No Such Thing As A Fish - 146: No Such Thing As A Queen Orca

Episode Date: January 7, 2017

Dan, James, Andy and special guest Sara Pascoe discuss sympathetic pregnancy, the world's most famous umbrellas and the surprisingly romantic life of coral.

Hello and welcome 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 Dan Shriver and I'm sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray and Sarah Pascoe and once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here we go. Starting with you, James Harkin. Okay my fact this week is that the first man to use an umbrella in London was pelted with rubbish for doing so. Wow but fortunately he had an umbrella. Yeah. Was that why he took it out? He didn't although according to his biographer when one person threw rubbish at him he used

his umbrella to give the man a right good thrashing. Oh really? Yeah. Wow. So that should be the fact. The first ever outing of an umbrella was used to beat a man. Oh yeah. That's quite cool. I should redo it. So yeah so this is a guy called Jonas Hamway and he had been to France. He was a bit of a traveller and he came back from France and in France they'd all been using umbrellas for quite a long time but in England they were seen as kind of either a feminine or a weakness of character that you'd have it or just French which was a bad thing at the time. Oh so when you say it's the first person seeing public with an umbrella you just mean the first man. Yeah. Like the women had them every day they were beating each other. You're right. Did I not

say man? You did say you did say men. Did I say man? Yeah. Oh so women women were used so he was the first. Yeah so women were using them and men were using them all over Europe go on Andy. Well I think also priests were using them because they're basically women in their girly clothes always singing songs smelling perfume everywhere. Basically they I think they had them at funerals but they had these huge heavy things at funerals which would maybe they'd have an assistant because it would they'd be outside and it'd be raining so they wanted to keep dry like that but yeah no proper lads as Sarah rightly points out did not have them I think. Yeah you're right and so what happened was if it was raining in London this was in the 1750s you would probably

hire down a handsome cab or a someone carrying a sedan chair or something like that and that would help you get out of the rain and so it was the people who were driving these cabs who didn't like the guy and so they started throwing things at him because they thought that he might put them out of business. Yes I knew it was the Hackney kind of carriagemen that had pelted him with rubbish but I just thought it was because he wasn't very popular. No so but it was because actually he was their competition so also did you know that he was anti-tipping this? Was he? Do you know what you mean by tipping like? Well tipping people so I get another reason why the Hackney cab drivers might have been like you shut your mouth and he was anti-tea drinking.

Okay why was he anti-tea drinking? I don't know it's just Wikipedia says he was right. Oh I do know. So he wrote this whole essay about tea because he again thought it was French and that was a bad thing at the time and he said men seem to have lost their stature and comeliness and women their beauty your very chambermaids have lost their bloom I suppose by sipping tea so he just thought it was bad for people. Well it's a good job that me Sarah and Dan are all drinking wine and you're drinking tea too. Like an ugly chambermaid. It's weird isn't it because actually umbrellas anti both Chinese originally. So actually it feels like he's kept saying French but it was a different kind of racist. It was less acceptable. But also now very English

right? Yes. Carrying an umbrella like a businessman. Oh yeah. Apparently most umbrellas are still made in China. Are they? Yeah. But actually they found that the terracotta army is one of the chariots that has a giant umbrella that's attached to it. That must have been an amazing discovery when they saw that. Because you would think you don't invent the umbrella before the house. But you'd think that in terms of people they would get like a rough kind of covering and hang on we could add walls to this. It would be that way round. So you think that the house is just a very advanced umbrella? It is. It really is. If they were to look like oh my gosh look what they've done. They've got toilets in their umbrellas. This was the 1700s that this happened in. But do

you know the first time that an umbrella was mentioned in the UK was in the 1600s? Okay. And it was in a book by Thomas Coyote. He was a court jester for the son of King James I. And he wrote this amazing book which came out in the same year as the King James Bible which was called Coyote's Crudities, hastily gobbled up in five months' travel. And he went from London to Venice in the same pair of shoes. And he came back and... It sounds like someone who needs an Edinburgh show. Doesn't it sound like a third year scraping the barrel? I'm going to walk to Venice and I'm not going to change my shoes. Yeah. So he came back and he put his supposedly put his shoes into a church, hung them up. He was like this is the one pair I wore and he was quite famous

in his day. So in his book he mentions umbrellas for the first time because as he was passing through Europe he saw them. He also mentions the fact that everyone was eating using this forked device. And that supposedly as well is how we started using forks. That's interesting because actually I think the first people to use forks were kind of ridiculed, weren't they? Yes. Again, effeminate, I think. Were they? Yeah. There was one famous guy, I can't remember who it was, who used a fork and was known as fork user and that was supposed to be an insult. They were like you fork user. Is that because it sounded exactly like fork you? Yeah. Is that where we got it from? Maybe. Do you know what early umbrellas were nicknamed in England? No. They were called Robinson's

because in the book Robinson Crusoe he makes himself an umbrella. Before he makes a house. It's all coming together. Everything makes sense. Do you know who had the first umbrella covered with Kevlar to make it bulletproof? No. Nicholas Sarkozy. Did he? He was like, I'm going to be dry and safe. Sky assassins. Wow. Did he carry the umbrella or was that a bodyguard? He held it himself. It must have been very heavy. Apparently other people have them now. Is it heavy Kevlar? I assume so, but maybe not. I mean, I'm sure he had special light as stuff as light as possible. I'll be making houses out of Kevlar next time. I found some famous umbrellas that I thought. Is there a Wikipedia list of

famous umbrellas? There should be and there should also be an umbrella museum where they keep them because I would definitely go. I haven't found an umbrella museum. I have found an umbrella cover museum. What? You mean the thing that slips over it? You know when you buy a short umbrella and it's got that little sort of slip of material, little pouch that you lose within about 20 seconds. There's a museum in Maine devoted to those. You're kidding. No. The website says, people flocked by the tents to see the museum. People were thrilled to donate their old umbrella sheets and the international press went bonkers. So the umbrellas that I would put into the museum if I had a couple of entries would be the first one is Mary Kingsley's umbrella. Oh yeah. Very

important umbrella and I'm surprised that it's not in the RGS. I'm surprised that I couldn't find if anyone's actually got it because it was the umbrella that she used to ward off the animals. Famously, she smacked a hippopotamus away while she was in her canoe. So she was an explorer in Africa, wasn't she? Yeah, she was and she went out of time when she was still, she didn't even wear trousers. She still wore a full Victorian garb. The dress, like it was insane. She sounds like such a bitch. She was amazing. Wacking hippos with umbrellas. They're in my way. You went to Africa and you didn't put any trousers on for God's sake. Who's in the wrong habitat here? That's true. I'm being unfair on her. She tickled the behind the veneer of a hippopotamus in order

to get it away. That's nice when you say it like that. And I think she kicked a crocodile in the face or something. I'm not sure. Yeah. So that's one umbrella because she was an incredible explorer and the second one is the umbrella that was thought to have assassinated JFK. Do you know about this story? No. Is that a theory? I've heard about umbrella man. Is that umbrella man? So umbrella man, I hadn't heard of this. So in the famous footage of the JFK assassination, there's famously this shot when people are analyzing it and not knowing where the shot might have come from. Out of nowhere, as the car is passing a bunch of people on the side, there's just this one guy standing there holding an umbrella and it's a sunny day. There's no

reason. Yeah. And they thought how is this possible? Could be a parasol. It could have been a parasol. That's true. It was an umbrella though. It was a dark umbrella. It turned out that it was a guy who was actually protesting Kennedy's father because Kennedy's father was a sympathizer with Neville Chamberlain, who was quite nice to the Nazis during his time and he was just protesting that. It was a very... That doesn't make any sense. Like if his father was a rain cloud, great protest. Because apparently a trademark accessory of Chamberlains was to carry an umbrella. Okay. There's still like six removed. You have to explain to everyone what your protest means. It's like going to a fancy dress party where you look nothing like what you're supposed to be

and you have to explain to everyone. Or being an impressionist who goes, oh, hello, I'm Western Churchill. That was uncanny. Well, except that while Kennedy was at Harvard, he wrote a thesis and it kind of, that was very much a part of that. So he thought Kennedy would get the little nod. And so everyone was going, who's the umbrella man? He turned himself in. He brought the umbrella in and basically he explained this convoluted reason why he was protesting. And this is the quote from me. He said, I think if the Guinness Book of World Records had a category for people who were at the wrong place at the wrong time doing the wrong thing, I would be number one in that position. Because he was there two seconds or so before Kennedy shot.

So there is a website which claims that in 1797 there was only one umbrella in Cambridge and that you could hire it out for an hour at a time. 1797. I think as soon as it starts raining, there's going to be a rush as well. But I don't know whether there was only one there, but it's true that in Paris, it was common practice as in you could hire them out by the hour and they had, they were all clearly recognizable. They had a number painted on so they couldn't be nicked. So it was like the Boris bike. Oh yeah, like the bike system. Yeah. Except obviously they could be nicked. I don't know how you would legislate against that or prevent it. But in France because they had the bike system before us, then they weren't

getting stolen there. It's really interesting culturally that in Paris they left them all and in Amsterdam they all got stolen instantly. I don't know what we're doing. Really? What are we doing in London? I think they're too heavy and shit aren't they? Yeah, I think if you're kind of riding that around, someone's going to know that it's not your actual bike. You reckon? Yeah. People are like detectives like that sometimes. Just we were talking about ancient China before and the umbrella. Something I thought I'd show you guys, which obviously doesn't translate too well, but people can Google this. The Chinese character for umbrella, San, it was designed to look just like an umbrella. So part of the... It looks like a house. It does, doesn't it? Yeah. Yeah, that's

it there. Yeah. It's beautiful, right? Just a nice little bit of how Chinese words often work is that you actually designed it initially to look like... Do they look like that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So if I was to read Chinese, might I get a clue of what the words are by looking at what they look like? Well, in its origin, so when I was taught Mandarin as a kid, you would start with the super simplified pictorial versions of it and it would show you that the turtle image would look exactly like a turtle and it slowly became hardened and edged and so on. The numbers one, two, three, they're just... Just lines. Yeah, for one and then add a two and a three. Yeah. Yeah. I kind of believe you, but then also I think maybe you went to special classes when they make Mandarin easy for Dan.

I get the turtle drawing out. Just hold my finger up, Dan. We know what you mean. Just draw an umbrella. We'll just accept it. That's what it is. Some stuff about throwing rubbish at things. Sure, okay. So when Blackfriars Bridge was opened, so it was a replacement bridge and Queen Victoria opened it and there's a statue of her at the end and she'd been in mourning for ages, like for Albert. So the crowd really hated her by then, so they pelted her with vegetables apparently. Really? Yeah. Why hi, Hater? Because she hadn't been to see them for such a long time, like decades. Why so they threw vegetables at her? Did anyone get in trouble for that? Presumably they did. Maybe they all said it was the wrong place

at the wrong time and it was not just in the chamber. We're just protesting Lord Liverpool. Maybe he used to like cabbage. We don't want to go to the Crimean War. Umbrella Inventions is one of the main inventions that people try. I think Mouse Traps is one of them and Umbrella's is the other one. I invented a Mouse Trap, but it was for pickpockets. So you put a Mouse Trap in your pocket and then when someone tries to get into your pocket, it traps their fingers and then you have to take them two miles away and release them in a field. That's good, but it makes your pockets unusable, doesn't it? Yes, you mustn't forget and put your hands in your pockets. There was a there's a museum in the UK and I wish I could remember

which one it is, but they have one of the oldest examples of a Mouse Trap inside a glass box and the curator came back one morning and found a Mouse Trap in it because it managed to get inside the box. Clever Mouse. Clearly sets and so yeah, an ancient Mouse Trap that was never meant to be used, caught a modern day Mouse like time travel. I once went to a museum in Bhutan and it was run by monks and they had a mouse problem that they discovered on that day when I was there and they're Buddhist monks so they didn't want to kill the mouse or even hurt it in any way, so they were just running after it chasing after all these monks running in and out of rooms like an old farce. I love how they think that that's not stressful for mice. I don't want to stress them

out, I'm just going to be like a hundred times bigger than them chasing after the room. A lot of them have, so you know about Toxic Plasma, have you talked about it before, Toxic Plasma Gonja, yes, so loads of mice have it and it means that they're not scared of cats and they're not scared of humans when they have it. Is it humans as well? Yeah, with humans as well, but so the theory is the people who really like worship cats is because, so lots of people are carriers, so they're really dangerous for babies to get it, but most, lots of human beings have it and the theory is that that's why there's humans who just love cats, not just like, oh hey, I've got a cat, but like this cat is my secret wife. My wife's like that, my real wife not my secret cat.

She always comes home at night, you know, you have to go into the neighbor's house, I think it's like a mouse. Okay, it is time for fact number two and that is Sarah. Okay, so my fact is about men and it's about how the male brain changes when his partner is pregnant. Okay, how does it change? Well, this is all very early research and a lot of the studies I've looked into have a very small amount of subjects, but it seems like things happen from literally four to six weeks of finding out his partner is pregnant, no matter when that is, that testosterone starts to drop and he starts to produce prolactin, which is a hormone that creates milk production in female

mammals, but in male mammals makes them less aggressive. So it's what's really, really interesting is it seems like on cortisol changes as well. Cortisol is a stress hormone, but in men and women it also causes you to put on weight because you're storing energy. So for a long time there's been a theory about and they've kind of called like sympathetic male pregnancies or I think it's called Kuvaard syndrome, which is when the men start to get nauseous and get morning sickness and they put on weight as well. There's now a theory that actually in terms of resources, the man putting on weight is quite sensible in terms of storing energy because he's going to have to do a lot more and give a lot more resources once as a baby. So it's really fascinating.

Wait, what does the male give in terms of that more body on a male? If you think about it like if you have more body fat than you don't have to eat as much, you work harder and also if you give your food away. So if you think about times of sort of fast and famine, any kind of stored energy is the difference between living and dying. So the cortisol thing is interesting. So another thing I found out when I was looking into this is that the more stressed the mother is, the more cortisol she produces and obviously having a new baby is very, very stressful, the faster the baby grows through her breast milk. So cortisol, it does make you as a child, it's better to make your mother more stressed.

Yes, that's exactly what it means. Thank you for interpreting it. And they've done rat studies and I hate animal studies and I don't think they're applicable, but they do obviously awful things to animals. But with rats, if they really, really stressed the mother out, then her children would come out much, much tougher with higher levels of cortisol and testosterone and things like already as if they're prepared for a horrible world. It's a kind of theory which is really interesting that whatever you do to the mother, especially through breast milk, she's telling, she's programming her children, you need to be ready for this. Do you have to be aware that your wife is pregnant or does your body? Yes, well, this is, I have so many questions about it. Number one,

this is such a heteronormative study. Yes. So first of all, try that. Adoptive parents, people who go through IVF. What about gay parents? Does this all, this is all the same. Yeah. And they have all these questions and then it's like, we studied 29 heterosexual couples and did some salivary hormone tests. Also, I have to say, there'll be one test that will find, oh my God, men have this amount of testosterone then when their partners are pregnant and then it'll be replicated and they don't find it, but they'll find something else. Okay. So it seems like, and also with the brain, because of neuroplasticity, it's so different from lots of people anyway, that there's never an absolutely 100% all people do this. I was kind of thinking if you had a one

night stand with someone, looking at your body going, you put on a bit of weight. And you go home and your girlfriend's like, hang on. Did really nothing happen in my leafa? Because you've got morning sickness. Yes, morning sickness. In these studies, they were saying that men get morning sickness as well. Yeah, they can do that. And so this and the sympathy cramps and everything. Yeah, it was really interesting. We didn't notice it for ages because most of the experiments done were on, as you say, rats and rat fathers, as it were, don't look after their offspring. So it's when they started experimenting on marmosets, where the males do look after their

offspring that they noticed these hormonal changes in marmoset brains. So it's one of the things where there are some things that are kind of hardwired because physically we can do them, but it's very, very unpopular to say, because it looks like you're reinforcing all these things we're trying to get away from, which is gender binary and things like being biologically different between men and women, which actually it's a really, really complex area. And it's not popular. They don't want to study it. People don't want to do it. So is that considered controversial? Kind of. So if you were to stand up at a feminist meeting and be like, guys, it's not your fault. Like you evolved to make babies. And until very recently, that's what happened if you had sex.

See you later. Enjoy your conference. Yeah, okay. And it's the same with the studies of the brain. They try and say like really complimentary things about both genders rather than negative. So rather than going like, Oh, women, maybe are less spatially aware. And it's not ever true in terms of it's just like, Oh, they'll do a study. And it seems like all men are using their brain this way or this way. And then you look at people who are brought up differently. And it's not, it's not true. But the brain is so elastic in terms of how it's used, people who do loads of maths are better at maths. And that's kind of seems to be the thing. It's really difficult not to be reductive and telling people. And it's the same with men, like obviously 90% of criminals are male,

90% of crimes. And there's a theory that's because the amygdala is much bigger and the prefrontal cortex develops much later. So you have this emotional instinctual brain that isn't very good at controlling itself. And that's very sexist to say to men like, you're just crazy. You're just much closer to monkeys. I read a really good article. It was a study from 2015 at Tel Aviv University. And they were saying, Okay, well, if you look at men's brains and women's brains, if you look at them generally, you can say, Okay, generally a men's brain will be a bit like this. And generally a woman's brain will be a bit like this. But actually 98% of people they studied didn't fit a clear cut profile. So you can kind of say generally speaking, it's like this.

But if you take an individual, it's really fascinating. So this obviously men's brains are about 10% bigger, which is covenants to body size really. But what's really fascinating is that there's a lot of so dyslexia, ADHD, things like that are all much, much more prevalent in men than women. And they don't know why and sort of the genetic basis for that. But there's certain kind of brain disorders, which are just you're much more likely an autism as well. It's more male. Yeah. And the testosterone and the crime thing, but I didn't realize as well testosterone doesn't actually get into the brain. There's a kind of there's a something in the brainstem that turns it into a different hormone because of how it would actually change the structure.

Yeah. There was a just on the men and pregnancy thing of physiological changes to the man in pregnancy, they did do a load of surveys of men about the symptoms that they'd experienced physically when their partners were pregnant. I bet their wives were like, what for me for now? How this affected you darling? Well, a lot of them complained of stomach cramps basically, but there were a few kind of there were a few kind of illustrative lines. One man said, my stomach pains were very much like a buildup of woman's contraction as she's giving birth. They start a mild and then got stronger and stronger and stronger. Another man claimed, I think I was in more pain than she was. Well, the cramps thing is interesting,

the cramps thing is interesting because oxytocin, which is a hormone that does make you bond, which does raise for men, especially in the last trimester of pregnancy. And obviously it's what a woman releases when she breastfeeds. It also causes muscle contractions. So it's what causes an orgasm in everyone. And so actually if you had raised oxytocin, that would absolutely make sense about cramping. Wow. Yeah. Okay. So my reading out the line for a cheap laugh at this man saying, I think I was in more pain than she was may have had point behind it. Also, do you know what? I think people say stuff like that with a wink that we don't hear. Yeah. That's very true. And that's the problem with the internet. Very true. I think so many

things that people say are joking. And then we write it down and go, what a bastard. I'm going to send him a turd in the post. And I think it's today they were talking about so women's gray matter actually decreases in certain parts of her brain. And that's so she can become obsessed with a baby. Whoa, really? She has to be obsessed with it. Oh, it'll die. Yeah. And it's caused by hormones, but you have to have a baby and then just want to stare at it constantly. Otherwise, someone else is going to eat it. Yeah. I mean, someone else like a wolf or something like Roger from next door. But I think when they first found that out, they saw that the emotion part of your brain shrunk a little bit and everyone thought that doesn't make any sense at all. And then they

realized actually you're just decluttering, like getting rid of all the not important pruning, they call it. And this is the thing with the brain. They say these things like, oh, that's the emotional part of your brain or that's the drive. And it's always so much more complicated than that. Like so the amygdala, which is like this emotional center, really, really ancient brain also is connected in terms of what you remember in terms of trauma and really like animal instinct. So that's the thing they used to call it like the lizard brain. And yeah, it was the thing which kind of is attaches you to when we were living in the sea or whatever. And it's just instinct. But of course, like you say, it's all really over simplistic. But then also in terms of, I mean,

all of us included relay people, how else are you supposed to understand this really complicated science? And as someone goes, that's the really old bit. This bit is monkey bit. Remember when you were monkey? It is interesting, though, that the brain can't understand itself. Yeah, that is interesting. Yeah, you have what's that theory of yours that, um, well, I think it's the only thing that's ever named itself. Yes. So cool. I tried to write stand up about how, you know, when you go like, oh my God, the brain's amazing. How arrogant it is that it's your brain telling you that. You're like, shut up, brain. It's the most complex thing we know of in the galaxy. I don't think we'll ever understand the brain. Excuse me bragging about yourself.

You know what you're saying about the gray matter shrinking? Yeah. So if you were to do a list of every animal species on earth in terms of how, let's say, loved a newborn is, where would we appear on that list? Very, very high. But the sad thing is, if anyone watches Blackfish, the documentary, is that like the black mirror for fish? People don't even talk about how clever fish are. Charlie Brooker nicked their idea. Um, so Blackfish is, uh, and it's really interesting. So orcas, orcas also have menopause like us, uh, grandparents, uh, never stopped caring for their young, young never leave their parents. The part of their brain, which we're again, very crudely would say is to do with familial love is like two and a half times bigger than ours. And when

their children are taken away from them in the wild to go to aquariums, they cry for the rest of their lives. Whoa. Yeah. Does that mean Queen Victoria was an orca? What? Oh, because she was, she was sad for the rest of her life. Guys, I have never seen her without a big dress on, which might have been a massive tail. She was a human head on an orca. That's why they threw things at her. Cause she was a weird orca queen. Oh my God. This is the, yeah, they saw emerge from the Thames to open Blackfriars bridge again. This is Splash the sequel. Oh, yeah. Cause I read the giraffes when they're born. This is, this is quite separate, but just thinking how like how the human body just is very much, everyone's around, takes the baby out, cuts a cord. It's so,

it needs us to be there basically. Um, with giraffes, they're born with slippers. All right. Yeah. They're born with slippers and their horns are bendy. What do you mean slippers? They have this odd thing around their hooves. Are they hooves? Yeah. And they, and they shed after about like three months after they're born, some, or maybe three days, three days or three months. Every other species other than us gives birth to young that are ready to live and we don't. So we give birth and then the baby continues growing. And that's thing to always remember in terms of the brain and that's as a species. Our whole society, all of our personal interactions are because we can't just have a baby and look after it on our own because the brain is so big.

Yeah. Yeah. Massive. Yeah. Oh, stop it with your brain. Every time we talk about the brain on the show, I get blown away by the oddness of what we're constantly learning about it. Cause it just completely flips. It's just such big knowledge every time we learn something new. So this is, this is not new, but this blew my mind today when I read it, blew my brain to that. So my brain is being blown by its own abilities. Yeah. I bet it literally in our side of skull, when you learn brain facts, your brain is like walking up and down, doing the moonwalk like I know it. So it's if you sleep in a new place, let's say a new house, a new hotel, anywhere you've gone to, that's not your regular place. Half of your brain stays in a kind of alert position so that it can

just wake up for new sounds. Yes. Like a dolphin. Exactly. Like Green Victoria. So neuroplasticity, which is the really exciting thing. The books that have been written about it are so amazing in terms of the brain, the way it prunes itself. That thing about, if you go to new places all the time, people who travel and get new stimuli, they build new neurons all of the time because they have to and that benefits all of the brain. But so there's things that's so fascinating and Dick Swab's book, he talks about how, so your brain, if it doesn't use certain parts, it prunes them as a child. So it's incredible. But people who grew up in the East who don't have certain sounds, like the R sound, their brain prunes them and then when they learn English later on,

they can't pronounce words properly because their brain physically has got rid of that part. Same with us and other languages as well. Yeah. Maybe can do, has the ability in theory to be able to do every single sound that's known to man, but then you just lose it at a certain age. Which is the brain going, and it's not a detriment. It's going, I'm going to use this for stuff I do need. Yeah. Right. Shall we move on to the next fact? You said that guy's name is Dick Swab. I know. He's one of the best. He's huge. But he's written, because there's like three amazing brain books at the moment and he's

one of them. And that's his name. But the thing is once you've said it three times, you get used to say it. I think if I was friends with Dick Swab, I would never get used to that. You'd think that when he handed the book and he said to the editor or the publisher, any changes, they went, actually, yeah. Mr. R Swab. Oh, R Swab is even worse. Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is Andy. My fact is that a fifth of all the species of coral on the planet have been named by the same man. Yeah. What's his name? His name is John Veron. I hope I'm pronouncing it right. His nickname is Charlie, which doesn't sound like a nickname, but actually it was in school. He was a teacher said, hey, Charles Darwin,

stop doing that because he was doing some cool experiment with animals. So he's a marine biologist and he's been nicknamed the godfather of coral. He's 71 years old now, but he has done so much in the world of looking at coral, exploring it, studying it, categorizing it. So in 1972, he was made the first full time researcher on the Great Barrier Reef, and he spent more hours diving down there than anybody else in the world, studied more of it than any other human alive. And he's just, he was interviewed in the FT last weekend and he's an extraordinary guy. So I thought he is. When he comes over to the UK, David Attenborough will introduce him onto stage and introduce him by saying that this is one of

the most important scientists in our time. He's a huge, huge deal, really exciting character. Has he done a TED talk? So he's not that big a deal actually. No, have you done one? No. Oh, okay. No, I wasn't like about to talk to you about coral, right? Okay, so I just got a bit jealous. Has he ever been on QI? Yeah, has he? God, I'd love it if they just occasionally, just because of quotas. They had to have a Dixie diver. Sarah Pascoe and Dick Swab. Yeah, so go on, Andy. So generally, where you get kind of soft corals and hard corals, but hard corals are the ones which live in colonies with lots of little individual animals and they excrete the skeleton of calcium carbonate, which becomes the reef and grows.

So that's what the... Yeah, that's not the animal, that's the kind of shell, isn't it? Exactly, yeah. And they have tentacles around their mouth and they can catch things, they can catch little bits of prey, even some small fish they can catch and eat them. And they're very, very cool. Do you know that they kiss? No, I didn't know that. Coral kiss. Oh, James, did you have a really sexy gap here? My wife is a coral, actually. Yeah, they got this new little camera. It's a new kind of camera. It's called the Benthic underwater microscope or BUM. Yeah, unfortunately. But it lets you see what's happening at very, very close up. And they found that these polyps, which is what makes the coral,

they get the food and then they pass on nutrients to each other by kind of kissing each other. Wow. Isn't that amazing? That's amazing. Yeah, that's cool. Is there benefit to an individual from passing on nutrients to another nearby? Well, I think, generally speaking, that's true in a lot of animals as well. When you all benefit from the kind of the ecosystem, don't you? So that's the thing about altruism, they now understand that you all kind of survive together. That's great. They're all made at the full moon as well. Once a year. It might be the light, or it might be them sensing something else,

or it might be the tide, I don't know, but yeah. Oh, yeah, because they have higher tides. They do this thing called broadcast spawning, where they all release this blizzard of bundles into the ocean. They're really brightly coloured. Who knew it was so sexy? It is my moonlight. It's sexy down on the ring. Kiss it in and spore in. Yeah. Wow. I get really confused by coral. I don't understand what it is exactly in terms of, there's no brain, but there is some kind of system that means they know how to reproduce. What kind of intelligence level are they at? Is it nothing and it's just a kind of system? I think it's like, if you think of everything as a tube, we are a tube from stomach to anus,

and you have a nervous system, so they just have a more simplistic version of what we've got. Okay. Well, corals are not tubes, in fact, because they don't have an anus. Well, their mouth functions as an anus, and they have to excrete via the mouth, because they're attached to the reef, and they're facing outwards into the world. I see. So they're like a windsock. But in the windsock of the sea. Like any less sexy as we go. I think the phrase like a windsock is quite sexy. And he's chat up light as it goes.

Livingston chatted something up with. Oh dear. Like a broom handle in the morning. That was his chat up light. How nice. I'm like a broom handle in the cupboard, in the cupboard of cobwebs. Yeah, but no, you're right Dan, because they are confusing as in they were thought to be plant corals until the 18th century, because you would think so from looking at them. But they're hugely important, and also they're dying out. So the Great Barrier Reef has been, they call it bleaching, where they rely on little algae living inside the coral, which photosynthesize

sunlight and provide the coral with loads of its energy. When the temperature changes, those algae produce too much oxygen, that stresses the coral out and damages it, so they expel the algae. And then that's the coral bleached, because those algae are very brightly coloured. So actually, if you look at coral, it's very brightly coloured, but actually it's the algae which is colourful, and the coral is just white. So a white coral is like a dead coral? Basically, yeah. If they don't get the algae back in time, when the temperature returns to normal, then that coral is dead. It's interesting, isn't it? Because we would probably think of algae as a bad thing for living, like if you're covered in algae. Yeah, for people, it's really bad.

For them, yeah, it's really, really vital. So coral is dying at the moment. In the northwest coast of Bali, they've been doing this thing. There's a beach that if you walk along, I'm going to pronounce it wrong, but it's Pematurin. If you walk along this beach, you'll see power cables going into the ocean. So literally, you'll be walking over power cables, and what they've been doing is they've been attaching low-voltage power cables to corals to stimulate them from all the bleaching that's going on. So they're giving a little electric shocks into these coral, and for some reason, and again, they're slightly, yeah, they're into it, but it's slightly like we haven't shown in any study that they're better than any of the other methods that we're doing, and I think it's

still a bit new research, but that's what they're doing at the moment. They're putting electric cables onto coral. Basically, the whole problem is the sea temperature rising, which is not something that can be counteracted large-scale. If it goes up by one degree, it's really bad for them, and we're looking at one and a half or two degrees of rise in the ocean temperature. That's the kind of thing that's like, even if we stop now, that's the irreversible change, isn't it? Yeah, and the really terrible thing is, well, that's the really terrible thing, but also, so shallow coral reefs, there are different kinds. Shallow coral reefs have the tiny amount of the ocean surface, obviously, but about 25% of marine species have a home in and around and on reefs, as in they're these huge

habitats of the ocean, but 25% of the ocean surface. Yeah, it's 0.1% of the ocean surface, and it's 25% of marine species that manage to find a home there, so it's this huge knock-on effect that might happen if we lose coral reefs. Yeah, but have you heard about the Twilight Zone? So the Twilight Zone is a deep reef, and a deep reef is really interesting because it's far down enough that it would require extra scuba gear in a way that isn't affordable, really, but it's not deep enough that you would send a submersible that was either manned by humans or done by remote, so they haven't really studied it, and only in the last 20 years they've been studying this Twilight Zone of reef, where they found that all the fish that live in it are exactly the same as

it appears they might have been for hundreds of millions of years, as in most coral higher up would be subject to say ice ages and so on, and they couldn't escape from it because they wouldn't know how to go deeper, so there's this whole level of new reef that they're studying. They've had more stability in that whole time. Yes, they've had no change because they wouldn't need to escape the glaciers or that deep enough. That's the thing with that statistic, and I'm not about to poo poo at the 25% thing, but obviously there's so much of the ocean we haven't studied because it's too difficult to get to, so actually that 25% of the ones we can count which are in the bright shallow bits. I read something about the sea floor today. This isn't really related, apart from it's in the

sea, but there's a place called Octopolis, which is just off the coast of Australia. Most octopuses kind of live on their own, and this is a place where octopuses kind of come together and hang out, and they kind of touch each other, which octopuses don't really like to do much when they're not mating or fighting, but it's a place where they kind of hang out. It's like a swinger's club. Well, I thought you dropped your pen when I said swinger's club. I knew I knew you from somewhere. Octopus mistress. Oh no, don't tell your cat wife. She's a carol. So here's a really interesting thing about that, right? So octopuses are really, really smart, really smart, but they're not quite as smart as things with a similar sized brain that live out of the water, and one of the

reasons is they're not social, and they think that by being social it helps your intelligence, but they think that this kind of area of octopuses, because they're all kind of hanging out together, they might get smarter and smarter and smarter, and if we were to leave them alone, they might get super smart. So you know that's the tribal effect is what it's called in human beings, and Susan Pinker wrote a book about it, which I don't think she mentions animals at all, but that's the theories. The more you interact with other beings that you have to learn to communicate you become more intelligent, and her theories that men who communicate more on a more tribal live longer, and that it's, you know, there's all these theories about men talk a lot less,

they have a smaller vocabulary, they talk less every day. In tribes where they talk as much as women, they live as long as the women. Oh, that's what her theory and that's what her book's about. There's a fish called filefish. They eat coral, and they gain the smell of the coral, so it means they can hide in the coral and no one can find them. So it's like if you were to eat something and you got the smell of it and then yeah, then you're like hiding a pizza shop. Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that the first female British playwright was called Joanna Lumley. Yeah, but it wasn't Joanna Lumley. It was not the first British playwright, as in absolutely

fabulous. Yes, so it's not the current living Joanna Lumley. No, this is from the 1500s, and the thing is, is that her name in a lot of online and in books she'll be presented as Jane Lumley, but actually so little is known about people from the 1500s. It's quite hard to establish if she was born Joanna or Jane, but definitely she was Joanna Lumley, and I just thought that was kind of cool. I hadn't heard that before. But she was a translator rather than a playwright. Yes, and it wasn't even published or finished. God, I love the olden days. Everyone's dreams could come true. It has since been published in 1909, so it has made it to publication. People do put it on in the UK as a play, but she was a very interesting person. Obviously she couldn't

publish stuff at the time because she was what is known as a woman, and they were not keen on them back then. They didn't allow them to do stuff like put out plays, so it's a shame because she was an extraordinary person, and yeah, she did this translation of Euripides. Yeah, I just saw that was quite cool. It is cool. So because we were looking up Jane or Joanna Lumley, I looked up the first woman in the UK who wrote her own original play, and her name was Elizabeth Cary, and I love it. It's called The Tragedy of Mariam. Do you know what it's about? No. Is it Robin Hood? It isn't. It's about Herod. She was Herod's second wife. Do you want to hear the synopsis of this play? He had a wife called Doris, didn't he? Yeah. That would have been his

first wife, I think, or maybe third spoiler alert. It does not end well for Mariam. Okay, so this is full of spoilers, but basically... Spoilers for something written in 1630. Yeah, I don't know. If you haven't seen it so far, you're probably not going to see it now. So basically, Herod the Great, his words. Basically, the first four acts, everyone thinks that he's dead, and Mariam's working out how she feels about him because she's like, oh, he did love me. He was a wonderful husband, but he also did kill my brother and grandad, and she's trying to work out what to do because he's been murdering everyone. But then in act four, Herod returns, and he says to everyone, I'm not even dead. And then Salome says that Mariam was unfaithful, even though she wasn't,

and then Herod kills her, the end. Oh, yeah. It's a good play. It's a long lead up of four acts of deliberation. Even though it's named after Mariam, she's only in it 10% of the time. There's a lot of chorus work. Elizabeth Carey, very interesting person. She was, she loved reading to the point where her parents had to ban anyone in the house giving her candles at night so that she would stay up by candlelight reading, reading books. So they were like, you have to start, and they were very encouraging her parents of her reading. But only in daylight. You may just sleep. Yeah. And she was brilliant at languages. She spoke a bunch of languages, Spanish, Italian, Latin, Hebrew, Transylvanian. And this is my favorite fact. It says that

later on at the age of 10, so this is all before 10 years old. She learned these languages. She helped exonerate a woman who was accused of witchcraft after noticing that the accused lady was answering yes to every question she was asked without thinking about what she was being asked. So at 10, she was like, she's just saying yes, because you're asking her questions. You have no idea what you're talking about. And they said, you're right. She's exonerated. She's not a witch. That's so interesting. Yes. So Afra Ben was a very influential, this is latest tilt. And she's often who is attributed as the first. She was the first female player, but she was a very influential female player

in the 17th century. And she was doubly cool because she was also a spy. One of the reasons that she wrote, or she wrote and then she gave it up for a while, and she took it up again partly to make a living because the government had not paid her for doing all the spying work that she had done. But her stuff is really good. Yeah, brilliant. I only say that because she's the only one of these three that I've read stuff by, but during my English studies. Yeah, same here. And they said she was the first proper female player. They lied to us. Was it her own original play, though? Yeah, they were. She was a professional as well. In a way, I don't want to give shit to my own fact, but I think she who you're just talking about has more of a claim to first female play

right. Well, hers is like an adapted screenplay. Yeah, I think Kerry has claimed. Oh, was that Kerry before? Kerry is before Ben. Yeah, sorry. So I was looking, I was looking up and I was interested in like female firsts as a thing. And so I looked on the Wikipedia list of female firsts and I found out something so delightful. So Elizabeth Thible in 1784 was the first woman to ride in a hot air balloon. How exciting. But in 1805, only 19 years later, Sophie Blanchard was the first woman to pilot a hot air balloon. So it took women 19 years to work out how to get from being a passenger. So then I thought, oh, this is so interesting, this Sophie Blanchard. So basically her husband was a hot air balloon pilot and he died. So she carried on his business

and so she became his first woman. And Napoleon really liked her. And he gave her this title, the air and noughts of the airfield festival or something. And then she died because she set up some fireworks. Hit a house and fell to the ground. That's why we shouldn't let women do shit. They can't be trusted. All of this. So, so female playwrights and things, even up until the time of Afro-Bent, which is, you know, a long time after the first play written by women, women weren't allowed on stage. Yes. So it was all boys. But the reason that it was ended was because basically Charles II, when he was restored to the throne, fancied actresses. He fancied actresses. And he decreed, well, what we have to do, actually,

I think the public will be outraged about boys appearing on stage in women's roles when actually no one really was outraged about it. But he said, no, it's completely outrageous. We must, you know, legalize and make it compulsory for female roles to be played by women. And that's basically the only reason it happened. How could he, sorry if this is a very dumb comment, how could he fancy actresses if the profession didn't exist? Because some things kind of happened, I mean, illegally. He fancied the idea of actresses. Right. Look at those boys. Imagine if those were real. So things happened illegally. But also, so in Shakespeare's time, some of the people who accredited writing were women, like women did actually write things,

it's just they didn't get their names on them. Yeah. So I read actually in one article, I don't know if this is true, but by the late 17th century, about a third of plays staged in London were written by women. But it fell to around 7% in the early 18th century. And it stayed between 7% and 10% until the 1980s. And it's so related to economics, actually, when you look at the ups and downs, women who have space and time, it's the whole Virginia Woolf thing created just as much as men. Jane Austen thing, writing on tiny bits of paper. I went to see her desk the other day. I did. Oh, the British library. And you're just so amazed. It's such a visual symbol of like this woman like in the corner, like, don't worry, I won't take up any room. It's really tiny. It has

her spectacles on it. It's the size of an iPhone. It's so small. It's really small. She was a mouse. Yeah, she was a mouse lady. Queen Victoria was an orca. Jane Austen was a mouse. My wife was a coral. Are there any actual women, please? Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, you can get us on our Twitter account. I'm on at Shriverland James at egg shaped Andy at Andrew Hunter M and Sarah at Sarah Pascoe. Yep. And you can also go to our group account, which is at QI podcast or go to our website. No such thing as a fish.com where we have all of our previous

episodes. Also, there's another website called no such thing as a news.com has all of our previous topical TV show series that we have done topical that was last year. No, it's still going. Trump is still happening. You want to learn about Trump? That's all we spoke about. And it is on no such thing as the news.com. We will be back again next week with another episode. We'll see you then. Goodbye.