No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As A Wolf Diving For Clams

Episode Date: October 21, 2016

Anna, Andy, Piers Fletcher and Justin Pollard discuss Samuel Pepys's porn stash, boiling swimming pools and a sixty-year-long life hack to owning beachfront property.

Hello and welcome to the QI offices in Covert My name is Anne Tyski. I am here with Andrew Hunter Murray, and this week we are joined by two great pillars of QI, the producer of QI, Pierce Fletcher, and one of QI's longest serving. been there for a million years, researchers and historian Justin Pollard. And once again, we've gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts on the last seven days, and in no particular audit here we go. Starting with you, Justin.

Okay, so the first person recorded ever buying a pornographic book in England was Samuel Peaks. So how was he recorded? Typically, idiotically, he managed to record it himself. Because, you know, Pete's wrote this sort of 10-year... diary, which is great because he records a great fire of London and the plague and all sorts of big events. But the main use of it is he records the details of his everyday life. And he wrote in his diary that he'd seen the idle, roguish book Les Chol Defi, which I have bought in plain binding. And he takes it home and he reads it. But then he promises himself in his diary,

which is written in shorthand so nobody else can read it, that as soon as I've read it, I will burn it. Which as far as we know he did, there's only one copy left of this book in the world. Wow. So he burned it in order to save himself the embarrassment of having it found among his collection but then he recorded the fact that he'd read it in his diary. He failed to clear his browser history. When he bought it he wrote in his diary well I was thinking about getting it because it's in French maybe it would be a good translation tool for my wife and then I think he saw what was in it and thought maybe not. Yeah but the great thing is that he found it and then he went away for a month nearly. It's obviously been praying on his

mine he could be going, I might just go down the strand today. And then eventually, oh, look, there's that bookshop again. And he went in and then he apparently stayed there. And he, he hung about in the bookshop for an hour before actually buying it. In a plane binding. Yeah, exactly. So, sorry, just was the plain binding in the same way as adults read Harry Potter with a different binding? Was that to conceal it? Exactly. Just so that, you know, when he's got on his shelf at home, it doesn't say, you know, pornographic book on the spine. says the reason is because it was cheaper in plain binding and he only took it home in order to destroy it. He didn't want to destroy it. This is a diary. He tends no one else to read, but he's

lying to himself in it. It is weird because at the end of his diaries, because he gave up after about 10 years the personal diary because of his eyesight was failing. He thought he was making him blind. Yeah. He was right, wasn't he? And he said, I'm going to keep going with my other diary, because he kept another diary going, but it was just official engagements and things like that. And it was being kept for him by other people. So he said, I'll have to to put in only what I can decently tell other people and which I will be sure won't get out. Did he mean for it to be seen? Do we know? We don't know for his private diary. Certainly it is not during his lifetime, not by his wife,

obviously. So it does record sort of every detail in it. And he has numerous affairs. But the funny thing is he obviously must be very conflicted because he's writing it, as you say, in code. But at the same time, he copies it out in fare and puts it into a leather-bound thing and makes sure that it's, you know, well-present. So there must have been some part of him that was saying somebody's going to read this and enjoy this one day. Otherwise, you know, why would you bother? I think he must have thought. I think that's like teenagers do that all the time, don't they,

write about their boyfriends and pretend that they want to hide the knowledge of it and leave it carefully open on their parents' beds. In long time in the future, it will be lovely when people get to read about my life. I think what he had was an early case of Portnoy's complaint. Portnoy's complaint is a disorder in which strongly felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings of a perverse nature. Yeah, because he does say he does say, he's, there's nothing wrong with a decent man, a morally upstanding man reading material like that for the sake of educating themselves.

He justifies himself, as they did right into the 19th century with the secret room of the British Museum, you know, which contained all the sort of phallic statuary and things that were considered inappropriate for the public. There was a secret museum at Naples, and it's exactly the same thing. All the erotic art that was found at Pompeii and Herculaneum. So there's a statue of the god Pan. sort of he's getting off with a goat. Yes, that's extraordinary sculpture. He really is. They really are in a loving embrace.

Definitely, yeah. And that is the same thing that happened. And Pompey had these erotic frescoes and they had locked metal cabinets put over them. But if you were a gentleman and you paid a small fee, they would remove the locked metal cabinet from the top of the fresco and you could see it. But if you're a woman, no dice, I'm afraid, Anna.

Interesting is what you're saying is the first recorded instance of buying pornography, but apparently what happened was most pornography at that time was circulated in the form of manuscript mcelonies that people would keep a miscellany of these kinds of things but also recipes and political tracks and school exercises

and they'd just keep them all bound together for themselves and to give to their friends but there was only ever one copy of each one. I've got one here. This is the guy named Anthony Scattergood who was a theologian at Trinity College Cambridge and in his miscellany he has an erotic poem called On Six Cambridge Maids Baving Themselves

by Queen's College, June 15, 1629, which is quite good. And then immediately after that is a recipe that says, For the eyes, take snails and prick them through the shells with a great pin, and they will issue out a fat water, drop the same into the eyes, evening and morning. Wow. So that, frankly, probably less attractive than the six. That was the kind of thing they just gathered together in these masonry. And often inverse form as well, because if it was inverse,

it was a sort of a little bit less sort of graphic, It was a bit more arty if it's inverse. So best-selling pornographic verses of the 15th century is a book called The Tale of Two Lovers. And you know who wrote it? Oh, that was the Pope's one, wasn't it? It was Pope Pius I. This was, to be fair, before he became Pope that he wrote this book.

All the popes have a past, don't they? So there was the goalkeeper and there was the Hitler Youth guy. Yeah. And the one who wrote, yeah, it's a tale of two lovers. That is saucy of the most popes. Samuel Pepes. Samuel Pepes. I think my favourite line in all the diaries is he woke up and he was going down into the cellar

and his exact words are, and put my foot into a great heap of turds, my mistake. It's just very funny. One of the only things I knew about Samuel Peepie's is that he buried his Parmesan during the Great Fire of London. I did not know that he was involved in the Great Fire of London. He started it? Yeah. No, he went to visit the King halfway through and advised the King, well you need to pull down the houses where the fire hasn't got to yet and make what they call a fire break

so it doesn't spread outside that area didn't he say he also said that the fire of london went on for months and months after we thought it did so i think it was still burning in march the following year what yeah isn't that weird and it started in september so i think yeah strange very strange another thing i didn't know about him was that he sort of wore spectacles which he was very impressed by and thought worked really well but what they were was paper tubes, which had been invented a few decades earlier, and they were just rolled up bits of black paper, and they were wider at the eye end than they were at the reading end, and so they focused right in on, you know, tiny lettering.

I guess. They do kind of work. I guess it gets rid of glare. Well, it's a small aperture, isn't it? You know how with the camera, people don't use old-fashioned cameras, but with the small aperture on the lens, you get a much greater depth of field, and you're just using that effect. You said that Nero had emeralds polished as glasses,

so for his reading, but he was Nero. Yeah. And that's probably a made-up story. Okay, let's move on to fact number two, and that is from Piers. Yeah, this is me. My fact is that if 50 people swam continuously for 15 months in an Olympic-sized swimming pool,

the water would boil. Have you worked that out? Yeah, I've got the physics. The thing is, the thing is, obviously... It's rubbish. physics as you know basically doesn't work but so what we see it's an idealised model but what this comes from

is the check called James Jewel after whom the jewel is named and a jewel is the amount of energy it takes to lift a tomato one metre from the ground but the thing is a hundred gram tomato standard tomato oh your standard European tomato anyway it's also the point is it's also the amount of energy released when you drop the tomato back to the ground

and that each of those is one jewel And the point about that is conservation of energy. You can't create or destroy energy, only convert it from one form to another. So if you have people swimming around, they raise the temperature of the water. And he demonstrated this. He had a tank, which was sealed, and he had a paddle in it, and a rope which, a bit of a string or something that came out at the top over a pulley. And then he had a weight on the end.

And the weight drops, turns the paddle, and he measures the temperature of the water, and is able to demonstrate that the amount of energy from the dropping weight is exactly equal to the amount of energy from the increase. recent temperature in water. So. Does it matter what stroke you'd be doing? No.

It's just about your body heat. Well, that's the other thing is it's not about your body heat. For the purposes of this calculation, I've excluded the body heat effect. Right. Have you excluded the fact that if you put people in 50 degree water, they tend to sort of stop functioning. Certainly out of 15 months. I've got various things that need to be left out of the calculation here in order to make it work.

One of them is that the water in this, idealised swimming pool doesn't radiate heat away. The heat that they create all stays there. The other is that there's nothing to do with the body heat. And the other thing is that you have to find a swimming pool that's open on Christmas Day. Because otherwise...

That is the hardest thing. As opposed to the laws of thermodynamics, which are easy to move around. I guess it's a Lido that we're looking for. Yeah, the other thing actually which makes it difficult is an Olympic-sized swimming pool. Did you know this? It does not have a standard size? Really?

Really? the depth is not standard. Oh, the depth of it can be anything from two metres to three meters. The pool in my illustration, I'm not going to actually run through all these numbers, so run into one link to, but it is two metres deep. It starts at 20 degrees. It would take 11,200 hours, which is 466 days to raise the temperature by 80 degrees from there. And the other thing, of course, you've got to contend with is at what point people will die.

Yeah. You can replace them though, so you could just have substitutes, presumably, to stand in. Are you getting people to dive into a swimming pool, which is 90 degrees already? and swim. Presumably full of fecal matter on urine. Yeah, if you could put me down for an early shift, please,

slash, that would be great. So many caveats. There's an entire thesis of caveats for this. But once we've overcome them, this is team making. Tea making for the future. Guys, I'm a fact about swimming, which does not,

I'm afraid it's not in the idealised realm of physics, but it is an actual fact. So I don't think if we can... Okay, so this is about urinating in swimming pools. So if a pool is chlorinated and you have a wee in it, it creates a case. chemical called cyanogen chloride.

Did you know this? And it's also it's toxic. It reacts with nitrogen. It's when chlorine reacts with the nitrogen in your urine. And it acts basically as tear gas and cyanogen chloride is classified as an agent of chemical warfare. So when you have a pee in the swimming pool, you are technically in breach of the organisation for the prohibition of chemical weapons. You are a war criminal. If you're wearing a swimming pool. If you don't report it to the OPCW, then yeah.

That sounds like because you need more idealised experiment than most. There is a calculation on this as well, and it was to see whether you could produce enough cyanogen chloride in this same Olympic-sized swimming pool that we found that's open on Christmas Day. The boiling one. Yeah, exactly. That would cause a fatal amount of cyanogen chloride to be created. So this is done by Casey Johnston at Ars Technica,

and she calculated that what you needed is 2,500 parts per billion. That's a fatal dose of cyanide. she said what it turned out you would need is a swimming pool that was two parts water to one part chlorine so is anyway completely fatal to swimming before you get it and you also need about three million people to have a pee in it before they were killed by the chlorine in the pool so we can't put it to military use just yet

wheel paddling pools onto the front line no no it does also make a thing called trichloramine which is another lung irritant and it makes a tiny bit of chloroform as well who knew that this much was going on when you had a pee in the pool? There is a way of making Flash's boiling pool work, of course. You have to do just one simple thing to his pool of water and the people without killing them. All you have to do is raise the pool up a mere 18 kilometres into the air.

What? Well, 18 kilometres in the air, then water would boil at blood temperature. That's probably a better solution. Which would probably be easier, actually. If you just raised up, it's called the Armstrong limit. We've made a breakthrough. I mean, people said this is a stupid. It's been very useful.

But it has been checked because, of course, when pilots go very high, above 18 kilometres, you have to wear a pressure suit, no matter how much oxygen you're getting from an oxygen mask. Because beyond that point, things like your tears and your saliva start to boil. Start boiling. That would be incredible there. There is a recording of an American pilot who said the last thing we remembers before blacking out. This is going above 18 kilometres without a pressure suit is feeling the sensation of his saliva boiling on his tongue. Wow.

That's going to be unpleasant. Do you know about boiling in space? this is very cool so this is a thing which hadn't been done obviously for decades because they have more pressing things to do like going to the moon

but obviously the further up you go the lower the boiling point of water and in the 1990s they did a series of experiments on boiling on the space shuttle and they found out that you know when you boil a kettle and it has thousands of thousands of bubbles

when you boil a liquid in space it just produces one big bubble no and it hoover's up all the other bubbles it swallows up all the others so you just have one massive bubble when your tea is ready. That's so great. That is brilliant. I was listening to a podcast the other day called

Smart Enough to Know Better, which is an excellent podcast, really interesting. And they were actually talking about a guy who tries to break records for blowing the biggest bubbles. And he was saying, once a bubble goes above five meters in diameter, if you puncture it, it no longer pops, it tears. Isn't that cool? So if you blow a gigantic soap bubble, it won't pop anymore. In Edinburgh this year, we were after a show called The Amazing Bubble Man. It was a children's show. It was unbelievably good. We were watching a bit of it through the curtains. Oh, no, did you feel a bit like a letdown after it?

We couldn't follow it, but thankfully, all his audience were four-year-olds and all our audience were not four-year-olds, so it was all right. But, oh, man, it was so, you know, he fills a bubble with smoke. Yeah. He sort of injects a bubble hypodermically and then pumps smoke into it, and it floats up, and when it pops, it produces this weird cloud of smoke. He has a sword that can sort of slice bubbles in two. You don't actually need a sword to do that.

You can get implement. Far less difficult to obtain. We'll do the same. That's true. Yeah, it's fascinating. He has a whole, and he sort of puts bubbles on people. You can put bubbles along the arm of a child, for example,

because they don't have hair on their arm. But for an adult with more hair on their arm, you can't do that because it doesn't quite work. So, yeah, all sorts of very interesting stuff. What a great plug for him? I know, I know. You can't remember his name. He doesn't need it.

He's hugely successful. Is he? I look as well into, I know this is kind of grotesque, but the business about the best way to kill a lobster. Oh, yeah. And because there's a sharply divided opinion between. Lobsters. Put them in cold water and bring it up to the heat gradually.

And then they sort of go to sleep and then they're anesthetized and die without knowing it. Or else you plunge them into boiling water and that kills them instantly. Or you stab them in the back. Or you don't kill them at all, which is the P-E-T-A-Peter position. If you do the P-E-T-A method and don't kill them, they're going to be very feisty on the plate. any problem they are they are

yeah we do know what happens if you boil a human alive there because there's a description of one from the reign of Henry the 8th

a cook called Richard Ruse who poisoned the Bishop of Rochester and he got caught and he thought it's a joke it's a joke

I gave him a purgative it's just a joke bit funny you know give him a runny tummy but Henry the 8th was incensed and actually put an act

of a tinder out against him so he could be convicted without trial then persuaded the Parliament to make poisoning an act of treason, then when he thought it couldn't get any worse, decided the penalty for poisoning would be being boiled alive.

So poor old Richard Ruse, who apparently had just had a bit of a joke with his employer, ended up being boiled alive. And there's someone who was actually watched, said he roared mighty loud and diverse women who were big with child did feel sick at the sight of what they saw and were carried away half dead. And other men and women did not seem frightened by the boiling alive,

but would prefer to see the headsman at his own. work. As in the what the executioner? Yeah, the executioner. So, you know, there's lots of different views. I read,

is it not really as good as having his head cut. Did that catch on as a means of execution? Or is he unique? No, there are a few others. There were actually a few before. It's often said that Henry VIII

invented boiling alive. They're actually in Scotland, there were a few. There was a laird somewhat earlier who's upset some of his nobles by apparently being too harsh with them. And they got together and threw him in a kettle. And apparently then to prove

they were all in it together, they all took a glass of the stew that they made by boiling their laird alive and drank it. Do you guys know about the world's deepest swimming pool? I don't know about the world's deepest swimming pool. What are you going to? There's not actually that much to say about it, except that I like it because it's called the deep joy, which sounds like a quote from one of Samuel Pepys's favourites. But I think this is in Belgium and you can walk through a tunnel at the bottom of it,

and it's the depth of nine or ten double deck of buses, I think. That's really cool. Here's my question, though, about what's the point of having a deep end at all in a swimming pool? Why don't you just make it all sort of a normal height? That's annoying. You want to dive down? Well, not much, particularly. I mean, the thing is, what you want to stand on your hands and have your feet sticking out, don't you? You could do that, like shallow end.

Some of us like to test out is. Otherwise you have to be with all the nobs up the shallow end. And you could have the whole pool people standing upside down. Flash has been forcibly removed from many public pools. No, the only point of having it, if you're going to do a very, steep vertical dive. Yeah. Otherwise, it's just waste of water. I guess they have to build that into the plans

for the pool. In case someone misses the sign saying, please do not do a steep vertical dive because following the advice of Pierce Fletcher, we have made the entire pool a depth of only a meter and 30. Feel free to stand on your head. It makes it really difficult to boil the water, you know, because you get so much more. Okay, time for fact number three.

And that is My Facts. And this is that. In Wales, the size of your garden used to be determined by how far you could throw an axe. And so this is a tradition in Wales that apparently is very well known. And I went to the trouble because I don't want to offend anyone of looking up how you pronounce it. And it's called T. Unos, which means one-night house. And it was this tradition that apparently dates back to the Middle Ages, according to Welsh folklore, which is that if you could build a house within a night and have a fire burning in the hearth and smoke

coming out of the chimney by the morning, then you own that property. And then the rule was that you could stand at each of the four corners of your house and throw an axe and the distance that you threw it marked out the boundaries of your property. And that's what you owned. And they continued doing this up until the 19th century. It was never legally... I've never found a law. It was never a legal thing.

I think people just did it. You get quite a big garden throwing an axe. Oh, no, no, no. I'm hugely relieved. I didn't live in pre-19th century wells because I would have had the smallest garden of all of my neighbours. There's an actual example of a house which is, or in fact, there's several where there's one in particular that's supposed to be built that way. Do you know about this? The Snowdonia Society?

The Snowdonia one. Yes. This is where, because I went on holiday. The Ugly House. Yeah, I was in Wales last week. So saw it and found out about this thing in an old book. But yeah, there is this house in Snowdonia called The Ugly House, which is actually really attractive now in a sort of tumble-downy sort of way, but it looks like something out of Hansel and Gretel or something.

And I think that was made by two brothers in the 15th century. Was it? Well, that's the legend. But apparently they think it's more likely to be a 19th century cottage. Yeah. Sounds more likely. The other thing is Hill, which is the word they translate as ugly. It really doesn't mean ugly in Welsh. It means rugged.

Oh, really? Much nicer. It does look rugged. Yeah. So, well, a load of the houses, the TUNOS houses, were obviously not very good because they'd been built in a night. So a load of them were torn down. But then they were replaced later on by more modern cottages on the same site. I just nip into your garden, build a shed overnight, light a fire in it,

throw me axe, and you wake up in the morning to find that I own half your garden. Yeah. And then later I build a very nice... house on the house. A nice conservatory on the side and then there's a swimming pool in place of my house when I've gone out. Yeah, look, it happened. I'd welcome you, Justin. Um, well, I was just going to say, you see, it might not be a law, but you can see how it's a kind of thing that people would believe it, or at least they'll talk about it in the pub. Apparently, you know, if you do this. And then they go out and they do it and everyone would have a laugh and

they see if they get away with it. Depends if anyone notices, I suppose, isn't it, really. I mean, there is a law of adverse possession in the UK, which changed in 2012, but still exists whereby if it's called squatters rights is sort of a shorthand for it and if you own a piece of land and act like the proprietor of it for long enough then then it can become your land do you have to be in it for seven years or something 12 years well it is you can't now go and squirt in someone else's house if it's their home and then wait for the process you know have them appeal to the courts you can immediately be chucked out for that now that's good you could even create your own private beach because you know most of the foreland in britain is owned by

the crown that's the bit between sort of midway between the neep and the spring high tide mark and the ocean is owned by the crown. But if you wanted your own beach, there were just a couple of simple things you have to do. Find a nice, quiet beach somewhere. Put up a sign saying, private, keep out, as you often see on beaches, actually, even though they're not.

You could put up a little fence. Don't have to, but it's nice to put up a little fence. Just show that you're caring for the land. Roll up your trousers, take your socks off, go for a paddle, and all you have to do is stay there for 60 years, and the beach is yours. 60 years. 60 years of paddling and the beach is yours.

and the beach is yours. Do you know how many Olympic swimming calls you could boil in that time? You don't actually have to be literally on the beach all that time. And I do wonder if those people who put up private beach signs are actually waiting for 60 years to be up to then say they now own the foreshore. I wouldn't have the now to do this before the age of, let's say, 20.

So by the age of 80, you'll have a beach. It's a gift for the grand surgeon, isn't it? It's like planting trees, you know, stealing foreshore. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this thing about throwing a thing and seeing how far at land, I looked into it and I found a book called The History of the Germanic Empire Volume 3, which is published in 1835. Best volume. It's an absolute cracker.

And it describes a load of these customs. So a shepherd could see how far he could drive his flock into someone else's forest by throwing his crook as far as far as he could. Wherever it lands, you can drive your sheep in that far. Or a wood cutter could cut wood according to how far he could throw his axe. Could you only throw it once? I don't know. The history of the Germanic Empire Volume 3 is pretty sketchy on details. But I just found this other custom which I thought I had to share with you, which is if you kill someone else's dog to make restitution to them, what you had to do is hang it up by the tail with its nose just touching the ground.

And then you had to cover it with wheat. So it was completely invisible. So you completely cover the whole dog with wheat. And then that heap of wheat is the compensation that's due to the person whose dog you've killed. Keep a wheat covered in dog carcass. It's delicious. If it's a toy dog, then you're fine. You're fine.

That's just a small loaf of bread you shove it into and you're sorted. The thing about throwing the axe, the way they found out how much your territorial waters were internationally, were how far you could fire a cannon back in the day. In fact, not even all that long ago under international law until the mid-20th century, territorial waters were decided it was three nautical miles, which was the length of a cannon shot. No way. And the idea was that that was the distance that you. could dominate the sea.

Defensible distance. Wait, you could fire a cannon, three miles. Three nautical miles, five point six kilometres. Spain claimed six nautical miles, but that was unusual. And the United Kingdom only extended from three miles to 12

in 1987. Wow. When we suddenly got a cannon upgrade. Got a bigger gun. These days, you've got cruise missiles, which can go quite a long way, so you could make a pretty good claim. So I think that doesn't work anymore,

but that's how it was. Wow. That's interesting. So it's actually, and presumably these Welsh guys were saying, well, I can defend this house, as far as I can throw this axe. But then you have to go out and get the axe from a limitless support.

A axe throwing is still a big deal in North Wales. Is it? Yeah, apparently. In fact, here's the interesting thing. At this moment, there is a thing taking place, which is called the Good Life Experience, the Hawadden Estate in North Wales, and Keros Matthews runs an annual axe throwing competition there.

I know who that is, but I don't. Catatonias. And the thing is, Keros Matthews and some other people, but she's the only one I'd heard of, so it's Geras Mattis. Well, it's becoming a trend here, and James Harkin, formerly of this podcast, has done axe throwing with his wife, Pellina, and said it was the best one he's ever had. I think there's one in Shoreditch, the best, but he lives a quiet life. He should read peeps.

But they are still, apparently people still use tomahawks in a military sense. No. This is true. The cruise missiles are called tomahawks, of course. So, I think in the Korean War, people actually brought throwing axes. as part of their gear, the Americans brought throwing axes. Here's the thing about Tomahawks, which I did not know, is that loads of Native American tomahawks had hollow handles

and could be used to smoke through. And basically, if some Native Americans met some white settlers, it could go one of two ways. You use the axe either to hit them, or you come to some sort of agreement, and then you smoke together to seal the deal. Amazing. In the film, you see the shadow of this shape

and be holding it up, and then you'd cut it in, it's a piece fight. cigar that would work this is so random but I discovered since we're talking about America and Wales that the first Welsh settler

in America was called Howl Powell. Howell Powell? I like that but anyway I was actually going to talk about squatting in America generally

in 2004 a woman in Georgia came home from a holiday and there was a car in her drive and all the lights were on her house and so she went into her house

and there was a stranger in there a woman who was wearing all this woman's clothes She'd changed all her utility bills into her name. She'd installed a washing machine and she'd installed a dryer and she'd moved her dog in. And this woman had just moved in, pretended to be her. So the lady arrived home and said, get out of my house.

And we have no idea why she did that. She'd ripped out a carpet. She didn't like how one room was painted. So she repainted it. What happened? She went to prison. Which one did? It was the right for homeowner.

That's a film, isn't it? Yes. Whose house is it is? This lunatic turned up claiming to be me and what's my house? That's a good teleformer. is who actually owns the house. And you get the two claimants and you have to ask them questions about,

well, where are the switches, if a light goes, the trip switches? Squatting through the keyhole. Yeah. Who would squat in a house like this? Yeah. Okay, we should move on to our final fact,

and that is from Andy. My fact is that some caterpillars find new friends by drumming on their anuses. Work on me? Yeah. So this, actually, this fact, was sent in by somebody, by Gorish Chorla, so thank you very much for sending us in.

I liked it so much. This is the masked birch caterpillar, and it lives on birch leaves, and it spins cocoons out of silk. But sometimes they need a lot of caterpillars to join in the silk cocoon ceremony and maintain their hiding place. So what they do is they do anal drumming.

So they bang their anus on the ground. They drum their anus on the leaf, and it summons the other caterpillars. But they're very versatile, because also, if they have rivals and they want to scare a rival away, Sometimes. Then they will do anal scraping. That's different from anal drumming. Oh, yes.

As we all know. So they have a thing called an anal or. Able or what? Not a choice I want to be presented with you. If you don't have a very strong musical ear as a caterpillar and you misinterpret the come hither for the... You're in trouble. You're in trouble. Well, the thing is that there's a recording of this thing online. You found that.

But there's the woman who researches it, says you can't really hear it, but if you get a laser vibromator, you hear this crazy rumbling sound, they actually sound like lions. They're really tiny lions. She's called Jane Yack, this researcher, and she says,

they talk to themselves with their arses as well, talking with their butts even when they were alone. When feeding, they go, chomp, chomp, chomp, chomp, chomp, anal scrape. Nothing unusual about that. I don't get invited to many dinner parties. The Alcon Blue Caterpillar, also makes a scraping noise, but not for other caterpillars.

It makes a scraping noise that red ants mistake for a queen red ant, and it releases a sort of a chemical that smells like them as well. So the red ants then take the caterpillar into their ant hill, kick out the actual queen ant. The caterpillar sits there eating the larvae, to which the ants don't seem at all bothered, because it smells like a queen. It looks like what doesn't really look like it? But it smells like we know it's making a queenie sort of noise,

right up until the moment when it pupates and it stays in there, protected by the ants, then it bursts out, at which point all the ants go, wait a minute, because there's a butterfly in the middle of their ant hill, which is unusual. But they're covered in really loose scales when they come out. So the ants make a grab for it, and all the scales just come off, and it just climbs out and flies away. Brilliant. That's amazing. Which is brilliant.

Is our own queen actually the queen, or is she just an enormous caterpillar? Imagine if one year for the state opening of Parliament, she comes out, and she seems to be all covered in these loose scales. What's going on there? All those laws. Do you know they have carnivorous caterpillars in Hawaii? What do they eat? They eat, beef.

They eat snails. They trap the snail in the silken noose, and then they eat it alive, because the snail can't move, and the caterpillar sort of goes into the hole, the front door, as it were, and the snail tries to withdraw further and further into its own shell, and then it runs out of space, and then gets eaten alive, and they eat the whole thing. That's a rough way to go, packed into a corner. Yeah. Man who discovered this, he said, called Daniel Rubinoff.

He said, almost all insects are predators, but to find a caterpillar going after snails a real shock, it's like finding a wolf diving for clams. We'll have to take his work with that, I suppose, because he's the expert. It would be a shock. If I was a snail, I would have a trapdoor in the back of my shell. Or a panic room. Which marine shells do.

They have an operculum. They have a little trapdoor they can close up their shell. Speaking of the words back door, I have a fact about, because the fact is about anal drumming. I have a fact about the giant California sea cucumber. It's a lovely organism, lives in the ocean, and it uses its anus as a mouth in spite of already having a mouth. What does it use its mouth?

It uses its mouth as a mouth. But then when there's food around, it sort of says, oh, I'll have a bit of my bum too. Both ends. Why not? Yeah. It has a series of tubes which go up from its bottom, and it gets water in through those tubes, and it sucks the oxygen out of the water. That's how it gets its oxygen.

But it also has these blood vessels, and they found that food has been making its way through these blood vessels from the bottom. So that's how they're food. Brilliant. On anuses, actually, I was reading about scorpion's anuses. And scorpions sometimes lose their anuses. You know, some creatures do autotomy, yes.

But the problem with scorpions, these particular scorpions, is that they commit autotomy. So if you threaten them from behind, then they drop their tail off but their anus is at the end of their tail so once they've done that they can no longer defecate or sting or sting indeed so they just wave around

randomly a little butt in fact the guy who discovered this a guy called Matoni said that once it had lost its tail he could see the buildup of fecal matter in the back of it until they got a photograph of it haven't they yeah so they and they can't grow it back

they can't grow it back the thing is they can breed before they dive you know what I mean It takes them so long to die that they can bring up a family and pay the school fees. So it's no problem. It's not a good chat up line though.

It's not a good chat up line though. It's like losing your hair. But you can still breed before you die. In principle. There is a tiny species of jawworm which doesn't have a common name. It's called haplenathia, which has a transient anus.

Most of the time, it doesn't have a bottom. It eats things and when it needs a bottom, a bottom appears for a while. It uses the bottom and then the bottom goes away again. That's so useful. Transient anus. Think how useful that would be. I can imagine supermodels wanting to invest in that something

because an anus is not actually that appealing body part. I know they say a lot of things would be a good name for a band, but transient anus would be a fantastic name for a band. Mapani worms. Go on. The larvae of the emperimoth. It said in the thing I read, commonly eaten in Africa.

Africa is always used to mean just this like a broad really. And you eat it by squeezing it like a tube of toothpaste and then giving a quick flick of the wrist to expel the slimy green contents of the gut. And it's a nutritious snack. And there was a bloke who was caught at Gatwick with the four sacks of these things which confiscated and destroyed. And the customs said they were worth £40,000. What? I know. But I looked up the cost and you could buy 40 grand tin for £16.99 online.

which means that if it really was 40 grand's worth, this is in 2013. He must have been carrying the same weight as a baby elephant. I saw that. I think it was about 100 kilos. And he claimed that they were for personal consumption. He said exactly that. How was he getting that much into the luggage? You just pack your backpack really densely.

You can get away with a lot. You cannot squeeze that into one of those tiny little wire containers at the EasyJet check-in. Well, he may not have been hand luggage. This was an unusual seizure, but the vigilance of our officers have stopped these dried instruments from entering the UK. Hooray. And possibly posing a risk to our food chain. Ingrid Smith,

a spokesman for the UK border agency. I love the idea that you need vigilance to spot 100 kilos of dried caterpillars in sacks. Okay, that's all of our facts today. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us here, you can get in touch with the others on Twitter. And he's on... At Andrew Hunter M. Justin.

At Justin. and pull out. Flash? Wow, they all have Twitter accounts. I didn't think either if you would. What's your account? My account is an email address,

which is podcast at QI.com, or you can go to at QI Podcast, which is our group account, or listen to any of our previous episodes at no such thingsafish.com or any of the first 52 are available to buy on iTunes if you look up.

First year of fish. That's all for this week. See again next week. Thanks for listening. Bye-bye.