No Such Thing As A Fish - 169: No Such Thing As Constantly Awake Beauty

Episode Date: June 16, 2017

Anna, James, Andy and Alex discuss synchronised blinking, the ants the size of foxes, and nocturnal apple-counting robots.

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, coming to you this week from the QI offices in Covent Garden. My name is Anna Tyshinski, I'm sitting here with Andrew Hunter Murray, Alex Bell and James Harkin and once again we've gathered round the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here we go. Starting with Alex. My fact this week is that baby elephants suck their trunks for comfort. And for adults to do all sorts of things with their trunks as well when they're nervous so they don't know what they're doing they will pick at their ears or kind of wipe their eyes and you know they do it like humans do with hands. So what is just a social thing that they don't know what

to do with their trunk? Yeah well actually when baby elephants are born they can't really control their trunks the first few days so they just wave around a bit wildly and also it's really sad they kind of tread on it and then they kind of scream because it really hurts but they can't work out where the pain's coming from or how to make it stop. Trunks are amazing. Did you know that elephants can be left or right trunked even though they've only got one? What does that mean? They will have a preference of picking up objects that are left or right from a really early age. Oh really? But surely if there is food on the left and they're right trunked they won't starve to death. That's true I don't really know but they move over like a tennis player who doesn't have a

backhand. Exactly. What they'll do is they will turn 340 degrees and pick it up with their tail. Oh right no. That would be 180. Like a FedEx driver. Has the FedEx driver thing been in the podcast before or is that just going to sound like nonsense to anyone? You should explain that. I'll explain it quickly that in America FedEx drivers aren't supposed to turn left instead they just do three right turns to get in the right direction and it works because America's on a grid system. Is it that it saves petrol? Saves petrol because otherwise you're kind of sat there waiting for the traffic to go and go and go. So if there's a clear road right? Not allowed Andy. Not allowed. That's like saying oh the traffic light was red but I didn't see anyone coming so

went through it anyway. But the other thing is in America sometimes you're allowed to turn right on traffic lights. Even if the traffic lights are red you're allowed to turn because it's just the rules. Same in Australia. It's very bewildering when you're a foreigner and you try to cross a road. Hang on. I don't see how turning right three times helps you if you're driving along the road and you need to turn left because there's a thing right there on the left. So you're going north and then you turn right and now you're going east and then you turn right and now you're going south and now you turn right and now you're going west and you needed to go west in the first place. It does seem like it would be a massive detail but they've done the stats.

I can't believe there are no circumstances under it. Do they disable the steering wheel so they can't turn left? So I think we're talking about elephants and adults do the trunk sucking sometimes as well. There's a behavioural ecologist who's called Joshua Plotnick who has been observing elephants and he says that when they get stressed out then they put their trunks in each other's mouths as comfort. That sounds a bit kinky to me. It doesn't work for a human to put your thumb in someone else's mouth and say it's because I'm stressed. But I would say that your thumb is your equivalent of a trunk. Your nose in someone else's mouth. I would say it's more like that. It's obviously the inserter who's doing the comforting, not the receiver.

So you put your trunk in the mouth of an elephant who looks upset. But when you start your thumb you're not doing it to comfort the thumb, are you? You're doing it to comfort the mouth. I don't know. But that doesn't mean that whatever you put your thumb in will feel better about it. Yeah it does. That's the rule in life. Go around inserting your thumbs into stuff and the world will be a happier place. So that's not the only thing that elephants do with their trunks. They also use their trunks for mating. The male will put his trunk to the tip of the female's private parts and then he'll put it back in his mouth and he has a thing called a vomeronasal organ and he can smell whether she's receptive and in the mood and on heat and so on.

And giraffes do the same thing I think. Lots of animals have that. They don't have trunks. They don't have trunks. So I think giraffes, I think, urinate on each other. Oh do they? Yeah. Yeah they do, don't they? And then smell if they're on heat or whatever. Yeah which is amazing considering the neck thing. Yeah. Because you're going to have to spray it quite high, aren't you? Yeah. That's weird. I would have thought a good way for an elephant to tell if she's not up for it is by the fact that they will get kicked in the face presumably when it sticks his trunk up her arse. I've got two black eyes but I'll give it a smell just in case. Do you know elephants have a specific call to warn each other about bees and they don't make this sound in any other scenario?

This was a study that was done I think it was last year and it's this certain rumbling sound they play when they so if they're played audio of bees buzzing they make this rumbling sound and then if they're played audio of that specific rumbling sound they also make the rumbling sound because they recognize that it's a sound that says bees because bees are one of the few things that can actually hurt them. They fly up their trunks and sting them on the inside. It is a bit like us because we have a thing that we say whenever bees are around which is bees. So on the trunk do you know what happened when Margaret Thatcher met an elephant? She and her husband Dennis went to the Sri Lankan president's garden party in Sri Lanka and the Sri Lankan president's

elephant was there and Dennis Thatcher didn't know much about elephant anatomy and he was given some bananas to feed to that elephant and instead of just offering them out to the elephant he picked them up and he started shoving them up the elephant's trunk. According to the... How many? How many get through? Supposedly he got through nearly half a dozen and then it snorted yellow gunk over everybody present. Thatcher started telling him off and he said well I don't know. I think that's a fairly reasonable mistake to make. It's pretty recently that I've worked out that elephants don't eat elephants. But I think if you're not sure then... Or ask. To be fair it sounds like it was six of one half a dozen of the other on the blame game

because elephants are supposed to pick stuff up with their trunks like food and then insert it into their mats. I don't think you can blame the elephant. I'm blaming the elephant. The elephant was unreasonably polite I think, waiting until like six but we was like no this is not... You're constantly taking Thatcher's side. This is another time. I've always been anti-elephant. But elephants don't know that they can't eat and drink using their trunks either. When they're babies they don't know how to suck water up with their trunks and hold it there and then put it in their mouths. They have to be taught it and copy the other adults and their parents. They're crap aren't they baby elephants? To begin with they do literally just drink

straight out of the pond away from their mouth. Because they don't drink from their trunks. They drink straight from their mouths and then they eventually realize that they can suck it up with their trunk and it's a more dignified way of drinking. Sucking it up through your nose and squirting it into your mouth. I mean if a human did that they'd be kicked out of a restaurant but apparently it's dignified an elephant. So the traditional Indian way of sobering up a drunk elephant was to feed it three pounds of melted butter. No. It's just a fact. Three pounds. Three pounds of melted butter. And feed it or shove it up the trunk. That is such a coming home drunk like meal to have three pounds of butter and nothing else.

It's so many people in the fridge. Well we've just got three pounds of butter. Melted immediately. No they used to and this isn't fun but they used to make them drunk so they would fight each other. They'd give them branding so they'd fight each other in the olden days. Really? Yeah. And then to sober them up they'd give them butter. Oh that is bad. So they have they're the only other animals other than humans that have anything that resembles a chin. Well it sure isn't quite a chin but they do have a bony protrusion underneath their bottom jaw. Unlike a lot of conservatives. All right on to fact number two and that is James.

My fact this week is that moviegoers blink in sync. Very good. Is it true or is it just poetic? It's true because it rhymes. Is that how it works? It is true. This was a study done by the University of Tokyo and they gave a load of people movies to watch and also movies with no narrative like just an aquarium and also an audiobook and they showed that people watching the movie were blinking in sync about 30% of the time and the others just not in sync at all. And the reason that they think it is is because when you're watching a film you kind of keep your eyes open when it's really exciting but then when there's a kind of down bit everyone kind of blinks at the same time. Is that why if you're watching Die Hard do you only blink twice throughout the whole

film? I've never seen Die Hard but is it really exciting? It's so exciting. It's a constant thrill. And this is basically what they thought was they worked out how often people spend blinking in a certain amount of time and if you're watching like a hundred minute film then you're going to spend 10 or 15 minutes blinking and they're like how can you still keep up with the story if you're not watching it happen? But that's because you don't bunch up all your blinks into one section of the film. You did that right in the beginning when they showed the production credits since the blink loads then. Well that's true but then how do we know that that's the case until we do a study about it? I know but it just seemed like the most self-evident question to answer in

all of scientific history. But if we're blinking in sync then everyone is missing the same parts of the movie. So there might be some really crucial bits in movies that everyone thinks is shit but they're actually great movies because of those seconds time marks. Is this why nobody gets Mulholland Drive? Yeah, exactly. Because he lulled you into the blinking and then he really quickly throws in the crucial explanation slot. The whole block just written up there. Have you done that? We do this though with other things don't we? So when you're reading apparently humans tend to blink when you finish reading a sentence or if you're listening to a speech then we'll tend to blink when the person speaking finishes a sentence. So we seem to blink at kind of rest

moments and there's been a thing that scientists have looked into is why do we blink so often? Because we don't need to blink as much as we do for lubrication purposes. Just quickly does that explain why when I'm giving a speech and I look at the audience after I finish the sentence they've all got their eyes shut. Only look when you finish sentences Andy. A baby's blink way less than adults do. This is insane. Are we talking about baby humans now? Because well the scientists think there's several reasons. They think it's because A they sleep more and eyes blink more when they're tired and what babies just aren't tired yet. Well they sleep more so they just they as in they they spend more time with their eyes closed and resting in a kind of eyes resting state. I thought

it was because they I thought it was because babies were so tired. That's what you always hear, oh he's just tired. Well it turns out he's not tired at all. He's not blinking is he? Maybe he's just an arse. And also because babies don't cry for like the first like few weeks of that life. They don't produce tears. They cry, they don't produce tears and so that apparently changes the amount by which you need to blink to keep your eyes moist. But the blinking thing is unbelievable and it's a really massive difference. So the average person blinks 15 to 20 times a minute and babies blink one or two times a minute. So it's actually about 15 times more and I cannot believe I haven't noticed this and I want everyone with a baby to verify this please. I almost texted

my friend who's got a baby this morning being like can you stare at your child for a minute please? Isn't that mad? That is mad. Once a minute. If you had a load of babies in a movie theater watching a movie but they only blink twice a minute it must be weird because there'd be no blinking at all in the whole theater and then suddenly they'll all just blink and then go back to normal again. But it must be the case then that we need to ask babies what Mulholland Drive is about. The great tragedy is they can't tell us. So on winking as opposed to blinking if I can take the conversation in that direction. There was a study in a journal called Communication Research Reports. This is in 2009. They surveyed people in a shopping mall and a campus and it was just to

see is the intent of winking clear basically. And the experiment was as follows. Someone would approach a passerby, ask for the time, get them to tell them the time, then they thank them, then they wink, then they walk off. And then immediately a researcher will pop up next to the passerby. If they weren't creaked out enough already. And he started saying did you notice that wink? What did you think? I trust him because he rimes. And then just to work out what the recipient of the wink had thought was the intent. And this is the interesting thing. Most people thought it was saying thank you all being friendly, all being flirtatious. But that's already, you know, three separate things. So I can't think of any other reasons. Well, other theories lower

down the list, included the possibility that the winker had an eye problem, was trying to seem cool, or was expressing some strange ulterior motive. One person suggested they didn't really want to know the time. I love there's only an option for was trying to be called not was being called. On winking, actually, I found have you ever heard of so you will have heard of 3D glasses? Have you heard of 3D no glasses? It's this really weird thing I found online that's been developed by a Brazilian production company called Jonathan Post and two neurons attached to the side of your head on either side. And they send little electronic signals that make one of the eyes blink. And it makes the left eye wink and then the right eye wink and then the left eye

wink and then the right eye wink and it goes faster and faster and faster until it's basically doing it like 25 times a second and your eyes that you're essentially blinking but out of sync. So it's like left, I write a left or right. And if you look at an object and you close on I and then you close the other and you close on I, the image kind of moves slightly. And that principle has been used so you can be able to watch 3D films without having to wear glasses. And apparently it's really convincing 3D. So really weird. Andy, you and I have just been doing that while Alex has been talking and my eyes are quite sore. I've been doing that. Are yours as well? Mine. Yeah. So I don't think this is going to be. I don't think so. There's no

way this could be good for you. I'm just doing it with her fingers. Yeah. The reason I'm doing that James is because I'm a natural scientist and I know the reason your eyes are sore is that you're using your muscles, which presumably this doesn't. So dragging her eyelids up and down manually, incredibly slowly. Her eye muscles are fine, but her fingers are really soft. Do you know when you wink, you do it left-eyed or right. Most people wink with a dominant eye. Yeah. For me, it's left. I did know that. Me too. You did know that. Well, I get my left eye naturally closes when I get drunk or when I'm tired. So does your right eye as well. We spend five years of our lives with our eyes shut from blinking. That's not including the

time you spend sleeping. That's assuming like a what a 70 year lifespan. Yeah. If you spend a third of your life asleep and you live 75 years, then that's 25 years of sleep. Five years. 50 years awake and 10% of that you're blinking. Yeah. So you spend a third of your life asleep. Which third would it be if you had to choose one third? I mean, it's got to be the last third, right? Yeah. But when you retired and you could play golf every day. Especially if I have to play golf every day. Surely it'd be at your work time or the middle third when you're meant to be building up capital and hopefully getting on the property ladder. He's asleep. Hopefully you go straight from poor as a young person to poor as an old person. It would be a very good way of

having a very long marriage if you got married immediately before you fell asleep. It's the opposite of sleeping beauty, isn't it? Constantly awake beauty. Until the prince came along and then she fell asleep. Okay, anyone got anything else? Cinema advertising is less effective when audiences eat popcorn. Really? According to a study. This got into a study from Cologne University and the reason is quite fun. It's because according to them, researchers remember new brands by simulating the pronunciation of a new name with their mouths. So when you see an advert for like Das and you've never heard of Das, you kind of just meld the word Das. And that's how you remember it. And if you're eating popcorn, you can't do that. So if you go into a cinema and

you face the audience, they're all blinking in synchrony and repeating the words on the adverts. We must look like a bunch of robots. Do we meld words in the films? Do you meld important lines of dialogue? I'm not aware that I do it, but then I've never watched myself at the cinema. But also you don't know it in advance. Usually you know what product is when you've watched it. This is a new product, I think. The idea is you do it just afterwards. It's not like people have memorised adverts and they're like, always, but it's the Das again. Everyone get ready to chant along. Did you read about that guy this week who sued his date because she was texting in a cinema? Quite right, too. He's a bit of a hero. He's this guy called Brandon

Vesma and he was going on a date with someone called Crystal. They went to see the 3D version of Guardians of the Galaxy, the new Guardians of the Galaxy. Which is an extremely bad sign. She apparently texted 10 to 20 times in the first 15 minutes of the film. After which she leaned over and said, would you mind not doing that? And she refused. So he said, I'm really sorry, would you mind going outside? You're distracting me. At which point she walked out and drove home and her car was his lift home. So abandoning him at the cinema. And so he sent her a text saying, can you pay me back, please? And she said, no. So he took it to the small claims court. Do we have a result yet? Or is it still making its way through the court?

I think he's going to withdraw his claim because some newspaper set up a meeting between them where she begrudgingly gave him the cinema money. But I noticed not the pizza money. He'd also asked for $4 for a pizza, which she didn't return. I think if they'd already enjoyed the pizza. That's fair enough. That's the day I'm working with. I also think he's taken her to a shit movie and she's having to sit there texting. So he should pay for the price of the text. Oh, yeah. I mean, I don't want to get old Judd's studio. Judd's James. They've already generated enough press that no one is going to go out with either of them from now on. So the job's been done really. Yeah, because people, they've heard about people sort

of, they Google each other before going on dates now before meeting. Yeah, people apparently do this. Thank God I'm married. He's actually had lots of propositions. It's been extremely good. Lots of girls have gone in touch saying, I totally agree with you. Will you go out with me instead? I promise I won't text at all. He doesn't come out of it that well because of the small claims caught part of it. Yeah, you could take me to the small claims court. Where are we going on our first date? Have you ever heard of the small claims court? The first 10 minutes of the Guardians of the Galaxy is pretty much the only watchable 10 minutes in the whole film. It's quite a good song and it's a bit, I can't believe it was such a good moment to end that section. And I can't

believe you thought we just needed to have a quick review of the Guardians of the Galaxy before we did. Any bits you'd recommend blinking in? The rest of the film. Such a damning review. Save up your blink. Okay, let's move on to fact number three and that is Andy's fact. My fact is that if you buy an apple today, it might have been taken off the tree in May 2014. Really? Yeah. That is incredible. Are these the really brown and moldy ones at the back that I sometimes buy for no good reason? Organic ones. No, they're not. These are perfectly good looking, healthy looking apples. So this is from a book called The Apple Orchard by a food writer called Pete Brown. It's all about the history of apples. It sounds... It used to be Pete Green. Oh, very nice. I think he's always

been called Pete Brown. So the book is called The Apple Orchard and basically apples get picked in about May. But then to ensure you have apples all year round, you need to keep them in a warehouse. And so the average time that they stay there is six months to a year. And they're kept in warehouses, which have had all the oxygen sucked out of them. Wow. And they've just got nitrogen in them like bags of crisps and library books and library books as we've covered before on this podcast. Yeah. And so I just, I think it's amazing. And they basically, they go into kind of hibernation. They kind of breathe more slowly these apples. But if you were in there with them, you'd be surrounded by healthy apples, but you would suffocate. It works out that iPhones and iMacs go through about

three model changes a year and they all supersede each other. So actually, if you walk into the Apple Store, your Apple products in the Apple Store are going to be fresher than the apples you buy. That's very strong. Yeah, that's really funny. Pete Brown. Do you know the fact about Pete Brown? He is, I was Britain's leading Apple researcher, Pete Brown. He's got really into apples. He used to be a beer and cider writer. And then you realize the thing you really love was apples. And he discovered during the course of his research that he has a severe allergy to them. So he's allergic to the one thing he loves. You sounds during the course sounds like he went a couple of years without even touching them. He wasn't really researching them properly.

Had he never had an apple before? This does confuse me because it's quite a severe reaction. His whole throat expands, his mouth blows up. So I don't maybe never tried it. His mouth blows up. It explodes right off his face. You know what I mean. But yeah, poor guy. Yeah, that's terrible. Is that why he's so obsessed with them? Because it's the one thing he can never have. Yes, that's true. So in the 19th century, we had tens of thousands of Apple varieties and they used to be like all shapes and sizes. So they'd be lumpy and some had really rough sand, papery skin and others would be really misshapen and look like potatoes. And they'd range from cherry sized to grapefruit sized. Grapefruit sized apples. You get grapefruit sized

apples. Except they would be apple sized apples. Yes, there was no apple size back then. But then when we got into like larger scale farming and we realized it was cheaper to just take graftings of apples and spread the same apple, the clones, then we massively reduced the number of apples we have. And now I think in America, there used to be 17,000, some between 14,000 and 17,000 varieties. And now it has 90. Whoa. So we've lost a lot of apples. That is amazing. Yeah. So yeah, every single Granny Smith is genetically identical to one that was in a house in Sydney centuries ago. Every single Bramley apple grew from a tree in a garden in Nottinghamshire. The Bramley apple tree has one fan club and its fan club is based in Japan.

And it's the one Bramley apple fan club in the world. It's in abuse in Japan. And because they imported Bramley apples, a Bramley apple graft 30 years ago and they just fell in love with it there. And the mayor of the town and a bunch, all the members of the apple fan club flew all the way to Nottingham from Japan in 2012 to visit the tree. And one said he nearly cried when he set eyes on it. Nearly, nearly cried. The sad thing about that fan club is they're all allergic to apples. And actually in that part of the world, I've just given it away now, but where do most of the world's apples get produced? Is it somewhere near Japan? It's somewhere near Japan. Yeah. Is it Japan? No. China. It's China by an insanely large amount, like 40 million

tons a year are produced there. And then the next biggest is the US, which is four million. Do you know what is the biggest brand of beer in the world? Budweiser. Nope. Is it that Australian one that everyone drinks on sale? Foster's. No one drinks. No, it is Snow Lager. And it's the main lager in China. And it's completely unknown almost in the rest of the world. But because China's so big, it means that they have something like 4% of all beers from snow. Do you know some apples are non vegan. This is true. Is it because they have a worm inside them? No. Nice try. Nice guess. It must be some kind of thing they spray on it. Pretty much. Yeah. So a lot of apples, they have a natural wax on them, right? Which it

preserves all the water inside the apple. But when they're picked, then they get washed to get rid of all the dirt and that washes off the wax too. So supermarkets spray them with wax. And it's not an unhealthy amount. It's about two drops per apple that you eat, like a really shiny apple. But some of it is Brazilian palm leaves, the wax. I mean, some of the wax is beeswax and some of it is shellac, which is derived from the secretions of an insect, a lac bug. Do you know robots can count apples but only at night? Shut up. Get out of here, Dan. You're on holiday. So this is the idea that if you are an orchard owner, you want to know how many apples are on your tree and humans can do it, but robots are cheaper. But the problem is, how does a robot

know what an apple is compared to a leaf or compared to whatever? It's really hard, especially in daytime. So what you can do is at nighttime, you can get a tree and you can have a robot looking at it and then you put a light on it and the light will reflect off the fruit and the leaves, but the reflections from the fruit will be round and it can tell those round shapes better than in the daytime when actually all the branches and leaves all get in the way. That sounds so terrifying to get stuck in an orchard at night when all the robots come out. Actually, on robots, I did a bit of reading about warehouses for this fact and Amazon warehouses and other distribution warehouses for huge shipping companies, but it used to be that you'd

have rows and rows and rows of shelves and then some people would be employed to pack and some people would be employed to go up and down the shelves, you know, moving stuff around. Now, what happens is all the humans that work in there, they work around the edges at these packing stations and there's no one in the middle. There's just loads and loads of tall, narrow shelves and all those shelves can drive around by themselves. It's brilliant. So everyone stays around the edge and they either load the shelves or they just stand there and they wait for the shelves to come to them and they just take off what's needed. Is it like the staircases at Hogwarts? Yeah, it's like that on a crazy scale. So amazing videos to watch for this. And this isn't even

the best bit because so obviously you've got hundreds and hundreds of shelves moving around and there's no order to what needs to be on the shelves. You can just put anything on the shelves in any order in any combination and as long as the computer knows what's on each shelf, it doesn't really matter where it's being stored because it could just drive anywhere it's needed. When you close the warehouse at night, all the shelves like rearrange themselves every night based on what's going to be needed for the next day. So for example, when it's coming up to Valentine's Day and you know, people are buying more like chocolates and roses and stuff, then all of that stuff and tickets to Guardians of the Galaxy 2. All of those shelves move to the close to the front

of the warehouse because they're going to be needed more often. Wow. It's so cool. Well done, Amazon. I just think they're going to be a big thing. That's my hot tip. If you plant, everyone will know this who has a vague interest in horticulture, but if you plant the seeds of a certain type of apple tree, like a braven apple tree, then of course it doesn't grow into the braven, does it? That's why people do grafting. I just don't understand that. I think that's mad. It is mad, isn't it? It is mad because, yeah, it is mad. It is mad. It's like saying if two people sleep together, they might have any animal. It could be a cow, it could be an otter. God, how fun would life be? It would be amazing. No, I am not giving birth to a cow, thanks very much.

Heart section in Clinton's like, it's a boy, it's a girl, it's a rabbit. Okay, let's move on to our final fact, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that the first Western eye witness account of India described it as having ants the size of foxes. This is so cool. Yeah, so this is a firsthand report by Megasthanes, who was the third century BC Greek ambassador to the royal court in Northern India, in what is now Northern India, and yeah, he described these ants that are the size of foxes and they mined for gold, and so they mined gold, and then they used to leave piles of gold up on the top of the ground while they went down and mined for more, and he said that humans from India would go and try and

steal the gold from the ants, and if the ants caught them, the giant ants, they'd be engaged in a combat to the death. And he's known as an eye witness. But the amazing thing is that they are real, right? This is the amazing kind of real. There are marmots who live in this area who dig burrows, and then when they dig burrows, little bits of dust come out, which does have sand in, and apparently people do collect the bits of gold. Yeah, so the only problem with that is how at some point someone decided that a marmot looked exactly like a giant ant. Well, no, because in Persian, supposedly, I haven't checked the original, the word for marmot is equivalent to mountain ant. Yes, I did read that. And I was just thinking, when you said that, in English,

merma-cology is the study of ants, which isn't a million miles from marmots. No, that must be from the same origin. Might be. That is just incredible. There are giant ants the size of foxes which dig up gold. They're not ants. It's a great fact, I don't know. It's incredible. There are mountain ants. Yeah, there are mountain ants. Marmots, close brackets. The size of foxes, brackets not quite. Herodotus wrote about these as well, and he said they were bigger than foxes, but smaller than dogs. Yes. Dogs are such different sizes. Yeah. When did we first get this? The like couples. Yeah. When did we first get this tiny dog? I think it was quite late on. I imagine they were more, they've gone the opposite way. I don't know. I'm trying to think. I think the

Aztecs had like chihuahuas, didn't they? Really? Is that an Aztec word? It's a Mexican word. So maybe. Just to be clear, yeah, Herodotus did mention them. You're right. And now, there are going to be people thinking, but he was before Magasthenes. I know everyone's now thinking that. Herodotus did say it, but he'd heard it from other people, and Magasthenes was the first Western person to go to India. But yeah, so it was this room that they'd been going for hundreds of years that they were ants the size of foxes in India. If they were the size of foxes, I worked out they'd be able to lift a cow. That's cool. I would be inclined to bring back fox hunting if they were constantly carrying off cows. How many times larger would you say the smallest foxes

than the biggest ant? So the biggest ant is like four centimetres? I think four inches. That's quite a big ant. It's big. Yeah, that is a big ant. I think it's an order of several orders of magnitude bigger. Do you? I think the smallest fox is several thousand times bigger than the biggest ant. I'm going for twice as big. No, it's one order of magnitude. It's 10 times bigger. Oh. So Alex is the size of foxes. Yeah, Alex is right that the biggest ant is a bullet ant, which is about four centimetres. And the smallest fox is about 41 centimetres, which is the fennec fox. Oh my goodness. Sweet. That's not actually as small as I would have thought. No. So I wonder if that ant would be able to carry that fox. Easily. But a baby fennec fox, presumably,

would have a hard time taking on an ant in a fight. It's such an embarrassing way to go in the fox community. Some plants employ ants to scare away giraffes. So these are ants that live in the tropics and they acacia plants attract ants to them. So ants live on the acacia plants and they drink their nectar and they the plants provide shelter for them. But the plants actually make a chemical which causes the ants to go into what was described by I think National Geographic as a defensive frenzy, which and they do this when it's your own. That's like me after I've mansplained something. No, no, no. I didn't mean that. Obviously, you know that. Oh God. So yeah, these ants go into this frenzy and they scare away the giraffes because they can

sting them. They've got quite bad bites. And so giraffe comes to eat the plant and the plant releases these chemicals into the ants that live on it to say, get rid of that giraffe and the giraffe starts trying to eat it and then it gets all these stings in its mouth and it goes away. Weirdly, there's a fact about I think it's ethylene, which is a chemical that plants release and it's related to the previous one about apples. So when plants release ethylene, if they're being eaten by let's say an antelope, they release ethylene and all the nearby plants will immediately put up their defenses and they'll release large quantities of a chemical which makes them inedible. In fact, poisonously inedible to the antelope or whatever is eating

them. So the antelope has to kind of sneak up and eat as much as it can of the first plant before all the nearby plants are completely radioactive and poisonous to it. Ethylene is the stuff which makes fruit go off, isn't it? It's like when you have bananas and apples in the same bit of your fridge. Exactly. But the reason it's doing that is to make itself attractive to you. Is it? It's like an advertising sign for the fruit. But if I get a rotten banana, I'm not attracted to that. I know, but animals are less fussy than you, James. So basically, once it releases the ethylene, all the fruit gets softer and sweeter and it changes color, meaning that the animals know, ah, that's ready to eat and it'll be delicious and sugary.

And so the fruit is basically saying, in your fruit bowl, humans are coming. Make yourself look good. So you'll be eating. Yeah. It's like taking someone on a date to Guardians of the Galaxy. It's a complete misjudgment of what that human might want. We just got a little plum texting in the car. We also are just speaking of employing ants. There are farms in India that employ ants to help them farm. They use Coca-Cola and Pepsi watered down as a pesticide. They spray it on the crops, not because they contain any pesticide chemicals, but because they contain loads of sugar and the sugar attracts the ants and then the ants will enjoy the sugar, but they'll also

eat all the larvae of the bugs that are apparently it's almost as effective as other pesticides, but way, way cheaper. Really? Is that the cheapest way of getting sugar on your land then? Is that the cheapest sugar you can get? It's a pretty cheap and easy way to do it because even just dilutex already comes. The liquid is very sugary. Probably not far off. Because I would have thought off-brand would be actually cheaper. I wouldn't go for Coca-Cola. I'd go for Roller-Cola. Yeah, that's true. Why go for the Coke? They did a study recently into ant personalities. They, the scientists. What are they all like? What they found, James, is that all a real range of characters. Sorry, I was being a bit ant-racist. You were. So they found that some ants are really

fussy about where they live. And so they'll move into what could be a nest and then be really choosy about it and dislike it and abandon it. And then some ants are just really chilled out and liberal and relaxed. And they'll go into any old hellhole piece of shit and just agree to live there. And it actually turns out this is what makes their colonies work. Because when you're looking for the ideal home, you need that really fussy guy who selects it very carefully. And then when actually you're just in a rush to find somewhere, then the other guy takes over and becomes the dominant ant. And he helps them make a fast decision and move into the nearest available nest. What you're describing is the odd couple, but with ants. The odd colony. That is so cool.

So they move into different places, ants. I didn't even know that. It seems like they do, yeah. Do you think ant landlords sometimes get confused because they say, oh, you've got 10 ants. And they're like, oh, well, I was hoping to have more than that. I was like, no, no, I just mean you've got 10 ants. No? Maybe, yeah. Do they, ants pronounce 10 ants, 10 ants? Is that the one difference between humans and ants is that they pronounce it with that emphasis on the second syllable? I'm just thinking for Alex's sitcom of the odd couple. This might be one possible storyline. I think more is like an ant version of Friends, where you've got kind of the moniker for studious one. Yes. Chilled out Phoebe. Yeah. Just quickly on, on Flying Ant Day. Yeah.

Which always moves around. There is no day, obviously. Like Easter. Just like Easter. It happens in accordance with fourth century literature. No, but I did not know this. So the male will deposit his sperm in the female. I did know that something like, something like that was probably going on somewhere. I didn't know that the female and the queen can keep male ant sperm for 20 years. Wow. Imagine that. It's her vagina full of nitrogen. I think that's a great basis for an ant romcom, right? In which an ant finds out 20 years later. Oh, you might have a, you might have a kid. Oh no, the, the bloke ant finds out. Oh,

we just had one thing. It was on Flying Ant Day. It was great. Yeah. Well, bad news, you've got 250,000 children now. Can I pitch you my 10 ants joke for that one? You can pitch it. That's Bridget Jones' baby. We all know that wasn't a good idea. That's true. Well, actually, this will never happen because as soon as the male has inserted his genitalia into the female and deposited his sperm, his genitalia explode inside where he dies. No, that is Bridget Jones' baby. I must have blinked in that bit. I've got one more thing, but it's just about this guy, Megastani. It's just one other thing that he reported that I quite liked when he went to India.

He, first of all, well, he described the people. This is how he, I guess, know that the ant's thing might have been a bit, he might have exaggerated the truth. He said that in India, live men with no noses and with no smell. That joke would have been original back then. There were other men with no mouths who fed by inhalation, but could be killed by two stronger smell. I guess when they hang out with them with no noses, then they all drop dead. Then there were men with dog's heads, but then he also described he was an ambassador, so he was in the King's court. It's funny. We've got some pretty wacky ambassadors today, but no one's sending this kind of shit back. He lived in the King's court and he said the

King of India liked to, he judged legal cases. That was one of his responsibilities, but he only did it while being continually massaged. He had a swarm of parrots that flew above his head at all times, and he was considered the embodiment of a city, which was a city called Pataliputra. Every time the King washed his hair, a celebratory festival was held to celebrate his hair washing. I wonder how often he did it. It would be such a hassle, I think, so maybe you'd not do it that often. Presumably he would never attend because he was like, I'm sorry, I'm washing my hair. Okay, that's all the facts for this week. Thank you so much for listening. If you want to get in

touch with us with any questions about any of the facts we said this week or anything else, you can contact these guys on Twitter. So Andy's on... At Andrew Hunter M. Alex is on... At Alex Bell Under School. James is on... At Egg Shaked. And you can email me on podcast at qi.com. And you can listen to all of our other episodes by

going to knowsuchthingsafish.com. And don't forget, we are also writing a book this year. It's called The Book of the Year. It's an easy title to remember. You can pre-order it now by going to qi.com forward slash fish book. We'll be back again next week with another four facts. We'll see you then. Goodbye.