No Such Thing As A Fish - 203: No Such Thing As A Muscular Butterfly

Episode Date: February 9, 2018

Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss the secret Matrix sushi recipes, why our skin doesn't leak and butterfly sperm trickery.

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 and I'm sitting here with James Harkin, Anna Chazinski and Andy Murray 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. Andrew Hunter Murray, I saw your face, starting with fact number one and that's my fact. My fact this week is that scientists have finally worked out why the four of us and all humans are not constantly leaking.

They started with the four of us, didn't they? We were the guinea pigs. They extrapolated. Yes, exactly. No, this is, this is, we've just worked out, actually I say just, I read it today. Actually and also, I think, Andy, you are leaking, are you? Oh, sorry, yeah. Hang on.

We've already had these chairs upholstered once this week, Andy, come on. This is, this was discovered or published at least in November of 2016 and I didn't know this but scientists have been desperately trying to work out, desperately is a bit of a stretch. Why we don't constantly leak? Because we shed more than 500 million cells every 24 hours, so basically in a two to four week period, our entire body of outer layer skin is completely replaced. In the process of that happening, we should just be suddenly, you know, a bit of arm skin

goes and suddenly blood's spurting out or sweat or we should be like just sprinkler systems nonstop but we're not and they don't know why except for now they do. And why is it then? James, it is so easy to explain, I'm not even going to bother. Why don't you try? Okay, what it is, is we have effectively three layers of skin which I think works a bit like a conveyor belt. You know how like shards teeth get replaced the further they go forward?

So the top layer is just the dead skin almost, it's really flaky and it goes all over the shop. Then there's this middle one which is a bit fluid and that's really nice. And then we have an original layer which is sort of like the real meat of the meat cake. Excellent metaphors. I didn't realize it was this easy to explain, I have to say. And so what happens is they all shift up one place and what they didn't know was how it

was that no holes were being revealed when the flakes of skin were disappearing. What was plugging the gap and what they've discovered is what effectively is kind of like a pritz tick glue. It's like a temporary glue, not as good as super glue which eventually comes to the second layer but that original layer has a sort of pritz tick glue which holds the gaps closed so it holds all the stuff in. So it's like a meaty cake with pritz tick on it. Yeah, at the bottom layer.

And don't forget there are three layers of shards teeth on the top layer. Yeah. I didn't realize that we were completely dead on the outside. No, we're not dead. It's almost dead on the inside. No, the very outermost layer of skin cells are dead I think. Yeah, we're just, we're wearing death. What are you wearing today?

Just death. That's the worst bits of me. That is weird, isn't it? Yeah. The cells are there and they're full of keratin which is also in your, you know, your fingernails and your hair and things but none of the cell machinery is in that outermost layer. Yeah, that is interesting. It's bizarre.

Yeah. So this study has found the structure of that second layer down the second layer is called the stratum granulosum and that layer has got a special structure that they've just found out and that's the reason that they've worked out that we're not leaking, right? This structure is an extremely efficient way to pack together shapes and it was first discovered by Lord Kelvin and it is tetra decohedrons which means it's objects with 14 faces and our cells are made of these shapes so they really pack together nicely which

means nothing can get through. Yeah. Although I've been so confused by this and I know mine was way easier as an explanation. What was that? Tetra decohedrons. The thing is, tetra decohedrons, you would have thought if that is good at plugging gaps then the ones with 16 faces are going to be even better and shapes with 18 faces are going to be even better.

It can't be that 14 faces is the maximum goodness at plugging gaps. You would think that but then think about a cube. That fits together perfectly but then an object with five faces isn't quite as good as a cube is it? I don't really know. Okay. But I'll take your word for it. Are you saying that nature should have selected a better decohedron?

I'm just saying it's interesting that this 14 faced shape seemed to be the ideal shape for our skin to be. Right. Okay. Yeah. It's the same shape as the new £1 coin. Is it now? Yeah.

So in extremis, could you plug a gap or a wound in your skin with a £1 coin? Yes. But hang on, no. Is it the same shape as that? I thought it's a 3D. It would be if it was a 3D. It's the same shape as that because the new £1 coin has 12 sides around the edge and then it has two sides on front and back.

That doesn't mean it's the same shape. It's not exactly. It's got the same number of faces. Yes. Yeah. Because it's more like a Rubik's cube but with more faces. It's more equilateral, I think, the one in the skin compared to the £1 coin. But basically, as you say, Andy, when I seriously wound you later, you can shove a £1 coin in

there and see how much good it does. So Lord Kelvin, back in the day, he was trying to work out what is the best way that foam can work. So if you have a load of bubbles, what's the absolute most efficient way that they can pack together? Yeah. And he came up with this particular shape. And then it's only recently that we found out it's in the human body.

That's amazing. That's really cool. Why was there a problem in the 19th century with foam being inefficiently packed? Well, no. So he was studying mathematics and there's a really interesting thing in maths which is if you get a load of bowls and put them together, how do they pack nicest? And the way it turns out is the same way as greengrocers do it with oranges. So you put them all down, then you put spheres in all the gaps and that's the most efficient

way of packing it. And they've done it with four-dimensional, five-dimensional, six-dimensional. It's a really interesting kind of mathematical thing that they do. Have you guys heard of Mattec? No. It's a lab in America and its business is growing human skin. So there's an incredible feature about them in Wired. I really recommend reading it.

They grow two humans' worth of skin every week, but in thousands of little coin forms. And basically it's so that you can test shampoos or cosmetics or anything you like, detergent or Lukelean or Suntown lotion on these little coins of skin. And they grow them. So what they do is they get offcuts from hospitals. So if you've been circumcised in Boston, your skin may have been, your foreskin may have been grown to two football pitches in size and then cut up for experiments. Wow.

So a shampoo will have the same effect on someone's foreskin as it will on someone's scalp? Can we be sure of that? No. Okay. We cannot. Is that a thing that says on the bottle? No, it's been tested on foreskins, so they know what they're doing. All the other operations as well, like a tummy tuck or breast surgery or various things

like this. Wow. I know. And they grow it. And so imagine that. So what we experimented on skin is a guy called Brown Secard, who I reckon we probably talked about before. He was a scientist in the 19th century who was always experimenting on himself.

And he wanted to know why we needed skin and whether we'd be fine without it. And so to do, to find out whether we'd be all right with our skin, he didn't do the disgusting thing you're imagining. He covered his skin completely from head to toe in flypaper varnish, which completely blocks it up. So it was to find out if the skin's actually having a useful interaction with the outside world and almost died because it turns out we do need our skin. That's like Goldfinger.

Yeah. The lady who, not the villain, it was the lady in the movie she was covered in gold. And she died. And there was a, did she though? I think, was that not a rumour? No. In the movie she died. Oh, in the movie she died.

Yeah. Yeah. I don't go to the movies and just listen to the rumours afterwards. I see everybody who dies with me, but like, did he really die? It was a rumour. He did. It would be a bigger bit of film trivia if one of the Bond movies had killed an actress by painting her goals.

No, but that was one of the great myths of it, is that in real life she suffered from that and she died. I thought it was a real myth that if that happened you would die, but I thought they had left something like a patch of skin on her back unpainted and she breathed through that. That was a rumour. But we don't know the absolute truth about this Bond lady, I don't think, based on that conversation, except that she definitely didn't die.

Right? Don't know. She's alive. She's fine. But yeah, Bronson Card did that and he did nearly die and you can if you do that and his student burst in and found him completely unconscious in the corner of the room covered in varnish. And so he got some sandpaper and started sandpapering this spot.

Did he sand him? Yeah, he sanded him down and then when he was getting conscious and he shouted. He must be a better way. Did he then cover him in a layer of tea coil and slowly work that in with the grain? Is that a carpentry joke? Kind of, yeah. Okay. Jokes a bit much.

But yeah, and he was really pissed off, Bronson Card, when he regained consciousness, he said, you've ruined the experiment. We were going to find out if it could kill somebody. That's amazing. I think his student was like, no, it can. He's the same guy who, he ate a patient's vomit once to give himself cholera so he could prove that Lordenham worked and then he almost died from that as well, actually, and had to be revived with some coffee.

Is it the same student who's just saving him? He comes into work each day, hey, oh Jesus, he's covered in rats, what's going on? You know, house mites, so they live on our skin and they eat skin, and do you know what they also eat? They also eat their own skin. Do they? Yeah. So house mites are as much a problem for themselves as they are for us, basically.

Do dung beetles eat their own dung? Don't know. You would, wouldn't you? You would. If you were into dung, it's the most readily accessible dung you can get, isn't it? Yeah. But the thing about house mites is that they have skin and then when it flakes off they eat it, and they also excrete it, and they eat it several times to get all the nutrition

out of it. Clever. Yeah. I know. I read a fact that I found pretty astonishing today, which is that we have a microbiome, so we're covered, obviously, every, apparently, centimeter of our skin is covered in thousands of different species of bacteria. So we are literally housing a planet in the same way that our planet is housing life.

We're doing the exact same thing, just on our own body with bacteria. And the article said that if you were to, if there was a scientist who decided to grind up a single person and sequence all the DNA from every... That guy had grinded up himself. He's got one foot in the grinder and his mate comes in. He comes in. Boss, no! But so, yeah, so the article was saying if a sadistic scientist like him did decide to

do that, grind up and sequence all of that DNA that was on our entire body, either in our body or out on top of our body, only 2% of the genetic material that he would find would be us, the human in that. And the rest of it's all the bacteria floating around us. 98%. We're carrying 98% something else other than us. Filthy. Yeah.

That's very cool. We need a shower. Disgusting. Yeah. OK, it is time for fact number two and that is James. OK, my fact this week is that the iconic green code at the start of the Matrix movie is made from sushi recipes. So cool.

So this is a fact. He's been on the internet a little bit over the last few weeks, but I really like it. And it was an interview with CNET by production designer Simon Whiteley and he said that these little things that are going up and down are made of reverse letters, numbers and Japanese Katakana characters, which are from sushi recipes. You know, it's his wife's sushi recipe book, wasn't it? He scanned it in and took all of the, yeah, the writing, so cool. So do you think there's anyone who just watches the Matrix when they need to cook a Japanese

meal for their friends? Where is that DVD? I also think I've only eaten sushi, I've never made it. There can't be much in the way of recipes. Take some fish, take some rice, wrap it up, eat it. So the Matrix, we all live in the Matrix. Oh yeah, it's an exciting theory, isn't it? Yeah, actually a relatively mainstream theory these days that we might live in the Matrix.

It is, but like I was reading a lot of articles about it off the back of you putting this fact forward and there's a lot of conferences with big scientists talking about it. And even I, who love this kind of thing, was a bit like, guys, this is bullshit. You're wasting your time. But then I have a physics degree and I actually believe it. Do you? Do you know what the problem is? This is what I noticed.

You had these big scientists, Neil deGrasse Tyson was the host of this big conference and a lot of scientists talking about it. And I realized the difference is that stoners say this stuff all the time. No one takes it seriously. But if you're able to like say an equation at the end of your sentence, suddenly the world is really interested. And that's what that was. That was a stoner conference with maths.

Maybe every time you say something stupid, if you just say y equals x squared. Yeah, exactly. Do you just only like conspiracy theories before they get mainstream? I think you're kind of a hipster for nonsense. The JFK assassination is so hack. So one of the most basic ways of looking at this is we think it's probably possible for us to make a simulation of the universe at some stage in the future. It will be.

And when that happens, it will be done and it will be done more than once. And we wouldn't know if we're in here or if we're in the simulation. And so likelihood is there's one reality and loads of simulations. So statistically, we're more likely to be in one of the simulations. Although I have a problem with that slightly because I'm not quite sure how we know there's any one reality. And then there's like a kind of multiverse theory and a parallel universe theory. So there could just be infinite numbers of simulations and realities.

And it's true, although it could be that each of the realities has a load of simulations. Of course. And you can have different levels of infinity. You can have higher infinities and lower infinities. Guys, stop hogging the joint. Hand it over, man. Give me a hit of that. Elon Musk, I think, says, I know he's got he's a bit wacky, but he does say that

that he thinks there's a billions to one chance that we're not living in a simulation. Yeah, I'm with him. But you say that. I don't know if people really believe it. You know, intellectually, it's probably true. But do you really think we're in someone's video game? I think it's more likely than not. But then I also think that it doesn't make any difference.

What I was about to ask, what what can I do if we're in a simulation? What what am I to do about it? You can hire in Silicon Valley to tech billionaires who have remained anonymous have hired a bunch of scientists to try and work on breaking out of the simulation. It must be Musk, right? It must be him who's one of them. They've remained anonymous. I don't want to spread rumors about people being given money to try and break us out

of the simulation that we're in. That was a that was two sentences, I think, in a New Yorker article, right? And no one has followed up on who these people are. But it sounds like it's true. It's a good job, though, isn't it? What a job being a scientist. Just sorry, yes, still nothing. But we'll need another grant, I'm afraid.

Yeah, we haven't beaten the boss on level three yet. So do you think they would just play the Sims and try and work out how to get the Sims out of their simulation? That's such a good idea. Yeah. Can you make the Sims play Sims when you're playing the Sims? Don't know. Because if you can do that, I'm with you and your theory. Only Alex Bell, who almost came on this podcast today, would know the answer to that

because he's a Sims fanatic and he's not here. Yeah. Oh, well. There was an engineer from MIT who worked out how much computer memory it would take up to simulate the universe as it is now. So the universe is massively complicated, and he looked into the size of the computer that would be needed to get in all this information. And he worked out that the computer itself that is running our simulation

would have to be bigger than the universe. So that's impossible. But then. But what, is he using Windows? It looks like you're trying to build a universe. Then he upgraded his system. And it turns out it's fine. Because you would just put on that little screen saver with the stars,

wouldn't you? Yeah. That's basically good enough for a first stab. See, I think a lot of people think that's not good enough. And that there's more to the universe. Maybe we're not even the computer game. Maybe we're the screen saver. How embarrassing. The point is we don't require much computer memory

because it's not like there's an entire universe that's been simulated. They've only simulated the bits that we're clever enough to spot. So we're too stupid to see all the massive gaps in this computer system. So it's like every time we study the movement of stars or something, then in this computer simulation, they go, OK, the humans are looking at it now. We better provide some information for them here. But the rest of the time, they don't have that information there. And that saves on computer memory.

And that's why there is a computer that's the right size to run this simulation that we're all in. And that's why in quantum physics, things only change when you actually observe them. Yes, because we're all in a computer. That's the thing. Like, you don't see the, you know, I haven't played Sims, but presumably there are people in it.

Are there people in it? Yeah, yeah, you build a family and they have jobs and life. So you don't see the family suddenly sitting around dinner going, do you think we're in a simulation? Because if we are, the simulation has started to question itself. There is a philosophy expansion pack of the Sims where they do do that. So it's really good.

So one way you might be able to tell if you're in the matrix is if there's a glitch in the matrix. This is a thing, isn't it? It's like a little meme. If you go into Reddit, you can go on to reddit.com slash glitch in the matrix. And you can see examples of when people have spotted it. So some of them, I only read the headlines because I read a few of the actual explanations.

They were a bit boring, but someone said three eggs have disappeared in my fridge. Glitch in the matrix, guys, where is my sandwich? Glitch in the matrix. I think I heard perfect by Ed Sheeran in 2008 or 2009. Wow. Come on, guys. If that isn't evidence, I don't know what is. It's irrefutable. There's a famous one as well, which I was told about by our buddy Joel,

who is one of the writers of those Lady Bird books. And he's he's very much convinced that this is the glitch. And it's that there used to be a series of kids books, which I used to read as a kid called the Bernstein. What's that? We've never heard that before. Oh, we got a bit close to reality, guys. Glitch alert. Glitch alert. They're going for it.

Men in black come in there. Yeah. So the Bernstein Bears, it was a series of kid books. And the glitch is that everyone seems to remember that they're called the Bernstein Bears, but in fact, they're called the Bernstein Bears. The authors were Bernstein. And genuinely, there's a whole thing on the Internet of people talking about, I swear to God, I grew up on these books. My whole childhood, it had an E, not an A in steam, not stain.

And the glitches, the books have suddenly just all changed themselves to a different name. That's like Walker's Crisps. Everyone thinks they remember Walker's Cheese and Onion crisps being the blue flavor or the whatever flavor they're not. The green flavor. They are the blue flavor. Yeah, they are the blue flavor. And everyone thinks that they used to be the green flavor and they never were.

But that sounds like it's another glitch. Yeah. And it's like, what happened to my sandwich, guys? So many glitches in the matrix. The creators of it were quite keen that everyone who was involved got to grips with a philosophy, weren't they? So it was the Wachowski brothers who are, in fact, both the Wachowski sisters now. So it was the Wachowski brothers who wrote the screenplay for and directed

the matrix, and they are both transgender and they are both now Lana and Lily Wachowski. But they, you know, cited as their influences for the matrix, like Homer and Hitchcock and Dostoevsky and this whole array of kind of different sources. So why Neo always goes, do you think it's the first part of the word Dostoevsky? No, no. Sorry. Wow.

We're really on different planes, aren't we? Anyway, during the filming of it, everyone who worked and all the actors were made to read three books. They were made to read three books of philosophy. So Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard, who's like a sociologist and philosopher. And then they were made to read out of control by a next editor of Wired, and they were made to read Introducing Evolutionary Psychology.

So they had to really come to terms with the philosophy that they were exploring. Yeah, that would have come in very handy during the massive gunfight scene in the lobby. So the Warner Brothers, they didn't trust the Wachowski brothers at first because the Wachowski brothers have very little experience making films. And this was a very big idea. So they told them they had to go away and direct another film first. They just go away and make a different film. And if that one's a success, we'll let you make the matrix.

What was the other one? They went and made a film called Bound, which is described by the New Yorker as a lesbian thriller with a happy ending. Which doesn't sound very close to the matrix. It doesn't seem like a perfect proof of concept. No, you mean they've set them sort of a bad job interview there. Yeah, but it was a success. And then they said, all right, you can go away and make the matrix.

And did they do a sort of classic happy ending or did they misinterpret it as a massage happy ending? I haven't seen Bound. Just curious if I saw the make a movie with a happy ending, you would do that. Would you though? So it doesn't fit in with the plot, but they told me to do it. Every Disney film would end in a masturbation scene if Dan was there. Well, we saved the day.

I'm just going to have a quick massage. It's very weird that you hear happy ending and that's the first thing you assume. The matrix would not have been made if you were the Wachowski brothers. OK, it is time for fact number three, and that is Chizinski. My fact this week is that the longest ever kayak trip was completed by a man who couldn't swim. This was a really good article in Vanity Fair

over some time in the last couple of weeks. It's about a guy called Oscar Speck, who was just this amazing guy. He was German and in 1932 he climbed into a kayak. His business wasn't going very well. He climbed into a kayak because business wasn't going very well. Germany was in the doldrums then because of the depression and because of the Versailles Treaty, combination of the two. And so he got in a kayak, thought, sod this, got onto the Danube

and he kayaked for 30,000 miles all the way to Australia where he arrived in 1939. And when he arrived? And when he arrived, he was immediately put in prison because the World War Two had started. He was German, but he enjoyed it so much that he decided he was going to go to Australia. That was never the plan.

So he would kayak during the day and then he would dine in the evenings with ambassadors and the rich of every place that he was staying. In fact, even, and this is maybe potentially why he was arrested when he got to Australia, he was German, obviously, but at one point he met up with a Nazi officer who gave him money funding the next leg of his kayak trip and he had a Nazi flag on the front of the kayak as he was going.

They probably thought they were being invaded by the smallest ever German bosses. You wait till the other guys get here. Yeah, he didn't think he was going to go to Australia. No. He had a vague goal of reaching Cyprus to work in the copper mines. Yeah, that was his big dream, wasn't it? He wanted to work in a mine.

That was his. And he realised it. Yeah. So he ended up by kind of coincidence, I guess, kind of north of Sydney in a big opal mining area. And he really did make his living from then on with opal mining. So he had this fantasy about mining and he was always sending random bits of rock home to his family

and saying, I think this is really precious and they just go, it's a lump of rock, mate, keep kayaking. And but he really did make his fortune in opal mining and he never went back home. I don't think he didn't go back home until 1970. Never saw his parents again, spent the rest of his days out in Australia. Well, seven of them are spent in prison of war. He was he was we should add

he stayed in Australia post-war, but for the entirety of World War Two, he was in jail. Yeah. So he was he arrived, was arrested and spent World War Two. Although he did escape twice. Did he get recaptured because he insisted on going with his kayak? Just look for any waterways suitable for a kayak. Could be on one of those. Well, he got arrested in India on the theory.

They believe that his kayak was also a submarine. Really? Yeah. Yeah. And they thought they thought it was a spy, right? They thought it was a spy and that he was kind of scouting for the for the Nazis. I've been canoeing or kayaking. And for a lot of the time, my kayak was a submarine. I had the problem where I went, I think it was kayaking with my wife, both of us in the same kayak, but I sat the back and she sat at the front.

And I'm a lot heavier than she is. And so she was paddling in mid air and I was just sinking. So the one thing that I didn't read in all of this stuff about him is that he couldn't swim. Did that change at all when he was? No, he never learned to swim. He never learned to swim. I mean, there's huge stretches of just ocean, like dangerous, high wave ocean. Well, there wasn't. I mean, there were stretches where he'd go for like 15 miles or whatever.

But actually, if you look at the route, he did hug the coast as much as he could, as you would. Also, he didn't really reach Australia. He reached an island that the Australians had colonised and it wasn't mainland. But it's still Australia. I would argue that you would have quite a journey to then get actually to the coast of Oz. He'd been all the way around Papua New Guinea as well by that point and drop down. Yeah, he landed in Saibai, which was Australia.

I'm impressed. Like, it's like, so you'd do it, Dan. But it's interesting that the not being able to swim thing is extraordinary because as soon as you're even this far away in a pool from a ledge and you can't swim, that becomes dangerous. You know, a kilometre is dangerous if you can't swim. Yeah, it is mad. Yeah. He was probably a bit mad.

I'm bigging him up here. So Britain sells kayaks to the Inuits now. Really? Yes, because a school trip went there a few years ago with a few kayaks and then by the end they didn't need the kayaks anymore, they were going home. And so they said to those guys, do you want these? And they were like, oh, yeah, we we ran out a few decades ago. We'll take some back.

And then the company that makes them now sends a few over every year. That's very cool. That's very nice. Pope John Paul, the second loved kayaking. Today. Yeah. He got he was in a race and he was winning it. And just before the finish line, he got a hole in his bow and he sunk just a holy boat. A holy boat. So good.

OK, it is time for our final fact of the show. And that is Andy, my fact is that male butterflies use fake sperm to trick each other into thinking they're extra fertile. I'm glad we've got a happy ending to this podcast. 90 percent of butterflies sperm is fake. What? So what's it? What is it? Plaster of Paris? It's it's just filler.

Poly filler. It's not. It's it's completely bogus sperm. It's sperm lookalikes, which have no nucleus. They carry no proper genetic information that can be passed on in a mating sense. 90 percent. Wow. So a sperm without a nucleus. Yeah. So it's just a it's a dummy. It's a dummy. Do they do they know that as in the sperm?

No, no, as in the butterflies. So they're like, they don't have sperm or they're like, I'm going to manufacture my fake sperm. I don't think they even know they're butterflies. They don't know anything. The animals. OK, they don't know what they're doing. I think they know what they they do know what they're doing here, because when they're mating, right, male butterflies, this is a bit gross, but they use their penis to measure inside the females how full she is,

i.e. whether she's mated before. And it's like using the dipstick in a car's oil tank. Is the closest analogy? Yeah. OK. Yeah. They then decide how. So sorry, do they pull it out and see where the line is? I don't know what they do, but they OK. I don't exactly know, but they then decide how much sperm to deposit based on the females mating history.

And it's much cheaper for them to produce non-fertile sperm, right? Cheaper in form as far as energy is concerned. It takes a lot less resources. Not money. Yeah. So if if the female is nearly empty, then the male will inject lots of fertile sperm, but then loads and loads of fake stuff, which is designed to put off future males who might mate with the female because then they they do the dipstick. They come along and say, oh, then there's females mated with loads of males

and there's a less of a chance that my genetic material will get passed on to the next generation. So they might be deterred from mating. Yeah. Yeah. So that's why they have these huge amounts of phony sperm. They also eject. Maybe this is the same thing they eject, actually. It's something called methyl salicylate, which is also called oil of wintergreen, which I think is that substance.

And it smells really, really strong. And that's what tells the males don't mate with this one. She's already been mated with. Yeah. And it's the same anti aphrodisiac deodorant. Exactly. They spray all the female. It turns you off. Yeah. But it's in it's in mouthwash and said in chewing gum and in various things that we use.

That's why you never have butterflies trying to mate with your mouth. Yeah. And thank God. So can I just get my head round this whole animals don't know what they're doing? So they don't know that they've put the filler in. I don't know that we know what they know. But no, no, but they must not know that they've put the filler in because otherwise they would then put the dipstick in to someone and be like, I reckon that's all filler.

No, because if they if they if they find that the females tank is already full, they inject a more potent mixture to compete more with the other males. So they have different tactics, depending on the mating situation, basically. And why would you not just go for your most potent sperm? Because it takes a lot of resources. OK. So it's easier to use the fake stuff. I know what you mean.

I do know what you mean. I don't understand why they haven't evolved instinctively think when they go in and then they dip in and they realize that she's full up instinctively evolved to be like, well, I do that a lot and it's not real. That's my trick. Yeah, exactly. Maybe the other guys have caught on.

So they don't know. They don't know that they're all filler. Maybe some of them do. Maybe they're not doing it as much as they were a few thousand years ago. So the females, if they don't want the sperm, they will eat it because they have a stomach next to the vaginas, which will eat the sperm. So this is specifically to male cabbage whites. And when your male comes in, he might do a blockage

in the vagina to stop anyone else coming in. But obviously that's not good for the female because she wants as much genetic material as possible. And so they found that she has something called a bursa copulatrix inside her reproductive tract, which is basically a second stomach, which means she can digest stuff that's in there. How are you so she can eat through her mouth and her vagina? It's quite the party trick.

No, but there are jaws. She's got jaws down there because the stuff the male deposits is surrounded by an incredibly hard shell, which which which is designed to block up the entire thing so that other males can't make with her. So she has evolved incredibly tough jaws to chew through this thing. There's a film where jaws, yeah, with jaws. There's a few.

It's not the one I'm thinking of. It's a giant butterfly vagina. Is there a film where vaginas have jaws? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's a B movie. I don't think it was a Spielberg. I think a B movie is a post-war butterfly movie. But yeah, it is good to eat, isn't it?

So the semen can actually contain useful stuff. And the men know that. And so they do this thing called puddling male butterflies where they suck salts off the ground. So the way butterflies drink is they drink through a straw in their mouth. There's long proboscis, which they uncoil. And the males will go along the ground sucking up lots of salts, lots of sodium.

And then this goes into their sperm. And when the woman, the woman, when the female butterfly eats that, then that creates good offspring. So what happens when it's winter and there's loads of ice and we put loads of salt on the roads and the butterflies come down and eat loads of salt? What happens then, Anna? You get super, super butterflies.

That's what you get. Yeah. You get. Do you actually? You do. You get you get males with extra muscles and females with bigger eyes and bigger brains. Wow. I don't see many butterflies in. Chips. Chips. I thought they all I didn't think you'd got many flying around in winter. Yeah. So you can get, let's say you you might salt the roads when it's not winter

or you might salt them in the higher places when it's cold or whatever. But basically they found out recently that if you salt the roads and the butterflies eat the stuff, then the next summer they have extra muscles, bigger eyes, bigger brains. And they asked the scientist who is involved. So surely that means that road salt is good for butterflies. And she said, I do not want that to be the take home message. Why not? Yeah.

Well, I think because basically you are changing nature in some way. And generally speaking, we think that doing that is probably not a good idea. There's going to be there's always something, isn't there? Oh, I would love to see muscular butterflies flying around with big arms. Well, did you did you I didn't read more on this because I didn't think it would be a good topic to talk about. But in Fukushima, there were mutant butterflies off the back of the radiation that were super strength.

But again, the take home message is not that give a load of radiation to butterflies. Yeah. Just quickly on this burst of copulatrix that you're talking about, James. So it's the the the the chewing and digesting organ. It takes 36 hours of constant chewing by the female to get through it. That's how tough that's a lot of chewing, even with your mouth. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. Well, it's flinching.

It's a whole new ball game. So. Oh, God. But no, a team of scientists looked into how the super strength sperm metaphor and they could only break it down by boiling it and concentrated sulfuric acid. Oh, wow, this thing that the male produces is wild. And the males, the the sperm metaphor, the actual package that they give to the female is up to 13 percent of the male's weight.

It's amazing, isn't it? It's all just a fight. Basically, the males are just going to make it harder and harder and more difficult to break down. And the females are just going to learn more tricks to break it down. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Crazy. It's amazing. It's the battle of the sexes.

We're all fighting it. Yeah. We were at James and I were talking to our group buddy, Leven Skyra, who's been on the podcast a bunch of times, and he was saying there's a new report that just came out, which show that the butterfly mouth and tongue predate flowers. And so you kind of go, well, that's what were they eating beforehand? If it wasn't that. And the suggestion from this new study is dinosaur tears.

I mean, that's very cool. Isn't that amazing? So they dip into the. So they've got this proboscis that we think has evolved to go into flowers, but actually it's evolved to dip into the dinosaur's eye sockets. No, no. Yeah. I guess these sockets themselves. Yeah. I didn't. I didn't. I'm just remembering. James and I literally saw him yesterday.

Yeah. So even now, butterflies will eat the tears of animals. I think we all probably knew that. But yeah, the idea is that because they existed before flowers, they must have been eating the tears before they even the flowers came along. Well, you would think if you were trying to gain sustenance from drinking animals tears that you would be more subtle than a massive butterfly. Yeah. You know what I mean?

As in they've got big, colorful wings, something like that landed on my eye. I would notice. I suppose that you could say that. I don't know what these animals are because I haven't seen the study, but I imagine that they didn't look exactly like butterflies like with the big shape wings and stuff. Yeah. Yeah. But do you think the butterflies had to evolve to make the dinosaurs cry? Like develop to say hurtful comments. Yeah. Yeah.

Otherwise, how do they do it? Or to punch them? Maybe that's why they have those superhuman butterflies. Float like a butterfly, sting like a butterfly, punch like a butterfly. OK, that is it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on our tribal land, Andy at Andrew Hunter M. James at James Harkin and Chazinsky. You can email podcast at qi.com. Yep, where you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing. You can also go to our website. No such thing as a fish dot com. We've got lots of stuff up there. We've got the links to our tour, which is still going on. Twenty eighteen, we're going to be going around the UK.

We're going to be doing Ireland. We're also going to Australia in May. So check that out if you're down under New Zealand as well. We have a link to our book, which is on Amazon. And we also have, as we said at the top of the show, a link to our new behind the scenes documentary behind the gills, which is now up online. OK, that is it, Andy.

Time for my massage and we'll see you all next week. Goodbye.