No Such Thing As A Fish - 161: No Such Thing As A Magic Donkey

Episode Date: April 22, 2017

Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss the first ever lie detector, a robotic Cleopatra and the world's largest exporter of false teeth.

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 Schreiber, I'm sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Huntamari and Anna Chizinski and once again we have gathered around the microphones only this time not with our four favorite facts from the last seven days but with the best four facts sent in by you, the listener. And so in no particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, and that is you, Chizinski.

Yeah, my fact was tweeted into us by someone called Owen Nelligan, so thanks for this Owen, this fact is that the person who invented the lie detector married the first person he interrogated with it. Did he say, will you eventually marry me? And she said no, and then it came up as a lie. Well, it's so close to that. According to a book about the history of lie detection and polygraphs, so this was a guy called John Augustus Larson and he was using a lie detector to interrogate Margaret Taylor

and it was about a diamond ring that she'd had stolen and so the result of the interrogation was that her diamond ring was found and returned to her and she was so grateful that she volunteered her services to him to play criminal in other lie detection tests and then after about a year apparently he had her on the lie detection test and he said, do you love me? And she said no and it came up as a lie. And it's bullshit. It sounds not true. No, no, I really don't.

Oh well, the machine's saying it. Sorry. Well, I guess the machine's saying it, I must do. Do you take this man to be your lovely wedded husband? No. Sorry. Because it made news, the fact that they got married, it was headline news at the time. The San Francisco Examiner had it on its front page, it said, inventor of lie detector traps

bride. They had their wedding as well with all the police force there and they played a prank on them basically immediately after the ceremony. They beat them up. No, they handcuffed them and they packed them into a paddy wagon and then just abandoned them in a countryside and just left them. It's a classic police prank. So I'm a bit confused about him inventing this thing, John Augustus last, the man who

married the woman he interrogated. So the invention of lie detector involves several stages I guess, but what he did was he integrated a test for blood pressure that had already been invented by someone called William Marston and he integrated that with a way to measure your pulse, your respiration and your skin conductivity and put that all together and then that was what became called the polygraph. So there are lots of different people who might have invented it. Yes.

If only we had a way of telling who was the real one. And you say someone called William Marston, but William Marston is hugely famous in the world of comic books because he is the inventor of Wonder Woman. Oh yeah. Yeah. So the inventor of the lie detector also, well the inventor of one of the stages of the lie detector also created Wonder Woman and it was his wife, Elizabeth, who helped him sort of connect the dots about the idea of emotion and blood pressure being combined

as a thing that you could tell people's emotions from. And that's for truth or false. How did he trap her? With the, I assume, the lasso, probably the lasso of truth, which she has a Wonder Woman, has a lasso. Yeah. And anyone caught in it can't lie. She has a lie detector.

Yeah. That's her weapon. That's not a lie detector though, is it? That's not lie. That's not a lie detector because every single thing you say will be the truth. It's just a lie preventer. Oh yeah. Yeah, that's true.

Just very quickly on William Marston, he had a really odd relationship because they're not sure who Wonder Woman was properly based on. They think that it was his wife, Elizabeth, but also they think it was this other lady called Olive. It turns out that they had an open relationship and they're based on both, so just a little nugget there. He lived with both women didn't he? Yeah, he did.

Yeah. Which of those two was the one who wore the weird outfit? One of them wore the outfit, but the other one had a golden lasso. Yeah. I see. He wasn't a very creative man at all. No. He was a bit of a self promoter, wasn't he?

I think that's why we associate him with the polygraph these days. So there was a Gillette advert in 1938 which he appeared on to say that the company's raises were better than the competition, like using the polygraph. Yeah. He sort of hooked people up to it. Which race is best? Is a Gillette a Wilkinson sword? And presumably if they said Wilkinson sword, it can cut it.

Yeah, exactly. Because polygraphs don't actually work. Do they? No, it's amazing. These things are complete crocs. So they don't work, but they're still used or are they not used anymore? Not used. But am I right in saying in court they don't necessarily take them as solid evidence?

No, they do. They do on Jeremy Kyle though. Right. But they're used in lots of other processes. So there was an article this week about how Trump's having real problems with getting a border control force up. So he wanted to increase the US border control by thousands. And actually their numbers are decreasing at the moment, the US border control.

And one of the reasons for that is that two-thirds of them fail the lie detector test that you have to pass to get into US border control. I didn't know you... Do you need to pass one to become president? I do not believe so. So if you are a particularly guilty person, just in general, you might fail a lie detector test just because you think of what would happen if you had told a lie or if you had committed the crime that they're asking you about.

So that will cause you a spike in blood pressure or a spike in temperature or a spike in your heart rate or whatever. And also, you can normalize the responses. So if they're asking you control questions at the beginning and you, let's say, you bite your tongue or you stab the inside of your leg with a fork or whatever while that's happening, then that will cause a big spike. And I think, well, those spikes are normal when he's answering those control questions. So later on, when we're asking him about the murder, you might have the same spike and

they'll say, well, no, you didn't do it. Do you think they'll be suspicious because you bring a fork into the polygraph test? Yeah, they might. Well, are you bleeding out of your mouth or are you like, gunbiting? Mr. Murray, is it true that you stole all the forks from the cartoon? So on the guide that this fact is about, he solved the crime that he was put in charge of solving. So it was this mystery on the campus of the University of California over who was stealing

lots of the students' possessions. So Margaret Taylor, who he married, had a diamond ring stolen. And he figured out who it was because he did a lie detector test on all of these students. And this is how it worked. It ended up working, apparently, to prove that the lie detector test would work forevermore. The way it worked was he sat someone down who was called Helen Graham and asked her if she'd taken the money. She exploded with rage, tore all of her equipment off, ran over to the recording device to tear

it up and said it was outrageous that anyone was allowed to use that. She had to be restrained and said that otherwise she would have beaten the officer in the face. So it sounds like she did it. And she did it then admit later on to doing the crime. So that's how they work. They just send you flying into a rage. I think that is how they work, isn't it? Like, really, the only way that a polygraph could possibly work in a court of law is by

making you admit to something. Right? Because people think they work. Yeah. Yeah. So they then become truthful. So there was this was supposedly a method they used in a BC era to determine whether someone was lying or not. Supposedly in India this was used. What you would do is you get a donkey and you'd cover its tail in soot, right? And then you put the donkey in a tent, OK?

And this is a dark tent and it's at night that you do this. And then you put the suspected liar in there and you say, we've got a magic donkey. And you have to grab the tail of the donkey when you're in there. And if it braves, we'll know that you committed the crime. But actually what it is is if they come out and they haven't got soot all over their hands, then you know that they didn't even grab the donkey's tail in the first place. So that's how they tell that you're the the wrong one. There's a story that Charles Napier did that, who's won the Inventive Logarithms,

but he did it with a chicken. So he had his a dark room, put soot on his cock and then asked people, Andy. I knew you were going to say it, but I'm so pleased when you did. No, he put he did a dark room, put soot on his chicken and then told people it was a magic chicken. And again, it was the it was a people without sutted hands who he knew were guilty. Yeah, but actually, even if I was innocent, I wouldn't take the risk of the chicken actually being magic and wrong because you could be a magic chicken

who's just got it in for you. Yeah, exactly. That chicken's always hated me. Because you do assume that if you pull a donkey's tail, it probably will break. And I think even in the illogical days of the BC era, people knew that they might do that, even if they haven't committed the crime. What are we meant to say for the BC era? What's the correct way of saying it? This was before the time of Christ.

Yeah, before the common era, I think. Yeah. What's the E in the BCE era? James said it a second ago. Actually, wow. But we could switch those two sentences. Do you want to know another method of telling the truth? Yes, please. Is it from which era is it from?

This is from the AD era, the Anno Domini era. Exactly, yeah. What does AD stand for? So this is in China. It's when you're being prosecuted, you have to hold a mouthful of rice, right? During the prosecutor's speech. Now, it was believed that when people are anxious, they stop salivating. So because you know that feeling of having a dry mouth when you're nervous.

So if the rice was dry by the time the prosecutor finished speaking, it was believed that you were guilty because you hadn't been salivating and the prosecutor's talking about your crime, which is unreliable. Because actually, they could have just taken lots of ecstasy, for instance. Yeah, that's true. Does that give you a dry mouth? Yeah, I've heard. Yeah. You know, do you know who invented the first way of measuring your pulse?

Oh, that must be a before-common-era thing, isn't it? It's not. So actually, maybe it's the first way that this book I was reading claimed. So it was Galileo, apparently. But it's really clever. So at the time, people didn't have watches where you could, you know, obviously check someone's pulse against the ticking of your watch. Check it by the sundial. Just saying it for hours.

Full day. So he invented this thing called the pulseilogium. And what he did was he rigged up this pendulum. So he hung this pendulum up and then he got the pendulum going and it was attached to a thread. So it was swinging and attached to this thread that he could pull on to make it longer or shorter. And he'd have the pendulum in one hand with his hand on that thread.

And then he'd test someone's pulse with the other hand and he'd make the string longer or shorter until it was exactly in time with that person's pulse. And that's a really accurate way of measuring it because the length of the pendulum tells you how fast their pulse is going. And then, you know, if that's normal, isn't that really clever? That is really cool. He was pretty clever, wasn't he?

He was OK. Yeah. There is a method where so this is a test they tried in the 1980s. Basically, there are loads of different lie detector tests and they hope that they're going to get a really accurate one at some point. There's a test called P300, which is basically that after you see a very distinct image, your brain will have a little burst of activity at 300 milliseconds after you see it, right? Right.

So the idea was if someone had committed a crime, let's say I mugged someone who was wearing an orange suit. Right. And I saw that suit again later. My brain would register that same burst of activity. But then an orange suit is quite unusual. So I think if I saw an orange suit, I would also be. This is the problem.

And you have to find things that the criminals saw and that are unique. So maybe he works in an orange suit factory and he won't register the same thing. And actually criminals were orange boiler suits, don't they? Yeah, that's true. So you might just be worried about the prospect of getting into prison for a crime he didn't commit. So that did not work, basically.

So it's the logic there that if you know that that test happening, if you commit a crime, you should do it in a place with no distinguishing features. Like Slough. OK, it is time for fact number two, and that is Andy. My fact is that Liechtenstein has roughly two companies for every person who lives there. So this is a fact from a guy called Richard Smith at Richard A.V. Smith. So probably we're not saying that these people all own two companies, are we?

No, we're not. Because a lot of the companies are from overseas, but they're registered in Liechtenstein because it's a tax haven. They make all their money from extremely dubious financial arrangements. They don't make all their money or indeed any of their money from dubious arrangements, I'm sure, just in case the lawyers are listening. I'm sure they make a lot of their money from practices that are frowned on in the wider international community, but which happen to be legal in Liechtenstein.

But they make money on false teeth, don't they? I remember there's an old QI fact that they're the biggest exporters of false teeth in the world, Liechtenstein. I think China might be about to overtake them. But Liechtenstein has been punching above its weight for some time. They've got 35,000 people. It's amazing that they export more than China. How many of the companies are false teeth factories?

Almost all of them, actually. Yeah, there's very little tax haven stuff going on. Are we talking teeth with gums, like as in full sets of dentures? Individual teeth. So not individual teeth? Well, I guess it depends, doesn't it? I think it's dentures. I think it's one company that makes all these dentures.

I think it's in Liechtenstein. It's a funny old place, isn't it? It's an amazing little place. Yeah, I mean, it's named after the guy who bought it. That's pretty amazing. And the family who still are the royalty there are the descendants of him. So it's still the Liechtenstein family. You just never see that because they never use their surname.

So weird. It's like Queen Elizabeth, you know, you rarely see Windsor. Oh, is she not called England? So it's 160 square kilometres, which is 174th the size of Yorkshire. Wow. I mean, I don't know how big Yorkshire is. It's quite big. Yorkshire is quite big, but it's smaller than like England, for instance.

Yeah, yeah. I read a really good fact in Lonely Planet about Liechtenstein, which is that their last military engagement was in 1866. So last time they sent soldiers out. So 80 soldiers went out and 81 returned. They made a friend and brought one back. Well, what is a friend other than someone that you've captured? Who knows, an Italian guy who's just like, I love you guys.

You're really fun. Let's I'll come back to Liechtenstein. Sounds like Stockholm syndrome. In 2007, 170 Swiss troops marched into Liechtenstein by accident on a training exercise. They crossed the border. So basically it's their army going into another country, which could be kind of a bad thing, I guess.

But the truth is that Liechtenstein's defence is actually looked after by Switzerland. Liechtenstein doesn't really have an army of its own. That's such a confusing defence attack strategy that's going through your head. So you could march in and then if anyone swaps you, stop hitting yourself. They've done it a few times, actually. They threw grenades into Liechtenstein, I think, in the late 60s. Really? And another time they set a bit on fire with flamethrowers. They started a forest fire.

They did ring to apologise after the 2007 one, didn't they? I think they went in, Liechtenstein didn't notice. They ran away again quickly after they realised. And then they called the next day to say, I'm really sorry, we accidentally invaded you. And the Minister for the Interior said, it's no problem at all, these things happen. So that happened again in 2002,

when British marines invaded Spain by mistake, thinking that they were practising invading Gibraltar. Despite the fact Gibraltar has a massive rock sticking out of it. And they said, well, the beach is very confusing, actually. So they stormed ashore, they had assault rifles, they had mortars. They took up a defensive position, just to face a couple of Spanish fishermen and a couple of local policemen who said,

Gibraltar's over there, look. And the MOD later on said, it was clearly an embarrassing and unfortunate incident, they made their apologies and left. But when they said Gibraltar's over there, does that mean the army asked for directions? No, I don't think they did. I think the Spanish police must have known

that they were doing a training exercise. Yeah. Rather than assuming they were being invaded via Britain. Although apologising and leaving is a very British way to invade somewhere. Yes. Sorry. The ruler, Prince of Lichtenstein, is the wealthiest monarch in Europe.

Wow. He's in the billions, isn't he? He's five billion, I think. They're both in the billions. Yeah. Well, the Queen's, because the crown wealth doesn't actually count towards the Queen's personal wealth, officially, otherwise, obviously, she'd be well up there.

Yeah. But yeah, he's loaded, but people love him. So in July, 2012, Lichtenstein did a bit of a turkey and there was a referendum on, I think we can call it that, there was a referendum on whether the Prince should have all of his powers extended and whether he should have the power to veto the results of any future referendum.

And 76% of the country said, yes. Yeah, we think if there are ever a referendum in future, you should be allowed to overall them immediately. So they love the guy. Yeah, they do. And he's an interesting character, because during that period, he threatened to just leave. I think that was why they voted.

Yeah, he said, if it goes the other way, I'm just going to leave. I'm going to take all my money. I'm going to take the name of the country. Yeah, you have to think of a new name. I'm taking back that Italian who came back with the army. I'm taking everything. And he, because they had another referendum where they wanted

to talk about abortion and whether it should be legal, because it's illegal in Lichtenstein. And they said we want it legal. And he just went, no, sorry, I'm overruling that. It's not happening. He, once a year, throws a big party for everyone in Lichtenstein to come to his, the palaces. But actually, 20% of those wanted him to leave the country.

Yes, the people invited to this party. We'll put them, we'll put them over near the toilets. Yeah, it doesn't hold grudges like that. 36,000 people invited to the same party. And it's supposed to be a garden party on his lawn. So I just wonder how big his lawn is. I guess if you own Lichtenstein, the whole thing is your garden.

So it's just like, that's the party wherever you are. So just stay at home. How do you not attend the party then if you're annoyed about the referendum? That's why everyone attends the party. 30,000 isn't that many though, is it? Like if you think about a football game, like Man United game would have, what, 70,000 or something.

I guess, it's quite a lot. I'm thinking of my flat now. So I think his garden is probably bigger than your flat. But not by much, I know what you're saying. Yeah, I've never been to your flat. No, oh, sorry, yeah, we had a party. I'm afraid not the whole population of the podcast was invited. OK, it is time for fact number three.

And that is my fact. My fact was sent in by Luke Haynes. That was on email. In 47 BC, there was a giant robot, Cleopatra, walking the streets of Alexandria, squirting milk from her breasts onto the heads of onlookers. OK, yes, this was sent to you personally, was it? This was sent to all of us.

But I think it was edged towards me in the email. And do you stand by it? Well, I did when I read it and sent it to you and let you all research it. And now, having googled it, I can't find any evidence that it's real. It appears in a New Statesman article and it's delivered at the top of the piece very confidently,

as if it's fact. And I just can't seem to find it anywhere else. But I still stand by it. OK, so I read a review of a book called Cleopatra Alive by Stacey Schiff. Yes. But the review was by Mary Beard, who I think we do trust as a classicist.

And she wrote about a famous procession in honor of the god Dionysus in the third century BC by Ptolemy II. So that's before Cleopatra. And they wrote that there were floats. And one of the floats had a large statue which stood up mechanically without anyone laying a hand on it and sat back down again when it had poured a libation of milk.

Oh, wow. So I don't know if this is the same thing, or even if that's true. But that is from a good source. But it seems to me like maybe two things have been conflated. I don't know, though. Was it a statue of Cleopatra?

Because that would be truly extraordinary. 300 years before she was born, yes. Well, it might not have been before the first Cleopatra, because Cleopatra was actually Cleopatra the seventh. Yes. The one who is famous for having affairs with Julius Caesar and Mark and things like that.

She was the seventh. You know how she hooked up with Caesar? What's up? Tinda. It was like their version of Tinda. And this is how it worked. She was married at the time to her brother, as was customary. So she actually married both of her brothers, both called

Ptolemy, and she engineered the death of both of them as well. I smell a sick comb. No, so she decided that she wanted to hang out with Caesar, because he's a very powerful man. I wanted to have a bit of flirting with him. And she was having a feud with her husband and Ptolemy. And Caesar was Ptolemy's enemy. Sorry, which Ptolemy we're talking about.

We're talking about Ptolemy her brother or Ptolemy her other brother. She really had a type, didn't she? Filling in the profile of the dating agency. Must be six foot called Ptolemy, my brother. Yeah, it was Ptolemy her brother. Which one? Her other brother. Her other brother.

Right. Anyway, he said you obviously can't see Caesar, because he's my enemy. And so she had herself wrapped up in a carpet and smuggled into Caesar's personal quarters. And then I think this is a famous depiction of her. She's always unrolled in films of Cleopatra, isn't she? I love that. It's so fun. The idea of being unrolled from a carpet onto the floor.

You know what? It sounds like fun, but I reckon when you do it, it's not going to be much fun, because the carpet will be round by the end of the rolling process. But as it gets closer and closer towards your body, as you're being unrolled, obviously the carpet will be more in your shape and you'll be sort of bumping over the floor. You're going to be bumping. It's going to be...

As if you haven't suffocated in the carpet. Maybe there's a delay. That would have been such an anticlimactic, which is a dead Cleopatra rolls out in front of Caesar. Roll a backup. Take her out. Wasn't they ferociously inbred, then, if they were all marrying their siblings? Yes. But she wasn't having babies with them.

It was all about keeping power. That'd be disgusting. Right. It was all about keeping power. So she married one of the Ptolemies when he was 10, and that was so that he could be the co-ruler. Ah, OK. But the thing is, I don't think they were particularly against

having sex with each other. Oh, I loved it. You know... I loved it. Cleopatra had only six great-great-grandparents out of a possible 16. Oh, wow. Wow.

But on the plus side, she had a lot of extra toes. Is that a plus? I've toes aren't that useful. I feel like I've just got enough. It would make the game of this little piggy goes to market go on a long time, but that's true for it. Just this little piggy married his brother. It was also called Ptolemy.

Ptolemy. Just speaking of toes, found out a thing a while ago, Ancient Egypt. This is sort of going into robots. Ancient Egypt, they actually worked out how to make a strap on toe for people who'd lost a toe so that it worked, so that they could continue to walk like an Egyptian. That's a terrible joke.

No, so it's amazing. They found it's the oldest use of augmenting a human prosthetic where they were able to walk again. And they found that it's because it's a leather and wooden thing that they would strap onto the toe. The flexibility of it was up to 86%, which meant that it literally worked like how a normal toe would function.

It wasn't... That was like... They must have had prototype models and refined it, refined it. So the flexibility allowed them perfect gait for what they had before. Do you know there's a specific rule in American football that you're not allowed to kick the ball with an artificial toe? Really?

Why? Because it's spring-loaded or something? Well, basically, they pretty much all the rules in American football are because people have done something and then they have to make a rule against it. But one of the best kickers of all time, I think he just got his record beaten for the longest ever kick.

He didn't have any toes on one of his feet. And he had a special, like, fake toe made so that he could kick properly. And it shouldn't really have helped him in any way. If you look at it, it shouldn't have helped, but obviously his opponents didn't like the idea and so they banned it. That's really petty.

Yeah, that's a shame. As if that, yeah. Can I just say this prosthetic toe dates back between the time of 950 and 710 BC. It's really old. Yeah, it's really advanced technology. I have another thing from around 950 BC. Oh, yeah.

Okay, so this is an automaton by King Mu of Zhu in China. I've probably pronounced that wrong, but that's how it looks. He had an engineer called Yan Shi and Yan Shi gave him a human-shaped figure which walked with rapid strides, moved its head up and down and touched its chin and began singing in tune.

Okay, this was supposedly 950 BC. Wow. And the King obviously thought it was amazing, but then as the performance was drawing to an end, the robot winked its eye and made advances to the ladies of the audience. Oh, no. And so the King demanded that it be broken down

until it was proved that it was actually an automaton because he thought it was some kind of a live thing. Also, it was an automaton. I assume the climax was going to be that that was obviously just a sleazy man. Just painted himself silver. Yes. Well, I mean, it's a story from ancient China,

so maybe it's not even true. In the BC era. They did have amazing things in the 18th century. So these are automata, so the recorder, we have drawings of them and things like that. So there was one called the Vaucanson Duck built by a Frenchman called Jacques de Vaucanson in 1738.

It could stretch its wings. It could smooth its feathers. It could splash around in water. It could stretch out and take corn from your hand. And then it produced realistic, horrible smelling duck droppings. Wow. And this was an automaton.

It was unbelievable. And sometimes when he was making a perform in front of ladies, de Vaucanson would put it in a little skirt. I'm not sure why. Yeah. What was the purpose that it served? Was it useful? No, entertainment.

It just provided you with duck droppings. But that's all ducks do, to be fair. Well. And more ducks. You can eat them. That's true. I don't know. I think like if you have one of the greatest engineers

in France coming to you with his new invention and all it is is a bit of metal that produces duck droppings, you might be disappointed. They're actually not even real duck droppings. They're artificial duck droppings. Was it for people, you know when people can't commit to a child, there's weird people who buy one of those strange life-like

dolls instead. For people who couldn't commit to having a real pet duck. Yeah, yeah, that was it, yeah. That's very thoughtful. It's an invention. So just back to Cleopatra quickly. She was pretty wild. She seemed to have a lot of fun in her life,

according to, well, the contemporary records. When she got into a carpet warehouse, she sometimes they wouldn't find her for weeks. Imagine her at the Oscars as well. Cleopatra has not appeared in Weirdly, the red carpet hasn't been delivered either. Oh, my God, what's happening here? That should have been like,

was it Elizabeth Taylor who played Cleopatra? She should have arrived like that. That would have been amazing. OK, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is James. OK, my fact this week came on Twitter through at flock of words, and it is that manatees control their buoyancy

through flatulence. Very clever. Yeah, it's very clever. There's loads of good ways that animals control their buoyancy, because if you think about it, if you're living in water, you want to decide how high and low you're going to be, don't you, really? Yeah, yeah.

So cuttlefish, cuttlefish have a bone with holes in it. OK, cuttle bone, it's known as. And the hollow structure contains both liquid and gas, and the cuttlefish can change its density by varying the quantity of liquid within its bones. That is amazing. Isn't that amazing?

Yeah, that's incredible. Do we do anything like that as humans? No, we go up and down stairs. Yeah, but do we do anything on the way? I mean, I fart a bit. Well, think about it this way. If you're in a swimming pool and you hold your breath, actually, you wouldn't sink under the water.

You'll be naturally buoyant. Yes. And then if you let all the air out, you naturally go down. Right, OK. Antarctic krill do things a bit like humans. They don't have these bones like cuttlefish and they don't fart like manatees,

but what they do is they kind of tread water all the time, so they're always kind of moving their little swimming legs back and front to make sure that they stay at the right level. That sounds so annoying. I know, imagine that, your whole life, you're just treading water. Oh, that's a horrible metaphor, isn't it? But they migrate, I think, daily.

They migrate and they don't migrate across, they migrate down and up. And they move to different bits of the water column, as it's called, depending on food and light and heat and this kind of thing. So that's how animals know where to hunt them. Are we sure they do that because of that and not just they're trying to get to the surface

and then they're so knackered, they give up and they drop back down to the bottom again? I don't know, I think that sounds more plausible. Yeah, it does, yeah. I was reading that manatees, they have to hold their breath to be underwater, so they constantly have to come up and reoxygenate. And they can take a lot in in one big breath,

it's something like 90% of the oxygen just gets re... They change 90% of the air in their lungs in a single breath. In a single breath. Humans then they change about a tenth in a single breath. Wow, yeah. So what they do, though, is when they go to sleep, they go down and they effectively do a form of sleepwalking, but sleep-sleeping.

Wait, sorry, sleep swimming. Sleep swimming, where they come to the surface and they take in breath, but they're still asleep and then go back down. Wow. Yeah, it's just like a bit of sleep. Are they definitely still asleep? Yeah, because I can't tell.

It's like a half awake, they say it's as close. Yeah, exactly, it's as close to... It's like if you know that you got up in the middle of the night to check the clock to see what time it was, so it was 4 a.m. and then went back to sleep, but you can remember that. It's having a conscious memory, but sort of also being still asleep, kind of thing.

Why don't you keep your clock just within view of your bed so that you don't have to get up every time you need to know that? Because my clock is my iPhone, so you've got to press the button to turn it on to have a look. I see, I see. Yeah, it's a bit more complicated. That must be so annoying because they can only last about 20 minutes underwater at max without getting up for air.

Yeah, but they... They must constantly... Well, they nap all the time. They don't have a long period of sleep. They're not like eight hours in the evening. They just nap in small little doses all the time. They're pretty lazy, aren't they, Manatees? Yeah.

I've seen them, they just kind of... I don't know, they just... Have you seen them all close? Yeah. Oh, they look so cool. They are quite cool. I saw them in a sea centre and also in the wild. And in a sea centre, they all have, like, scars on them.

This was a few years ago from when boats have hit them. Yeah, apparently 90%, I think, are scarred from boats. Wow. But they just kind of... They're like cows. That's because they're called sea cows sometimes, aren't they? And they just kind of go around the sea, just grazing and then sleeping for a bit.

What do you want them to do? Build milk squirting robots? But they look like they're really fat and like they've got loads of blubber to survive in cold waters. And they haven't. It turns out they're all intestines because they're herbivores. So they have to eat loads and loads of plants. They eat about a tenth of their weight in plants every day.

Yeah. And so they have to constantly be grazing and constantly be digesting, which is where they get all the methane for their flatulence from. But the lack of blubber means they can't survive in cold waters. So they have to migrate when it gets cold in winter. And sometimes they swim into the, you know, the warm water outlets of power plants and things like this.

Yeah. Because you get hundreds of manatees in Florida just converging. In fact, did you see in 2015, they got, I think, 19 manatees got stuck in a pipe, in a drainage pipe in Florida because they obviously got... Did the first one go in and then the next one tried to save him? Can you imagine how annoying that was with the first one? Why wasn't he shouting back, going back up, guys?

I can't. Did they get out, OK? Yeah, they all got out. They were fine. They were a bit dazed. They had to go in and put them on stretchers. Really? It was amazing seeing them. Yeah, they caught the pipe open. Oh, OK, right.

They also, there's a manatee hotline that you can call in Florida. To talk to manatees in your area. Well, there's, because obviously there's a lot of interesting rules that happen in Florida with manatees, the stuff about, you know, how to touch a manatee. There was a case where a dad almost went to jail because there was a photo of him touching a manatee. That's illegal.

No, I don't mean disgusting touch, like literally touching a manatee. Yeah, I know. OK, I don't think anyone was thinking. I thought your face suggested that's what I was saying. No, it wasn't at all. OK. But thank you for clarifying. But so one thing that they often get is phone calls from people saying that we've got huge problems.

The manatees are in huge danger by the shore. And often what that is, is that manatees actually mate very close just off the coast of Florida and they do it in mass groups. And it looks like there's a struggle going on, like because the water is going crazy. So Nadia Gordon, she's a marine mammal biologist with the state agency in Florida.

And she says the call we usually get is there's a mum manatee and all the babies are trying to save it. But then in actuality, the large female can have up to 20 something males trying to breed the one female. And that's what's going on. So it looks like they're in serious trouble. And that's a lot of the phone calls. So that's what happens.

You get all the males who are trying to mate with the female and the females in the middle and all the males are trying to get at her. But they don't have claws or horns or anything like that or arms or anything. So they're just kind of bumping each other. So it's kind of like if you're in a nightclub and there was a load of men trying to get towards a woman, but they had their arms by their sides

and they're kind of bumping each other. It would be a bit like that. It's the weirdest simile, because no one's ever been in that situation in a nightclub where all the men have their arms tied to their sides and they're bumping towards the one. But I think clubs would be more enjoyable for women if that were the case.

It certainly would. But I think you can imagine that. I can imagine it. I can imagine it. I like that. I would go to that club. Yeah. But what happens obviously is that the one who's best at barging people

out of the way gets the girl. But then the other ones, what do they do? Well, actually, they tend to just try and mate with each other. Oh, there you go. Right. Also, in a way, everyone wins. Well, in a way. In a way.

Everyone else has come joint second though, I think. So obviously, they were mistaken for a mermaid, we think, in Columbus's journal. He said he'd seen a mermaid, what the locals refer to as a mermaid. And we think it's a manatee. And you can kind of see why they look. If you look into their eyes, there's something very human about their faces.

Well, they don't have eyelashes. Exactly, just like you. And their eye muscles close in a circular motion like an aperture on a camera. Right. So they've got some differences, obviously, between the human and the manatee. Or you've got really weird boyfriends in your hands.

They have large, pendulous breasts. They do. There we go. That's where the name manatee comes from. It's an old carib word meaning breast. Ah, OK. And Columbus, when he saw them, he did say that they rose well out of the sea.

But they're not so beautiful as they're said to be. No. For their faces had some masculine traits. And they had scars where they'd been hit by boats. They had no eyelashes. On the other hand, those breasts were very pendulous. They have been at sea for a long time. That's true, I guess.

And they are terrible in bed. OK, that's it. That's all of your 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, we can be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Shriverland, James.

At Egg Shaped. Andi. At Andrew Hunter M. And Shazinski. You can email podcast at qi.com. Yep. Or you can go to our group count, which is at qipodcast. Please keep sending us in facts.

We might do another show like this one day. Also, you can go to our website, nosuchthingasafish.com, where you'll find all of our previous episodes. You'll also find a link for our tour. There are tickets available now. We are doing a UK tour. Please come along. It's going to be really fun.

We'll see you again next week with another episode. Goodbye.