No Such Thing As A Fish - Little Fish: Juan Trippe

Episode Date: December 14, 2025

Dan, James and Andy discuss YOUR facts. In episode seven, subjects include krill, coupes and cattle. And one of us learns a bit more about classical music. We also meet eight new Custodians of Fish Facts. 

Hey, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Little Fish. This is the show where we step back from our own four favorite facts from the last seven days. And we read out your favorite facts. If you'd like to submit some of your favorite facts, podcast at QI.com, send them there. And he goes through all the mail. And he picks out the best choice cuts for us to read out on this show. So we've all had our facts distributed. Who wants to open up with one? I'll do one. Let's do it. All right. This is from Gleb who writes, hi, love the show.

Long-suffering listener, first-time writer, yada, yada. So we know you do listen. Thanks for sticking with it, Gleb. It's not easy. It's hard enough doing it. Imagine having to be the listener all this. Well, Glebs' fact is this. In the 1930s, Pan Am, Pan American.

airline, were looking for a plane that could safely cross the Atlantic with cargo in one trip for their mail service. The guy who commissioned the design process was called Juan Tripp. Is that true? It's actually true. It's stunning. I went down a real trip wormhole on this. He was a big deal in the world of aviation. Yeah? Yeah, he was born in 1899 and he started founding aviation firms he founded panam and he pushed a lot of development of long range planes because before you know did you have to stop on the way like in the azores or something or did they just not do it i think i think there was a sort of northern route where you had a little hop over to greenland or northern canada something like that but basically it was really hard to do and in fact in those days all like

i read a thing that in the old days it took eight days to get from miami to buenos ayres in so like it was just a very, very slow process. And he set up all these air bases around the world, and he conceived this idea of, you know, shortening journeys. And he was a very big deal. And his nickname was mummy because he was so secretive. I actually don't think he needed a nickname. No, Juan Tripp is absolutely right. I think when you have such a solid name, you should probably rail against any nicknames. You're right. You're absolutely right. Why does mummy work for being secretive? He kept mum. He kept mum. That's right. Okay. He wasn't just wrapped up. in

cloth in those little lemon-scented refreshing towelettes that you get on a plane he lived inside those he lived off the plate

and there's one trip staring back at you yeah he was named Juan he wasn't Spanish at all no wasn't remote Hispanic or anything

nope his family were from Maryland and he was from North Europe his ancestry you know he was named either after his

mother's stepfather Juan or his great-uncle's Venezuelan wife Juanita or his mother's half-sister Juanita sources very quite widely. He was named after someone called Juan Juanita. It doesn't matter. You've never heard of this guy until a minute ago. It's not important. But I did the research and I had to hear it. But it is interesting that all those people are quite distantly related from him. Yeah, you're right actually. It's not like named after his father. No, it's always like his great uncles. Venezuela's wife. Almost like they put something in that you

wouldn't possibly be able to check using the normal records. Yeah. There you go. One trip. That's very good. Okay. Here is a fact from Bjorn Hauga. Bjorn writes, Hi, I love your show. Since you've been continuously delighting me with interesting facts, I thought I'd send you an interesting fact myself. That's why we're here, Bjorn. Bjorn read a book that said a quarter of the iron in the top 20 meters of the ocean is locked up in Krill. It's from a book called The Curious Life of Krill It sounds like they would know

But you know I didn't think there was that much iron In the ocean anyway So I was kind of unsure How important is And I also thought Is Krill Magnetic If it's got so much iron in it

Maybe it is Are you thinking fishing Fishing rod? I would say it'd be a really easy way to fish wouldn't it Just shove a magnet in the water Anyway it turns out There was a recent study

That looked how much iron Is in Krill in a place called Pritz Bay in Antarctica, which I think is named after the DJ Eric Pritz, who made the sun call on me in the 2000s. No, it wasn't. I was fooled. I thought about you, Dan.

I did not even question it, as you were saying it. They found that there's 19 milligrams per kilogram of iron in acrylic, which would be extremely weak or negligible for practical purposes when it comes to magnetism. But here is one interesting thing that I did. workout. A blue whale eats four tons of krill a day. So that means if you could take all the iron out of all the krill that a blue whale eats, you could get a single table knife worth of iron out of that blue whale every day. Wow. A beautiful fact. So would a blue whale go off in the

airport at security? No, again, the amounts of iron is extremely negligible compared to the weight of the stuff that's eating. It depends on what the whale does with the iron it eats. If the, if the iron is all concentrated in a special sort of iron gizzard or something, which I don't think science has proved or disproved yet. I'm fairly sure that it poos it out. Okay, so it's not like there's a cutlery drawer inside a whale

that steadily gets larger over its life. Starts developing butter shovels or whatever. Asparagus tongs. No, okay. That's James, what a... You've taken an already great fact. Yeah. And you've improved on it. Yeah. Well, it was a great fact beyond. Thank you very much for writing it.

Very good fact. I've got a fact that's been sent in here. It's a bit of a sexy one. Oh dear. You ready for a sexy one? I have a feeling that the way you read it is going to become less sexy. Let's see. Let's see how many people disagree.

He's doing a sexy voice. I'm doing my sexy dance as well. Yeah. Here we go. So this is from Conan from Singapore. Just like we think that champagne glasses were modeled after the shape of Marie Antoinette, which they are not. True, he puts in brackets.

I'm not the whole shape of her. It was supposed to be the coop, which is like the very shallow, rounded, was supposed to be based on her breast. Yeah, isn't it? There you go, right. Okay. But it's not. It's not.

No. And what Conan, or Conan is saying, is that in Hong Kong, what is true is that they sell a dumpling that is named after the breasts of an actress in Hong Kong called Amy Yip. And these are dumplings that can weigh up. 350 grams and they even have half full boiled eggs inside of them. Like women's breasts do, right? If my biology knowledge is anything to go by, I think that is how it works.

I actually remember Amy Yip, now that I've looked it up. I really know. She starred in quite a few Chinese movies that were slightly erotic. And I remember as a kid in the late 90s seeing a movie come on TV called Erotic Ghost Story and watching that and she was suddenly we see where it all comes from originally it was really steamy

like it was like I was way too young to be watching this movie what's interesting is because she was known largely for how voluptuous she was she never did full nude scenes in movies what they did was they used to do clever camera angles that would show side breast and so on

that gave you the impression that you think you had and this was known in the industry because she's called Amy Yip as a Yip-tees and it would be the not full exposure of Amy Gibbon movies yeah well well well and she's really cool she's amazing actress

I'll be honest Dan I sent it to you because there was a Hong Kong connection and I didn't realize I was giving you this Proustian moment catapulting you back to your first interest in the paranormal I'm sort of sorry but I'm actually not sorry I'm interested that that happened

yeah like Proust nibbled on a Madeline and that nibbled on a breast-shaped dumpling It's a big moment for me. Thank you, Andy. There's a new company in the UK that's just announced they've launched five actual breast-shaped champagne glasses. I think they've taken real women's breasts and they've modelled their glasses on that

as a kind of repost to the French saying these glasses actually are based on breasts. Very nice. Okay, let's go another fact to you, Andy. All right, here's one. This is from Sandeep Jandu, who's a biology PhD student studying mosquitoes. So has sent a fact about ants. There is an ant which produces offspring of a different species to the ant.

Okay. The original ant. It's insane. Like a surrogate? Kind of. You know what? I read this story quite recently. And good luck explaining it.

Okay. I'll give it to go. Basically, lots of ant queens, they produce workers. And a lot of them produce hybrid workers, taking sperm from, other species. This is called sperm parasitism. That's the thing that happens in several species. But these ants, they're called mesore ibericus. They're incredibly weird. They do need sperm from another species. And the female queen stores sperm from another species of ant. And then she uses that to fertilize her eggs. But when she lays the eggs, she removes,

I don't know if we know how this has done, she removes her own DNA or her own species DNA from these eggs. So she has basically made a clone of the other ant species whose sperm she used to make the workers, right? That's so weird. And basically, she's created a completely separate species to herself. But here's the really weird thing. That other species doesn't exist where they live. Right. So where did she get the sperm from? Wow. And what we think happen is probably they did overlap with that other species like many moons ago, but she's been able to continually sort of clone it and clone it so it doesn't matter that the other species don't live there anymore. That is nuts. The authors of this study have coined this word xenoparity, which is like a

two species organism. It's mad. The explanation I found by one of the scientists behind it, I think, is that it's the equivalent of a human having a chimpanzee, like giving birth to a chimpanzee, but we then use that chimpanzee to sire a race of human chimp hybrids to do all our housework for us. Are they suggesting we do that? They're not suggesting we don't do that. So thank you, Sandeep.

Insane. That's incredible. I read something which is relevant. This will become relevant in a second. Have you guys heard of Devil's Gardens? No. So this is in the Amazon basin and what will happen is people will be walking through

and suddenly they'll come to a clearing. It looks like someone's just cleared the area but there'll just be a few trees that are still up. So for a long time, locals attributed this to a shape-shifting demon, who they thought like to cause misfortune and so on, and you'd walk there and you would get bad things that would happen to you. Turns out, when scientists looked into it, it's a type of ant. It's an ant, which is called the lemon ant,

and it produces a natural formic acid, which injects into a lot of the plants in the area and kills them off, except for certain plants that they want to keep, which have hollow roots in them. or hollow stems that the ants then nest in. So it's their whole nesting area. And some of these areas have been lasting for 800 years or so. Wow.

And so for ages it was a superstition of the area, but it just turns out the lemon ants have been creating these houses in these trees. Amazon's suffering enough. Knock it off, ants. It's hardly fair to blame the ants because of what we're doing. I'm not... Completely, completely. Completely. Yeah. Hey, why don't we get more facts? James?

Yeah, here's one from Harrison Lee. Harrison Lee writes that I am currently vacationing in Salzburg, Austria, the birthplace of Mozart, and learned that Mozart chocolate has nothing to do with Mozart. The chocolate was invented 100 years after his death. Further, the most commonly sold Mozart chocolate is made by a German company, Riba. Wait, are they suggesting that as well as composing amazing tunes, Mozart started a line of chocolate? I'll be honest. I wasn't massively surprised Harrison by this. I didn't think Mozart made these

He appears on I've been there To Salzburg He's on the chocolate itself They're called Mozart balls Yeah But do you know who invented them first Who invented the Mozart balls

First Bateshoven No no I keep telling you Paul first Oh God Invented them He was a guy

But he was from Salzburg In fairness But yeah They're now made by this German company Right Peter's second must have been absolutely gutted. Have you guys ever flown out of Salzburg on an airplane? I haven't.

As someone who's a nervous flyer, it's one of the most terrifying runways because the runway at the end of it is just a giant cliff face. So if you haven't got the right height, you're just going bang into the cliff face. As they go along the runway, do the planes go, da-da-da-da. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a joke about Beethoven-Smith. This is Mozart. No, we're talking about it up.

Please edit that bit up. Beethoven was from Vienna. Carry on. That reminds me of in, similarly in Bhutan, in Timpoo Airport. You come out of the airport off the runway, right in front of you is a cliff. So you bank left to get out of the cliff.

And when you bank left, there's another cliff. Oh, my God. You have to bank right to get out of it. So you have to do a zigzag. tag to get out. Jeez, that's why I could arrive in Bhutan but never leave if I went. That is nuts. That and you also would probably marry a Yeti. Yes. Oh, yeah. Yes, exactly. I was sat on that plane, by the way, when we were taking off next to a pilot who was hitching a ride. And I said to him, he wasn't hitching. He wasn't just stood on the runway. He's not out. Yeah, he was. We pulled

over. I opened the emergency door. He was, he's, I said to him, this is crazy. You've got a cliff at the end of the runway, what happens if you go too low? And he just went, don't go too low. Yeah? Like, the cockiness of these guys. But you've got to have it, right? So there's a cliff at the end of the, so it's not a cliff edge. No, it's a cliff. It's a cliff. Face. Right, right. Yeah, yeah. So the do-da-da-da-d joke doesn't work for that reason either. Well, I don't think we need to spend any more time on that joke. Good to know it's stayed in. What joke you mean? Why didn't you do the fact?

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, all right. Yeah, yeah. So this is from Kerry in Queensland. And she says, I love Antibene Trivia on the podcast, and here's one that I found. In 1873, Bush Ranger Harry Redford was unanimously acquitted of cattle theft only because the jury was so impressed by how he managed the feat. That's good. Yeah.

So this is a pretty amazing story. This guy, this guy, Harry Redford, he's, there's Reedford, Redford, there's different spellings of his names. Oh, well, Australian listeners don't mind if we mispronounce something. We are terrible. Queensland, Queensland. I'm so nervous about how I said that. But so basically, he stole the numbers vary from 300 to 1,000 cattle, and he knew that he

couldn't sell them locally, so he had to get to another bit of Australia. he decided to cross a 1,500 kilometers worth of Australian desert. Was it the Nolaba plane? It won't do it. Don't do it. This is only 10 years earlier, Burke and Wills, who were two explorers, who tried to do the same feat, died in this process. Also, they didn't bring a thousand cows to eat, did they?

The fools? Big mistake. I always bring a thousand. No, so he managed this. And so at the trial, the very fact that he'd managed this amazing feat, kind of acquitted him because they just thought, that's too impressive. And then it sounds like the... It doesn't really feel like that's how

it should work? No. I don't know. I think if I mugged someone and then I ran away to the North Pole and I was the first person who'd ever done it with their wallet. You know what I mean? I think that sort of does take precedence. Yeah, I think the judge, because it was up to the jury to decide, he said, you're lucky it wasn't me deciding

because the jury were the ones. And then there's a weird detail that we've been sent by Kerry, which says that his trial was delayed for more than a year because of how long it took to gather the witnesses, one of whom was a bull. Oh, come on. I'd like to call 999 more bulls.

Yeah, so that's the story of Harry Redford. Andy. Yeah, I've actually got another Aussie one. This is from Ari Toon-Samminson, and it's that the annual Henley-on-Todd Regatta in Australia boat race was cancelled in 1993. because the river Todd was wet there's a river

which is normally dry and there's a place that Henley on Tobrogata happens it's in Alice Springs Oh yeah Made famous of course by Neville Shute's brilliant novel A town like Alice Which is not actually set in Alice Springs

It's just about a town that's like Alice Springs Is it? Yeah Living next door to Alice That song by Roy Chubby Brown That was about someone who lived in the next town. Yeah, and international listeners, if you don't know who Roy Chubby Brown is, don't look him up. What a source to bring in. With a gun to my head, I would not have guessed.

The next name you named will be Roy Chubby Brown. Real name Royston Vasey, which is where the League of Gentleman fake town is set. It was based in Royston Vasey Royceubby Brown's real name is Royston Vazey Yeah Good trivia Great trivia We can always pull it back

Aren't we Absolutely Anyway But this is the world's only Dry riverboating event People make boats And then they run along With them like the flintstones

In the dry river bed That's been going on for I think about 60 years now But in 1993 There was flooding And it had to be cancelled Because the really was wet Great

Okay Here's the last one from me By Dave Rule Dave Rule writes Longtime Listener first time call out I thought you might appreciate this list of things

unexpectedly named after people I had heard most of these but definitely not all of them so Google's Page Rank which is the tool for ranking web pages is named after Larry Page Okay Main Street, San Francisco

is named after Charles Main I've never heard that Snowflake Arizona is named after two people Mr Snow and Mr. Flake and Taco Bell is named after a guy called Glenn Bell.

Wow. That's good, isn't it? That's really good. Snowflake is amazing. So I looked into my files for some more sort of weirdly named things. The insult dumb-dum

like if you call someone a dumb-dum that's named after a town in India. Is it? Right. Yeah, because you think it's because someone's dumb but actually it's like a pun on that because dumb-dums were a type of bullet

and these bullets were first made in the town called Domdom near Kolkata. German chocolate cake is named after someone called Samuel German. And that was, it was invented in the US. And the Indonesian football team called Seaman Padang is named after a local cement company called Seaman Cement Cement. Oh, wow. Wow. I was going to say David Seaman, the goalie.

Yes, that would have been good. Seam and cement. Yeah. That's great. You can make your own jokes up for that one. Absolutely. Well, brilliant. Thank you everyone for sending in your facts.

We're going to be doing this every Monday. But before we wrap up today, we have a very important job to do, which is that members of the highest level of club fish, known as Friends of the podcast, all as a reward for joining us at that highest bit, get given custodianship over one of the facts that we have done over the past 11 years of fish episodes. And so we are now going to dish out some more facts to some of those people. So, Andy, let's start with you. Yeah, I got one. This goes out to Stu Rottenbury. Congratulations, Stu. Your fact is one of my old facts.

It's that. The words Tory and Prime Minister both started out as insults. And you could say they still are, actually. Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, the king of satire over there.

Yeah, I think Atori is a kind of Irish raider. Yeah, that's right. It was a kind of bandit who operated in Ireland. And I think Prime Minister was the idea that you were taking the piss that this person thinks they're in charge when actually they're ahead of a larger group of people. Is that right? That's it. It's exactly that. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. Well, here is one. This was originally by Anna. And it's now under the custodianship of another Anna, Anna Darlene. And Anna says that in a 2005 questionnaire about something. absence abuse, one in five admitted to taking a drug which doesn't exist. Can anyone remember the name of the drug?

I think it was called Derbysol. Derb is good memory, Andy. That's right. This is episode 11. Yeah, I can't remember anything from about episode 12 to 600, but yeah, yeah. Derbissol, that's right. So it was just basically they put in a load of drugs, have you taken them? And they put in this one that didn't exist just to catch people out who are lying. Lovely.

Brilliant. Okay. Well, let's do another one. This one goes to a group of people. Team Charnedy. Team Charnedy. What do you think? What's that pronunciation?

Charneedy. It could be that this person's first name is team. That's true. Or it could be Team Charlotte and Eddie. Charmetti. Yes. Oh, like maybe it's Charles and Eddie. They're singers from the 1990s.

Or Prince Charles. Would I like, would I lie to you, baby? Would I lie? to you. James, just throwing in a lot of references that have even got rid of me as an understander. Well, this is... It could be Prince Charles and Prince Edward, of course.

Either way, it's suddenly a celeb pack show. This is very exciting. Your Highnesses and excellent musicians, thank you for listening. And you now are the custodians of a fact that I said in episode 11, which is that sea otters have a secret pocket that they like to keep their stones in. Very good It's a special Secret pocket

It's a secret pocket Much like the royal family Have their own jewels Yes Oh brilliant Which they're keeping a secret tower In the middle of London Nice

Yes And their own secrets Which we don't need to get into We don't Not while they're listening anyway But yeah So thank you very much To team

Love the Otis Okay Why don't we get one from you Andy All right This fact goes out to Dries Belinks and it's that knobs have been made illegal

in Vancouver I'm referring of course to door knobs this was the James fact It's absolutely straight on brand for me isn't it Make it sound a bit more rude

than it actually is I think this was an early day classic And I've said this a few times About the early day classics Of no such thing as a fish But the reason I say it is For this one is Do you remember in the very early days of fish

we produce some business cards so when we started out we handed out business cards to people saying we've got this new podcast and on the back of it it had a fact from each one of us and that was your fact James for your business card. I didn't recall that at all. Very few podcasts I think now have business cards

and I think that's a shame. Well yeah because look what it did for us here we are 11 years later. I know absolutely but the off menu boys I don't think are carrying around a stack of cards with a fact about food on them and that's why who couldn't agree more Yeah. All right. Well, okay, next fact. I just want to say that I really like off menu and those guys, if they want to come on our podcast, it would be more than welcome. That's a good point. Okay, let's get to another fact here. So we have episode 12. We're now going into James. Why don't you give us this one?

Okay. I can tell you mine from episode 12. It was the first fact in that episode. And it was that if the new Godzilla, which is very much now the old Godzilla, if the new Godzilla existed, it would be. produced 12.9 million gallons of urine a day, and that fact is now under the custodianship of Douglas. Oh, and so congratulations to you, Douglas. Very, very nice. Brilliant, in fact. So I guess there must have been a new Godzilla film out, right? I think it was made by Gareth Edwards, who you and I had on Museum of Curiosity. So we knew, Gareth, we had a few nights out with him. I saw it in the cinema.

Yeah. There's a very exciting bit. Spoiler alert. Sorry, yeah. what's the what's the exciting bit it's just a bit where some people are trying to parachute down i believe onto godzilla it's a it's an exciting moment it's been a while since i've seen the film because this was 11 years ago yeah it's uh yeah 12.9 million gallons of urine a make you think how many gallons are in it say an olympic swimming pool 660,000 gallons so that's no so that's 20 Olympic swimming

pools yeah of urine a day and that's gonna oh it's gonna ruin those olympics isn't it All right, let's get a few more. Andy, do you want to read the next one? This is a fact that goes out to Stephen Armstrong Worthington. Congratulations to you, Stephen. It's a great fact. It's that I love this fact. The real Long John Silver from Treasure Island was father to the real Wendy from Peter Pan.

What? I know. I know. Do we really know who the real Long John Silver was? Well, he was inspired by William. William Henley, who was a writer and an editor. And he also started that regatta in Australia. Yeah, amazing guy.

He wrote this poem Invictus, it is all about being unconquered, and it's all about being a, you know, knowing, being captain of your soul. It's quite stirring stuff. And so he clearly, and he had a daughter who was called Margaret Henley, and that inspired Jay and Barry to choose the name Wendy for Peter Penn.

Ah, okay. Because she was his Wendy Wendy. That's it. It. Very nice. So anyway, I love that fact. There you go. Congratulations, Stephen.

Okay, let's go another one. This was my fact from episode 12, and this is going to Sean Donaway. The fact is that tinfoil hats worn by conspiracy theorists would actually amplify the signal. Very good. Brilliant. So the idea, if you don't know it, is that people believe that if you wear a tinfoil hat, it's going to stop the government from getting into your brain, from getting signals out of there. So it's an anti-stealing ideas device.

and then some scientists did a test on it and they worked out that if anything it would amplify a signal rather than decrease it and that's why you wear the anti-5D bracelet isn't it then? Because that's been proven to work under lab conditions I only work with proof yeah there you go Sean Donaway

it's a great story, great study shall we do one more? Let's do one more the fact that now belongs to Shona McLean that geese sometimes fly upside down to lose height quickly when coming into land but their head and neck stay the right way up and this is called whiffling. It's got Murray all over at that fact. I love this fact. He loves a whiffle. This is probably the fact if someone asked me for a fact, it's one of the top two or three that occur to me to say to someone. Is it? Yeah, there's one inappropriate one which I can't

remember, oh, it's about kangaroos and their intimate parts. And then this fact is the one I say when I've got rid of that fact from my head. It's like, geese fly upside down. And if you've never seen a photo of a goose whiffling. It's amazing. You've got to Google it because they look so silly. Yeah, it is incredible. Well, there we go. We've dished out eight new custodians facts for this episode. Congratulations to you all. Hope you're happy with the facts that you got. If you would like to get one of your own facts, well, all you need to do is go to patreon.com slash no such thing as a fish. And if you join the friend of the podcast here, you automatically will be issued one. And then we will read it out at some point on one of these episodes.

otherwise if you want to send a fact in for Little Fish podcast at QI.com and he goes through it all as I said at the top and he'll pick some more for next week's episodes to get hunting and send them in. All right everyone, we'll see you again next week and we'll also see you on Friday for the main no such thing as a fish episode and until then, goodbye.