No Such Thing As A Fish - 199: No Such Thing As An Heroic Fire-Goat

Episode Date: January 12, 2018

Live from Leicester, Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss meerkats' inside-out bottoms, California's imprisoned firefighters, and the risk of finding a golf ball in your crisps.

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you from Leicester. My name is Dan Schreiber and I am sitting here with Anna Chazinski, Andrew Hunter Murray and James Harkin and once again we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here we go starting with you Chazinski. My fact this week is that Walker's crisps only source potatoes that are grown far away from golf courses because their factory machines can't distinguish between golf balls and potatoes. That's amazing. So this is a Walker's crisps factory in Leicester obviously and well done guys a very good contribution to

the country I would say. And yeah its factory has this density based sorting system so what it is all the potatoes come in and the machine automatically knows the stuff that has the right density to be a potato that can be turned into a crisp but it just turns out the density of golf balls is exactly the same and so it used to be that there'd be a lot of golf courses next to the fields where farmers are growing their potatoes which would then be shipped to Walker's and lots of people got like hard bits of golf ball in their crisp packets. So would you sort of you'd be on the green about to take your shot and a Walker's machine would just nab you golf ball and whisk it off to a factory. I didn't read the details

of it but I would assume it's more likely that you'd take your shot it would go over into the field as you're a golfer James sometimes you miss hit things right not you just very very occasionally every single time I ever play yeah. And then it gets scooped up by the tractors. I wouldn't have thought I'd be able to replace my golf ball with a potato for instance. I know it's weird isn't it. It doesn't feel like they're the same density. I'll give it a go. And so was this a problem where there were there people sending packets back going I expected salt and vinegar crisps and I got a golf ball like is that ever been a thing. People did mention it mentioned that they had hard crisps but if you're interested each golf

ball yields 18 crisps. That's incredible. But no the factory is really cool isn't it. So one of the things I really like about it is basically a crisp goes from being a potato to being in a bag in 20 minutes. Wow. Which is extremely fast I think and there's a man at the end of the whole potato line who just said he's the potato overlord and he just looks at the potatoes and he said they're all good they're all good they're all good that one's bad. Yeah it doesn't sound quite as exciting as you just made it look though because I think maybe you read the same article as I did in the Leicester Mercury. Another great contribution to the country. They said about this guy who's checking that actual potatoes go through they said he looks

unsurprisingly utterly bored. The worst thing is they probably got permission from walkers to go in and said oh we'll write it up really nicely. They say look utterly bored. This is surely the worst job in the whole building. In the whole building though maybe everyone else is a crisp taster except that one guy. There are crisp tasters out there. You have to be a super taster if you want to be a crisp taster and when you're doing it you're not allowed to drink tea or coffee because it will interfere with your palate and they have to have 20 minute breaks between tests where all they eat is fruit and they make it so that you're only allowed a certain number of crisps every day so you don't go over your salt limit for the day as well. It doesn't sound quite as cool does it?

No it doesn't. I mean it's better than the guy just looking at potatoes all the time. But what use is that crisp once the guy's eating it? No, no, no. They don't have the tree there afterwards. You have the assistant vomitor and I think actually that's the worst job and they shove their fingers down his throat and they get the crisp back. It's just for like the general batch. It's like a sample. You should have said that because that makes sense. You left us all hanging thinking. I think when you say ozol I think my feeling is that the people of Leicester got that. I'll talk about me and the voices in my head. I think you said that because you've seen wine tasters and you've seen them taste the wine then spit it out again like they do don't they and did you assume

that other people then drunk that spot out spot out wine? I thought they just put that back in the bottom. I have a fact about the Leicester walkers factory. They aim to extract so much water from the potatoes that they don't need any water because potatoes are 80% water okay. So when the potato slices get sliced up and then they get boiled all the steam comes off and they condense it and get water from that that they use for the process of running their building. Well they also use water to peel the potatoes don't they? They fire it at it so it must be for that. Yeah so basically what I'm saying is in the event of a catastrophe this is probably the safest place to be on the planet because you've got self-sufficient supplies of water and potatoes. Yeah as long as

the potatoes keep being delivered. They might relax their whole no golf course kind of deliveries. They also have a sort of what was described in this amazing blog I read and I would really recommend this blog it was this girl who went to visit the factory and gives a really detailed description of her tour of it and I can't remember what she's called or what the blog's called so just Google and Google until you find it. She described how there's sort of a log flume for the potatoes where they're dropped in this water and as the potatoes go through the factory all the starch is some of the starch comes out of it so in the various processes some of the starch comes out so when it goes into this log flume to get transferred through the factory then the starch

goes into the water and it goes a kind of milky colour and when she was being shown round they reassured her they said don't worry that starch doesn't get wasted it goes to a starch recovery plant which is just next door and then it gets turned into quavers. That's what quavers are. That's awesome. Did she work that out or did they work that? Was she told that for the blog? How would you deduce that? Would she have followed a secret door that said no no don't go here this is where we put the starch which is opposite it's the quavers factory holy shit. I just blown this thing wide open. Oh my god of all the things you could work out that really is one you have to be told

just opened a bag of quavers three weeks later oh my god I recognise this. Hey so you know how you're saying it takes 20 minutes from it going from the van into that's the full potato into a crisp packet in 20 minutes time the amount of potatoes that they use every single hour if you went to the Leicester Tiger Stadium I haven't been to that but I imagine some of you guys here have the amount of potatoes they use in a single hour would carpet the entire floor of that stadium that's how many potatoes per hour and that's every day that this happens so there's way more potatoes on earth than I realised is what I get from that that's a lot of potatoes that would make the sports matches that get played at the Leicester Tiger Stadium

extremely amusing. What gets played there? Oh brilliant come on Andy I've got to do your research before coming to these cities. Did you guys read about my favourite part of the factory and then we can move on from it but it's a machine called the opti-sort and this is the last machine that the crisps are put through and this is to check for potatoes that might have flaws in them so there's a machine at the beginning that looks at them to check for green bits and shaves the green bits off but there might still be some left and what the opti-sort does is it separates the crisps individually onto this conveyor belt so they're one layer thick and then they get hulled like catapulted really fast at three meters per second past this camera

really high speed camera that checks for flaws and if the camera sees any kind of little speck of green or any speck of black or something then the crisp flies over a gap still going really fast a 10 centimetre wide gap and if it's a dodgy one then there's a swift puff of air that blows down through the gap and dismisses it from the production line. Wow isn't that cool? Yeah but why all the drama of the speed and the tight... Because you've just got to be incredibly quick because you've got to make so many bloody crisps. That's actually the motto of Orca's crisps we've got to make so many bloody crisps. I suppose you think it's easy you bastards at kettle hand manufacturing everyone we've got a proper company to run here. We should move on we need to move on. I have so much stuff

and golf. Now we don't have time we don't have time. Why don't you try and crowbar a golf fact into one of these. Just wait for that later on. Yeah okay it's time for fact number two and that is James. Okay my fact is about golf. It's not it's not. I could make it about golf. That would really screw up the podcast with me. Your word yeah. Okay no it's not about golf. My fact this week is that during World War one truces would occasionally be cold in the trenches so both sides could yell insults at one another. So good. That is really cool isn't it. So this is the diaries of a guy called Sapa French uh Sapa was his nickname and he said in one of his diaries and this was been quite recently found I saw a rather curious thing in the trenches this morning

heard some shouting and laughing and saw a German leaning over the parapet and shouting across to our men. The distance was about 75 yards. One of our men shouted come on over Fritz. Fritz shouted back in perfect English no blooming fear. In fact they could all speak good English. This went on for half an hour and then all the heads went down and the war went on the same as usual. That's pretty cool isn't it. They just thought let's just do a bit of insults and then we'll carry on shooting each other. That's amazing. A lot of German people who'd been in Britain before the war had been waiters and there was one instance which was a bit of a nicer instance of how they used to actually chat between the trenches when they weren't actually at war and someone recorded

how one Englishman had shouted good and Morgan at dawn presumably the only two words he knew and then the other the German guy on the other side had responded and said hello in English and then they started exchanging some kind of fun insults and they'd ended by saying the English guy said waiter and the German guy said coming sir. The war so nearly tipped over into banter and it would have avoided hundreds of thousands of deaths. The trenches were really interesting because the British ones were made as if it was going to be quite temporary that's what they thought and the Germans thought we might be here for a while and so their trenches they had doorbells no yep they had staircases electric lights steel doors real kitchens and wallpaper wallpaper

no paper on the trenches yeah the doorbell is a especially impressive thing because obviously when the British go over the top and arrive they'll have to wait after ringing the doorbell very clever but they were I just recently read all quite on the western front which is an uplifting read if you haven't been there yet but about the first world war and the constant chat among the German troops was how their stuff was better than the Allies that's cool and there's um there's kind of a history of yelling and shouting in wars um the Georgian hero Tariel was apparently able to drop opposing warriors using only the force of his mighty war cry okay and in Welsh mythology their hero Culhuk he was said to be able to give a battle cry so loud and violent that all women

in the courts will become sterile oh whoa he must have been a really popular guy at parties I thought you were I was wondering where you were going I thought you were going to say pregnant no it sounds like it would be that doesn't yeah exactly the opposite actually yes yes a sobering thought um I have another fact about um life in the trenches okay and sort of agreements between the two sides in the trenches um so there was a guy in the first world war British officer captain Robert Campbell he got captured by the Germans I think after the Battle of Mons and um after nearly two years imprisoned um in a German prisoner of war camp he heard his mother was dying and he wrote to the Kaiser you know asking to be released to go and be with his dying

mother incredibly the request was granted he was given two weeks leave from a prisoner of war camp on the German side to go back to England visit his mother on the understanding that he would then go back and go to prison again and he did he went he visited his mother he spent time with her in the last days of her life and he then honored the agreement and returned and he and and then the next day he's like oh my dad's sick now and that's the it's the only time that happened in the whole of the war well because didn't the Allies then um so there was a German prisoner of war with the Allies who tried it I think because that had happened really and the Allies did not let him go and then they said no we didn't trust you and so then it was clamped down on so yeah it's the only

one wow it's so weird though I think these insults mean a lot to military when they're doing it to each other because it still goes on to this day and a few years back there was a big moment between North Korea and the Americans the North Korean soldiers were seeing American soldiers uh point you know pointed them make strange noises they were pulling disgusting facial expressions at them and this was their big problem with them and the Americans said we wouldn't do this and this is how important that is in the follow-up bit to the statement of them going they're pulling faces at us they're make you know they're pointing at us really weirdly they said oh also they're aiming their guns at us that's like the second thing on the list and then just to prove how childish it is

the statement warned US troops to stop the hooliganism or face dog's death anytime any place like it's just it's all it is it's like banter wars isn't it that reminds me of is it in that book or did we cut it um in Bhutan it's in the book yeah yeah in Bhutan there was um a battle it wasn't a battle it was an argument between India and China and they went kind of arguing over this tiny bit of Bhutan and if they went to war it would have been something like a quarter of the world's population would have gone to war and they all went to this tiny bit of Bhutan but they decided they none of them really wanted to have a war and so no one brought any weapons and you can see videos of it and it's just basically some Chinese soldiers and some Indian soldiers kind of

just chest bumping each other yeah yeah it's incredible yeah it's literally it's a whole line of army members just not fighting but sort of just scuffling yeah yeah night how in Leicester is that what it's like here you don't know just go home and have a nice pack of crisps um there was a lot of friendliness there's a really good book about world or one called meeting the enemy the human face of the great war and even more friendly than that there was one instance where Brits arrived at the Somme and they were expecting they were like you know we're fighting the enemy you know all geared up for a massive battle and they arrived and they just found on a bit of barbed wire a note and it was from the German saying why don't you send two or three of

your guys with some stuff you want to trade and we'll send two or three of ours and we'll swap presents and they met up in the middle of No Man's Land that first day and they exchanged kind of magazines and souvenirs and periodicals that they wanted to read and it's amazing having a book club in the middle of a total war it really is it's so impressive so we and we haven't even mentioned the Christmas truce which was a big thing a sporadic thing along a lot of the western front so I didn't know though it stretched not only in the army it stretched to the other services as well so on Christmas eve 1914 the royal flying corps flew over a German airfield at Lille and they dropped on the runway a plumb pudding and then on Christmas day the German air force flew over a

British airfield and they dropped a bottle of rum to say thank you at the Christmas truce there was one really lovely moment a lot of Germans have been living in the UK before the war and during the Christmas truce they all went up into No Man's Land and one of the English guys realized that one of the German guys was his barber who used to cut his hair in Hoban and he said I need a haircut and so his hoban barber cut his hair for him I mean that was very trusting as I do you know it didn't take part it was an absolute killjoy at the Christmas truce actually oh was it uh the senior officers or the yeah they didn't but in particular one soldier on the German side you might be able to guess it was oh I can guess yeah is it the most famous one it's the most famous one Hitler he

absolutely was not a fan hated the Christmas truce yeah refused to take part he sat in a strop on his own and just said really disapproving things like you guys have no sense of honor and this isn't what we should be doing in wartime classic Hitler hey um we should move on to our next factor right um okay it is time for fact number three and that is my fact my fact this week is this and I find this so interesting 14 percent of all california's firefighters are in prison is that amazing what do you mean by that they take people who are in prison women who are in prison and they say would you like to sign up for this and will relocate you to a program whereby you'll be a firefighter but under the confines but you won't

be an actual prison and lots and lots of women have signed up to it so as a result 14 percent of their whole firefighting force are prisoners who are serving time and then when they're needed they they go and they go and either fight fires or they clear paths where fires might happen and yeah I think I mean it's women unmen isn't it there's women I mean at one point it was 40 percent it was 30 to 40 but I think yeah no it's both lots of men and I don't think they get to do the super fun stuff like the hosing they do a lot more clearing like you said yeah some of them do get chainsaws oh yeah because obviously you need to clear a path in forest you're gonna need a chainsaw to do it yeah so yeah and they get they get paid something like a dollar an hour in America but the

exchange of it is that they're not in a classic prison system they get to and they get days off their sentence every time they serve for what they're what they're doing with their job as a firefighter but it's only a dollar an hour when you're actively fighting a fire if normally you get paid about a dollar a day but I think there is a certain economy in prisons isn't there and you know there's a lot of trading that goes on and did you know that they have their own shopping catalogs well in prison yeah so they're in shopping catalogs at least in America so gizmodo the really great website did a series of articles called lockdown and interviewed this guy who said that they have a shopping catalog of approved items so it's anything that you want really from

TVs to toothbrushes or whatever and what happens is you can pick what you want and you take it out the small pay that you might have got in prison or your family can buy it and then it gets delivered and then it gets engraved so you get automatically engraved items because otherwise all the other prisoners have also got the same stuff and so you need to know that it's yours and actually weirdly in the youtube clip I was watching of the guy being interviewed he was saying and this is some of the stuff the prisoners have ordered this week and he was opening packages and he opened up a DVD of the series Richie Rich season two wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait I only know Richie Rich as a film I did too until I had to look into this you're saying they've made

a tv series of Richie Rich yeah it's the same the same general thesis oh sure yeah that is fantastic well I get I mean you hid a fact within a fact there it gets something like 22 percent on rotten tomatoes but you could certainly give it a go but so the thing that really amazed me about this fact was a that's an amazing percentage that are they're in prison that are working for the firefighters but b I thought that firefighting was largely about fighting fires and it turns out that it's not it turns out that most of the time that firefighters spent is doing tasks that the public call for them to do and there was a report from the UK from a few years ago that said we need to stop responding to these weird calls that we're getting because that we just keep wasting our time between

2009 and 2011 these are the stats 1613 incidents where people were locked out where firefighters had to go and let them back in um 276 adults called firefighters out because they were locked in toilets 14 people were locked in cupboards one woman was stuck in a fridge one man was stuck in a freezer and one person was stuck in a recycling bin there is so many ridiculous things that they get called out in on a day-to-day basis they used to shout as they ran to a fire and this was going on as late as 1901 in America as they went to the fire they would shout hi-y-y hi-y-y hi-y-y were they doing the Nenors themselves well it seems that way right yeah I mean I kind of I worked out what I thought the tune might be it might not have been that okay it might have been

hi-y-y hi-y-y I don't know but when they they decided to replace the shouting with a gong a gong and they all hated it they were like no we like doing the hi-y-y thing and also when automatic fire alarms came in they all hated that as well the reason being that they had lookouts who would look out for the fire and as soon as the automatic fire alarms came in those guys lost their job it's the robots taking over the jobs isn't it that was the start of it it is pretty much and so then the firemen started doing fire alarm pranks to set off these fire alarms no did they oh but that's I think they used to be loads of um rival gangs of firefighters and there's a scene in New York where all the firefighters

get in the scrap outside of fire because they all want to be the ones to um solve solve the fire so you know in japan firefighters um they bring water pumps to the fire but they don't aim the water at the fire they aim it at themselves what so they wet themselves down so they're not flammable and then they this was in the Edo period in the 17th century oh right not now yeah and so they would wet themselves down they'd run into the house and then they pulled the house down and that's how they stopped the fires and they used to smother them didn't they so they had deliberately very very thick clothes that would weigh you know as much as a person when they were wet and they would go up to a fire and just smother it they'd go up to a fire they would just jump on

it basically uh they would they would be able to get close enough that they could cover it up but amazingly they were positions of real um respect in japan in the Edo period so up until 1868 and they used to wear outfits that looked like normal firemen's outfits on the outside so they were quite plain but then on the inside of their suits they had unbelievable works of art stitched throughout them and they had like stories and everything it was kind of like manga that kind of style and they became really famous and if they were successful and they put out a fire they all turn their coats inside out and they paraded through the streets victoriously wow and they often had their bodies tattooed with the designs on their coats because you know it was

such a mark of you know something special and yeah they were and also the stories that were told on the inside of their jackets became bestsellers in japan so the kind of cartoon strips that firefighters had became well known stories that you tell your children there was another thing which uh speaking of covering yourself completely in uh in water to be going in that was in the early days one of the things with firefighters breathing was very hard and so in order to get into a fire and keep your own breath and not suffocate was a hard thing so most firefighters used to have a massive beard the male firefighters that would go in and what they would do is they drench their beard into a bucket of water and then they would bite into their beard and hold it

over their mouth and that's how they would survive the fires because they would have this beard mask that stopped the the smoke coming through to them is that true yeah incredible isn't it true that the guy with the longest beard ever died because there was a fire and he ran out of his house and he forgot to put his beard in this pocket and he tripped over it and fell down the stairs yes should have just dipped it in the bath before he left that doesn't stop you tripping over it if anything it makes it more rope like makes it likely oh yeah let's lock it up um have you guys heard about the firefighting goats of san francisco no but i get the feeling we're about to sure thing san francisco has firefighting goats that's great great maybe anyway time for fact

number four and no do you want to do you want to say it yeah sure um look that well they're kind of pre firefighting goats so they're let loose around san francisco to eat bits of dry scrubland that would otherwise be a massive fire risk that's clever but they've been introduced and it's helped massively with the problems of fire breaking out in the summer that's really clever it's not as kind of rock and roll when you explain it when the goat goes home to his wife and he's like i'm a firefighter what do you do today darling i just ate some more grass it was really nice save some lives um should we move on to our final fact okay it is time for a final fact of the show and that is andy my fact is that meerkats can turn their bottoms inside out

so so do they do it on purpose they do do it on purpose um they do it to socialize so they've all got a party trick and it's all turning the bottoms inside out so they they they have what's called an anal pouch um and it's under their tails and they produce this kind of paste inside it and they it's nature you can't go it's nature um and they smear it on plants and rocks to mark territory as their own and they even sometimes smear it on other meerkats i read that this paste comes out of them a lot like when playdough is extruded from one of those doll's heads i believe so yeah from a doll's head yeah you know those things yeah you remember it was like an old kind of toy from the probably you're too young i guess but you used to have

playdough and you used to squeeze it and then you had these little dolls and it would come out their hair and their hair would end up looking like oh yeah yeah yeah yeah and scientists do squeeze it didn't they so when they're trying to study the makeup of this paste that's how they get at it when they've extruded their pouches the scientists literally grab it and they squeeze it and you can actually get it out like that yeah that i think is a worse job than being the crisp tester at walkers hanging outside a meerkat's nest with a cotton bud just waiting but they um this came to light i think probably andi you read this they've done a new study about the bacteria in meerkat bottoms yeah and they found that it's the bacteria that makes up this

the different smells which means they can kind of say whose anal paste it is yeah it's so the smell comes not from the meerkat it comes from the bacteria but the meerkats use the bacteria to judge yeah what's going on socially and so they swapped these um anal pouches couldn't they and to get the bacteria yeah and i read an article in popular science and they were talking about these guys who were doing the swabbing and they said these pouches are wide open they're almost asking to be swabbed so meerkats are kind of bastards aren't they sure yeah famously yeah they really are they've actually did a study recently looking at the most murderous mammals and meerkats came out on top and they're looking at how many of their deaths are caused by members of their own

species and with meerkats is 20 percent so 20 percent of meerkat deaths are caused by other meerkats which is amazing they're always killing each other they kill their own babies they kill their mates babies wow i love killing babies and i read that study as well and it also said that sea lions are more murderous than actual lions oh wow that's quite a good fact isn't it that's great humans are not very murderous howie according to what we should be apparently we should be about 200 times more murderous than we actually are should be according to the rules laid out 100 million years ago yeah pin to a tree that's really nice that we've we've kind of mastered our worst instincts yeah it kind of goes off a few times when there's wars and shit so sometimes

they when they're fighting they latch on to their enemy so i think basically the tension in meerkat colonies it's caused by the fact that they'll have colonies of up to 50 meerkats and there's basically one mating couple isn't there and no one else is really allowed to have kids and if someone else has kids then the lead couple kills those kids and also the who's the dominant couple it's all decided on based on the size and their weight and and their age and so everyone's always looking at each other and working out who's going to be bigger who's going to be the next in line and they are literally as one article pointed out all the meerkats are comparing the meerkats that's what they're doing that's very good just on compare the meerkat did you know that in 2010

remember um the lead meerkat olav um yeah sure he released an order biography that year do you remember it was like it was like oh i don't remember no you you should have because it was one of the biggest selling books of that year that was the year uh that tony blair released his memoirs and there were i do remember that one yeah there were more pre-orders on the meerkats book than nowhere on tony blair's memoirs russle brand's book on david beckham's book then sharyl cole's book this guy outsold everyone way yeah did you have any big reveals no the fortune yeah he started the iraq war yes yeah i knew it um but oh no actually i read here's one odd reveal it's not in the book but the voice of the meerkat is and this is very niche but this is for anyone who's watched

alan partridge the second series of alan partridge when he's staying in the hotel it's the guy who fixes everything you know that guy uh michael yeah michael is the voice of michael the geordie ex opa guy yeah he's the voice of i was watching alan partridge this afternoon so i'm this is an amazing fact for me you were saying about comparing the meerkats um this study i think you were talking about um it's a guy called clutton brock and he did these experiments where they fed extra food to some of the meerkats that weren't the main meerkats and when they got fatter the main meerkats got fatter as well and so they found that basically when you're comparing with the other meerkats if someone gets bigger than you you immediately eat a load of pizza or whatever they eat and then just

try and get bigger than them because you always want to be the biggest one because it's the biggest one who's the most important yeah so you're always looking around and it's goes oh he's looking you know barry's looking a bit fat today i think someone compared it to something that goby fish do which is almost the opposite but it's quite interesting is that goby fish go on diets and it's for the same kind of peer pressure reasons like the biggest goby fish is the one who's dominant and they don't want to cause um conflict and so if they see a big goby fish they make themselves less big they eat a bit less because they're like oh i don't want to start a fight with that guy i'll just go on a little diet be small which is quite sweet isn't it but meerkats are much more

like up in your face if you're gonna get big i'm gonna get big i'll race you to the top kind of attitude yeah true uh and meerkats when they sleep is quite interesting what they do they pile on top of one another to keep warm adorable yeah so like when this in summer when it's hotter they kind of spread out a lot and in winter when it's cold they kind of grab another meerkat on top and kind of snuggle in quickly murder them and they all have meerkat rugs in their homes um i had some stuff on anus's if that's yes so this fact is about they can turn their bottoms inside out um i didn't realize i was reading a bbc article apparently to chart the evolution and history of anus's is really hard because a lot of species have a bum and then

they suddenly don't have a bum and then they have a bum again and so there's this like missing link of anus's that really yes you can't you can't through the fossils chart it properly because suddenly it's just out of nowhere no bum and then thousands of years later suddenly there's there's a bum again that's so odd do we have examples of well there's no there's one then unbumbed creatures i can't remember any but there is a thing called having a transient anus a transient anus yes yeah but i think i might be in the lifetime of an individual you have a bum yeah you don't have a bum exactly no that's so that's a very short term example of the long term thing i was mentioning there's so we've covered the sea cucumber before oh yeah which is a little it's

it's not a cucumber but it does live in the sea it's a kind of what is it it's kind of fishy organism it's not a fish they're really weird they look like odd cucumbers underwater but we've come we've said before they can um self eviscerate when they're threatened by a predator they distract the predator by squirting their own intestines out of themselves and that distracts the predator because he thinks what's this and then and then they slowly leave but the other incredible thing is um they can turn solid or mushy on command on self command so they can turn their body into a mush and then climb through a tiny crack and then re-solidify into lumps so they can't be got out through the crack by a predator whoa then nuts they're so nuts and then it's not

only for self-defense that they self eviscerate um it's a seasonal thing in autumn they just reabsorb all their intestines into their body and they just become a solid lump of flesh basically so fishermen in the Caribbean they harvest them in october because they know they're not going to have to gut them because they have no guts anymore oh yeah and then in spring the they regrow all their organs and they continue like that that's insane they're so weird the one thing i know about um the anus of a sea cucumber is that um there's a fish that lives in there isn't there it's called a slender pearlfish and it lives inside the anus of a sea cucumber and the funny thing about them is whenever they want to go into a sea cucumber's anus they kind of do a little knock on the anus

and the anus opens up oh my god like they're entering a german trench or something really and is it a secret knock or is it just a normal oh you think it's like yeah uh it's the pearlfish again what a slang term for the anus by the way the german trench that we've kind of guessed over there guys we need to wrap up do you have anything before we do oh there are a dragonfly larvae eats um via its anus um what they do this is really cool they draw water in through the anus they clench and then they compress the abdomen and the muscles in the thorax against the water filled in the rectum and then they can raise the pressure in their body and it fires out their mouth and then they can eat what isn't that cool you're drawing water in you're squeezing and then

your mouth comes out and you eat wow that's so awesome what i'm glad i'm glad i don't do that but i'm happy that someone else has found out that i see to do that was that on blue planet or it was on brown planet actually 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 during the course of this podcast we can be found on our twitter accounts i'm on at shribeland andy at andrew hunter m james at james harkin and chasinski you can email podcast at qi.com yep or you can go to our group account which is at no such thing or you can go to our website no such thing as afish.com where we have

all of our previous episodes we have a link as well to our book which is out now and guys at the end of the show we're gonna be out there we've got a bunch of copies so if you want to buy a copy and say hi we can sign it for you for christmas or whatever um and we have pre-signed copies as well if you can't be asked to line up or if you don't want to speak to us yeah actively dislike us or you can just go home you can just go home you don't need to we can't force you um yeah and um we're gonna end this show aren't we with a fact yes we have a fact that you guys sent in at the beginning of the show we're gonna give away one of our books to one of you and ana you have that fact yep so this is our favorite fact that you guys sent in and it's from uh i don't know if i can

read my own writing but victor jega nathan are you in you in oh such a good fact so this fact is that uh guide runners for site impaired runners can't use elasticated tethers at the Paralympics anymore after the chinese started catapulting their runners across the finish line at the last minute that's amazing awesome we'll be out the back guys thank you so much for coming we'll see you later next day goodbye um