No Such Thing As A Fish - 138: No Such Thing As Fluff Island

Episode Date: November 4, 2016

Andy, Anna, Alex and special guest Ed Brooke-Hitching discuss left-handed snails, non-existent islands and the White House press-pit-swimming-pool.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden. My name is Andrew Hunter Murray and I'm sitting here with Anna Tijinski, Alex Bell, and special guest Ed Brooke Hitching. Once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in no particular order, here we go, starting with you, Ed. In 1875, the British Navy erased 123 islands from their charts because they didn't exist. The British Navy didn't exist or the islands? Yeah, I think you were going to do that. No, it's... Phantom islands were a huge problem

when we were sorting out our charts. The maps were just cluttered with these things. And mainly caused by human error, especially in a time before we could measure longitude, you would estimate your position with dead reckoning. And because of that, you had huge amounts of wildly inaccurate coordinates that would be fed back to cartographers, painted on maps and presented as fact. So to be fair to them, they were often real islands. They just weren't anywhere near the places where they were told that they were. To what extent is an island in a different place before it becomes a different island?

I'll give them a hundred miles leeway in any direction is unbelievably generous. They're doing their job half right as well. You're giving them too much. You've got to be loose with these poor chaps. They didn't have longitude. Okay. Were there sort of mirages and things that meant people think they'd seen an island and they hadn't? Yeah, there's a whole load of crazy natural phenomena, presumably still out there waiting for you to think that you are seeing land when you're not. I mean, we're talking icebergs, sometimes covered in dirt that can disguise them as an island surrounded by seagulls.

Did somebody do that? Did somebody go to an iceberg? Did somebody put a palm tree on it? The biggest prank of all time. America. The whole thing is just made up. It's all about the iceberg. But there's also things like low hanging clouds, which doesn't sound like you would mistake the solid land. Fluff Island. The fluffiest island in the whole South Pacific.

Is it still happening? Do we ever get? Yes, there's one in 2012 that got discovered. Sandy Island got undiscovered. Yeah, whereas it was in the Eastern Coral Sea. Yeah, the northeast coast of Australia. Oh, so it was undiscovered then? So everyone thought it was there and then eventually someone went there and there was nothing there. Wow.

You've been on maps for a hundred years and it was discovered to be fake seven years after you launched Google Maps. Yeah. So you could, to have time, find it on Google Maps and you still can, but there's a little annotation saying it does not exist. Please refresh your browser. I don't know how embarrassing if you lived there and you found out it wasn't real. I feel like such an idiot.

Do you think some people do still try to build houses though? You know, like if you go on a walk and you are insisting that you're following a footpath, but you've obviously lost it, but you just keep hacking through the undergrowth. Do you think there are people who are putting brick upon brick on water? On a cloud. Yeah, yeah. There was a radio DJ in the 60s who claimed to have broadcast a radio show from a reef

called the Maria Tereza Reef that no one has ever been able to find. And he swore to his friends that he was there and the water was lapping up to his knees and his deck chair was floating away. Maybe he just had a sound effect CD and he was like, oh, the water's really close. He was in his mum's basement. So three years ago, Pakistan got a new island, completely new island. They had an earthquake in the country because there are a couple of tectonic plates right up against each other there, hence the Himalayas.

Anyway, after this earthquake, it disturbed a pocket of pressurized gas. And as a result, this entire section of the seabed rose up to the surface. Bobbed around for a bit. And until the gas underneath it was going to sort of collapse or get pressurized. And then it sank again. But it was so unattractive as an island, it was just mud and silt. And it was covered in dead fish, which had not realized what was happening to it. I mean, it's not the sort of mystical land appearing out of the sea that we all dream of.

It was much of a stir. No wonder it sank. Everyone was so horrible to it. I think if I were a fish, I would manage to swim into the water. I mean, how quickly did this island pop up out of it? What if you're a flatfish and you're meant to be on this surface? You might not notice as it was rising. Yeah, I see.

The sky's getting scarily close. It's kind of like the fish's version of a tsunami. Yes. Do you know that there's no map containing the phrase, here be dragons? But there are two globes, ancient globes, which do have the phrase, here be dragons. Or they have the Latin because they were classy back then, which is Hicksund Dracones. And one of them is from 1510. And it's one of the first ever European globes.

And one of them is from 1504. And it's from ostrich eggs. That's what they made it out of. Take two ostrich eggs, cut them in half, glue them together, draw on globes. Oh, wow. Do we think one day the sea will recede to reveal that there are, in fact, dragons there? Wouldn't that be nice? Wouldn't it be?

Well, you just get an island floating up with the dragons flopping around like fish. Well, a lot of these monsters, they sort of, they're painted on for stylistic flourishes. And sometimes it's just not a lot of information. You've got to fill the blanks. It's called horror vacui. You know, these cartographers, they cannot ignore blank spaces. They have to fill it in with something. But there's one particular monster you sometimes see drawn on maps of South America,

in the Patagonian region. And it's a giant, a giant couple. And it usually says a regium gigantum region of the giants. The weird thing is that wasn't just a stylistic flourish. It got to the point in 18th century London where they really believed there was a race of eight foot giants that stalked the landscape in Patagonia. And to the extent that I think Dr. Matthew Matty, secretary of the British Royal Society, sent a letter to the French Academy of Sciences

saying the existence of giants here is confirmed. What? Yeah. And when they printed their journal, it came with a frontispiece illustration of one of the sailors. And British sailors at that time were about five foot five. One of the sailors was giving them a biscuit. Just going to piece off. And so it was a massive bassella.

Oh, wow. Maybe they only viewed them from a distance. And it was just that that area had slightly smaller trees. Well, the thing is, they reckon that it was a native tribe that no longer exists of maybe six foot tall men that still to a very short Englishman would look terrifying. Wow. There's still an element of exaggeration going on there, isn't there? When a six foot tall man morphs into a hereby giants type,

they had six foot tall people. It wasn't Washington or Lincoln six foot. Abraham Lincoln, I think, was six foot four. I think that's with the hat, though. And I think it was even bigger with the hat. Really? With the hat, he was about seven feet tall. Wow.

Yeah. They have a full, fully functional audio animatronic robot of him in Disneyland. He gets out. Is it fully, is it fully functional? Yeah, fully functional. Does it emancipate slaves? No, it just stands up and makes a speech. It's supposed to be exactly like him.

They have all the presidents. They have a whole hall for every single president in the United States. And they all get up and talk and make speeches. You watch a video on YouTube. It's pretty weird and cool. And it's very patriotic. Where is this? Disneyland.

Disneyland. When you said it, I just had a vision of all of them in a hall talking at the same time on their own. And it's just the most frightening, weird, unsettling. And they'd tag each other in like wrestlers. On Victitious Island. So you were saying that there were various reasons that they got it wrong and they put islands in the wrong places.

But they did also make them up, didn't they? Like you say, they wanted stuff to happen. They didn't like empty space. And so I was reading about Benjamin Morrell, who I assume you're a Maps fan. Benjamin Morrell. I mean, I just find historical liars fascinating. So what Benjamin Morrell did is he made up a whole bunch of places and islands. So he made up this island called New South Greenland near Antarctica,

which didn't exist. And we thought it existed for 100 years until I think a Shackleton expedition undiscovered it in between 1940 and 1917. They went there and said, oh, that's not here. But why did this guy do that? Well, voyages at that time, and probably still are, are a business operation. You need to raise funds and sponsorship to do it. And people are more likely to give you money if it's exciting,

if you're often an adventure. All he wanted to do was go and travel. He just wanted to live at sea. And so when he came back and he had a particularly uneventful trip, he had to sex it up somehow. So he invented his buyer's island. There's Morrell's land, was one of his he claimed. A humble man.

That's where the wheels started coming off of where he was asked. And what was the name of that that the locals had for it? Oh, Morrell's land. And so, yeah, that's how he secured funding. And so he was known as the biggest liar in the Pacific because of this tendency to just invent geography. So we should say the reason that Ed knows so much about this is that you have written a book on this very subject, haven't you, Ed?

Yeah, it's called The Phantom Atlas. And it comes out November 3rd. And it's basically an atlas of the world as we believed it to be rather than how it actually existed. There you go, Phantom Atlas. Go and buy it. Not on the 2nd of November, but on the 3rd. Because on the 2nd, it won't exist.

Yes, you'll be a bit disappointed. Yeah, yeah. There, isn't there an island somewhere called Disappointment Island? Maybe it was one that Morrell bigged up and then his son went and visited this paradise. Made of ice cream and it's 80 meters high. Turned out it's just covered in dead fish. Disappointment Islands.

One of the first Westerners to land there was John Byron, who was the grandfather of Lord Byron. The man who discovered the Patagonian Giants. Really? Was John Byron? Yeah, he was captain of the Dolphin. Wow. And they called him Foul Weather Jack

because he had this amazing neck of sailing always into enormous tombs. I think we've mentioned it before briefly. So the islands had already been called the unfortunate islands because they didn't have a decent water supply on them. And that was by Magellan. But they were called Disappointment Islands for a different reason.

It wasn't because there wasn't any water. It was because John Byron found that the people who lived there were of a hostile disposition. And they didn't like him. That's a dick move to rename someone. That's like, you now live on bastard lanes. It's quite aggressive, isn't it? No, we were just a disappointment.

Yeah, he didn't call them fierce or frightening, which I think they would have been more flattered by to call someone a disappointment. It's been a real disappointment. Yeah, we were really expecting good things from these islands. I bet he was really nice to their face as well. He was really busy left. Lovely time, guys.

Thank you for the Candy Floss Brilliant Islands. We'll definitely call it that when we get back. Okay, time now for fact number two, which is my fact. My fact this week is that the White House only got the ability to print on double-sided paper this year. And was that the staff weren't trained well enough, if you understand? It's a very hard little click box to find, actually.

It's very hard. They've had the ability. They just... Have had the ability. No, this is the amazing thing, is that they have not had the ability. It's incredible. So the White House has just had a huge technological overhaul,

which has meant that they can now print double-sided. They can do color printing. They don't all have to use Blackberry phones. It's incredibly difficult to upgrade any technology in the White House, but partly because of security and partly because it's very complicated, but also there are four different offices, which look after White House tech.

So it's a complete nightmare. It's the National Security Council, Executive Office of the President, the Secret Services, and the White House Communications Agency. And between them, nothing has been achieved for the last 20 years. All of that expertise, they still can't get the office printer to work.

No one's got any hope. No, and they even, one thing they did, they had to remove lots of spare wiring that was just left in the walls of the building from previous systems that were no longer in use. They removed 13,000 pounds of wiring. So the White House has just lost 13,000 pounds in weight. So when they renovated the situation room in 2006, 2007,

up until that point, they were using cathode ray tube TV screens and fax machines and phones from the 80s. Like, you're absolutely right. It was a completely dire situation. And apparently it was a really disruptive overhaul. They found bits of windows and the remains of a sunken courtyard

that had been left there by a previous president that they didn't know was there. So I think Roosevelt built in the White House a warm swimming pool and he used it for therapeutic swimming for his polio. So this was in the 1930s. There was a big opening in 1933. That was inside the White House. Various other presidents used it.

And then Nixon, fun lover that he was, decided to cover it up and build the press of this room. Classic Nixon. Well, he also installed the bowling alley though. So, you know, he's nice and all. Yeah, that's true. So Nixon covered it up typically and he turned it into a press briefing room.

But we only realized quite recently when they were excavating the White House or doing some building work. So the swimming pool is actually completely intact underneath it. So underneath this floor, underneath where the main White House press secretary stands is the deep end of the swimming pool

and then goes up to the shallow end underneath there. That's a fun metaphor for a new press secretary. We're putting you in the deep end. Presumably it's been trained. I think it has been trained. That's true. Although Hillary Clinton expressed a while ago, I think when Bill was president,

she expressed a desire to have that swimming pool back. So you never know if she wins. She might stop all press briefings. The press briefings get the pool back. That's going to be our campaign slogan. It's only where we can have both and you have inflatable floating chairs for the press people. That is a good idea.

And then you should do length up and down the aisle. And then the press secretary can have a flamingo or something, an inflatable flamingo to be on to show that position. You know, the secret service had to hide the front doorbell on the north side of the White House, from Calvin Coolidge, the president, because he would prank them.

And every time someone rang the doorbell, it wasn't expected. Obviously, the secret service had to rush it. We're talking 1929. And he just loved doing it and then hiding in a bush and watching them arrive and be completely confused. So when they finally figured out what he was doing, and this is from an article in Time.

I'm not pulling this completely out here. They hid the doorbell from him so he couldn't do it again. After that, he was leaving bags of flaming dog shit on the doorstep of his own house. Obama still has a blackberry, doesn't he? But he really wants an iPhone. Does he? Yeah, he was saying, oh, it's a great phone,

but it doesn't take pictures. You can't text. The phone doesn't work. You can't play music on it. And he's really jealous of his wife and kids because they've got cool phones, and they could snapchat and stuff. And he was complaining.

That sounds like a terrible phone. If it can't text, take pictures or do anything else. That's actually the reason that he's not completely tearing up the Constitution and standing for a third term. He would, but he wants that iPhone. It's kind of odd that you're the president. You still can't get the model of phone that you want. Well, it's because it needs to be heavily modified,

doesn't it, by the Secret Service, whatever phone the president uses. I think this is why. And so an iPhone is a little bit more difficult for them to hack into, I think, or they've gone to so much trouble by the time they've modified his bloody Blackberry, that when he comes back next year and says,

I want an upgrade, they say, sorry, mate. It's just the Secret Service. They're always modifying things. So we've talked before about the presidential cars and how they're modified. And I just get the idea of a Blackberry, which has got three inches of armor placing on the outside. And there are seven decoys.

So whenever he goes, which one is my phone? So another thing about early days of tech in the White House, the first ever telephone in the White House could only be used to call the Treasury. And if you wanted to ring the White House, the Treasury just had to pick up the phone and dial one. That's so cool. Yeah, so printing.

Yes, printing. Let's talk about that. Did you know, you know, Hart the Herald Angels thing? Yeah, the song. The song. Do you know what relation that has to printing? No.

That Mendelssohn wrote that tune to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the printing press. Yeah, isn't that weird? It was for some celebrations in honor of Gutenberg. And yeah. I didn't get that from the lyrics. I've said, I always thought it was. Should have been called

Hart the Herald Angels print. Glory to the newborn. Canon HP LaserJet 600. That is very cool. Yeah, so just to clarify, aside from these guys silly jokes, the lyrics were not the same time. They were, in fact, lyrics suitable

to the celebration of Gutenberg. Oh, really? So it's just the music that we're talking about. It was, yeah. So he wrote the tune and then someone else wrote the lyrics about, it was called the Gutenberg cantata. Then later on, it was repurposed.

Well, do you guys know the, you know the expression to a T when you're talking about knowing something very precisely when you plan the bank robbery to a T? Do you know what the T stands for? No. No. Tittle.

And Tittle is the official name for the dot in a lowercase i that printers use. Oh, really? It's J. So the original phrase was to a Tittle. So what's a jot then? Because I know the phrase Jot and Tittle. Yeah, that's from the Bible.

They care not a jot. Yeah, to care not a jot or a Tittle. Were they people? They sound like characters from the Bible. Oh, no, they won't be. What kind of weird children's Bible are you reading? Jot and Tittle. And all these weird things.

They could actually, they could catch on as fancy names. Tittle. Tittle, come and do your piano practice. Jot. It's definitely Jot as a boy's name and Tittle as a girl's name, I think. Well, she's going to have a rough time at school.

Did you know that on printing, publishing, the illustrator of the first ever nursery rhyme book was sued for selling porn? This was a guy called George Beckham Jr. It was in the 1740s. And the nursery rhyme book was three inches by 1.75 inches, which is so sweet. I know, isn't that cool?

Because it was built for children, so it was child-sized. But then you went on to sell loads of porn, which makes me really wonder what were the illustrations. He put some saucy images in the first children's book. Well, maybe he did, but I don't think he did. Have you heard of the smallest ever inkjet-printed picture? This was done not so long ago.

It's 0.08 millimeters by 1 millimeter, and it's a picture of a few different tropical clownfish. It's the same as Nemo, basically. And it's unbelievable. It's done with a thing called quantum dots. The really weird thing is the dots look like a different color according to what size they are. So obviously, they're all absolutely tiny,

but the very, very smallest ones look blue. The slightly larger ones look green, and then the bigger ones look red. So you can print different colors using the same ink. But just using this, I think it's something to do with the light, but I'm not completely sure. So it's obviously something to do with light. That's on the press release.

That's on the press release for dummies. Time for fact number three now, and that is Alex. My fact this week is that World War II Morse code operators could recognize each other's accents over the line. They were speaking in Morse code at the time, presumably. Yes, yeah, yeah. So it's not even just World War II operators. It's all operators.

If you do Morse code a lot, if you're one of those kind of people, it's known as your fist. If you have a good fist or you have a poor fist, that means you've got a very kind of sloppy bad way of typing in Morse code. It means a completely different thing, actually, where I was brought up, but yeah. And I grew up in a boxing community,

just to make that ultra clear. Bit like, I guess it's like an anti-ation, but for Morse code, if you have a good fist, you code very exactly like I'm not doing now. You code very clearly. Very good. Articulately is the word that I can never remember. Just to be clear, is it the speed

with which people are typing the letters? It's not the speed, it's everything. It's the rhythm which you type. It's also you would Morse differently depending on the type of instrument you were using. So there are different mechanisms and different things. So you would get different rhythms or different intonations of your dots and dashes.

Could British Morse code people recognize individual German? Yeah. But it's not like, hello, sir. This is regional access. No, it sounds like it's exactly the equivalent of that. Yes, I think it is. I know that the people in Bletchley monitoring spy codes and speaking a lot with the same people from a long way away,

they'd never met or able to recognize each other just from the Morse accents. I remember one story, a lady who worked at Bletchley talking about it, and she felt that she knew the person who she was listening into so intimately that she referred to her as, I think, Maria. She gave her a name. Wow.

Even though you only hear dot, dot, dot, dash, dot, dot, dash, dot, wow. Classic Maria. There's this story about Thomas Edison. It's one of those probably apocryphal. After he went deaf, that he and his wife would communicate through Morse code. And so when they went to the theater, she would have his hand on his knee and would tap out the lines

as they were performed, which that would be pretty rapid and quite irritating tapping. Yeah. Especially for whoever's in the row in front of them. Are we sure she wasn't a Scotsy trying to say, excuse me, I need the toilet. Can you get up and let me pass? So on communicating in secret using Morse code,

here is a cool thing. During the Second World War, there was a British prisoner of war who was imprisoned in Germany. He was called Major Alexis Casdalli. And he was a sewer. So he would serve to pass the time very intricate, beautiful patterns.

And there are bits of cross stitch. And there's one he did that's really nice. It says, you know, this piece of work was made by Major here at this castle on these dates. But around the edges, there are two borders and they are little patterns of dots and dashes. And one of them says, God save the king in Morse code. And the other one says, excuse my French, fuck Hitler.

And it's amazing. And this was so, it was so nice and pretty that he was allowed to hang it on the wall at the prison camps he was in. And none of the German guards ever spotted or deciphered that this was Morse code. So risky because so many of them must have known Morse code. It was war time.

I thought everyone had to memorize it. Unbelievable. In 2010, members of the Columbian Army were being held hostage by the Guerrilla Army in Columbia, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia. And so the Columbian Army wanted to get a message to them. And they decided the best way to do it would be to commission a pop song

which had Morse code hidden inside it and then find a way of getting it on air, broadcast on radio so that they could get a message to their capture. So at various points in the chorus, they sing the words, listen to this message, brother. And then after that, the beat is built around a Morse code message that says,

nine people rescued your next, don't lose hope. And they got through it, isn't that amazing? And then there's an interview with a guy who said, yeah, I recognize it pretty much immediately because I was expecting Morse code and it was pretty blazing when I heard a listen to this message. Yeah, it's amazing.

And I knew your accent, obviously, because of that extra long gap you leave between the E and the L. It better be a good song as well. Otherwise, you just turn the radio off there. Yeah, that was the problem. They had to make it good because they had to justify forcing radio.

They had to try and get it on radio stations so that it could be broadcast as a song on the radio. And so it couldn't be awful. Otherwise, people would get suspicious. Yeah, and you'd have to be like, you know, Ken hates jazz. We can't do that. He will switch over immediately.

Actually, not that useful a message, to be honest, if I were sitting there in prison and I just finally decoded, oh, what's the key to how I get out? We're on our way. I think that's hope, you are well. Because at the moment, we're having a great time recording a pop song,

but we'll be there soon. There's Morse code on Mars. Anyone? Sir. Yep. The Curiosity rover leaves tire tracks and it has Morse code in those tire tracks. It says JPL,

but there's actually a practical use for it. You're able to look at a picture and they know how big the tire tracks are because they design the wheels. So then they can be like, oh, OK, that's that much distance. Very efficient dead reckoning. Yes, that's exactly what it is.

Yeah. We should say what JPL stands for is the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is NASA's, the other guys who built the rover, right? Yes. That's very cool. Do you know what 21 means in Morse code?

No. So you used to have all the letters, obviously, but it's such a pain to type out every letter, as Alex says. So there are about 99 short codes, which we're using the numbers from 1 to 99. 21 is stop for meal. So that's why you're not getting a reply.

88 is Love and Kisses. I really like 28, which is Do You Get My Writing? Which is such a... Really insecure hip depot. A lot of themes that are emerging in the last message, and I really want you to draw them out. Just remember this,

which is so related to the original fact, but now we're slightly off topic. But there were people in World War II who claimed they could recognize a German accent in a pigeon. These were experts, because there were a lot of pigeon spies that people thought were coming over here. Coming over here, taking our information,

going back to Germany. Exactly. And so experts claimed that they could recognize a German speaking carrier pigeon. This sounds to me like someone who knows his pigeons, and he can tell by looking at them, but he comes up with a really clever way of sounding like he's the expert.

Like, just say coup again. He just knows he's got brand dots. That's German. Is it that the ones which are German spies have a tube on their leg, which has a message in it? They've got a little monocle. A way that Morse code has been used recently

is in a chess tournament last year, and it was used by an Italian chess player to cheat. But it was quite impressive, so it was one of the biggest, I think it was the biggest chess tournament in Italy. And this guy was ranked number 51,366 in the world, and yet got to the penultimate round. So apparently the tournament organizers were a bit suspicious

up to that point anyway. And he kept on, he had his hand constantly under his armpit while he was playing, and he was blinking in a most unusual manner, apparently. So subtle. He kept asking for the same song to be played over and over again.

So eventually, people thought this was a bit dodgy, so they asked him to take off his shirt, and understandably, actually, he said he wouldn't. And so then they put him for a metal detector, and they found that there was a video camera and a little pendant that he was wearing around his neck, and then there was a box under his armpit with a mass of wires going all around his body,

and that was transmitting signals to him from a computer or a friend who was telling him what moves to do. The friend who was only number 49,000 in the world. Speaking of cheating, there's a sport called Vincen Sport, a sort of competitive bird tweeting, where you have your bird in a box, and they measure how many syscoeats it produces. What's the amount of time?

A syscoeat is just the name of the note of a chip, and if it goes a sysco what, then it's a dud. But they found, I think fairly recently, there was a competition. So you have a bird, and you have to make your bird produce more. You have a bird in a box, you don't do anything to make it,

you've just trained this bird to chirp. Okay, there's a huge amount of cheating in the Vincen Sport Finch singing. Or cheeping. To the point where one year they opened up a box because they noticed that his bird cheeped the exact same number each time, and they found a CD player.

It hadn't struck the tournament organisers to have sort of transparent boxes. Their suspicion was aroused when he asked if he could plug in his finch. Does anyone have anything else before we move on? Can we end this section with a stop? Yeah, you know we can, Alex. Just stop.

Okay, time for our final fact this week, which is Anna. My fact this week is that braver snails have thicker shells. This is so good. I love this. Braver snails are thicker. It's like a fridge magnet, saying. It is, isn't it?

It works up ages. What does it mean? What are you trying to tell me? It's something you tell your children to stop being bullied in the playground, I think. I can see you're trying to work now. I'm figuring out the wording. So snails with thicker shells are braver.

What a great question. We don't know. So it could be either way round. This is a study last year that was published in Biology Letters, which is the Royal Society Science Journal, published last year, and it found that risk-taking freshwater snails

tend to have thicker, stronger, rounder shells. But we don't actually know, so we can only hypothesize as to whether they've developed stronger shells because they're naturally very risk-taking and so they need to mitigate that risk of predation by having a stronger shell or whether they had a stronger shell

and so they went out and took more risks. I have never noticed a snail taking risks or being conspicuously brave. Burning buildings. It's never a snail coming out with the orphans over his shoulder. How do you define bravery in a snail? Like what kinds of things?

Yeah, climbing up, saving children. Yeah, so bolder snails are defined as snails who, when you scared them and they retracted their neck back into their shell, they then stuck their neck back out again within 10 seconds and the cowardly snails were those who exceeded the 10-second limit

for sticking their neck back out again. And also, I think the bolder snails had a wider aperture, so they had a bigger front door, essentially. So that sounds disgusting. That's snail. Snails are amazing. We've never really talked about them before. Snails are unbelievable.

Satsuma snails? Go on. So generally, in snails, you can get left-handed snails and right-handed snails in the sense that some snails have a left spiraling shell and some snails have a right spiraling shell. The first interesting thing is that in most places around the world,

the ratio of left spiraled to right spiraled snails is roughly the same as the ratio of left-handed people to right-handed people. The reason that there aren't very many left-handed snails in most parts of the world is because it's very difficult for left spiraled and right spiraled snails to have sex. In Japan, there's a snail called the satsuma snail,

and there are a lot more left spiraling snails than right spiraling snails there because they have a predator, which is a snake that likes to eat them, and it has real difficulty latching on and biting down on snails with left spiraled shells for some reason, so they flourish. That is such a good example of natural selection.

Do you hear the story of, in New Zealand, they have giant snails that can grow the size of Hamburg? It's called the Poella Fanta. In 2011, their habitat was on a particular plateau that was due to be mined, and so the government in a mass operation moved these, I think, something like 6,000 of these giant snails into these high-tech cool rooms temperature-controlled.

Do you know what's coming next? Oh, no, they died. There was a glitch, and the temperature plummeted to zero, but no one noticed for ages because they didn't constantly check on the snails, and half of the snails hadn't been re-homed, so I think something like 800 or 1,600, these very rare snails, died.

They were all killed. Oh, that is a cock up. Wow. Have you heard of the giant African land snail? No. This is an amazing snail. It's massive, and they're really popular for eating, and people keep on smuggling them around the world.

It's about 15 centimetres long normally, which is pretty long, but it gets really big. In 2005, there was a passenger coming through Heathrow who said she had something small to declare and she walked through the red lane. They looked in her luggage. She had 104 kilos, 16 stone of snails in her luggage. 16 stone.

Alive. Yeah, alive and with eggs all over the place. Oh, that works. Well, they're really popular to be eaten. One farmer in Austria sells snail caviar and snail livers, and snail livers are also in spiral shapes. Are they? They're amazing.

Cool. Yeah. You know, speaking of smuggling snails, you know Patricia Highsmith, the novelist who wrote The Talented Mr Ripley of those books. She wrote Strangers on a Train, which was adapted into a Hitchcock film. She hated people and loved snails, had a snail obsession,

so she used to smuggle snails with her and she kept about 300 snails as pets, took them with her wherever she went. When she went to a dinner party, she'd always have them in her handbag and then she'd get bored. Many, many, a good proportion, and then she'd whip them out and put them on the table. Sorry, the snails, right?

The snails, yes. No wonder people didn't like her. I know, she didn't like people. She hated people. She sometimes apparently traveled around with a snail under each breast. Why would you invite that person to a dinner party? There was a guy, I like this guy so much.

He was a charity director called Lloyd Scott, and in 2011 he dressed up as a snail to do the London Marathon. It took him 26 days. He raised £20,000 doing so. One article wrote, he has crawled for 26 days across broken glass, nails, dog feces, enduring cramps, vomiting, and at least one trip to A&E.

He has said he was reluctant to repeat the experience. All right, so he gets to the end of the course, took him 26 days. Oh no, and someone stepped on him and squashed him. He was in a nine-foot-long snail costume dressed as Brian from The Magic Roundabout. He was then sacked by the charity he worked for because he hadn't raised enough money doing it.

It's because it had cost more money to do it than it cost money. He'd incurred a loss, basically, and not raised enough money. And as a result, imagine just crawling slowly towards the P45 at the other end of the world. It's so unkind. Why wouldn't they sack him during it? Why would they wait until he's done the whole thing? They do sound just sadistic people, you're right.

It's true. Just cheering him on all the way as well. Snails, anuses are... Gotta talk about snails, anuses, for us snails. Snails, anuses are just above their heads. But they're not there for the whole lot. No, so they start out at the back of them and then they undergo the coiling process like the rest of the body.

So I think the snail must be thrilled as it begins as an embryo that it's bummers all the way at the back of it. It doesn't have to have anything to do with it and it gradually grows up and around until it's perched right above its eye. But it's a really weird thing that only happens to a specific type of invertebrate. And it's basically... Our whole body just turns around. I'm unbelievably glad it only happens to a certain type of invertebrate.

The ramifications for the cosmetics industry here would be huge in terms of having bum replacements so that you looked young and beautiful again because your bum was where your bum is, instead of on the back of your neck. That's a good point. Although you save on underpants, you just use a hat, right? Great point, yeah. Pants and hats double up as one. That's a small advantage to many disadvantages.

As true as you get older, you really want your ass to be as far away from you as possible. I was on petsnails.co.uk. Awfully confused with petsnails. Okay. But they have a list of problems that your snail can have. And the list of problems in Keloods, excessive mucus, swollen tentacles, and sudden multiple death. There's a page for what happens if I stepped on a snail.

What do I do? How can I resuscitate it? What do you do? Well, the author then said, if you found a snail that looks really mangled, or the internal organs are sticking out of gaping cracks in the shell, etc. Please call 911, because 999 is overstressed. I euthanized them by stamping on them. It sounds horrible, but it's far better than taking hours to dry out and die from desiccation.

All right, good advice. Probably worth clarifying, because I always thought this was true, and it's not true, that snails are built into their shells. They just live in the shells like a herb crab. You doesn't turn into a slug if you take out. How many snails did you remove before you found them? Gone anywhere near them. Have you heard of semi-slugs?

Is that just a slightly flaccid slug? It's supposed to be the permanently erect slugs you normally get. Oh, they're always like that around me, I'm just saying. You and Patricia Highsmith, aren't they? Semi-slugs, they're slugs, which have got a shell on their back, but it's not quite big enough for them to fit the whole body into. But it's not quite completely vestigial yet, so they can kind of cram a bit of themselves into it.

I'm definitely still a size eight. I don't know, Boris, your house is looking pretty small these days. Okay, that's it. That's all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you have enjoyed this podcast and you'd like to follow us on Twitter, you can do so. I'm on at Andrew Hunter M. Alex.

At Alexbell Under School. Ed. At Fox Tosser. Yeah, which is a reference to Ed's previous book, which is very good, either by that or the Phantom Atlas. And Anna. You can email podcast at qi.com. There's also a group Twitter account, which is at QI podcast.

And if you want to listen to all our previous episodes of No Such Thing as a Fish, you can go to our website, which is qi.com forward slash podcast. Also, the first 52 episodes of Fish are now available to buy on iTunes, and they are not available on the website. So if you want to listen to them, you got a shell out like a snail. Okay. See what you did there. See what I did.

We'll be back again next week with another podcast. Thank you so much for listening and goodbye.