SOUNDSCAPE: THE RATS’ TALE
Radio 4, 3.45pm
Anyone who has ever spent a sleepless night pondering the fact that he or she is never very far away from a rodent with nasty sharp pointy teeth will be unlikely to enjoy this week of short reports. Those who can contemplate with equanimity the knowledge that we share these islands with some 60 million of them may well be riveted by this vivid sound collage of rats at work, rest and play — three of them, actually, all female, brown and trying to look after their families in a dog-eat-rat world. Little do they know that we know where they live — in a Tyneside sewer, on the harbour in Merseyside and on a farm in Suffolk.
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SIZE MATTERS
Radio 4, 9pm
More fauna treats with Sue Broom’s examination of why it is that some animals are bigger than others and, indeed, why it is that animals look the way they do. “No designer would create something as absurd as a peacock’s tail, a nightingale’s song or a daffodil’s flower,” says the geneticist Prof Steve Jones. “They evolved because size increases the chance of sex.”