No Such Thing As A Fish - 263: No Such Thing As Millipede Lipbalm

Episode Date: April 5, 2019

Live from Cambridge, Dan, James, Anna and Andrew discuss silk-spinning goats, the invention of the scooter, and millipede PR problems.

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast. This week, coming to you live from Cambridge, my name is Dan Shriver and I am sitting here with Anna Chazinski, Andrew Hunts of 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 my fact, my fact this week is that adult scooters were invented by a Swiss banker who was hungry for a sausage. That's true. This was in the 1990s, there was a man who was a Dutch Swiss banker and he was called Wim Obeter and he was at home one night and he suddenly really wanted a sausage and he thought, you know,

it's what he called a micro distance. It wasn't far enough to get in a car and drive there and find car parking. What, a sausage shop? Yeah, he had a favorite sausage shop and it wasn't close enough that he could walk to it and he thought, why is there not a device that I could use to get me there? And then he suddenly had the idea of turning what was only available really for kids, kid scooters. Why not make an adult version of that? So he invented that as a result. But by the time he's invented it, he's not going to want a sausage anymore. That's the sad bit of this story. He starved to death in the manufacturing process. So when he eventually had a prototype, he took it down to his town and everyone laughed

at him because the idea of an adult on a scooter was seen as a really ridiculous. Ten years later and with the support of his wife, he had the prototype made into a real thing. It started going to market. It went to big sales and then in America, it got sold with the name Razor, Razor scooters, which I grew up riding and that was him. It was down to the man wanting a sausage. And he said he gave them sex appeal, which is something I haven't seen evidence of yet on adults on scooters. But he said he described it was like the tiny wheels, the polished aluminium and the foam handlebars, the combination of those three things gives them more sex appeal than your average kid's thing. I don't know if foam

handlebars are sexy, but maybe that's just me. I've got weird taste. There was a kind of really, really, really proto scooter which was invented in the early 19th century. So it was called the dandy horse. It was technically called a pedestrian curicle. So it was invented in 1818 was when it was first patented and it had other names. It was called a swift walker or a pedestrian's accelerator. That was the name that was given. I can't believe this. This is three years after the Battle of Waterloo was over, but it was for fashionable dandies in town. And what it was was imagine a bicycle and just take away the pedals. Okay, so you sit astride it on the saddle and then you just have to push yourself along the

ground on either side. This was the ultra fashionable device in London to have, you know, there were only about 300 of them made. But it's the bizarre thing about the dandy horse is, it appeared, as you say, in 1817, it was invented as probably 1818. And it's suddenly come back, right? So that's what you see kids going around on them today. They're local balance bikes or whatever. And it helps them cycle. And also it was fashionable for a year. So invented 1817, really fashionable in London, 1818 disappeared by 1819. And you can find articles by the 1830s, you've got articles going, God, you remember the dandy horse? That was weird, wasn't it? But that's actually true of the adult scooters as well. Yeah, they are coming back in America,

especially. But in 1999, they had $4 million worth of sales 4.5. In 2000, it was 70 million. And in 2001, it had gone back down to 6 million. So it's just that one year where they became absolutely massive. Yeah. And then quite a few people got injured, I think. Well, what yeah, what happened was is he the problem he had was he made this new innovation, you could fold it was it could go in your bag. Everyone got excited immediately. Every country that had copies, you know, pirated copies made got in on the action. So the market was flooded with all this stuff. And as you say, handles weren't made properly. So people were chopping their were not chopping their fingers off, but damaging. One person lost one person lost a bit

of a finger due to a cheap imitation. Yeah, exactly. They made the handles out of knives or something. That's sexy. They're made now. There is this the town that it's produced in as a it's just outside of Zurich and it's called Kusnacht. And it's where they manufacture or where the headquarters for this razor company is without the name razor, his original company. And it's a really cool town. It sounds like there's a lot of amazing stuff that's happened and going on there. So notable people outside of this razor that is there from that town include Julius Maggi, who invented the pre-cooked soup Maggi noodles from this tiny, tiny town. Carl Jung was from there. I usually have led with Carl Jung. Well, how about this? Tina Turner lives there since 1994.

Yeah, Carl Jung, Tina Turner and the Maggi noodle guy. Yeah, you put those in the wrong order. They were clarified. But it's bizarre that scooters, even though we're claiming that this guy invented them, they are not a new invention. And I really had no idea that these motorized scooters that you see today were first properly invented in 1915. And there are loads of pictures in the early 20th century of people going around on them. And again, it was short lived between about 1915 and 1922. They were partly a response to wartime gas rationing. So they didn't use up very much petrol. And it was in America, and they would come with head and tail lights and a toolbox. And policemen used them. Post was delivered on them. Postmen used them for a while.

Wait, sorry. Are these things like Vespers or are they things like? No, you're standing. You're standing on them. You're standing like a child, but with a small motor. Yeah. And they had even, I did read a source that said they were used by a New York gang called the Bog Trotters, the Long Island Bog Trotters. You did exist. And this is written in a lot of books. I've struggled to find the primary newspaper reports that talk about the Bog Trotters disappearing down alleyways on push scooters. But yeah, apparently they were really useful for getting away from police. They just do a motorized scooter down an alleyway. Yeah, it's possible, I guess. If you commit a crime at the top of a hill, you're laughing.

I found something about sort of development of new kinds of transport. Okay. Similar wartime transport innovation. So motorized rollerskates. So separate rollerskates with motors inside them were invented in the Second World War for people in the war. Well, the inventors suggested that would have been, I mean, the war. I'm not going to say the war is fun because war isn't fun. No, but if we all had motorized rollerskates, it would have taken the edge off. It would have taken the edge off. Well, the guy who invented them was called Tom Hancox. He took the mower out of a lawn mower and he basically put these, he put these engines on these rollerskates and his footage, Pathé news footage of him scootering around and he's even got a little trailer on the

back which his daughter sits on and she's just sitting there going along the road. And he suggested that soldiers could use them to save on marching and he was not taking up on his offer basically. But they're coming back. Those are the Segway last year invented motorized rollerskates. Really? Really? They were not greeted with great favor. Headlines included Segway is back and it's coming for your last shred of dignity. Segway's East Gates are a whole new way to look cool while falling over and Wired magazine named them the object in the office most likely to kill you. Yeah, but these electric scooters, they are quite popular now in America in a lot of cities. They have like a kind of Uber thing or a Boris bike kind of thing where you can,

you can take them for a small amount of money and take them around. Can't you? A Lyman bird are the two main companies. The problem is they're new. And so for instance, the scooters that Bird has got their rebranded Xiaomi devices, which have a weight limit of 200 pounds, when the average American man weighs 197.9 pounds. And a couple of weeks ago, Lyme did an official statement saying there was a bug that caused sudden excessive braking. And they said it's all right, it only happens when being ridden downhill at top speed. Excessive braking is not what you want, is it? No, basically you'd go downhill and you'd hit something small on the road and the whatever's in there in the scooter makes it think that it's a

massive obstacle and just immediately stops. They did say, I should say for the legal reasons, that fewer than 0.0045% of all rides worldwide have been affected. That's not covered. The Segway has a checkered history, doesn't it? And the guy who invented the Segway, Dean Cayman, in fact, thought it was going to take over the world. And he called it ginger after Ginger Rogers because I guess they're so elegant. But he also invented a bunch of other things. So he invented a robotic wheelchair which goes upstairs, which is quite cool. So the wheels climb over each other so you can get up the stairs. He also invented a person cannon. This is technically called a controllable launcher and it's a cannon that fires its payload,

as in the person that you put in it, onto the top of buildings. So if you're... I mean, that does sound really cool, doesn't it? Hang on, do you set the height of the building that you want to get onto the top of? Of course you do. They're not all set up to be the size of the shard. And then you've just got a one-story house. You wouldn't want to be going to the top of the shard, though, because even if you get right to the top, you're instantly impaled from the shard. This is the worst building to land on in the world. What if you work on the 15th floor in the building's 30th floor spot? You're still as far away. Could you open a window and just get propelled through that? Wait, what do you mean open a window? They don't want to go inside the

building. It's not just a quick way of getting to work. What are you saying, really? You were saying it fires you onto the top of a building. Yes, if you're... Sorry, if you're a fireman or something, the building's on fire. If there's a terrorist up there, it's not just, oh, I'm too lazy to use the lift. I don't want to be with a scum in there. Just get my purse and can I? If there's a terrorist up there, I would have been a great see to die hard with Bruce Willis, because a lot to the top of the... He said it was... His potential uses were anti-terrorism. I don't remember when terrorists have hidden on the top of buildings, and we haven't been able to get to them. But this is what we need when they do. And apparently it would land you gently

at a safe impact distance from the end. It won't, it won't. They thought the second one would be bigger than the internet, though. They said this is going to be the biggest thing since the internet. They said this is going to render cars obsolete. And then the problem with it is that they did it in massive secrecy. So they were really paranoid when they were making it that Japan was working on something similar. So everyone who was making it had to have all their blinds nailed down, properly taped shut so no one could see anything. But they couldn't test it because they were so paranoid about other people seeing it. So they were astonished when it was let outside and only weirdos and nerds used them. I've got four. Well, exactly. I'm going to have to move us on in a

second to our next fact. I've got one tiny fact. This is just about sort of little motorised forms of transport. Since Donald Trump became the president, the Secret Service has spent $300,000 renting golf carts from him so they can protect him while he plays golf. Yeah. Just in case anyone was on the fence about him at this point. Okay, it's time for fact number two, and that is Anna. My fact this week is that goats have been engineered to produce spider silk because when farmers tried to get the spiders to do it themselves, they just kept eating each other. And this is an amazing thing that goats were engineered to do in the early 2000s. They have been genetically spliced with the protein from spiders that makes

their silk. And apparently some farmers have been trying to farm spider silk for over 100 years, but it's a complete nightmare because they're territorial cannibalistic predators that will eat anything in their way, especially with the spider. So yeah, it didn't work. And then they finally found out that you can put these genes in goats, which don't tend to eat each other. Unless you've got a very unhappy farm and they're what's called transgenic. So a transgenic goat is transgenic is when you have the DNA of something totally different put into you, and it comes out in their milk. They're not just weaving these webs, you can't go and see the goats. They don't get glands, silk glands inserted. You don't come in the morning and you're in the farm

and your goats are going to treat the stock. Imagine if you got bit by a radioactive goat of this kind. Just having to explain your superpower would be so long. The reason I've climbed up this apparently sheer wall of a dam is a niche goat reference. So the spiders, the early versions where they did this, they put a spider in a tiny little almost like the stocks, you know, if you throw like eight holes. It was just for the abdomen and you put the spider in there and then you'd put a thing in and it would pull all the spider silk out. But the thing is they kept all the spiders together and eventually the spider spun the webs over the walls. So it was completely covered,

which meant that no other insects or mosquitoes could get in. And so they ended up not having anything to eat, which is why they all at each other. And then eventually there was only a few left alive, but they were all absolutely massive because they'd eaten all their mates. Just a thing on spider silk that I didn't know is how useful it has been already in the past. So for instance, it's been totally vital to astronomy. I don't know this. So for 250 years, it was used in telescopes and it's using the eyepieces of telescopes and it acts as a kind of as crosshairs, basically. So if you're looking through a normal telescope, you see a shadow of stars, you need some kind of reference point. It's amazing you never got that job in the sky of

night. Do you think that's a common complaint that they go, oh man, it's too many? It was, it's not that it's too many, it's that you can't pinpoint where they are. And so what you do is you need crosshairs to act as a reference point and the perfect crosshairs are spider silk. And so they've been used in telescopes for hundreds of years. They used to have a spider silk collector, Greenwich of the Observatory until the 1950s. And I was actually reading the astronomical guidelines from the 1890s about how to collect spider silk and it says you have to stand on a stool and you hang a spider from a piece of wood and then as it drops, you wind its thread with a fork. So you just collect its thread with a fork. So this poor spider thinks it's dropping and

dropping and is just saying the same place. And then it sometimes says if a rachne is inclined, however, to be obstinate, gently blow on her with a full steady breath and she will weave. But this is how they've been pinpointing where stars are. That's incredible. It's amazing. I can't believe that you can collect it and store it like that. Oh yeah. Well, another thing was in war, it's very useful. So in the Second World War, it was used in gun sights for the same reason. You put it on the lens of gun sights and it was exactly that reason to help you focus. And there was a team of spider ticklers who were employees. Yep, the US employee, the main one was called Nan Songa and a bunch of other women who tickled spiders. She tickled so many webs out of spiders

that the US had to appeal to Mexico for extra spider imports because she'd exhausted all the web available in America. I mean, how many spiders are there in America? She kind of tickled every single one. She was pacing through those spiders. You're on roller skates. You, you're tickling spiders. What's going on? Do we want to win this war? I think there's been debate, not serious debate, but debate nonetheless about what kind of spider bit Spider-Man. The theory is that... Finally, we've got to the big issue of the night. Spider-Man must be one or another kind of spider, because it wasn't just any old spider that bit him, was it? So, so tarantulas probably produced silk from their feet, but that's interesting. Oh yeah, because he doesn't, when he fires the silk,

it's out of his hands. He doesn't pull it out of his bum, does he? Yes, if he had been bitten by a radioactive house spider, he would have to laboriously, like his costume would look very different for example. And they really wanted to make the film a PG, so they were like, find me another species, mate. Yeah, I mean, it's worth saying that Spider-Man has gadgets that shoot out the web. It's not actual web shooting out of his arms. Really? When the movie's at least. He can stick to walls, can't he? Or does he have like sticky gloves? He can stick to walls. He can stick to walls. I did not know that. The thing is, the four people who know least about Spider-Man in this room are sat on the stage. Everyone else is going off for fuck's sake, guys.

If you don't have any fishing bait when you're going fishing, an alternative to use, particularly if you're in the Solomon Islands, is spider silk. They have a fish there, which is called the needlefish, and its mouth is too small to eat any of the classic luring bait that you use. So what they do there is they use like a kite string, so they throw that out into the water, and they attach to it blobs of rolled up silk from a spider's web, and they will just bounce it on the water. And what happens is, is that these fish come up, and they leap into it, and they get stuck to it, and then they pull them back, and that's how they catch them. So that's their bait. Couldn't they then just swim off, but with a mouth that's stuck together?

No, because the guy's got the kite string. He's pulling them back in. You've got the kite string. Sorry, got it. Yeah, yeah. No, you haven't just thrown a bit of... Sorry. You've never been great at fishing, have you, Andy? Just throw the rod in there with everything. Just sit by the side of the lake for two hours. I found it very calming. Okay, I'll be back. That's shown that fish. I bet that's really uncomfortable in its mouth right now. That's fishing. Okay, we're gonna have to move on to fact number three, and that is Andy. My fact is that when King George VI visited Washington, an American chemist provided the royals with special London water so they could have exactly the same tea as they had in Britain. And this was

the first time any king had visited a sitting US president because of all the unpleasantness previously. Can I ask this water? It wasn't that they brought it over from London, or was it? No, they didn't. They made it up. They sort of analysed the chemicals in it, and a chemist called Betts offered to provide special London water. And the White House said, that's a very nice inhospitable thing to do. We'll have five gallons of it. And then halfway through the royal visit, Betts got another telegram saying, we find we will need far more water than we asked for. Would it be possible? And could you be so kind as to furnish us with 20 more gallons? Because the royals evidently drank a lot more tea than the Americans are bound for. I looked it up.

If that was small cups of tea, the original consignment would have made 120 small cups of tea, and then they asked for enough to make another 500 cups of tea. Wow. And he was only there four days or something, wasn't he? Yeah. So it must have been lots of people drinking it. So it was just the king. It was a big trip. When they went there, they were received outside the White House by over 250,000 people. It was Mayhem. Everyone came out to see that. They made a lot of trips. This was when the war was about to kick off. So it was very symbolic, the trip that they were doing. And George VI went to visit the tomb of George Washington, who obviously was a foe of his great, great, great grandfather. So that was a huge symbolic moment to visit the man who

effectively kicked us out of America. And so that is his revolting tea all over that tombstone. They also, as well as that, they had hot dogs for the first time. The first time a royal had had a hot dog. The headline in the New York Times said, King tries hot dog and asks for more. The hot dogs were served on a silver tray. And apparently the queen at the time, which we would know as the queen mother, she asked Roosevelt how to eat a hot dog. And Roosevelt said, very simple, push it into your mouth and keep pushing until it is all gone. It's good advice in general, I think. It's a sure-fire recipe for choking. Well, then she used the knife and fork after that. No photographers are allowed to take photos.

Of the royals eating hot dogs? Yeah. I think you're not allowed to take photos of the queen eating now, are you? You don't want that phallic shot, do you? You don't want the hot dog going into the queen's mouth wholesale. You don't want the president of the United States shoving a sausage in the queen's face, do you? It's bad, Pierre. I looked up a little bit about tea. You know Carl Linnaeus, who's famous for categorizing life. He was really desperate. He wanted to import a lot of plants because he was a specimen collector. And he was desperate to bring back tea from the east. And time and time again, he failed to bring back any tea from the east. He tried 20 different times to get a single tea plant from China where it was at the time.

But what happened? Did he keep getting halfway through and then just thinking, oh, I could do with a brew? Well, they died en route. Other times they were eaten by Razzle Mice. There was once a time where he had a student called Pierre Osbeck who had managed to source a tea plant and he got it all the way to the Cape of Good Hope sailing all the way back from China. And then there was a sudden whirlwind and it was blown overboard. Another one, another one fell off ship when the ship blasted a ceremonial gun as it left the harbour. Put it below deck. What are they doing? I know, I know. But why have they only got one specimen each time? I reckon like the 13th or 14th time I've been like,

why don't we take two this time just in case? So the following assistant after the gun debug, he was called Lagerström and he brought a plant back to Uppsala. He managed it, he made it, brought a plant back, and then he nourished it over two years before finding out it was the wrong one. Was it because, is this in China that he was taking the plant from? Yeah, so it was that China had a stronghold over tea and they didn't want any, that could, that was the biggest, most dangerous thing to their economy for you to take that out. And there was, as a result of someone actually managing to smuggle it out and setting it up, that's what gave birth to so much of how the West became powerful basically through tea. It was,

if I made that up, I feel like you're looking at me like I made that up. Some more clarity wouldn't go amiss. So I was looking at tea, so tea's a very British thing. The Brits have been very proud of their tea making, their cons, their addicted to tea basically have been for a long time. And to the extent that in war it's been really useful and every single tank, every single armored tank to this day has tea making facilities in it. And this is because it caused a serious problem in the war. So in the Second World War, just off the Normandy landings, there was a British battalion, a British tank battalion, who had a couple of minutes to spare. So they did what all British troops did with a couple

of minutes to spare. They popped out of their tanks. Tickled a few spiders. And they tickled some spiders. Had a quick roll of skate. And they made a tea and they made this tea and the enemy saw that they were doing that and they sort of destroyed them and their tanks. And so it became apparent that there needed to be tea making facilities within tanks. And you couldn't put petrol and light fires in tanks to make tea. And so tanks were all equipped in their little funnel in the sort of chimney with proper tea making facilities that were designed for tanks that used the electricity that the tank used. And it was inside the turret and they are still used to this day. And it was because the Brits needed to drink tea at all times. So cool. That's amazing.

Even in tanks. We're going to have to move on shortly to our final fact. Can I just, I've got some stuff about milk and tea. So the way the Brits drink tea is with milk. And I wanted to know when that actually started. And so the first person to recommend drinking tea with milk was a guy called Thomas Garway in 1670. So no one drunk tea with milk then, most other countries they don't. But he wrote a pamphlet called an exact description of the quality and virtues of leave tea drawn up for the satisfaction of persons of quality. And he gave a bunch of reasons why tea is a great thing to drink. So he said, if you add milk to it, it avoids looseness in the bowels, which is quite good to know, I think.

He also said the good thing about tea is it prevents fevers by provoking a most gentle vomit. Tea was really weird then. He said it makes the body active and lusty. And he said that this is something that he learned from Japanese law that had been brought over. The best tea ought to be gathered by virgins. They're the only people who are qualified to gather the best tea. Yes. You were saying about vomiting. The reason that we have tea in Britain is due to vomiting. And this is because when Charles II married Catherine of Briganza of Portugal, she brought the idea of tea over. It had been, a few people had had it, but it wasn't really popular. And she came over to the UK on a boat and it was an extremely stormy crossing. And when

she arrived, she was feeling really, really sick. So she asked for a cup of tea and everyone went, what the fuck's tea? And they didn't know what tea was. And so they gave her instead a glass of ale, which unsurprisingly did not make her feel better at all. And so she decided that we're going to have to have a lot more tea in the country. And then it became much more popular thanks to that. Really? Okay. God imagine if you went traveling and you got to the other end and they said, what the fuck's tea? You'd go back. Have you ever heard of America? Okay. It's time for our final fact of the show. And that is James. Okay. My fact this week is that many millipede researchers are annoyed that more than 70 years after World War Two, the animals

are still associated with the Nazis. It's certainly the first symbol I have in mind when I think Nazi. So this is true, apparently. Oh, a very early qualifier there. Well, I was told this by a good friend, Erica McAllister, who works in the Natural History Museum. Why are they Nazi insects? Well, I googled it and apparently it comes from the Dig for Victory campaign. So do you remember during World War Two, the people who were left home, they weren't tickling spiders and they weren't playing with the roller skates and stuff like that. They were making food at home so that we wouldn't run out of food. And so they sent a load of pamphlets around to everyone saying, this is what you have to do. This is how to plant sprouts and this is how to dig up potatoes. But it also said this is

what you have to do with pests. And they had a picture of a centipede and a picture of a millipede. And they said the centipede was a fast moving friend. And the millipede was a slow moving enemy. And they showed you how to tell the difference between the two of them. And the millipede was holding a massive swastika. And sorry, is that the main way you tell the difference even today? But the reason was that centipedes eat insects and millipedes eat plant matter. And so if you're making vegetables, what you don't want is insects that are going to eat the roots of your plants. But you do want centipedes that might eat the other pests. But in actual fact, millipedes mostly eat decaying organic matter. They have very weak mouths, so they can't really

eat tubers and stuff like that. So it was completely ridiculous. I can't eat a tuber. Fair play to you. Too silly. Well, thank God we've resuscitated the reputation of the millipede. Everyone thought was a fascist. Millipedes don't have a thousand legs. Sometimes researching the show is just horrible. They have 750 as the most they've ever had. There is a theory that one day there could be a millipede with a thousand legs. Why? How come? Because I believe that some of them develop extra legs the longer they live. Really? Yeah. Well, they all do. Millipedes all add legs to themselves as they're growing. So when they're born, they're born with about three pairs of legs. And it's kind of like they're adding to

each other like their leg or something or like a conga line. They're constantly adding a new segment. They shed, they molt, and then they add a new segment with legs. So if they live forever, I guess they would, but... If they live forever, yes. A thousand years. A thousand years. Just like the Third Reich was predicted to. More and more evidence as we look for it. Well, this is the really cool one. It's called Iliakmi plenipedes, which is the one with the most legs ever. It's only lives in California under a particular boulder. No, sorry. It lives in a very small four and a half square kilometers, not a boulder, four and a half square kilometers. It was found under a boulder. It was missing for 80 years, and then it was rediscovered. It should have just

looked under the boulder. Yeah, should have looked in Argentina. It's too much. It's too much. But this is, oh, this is a really weird thing. The male of this species, Iliakmi plenipedes, or plenipers, it has converted two of its legs into sex organs, which is a thing that some animals can do. That's what millipedes tend to do. Their legs turn into penises. How? How did that? During puberty. Imagine that, 13 years old, and one of your legs turns into a penis. That's a rough day at school, isn't it? You would hope to get it. Your shoes would fit. And why aren't you doing PE today? Yeah, it sounds really traumatic, actually. Their whole bodily makeup changes. This is a recent

study that looked into what happens when they hit puberty, and it's usually on their fifth, sixth, or seventh segment, those legs turn into a gonopod, or gonopod. And it's basically, it's sort of penises that clasp the female while they put sperm into her. And it involves the rearrangement of all their internal organs, basically. And it's an exhausting process in terms of energy consumption to turn your legs into a penis. And so some adolescent male millipedes go through reverse adolescence, because they develop the penis legs, and then they're so exhausted. They're basically at starvation level, because they've used so much energy. And so they go backwards again. They're like, I'm knackered. I can't deal with this whole sexually majority. So wait, do they turn their

leg penises back into legs? Yeah. Yeah. They're reverse adolescents. Wow. What? Imagine if Spider-Man was bitten by a millipede. This one's definitely got PG, guys. So, okay, well, Madagascar's giant pill millipedes, they have a music making organ on the backside. The males is called a harp, and the females is a washboard. And basically it's like a load of ridges, but both sexes have a knob on their backside of the last pair of legs, which they rub across their backsides to make noises. Wow. So like the female sounds a bit like a washboard, and the male sounds like, it's like a skiffle group. Whereas a lot of them are deaf as well, tragically. So they make this music to seduce each other, but they can't hear. And so we don't really know what

the point is. Wow. Maybe they're feeling the vibrations in their hairs. Yeah. But they can't hear the beautiful skiffle music that's been created. It's very sad. You know, some of them have, this is just quite a cool thing, they have spiral stomachs to give themselves a larger surface area to digest food, because obviously they're very, very long. So if the food is going around a spiral, it gets maximum surface area. Oh, that is clever. Very clever. Very clever. They give each other back massages as well. Yeah. This is actually how they seduce their mates, is they give the ladies a back massage. So the millipede's defence mechanism is to curl up into a ball, into a spiral. And sometimes if she hears a male coming, she thinks, or she's a male coming, she thinks, oh,

that's a threat. And so she curls up tightly. And to try and seduce her, he'll walk over her back until she relaxes. Lower, lower, lower still. Got a long way to go. But that's, that's not, to me, if you, if you turn that into human terms, if you were seducing and you gave a back massage, you would go with hands. You wouldn't, anyone who gets a massage, when you suddenly feel someone standing on your back. Isn't that a thing? Like, there is something like, my wife had a massage the other day, and she had people walking all over her back. Yeah, it's a thing. There you go. And imagine if those people had 750 legs, that would be a good massage. I'm going to get a call. On one of them's a penis. You are never seeing them again.

We're going to have to wrap up shortly, guys. I've got one quick thing, which is that lemurs self-medicate using millipedes. This is really cool. So they get these infestations of threadworms, which are very nasty things, around their mouth and around their anuses. And they, they sort of crawl out and then they lay their eggs in your skin around those two areas, threadworms. They're very unpleasant to get. So lemurs have a particular kind of millipede, which has a chemical defense mechanism inside it, and it can blind and poison predators, and it's quite strong. So the lemurs chew on the millipedes, and then they rub the remains around their mouths and around their anuses, and then they swallow them. And that repels the threadworm.

It's an awful moment for the millipede when it thinks, oh, this is a real low point in my life, I'm being used as lip balm. Little does it know. The anus is coming. Okay, 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 at Shriverland, Andy, at Andrew Hunter M, James, at James Harkin, and Chazinsky. 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 a website, no such thing as a fish.com. We have links to our upcoming tour of both the UK and of Europe. Thank you so much for listening.

We'll be back again next week. We'll see you then. Goodbye.