No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As Constantly Awake Beauty

Episode Date: June 16, 2017

Anna, James, Andy and Alex discuss synchronised blinking, the ants the size of foxes, and nocturnal apple-counting robots.

Welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish. Coming to you this week from the QI offices in Covent Garden. My name is Anna Tushinsky. I'm sitting here with Andrew Hunter Murray, Alex Bell and James Harkin. And once again, we've gathered round the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days. And in no particular order, here we go. Starting with Alex. My fact this week is that baby elephants suck their trunks.

for comfort. Aww. It's very sweet. Is that the response you're going for? Yep. That's what I've got. In fact, adults do all sorts of things with their trunks as well. When they're nervous or they don't know what they're doing, they will pick their ears or kind of wipe their eyes and they do it like humans do with hands.

So, what it's just a social thing that it's, they don't know what to do with their trunk? Yeah, well, actually, when baby elephants are born, they can't really control their trunks the first few days, so they just wave around a bit wildly. And also, it's really sad. They kind of tread on it. then they kind of scream because it really hurts. But they can't work out where the pain's coming from. Well, how to make it stop? Yeah.

Trunks are amazing. Did you know that elephants can be left or right trunked, even though they've only got one? What does that mean? They will have a preference for picking up objects that they're left or right from a really early age. Oh, really? But surely, if there is food on the left and their right trunk,

they won't starve to death. That's true. No, but they move over. Like a tennis player who doesn't have a backhand. Exactly. What they'll do is they will turn 340 degrees. And pick it up with their tail. Oh, right, no.

No. That'll be 180. Like a FedEx driver. Yeah. Has the FedEx driver thing been in the podcast before? Is that just going to sound like nonsense to anyone? Yeah, you should explain that. I'll explain it quickly that in America, FedEx drivers aren't supposed to turn left.

Instead, they just do three right turns to get in the right direction. And it works because America's on a grid system. What, and that's, is it that it saves petrol? It saves petrol. Because otherwise, you're kind of sat there waiting for the traffic to go and go and go. So if there's a clear road, right? Not allowed, Andy. Not allowed.

That's like saying, oh, the traffic light was red, but I didn't see anyone coming, so I went through it anyway. But the other thing is, in America, sometimes you're allowed to turn right on traffic lights. Even if the traffic lights are red, you're allowed to turn because it's just the rules. Same in Australia. It's very bewildering when you're a foreigner and you try to cross a road. Hang on. I don't see how turning right three times helps you if you're driving along the road and you need to turn left because there's a thing right there on the left. So you're going north and then you turn right, and now you're going east,

and then you turn right and now you're going south, and now you turn right, and now you're going west. And you needed to go west in the first place. It does seem like it would be a massive detail, but they've done the stats. I can't believe that there are no circumstances. Do they disable the steering wheel so they can't turn left? So I think we were talking about elephants. And adults do the trunk sucking sometimes as well.

There's a behavioural ecologist who's called Joshua Plotnick, who has been observing elephants and he says that when they get stressed out then they put their trunks in each other's mouths as comfort, yeah. That sounds a bit kinky to me. It sounded a bit kinky. It doesn't work as an excuse for a human

to put your thumb in someone else's mouth and say it's because I'm stressed. But I always say that your thumb is your equivalent to a trunk. You put your nose in someone else's mouth. I would say it's more like that. It's obviously the insertor who's doing the comforting, not the receiver. So you put your trunk in the mouth of an elephant

who looks upset. Obviously. I thought it's a stupid error to make. Well, when you start your thumb, you're not doing it to comfort the thumb, are you? You're doing it to comfort the mouth? I don't know. But that doesn't mean that whatever you put your thumb in will feel better about it. Yeah, it does.

That's the rule in life. Go around inserting your thumbs into stuff and the world will be a happier place. Okay. So that's not the only thing that elephants do with their trunks. They also use their trunks for mating. The male will put his trunk to the tip of the female's private parts and then he'll put it back in his mouth. and he has a thing called a vomero nasal organ

and he can smell whether she's receptive and in the mood and on heat and so on and giraffes do the same thing I think lots of animals. They don't have trunks so. They don't have trunks so I think they giraffes I think urinate on each other. Oh do they?

Yeah they do don't they and then smell if they're on heat or whatever. Yeah which is amazing considering the neck thing. Yeah. Because you're going to have to spray it quite high, aren't you? Yeah. That's weird. I would have thought a good way for an elephant

to tell if she's not up for it is by the fact that it will get kicked in the face, presumably, when it sticks his trunk up her ass. We've got two black eyes, but I'll give it a smell just in case. Do you know elephants have a specific call to warn each other about bees, and they don't make this sound in any other scenario. This was a study that was done, I think it was last year,

and it's this certain rumbling sound that they play when they... So if they're played audio of bees buzzing, they make this rumbling sound. And then if they're played audio, of that specific rumbling sound, they also make the rumbling sound because they recognise that it's a sound that says, bees. Because bees are one of the few things that can actually hurt them, and they fly up their trunks and sting them on the inside.

It is a bit like us because we have a thing that we say whenever bees are around, which is bees! So on the trunk, do you know what happened when Margaret Thatcher met an elephant? She and her husband, Dennis, went to the Sri Lankan President's Garden Party in Sri Lanka, and the Sri Lanka president's elephant was there. and Dennis Thatcher didn't know much about elephant anatomy and he was given some bananas to feed to that to his elephant

and instead of just offering them out to the elephant and he picked them up and he started shoving them up the elephant's trunk according to the How many? How many can get through? Supposedly he got through nearly half a dozen and then it snorted yellow gunk over everybody present and Thatcher started telling him off and he said I don't know

I think that's a fairly reasonable mistake to make but pretty recently I've worked out that elephants don't eat but I think if you're not sure then or ask to be fair it sounds like it was six of one half for a dozen of the other

on the blame game because elephants are supposed to pick stuff up with their trunks like food and then insert it into their mouths don't think you can blame the elephant yes yeah I'm blaming the elephant

was unreasonably polite you're waiting until like six but he was like no this is not supposed to go you're constantly taking Thatcher's side this is another time it's my Tory instinct I've always been anti-elephant

but elephants don't know that they can't eat and drink using their trunks either. When their babies, they don't know how to suck water up with their trunks and hold it there and then put it in their mouths. They have to be taught it and copy the other adults and their parents. They're crap, aren't they, baby elephant? To begin with, they literally just drink straight out of the pond away from their mouth. Yeah.

No, no, no, no, they don't drink from their trunks. They drink straight from their mouths. And then they eventually realize that they can suck it up with their trunk and it's a more dignified way of... What dignified? Sucking it up through your nose and squirting it into your mouth? Yeah. I mean, if a human did that, they'd be kicked out of a restaurant, but apparently it's dignified an elephant.

So the traditional Indian way of sobering up a drunk elephant was to feed it three pounds of melted butter. No. It's just a fact. Three pounds. Three pounds of melted butter. And feed it or shove it up the trunk. That is such a coming home drunk like meal to have. Three pounds of butter and nothing else.

It's something in the fridge. Or we just got three pounds of butter. Melt it immediately. No, they used to, and this isn't fun, but they used to, um, make them drunk so they would fight each other. They'd give them brandy so they'd fight each other in the old days. Yeah. And then to sober them up, they'd give them butter.

Oh, that is bad. So they have, they're the only other animals other than humans that have anything that resembles a chin, which sure isn't quite a chin. But they do have a bony protrusion underneath their bottom jaw. Unlike a lot of conservatives. Indeed. All right. on to fact number two and that is James.

My fact this week is that moviegoers blink in sync. Very good. Is it true or is it just poetic? It's true because it rhymes. Is that how it works? Yeah. It is true. This was a study done by the University of Tokyo and they gave a load of people movies to watch and also movies with no narrative like just an aquarium and also an audio book and they showed that people watching the movie were blinking in sync about 30% of the time and the others just not in sync at all. And the reason that they think it is is because

when you're watching a film, you kind of keep your eyes open when it's really exciting. But then when there's a kind of down bit, everyone kind of blinks at the same time. Is that why if you're watching die hard, do you only blink twice throughout the whole film? I've never seen die hard, but is it really exciting? It's so excited. It's a constant thrill. And this is basically what they thought was they worked out how often people spend blinking in a certain amount of time. And if you're watching like a 100 minute film, then you're going to spend 10 or 15 minutes blinking. And they're like, how can you still keep up with the story

if you're not watching it half the time? But that's because you don't bunch up all your blinks into one section. You should do that right at the beginning when they're showing either production credits which is the blink loads then. Well, that's true. But then how do we know that that's the case until we do a study about it? I know, but it just seemed like the most self-evident question to answer in all of scientific history.

But if we're blinking in sync, then everyone is missing the same parts of the movie. So there might be some really crucial bits in movies that everyone thinks of shit, but they're actually great movies because those seconds tie-in-bath. This is why nobody gets Mulholl and Drive. Yeah, exactly, yeah. Because he lulled you into the blinking, and then he really quickly throws in the crucial explanation. Single-wind frame.

The whole bunch is written up there. We do this, though, with other things, don't we? So when you're reading, apparently humans tend to blink when you finish reading a sentence. Or if you're listening to a speech, then we'll tend to blink when the person's speaking finishes a sentence. So we seem to blink at kind of rest moments. And there's one of the things that scientists have looked into is why do we blink so often? Because we don't need to blink as much as we do for lubrication purposes. Just quickly, does that explain why when I'm giving a speech and I look at the audience after I finish a sentence?

They've all got their eyes shut. Yes. Oh, good. Okay. Only look when you finish sentences, Andy. Babies blink way less than adults do. Yeah, this is insane. Are we talking about baby humans now?

Baby humans, yeah, the baby humans. Because, well, the scientists think there's several reasons. They think it's because, A, they sleep more and eyes blink more when they're tired. And... What, babies just aren't tired yet? Well, they sleep more, so they just, they, as in, they spend more time with their eyes closed and resting in a kind of eyes resting state. I thought it was because babies were so tired. That's what you always hear, oh, he's just tired.

Well, it turns out he's not tired at all. He's not blinking, is he? Maybe he's just an ass. and also because babies don't cry for the first like few weeks of their life they don't produce tears they cry they don't produce tears and that apparently changes the amount

by which you need to blink to keep your eyes moist. But the blinking thing is unbelievable and it's a really massive difference so the average person blinks 15 to 20 times a minute and babies blink one or two times a minute so it's actually about 15 times more and I cannot believe I haven't noticed this

and I want everyone with a baby to verify this please I almost texted my friend who's got a baby this morning being like, can you stare at your child for a minute, please? Isn't that mad? That is mad. Once a minute. If you had a load of babies in a movie theater watching a movie, but they only blink twice a minute,

it must be weird because there'd be no blinking at all in the whole theater, and then suddenly they'll all just blink and then go back to normal again. But it must be the case then that we need to ask babies what Mulholland Drive is about. The great tragedy is they can't tell us. so on winking as opposed to blinking if I can take the conversation in that direction there was a study in a journal

called communication research reports this is in 2009 they surveyed people in a shopping mall and a campus and it was just to see is the intent of winking clear basically and the experiment was as follows someone would approach a passerby ask for the time

get them to tell them the time then they'd thank them then they'd wink then they walk off right and then immediately a researcher will pop up next to the pass-and-by. As if they weren't creaked out enough already. And he started saying,

Did you notice that wink? What did you think? I must trust him because he rhymes. And then, just to work out what the recipient of the wing had thought was the intent. And this is the interesting thing. Most people thought it was saying thank you,

all being friendly, or being flirtatious. But that's already, you know, three separate things. So I can't think of any other reasons. Well, other theories lower down the list, included the possibility that the winker had an eye problem. was trying to seem cool

or was expressing some strange ulterior motive. One person suggested they didn't really want to know the time. I love there's only an option for was trying to be called, not was being cool. On winking, actually, I found, have you ever heard of, so you would have heard of 3D glasses? Have you heard of 3D no glasses?

It's this really weird thing that I found online that's been developed by a Brazilian production company called Jonathan Post and two neurons attached to the side of your head on either side. and they send little electronic signals that make one of the eyes blink. And it makes the left eye wink

and then the right eye wink, and then the left eye wink, and then the right eye wink, and it goes faster and faster and it's basically doing it at like 25 times a second, and your eyes are essentially blinking, but out of sync. So it's like left eye, right eye, left eye, right eye.

And if you look at an object and you close one eye, and then you close the other one eye, the image kind of moves slightly. And that principle has been used so you can be able to watch 3D films without having to wear glasses, and apparently is really convincing 3D.

So, Andy, you and I, you and I have just been doing that while Alex has been talking and my eyes are quite sore, I think, you're doing that. Yours as well? So I don't think this is going to be... I don't think so. There's no way this could be good for you. Anna's doing it with her fingers.

Yeah, the reason I'm doing that, James, is because I'm a natural scientist and I know the reason your eyes are sore is that you're using your muscles, which presumably this doesn't. So Anna's just dragging her eyelids up and down manually, incredibly slowly. Her eye muscles are fine, but her fingers are really soft.

Do you know, when you wink, you do it left, right, Most people wink with a dominant eye. Yeah. For me, it's left. I did know that. Me too. You did know that?

Well, I get, my left eye naturally closes when I'm, I get drunk or when I'm tired. And so does your right eye as well. We spend five years of our lives with our eyes shut from blinking. That's not including the time you spend sleeping. That's assuming, like, what, a 70-year lifespan. Yeah. If you spend a third of your life asleep and you live for 75 years, then that's 25 years of sleep. Five years.

50 years awake and 10% of that, you're blinking. Yeah. So you spend a third of your life asleep. Which third would it be if you had to choose one third? I mean, it's got to be the last third, right? Yeah. But when you're retired and you can play golf every day. Especially if I have to play golf every day.

Surely it'd be at your work time. Well, the middle third when you're meant to be building up capital and hopefully getting on the property ladder. He's asleep, I'm afraid. Hopefully you go straight from Paul as you. young person to poor as an old person. It would be a very good way of having a very long marriage if you got married immediately before you fell asleep.

It's the opposite of sleeping beauty, isn't it? Constantly awake beauty. Until the prince came along and then she fell asleep. Okay, anyone got anything else? Cinema advertising is less effective when audiences eat popcorn. Really? Really? It's called into a study from.

Cologne University and the reason is quite fun it's because according to them researchers remember new brands by simulating the pronunciation of a new name with their mouths so when you see an advert for like Daz and you've never heard of Daz you kind of just mouth the word and that's how you remember it and if you're eating popcorn you can't do that so if you go into a cinema and you face the audience they're all blinking in synchrony and repeating the words on the adverts. We must look like a bunch of robots. Do we mouth words in the films? Do you mouth important lines of dialogue? I'm not aware that I do it, but then I've never watched myself at the cinema.

But also you don't know it in advance. Usually you know what product is when you've watched you. This is a new product, I think we're saying. The idea is you do it just afterwards. Oh, I see. It's not like people have memorized adverts and they're like, always, but it's the DAZ again. Everyone get ready to chant along. Did you read about that? this week who sued his date because she was texting in the cinema quite right too he's a bit of a

hero he's this guy called Brandon Vezma and he was going on a date with someone called Crystal they went to see the 3D version of Guardians of the Galaxy the new Guardians of the Galaxy which is an extremely bad sign she apparently texted 10 to 20 times in the first 15 minutes of the film after which he leaned down and said

would you mind not doing that and she refused so he said I'm really sorry would you mind going outside you're distracting me at which point she walked out and drove home and her car was his lift home, so abandoning him at the cinema. And so he sent her a text and can you pay me back, please? And she said, no, so he took it to the small claims court. Do we have a result yet, or is it still making its way through the court?

Supreme. I think he's going to withdraw his claim because some newspaper set up a meeting between them where she begrudgingly gave him the cinema money. But I noticed not the pizza money. He'd also asked for $4 for a pizza, which she didn't return. I think if they'd already enjoyed the pizza. that's fair enough that's that's

but I also think he's taking her to a shit movie and she's having to sit there texting so he should pay for the price of the text oh yeah I mean I don't want to get old judge studio I think James

they've already generated enough press that no one is going to go out with either of them from now on the job's been done yeah because people they've heard about people sort of they google each other before going on dates now before we yeah people apparently do this oh thank God I'm married

he's actually had lots of propositions it's been extremely good for his love life lots of girls have got in touch saying i totally agree with you will you get out with me instead i promise i went text at all he doesn't come out of it that well because of the small claims court part of it yeah really good point maybe you could take me to the small claims court sometimes where are we going on our first date have you ever heard of the small claims court okay the first 10 minutes of the guardians of the galaxy it's pretty much the only watchable 10 minutes in the whole film it's quite a good song and there's a bit I can't believe it was such a good moment to end that section

and I can't believe you thought we just needed to have a quick review of the Guardians of the Galaxy before we did. Any bits you'd recommend blinking in? The rest of the film. Such a damning review. Save up your blink. It's awful. Okay, let's move on to fact number three

and that is Andy's facts. My fact is that if you buy an apple today, it might have been taken off the tree in May 2014. Really? Yeah. That is incredible. These are really brown and mouldy ones at the back that I sometimes buy for no good reason. The organic ones.

No, they're not. These are perfectly good looking, healthy looking apples. So this is from a book called The Apple Orchard by a food writer called Pete Brown. It's all about the history of apples. It used to be Pete Green. Oh, very nice. I think he's always been called Pete Brown. So the book is called The Apple Orchard

And basically apples get picked in about May But then to ensure you have apples all year round You need to keep them in a warehouse And so the average time that they stay there Is six months to a year And they're kept in warehouses Which have had all the oxygen sucked out of them Wow

And they've just got nitrogen in them Like bags of crisps And library books And library books as we've covered before On this podcast And so I just I think it's amazing And they basically

they go into kind of hibernation. They kind of breathe more slowly these apples. But if you were in there with them, you'd be surrounded by healthy apples, but you would suffocate. It works out that iPhones and IMAX go through about three model changes a year, and they all supersede each other.

So actually, if you walk into the Apple store, your Apple products in the Apple store are going to be fresher than the apples you buy in. That's very strong. Yeah, that's really funny. Pete Brown. Do you want to know a fact about Pete Brown? Yeah.

He is, Britain's leading Apple researcher Pete Brown. He got really into apples. He used to be a beer and salt. a writer and then you realize the thing you really love was apples. And he discovered during the course of his research that he has a severe allergy to them. So he's allergic to the one thing he loves. So, he sounds during the course,

sounds like he went a couple of years without even touching them. He wasn't really researching them properly. Right. Had he never had an apple before? This does confuse me because it's quite a severe reaction. His whole throw expands, his mouth blows up. So maybe he'd never try enough. His mouth blows up.

Explos one of his face. Yeah, no, well, I mean. But yeah, poor guy. Yeah. That's terrible. Is that why he's so obsessed with them? Because it's the one thing you can never have. Yes, that's true. So in the 19th century, we had tens of thousands of apple varieties,

and they used to be like all shapes and sizes. So they'd be lumpy and some had really rough sandpapery skin, and others would be really misshapen and look like potatoes. And they'd range from cherry size to grapefruit sized. Great fruit-sized apple. You get grapefruit-sized apples. Except they would be apple-sized apples. Yes.

There was no apple size back then. But then when we got into larger-scale farming and we realized it was cheaper to just take grafting of apples spread the same apple, the clones, then we massively reduce the number of apples we have. And now I think in America there used to be 17,000, somewhere between 14,000 and 17,000 varieties, and now it has 90.

Whoa. So we've lost a lot of apples. That is amazing. Yeah. So yeah, every single Granny Smith is genetically identical to one that was in a house in Sydney centuries ago. Every single Bramley Apple grew from the tree in a garden in Nottinghamshire.

The Bramley Apple tree has one fan club, and its fan club is based in Japan. And it's the one Bramley Apple fan club in the world. It's in Obuse in Japan, because they imported Bramley Apples. A Bramley Apple graft 30 years ago, and they just fell in love with it there. And the mayor of the town and a bunch of all the members of the Apple Fan Club flew all the way to Nottingham from Japan in 2012 to visit the tree. and one said he nearly cried when he set eyes on it. Nearly, nearly cried.

The sad thing about that fan club is they're all allergic to apples. Actually, in that part of the world, I've just given it away now, but where do most of the world's apples get produced? Is it somewhere near Japan? It's somewhere near East Japan, yeah. Yeah, is it Japan? No. China?

It's China. By an insanely large amount, like 40 million tons a year are produced there. And then the next biggest producer is the US, which is 4 million. Do you know what is the biggest brand? of beer in the world? Badweiser. Nope. Is it that Australian one that everyone drinks in Australia?

Foster's? No one drinks. No one drinks. No, it is snow lager and it's the main lager in China and it's completely unknown almost in the rest of the world. But because China's so big it means that they have

something like 4% of all beers from snow. Do you know, some apples are non-vegan. This is true. Is it because they have a worm inside them? No. nice try, nice guess.

It must be some kind of thing they spray on it. Pretty much, yeah. So a lot of apples, they have a natural wax on them, right? Which it preserves all the water inside the apple. But when they're picked, then they get washed to get rid of all the dirt, and that waters off the wax too. So supermarkets spray them with wax. And it's not an unhealthy amount.

It's about two drops per apple that you eat, like really shiny apple. But some of it is Brazilian palm leaves, the wax, I mean. Some of the wax is beeswax, and some of it is shellac, which is derived from the secret. of an insect, a lackbug. Do you know robots can count apples, but only at night? Shut up.

Get out of here, Dan, you're on holiday. So this is the idea that if you are an orchard owner, you want to know how many apples are on your tree, and humans can do it, but robots are cheaper. But the problem is, how does a robot know what an apple is compared to a leaf or compared to whatever? It's really hard, especially in daytime. So what you can do,

What you can do is at night time You can get a tree and you can have a robot looking at it And then you put a light on it And the light will reflect off the fruit and the leaves But the reflections from the fruit will be round And it can tell those round shapes better Than in the daytime When actually all the branches and leaves all get in the way

That sounds so terrifying To get stuck in an orchard at night When all the robots come out Oh my God Actually on robots I did a bit of reading about warehouses for this fact and Amazon warehouses and other distribution warehouses for huge

shipping companies that used to be that you'd have, you know, rows and rose and rose of shelves and then some people would be employed to pack and some people would be employed to go up and down the shelves, you know, moving stuff around. Now, what happens is all the humans that work in there, they work around the edges at these packing stations and there's no one in the middle. There's just loads and loads of tall, narrow shelves, and all those shelves can drive

around by themselves. It's brilliant, so everyone stays around the edge and they either load the shelves or they just stand there and they wait for the shelves to come to them and they just take off what's needed. Is it like the staircases at Hogwarts? It's, yeah, it's like that on a crazy scale. So amazing videos to watch for this. And the best, this isn't even the best bit,

because, so obviously you've got hundreds and hundreds of shelves moving around, and there's no order to be on the shelves. You can just put anything on the shelves in any order and any combination. And as long as a computer knows what's on each shelf, it doesn't really matter where it's being stored because it could just drive anywhere it's needed. When you close the warehouse at night, all the shelves, like, rearrange themselves every night,

based on what's going to be needed for the next day. So, for example, when it's coming up to Valentine's Day and, you know, people are buying more, like, chocolates and roses and stuff, then all of that stuff. Tickets. Tickets to Guardians of the Galaxy, too. All of those shelves move to the close to the front of the warehouse because they're going to be needed more often.

Wow. It's so cool. Well, done, Amazon. Well, I just think they're going to be a big thing. That's my whole thing. If you plant, everyone will know this, who has vague interest. in horticulture, but if you plant the seeds of a certain type of apple tree,

like a braven apple tree, then of course it doesn't grow into the braven, does it? That's why people do grafting. I just don't understand that. I think that's mad. Yeah, it's, yeah. It is mad, isn't it? It is mad because, yeah, it is mad. It is mad.

It's like saying if two people sleep together, they might have any animal. It could be a cow, could be an otter. God, how fun would life be amazing? No, I am not giving birth. to a cow, thanks very much. Card section in Clinton's like, it's a boy, it's a girl, it's a rabbit. Okay, let's move on to our final fact, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that the first Western eyewitness account of India described it as having ants the size of foxes. This is so cool. Yeah, so this is a first-hand report by Magasthenes, who was the third century BC Greek ambassador to the Royal Court in northern India. in what is now Northern India. And yet he described these ants that are the size of foxes

and they mined for gold. And so they mined gold and then they used to leave piles of gold up on the top of the ground while they went down and mined for more. And he said that humans from India would go and try and steal the gold

from the ants. And if the ants caught them, the giant ants, they'd be engaged in a combat to the death. And he's known as an eyewitness. He is an eyewitness. He is an eyewitness. But the amazing thing is that they are real, right?

This is the amazing thing. It's kind of real. Wait, what? There are marmots who live in this area who dig burrows, and then when they dig burrows, little bits of dust come out, which does have sand in, and apparently people do collect the bits of gold.

Yeah. So the only problem with that is how, at some point, someone decided that a marmot looks exactly like a giant ant. Well, no, because in Persian, supposedly, I haven't checked the original, the word for marmot is equivalent to mountain ant. Yes.

I was just thinking when you said that, in English, mermacology is the study of ants, which isn't a million miles from marmot. No, that must be from the same origin. It might be. That is just incredible. There are giant ants, the size of foxes, which dig up gold.

They're not ants. It's a great fact, I don't know. It's incredible. There are mountain ants. Yeah, there are mountain ants. Marmots, close brackets. The size of foxes, brackets, not quite. Herodotus wrote about these as well

and he said they were bigger than foxes but smaller than dogs Yes Dogs are such different sizes Yeah When did we first get this? They're like apples Yeah

When did we first get this tiny dog? I think it was quite late on I imagine they were more They've gone the opposite way of apples I don't know I'm trying to think I think the Aztecs had like chihuahuas Didn't they?

I think so Is that an Aztec word? It's a Mexican word Yeah So maybe Just to be clear Yeah Herodotus did mention them, you're right, and now there are going to be people thinking, but he was before Magasthenes.

I know everyone's now thinking that. Herodotus is... They're all malving it. Herodotus did say it, but he'd heard it from other people, and Magasanis was the first Western person to go to India. But, yeah, so it was this rumour they'd been going for hundreds of years that there were ants the size of foxes in India. If they were the size of foxes, I worked out they'd be able to lift a cow. That's cool. I would be inclined to bring back fox hunting if they were constantly carrying off cows.

how many times larger would you say the smallest foxes than the biggest ant so the biggest ant is like four centimetres I think four inches that's quite a big ant it's big ant I think it's an order of several I think it's several orders of magnitude bigger

do you I think a several I think a smallest fox is several thousand times bigger than the biggest ant I'm going for twice as big no it's one order of magnitude it's ten times bigger so Alex's ten times bigger the size of foxes. Yeah, Alex is right

that the biggest ant is a bullet ant which is about four centimeters and the smallest fox is about 41 centimeters, which is the fenic fox. Oh my goodness. Oh, sweet. That's not actually as small as I would have thought. No. So I wonder if that ant would be able to carry that fox.

Easily. But a baby fenik fox, presumably, would have a hard time taking on an ant in a fight. Such an embarrassing way to go. the fox community. Some plants employ ants to scare away giraffes. So these are ants that live in the tropics, and they acacia plants attract ants to them.

So ants live on the acacia plants, and they drink their nectar, and the plants provide shelter for them. But the plants actually make a chemical, which causes the ants to go into what was described by, I think, National Geographic, as a defensive frenzy, which, and they do this when a like me after I've mansplained something. No, no, no, I didn't mean that. Obviously, you know that. Oh, God.

So, yeah, these ants go into this frenzy, and they scare away the giraffes because they can sting them. They've got quite bad bites. And so a giraffe comes to eat the plant, and the plant releases these chemicals into the ants that live on it to say, get rid of that giraffe, and the giraffe starts trying to eat it, and then it gets all these stings in its mouth,

and it goes away. Weirdly, there's a fact about, I think it's ethylene, which is a chemical that plants release, and it's related to the previous one about apples. So when plants release ethylene, if they're being eaten by, let's say, an antelope, they release ethylene,

and all the nearby plants will immediately... Put up their defences. They'll put up their defences, and they'll release large quantities of a chemical, which makes them inedible. In fact, poisonously inedible to the antelope or whatever's eating them. So the antelope has to kind of sneak up

and eat as much as it can of the first plant before all the nearby plants are completely radioactive. and poisonous to it. Ethylene is the stuff which makes fruit go off, isn't it? It's like when you have bananas and apples in the same bit of your fridge. Exactly. But the reason it's doing it is to make itself attractive to you.

Is it? It's like an advertising sign for the fruit. But if I get a rotten banana, I'm not attracted to that. I know, but animals are less fussy than you, James. So basically, once it releases the ethylene, all the fruit gets softer and sweeter and it changes color, meaning that the animals know, ah, that's ready to eat and it'll be delicious and sugary. And so the fruit is basically saying in your fruit bowl, humans are coming. Make yourself look good.

Really? So you'll be eaten. Yeah. It's like taking someone on a date to Guardians of the Galaxy. It's a complete misjudgment of what that human might want. You've just got a little plum texting in the car. We also are just speaking of employing ants. They're at farmers in India that employ ants to help them farm.

They use Coca-Cola and Pepsi watered down as a pesticide. They spray it on the crop. not because they contain any pesticide chemicals, but because they contain loads of sugar. And the sugar attracts the ants, and then the ants will enjoy the sugar, but they'll also eat all the larvae of the bugs that are. And apparently it's almost as effective as other pesticides,

but way, way, way, but way, really? Is that the cheapest way then? Is that the cheapest sugar you can get? It's a pretty cheap and easy way to do because you've been just dilutics, it already comes. The liquid is very sugary.

Probably not far off. Yeah. And do they use on, because I would have thought off-brand would be actually cheaper. I wouldn't go for Coca-Cola. I'd have gone for Rolla-Cola. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's true. Why go for the coat?

They did a study recently into ant personalities. They, the scientists. What are they all like? What they found, James, is they're all a real range of characters. Are they? Yeah. Sorry, I was being a bit ant racist. You were.

You were. So they found that some ants are really fussy about where they live. And so they'll move into what could be a nest and then be really choosy about it and dislike it and abandon it. And then some ants are just really chilled out and liberal and relaxed. And they'll go into any old, you know, health. whole piece of shit and just agree to live there. And it actually turns out this is what makes their colonies work

because when you're looking for the ideal home, you need that really fussy guy who, you know, selects it very carefully and then when actually you're just in a rush to find somewhere, then the other guy takes over and becomes the dominant ant, and he helps them make a fast decision and move into the nearest available nest. What you're

describing is the odd couple, but with ants. The odd colony. That is so cool. So do they move into different places, ants? I didn't even know that. It seems like they do, yeah. Do you think ant landlords sometimes get confused because they say, oh, you've got ten ants. And they're like, oh, well, I was hoping to have more than that.

It was like, no, no, I just mean you've got ten ants. Maybe, yeah. Do they, is the ants pronounce tenants, ten ants? Is that the one difference between humans and ants? Is that they pronounce it with that emphasis on the second syllable? I'm just thinking for Alex's sitcom of the ant, couple. This might be one possible storyline. I'm thinking more like an ant version of friends

where you've got kind of the moniker fastidious one. Yes. Chilled out Phoebe. Yeah. Just quickly on flying ant day. Which always moves around. There is no day, obviously. Like Easter.

Just like Easter. It happens in accordance with fourth century liturgical principles. No, but I did not know this. So the male will deposit his sperm and the female. I did know that something like that was probably going on somewhere. I didn't know that the female and the queen can keep male ant sperm for 20 years. Wow.

Imagine that. Is her vagina full of nitrogen? I think that's a great basis for an ant rom-com, right, in which an ant finds out 20 years later. Oh, you might have a kid. Oh, no, the bloke ant finds out. Oh, we just had one thing. It was on Flying Ant Day.

It was great. Yeah, well, bad news. You got 250,000. children now. Can I pitch you my ten-aunt's joke for that one? You can pitch it. That's Bridget Jones's baby. We all know that wasn't a good idea.

That's true. Well, actually, this will never happen because as soon as the male has inserted his genitalia into the female and deposited his sperm, his genitalia explode inside her and he dies. No, that is Bridget Jones's baby. I must have blinked in that bit. I've got one more thing, but it's just about this guy in McAstony. one other thing that he reported that I quite liked. When he went to India,

first of all, well, he described the people. This is how I guess know that the ant's thing might have been a bit, he might have exaggerated the truth. He said that in India lived men with no noses. How do they smell? That joke would have been original back then. There were other men with no mouths who fed by inhalation but could be killed by too strong a smell.

so I guess when they hang out with the men with no noses then they all drop dead and then there were men with dogs heads but then he also described he was an ambassador so he was in the Kings the Kings Court but just it's funny like we've got some pretty wacky ambassadors today but no one's sending this kind of shit back

so he lived in the King's Court and he said the King of India like to he judged legal cases that was one of his responsibilities but he only did it while being continually massaged and he had a swarm of parrots that flew above his head at all times. And he was considered the embodiment of the city, which was a city called Pataliputra.

And so every time the king washed his hair, a celebratory festival was held to celebrate his hair washing. I wonder how often he did it. Yeah. It would be such a hassle, I think. So maybe you'd not do it that often. Presumably he would never attend because he was like, I'm sorry, I'm washing my hair.

Okay, that's all of our facts for this week. Thank you so much for listening. If you want to get in touch with us, with any questions about any of the facts we said this week or anything else, you can contact these guys on Twitter. So Andy's on. At Andrew Hunter M. Alex is on.

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