203: No Such Thing As A Muscular Butterfly

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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 and I'm sitting here with James Harkin, Anna Chaczynski and Andy Murray 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.

Andrew Hunter Murray, I saw your face.

Starting with fact number one, and that's my fact.

My fact this week is that scientists have finally worked out why the four of us and all humans are not constantly leaking.

They started with the four of us didn't they?

We were the guinea pigs.

And they extrapolated.

Yes, exactly.

No, this is this is we've just worked out.

Actually, I say just actually and also I think Andy you are leaking are you oh sorry yeah hang on

we've already had these chairs upholstered once this week Andy come on this is uh this was discovered or published at least in November of 2016 and I didn't know this but scientists have been desperately trying to work out desperately, is a bit of a stress, desperately is a bit of a stress, why we don't constantly leak.

Because we shed more than 500 million cells every 24 hours.

So, basically, in a two to four week period, our entire body of outer layer skin is completely replaced.

In the process of that happening, we should just be suddenly, you know, a bit of arm skin goes and suddenly bloods spurting out or sweat, or we should be like just sprinkler systems non-stop, but we're not.

And they don't know why, except for now they do.

And why is it then,

James?

It is so easy to explain.

I'm not even gonna bother.

Why don't you try?

Okay, what it is, is we have effectively three layers of skin, which I think works a bit like a conveyor belt.

You know how, like, sharks' teeth get replaced the further they go forward?

Yeah, so the top layer is just the dead skin almost, it's it's really flaky and it goes all over the shop.

Then there's this middle one, which is a bit fluidy, and that's really

nice.

Um,

and then we have an original layer, which is sort of like the real, the real meat of the cake.

Of the meat cake.

Oh, yeah.

Excellent metaphors and sounds.

I didn't realize it was this easy to explain, I have to say.

And so what happens is they all shift up one place.

And what they didn't know was how it was that no holes were being revealed when the...

flakes of skin were disappearing.

What was plugging the gap?

And what they've discovered is what effectively is kind of like a pritstick glue.

It's like a temporary glue,

not as good as super glue, which eventually comes to the second layer.

but that original layer has a sort of prit stick glue which

holds the gaps closed so it holds all the stuff in.

So it's like a meaty cake with prit stick on it.

Yeah, at the bottom layer.

And don't forget there are three layers of sharks teeth on the top layer.

Yeah.

I didn't realize that we were completely dead on the outside.

No, we're not dead.

Some of us are dead on the inside.

No, the very outermost layer of skin cells are dead, I guess.

Yeah, we're just we're we're wearing death.

What are you wearing today?

Just death.

That's the worst bits of me.

That is weird, isn't it?

Because the cells are there and they're full of keratin, which is also in your fingernails and your hair and things, but none of the cell machinery is in that outermost layer.

Yeah, that is bizarre.

So, this study has found the structure of that second layer down.

The second layer is called the stratum granulosum.

And that layer has got a special structure that they've just found out, and that's the reason that they've worked out that we're not leaking, right?

This structure is an extremely efficient way to pack together shapes.

And it was first discovered by Lord Kelvin.

And it is tetradecahedrons, which means it's objects with 14 faces.

And our cells are made of these shapes, so they really pack together nicely, which means nothing can get through.

Yeah.

Although I've been so confused by this, and so.

I know.

Mine was way easier as an explanation.

What was that?

Tetradekrageons.

The thing is, tetradecahedrons, you would have thought if that's good at plugging gaps, then the ones with 16 faces are going to be even better.

And shapes with 18 faces are going to be even better.

It can't be that 14 faces is the maximum goodness of plug-in gaps.

But then think about a cube.

That fits together perfectly.

Yeah.

But then an object with five faces isn't quite as good as a cube, is it?

I don't really know.

Okay.

But I'll take your word for it.

But are you saying that nature should have selected a better decahedron?

I'm just saying it's interesting that this 14-faced shape seemed to be the ideal shape for our skin to be.

Okay, yeah.

It's the the same shape as the new £1 coin.

Is it now?

So, in Extremis, could you plug a gap or a wound in your skin with a £1 coin?

Yes.

But hang on, no, is it the same shape as that?

I thought it's a 3D.

It would be if it was a 3D.

It's the same shape as that because the new £1 coin has 12 sides around the edge and then it has two sides on the front and back.

Does that mean it's the same shape?

It's not exactly, it's got the same number of faces.

Yes, yeah, because it's more like a Rubik's cube, but with more faces.

It's more equilateral, I think, the one in the skin, compared to the pound coin.

But basically, as you say, Andy, when I seriously wound you later, you can shove a one pound coin in there and see how much good it does.

So, Lord Kelvin back in the day, he was trying to work out what is the best way that foam can work.

So, if you have a load of bubbles, what's the absolute most efficient way that they can pack together?

And he came up with this particular shape.

And then it's only recently that we found out it's in the human body.

That's amazing.

That's really cool.

Why was there a problem in the 19th century with foam being inefficiently packed?

Well, no.

So

he was studying mathematics, and there's a really interesting thing in maths, which is if you get a load of bowls and put them together, how do they pack nicest?

And the way it turns out is the same way as greengrocers do it with oranges.

So you put them all down, then you put spheres in all the gaps, and that's the most efficient way of packing it.

And they've done it with four-dimensional, five-dimensional, six-dimensional.

It's a really interesting kind of mathematical thing that they do.

Have you guys guys heard of mattech no it's a lab in america and its business is growing human skin

so there's an incredible feature about them in wired i really recommend reading it they grow two humans worth of skin every week but in thousands of little coin forms and basically it's so that you can test shampoos or or cosmetics or anything you like detergent or loot cleaner or suntan lotion on these little coins of skin yeah and they grow them so what they do is they get off off-cuts from hospitals.

So if you've been circumcised in Boston, your skin may have been, your foreskin may have been grown to two football pitches in size and then cut up for experiments.

Wow.

So a shampoo will have the same effect on someone's foreskin as it will on someone's scalp.

Can we be sure of that?

No.

Okay.

We cannot.

Is that the thing that says on the bottom?

No, it's been tested on foreskins, so

they know what they're doing.

Yeah.

All the other operations as well, like a tummy tuck or breast surgery or various things like this.

Yeah.

Wow.

I know.

And they grow it.

And so imagine that.

Someone else who experimented on skin is a guy called Brown Seccard, who I reckon we probably talked about before.

He was a scientist in the 19th century who was always experimenting on himself.

And he wanted to know why we needed skin and whether we'd be fine without it.

And so

to find out whether we'd be alright without our skin,

he didn't do the disgusting thing you're imagining.

He covered his skin completely from head to toe in fly paper varnish, which completely blocks it up.

So it was to find out if the skin's actually having a useful interaction with the outside world

and almost died because it turns out we do need our skin.

Yeah, that's like Goldfinger.

Yeah, the lady who,

not the villain, it was the lady in the movie.

She was covered in gold.

And she died.

And there was a rumor.

Did she, though?

I think, was that not a rumour?

No, in the movie she died.

Oh, in the movie, she died, yeah, yeah.

I don't go to the movies and just listen to the rumours afterwards.

I see everyone who dies in the movie.

I'm like, did he really die?

It was a rumour he did.

It would be a bigger bit of film trivia if one of the Bond movies had killed an actress by painting her goals.

No, but that was one of the great myths about it, is that in real life, she suffers from that and she died.

I thought it was a real myth that if that happened, you would die.

But I thought they had left something like a patch of skin on her back, unpainted, and she breathed through the hat.

That was a rumour.

But we don't know the absolute truth about this Bond lady, I don't think, based on that conversation, except that she definitely didn't die.

Right?

Don't know.

Oh, she's alive.

She's fine.

But yeah, Brown Saka did that and he did nearly die and you can if you do that and his student bursts in and found him completely unconscious in the corner of the room covered in varnish and so he got some sandpaper and started sandpapering his fast.

Yeah, he sanded him down and then when he regained consciousness he shouted.

Must be a better way.

Did he then cover him in a layer of tea coil and slowly work that in with the grain?

Yes, is that a carpentry joke?

Kind of, yeah.

Okay.

He jokes a bit much.

But yeah, and he was really pissed off, Brown Saka, when he regained consciousness.

He said, You've ruined the experiment.

We were going to find out if it could kill somebody.

That's amazing.

And then the student was like, No, it can.

He's the same guy who ate a patient's vomit once to give himself cholera so he could prove that laudanum worked.

And then he almost died from that as well, actually, and had to be revived by the same thing.

Is it the same student who's just saving

comes into work each day?

Hey, oh, Jesus, he's covered in rats.

What's going on?

You know, house mites?

Yeah.

So they live on our skin and they eat skin.

And do you know what they also eat?

They also eat their own skin.

Do they?

Yeah.

So house mites are as much of a problem for themselves as they are for us, basically.

Do dung beetles eat their own dung?

I don't know.

You would, wouldn't you?

You would.

If you were into dung.

Yeah.

It's the most readily accessible dung you can get, isn't it?

Yeah.

But the thing about house mites is that they have skin, and then when it flakes off, they eat it,

and they also excrete it and then eat it several times

to get all the nutrition out of it.

Clever.

Yeah.

I know.

I read a fact that I found pretty astonishing today, which is that we have a microbiome, so we're covered, obviously, every apparently centimeter of our skin is covered in thousands of different species of bacteria.

So we are literally housing a planet in the same way that our planet is housing life.

We're doing the exact same thing, just on our own body with bacteria.

And the article said that if you were to, if there was a scientist who decided to grind up a single person and sequence all the DNA from that guy grind up himself

He's got one foot in the grinder and his mate comes in and comes in boss no

But so yeah, so the article was saying if a sadistic scientist like him did decide to do that grind up and sequence all of that DNA that was on our entire body either in our body or out on top of our body only 2% of the genetic material that he would find would be us, the human beings.

And the rest of us are the bacteria.

The rest of us are all 98%.

We're carrying 98% something else other than us.

Filthy.

Yeah.

That's very cool.

We need a shower.

Disgusting.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that the iconic green code at the start of the Matrix movie is made from sushi recipes.

So cool.

So this is a fact.

It's been on the internet a little bit over the last few weeks, but I really like it.

And it was an interview with CNET by production designer Simon Whiteley.

And he said that these little things that are going up and down are made of reverse letters, numbers, and Japanese katakana characters, which are from sushi recipes.

You know, it was his wife's sushi recipe book, wasn't it?

He scanned it in and took all of the

writing.

So cool.

So do you think there's anyone who just watches The Matrix when they need to cook a Japanese meal for their friends?

Where is that DVD?

I also think I've only eaten sushi, I've never made it.

There can't be much in the way of recipes in there.

Take some fish, take some rice, wrap it up, eat it.

So The Matrix, we all live in The Matrix.

Oh, yeah.

It's an exciting theory, isn't it?

Yeah, actually a relatively mainstream theory these days that we might live in the matrix.

It is, but like I was reading a lot of

articles about it off the back of you putting this fact forward and uh there's a lot of conferences with big scientists talking about it and even i who love this kind of thing was a bit like guys

this is bullshit wasting your time but then i have a physics degree and i actually believe it do you yeah do you know what the problem is i this is what i noticed you had these big scientists neil degrasse tyson uh was the host of this big conference and a lot of scientists talking about it and i realized the differences is that stoners say this stuff all the time.

No one takes it seriously.

But if you're able to say an equation at the end of your sentence, suddenly the world is really interested.

And that's what that was.

That was a stoner conference with maths.

Maybe every time you say something stupid, if you just say y equals x squared.

Exactly.

Do you just only like conspiracy theories before they get mainstream?

I think you're kind of a hipster for

nonsense.

Yeah, the JFK assassination is so hack.

So one of the most basic ways of looking at this is we think it's probably possible for us to make a simulation of the universe.

At some stage in the future, it will be.

And when that happens, it will be done.

And it'll be done more than once.

And we wouldn't know if we were in here or if we're in the simulation.

And so likelihood is there's one reality and loads of simulations.

So statistically, we're more likely to be in one of the simulations.

Although, I have a problem with that slightly because I'm not quite sure how we know there's only one reality.

And then there's like a kind of multiverse theory and a parallel universe theory.

So there could just be infinite numbers of simulations and realities.

It's true, although it could be that each of the realities has a load of simulations.

Oh, God, of course.

So you can have different levels of infinity.

You can have higher infinities and lower infinities.

Stop clogging the joint.

Hand it over, man.

Give me a hit of that.

Elon Musk, I think, says, and I know he's got, he's a bit wacky, but he does say that he thinks there's a billions to one chance that we're not living in a simulation.

Yeah, I would say.

But you say that.

I don't know if people really believe it.

You know intellectually it's probably true.

But do you really think we're in someone's video game?

I think it's more likely than not, but then I also think that it doesn't make any difference.

Well, I was about to ask, what can I do?

If we're in a simulation,

what am I to do about it?

You can hire in Silicon Valley two tech billionaires who have remained anonymous have hired a bunch of scientists to try and work on breaking out of the simulation.

It must be Musk, right?

It It must be him who's one of them.

They remain anonymous, so I don't want to spread rumours about who it might have been.

People have been given money to try and break us out of the simulation that we're in.

That was two sentences, I think, in a New Yorker article, right?

And no one has followed up on who these people are, but it sounds like it's true.

What's a good job, though, isn't it?

What a job.

Being a scientist.

Sorry, yeah, still nothing, but we'll need another grant, I'm afraid.

Yeah, we haven't beaten the boss on level three yet, so.

Do you think they would just play The Sims and try and work out how to get The Sims out of their simulation?

That's such a good idea.

Yeah.

Can you make The Sims play Sims when you're playing The Sims?

Dunno, man.

Because if you can do that, I'm with you and your theory.

Only Alex Bell, who almost came on this podcast today, would know the answer to that, because he's a Sims fanatic and he's not here.

Yeah.

Oh, well.

There was an engineer from MIT who worked out

how much computer memory it would take up to simulate the universe as it is now.

So the universe is massively complicated.

And he looked into the size of the computer that would be needed to get in all this information.

And he worked out that the computer itself that is running our simulation would have to be bigger than the universe.

So that's impossible.

But then.

But what is he using?

Windows?

It looks like you're trying to build a universe.

Then he upgraded his system, and it turns out it's fine.

Because you would just put on that little star screensaver with the stars, wouldn't you?

Yeah.

That's basically good enough for a first step.

See, I think a lot of people think that's not good enough, and there's more to the universe.

Well, maybe we're not even the computer game.

Maybe we're the screensaver.

How embarrassing.

The point is, we don't require much computer memory because it's not like there's an entire universe that's been simulated.

They've only simulated the bits that we're clever enough to spot.

So we're too stupid to see all the massive gaps in this computer system.

So it's like every time we study the movement of stars or something, then in this computer simulation, they go, okay, the humans are looking at it now.

We better provide some information for them here.

But the rest of the time, they don't have that information there.

And that saves on computer memory.

And that's why there is a computer that's the right size to run this simulation that we're all in.

And that's why, in quantum physics, things only change when you actually observe them.

Yes, because we're all in a computer.

That's the thing.

Like, does you don't see the

you know, I haven't played Sims, but presumably there are people in it.

Are there people in it?

Yeah, yeah, you build a family and they have jobs and they like.

So, you don't see the family suddenly sitting around dinner going, Do you think we're in a simulation?

Because if we are, the simulation has started to question itself.

There is a philosophy expansion pack of The Sims where

they do do that.

So it's really good.

So one way you might be able to tell if you're in the Matrix is if there's a glitch in the Matrix.

This is a thing, isn't it?

It's like a little meme.

If you go into Reddit, you can go onto Reddit.com slash glitch in the matrix and you can see examples of when people have

spotted it.

So some of them, I only read the headlines because I read a few of the ma of the actual explanations.

They were a bit boring.

But someone said, Three eggs have disappeared in my fridge.

Glitch in the matrix, guys.

Where is my sandwich?

Glitch in the matrix.

I think I heard perfect by Ed Sheeran in 2008 or 2009.

Wow.

Come on, guys.

If that isn't evidence, I don't know what is.

It's irrefutable.

There's a famous one as well, which I was told about by our buddy Joel,

who is one of the writers of those Ladybird books.

And he's very much convinced that this is the glitch and it's that there used to be a series of kids books which I used to read as a kid called the Berenstein

What's that?

We've never heard that before.

Oh, we got a bit close to reality guys.

Witch alert, witch alert.

They're coming for

men in black coming.

Yeah, so the Berenstein Bears, it was a series of kid books, and the glitch is that everyone seems to remember that they're called the Berenstein Bears but in fact they're called the Berenstain Bears.

The authors were Baron Stain

and genuinely there's a whole thing on the internet of people talking about I swear to God I grew up on these books my whole childhood it had an E, not an A in Stein, not Stain.

And the glitches, the books have suddenly just all changed themselves to a different name.

That's like Walker's crisps.

Everyone thinks they remember Walker's cheese and onion crisps being the blue flavour or the whatever flavour they're not.

The The green flavour.

They are the blue flavour.

Yeah, they are the blue flavour, and everyone thinks that they used to be the green flavour, and they never were.

But that sounds like it's another glitch.

Yeah.

And it's like, what happened to my sandwich, guys?

So many glitches.

In The Matrix, the creators of it were quite keen that everyone who was involved got to grips with a philosophy, weren't they?

So it was the Wachowski brothers, who are in fact both the Wachowski sisters now.

So it was the Wachowski brothers who wrote the screenplay for and directed The Matrix.

And they are both transgender.

And they are both now Lana and Lily Wachowski.

But they, you know, cited as their influences for The Matrix, like Homer and Hitchcock and Dostoevsky, and this whole array of kind of different sources.

That's why Neo always goes, DOL!

You think it's the first part of the word Dostoevsky?

Sorry, I'm just

wow.

We're really on different planes, aren't we, darling?

Sorry.

Anyway, during the filming of it, everyone who works in it, all the actors were made to read three books.

They were made to read three books of philosophy.

So Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard, who's like a sociologist and philosopher.

And then they were made to read Out of Control by an ex-editor of Wired, and they were made to read Introducing Evolutionary Psychology.

So they had to really come to terms with the philosophy that they were exploring.

Yeah, that's interesting.

That must have come in very handy during the massive gunfight scene in the lobby.

So the Warner Brothers, they didn't trust the Wachowski brothers at first because the Wachowski brothers have very little experience making films and this was a very big idea.

So they told them they had to go away and direct another film first.

They just said, go away and make a different film and if that one's a success, we'll let you make the Matrix.

And what was the other one?

They went and made a film called Bound, which is described by the New Yorker as a lesbian thriller with a happy ending.

Which doesn't sound very close to the Matrix.

It doesn't seem like a perfect proof of concept.

No,

you mean they've set them sort of a bad job interview there?

Yeah, but it was a success.

And then they said, all right, you can go away and make the matrix.

And did they do a sort of classic happy ending, or did they misinterpret it as a massage?

Happy ending.

I haven't seen Bound.

Just curious.

If I was able to make a movie with a happy ending, you would do that.

Would you, though?

It doesn't fit in with the plot, but they told me to do it.

Every Disney film would end in a masturbation scene if danced there.

Well, we saved saved the day.

I'm just gonna have a quick message.

It's very weird that you hear happy ending and that's the first thing you assume.

The matrix would not have been made if you were the one to ask about this.

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

My fact this week is that the longest ever kayak trip was completed by a man who couldn't swim.

This was a really good article in Vanity Fair over sometime over the last couple of weeks.

It's about a guy called Oscar Speck, who's just this amazing guy.

He was German, and in 1932, he climbed into a kayak.

His business wasn't going very well.

Germany was in the doldrums then

because of the Depression and because of the Versailles Treaty, a combination of the two.

And so he got in a kayak, thought, sod this, got onto the Danube, and he kayaked for 30,000 miles all the way to Australia, where he arrived in 1939.

And when he arrived?

And when he arrived, he was immediately put in prison because the World War II had started.

He was German.

But he enjoyed it so much that he decided he was going to go to Australia.

That was never the plan.

So he would kayak during the day and then he would dine in the evenings with ambassadors and the rich of every place that he was staying.

In fact, he even, and this is maybe potentially why he was arrested when he got to Australia.

He was German, obviously, but at one point he met up with a Nazi officer who gave him money funding the next leg of his kayak trip and he had a Nazi flag on the front of the kayak as he was going they probably thought they were being invaded by the smallest ever german bosses

you wait till the other guys get here

yeah he didn't think he was going to go to australia did he his um he had a vague goal of reaching cyprus to work in the copper mines yeah that was his big dream wasn't it he wanted to work in a mine that was his and he realized it yeah so he ended up by kind of coincidence i guess uh kind of north of sydney in a big opal mining area.

And he really did make his living from then on with opal mining.

So he had this fantasy about mining and he was always sending random bits of rock home to his family and saying, I think this is really precious.

And they'd just go, it's a lump of rock, mate.

Keep kayaking.

And but he really did make his fortune in opal mining and he never went back home, I don't think.

Or he didn't go back home until 1970, never saw his parents again, spent the rest of his days out in Australia.

Well, seven of them were spent in a prison of war.

He was he was, we should add, um, he stayed in Australia post-war, but for the entirety of World War II, he was in jail.

Yeah.

So he arrived, was arrested, and spent World War II.

Although he did escape twice.

Did he get recaptured because he insisted on going with his kayak?

Just look for any waterways suitable for a kayak.

He'll be on one of those.

He got arrested in India on the theory.

They believed that his kayak was also a submarine.

Really?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And they thought he was a spy, right?

They thought he was a spy and that he was kind of scouting for the for the Nazis.

I've been canoeing or kayaking, and for a lot of the time, my kayak was a submarine.

I had the problem where I went,

I think it was kayaking, with my wife, both of us in the same kayak, but I sat at the back and she sat at the front, and I'm a lot heavier than she is.

And so she was paddling in midair

and I was just sinking.

So the one thing that I didn't read in all of this stuff about him is that he couldn't swim.

Did that change at all when he was...

No, he never learned to swim.

He never learnt to swim.

And there's huge stretches of just ocean, like dangerous high-wave ocean.

Well, there wasn't, I mean, there were stretches where he'd go for like 50 miles or whatever, but actually, if you look at the route, he did hug the coast as much as he could, as you would.

Also, he didn't really reach Australia.

He reached an island that the Australians had colonised.

And

it wasn't mainland.

But it's still Australia.

I would argue that you would have quite a journey to then get actually to the coast of Oz.

He'd been all the way around Papua New Guinea as well by that point and dropped down.

Yeah, he landed in Saibai, which was Australia.

I'm impressed.

I'd love to see you do it, Dan.

But it's interesting.

The

not being able to swim thing is extraordinary because...

As soon as you're even this far away in a pool from a ledge and you can't swim, that becomes dangerous.

You know, a kilometre is dangerous if you can't swim.

Yeah, it is mad.

Yeah.

He was probably a bit mad.

I'm bigging him up here.

Yeah, man.

So, Britain sells kayaks to the Inuits now?

Really?

Yes, because a school trip went there a few years ago with a few kayaks, and then by the end, they didn't need the kayaks anymore, they were going home.

And so they said to those guys, Do you want these?

And they were like, Oh, yeah, we ran out a few decades ago.

We'll take some back.

And then the company that makes them now sends a few over every year.

That's very cool.

That's very nice.

Pope John Paul II loved kayaking.

Did he?

Yeah, he was in a race and he was winning it and just before the finish line he got a hole in his boat and he sunk.

Just holy holy foot.

So good.

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Today, we're exploring deep in the North American wilderness among nature's wildest plants, animals, and

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

My fact is that male butterflies use fake sperm to trick each other into thinking they're extra-fertile.

I'm glad we've got a happy ending to this podcast.

90% of butterfly sperm is fake.

What?

So what's it?

What is it, Plaster of Paris?

It's just filler.

Polyphilla.

It's not polyphylla.

It's completely bogus sperm.

It's sperm lookalikes, which have no nucleus.

They carry no proper genetic information that can be passed on in a mating sense.

90%.

Wow.

So a sperm without a nucleus.

Yeah.

So it's just a dummy.

It's a dummy.

Do they know that?

As in

sperms, are they?

No, no, as in the butterflies.

Are they like, what?

They don't know.

They don't know how much sperm or they're like, I'm going to manufacture my fake sperm.

I don't think they even know they're butterflies.

They don't know anything, the animals, okay?

They don't know what they're doing.

I think

they do know what they're doing here.

Because when they're mating, right, male butterflies, this is a bit gross, but they use their penis to measure inside the females how full she is, i.e.

whether she's mated before.

And it's like using the dipstick in a car's oil tank is the closest analogy.

Yeah?

Okay.

Yeah.

They then decide how much.

So sorry, do they pull it out and see where the line is?

I don't know what they do, but they

don't know exactly how they do it, but they then decide how much sperm to deposit based on the female's mating history.

And it's much cheaper for them to produce non-fertile sperm, right?

Cheaper in form as far as energy energy is concerned.

Exactly, it takes a lot less resources.

A lot of money.

Yeah.

So if the female is nearly empty, then the male will inject lots of fertile sperm, but then loads and loads of fake stuff, which is designed to put off future males who might mate with the females.

Because then they do the dipsticks.

They come along and they'll say, oh, then there's females mating with loads of males, and there's a less of a chance that my

genetic material will get passed on to the next generation.

So they might be deterred from mating.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So that's why they have these huge amounts of phony sperm.

They also eject, maybe this is the same thing that they eject actually.

It's something called methyl salicylate, which is also called oil of wintergreen, which I think is that substance, and it smells really, really strong.

And that's what tells the males don't mate with this one she's already been mated with.

And it's the same.

It's an anti-aphrodisiac

deodorant.

Exactly.

They spray on the female.

It turns you off.

Yeah, okay.

But

it's in mouthwash.

And

in chewing gum and in various things that we use.

That's why you never have butterflies trying to mate with your mouth.

Yeah, and thank God.

So can I just get my head round this whole animals don't know what they're doing thing?

So they don't know that they've put the filler in.

I don't know that we know what they know.

No, no, but they're again.

They must not know that they've put the filler in because otherwise they would then put the dipstick in to someone and be like,

I reckon that's all filler.

No, because

if they find that the female's tank is already full, they inject a more potent mixture to compete more with the other males.

So they have different tactics depending on the mating situation, basically.

And why would you not just go for your most potent sperm?

Because

it takes a lot of resources.

Okay.

So it's easier to use the fake stuff.

I know what you mean.

I do know what you mean.

I don't understand why they haven't evolved to instinctively think when they go in and then they dip in and they realize that she's full up, instinctively evolve to be like well I do that a lot and it's not real that's my trick yeah exactly maybe the other guys have caught on so they don't know they don't know that they're all filler maybe some of them do maybe they're not doing it as much as they were a few thousand years ago um so the females if they don't want the um sperm they will eat it because they have a stomach next to their vaginas which will eat the sperm.

So this is specifically to male cabbage whites and And when your male comes in, he might do a blockage in the vagina to stop anyone else coming in.

But obviously, that's not good for the female because she wants as much genetic material as possible.

And so, they found that she has something called a bursa copulatrix inside her reproductive tract, which is basically a second stomach, which means she can digest stuff that's in there.

How are you?

So, she can eat through her mouth and her vagina.

It's quite the party trick.

No, but there are are jaws.

She's got jaws down there.

Because the stuff the male deposits is surrounded by an incredibly hard shell,

which is designed to block up the entire thing so that other males can't mate with her.

So she has evolved incredibly tough jaws to chew through this thing.

There's a film where...

Jaws, yeah.

With jaws.

There's a few.

It's not the one I'm thinking of.

There's a giant butterfly vagina.

Isn't there a film where the vaginas have jaws.

Yes, yeah.

Yeah.

I think it's a bee movie.

I don't think it was a Spielberg.

Obviously, meant a bee movie as opposed to a butterfly movie.

But yeah, it is good to eat, isn't it?

So the semen can actually contain useful stuff, and the men know that, and so they do this thing called puddling male butterflies, where they suck salts off the ground.

So the way butterflies drink is they drink through a straw in their mouth, this long proboscis, which they uncoil, and the males will go along the ground sucking up lots of salt, lots of sodium, and then this goes into their sperm.

And when the woman, the woman, when the female butterfly eats that, then that creates good offspring.

So, what happens when it's winter and there's loads of ice, and we put loads of salt on the roads, and the butterflies come down and eat loads of salt?

What happens then, Anna?

You get super, super butterflies.

That's what you get.

Yeah, you get.

Do you actually?

You do.

You get males with extra muscles and females with bigger eyes and bigger brains.

Wow.

I didn't see many butterflies in winter.

In gyms.

In gyms.

I thought they all, I didn't think you'd got many flying around in winter.

Yeah, so you can get, let's say, you might salt the roads when it's not winter.

Or you might salt them in higher places when it's cold or whatever.

But basically, they found out recently that if you salt the roads and the butterflies eat the stuff, then the next summer they have extra muscles, bigger eyes, bigger brains.

And they asked the scientist who is involved, so surely that means that road salt is good for butterflies.

And she said, I do not want that to be the take-home message.

Why not?

Yeah.

Well, I think because basically you are changing nature in some way.

And generally speaking, we think that doing that is probably not a good idea.

There's going to be

something, isn't there?

Oh, I would love to see muscular butterflies flying around with big arms.

I didn't read more on this because I didn't think it would be a good topic to talk about, but in Fukushima there were mutant butterflies off the back of the radiation that were super strengthed.

Really?

Butterflies.

Yeah, again, the take-home message is not that give a load of radiation to butterflies is good.

Just quickly on this burst of copulatrix that you were talking about, James.

So it's

the chewing and digesting organ.

It takes 36 hours of constant chewing by the female to get through it.

That's how tough the thing is.

That's a lot of chewing, even with your mouth.

Yeah.

Exactly.

Well, it's flinching.

It's a whole new ball game.

So.

Oh, God.

But no, a team of scientists looked into how the super strength spermatophore, and they could only break it down by boiling it in concentrated sulfuric acid.

That is how tough this thing that the male produces is.

And the males, the spermatophore, the actual package that they give to the female, is up to 13% of the male's weight.

It's amazing, isn't it?

And it's all just a fight.

Basically, the males are just going to make it harder and harder and more difficult to break down, and the females are just going to learn more tricks to break it down.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

It's crazy.

It's amazing.

It's the battle of the sexes.

We're all fighting it.

Yeah.

James and I were talking to our group buddy, Levin Skyra, who's been on the podcast a bunch of times, and he was saying there's a new report that just came out, which showed that the butterfly mouth and tongue predate flowers.

And so you kind of go, well, that's what were they eating beforehand if it wasn't that?

And the suggestion from this new study is dinosaur tears.

Yeah.

I mean, that's very cool.

Isn't that amazing?

So they dip into the...

So they've got this proboscis that we think has evolved to go into flowers, but actually it's evolved to dip into the dinosaur's eye sockets.

Yes.

No, no, yeah.

I guess these sockets themselves.

Yeah.

I didn't, I'm just remembering all.

Because James and I literally saw him yesterday.

Yeah, so even now, butterflies will eat the tears of animals.

I think we all probably knew that.

But yeah, the idea is that because they existed before flowers, they must have been eating the tears before even the flowers came along.

Well, you would think if you were trying to gain sustenance from drinking animals' tears, that you would be more subtle than a massive butterfly.

Yeah, you know what I mean?

And then they've got big, colourful wings.

If something like that landed on my eye, I would notice.

I I suppose that you could say that I don't know what these animals are because I haven't seen this study, but I imagine that they didn't look exactly like butterflies, like with the big ear-shaped wings and stuff.

Yeah, yeah.

But do you think the butterflies had to evolve to make the dinosaurs cry?

Like, developers evolve to say hurtful comments.

Yeah, yeah.

Otherwise, how do they do it?

Or to punch them?

Maybe that's why they had those superhuman butterflies then.

Look like a butterfly, sting like a butterfly, punch like a butterfly.

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 accounts.

I'm on at Triberland, Andy, at Andrew Hunter M.

James, at James Harkin, and Chaczynski.

You can email podcast at qi.com.

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

You can also go to our website, no such thingasoffish.com.

Got lots of of stuff up there.

We've got the links to our tour, which is still going on in 2018.

We're going to be going around the UK.

We're going to be doing Ireland.

We're also going to Australia in May.

So check that out if you're down under New Zealand as well.

We have a link to our book, which is on Amazon.

And we also have, as we said at the top of the show, a link to our new behind-the-scenes documentary, Behind the Gills, which is now up online.

Okay, that is it, Andy.

Time for my massage, and we'll see you all next week.

Goodbye.

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