263: No Such Thing As Millipede Lipbalm

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episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast.

This week coming to you live from Cambridge.

My name is Dan Shriver and 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 my fact.

My fact this week is that adult scooters were invented by a Swiss banker who was hungry for a sausage.

That's true.

This was in the 1990s.

There was a man who was a Dutch Swiss banker and he was called Wim Ober

and he was at home one night and he suddenly really wanted a sausage

and he thought I could you know, it's it's a it's what he called a micro distance.

It wasn't far enough to get in a car and drive there and find car parking.

What a sausage shop?

Yeah, he had a favorite sausage shop and it wasn't it wasn't close enough that he could walk to it and he thought why is there not a device that I could use to get me there and then he suddenly had the idea of turning what was only available really for kids kid scooters.

Why not make an adult version of that?

So he invented that as a result.

But by the time he's invented it, he's not going to want a sausage anymore,

that's the sad bit of this story.

Yeah

He's starved to death in the manufacturing process

No, he so when he eventually had a prototype he took it down to his town and everyone laughed at him because the idea of an adult on a scooter was seen as really ridiculous ten years later and with the support of his wife he had the prototype made into a real thing it started going to market it went to big sales and then in America it got sold with the name razor razor scooters which I grew up riding and that was him.

It was down to the man wanting a sausage.

And he said he gave them sex appeal, which is something I haven't seen evidence of yet on adults, on scooters.

But he said he described it, he was like, the tiny wheels, the polished aluminium, and the foam handlebars, the combination of those three things give them more sex appeal than your average kids think.

I don't know if foam handlebars are sexy, but

maybe that's just me.

I've got weird taste.

There was a kind of really, really, really proto-scooter which was invented in the early 19th century.

So it was called the dandy horse.

It was technically called a pedestrian curricle.

So it was invented in 1818, was when it was first patented.

And it had other names.

It was called a Swift Walker or a Pedestrian's Accelerator.

That was the name it was given.

I can't believe this.

This is three years after the Battle of Waterloo was over, but it was for fashionable dandies in town.

And what it was was: imagine a bicycle and just take away the pedals.

Okay, so you sit astride it on the saddle, and then you just have to push yourself along the ground on either side.

This was the ultra-fashionable device in London to have.

You know, there were only about 300 of them made.

But it's the bizarre thing about the dandy horse is: A, it appeared, as you say, in

1817 it was invented, it was probably 1818, and it's suddenly come back, right?

So that's what you see kids going around on them today.

They're called balance bikes or whatever, and it helps them cycle.

And also, it was fashionable for a year.

So, invented 1817, really fashionable in London 1818, disappeared by 1819.

And you can find articles by the 1830s, you've got articles going, God, you remember the dandy horse?

That was weird, wasn't it?

But that's actually true of the adult scooters as well.

Yeah.

They are coming back in America especially, but in 1999, they had $4 million worth of sales, 4.5.

In 2000, it was 70 million.

And in 2001, it had gone back down to 6 million.

Wow.

So it's just that one year where they became absolutely massive.

Yeah.

And then quite a few people got injured, I think.

Well, what happened was

the problem he had was he made this new innovation.

It could fold, it could go in your bag, everyone got excited.

Immediately, every country that had copies, you know, pirated copies made, got in on the action.

So the market was flooded with all this stuff.

And as you say, handles weren't made properly, so people were chopping their well, not chopping their fingers off, but damaging their own.

One person lost a bit of a finger due to a cheap imitation.

Yeah, exactly.

They made the handles out of knives or something.

That's sexy.

They're made now.

There is this, the town that it's produced in, it's just outside of Zurich, and it's called Kusnacht.

And it's where they manufacture or where the headquarters for this Razor company is, without the name Razor, his original company.

And it's a really cool town.

It sounds like there's a lot of amazing stuff that's happening going on there.

So notable people outside of this razor that is there from that town include Julius Maggie, who invented the pre-cooked soup, Maggie Noodles, from this tiny, tiny town.

Carl Jung was from there.

You should have led with Carl Jung.

Well, how about this?

Tina Turner lives there since 1994.

Yeah, Carl Jung, Tina Turner, and the Maggie Noodle guy.

Yeah, very exciting.

You put those in the wrong order.

They were clarified.

But it is bizarre that scooters, even though we're claiming that this guy invented them, they are not a new invention.

And I really had no idea that these motorized scooters that you see today were were first properly invented in 1915.

And there are loads of pictures in the early 20th century of people going around on them.

And again, it was short-lived.

It's between about 1915 and 1922.

They were partly a response to wartime gas rationing, so they didn't use up very much petrol.

And it was in America, and they would come with head and tail lights and a toolbox.

Policemen used them, post was delivered on them, postmen used them for a while.

Are these things like Vespers, or are they things like

you're standing on them?

You're standing fuel-powered.

you're standing like a child but with a small motor yeah

and they had even i did read a source that said they were used by a new york gang called the bog trotters the long island bog trotters

who did exist and this is written in a lot of books i've struggled to find the primary newspaper reports that talk about the bog trotters disappearing down alleyways on push scooters but yeah apparently they were really useful for getting away from police they just do a motorized scooter down an alleyway yeah that is possible i guess if you commit a crime at the top of a hill you're laughing

I found something about sort of development of new kinds of transport.

Similar wartime transport innovation.

So, motorized roller skates,

so separate roller skates with motors inside them, were invented in the Second World War.

For people in the war?

Well, the inventors suggested that.

That would have been, I mean, the war.

I'm not going to say the war is fun, because war isn't fun.

No.

But if we all had motorized roller skates.

It would have taken the edge off.

It would have taken the edge off.

Well, the guy who invented them was called Tom Hancock.

He took the mower out of a lawnmower and

he basically

put these engines on these roller skates.

And there's footage, pathé news footage, of him scootering around.

And he's even got a little trailer on the back, which his daughter sits on, and she's just sitting there going along the road.

And he suggested that soldiers could use them to save on marching.

And he was not taken up on his offer, basically.

But they're coming back.

Segway last year invented motorized roller skates.

Really?

But they were not greeted with great favor.

Headlines included, Segway is back and it's coming for your last shred of dignity.

Segway's E-Skates are a whole new way to look cool while falling over.

And Wired magazine named them the object in the office most likely to kill you.

Wow.

Yeah, but these electric scooters, they are quite popular now in America, in a lot of cities.

They have like a kind of Uber thing or a Boris bike kind of thing where

you can take them for a small amount of money and take them around can't you?

Lime and Bird are the two main companies.

The problem is they're new and so for instance the scooters that Bird has got they're rebranded Zaomi devices which have a weight limit of 200 pounds when the average American man weighs 197.9 pounds

and a couple of weeks ago Lime did an official statement saying there was a bug that caused sudden excessive braking

and they said it's all right it only happens when being ridden downhill at top speed

Excessive braking is not what you want, is it?

No, basically, you'd go downhill and you'd hit something small on the road, and whatever's in the scooter makes it think that it's a massive obstacle and just immediately stops.

Oh, God.

They did say, I should say for the legal reasons, that fewer than 0.0045% of all rides worldwide have been affected.

That's us covered.

The Segway has a checkered history, doesn't it?

And the guy who invented the Segway, Dean Kamen, in fact, thought it was going to take over the world.

And he called it Ginger after Ginger Rogers, because I guess they're so elegant.

But he also invented a bunch of other things.

So he invented a robotic wheelchair, which goes upstairs, which is quite cool.

So the wheels climb over each other so you can get up the stairs.

He also invented a person cannon.

This is

technically called a controllable launcher.

And it's a cannon that fires its payload, as in the person that you put in it, onto the top of buildings.

So if you're...

I mean, that does sound really cool, doesn't it?

But hang on.

Do you set the height of the building that you want to get onto the top of?

Of course you do.

They're not all set up to be the size of the shard.

And then you've just got a one-story house.

You wouldn't want to be going to the top of the shard, though, because even if you get right to the top, you're instantly impaled in the shard.

This is the worst building to land on in the world.

What if you work on the 15th floor and the building's 30th floor as far you're still as far away could you open a window and just get propelled through that?

Wait, what do you mean open a window?

They don't want to go inside the building.

It's not just a quick way of getting to work.

What are you saying?

You were saying it fires you onto the top of a building.

Yes,

sorry, if you're a fireman or something and the building's on fire floor,

if there's a terrorist up there, it's not just, oh, I'm too lazy to use the lift.

I don't want to be without scumming.

Just get my purse and cannot.

If there's a terrorist up there.

That would have been a great scene to die hard when Bruce Willis gets logged to the top of the...

He said it was its potential uses for anti-terrorism.

I don't remember when terrorists have hidden on the top of buildings and we haven't been able to get to them.

But this is what we need when they do.

And apparently it would land you gently at a safe impact distance from the internet.

They thought the segue would be bigger than the internet though.

They said this is going to be the biggest thing since the internet.

They said this is going to render cars obsolete.

And then the problem with it is that they did it in massive secrecy.

So they were really paranoid when they were making it that Japan was working on something similar.

So So, everyone who was making it had to have all their blinds like nailed down, properly taped shut, so no one could see anything.

But they couldn't test it because they were so paranoid about other people seeing it.

So, they were astonished when it was let outside and only weirdos and nerds used them.

I've got four.

Well, exactly.

I'm gonna have to move us on in a second to our next facts.

I've got one tiny fact.

This is just about sort of little motorized forms of transport.

Since Donald Trump became the president, the Secret Service has spent $300,000 renting golf carts from him so they can protect him while he plays golf.

Wow.

Yeah.

Just in case anyone was on the fence about him at this point.

Okay, it's time for fact number two, and that is Anna.

My fact this week is that goats have been engineered to produce spider silk because when farmers tried to get the spiders to do it themselves, they just kept eating each other.

And this is an amazing thing that goats were engineered to do in the early 2000s.

They have been genetically spliced with the protein from spiders that makes their silk.

And apparently, farmers have been trying to farm spider silk for over 100 years, but it's a complete nightmare because they're territorial cannibalistic predators that will eat anything in their way, especially for the spider.

So yeah, it didn't work.

And then they finally found out that you can put these genes in goats, which don't tend to eat each other, unless you've got a very unhappy farm.

And they're what's called transgenic.

So a transgenic goat is transgenic is when you have the DNA of something totally different put into you and it comes out in their milk.

They're not just weaving these webs.

You can't go see them.

So they don't get glands, silk glands inserted.

You don't come in the morning and you're in the farm and your goat's in the middle of a tree.

Imagine if you got bit by a radioactive goat of this kind.

Waiting to explain your superpower would be so long.

And the reason I've climbed up this apparently sheer wall of a dam.

It's a niche goat reference, whatever there was one.

So the spiders, the early versions where they did this, they put a spider in a tiny little, almost like the stocks, you know, if you throw like

it has eight holes.

It was just for the abdomen, and you'd put the spider in there, and then you'd put a thing in, and it would pull all the spider silk out.

But the thing is, they kept kept all the spiders together, and eventually the spiders spun the webs over the walls so it was completely covered, which meant that no other insects or mosquitoes could get in.

And so they ended up not having anything to eat, which is why they all ate each other.

And then eventually there was only a few left alive, but they were all absolutely massive because they'd eaten all their mates.

And that's why it never kind of eats.

Just a thing on spider silk that I didn't know is how useful it has been already in the past.

So, for instance, it's been totally vital to astronomy.

I don't know this.

So, for 250 years, it was used in telescopes and it's used in the eyepieces of telescopes and it acts as a kind of crosshairs, basically.

So, if you're looking through a normal telescope, you see shadows of stars.

You need some kind of reference.

It's amazing you never got that job at the sky of night.

Do you think that's a common complaint that they go, oh man,

it's too many?

It was, it's not that it's too many, it's that you can't pinpoint where they are.

And so, what you do is you need crosshairs to act as a reference point.

And the perfect crosshairs are spider silk.

And so, they've been used in telescopes for hundreds of years.

They used to have a spider silk collector at the Greenwich at Greenwich, at the Observatory, until the 1950s.

And I was actually reading the astronomical guidelines from the 1890s about how to collect spider silk.

And it says, you have to stand on a stool and you hang a spider from a piece of wood.

And then, as it drops, you wind its thread with a a fork.

So, you just collect its thread with a fork.

So, this poor spider thinks it's dropping and dropping, and it's just saying in the same place.

And then it sometimes says, If arachne is inclined, however, to be obstinate, gently blow on her with a full, steady breath,

and she will weave.

But this is how they've been pinpointing where stars are.

That's incredible.

It's amazing.

I can't believe that you can collect it and store it like that.

Oh, yeah.

Well, another thing was in war, it's very useful.

So, in the Second World War, it was used in gun sights for the same reason.

You put it on the lens of gun sites and it was exactly that reason to help you focus.

And there was a team of spider ticklers who were in the nice.

Yep, the US employed, the main one was called Nan Songer and a bunch of other women who tickled spiders.

She tickled so many webs out of spiders that the US had to appeal to Mexico for extra spider imports because she'd exhausted all the web available in America.

I mean, how many spiders are there in America?

She kind of tickled every single one.

She was pacing through those spiders.

You, you're on roller skates.

You, you're tickling spiders.

Are we going on to win this war?

I think there's been debate,

not serious debate, but debate nonetheless, about what kind of spider bit Spider-Man.

The theory is that it's...

Finally, we've got to the big issue of the night.

Spider-Man must be one or another kind of spider, because it wasn't just any old spider that bit him, was it?

So tarantulas probably produce silk from their feet but that's oh yeah because he doesn't when he fires the silk it's out of his hands he doesn't pull it out of his bum does he he would if yes if he had been bitten by a radioactive house spider he would have to laboriously

like his costume would look very different for example

and they really wanted to make the film a pg so they were like

find me another species mate

um yeah I mean, it's worth saying that Spider-Man has gadgets that shoot out the web.

It's not actual web shooting out of his arms.

Really?

Well, in the movies, at least.

I don't know if you can see it.

Well, he can stick to walls, can he?

Or does he have like sticks?

He can stick to walls.

He can stick to walls.

I did not know that.

The thing is, the four people who know least about Spider-Man in this room are sat on the stage.

Everyone else is going, oh, for fuck's sake, guys.

If you don't have any fishing bait when you're going fishing, an alternative to use, particularly if you're in the Solomon Islands, is spider silk.

They have a fish there, which is called the needlefish, and its mouth is too small to eat any of the classic luring bait that you use.

So, what they do there is they use like a kite string.

So, they throw that out into the water, and they attach to it blobs of rolled-up silk from a spider's web, and they will just bounce it on the water.

And what happens is that these fish come up and they leap into it, and they get stuck to it, and then they pull them back, and that's how they catch them.

So,

that's their bait.

Hang on, couldn't they then just swim off, but with a mouth that's stuck together?

No, because the guy's got the kite string.

He's pulling them back in.

You got the kite string.

Sorry, got it.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, no.

You haven't just thrown a bit of.

Sorry.

You've never been great at fishing, have you, Andy?

You just throw the rod in there with everything.

Just sit by the side of the lake for two hours.

He'll be back.

That's shown that fish.

I bet that's really uncomfortable in its mouth right now.

That's fishing.

Okay, we're going to have have to move on to fact number three, and that is Andy.

My fact is that when King George VI visited Washington, an American chemist provided the royals with special London water so they could have exactly the same tea as they had in Britain.

And this was the first time the king had,

any king had visited a sitting US president because of all the unpleasantness

previously.

Can I ask this this water?

It wasn't that they brought it over from London, or was it?

No, they didn't.

They made it up.

They sort of analyzed the chemicals in it, and a chemist called Betts offered to provide special London water.

And the White House said, that's a very nice and hospitable thing to do.

We'll have five gallons of it.

And then halfway through the royal visit, Betts got another telegram saying, we find we will need far more water than we asked for.

Would it be possible?

And could you be so kind as to furnish us with 20 more gallons?

Because the royals evidently drank a lot more tea than the Americans are born for.

I looked it up.

If that was small cups of tea, the original consignment would have made 120 small cups of tea.

And then they asked for enough to make another 500 cups of tea.

Wow.

And he was only there four days or something, wasn't he?

Yeah.

So it must have been lots of people drinking it.

No, it's just the king.

It was a big trip.

When they went there, they were received outside the White House by over 250,000 people.

It was mayhem.

Everyone came out to see that.

They made a lot of trips.

This was when the war was about to kick kick off.

So it was very symbolic, the trip that they were doing.

And George VI went to visit the tomb of George Washington,

who obviously was a foe of his great-great-great-grandfather.

So that was a huge symbolic moment to visit, yeah, the man who effectively kicked us out of America.

So that is revolting tea all over that tombstone.

They also, as well as that, they had hot dogs for the first time, the first time a royal had had a hot dog.

The headline in the New York Times said, king tries hot dog and asks for more.

The hot dogs were served on a silver tray and apparently the queen at the time, which was who we would know as the queen mother, yeah, she asked Roosevelt how to eat a hot dog and Roosevelt said very simple, push it into your mouth and keep pushing until it is all gone.

It's good advice in general, I think.

It's a sure phone recipe for joking.

Well then she used the knife and fork after that.

Did she?

Yeah, and no photographers are allowed to take photos because.

Of the royals eating hot dogs.

Yeah.

I mean, that's the thing.

I think you're not allowed to take a photo of the queen eating now, are you?

You don't want that phallic shot, do you?

You don't want the hot dog going into the Queen's

wholesale.

Yeah, you don't want the President of the United States shoving a sausage in the Queen's face, do you?

It's bad PR.

I looked up a little bit about tea.

You know, Carl Linnaeus, who's famous for categorising

life?

He was really desperate.

He wanted to import a lot of plants because he was a specimen collector and he was desperate to bring back tea from the East.

And time and time again he failed to bring back any tea from the East.

So he tried 20 different times to get a single tea plant from China where it wasn't.

What happened?

Did he keep getting halfway through and then just thinking, oh, I could do with a brew?

Well, they died en route.

Other times they were eaten by rats or mice.

There was once a time where he had a student called Per Ozbeck who had managed to source a tea plant and he got it all the way to the Cape of Good Hope, sailing all the way back from China, and then there was a sudden whirlwind and it was blown overboard.

Another one fell off ship when the ship blasted a ceremonial gun as it left the harbour.

Right over the edge.

Put it below deck.

What are they doing?

I know, I know.

Why have they only got one specimen each time?

I reckon like the 13th or 14th time, I'll be like, why don't we take two this time, just in case?

So the following assistant after the gun debuck, he was called Lagostrom, and he brought a plant back back to Uppsala.

He managed it, he made it, brought a plant back, and then he nurtured it for two years before finding out it was the wrong one.

Was it because, is this in China that he was taking the belief strong?

Yeah, so it was that China had a stronghold over tea and they didn't want any,

that was the biggest, most dangerous thing to their economy for you to take that out.

And

as a result of someone actually managing to smuggle it out and setting it up, that's what gave birth to so much of how the West became powerful, basically, through tea.

It was, if I made that up, I feel like you're looking at me like a mother.

No, it was just

some more clarity wouldn't go amiss.

So I was looking at tea.

So tea is a very British thing.

The Brits have been very proud of their tea making.

They're addicted to tea, basically, have been for a long time.

And to the extent that in war, it's been really useful.

And every single tank, every single armoured tank to this day has tea-making facilities in it.

And this is because it caused a serious problem in the war.

So, in the Second World War, just after the Normandy landings, there was a British battalion, a British tank battalion, who had a couple of minutes to spare.

So, they did what all British troops did with a couple of minutes to spare.

They popped out of their tanks.

Tickled a few spiders.

They tickled some spiders.

Had a quick roller skate.

And they made a tea.

And they made this tea, and the enemy saw that they were doing that and they sort of destroyed them and their tanks.

And so it became became apparent that there needed to be tea-making facilities within tanks.

And you couldn't put petrol and light fires in tanks to make tea.

And so, tanks were all equipped in their little funnel in the sort of chimney with proper tea-making facilities that were designed for tanks that used the electricity that the tank used.

And it was inside the turret, and they are still used to this day.

And it was because the Brits needed to drink tea at all times.

So cool.

That's amazing.

Even in tanks.

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

Can I just, I've got some stuff about milk and tea.

So, the way the Brits drink tea is with milk.

And I wanted to know when that actually started.

And so, the first person to recommend drinking tea with milk was a guy called Thomas Garway in 1670.

So, no one drank tea with milk then.

Most other countries, they don't.

But he wrote a pamphlet called An Exact Description of the Quality and Virtues of Leaf Tea Drawn Up for the Satisfaction of Persons of Quality.

And he gave a bunch of reasons why tea is a great thing to drink.

So, he said, if you add milk to it, it avoids looseness in the bowels, which is quite good to know, I think.

He also said the good thing about tea is it prevents fevers by provoking a most gentle vomit.

Tea was really weird then.

He said it makes the body active and lusty.

And he said that this is something that he learned from Japanese law that had been brought over.

The best tea ought to be gathered by virgins.

They're the only people who are qualified to gather the best tea, yes.

You were saying about vomiting.

The reason that we have tea in Britain is due to vomiting.

And this is because when Charles II married Catherine of Braganza of Portugal, she brought the idea of tea over.

It had been, a few people had had it, but it wasn't really popular.

And she came over to the UK on a boat, and it was an extremely stormy crossing.

And when she arrived, she was feeling really, really sick.

So she asked for a cup of tea, and everyone went, What the fuck's tea?

And they didn't know what tea was, and so they gave her instead a glass of ale,

which unsurprisingly did not make her feel better at all.

And so she decided that we're going to have to have a lot more tea in the country, and then it became much more popular thanks to that.

Really?

Just a fact.

God, imagine if you went traveling and you got to the other end and they said, what the fuck's tea?

You'd go back.

Have you ever heard of America?

Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that many millipede researchers are annoyed that more than 70 years after World War II, the animals are still associated with the Nazis.

It's certainly the first symbol I have in mind when I think Nazi.

So this is true, apparently.

Oh, a very early qualifier.

Well, I was told this by our good friend Erika McAllister, who works in the Natural History Museum.

Why are they Nazi insects?

Well, I googled it, and apparently it comes from the dig for victory campaign.

So do you remember during World War II, the people who were left home, they weren't tickling spiders and they weren't playing with the roller skates and stuff like that.

They were making food at home so that we wouldn't run out of food.

And so they sent a load of pamphlets around to everyone saying, this is what you have to do.

This is how to plant sprouts and this is how to dig up potatoes.

But it also said this is what you have to do with pests.

And they had a picture of a centipede and a picture of a millipede.

And they said the centipede was a fast-moving friend and the millipede was a slow-moving moving enemy and they showed you how to tell the difference between the two of them and the millipede was holding a massive swastika.

Right.

And sorry, is that the main way you tell the difference even today?

But the reason was that centipedes eat insects and millipedes eat plant matter.

And so if you're making vegetables, what you don't want is insects that are going to eat the roots of your plants, but you do want centipedes that might eat the other pests.

But in actual fact, millipedes mostly eat decaying organic matter.

They have very weak mouths, so they can't really eat tubers and stuff like that.

So it was completely ridiculous.

I can't eat a tuber.

Fair place here.

Too sad.

Well, thank God we've resolved the reputation of the millipede.

Everyone thought was a fascist.

Millipedes don't have a thousand legs.

No.

And sometimes researching the show is just horrible.

They have 750 is the most they've ever had.

Yeah.

There is a theory that one day there could be a millipede with a thousand legs.

Why?

How can?

Because I believe that some of some of them develop extra legs the longer they live.

Really?

Yeah.

Well, they all do.

Millipedes all add legs to themselves as they're growing.

So when they're born, they're born with about three pairs of legs.

Yeah.

And it's kind of like they're adding to each other like their Lego or something, like a congoline.

They're constantly adding a new segment.

They shed, they molt, and then they add a new segment with legs.

So if they live forever, I guess they would.

If they live forever, yes.

A thousand years.

A thousand years.

Just like the Third Reich was predicted to.

There's more and more evidence as we look for it.

Well, this is the really cool one.

It's called Iliacumi plenipes, which is the one with the most legs ever.

And it only lives in California under a particular boulder.

Well, no, sorry.

It lives in a very small, four and a half square kilometers.

Not a boulder, four and a half square kilometers.

It was found under a boulder.

It was missing for 80 years

and then it was rediscovered.

It should have just looked under the boulder.

Yeah.

Should have looked in Argentina.

It's too much.

It's too much.

But

this is oh, this is a really weird thing.

Oh, yeah.

The male of this species, Iliac me plenipes, or plenipes,

it has converted two of its legs into sex organs.

Yeah.

Which is a thing that some animals can do.

That's what millipes tend to do.

Their legs turn into penises.

How?

How?

During puberty.

Imagine that.

13 years old, and one of your legs says into a penis.

That's a rough day at school, isn't it?

You would hope.

Some of your shoes are fit.

And why aren't you doing PE today?

Well,

you know, it sounds really dramatic, actually.

Their whole bodily makeup changes.

This is a recent recent study that looked into what happens when they hit puberty, and it's usually on their fifth, sixth, or seventh segment.

Those legs turn into a gonopod or gonopod, and that's basically sort of penises that clasp the female while they put sperm into her.

And it involves the rearrangement of all their internal organs, basically.

And it's an exhausting process in terms of energy consumption to turn your legs into a penis.

And so, some

adolescent male millipedes go through reverse adolescence because they develop the penis legs and then they're so exhausted, they're basically at starvation level because they've used so much energy.

And so they go backwards again.

They're like, I'm knackered.

I can't deal with this whole

sexually.

So they turn their leg penises back into legs.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They reverse adolescence.

Wow.

What?

Imagine if Spider-Man was bitten by a millipede.

This one's definitely not a PG, guys.

So, okay, well, Madagascar's giant pill millipedes, they have a music-making organ on their backside.

The male's is called a harp, and the females is a washboard.

And basically, it's like a load of ridges, but both sexes have a knob on their backside of the last pair of legs, which they rub across their backsides to make noises.

Wow.

So, like, the female sounds a bit like

a washboard, and the male sounds like a guitar, it's like a skiffle group.

Whereas a lot of them are deaf as well, tragically.

So they made this music to seduce each other, but they can't hear.

And so we don't really know what the point is.

Wow.

Can they

see?

Maybe they're feeling the vibrations in their hairs.

Yeah.

But they can't hear the beautiful skiffle music that's been created that way.

That's very sad.

You know, some of them have, this is just quite a cool thing.

They have spiral stomachs to give themselves a larger surface area to digest food because obviously they're very, very long.

so if the food is going around a spiral it gets maximum surface area oh

very clever

very clever they give each other back massages as well yeah this is actually how they seduce their mates is they give the ladies a back massage so uh the Millipi's defense mechanism is to curl up into a ball into a spiral and sometimes if she hears a male coming she thinks or she's male coming she thinks oh that's a threat and so she curls up tightly and to try and seduce her he'll walk over her back until she relaxes.

Lower.

Lower.

Lower still.

Got a long way to go.

But

that's not, to me,

if you turn that into human terms, if you were seducing and you gave a back massage, you would go with hands.

You wouldn't, anyone who gets a massage when you suddenly feel someone standing on your back.

Isn't that a thing?

There is some people like that.

My wife had a massage the other day

and she had people walking all all over her back.

Did she?

Yeah, it's a thing.

There you go.

And imagine if those people had 750 legs.

That would be a good massage.

I'm going to get a call.

One of them's a penis.

You are never seeing them again.

We're going to have to wrap up shortly, guys.

Well, I've got one quick thing, which is that lemurs self-medicate using millipedes.

This is really cool.

So they get these infestations of threadworms, which are very nasty things, around their mouth and around their anuses.

And

they sort of crawl out and then they lay their eggs in your skin around those two areas, threadworms.

They're very unpleasant to get.

So, lemurs have a particular kind of millipede, which has a chemical defense mechanism inside it, and it can blind and poison predators, and it's quite strong.

So, the lemurs chew on the millipedes, and then they rub the remains around their mouths and around their anuses, and then they swallow them, and that

repels the threadworms.

Everyone

it's an awful moment for the millipede when it thinks, oh, this is a real low point in my life.

I'm being used as lip balm.

Little does it know.

The anus is coming.

Okay, that is it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

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

I'm on at Schreiberland.

Andy.

At Andrew Hunter M.

James.

At James Harkin.

And Chacinsky.

You can email podcast at QI.com.

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

We have links to our upcoming tour of both the UK and of Europe.

Thank you so much for listening.

We'll be back again next week.

We'll see you then.

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