274: No Such Thing As A Polite Baby

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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 Brighton.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

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

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

And in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with you, Andy.

My fact is that babies who live in London are more rude than babies from the West Midlands.

So...

What do the London babies do?

They come at you with a knife.

They don't say thank you, and they don't say sorry.

And this is a study by Liverpool University that studied 2,500 babies.

Sorry, it must be babies of a certain age because I don't think any like one-month-old babies.

That's true.

It's all about the first words that they learn.

And it turns out the babies in London and Wales, weirdly, are least likely to include the word thank you among their first words.

And normally babies are quite polite, as in the word sorry crops up quite a lot.

Well, they're always fucking up.

So

I'm not surprised.

If I shat myself seven times a day, I'd apologise all the time as well.

Hang on.

They've not shat themselves.

They haven't gone, oh God, I am so sorry.

They've just gone to the toilet.

That's what shitting yourself is?

No, that sounds like...

If I went to the toilet seven times a day, I wouldn't complain about it.

No, when it's in your pants, it's shitting yourself.

My son doesn't say, and he's a Londoner, I I guess.

What does he say?

He says no, like a lot.

Wow.

Yeah, you'll be like, can I have a hug?

No.

It's really cutting.

Actually, no is one of the more common first words of babies.

And there are quite a few babies, a high percentage who have no as their first word, say nothing else for the first three months.

Pretty much.

They just say no, no, no, no, no, no.

Like Bohemian Rhapstein.

Or to unlimited.

They're just like, no, no, no.

Wow.

Yeah, he just says no.

He says, mummy, daddy, and guys, I've shat myself.

Do we know why this is the case?

Is there any...

And they're not rude in other ways.

They just don't like to say please and thank you.

Yeah, they're not.

I don't think they're noticeably impolite in other ways.

It's just, yeah.

I don't know what the reason behind it is, actually.

Presumably their parents aren't teaching it to them, or is it quite random what babies are saying?

First word is just a random word.

It's got to be a word you've heard before.

I mean that they, so I would have assumed the baby's first word is something the parents are attempting to teach them or is it just something that the baby picks up from what they hear about.

So it means that babies in London are not hearing those words as regularly.

I think that was a suggestion anyway.

Other common first words or early words at least include carrot, cake, doggy, quack, banana, and bird poo.

Wow, really?

Who's saying that a lot to their children there?

Is that London specific?

No, that was in this study, it was all regular things.

And another thing is that this is in all regions, actually.

One of the names that children are most likely to learn after mummy and daddy is Pepper.

Flat out, my son learned that before he said mummy and daddy.

I'm not lying.

Pepper is...

Loves Pepper.

He loves Pepper.

Yeah, Pepper is his hero.

Turmeric is the other one.

He says a lot of stuff.

That's a London baby, all right, isn't it?

They're surprisingly clever babies, aren't they?

They can count from extraordinarily young.

So they can count at five months old to an extent, which I find incredible.

Because if you look at a five-month-old, they can barely move their head.

And, you know, they're tiny.

But there was this study done which basically showed five months old this screen on a stage, the big screen on a stage, and then they took out a Mickey Mouse doll and they showed it to the kid, and then they put it behind the screen.

And they took out a a second Mickey Mouse doll, put that behind the screen, and then they lifted the screen up.

And if there were two Mickey Mouse dolls there, the kid was like, fine, looked away quite quickly.

If there were three Mickey Mouse dolls there, then the kid would stare at it for ages, which is the only way that we know if a baby is confused or surprised or anything, is they just stare for a long time.

Because it's so confused, because it knows it's counted two and you reveal three.

On the thing about them being surprised and looking at things, so this is why Peekaboo is such a great game for babies and for all of us actually.

No,

so basically they are surprised when things

they like sort of testing.

There's a theory of object permanence, which is that things are still there even when you can't see them.

So even if you're hiding, when you appear again, it's sort of surprise and confirmation at the same time that you're correct.

So babies laugh more in normal peekaboo than they do in trial versions of peekaboo, where the adult hides and then they reappear as a a different person.

That's not funny to a baby.

They like peekaboo because it's predictable.

Yeah.

Okay, because they know that it's wrong if they're a different person.

Exactly.

So they're like, sort of, yes, it was standard stuff.

I also did not know that.

So they'd love the Big Bang theory, for example, because it's very

basic, obvious stuff.

The TV show?

Or the actual theory.

Very obvious.

Yeah, exactly.

I did not.

Did you know that peekaboo is a style of boxing?

Is it?

It's a style of boxing where you put your hands in front of your face.

Okay.

And then do you whip your hands away and give the man a shot?

No.

No, you do it, and then you whip your hands out of the way, and it's Mike Tyson there instead.

It's not that you cover your eyes, because obviously that's a very bad boxing technique.

They're quite into punching, actually, babies, aren't they?

Or they can get quite aggressive.

So this was

another study that was done done about how our adult behavior can impact very young children's behavior.

And they did this experiment with really young kids, with young toddlers.

And what they did was they had some kids watch an adult beat up a punching bag clown, you know, like a big toy clown.

So I would have loved to have been the adult in this experiment.

So the adult got to beat the crap out of this clown.

And then some other babies.

I got allowed back in McDonald's.

So there was another clown which didn't get beaten up where the adults just treated it nicely.

And then there was another control group that did nothing.

And the kids who'd seen an adult beating up the clown, not only did they then, when they were unleashed on the clown, beat it to shreds, like really attacked it, but they improvised new weapons out of whatever they could see

to really try and make it.

So there was like a dark gun was left in the room, and there's some quite dramatic footage.

That's not improvising a weapon.

Picking up a dark gun.

Yeah, they didn't build the dart gun out of a mop and an orange.

Maybe they did.

There was a dark guy in the corner of the room.

You can watch this on YouTube.

There's like a two-year-old kid who goes up to the clown and holds a dart gun to its head and starts whispering scary stuff in its ear.

That's amazing.

The guy is a psycho.

And then lots of people said, but it's okay.

It's a punching bag clown.

It's what they're for.

And so they repeated the experiment, but using a real person dressed as a clown, and they also beat the crap out of him.

Really?

Yeah.

Oh my god, that's amazing.

Actually, on aggressiveness in children, I don't have kids, so I don't know if this is common, but I was surprised to read that they often bang their head against the bed or the crib or the wall.

And they'll do this at around six months of age, quite a lot of children will just start headbanging things.

And apparently, the reason they do it, it can last up to 15 minutes.

And the reason they do it is it gives them a surge of adrenaline.

Because like if you get hurt, for instance, you get some adrenaline and then that helps them to sleep afterwards because they get the surge of adrenaline and then it gives them a kind of a downer.

Apparently this is true.

It's so cool.

They're like that.

And from the reaction, I think it's not a common thing.

I've not seen my son do that.

But apparently late because it is quite relatively, or you know, it does happen, but whenever any parent sees it, they're like, holy fuck.

Right.

There's a thing that kids have.

I haven't got any research on this.

I just remember learning this at the time when I had my son.

That kids at the beginning, they have no separation between what's like every their vision is quite solid, so 3D objects are not so great but one of the things is perception of size is a thing that they don't fully get and then they hit a certain age where suddenly they realize that they're tiny and everyone else is massive and it freaks them out they're suddenly surrounded by giants and it's a really traumatizing moment for kids

yeah so you can really take advantage of that moment when you

Well, there is this weird thing that we think that they see everything upside down at first.

Really?

Yeah.

So you know there's this thing where you see things upside down because that's the way the light hits your retina, it hits it in the wrong, hits it upside down, and then your brain reverses the image and

you see a correct image.

But actually the light enters your eyes and shows you an upside down image.

So we think that before babies work out how to flip the images, because they're idiots,

they can't see the right way up for the first week of their life.

So everything is upside down for them.

That's crazy.

That's so weird.

That's weird.

And also they can do mirror writing, which I only learned this recently.

And to any parent, I think this is quite standard.

I learned it from a parent who who was like, oh, yeah, she's at the stage where she's doing mirror riding.

She was Australian.

But to her, everything did look upside down because she was Australian.

True.

But yeah, a lot of kids at toddler age, the natural way they write is proper mirror writing, like Leonardo da Vinci did, that we can't possibly do naturally as humans.

And then they just grow out of doing it.

Have you met kids that do this?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's incredible.

That's crazy.

We're going to have to move on shortly to our next fact.

I just, one small interesting thing, just on the idea of rudeness in babies.

In Thailand, because of superstitions, there's a common thing that's done, which is you never say that a newborn baby is beautiful, you always call it ugly.

So for the first, it's the idea that by calling them ugly, ghosts would be scared away and so on.

And yeah, so for the first few weeks of a baby's life, they're just being called butt ugly.

In the Philippines, is that?

No, that was in Thailand.

I don't know if it happened in Hong Kong because I used to get called.

Definitely happened in Bolton.

Yeah.

I was a genuinely ugly baby and one of my best friends, her mum, came to see me, first person to see me after I was born.

And she tells me this story now.

She said, I just couldn't bring myself to even find the words to say that you were in any way beautiful or

you were just so ugly.

And the first thing that was said about me was she looked at me and went, oh, how interesting.

And then you work for the company quite interesting.

That's how it all began.

Inner face.

Just another thing on rudeness and how rudeness can affect us.

So there's lots of studies that have done that have shown that it's extremely infectious in a way that we can totally understand.

Because what it does is if someone's rude to you, it takes a lot of mental energy to respond to that.

It's quite draining, working out your impulse control and not punching them in the face.

And then you become weaker.

Your impulses come weaker.

So therefore, you're then rude to the next person.

And it's to the extent that

it really damages our mental faculties in various other ways.

So it also makes us stupider.

So as soon as someone's rude to you, it makes you stupid.

to the extent that if you even read words that sound like they're rude, so there was a study where people were asked to read the words interrupt, obnoxious, and bother.

Don't know how rude that is.

But after that, they performed five times worse on a mental task.

So, if you were to read, for instance, the Daily Mail

or watch a Winnie the Pooh episode,

is that rude?

Oh, bother.

He always says

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Okay, we need to move on to our second fact of the show.

And that is my fact.

My fact this week is in 17th century Japan, the super rich would protect their homes from burglars by installing musical floorboards.

So, like the piano in Big.

Yeah, no, this is not quite that.

These were called nightingale floors.

And the idea was that they worked out that in Japan, if you had a palace and you were worried about, let's say, the head of the palace being murdered by ninjas or anyone good at creeping in, what you would do is you would have creaky floorboards, and the creaky floorboards would alert everyone to the fact that someone was there.

Now, some people just have creaky floorboards, but these were specifically designed and they were very expensive to install.

And what it was was underneath the floorboard there was a nail that went along a bracket, and it produced a frequency sound that sounded a lot like a nightingale singing a song, the bird, the nightingale bird.

You can see clips on YouTube.

As opposed to the Victorian

nurse.

They were all confused.

I'm glad we clarified.

Yeah, so it was really cool.

But my favorite thing about this whole fact is obviously there are people patrolling the grounds of the palace.

So what do they do?

Because they need to walk over these floorboards.

So what they ended up doing was agreeing on a system of rhythm that would effectively be playing a song as you walked.

And if they heard the rhythm, they'd be like, oh, it's Mike, you know, as opposed to.

Oh, wow.

That's clever.

That's very clever.

They have in Japan quite exciting sort of burglar defenders even today.

They have in shops, modern day shops in Japan, often have this bright orange sphere that's next to the till if you're buying something.

And what it actually is, is it's a paintball.

And they're trained, as shopkeepers in Japan, to throw this paintball at someone if they try to rob the shop.

And the idea is that it will leave this mark on them and then they'll be identifiable.

So just look for the guy covered in orange paint.

And they probably get trained in it.

They get told to throw it actually at the person's feet because then it will splash up onto them and they're more likely to get covered in paint.

And then if you if you missed the burr if you missed the robber, then you have to run out to their getaway car and throw the anti-crime ball at the guard at the car instead.

That is pretty cool.

And the police can find it, yeah.

I was looking at kind of weird home innovations that have been done because this is a cool floor.

Have you guys heard about the self-sluicing house?

The ho the what the self-sluicing

house.

Sleuthing.

Sluicing.

The self-sluuthing house would be a house that solved the crime after it had been burgled.

It would be a Sherlock home.

Well, yeah, this was...

No, sluicing.

I don't want my house sluiced.

Sluiced.

It's self-love.

Are you going to explain what a sluice is?

What a sluicing is it?

It sluices itself.

So it's this was

okay.

So

it washes, rinses, and dries itself.

Right?

Okay.

So

this was invented in 1980 by a woman from Oregon called Frances Gabe.

And it was basically the whole house was a massive dishwasher.

And so

there was only one of these ever built, amazingly.

And she lived in it.

It was the prototype.

And it had a she was a genuine inventor and a true eccentric, because there was a sprinkler in every room.

So she would go around with an umbrella and she pressed a button in each room and it just soaked the whole room with sudsy water.

And then she pressed another button and then a second spray would blast it with warm water.

So all the water runs off in the floor, you know, through drains.

And then jets of warm water dry the house.

Rom air.

Warm air.

Rom air.

So what did I say?

Warm air will dry the house not.

Warm air.

So jets of warm air.

Dry the house

and then it but the water that runs off through the drains goes through the dog house and the dog gets washed too

where do you put the tablet

but then well like even if like things like electronic tablets for instance anything electronic would just get that's true she her a lot of her life was spent devoted to buying new products

devoting ways to not wash the bed or the books as well.

So she had to invent waterproof jackets for books and she had to invent a waterproof cover for the bed.

And it was more bother than it was worth frankly but it did happen it's real that's really good um did you know on floors they used to cover floors with herbs this is just another thing about you know when you watch period dramas that they need to start getting right that the the first use for mint really in this country in medieval times was you sprinkled it on the floor because this is when people had sort of stopped washing a bit late medieval tudor times and everything stank and so what you had was you had lots of mint and herbs that you strewed over floors that's really like shake and vac

Are they those crisps where you shake the salt in?

No, admittedly, that is not a 2019 reference.

Shake and back.

Is this as old as these Renaissance boards?

It was what you used to do is when you hoovered.

This was in probably the 70s, so even before I was born, but you would put this weird, like almost like washing tablet smell stuff on your carpet and then you would hoover over it and it would make it smell

like the 70s.

Just like that.

Like the 70s.

The royal family had a herb herb strewer.

It was one of the royal court.

It was introduced by Charles II in 1660 and lasted for a couple of hundred years.

You had the groom of the stool, you had your lady in waiting, you had your herb strewer.

And they had to strew herbs all over the floor.

Nice.

That's amazing.

I have a thing on sort of alternative alarm systems to what would be seen as an average one to use.

This is a very weird one.

There was in Marbella, there was a lady who was in her house, and she got

robbers came in, tied her up and she was on the bed and they were stealing all the stuff.

And then what happened was, is, and this is the story that they tell, they suddenly started noticing that the woman on the bed was in a lot of family photos surrounding the bed and bits of the house with the actor Dolph Lundgren,

who is in Rocky 4.

He's the big Russian dude, quickly realizing that that was the husband of the woman that they had on the bed and thought, we got to get the hell out of here right now.

And they bolted for that reason.

That is a really good idea, isn't it?

If I live on my own, then I get a load of photos with me and Mike Tyson

and just pretend that we're a couple.

And then

could happen.

And then when the burglars come, then they'll run away.

Yeah.

But when he gets wind of that, I think you are in serious trouble.

And we're going to have to move on to our next fact very shortly.

I've got one thing about burglars.

I like stories of burglars being caught.

So there was in 2015, a burglar was taunting police because they they'd launched an appeal to try and trace him on Facebook and he was so cocky that he wrote on Facebook in answer to the police comment ha ha catch me if you can you won't see me slipping and then a news agency later spoke to him and he said I've been walking around near home so they're not trying too hard and he was arrested later that day.

That's just on the Facebook thing, a very similar thing.

There was a guy who had his house burgled.

He got back and it was nothing he can do.

So he went on his computer and it turned out that while the burglar was there he had logged into his own Facebook account and failed to log back out so oh wow

between 2013 and 2016 the police in East Kilbride Devon Warwickshire Camden and Bristol all issued warnings about secret signs that burglars were using and so what they would do is they would put little signs on the floor next to some houses and it might be telling people that this has already been burgled or that a medium-sized dog lived here is married to Dolph Lundgren.

One of them meant supposedly occupants are nervous and afraid.

Okay,

but then in 2016, West Mercier Police pointed out that all these secret signs, so-called, were actually made by utility companies.

And the sign that they said meant nothing worth stealing actually meant new lampposts to go here.

Okay, we need to move on to fact number three, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that according to its ingredients list, pepperami contains 108%

pork.

That actually means pepperami is less good at math than a five-month-old child.

How is it possible?

I saw this in an old copy of New Scientist, and apparently, actually, it is true.

So, this is more of a recipe than an ingredients list.

And basically, if you're making salami or some kind of cured meat like that, then a lot of it is through desiccation, is how it cures.

So you would have a load of pork and then you would dry it out so it would lose a load of the water.

So it is possible to use 108 kilograms of pork to make 100 kilograms of pepperami.

So it is true.

A sausage can lose up to 50% of its weight during the curing process.

Pepperami are very crafty with their advertising campaigns.

So in 2017, they launched a mass porking campaign.

It's weird because to me that sounds like an enormous PR error.

It was a different time, wasn't it?

Well, they were trying to supposedly doing it to highlight the growing pothole problem in London.

And they cordoned off 100 potholes and filled them with pepperamis.

Great.

It is as tough as tarmac, isn't it?

I mean,

weird.

They've got a strong history in advertising.

So I hadn't realised that the pepperami man, like the living creature that is the pepperami guy, was voiced by Adrian Edmondson.

He was this, you know, big epitome of manhood, wasn't he?

And they've had to review him now.

So he used to be this really masculine macho bloke.

Oh, not the pepper army guy as well.

I'm so sorry.

He's not been you-treat, has he?

No, God, I don't want to spread that rumour about the pepper army guy.

No.

No, it's pepper army, too, actually.

He has been modernised because of us his.

He's doing a tuxedo.

He's just a sophisticated pork man.

They're just making him have less innuendo and macho behavior to cater to a younger generation less tolerant of 90s culture.

Dried meat.

So dried meat is pretty much one of the oldest meals we know about existing.

So Ertzi the Iceman, a long-standing friend of the podcast,

and

dead mummy found in the Alps, one of his last meals was goat jerky.

And so it's amazing how they found it out.

So they, you know, they found him frozen up in the Alps, you know, very well preserved, not perfectly preserved, he's a mummy.

But

they thought, well, we can find out what he was eating.

And his stomach wasn't where it should have been.

So his stomach was pushed way up under his ribs because it had moved a bit in the 5,000 years since he died.

So they had to defrost him for a bit, because he's normally kept on ice to keep him that way.

And then they had to use an endoscope to pull out these blobs from his stomach and intestines.

and they had to analyze that and found out that it was dried strips of goat meat and that was one of his last meals.

Wow.

That's amazing.

And it's so well preserved.

You could probably re-eat that, couldn't you?

It's

jerky.

Jerky lasts forever.

Yeah.

It's amazing.

On no, okay, it's just me.

It's amazing your funding bids keep being turned down, isn't it, Anna?

Reason for wanting to study Iceman.

Jerky sounds nice.

Just on, this is kind of salami, pepperami is like salami.

And did you know that salami brought down the people responsible for the biggest diamond heist of all time?

They were foiled by a piece of salami.

This is in 2003.

And basically, it was this group of robbers who broke into the vaults two floors beneath the Antwerp Diamond Center.

And they stole $100 million worth of diamonds and jewelry and all of that.

It's the biggest heist ever.

And they didn't know how to get them, whatever.

But in the area, there happened to be a guy living there who always had people dumping rubbish on his land and he used to get really angry about it and constantly calling the police and whinging about it so he called the police the next day after this big diamond heist and said oh I'm really annoyed I've got rubbish on my land again there's all this that well there's some salami for a start someone's chucked salami on my land and there's also some diamond center envelopes which could someone take away and the police went some what uh okay and it turned out the heist guys had gone they'd robbed all this stuff and then they'd eaten some salami sandwiches earlier that they hadn't finished and then they just tossed them in the ground and they found these sandwiches and they did the DNA tests and they traced it back to the guy who'd eaten them.

Whoa.

And then they so they found the guy who'd eaten the salami.

They arrested the pig.

So unfair.

What would have been missing from his side?

Not only that, they found the main guy who'd done it, who was this guy called Notar Bartolo.

But then they went to his house and they found the salami receipt from the butcher's where he'd got it.

So then they went to the butcher's and they could tell by the receipt what time it had been bought.

They checked the CCTV and they also then found the guy who'd bought it.

So there you go.

Two birds, one salami.

That's so cool.

Amazing.

Just on pigs, you know that some people have the ability to,

if you give them a plate of pork and they start eating it, to tell you the gender of the animal.

Oh, come on.

It's a genuine thing.

It's all to do with a receptor which is called androstostone.

And that's not how you say it.

So now that we've got that out of the way, let's do the right version.

Androstenone, it's a steroid similar to testosterone, and it's found in male pigs.

And there are certain people who are able to detect that way more than other people.

Now, most meats, weirdly, if a pig is castrated, then that thing, that andestotron budon, gets...

gets knocked down and so you can't usually tell.

However, the European Union are going to say that castration is inhumane.

So a lot more people who have this will be able as they eat to go, I'm eating a man.

Is it a nice taste?

No, it's a horrible taste.

So these people are just not going to be able to eat meat anymore.

Exactly.

They're tasting.

Well, no, they'll have to ask for specifically female pigs to eat.

You can't do that in a restaurant.

Yeah.

You can't like say, take these sausages back and bring me a male one.

No, but it's true.

It's a genuine thing.

It's amazing.

Yeah, it and it tastes horrible.

So that's why they do get rid of it as well.

That's amazing.

Do you know what the longest salami ever was?

Well, it was a salami, but do you know how long it was?

Have a bash.

5,000 meters.

5,000?

50 meters?

5,000 meters?

There isn't room for that anywhere.

No one's got five kilometers of space to put a salami in.

Yeah, but for a picnic, you could have it for a picnic, couldn't you?

Well, if you wind it round.

Well, if you had a very, very long picnic in a very

vacant space, isn't it?

If you're having it on a runway at an airport,

you could take the salami there.

Exactly.

Well, I mean,

it's still long.

It's not that long, but it's 1,152 meters and 16 centimeters.

That's a long bit of meat, isn't it?

That's an extremely long salamier because Dan guessed 5,000 meters.

We're all thinking, oh, it's not 10 miles, is it?

It was made by a Belgian company called Cox Fresh.

That was founded by a Belgian man in 1935 called Charles de Coque.

And in 2016, they renamed Cox Fresh Charles,

which I think is sensible.

Very wise.

Do we know what happened to the salami that they made?

No, I don't.

I imagine they sliced it up and then ate it.

Story checks out.

You said that like the end of the bedtime story.

And they all ate it up.

Okay, son, good night.

What do you mean, no?

Stop banging your head on that thing.

Here, have a nice clown to kill.

There was a, this is just another one that you'll like, James, because it's very immature facts.

In Taipei, there was, Taipei was named the World Design Capital in 2016.

And to celebrate, they had literally a massive sausage party.

It was at the Taiwan Design Center, and they made it all completely sausage-themed.

So it featured a smoky-scented sausage mist that descends upon visitors as they enter.

That sounds quite nice, doesn't it, really?

I'm so glad we've picked Brighton, home of vegetarianism, to bring these facts.

They had a sausage festooned chandelier, very classy, and then some sausage carnival games.

And the whole sausage fest was put together by a designer called Alice Wang.

We're going to have to move on.

Shall we go for it?

Yeah.

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

My fact this week is that baby songbirds have inbuilt nappies.

This is great.

They don't need pampas.

They've already got them within themselves, literally.

They're called fecal sacs and they are for particularly common.

It's not quite as good branding as pampas, is it?

They need to work on their PR strategies.

It's most common in passerine birds, which are basically songbirds, so birds like robins and bluebirds.

And

it's only for nestling, so it's only when they're babies and they're in the nest, and you can't leave your poo just all over the nest because that's very unhygienic.

And so, what the little nestlings do when they need to go to the loo is they turn their rear end towards their parent, they point their arse at their parent, and they eject this white bag of poo that's encased in a mucous membrane, and they eject it at the parent, which flies away and disposes of it.

It's incredible, yeah.

It's really cool, they sometimes eat it, they sometimes eat it as well, yeah.

For a really cool reason, right?

Well, no, because sometimes the baby has not digested everything inside it, so what you are effectively getting is like a packaged dim sum of just

it's just like a capsule and you take it in and so the birds get a lot of nutrients from it because yeah, it's not being fully digested.

Yeah.

And also the other advantage is if you swallow it, or indeed if you take it away, it means that no predators will find it because it smells and it would it would attract predators otherwise.

Yeah.

Allegedly it comes with a handle.

No, it doesn't.

It does.

It comes with a little handle.

That's amazing.

Like a briefcase.

Yeah.

Or a plastic bag or

anything with a handle really is what it is.

And can they slap their beak through the handle?

It doesn't feel like it's going to be that big.

I think they grab the handle with the beak and then they take it away.

Although they have to do a lot of it because every baby bird produces one fecal sac every hour throughout the day.

So a lot of the parents' job is just distributing this stuff all around away from the nest to, you know, trick predators or to avoid predators.

That's the other reason for eating it, is so that they don't have to leave.

Because they're lazy.

No, no, no.

As in, as in you're immediately disposing of the evidence that would draw predators.

So quickly eat the poo of your child, and then that's

no, there's no kids here.

You know, you can't.

You know what?

Even when surrounded by muggers, I would not.

Most muggers don't track their victims by sniffing out their baby's feces.

We've never heard of police give an answer going, well, fortunately, the potential victim ate his own shit.

Bluebirds have been seen festooning fence posts and utility poles with these fecal sacs.

Wow.

Like a dog walker might do with a dog poof bag.

Oh, cool.

No one's sure quite why they do that, though.

We don't know.

It could be to say that this is my territory, for instance.

Or it could be like they're claiming they were going to walk back that way and put it in a bin.

And then they forgot.

I think blackbirds do this as well.

And I've found that there's a blackbird in in Tibet.

It's the Tibetan blackbird,

and that's as

a species.

It's a species called the Tibetan blackbird, but its Latin name is Turdus maximus.

Well, they're Turdus Turdus crows, aren't they?

I think I'm the thrushes is Turdus Turdus.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Very turdy.

The great hornbill is another bird that does exciting stuff with Pooh.

So this is, they look very cool.

They've got big bills.

they hang around in like India, Southeast Asia, that part of the world.

And they do a cool thing when they're rearing their chicks, which is that they build themselves a little prison.

The mother basically goes into this big hollow in a large, in a big fat tree trunk, so it builds a big hollow, and then she seals up the whole opening with her own feces.

So she makes plaster out of her feces.

She closes them all in, so they're completely trapped, and she creates this tiny little slit in the feces.

And that is where her mate, the father, will come and deliver food to all of them.

So they have to sit sit inside this prison for ages.

The mate delivers food through this little letterbox.

And it's also where she has to void the feces of her chick.

So every time one of the chicks poos, then they have to squash it out this letterbox.

And then yours are receiving food through the same entrance, which isn't very hygienic at all.

People have been doing that in my letterbox as well.

I'm not sure.

Yeah, sadly, I don't know if they migrate all the way to North London, so it could be another explanation.

I was looking at a bird that benefits from other animals poo.

So there's a vulture in Egypt called the Egyptian vulture.

That's amazing.

Where do they get these names?

And so what it does is it goes to cow dung and it finds the yellow bits of cow dung and it starts eating it and sort of scrubbing its face inside.

And the reason for that is it's helping its beak to go to the brightest yellow that it can go.

So it's effectively a sort of makeup that it puts onto itself, but sort of actually enhances the yellowness anyway of their beak, like an exfoliating kind of thing.

And is that to attract mates?

Didn't read that far in the article, but I imagine.

Yeah, it is.

Yeah, we both did read the article now.

Great.

So it's the carotenoids

inside the poo which makes them go more orange.

Yeah.

And it is to attract mates.

Sexy.

Everyone loves a sexy orange beak.

Did you know that you drink some dinosaur urine every day?

Yeah, it goes with my 70,000-year-old beef jerky.

This is, I think, being calculated that dinosaurs were around for 186 million years.

Basically, they had time to drink so much that

almost every single molecule of water on the planet has at some point been through a dinosaur's kidney.

So cool.

So that's a cool thing you can think next time you're having a glass of water.

We should talk, I think, because we're talking about bird put.

It feels like we should talk about guano.

Okay.

Yeah, we agreed, to quit.

Uh, guano is basically has held up the Peruvian economy for about 200 years.

When you say held up, you mean it supported it rather than delayed it?

It's supported it, yes.

So, this is bird poo, and it is specifically, and bird poo is an extremely useful fertilizer.

You probably know you spread it on your fields.

Um, so it's uh exported worldwide, and a huge percentage comes from Peru, and that is because it has booby pelicans and guane cormorants who produce the best guano, and it's because they have 80% of the world's entropy, and this feeds them up.

And basically, there are a few little islands that are just covered in it that get harvested for their poo the whole time.

So, there's this one tiny island, Guanape Sur, where there are only two guards allowed to live on it.

One of them has been living on it for 13 years.

He's the only person allowed, and he's there to fight off anyone who wants to steal the bird poo.

And then, I think it's the case that it's only like every 10 years that suddenly hundreds of harvesters are allowed to come and scrape it off the rocks and sell it.

Then they have to go away and wait for it to re-there are birds living there as well, as in they're constantly deposited.

Constantly leaving it there, yeah.

Yeah, they're not shipping it in.

These islands are incredible.

Some of them are covered 200 feet deep in poo.

Whoa!

And the guy is actually living on the island as well.

Yeah, lives there the whole time.

He does say he misses his family.

So America passed a law in the, I think, the late 19th century, which legally allowed it to seize any island which had guano on it.

Because it was so important for it.

And when you say legally it was according to American rules.

Was it?

It was, yeah.

But in 15 years Britain imported 2 million tons of guano with just whole thousands of ships just full of guano bringing, you know, and fertilizer yields rocketed.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It was most of their income, Peru's income, for about 40 years, was that?

And

there's a guy we mentioned sometimes called William Buckland, who's a naturalist, and he was around at the beginning of the 19th century, and he once pranked his Oxford college using guano.

So it was in about 1804 he got hold of some of this, which is pretty new then, and he spread it on the grass in the main

lawn of his college by night.

He spelled out five letters, and that grass grew incredibly powerfully.

Go on.

Which letters do you think he spelled out?

Was it just guano?

Guano.

Guano, yes.

Yes, it was.

It's not the best reveal I've ever heard.

I'm kicking myself for building that up to be a big,

you know.

Yeah, but then it grew incredibly strongly up, Senguano, and it's sort of supergrass, as it were.

Really?

Very cool.

And that's where the band got the name, isn't it?

You know that there's a theory that

in Antarctica that in order for penguins when they're about to go into breeding season, the way they need ice to be melted in order for them to have a nice patch, they all get together and they poo the ice away.

Yeah.

So they all stand and huddle and they all go for it and then the heat, the heat of the poo melts the ice and then, yeah, that's a thing.

Did you say this is a theory or

no?

No, no, they definitely do it.

The thing is that we don't think they do it intentionally.

Exactly.

So it's a theory that they're doing it intentionally.

That is like the scene in Alien Resurrection where, and I'm sorry to go all film nerdy here, but the aliens all kill one of the other aliens because they've all got acid for blood.

So to make their escape from the lab they're in, they deliberately kill one and then it burns through the floor of the room that they're in.

And that's what the penguins are doing.

I don't get it like that.

It's kind of what they're doing.

It's almost exactly the same as what the penguins are.

They're using their bodily fluids to get through a floor surface.

That film's not going to do nearly as well if they're just shitting on the floor.

Aliens squatting over a demonic film.

I found another,

there's a beetle which is called the three-lined potato beetle.

And in order to protect it from.

It's from

it's from a.

you don't know, do you?

So it's a beetle,

and no one knows where it's from, but it's

and so what it does is it has a big problem with predators, obviously, like all beetles.

It's constantly predatored on, and it has

professor, slow down,

But no, please don't slow down.

You know that theory we mentioned earlier, that the more people are rude to you, the stupider you get.

You're saying we've been shooting ourselves in the foot, really, haven't we, over the years?

Five years in, there's almost nothing left.

You brought this on yourselves.

Yeah, so basically, in order to protect itself, it eats toxins, and then the toxins are pooed out, and then it grabs the poo and it smothers its back in the poo.

So it means that no animal would ever eat it because they would die from the poison of it.

But then, weirdly, there's a symbiotic relationship with an ant that eats that, but then protects the beetle as a trade-off.

Wow, so no one's going to eat it, but it's never going to get a shag, is it?

Really?

That's because there's not a way to attract people.

It's smearing poo on yourself.

It's not a controversial statement.

We need to wrap up, guys.

Very good.

Just because this is a bit about nappies, bird nappies, just a thing I learned about human nappies.

So people toilet train their kids differently all around the world.

And I was reading about a few of the different countries, the ways they do it.

So in 2012, a study looked at Vietnam and found that all the mothers they looked at there trained their kids to wee on command when they whistled.

They made it so that they looked for themselves.

That must have been very awkward at a football match.

It was very clever.

So the mothers basically, when they saw their baby look like it was going to wee or poo, then they'd take it to the toilet, hold it over the toilet or the the potty and they'd whistle while they pooed and it's a bit of a Pavlovian thing where the babies were eventually trained to wee only or poo only when their mothers whistled and so they could just schedule their poos in it's terrifying power that your mother will hold over you though in later life

if you

bring if you bring someone home that your mum doesn't like she can just embarrass you royally in front of them.

Mind you, as a woman in the hashtag MeToo, it, what a great way to deter wolf whistlers.

They're not going to do that for long.

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, I can be found on my Twitter account, which is at Triberland.

Andy is on

and James.

At James Harkin.

And Shaczinski.

You can email podcast at qi.com.

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

We have everything up there from our previous episodes to upcoming tour days.

That is it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much.

We'll see you again, Bryden.

Good night.