’s backyard as a slightly rogue lawn-management plan turns out to be a surprisingly sophisticated idea, complete with oversized wellies, worms, a fox, a prized golf club and a biological lawnmower with terms and conditions.

If you’re new to Feral by Design, the usual premise is simple: look at a human problem, then ask what nature has already worked out that we might steal. This episode bends that rhythm a little.

Because sometimes we don’t need to copy nature at all.

Sometimes the better move is to hire it.

This is a story about targeted grazing, wildfire risk, bushfire fuel reduction, nature-based solutions, biomimicry and a deceptively useful design question: what already wants to do some version of this job?

🐐 Nature owns the patent. Sometimes it says: “Mate, don’t copy me. Hire me.”

Follow Feral by Design for new episodes every fortnight.

Sources:
NSW Rural Fire Service "Goat Brigades" – Meat & Livestock Australia: https://www.mla.com.au/news-and-events/industry-news/goat-solution-trialled-for-bushfire-mitigation/
CFA goat grazing trial, Wodonga: https://news.cfa.vic.gov.au/news/goats-used-to-successfully-reduce-fire-risk-in-wodonga
Goats at Big Rock, Malibu – Hoodline: https://hoodline.com/2026/06/goat-fire-brigade-chews-through-malibu-hills-to-shield-homes/
City of Los Angeles goat grazing pilot, Corbin Canyon: https://cd3.lacity.gov/articles/press-release-councilmember-bob-blumenfield-launches-very-high-fire-severity-zone-goat

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feralbydesign.com

Created and hosted by Pia Williams
Clever by Nature. Feral by Design.

What happens when you give someone a way of looking, without telling them what to find?

Pia takes one small part of her octopus-inspired innovation method out of the office and sends it on holiday to Zimbabwe with her friend Jane.

The experiment starts at Eastgate Centre in Harare, the termite-inspired building from the previous episode. Jane gets one loose lens: How does this place feel? What can you hear? What do you notice? What surprises you?

Then Pia gets out of the way.

What begins as a visit to a biomimicry landmark somehow turns into termite-mound excursions, sunset drinks on top of one, an unofficial Zimbabwe branch of Feral. And a safari where termite mounds become surprisingly competitive with lions.

Underneath the fun is an experiment in attention: how a simple lens can change what we notice, what we follow and even what the people around us start seeing.

A story about biomimicry, octopus intelligence, distributed sensing, curiosity - and what can happen when you direct attention without prescribing the answer.

Partner episode: How Termites Taught a Building to Keep Cool (Eastgate Centre)
Original method episode: The Octopus Method: Octopus Intelligence When You're the Bottleneck

Nature owns the patent. We get to copy it.

S3E07

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Created and hosted by Pia Williams
Clever by Nature. Feral by Design.

Eastgate Centre in Harare, Zimbabwe, is one of biomimicry’s most famous buildings. Designed by architect Mick Pearce and inspired by termite mounds, its passive cooling system uses around 90% less energy for heating and cooling than comparable conventionally air-conditioned buildings.

Thirty years later, Feral went inside.

Our first roving correspondent, Jane, went into Eastgate to find out what this famous piece of termite-inspired architecture actually feels like today, how its passive cooling works, and whether the story we’ve been telling about Eastgate for 30 years still holds up.

She found cold air, 48 chimneys, cactus-inspired surfaces, a touch of The Matrix, some strangely empty upper floors... and a termite story that science has made considerably more interesting since Eastgate was built.

Eastgate engineering functionality still works as designed. But our understanding of the biology moved on.

A story about Eastgate Centre, termite-inspired architecture, passive cooling, biomimicry and a deceptively useful question: what’s already here that I could use instead of fight?

Next episode: Jane takes the Octopus Method into the wilds of Africa. Listen to S1E04, The Octopus Method, first if you can.

Sources
Mick Pearce — Eastgate Centre project page: https://www.mickpearce.com/Eastgate.html

Arup — The Arup Journal, 50th Anniversary Issue: https://www.arup.com/globalassets/downloads/arup-journal/the-arup-journal-50th-anniversary-issue.pdf

Hidden Architecture — Eastgate Centre: https://hiddenarchitecture.net/eastgate-centre/

Nautilus — "The Termite and the Architect": https://nautil.us/the-termite-and-the-architect-234706

ASME — "What Termites Can Teach Engineers" by Mark Wolverton: https://www.asme.org/topics-resources/content/what-termites-can-teach-engineers

King, H., Ocko, S. & Mahadevan, L. (2015), "Termite mounds harness diurnal temperature oscillations for ventilation," PNAS

Grist — cactus-inspired façade design (Jane C. Hu)

Knight Frank Zimbabwe — Harare CBD office vacancy data

S3E06

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Created and hosted by Pia Williams
Clever by Nature. Feral by Design.

Last week, we looked at the biology behind GLP-1 medicines like Ozempic and Wegovy. This revisited Season 1 episode looks at the other half of that moment: the needle itself.

Mosquito mouthparts have inspired researchers and designers working on less painful needle technology, microneedles and medical devices. Their six-part feeding system works very differently from a conventional needle, using multiple tiny structures together rather than one blunt puncture.

When you were a kid, did you ever get jabbed with a needle so big it felt like a medieval weapon? I did, the kind that left welts and trauma in equal measure.

Turns out, the real master of painless penetration was buzzing around my head the whole time.

This episode of Feral by Design explores how mosquito mouthparts inspired biomimicry researchers to rethink needle design, pain, precision and the way we deliver medicine.

It’s a classic biomimicry story: brute force versus elegance, one sharp object versus a coordinated six-part system, and why one of the world’s most annoying insects might deserve a tiny nod of respect before you swat it.

This is a revisited Season 1 episode with a new introduction pairing it with Ozempic’s Secret Weapon.

S3E05A

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Created and hosted by Pia Williams
Clever by Nature. Feral by Design.

What does Ozempic have to do with a venomous desert lizard that spends most of its life underground?

This story starts at 3am with a unicorn saying the word chocolate fifteen times, and ends with the Gila monster, GLP-1, Ozempic, Wegovy and one tiny molecular difference that helped change modern medicine.

Our bodies already make GLP-1. It works beautifully, then disappears in minutes. The Gila monster carries a remarkably similar molecule called exendin-4, except nature built this one differently enough that the body’s molecular scissors struggle to cut it.

That difference helped lead to Byetta, the first GLP-1 receptor agonist, and later helped inspire a deeper biomimicry move: don’t copy the molecule. Copy the principle.

And the best part? Nobody found it by asking nature how to control appetite. An endocrinologist in the Bronx found it while looking through venom.

So this episode is about food noise, microscopic scissors, accidental discovery, a drug market worth tens of billions of dollars, and a squat pink-and-black lizard that had been sitting on the answer for millions of years.

Biology: Exendin-4, found in Gila monster saliva, can activate the same GLP-1 receptor as our own hormone but resists the rapid DPP-4 breakdown that makes native GLP-1 so short-lived.

Biomimicry: Byetta copied the Gila monster molecule directly. Later GLP-1 drugs including Ozempic and Wegovy took the underlying design principle and applied it back to human GLP-1.

Next week I’m bringing back the perfect companion from Season 1. Today, the drug. Next week, the needle.

Nature owns the patent. We copied it.

Topics: Ozempic, Wegovy, GLP-1, Gila monster, exendin-4, Byetta, biomimicry.

Sources

Exendin-4 and the Gila monster

Eng J, Kleinman WA, Singh L, Singh G, Raufman JP. Isolation and characterization of exendin-4, an exendin-3 analogue, from Heloderma suspectum venom. Journal of Biological Chemistry. 1992;267(11):7402–7405.

GLP-1 physiology and DPP-4 - the biomimicry claim

Deacon CF, Knudsen LB, Madsen K, Wiberg FC, Jacobsen O, Holst JJ. Dipeptidyl peptidase IV resistant analogues of glucagon-like peptide-1 which have extended metabolic stability and improved biological activity. Diabetologia. 1998;41(3):271–278. doi:10.1007/s001250050903.

Semaglutide design

Lau J, Bloch P, Schäffer L, Pettersson I, Spetzler JC, Kofoed J, Madsen K, Knudsen LB, McGuire J, Steensgaard DB, Strauss HM, Gram DX, Knudsen SM, Nielsen FS, Thygesen P, Reedtz-Runge S, Kruse T. Discovery of the once-weekly glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) analogue semaglutide. Journal of Medicinal Chemistry. 2015;58(18):7370–7380. doi:10.1021/acs.jmedchem.5b00726.

Drucker DJ, Habener JF, Holst JJ, et al. The discovery and development of GLP-1 based drugs that have revolutionized the treatment of obesity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 2024;121(39):e2415550121. doi:10.1073/pnas.2415550121.

Knudsen LB, "Inventing Liraglutide, a Glucagon-Like Peptide-1 Analogue, for the Treatment of Diabetes and Obesity." ACS Pharmacol Transl Sci 2019;2(6):468–484. doi:10.1021/acsptsci.9b00048

Patient experience

de Vere Hunt I, Ramirez-Posada M, Babu CS, Brown-Johnson C, Linos E, Rodriguez F. Patient Experiences With GLP-1 Receptor Agonists. JAMA Network Open. 2026;9(6):e2616951. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2026.16951.

Global music industry stats - $31.7billion in 2025

https://www.ifpi.org/global-music-report-2026-global-recorded-music-revenues-grow-6-4-as-record-companies-drive-innovation/

Moonbow Unicorn Forest Bedtime story

https://insighttimer.com/corycochiolo/guided-meditations/moonbow-unicorn-forest-childrens-bedtime-story-slash-meditation

S3E05

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feralbydesign.com

Created and hosted by Pia Williams
Clever by Nature. Feral by Design.

In 1971, a temp agency ran a print ad for the perfect worker. She never took a vacation. Never asked for a raise. Never got sick. Never stopped. They called her the Never-Never Girl.

Nobody prints that ad anymore. We just say it about each other. Reliable. Committed. Always steps up. But knowing when to stop can be just as important.

This episode starts with a nearly finished episode of this show going in the bin, and then four nights of going back at it, a genuinely new idea every time, and nothing that survived. Every attempt felt like resourcefulness. None of it was.

The question underneath it is knowing when to stop, when the only person available to make that call is the one who's been at it for four nights?

The red harvester ant is the mascot for never stopping - the fable, the kitchen bench, busy as an ant, and she spends most of her time at home. On a hot dry day, with seeds sitting on the ground and nothing in her way, she stays in, because going out costs her more water than she'd bring back.

After forty years watching these colonies, Gordon found something stranger still: nobody makes that decision. There is no ant in charge. The colony speeds up and slows down all day on the rate of what's coming back, and not one individual ever decides anything.

Which means the ant isn't better at stopping. She's simply never asked. There's no moment in her life where she has to talk herself out of one more go.

This episode is about what that changes - why "can I do this?" is always answered yes and therefore stops nothing, why the colonies that pulled back hardest in a drought produced the most descendants, and the difference between stopping a go and stopping the goal.

Three worth stealing: find your signal, check the conditions, and know what a stop actually means.

Nothing out there has to be strong at midnight. Which is lucky.

Nature owns the patent. We get to copy it.

Biology: Red harvester ant colonies regulate foraging by the rate at which foragers return with seeds - no central control, no individual decision. On hot, dry days they forage less, because being out costs water that only returning seeds replace.

Principle: Effort is set by what comes back and what the conditions cost. Never by how hard the individual is trying.

Application: Knowing when to stop is about decision-making, not willpower. The signal that it’s time to stop is often already there and being ignored, because stopping can feel like giving up on the whole goal. Check the conditions before you start, notice when effort is no longer producing a useful return, and let one attempt end without abandoning the ambition.

Enjoyed this? Try Feral by Design Season 2: Too Fast To Think: The Sloth Strategy For Better Decisions - another episode about why doing less can be the winning move.

S3E04

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Created and hosted by Pia Williams
Clever by Nature. Feral by Design.

A three-year-old turns a stolen maxi pad into a bird, a plane, and a crown - no hesitation, no second-guessing. Three completely different uses for one object in about fifteen seconds.

That moment leads to an unexpected question about risk taking profiles: why do some of us dive straight at the unfamiliar while others hang back and watch? The answer comes from decades of research on a small British songbird with a name that still makes people laugh - the great tit.

Scientists have repeatedly found two distinct exploration styles. Fast explorers move immediately and commit hard. Slow explorers sample, check, and stay adaptable long after the fast ones have already locked in. The obvious question seems to be how to create more fast explorers. Nature, however, has been answering a different question all along.

This episode explores why neither risk taking profile wins, why the very trait that helps someone commit quickly is also the one that makes them slower to let go, and what it costs a team, a family, or a friendship group when everyone responds to the unfamiliar in the same way.

Sometimes the bad question is the only way to find the good one.

References

1. Verbeek, M.E.M., Drent, P.J., & Wiepkema, P.R. (1994). Consistent individual differences in early exploratory behaviour of male great tits. Animal Behaviour, 48(5).

2. Dingemanse, N.J., Both, C., Drent, P.J., & Tinbergen, J.M. (2004). Fitness consequences of avian personalities in a fluctuating environment. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 271(1541).

S3E03

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feralbydesign.com

Created and hosted by Pia Williams
Clever by Nature. Feral by Design.

London has just rehired an employee it fired four hundred years ago. No severance. No apology. Just an awkward, "Come back. We clearly can't do your job without you."

Her name's Willow, and she's a beaver.

When five Eurasian beavers were reintroduced to Paradise Fields beside Greenford Tube station in West London as part of the Ealing Beaver Project, they quietly tackled a flooding problem that engineers, councils and commuters had lived with for decades. The story of beavers, flooding and the London Underground sounds almost too neat. But the real story sits beneath the headlines.

The council's concrete-and-sandbags answer to flooding. The volunteer-built dam Willow promptly judged not good enough. Why beavers aren't really dam builders at all, but water managers. How leaky dams slow and spread water as part of natural flood management. And why the human copies still can't quite keep up.

Using a Feral lens, Pia digs into the fascinating difference between biomimicry and nature-based solutions, and makes the case for checking the dusty shelf before reaching for something shiny and new.

Last time, we borrowed boundaries advice from a beaver.

This time, nature's here to remind us that sometimes the smartest hire is the one you fired centuries ago.

Enjoyed this? Check out another Beaver episode Feral by Design Season 1 Episode 2: How to Build Boundaries That Actually Work: The Beaver Method.

Biology: Eurasian beavers continually build and maintain wetlands that slow, spread and store water, naturally reducing flood risk while creating habitat for hundreds of other species.

Principle: Living systems create conditions, not just outcomes. The behaviours that maintain a solution can be just as important as the structures themselves.

Application: The Ealing Beaver Project shows how restoring a keystone species can reduce flooding, improve biodiversity and strengthen communities. Sometimes the smartest engineering solution isn't building something new. It's recognising that nature never really forgot how to do the job.

References

• Wilson, C., Maddock, I. et al. (2023). Beaver-like dams can enhance existing flood management strategies for at-risk communities. Journal of Hydrology. Cardiff University / University of Worcester.https://www.cardiff.ac.uk/news/view/2735456-beaver-like-dams-can-enhance-existing-flood-management-strategies-for-at-risk-communities,-study-finds
• Turnbull, J., Fry, T., & Lorimer, J. (2026). Beavers in Paradise: Prefiguring London's Urban Wilds. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space. DOI: 10.1177/25148486261447678
• Restoration Ecology.https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/rec.70377
• The Ealing Beaver Project. Official project website, "Mitigate Flooding".https://theealingbeaverproject.com
• BBC News. Willow's story, Greenford flooding and the beavers' three-year flood-free record.https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckg728erp1yo
• Positive News. "Step aside, humans": Interview with Şeniz Mustafa, England's first urban beaver officer.https://www.positive.news/environment/how-beavers-solved-a-flooding-problem-in-west-london/
• The Independent. Greenford flooding and the Ealing Beaver Project.https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/tube-flooding-ealing-beaver-project-greenford-b2996312.html

S3E02

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Created and hosted by Pia Williams
Clever by Nature. Feral by Design.

A 14-year-old boy suffers two brain bleeds in a freak accident at school. He comes home and sleeps 21 hours a day.

To everyone watching, it looks like the world has gone quiet. In nature, that stillness isn't defeat. It's a high-stakes repair cycle we're only just beginning to understand.

This episode sits inside the gap between the crisis everyone rallies around and the long, invisible recovery nobody quite knows how to show up for, when contribution disappears, healing looks like nothing, and sometimes the injury itself can't be seen.

It started with a teenage injury, but what nature reveals applies much more widely: to recovery after injury, illness or any experience that suddenly changes what someone can do, and to the people trying to support them.

The answer turned up in the most unlikely places: a tiny ant on a raid and a social mongoose with a very specific job description.

Using a biomimicry lens, Pia explores what banded mongooses do when a member can't keep up, and what Matabele ants reveal about the signals that trigger, or fail to trigger, rescue. Not metaphor. Biological strategy.

And they point towards something surprisingly hopeful: practical ways to rethink contribution, recognise invisible need and support recovery without reducing someone to what they've lost.

Because maybe the question isn't what someone can no longer do. Maybe it's what they can still genuinely contribute, and whether the system is built to notice.

If you enjoyed this episode please share it with someone. Nature thrives on signals, and Feral does too.

00:00 Diminished
00:54 Henry's accident
05:05 A biomimicry question
08:50 Contribution, not consolation
13:05 When doing nothing is actually the work
15:25 Why invisible injuries are so isolating
17:55 The recovery is collective
22:10 Karen's question, answered
23:25 Nature owns the patent

S2E0X

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Created and hosted by Pia Williams
Clever by Nature. Feral by Design.

Red wine meets MacBook. Laundry floods. Toilet leaks. All within 24 hours.

Somewhere between staring at flood-damaged laundry cabinets and Googling "how much liquid can a MacBook survive?", Pia realised she'd recently spent a lot of time thinking about forest canopies, distributed load, systems thinking, and what happens when systems become overly dependent on a single point.

Professionally, she spends a lot of time thinking about how systems absorb pressure. Personally, she'd accidentally designed herself as a single point of failure.

Using a biomimicry lens, this episode explores what forest canopies actually do: quietly solving concentrated load problems for hundreds of millions of years. Not as a metaphor. As a biological strategy.

Because canopies don't just capture sunlight. They absorb pressure, distribute load, and create overflow pathways long before they're needed.

Maybe resilience isn't about becoming stronger. Maybe it's about making sure everything isn't depending on the same branch.

Nature owns the patent. We get to copy it.

🌲 The Breakdown:

• The Biology: Forest canopies distribute environmental pressure across overlapping structures, reducing localised stress while creating pathways that absorb and redirect excess load.
• The Principle: Resilient systems spread pressure across multiple pathways rather than relying on a single component to absorb it all.

The Application: How to design personal and organisational systems with buffer and overflow capacity so disruption can be shared, redirected, or absorbed.

S2E10

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Created and hosted by Pia Williams
Clever by Nature. Feral by Design.

A homemade billy cart hurtles downhill through a suburban intersection. A keynote slide turns into an entirely new workshop framework. A conference room applauds the removal of friction from modern work. Somewhere in Costa Rica, a sloth hangs completely still above a parked car while a group of humans walk straight past it.

None of these things seem connected.
Until they do.

Because mental fatigue isn't always about doing too much. Sometimes it's what happens when everything keeps inviting your attention, energy and response, while we've quietly removed many of the natural stopping cues that used to regulate us. Waiting. Friction. Pause points. The moments where thinking had time to catch up with momentum.

And perhaps some of what we experience as mental fatigue is the cost of that constant activation.

Using a biomimicry lens, Pia explores what sloths are actually optimised for - conserving energy, reducing unnecessary movement, and being highly selective about when effort is worth the cost.

Not as metaphor.
As biological strategy.

Because maybe intelligence isn’t just about how quickly you move anymore.

Maybe it’s about knowing when to pause.

Nature owns the patent. We get to copy it.

Biology: Sloths conserve energy through exceptionally slow metabolisms, camouflage, and specialised low-movement survival strategies.

Principle: Build systems that reduce unnecessary activation and make stability the default rather than relying on constant active effort.

Application: Reframing how humans design attention, work, and decision-making systems, to mitigate mental fatigue in environments increasingly optimised for constant responsiveness and escalation.

S2E09

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Created and hosted by Pia Williams
Clever by Nature. Feral by Design.

Bob Hawke looks down the camera and says: any boss who sacks an employee for not showing up today is a bum.
A nation stops. Beer is raised. A boat wins. A jacket becomes iconic.

That’s what we remember.

But under the surface, something else was happening. Not just a race between boats, but a race in how water itself was being handled. A surface that didn’t fight the flow, but shaped it.

This episode sits inside that moment.

It traces what happens when performance shifts from effort to design. When the edge doesn’t come from trying harder, but from moving differently.

A solution that had already been solved - quietly, over millions of years.

Using a biomimicry lens, Pia explores what happens when something works too well. When an advantage moves from impressive to uncomfortable. When winning starts to feel like a problem.

Because nature doesn’t level the playing field.
We do.

S2E08

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Created and hosted by Pia Williams
Clever by Nature. Feral by Design.

A man raises a glass for two people he's loved for sixty years. A woman stands in a car park, looking up at the sky, saying, "I don't know what you're trying to tell me." A baby cries, and no one knows why.

None of it looks broken. But something is being lost in translation.

This episode introduces The Firefly Signal, an original biomimetic design concept for understanding dementia behaviour when someone can no longer tell you what they need. Inspired by one of nature's simplest communication systems, it explores whether distress might signal pain, panic, or something in the environment.

It sits inside the quiet, relentless task of trying to read someone who can't tell you what they need. Of making calls with incomplete information. Of choosing a direction and not knowing if it's right until much later, when you're already tired, and they're already more distressed.

Using a biomimicry lens, Pia explores what happens when signals blur. Not just in dementia care, but at both ends of life, before language arrives and as it starts to leave.

From the rhythm of fireflies to the people trying to read the room, this episode explores at home dementia care, caregiving, and the difficult communication problem carers are actually trying to solve.

Not to diagnose. Not to cure. Just to find a better first move.

It’s a different approach to carer support, using patterns and changes in dementia behaviour to help make that first move a little less blind, with potential relevance anywhere someone has to interpret distress without words, including parents trying to understand what a baby needs.

Because when something's wrong, and you don't know what kind of wrong it is, where you start matters.

Biology: Fireflies use bioluminescent light patterns to communicate through rhythm, allowing individuals to recognise meaningful signals even in low visibility.

Principle: When direct communication breaks down, meaningful changes become easier to detect when there is a clear baseline and a recognisable pattern.

Application: The Firefly Signal re-imagines how carers might recognise whether distress is more likely to be physical or environmental, helping guide a better first move when someone can no longer explain what they need.

S2E07

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Created and hosted by Pia Williams
Clever by Nature. Feral by Design.

A friend cancels a trip. Petrol prices climb. A flight route disappears. None of it looks broken, but something doesn’t quite behave normally anymore.

It's April 2026, as the world watches a war reshape ordinary life from thousands of kilometres away.

This episode sits inside that feeling. The strange disorientation of being physically safe, untouched by violence, and already inside its ripple.

Using a biomimicry lens, Pia explores how systems respond to disturbance - not just where the disruption happens, but far beyond it. From the “landscape of fear” in ecology to the way human systems subtly reconfigure under pressure, this is an attempt to understand what we’re actually sensing. Not to solve it. Not to make it feel better. Just to see it more clearly.

Because when systems shift, the effects don’t stay local. And noticing that isn’t nothing.

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Created and hosted by Pia Williams
Clever by Nature. Feral by Design.

I could feel them shut down.

What happens when you feel yourself shift and can’t quite stop it?

Weakly electric fish navigate murky water by emitting a constant field, and everything in range responds to it. Rose didn't make her team shut down. She emitted a signal.

How does a system stay intelligent when defensiveness enters the room, without escalating it? Nature has been solving for this for 3.8 billion years.

In Feral's first ever collaboration, our host Pia sits down with Rose — a leadership coach, longtime friend and closet puffer fish — to let the weakly electric fish show us the way.

Name it. Contain it. Date it.

A practical way to recognise defensiveness, contain the signal and stop spreading it through the room.

Nature owns the patent. We get to copy it.

Follow Feral for new episodes every fortnight.

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Created and hosted by Pia Williams
Clever by Nature. Feral by Design.

Most people have heard the word biomimicry.
Very few actually know what it means.

This short field note explains how the ideas in Feral by Design work - how scientists study organisms, uncover the mechanisms behind their survival, and translate those patterns into human design.

Beavers, octopuses, termites… they’re not metaphors.

They’re operating manuals.

And once you see the pattern, you start noticing it everywhere.

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Created and hosted by Pia Williams
Clever by Nature. Feral by Design.

Nature has notes. Apparently, sometimes she delivers them in person.

This one arrived as a stunned kingfisher on Pia's porch tiles, moments after flying full-tilt into her window. Literally as she was writing this episode!

How do we speak a language birds can actually read?

From the “system reboot” behaviour of concussed birds to a 100-million-year-old secret hanging in your garden, this episode dives into the origins of ORNILUX. It’s the story of how a German manufacturer looked at the UV-reflective patterns in spider webs, an ancient defence mechanism, and engineered a modern solution to the 100-million-bird-strike problem.

It’s a story about communication design, locally attuned signals, and what happens when we finally ask what the receiver can actually see.

Biology: Orb-weaver spiders use UV-reflective silk patterns to make webs visible to birds and prevent collision.
Principle: Signals must be designed for the receiver’s sensory system, not the sender’s intent.
Application: ORNILUX glass uses UV patterns to make otherwise invisible surfaces detectable to birds.

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Created and hosted by Pia Williams
Clever by Nature. Feral by Design.

Why do some problems keep coming back, even after you thought you'd fixed them? It's like scratching the wrong itch.

This episode came from noticing a place where biomimicry could quietly change the way Pia works, thanks to a wombat called Chardonnay.

She’s treated wombats with mange in the wild. Every few days, hiking in, pouring medicine onto the animal, hiking back out. Weeks of this. Sometimes months later, the mange is back. And the cycle begins again.

Because the mites don’t just live on the wombat. They survive in the burrow.

Treat the host, ignore the habitat, and reinfection undoes everything.

One day, driving home from the mountains, it hit her. She’d been doing the exact same thing with clients. Training teams, watching them transform, then coming back months later to find old behaviours back in place. Not because the training failed. Because the conditions pulled them back.

That’s the pattern behind so many recurring problems: we intervene where the problem shows up, while leaving the conditions that keep recreating it untouched.

This episode sits inside that pattern. The places where we keep scratching the wrong itch.

This isn’t motivation or mindset. It’s a design flaw.

Nature owns the patent. We get to copy it.

Biology: Sarcoptic mange mites survive both on wombats and within their burrows, enabling reinfection even after the host is treated.
Principle: Intervening at the point of impact is insufficient if the conditions that regenerate the problem remain unchanged.
Application: Shifting focus from individual behaviour change to redesigning the surrounding system or “habitat” to prevent recurring failure.

Note on the wombat work:
The fieldwork described in this episode is done with the Blue Mountains Wombat Conservation Group, a volunteer-run organisation treating sarcoptic mange in wild wombats.

S2E02

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feralbydesign.com

Created and hosted by Pia Williams
Clever by Nature. Feral by Design.

A swim that went wrong.
A lifesaver’s eyes locked on mine.
And a question I couldn’t shake.

Most beach safety systems are built for calm moments. But danger rarely shows up when we’re calm. At the beach, water reorganises itself minute by minute, yet the signals we rely on stay exactly the same.

What happens when static signals try to manage moving risk?

From static surf flags to cuttlefish, this is a story about redesigning beach safety around sensing change and signalling state. And what happens when things that don’t move are designed to manage those that do.

Not about sharks.
Not about following rules.

But about what it would feel like if our safety signals could change state, the way cuttlefish do.

Nature owns the patent. We get to copy it.

Biology: Cuttlefish dynamically change colour, contrast and texture to signal internal state in real time, making changes instantly visible to others.
Principle: Signals should reflect changing conditions, not fixed states, so that risk is communicated in real time.
Application: Reimagining beach safety systems such as beach signals or wearable devices that change state with conditions, enabling people to sense and respond to risk as it emerges.

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feralbydesign.com

Created and hosted by Pia Williams
Clever by Nature. Feral by Design.

The second episode in the Feral Festive Special drifts into unexpected territory: snowflakes.
This episode isn’t biomimicry — snowflakes don’t behave — but the pattern they form, shaped by whatever air they fall through, is the part we’re playing with today.

December has its own weather system: family dynamics, big tables, small tables, solo days, first holidays after loss, chaotic joy, quiet overwhelm — often all within the same week. And for some reason, we keep trying to control the whole thing.

Snowflakes don’t.
They don’t plan or perfect.
They just respond to the moment they’re in — a small, surprisingly grounding way to think about a month that can feel too full, too loud, or too tender.

If your festive season is looking wobbly, wonderful, weird — or all three — this episode is a light, calming reframe for a very human December.

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feralbydesign.com

Created and hosted by Pia Williams
Clever by Nature. Feral by Design.