Futility Closet - 239-The Man-Eaters of Tsavo

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to the Futility Closet podcast, forgotten stories from the pages of history. Visit us online to sample more than 10,000 quirky curiosities from MIT's pianos to Isaac Newton's cenotaph. This is episode 239. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In 1898, two lions descended on a company of railway workers in British East Africa. For nine months, they terrorized the camp, carrying off a new victim every few days as engineer John Patterson struggled to stop them. In today's show, we'll track the man-eaters of

Starting point is 00:00:43 Savo and learn what modern science has discovered about their motivations. We'll also consider more uses for two cars and puzzle over some prolific penguins. On March 1st, 1898, a British engineer named John Henry Patterson arrived in British East Africa, what's today Kenya. He'd been sent to work on the construction staff of the Uganda Railway, which would connect Lake Victoria to the Indian Ocean. When he arrived, the rails had been laid as far as the Tsavo River, about 130 miles from the coast. At the river, the rail workers had built a temporary bridge and then pressed on toward the sea. Patterson's job was to build a permanent structure and to complete all the other work for 30 miles on each side of the river. He would oversee a large group of laborers, mostly Indian, who lived in several camps spread

Starting point is 00:01:34 over an area of eight miles. He'd been at Tsavo only a few days when he received word that two workers had been carried off from their tents in the night. That didn't seem alarming. He imagined that other workers had attacked them to get their savings. But then one morning he was roused with the horrible news that one of his officers had been seized in his tent, dragged away, and eaten. At the site of the attack, he could see the furrows left by the victim's heels as he was hauled out of the tent. The sand also distinctly showed the footprints of a lion. One witness said that the officer had been sitting near the open door of the tent. At about midnight, a lion had put its head through the door and grabbed him by the throat. He had time to yell, choro, meaning let go, and threw his arms around the lion's neck,

Starting point is 00:02:14 and then he was gone. Patterson set out to track the animal. It seemed to have stopped several times before it started its meal. He wrote, pools of blood marked these halting places, where he doubtless indulged in the man-eater's habit of licking the skin off so as to get at the fresh blood. At last they came to the eating place, where two lions had struggled for possession of the body. A short distance away lay the officer's head, staring at them with startled, horrified eyes. Patterson called it the most gruesome sight I had ever seen. He vowed to fight back. That night he sat up in a tree near the lost man's tent, hoping that the killers would return. All the other workmen stayed hidden in

Starting point is 00:02:50 their tents. Shortly after climbing the tree, Patterson heard the roaring of two lions coming closer, but then they went quiet as lions always stalk their prey in silence. He kept a sharp watch on the area below him, but after two hours, he heard a scream in a camp half a mile away and knew that he'd failed. The lions had found a victim there and would disappear for the night. This began an exhausting game of guesswork. The next day, Patterson located the camp of the new victim, and that night he climbed a tree outside that tent, tethering a goat beneath him as bait. About midnight, as he huddled miserably in the rain, he heard a shriek far off in the darkness. The lions had eluded him again. The workmen's camps were scattered widely, and the lions seemed to have a

Starting point is 00:03:29 tactic of breaking into a different camp each night. Patterson wrote, they almost appeared, too, to have an extraordinary and uncanny faculty of finding out our plans beforehand, so that no matter in how likely or how tempting a spot we lay in wait for them, they invariably avoided that particular place and seized their victim for the night from some other camp. Worse, it was difficult and dangerous to hunt them by day. It was impossible to move through the undergrowth without making noise. Patterson spent all his spare time trying, anyway, but he had no luck. After the lions had seized a victim, he could trace them as far as the river, but then would lose their trail since they seemed to choose rocky ground. In short, these were almost perfect conditions for a pair of enterprising lions to terrorize

Starting point is 00:04:08 a group of humans. And they seemed to be learning. In their early, clumsy efforts, they made off once with a mattress and once with a bag of rice rather than a man. But with experience, they grew more deadly, and nothing seemed to deter them. Not fences, tents, fires, shouts, or shots. In time, the workers came to believe that they were not real animals at all, but devils in lion's shape. They insisted that it would be

Starting point is 00:04:30 useless to try to shoot them. They were the angry spirits of departed native chiefs who were protesting against the railway. Patterson and his workers built bomas, or thorn fences, around their camps and kept bright fires burning through the night, but the lions would jump over or break through the fences and carried off a man regularly every few nights. For the moment, the danger was lessened because the main body of railway workers was still nearby, two or three thousand men scattered over a wide area. But when that large camp moved on, Patterson was left with only a few hundred men, and the danger to each man was much greater. Patterson says this created a regular panic and was everything he could do to get the men to stay on. In each camp, a night watchman would clatter half a dozen

Starting point is 00:05:09 empty oil tins suspended from a tree, pulling on them by a long rope from the safety of his tent. It did no good. At the hospital camp, an assistant heard a noise outside one night, opened the door of his tent, and saw a great lion standing a few yards away looking at him. As it sprang, he jumped backward into a box of medical stores, which made such a clatter that the lion headed off to another part of the enclosure, where it jumped onto a tent, seized a man, and dragged him off. Patterson ordered the hospital moved closer to the main camp and then sat up all night at the old location because he'd heard that lions generally visit recently deserted camps. But the lions eluded him again. In the middle of the night, he heard shrieks and

Starting point is 00:05:45 cries coming from the new hospital, and at daylight he found that one of the lions had carried off the water carrier. The lions were growing bolder. They devoured one man only 30 yards from the tent where they'd seized him and ignored the shots that were fired after them until they'd finished their meal. Patterson could only follow behind, laying watch each night at the last attack, only to be outwitted again. The night watching was dreary and fatiguing, but he felt it was his duty, and he believed the men looked to him for protection. He wrote, in the whole of my life I have never experienced anything more nerve-shaking than to hear the deep roars of these dreadful monsters growing gradually nearer and nearer, and to know that someone or other of us was doomed to be their victim before morning

Starting point is 00:06:21 dawned. Once they reached the vicinity of the camps, the roars completely ceased, and we knew that they were stalking for their prey. Shouts would then pass from camp to camp, Kabardar bayon shaitan ata, beware brothers, the devil is coming. But the warning cries would prove of no avail, and sooner or later agonizing shrieks would break the silence, and another man would be missing from roll call next morning. It seemed as if the lions really were devils,

Starting point is 00:06:45 or led a charmed life. By day, he tracked them hopelessly through the jungle, and at night the killings continued. He wrote, I have a very vivid recollection of one particular night when the brutes seized a man from the railway station and brought him close to my camp to devour. I could plainly hear them crunching the bones, and the sound of their dreadful purring filled the air and rang in my ears for days afterwards. And their daring only increased. Up to this point, a single lion had made each attack while the other had waited in the bush. Now they began to enter the bomas together, each seizing a victim.

Starting point is 00:07:17 Two Swahili porters were dragged off in this way during the last week of November. One was devoured, and the other was found caught in the bushes of the boma. The lion had been unable to drag him through, but he was so badly mauled that he died before he reached the hospital. By this time, the whole district was panic-stricken, and finally the workmen could stand it no longer. The largest group of them stopped a passing train and departed, and the few who remained spent three weeks trying to build lion-proof huts, so work on the railway stopped completely. Even when friends arrived to help, Patterson could make no progress. The district officer, Mr. Whitehead, arrived on December 2nd, but as he was making his way from the railway station, a lion pounced on him in a cutting, leaving four great claw marks on his back and dragging off his servant. Patterson built an elaborate lion trap and put in two men as bait, armed with rifles and protected by a row of bars. When the trap door clattered down, the men were so terrified that they fired indiscriminately and somehow freed the door while hitting the lion only slightly. It escaped into

Starting point is 00:08:09 the night. Finally, Patterson's visitors had to return to their district, and he was alone again with the lions and no closer to a solution. His luck turned on December 9th, when one of the lions snatched a donkey from a camp by the river. They discovered it eating the meal, and it disappeared into the jungle. But the donkey was only partially devoured, and Patterson hoped the lions might return to it at nightfall. So he had a 12-foot structure built nearby with a plank at the top as a seat. At sundown, he took up his position. The darkness and the silence deepened until they were almost total. At length, he imagined he could hear a large body pushing its way through the bush. It stopped, and he heard a deep sigh, a sure sign of hunger in a lion. The creature advanced again and then stopped suddenly and

Starting point is 00:08:49 growled. It had noticed him. He began to fear that he'd be disappointed again, but now he realized that instead of making for the donkey, the lion had begun to circle his flimsy platform. He wrote, For about two hours he horrified me by slowly creeping round and round my crazy structure, gradually edging his way nearer and nearer. The structure was only four poles inclined together. If one of them should break, or if the lion could leap twelve feet to the top, he would be finished. He tried to keep perfectly still, though he got the fright of his life when an owl flew into the back of his head around midnight. At last the lion began to creep directly toward him. He wrote, I could barely make out his form

Starting point is 00:09:23 as he crouched among the whitish undergrowth, but I saw enough for my purpose, and before he could come any nearer, I took careful aim and pulled the trigger. The blast was followed by a terrific roar, and Patterson could hear the lion leaping about in all directions. The first bound had taken it into thick bush, though, and Patterson could no longer see it. He kept firing at the sound of its plunging, and at length he heard a series of mighty groans, which subsided into deep sighs and finally stopped. Inquiring voices called out through the jungle from the camp about a quarter mile away. He shouted back that he was safe and that one of the lions was dead, and every man came to celebrate, beating tom-toms and blowing horns. In the morning they found the lion, dead but poised as if for a spring. Patterson had hit it, once behind the left

Starting point is 00:10:03 shoulder, evidently penetrating the heart, and once in a hind leg. It measured nine feet eight inches from nose to tail, and it would have stood three feet nine inches high. It took eight men to carry it back to camp. The news spread quickly. Telegrams of congratulation came pouring in, and scores of people flocked from up and down the railway to see the skin for themselves. But the second lion was still out there, and it seemed just as fearless as ever. In fact, a few nights later, it climbed up the steps of an inspector's bungalow and prowled the veranda. The inspector, thinking it was a drunken worker, shouted, go away, and fortunately didn't open the door. His visitor seized a couple of goats instead and devoured them on the spot. This lion seemed at least as powerful as the first.

Starting point is 00:10:43 Patterson sat up the next night in an iron shanty outside the bungalow. Outside, he put three full-grown goats as bait, tied to a half rail that weighed 250 pounds. He saw nothing until just before daybreak, when the lion appeared, seized one of the goats, and carried it off, dragging with it the other two goats and the rail. Patterson fired several shots after it, but lost it in the gloom. The next morning, they tracked the lion and found it still busy at its meal. It slunk off, but Patterson remembered the lesson of the first lion and had a platform put up a few feet from the dead goats. There, he took up his position before dark. He was exhausted from constant watching and was just dozing off when the lion emerged from the bushes and passed almost directly

Starting point is 00:11:21 beneath him. He fired both barrels into its shoulder and it disappeared into the bushes. For about 10 days, they saw nothing more of the lion, but on December 28th, Patterson was watching in a tree with his gun bearer when at 3 a.m. he awoke from a doze with the uncanny feeling that something was wrong. He looked around and saw nothing and was about to lie back again when something moved in the bushes. The lion was stalking them. He wrote, risk of losing him this time. He waited until the lion was only 20 yards away and then fired at his chest. He heard the bullet strike and the lion bounded away. At daylight, they set out to track it. Patterson, a native tracker, and the gun bearer with a martini carbine. They'd gone a quarter mile into the jungle when they were met with a warning growl. Peering through the bushes, Patterson could

Starting point is 00:12:19 see the creature snarl at him. He aimed and fired and the lion sprang up and charged him. He fired again and knocked it over, but in a second it was up again, fearless and ferocious, charging even in the face of a third shot. With the lion nearly upon him, Patterson put out his hand for the carbine, and it wasn't there. The gunbearer was climbing a tree. With no time to think, Patterson jumped up himself and swung into the branches just as the lion reached them. As it turned to creep back into the thicket, Patterson saw his last chance. He took the carbine, aimed, and fired, and saw the lion fall over and lie still. Filled with joy at his final victory, Patterson scrambled down from the tree and was starting toward it when it leaped up and made one last spring at him. This time he had the carbine ready, though. He fired

Starting point is 00:12:58 twice more, and the lion dropped for the last time, not five yards away. The body measured nine feet, six inches inches and would have stood three feet eleven inches high. They found that the hide bore six bullet holes. Patterson's fame spread far and wide over the country, and natives from up and down the line came to see the trophies and the devil killer, as they called him. Best of all, the workers who had fled came back to Tsavo, and they presented him with a silver bowl that he prized for the rest of his life. His achievement rang briefly around the world. The Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, described the adventure in the House of Lords.

Starting point is 00:13:29 Teddy Roosevelt said, I think that the incident of the Uganda man-eating lions is the most remarkable account of which we have any record. And the Spectator wrote, If the whole body of lion anecdote from the days of the Assyrian kings till the last year of the 19th century were collated and brought together, it would not equal in tragedy or atrocity, in savageness or in sheer insolent contempt for man, armed or unarmed, white or black, the story of these two beasts. That tone is striking today. The lions were seen as evil for preying on humans. Patterson wrote, never for a moment did I realize that the African wilderness held in its mysterious recesses two prowling demons who looked upon myself and my workmen as a sort of manna sent down from heaven for their special

Starting point is 00:14:09 delectation. Of course, lions aren't evil, but for a long time we could only guess at what had driven these two. Patterson guessed they had killed 135 men, the Ugandan Railway Company put the number at 28, and the best modern guess is 35, but that's still an enormous number in the space of nine months. It was known that there still an enormous number in the space of nine months. It was known that there'd been a drought in the area and that an infectious disease had reduced the cattle and buffalo populations that the lions normally hunted. Also, a slave trade route had passed through the area where sick and dead slaves were left behind, which may have given the local lions a taste for humans. And of course, the railway project had brought thousands of people to the area. These are all plausible factors, but they're mostly speculation.

Starting point is 00:14:46 By an odd stroke of fortune, though, a reliable answer has come to light, courtesy of John Patterson. When he returned to Britain, he brought the lion's hides and skulls with him as trophies, and they spent 25 years on the floor of his home as rugs while he wrote a best-selling book about all this. In 1924, he sold them to the Field Museum in Chicago, and that means that modern scientists have been able to study the lion's fur and teeth. What they found shows that the lions weren't driven to eat humans out of desperation. Patterson had said that he'd heard the lions

Starting point is 00:15:14 crunching bones. Normally, a lion won't do that unless it's starving, and that lent support to the theory that the lion's normal prey had dried up. But the lion's teeth don't show that they'd recently been eating human bones. Patterson was just wrong about that. What the teeth did show was dental disease. One of them had a broken canine and a painful abscess. Lions use their teeth to grab and kill prey, and this one would have had trouble opening its mouth, so taking down a large animal like a zebra or a buffalo would have been excruciating. So that's probably why it turned to eating humans. Most of the railroad workers came from South Asia, where there are no lions, so they were easier to hunt than buffalo, antelope, or zebra.

Starting point is 00:15:49 The second lion's teeth were somewhat better, but probably it followed the first because they were siblings or cousins of about the same age. In any case, they weren't eating humans exclusively. Man-flesh probably made up only about 30 and 13% of their diets. So the Tsavo lions didn't attack humans because they were evil. They attacked us because we'd encroached on their territory and they found us convenient to hunt. of their diets. So the Tsavo lions didn't attack humans because they were evil, they attacked us because we'd encroached on their territory and they found us convenient to hunt. Bruce Patterson of the Field Museum said, we humans like to think we're at the top of the food chain, but the moment we step off our paved streets, these other animals are really on top.

Starting point is 00:16:24 This week I have several small updates to various lateral thinking puzzles, so consider yourself warned about potential spoilers to previous episodes. Trey Hart wrote, Greg and Sharon, I have been enjoying your podcast for a while now and just came across episode 225 about the stork derby. In the lateral thinking puzzle, you talked about people stealing palm trees. Growing up in Southern California, we had a neighbor that had their king palm stolen from their front yard one night. They got a new king palm to replace the stolen one and then wrapped a chain around it and attached it to a concrete anchor on the other side of the fence. It's sad,

Starting point is 00:17:00 but also humorous that people have to chain up their palm trees. Thanks for everything you do and keep up the great work. And the puzzle had involved people stealing trees from the side of the road, so it was interesting to hear that thieves are actually stealing trees from people's yards. It amazes me that anyone even thought that up as a crime, you know? You sort of deserve some points for enterprise. It can't be easy to steal a mature palm tree. Yoan wrote, Hi, podcasters. I have a different solution for the puzzle with the unlucky phone thief in episode 234. A friend of mine had

Starting point is 00:17:33 several work phones stolen used for testing in-app development. The thief was identified when a selfie was automatically synced from one of the phones to the company Dropbox. The photo was even geotagged at the guy's home. Thank you so much for the podcast. And I just think it's kind of amusing when stolen items are able to rat out the people who took them like this. That's like even if he somehow realized what had happened, there's nothing he can do about it. So we just need to make palm trees able to do this, right? Adnan sent an update to the puzzle from episode 233 with the subject line, your lateral thinking puzzle happened in real life on a grand scale. Hi, podcasters and podcat. Recently, you had a lateral thinking puzzle with an employee of an employment agency

Starting point is 00:18:17 being fired and coming back to his job for several months until he was hired and never appeared again. There has been recent, not very cheerful news of Sweden cutting down a third of their employment agency staff. Just wanted to point out that it could have been a much more shocking and confusing lateral thinking puzzle to say that 4,500 got fired and kept coming back to work. Thanks for all the entertainment. And Adnan sent a link to an English language article on the topic, which was much

Starting point is 00:18:46 appreciated. The article from the January 30th Sweden edition of The Local said that the Swedish Public Employment Service has said that it will have to lay off a third of its employees due to heavy budget cuts to the agency's funding. The agency is expecting these cuts to have significant negative effects on their ability to assist job seekers. And it seemed to me will also add to the number of unemployed people seeking jobs, perhaps even needing to be served by the agency. So, yes, possibly the puzzle from episode 233 on quite a grand scale. And actually happened. I mean, in the puzzle, it was just kind of a quirky thing that might someday happen. This must have actually happened in this case on a big scale. Yeah. Carlos Q. Coutinho wrote about the discussion in episode

Starting point is 00:19:30 233, which was a follow-up to the puzzle from episode 228. We talked about road space rationing in some countries where cars with certain license plate numbers can't drive on certain days of the week. Carlos let us know about similar systems here in the U.S. that might have also prompted people to want to own more than one car. Hello, Sharon, Greg, and meow to Sasha. I recently listened to episode 233, and I'd like to add a few things to the already expanded puzzle answers. When I was a kid in the 1970s in Rhode Island, we had gas rationing, depending on what number your license plate ended in. My parents had two cars, one for each of them, and the people who lived upstairs also had two cars in their family, and we were very friendly with each other. We would often swap

Starting point is 00:20:14 around license plates depending on what car needed gas, and one of our own cars ended up being basically a storage tank. I got very good at siphoning gas at an early age. We would also swap around tires between cars to pass the annual inspection, but that is a different story. And this rang a faint bell for me about gas rationing. I looked it up and learned that gas rationing based on license plate numbers was widespread in the U.S. during the first oil crisis of 1973 and was instituted again in several states in the second oil crisis of 1979. But it was also instituted in New York and New Jersey in 2012,

Starting point is 00:20:48 after Hurricane Sandy reduced supplies of gas in parts of the Northeast. I didn't remember much about this myself, but from what I read, it's actually rather debatable as to whether this kind of fuel rationing is even helpful. Some economists who studied the situation in the 70s reported that the rationing programs might have actually increased the already long lines for gas at the time, since this kind of rationing doesn't either increase supply or decrease demand and might lead people to try to buy gas more often than they might otherwise would have. On the other hand, there are some who think that the rationing might have helped in Sandy's aftermath, as there seemed to have been a certain

Starting point is 00:21:24 amount of panic buying, with people filling up their tanks daily or even multiple times a day, and the odd even scheme would have at least slowed some people down. But it seems that because the post-Sandy situation was fairly short in duration and kept improving on its own, it's kind of hard to draw firm conclusions about the effects of whether the rationing did or didn't help. firm conclusions about the effects of whether the rationing did or didn't help. Yeah, it must be hard to assess the effect of something like that because those situations are so rare and there are so many variables you can't really tell. And the situation was changing all the time. Yeah, so you can't really evaluate it. Yeah. On the subject of owning two vehicles for commuting, Carlos wrote,

Starting point is 00:22:02 I used to hunt in the Adirondack Mountains and some of those houses were on mountains and hard to get to. It was common to see a nice car parked at the bottom of the driveway or right-of-way and an old beat-up 4x4 used to get to the home itself. Many of those roads were rough and would really beat on a vehicle, so it made sense to take your nice vehicle grocery shopping, which was usually much farther away than in the suburbs, get home, transfer everything to the beater truck, and then drive to the house in four-wheel low.

Starting point is 00:22:29 That's a good solution. I guess we could have made that a lateral thinking puzzle, right? In episode 233, I touched on the contrast of how some people in the U.S. might use two cars for commuting, while in other countries using two bicycles might be more common. Carlos actually used a hybrid system when he worked in Boston and would drive his car to the train station to take the commuter rail into the city and kept a bicycle locked up near the train station that he could use while in the city. He said that it was easier to get around Boston on a bike than by car anyway, and I'm sure it was a lot cheaper than trying to own and maintain two

Starting point is 00:23:04 cars. Definitely better for the environment and his health too, I would think. Yeah. Orion Sautter wrote, hello again, closeteers. I just finished reading the book, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, a series of autobiographical stories and essays by the physicist Richard Feynman. In one chapter, he discusses how he was a fan of lateral thinking puzzles and got a reputation for solving them after instantly answering one because he'd heard it before. Feynman wrote, it was the long story about how a mother and daughter stop at a hotel and stay in separate rooms and the next day the mother goes to the daughter's room and there's nobody there or somebody else is there and she says, where's my daughter? And the hotel keeper says, what daughter? And the registers only got the mother's name,

Starting point is 00:23:48 and so on and so on, and there's a big mystery as to what happened. The answer is the daughter got bubonic plague, and the hotel, not wanting to have to close up, spirits the daughter away, cleans up the room, and erases all evidence of her having been there. Orion wrote, I was curious whether there was any historical backing to this, but Snopes says it's just an urban legend of the period. Given that this is a famous story, I wouldn't be surprised if you've actually already puzzled over it, but my memory is rather poor, so I can't be sure. In any case, there's plenty more of interest in the book that I think you might enjoy. Thanks as always for all the work you put into the blog and podcast. So the puzzle that Feynman describes is actually a pretty good example of the kind of puzzle that

Starting point is 00:24:29 might be good for long car trips or long walks, but maybe not so great for trying to solve in five or so minutes to fit into a podcast. We've been learning that some puzzles work a lot better for our format than others, given our particular constraints of needing to solve the puzzle relatively quickly, which means that it can't have too complicated of an answer or a backstory, and to have it be fun to listen to. So the answer needs to be something that someone has a decent chance of being able to guess, rather than something that's kind of obscure or very detailed or fairly implausible, any of which might cause the guesser to get really stuck. Yeah, I guess the ideal ones have an actual sort of lateral twist

Starting point is 00:25:08 that when you solve it, you can see immediately, oh, that must be it. Right. But those are fairly rare. Yes, yes, and even the Feynman one, I think even if you wildly guessed, did they think it was bubonic plague? You wouldn't even realize you'd gotten it right.

Starting point is 00:25:23 It would have been like a wild shot in the dark. Tim Oden wrote about how much he enjoys listening to our puzzles and said it's joyfully revealing of how each of your brains work different as they are which in turn is instructive of how to think better tagging along as you pick up a naughty thicket watching you twist and turn and rotate it for views from angles I'd never consider. Then joining you as you turn it inside out to release its elegant secret is a neuronal hike that always exercises my mind and improves its health. Your lateral frolics grease gears for problem solving in daily life, of course, but in an odd way, your probing banter also makes me more tolerant, more patient, more humble, more willing to suspend judgment and withhold pronouncements by weaving my thinking with a thick thread of you don't know as much

Starting point is 00:26:10 as you think you know. And I hadn't really thought about that before, but I do try to approach life as much as possible with the ideas of don't make assumptions and try to recognize how much I don't know. And I guess doing the puzzles would help strengthen those perspectives for me. It can be hard sometimes because the human brain does seem to be wired to both make assumptions and to feel rather certain about what we think. So sometimes it's kind of like swimming against a current, but I'd be happy to think that our puzzles might help even a little in strengthening those kinds of muscles for people.

Starting point is 00:26:44 Thanks so much to everyone who writes to us. We're always sorry that we can't read all the email we get on the show, but we do appreciate hearing what you have to say. So if you want to say something to any of us here, please send that to podcast at futilitycloset.com. And I've really been appreciating the pronunciation help that people have been including. And I've really been appreciating the pronunciation help that people have been including.

Starting point is 00:27:10 It's my turn to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. Greg is going to give me an odd-sounding situation, and I have to try to work out what is actually going on, asking only yes or no questions. This is from listener Matt Spedding, and it's based on an item he heard on the podcast No Such Thing as a Fish. Since mid-1982, the penguin population on the Falkland Islands has exploded in numbers. Why? Since 1982, the penguin population on the Falkland Islands has exploded in numbers.

Starting point is 00:27:38 Does this have anything to do with changes in weather? No. Does this have anything to do with changes in the populations of other animals? I think technically I have to say yes, but that's going to mislead you. Because I was thinking like if a predator of theirs has declined or something that penguins eat has increased, either of those would affect penguin populations. You're not far off, but I don't want to mislead you. Okay, the Falkland Islands.

Starting point is 00:28:14 Were there penguins on the Falkland Islands before 1982? I'm not really aware what's on the Falkland Islands. Yes, they were. I associate it with sheep or something, but I must be totally wrong. Okay, so there were penguins on the Falkland Islands, but now there's a lot more penguins. Yes. Okay. Did this happen for natural reasons?

Starting point is 00:28:33 No. No. Are humans involved somehow? Yes. Okay. Were humans deliberately trying to increase the penguin population on the Falkland Islands? No. No.

Starting point is 00:28:43 Are they deliberately trying to increase the penguin population on the Falkland Islands? No. No. So, but humans did something that changed something that allowed... I've got it so specific. I've just got it narrowed down here. Humans did something that changed something that allowed the penguins to flourish. Yes. Okay.

Starting point is 00:29:00 Hmm. So, okay. So, a population can increase either because you remove predators, you increase a food source, or you somehow make conditions more hospitable for the population, let me think. Okay. But you're saying it's not that they removed a predator or that there are less of some kind of penguin predator. Would you say that's it or something along those lines something along those lines i wouldn't quite say okay something something that could kill penguins is killing fewer penguins even if it's not a predator no penguin eggs i don't want to tell you the wrong thing something that would have ruined penguin eggs is ruining fewer penguin eggs i'll say this relates to the falklands war between britain and argentina between 1981 and 82 and it somehow helped out the penguins yes

Starting point is 00:29:53 but not because they removed a predator or did they remove like a competition for uh food sources um i can't quite answer okay okay is it because humans showed up on the falkland islands that hadn't been there previously some group of humans showed up on the falkland islands because they were fighting a war um no some humans left the falkland islands because they were fighting a war okay i don't want to i don't want to yeah all right let me go back to okay what can increase did did did humans do something that made it easier for penguins to breed reproduce make more new penguins i'm jumping around here well i'm not giving you much help um as opposed to see a population is going to increase i'm thinking if either fewer members die

Starting point is 00:30:47 or it reproduces better this is the two big things i'm thinking of unless i'm missing something so i'm trying to get at which one of those i should be going for i'll i'll say that something happened that uh kept humans away from the area and that what permitted, sort of created a refuge for these penguins, which is what encouraged the growth in the population. Because the humans weren't there interfering. Yes. Or keeping the penguins away. So something about the war, was it, okay. And is this still ongoing?

Starting point is 00:31:23 The situation is still ongoing. Yes. And the war is long over. And the war is long over. And the war is long over. So as part of the settlement of the conflict, no. No. No, you're shaking your head, so I'm not on the right track at all. So something about the war, something about the conflict itself, like the actual incident itself, as opposed to the aftermath of it? incident itself as opposed to the aftermath of it? It had an unplanned long-term effect that kept humans away from this area but let the penguins stay. It kept humans away from the area because of some change in laws or rules or governance,

Starting point is 00:31:59 anything like that. No, it's more immediate than that. It kept humans away from the area because the area became uninhabitable by humans or less habitable by humans. Yes. So something in the Falkland Islands became less preferable to humans. Yes. Because of the conflict? As an aftermath of the conflict?

Starting point is 00:32:20 Yeah, as an effect of the conflict. So it's that humans would choose not to be there. Yes, it was actually it's that humans would choose not to be there. Yes, it was actually dangerous. It still is for humans to be there. Because of landmines? Yes. Oh, my.

Starting point is 00:32:30 That is exactly it. And the landmines don't blow up the penguins, hopefully? That's it. In the Falklands War of the early 1980s, Argentine forces laid thousands of landmines around York Bay to prevent an amphibious landing by the British. After the war, these areas were fenced off, keeping humans away and making an unplanned refuge

Starting point is 00:32:44 for Magellanic penguins, which are too light to set off the mines. Oh, I'm glad they're not setting off the British. After the war, these areas were fenced off, keeping humans away and making an unplanned refuge for Magellanic penguins, which are too light to set off the mines. Oh, I'm glad they're not setting off the mines. That would be pretty sad. So thank you, Matt, for sending that. Thank you. And if anybody else has a puzzle they'd like to send in for us to try, please send it to podcast at futilitycloset.com. Futility Closet is a full-time commitment for us and is supported entirely by our amazing Thank you. campaign, where you'll also get extra discussions on some of the stories, more lateral thinking puzzles, peeks behind the scenes, and updates on Sasha, the official Futility Closet podcast. You can find our Patreon page at patreon.com slash futilitycloset, or see our website for the link. At our website, you'll also find over 10,000 compendious amusements, the Futility Closet

Starting point is 00:33:42 store, information about the Futility Closet books, and the show notes for the podcast, with the links and references for the topics we've covered. If you have any questions or comments for us, please email us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. Our music was written and performed by Greg's awesome brother, Doug Ross. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.

Futility Closet - 239-The Man-Eaters of Tsavo

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