No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As A Screaming Scream

Episode Date: July 29, 2016

Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss railroad glow worms, Marx & Spencer, and kangaroos on trampolines.

And welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden. My name is Dan Shriver. I'm sitting here with Anna Chisinski, James Harkin, 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. Starting with you, Chazinski. My fact this week is that the first trampolines were made of woolers. skin. And this is a thing that's called blanket tossing. And it's been practiced for the by teenage boys for thousands of years. Okay. So blanket tossing is something that's been

practiced by the Inupiat Eskimos up in Alaska for, we don't know exactly how long, but references to it go back to, on Google books, they go back to the very early 19th century. And that talks about it as a tradition that's obviously been practiced for a long time. And it's a game they played where they'd get a walrus hide and they'd attach it with ropes to four poles and then they'd have lots of holes drilled into the walrus hide all around it so people could get their hands through the holes

and pull on the holes so they pull on the skin and then they dump somebody in the middle of the skin and it's about at waist height it's suspended and then when everyone pulls on the holes at the same time then obviously the skin flicks upwards and it throws the person on them up in the air Wow! So we're going to say that counts as a trampoline are we?

I think I am for the sake of this fact No, I think, because it's attached to things at the sides. It sounds more like a, you know, when there's a fire in a building and someone needs to jump out and there's people below. A fire net. A fire net by the foreman. Those are really interesting. I didn't really know about those. So you see them in old films and things.

There's one in Dumbo. Isn't there? In the circus show, there are all the clowns and hit dumbo's at the top of a burning building. But Dumbo can fly. Well, yeah, but they don't know that at the time. They're planning the circus show. No. And also, James, spoiler, very much alert.

But anyway, we don't really know why people did this. It seems like a lot of people speculate, but it could have been, for instance, in order to, when they were hunting, get one member of their tribe raised up high so that they could see for a long way where the nearest new walrus was to kill to make their new trampoline or whatever.

That's an amazing idea. And then gradually they noticed that the people were staying on it for ages. Oh, just one more go, guys. I thought I saw something. I read something about you've been framed, something like 40% of home video accidents, videos that are sent in are of trampolining accidents. Yeah.

That doesn't sound true to me. It sounds so untrue. I don't know, because it's an occasion that you'd film someone being on a trampoline. I do see that, but from my memory of watching you've been framed, it's usually cats and dogs doing stupid things. Oh, they weed out. You know, they mostly take from the other 60%. Yeah.

You can't just show incessant trampolines. People will get bored. It's true. but how many people own trampolines? I thought everyone did, am I wrong? Do you want to hear a headline from Scotland in 2010? Yes, please. A man caught jumping up and down naked on a trampoline

has avoided a jail sentence. Okay. There was a man whose surname was Burden and he had his manhood in one hand and a cigarette in the other when he was spotted by the neighbour and a neighbour called the police and he was arrested and charged with shameless indecency.

Wow. And the prosecutor said, he told police he had gone out to the trampoline and had masturbated himself there. So blanket tossing survives in some ways. And asked why he did it. Burden told officers, just for the thrill of it. On the plus side, he did manage to win $250 when he sent in the video to you being framed. I was reading about the earliest modern trampolines. And I went to the Olympics website because they've got a history of trampolining on there.

So the earliest that they have is 1934, and it was for astronauts. And the idea was it was to get astronauts used to the idea of what space conditions might be. It was the best kind of possible exercise for them to do. Yeah. How many astronauts were there in 1934? That's a very good point. There would have been none. I thought NASA used them, but not in the 30s.

Yeah, I wouldn't think so. So maybe the modern trampoline was developed in 1934, and then NASA started using them down the line. It was by two guys called... George Nissen and Larry Griswold at the University of Iowa. And they came up with this idea. And the guy, George Nissen, he was traveling in Spain. And he heard the word trampoline, which meant the springboard. And he thought, that's a good name.

And he took it. So in Spanish, the word trampoline means springboard. And in Italian, it means stilts. Is it? Yeah. Not sure why. Wow. Those countries arriving to the Olympics with the chaplain event.

Nissen always wanted it to be in the Olympics But it wasn't until 2008 And he was given the honour Of testing out the first ever Olympic trampoline Before the event And he was 94 years old Wow He died a couple of years later

But yeah He was really cool He at his 80th birthday Apparently Had a big dinner party And in the middle of the dinner party He threw all the silverware aside And got onto the table

And did a handstand At 80 Wow What a fun guy You do get kicked out of the restaurant for doing that Especially if you're naked with a cigarette in one hand Do you know how Nissen got the trampoline popularised? No

He jumped up and down on one with a kangaroo The kangaroo? Does it go twice as high? Actually, it's interesting you say that You should all look up at home a YouTube video Of a kangaroo that accidentally jumps onto someone's trampoline in America And they filmed it and it tries to jump off And obviously it doesn't have the consistency

the kangaroo expects and it just face plant into the ground in front. Wow. But Nissen hired a kangaroo in 1960 and jumped up and down a trampoline with it and apparently locked eyes with it for ages and had lots of photographs taken and this photograph went viral all around the world and people thought, yeah, that looks great. They all hired trampolines and kangaroos. Was that like a bundle deal that you could have? Trampoline plus kangaroo for 50 quid extra.

No, they didn't. They didn't actually hire out kangaroos. He also tried to invent a load of games. Did he? So one of them was called Space Bowl. And what it was is you'd have four people on a massive trampoline, two on each side, and there'd be a wall in between. And the wall would have a hole in it.

And you'd try and throw the ball through the hole and hit a target on the other side of the trampoline, and the other guys would try and block it. Yeah, I think it sounds fantastic. Sounds like a trampoline version of Quidditch. Yeah. In Australia, we used to play trampoline volleyball. That's so cool. Is it?

Yeah. There's a lot of trampoline games that get played out in Australia that I don't have scene over here. We don't have so many trampolines. Australia's just got so much space. You know, you can fit them in. Is that why you've got so many kangaroos? You just bought a load of trampolines. They all came with a free kangaroo. What do I do with this guy? Yeah. Okay, so some other things that you can make using walruses as well as trampolines.

So a walrus stomach lining was used for sales by Inuit people. The shoulder blades were used as shovels and their penis bones were used to make houses to brace the walls, also to secure the flooring in their houses. And also, there were some Inuits in St. Lawrence Island who used the penis bones to make snow goggles. Really? Wow. They use them as tent poles as well. Yeah. And this is cool. You would live in a walrus home, so you would stretch the hideout over whale rib frames, or penis bone frames, and the windows would be made of stretched walrus gut or stretched penis membrane from the walrus that was your window in your warren skin house what does that mean what's a membrane very thin piece of skin thin a skin i suppose yeah

they also apparently their whiskers were could be used as nose pickers and you would like your home using warrubber in the lamps and you would also turn the intestines into your clothes so you were completely living inside of warrass and you'd eat they made they made frozen um blocks of walrus meat which they turned into, I find this impossible to believe, but I love it. One way sledges, which you would eat as you went. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, my God. You know, Captain Cook's biographer says the closest he ever came to suffering a mutiny was when he tried to make his men eat walrus, and they all vomited and said it was disgusting.

Captain Scott, when he was in the Antarctic, I was reading about this the other day. He tried to get, they tried to eat seals when they were going down the Antarctic, but it was so disgusting, they hated the taste of it. So they boiled it really, really, really for ages to try and get rid of this kind of horrible fishy taste. Because they boiled it so much, it got rid of all of the vitamin C in there,

and so they all caught scurvy. Wow, really? Yeah, but they didn't know at the time that's what was doing it, but yeah. Wow. That's really interesting. But do you know how they hunt them, how the Alaskan Eskimos hunt walrus and how they have done for hundreds of years? They take a seal skin out, so apparently they're attracted to seal skin, they want

to eat the seal skin, and they have it dragging behind the boat and the warrus comes and then they kill it with a harpoon and then in order to carry it back to the shore they inflate it with a tube and so the war was just floats behind the boat like a little inflatable boy like a boy exactly do you know that their uh their mouths have a vacuum force suction right when they eat seals this is how strong their suction is they can suck the skin off the seals what yeah that's what i read is that the best bit the skin no they're trying to to the meat, so they want that out of the way. So then they spit it out.

Yeah, yeah. Okay. It sounds so dubious. I've got another amazing sounding thing about waruses, which I almost can't believe, is that they have these very strong muscles and they can basically push their eyes out a bit, so they can either look forwards or sideways. I read that when they're attacking seals, one way in which to kill them is that they drown them.

So they've got incredibly strong grips, and they grip around them with a hug, which often has confused a lot of humans who, if they're in a... SeaWorld. That often confuses a lot of people because it looks very friendly, but actually it's a really solid grip and they take you down. I just imagine him being in SeaWorld and you're like, oh look, that waris is kissing that seal and then it rips its skin off. Oh my God. Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is Andrew Hunter Murray. My fact is that one suggested solution to the problem of storing nuclear waste for thousands of years is putting up warning signs. with Edvard Monks the scream on them.

So this is particularly at New Mexico's waste isolation pilot plants. There are loads of nuclear storage facilities all over the world where you store all the waste that you get from nuclear power plants. And the problem is that so far, I think the whole industry has generated about 300,000 tons of the stuff. And it has to be protected from all life forms for about 100,000 years. Yeah.

And, I mean, it's 10,000 years since we invented farming. And some of it lasts for a million years. So the idea that we're going to be able to clearly say to future civilisation is. We can hardly even understand Shakespeare and Chaucer and stuff. Yeah, I know the pyramids are 5,000 years ago. Yeah.

And we know what hieroglyphs mean, but it's taken a lot of work. But the idea is, I guess, and it does kind of make sense, right? The Edward munches the scream, or however we're pronouncing his name, it just does look like a human. who's terrified and you imagine that unless we really physically evolve out of looking at all like ourselves it probably still weren't 100,000 years. I don't know because that emoji which is a bit like the screen where he's got his hands next to his face that almost means wow. Oh yeah. Does it? So what if in just 50 years? In just 50 years from now that means awesome cool thing. Yeah. Great

roller coaster ride. Yeah. Yeah. So they haven't actually done this but this was one proposal and there other proposals included things like making a whole landscape nearby full of jagged concrete spikes to make it this horrible foreboding place. I saw that suggestion, but then someone said there's a very big problem that usually when you make big, ugly things, they just get destroyed by the next generation. Right. Yeah. But the problem is, it's all, we have no idea what future societies are going to be like.

They might find Evermug's painting the scream unbelievably sexy and enticing. That might be what an attractive person looks like in 2000 years. So it's a huge philosophical problem. And actually, the French nuclear agency is called Andres. and it has a special memory division and their job is to deal with these problems and to think about them. There was one guy who said,

my job is essentially to communicate with people in the future, which is the coolest job. And I liked, I think it was him who was pointing out one of the ways that things could be misinterpreted in future is if we drew a little comic above dangerous sites which showed a little diagram of a man walking into a barrel of radioactive waste and then the next one was his head exploding or something and the next one was his coffin.

Actually, in the future, they might read backwards. So they might think that it's something that brings you back to life again. They might think that if your head's exploded, this is the thing that gets the pieces of brain from all the different parts and puts them all back together. Yes. And you definitely want to dig that up. That's like my parents, when they moved to Hong Kong,

they lived on Redneck Cellar Road. And no one could work out what Redneck Cellar was. I just had no idea. It turns out that it was actually Alexander Road. But the person who was Chinese, who was making the sign, obviously wrote from right. No, no way. So Redneck Cell is very famous as a early example of that happening.

Exactly that amazing. Wow, that's really cool. You guys must have all found that other thing about making GM cats. So what you do is you genetically modify cats so that whenever they see any radiation, they change colour. Then you also make a nursery rhyme saying, little cat, little cats, if you change color, we're all going to die. And so people remember the nursery rhyme and see a cat's changing color and think,

oh shit, that means we're all going to die. and so they stay away from the radiation. It was a thought experiment, I think, wasn't it, by philosophers in the 80s? Francois Bastide and Paolo Fabri. Yeah. I think the idea was that we've always in human culture been really interested in cats and they've always been important to us as symbols. So if we go way, way into the future, we can be reasonably sure

they think that humans will still be watching cats and still be taking note of them and when they start glowing, they'll still be... I think there's no good way of doing it. I don't think we are going to crack this. I really like the idea of just making it really boring so people don't want to go there. Like just making a completely wasteland, nothing there, put it 400 metres down and hope that no one's going to go 400 meters down. It's just such a long time.

That's the problem is you've no idea what's going to happen. Or fire it into the sun. It was discussed a lot, wasn't it, firing stuff into space? And I think the fear was that if there were an accident in the atmosphere and we had hundreds of thousands of tons of radioactive waste on a craft that then exploded, it would just rain down upon us. You'd feel so, so stupid. Do you feel like an idiot?

Not for long, but... I quite like the idea of the comic book, but then also having some kind of, you know, cracking of an egg so you can see the direction that time goes. You know what I mean? So there are some things which are definitely one directional in time due to entropy. So you could put those in the same direction as the comic book

and then they would realize... But they'll have time travel by then, James. But then surely we could just go forward in time to where they are and just tell them. No, they'll have... time travel. When they come back here to 2016, which was the most interesting year in the whole of history, we can just go, oh, by the way.

Although in that case, what are we worried about? We should just wait for the time travel. If they can't be bothered to even develop time travel, I don't think they deserve safe for these people. I just love the idea of time travel is finally coming back, but just being seriously pissed off with us. So opening line, but what's that weird scream guy you put to say? Don't go into a massively radioactive.

Why do you put a picture of the most attractive? attractive woman for the five million century. So the scream. Yeah. That guy is not screaming. Well, the scream is not coming from him. The whole point of that painting is it's a scream coming from nature. And he's kind of covering his ears to keep out the scream that's coming from nature.

Do we know what he meant by nature screaming? I'll read something that he said, I was walking along the road with two friends. the sun was setting suddenly the sky turned blood red i paused feeling exhausted and leaned on the fence there was blood and tongs of fire above the blue black fjord and the city my friends walked on and i stood there trembling with anxiety and i sensed an infinite scream passing through nature so it's almost like an anxiety attack isn't it yeah it was just after the eruption of is it crackatoa 1880s yeah so there had just been a volcanic eruption in Southeast Asia and so all the skies were quite weird and red and kind of strange. And they think that's where that came from.

Well, people's faces also suddenly going weirdly curvy. So I didn't know he did four versions of it. Screen one, screen two. Screen one, screen two. Okay, it is time for fact number three. And that is my fact. My fact this week is that Carl Marx used to do London pub cralls. So London Pub Crawls, for anyone overseas, that means jumping from bar to bar in a single evening and having a drink at each of those bars.

He managed to do 18 bars. So this is Karl Marx, who I've always associated as a deep philosophical thinker and not someone who was a pisshead. They went all the way up Tunton Court Road, which is very close to where we work. And there's not as many bars these days on it. There were 18 in his day. And they managed to do it. And at the end, they got old ladish and started breaking stories. stuff in the street, throwing rocks at lamps.

Well, they had a bit of a sort of xenophobic brawl with a bunch of Englishmen in a pub, didn't they? So, one of the people that Marx was on this bar crawl with, who was Wilhelm Leagnet, wrote about it later. And so they got into some chats with some British guys in a pub, and it all started off very friendly. And then they sort of started debating politics. And he noted that at one point, the British people, when they said Russian, they usually meant Prussian. It seems Russia and Prussia are frequently confounded in England, which feels like

classic English, Raja Prussia, whatever. Completely different places, obviously. Yeah. Yeah, then they started to claim that Germans were culturally superior to English people, and so I think the English people started to fight them, wanted a fist fight. And they scarpered, and then they decided to smash up some lamp posts as they ran away. Did you know that Karl Marx, when he went on honeymoon with his wife, Jenny, took 45 books with him. It's so insulting. It's so rude. Unless they were books on the arts, of good sex. I don't think they can all have been. You don't think there are that many.

In my experience, you only need a few of those on any holiday. Do you know Jenny and Marks had four daughters were born? Three of them survived to adulthood. They're all called Jenny. Bizar. Yeah. And then the son that they had is called Edgar after Jenny's brother. Weird. I think my favourite thing that I read about Karl Marx is that obviously he's buried in Highgate Cemetery. And I've been to it.

If you live in London, it's worth going. It's huge, huge tombstone with his head on the top of it. And what I love is that there's constantly reports being made that Marxists who go to visit him are furious that they have to pay to get into the graveyard and none of them realize that when they get there. I think he's buried next to Herbert Spencer. We've covered him. He's the philosopher who had an angry suit he got into when he was angry.

But he also had theories that were very different to Marxists. So in Russia is always a joke that these two people are buried near each other and they're kind of arguing after death. Oh, really? And the other joke is they're Marx and Spencer. Oh, yes. I think they're opposite each other, in fact, looking at each other. Yeah.

Do you know Marx's biographer said one of his personal habits to inspire his creativity was to stand up to be at a table working and he'd stand up and he'd start walking around the table and he'd just walk faster and faster and he'd just walk faster and faster and he'd just find that was a way to make ideas come to him. Just start sprinting around a table. It just sounds like you'd pass out. I think he had a lot of boils on his bum as well. He did. Throughout life. So he found sitting incredibly hot. hard.

That makes sense. Those two facts been connecting. Yeah, exactly. Although they do say that he would do the walking around as soon as the idea

came to him, he'd immediately slam himself into a chair and start writing. That doesn't sound like something you'd do. With boils. You'd gently slide in, slither in.

Slither in. Is that where the... That was one of the pubs he went to, actually. Yeah, the skin disease he had was really debilitating and he wrote to Engels saying he had boils all over his penis.

That's a nice letter. to get. Gantles maybe was there with a friend going, I've this philosopher Marks, I know. I've just got a letter from him. You should read this one. He's an incredible brain. From each according to his ability,

to each according to how many boils the Lassa has on their pitch? We saw a letter of his just a few days ago. You and I, Anna and I were at the British Library, and they have this incredible treasures room where they have original writing from Dickens and Thomas Hardy and everyone. God, is every single person you'd want to see the handwriting of, you'll see it there in this room. they have a letter from marks to Engels, and they used to write in pseudonyms.

They used to have... I'm not surprised because of what they were writing about. Just on pub crawls. Uh-huh, yeah. There is an Oliver Reed pub crawl in Wimbledon, which is my hometown. Oh, yeah. Yeah, and it's eight different pubs, and the record for it is two complete laps, i.e. 16 pubs, having a pint in each, and it is held by Oliver Reed.

After he completed the 16 pubs, he threw up on Steve McQueen. Have you seen these guys who are trying to go to every pub in the UK? No. There's a group of guys. They're known as the Black Country Ale Tirsters. So I assume they're from the middle and somewhere. And they've done over 18,000 pubs in the UK, including every single one of the 3,905 pubs in Wales.

Wow. Okay. There used to be more of them, and then I think one of them died. and a few of them stopped when they reached 18,000, but some of them are still going. There was an interview with one of them in the newspaper, and he said, nowadays, I try to limit myself to 1,500 pints a year.

That is restraint if I ever heard it. But they don't think they'll ever get every single one in the UK because it's just too many. Because they just keep making new ones. There's a similar problem that is had by the woman who's visited the most weather spoons in the UK, this woman called Mags Thompson, and she's been to 972.

That was as of 2014, I think. But she says it's just very hard to keep up because they keep popping up everywhere. Well, they all are in the same night, and then she vomited on Steve McQueen. She said, it's a good conversation point. If I meet someone from, say, Swansea, I can say, I know Swansea. Nice weather spoons there. Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that there is an insect in New Zealand who catches its prey by

pretending to be a star. Which star does it pretend to be? Steve McQueen. No, these are glowworms. They live in a cave and they all live on the ceiling and there's loads of them and they pretend to be stars in the night sky and there are other insects in there who navigate using the stars and they get confused by these glowworms pretending to be stars and then they fly into their liars and they get eaten.

Yeah, it's amazing. It's pretty cool. And it requires serious cooperation unless you want to be a star on a really cloudy night then they're all working together, aren't they? Yeah, that's true. I don't think they do exactly the same. They don't do Orion's belt and that kind of stuff.

But yeah, they just generally look like stars. So it's in the Waitomo Cave, which is in New Zealand. And I read this in an article on the online magazine Deep Look. They're from a species called Arachno Camper Luminosa. and yeah there's moths and stuff in this cave and there's like little bits of mucus coming down and the moths fly into the mucas and then they can gobble them up.

What a lovely way to go. You should put up a picture on your Twitter because it looks unbelievable. I will. If you go to my Twitter at Egg Shapes, I'll put that picture up. Yeah. I really like as well that the glow,

they can change the glow. So if one of the larvae next to them has eaten, it just calms down a bit and if there's a hungry one next to it, it glows harder. Wow. Oh, come on. Yeah, it just puts out more glow.

Wow. I think most female glowworms, the harder they glow, the more eggs they have. So it is actually a good thing for a male to see a glowworm that's really glowing like hell. Because it means that she's more likely to be fertile. But by total coincidence, this weekend, I was hanging out with glowworms, which is weird. I don't think we've ever talked about them before. But yeah, I was in Cornwall in a place called Cadweth, where everyone should go, because it's one of the only guaranteed glowworm sighting places.

Shot the people of Cajwif will love that now. It's got a very nice weather spoons, though. It does not have a weather spoons. But they are incredible. They do look like something that sci-fi has created. And there's this one in particular I love that's called the Railroad Worm, which has a body that glows green and a head that glows red. And it's called the Railroad Worm because it looks like a set of railway tracks.

It's got little green dots up either side of its body that lead to a red light. But it's like a little worm traffic line. That's amazing. It's beautiful. Look it up. I was reading the UK glowworm survey website because there are I think a few hundred places in the UK where you can see glowers, but not, I mean not...

Not as good as this one, though. Well, yeah, and I think there's nowhere else in the world that's like the Waitomo case, but one of the headings on the UK glowworm website is, is it really a glowworm? And then it says, one cause of false reports of glowworms is actually light reflected from shiny leaves,

do you... Or litter. please check what you see really is a beetle with the light coming from the final tail segments not a salt and vinegar crisp packet

because that's what they are the beetles aren't they they're not worms so actually I think they're in a bit of trouble in the UK aren't they glow worms a lot of them are dying out I think they're improving a bit now

but for a while they did one of the reasons is dog poo and apparently according to Nick Moyes who's the assistant keeper at Derby Museum He says the number of glowworms, especially around him, has gone down because dog poo creates more plant growth. They make it hard for the females and males of the glowworm species to find each other because of so much plant life. That is fascinating and I'm going to take it up with Cadrith Council because they put a sign up on their cliff path which says,

please excuse the overgrown path. We like to encourage glowworms to hang out and breed here. That is obviously just an excuse for lazy path. That's interesting. Or Nick Moyes at the Derby Museum is wrong. So let's not jump to too many congratulations. All there are two different species of glowworm. No, but I'd like to see a fight between Nick Moyes and Cadrith County Council. So I've been reading about various insects that live in caves and various other cave dwelling animals. So there's one you might like to know about, which is a species of cave insect called Neo-Trogler. And this is an interesting thing because

The females have penises and the males have vaginas. Well, surely that makes them male and female, no? Well, no, here's the thing. So the female, it's a penis-like organ. I think it's technically known as a gynosome. And it gets erections, and it's spiny. Like an old penis. Oh, God.

Yeah, so the female gets an erection in her gynosome. And the male has a vagina-like chamber, right? and the female inserts her penis into the male to hold it still and then it acts like a vacuum cleaner and it sucks out the male sperm. Oh my gosh. It's like the seal and walrus all over. It can do that for up to 70 hours straight. Wow.

Yeah. And the thing is... 70 hours? 70 hours. And the really interesting thing is that, I mean, well, that's the really interesting thing, but this other thing. So they're locked together unbelievably tightly due to these bristles and spines and pouches in the

males of vagina and the bristles on the penis. So there was a scientist from Hokkaido University who was experimenting. He tried pulling a copulating pair apart. Oh, why would you do that? Well, I know. Well, it gets worse because the male was then ripped in two. Oh. It's a bad end to a date, isn't it?

You think it's going so well? And then, yeah. So that possibly means that males in the natural world can't actually resist the act of mating because they'll do themselves more damage. Sure. I looked at a couple of things on insect camouflage, strategies or insects disguising themselves as other things. So one of the things I love is that spiders, which obviously aren't insects,

disguise themselves as ants by lifting up their two front legs and pretending that their antenna by waving them above their heads. So then they only have six legs, obviously. Yeah, and they've only got six legs. And then they lift another two and pretend to be a cow. And then another two and pretend to be a human. They've found not too long ago that camouflage within insects, has been going back for very, very long.

They've actually found in Amber the earliest examples of it. And it was found by a Chinese Academy of Sciences in Nanjing, by a team led by Bowang. And it's called debris camouflage. And debris camouflage is when you just carry, effectively carrying a leaf on top of you, but they've got examples of it where it definitely was, just trying to hide underneath a leaf.

Just like cellotaping leaves you and pretending to be a tree. Exactly. None of you has asked me Why I've got an empty pack of salt and vinegar crisps On top of my head I thought it was a glow weather Orchids disguise themselves as wasps

So that other wasps will have sex with them Rather than just attracting the wasp To come and pick up pollen They actually make wasps come and mate with them By emitting smells that smell like a wasp And making themselves look like a wasp And 75% of wasps who land on these orchids Do actually ejaculate

So they just go away thinking Oh I successfully had sex there Isn't that weird? I think they've just mated with a... The weird thing is humans, we have no idea what the thing is that is persuading us to have sex with it by successfully mimicking a human is.

If I found out that my wife's been an orchid all this time. We don't know. What is it? What's out there? Okay, that's it. That's 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 we've said

over the course of this show, you can get us on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Shreiberland. Andy at Andrew Hunter M. James at Eggshake and Shazinski. You can email a podcast at QI.com. Yep. Or you can go to our group account, which is at QI podcast, or go to our website, No Such Thing as a Fish.com, where we have all of our previous episodes. We will be back again next week with another episode. We'll see you then. Goodbye.