No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As An Eton Oyster

Episode Date: December 18, 2025

John Lloyd joins Dan, James and Andy to discuss rivers, shipworms, oysters, and tuners. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.  Join Club Fish for ad-free episodes and exclusive bonus content at apple.co/nosuchthingasafish or nosuchthingasafish.com/patreon Get an exclusive 15% discount on Saily data plans! Use code [fish] at checkout. Download Saily app or go to https://saily.com/fish

Merry Christmas, everyone! Ho! Ho! Ho! Yep! Thanks, Dan. Well, as you can see, we are all in the Christmas spirit, and why would we not be, because we have a very special guest for you here today? That's right. It is the man known as the chief gnome of the QI operation. He is the person who brought us four, including Anna, together, to make no such thing as a fish.

It is John Lloyd. Yes, the Christ figure to our three wise men? Oh my God. Okay. Okay. No. I'm rowing back. He's the producer of QI. He's the producer of every great comedy series you watched.

Black Anna's Spitting Image, not the 9 o'clock news, so much. And he's the author of a book called The Meaning of Liff, co-written with Douglas Adams 42 years ago. And it's just been reissued. It's a fantastic book. Yeah, this book is basically a dictionary of things that there should be words for, but they don't exist.

And so, what they've done is there are signs of place names all around the UK that don't have any meaning attached to them and they've attached these observations to those to create new words. Like Bath? No. Bath has a meaning. That already has a meaning, badly.

Sandwich, for example. That is a... No, you guys are screwing this up. Des Moines, the two little lines coming down from your nose to your mouth of the Des Moines. Ah, nice. I like Ely. That's always been my favourite.

The first tiniest inkling that's something, somewhere, has gone terribly wrong. Okay, so that's the meaning of life. It's available in all shops now. brilliant Christmas present, stocking filler. Main present, I would say. Absolutely. But what if you're listening to this,

and it's too late to do the shopping, and you need to get the fish lover in your life a gift, what to do is get the fish listener in your life. Membership of Club Fish. A wonderful, super secret, top secret, but also crucially accessible to everyone on the planet, members club. Absolutely.

There's loads of things on there. There's loads of bonus content. There is going to be a super special quiz coming up in the new year. that we're going to announce there are extra long versions of our normal episode that is video episodes of Drop Us Align

which is our audience feedback show Go to patreon.com slash no such thing as a fish and you can get your membership there But in the meantime please enjoy this episode of No Such Thing as a Fish

with John Lloyd CBE Christ of the British Empire On with the show Hello. Hello and welcome to another episode of No such thing as a fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Hoburn. My name is Dan Shriver. I am sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray, and John Lloyd, And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in a particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, and that is Andy. My fact is, the Chicago River used to be sparkling, but only because of all the animal carcasses floating in it.

Mmm, yum, yum, yum. How do dead carcasses make something fizzy? Well, they give off methane. They give off gas. Oh, yeah. They sort of, basically, there's a bit of the Chicago River, which was called Bubbly Creek. And this is actually a good news story from this year, because finally they've cleaned it up. But 100 years ago, it was really foul.

It was amazing. So, this bit of the Chicago River, which has been full of junk for a century. And the reason that it was so bad in that particular bit was because it's next to the abattoir district, the slaughterhouses, all of that. And it was so foul that bits of it were just solid at the surface. The river was just caked with lumps of matter. So you don't need a bridge. No bridge required. No, no, no, exactly.

Really good. Chickens could walk on it. Could they? Completely unharmed. They'll just wander out over the sea. Chickens can swim. So that doesn't really help them that much, can they? Can they?

Can they? Or am I thinking of ducks? You think of ducks? That's because the reason there were so many carcasses in it, is because from 1865 to the 1920s, more meat was processed in Chicago than anywhere else in the world. No. Really?

Wow. And it's a big foody place. I was interested in other kinds of food in Chicago. Did you know shredded wheat was invented in Chicago? What's it? It's premiered at the World Spare in Chicago in 1983, invented by Henry Perky. Yeah.

Okay. And also 31% of children admitted to the University of Chicago Burn Center over a 10-year period were scalded by instant noodles. Oh, yeah. Wow. I've been there. To that centre?

No, to the world of scolded, the pot noodle situations. Yeah, you've got to let those noodles stand. Gotta get to them. Gotta get straight into them. You say sparkling. It didn't look nice, did it, right? The bubbles were purely the sparkly elements.

Yeah, it's feted, I'd say, rather than sparkling. Because I've got some sparkling water here in front of me, it's beautiful and clear. Oh, that's lovely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I put a dead mouse in here before we started just to help it bubble. Well, you say in the bubbly water, though, a litre of bottle water contains an average of 240,000 detectable plastic fragments. Oh, dear.

So don't drink that. Don't drink that. Here's another one, James. Reusible water bottles can have 40,000 times more bacteria than a toilet seat. Oh, well, this is a reusable. This is one that I'm going to chuck away into the street afterwards. I'm going to chuck it into the Thames and see what bubbles up. Can I tell you a thing about bubbles?

Yes. Bubbly water. Okay. So London has the ability to spritz its own water. The Thames? The Thames. It has two boats, the bubble boats, which can inject gas into the river. Is it just for fun?

It's not. It's really important. It's only occasionally needed, right? So when there is really hot weather and when there are sometimes sewage overspills, which mostly won't happen anymore because of the new big Thames Tideway Tunnel which we've talked about blah blah blah but basically there are times where

you just need to inject oxygen into the water so fish can breathe. I see so there's a sewage overflow that means there's not enough oxygen in there so you need to get some in. Exactly. And there are two boats that are called Bubbler and Vitality.

It's an absolute last resort. If you're using the oxygenate the water boat it's a really bad sign but they can each inject 30 tonnes of oxygen into the river every day. that's really cool this is necessary because in 1957 the Thames was declared

biologically dead and by 1970 it was so polluted it had started to dissolve the hulls of boats wow it was that toxic yeah it's a lot better I think it's a lot better now it's really interesting because the word

Thames means river in Celtic same as the word thine means river from old English word tinan which means to dissolve okay It's amazing that we can tell how much oxygen is in the Thames. Like, that's pretty extraordinary that you would take a sample of one spot

and that would tell you the story of the entire Thames. That seems quite wild. I had this thing quite recently where they put a little thing on your finger and they tell you how much oxygen is in your blood. How the fuck does that work? Is it because all your blood goes through your finger at some point or another? No, it can't. Can it? No, it can't.

That's not how it works. No, because some of the blood goes out to your leg and then back to the heart. Yeah. And then goes out to your finger and then back to the heart. Yeah. I don't know how it works.

And I don't want to know, actually. No, you're right. I prefer to think it's magic. Okay, here's some stuff on corpses and carcasses. Do you know there's a theory that anthrax can lure you in? Really? Yeah. So the idea is that anthrax gets into an animal.

Okay. The animal dies. And then the animal sort of fertilizes the ground. And so it gets more lush. And then that gets more animals to go to it. And then those animals catch the anthrax and then they die. And there's an idea that that's how it's evolved. That's its life cycle.

Isn't that cool? Yes. That's very cool. It's so weird that that stuff. Well, I guess we've, we, I make that sound as if it's like the anthrax is going, psh, hey, shh. Like, you know, I've turned it into a human in my mind. You know, we have to anthropomorphize a lot of these facts to make them interesting.

Yeah. And the other thing that I found is I went to a place called Paddarak in France. It's a big sort of cave. And they said that in the 20th century in some parts of France, there was a law that if your animal got diseased and died, you have to go and throw it into the nearest chasm. Oh, chasm. That's what they called it. Like, to be further, one in Padderac is like a big chasm. And they thought the devil lived down there and stuff. It was like one of those, you know, it's like a sinkhole kind of thing. Right, right, right. But the problem is that the rivers go underneath these chasms, and they're attached to the water supply. So you throw in your anthrax cow or sheep, and then it gets into the water and people get sick that way. So it was a misguided law. So many of them are. Question. Yeah.

What's the difference between a chasm and a gorge? Oh, well. I would say that a chasm is caused by a collapse of land to make a hole, whereas a gorge is caused by a river. Right, so it's like a huge river, right, right, right. A river is like almost like a blue-shaped valley caused by a fast-flowing river. Yeah, a gorge, sorry. Right, right. And a canyon?

Same. Same, but bigger. Big river. A big river. Big river. Do you know what a current bum is? A current bum. A current bum is a rock under the source of a river, which gives that sort of hump thing.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it's covered in water. Yeah, the water goes over a boulder. Is this meaning of life, or is that just what it's actually called? It's a book called Landscape, where Robert MacFarlane, which I highly recommend about the dialect words all over the country. Very cool. The river is now clean, Andy. You said the Chicago River, right?

Except once a year it looks like toxic goo. Oh. And that's because of St. Patrick's Day. They dye the river, the entire river, green. Lovely. Yeah. Lovely? Well, I celebrate Irish heritage, James.

I don't know why you don't. It's weird because I am part Irish. But I refuse. I just straight up refuse. Um, well, I don't know what's, oh, well, I think the question is, is it okay? Like, are they putting in toxic goo or are they putting in food coloring? Food coloring. I, they started with toxic goo and that quickly got, uh, bad feedback. I think they did because it started by accident in 1961 when some people were putting dye into the water to see where like a leak had come out or to see where the water flowed. And then it was around St. Patrick's Day. So everyone thought, oh, they did that on purpose. And they went, oh, well, We didn't, but let's do it on purpose of future. But that die was toxic. Ah, there you go.

That's very funny. The Chicago River is a friend of the podcast. Yeah. Oh, so it is. Because in 2004, the Dave Matthews band drove over it in their bus and dumped an estimated £800 of human feces onto a passenger sightseeing boat. Oh, yes. But why did they have £800 pounds of feces on their bus?

They've been saving it up. The tour bus. That's a hell of a tour. Was it through a grating in the middle of the bridge? Can you imagine being on that boat? Celebrity feces all over. You wouldn't know it was celebrity, though. If you knew it was celebrity, that might take the edge off.

Do you think if you saw Dave Matthews waving out the window, you'd go, how lucky are we? I don't think Dave Matthews is of a level of celebrity enough. No? I know his face. I'd want it to be A-list. You want Taylor Swift's bus traveling? Sort of, yeah. Right.

That's going to be mixed with Travis Kelsey's. Oh, gosh. Too much, too much In the meaning of live Chicago is defined as the foul-smelling wind that precedes an underground train But it might of course be one of Dave Matthews farts But it was known as the Stinking River

Wasn't it, the Chicago River That's what locals called it all the way through the 20th century It was really It sounds like it was so bad And a lot of the contemporary descriptions Of how awful it was Come from this brilliant book The Jungle by a writer called Upton Sinclair

Who wrote It was a journalist Expoise, really, of the slaughterhouses and their practices and just how, you know, appalling the quality was there. So I'll just read you a couple of sentences of it. The material brought to the surface was as black as ink. A considerable amount of gas was given off, which was so evil-smelling that it could be detected even above the prevailing odour from the stockyard pens. I know. And sometimes the river would catch fire because it was so kind of crud.

And sometimes people would wander. out? I'm presumably you're chasing your chicken. And you're trying to get it back and then they just disappear below the surface. Could they get out a bit into it? You mean? They could walk over some glub and then disappear? That's insane. Upton Sinclair. Oh, yeah. He was known as like a muckraker. He wrote fiction

that exposed what was going on in society and quite a few laws were changed off the back of different books that he wrote over the course of his life. So he's really important. But I also have a book of his at my house which is called Mental Radio. And it's a book he wrote all about

his experiments with telepathy because his wife, Mary, believed that she had telepathic ability. So weird how these really awesome people getting a bit woo-woo towards the end. If you look at all these, all the people who invented quantum mechanics, for example, all became really mystical towards the end of their life because, you know, Shreddinger. I guess it is kind of like, it's almost like magic, isn't it? Quantum mechanics. I think so. I think you go, once you've done a lifetime of science, you think actually, but

Why? Why is there something and not nothing? Because I've got a friend who was a Nobel Prize in a book called Brian Josephson, who invented the Josephson Junction. Oh, yeah. So superconduct a guy. Yeah, yeah. Who is basically slightly sent to Coventry in Cambridge because he's become a Buddhist and become very spiritual. He's the most wonderful person. I think in the University of Cambridge, they don't say sent to Coventry.

They say sent to the University of Warwick. That's very funny. But yeah, Albert Einstein wrote a forward to the German edition of Mental Radio. and he was interested in. But yeah, so Upton Sinclair was a very interesting character. It sounds like a good, it's a good name for a radio station.

Welcome to Mental Radio. It's no music, it's just pranks. That's it. It's just Steve Pink, wall to wall, Steve Pink. But the thing about telepathy, I'm slightly telepathic. Oh, here we go.

I can do, there's an online site where you can get scores way, way, way above chance. Right. You have to guess where a thing is under a hidden map. That's called Mind Sweeper, isn't it? I'm actually getting telepathic messages right now from Andy and James saying, Dan, what the fuck have you done to our podcast by introducing this subject?

Can you hear it? I can hear it. Stop the podcast. Everyone this week's episode of Fish is sponsored by Saly. Dan, have you ever been abroad? Yes. Okay. Have you ever needed to use the internet abroad?

No. Okay. On with the podcast. No, no, not true. It's my. Everything, the internet. I'm basically on holiday with the internet. Okay, well, that says more about your family relationships than it does about you. The point is, if you have ever been lost abroad or needed an internet connection and you haven't

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in Hawaii, a tightly guarded secret that used to be passed down from generation to generation, was how people used to tune their guitars. But surely everyone knows that. They're those little knobs, aren't there on the end? Well, see, I don't know how to tune a guitar. Honestly, if we left you in a room with a guitar, you'd work it out. Really? If you turn those knobs, the sound changes.

Well, I know you turn, I know you turn the knobs, but I don't know, I just, I'm very impressed when I see anyone do it. And also, you really shouldn't be. You wouldn't know what you were tuning it to, right? Oh, that's it. That's the thing. So a guitar, if you play a classical guitar, like I would tune a guitar, maybe James would tune a guitar, your tuning is E-A-D-G-B-E. That's sort of the classic.

And you can make classic e-notes, G-notes, all that. It's basic stuff. You don't understand that at all, do we, Andy? If you tune it that way, that means wherever you put your fingers on the guitar, it will always sound the same. So you just know where to put them because you know how each one is tuned. Every good child deserves fun. What happened to that? Oh, that's the staves of a musical.

scar, isn't it? Every good boy deserves favor? That's it, yes. Yeah. But this is very interesting because this is slack key guitar in Hawaii. It's a Hawaiian guitar tradition that has been part of their world for hundreds of years, and the idea

is that they all tune it differently to an open set of notes. When you then play it as an open chord, so you don't use your other hand, it plays a lovely chord and every family seem to have designed its own different set of notes unique to them. And that's what would be passed down from family to family.

Now, the reason that this happened is almost to do with what you're saying, Andy. So when Captain Cook first came to Hawaii, there was a guy on board called Captain Vancouver, who was the captain of the next vote that came to Hawaii. And he brought a bunch of cattle. And the cattle arrived, and it was roaming around. And the king of Hawaii didn't know what to do with them. How is this going? This is the origin story of the guitar in Hawaii. It's really interesting. Now, in those days in Hawaii, we always tied an onion to our balance. Cattles roving free in Hawaii. They don't know what to do.

So they decide to bring in some Mexican and Spanish cowboys to teach them how to farm. Vacheros. Yes, exactly. They brought their guitars. They played the guitars. And then when they left, they left them the guitars. After a while, a bunch of them went, how do we even tune these things? And they weren't quite sure of the classical tunings.

So they had to create their own tunings. And family by family, this is what they did. and all these beautiful songs started emerging. Dan, you sent around a link like we always do with these facts just so that we can check that they're true. And this, we all do it. We all do it. I mean, this idea came about because of Dan's facts, but we all do it.

And this was about a guy called Raymond Kane. But he has a middle name that I wonder if you read his middle name. Oh, yes, I did, yeah. Well, you're so good at pronouncing things, Dan. I wonder if you'd like to just remind us what his middle name is. Oh, my God. Where is it? It's just there.

Oh, okay. Well, this is going to be embarrassing for you because, as it turns out, this is my middle name as well. So it's Calio Aloha, Poina, Aleo, Helemanu. No, helemanu. Oh, you're so close. I was doing the Australian. Do you know, Alan Davis and I went to see the Swedish version of QI years ago? Oh, yeah.

And as the producer, very sweetly said, John, it's such an honour to have you here as the divisor of the whole thing that was, you know, would you kindly introduce the guests? And he gave me the list of Swedish guests and I read them all out and their audience were in hysterics because I didn't get one syllable right.

They were screaming after. Who was Raymond Caney? He was, good question. He was a slack key guitarist. And I think the thing you sent round was no bittery of him, maybe. It was, yeah, that's right. I don't play the gig.

guitar at all, but I do play a bit of piano. And obviously one thing I know is about piano is where middle C is. But I didn't know, and this is the most interesting thing I think I found in the whole month, is there are three middle C's on the guitar. Did you work that out yourself when you were tuning it? If you're tuning on your own, you'll use your lowest e-string as a guide to the next string, because you can play all the chords. I do it the other way from the highest e-string onto the next one.

So what you do is you find a... But do you know where middle C is? Yeah. Name it. Okay. First thread of the second string, fifth thread of the third string, and tenth thread of the fourth string.

I don't know what any of those things mean. Okay. This is also why the quiz failed. You give the answers before the person gets to guess. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But then I'm allowed to say, yeah, I knew all that. I get the point. Trade secrets in music,

as this is a bit of a trade secret, you know, how these Hawaiian families kept their guitars. There is proof legally that an al-a-lawful. album can be a trade secret. What does that mean? Okay. Have you heard of the Wutang Klan? Oh, yes. I've seen them.

I saw them in Aspen, Colorado. Amazing. Lider used to be in the Wutang Clan. The Lizar, yeah. This is one of the most amazing things. Imagine you're at a Wutang gig. You turn around and John Lloyd and Rowan Atkinson. Mr. Bean is standing at a Wutang Klan.

That's where you went to, right? Yeah. Yeah. So is this about the time when they released one? That's it. One record or something. They released, they recorded a secret album in 2007, and they made one hard copy of it. So it doesn't exist outside this hard copy, right?

And an American, a wealthy American guy called Martin Shrekly. Yeah, super controversial. He bought, yeah, very controversial character, bought it for $2 million. And there were very strict restrictions on how it could be played or reproduced or all of that for the next 90-odd years. Eventually, in unrelated reasons, he was sent to prison for fraud. and no no I think they might be slightly related to the fact that he had two million quid to spend on one record so that's very true yeah yeah yeah um I think I just for the no you're absolutely right just for the lawyers listening so as part of that deal he as part

of him going to prison for fraud the album had to be sold off right and he got sold off to a crypto firm called pleaser dow and then when shrekly got out nonetheless despite the album having been sold off he started playing it for loads of people online and the crypto firm sued him and all of this led to a judge decreeing that an album can be technically a trade secret. I've got two secrets from the meaning of Lyft, two

secrety words. Oh, cool. Mary Tavey, which you probably know is a place in Devon. Mary Tavey is a person to whom under dire injunctions of silence you tell a secret you wish to be far more widely known. Lovely. Useful one. And Tuki Tuki,

which is a place in New Zealand. Tuki Tuki Tuki is a sexual liaison, which is meant to be secret, but which is in fact common knowledge. That's nice. Chartreuse. Oh, yeah. Drink? Yes, green.

Yeah. The recipe is only known by two monks. No. Apparently so. Really? Yeah. There are all these recipes, aren't there? Like the Coca-Cola one famously is a bit secret.

You know they use Chartres to dye the Chicago River, of course. That's like that. Yeah. That's where the fish are so cheerful all the time. The Coca-Cola one's really interesting. So they have like a secret formula, right, which they say, oh, no one can work out what this is and all that. And actually, you can kind of pretty easily work out what it is. But obviously Pepsi has the same thing because they make arguably the same drink.

I know they're slightly taste different, but they're pretty much the same thing. But why do they not have secret ingredients? Like they don't say, oh, we have a secret thing called 7X that nobody knows about. Is it because no one really likes Pepsi? Is that it? No, because I think you'll find that the advertising campaign in the 90s showed that everyone loved Pepsi and today we're sponsored. No, and basically they just use normal law and just make people sign non-disclosure agreements

and if they give the secrets away, they sue them and stuff. Rather than saying that they have some sort of secret ingredient that no one can know. Because it does seem mad that you can keep, like, with so much like sort of regulation. Regulation and all the warnings on the back of a package. You can just have a secret source in there? You have to sort of, I think you have to register it somewhere. But it's accepted legally as a trade secret. That's the thing.

Got it. So it is a special legal framework. It's got an injunction on it, basically. Kind of. But there is a thing. Anyway, it's orange, vanilla, cinnamon. Don't say the final one. And dead animals.

Well, we had an email from listener Esther Nelkin, who says, you may have covered this previously, we haven't covered this previously, but in order for Coca-Cola to be recognized recognized as kosher, a rabbi had to be told the secret formula in 1935. Rabbi Tobias Geffen signed an NDA and was allowed to investigate the ingredients. Wow. And she adds, I couldn't find who the rabbi is today who holds the information. That's amazing.

That's a damn brown novel waiting to be written, isn't it? You're so right. You're so right. I've got some specifically Hawaiian secrets here. Oh, cool. That physicists at the University of Hawaii have recently solved the problem the secret of how washing machines get clothes clean. It's never been known until now.

So there are now two physicists who know the secret of how that works. And the other one is that 2018 was a bad year for Hawaii. They had a massive volcanic explosion. And the authorities warned people not to toast marshmallows over it, which is very good advice. But they also had, in 2018,

38 minutes of panic, after a wrongly pressed button set off an alert warning of an incoming ballistic. missile attack. Yes. And the way it's connected to a secret is the governor of Hawaii

couldn't correct the false missile alert for 17 minutes because he didn't know how to log on to his own Twitter and Facebook accounts. Wow.

They were kept from him. There's only one rabbi in Hawaii who knew what the password was. That was mad, wasn't it, when that happened? I think a lot of people just started going around telling people

about their secret liaisons and stuff like that because of us. Tuki, Tuki, Tuki was everyone. The end of the world. We were writing the books of the year at the time, and there was definitely an article about that. And I think it's, I think it was the second time that the person who accidentally sent the alert

out had made this mistake. And it was, it was something stupid, like there were two buttons next to each other. It was, I think it was a drop-down menu. That's right. And it was a drop-down menu, and it was send nuclear alert, brackets, test. Or send out-of-office reply. Yeah. Okay, it is time for fact. Number three, that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that in 1874, the world's largest pearl got lost down the back of a sofa. And was this a kind of Princess on the P style situation? Expand. Well, yeah, easy, okay. They kept putting cushions on top of the sofa. Yeah, and it was only found when, I can't remember the original fairy town now. Is it the true princess? can identify the world's largest pearl

down the back of a sofa. Is it, James? Is it the... It's not that. It's not that. It's not that complete misremembrance of a fairy story. Anyone else?

No, this is something I read in BBC History magazine. It was in an article by Kate Williams and it was about the La Peregrina Pearl and the sofa in Windsor Castle and how the two things interacted in 1874. And it was a... woman called the Duchess of Abercorn, who was at a party with her husband, James Hamilton, and she momentarily lost a pearl down the back of the sofa.

But it was enough that it was recorded, and we now know about it. Is it such a massive pearl that it would seriously damage the sofa? How big is it? Would you feel a lump if you sat down on it? That's what I'm trying to. Like the princess and the pee. Oh, I was thinking more the current bums. Current bums, yeah, true.

If you sat directly onto it with no sofa involved, you would feel it on your bum. Sure. In the sofa, I don't think so, because it is about 11.2 grams in weight, which is about the same weight as the world's smallest monkey. Okay. If you sat on the world's smallest monkey, would you feel that? You'd feel it. Or was it like a cushion? You'd feel it for sure, but not necessarily if it was inside a sofa.

And can you give us a size rather than a weight? No, I'm afraid I can give you. more versions of the weight. So it was 55.95.9.5 carrots, 4 ounces or 223.8 grains. How long was this very large or small item with a certain weight? How long was it lost for? It was lost momentarily. This is a fascinating fact. Wait, I've lost my glasses. No, there they are on my head. It was interesting enough that Kate Williams wrote about it in BBC History magazine. I think the most interesting thing

is how small monkeys get these days I'm staggered an adult monkey that weighs 11 grams Have you seen them There's like these monkeys that you can put them on your finger and they just hold on like a beanie day

That's a toy No you do They do exist I've seen videos of them It is incredible I think why it's notable Is that this is not just any ordinary pearl

It's not just that it was the world largest at the time This is La Peregrina Yeah I said that This is the wanderer This is a part that has been part of so much history.

You can see it in the portraits of Mary Tudor. She was wearing this pearl. It made it all the way into the modern day to Elizabeth Taylor, who wore it in two movies. And it's just had this amazing history. So the idea that you could lose this at all. I know. And just to say on Elizabeth Taylor,

she got given it by Richard Burton, her husband a couple of times. And she lost it in a dog's mouth. Again, momentarily. And the pearl was the same size on both occasions But yeah, she lost it And she was really worried Because this was a very iconic piece of jewellery

And she looked in her dog's mouth And there it was Extraordinary So pearls Oh yeah Famous pearls This one's called La Peregrina Right?

Yeah There is also another incredibly famous pearl Called La Pelegrina Oh my gosh No It's so weird And this one is also one of the most storied pearls. This one's been through

France, maybe Louis the 16th. It was involved in the October revolution in Russia, not in a key role. What does Pellegrina mean? Because Peregrina means a female pilgrim, presumably, isn't it? Peregrina is the wandering one, isn't it? A female wanderer. A pelegrina.

I haven't actually written down the meaning of it. I don't know. Isn't it? A bottle water, isn't it? Pellegrina. It's a female bottled water. That's it. That's it. That's it. Yes. So you know how mollusks of all sorts make pearls

a lot of all sorts a few specific sorts so what is it like they get a bit of grit in them and they put something around it or something yeah there's the main idea is that pearls form around a grain of sand or a bit of grit in fact it's almost always a parasitic worm

that gets inside the muscle or the oyster or whatever I know and they just coat it in the sticky stuff and then they keep on coating and that's how a pearl develops but this is the amazing thing about how mollusks make them, they can moderate the thickness of the layers that they produce. I find this really weird. If a layer of a pearl is a bit thick on one side, the next layer will be thinner on that one side in response. That's why they're circles. That's why they're

perfectly round. It's because they're constantly balancing out to make it. I know. And this was studied by scientists to cut pearls with a diamond wire saw and then polished them and counted the layers and measured the thickness of all the layers inside. That's crazy. It's craft. It's real craft. Yeah, yeah. That's really beautiful. You know the oysters that you get pearls in and not the same as the oysters that you eat? Is that so? Yeah, they're different species. They're in the same family, but that's as closely as they're related. So the eaten oysters are in Australia, and the pearl oysters are in their teridai. I thought when you said eaten oysters, I thought very upper class oysters. Very well educated.

So those two types of oysters are less closely related to each other than we are to the world's smallest monkey. He's a big of appearance for the world's small of monkey. He's the size of a pearl now. It is the size of the world's biggest pearl at the time, which actually it's not the world's biggest pearl anymore. No, no. The world's biggest pearl is the gigapurl which was discovered in the Philippines and is about the I would say that one? I don't know.

It's 27, just over 27 kilos, and it's the size of a female chimp. That's a hell of a jump from 11 grams to 27 kilos. But it's not like a really beautiful one. It looks kind of a bit ugly, doesn't it? But it's not a perfect round pearl. It looks a bit like a manky brain. I think I saw a picture of it. It looks a bit.

We didn't know we had it for a long time because this Filipino man who owned it just kept it under his bed. He didn't know what it was. He had it there for 10 years. And eventually he just had to get it out of the house. You see, if James' fact would be a lot more interesting, the pearl was lost for 10 years down the back of the sofa, then we could have paid attention.

But a thing that interests me is, yeah, James. The thing that interests me is value, all right? So why do we decide that pearls are valuable? So, for example, Mark Twain's great quote, I wonder how much people would pay for a soap bubble if there's only one in the world, that wonderful iridescence you get on bubbles. Yeah.

And in some cultures, mother of pearl, that marvelous thing you get inside the shell, is more valuable than the pearl themselves. And Japanese divers used to throw away the pearls because they're collecting the mother of pearl. And yet, according to Suetonius, the Roman historian, the main reason Julius Caesar invaded Britain, do you know what it was? It wasn't tin or lead or anything. It was they had the biggest supply of freshwater pearls in muscles. Really? Do we still have pearls?

I've been to a pearl farm in the UK somewhere, I'm sure maybe it was in the Isle of White or somewhere. But do we make pearls in this country? There aren't any pearl factories, I think, but freshwater pearl mussels are a big deal. And they're being rebred and reintroduced, and they're more common in Scotland

because the water's just a lot cleaner up there, basically, and the muscles can survive. But yeah, you get British pearls. And in fact, they're incredibly weird. They release millions of larvae into the water. That's how they breed. It's called a sperm cast. Yep.

Which is looking around. Yeah, yeah. And then they hope to get themselves swallowed by a passing salmon. This is their tactic. This is their life cycle, basically. They spend a year living on the gills of this salmon or a brown trout. And then they drop off the gills after a year and they burrow into the riverbed. And they can live in a riverbed for 130 years.

What? Wow. There will be some. Wow. So there could. be pearls in the UK, which remember Queen Victoria, or which were around in the time of Queen Victoria. That's crazy. That's very nice. Well, they might remember then, if they remember that time. We were talking about the fact that this pearl was lost at Windsor Castle, but something

was also lost in a sofa in Buckingham Palace while Queen Victoria was queen. That was a 14-year-old boy. Oh, careless. Yeah. They just lost a boy. How one was it there for? Momentarily or for 130 years. Was he larger or smaller than the world's smallest monkey? He was called Boy Jones. He's quite famous. Edward Jones. He was the first ever celebrity stalker, broke into Buckingham Palace multiple times, sat

on the edge of her bed once, took her underwear. Oh, boy, Jones. Yeah, he hid under a sofa. Was he actually a boy? Yeah. Yeah, he was 14. Yeah. 14.

I don't think he was taking the underwear because he was a pervert. I think he was just wanting to show that he would, he'd been there. Well, it was a 14-year-old boy, so it was probably a bit of a pervert. That's all like all 14-year-old boys. Tell me if I'm wrong about this, but I think they caught him, and then they let him go, and then they caught him again, and then they sent him to Australia. Yeah, they were like, okay, you've broken in twice. Where can we put you that will just make it that slight bit more hard to get in Australia?

Wow, do we know what he did in Australia? Did he? I think he disappears from history. Yeah, I think if memory serves. I think he took the underwear with him, and he opened a brand of shops, called Victoria's Secret. Beautiful. Beautiful.

You say the world's largest pearl. I researched the world's largest things. Okay. So the cuckoo in the world's largest cuckoo clock weighs 23 and a half stone. Wow. Wow. Okay. The world's largest container ship can carry 4,282,600 mattresses.

Oh, but how many marmosets? That's what we all really got up. And in 2018, in protest at losing access to the sea after a war with Chile in 1884, Bolivia displayed the world's largest flag. Do you know how big it is? It's three metres wide and 200 kilometres long. Sorry, yes, I did know it. Just continuing that quiz from before.

Damn, another point of James. You are killing this quiz. Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show, and that is John. Okay, my fact is, for a shipworm, the most nutritious part of an ice lolly is the stick. The perfect companion for a day at the beach. Yes. You have the lolly, they have the stick. It's like Jack Spratt at his wife, isn't it?

Now, you obviously all know what a shipwom is, I'm guessing. But for people who don't know, shipworms are not worms. Yeah. They are a kind of clam. And unlike normal clams or muscles or oysters, you know, reference the pearls, they don't have a proper shell. Their shells have evolved to slide off down the body and become a sort of amazing little jaw thing, like a little hat, like a little helmet, covered with lots of tiny teeth. And they use these to bore into, they start as tiny larvae as thin as a needle. and they bore into ships and wharves and piers and that kind of thing

and destroy them by honeycaming them. Wow. They're the bane of mariners and seamen and sailors since forever. I mean, the most extraordinary thing. They've altered modern history, haven't they? Like, basically, they have transformed the world we live in. They're known as the termites of the sea. There's such an invasive problem.

There's something mystical and magical about these things. There's a shipworm in every historical event. that's on water. So in 1503, shipworms honeycomb the hulls of Columbus's ships on his fourth voyage. Two of them sank and had to be abandoned. The other two,

they just managed to get to Jamaica, where they were considered unseaway. They were trapped there for a whole year, all of Columbus's men. Wow. In 1580, when Francis Drake reached London, after circumnavigating the globe, the golden hind was rotten and spongy

from shipworn and never sailed again. On James Cook's first voyage, you know, his ship, H.M. Hasiddeb, was so badly damaged by shipworm. It had to be hauled onto land and repaired three times. It just goes on on. Shipworms helped England defeat the Spanish armada for Christ's sake. Really?

Yes. Yeah. Because the Spanish ships were much bigger and more powerful, but the shipworms made them weak, and so cannibals would go straight through this rotten wood. Right. That's very cool. I mean, the cannibals had something to do with it.

Yeah. Their point of origin isn't even known really because they've just been spread worldwide by boats at any time a ship takes it somewhere. Cryptogenesis, like the Cryptid Factor, that's what it's called. Oh, really? If you don't know where something's from, it's called Cryptogenesis. Right. And no one knows where the Cryptid Factor came from.

Or where it's going. Wikipedia is very I'd say it's very horny for shipworms. It describes them as a group of saltwater clams with long, soft, naked bodies. It's quite something, isn't it? Yeah. We all have naked bodies.

until we put clothes on. Well, that's true, but are they long and soft? Podcast at QI.com. This is for spermcast, Andy. I saw a description of, they don't look very nice, shipworms. It says a shipworm's head under its little shell helmet looks like a blend of wet lips and diseased intestines,

and they have no eyes, and they breathe through their bottoms. I think you look like a mixture of wet lips and intestines or whatever it was, It's probably good that you don't have any eyes. It's true. Well, also, they don't need to... They're very interesting things biologically because they don't, I think, have to find a partner because they all start out male.

They just live as teenage boys, basically, on ships, burrowing into it. Then they just... Stealing queen's underwear. That's it. I think they just release sperm. Then they turn female. Then they just absorb the sperm

that they just released when they were a teenage boy, and they use that to mate. That's easy. Isn't that crazy? It's an incal's dream. It is. It absolutely is. So wood-eating creatures are called xylophages, as I'm sure you know.

Now, question is, why do they eat wood? And the answer is because wood is mostly made of cellulose. And cellulose, get this, is entirely made of glucose. Did you know that? Oh. So if you can digest wood, it's extremely nutritious. I mean, it really is. Yum.

That's why a shipworm would love an ice-wally, but only the stick it would want because there's more glucose in the stick than there is in the lolly. Wow, I see. And that's why you shouldn't eat the stick of your lolly because it's actually just very bad for you. Yeah, yeah.

If you had the right bacteria inside your stomach, you would be able to eat it, right? Because it's in all these animals that eat wood, they have some special bacteria in their stomach that can digest the wood. Is that right? Yes, that's right. Yeah, yeah.

So why do we not do that? There must be some kind of pill you can take to give you that, like some kind of yak, give you the wood bacteria. Yeah, like a bacteria transfer, right? I don't imagine a race of sort of super soldiers who can just eat the trees.

Eat the forests that the enemy are hiding in. Exactly. It makes the end of Beth very different, doesn't it? I just want to give a shout out for the positive side of shipworms because obviously they look disgusting and they do all this damage and so on. But, you know, one study estimates that shipworms have sunk more ships than pirates.

I thought that was rather lovely. But they also do good things. And there's nothing good or bad in the universe. It's just it depends which angle you're coming from. So, for example, they're responsible for cleaning up more driftwood in the world than anything else. And the rotary accent, so the way they drill is that little toothy, helmety thing rotates eight to ten times a minute.

And this inspired Mark Brunel, is Unbarred Kingdom Brunel's dad to invent the rotary tunneling machine. that dug the first tunnels under the Thames and which is still essentially used today. Wow. That's all to do with shipwams. So good for them. Very cool.

And they gave us the Industrial Revolution. Shipwheres? Kind of, yeah. So because Britain needed metal ships to stop the shipwaves from burrowing, we had to get lots of metal. And what did we have? Because Julius Caesar wasn't bothered about it.

Lots of copper. And so we had to get at the copper, but it's underground. So you need to do lots of mining And then there's lots of water under the mines You need to get the water out How do you get the water out? You create engines

And Thomas Newcomen created the steam engine To drain mines Because we needed the copper Because we needed it to get rid of shipworms And that is essentially what started The Industrial Revolution It's so cool It's so cool

Lolly sticks Yeah Do you remember when they had jokes on them Those were the days Don't they? Did they not still? No they got phased out in 1980s 1988, do you know why they got phased out?

There was a reason that they gave, and then there was the actual reason. Because of woke. Because of woke. In 1988. Yeah, because of early woke. What was the reason they gave? Out of date jokes? Oh, had that, come on.

In Britain, the land of the cracker. The land of the cracker. Why would it... Okay, I'm going to give you that. The official reason was that people had more... sophisticated tastes than to... I mean, they're selling these to children, right? Sophisticated, what, joke tastes?

Yeah, yeah. What do they want? Like, lengthy observational stuff on the steak. Just Stuart Lee sets. But the actual reason is because they were selling them abroad. So you had a big batch of ice lollies that you made, and they wouldn't all be sold in English-speaking countries. So there's no point putting English jokes on there

because 50% of them would be in Spain or... of Rants or whatever. I think that's such a shame. I remember having jokes on my lolley stick. Yeah, sure. I don't remember that. But I was born in 1987, so I can't have been having them

when I was a year old. Well, they occasionally bring them back for a very short amount of time. I think in 2012, Wals did a thing where they asked a load of people to send in jokes that they were going to print on the sticks and maybe for six months they did it.

But yeah, so it comes in and out, but generally speaking, they got phased out in 88. Damn. I've some nice lolly. stuff. Did you know that it was invented in Turin? Was it? Yes, along with Vermuth,

Natella and Frere Roshay, all invented in Turin. Invented in 1937, the chock ice. That was the first, the original ice lollies. It was a good year for sweeties, actually, 1937 because Maltese's, Poppits, Smarties and Rolos were all invented in the same year. Isn't that strange?

What was that sort of nexus of sweet inventions? They must have just invented a lot of the machinery. Does it? The Canberry explosion. the Cadbury explosion Really good Also you mentioned So close to being a joke

That almost It really, no I really like it The Cambrian Yeah, it's the Cambrian explosion Yeah, I know The Cadburymian Yeah, it doesn't work It's so close to you're working

That's my radio show Welcome to very close to a joke So should we talk about While we're talking about eating things I think people eat shipworms In some places Do they? Yeah

Okay they don't look nice but they are delicious and they are also incredibly nutritious shipworms have more protein than beef as well as being rich in iron, zinc, selenium and vitamin B12 and you said Dan they're called sometimes the termites of the sea and a termite contains

twice as much protein as sirline steak I'm not going to say taking off but I think the world's first modern shipworm farm was founded a couple of years ago because they convert boring old wood to very edible protein. But they're so brilliant because if you're farming salmon, for example, in order for the

salmon to have something to eat, you've got to collect four times as many tiny fish for this. It's ecologically incredibly damaging fish farming. Whereas you just chuck a, you know, crappy old log of driftwood into the thing and shipworms eat that and it's incredibly effective

environmentally. Yeah. And they grow really fast as well. And they grow, the shipworms grow, what is it, 20 times as fast as muscles, which obviously we all like. Are we eating shipworm food then? Is it out there? Not yet, but it is these two guys at Cambridge David Willer and

bizarrely a guy called Ruben Shipway started a thing called the Naked Clam project because as Andy said, they're sort of naked because they don't have a shell and they reckon this is going to solve world malnutrition because not only they're very nutritious, they're environmentally safe and they've got this amazing thing

is in the tanks where these shipworm nibbling on the driftwood, they chuck in a few garlic capsules as well so that you get ready garlic clam. Oh my God. You know what? Next to my house, not far from my house, there was a restaurant opened where all the food was made out of insects. Oh yeah? In the last, this was in the last year. Wow. It lasted about three months because people do not want to eat that shit. You must have gone presumably. I wanted to. And then by the time I tried to bucket, it was already closed down. But you wonder why not? I mean, so for one of the many, xylophages along with beavers and

woodworm death watch beetle is woodlice which are wood eating things and they are closely related to they're not insects they're crustaceans and we don't have a problem eating clams or lobsters but wood lice well it's because it's got

louse lice in the title but the same with chipworms if you call them shipwheres people aren't going to want to eat them if you call them long oyster yes yum yum yum yum oh what's that thing as scoffier when When Escofio first wanted to serve frogs' legs, he called them nymphs of the dawn. Brilliant.

But we can come up with a good name for shipworms. We can get in on this. Well, naked clams doesn't do it for me. He wouldn't want that doesn't sound. Long, soft, naked. Yeah. Glad bodies. Chocolate willies.

How about that? They already exist. There's one shipworm we haven't mentioned. Oh, yeah. The giant shipworm. Oh, yes. We must have that in. Cufus polythalamia.

It was legendary. a long time, Dan, right up your street. Oh, yeah. And it doesn't live in the sea. So it's a related species, because there are loads of different species of things. We've mostly been talking about the one that eats ships, which is one specific species of shipwam. This one lives in mud, and

it doesn't burrow into wood. It builds this chalky case around itself, and it can get up to five feet long. Wow. It's so big. Same size as Nicky Manage. So, Nicky Vinage. And 40 times

longer than the smallest monkey with a but it's yeah you said Dan most shipworms are 8 to 18 inches long and this can be 5, 6 feet long but it doesn't eat wood

that's the weird thing about this shipwell yeah it's bizarre but basically there was a team of scientists who found one and they found it because someone in the Philippines had taken a film of it on YouTube they've been searching for it for ages without success and then someone found it on YouTube basically but you can see them pouring it out

of its shell or whatever it is and it's absolutely disgusting It's really, it's the stuff of nightmares. It's really cool. And if it was called muddy nymphs, would you eat it? Yes, absolutely. I have 12. Yeah, yeah.

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've said over the course of this podcast, we can all be found on our online social media accounts. I'm on at Scriberland on Instagram, James. My Instagram is no such thing.

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So the meaning of LIF is 42. And that's in all bookshops now and online. So get it for Christmas, for someone you love. It is for my money. It's the funniest book that's ever been written. John Lloyd and Douglas Adams, the co-writers. Now, also, if you want to send us any facts that you want us to put into our shows, either drop us a line or Little Fish, podcast at QI.com is the place to get us all.

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