No Such Thing As A Fish - 222: No Such Thing As A Warmongering Pigeon

Episode Date: June 22, 2018

Live from Melbourne, Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss superloud fish sex, taxiing to a war zone and why these facts probably aren't true.

Hey, guys, just a quick announcement before we start this week's show, which is that we have a special bit of news. We have released an audio cassette. Yes, that's right, but it's not your normal audio cassette. This is like a futuristic year 3000 cassette, because in it, it contains not just your average 50 minutes that an audio cassette would. We have over 1900 minutes on this. It's true. It's a USB audio cassette. It's amazing. It looks like an audio cassette, and this USB pops out and on it, it's got the complete second year of fish, which you may have noticed. We've taken down from the website and we've put it onto this cassette.

Yeah. And it's also got a special filmed episode, never before seen, never again seen, but it's filmed. Yeah, that's right. We filmed it in our natural habitat at the QI office in Covent Garden around the table that we started the whole podcast on. And I have to say, it's got for me personally, my favorite fact that I found in all four years of doing the podcast. It's very exciting. It's a very good fact when you hear it. You won't believe fact number three. It's fact number four. But yeah, you can get it by going to qi.com slash cassette. And I do encourage you just to go there, just to look at it. It's a thing of beauty. It's absolutely stunning. It's this retro item. It's a proper cassette, the casing, the booklet, everything

is there, and it's yellow. It is yellow. The actual cassette is yellow. So qi.com slash cassette. All right. On with the show. On with the show live from Melbourne, Australia. Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you from Melbourne. 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, Andrew Hunter Murray. My fact is that there was a showman in the 1930s whose act consisted of repeatedly crashing his plane into the ground. This is

such an amazing guy. So this fact, sorry, Andy, how do you repeatedly crash? Surely you can only crash a plane once into the ground. That's a very good point. He sequentially crashed separate planes into the ground. Let the record show. So this fact was actually sent in to us to me by a guy called Cameron Dawkins. So Cameron, thank you very much for this. And I looked into him a bit more, the showman, not Cameron Dawkins. Do you not care about Cameron at all? I do. He said you were fine. That's true. All right, I've researched Cameron Dawkins' life. We're here to tell you some home truths. Andy, all the research we've done is on Cameron. Oh, no. Cameron was born in 1982.

Okay. No, the guy's name, the showman's name, he was called Frank Frakes. What a cool name. He was from Tennessee and his specialty, he was an aerial showman. So he did lots of stuff. So he did loop the loops and he did all sorts of acrobatics with his plane. But his special trick was crashing planes into trees, lakes, pre-built houses, and sometimes just smashing them right into the ground. He would buy a very old, clunky plane. So obviously planes were very, very basic in these days. He'd buy a really old, clunky plane, he would get it just airworthy, and then he would crash it. Yeah. And he was very honest about his career. He said, I admit, I fool the public. Everyone who goes out there will expect to see me get killed,

but I won't. And he, it's amazing, you can see footage of this online. There's all these old newsreels where they say, see, Frank, has he that kind of voice. And you see him go through houses and there's one, there's one great clip where he misses the house because the plane actually goes out of control. He loses genuine control of it and he plummets and you see him plummet in the distance. And by pure coincidence, he plummeted onto a car. So everyone was just as happy because he still hit a thing. Apart from the guy driving the car. And he was, yeah, he was badly hurt, but he... And we're definitely sure he wasn't just a very bad pilot. Oh, well, all the time. The whole time. His act was actually, watch me stay flying.

He was sponsored by Camel Cigarettes, as were everyone in those days. So actually, if you google him and if you look at sort of old sausage from the time, the only thing that mentions him are cigarette adverts, where he just, it's so weird adverts in those days in the 30s, because you'll get like a really long form piece, paragraph after paragraph about his career. And then the closing line will be something like, and below you see him having performed this stunt and ready to enjoy his favorite smoke, Camels. And yeah, and he'd have, there'll be little cartoons of him where he'd say, I always smoke Camels. I can smoke as many as I want and I feel fresh, never jittery, never upset. Yes, yes, my job is dangerous, but I'll tell you what's even more dangerous, a lifetime

of smoking, Camel Cigarettes. So the civil aviation authority didn't like this guy, did they? Right. They kept trying to shut him down and all he'd do was just move to a different state where they couldn't get hold of him. And so one time he was flying in Florida and he crashed his plane and everyone thought he was really injured. So an ambulance came and put him in the ambulance and then they drove off and then they got to state lines, he jumped out and then ran off and then did a show in the next state the next day. That's amazing. It was very popular back then, wasn't it? What, doing these like tricks and stuff? Do it, yeah, particularly air flights and air stunts. It was basically after the First World War, there was this massive surplus of aeroplanes and the

government didn't know what to do with them. And so they sold them for nothing. I think actually they would sell the petrol in the tank and it came with a free plane sometimes. So all these amateurs just bought up all these planes and became stuntmen and yeah, it was a huge deal. And we've mentioned it before on the podcast, but what they used to do was a thing called barn storming where a group of them would go and fly over a town and they would land in a field, they would ask for permission to put on a massive show and if they got the permission they would drop leaflets out of the plane saying come and watch our show. So they traveled in a pack, they were a tour, like a flying, a literal flying circus that would come in and do their show.

And then some people think that the barn storming word comes from crashing into these barns like this guy did. He crashed into prefab buildings, didn't he? Yeah. Do you know his other act? It was called the casket of death and he would climb into a barrel which would be reinforced, blow it up with dynamite from inside and then jump out. What you're saying is that he's in the same place as the dynamite, they're both inside the barrel. I would have had at least the barrel in between me and the dynamite. Well, that's why your circus act failed. James safely blows up a barrel at a distance. There's no barrel.

There was another guy called the salamander and he had a death slide which was like a bobsleigh with a cradle of lit fireworks underneath him but he also did a trick where he poured a pile of gunpowder along his neck and arm to a pile in his hand and his assistant would set fire to the gunpowder in his collarbone and when it got to his hands it would blow up. But he only did it apparently on special occasions. He only ever did it twice, didn't he? But gunpowder based on something were quite a thing. Again, because the war just happened, people were quite into blowing things up and in the 30s in Germany rocket cycling was quite a big deal and so this was tying big sticks of dynamite to a bike and then lighting it and then it propels

you in your rocket. There was a guy called Herr Richter who was good at this. There was another guy called Wiley Coyote who was good at it. Yeah, so this guy, he tied 12 rockets to his bike and then he called it Rackenton Rudd and when he hit 55 miles an hour the first time he did it all, they all exploded and he flew off and traveled about 50 yards into a hedge I think but he kept it up. It is weird. They used to, the daredevil, it was a job that suddenly boomed where people were answering adverts in the newspaper, this is a genuine one from 1931, wanted single man, not over 25, to drive automobile in head-on collision with another car. Must crash with another car at 40 miles an hour and give unconditional release in case of injury

or death. Name your lowest price. And these are like, if you picture the cars as well, if you picture in your head just old cars of the olden days, they were, those are the ones that were flying over buses and they couldn't get much speed and it's pretty extraordinary to look at all the photos at the time. Yeah, they were kind of flimsy, weren't they? Because another thing they used to do was travel in a car, well a little bike with a sidecar with a lion in it. This was another popular thing and they actually had a name, I think they were called Lion Drones, so they'd go round a velodrome but on a motorbike and sometimes there'd be a lion in your sidecar and then there was another one where you were riding around a velodrome on your motorbike and a bunch of lions got released and

chased you and just charged after you. This is entertainment, sounds great. Yeah, that's cool. The first person to do a loop-the-loop in an aeroplane was a Soviet guy called Piotr Nesterov and he was immediately arrested for risking government property and then a few months later there was a French guy who did it called Adolf Pegu and he became world famous and then the Soviets went, oh maybe we shouldn't have arrested that guy after all and they took him out of prison and he was promoted to staff captain and awarded a medal. Really? Wow, that's so funny. Have you ever heard, obviously jumping out of a moving plane is very dangerous, have you ever heard of jumping into a moving plane? No, this is a thing that some people do. Well if you're really late

for your flight. I'm serious, this has been done. It was first done in 1997 and then last year 2017 two guys recreated it at two French air devils. So what happens is you jump out of the aircraft, you're wearing a wingsuit, you then fly until you've caught up with the aircraft which is flying downwards and then you jump back into it. Wow. It's not as rare, it is also one for special occasions Wow. Well check this story, I was reading about a guy called Graham Donald, he was a pilot in 1917 and he was attempting for the first time in a plane that's called a Sopwith Camel. Yeah, so he was attempting his first loop the loop. So he went up 6,000 feet and he got to the peak of his loop the loop, he was upside down and his belt snapped and he fell out, he disappeared out of the plane.

Yeah, now 55 years later he tells a story. Oh it was, 55 years later he landed. So check this out, he's upside down, the belt snapped and he falls out, he plummets 5,000 feet but because he was in the middle of a loop the loop maneuver his plane came back down. This is his story, he landed on the wing of the plane with 2,000 feet to go. Climb back in, yes I've got it. Okay, there are a thousand people here, does anyone believe that story? Give us a tip. Graham Donald, check him out, 1917. A thousand, but it doesn't matter if he said it, he's obviously delusional, a thousand percent not true. No, he's incredible, he met it on the bottom of the loop, on the wing. It is literally incredible, it is not credible.

How did the plane know where to go? Because he had it in a loop the loop maneuver, it was just following its path, it was a natural path. That's not how physics works, it's a software paddle, it would just go to straight, it got a tangent. He said the first 2,000 feet passed very quickly and terra firma looked damn firma. As I fell I began to hear my faithful little camel somewhere nearby, suddenly I fell back onto her. Maybe he was talking about the cigarette's camel. And he made a good landing, he's a hero. Wow. Hey we're gonna have to move on to our next fact. All right. Do you guys know? Okay. Do you guys know Tommy Fitzpatrick, my favorite stuntman? In 1956 he was really drunk in a pub in New York, he made a bet with his friend there

that in 15 minutes he would be back at that pub in an aeroplane and then he went to an airport in New Jersey, he stole a plane, he landed it on St Nicholas Avenue in Manhattan between a whole bunch of cars and in complete darkness no lights on the plane, nothing. And he rocked up back in the bar and he said hey guys I did it. I suspect it took him longer than 15 minutes. He was charged with grand larceny but the owner of the plane didn't press charges so he got away with it. And two years later he was in the same bar telling the story and the person he was telling didn't believe him so he did the exact same thing again. Okay it is time for fact number two and that is my fact. My fact this week is that a new

scientific study has shown that people who claim to know a lot of facts don't actually know as many facts as they think they do. Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa Dan. What does it say about people who don't know about many facts and that the few facts that they do say are often described as dubious? So yeah so this is a study that was written by a man called Graham Donald who previously survived the loop in a plane. No I'm joking I'm joking this is real this is real. The other thing was real I don't know why. Other thing was real. So this is a new study this is that people who think that they have superior knowledge both knowledge belief facts they tend to overestimate how much they actually know and then so they did this as a study it's in a paper that's called

is belief superiority justified by superior knowledge they sat people down and they asked them what they knew and then they did a test to actually test if they knew what they thought they knew and it turns out they don't. But even when they were told that they were wrong they still believed that they knew more than most people didn't they? Yeah and this was a it was all about political facts. Yes exactly yeah. Oh so as if they have political biases then they won't they'll just assume they know facts. They were like objectively I'm right yeah. Yeah okay. And these people were also found to whenever they want to read about a subject they always read papers that agreed with whatever their viewpoint was and they also did it knowing that they were doing that

said no this is fine this is what I'm meant to do so that's what the study was about. I know I'm relating to so much of what you just said. But I think there have even been studies done before that show that the more expert you are in something the more you'll lie about how much you know about it. So basically there was a study in 2015 that found that you're likely to over claim if you're good at something so for instance if you're a geographer then you'll claim you know of a place that actually doesn't exist and that literally happened so a bunch of geographers by profession were given a list of geographic locations and told you know tell us if you're familiar with these places and they said yeah Lake Othello sure yeah Kashmir and Oregon yeah I know that place

said sir my aunt lives there and none of those places existed. 92% said same with biologists so biology experts were said are you familiar with these toxins and chemicals and so they were asked do you know about meta toxins do you know about retroplex and they just ticked all those boxes they said yeah of course they do I'm a biologist all made up that doesn't just happen with people who are experts in the field so for example in 2013 the TV host Jimmy Kimmel who's a very famous guy he carried out an experiment on this and when I say he I mean someone in his production team but they went to Coachella the American music festival your honor and they filmed themselves asking people have you heard of these bands and are you looking forward to seeing them at Coachella

but there were a lot of made-up bands and it's amazing seeing people saying oh yeah I've heard I haven't heard their new stuff but I my friends have told me I have to see them when the bands were called things like Dr. Shlomo and the GI clinic the obesity epidemic I love that stuff and my favorite shorty jizzle and the plumber cracks I really like the idea that Jimmy Kimmel actually instead of working on his show and doing jokes is like can we get more scientific surveys going on and I'll focus on them you guys do the rest another psychological study Anna you're quite good at crosswords uh I'm better than Dan sure James could have asked you anything that you were good at and that's still the answer

so um I'll give you some words and so see if you can guess what they are I'll just give you a horrible thing to do so um it's four letters w blank blank h w blank with okay um I'll say wash okay s blank blank p soap stop okay well this has worked quite well because you know this isn't how crosswords work well here's the thing here's the thing right apparently anyone who says cleansing related words like wash or soap uh has yeah has done some extremely bad deeds in the most recent past wow and it literally says instead of alternatives such as with and stop I thought with I just took wash because she said with already I did say soap first I grant you that

this is great so I'm the normal against which you're the angelic one and this is the evil bastard so this is there's a thing about um when you're tricked by a fraudster it turns out it's not the fraudster who's tricking you it's you who's tricking you okay you trick yourself into thinking this fraudster is this fraudster is plausible okay um so in 2008 Stephen Greenspan he's an author he published a book called the annals of gullibility which was the summary of decades of work of his about how not to be gullible how not to be fooled two days after publication he discovered that his financial advisor one mr bernie made off had defrauded him out of a third of his retirement savings I know yeah but he I bet he's glad that we're

having a massive laugh about that in Melbourne that is pretty funny though but what he said is that well what he didn't say this but the theory goes that Greenspan trusted made off he made himself believe no this guy seems plausible if I give him a bit of money I'll get loads back okay um so this this fact is about basically the dunning kruger effect which I'm sure we've mentioned before semi well-known people have low ability who are just crap at things thinking they're really good at things and the idea is that if you literally know almost nothing about something you don't know the stuff that reveals to you how little you know um so like a good example that really spoke to me was um if you don't know the I bet they all speak to you down so if you're bad if you're

about it writing um and let's say you don't have a good grasp of grammar um and spelling you won't know that you're a bad writer because you don't know the rules in order to know that you're bad at those rules therefore you think you're good without knowing yeah yeah that is a good example the example it was based on though I'm actually going to edit that out because it doesn't help us if you say smart things on this podcast you've got a personality to keep up here down um so the example I didn't know the example on which dunning kruger in fact was based so it was Dr Dunning who came across this incident David Dunning came across this incident in 1995 I think it was a man who robbed banks in Pittsburgh and he was caught on security cameras so he went in broad daylight

he didn't have a mask on or anything caught on security cameras arrested and when he was interviewed he said but I wore the juice and it turned out he'd rub lemon juice on his face and he thought because that works as invisible ink that that would render his face invisible to security cameras that is a brilliant trick to play on someone isn't it to tell them that even better if you tell them that human semen was used as invisible ink in the water right which it which it was which it was yeah otherwise that would have been an extremely weird thing for me to say but again human semen on your face does not render it invisible to security cameras just to be clear how did we get quite conspicuous actually

it'd be so weird at a lot of the end of ports where's she gone like it would be we need to move on in a second actually yeah we need to move on five minutes ago anything before we do um just one one little thing british uh there's a thing called the better than average effect where you'll you'll have heard lots of people most people consider themselves better than average drivers there was a study on uh british prisoners which found that they rate themselves as more ethical and more moral than british people who are not in prison they also think they are more they think they're more kind moral trustworthy honest dependable generous law-abiding self-controlled and generous the only category they didn't think they were

better than average on was law abidingness and even then they considered themselves average with everyone else okay it is time for fact number three and that is chasinski yep my fact is that in the first major battle of world war one the soldiers arrived by taxi and the taxi drivers duly charged the government 70,012 francs for the journey was the incentive to get soldiers to jump out of the taxis very quickly because the last guy would have to pay is that what you do i'd never noticed it but come to think about it well i think we're learning where these words wash and soak come from andy and this is this is the amazing story of the battle of the man which was a massive turning point in the first world war was september 1914 first major battle on the western front

and the germans were getting dangerously close to paris but that did mean that they could deploy all the paris taxi drivers and so the prison government sent 3000 soldiers by taxi from paris to the front the warfront in 600 cabs and everyone carried five soldiers so a bit of a squash because that's you know that's four squashed up in the back and then one in the front who has to make awkward conversation with the driver all the way there so what are you saying that later on they're in the trenches going well it's bad here but it's not as bad as the squash taxi that we had to get here in it must have looked quite bizarre because they weren't allowed to have their lights on except the taxi at the very front and everyone else just had to follow the back lights

the back red lights so they couldn't be spotted but yeah this is how they got to the front and then it was a turning point and the allies won it and happy news the war then went on for another four years so the account of it on wikipedia just reports that the germans were surprised it's a very important element of war they did i do love that they got charged for it taxi drivers you know however much they want to do their duty for their country in the end you have deprived them of a couple of fares so yeah 70 000 francs well it's such a big big steep journey yeah it is london used to send in double-decker buses during the war effort as well and that was amazing because they were those are big buses not the modern ones obviously the sort of the old classics

and they were going down these country roads which obviously weren't built to take these double-decker buses so what would often happen is they would come across another double-decker bus from another ally coming the other way try and get past each other but tip over and so the roads were littered would tip over buses that they couldn't get back up to function were they littered was it like you know you can't stretch your arms out on this row without bumping into a double-decker bus it just some of those ones actually because they were used for lots of different things they were used as ambulances and for transport the london buses and some of them were used to carry pigeon to carry carry pigeons to carry carry pigeons and they had special pigeon lofts built on the

top of them so they're really cool pictures of these double-decker buses with a pigeon loft kind of house built on top of it and brought them over that's amazing you think the pigeons could just fly over you thought but they were actually all conscientious objectors so they really had to be forced there is some stuff on taxis yeah okay yeah um so in the uk um it's illegal to get into a taxi if you have plague unless you tell the taxi driver so you're not allowed to withhold it from him um and this is actually there's all sorts of different diseases this is according to the public health control of diseases act of 1985 um so if you have the plague cholera relapsing fever smallpox or typhus then you have to tell the taxi driver but also weirdly food poisoning

you need to and these are all if you also if you want to go to a library and get a book out and you have plague you have to tell the driver that you're going to the library it's none of his fucking business it is it is kind of his business where you're going yeah I've got a taxi story this is from 2015 and it's a story about a taxi in Britain it was that in 2015 a group of friends tricked a taxi driver out of a 140 pound fare by leaving a mannequin in a hat in the back seat and pretending it was their sleeping friends

oh really they went from Brighton to London which is about 50 miles it's a very long journey lucky cabin and they were like oh no you need to take Derek here up to Manchester and they just they got the two of them they got out and they left the guy the mannequin in the hat and they said our friends asleep but will you wake him up here's the address and where did they send him to that's what I want to know it was it wasn't too far on yeah because he might have got he might have worked it out right he might have worked it out yeah do you know some other cars that drove from Brighton to London were it was such a pointless link it's about taxis I mean were the world's first fleet of electric taxis and these were in 1897 so electric cars came along

and most cars were taxis then and so in 1897 they wanted to show off they were called hummingbirds because they made the sound of a hummingbird whenever they drove along and they travelled maximum 12 miles an hour usually more like nine and as part of the unveiling they did the London to Brighton journey which as you say is about 50 miles although they weren't actually able to complete the journey and they had to do part of the race by train so the other the other reason they were unpopular the electric cars was because they had electric lighting inside and people didn't really like that because people with a bashful disposition felt as conspicuous as if they were on the stage with the limelight on them and so people didn't like having lights on so was the

light on while they were driving uh it was on you the passengers oh that's so weird okay so the first taxis were sedan chairs right in London and they were well all over um but they were very good precisely for the opposite reason which is that there was no light on you at all and you were surrounded by fabric so it was extremely discreet um and the best thing was they could go into your house and up the stairs so if that's really awesome they were really good that's like getting an uber and the guy carries you up to bed so you know they were faster than carriages lots of narrow stairways two guys carrying you up there and basically if you were having an affair or you're trying to avoid a rest you just get into a sedan chair in your house and say take me to that house

second floor please and they'll do it what yeah as a connection our uh our mother show qi um steven fry his car is a london black cab and he's it's fine now because he lives in the countryside in norfolk but he used to live in london and most of his days were people just hopping into the back and seeing steven fry up i had that steven fry in the front of my care prince philip our prince philip and yours that was a risky one man yeah he had a he had a private cab but he only gave it up last year did he okay yeah good so um you know the first drunk driving incident was a taxi driver and this was also in 1897

this was a cab driver called george smith who drove his taxi straight into the side of a building and wrote it off he was arrested for drunk driving first person ever and the police officers couldn't prove it but they knew he was drunk because apparently he was acting drunk and he said he was drunk but that after that they realized that they needed a test for it and that's where the breathalyzer came from so they based the breathalyzer on that and initially it was a balloon and you blew into a balloon and then you put the end of the balloon over a sort of a bottle of chemicals which changed from purple to yellow and it didn't work very well because there was no measure of how drunk you were it just changed from purple to yellow and you went i don't know how yellow is

that is that like yellow and is that bright enough yellow yeah let's arrest him oh we need to move on very soon um i read that the words do you know where the word taxi comes from um no taxes like tax arrangement it means movement in latin yeah it comes from the word taxi meter oh okay isn't that weird oh what was what was the taxi meter before a taxi then it had it had a different name but then someone invented the taxi meter and then we're like oh that's a fantastic what are we going to put this in yeah so they built a car around it okay we need to move on to our final fact of the show and that is james okay my fact this week is that the gulf corvina fish has such loud sex that it can deafen dolphins

that is they shouldn't be listening the perverse so the gulf corvina is a mexican fish they have sex in huge orgies with lots of these fish and they have mating calls that sound like rapid sounding pulses like a machine gun and you get a whole load of them together because it's an orgy and that's what happens i believe in orgies and apparently it sounds like a crowd cheering at a football stadium or a really really loud beehive and there was a guy who studies them called timothy rothwell and he said that the sound was literally so loud that he had to shout to talk to the rest of the team when he was studying them and he's above water so you can still hear it there yeah it's incredible i listened to a sound

file of it today and yeah you could sound only i know right i'm missing out on the good stuff um it uh it does sound like a sort of kind of like a like a machine gun sound that you were talking about i imagine you know when in australia when you press those buttons to cross the street and it just goes like that yeah that's that's actually not many people know that that's the sound of a little known fact and this um kind of an orgy thing the frenzy thing that they do basically sees all of the world's adult covinas gathered in less than one percent of their usual home so they all come from all different places they all come to this one place so it's like everyone getting into one cupboard for the orgy not really it's less than one percent of their

usual home yeah but that it's like that but everyone in your home so which will just be you and your girlfriend i guess well it's just like you and your girlfriend getting in a cupboard i worked out the numbers and it was a bit like it's a bit like everyone in london going to disneyland once a year to have sex about that size and that i know is a contravention of park rules i don't like it and how do you know that that's why you guys have to do it in the cupboard now right everyone knows is disneyland or a cupboard i mean it's actually really inconvenient for these fish that they do this right because yeah as you say they all gather together um to have sex and they're

really tasty they're a delicacy and fishermen go to where they gather to have sex and then they make this huge noise to really advertise exactly where they are and so fishermen know exactly where to go to fish for them yeah it's not the worst um fish sex tactic so there is a fantastic book uh by mara j heart it's called sex in the sea i highly recommend it it's all about this sort of thing i don't recommend never you mind why i recommend it all for that matter why i bought it but it has information about fish you were very disappointed it was a non-fiction but quite you anyway no they're a fish called grunion and they to have sex throw themselves onto land which is very inconvenient because they are fish and the female has to dig a hole in the sand and

then bury herself in the sand until there's only her head sticking out she starts laying eggs and then the male jumps on her and spoons her and and has sex with her and he uses her as a slide for his sperm which lands on the eggs and then they have to try and catch a wave back it sounds like the most inconvenient mating ritual you can imagine and yeah she actually can't breathe through any of it right um so it's so unpleasant and it they're orges as well aren't they so often she's got a few males curved around her while suffocating to death whilst attempting to procreate it's very bad deal we actually have it quite good guys by comparison i started reading about so it dolphins are going death off the back of these fish having sex and um i was looking into dolphin sex to see

what they and there's this is really cool this is a um did you watch flipper three in the course of your research so uh this is Australian scientists have found that um dolphins they've observed them doing this new thing where they come to surface and they pull like a banana shape so their head goes up and their back goes up and they sit there like a big banana and that's apparently really attractive and they go well look at the banana and they and and that's like a new mating thing that we've not noticed before this was last year that we discovered this and also what they do is um these are humpback dolphins they dig down and they break off coral and they wear them on their nose as a little hat so they have a hat yeah and again so they're mid-banana move with coral on their nose and people or the

other dolphins are looking at them going sexy yeah that's sex yeah although they like to avoid males sometimes so dolphin females are often really hassled by the males and kind of gang banged um and so they really will have lots of males chase them at the same time try to have sex with them and they flip over in the water and they stick their reproductive parts out of the water and the males can't get to them at all really yeah um yeah they also slap them in the face with their tails quite a lot when they're being chased um sorry i said coral sponges they put sponges on their nose yeah yeah that makes more sense though yeah there's i was looking at some fish sounds oh yeah because underwater creatures have the most amazing ways of making noise and it works

completely differently underwater so clown fish make a chirping noise by gnashing their teeth they literally the only way they communicate is by snapping their teeth together um their oyster toad fish they make a blare like a falcon noise by contracting their swimming bladders and there's gourami which snap the tendons of their pectoral fins so they basically clap their fins together i suppose in order to communicate with each other that's cool they can be super loud fish they've they um have been known to keep people awake at night haven't they i think we've covered various things in the past a lot of the facts here are going to keep me awake at night but i think the problem was is that um Jacques Cousteau did a documentary didn't he in 1956 called the Silent

World oh yeah and it was all about the underwater um but basically his diving tanks masked all the sounds of the water so he was like oh it's so quiet in here but actually that's just where his microphones were and so lots of people thought it was really quiet but like you're like you say Anna it is loud as hell is it even though it doesn't really work very well with our ears because i thought this was really interesting so sound waves uh because they travel a different way in water to how they do an air and we've got air in our ear that's why sound is messed up for us underwater but that's also why whales you know they have huge amounts of wax in their ears so you see um whales earwax it comes you know many many inches long earwax and that's kind of the same density

as water so that means that the sound waves can travel into their ears and they'd be fine but it's assumed that if they came up onto the surface they would be deaf in air really so yeah that's how you make a fish deaf i just on sex sounds peacocks have been observed um on land um as opposed yeah um they peacocks they do not thrive underwater so peacocks um have been found to be doing a false sex sound in order to attract mates so what will happen is while they're mating they have the sound that they do which is um which they'll just go the whole way through the do it now come on i haven't annoyingly could not find that audiophile um but they uh so they make this sound and then the thing is it's a very loud sound that the male makes so while it's happening

other females in the area will hear it at a distance and go oh that sounds like a good guy to reproduce with which is what they're trying to do so that's what they listen out for and if they the reason that that's good that sound is it means that someone has picked them as genetically uh good to reproduce since that's very important so peacocks that are not good at reproducing genetically have worked out this trick where if they just make the sound even though they're not having sex female peacocks will hear them in the distance going whoa that guy must be awesome and and head over it to do it um i think we've we've discussed this before i think it's so a lot of animals do these fake coals but there are some where they can't do fake coals isn't it and

i reckon it's is it elans they click their knees or something like that they do and they that is a thing which is attractive to women if they click their knees yeah um but only the big ones can make the noise and it's impossible for the small ones to fake it yes it's an honest signal whereas the peacocks can just stand in their windows going oh wow oh yeah what's that oh yeah i know i'm good what great wow okay that is it that is all of our facts thank you so much for listening if you would like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast we can be found on our twitter accounts i'm on at schreiberland andy at andrew hunter ebb 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 our facebook page which is no such thing as a fish we have a website no such thing as a fish dot com we have there's a lot edit put no such thing as a fish in the internet you'll get something um and uh we will be back again next week with another episode guys you have been amazing thank you so much we'll see you then goodbye