232: No Such Thing As A Seven Foot Bond

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Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

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

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 my fact this week.

My fact is that the legendary sumo wrestler Mainumi Shuhei injected silicone into his scalp so that he could meet the height requirements to become a sumo.

What were they?

So this was you had to be 173 centimeters tall.

This was back in the day,

up until the 90s.

So that was the height requirement.

You thought about five foot nine.

Yeah, I believe that's about five foot nine.

Yeah.

And so a lot of wrestlers were very close, five foot eight, five foot seven, and they just weren't quite there.

172 centimeters.

And so what they used to do, and this is what this wrestler, Shuhei, did, he went to a doctor and he had surgically inserted into his scalp a little bag that could be filled with silicon and the silicon would go up to four centimeters high.

The other thing that they used to do before the silicon thing was bash themselves on the head so they'd get a lunch

which would then be just you know like in a cartoon how he goes no

wow that's why they genuinely did that.

You can't guarantee you're going to bruise like that.

I would concentrate on growing hair instead of beating myself on the head.

No, but they push

a ruler down on your head, yeah.

Also, all sumos have that quite flat hair, don't they?

Yes, yeah.

So, um, this guy, I just want to apologize if I've pronounced his name wrong.

In fact, I'm just gonna refer to him by his nickname, I think, and seeing that.

Yeah, you should worry about him because he's pretty tall these days.

You definitely have you in a fight.

Yeah, he's like seven foot tall now.

Yeah, it's fighting, it keeps going, yeah.

No, he doesn't.

You get one enlargement, and then after a while, it's not enough.

Exactly, yeah,

so he has a nickname, which he's known by to the fans, which is Waza no Depato.

It translates roughly as department store of techniques so I will refer to him

why do you think you could say what the nickname easier than you can say my new Mi Shuhu I actually just flew over that and then headed straight to the department store of techniques the department store of techniques he was an amazing guy so he was known for using 33 different what they call kimmerite which are fit basically finishing moves

he did one which was a triple attack force out so he simultaneously trapped the guy's leg grabbed another and pushed his head into his chest the opponent's head into the opponent's chest

Sorry, what?

He pushed his opponent's head into his opponent's chest.

Yeah, so he brought his head down in there while tripping him up and while grabbing a leg, and that's called a triple threat.

So it's kind of like you're forcing someone into a forwards roll sort of thing.

If you trip them over and then you bend their head down,

yeah.

So you don't push their head just straight down.

So it goes

into their chest, which means maybe that they then don't meet the height requirement for an automatic win.

These days you can qualify through speed and agility as well well as height, or instead of height.

Can you?

Yeah, if you're really fast, really agile and tiny.

There is one move in Sumo, one technique, called henker, which I don't know if this guy did, but it's the way that the winner of the Sumio championships in 2016 won it.

And the henker is when your rival hurtles towards you, super fast to take you down, and then you just step to the side like you're in a cartoon, and your rival goes plummeting out of the ring, and then you win that way.

Does he run out of the ring and then not realize he's actually above the ground for a few seconds and then plummets?

Yes, exactly.

And eyeballs pop out of his head and stuff.

But the thing about this move is that even though it's a winning move, it's really frowned upon.

So Sumo is a lot about honor and respect, and you get booed by the crowds for doing this.

So he won this championship.

He's called Hakuho, and he was massively booed by the crowds.

A lot of them left before even listening to his victory speech.

And when he gave his post-match speech, he just immediately apologised.

He was on the verge of tears and said, you know, I never thought that I'd win doing that move, but I guess, I guess, I did.

Wow, sorry.

Um, you know, they all have this sort of bun of hair, yes, they have the same bun.

Um, I have read, I can't quite believe this, but I've read that they're the only

um, you have to have that bun, and if you're not in the game, you're not allowed to have the bun.

And when you retire, your bun gets cut off by your friends and family and colleagues, and your trainer cuts the last strand of the bun.

That's when you retire.

But there are only 55 master hairdressers who are allowed to do this bun.

That's very cool, Yeah.

And so what are they trained?

They're trained specifically as hairdressers in the art of that one specific thing.

We've reached the limits of my knowledge.

Okay.

And we've

hurtled beyond it.

The ritual when they cut it off is a major thing though, isn't it?

There's often crying there.

Oh, it's really like emotional people.

It's very sad.

Yeah, losing your button.

I suppose your whole life is being a sumo, isn't it?

Like, that's all they do.

Yeah.

You can't do anything else.

Yeah.

And that's the symbol of it.

Yeah.

That was the symbol of doing this podcast.

Typing with your hands, I suppose.

Yeah, so you won't put your fingers off at the end.

I'd cry.

For the last episode, we all have to

cut each other's fingers off.

I think it's just taking our microphones.

I didn't think that.

I'd be relieved.

You know, sumos, before they start a fight, they clap their hands and they do that thing where they'll clap and then they spread their arms out really wide.

Do you know why they do that?

Is it to make themselves look bigger to their opponents so they're more scared?

It definitely does serve that purpose and the way they do it doesn't imply that's the reason but officially is to show that you're not armed

because

you can't be armed in sumo.

I think also the stamping that they do is to drive away evil spirits or it traditionally is and therefore it survives as a kind of remnant of that.

Yeah.

Because they also sprinkle salt don't they on the on the ring before going into it which is also to purify it and don't allow women in

to purify it as well.

But that is right though isn't it?

That's what they say.

There were two women went in this year in the news

and I can't remember what happened.

It was basically a guy had a heart attack

or something like that.

They'd passed out.

The women jumped in.

They were qualified doctors and nurses and they jumped in and they immediately got told to get out of there while this guy was dying.

And then because there'd been women in there they had to throw a load of extra salt in.

Yeah.

And then during the fight they were skidding around on the salt and it ruined the whole match.

It proves his bad luck.

There was a guy who was known for the salt particularly.

He used to throw just a lot of salt on the uh in the ring.

So his name was Salt Shaker.

That was his nickname.

And yeah, that was sort of his pre-match ritual, which became his thing.

Is it related to the fact that you throw salt over your shoulder?

So do you throw salt over your left shoulder whenever you eat salt?

Yeah.

A little bit.

Whenever you eat salt.

Yeah.

My dad's always done it's a huge way.

Actually, we do it when we spill salt.

I thought it was when you spilled salt.

It's bad luck to spill salt.

Oh, right.

Therefore, you have to throw a bit more over your shoulder to counteract the evil.

But I also do it if I have too much salt in my hands when I'm cooking and I have a bit left over, it goes over the shoulder rather than in the bed.

Yeah, under the the pretence of doing it for good luck when really you're just too lazy to bother actually clearing up.

I actually do that with old kitchen waste.

Just something on height restrictions.

So, do you know that MI5 has height restrictions?

No.

And these were introduced in 2004, and it makes a lot of sense.

So, as a man, you're not allowed to be taller than 5'11.

As a woman, you're not allowed to be taller than 5'8.

Which is actually, you know, a lot of men are obviously taller than 5'11, but it's just so you don't stand out as much in a crowd.

literally.

Literally.

I wonder how tall the James Bonds are.

I thought you might ask that.

I heard an answer.

Did you?

Have you got them all?

I have, yeah.

But remember, the MI6.

I know that.

So is it MI6 have different height requirements?

Apparently, MI6 has unofficial ones, which are quite similar, but MI5s were official.

But all the James Bonds would not have been able to get into the Secret Service under these rules, except for Daniel Craig, who just slots in under.

So I think he's 5'10 and a quarter.

And all the others are taller than 5'11.

Could you have part of your head removed to keep you underneath?

Or would that maybe make you more conspicuous, I guess, if you have a flat head?

No, but if you always wore a very boring hat.

But that would make you seem taller.

Yeah, that's true.

Maybe you need to cut off the bottom of your feet.

Yeah.

Well, I was going to say, I would have my feet extended as a sumo rather than my head.

Because it's much less dangerous having foot surgery, isn't it?

Extended as in like heels.

Yeah, platform.

Platforms underneath.

Platform feet.

Wow, that's cool.

That would be a very good thing for a supervillain to do to James Bond, is just, instead of killing him, just give him massive leg extensions internally so he's seven foot nine and he can't go anywhere conspicuously again.

They are making a new James Bond, aren't they?

Yeah.

Presumably, there's still time to slip that into the prescription.

I think they're looking for a director at the moment.

Oh yeah, because Danny Biles not doing it.

I think the first four-person directed James Bond film.

I was reading in China that if you want to become a teacher, you have to be a certain height as well, school teachers.

So this was a story that the BBC published this year about a lady who had qualified for her teaching certificate.

She'd done the years of studying, and at graduation, they measured her, and she wasn't tall enough.

You can't teach if you're under four foot nine.

Speaking of restrictions in China, so theme park rides often have a height restriction, but there's a new theme park ride in China or a new restriction on it, which is a weight restriction.

But this is more that you have to be over a certain weight in order to ride for free.

So, this is a theme park called Tang Paradise Park, and it gives free entry to any woman who's fatter than this really famous, really respected and admired concubine called Yang Gui Fei, who's an eighth century consort and she's like one of China's four great beauties apparently.

And if you're heavier than she is, so she was 61.8 kilos, you ride for free and it's trying to destigmatize chubbiness.

But you do have to get on a giant pair of weighing scales before you get on the ride.

Does that do the job?

Kind of a shaming.

It's a real fat shaming, but here's your consolation prize, a roller coaster.

And I just want to say.

It's a roller coaster of emotions for our ladies.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that a quarter of all mentions of teeth in the Bible also include the word gnashing.

I mainly know the word gnashing from Nasher, Dennis the Menace's dog in the Bino.

I reckon he got his name from the biblical word.

I guess he must have done.

He was very devout, wasn't he?

Yeah.

So for the QI Factbook, I had to find a fact which was related to both teeth and the Bible, because all the facts are in order.

And so I went onto the Bible gateway and searched the King James Bible for mentions of teeth.

And there are 56 that I found, and 15 of them have the word gnash in one of its various forms.

The first one is in Job, and he says, He teareth me in his wrath, who hateth me, he gnasheth upon me with his teeth, mine enemy sharpeneth his eyes upon me.

So, basically, just it's a lot of gnashing of teeth.

A lot of people going to hell, a lot of people, you know, not so happy in the Bible.

Is gnashing of teeth, is that like a

yeah, it's like grinding your teeth in, and usually it's in anger or in pain or in agony or something like that.

Brooksism, it's called

teeth gnashing, you're gnashing your teeth, um, and it's a dental problem for many people.

So, I think one in ten people grind their teeth.

So, it is officially grinding, grind their teeth and gnash their teeth at night.

But it is bad.

It's interesting.

So people who are teeth, people who are sleep brooksers, as they're called, will be gnashing their teeth for up to 40 minutes per hour, and that's with a force of about 250 pounds.

So that's a huge amount.

You know, that's two or three people.

And that's compared to...

Just sitting in your mouth.

Just sitting in your mouth on your jaw, gnashing your teeth together.

That's bad.

And that's compared to in the daytime, if you're an awake Brookser, it's just 20 minutes per day as opposed to 40 minutes an hour, and it's only 20 pounds of force.

So that's quite a lot of force you're exerting on your little mouth in your sleep.

Yeah.

I was reading about teeth

just throughout the ages, and the one that I'd not heard about before was what the Mayans used to do with their teeth.

What did they do?

Have we spoken about this before?

I don't think we have.

So they were not only very proud of their teeth, they had a lot of dentistry work done to them.

And their dentists have been said when people have looked through the records of the different type of things that they've done, quite advanced for their time.

And one thing they wanted to do was pimp up their teeth just to make it really shiny and beautiful.

So there were two things that they could do.

One is that they would just cut into each tooth and give it a little indentation.

So it just looked a bit more interesting than just your regular flat tooth.

And they would leave that as was.

But sometimes they would create this indentation, this little crater, and they would put little bits of jewelry inside that would sit.

Kind of like how a lot of

rappers.

Yeah, like Kanye West did that recently.

Not the jewels, but I heard that Mick Jagger got that done with the draw, but I don't think he did.

I think that's just a story I got told.

It's not a good rumour, is it?

Surely you could just look at his face and say, oh no, he didn't do that.

I think he's had it taken out now, but I think he got a bit of an emerald put in, and someone said, oh, people kept saying to him, oh, you got spinach in your teeth.

But this is a very vague memory.

Yeah.

So I don't think it's true.

I can't believe that's the most exciting rumour someone could make up about Mick Jagger.

I mean, his whole life consists of things more exciting than that.

So, you know what the Mayans would have been digging into?

They would have been digging into the skin of the teeth, which is another phrase from the King James Bible.

Yeah.

And

it's a very weird one as well, because Job says he just escaped by the skin of his teeth.

But what does it actually mean?

Well, a lot of Job is...

There's a lot of gnashing in Job because basically he's him being tormented by God and the devil and everyone, right?

He's just having a pretty bad time of it.

Awful.

And so in this case, he says, my bone cleaveth to my skin and to my flesh, and I I am escaped with the skin of my teeth.

Wow.

But it's so unclear what it means.

And everyone says, oh, I suppose that means you escape with as narrow a margin as the skin on your teeth is narrow.

But when you read that sentence, it's not really what that would mean in English.

Maybe teeth used to have skin.

I think that's the obvious conclusion.

We were talking a long time ago.

And people always left it on.

So loads of, I mean, do you know that bite the dust is a thing that's from the Bible?

But I look for the, well, supposedly it is, but the phrase is, they that dwell in the wilderness shall bow before him, and his enemies shall lick the dust, which is slightly different to bite the dust.

It is, yeah.

It's another one that licks the dust.

It doesn't have the same thing.

I've got a quiz question for you guys.

Okay.

Okay.

In which religious book does Satan appear to tempt Adam and Eve to eat forbidden fruit?

Yep.

The Bible.

James Harkin.

It is not the Bible.

It's not the Torah.

I'm afraid.

No, keep going.

The Grunth of Seekers of God.

Oh, you've gone too obscure.

The Book of Mormon.

It's the Quran.

So, in Genesis, in the Bible, there is no mention of the fact that it's Satan.

It's just a snake.

And this was an interpretation that was put on it many centuries later.

So it was in the intertestamental period between Old and New Testaments.

They thought, I bet that was Satan.

But actually, it's just a snake in Genesis.

But in the Quran, when it describes the story, it says that

Adam and Eve were tempted by Satan.

Wow.

I've got a fact about Bibles.

Go on.

Do you know about the space Bibles?

Space Bibles.

No, so are they Bibles that have been sent into space?

Exactly.

Apollo 13.

So they're exactly literally what they do.

Apollo 13 had 300 Bibles on it.

No it is.

No way.

No it is.

No, wrong.

There were 300.

They needed so much rocket fuel for that.

I know.

But you need to be able to convert the aliens when you meet them, don't you?

So what it was, they were, you remember microfilm, you know, the way of making things incredibly small.

So they were all one inch by one inch, and each of them was printed with all the holy scriptures

and um obviously Apollo 13 went pretty badly wrong, but the the Bible survived and they went up again with Apollo 14 and uh a hundred of them went to the moon and the other two hundred just went up into space.

Don't you think that that seems like a bad omen?

I wouldn't want to be on Apollo 14 with the same Bibles that were on Apollo thirteen.

I'd assume that God was angry for some reason.

Um do you know that you're as of last year, you're no longer allowed to sell biblical teeth

or any relik-y teeth?

And these days, they now have started giving a certificate of authenticity to relics.

They've always had that, though, haven't they?

Well, I think they're now saying officially that these are the only ones recognised by the church.

So if

there's a museum that has, for example, I read one has Jesus Christ's bread-cutting knife from the Last Supper, claims to have it.

Unless that now has a certificate, it cannot be considered.

Does the Pope just wander around going, yeah, that one looks real?

No, that one's not.

I mean, who's deciding what gets the certificate?

Obviously, none of them are real.

Well, sorry, guys.

They would disagree with that, I imagine.

Yeah, because they would say none of them is real.

Israel.

Don't always make it about that, Andy.

Not now.

Okay, it is time to move on to fact number three, and that is

Andy.

My fact is that if you bought land in Australia before 1891, you had the legal right to the land stretching all the way to the centre of the earth.

Pretty cool.

So amazing.

Yeah.

And that's why they always say it so hot in Australia.

They're all living, aren't they, right in the core?

So this was an old law, and there's a sort of historical Latin phrase, cuius es solum, aeus, usque ad, coelum ad et ad inferos, which means whoever owns the soil holds title up to the heavens and down to the depths of hell so that was a legal principle that you just owned all the land

so does the heavens extend as far as the infinite universe like where does that end well that's the thing i think it was before people really knew about the infinite universe so they really undersold it when they yeah when they yeah they should have tried they might have thought that heaven was up there that's true which feels blasphemous to us selling a slice of heaven yeah no up to the heavens they didn't say penetrate the heavens

they say up to the heavens yeah up to the heavens but this it was problematic wasn't it because this is before aeroplanes were invented and before spades were invented.

So

you couldn't go very far up or down in those days.

Exactly, yeah.

And then hot air ballooning was the thing which changed it because people kept being worried about hot air balloons and saying, oh, you've trespassed over my house and you're a hot air balloon way up there.

Yeah, there was one court case, wasn't there, with the guy who invented Granada?

Okay.

He owned a house.

He's called the Baron of Lee or something like that.

Is that the chicken guy?

Because there was a farmer called Thomas Lee Corsby who in 1945 and he sued the US government because they'd been flying their aeroplanes above his property, so about 83 feet above his property.

And it was causing his chickens to fly into the wars and kill themselves, apparently, he argued.

And he said he'd have to give up farming because so many of his chickens have died.

And that's when it was kind of enshrined in law how much land you're entitled to above you.

And it was established that you're not entitled to all of it, but you're entitled to enough land above your house that all your chickens don't die.

Yeah, actually, my one was the British law.

So

that was the American one.

Got it.

Australia changed it too, I'm very sad to say.

Did they?

Yeah, 1891 they changed it.

You now only get 15 meters down.

Yeah.

That's not very much at all.

Well, when you think it used to be 6,371 kilometres, yeah, that's exactly

dent in your property.

Is that half the earth, or is that the whole thing?

That's to the core from the surface, yeah.

I looked into actually what was going on in Australia in 1891 as a partial Aussie.

I was sort of thinking, I have no idea what life was like back then.

So population of Australia back in 1891 was just over 3 million.

Wow.

Yeah, so the population of London at the exact same time was 5 million something.

So the whole population of Australia, yeah, still underneath the city of London.

They had really cool names for all of their leaders at the time.

The Premier of New South Wales was called Henry Parks.

Then you had the Premier of Western Australia, who's called John Forrest.

So it's all sort of

marinery-based.

And then there's Philip Fish, Premier of Tasmania.

He was very cool.

But the most exciting thing was Banjo Patterson, who is our sort of greatest poet, really, songwriter, Banjo Patterson.

So he wrote Waltzing Matilda, and he wrote Man from Snowy River.

He wrote in 1891 his masterpiece.

Which was?

No, it's called his masterpiece.

It was a poem.

It's very obscure.

No one's really heard of it.

Very good.

Yeah, thank you.

Do you know what the deepest building in the world is?

No.

Well, according to my research, which...

Wait, is this a quiz question?

Oh, yeah.

Why did you do that?

You could get it, actually.

Think of a country where the rules at one stage were that you could go really, really deep.

Australia.

Australia.

So it's the deepest building.

So the Sydney Opera House.

It's correct.

Oh, yes.

Well, this is according to constructionweekonline.com, and I couldn't really find much evidence apart from that.

But apparently, the car park extends 12 stories into the earth, and that's the deepest basement in the world.

Wow.

Is it really?

It's also the fifth deepest that we've ever dug as a sort of operating building in the world.

So that's 120 feet deep.

The second

deepest we've ever gone is the Large Hadron Collider, which is 575 feet deep.

But the deepest of all, do you guys know?

There's like ball holes that they have, don't they?

So this is where people work.

So this is like a building, effectively.

No, okay.

Have we heard of this building?

No, it's a laboratory in China.

How are we supposed to get that?

Well, no, I was going to ask you more.

So if the second deepest is 575 feet,

what do you think the the deepest is?

575.5.

Wow.

No, no, very far away.

It's 12 kilometers.

It's 7,900 feet deep.

What?

And that is a, yeah, it's the deepest building in the world or laboratory.

It's inside a mountain, but I thought that's a cheap because a mountain is above ground, but actually, it starts, they start counting it, I believe, from the bottom of the mountain going down into the supervillain lives there.

Yes, exactly.

That's in China.

Yeah, it's in China.

What is it?

The idea is that, so it's a laboratory, and I think they want to study the background radiation and dark matter and so on.

And the lower you go, radiation becomes less.

So they do it from there.

But I don't know how they can see.

But yeah, how they can see there'll be electric lights and stuff.

There we go.

They probably got

that technology, yeah.

Since we, you know, we're investigating dark matter and background radiation now.

I think they probably bring a candle down at the very least.

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

My fact this week is that jumping spiders that wear eyeliner are more likely to be eaten by their mate.

So, the way this works is, and this is being, this is some experiments that are being done in a lab in Florida.

It's a lab of a behavioural ecologist called Lisa Taylor, and she was looking at how jumping spiders kind of flirt with each other.

And so, if you're a jumping spider male, one of the problems is, as with a lot of spiders, is that if you're trying to flirt with a female, there's sort of an equal chance that she'll eat you instead.

So I think about one in five jumping spiders who try to flirt with females then get attacked and they try to eat them.

I like those odds.

And she noticed that some of them have these really bright red and white stripes on their faces to make themselves look a bit toxic so that it doesn't get eaten by the mate.

And so she was like, if I put some black eyeliner on their eyes to cover up these red stripes, they now won't look toxic and they'll get eaten.

And she said she did find that suddenly they stopped eating them

once the stripes were taken.

I thought it was that the red complexion signifies health.

Females were noticing the colour and saying, oh, good, nice and healthy.

Well, it's both.

It's a combination.

So red signifies health, so they think, oh, good, I want to shag that.

But it also signifies toxicity.

So they think, I don't want to eat it.

So that's exactly what you want as a male because you want sex, but you don't want to be eaten.

Why are they not all red all the time?

Evolution doesn't start at the end point, James, does it?

You're quite right.

It just takes time.

And they're doing more experiments on them now where they're putting false eyelashes on the top of their heads.

Oh, yeah.

So some of them have these tufts, which may indicate genetic fitness.

And so they're gluing little bits of false eyelash onto the top of the heads to give them extra tufts and seeing if that indicates anything to the females.

So they're basically making themselves very, very slightly taller to improve their

sounds like the tests are aimed at helping a helpless male, as in it's it's trying to well because the the jumping spider basically doesn't even know which is is his own species when he woos.

Oh, yeah.

He just, whatever he walks up to, whichever spider, he starts dancing and trying to woo, even if they can't breed, and it leads to nothing.

So he exerts all this energy for nothing.

So he just has no idea.

It doesn't just lead to nothing.

They frequently get eaten because they approach a spider of the wrong species

and start flirting.

That's like flirting with a lion.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Isn't it?

Imagine if you couldn't tell a woman from a lion.

Just every now and then you think, oh, I'm in here and then you get eaten.

Yeah.

That'd be awful.

Oh, I'm just going to pop down into that lovely lady's enclosure.

And they dance

for about 20 minutes, which is a long time if you're a spider, because they only live for two years.

So that's equivalent.

If every time we had sex, we had to do an 11-hour courtship dance.

It's the equivalent of that.

Wow.

My God.

That's amazing.

Which is worth a try.

I think.

It is.

You'd be too tired by the end, though.

You would be

performed.

11 hours and then it's a lion.

I was reading about how jumping spiders spiders jump, how they get the, why they're given that name, because they can leap huge heights.

I think one was found in the UK recently that could leap six foot, which I think is a record.

What I thought was it must be their muscular legs that allows a jumping spider to leap, and that's not the case.

What they do is they segment their muscles into different.

So basically their leg is broken up into two different bits and the leap comes from them slamming blood into the bottom of their legs and that just lobs them off, gives their legs a reaction to jump.

It's not actual muscle jumping.

So they must feel really lightheaded when they do it, right?

Because all the blood's gone to their legs.

Yeah, that's true.

They always faint, do you think?

Every time they jump, they pass out in the air.

Must be, right?

Yeah.

But the other thing is that they can stop halfway through a jump.

That's pretty cool.

What do you mean by that?

So they can spin a really quick line of silk and then use that as a drag line to create air resistance.

Oh, like Spider-Man.

Basically,

just like Spider-Man.

So they can just stop halfway through jumping if they decide it's a bad idea.

Yeah.

Or slow down dramatically, can't they?

And they always, a lot of them often do it to make sure they don't massively crash land.

So if you just jump with no drag line, then you face first, teeth out.

But with the drag line, they can sort of reorient themselves in the air.

Yeah.

It's very clever.

I read about the dancing and how it evolved, because like Anna says, you don't start at the end with evolution.

And in this article, they said that basically you do your dance as a spider, and the female is generally not interested.

And so you have to do a slightly better dance, and then she is interested.

And then the next generation does that slightly better dance, but then their generation isn't that interested.

So that's why the dances are so long and complicated.

Because basically over the millions and millions of years, they've been improving their dance moves.

But do they do better and better and better?

Do they do the history of all the dances moves until they get to the end?

New move.

That's why it's 20 minutes.

Yeah.

No, they so basically you're doing, if you try to do the dance moves that your great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather did, it wouldn't work on the current crop of the damage.

I can confirm that if you do the Charleston,

it

excites very little interest.

That certainly means that we're much less evolved than spiders because they're doing that and we've got flossing.

After millions of years of evolution, humans have managed to do a flossing dance.

Or is it true that the flossing is the absolute epitome of the possibility of dance in this millions of years?

No, I don't think it is true.

So after female jumping spiders mate for the first time, many of them will never have any interest in sex ever again.

Oh.

I know.

This sounds like my marriage.

I don't even know why I say that, John.

Just because you're from the north, and you're a comedian.

It's the law.

I wouldn't say my wife was fat,

but she got into every Chinese theme path for free.

Oh, my goodness.

Okay.

So there's a species called Servia incarna, and it was caught and tested, and they have sex only once, and then the females, they just have all the sperm they need for the rest of their life.

So they can produce lots of generations.

Yeah.

So they keep the sperm ready, don't they?

They just store it.

They keep it.

So that's all they need.

Just have one shag.

Sometimes two.

Sometimes they go back for one more.

Wow.

That lucky guy.

So every poor husband is desperately hoping for that second shag.

His whole life.

Wow.

So there's a really cool thing about some jumping spiders, actually at least 30 different species which practice bondage with females.

And this is actually quite a good way of not letting them attack and eat you.

And so they sort of tie them up in silk before sex.

So you cripple the woman by tying her to your web or tying her legs together.

And then you can, you're giving me a look like that's unfair, but she is going to eat you.

No, no, don't do it.

Oh, that's enough.

It's just the typical feminism

rearing its head again.

Cripple.

She is right, but you should definitely tie down women.

They're known quite sweetly as bridal veils, veils, these things.

Well, quite euphemistically, you might say.

Yeah, well, yes, indeed.

Because the bridal veil isn't massive and doesn't have weights all around it to secure the woman to the floor.

How do you think I got married?

Again.

Can't help it.

Wow, that is

quite something.

Yeah, it's handy.

And they actually tested this because a scientist wanted to work out if the ones who were unable to spin these things got eaten more regularly.

And so again, they did this very cool experiment where they put dental silicon into their web spinning apparatus, which means that they can't use it anymore.

And the way they immobilize spiders so that they're able to do this is they put them in the freezer.

And apparently that temporarily immobilizes a spider.

So this is just...

Scientists always do this.

Okay, so there's jumping spiders.

Some jumping spiders,

they call it singing.

Basically, they rub their body segments together and it makes vibrations which get communicated to the female.

And the females hear it through a slit in their legs, which is quite cool.

And every spider has his own special embellishments that he adds.

So, 7% of courtships, where that happens, end in the male being eaten, which is not great odds, but not terrible.

But researchers then incapacitated the males and stopped them from singing.

I don't know how, whether they just, you know,

made their bodies stiffer so they couldn't rub the sections together.

Don't you shame them.

If you just say that was really out of tune or something.

Yeah, they shame them, but they did something to stop them singing.

And if the males aren't aren't allowed to sing by researchers, 30% get eaten.

So that's at least three separate experiments where researchers have stopped male spiders from not being eaten in their courtships.

It's a bit of a theme.

Yeah, these researchers are starting to look like the bad guys, aren't they?

Thinking about it.

So

there are actually animals in the wild that sort of wear makeup themselves without scientists applying it to them.

I think we've spoken before about there was that vulture, the bearded vulture, rubs its head and its bottom in soil, and it sort of gets its face all scruffy.

It gives it a reddish-brown hue that it then uses to attract and probably intimidate possibly.

But relevant to the jumping spider of the fact, there are assassin bugs that go around wearing the dead carcasses of the ants that they've killed as what the article said is a sort of backpack.

So they just wear a bunch of them and it's to trick jumping spiders into not eating them.

So it's effectively a backpack of camouflage.

And this is makeup we're saying, right?

This is

more a sort of you've done your makeup, you now need your bag.

It's an epitremont.

You're going out.

Yeah.

Imagine if you had your makeup artist, a celebrity, ready to go on telly.

And what would you like, some blusher?

Could I have a few corpses piled onto my back, please, and all around my body?

Flamingos wear makeup.

Do they?

Yeah.

But they sort of generate their own makeup.

So it's like having a mascara gland.

Really?

Yeah.

So they have this oil, which they secrete from a gland near their tails.

And it has various health effects.

So, it's not just used for cosmetic reasons, but they daub the oil onto their feathers from the gland.

And one of the effects it has is to make them a deeper pink.

And scientists have observed that during the mating season, they do it much more often.

So, that seems to be an indication that they are because being deep pink is quite sexy to a flamingo.

It's like what it's like, fake tan.

It's like fake tan, it's sort of real tan, actually, isn't it?

It's like having a sun cream gland near your bottom which squirts out all over your body.

Yeah, would you either have that or a ham for a ham?

That's such a nice thing.

That's quite niche, that, isn't it?

The people who get it are going to love it.

It's going to explode.

That's incredible crossover.

Okay, that's it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

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Goodbye.

Bye.