No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As A Seven Foot Bond

Episode Date: August 31, 2018

Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss spiders with eyeliner, biblical teeth gnashing, and the sumo wrestler with silicone in his scalp.

Hello 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 Schreiber. I am sitting here with Andrew Hunter Murray, James Harkin, and Anna Chazinski, and once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order, here we go. Starting with my fact this week. My fact is that the legendary sumo wrestler,

Minumi Shuhei, injected silicone into his scalp so that he could meet the height requirements to become a sumo. What were they? So this was, you had to be 173 centimetres tall. This was back in the day up until the 90s, so that was the height requirements. Is that about 5'99? Yeah, I believe that's about 5 foot 9. Yeah.

And so a lot of wrestlers were very close, 5 foot 8, 5 foot 7, and they just weren't quite there. 172 centimeters. And so what they used to do, and this is what this wrestler, Shuhay did, he went to a doctor and he had surgically inserted into his scalp a little bag that could be filled with silicon, and the silicon would go up to four centimeters high. The other thing that they used to do before the silicon thing was bashed themselves on the head, so they get a lump, which would then be just, you know, like in a cartoon, how he goes,

no. Wow. That's what they genuinely don't get that. You can't guarantee you're going to bring up. like that. I would, I would concentrate on growing hair instead of beating myself on the head. No, but they push, they push a ruler down on your head. Also, all sumos have that quite flat hair, don't they? Yes, yeah. So, um, this guy, I just want to apologize if I've pronounced his name wrong. In fact, I'm just going to refer to him by his nickname, I think, instead.

Yeah, you should worry about him because he's pretty tall these days. He's definitely have you in a fight. Yeah. He's like seven foot tall now. Yeah. It's funny. It keeps going. Yeah. No, he doesn't. You get one enlargement and then after a while it's not enough. Exactly. So he has a nickname, which he's known by, to the fans, which is Waza No Depato, translates roughly as Department Store of Techniques. So I will refer to him. Why do you think you could say the nickname easier than you can say, Manumi Shuhay?

I actually just flew over that and then headed straight to the Department Store of Techniques. The Department Store of Techniques. He was an amazing guy. So he was known for using 33 different, what they call Kimmerite, which are basically finishing moves. he did one which was a triple attack force out. So he simultaneously trapped the guy's leg, grabbed another, and pushed his head into his chest, the opponent's head into the opponent's chest.

Sorry, what? He pushed his opponent's head into his opponent's chest. Yeah, so he brought his head down in there while tripping him up and while grabbing a leg. And that's called a triple threat. So it's kind of like you're forcing someone into a forwards roll sort of thing. If you trip them over and then you bend their head down. Yeah.

So you don't push their head just straight down. into their neck, which means maybe that they then don't meet the height requirement, automatic win. These days you can qualify through speed and agility as well as height or instead of height. Can you? Yeah. If you're really fast, really agile and tiny. There is one move in sumo, one technique called Henker,

which I don't know if this guy did, but it's the way that the winner of the Sumo Championships in 2016 won it. And the hanker is when your rival like hurtles towards you, super fast to take you down, and then you just step to the side like you're in a cartoon and your rival goes plummeting out of the ring and then you win that way. Does he run out of the ring and then

realise he's actually above the ground for a few seconds and then plummet? Yes, exactly. And eyeballs pop out of his head and star. But the thing about this move is that even though it's a winning move, it's really frowned upon. So sumo is a lot about honour and respect and you get booed by the crowds for doing this.

So he won this championship. He's called Hakuho. And he was massively booed by the crowds. A lot of them left before even listening to his victory speech. And when he gave his post-match speech, he just immediately apologized. He was on the verge of tears and said, you know, I never thought that I'd win doing that move. But I guess I did. Wow.

Sorry. You know they all have this sort of bun of hair. Yes. They have the same bun. I have read, I can't quite believe this, but I've read that they're the only, you have to have that bun. And if you're not in the game, you're not allowed to have the bun. And when you retire, your bun gets cut off by your friends and family and colleagues, and your trainer cuts the last strand of the bun.

So that's when you retire. But there are only 55 master hairdressers who are allowed to do this bun. That's very cool. Yeah. And so they trained specifically as hairdressers in the art of that one specific thing. We've reached the limits of my knowledge. Okay. And we've hurtled beyond it.

The richer when they cut it off is a major thing, though, isn't it? There's often crying there. It seems like an emotional. emotional people. Very sad. Yeah. Losing your button. I suppose your whole life is being a sumo, isn't it?

Like, that's all they do. Yeah. And that's the symbol of it. Yeah. And what's the symbol of doing this podcast? Typing with your hands, I suppose. Yeah, so we'd put your fingers off at the end. I'd cry.

Yeah. For the last episode, we all have to cut off, cut each other's fingers off. Yeah. I think it's just taking our microphone. Yes. I didn't think of them. You know, sumos before they start a fight, they clap their hands and they do that thing where they'll clap and then they spread their arms out really wide.

Do you know where they do that? Is it to make themselves look bigger to their opponents so they're more scared? It definitely does serve that purpose and the way they do it does imply that's the reason. But officially is to show that you're not armed because you can't be armed in sumo. I think also the stamping that they do is to drive away evil spirits or it traditionally is. And therefore it survives as a kind of remnant of that. Yeah. Because they also sprinkle salt, don't they, on the ring before going into it,

which is also to purify it. And don't allow women in. Yep, that's true. To purify it as well. But that is right though, isn't it? That's what they say. Yes. There were two women went in this year in the news.

And I can't remember what happened. Basically, a guy had a heart attack. Yeah. Or something like that. They passed out. The women jumped in. They were qualified doctors and nurses and they jumped in. And they immediately got told to get out of there while this guy was dying.

And then because they've been women in there, they had to throw a load of extra salt in. Yeah. And then during the fight, were skidding around on the salt and it ruined the whole match. It proves it's bad luck. There was a guy who was known for the salt, particularly. He used to throw just a lot of salt in the ring. So his name was Salt Shaker.

That was his nickname. And yeah, that was sort of his pre-match ritual, which became his thing. Is it related to the fact that you throw salt over your shoulder? So do you throw salt over your left shoulder whenever you eat salt? Yeah, a little bit. Whenever you eat salt? Yeah, my dad's always done it's a huge way. Actually, we do it when we spill salt.

I thought it was when he spilled salt. It's bad luck to spill salt. Oh, right. Therefore, you have to throw a bit more over your shoulder to counteract the evil. But I also do it. If I have too much salt in my hands when I'm cooking, and I have a bit left over, it goes over the shoulder rather than in the bit. Yeah, under the pretence of doing it for good luck,

when really you're just too lazy to bother actually clearing up. I actually do that with all kitchen waste. Just something on height restrictions. So, did you know that MI5 has height restrictions? No. And these were introduced. in 2004 and it makes a lot of sense. So as a man, you're not allowed to be taller than 5 foot 11.

As a woman, you're not allowed to be taller than 5'4. 8, which is actually, you know, a lot of men are obviously taller than 511, but it's just so you don't stand out as much in a crowd. Literally. Literally. I wonder how tall the James Bond's are. I thought you might ask that. I prepared an answer.

Did you? Have you got them all? I have, yeah. But remember, they're MI6. I know that. So is it, MI6 have different height requirements? Apparently, MI6 has unofficial ones, which are quite similar. similar, MI5s were official, but all the James Bond's would not have been able to get into the Secret Service under these rules, except for Daniel Craig, who just slots in under. So I think he's 5'10 and a quarter. And all the others are taller than 5.11.

Could you have, like, part of your head removed to keep you under? Or would that maybe make you more conspicuous, I guess, if you have a flat head? No, but if you always wore a very boring hat. But that would make you seem taller. Yeah, that's true. Maybe you need to cut off the bottom of your feet. Yeah. Well, I was going to say, I would have my feet extended as a sumo rather than my head.

Because it's much less dangerous having foot surgery, isn't it? Extended as in like heels. Yeah, platforms. Platforms underneath. Wow, that's cool. That would be a very good thing for a super villain to do to James Bond. It's just, instead of killing him, just give him massive leg extensions internally. So he's 7 foot 9 and he can't go anywhere.

They are making a new James Bond, aren't they? Yeah. Presumably, there's still time to slip that into the script. I think they're looking for a director at the moment. Oh, yeah. Because Danny Biles start doing it. I think the first four-person directed Jay's Bodhill. I was reading in China that if you want to become a teacher,

you have to be a certain height as well, school teachers. So this was a story that the BBC published this year about the lady who had qualified for her teaching certificate. She'd done the years of studying. And at graduation, they measured her. And she wasn't tall enough. You can't teach if you're under four foot nine. Speaking of restrictions in China,

So theme park rides often have a height restriction, but there's a new theme park ride in China or a new restriction on it, which is a weight restriction. But this is more that you have to be over a certain weight in order to ride for free. So this is a theme park called Tang Paradise Park, and it gives free entry to any woman

who's fatter than this really famous, really respected and admired concubine called Yang Gwifay, who's an eighth century consort, and she's like one of China's four great beauties, apparently. And if you're heavier than she is, so she was 61.8 kilos. You ride for free, and it's trying to destigmatize

chobbiness. But you do have to get on a giant pair of weighing scales before you get on the ride. Does that do the job? It's kind of a shaming. It's a real fat shaming, but here's your consolation prize, a roller coaster. It's a rollercoaster of emotions for our lady, isn't it?

Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that a quarter of all mentions of teeth in the Bible also include the word gnashing. I mainly know the word gnashing from Nasha, Dennis the Menace's dog in the Bino. I reckon he got his name from the biblical word.

I guess he must have done? He was very devout. Was he? Yeah. So for the QI fact book, I had to find a fact which was related to both teeth and the Bible because all the facts are in order. And so I went on to the Bible gateway

and searched the King James Bible for mentions of teeth. and there are 56 that I found and 15 of them have the word nash in one of its various forms and the first one is in Job and he says, He tarith me in his wrath Who hateth me,

he gnasheth upon me with his teeth Mine enemy sharpeneth his eyes upon me. So basically just, it's a lot of gnashing of teeth. A lot of people going to hell. A lot of people, you know, not so happy in the Bible. Is gnashing of teeth?

Is that like a... Yeah, it's like grinding your teeth and usually it's in anger or in pain or in agony or something like that. Brooksism, it's called teeth gnashing. You're gnashing your teeth. And it's a dental problem for many people.

So I think one in ten people grind their teeth. So it is officially it is grinding, but grind their teeth and gnash their teeth at night. But it is bad. It's interesting. So people who are sleep brooksers, as they're called, will be gnashing their teeth for up to 40 minutes per hour. And that's with a force of about 250 pounds. So that's a huge amount.

you know, that's two or three people. And that's compared to... Just sitting in your mouth. Just sitting in your mouth on your jaw, gnashing your teeth together. That is bad. And that's compared to in the daytime, if you're in a wake, Bruxer, it's just 20 minutes per day, as opposed to 40 minutes an hour, and it's only 20 pounds of force. So that's quite a lot of force you're exerting on your little mouth in your sleep. Yeah.

I was reading about teeth just throughout the ages. And the one that I'd not heard about before was what the Mayans used to do with their teeth. What do they do? Have we spoken about this before? I don't think we have. So they were not only very proud of their teeth. They had a lot of dentistry work done to them, and their dentists have been said when people have looked through the records

of the different type of things that they've done quite advanced for their time. And one thing they wanted to do was pimp up their teeth just to make it really shiny and beautiful. So there were two things that they could do. One is that they would just cut into each tooth and give it a little indentation. So it just looked a bit more interesting than just your regular flat tooth. and they would leave that as was but sometimes they would create this indentation this little crater and they would put little

bits of jewellery inside that would sit kind of like how a lot of rappers yeah like Kanye West did that recent not not the jewels but I heard that Mick Jagger got that done with the jewel but I don't think he did I think that's just a story I got told it's not a good rumor is it surely you could just look at his face and say oh no he didn't do that

I think he's had it taken out now but I think he got a bit of an emerald put in and someone said oh you people kept saying to him oh you got spinning your teeth. But this is a very vague memory. Yeah. So I don't think it's true. I can't believe that's the most exciting rumor someone could make up about Mick Jagger.

I mean, his whole life consists of things more exciting than that. So you know what the Mayans would have been digging into? They would have been digging into the skin of the teeth, which is another phrase from the King James Bible. Yeah. And it's a very weird one as well because Job says he just escaped by the skin of his teeth. But what does it actually mean? Well, a lot of Joe.

Job is, there's a lot of gnashing in Job because basically he's him being tormented by God and the devil and everyone, right? Yeah. He's just having a pretty bad time of it. Awful. And so this, in this case, he says, my bone cleaveth to my skin and to my flesh, and I am escaped with the skin of my teeth. Wow. But it is so unclear what it means. And everyone says, oh, I suppose that means you escape with as narrow a margin as the skin on your teeth is narrow.

But when you read that sentence, it's not really what that would mean in English, is it? Maybe teeth used to have skin. I think that's the obvious conclusion We're talking a long time ago And people always left it behind So loads I mean, do you know Bite the dust is a thing that's from the Bible

But I look for the, well Supposedly it is But the phrase is They that dwell in the wilderness She'll bow before him And his enemies shall lick the dust Which is slightly different to bite the dust It is, yeah

It's another one that licks the dust It doesn't have to say ring I've got a quiz question for you guys Okay Okay In which religious book does Satan appear to tempt Adam and Eve to eat? The Bible.

James Harkin. It is not the Bible. The Torah. I'm afraid. No, keep going. The grunt of seekers of... Oh, you've gone to obscure. The Book of Mormon.

It's the Quran. So, in Genesis, in the Bible, there is no mention of the fact that it's Satan. It's just a snake. And this was an interpretation that was put on it many centuries later. So it was in the intertestamental period. between old and New Testaments, they thought, I bet that was Satan. But actually, it's just a snake in Genesis. But in the Quran, when it describes the story, it says that Adam and Eve were tempted by Satan.

Wow. I've got a fact about Bibles. Go on. Do you know about the space Bibles? Space Bibles? No, so are they Bibles that have been sent into space? Exactly. Apollo 13.

So they're exactly literally what they did. You're good at this. Apollo 13 had 300 Bibles on it. 300. No, it did. No, it did. No, wrong. They were 300.

But they needed so much rocket fuel for that, surely. I know. But you need to be able to convert the aliens when you meet, don't you? So what it was, they were, you remember microfilm, you know, the way of making things incredibly small. So they were all one inch by one inch. And each of them was printed with all the Holy Scriptures. And obviously Apollo 13 went pretty badly wrong. But the Bible survived.

And they went up again with Apollo 14. and a hundred of them went to the moon. And the other 200 just went up into space. Don't you think that that seems like a bad omen? I wouldn't want to be on Apollo 14 with the same Bibles that were on Apollo 13. I'd assume that God was angry for some reason. Do you know that as of last year,

you're no longer allowed to sell biblical teeth or any relicky teeth? And these days, they now have started giving a certificate of authenticity to relics. They've always had that though, haven't they? Well, I think they're now saying officially that these are the only ones recognized by the church. So if there's a museum that has, for example, I read one has Jesus Christ's bread cutting knife from the last supper claims to have it. Unless that now has a certificate, it cannot be considered.

Who goes a pope just wander around going, yeah, that one looks real. No, that one's not. I mean, who's deciding what gets a certificate? Obviously, none of them are real. Well, sorry, guys. They would disagree with that, I imagine. Yeah, because they would say none of them is real. Israel.

I'm always making about that, Andy. Okay, it is time to move on to fact number three, and that is Andy. My fact is that if you bought land in Australia before 1891, you had the legal right to the land stretching all the way to the center of the earth. Pretty cool. So amazing. Yeah. And that's why they always say it's so hot in Australia.

They're all living, aren't they, right in the core? So this was an old law And there's a sort of historical Latin phrase Cuyus S. S. S. Coyat, koelum, et ad infaros, which means whoever owns the soil holds title up to the heavens

and down to the depths of hell. So that was a legal principle that you just owned all the land. So does the heavens extend as far as the infinite universe? Like where does that end? Well, that's the thing. I think it was before people really knew

about the infinite universe. So they really undersold it when they Yeah. They should have chopped more. thought their heaven was up there. That's true, which feels blasphemous to selling a slice of heaven. No, up to the heavens. They didn't say penetrate the heavens.

Oh, they say up to the heavens. Yeah, up to the heavens. But this, it was problematic, wasn't it? Because this was before aeroplanes were invented and before spades were invented. You couldn't go very far up or down in those days. Exactly, yeah. And then hot air ballooning was the thing which changed it. Because people kept being worried about hot air balloons and saying,

oh, you've trespassed over my house and you're a hot air balloon way up there. Yeah, there was one, a cart case, wasn't there, with the guy who invented Granada. He owned a house. He's called the Baron of Lee or something like that. Is this the chicken guy? Because there was a farmer called Thomas Lee Coresby, who in 1945, and he sued the US government because they'd been flying their airplanes above his property, so about 83 feet above his property. And it was causing his chickens to fly into the walls and kill themselves, apparently, he argued. And he said he'd have to give up farming because so many of his chickens have died. And that's when it was kind of enshrined in law,

how much land you were entitled to above you and it was established that you're not entitled to all of it but you're entitled to enough land above your house that all your chickens don't die. Yeah, actually my one was the British law. So, yeah, so that was the American one. Got it. Australia changed it too, I'm very sad to say.

Did they? Yeah, 1891, they changed it. You know only get 15 metres down. Yeah, as a post. It's not very much at all. Well, when you think it used to be 6, 371 kilometers, yeah. Exactly. Yeah.

A dent in your property. Wait, is that half the other, is that the whole thing? That's to the core from the surface, yeah. I looked into actually what was going on in Australia in 1891 as a partial Aussie. I was sort of thinking I have no idea what life was like back then. So population of Australia back in 1891 was just over 3 million. Wow, do you? Yeah, so the population of London at the exact same time was 5 million something.

So the whole population of Australia, yeah, still underneath the city of London. They had really cool names for all of their leaders at the time. The Premier of New South Wales was called Henry Parks. Then you had the Premier of Western Australia who was called John Forrest. So it's all sort of, you know, greenery-based. And then there's Philip Fish, Premier of Tasmania. He was very cool. But the most exciting thing was Banjo Patterson, who was our sort of greatest poet, really, songwriter, Banjo Patterson.

So he wrote Waltzing Matilda and he wrote Man from Snowy River. He wrote in 1891 his masterpiece. Which was? No, it's called his masterpiece. It was a poem. It's very obscure. No one's really heard of it. Very good.

Yeah. Thank you. Thanks, Dan. Do you know what the deepest building in the world is? No. Well, according to my research, which was... Wait, is this a quiz question? Oh, yeah.

Why didn't you do that? You could get it, actually. Think of a country where the rules at one stage were that you could go really, really deep. Australia. So it's the deepest building. So the Sydney Opera House. It's correct. Oh.

Well, this is according to Constructionweekonline.com and I couldn't really find much evidence apart from that but apparently the car park extends 12 stories into the earth and that's the deepest basement in the world. Wow. It's also the fifth deepest that we've ever

dug as a sort of operating building in the world so that's 120 feet deep the second deepest we've ever gone is the Large Hadron Collider which is 575 feet deep but the deepest of all. Do you guys know? There's like bar holes that they have. So this, this is where

people work. So this is like a building effectively. Have we heard of this building? No, it's a laboratory in China. How are we supposed to get that? Well, no, I was going to ask you more. So if the second deepest is 575 feet, got it. What do you think the deepest is? 575.5. Wow. No. No, very far away. 12 kilometers. It's 7,900 feet deep. What? And that is a, yeah, it's the deepest building in the world, or laboratory. It's inside a mountain, but I thought that's a cheat because a mountain is above ground, but actually they start counting it, I believe, from the bottom of the mountain going down into the earth's crush. And which supervillain lives there?

And that's in China. Yeah, it's in China. And what is it? The idea is that, so it's a laboratory, and I think they want to study the background radiation and dark matter and so on. And the lower you go, radiation becomes less. So they do it from there, but I don't know how they can see. How they can see, there'll be electric lights and stuff. There we go.

We do have that technology, yeah. Since we're investigating dark matter and background radiation now, I think they can where we bring a candle down at the very least. Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is Chazinski. My fact this week is that jumping spiders that wear eyeliner are more likely to be eaten by their mate. So the way this works is, and this is some experiments that are being done in a lab in a fly. It's a lab of a behavioral ecologist called Lisa Taylor. And she was looking at how jumping spiders kind of flirt with each other.

And so if you're a jumping spider male, one of the problems is, as with a lot of spiders, is that if you're trying to flirt with a female, there's sort of an equal chance that she'll eat you instead. So I think about one in five jumping spiders who try to flirt with females, then get attacked and they try to eat them. I like those odds. And she noticed that some of them have these really bright red and white stripes on their faces to make himself look bit toxic so that it doesn't get eaten by the mate. And so she was like, if I put some black eyeliner on their eyes to cover up these red stripes, they now won't look toxic and they'll get eaten.

And she said she did find that suddenly they stopped eating, eating them once the stripes were taken. I thought it was that the red complexion signifies health. And the females were noticing the colour and saying, oh, good, nice and healthy. Well, it's both. It's a combination. So red signifies health. So they think, oh, good, I want to shag that.

But it also signifies toxicity. so they think I don't want to eat it. So that's exactly what you want as a male because you want sex but you don't want to be eaten. Why are they not all read all the time? Evolution doesn't start at the end point, James, does it? You're quite right. It just takes time.

And they're doing more experiments on them now where they're putting false eyelashes on the top of their heads. Yeah. So some of them have these tufts which may indicate genetic fitness and so they're gluing little bits of false eyelash onto the top of the heads to give them extra tuft and seeing if that indicates anything to the females.

So they're basically making themselves very, very slightly taller to improve their. Amazing. Amazing. Yeah. It's interesting. It sounds like the tests are aimed at helping a helpless male, as in it's trying to walk. Because the jumping spider basically doesn't even know which is his own species when he woos. Oh yeah. He just, whatever he walks up to, whichever spider, he starts dancing and trying to woo, even if they can't breed. And it leads to nothing. So he exerts all this energy for nothing. So he just has no idea. It doesn't just lead to nothing. They frequently get eaten because they approach a spider of the wrong species. Yes. Yeah. And start flirting. Yeah. That's like flirting with a lion. Yeah.

Imagine if you couldn't tell a woman from a lie. Just every now and then you think, oh, I'm in here and then you get eaten. That'd be awful. Oh, I'm just going to pop down into that lovely ladies enclosure. And they dance for about 20 minutes, which is a long time if you're a spider, because they only live for two years. So that's equivalent. If every time we had sex, we had an 11-hour courtship dance as the equivalent of that. Wow. Oh my gosh. That's amazing.

Which is worth a try, I think. It is. You'd be too tired by the end, though. You'd be, you'd underperform. 11 hours and then it's a lion. I was reading about how jumping spiders jump, how they get the, why they're given that name, because they can leap, huge heights. I think one was found in the UK recently that could leap six foot, which I think is a record.

What I thought was it must be their muscular legs that allows a jumping spider to leap. and that's not the case. What they do is they segment their muscles into different. So basically their leg is broken up into two different bits. And the leap comes from them slamming blood into the bottom of their legs. And that just lobs them off, gives their legs a reaction to jump. It's not actual muscle jumping. So they must feel really lightheaded when they do it, right?

Because all the blood's gone to their legs. Yeah, that's true. They always faint, do you think? Every time they jump, they pass out in the air. Must be, right? Yeah. But the other thing is that they can stop halfway through. a jump. It's pretty cool.

What do you mean by that? So they can spin a really quick line of silk and then use that as a drag line to create air resistance. Like Spider-Man. Basically, yeah, just like Spider-Man. So they can just stop halfway through jumping if they decide it's a bad idea. Yeah. Or slow down dramatically,

can't they? And they always, a lot of them often do it to make sure they don't massively crash land. So if you just jump with no dragline, then you face first teeth out. But with the drag line, they can sort of reorient themselves in the air. Yeah. It's very clever.

I read about the dancing and how it evolved, because like Anna says, you don't start at the end with evolution. And in this article, they said that basically you do your dance as a spider and the female is generally not interested. And so you have to do a slightly better dance and then she is interested. And then the next generation does that slightly better dance, but then their generation isn't that interested. So that's why the dances are so long and complicated.

Because basically, over the millions and millions of years, they've been improving their dance moves to get them better and better. Do they do the history of all the dance moves until they get

until the end new move? That's why it's 20 minutes. Yeah. So basically you're doing, if you try to do

the dance moves that your great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, grandfather did, it wouldn't work on the current crop

of spiderware. I can confirm that if you do the Charleston air of it excites very little interest. Well, that certainly means that we're

much less evolved than spiders because they're doing that and we've got flossing. After millions of years of evolution, humans have managed

That's true. Or is it true that the flossing dance is the absolute epitome of the possibility of dance in this millions of years. No, I don't think it is true. So after a female jumping spider's mate for the first time, many of them will never have any interest in sex ever again. Oh. I know. Sounds like my marriage. I'm going to cut that out.

I don't even know why I say those jokes. Because you're from the north and you're a comedian. It's the law. I wouldn't say my wife was fat But she got into every Chinese theme part for free Um My goodness, okay So there's a species called

Cervaya Encana and it was caught and tested And they have sex only once And then the females, they just have all the sperm they need For the rest of their life So they can produce lots of generations Yeah, so yeah So they keep the sperm Ready, don't they?

They just store it, yeah, yeah. So, yeah. that's all they need. I just have one shag. Sometimes two. Sometimes they go back for one more. Wow. That lucky guy.

So every poor husband is desperately open with that second shag. His whole life. So there's a really cool thing about some jumping spiders, actually at least 30 different species, which practice bondage with females. And this is actually quite a good way of not letting them attack and eat you. And so they sort of tie them up in silk before sex. So you cripple the woman by tying her to your well. her

tying her legs together and then you're giving me a look like that's unfair but she is going to eat you if you don't do it

oh that's true it's just the typical unner feminism rearing its head again crippling it is right but you should definitely tie down women

they're known quite sweetly as bridal veils these things in the quite euphemistically you might say yeah well yes indeed because the bridal veil

isn't massive and doesn't have weight all around it to secure the woman to the floor how do you think I got married again can't help it

wow that is yeah that's quite something yeah yeah it's handy and they actually tested this because a scientist wanted to work out if the ones who were unable to spin these things got eaten more regularly and so again they did this very cool experiment

where they put dental silicon into their web spinning apparatus which means that they can't use it anymore and the way they immobilize spiders so that they're able to do this is they put them in the freezer. And apparently that temporary immobilizes a spider. So this is just scientists always do this.

Okay, so there's jumping spiders. Some jumping spiders, they call it singing. Basically, they rub their body segments together, and it makes vibrations which get communicated to the female. And the females hear it through a slit in their legs, which is quite cool. And every spider has his own special embellishments that he adds. So 7% of courtships where that happens end in the male being eaten, which is not great odds, but not terrible.

But researchers then incapacitated the males and stopped them from singing. I don't know how whether they just made their body stiff so they couldn't rub the sections together. You shame them. If you just say that was really out of tune or something. Yeah, well they shame them. But they did something to stop them singing. And if the males aren't allowed to sing by researchers, 30% get eaten.

So that's at least three separate experiments where researchers have stopped male spiders from not being eaten in their courtships. It's a bit of a theme. Yeah, and these researchers are starting to look like the bad guys, aren't they? Think about it. So there are actually animals in the wild that sort of wear makeup themselves without scientists applying it to them. I think we've spoken before about there was that vulture, the bearded vulture, rubs its head in its bottom in soil, and it sort of gets its face or scruffy.

It gives it a reddish-brown hue that it then uses to attract and probably intimidate possibly. but relevant to the jumping spider of the fact, there are assassin bugs that go around wearing the dead carcasses of the ants that they've killed as what the article said is a sort of backpack. So they just wear a bunch of them. And it's to trick jumping spiders into not eating them. So it's effectively a backpack of camouflage. And this is makeup we're saying, right?

It's more sort of you've done your makeup, you now need your bag. It's nepotramant. You're going out. Imagine if you had your makeup. artist, a celebrity, ready to go on telly. And what would you like some blusher? Can I have a few corpses piled onto my back, please, and just all around my body?

Flamingos wear makeup. Did they? Yeah. But they sort of generate their own makeup. So it's like having a mascara gland. Really? Yeah. So they have this oil, which they secrete from a gland near their tails.

And it has various health effects. So it's not just used for cosmetic reasons, but they daub the oil onto their feathers from the gland. And one of the effects it has is to make them a deep. Deeper pink. And scientists have observed that during the mating season, they do it much more often. So that seems to be an indication that they are, because being deep pink is quite sexy to a flamingo. It's like, well, it's like a fake tan.

It's sort of real tan, actually, isn't it? It's like having a sun cream gland near your bottom, which squirts out all over your body. Yeah. Would you rather have that or a ham for a hand? That's such a niche. That's quite niche, that isn't it? The people who get it are going to love it. It's going to explode.

That's incredible crossover. Okay, that's 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 Schreiberland, Andy. At Andrew Hunter, M. James. At James Harkin.

And Chisinski. You can email podcast at QI.com. Yep. We also have a group account, which is at No Such Thing. We have a Facebook page. No Such Thing is a Fish. Just go on there and put that in. go to no such thing as a fish.com.

That's our newly rebooted website. It has links to all of our episodes, our upcoming book, our tour dates, everything that you'd want from us. It's on there. So please head there, No Such Thing Asafish.com. We'll be back again next week

with another episode. We'll see you then. Goodbye. Bye. Bye. I'm trying to eat.