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

Episode Date: February 9, 2018

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

Welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden. My name is Dan Shriver, and I'm sitting here with James Harkin, Anna Chazinsky, and Andy Murray, and once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order, here we go. Andrew Hunter Murray, I saw your face. Starting with fact number one, and that's the first. My fact, my fact this week is that scientists have finally worked out why the four of us and all humans

are not constantly leaking. They started with the four of us, didn't they? We were the guinea pigs. And they extrapolated. Yes, exactly. No, this is, we've just worked out. Actually, I said just. Actually, and also, I think, Andy, you are leaking?

Oh, sorry, yeah. We've already had these chairs upholed once this week, Andy. Come on. This is, this was discovered. or published at least in November of 2016. And I didn't know this, but scientists have been desperately trying to work out. Desperately is a bit of a strategy. Why we don't constantly leak?

Because we shed more than 500 million cells every 24 hours. So basically in a two to four week period, our entire body of outer layer skin is completely replaced. In the process of that happening, we should just be suddenly, you know, a bit of arm's skin goes and suddenly blood's spurting out or sweat or we should be. like just sprinkler systems nonstop, but we're not. And they don't know why, except for now they do. And why is it then? James, it is so easy to explain. I'm not even going to bother. Let me try. Okay, what it is, is we have effectively three layers of skin, which I think works a bit

like a conveyor belt. You know how like sharks' teeth get replaced the further they go forward? So the top layer is just the dead skin almost. It's really flaky and it goes all over the shop. Then And there's this middle one, which is a bit fluidy, and that's really, that's really nice. And then we have an original layer, which is sort of like the real, the real meat of the cake. Oh, yeah. Some excellent metaphors. Yeah. I didn't realize it was this easy to explain, I have to say.

And so what happens is they all shift up one place. And what they didn't know was how it was that no holes were being revealed when the flakes of skin were disappearing. What was plugging the gap? And what they've discovered is what effectively is kind of like a pritt stick glue. It's like a temporary glue, not as good as super glue, which eventually comes to the second layer. But that original layer has a sort of prit stick glue, which holds the gaps closed, so it holds all the stuff in. So it's like a meaty cake with prit stick on it. Yeah, at the bottom layer.

And don't forget there are three layers of shark's teeth on the top layer. Yeah. I didn't realize that we were completely dead on the outside. No, we're not dead. Some of us are dead on the inside. No, the very outermost layer of skin cells. are dead, I think. Yeah, we're just, we're wearing death. What are you wearing today? Just death. That's the worst bits of me. That is weird, isn't it? Because the cells are there, and they're full of

keratin, which is also in your, you know, your fingernails and your hair and things, but none of the cell machinery is in that outermost layer. Yeah, that is bizarre. So this study has found the structure of that second layer down. The second layer is called the stratum granulosum. And that layer has got a special structure that they've just found out and that's the reason that we're not leaking right this structure is an extremely efficient way to pack together shapes and it was first discovered by lord kelvin and it is tetra decahedrons which means it's objects with 14 faces and ourselves are made of these shapes so they really packed together nicely which means nothing can get through yeah although i've been so confused by this and i know mine was way easier as an

What was that? Tetra dectrochum. The thing is, tetraedrin, you would have thought, if that's good at plugging gaps, then the ones with 16 faces are going to be even better, and shapes with 18 faces are going to be even better. It can't be that 14 faces is the maximum goodness at plugging gaps in the skin. But then think about a cube. That fits together perfectly.

Yeah. But then an object with five faces isn't quite as good as a cube, is it? I don't really know. Okay. But I'll take your word for it. But are you saying that? nature should have selected a better decahedron. I'm just saying it's interesting that this 14-faced shape

seem to be the ideal shape for our skin to be. Right, okay, yeah. It's the same shape as a new £1 coin. Is it now? So in an extremist, could you plug a gap or a wound in your skin with a £1 coin? Yes. But hang on, no, is it the same shape of that?

I thought it's a 3D... It would be if it was a 3D... It's the same shape as that because the new £1.1 coin has 12 sides around the edge, and then it has two sides on front and back. It doesn't mean it's the same shape. It's not exactly that it's got the same number of faces. Yes, yeah, because it's more like a Rubik's cube, but with more faces.

It's more equilateral, I think, the one in the skin compared to the pound coin. But basically, as you say, Andy, when I seriously wound you later, you can shove a one pound coin in there and see how much good it does. So Lord Kelvin back in the day, he was trying to work out what is the best way that foam can work. so if you have a load of bubbles what's the absolute most efficient way that they can pack together and he came up with this particular shape

and then it's only recently that we found out it's in the human body that's amazing that's really cool why was there a problem in the 19th century with foam being inefficiently packed well no so he was studying mathematics

and there's a really interesting thing in maths which is if you get a load of bowls and put them together how do they pack nicest and the way it turns out out is the same way as green grocers do it with oranges. So you put them all down, then you put spheres in all the gaps, and that's the most efficient way of packing it. And they've done it with four-dimensional, five-dimensional, six-dimensional. It's a really interesting kind of mathematical

thing that they do. Have you guys heard of map tech? No. It's a lab in America, and its business is growing human skin. So there's an incredible feature about them in Wired. I really recommend reading it. They grow two humans' worth of skin every week. But in the... thousands of little coin forms. And basically it's so that you can test shampoos or or cosmetics or anything you like detergent or leuclina or suntan lotion on these little coins of skin. Yeah. And they grow them. So what they do is they get offcuts from hospitals. So if you've been circumcised in Boston, your skin may have been, your foreskin may have been growing to two football pitches in size and then cut up for experiments. Wow. So shampoo will have the same effect on someone's

foreskin as it on someone's scalp. Can we be sure of that? No. Okay. We cannot. Is that a thing that says on the bottle? No, it's been tested on four skin. They know what they're doing. Yeah. All the other operations as well, like a tummy tuck or breast surgery or various things like this. Yeah. Wow. I know. And they grow it. And so imagine that. Someone else who experimented on skin is a guy called brown saccard, who I reckon we probably talked about before. He was a scientist in the 19th century who was always experimenting on himself. And he wanted to know why we needed skin and whether we'd be fine without it.

And so to do, to find out whether we'd be right without our skin. He didn't do the disgusting thing you're imagining. He covered his skin completely from head to toe in fly paper varnish, which completely blocks it up. So it was to find out if the skin's actually having a useful interaction with the outside world and almost died because it turns out we do need our skin. Yeah, that's like gold finger. Yeah, the lady who, um, not the villain, it was the lady in the movie.

She was covered in gold. And she died. Did she though? I think was that not a rumor? No, in the movie she died. Oh, in the movie she died. Yeah, yeah. I don't go to the movies and just listen to the rumors afterwards.

I see everyone who dies with the movie, but like, did he really die? There's a rumor he did. It would be a big bit of film trivia if one of the Bond movies had killed an actress by painting her goals. No, but that was one of the great myths of it, is that in real life, she suffered from that and she died.

I thought it was a real myth that if that happened, you would die. But I thought they had left something like a patch of skin on her back unpainted and she breathed through the house. That was a rumor. But we don't know the absolute truth about this Bond lady

I don't think based on that conversation except that she definitely didn't die. Right? I don't know. Yeah, she's alive. She's fine. But yeah, Brown-Soucard did that and he did nearly die and you can if you do that

and his student burst in and found him completely unconscious in the corner of the room covered in varnish and so he got some sandpaper and started sandpaping this farm. Yeah, he sanded him down. And then when he regained consciousness, he shouted. There must be a better way. Did he then cover him in a layer of teacoyle and slowly work that in with the grain?

Is that a carpentry joke? Kind of, yeah. He jokes a bit much. But yeah, and he was really pissed off, Brown-Sacar, when he regained consciousness. He said, you've ruined the experiment. We were going to find out if it could kill somebody. That's amazing. I think his student was like, no, it can.

He's the same guy who he ate a patient's vomit once to give himself cholera, so he could prove that laudanum worked, and then he almost died from that as well actually and had to be revived. Is it the same student who's just saving him? Comes into work each day. Hey, oh, Jesus, he's covered in rats. What's going on?

You know, house mites? Yeah. So they live on our skin and they eat skin. And do you know what they also eat? They also eat their own skin. Do they? Yeah. So house mites are as much of a problem for themselves

as they are for us, basically. Do dung beetles eat their own dung? Don't know. You would, wouldn't you? You would. If you were into dung. Yeah. It's the most readily accessible dung you can get, isn't it?

Yeah. But the thing about house mites is that they have skin, and then when it flakes off, they eat it, but then they also excrete it and then eat it several times. Wow. To get all the nutrition out of it. Clever. Yeah.

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

that our planet is housing life. We're doing the exact same thing just on our own body with bacteria. And the article said that if there was a scientist who decided to grind up a single person and sequence all the DNA from every...

That guy had grind up himself, he's got one foot in the grinder. And his mate comes in. He comes in, boss, no! So, yeah, so the article was saying if a sadistic scientist like him did decide to do that, grind up and sequence all of that DNA that was on our entire body, either in our body or out on top of our body, only 2% of the genetic material that he would find would be us, the human. And the rest of it's all the bacteria floating around us. Yeah, 98% were carrying 98% something else other than us. Filthy.

Yeah. That's very cool. We need a shower. Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that the iconic green code at the start of the Matrix movie is made from sushi recipes. So cool. So this is a fact. He's been on the internet a little bit over the last few weeks, but I really like it.

And it was an interview with CNET by production designer Simon Whiteley. And he said that these little things that are going up and down are made of reverse letters, numbers and Japanese Katakana characters, which are from sushi recipes. It was his wife's sushi recipe book, wasn't it? He scanned it in and took all of the writing. So, do you think there's anyone who just watches the Matrix when they need to cook a Japanese meal for their friends? Where is that DVD? I also think I've only eaten sushi.

I've never made it. There can't be much in the way of recipes. Yeah. Take some fish, take some rice, wrap it up. eat it. So the Matrix, we all live in the Matrix. Oh yeah. It's an exciting theory, isn't it? Yeah. Actually, a relatively mainstream theory these days that we might live in the Matrix. It is, but I was reading a lot of articles about it off the back of you putting this fact forward, and there's a lot of conferences with big scientists talking about it. And even I, who love this kind of thing,

was a bit like, guys, this is bullshit. You're wasting your time. But then I have a fifth. physics degree and I actually believe it. Do you? Do you know what the problem is? This is what I noticed. You had these big scientists. Neil de Grasse Tyson was the host of this big conference and a lot of scientists talking about it. And I realized the differences is that stoners say this stuff all the time. No one takes it seriously. But if you're able to like say an equation at the end of your sentence, suddenly the world is really interested. And that's what that was. That was a stoner conference with math. Maybe every time you say something stupid, if you just say why equals X. Exactly. Do you just only like conspiracy theories before they get mainstream? I think you're kind of a hipster for nonsense. Yeah. The JFK assassination is so hack. So one of the most basic ways of looking at this is we think it's probably possible for us to make a simulation of the universe at some stage in the future it will be. And when that happens, it will be done. And it'll be done more than once. And we wouldn't know if we're in here or if we're in the simulation. And so likelihood is,

there's one reality and loads of simulations. So statistically we're more likely to be in one of the simulations. Although I have a problem with that slightly because I'm not quite sure how we know there's any one reality. And then there's like a kind of multiverse theory and a parallel universe theory. So there could just be infinite numbers of simulations and realities. That's true, although it could be that each of the realities has a load of simulations. Oh, God, of course. And you can have different levels of infinity.

You can have higher infinities and lower infinities. Guys, stop hogging the joint. Tand it over, man. Give me a hit of that. Elon Musk, I think, says, and I know he's got, he's a bit wacky, but he does say that that he thinks there's a billions to one chance that we're not living in a simulation. Yeah, I'm with it. But you say that.

I don't know if people really believe it. You know, intellectually, it's probably true. But do you really think we're in someone's video game? I think it's more likely than not, but then I also think that it doesn't make any difference. Why I was about to ask, what can I do if we're in a simulation? What am I to do about it? You can hire in Silicon Valley two tech billionaires who have remained anonymous, have hired a bunch of scientists to try and work on breaking out of the simulation.

It must be Musk, right? It must be him who's one of them. They've remained anonymous, so I don't want to spread rumors about who it might be. Have people been given money to try and break us out of the simulation that we're in? That was two sentences, I think, in a New York article, right? and no one has followed up on who these people are, but it sounds like it's true. It's a good job, though, isn't it?

What a job, being a scientist. Sorry, yeah, still nothing, but we'll need another grant, I'm afraid. Yeah, we haven't beaten the boss on level three yet, so... Do you think they would just play The Sims and try and work out how to get the Sims out of their simulation? That's such a good idea. Yeah.

Can you make the Sims play Sims when you're playing the Sims? Don't know, mate. Because if you can do that, I'm with you and your theory. Only Alex Bell, who almost came on this podcast today, would know the answer to that because he's a Sims fanatic and he's not here. Yeah. Oh well.

There was an engineer from MIT who worked out how much computer memory it would take up to simulate the universe as it is now. So the universe is massively complicated and he looked into the size of the computer that would be needed to get in all this information and he worked out that the computer itself that is running our simulation

would have to be bigger than the universe. So that's impossible. But then... But what? Is he using Windows? It looks like you're trying to be. build a universe. Then he upgraded his system and it turns out it's fine. Because you would just put on that little screen saver with the stars, wouldn't you?

That's basically good enough for a first step. See, I think a lot of people think that's not good enough and there's more to the universe. Maybe we're not even the computer game. Maybe we're the screensaver. How embarrassing. The point is we don't require much computer memory because it's not like there's an entire universe that's been simulated. They've only simulated the bits that. that we're clever enough to spot.

So we're too stupid to see all the massive gaps in this computer system. So it's like every time we study the movement of stars or something, then in this computer simulation they go, okay, the humans are looking at it now, we better provide some information for them here. But the rest of the time,

they don't have that information there. And that saves on computer memory. And that's why there is a computer that's the right size to run this simulation that we're all in. And that's why in quantum physics, things only change when you actually observe them. Yes, because we're all in a computer.

That's the thing. Like, you don't see the, you know, I haven't played Sims, but presumably there are people in it? Are there people in it? Yeah, yeah. You build a family and they have jobs and lives. So you don't see the family suddenly sitting around dinner going, do you think we're in a simulation? Because if we are, the simulation has started to question itself. Well, there is a philosophy expansion pack of the Sims where they do do that.

So it's really good. So one way you might be able to tell if you're in the Matrix is if there's a glitch in the Matrix, this is a thing. it is like a little meme. If you go on to Reddit, you can go on to Reddit.com slash glitch in the Matrix. And you can see examples of when people have spotted it. So some of them, I only read the headlines because I read a few of the actual explanations. They were a bit boring. But someone said, three eggs have disappeared in my fridge.

Glitch in the Matrix, guys. Where is my sandwich? Glitch in the Matrix. I think I heard perfect by Ed Sheeran in 2008 or 2009. Wow. Come on, guys. If that isn't evidence, I don't know what is. It's irrefutable.

There's a famous one as well, which I was told about by our buddy Joel, who is one of the writers of those Lady Bird books, and he's very much convinced that this is the glitch. And it's that there used to be a series of kids' books, which I used to read as a kid, called the Berenstein... What's that? We've never heard that before. Oh, we got a bit close to reality, guys.

Glitch alert, glitch alert. They're coming for us. Men in black come in there. Yeah, so the Berenstein Bears, it was a series of kid books, and the glitch is that everyone seems to remember that they're called the Berenstein Bears, but in fact, they're called the Berenstain Bears. The authors were Berenstain.

And genuinely, there's a whole thing on the Internet of people talking about, I swear to God, I grew up on these books, my whole childhood, it had an E, not an A, in Steen, not staying. And the glitches, the books have suddenly just all changed themselves to a different name. That's like Walker's Crisps.

Everyone thinks they remember Walker's Cheese and Onion Crisps being the blue flavour or the whatever flavor they're not. The green flavor. They are the blue flavor. Yeah, they are the blue flavor. And everyone thinks that they used to be the green flavor and they never were. But that sounds like it's another glitch.

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

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

Sorry, I'm just. Wow. We're really on different planes, aren't we? Sorry. Anyway, during the filming of it, everyone who worked in it, all the actors were made to read three books. They were made to read three books of philosophy.

So Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudria, who's like a sociologist and philosopher. And then they were made to read Out of Control by an ex-editor of Wired. And they were made to read introducing evolutionary psychology. So they had to really come to terms with the philosophy that they were exploring. Yeah. That must have come in very handy during the massive gunfight scene in the lobby. So the Warner Brothers, they didn't trust the Wachowski brothers at first because the Wachaski brothers have very little experience making films. and this was a very big idea.

So they told them they had to go away and direct another film first. Okay. They just said go away and make a different film, and if that one's a success, we'll let you make the Matrix. And what was the other one? They went and made a film called Bound, which is described by the New Yorker as a lesbian thriller with a happy ending.

Oh. Which doesn't sound very close to the Matrix. It doesn't seem like a perfect proof of concept. No. You mean they've set them sort of a bad job interview there? Yeah, but it was a success. And then they said, all right, you can go away and make the Matrix. And did they do a sort of classic happy ending,

or did they misinterpret it as a massage? I haven't seen Bound. Just curious. If I was told to make a movie with a happy ending. You would do that. Would you know? It doesn't fit in with the plot, but they told me to do it. Every Disney film would end in a masturbation scene if town was there.

Well, we saved the day. I'm just going to have a quick massage. It's very weird that you hear happy ending, and that's the first thing you assume. matrix would not have been made if you were the Wacharski brothers. Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is Chisinski. My fact this week is that the longest ever kayak trip was completed by a man who couldn't swim. This was a really good article in Vanity Fair at some time of the last couple of weeks.

It's about a guy called Oscar Speck, who was just this amazing guy. He was German, and in 1932, he climbed into a kayak. His business wasn't going very well, like Germany was in the doldrums then. because of the Depression and because of the Versailles Treaty, a combination of the two. And so he got in a kayak, thought, sod this, got onto the Danube, and he kayaked for 30,000 miles all the way to Australia,

where he arrived in 1939. And when he arrived? And when he arrived, he was immediately put in prison because the World War II had started. He was German. But he enjoyed it so much that he decided he was going to go to Australia. That was never the plan. So he would kayak during the day,

and then he would dine in the evenings with ambassadors and the rich of every place that he was staying. In fact, he even, and this is maybe potentially why he was arrested when he got to Australia. He was German, obviously, but at one point he met up with a Nazi officer who gave him money funding the next leg of his kayak trip, and he had a Nazi flag on the front of the kayak as he was going. They probably thought they were being invaded by the smallest ever German forces. You wait till the other guys get here. Yeah, he didn't think he was going to.

to go to Australia. No. He had a vague goal of reaching Cyprus to work in the copper mines. Yeah, that was his big dream, wasn't it? He wanted to work in a mine. And he realised it. Yeah. So he ended up, by kind of coincidence, I guess, kind of north of Sydney, in a big

opal mining area. And he really did make his living from then on with opal mining. So he had this fantasy about mining. And he was always sending random as a rock home to his family and saying, I think this is really precious. And they'd just go, it's a lump of rock, mate. keep kayaking. But he really did make his fortune in opal mining. And he never went back home. I don't think. Oh, he didn't go back home until 1970. Never saw his parents again.

Spent the rest of his days out in Australia. Well, seven of them were spent in a prison of war. He was, we should add, he stayed in Australia post-war. But for the entirety of World War II, he was in jail. Yeah. So he was, he arrived, was arrested and spent World War II. Although he did escape twice. Did he get recaptured because he insisted on? going with his kayak. Just look for any waterways suitable for a kayak.

He'll be on one of those. He got arrested in India on the theory. They believed that his kayak was also a submarine. Really? Yeah. And they thought it was a spy, right? They thought he was a spy and that he was kind of scouting for the Nazis. I've been canoeing or kayaking, and for a lot of the time, my kayak was a submarine.

I had the problem where I went, I think it was kayaking with my wife, both of us in the same kayak. But I sat at the back and she sat at the front. And I'm a lot heavier than she is. And so she was paddling in mid-air. And I was just sinking. So the one thing that I didn't read in all of this stuff about him is that he couldn't swim. Did that change at all when he was? No, he never learned to swim.

He never learned to swim. Because there's huge stretches of just ocean, like day. dangerous high wave ocean. Well, there wasn't, I mean, there were stretches where he'd go for like 50 miles or whatever, but actually, if you look at the route, he did hug the coast as much as he could as you would. Also, he didn't really reach Australia. He reached an island that the Australians had colonized and it wasn't mainland. But it's still Australia.

I would argue that you would have quite a journey to then get actually to the coast of Oz. He'd been all the way around Papua New Guinea as well by that point and dropped down. Yeah. He landed in Saibai, which was Australian territory. I'm impressed. Let's see you do it, Dan. I'm just saying. But it's interesting.

The not being able to swim thing is extraordinary because as soon as you're even this far away in a pool from a ledge and you can't swim, that becomes dangerous. You know, a kilometer is dangerous if you can't swim. Yeah, it is mad. Yeah. He was probably a bit mad. I'm bigging him up here. Yeah, I know. So Britain sells kayaks to the Inuits now.

Really? Yes, because a school trip went there a few years ago with a few kayaks, and then by the end, they didn't need the kayaks anymore, they were going home. And so they said to those guys, do you want these? And they were like, oh, yeah, we ran out a few decades ago. We'll take some back. And then the company that makes them now send a few over every year. That's very cool.

That's very nice. Pope John Paul II loved kayaking. Did he? Yeah. He was in a race and he was winning it. And just before the finish line, he got a hole in his boat, and he sunk just a holy boat. A holy boat. A holy boat.

That's a very nice. Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is Andy. My fact is that male butterflies use fake sperm to trick each other into thinking they're extra fertile. I'm glad we've got a happy ending to this podcast. 90% of butterfly sperm is fake. What? So what is it? What is it? Plaster of Paris.

It's just filler. Polyfiller. It's completely bogus sperm. It's sperm lookalikes, which have no nucleus. They carry no proper genetic information that can be passed on in a mating sense. 90%. Wow. So a sperm without a nucleus.

Yeah. So it's just a dummy. It's a dummy. Do they know that as in? The sperm's are the butterflies? No, no. As in like, the butterflies, are they like, I've got so much sperm?

Or they're like, I'm going to manufacture my fake sperm. I don't think they even know they're butterflies. No. They don't know anything, the animals, okay? They don't know what they're doing. I think they know what they're doing here. Because when they're mating, right, male butterflies, this is a bit gross,

but they use their penis to measure inside the females how full she is, i.e. whether she's mated before. And it's like using the dipstick in a car's oil tank is the closest analogy. Yeah? Okay. They then decide how much...

So sorry, do they pull it out and see where the line is? I don't know what they do, but they... I don't know exactly how they do, but they then decide how much sperm to deposit based on the female's mating history

and it's much cheaper for them to produce non-fertile sperm, right? Cheaper in form, as far as energy is concerned. Exactly, it takes a lot less resources. Not money. Yeah. So if the female is nearly empty,

then the male will inject lots of fertile sperm, but then loads and loads of fake stuff, which is designed to put off future males who might mate with the female. Because then they do the dipstick thing. They come along and they'll say, oh, then there's females made to the loads of males and there's less of a chance

that my genetic material will get passed on to the next generation. So they might be deterred from mating. Yeah. Yeah. So that's why they have these huge amounts of phony sperm. They also eject. Maybe this is the same thing that they ejected, actually.

It's something called methyl saliclate, which is also called oil of wintergreen, which I think is that substance and it smells really, really strong. and that's what tells the males don't mate with this one she's already been mated with. Yeah, it's an anti-aphydridex. Yes. Deodorant.

Exactly. They spray all the female. It turns you off. Yeah. But it's in mouthwash and in chewing gum and in various things that we use. That's why you never have butterflies trying to mate with your mouth. Yeah. And thank God.

So can I just get my head round this whole animals? Don't know what they're doing thing. So they don't know that they've put the filler in. I don't know that we know what they know. No, no, but they must not know that they've put the filler in because otherwise they would then put the dipstick in to someone and be like, I reckon that's all filler. No, because if they find that the females' tank is already full,

they inject a more potent mixture to compete more with the other males. So they have different tactics depending on, the mating situation basically. And why would you not just go for your most potent sperm? Because it takes a lot of resources. Okay. So it's easier to use the fake stuff. I know what you mean.

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

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

But obviously that's not good for the female because she wants as much genetic material as possible. And so they found that she has something called a Bursa copulatrix inside her reproductive tract, which is basically a second stomach, which means she can digest stuff that's in there. How useful. So she can eat through her mouth and her vagina. Okay.

It's quite the party trick. No, but there are jaws. She's got jaws down there. Because the stuff the mail deposits is surrounded by an incredibly hard shell, which is designed to, block up the entire thing so that other males can't mate with her. So she has evolved incredibly tough jaws to chew through this thing.

There's a film where... Jaws, yeah. With charts. There's a few. It's not the one I'm thinking of. There's a giant butterfly vagina. Isn't there a film where vaginas have jaws? Yes, yeah.

Yeah. I think it's a B movie. I don't think it was a Spielberg. I think about a B movie as opposed to a butterfly movie. But yeah, it is good to eat, isn't it? So the semen can actually contain useful stuff. And the men know that. And so they do this thing called puddling male butterflies

where they suck salts off the ground. So the way butterflies drink is they drink through a straw in their mouth, this long proboscis, which they uncoil. And the males will go along the ground, sucking up lots of salts, lots of sodium. And then this goes into their sperm. And when the woman, when the female butterfly eats that, then that creates good.

offspring. So what happens when it's winter and there's loads of ice and we put loads of salt on the roads and the butterflies come down and eat loads of salt? What happens then, Anna? You get super super butterflies. That's what you get. Yeah. You get, do you get males with extra muscles and females with bigger eyes and bigger brains. Wow. I don't see many butterflies in winter. Chims. I thought they all, um, I didn't think you've got many flying around in winter. Yeah, so you can get, let's say, you might salt the roads when it's not winter, or you might salt them in higher places when it's cold or whatever. But basically, they found out recently that if you salt the roads and the butterflies eat the stuff, then the next summer they have extra muscles, bigger eyes, bigger brains. And they asked the

scientist who is involved, so surely that means that road salt is good for butterflies. And she said, I do not want that to be the take-home message. Why not? Well, I think because basically you are changing nature in some way, and generally speaking, we think that doing that is probably not a good idea. There's always something, isn't there? I would love to see muscular butterflies flying around with big arms. I didn't read more on this because I didn't think it would be a good topic to talk about,

But in Fukushima, there were mutant butterflies off the back of the radiation that were super-strength butterflies as well. Again, the take-home message is not that give a load of radiation to butterflies is good. Just quickly on this burst of copulatrix that you're talking about, James. So it's the chewing and digesting organ, it takes 36 hours of constant chewing by the female to get through it. That's how tough the things. That's a lot of chewing even with your mouth. Yeah. Exactly.

When it's plenching. It's a whole new ballgame. So, so. Oh, God. But no, a team of scientists looked into how the super strength spermatophore, and they could only break it down by boiling it in concentrated sulfuric acid. No.

That is how tough this thing that the male produces is. And the males, the spermatophore, the actual package that they give to the female, is up to 13% of the male's weight. it's amazing, is that? It's all just a fight. Basically, the males are just going to make it harder and harder and more difficult to break down, and the females are just going to learn more tricks to break it down. Yeah, yeah.

Crazy. It's amazing. It's the battle of the sexes. We're all fighting it. Yeah. We were at James and I were talking to our group buddy, Levin, Skyra, who's been on the podcast a bunch of times. And he was saying there's a new report that just came out, which show that the butterfly mouth and tongue,

predate flowers. And so you kind of go, well, that's, what were they eating beforehand if it wasn't that? And the suggestion from this new study is dinosaur tears. Yeah. I mean, that's very cool. Isn't that amazing? So they dip into the, so they've got this proboscis that we think has evolved to go into flowers, but actually it's evolved to dip into the dinosaurs eye sockets?

Yeah. No, no, yeah. I guess these sockets themselves, yeah. I didn't, I'm just remembering. No, you're right. I literally saw him yesterday. Yeah. So even now, butterflies will eat the tears of animals.

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

As in they've got big, colourful wings. If something like that landed on my eye, I would notice. I suppose that you could say that I don't know what these animals are because I haven't seen the study, but I imagine that they didn't look exactly like butterflies like with the big ear-shaped wings and stuff. But do you think the butterflies have to evolve to make the dinosaurs cry?

They evolved to say hurtful comments. Otherwise, how do they do it or to punch them? Maybe that's why they had those superhuman butterflies then. Float like a butterfly, sting like a butterfly, punched like a butterfly. 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 Chisinski.

You can email podcast at QI.com. Yep, where you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing. You can also go to our website, no such thing as a fish.com. We've got lots of stuff up there. We've got the links to our tour, which is still going on 2018. We're going to be going around the UK. going to be doing Ireland. We're also going to Australia in May, so check that out if you're down under, New Zealand as well. We have a link to our book, which is on Amazon, and we also have,

as we said at the top of the show, a link to our new behind-the-scenes documentary, behind the Gills, which is now up online. Okay, that is it. Andy, time for my massage, and we'll see you all next week. Goodbye.