we're in the Cleveland Wildlife Park in
Adelaide in South Australia I'm really
excited to found a wallaby because just
before I left England I read the paper
about Wallabies and surprisingly about
Wallabies and methane and this paper
said that when Wallabies digest grass
and they digest grass because they eat
it like cows eat grass they produce very
little methane when they belch
they produce about one-fifth of the
methane that the cow produces
when cows eat grass it's very hard to
digest so it goes into their stomach and
their stomachs are filled with bacteria
that break the grass down and the
bacteria as well break down the
complicated molecules in the grass the
cellulose and the starch and so on into
small molecules eventually acetic acid
propionic acid but some of the bacteria
turn out methane and the cow can't
digest the methane or use it in their
body so it belches it out
all the methane comes out at the back
end of the cow so you shouldn't smoke
when you're milking a cow the amount of
methane that's produced by a cow is
surprisingly large in some countries
where they have a lot of cattle for
example New Zealand the methane coming
out of the cows is worse than the carbon
dioxide coming out of the cars from the
point of view of global warming because
methane gas when it goes in the
atmosphere can absorb infrared light
from the Sun just like carbon dioxide
but one molecule of methane has a much
bigger effect on the atmosphere than one
molecule of carbon dioxide so the point
of this paper was that Wallabies have
different bacteria in their stomachs
which instead of producing methane
produced six Inuk acid which is the dye
acid of butane and so Wallabies are
environmentally far more friendly than a
cow the importance of this is that if we
could take the bacteria from the
Wallabies stomach and introduce it into
cows the cows may start digesting the
grass in a different way and reduce
their emission
the V thing I think the long-term dream
may be to modify the bacteria that you
normally find in the cows so that they
produce less methane in the same way
that the bacteria do inside the wallaby
now this is not genetically modifying a
cow it's just making a slight change the
bacteria that naturally in their
stomachs
I think the Wallabies great hasn't
belched yet and they don't have a match
to see if it's methane six Inuk acid is
the diacid of butane so four carbon
atoms with a acid group at either end
and it's a white powder if you have it
in the lab so this is the paper about
methane emissions from Wallabies these
are tamo Wallabies and I think the
wallaby that I've been just playing with
is a different sort because time our
Wallabies are very shy there's some in
the Wildlife Park but they say you can
never get near to them to me from
England when wallaby is much like
another now the paper is very
complicated it's really a biological
paper and you can see it has a huge
diagram in here which I don't really
understand apart from the chemistry here
and you can see there is succinate and
the bacteria break down a whole series
of things from one compound to another
inside the stomach if it had been a cow
there would be a similar chain but in
the end instead of saying succinate you
would say anything it's a serious
problem this methane emission because
more and more people are eating meat so
the number of cows in the world is going
up and up and up as the human population
increases so more and more methane is
being generated it's very like the
anaerobic digesters that some people use
for making biogas you need a large
quantity of material to ferment to react
with bacteria
which is why cows are so big in general
animals that eat grass are really big
and the dinosaurs that it vegetation
were huge a sort of walking digester so
God knows what would have happened if he
were smoking next to a dinosaur when it
belched probably that's what dragons
look like