393: No Such Thing As Charlie And The Sperm Factory

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Hi, everyone.

Welcome to this week's episode of No Such Thing as a Fish.

Now, before I remind you about our tour, which is about to begin in places such as Tunbridge Wells, Nottingham, Richmond, Reading, Peterborough, and a whole load of other places, I want to tell you about the very, very, very special guest that we have on today's show.

Anna is away at the moment, she's on holiday.

I'm not sure exactly where she's gone, probably somewhere very sunny.

Last I saw, she was removing lots of the holiday clothes clothes from her bag and replacing them with 19th century literature, so I'm sure she's having a great time.

But in her place, we have the incredible journalist and author, Mary Roach.

Now, I don't know if you'll know about Mary, you really should if you don't.

She is, well, what I would say is, if you were to take QI, the TV show, and no such thing as a fish, and squish it all together in a tiny little ball, send it over to America, and then reconstitute it as a single human, then pretty much you're gonna end up with Mary Roach.

She has written some of the greatest popular science books in history.

Books such as Stiff, The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers,

Bonk, The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex.

I think you can see probably why we get on very well with Mary.

Packing for Mars, The Curious Science of Life in the Void, Gulp, Adventures on the Alimentary Canal.

And her latest book is, in America, it's called Fuzz, When Nature Breaks the Law and in the UK it is known as Animal Vegetable Criminal and it is a book all about times when the natural world came up against the legal world.

I haven't read it yet.

Dan has read it and he assures me it's absolutely brilliant and I can definitely believe that because I've read all of Mary's other books and to a tome they are incredible.

So really do enjoy the show.

I'm sure you will.

Buy Mary's new book and pretty much all of her old books if you're interested in stuff

And do come to our live shows if you live in any of the aforementioned places that I mentioned earlier on.

Then come along in the next couple of weeks.

Or if you live anywhere in the UK and Ireland, then go to qi.com/slash fish events and you can see where we will be playing near you.

Okay, on with the podcast.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from four undisclosed locations globally.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I'm sitting here with Andrew Hunter Murray, James Harkin, and our very special guest.

It is Mary Roach.

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 marry.

When feeling threatened, gulls practice a maneuver called defensive vomiting, the point of which, experts say, is not to disgust and repel the predator, but to offer it an alternative meal.

Wow.

What possibly could they offer that is better than what the animal was coming for in the first place?

Is it vomit?

Is it actual vomit?

It is.

It's vomit.

And I think that is a service because it's partially digested.

Oh, yeah.

It saves effort.

So when I first heard about defensive vomiting, I actually heard about it in a vulture because vultures do this too.

And I thought, oh, they do this to be lighter.

So when they flee, when they fly away, they'll have less weight.

And then the guy said, no, no, that's not why they do it.

The other thing I thought would be to disgust them because you hear about women feeling threatened and like vomiting to disgust their attacker.

So I thought it was that.

In fact, no, it's just to offer them something more appealing

to eat.

I was reading in your book that you were talking to an expert, and specifically the items that she has seen been vomited up before her include ants, strawberry shortcake, a large mackerel.

But yeah, but Dan, think about it.

That does make sense, right?

If you're coming over to eat a gull, but you get some strawberry shortcake instead, then that's obviously way tastier, though.

That's a big win.

Well, you get, it looks like from the list that sometimes it's very awesome cuisine, like spaghetti marinara with mussels and the other times it's a loaded diaper so it's you know wow i wonder if the predator ever waits you know it's sitting there in front of a diaper that's just been vomited up in front of it and it's saying no i'm i'm still going to eat you unless you can cope with something a little bit better the gun is saying hang on hang on i've got i've got some shortcake i'm sure i had some shortcake earlier

I read of one bird, the Fulmar.

Do you know this one?

It's very oily, the Fulmar.

And in the olden days, they used to kind of use them as torches.

They would set them on fire because they were so oily.

but i read that they um sometimes vomit very very oily sick onto another animal and it might stop their feathers from working and stop them from being able to fly and and swim and stuff like that right

yeah that's a very cool there's so many things you can do with vomit yeah i think we underutilize our own vomit yeah are there powers do we have extra powers to our vomit that we're not utilizing i don't know if we do maybe so dan you're really interested in that aren't you because just this morning you messaged us saying that you've just been vomited on.

Yes, I like

this wasn't me doing research for the show.

My son vomited on me this morning

in pure coincidence.

He's a bit ill.

But yeah, it is, I couldn't fly afterwards.

I was very scary.

I really, like I said, it's not bird-related, but it's a Nigerian bit of folklore that there are snakes which will vomit up a diamond, okay?

If they're hunting at night, they need a bit of light, and so they throw up a diamond, and the light will kind of refract around inside it and light up the local area.

That's really interesting because like, do you know those little bits of glass in Rhodes, cat's eyes?

Well, they were supposed to have been invented in like the 20th century, right?

But it seems like maybe snakes invented them way before.

Yes, the snakes don't do this, unfortunately.

It would be amazing if they did.

The reason the myth came about is they've got these little mineral deposits.

I think they're called calcioli or calcioli.

I don't know how you pronounce it.

They're like kidney stones, basically, in their bodies.

And so they are there, but they're not diamonds and the snakes don't throw them up.

But I guess people have cut open the snakes and said oh look here's the magical diamond it uses as a torch but don't you need a you need a light source do they also throw up a flashlight i mean what where are they it's like the diamond is no good if you don't have

the right kind of light so true wow and so vultures do it as well any other birds any other animals do this I've only heard of vultures and gulls.

Vultures are problematic because they like to roost on, you know, those giant communications towers?

They have a lot of places for vultures to just sit there and hang out, which they like to do.

And so it makes it really, if you are someone whose job is to climb the communications tower and do work, you, first of all, are stepping a lot of vulture shit all over the struts of the communications tower.

But also you have like 50 vultures vomiting down under this rain of vomit.

Oh my god.

So, yeah.

I heard that when I first read about gulls spewing out, I thought it was a thing about, you know, just getting weight off so that they could fly away faster.

And that turns out to be a myth.

But apparently it's not a myth within Komodo dragons.

They can't fly.

That's a different dragon you're thinking of, Dan.

Sorry, yeah.

No, no, if they need to make a speedy getaway, they will just quickly have a vomit and it will lighten their load a bit, just allowing them that extra bit of speed.

And also, I'm sorry, how do we really know what the answer is?

Nobody's asked the gulls.

Yes.

We've got different theories, and I kind of like the

speedy getaway.

Let me lighten the load.

Have we even tested that as a theory?

Like, surely Usain Bolt should have had a quick vomit before he ran some of those hundred meters to really smash the record.

You do get that.

Sports people sometimes do vomit before their sporting events.

I've heard of a few soccer players doing it, but usually I think it's like nerves and stuff like that, right?

Adrenaline and stuff.

And of course, there was the marathon runner.

What was she called?

Paula Redcliffe.

Paula Radcliffe, she had a poo halfway through, which might have lightened her load and did she win yeah she did okay she did see it works I think though in the long run she probably would think maybe I wouldn't take that poo maybe it wasn't worth the win because it's all anyone talks about

the greatest female marathon runner of all time and that's all we ever talk about anyway exactly like three of us knew that she definitely had a poo but I did not know if she won that race

This example of the gull vomiting, which is in your book, which I was reading about, it kind of was leading into this story about how there was huge problems at the Vatican when the Pope was going to have a big celebration and they had all these daffodils there and all the gulls were coming in and they don't eat flowers, but they were pissed off and seemed to be knocking them over.

And they thought maybe they were going in to pick the worms, but there was no obvious sign that that was happening.

And you sort of were questioning whether or not this is just a dickhead species of gull, maybe.

Exactly.

As we learned, gulls will eat just about anything, but they don't eat flowers.

And daffodils, I read somewhere, are poisonous.

And they didn't eat, they weren't eating them.

They were just sort of pulling them up and like throwing them around.

And the people who set this floral display up, they come down from the Netherlands and they spend like the entire day before setting it up.

So they were pretty pissed at the gulls.

But there wasn't any obvious reason gulls do a defensive thing where they pull up grass to just be macho and say, this is my territory.

But that's why I just sort of thought, well,

is it just that they're dicks?

Yeah, no.

Mary, I was reading about the training that you did because I know the book is all about wildlife and humans and the sort of vexed legal areas between them.

And you did this, is it WART?

Yes, wildlife human attack response training.

Yeah, it's kind of a, I don't know if you guys have forensics shows, like people go onto the crime scene and collect evidence.

Yeah, yeah.

It's kind of that, but when wild animals killed someone.

So they still have the yellow tape, you know, and the people come in with their

evidence bags, the little evidence flags, and they're looking for blood spatter patterns and all that stuff.

I love it, though, because the thing you wrote about is we do think, okay, so they're coming in and they're looking at, say, like a cougar that's killed a young man, but then it turns out that's all a setup.

The cougar's been framed.

And actually, it was a human killer that they didn't identify at the time, only years later, because they see puncture marks, but those have been framed.

And

I just love the idea that they're there to sort of suss out, okay, it looks like they were mauled by a cougar, but were they really?

Yeah, exactly.

It was a a dude with an ice pick who stabbed somebody in the neck and some doofus wildlife person who didn't take wart training

um he's like yeah that looks like a cougar because they go right for the neck yeah they do go for the neck but they have an upper jaw and a lower jaw and the teeth marks are look a certain way they don't look like an ice pick anyway so that guy finally did get busted like 10 years later he was bragging about the crime in prison oh or something

they gave you advice i read about what to do if you have to shoot a bear because it's attacking someone.

And it said, I can't believe this, but I wanted to check it with you.

You're advice to run up to the bear, plant the barrel on it, and then shoot upwards.

And it's because you can't aim under those circumstances because it's so stressful.

Yeah, exactly.

And also, there's a whole thing about if a bear is attacking somebody and they're going at it and you're trying to shoot the bear, how do you make sure you don't shoot the guy?

So there was this story of this, I forget the guy's name, Worf or something, or Wolf.

I don't know.

Anyway, he killed the bear, but he also shot the guy in the leg.

But, you know, a small price to pay, I suppose.

Yeah.

I suppose you can't really outrun a bear if it's going to come after you, right?

So you might as well go towards it.

But if it's busy attacking your friend, you've got a chance.

Yes, you do.

Yeah.

Always be the second slowest person.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, you could try the vomit.

Your friend's being bored by the bear.

You just throwing up in the background.

Mary, did you do any arson stuff or arson dog stuff in the course of the book?

Any arson?

Sorry, I was reading about the arson dogs that they have in America.

Have you heard of these?

It's insane.

There's a place in Connecticut called the Accelerant Detection Canine School.

Oh, the Accelerant.

Yeah, exactly.

Anything used to get a fire going.

They can identify 17 different types of accelerant.

And this is the amazing thing.

Sometimes they will bring the dogs to the fire while it's still burning, because often when there's a fire, there's a crowd of onlookers, right?

But sometimes the people who set the fire are in the crowd watching it, and they will turn up, and the dog will sniff a few drops of petrol or whatever they used on them, and then they get busted.

Wow.

That's incredible.

We should probably move on in a sec to our next fact.

Does anyone else want to add anything before we do?

Can I say something about fly vomit?

Yeah.

Most people vomit after they eat, but flies will vomit onto the food that they're planning to eat and digest it outside the body, kind of turn it into soup, and then basically put a straw on it and suck it out.

Frowned on.

Suck it out.

Very frowned on buffets.

I once went to New Zealand and I was in a cave and it was pitch black and you kind of float on these rubber rings and on the ceiling, it looks like stars.

It looks like you're looking at the heavens.

And actually, have you seen it?

So they're glowworms, right?

But what they don't, well, what they do tell you, but what I'd forgotten, is that actually it's glowworm vomit that is hanging down from the ceiling.

And what they do is they vomit out these strands and then animals get caught in it and then they can gobble it up a bit like fly paper.

They did some analysis on the vomit and they found that it was 99% water and 1% something else.

And that something else turns out to be urea, which is basically glowworm piss.

And they're not quite sure how the piss gets into the vomit, but it does seem like they're vomiting out pissy water

to collect these insects.

James, just quickly, the New Zealand cave you went to, is it called the Waikiki?

Yeah, Waikiki, I think, yeah, something like that.

We went on a tour to Australia and New Zealand.

Is that what you did with your time after the tour ended?

Yes, it is, actually, as it happens.

I also went to the Hobbit world.

Oh, it's good, but just I had a few days extra, but I didn't have the means to travel, so I just went to the Wellington Funicular Railway Museum instead.

And I have to say, yours does sound more exciting.

I've got to say, both of these sound very much on the brands, don't they?

I went to World of Socks.

What?

I heard about it.

I saw signs for it, and I made my husband take a detour for World of Socks.

It's just a store.

No, it's just a store that sells socks.

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Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that any truffle farmer worth their salt will do regular PCR tests on their truffles.

Are they testing them for COVID?

And do they have to go into isolation?

Blah, blah, blah.

So, this is basically me playing off the fact that PCR tests are just a very common, widely used thing in biology and chemistry.

They are tests where you make billions and billions of copies of the DNA of a sample, and it just means that you can test it a lot easier.

I went very recently to the Eco Musée de la Truff in the village of Sorges in France, which is the big truffle museum in France.

And this is something I learned while I was there.

Is this whole podcast you just doing tax-deductible trips by mentioning it as work?

Is that what's going on?

I've been doing that for eight years, Dan.

I surprised you haven't noticed by now.

Yeah, so there's a few reasons why you might do it.

So, first of all, you might want to check your truffles to make sure that there's no other funguses coming into your farm yard because a truffle for anyone who doesn't know it's like a mushroom but it's from the fungal family but unlike a normal mushroom it doesn't send out spores the spores all grow on the inside and they grow underground and you can pull them out and they're delicious to eat but they're very very expensive and so when you're growing them you need to know that they're growing properly and the pcr test can check if there's any other fungus in the area and the other way that they're useful is you get a lot of cheap funguses coming in from different parts of the world especially from China.

And so, when you are selling your truffles, you can do a PCR test to show they're the real deal and they're not cheap truffles from elsewhere in the world.

And what's amazing as well is those cheap truffles are so identical to a real truffle that even if you held them under a microscope, the spores are just not different enough for you to be able to tell the difference.

Yeah, it's incredible.

So, there's two ways of telling: one on a molecular level, or the other way is by tasting it.

Because, according to French truffle aficionado Eduardo Manazares, it tastes like a turnip.

Whereas a truffle has this amazing kind of earthy flavor, doesn't it?

Like actual truffles.

But these ones taste like potatoes, uncooked, unsalted potatoes.

But you know what?

I think probably you ship them over here to America, the fake ones, and nobody will know.

I'm not sure I've ever eaten any truffles.

I did think, oh, no, once a few years ago, I had some chips which had truffle oil on them.

Imagine my surprise researching this fact.

Most truffle oil has never even been near a truffle.

It's made of something called bismalthiliomethane, which is derived from petroleum.

And the only reason it's used is that it smells a bit like truffle.

No.

Wait.

Petrol on your chips.

Yeah.

I wonder why they were burned all the time.

So they use, we're talking about arson dogs earlier, they use truffle dogs to find them.

But not only do they use truffle dogs, they use truffle hogs.

Truffle hogs are amazing.

These are domesticated pigs that go around smelling out the truffles, and the reason they're able to smell them is because they share the natural sex hormones that the male pigs produce in their testicles, which they somehow bring up to their mouth and salivate out for the female pig to smell.

It's got a very similar smell, and so they're basically smelling the ground for male hogs, but finding truffles.

That's amazing.

I encountered some amazing bore technology that involved those pheromones and that saliva in Denmark in order to figure out which pigs are ready for mating.

You can do it by just taking around a teaser bore and the boar kind of salivates and makes these horrible retching, grunting sounds.

And the females that get aroused, they know, okay, these females are ready for insemination.

But instead of the teaser bore, Somebody, the Danish Pig Production Council, I think it was, they developed this boar on wheels, remote controlled, that was doused with bore mate, which is the pheromone of the bore.

It's a spray.

So it was doused with that, and they had an MP3 of it playing the retching, horrible, grunting sounds.

And they would make it go around to all the females to see which ones were ready.

But

it didn't work very well, and the farmers didn't like it.

Its name was Skippy.

Skippy.

Oh, boy.

You'd feel really disappointed if you'd called for Skippy the Bush Kangaroo and Skippy the wheeled sex bore turned up.

The thing is about the pigs, Daniel was saying, is that they don't really use pigs anymore because, or the hogs, because they basically will eat the truffles if they find them, whereas the dogs will just sniff them.

And the other thing is, if you have a really good area where your truffles are, then you don't want anyone else to know about them.

You want to keep it secret.

If you drive up there with a dog in your car, then people are thinking, oh, he's just taking his dog for a walk.

But if you drive up there with a pig in your car, then people are like, well,

I know what this guy's up to.

Well, I've got a good idea what this guy might be up to.

It is, that's exactly it.

Because the idea is, as soon as the pig finds it, you basically have to wrestle the 20-stone pig and you have to wrestle the truffle out of its mouth.

It's impossible to do.

Whereas dogs will swap for sausages, apparently.

They kind of notify you and then they say, okay.

But actually, the best thing to find truffles is truffle flies.

So truffle flies can find truffles better than dogs and pigs.

And that's because female truffle flies like to lay their eggs in truffles, so they need to be able to find them.

And the way that you do that is you walk around because these flies are really, really tiny and they're almost see-through, so you can hardly see them.

And you just prod the grass with a little stick.

And then, if you get the right moment, then they'll all kind of fly up and they'll hover over the area where your truffles are, and then you can dig in and get them.

Would you eat a truffle which had truffle flies in it, James?

In it?

Well, I must say, I'm not a big fan of any kind of mushrooms, so probably not.

No, really.

Because apparently, that does happen.

It's not always treated as a bad thing if there are truffle flies in there.

So there was a doctor at the University of Nancy called Dr.

Francis Martin who said that if you collect it just at the right time, the truffle will have eggs and larvae in it, which adds proteins and aroma to the truffle.

Have you ever eaten any weird stuff like that, Mary?

I kind of get the feeling you might have done.

I have had some weird food.

Yeah, I was was up in the Arctic, in an Inuit town, and because I had this idea, like, if you only eat meat, how do you get your vitamins?

And the answer is organ meats.

So they basically eat the whole entity.

I went to this community feast and they had this Arctic char lying there.

And the guy who was hosting me said, we're going to give you the best part.

And I could see his sort of cutting something that looked like the forehead.

And I was like, oh, okay, great.

Cause I know cheeks, you know, cheeks are good.

So probably forehead is pretty good but it was the raw eye and it's a fairly sizable fish so it has a fairly sizable eye and it had that you know that thing hanging the muscular thing in the back I don't know if you know that the back of the eye has this it's kind of like when you eat a chicken leg that hard awful tendony bit it was like that and I said oh thank you and all the elders were standing around like nodding like and I don't know if they were just it was a prank or it really is the best part but I said it's not gonna be like a cherry tomato is it?

They don't eat cherry tomatoes.

He's like,

no, no, no.

It was like a cherry tomato.

It just exploded in my mouth.

Because you'd have to, you know, you eat the whole thing at once.

You don't take a bite because it would dribble.

Oh, my goodness.

I've never had truffle.

I mean, I guess I've had shaved truffle shavings.

Oh, yeah.

You know,

but that's, yeah, I don't know.

I don't know what all the fuss is.

I know.

They sell for so much.

So, like a pound of black truffle, you can get white and black truffle, can sell for like 400 American dollars a pound.

Do you guys know, is it the case that it's it's not just about eating, but if you can get a truffle, you can breed it?

Is that what is that the thing or is it not?

Is it purely just eating?

Some of them are cultivated.

In fact, there are some kinds that you can and some you can't.

So I think it's Italian white truffles, they're still wild and they're really hard to find.

But French black truffles, pretty much all of those are cultivated.

Yeah, something like 95% now of all the French truffles are cultivated these days.

They cultivate them all over the world, as in America they certainly do for sure.

It takes 10 years for them to grow.

And it might be that you just plant your farm, then 10 years later, you find out you've got a load of turnips.

Well, not if you use your PCRs.

Have you guys heard of Helen Gilke?

No, no.

So Helen Gilkey was the first woman to receive a PhD in botany at the University of California in Berkeley.

And she was the world expert on truffles probably throughout the 1930s, 1940s, and into the 1950s.

She named a whole load of truffles, but whenever she named them, she also drew them, and she would also write a poem about them.

And the poems that she wrote were amazing.

So, here's a poem that she wrote: Now, here comes Hydnotria, it's hymenium lush, lining the walls with a deep piled plush, gradually merging at entrances wide into the pattern of surface outside.

American species, we have not a few, and both those in Europe we likewise have two.

For example, H.

tulasnei of old world fame by mycologist Berkeley given its name.

Its presence in US regarded as myth until here discovered by Alex H.

Smith.

Very nice.

Sounds great.

It's a bit of doggerald, but I think that's really nice.

I love it.

I love it when a poem is like a Wikipedia article for you.

Like, we just got the story of the truffle.

She must lean very heavily on the words snuffle, scuffle, and ruffle, though.

I fear see, you're right.

Can I tell you one thing about the truffle of the year?

Oh, yes.

This was a thing in the 40s and 50s, and it was a PR campaign.

There was a guy called Giacomo Mora who was trying to make white truffles fashionable, which they weren't at the time.

It was all about the black truffles then.

And he launched this campaign where he would send the best truffle of the year to a global celebrity.

So in 1949, Rita Hayworth received the best truffle of the year.

Wow.

Wow.

53, Winston Churchill.

That's 1954.

Marilyn Monroe.

Pope Paul VI in 1965.

Emperor Haile Selassie got one.

Or just this weird club of people who've received the best truffle.

That's incredible.

Do we know that they received them as in they didn't just receive some weird thing in the mail and chuck it away?

I'm sure it was recorded delivery, but we don't know

we haven't got photos of Marilyn with the truffle at Haile Selassie.

Even if it wasn't recorded delivery, he probably had a letter with it explaining what it was.

Probably wasn't just a truffle through the past.

Hopefully, they were given some kind of warning

before it showed up.

Because I used to work at the SPCA, the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

I was in the public affairs office, and my boss at one year, for Christmas presents for people in the media, she had these cookies in the shape of a bone, you know, human cookies, and she just left them in a bag on the doorstep.

She went around and delivered them, but she didn't tell people.

And someone called the bomb squad

and blew up up the cookies.

Oh my god,

on truffles and how much people love them.

Yeah, I just love this line.

The composer Rossini claimed that he had only cried three times in his entire life.

Okay, here's the quote: He said, once when my first opera failed, once again, the first time I heard Paganini play the violin, and once when a truffles turkey fell overboard at a boating picnic.

Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that there are signed copies of Life magazine circulating on auction sites that are said to be autographed by Ham, the first chimpanzee in space, but are in fact forgeries signed by other chimps.

Wow.

Other chimps that have been in space or just other chimps?

No.

Oh, really?

Just boring other chimps.

This is true.

I talked to Ham's trainer and vet,

Bill Brits, when I was working on Packing for Mars.

And he said, he was talking about how Ham was this beloved, world famous on the cover of Life magazine to the extent that people were sending flowers and letters to Ham.

And they started requesting autographs for Ham the chimpanzee.

Bill tried to oblige them.

You know, they would send their copy.

And Ham, the chimp, was not signing with a pen.

It was a paw print.

And at a certain point, he said, I was afraid we would wear him out.

So at a certain point, we just took any chimpanzee and used their paws.

So it is true.

The other chimps are actually, I've accused them of forging signatures here.

They are innocent bystanders whose palms have been pressed onto paper.

It's quite benevolent then.

That's nice.

I didn't know that background.

That's a relief.

Yeah.

As if it was done for Ham's benefit, you know.

Part of it was, you know, because the Soviets had put dogs up up in space and successfully landed them.

Uh, the U.S.

was trying to make a really big deal about, look, we did it too.

It was like he was a short, hairy astronaut.

They dressed him up in a pressure suit, which he didn't need.

It's the capsule was pressurized.

You know, he did these photo shoots, and it was, and he was a very friendly, outgoing chimp, unlike the second chimp, Enos, that nobody ever talks about.

Whoa, so why was what was wrong with Enos?

He was a very uh ornery, aggressive, unpleasant, and kind of ugly chimpanzee.

chimpanzee.

Yes.

I'm telling you,

but just your buzz is grumpy.

Yeah.

His trainer,

Dr.

Finneg,

when people would ask him about him, this is how he described him in public.

Instead of saying he was ornery, he was cussed, he was horrible, he'd said he was a taciturn pillar of the community kind of guy.

Do you know these handprints?

Can you tell the difference between a ham one and a sham one?

Like, is it possible to tell the difference or not?

Probably if you had a real one and you compared it, I mean, they're probably fingerprints, right?

Oh, yeah.

I would imagine it would be pretty easy, but you'd need to have an actual ham print.

Yeah.

I've seen a photo.

They do look quite hard to distinguish.

They're quite inky.

They're quite thick.

So the one that I found was sold on an auction site back in, I think, around 2008 and it sold for surprisingly little, in my opinion.

It was $2,100.

And they sell other things, like, you know, like on lots of animals, you'll have the identifying name on a little metal sign.

What do you mean, Dan?

Do you mean like a dog tag?

A dog tag, sorry, but it was a chimp tag.

Yeah.

Actually, just very quickly, because a lot of people listening might actually not be aware that we sent primates to space before we sent humans.

And in fact, Ham has that honor.

Ham is the first primate to go into space.

Beat Alan Shepard, the American, beat Yuri Gagarian, the Russian.

And this was on the 31st of January, 1961.

It was a test for the Americans to make sure that everything would go right ahead of their trip with Alan Shepard, which actually cost them the honor of getting the first man in space because Yuri Gagarian got in there in that time.

But Ham was a huge celebrity back in the day.

It was obviously a big deal.

And as Mary was saying, just a really charismatic chimp.

And you know, who got no publicity at all was the five Alberts who went up beforehand.

What?

These were, yeah, the Alberts.

And then there was Patricia and Michael.

These were all monkeys.

They weren't apes.

You know, chimp is at apes.

These were monkeys that were launched in a suborbital flight and came back down.

But wow, I've never heard of them.

Yeah, the Alberts.

The first Alberts ended catastrophically.

They didn't survive.

So at a certain point, somebody realized, you know, maybe we should stop calling them Albert.

They switched to Michael and Patricia.

It's a bit weird naming them in the first place because it does humanize them a bit more.

And when you hear that, you know, Michael and Patricia

have not survived their space journey, it's much sadder.

But so Ham was retrospectively named because for that exact reason, Andy.

So when I say that the dog tag was sold, it didn't say the word ham on it.

It just had the number 65 because that was the number of chimpanzee he was in a big number of, I think, around 80 chimpanzees who were auditioned for the role.

What kind of audition was it?

You had to sing a song, then you had to do your party trick.

In a tutu.

Yeah.

There was a swimsuit round.

Yeah.

It was bizarre, the training.

Well, it wasn't bizarre.

It was very scientifically worked out, but you had to push a lever after seeing a light.

That was the mission.

And then that's what Ham had to do in space.

Yeah, it was basically to make sure that they were still functioning, that something horrible wasn't happening to their cognitive abilities in zero gravity, that they were able to do the training that they'd been trained to do.

Ham did do a press briefing after his trip.

He was wheeled out, as you say, in the suit.

Or certainly he was asked to get into the metal couch that was like the one he'd been in on the spaceflight, and he very vigorously refused to get in there.

So it seems to imply he didn't have a wonderful time.

It's a thing that's sort of being rewritten in the sort of perception of Ham, because the footage that always gets shown of Ham is him having, let's say, a quite pleasant trip up into space.

But the extended version of it, and I've not seen the footage myself, but there's a lot of talk about there being a lot of distress distress in his face and him being quite scared.

And Jane Goodall, who did see the footage when it happened, said she's never seen a chimpanzee look so scared in her life with the facial expressions.

And I think at the time, as Mary, you point out in the book, no one knew how to place Ham.

Was Ham an astronaut?

who was going there as part of a heroic adventure?

Or was it an animal who had no idea what was going on?

And obviously it was an animal that had no idea, but the perception was that it was a hero for America.

And so the narrative was that, and it's being reassessed a lot now to say, actually, it was animal cruelty.

I have a refrigerator magnet of ham, and he looks like he's smiling.

In fact, that's not a smile.

That's a sort of a grimace of stress.

But people looked at it and thought, oh, look, he looks so happy.

But I have a photo of myself doing that on a log flu in a theme park.

And again, it does look like a smile, but I'm not happy.

I was looking at other hams in space.

That's why.

Go on.

Well, I found a few.

So we've mentioned on the podcast before, the first ever meal eaten on the moon was a ham sandwich.

So

ham is quite an iconic thing.

By Buzz Aldrin.

By Buzz Aldrin.

The ugly one.

Oh, no, no.

The grumpy one.

Oh, my God.

So that would be a little dehydrated cubed ham sandwich, about one inch square, I believe.

Oh, what's that?

Yeah, we're not talking dry mustard and lettuce and tomato.

Well, you see, in my head, it was always like, yeah, like a 12-inch sub, definitely.

Yeah, the ones that went to the moon, the space sandwiches then were like, they were little dehydrated cubes that you would pop the whole sandwich in your mouth at once so there would be no crumbs.

Because if you had crumbs and they floated around and they'd get into the electronics and they could cause problems.

And they were so dry that you would have to moisten them with your own saliva.

So you'd have to hold them in your mouth and kind of gather up the spit to make them swallowable.

They were so, they tended, this stuff tended to ravel up into space and come right back down.

And they also didn't want to eat because they didn't have a toilet.

They just had the bag, the fecal bag.

A lot of times on these shorter missions in particular, like Gemini, they just didn't eat because they didn't want to use the bag.

So, yeah.

That makes sense.

That makes sense.

Just on that, do you remember we had Tim Picon about a year ago talking about his time in space?

I don't think we ever mentioned they do this training where you're underwater for a while, a special underwater base.

And they had a problem with their toilet.

And for whatever reason, the answer became you had to stick your bum out of this underwater base and just sort of poo into the open ocean.

But the problem was that lots of fish got the message that this was dinner time and they would turn up and they'd start nibbling your bum if you didn't have a poo quickly enough.

And so

it became the kind of race.

Is that a nice thing?

When people like go into shopping centres sometimes and get

fished and nibble on their feet, right?

That's amazing.

People say that's a nice feeling.

Do you think it's the same on the bum bum?

James is actually banned from every shopping centre in the UK for misusing those facilities.

And I think they tried to solve the problem by putting up this curtain of bubbles to give the astronauts in training a kind of privacy screen, right?

But unfortunately, it was just a massive dinner gong.

Yeah.

And all the fish would see the bubbles from miles away.

And they're like, oh, great.

There's going to be an astronaut poking their ass out.

i suppose it's all right if they're the little kind of nibbling fish but if you get a huge like great white shark coming along you don't want that do you what a death though what to report that timpeak died when a shark ate him anus first

that's really fair um do you guys know um you might probably do know her actually peggy whitson uh She's an she's an astronaut.

So she has the record for the most time that any American American has been in space and any woman has been in space.

She was in space for 665 days.

Oh, yeah.

And she was the first person to do a real-time kind of DNA test to find

species while in the ISS.

So basically, they would scrape a bit of the table and they would put it in and they would be able to tell which species are there.

And that's obviously really, really important, especially in the future.

It might be really important when we're trying to find you know if there are life on other planets or wherever.

Um, but she did that, of course, using a PCR test.

So, in the future, any astronaut worth their salt will be doing a PCR test wherever they go.

Wow.

I interviewed Commander Whitson

from Mars.

I did.

She's just really badass fabulous.

So, she told me this story about she was coming back from the ISS on Soyuz, you know, the capsule, and they do, they don't do a splashdown, they come down on land.

Well, they uh, it was kind of a off-nominal, as they say, something things didn't go quite right.

And she didn't land where she's she was meant to land.

She lands in this field out on the steps, and she gets out.

And then it's this farmer who comes over and he's like, Where did you come from?

And she's like, I came from space.

He just like walks away.

That's amazing.

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Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is Andy.

My fact is that you can now send sperm on a postcard.

Andy's address is.

so I couldn't do it before.

Could I not?

Well, it's just been proved that it can be done.

So you mean, like, and it survives.

I mean, I presume

it's dead sperm on a postcard forever.

Yes, absolutely.

Since the invention of the medium.

Yeah, it's been, I'm sure.

Probably one of the first things they sent, so I would have thought.

Absolutely.

Wish you were here.

Okay, so this is an experiment that some scientists in Japan at Yamanashi University have been doing.

Normally, sperm gets sent around the place in glass vials, and it's vulnerable to breaking.

And some freezing methods are things like freezing with liquid nitrogen, which is not a great system for sending sperm around the place.

And they have been working on ways to make sperm.

viable in transit in more convenient ways.

And they've been freeze-drying sperm for some years now.

And now now they are getting to the bit of their experiments where they are sending it around.

So what they did was they freeze-dried some sperm, mouse sperm in this case, onto a single sheet of paper.

And they sandwiched the paper between two little sheets of plastic, but then they just attached that to a postcard and they sent it through the post.

And it was absolutely fine.

And they were able to get viable mice bred from this sperm.

And they really tested themselves as well.

They sent it at New Year when the postal system is under a lot of stress because lots of people are writing to each other.

And what was on the back of the postcard?

Was it a scenic?

One of them was a happy new year card.

We do know that from the experiment, but they haven't clarified what else was on the

exciting bits.

Oh, I don't know if it was the front or the back, actually.

I assume that it was on the bit where you write the message.

Yeah, you would think so.

Yeah, right.

But the bigger challenge here is possibly how to get the sperm out of the mouse.

That is a bit of a challenge for scientists.

I talked to a woman who was looking into a male birth control and they were testing it on macaques and

she said we had a heck of a time getting them to, you know, they wanted them to masturbate and produce a sample.

And she said, and it was very, very difficult.

They had to end up using a sort of ejaculator thing.

But anyway, she had this great line.

She said, a monkey is not smart enough to know what we want, but too smart to have sex with an artificial vagina, vagina, because that's what they were trying.

Raise trying to get them to mount the artificial

monkey vagina.

So that was the challenge.

So a mouse, yeah.

Well, maybe, maybe this is the answer to your postcard question because maybe on the other side was a sexy picture of a mouse, and they just got them looking at it.

And as they ejaculated, just swap it around.

If you know how they got sperm out of a mouse, then send your answers on a postcard to Andrew onto Marie.

Maybe they just wheel in a little mouse on wheels, Skimmo,

slaying some noise

skippy modding his career's really dropped well you've you got a new gig mate

no but mary you're absolutely right about the because i know that for bigger animals they sometimes use a little um artificial vagina oh oh electro ejaculator yeah yes which that goes i think um into

up the bum and then Yeah, quick blast of that and away you go.

But no, you're right.

They use the artificial ones too.

but for a mouse I don't know if anyone makes a

it's tiny

tiny yeah it's interesting they tried lots of different types of paper didn't they to see which was the best they tried washi which is like that traditional Japanese wrapping paper they also tried like a vinyl sheet they tried weighing paper which turned out to be the best filter paper a few different things but they found that even though some of them worked like for instance weighing paper worked particularly well some of them didn't work because the paper would stick together with the sperm and so you wouldn't be able to get it back afterwards.

Interesting.

I might be wrong about this, but I think from what I was reading in the paper, the spermatozoa die, but you can still get the DNA.

The DNA remains intact, and then you can take the DNA and then you can inject it into like a

new site or whatever they inject stuff into.

I see.

Okay, so it's yeah, the sperm.

It's not like in Star Wars where they bring back Han Solo after he's been frozen in position in the thing.

How did they get the sperm out of Han solo?

Is it a solo hand thing?

Very nice.

Some mouse sperm, they think, are saboteurs, which kind of act as cock blockers for other sperm or for rival mouse sperm.

They seem to block the sense of direction systems in other mouse sperm, which is just remarkable.

That's interesting.

I remember someone did a study testing this theory that the corona of the glands of the penis was a sperm displacement device.

Like, in other words, if you go in right after another guy's been in there, this ridge would kind of remove the other person's sperm.

And what I enjoyed about this study is that they had to come up with a recipe for semen simulant in order to test this.

They also had to buy a bunch of dildos.

And they,

and in my bunk, they had,

actually, I had two recipes for semen simulant, and one with cornstarch-based, one flour-based.

What I liked a lot was that, you know, how in a recipe it'll be like, yield two dozen cookies.

So it said, yield one ejaculate.

Oh,

wow.

Speaking of semen recipes,

have you guys happened to come across, oh, wrong word, the wrong phrasing.

Have you guys seen the book Natural Harvest?

No.

Interesting book.

Published by a guy called Paul Fotenhauer.

Foty is his nickname.

And it's basically a collection of semen-based recipes.

This was released in 2008.

It's a real book.

You can buy it.

He's done a sequel, which is a sort of cocktail bartender's handbook cocktail.

Yeah, what kind of tail?

So here's the description.

He says, Semen is not only nutritious, but also has a wonderful texture and amazing cooking properties.

Like fine wine and cheeses, the taste of semen is complex and dynamic.

Semen is inexpensive to produce and is commonly available in many, if not most, homes and restaurants.

Despite all of these positive qualities, semen remains neglected as a food and it's an entire book that you can get where semen is sort of just added in the recipe as a little twist.

So there's a lot of normal recipes, just with, you know, like shepherd's pie with semen.

Oh, it's God.

Really?

I mean, because I was thinking it has proteins in it, doesn't it?

So you could whip it up like egg whites.

I was thinking for cocktails, for instance.

I don't know.

Like a very small meringue.

Very small meringue, though.

No, do you remember midget gems, Andy?

I do.

They were like little bits of biscuit with a tiny meringue on top.

I thought they had very complex flavours when I was growing up.

I had no idea.

I don't know what you're doing.

No, you had to grow up in the UK in the 1980s to get that.

Midget chems.

I swear to God, the Peter Cake demographic has just lost their minds for that bit.

That's good.

When you're sending semen from one place to another, you obviously need it to be in as good condition as possible.

And that's why you might need something called an extender.

And an extender is a nutrition-rich liquid which you can add to your semen from, let's say, a horse or from whatever, and it will make it last for longer.

So you can get human extender.

There's one company called Sperm Prep, which they make this thing out of egg yolks, and you can kind of mix it in, and it'll make the sperm last for longer.

One of them is called Excel, which obviously makes sure you get the right Excel if you're trying to get something on your computer.

Don't go for the wrong thing.

And also another one called BTS.

So if you're ever trying to buy a Korean pop group's records, make sure you get the right BTS.

And so what it just sort of keeps it in good nick and yeah, it's nutrition, right?

Like it's the one that James is talking about with the yolk is that's called a TYB, a test yoke buffer.

And and it's basically the same, it's the same principles of when a person is ovulating, they obviously have to feed, it helps the sperm to get fed as it's trying to fertilize and this is the exact same principle.

So it's like chicken egg yolk or a type of chicken egg yolk that is just feeding it as it's in the mail.

It's really clever.

It's really interesting the whole situation with sperm donors in the pandemic because the supply has not been as great as the demand.

The demand has been huge because a lot of people, as they've been sitting at home, think, actually, maybe I do want a kid and maybe they haven't been able to do it.

And so they need the donations, but they haven't been able to get enough into the actual sperm banks to distribute them.

So there's been this whole kind of black market that is a black market that exists on Facebook pages, for example.

And there are these, what are kind of known as these kind of like mega sperm donors, these specific men in the US who famously have fathered, you know, hundreds of kids.

They've been flying all over the country since the lockdown has stopped and been sort of like handing over their sperm basically.

Awesome.

These guys are kind of like they used to have, before there was artificial insemination, they had what's called the boar truck.

And it was just a boar with good genes that would travel from farm to farm and inseminate the sounds.

Wow.

Exactly that.

The bore truck.

And it's what the most interesting thing about it is you know who the donor is, which apparently has been a big thing for a long time.

You have a lot of people going, I wish I could know the name and the genetics of the family that I'll be inheriting through the father's sperm.

And this is the quick way of doing it.

You don't have to wait till a child is 18.

You suddenly can do it.

Yeah, remember there's this story about the guy, there was like a genius sperm bank.

Supposedly, all these well-bred Ivy League school types would come in and donate sperm.

And there was a waiting list.

And it turned out in the end, it's just the guy who started the company.

It's just all his sperm.

No way.

Just one guy.

A lot of it was one guy.

Yeah.

They charged a lot of money.

It was quite a scam, yeah.

Gosh, I think he found it hard to get Nobel Prize winners to donate, didn't he?

And also, a lot of them are in their 60s and 70s and 80s and perhaps aren't giving the full cup full at that age.

But also, you want their dads, don't you?

You want the dads of the Nobel Prize winners.

Oh, good point.

You want Mozart's dad?

You don't want Mozart.

A lot of this is the plot of a Roldal novel.

Roldal's rudest novel and Roldah's least family appropriate novel.

James and the Giant Sperm, was it?

Oh my gosh.

It was Charlie and the Sperm Factory.

No.

George's Marvelous Medicine.

No, it was, it's called My Uncle Oswald.

Oh.

And it is extremely rude.

It's hilarious and very, it's absolutely scandalous.

And it was before he started becoming cuddly Uncle Rold.

Here's something that I didn't know about sperm until I was researching this week.

And that is post-ejaculatory modifications to sperm, otherwise known as PEMS.

And this is, in lots of animals, we're kind of just starting to learn about it, so we don't know how common it is, but in lots of animals, a male sperm, once it gets into the female reproductive system, will change and will gain proteins and gain changes from the reproductive tract of the female.

So it will actually completely change.

So there are some animals where the sperm will be a certain size and then once it gets into the female, she will add some kind of proteins or whatever and it will grow in size.

Some of them it will turn inside out.

The scientists who were writing about this were saying basically the problem is that all of our biology over the last 500 years, people have basically only looked at male subjects all the way through.

And now that we're starting to look at more of the female reproductive system, we're starting to learn a whole load of stuff that we didn't know before.

That's crazy, though.

Isn't that amazing?

I've never heard of that.

That's insane.

That's like having a, it's like different outfit for when you're trying to get into a club versus an outfit that you're comfortable dancing in.

We should wrap up shortly.

Do you guys have anything else before we go?

William Shatner got all of the horse semen in his recent divorce.

That's just a fact.

Wow.

Yeah.

There's not much more to say about that.

Apart from he and his wife got divorced, they have horses.

And

she's allowed to visit the horses, but explicitly in the settlement, he gets all the sperm.

Okay, so he gets gets the horses as well.

It's not like he collects.

He doesn't just go once every few months and collect it.

Wow.

No.

That's a kind of weird future custody element almost.

I don't know if it's custody.

They didn't say anything about the consistency.

What is he doing with it, is the question?

Well, making more horses, I think.

More horses.

Okay, or he's got natural harvest by Paul.

Okay, 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 have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Schreiberland.

Andy.

At Andrew Hunter M.

James.

At James Harkin.

And Mary.

Mary underscore Roach.

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

You'll find all of our previous episodes up there.

You'll also find links to our tour, which we're about to start.

We're going to 26 different places in the UK and Ireland.

We're even playing crazy places like the London Palladium.

So do go and check it out.

But the most important thing of all is you need to get Mary's latest book in America.

If you're listening over there, it's called Fuzz.

If you're in the UK, it is called Animal, Vegetable, Criminal.

This is genuinely, and I don't care that she's here with us right now listening to this.

This is the best author out there.

She's the best we've got.

Such an honor to have her on our show do get this new book we're reading at the moment and it's just awesome all right we will be back again next week with another episode and we'll see you then goodbye

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