405: No Such Thing As Caviar-Flavoured Water

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Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast.

This week coming to you live from Canterbury.

My name is Dan Shriver.

I am sitting here with Anna Toshinsky, Andrew Hunter Murray, and James Harkin.

And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days.

And in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with fact number one, and that is Andy.

My fact is that if it's served carefully enough, nobody can tell the difference between pate and dog food.

You've all been wasting your money all these years.

I'm not coming to your restaurant.

How do you serve it?

What's the difference?

Well, this was a study done by the American Association of Wine Economists in 2009, who I guess just got bored of studying wine and sort of branch out into wine-affiliated foods like pate.

And they basically were trying to work out if people could tell the difference.

So

the researchers, they blended up some dog food.

That's what they did.

Until it looked like liver moose, basically.

And then they had about, I think, 18 subjects and they challenged them to to work out which was dog food and which was not and about one person in six guessed dog food but there were six samples so this is no better than chance effectively that people can tell I should say you're being a bit unfair Andy they also garnished it with parsley.

Sorry.

Sorry.

Everything I passed the on.

So the really weird thing about this is that people knew it was horrible, but they just didn't know it wasn't pate.

They knew that one of the things was dog food.

72% of the people who tasted it said, well, that is the worst thing in this whole array of samples.

But most of them, five and six, did not say that's the dog food.

So presumably they thought this is disgusting, but that can't possibly...

Did they think dog food tastes better than it does?

I think, yeah, I think they did.

And I think the researchers had told them, don't worry, we're not going to feed you something horrible.

And

they tasted that and they said, well, that is horrible, so it can't be the dog food.

So should we be eating dog food?

No, no.

Okay.

You can't.

Why not?

Why not?

It sounds like we think it's horrible.

We just don't think think it's dog food.

But we still don't enjoy it.

But I like pate.

It tastes worse.

70% of people think it tastes worse.

The worst out of all the pâtés they were given.

But still tastes like a bad pate, which I think I'd still like.

So

to be honest, it wasn't the worst tasting thing there.

That was the liverwurst was probably their worst tasting because they had liverwurst, duck liver moose, pork liver pate, and spam.

And the liverwurst, I think, was the one that they most often thought was pet food, right?

Yeah.

Bizarre.

And turns out, a journalist did a very unscientific study just asking her friends to feed a bunch of stuff to their dogs.

And dogs also prefer the taste of actual pate to dog food.

Unsurprisingly, as anyone who has a dog knows, they always want to eat human food more than they want to eat dog food.

Yeah.

But that's for variety, right?

That's why I think if I had dog food, I'd be like, wow, that feels really nice.

But, you know, if I had it every night, I'd be...

There's nothing to stop you from having dog food.

And if you come down to my new restaurant, Fido's, you can have it every night.

I wonder though if it's the same with dogs, that they're sort of, you know, whether or not they're tricked into thinking they think something is tasty.

For example, there's an inventor, he was called Charleston Ellis.

He's the guy who created a dog biscuit that was shaped like a bone, rather than it just being a biscuit.

And when he shaped it into a bone, suddenly his dog that he was testing it on really liked it.

And there's this quote where he says that he says, to this day, and this is in 1936, I cannot tell whether my dog is interested in the bone-shaped biscuit because it fools him as such he's like oh it's a bone or whether after my shaping the biscuit in an effort to cater to his taste he feels duty bound to fool his master by simulating an interest in it yeah possible very polite dog he's got there

what you're saying about dogs preferring human food is interesting because I don't have a dog and I didn't know that but I thought that the whole point of dog food was that you had to make it taste disgusting enough for dogs to like.

That's what they say, isn't it?

So, and this is particularly what they do with treats, dog treats, is they add stuff like, is it cadaverine and putrescine?

So, it's things that smell like rotting corpses and rotting foods.

It does exactly what it says on the tip.

Yeah, but that's apparently what they like.

This is what they claim, is that the more repulsive it smells to us, the more delicious it is to pets.

And so, that's what they add to.

And I think we might have said before on the show that sometimes you get humans who taste the dog food.

But I read that the reason they do that is more because

you don't want the humans to be disgusted when they're feeding their dogs, otherwise, they won't buy that kind of dog food.

It's not about taste being good for humans, it's about us not being disgusted when we put it in a bowl.

That's interesting because I was reading a dog food manufacturer who was saying the hardest thing about it is to make something that's not repulsive to humans.

Because what dogs like is like feces,

roadkill,

I probably won't have the starter underneath.

And if you serve something that's a combination of feces, roadkill, and vomit, the human owners do tend to bulk at it.

Yes.

Biggest challenge.

Have you guys heard the phrase eating your own dog food?

No.

So this is not a phrase I've heard.

I think it's an American thing.

You can imagine what it means, though.

Trying something.

It's from the business world.

It's...

Oh, let's say you're Microsoft.

Yes.

You want people who work at Microsoft to be using Microsoft products, you know, because so you want, you want, you know, the proof proof of the pudding is in the were you using another better metaphor to explain your shittier metaphor?

Yeah, you were, I think I was,

but yeah, you should be you should be comfortable trying your own product and you should believe in it enough that you can honestly recommend it to other people, you know, and you should be eating your own dog food anyway.

But that's not that doesn't make any sense because you're not recommending it to other people, you're recommending it to dogs.

It would make sense if Bill Gates was trying to market computers to cats.

But he's not.

Okay.

Okay.

All right, now we've all acknowledged the structural flaws in the metaphor.

There was a man called Mitch Felderhoff who actually did eat his own dog food last year because he lives in Texas and he owns a dog food firm and he did it for a month.

He only ate products that his firm made.

Cool.

He got approval from his doctor and his wife crucially before he started because of what I imagine his breath was like.

And he did say, one of the things I did that was key is that I did do some intermittent fasting, i.e.

some meals I just didn't eat anything at all.

There was a woman in America called Dorothy Hunter who did the same thing in 2014.

She worked for a company called The Honest Kitchen, and for a month again, she ate nothing but dog food.

She said that she didn't add any seasoning, but she heard that hot sauce is good.

Who she heard that from, and maybe you'll know, I'm not sure.

But she said the main problem is that humans are social eaters, and socially, this has been very hard.

So I could imagine her going at a dinner party for her friends and bringing a pedigree chum with her and whatever.

They just put it on the floor in the corner.

The word pate originally meant pet food.

Did it?

Yeah.

It appeared in the 18th century, I think, in France.

And its first use, it had a double E.

Its first use was specifically about chicken food.

And when I was looking through sources that referred to pâté, it goes right up until the end of the 19th century.

Pate refers to chicken food.

And then it broadened to mean kind of breadcrumbs and bits of meat that you'd give to any pet.

And then somehow it became pâté.

Right.

Wow.

Yeah.

No wonder they couldn't tell the difference.

Maybe they're from the 15th century or whatever it was.

That's what it was.

Do you know that if they're given the choice, dogs will not give humans treats?

Oh.

What do you mean?

As in, researchers trained 37 dogs to press a button which would give them a treat.

Yeah.

Okay, so the dogs were well familiar with the fact that pressing a button gives a treat, provides a treat.

And then the button

was placed in another room.

And the humans were placed next door with the button.

And the dogs would beg.

The dogs would beg, beg, beg, please press this button so I get a treat falling into my room.

Anyway, the situation was then reversed and the button was put into the room with the dog and no matter what the humans did, the dogs did not care.

They pressed the button no greater for the people who had given them treats than for the people who hadn't given them treats.

What a great experiment.

Do you think they'd take us for walks?

We needed it?

Sounds like no.

Sounds like no.

Sounds like they're not doing anything.

Well, no, that's different because then we'd be shitting all over their furniture.

And that's.

Are they doing this because they're mean or stupid?

Do they know?

I think

stupid.

Do you think?

Because I think my cat would not just not press the button, but would also probably unplug it so no one else could be hearing it.

Do you know dogs and cats can taste water?

What?

Yeah, I can taste water.

You can't?

Yes, I can.

Only if you put blackcurrants in it, then.

Yeah, you can taste squash.

You can test from a tap, it's sort of, oh, I guess that's probably like the metals and stuff.

You basically can't.

I mean, there are some studies that say water has a bit of a sour taste, but essentially, humans don't have specific taste receptors for water, which is why it's so bland and crap, and we have to make squash.

Whereas dogs and cats, the reason you don't get a dog and cat squash is that they've got specific receptors on the tip of their tongue.

This was discovered in the 1950s.

They found it first on frogs and then thought, oh, I wonder what else can taste water.

And when you drop water onto the tongues of like sedated cats and dogs, it stimulates all these receptors.

I don't suppose we know what it tastes like, so they're just watery, I guess.

They say it tastes like caviar.

Yeah.

No, really?

No, no, they don't.

They don't have

Fallen for the old classic and a prank.

They refuse to tell us.

I can't believe it.

Fell right in the trap.

I was out with my in-laws on a walk recently, and they have a dog called Benji, and Benji started licking

really disgusting puddle.

And like, you know...

you know,

and I was like, Benji, and I said that, and they said, no, it's fine.

And I haven't had a dog for years.

What does that taste like to them and why can they survive because that would well it might have feces and roadkill in in which case it's

all right chef's kiss that's their ibena is it they do tend to prefer a puddle to and our dog loves to wee in a puddle at the same time as drinking from it which

always think is a nice touch yes i feel that it's almost a perpetual motion machine isn't it

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It is time for fact number two, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that during World War II, Heinz developed a self-heating can of soup.

To work it, it had to be lit like a bomb.

Unfortunately, it very often exploded like one, too.

So this was a pretty remarkable thing.

During the war efforts, when they were going out, there was this big problem that they had terrible food and they wanted to have better food.

And to cook food was kind of a giveaway because you would have to start fires and so on.

It would just be a giveaway to to where an army might be.

So Heinz, along with the army, they developed this self-heating can, which effectively looked like a can that had a wick sticking out, so like a bomb, and soldiers were encouraged to light it using cigarette, lit cigarettes.

And it would take about four minutes to heat the can.

But before you lit it, you were meant to puncture holes into it.

And if you punctured the holes in the wrong way, which often happened, the can would then heat up in such a way that it would lead to an explosion.

You'd be covered in tomato soup.

Everyone would be like, It's blood, he's hit by a

it was a very confusing time.

Um, and this kind of often happened.

Um, in some cases, it wasn't even to do with the puncturing, just there was faulty cans and so on.

So, there were people talking about cans exploding at Normandy.

Um, there was tomato soup everywhere, you know,

and getting scolded.

So, embarrassed if you were injured on the Normandy beaches by a malfunctioning tin of soup

as you collected your military cross.

What was it for again?

Just getting into it at Normandy.

Yeah, wasn't there was one account where they were just trying these out.

I think this was 1944.

There was a flotilla of ships off the south coast of Britain, and it was the first time they'd seen these.

And I think it seems like you're supposed to put holes in the top of the can, and someone put them in the sides.

And then the can was at head height, and it sprayed directly into his ears, apparently.

And he got very badly scolded ears.

Because it was heated by a heating element inside the can.

it wasn't So it got very hot and the can itself got extremely hot.

It was health and safety nightmare.

Yeah, they often I mean it's that's what they said about the second world war in total actually

They they got very hot and and some soldiers I don't know if this was after they'd used the they'd poured the soup out but they would use the cans effectively as a hot water bottle in the colder places that they were at because they were just they got so hot you had to handle them with a cloth and so yeah and they used to attach them onto the side of bums bombs right and that's why we got the term souped up weapons.

Yeah.

No you're not gonna fall for that one like I fell for the caviar thing.

I was so close but because of what she did to you earlier I was a bit more on edge.

The self-heating can was invented in 1879 by a guy called Yevgeny Fyodorov from Russia.

His had quick lime in it and water and you would twist the bottom and the two things would mix and they would warm up.

Unfortunately it didn't really warm them up very much so you just you had the stew but it was kind of a lukewarm stew.

And he was also the first person that I could find who made a plane in Russia, Fyodorov.

So he was a proper engineer.

That's a big leap up, isn't it?

Self-eating soup can one day, plane the next.

Yeah, but it was soup cans that helped it lift into the...

No, it wasn't.

It wasn't self-propelling.

It would tie to the back of a car or a carriage, and the carriage would drive along and he would be lifted up by it.

Oh, of course.

That's really cool.

That's more self-eating.

The Heinz ones were a bit cheaty because you did apply the cigarette, didn't you?

Oh, yeah.

But that's more self-heating.

And I did read another account of someone who had a self-heating can in World War II in Germany.

And they said that you pulled a flap and that ignited an element, so like flint or something.

So it seems like you didn't need a source of flame.

Wow.

And in fact, now you'd use the same thing that this Russian guy used because there's now something called Hot Can, which I really want to buy some of these.

They have, they do the same thing.

They put limestone and water in the space between the inner packet and the outer packet.

And the way you heat it up is it comes with a little spike, weird thing to come with your can of soup, but it comes with a spike, and you pierce the water so it mixes with the limestone.

And it's this reaction, like an exothermic reaction.

And in eight minutes, you've got boiling hot soup.

That's cool.

That's awesome.

Get it from Harvey Nichols.

Four pounds a can.

I don't believe you.

I don't believe a word you say anymore, Adam.

Oh, but that's nice that it's a sort of upmarket store like Harvey Nichols, because I don't know if we've said before, I think we may have done, the first shop to sell baked beans in the UK Heinz baked beans was Fortnum and Mason right

yeah it was an extremely luxurious um product back in the day I guess because it was imported from from America yeah that was it yeah it was Henry Hines who came up with it who was known as the pickle king and he started growing pickles at the age of eight and selling them.

Did he?

Yeah.

He was an incredible.

Was he growing like because pickles don't grow, right?

You have to take a vegetable and you have to pickle it.

Was he like growing the...

Yeah, that's a good point, actually.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Do you know that he's related to Donald Trump?

Is he?

Yeah, yeah.

The Heinz family and the Trump families are related.

That's how he's so orange.

It's the baked beanie.

Just rubs baked beans on his face.

What's the connection?

Do you know?

Yeah.

It's a place called Kalstadt, which is in Germany.

And both the families came from there.

Henry Hines was the second cousin to Frederick Trump, who was the grandfather of Donald Trump.

Right.

And if you go to this town, they are much happier with the Heinz connection than they are with the Trump connection.

Partly because the Heinz family recently provided a major donation for the renovation of the local organ, whereas Donald Trump did not contribute to this project.

Right.

Well, there's another American political connection in that the great-great-great-granddaughter, something in that territory of Heinz is married to John Kerry when he was running, and still was married, but when he was running for presidency.

and so he didn't get the presidency, but he got to fall back on those baked bean billions, which is

good consolation.

Yeah, she was Republican, wasn't she?

Teresa.

Was she?

And she remained Republican until he said, I'm actually going to run for president on the Democrat label.

Would you mind switching your allegiance?

And then in 2004, she reluctantly was like, okay, I'll become a Democrat.

Wow.

So different variety of me for this presidential campaign.

Well, there are 57 varieties.

Right?

Because Heinz, 57 varieties.

Yeah, that's why I made the joke about the variety of the various things.

Sorry, guys, I think.

We should quickly say, because people are screaming at home that there aren't 57 varieties.

It's just a marketing thing.

Yep.

Yeah.

It was clever, right?

There were about 6,000?

No, it was more...

It was.

No, there are lots.

There are lots of people.

I think there are a few thousand.

At the time, there was...

Oh, at the time there were already over 60 when you sort of the slogan.

What it was was, it was the number five and seven.

I think him and his wife had a favorite number.

I think his was five, his wife's was seven, or vice versa, and that's the only reason.

And he'd seen another product, sort of, it was like, you know, 60 different kinds of footwear, you know, for one company.

And he thought, that's very clever.

And now, if you go on the website, they're like, oh, it's ridiculous.

Of course, we have more than 57.

It's just a random number.

We actually have more than 5,700.

So again, they've taken that random number.

They can't get away from it.

He did experiment with 59 and 51 first, which makes me wonder if nine and one were the favorite numbers of his mistresses.

If

he finally ends up on 57.

So I looked up Heinz on YouGov, the website, because they have a lot of interesting data.

Heinz

is the brand most liked by women in the UK.

Okay.

It's one.

Interesting.

The sort of

women's face.

I was going to say, do they make vibrators?

I don't know why that's coming to my head.

Not one of the 6,000.

That's a messy night on your own, isn't it?

Last couple of years.

Traumatising thing for your husband to walk in on at the end of the night.

I was was just trying to shake the ketchup to get it out.

Oh my god.

It's the 10th most popular thing in the UK.

Is it?

Really?

Or a specific kind?

Does that say to you that people just don't have much of an imagination when asked what's the best thing?

No, but guess what's number one?

Number one, of all the things in the UK?

Is it a product?

I'm not saying it's...

Is it Canterbury Cathedral?

It's not playing to the local audience.

It's Canterbury Cathedral?

Not even top thousand, I'm afraid.

Oh.

I'll give us a quick.

It's an obvious one.

A glove.

The Queen?

Prince Philip?

Like the Queen, but not.

Buckingham Palace.

Not Prince Andrew.

David Attenborough.

David Attenborough is the most popular thing in the UK.

Then there are a load of charities, you know, British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research.

Number seven, Tom Hanks.

Number eight, Heinz.

Number ten, Lego.

Eleven, Google Maps.

This is an interesting one.

Number 31, Queen.

Number 96, the Queen.

Ouch.

You got a slap in the face for Lizzie.

She's probably feeling under pressure.

You know, Heinz made Mayo Chup once.

What's that?

Well, it's what it sounds like.

What it's a little bit different?

Ketchup.

That's absolutely right.

It's a combination product, and they launched it.

I think they launched it in the US a while earlier, but they launched it in Canada in 2019, at which point the chief of the Cree people, you know, one of the First Nations peoples in Canada, Canada, explained that in the Cree language, it means shit face.

Ah, no way.

I got absolutely mayo-tropped last night.

Have you guys heard of Muriel Letau?

No.

Well, you should have done because she was the person who came up with the idea of painting Campbell's soup.

So you know that Andy Warhol thing?

Yeah, yeah.

So basically, he didn't know what to do.

He wanted to get away from what he was doing, which was quite similar to another artist called Roy Lichtenstein.

And he didn't know what to paint.

And this person called Muriel Letow, she said, You should paint something that everyone sees every day, that everyone recognizes like a can of soup.

And we know that she said that because she asked for some money.

She said, I know what you have to do, but you need to give me $50 first.

And Andy Wahol gave her $50 and she gave him this idea.

He went straight out, bought a load of soup, decided to paint it.

And he sold his or his painting sold in 2006 for $11.7 million.

And I think everyone would kind of agree that it's not how great the painting is, but it's the idea that's the important part of it.

And she sold that idea for $50.

Really?

Yeah.

I can't tell if people are applauding, selling the idea really cheaply.

But she also wrote erotic novels and she was known, nicknamed for a while as the First Lady of Hanky Panky.

Oh, wow.

That deserves a round of applause, doesn't it?

It was her who pioneered that Heinz vibrator, wasn't it?

Listen, we need to move on to our next fact.

It is time for fact number three, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that Argentina's armed forces have 47 ships, 139 aircraft, and 20 llamas.

Why?

Well, the ships are to attack things on the water.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Aircraft for the Air Force mostly.

So you're not saying these are the infantry.

Are they kind of therapy llamas for stressed-out soldiers?

No, no, they are.

Because the army does lots of other things rather than just being in wars.

It often has to help infrastructure in the country.

This is for when they have logistics, they're in the high mountains.

Especially in the pandemic, for instance, they've had to get medicines up into the mountains.

The army have been brought in to help.

It's not always easy for people to get up there, but it's very easy for llamas to get up there.

So, yeah.

Then, when the llama does get up there on its own, how is it helping?

Well, it usually.

I can't say I'd be reassured if I'm dying on a mountainside.

It's just cute, right?

It's just cute.

People can walk around with it.

No, it will have a soldier with it, but it's a beast of burden, it's a llama, so they will carry the stuff up there.

Right.

So, it's quite hard to put stuff on a wagon or in a car and get it up to the top of the mountains.

Not so hard to put it on the back of a llama.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But you can't ride them, can you?

Llamas, no, you'll break their backs.

They're too fragile to be honest.

Yeah, you shouldn't never ride a llama.

If you learn one thing tonight.

Yeah.

Unless you're a child.

In the aircraft, do they then have,

unless, sorry for cutting you off, yes, unless you're a child.

I didn't want, because I know there are some kids in the audience, and you should feel free to ride llamas, I think, for the next couple of years.

Maybe until you hit adolescence.

As you were, Dan.

Thank you.

Yeah, I'm just curious where they lived inside these boats.

Do they have their own?

No, they don't live inside the boats or the aeroplanes or anything.

I just was listing the things in their outfits.

I've got so many questions.

How did they tailor their uniforms?

Okay.

To answer all of his notes.

How do they sail the ship?

Throw away that page.

Okay.

They used to use their dung, though, in the Peruvian army to actually...

to actually that's why i thought they might be on the ship because their their feces is actually useful as as petrol for the actual ships oh really yeah they used to burn it um yeah yeah

it's a good fuel.

The Inca people, obviously, were a huge llama-keeping culture, and they had thousands and thousands.

They're wild llamas as well.

And their method of hunting llamas was to do the Hokikoki.

This is so cool.

Okay, so what?

Left arm in, left arm out?

Well, you all join.

Well, Hokikoki or Old Lang Syne, depending on how you feel about it.

Basically, what you need to do if you're in the Inca society, you gather 50 to 60,000 people, quite a lot.

You surround the llama plane, you all join arms, and you slowly move in.

You move in, you corral the llamas into a smaller and smaller space, and then people enter the

killing zone with slings and bolasses and lassoes and stuff like this.

And you would get up to 30,000 llamas in a single day's hunting that way.

That's amazing.

It's a lot of pressure, though, because if you accidentally let go of someone and they all run through the game, they throw you all.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're right.

Yeah, you do the left arm in, left-arm out thing, which is not a part of the song you're supposed to reenact.

They did use them in war, the Incas.

We know that they used a lot.

We don't know exactly how, but we think probably as a beast of burden again.

But there was one battle where they abandoned 15,000 llamas after a battle with the Spanish.

So they were using a lot of them.

Yeah.

Okay, fair enough.

How do you feel abandoned if there's 15,000 of you?

Yeah, that's fair.

That's fair.

The Israeli army uses llamas, or at least it used to until 2017, and they've started using robots instead.

Wow.

Robot llamas?

Regrettably, not.

They're just like little

doggy robots.

Is that for guarding?

No, they would use them so when the army was going again into the mountains, they would have llamas with them.

They would be carrying things.

They were really useful because they kept cool amidst gunfire.

So whenever there's gunfire, a llama wouldn't shit itself and run away.

It would just kind of cool.

Yeah, yeah, this is cool.

That's amazing.

Ironically, they're very difficult to alarm,

aren't they?

Yes.

And they would also, if they were in the mountains, it got very cold, they would lie down with the soldiers and kind of keep them warm because they're very fluffy, very, you know, robot and fast.

Yeah, they could lie for up to three days without moving with the soldiers around them if you needed to ambush.

Which robots can't do, really.

I mean, they can stay still, but they can't keep you warm at night.

Well, if you make a very fluffy robot.

What a self-heating robot, like the cans of

Well, llama mating is pretty interesting, just while we're on llamas lying down and keeping each other warm at night.

Because they're really hard to

breed.

There are a few reasons in their natural mating cycle which make them really difficult to breed.

So

they don't breed like us.

So female llamas release an egg after sex, as opposed to the human method of

once per month, you know, come or make.

But also, llama semen is very lethargic.

And

they are known as dribble ejaculators.

Oh my gosh.

Jesus Christ.

It's really bad.

It's so hard to get semen out of a llama.

It's like getting blood out of a stone.

That is the worst thing I've ever heard you say.

But there are, great news, guys, artificial llama vaginas, which you can buy on the market.

No one can stop you.

If you've got the money, you can get one.

And they come with a kind of hot water bottle to simulate the temperature of a real llama.

And they also come with a surrounding life-size, cuddly female llama bottom.

Wow.

Yeah.

Just the bottom, though.

You can, if you're feeling flash, you can get the full female llama package.

I can't do that.

You can.

Really?

I mean, don't.

Do what you like, actually.

Do they do checks?

When you buy the llama vagina, do they check that you do have a male llama?

I know what you're saying about they can't stop you, but it kind of feels like they should be able to stop.

They should be able to stop you there.

Should be back on checks.

Is there a dribble ejaculator in the house?

She knows my school nickname.

They're very sociable.

We're talking about real llamas now, right?

Yeah.

in a platonic way.

They may not be good at shagging, but they do love each other.

And

this is why they make such good guards.

So, you know, people often have a llama to guard their herd of sheep or their herd of goats.

And that's because they get super protective of them.

So, you've got your herd of goats, you've got a llama.

They're great and they scare away.

They've been known to kill wolves and stuff occasionally.

It's very impressive.

But if you've got a llama guard, do not get two llama guards.

Because the moment that you get a second one, it just becomes friends with its llama and ignores all the goats and the sheep.

And let's not get ravaged by the wolves.

There's a golf course in North Carolina called Telamore Golf Course, and they have caddies that are llamas.

So the llamas will carry your golf clubs around with you.

But one thing that I saw in only one place is that there are golfers who have these llamas, and they've noticed that whenever they hit a good shot, just before they hit it, the llama gives off a little moan.

It kind of goes

like that.

And so you have these golfers who have stood there and they're just waiting to hear.

They keep moving a little bit this way, a little bit that way.

And as soon as they hear the moan, they go right and then they hit it.

Wow.

You think the llama can tell good golf posture?

Yeah.

That's what it seems like.

Unbelievable.

That's amazing.

They do make weird noises.

Like the noise of alarm sounds like, I had it described as sounds like a rusty door hinge.

And that is exactly what it's like.

It's like,

something out of a horror film.

But not when they're mating.

When they're mating, and I hesitate to return to the field because everyone lost their shit last time,

but

they orgl.

Augling is what they do.

Augling and dribbling.

They make that noise, right?

Yeah, they do.

If you hit orgling, you're in trouble.

Or in luck.

In luck, yeah.

There's a dribble coming your way.

I was on kentlive.com,.co.uk, reading about llama-related news from this year.

Yeah.

British naturism have an event.

This is actually in East Sussex, but people from Kent can go.

It's a walking with llamas completely naked night.

Feels it would have been safer to make it a day event.

Anyway, it was supposed to happen at the start this year.

I think it might have got cancelled due to COVID.

Maybe we'll come back.

Anyway, the British Naturism website, it's been taken down.

But I did notice that on there, weirdly, they sell hoodies, fleeces, and 19 different designs of t-shirts on the British Naturism website.

You've got to have something to take off.

Exactly.

I'm just picturing the horror movie, that scene where it's completely dark, you're lost in the woods, you're going, who is that?

I can hear someone

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We need to move on to our final fact of the show.

It is time for our final facts show, and that is Anna.

My fact this week is that for a few days every year, Britain's beaches are covered in worm sperm.

Oh, good, more sperm.

Okay.

That's right.

It's not the dribbling kind.

It's specifically lugworm sperm.

And this is incredible.

So I was on a beach recently and I was looking at, you know, those lugworm sand spirals you see on pretty much all beaches at low tide, like little

look like long worms made of sand.

And they're created by lugworms because they dig these burrows and then they deposit these things on top of the burrows.

But the other thing they do is, the way they mate, is the male lugworm, who's in quite a deep burrow on the beach, for a couple of days a year.

He spurts some sperm out.

So when the tide goes out, he spurts his sperm out onto the sand in a little white lump.

You can see it if you keep your eyes peeled.

And when the tide comes in, it gets all this lugworm sperm.

So, there'll be thousands and thousands of little piles of sperm on the beach.

The tide comes in and it washes it into the females' burrows, and they get a little cascade of sperm coming down, and it fertilizes their eggs.

And that's

the love of life.

It's so amazing how they never

meet.

I mean, so many of us, they never meet.

It's like saying you've got male.

Or

Is that what happens to You've Got Mail?

Have you...

How do they...

They send it through the post.

Yes, Tom Hanks

sends a postcard.

I don't know if everyone likes Tom Hanks so much.

Yeah, he's fathered most of the people in this country.

Also, they do meet, I know, at the end of You've Got Mail.

Yes.

But mostly lugworms are.

It's like IVF, I would say, would be a better

analogy.

Or like when you go to Sperm Bank, Springboard.

It's unbelievable.

I mean, it's also unbelievable that lugworms, which I had never heard of, by the way, I don't know if that's especially ignorant.

I'd never heard of lugworms being a thing before researching this fact, that they all mate at exactly the same day every year, you know, the same few days, they just all know to do it.

And we don't know how they know that either.

Like, we know that there is pheromones involved, right?

So, when the female notices that the sperm washing around, she'll release her eggs.

And when the males can tell those eggs around, they release their sperm.

But what triggers it in the first place?

We have no idea.

And so, there's a thing called sperm watch, which is

on after Spring Watch, isn't it?

It's the late night.

It's a late night.

Yeah, actually, yeah.

The red button.

And what they want is for people to

tell them when they see this stuff on the beach.

So you will see this little pile of white stuff on the beach.

They say, don't confuse it with seagull poo.

It looks a lot like seagull poo.

But if you see these things that look like seagull poo, but they're in little ponds, then tell them.

And then hopefully we can work out what it is.

It might be the temperature, it might be a a change in weather, we're just not sure.

Yeah, I love though, like as you say, this is a citizen thing and there was a big website and a big PR push and they were like, you know, this is like for anyone of any age, go out.

But as James points out,

someone decided to call it sperm watch.

And it just feels the most inappropriate.

And it was things like you go on their site and for any would-be sperm spotters, again,

you get a pencil and a clipboard.

Well, this is what they ask you to take, a pencil, a clipboard, tide tables, and a recording sheet.

and the idea is that you've got to run around and i think you have to see how many you can spot in 10 minutes um or the time it takes to find a hundred of them to know that this is an area that's a fun game it's great fun game it's like pokemon go it is yeah it's like pokemon goo

can i just tell you the one so these um anna you said that the casts they have on the beach as in they live in a burrow in a u-shaped burrow and they eat food at one end and then they just poo it out at the other end of the burrow and they're in this u-shape and that's what produces the cast.

The headline of this on the Barry Today website was, The Love Life of Lugworms Involves the Casts of Thousands.

Nice.

What is that?

That's lovely.

What's the Barry Today?

Just for people called Barry.

Yeah, okay.

How did you get on it?

So there are two types in the UK, two species, the blow lugworms and the black lugworms.

And what I find incredible is how deep they go and how big they are.

Because there's little coils of sand.

You're expecting a small little worm.

But the black lugworm can can be 40 centimeters long, so like half a meter long, practically, and it burrows down about 70 centimeters.

So you need to dig pretty far, because people dig for these quite a lot.

They're very useful as fishing bait.

But you need to dig a long way to get one little worm.

And then they're not little.

No, that's true.

And to tell you this, like, I watched the movie Dune.

this weekend and this really spoiled it for me because all the way through I was like these massive worms that live underneath the dunes in Dune how are they reproducing?

Where are their casts?

Anyway, the other people in the cinema did not appreciate those questions.

They also, their breathing is pretty amazing.

So they can breathe.

There was a big mystery about how they could breathe for so long, when the tide goes out and when it comes in.

And they worked out it was something like six hours that they could survive.

And they studied it and looked into...

what was going on and it turns out that they have so if we um

god it's science i get a bit stuck but

The hemoglobin thing.

So

in human blood, one hemoglobin protein holds four oxygen molecules at a time.

In a lugworm, it's 156.

And

it's insane.

And what they've done is they've isolated it and they've applied it to medicine now.

And it's a huge thing for transplants of anything like liver and so on because it means that you can hold it.

If they're pushing this hemoglobin new product that they've created, you can make it last for days rather than hours for a transplant needing to happen.

It's a game changer.

It's because they breathe through gills.

So they breathe through gills and then they take in a huge amount of oxygen.

And there was a scientist, there's one French scientist called Frank Zell who found this out in the 90s.

And the amazing thing about lugworm blood is it's compatible with all blood types.

Because the hemoglobin is not anchored to red blood cells.

So this is really exciting.

And there is a factory in France which produces over a million lugworms a year, each of them producing a tiny amount of blood.

But that has been used in kidney transplants.

It makes people recover faster, it improves their organ function.

They are so incredible.

It's still being tested a little bit, isn't it?

But they are using it in real life things.

And the first person to have a double-face transplant use this stuff.

By which I mean he didn't end up with two faces at the end.

Yeah, yeah.

He had a face put on, it rejected, and he had another one done.

Yeah, he wasn't like, Can I get one on the back as well?

I was reading about bloodworms, which are very similar.

Well, in fact, I was reading about sandworms in general, of which a lugworm is a type.

And in Maine, in America, that it's one of the main sandworm digging-up industries.

So, Maine employs about a thousand people who go and dig up lugworms and bloodworms and sell them to anglers.

And I just really enjoyed this.

It was a New York Times article from 1976, so I don't know if it's still the case.

But you basically get bloodworm hunters and sandworm hunters.

And the sandworms are a bit more free-swimming, and the bloodworms are a bit more burrowing, like our lug worms.

And apparently, they're two extremely separate groups.

It's like the People's Front of Judea and the Judean People's Front.

They hate each other.

And the Bloodwormers have a reputation, apparently, for real roughness.

And in fact, there was a strike of all of the sandwormers and bloodwormers in 1976.

And when both groups were striking, the Bloodwormers told the Sandwormers that if they dared to accept an offer for like a pay increase that didn't involve a pay increase also for the Bloodwormers, the Bloodwormers said they would go and tear up all of their mud flats, which they used to do their harvesting.

Wow.

That's scary buns.

That's That's a menacing phrase to hear.

I'll tear up your mud flats.

It could mean any number of things.

We're going to have to wrap up in a second.

Can I just tell you, there's a giant beach worm in Australia, which is one centimetre wide and three metres long.

Did you say giant?

Yeah.

And did you say centimetres?

Well, it's one centimeter wide.

I watched Dune this weekend.

Okay.

Not 400 metres.

Yeah, yeah.

Wow.

So what's it do?

This?

It just wriggles around.

But it is, no, three metres.

It's very, very long and only a tiny bit wide.

It's a really strange organism.

It's a strong fisherman, isn't it?

That puts that on the end of his rod.

The whole fishing line is the worm.

Plot twist.

Oh, go on.

Well, I can tell you there is a new taste in town.

Okay.

So there's salty and bitter and all that kind of stuff.

We've talked about umami on this show, I'm pretty sure, and on QI as well.

There's also a thing called kokumi.

And kokumi is something, it doesn't really taste of anything, but it makes other tastes enhanced.

And we have a special receptor in our tongue, so we know it does count as a proper taste.

Anyway, you find it in fish sperm.

The caviar menu at Fido's Restaurant and Grill just got a new option.

Well, do you know what's so weird?

Is that I was reading about Kokumi for the first fact we mentioned today because cats love it,

yeah.

And they deliberately try and get Kokumi and umami into cat food.

So there we go.

Wait a minute.

It also tastes a bit like caviar.

So maybe the water does taste of caviar.

It's all coming together.

How beautiful.

We've tied it all up in a bow.

There we go.

At a good point to end on then.

That is it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you would like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Schreiberland.

Andy.

At Andrew Hunter M.

James.

At James Harkin.

And Anna.

You can email podcast at qi.com.

Yep, you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing, or our website, no such thingasofish.com.

All of our previous episodes are up there.

Do check them out.

Also, if you want to come and see us on the tour, what we are currently on, nerd immunity, we have links to all the upcoming shows there.

But outside of that, just quickly, thank you so much, Canterbury.

That was so much fun.

Thank you for having us.

We will be back again.

And everyone else listening at home, we will be back again next week with another episode.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.