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Feral by Design
Feral by Design is a podcast that uses biomimicry to steal nature’s smartest strategies for human chaos.
Each episode starts with a messy real-world problem, turns to a creature that’s already solved something similar, looks at their strategies and follows the thread you didn’t see coming. Sometimes it lands on one idea, sometimes a few - but it always lands somewhere useful.
Grounded in real science, told through self-deprecating stories, and always surprisingly practical.
Biomimicry made accessible, useful, and genuinely fun.
Nature owns the patent. We get to copy it.
Feral by Design
Scratching the Wrong Itch: Wombats, mange and why our systems won’t heal
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This episode came from noticing a place 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.
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 problem.
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.
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Created and hosted by Pia Williams
Clever by Nature. Feral by Design.