199: No Such Thing As An Heroic Fire-Goat

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Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you from Leicester.

My name is Dan Schreiber and I am sitting here with Anna Czaczynski, Andrew Hunter Murray and James Harkin.

And once again, we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order.

Here we go, starting with you, Czaczynski.

My fact this week is that Walker's Crisps only source potatoes that are grown far away from golf courses because their factory machines can't distinguish between golf balls and and potatoes.

That's amazing.

It's true.

So, this is Walker's Crisp factory in Leicester, obviously.

And

well done, guys.

A very good contribution to the country, I would say.

And yeah, its factory has this density-based sorting system.

So, what it is, is all the potatoes come in, and the machine automatically knows the stuff that has the right density to be a potato that can be turned into a crisp.

But it just turns out that the density of golf balls is exactly the same.

And so it used to be that there'd be a lot of golf courses next to the fields where farmers are growing their potatoes, which would then be shipped to walkers.

And lots of people got like hard bits of golf ball in their crisp packets.

So would you sort of, you'd be on the green about to take your shot, and a walker's machine would just nab your golf ball and whisk it off to a factory.

I didn't read the details of it, but I would assume it's more likely that you'd take your shot, it would go over into the field as you're you're a golfer James sometimes you miss hit things right not you

very very occasionally every single time I ever play yeah yeah

and then it gets scooped up by the tractors but I wouldn't have thought I'd be able to replace my golf ball with a potato for instance I know it's weird isn't it it doesn't feel like they're the same density I'll give it a go and so was this a problem were there were there people sending packets back going, I expected salt and vinegar crisps and I got a golf ball.

Like, has that ever been a thing?

People did mention it, mention that they had hard crisps.

But if you're interested, each golf ball yields 18 crisps.

Really?

That's incredible.

But no, the factory is really cool, isn't it?

Yeah.

So one of the things I really like about it is

basically a crisp goes from being a potato to being in a bag in 20 minutes.

Wow.

Which is extremely fast, I think.

And there's a man at the end of the whole potato line who just said, he's the potato overlord.

And he just looks at the potatoes and he said, They're all good, they're all good, they're all good.

That one's bad.

Yeah, it doesn't sound quite as exciting as you just made it look, though.

Because I think maybe you read the same article as I did in the Leicester Mercury.

Wow, another great contribution to the country.

They said about this guy who's checking that actual potatoes go through.

They said he looks unsurprisingly utterly bored.

The worst thing is, they probably got permission from walkers to go in and said, oh, we'll write it up really nicely.

They say he looked utterly bored.

This is surely the worst job in the whole building.

Whoa.

In the whole building, though, maybe everyone else is a crisp taster, except that one guy.

There are crisp tasters, aren't there?

Yeah.

You have to be a super taster.

if you want to be a crisp taster.

And when you're doing it, you're not allowed to drink tea or coffee because it will interfere with your palate.

And they have to have 20-minute breaks between tests where all they eat is fruit.

And they make it so that you're only allowed a certain number of crisps every day, so you don't go over your salt limit for the day as well.

So it doesn't sound quite as cool, does it?

No, it doesn't sound sad.

I mean, it's better than the guy just looking at potatoes all day.

But what use is that crisp once the guy's eaten it?

No.

No, no.

They then

retrieve it afterwards.

You have the assistant vomiter, and I think actually that's the worst job.

And they shove their fingers down his throat and they get the crisp back.

It's just for like the general batch, it's like a sample.

Yeah, that I mean, you should have said that because that makes sense.

You left us all hanging thinking.

I think when you say Azoll, I think my feeling is that the people of Leicester got that.

I was talking about me and the voices in my head.

I think you said that because you've seen wine tasters and you've seen them taste the wine, then spit it out again, like they do, don't they?

And did you assume that other people then drunk that

spat out wine?

Yeah, I thought they just popped that back in the bottom bottom.

I have a fact about the the Leicester Walkers factory.

They aim to extract so much water from the potatoes that they don't need any water.

Because potatoes are 80% water, okay?

So when the potato slices get sliced up and then they get boiled, all the steam comes off and they condense it and get water from that that they use for the process of running their building.

Well they also use water to peel the potatoes, don't they?

They fire it at it, so it must be for that.

Yeah.

So basically what I'm saying is in the event of a like a catastrophe, this is probably the safest place to be on the planet because you've got self-sufficient supplies of water and potatoes.

Yeah.

As long as the potatoes keep being delivered.

They might relax their whole no-golf course kind of deliveries.

They also have a sort of what was described in this amazing blog I read, and I would really recommend this blog.

It was this girl who went to visit the factory and gives a really detailed description of her tour of it.

And I can't remember what she's called or what the blog's called.

So just Google and Google until you find it.

And

this is, she described how there's sort of a log flume for the potatoes where they're dropped in this water.

And as the potatoes go through the factory, all the starches, some of the starch comes out of it.

So, in the various processes, some of the starch comes out.

So, when it goes into this log flume to get transferred through the factory, then the starch goes into the water and it goes a kind of milky colour.

And when she was being shown round, they reassured her, they said, Don't worry, that starch doesn't get wasted, it goes to a starch recovery plant, which is just next next door, and then it gets turned into quavers.

Oh,

that's what quavers are.

That's awesome.

Did she work that out, or did they work that?

Was she told that for the blog?

How would you deduce that?

Would she have followed a secret door that said, No, no, don't go here, this is where we put the starch.

It's the quavers factory.

Holy shit.

I just blown this thing wide open.

Oh my god.

Of all the things you could work out, that really is one you have to be told.

Just opened a bag of quavers three weeks later.

Oh my God, I recognize this.

So you know how you were saying it takes 20 minutes from it going from the van into, so that's the full potato into a crisp packet in 20 minutes time.

The amount of potatoes that they use every single hour, if you went to the Leicester Tigers Stadium,

I haven't been to that, but I imagine some of you guys here have.

The amount of potatoes they use in a single hour would carpet the entire floor of that stadium.

That's how many potatoes per hour, and that's every day that this happens.

So there's way more potatoes on Earth than I realized, is what I get than that.

That's a lot of potatoes.

That would make the sports matches that get played at the Leicester Tigers Stadium extremely amusing.

What gets played there?

Oh, brilliant.

Come on, Andy.

Sorry.

You've got to do your research before I come into these things.

Did you guys read about my favourite part of the factory?

And then we can move on from it, but it's a machine called the OptiSort.

And this is the last machine that the crisps are put through.

And this is to check for potatoes that might have flaws in them.

So there's a machine at the beginning that looks at them to check for green bits and shaves the green bits off, but there might still be some left.

And what the OptiSort does is it separates the crisps individually onto this conveyor belt so they're one layer thick.

And then they get hurled, like catapulted really fast at three meters per second past this camera, really high-speed camera that checks for flaws.

And if the camera sees any kind of little speck of green or any speck of black or something, then the crisp flies over a gap, still going really fast, a 10 centimeter wide gap.

And if it's a dodgy one, then there's a swift puff of air that blows down through the gap and dismisses it from the production line.

Whoa.

Isn't that cool?

Yeah, but why all the drama of the speed and the tight...

Because you've just got to be incredibly quick, because you've got to make so many bloody crisps.

That's actually the motto of Walker's Crisps.

We've got to make so many bloody crisps.

I suppose you think it's easy, you bastards at kettle hand manufacturing every one.

We've got a proper company to run here.

We should move on.

We need to move on.

I have so much stuff on golf.

We don't have time.

We don't have time.

Why don't you try and crowbar a golf

fact into one of these?

Just wait for that later on.

Yeah.

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

Okay, my fact is about golf.

It's not.

I could make it about golf.

That would really screw up the podcast, wouldn't it?

It would, yeah.

Okay, no, it's not about golf.

My fact this week is that during World War I, truces would occasionally be called in the trenches so both sides could yell insults at one another.

That's so good.

That is really cool, isn't it?

So, this is the diaries of a guy called Sapa French.

Sapper was his nickname.

And he said in one of his diaries, and this has been quite recently found: I saw a rather curious thing in the trenches this morning, heard some shouting and laughing, and saw a German leaning over the parapet and shouting across to our men.

The distance was about 75 yards.

One of our men shouted, Come on over, Fritz.

Fritz shouted back in perfect English, no blueing fear.

In fact, they could all speak good English.

This went on for half an hour, and then all the heads went down, and the war went on the same as usual.

Wow.

That's pretty cool, isn't it?

They just thought, oh, let's just do a bit of insults and then we'll carry on shooting each other.

A lot of German people who'd been in Britain before the war had been waiters.

And there was one instance, which is a bit of a nicer instance, of how they used to actually chat between the trenches when they weren't actually at war.

And someone recorded how one Englishman had shouted, Guten Morgan, at dawn, presumably the only two words he knew, and then

the German guy on the other side had responded and said hello in English.

And then they started exchanging some kind of fun insults.

And they'd ended by saying, the English guy said, waiter, and the German guy said, coming, sir.

So.

The war so nearly tipped over into banter.

And

we could have avoided hundreds of thousands of deaths.

Yeah.

The trenches were really interesting because the British ones were made as if it was going to be quite temporary, that's what they thought.

And the Germans thought we might be here for a while.

And so their trenches, they had doorbells.

No.

Yep.

They had staircases, electric lights, steel doors, real kitchens, and wallpaper.

Wallpaper?

No.

Wallpaper on the ball.

And the trenches.

Yeah.

The doorbell is an especially impressive thing because obviously when the British go over the top and arrive, they'll have to wait after ringing the doorbell.

Very clever.

But they were.

I just recently read All Quiet on the the Western Front, which is an uplifting read if you haven't been there yet, but about the First World War.

And the constant chat among the German troops was how their stuff was better than the Allies.

That's cool.

And there's kind of a history of yelling and shouting in wars.

The Georgian hero Tariel was apparently able to drop opposing warriors using only the force of his mighty war cry.

Okay, and in Welsh mythology, their hero, Kulhuk, he was said to be able to give a battle cry so loud and violent that all women in the courts would become sterile.

Oh.

Whoa.

He must have been a really popular guy at parties, huh?

I was wondering where you were going.

And I thought you were going to say pregnant.

No, it sounds like it would be that, doesn't it?

Yeah, exactly the opposite, actually.

Yes.

Yes.

A sobering thought.

I have another fact about life in the trenches.

Okay.

And sort of agreements between the two sides in the trenches.

So there was a guy in the First World War, British officer, Captain Robert Campbell.

He got captured by the Germans, I think after the Battle of Mons.

And after nearly two years imprisoned in a German prisoner of war camp, he heard his mother was dying.

And he wrote to the Kaiser, you know, asking to be released to go and be with his dying mother.

Incredibly, the request was granted.

He was given two weeks' leave from a prisoner of war camp on the German side to go back to England, visit his mother on the understanding that he would then go back and go to prison again.

And he did.

He went, he visited his mother, he spent time with her in the last days of her life, and he then honoured the agreement and returned.

And then the next day he's like, oh, my dad's sick now.

And that's the only time that happened in the whole of the war.

Well, because didn't the Allies then,

so there was a German prisoner of war with the Allies who tried it, I think, because that had happened.

Oh, really?

And the Allies did not let him go.

And then they said, no, we don't trust you.

And so then it was clamped down on.

So

he's the only one.

Wow.

It's so weird, though.

I think these insults mean a lot to military when they're doing it to each other.

Because it still goes on to this day.

And a few years back, there was a big moment between North Korea and the Americans.

The North Korean soldiers were seeing American soldiers point.

you know, point at them, make strange noises.

They were pulling disgusting facial expressions at them.

And this was their big problem with them.

And the Americans said we wouldn't do this.

And this is how important that is in the follow-up bit to the statement of them going, they're pulling faces at us.

They're making, you know, they're pointing at us really weirdly.

They said, oh, also, they're aiming their guns at us.

That's like the second thing on the list.

And then this just to prove how childish it is, the statement warned U.S.

troops to stop the hooliganism or face dogs' death anytime, any place.

Like, it's just, it's all it is, is like banter wars, isn't it?

That reminds me of, is it in that book or did we cut it?

In Bhutan.

It's in the case.

In Bhutan, there was a battle.

It wasn't a battle.

It was an argument between India and China.

And they went kind of arguing over this tiny bit of Bhutan.

And if they went to war, it would have been something like a quarter of the world's population would have gone to war.

And they all went to this tiny bit of Bhutan, but they decided they none of them really wanted to have a war.

And so no one brought any weapons.

And you can see videos of it.

And it's just basically some Chinese soldiers and some Indian soldiers kind of just chest-bumping each other.

Yeah.

It's incredible.

Yeah, it's literally, it's a whole line of army members just not fighting, but sort of just

Naito and Leicester.

Is that what it's like here?

You don't want to just go home and have a nice pack of crisps?

There was a lot of friendliness.

There's a really good book about World War I called Meeting the Enemy, the Human Face of the Great War.

And even more friendly than that, there was one instance where Brits arrived at the Somme and they were expecting, they were like, you know, we're fighting the enemy, you know, all geared up for a massive battle.

And they arrived and they just found on a bit of barbed wire a note and it was from the German saying, why don't you send two or three of your guys with some stuff you want to trade and we'll send two or three of ours and we'll swap presents.

And they met up in the middle of no man's land that first day and they exchanged kind of magazines and souvenirs and periodicals that they wanted to read.

And It's amazing having a book club in the middle of a total war.

It really is.

It's so impressive.

And we haven't even mentioned the Christmas truce, which was a big thing, a sporadic thing along a lot of the Western Front.

So I didn't know, though, it stretched not only in the Army, it stretched to the other services as well.

So on Christmas Eve, 1914, the Royal Flying Corps flew over a German airfield at Lille, and they dropped...

on the runway a plum pudding.

And then on Christmas Day, the German Air Force flew over a British airfield and they they dropped a bottle of rum to say thank you.

At the Christmas truce there was one really lovely moment.

A lot of Germans had been living in the UK before the war and during the Christmas truce they all went up into no man's land and one of the English guys realized that one of the German guys was his barber who used to cut his hair in Hoban and he said I need a haircut and so his Hoban barber cut his hair for him.

I mean that's very trusting isn't it?

Do you know who didn't take part?

It was an absolute killjoy at the Christmas truce actually.

Oh was it the senior officers or the Yeah, they didn't, but in particular, one soldier on the German side.

You might be able to guess who it was.

Oh, I can guess.

Was it the most famous one?

It's the most famous one.

Hitler.

He absolutely was not a fan.

Hated the Christmas truce.

Yeah, refused to take part.

He sat in a strop on his own and just said really disapproving things like, you guys have no sense of honor, and this isn't what we should be doing in wartime.

Classic Hitler.

Hey, we should move on to our next fact, right?

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

My fact this week is this, and I find this so interesting.

14% of all California's firefighters are in prison.

Is that amazing?

What are you doing?

14%.

They take people who are in prison, women who are in prison, and they say, would you like to sign up for this?

And we'll relocate you to a program whereby you'll be a firefighter under the confines, but you won't be in actual prison.

And lots and lots of women have signed up to it.

So as a result, 14% of their whole firefighting force are prisoners who are serving time.

And then when they're needed,

they go and either fight fires or they clear paths where fires might happen.

And yeah.

I think it, I mean, it's women and men, isn't it?

It's women and men.

At one point, it was 40%.

It was 30 to 40, but I think, yeah, no, it's both.

Lots of men.

And I don't think they get to do the super fun stuff.

like the hosing.

They do a lot more clearing, like you said.

Yeah, some of them do get chainsaws.

Ooh.

Yeah, because obviously you need to clear a path in forests.

You're going to need a chainsaw to do it.

Yeah.

So yeah.

And they get paid something like a dollar an hour in America, but the exchange of it is that they're not in a classic prison system.

They get to, and they get days off their sentence every time they serve for what they're doing with their job as a firefighter.

But it's only a dollar an hour when you're actively fighting a fire.

Normally, you get paid about a dollar a day.

But I think there is a certain economy in prisons, isn't there?

And there's a lot of trading that goes on.

And did you know that they have their own shopping catalogues?

Well, in prison.

Yeah, so there are in-mixed shopping catalogs, at least in America.

So Gizmodo, their really great website, did a series of articles called Lockdown and interviewed this guy who said that they have a shopping catalogue of approved items.

So it's anything that you want, really, from TVs to toothbrushes or whatever.

And what happens is you can pick what you want and you take it out of the small pay that you might have got in prison or your family can buy it and then it gets delivered and then it gets engraved.

So you get automatically engraved items because otherwise all the other prisoners have also got the same stuff and so you need to know that it's yours.

And actually weirdly in the YouTube clip I was watching of the guy being interviewed he was saying and this is some of the stuff the prisoners have ordered this week and he was opening packages and he opened up a DVD of the series Richie Rich season two.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

I only know Richie Rich as a film.

I did too until I had to look into this.

Are you saying they've made a TV series of Richie Rich?

Yeah, it's the

same general thesis.

Oh, sure.

That is fantastic.

Well, I mean, I...

You hid a fact within a fact there.

It gets something like 22% on rotten tomatoes, but you could certainly give it a go.

But so the thing that really amazed me about this fact was: A, that's an amazing percentage that are in prison that are working for the firefighters.

But B, I thought that firefighting was largely about fighting fires, and it turns out that it's not.

It turns out that most of the time that firefighters spent is doing tasks that the public call for them to do.

And there was a report from the UK from a few years ago that said we need to stop responding to these weird calls that we're getting because we just keep wasting our time.

Between 2009 and 2011, these are the stats.

1,613 incidents where people were locked out, where firefighters had to go and let them back in.

276 adults called firefighters out because they were locked in toilets.

14 people were locked in cupboards.

One woman was stuck in a fridge.

One man was stuck in a freezer.

And one person was stuck in a recycling bin.

There is

so many ridiculous things that they get called out in on a day-to-day basis.

They used to shout as they ran to a fire.

And this was going on as late as 1901 in America.

As they went to the fire, they would shout, hi-ya, hi-ya, hi-ya.

Were they doing the Ninos themselves?

Well,

it seems that way, right?

Yeah.

I mean, I kind of worked out what I thought the tune might be.

It might not have been that.

Okay.

It might have been hi-yai, hi-yai.

I don't know.

But when they decided to replace the shouting with a gong,

a gong!

A gong, and they all hated it.

They were like, no, we like doing the hi-ya, I think.

And also, when automatic fire alarms came in, they all hated that as well.

The reason being that they had lookouts who would look out for the fire.

And as soon as the automatic fire alarms came in, those guys lost their job.

It's the robots taking over the jobs, isn't it?

That was the start of it.

It is pretty much.

And so then the firemen started doing fire alarm pranks to set off these fire alarms.

Oh.

Did they?

But that's the thing fired.

There used to be loads of rival gangs of firefighters.

And there's a scene in New York where all the firefighters get in the scrap outside of fire because they all want to be the ones to

solve the fire.

So you know in Japan firefighters they bring water pumps to the fire but they don't aim the water at the fire, they aim it at themselves.

What?

Oh yeah.

So they wet themselves down so they're not flammable and then they ru this was in the Edo period in the 17th century.

Oh right.

Not now.

So they would wet themselves down, they'd run into the house and then they'd pull the house down.

And that's how they stopped the fires.

And they used to smother them, didn't they?

So they had deliberately very, very thick clothes that would weigh, you know, as much as a person when they were wet.

And they would go up to a fire and just...

Smother it.

They'd go up to a smother it.

They would just jump on it, basically.

They would be able to get close enough that they could cover it up.

But amazingly, they were positions of real respect in Japan in the Edo period, so up until 1868.

And they used to wear outfits that looked like normal firemen's outfits on the outside, so they were quite plain.

But then on the inside of their suits, they had unbelievable works of art stitched throughout them, and they had like stories and everything.

It was kind of like manga, that kind of style.

And they became really famous.

And if they were successful and they put out a fire, they all turned their coats inside out and they paraded through the streets victoriously.

Wow.

And they often had their bodies tattooed with the designs on their coats because, you know, it was such a mark of

something special.

And yeah, they were.

And also the stories that were told on the inside of their jackets became bestsellers in Japan.

So the kind of cartoon strips that firefighters had became well-known stories that you tell your children.

There was another thing which, speaking of covering yourself completely in water, to be going in, that was in the early days, one of the things with firefighters, breathing was very hard.

And so in order to get into a fire and keep your own breath and not suffocate was a hard thing.

So most firefighters used to have a massive beard.

The male firefighters that would go in.

And what they would do is they drench their beard into a bucket of water and then they would bite into their beard and hold it over their mouth.

And that's how they would survive the fires because they would have this beard mask that stopped the smoke coming through to them.

Isn't that true?

That's incredible.

Isn't it true that the guy with the longest beard ever died because there was a fire and he ran out of his house and he forgot to put his beard in this pocket and he tripped over it and fell down the stairs.

Yes.

Should have wet it.

Should have just dipped it in the bath before he left.

That doesn't stop you tripping over it.

If anything, it makes it more rope-like, makes it likely you'll drop over it.

Just lock it up.

Have you guys heard about the firefighting goats of San Francisco?

No, but I get the feeling we're about to.

Sure thing.

San Francisco has firefighting goats.

That's great.

Great movie.

Time for fact number four.

And now do you want to say it?

Yeah, sure.

Look, well, they're kind of pre-firefighting goats.

So they're let loose around San Francisco to eat bits of dry scrubland that would otherwise be a massive fire risk.

Oh, that's clever.

But they've been introduced and it's helped massively with the problems of fire breaking out in the summer.

That's really clever.

It's not as kind of rock and roll when you explain it.

When the goat goes home to his wife and he's like, I'm a firefighter.

What did you do today, darling?

I just ate some more grass.

It was really nice.

Save some lives.

Should we move on to our final fact?

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

My fact is that meerkats can turn their bottoms inside out.

So do they do it on purpose?

They do do it on purpose.

They do it to socialize.

So

they've all got a party trick and it's all turning their bottoms inside out.

So

they have what's called an anal pouch

and it's under their tails and they produce this kind of paste inside it and

it's nature.

You can't go, ugh, it's nature.

And they smear it on plants and rocks to mark territory as their own.

And they even sometimes smear it on other meerkats.

I read that this paste comes out of them a lot like when Play-Doh is extruded from from one of those doll's heads.

I believe so.

Yeah.

From a doll's head.

From a doll's head?

Yeah, you know those things.

Yeah, you remember.

It was like an old kind of toy from the...

Probably, you're too young, I guess.

But you used to have Play-Doh and you used to squeeze it.

And then you had these little dolls and it would come out their hair and their hair would end up looking back.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And scientists do squeeze it, don't they?

So when they're trying to study the makeup of this paste, that's how they get at it.

When they've extruded their pouches, the scientists literally grab it and they squeeze it and you can actually get it out like that.

Yeah.

That I think is a worse job than being the Chris

tester at Walker's, hanging outside a meerkat's nest with a cotton bud just waiting.

But this came to light, I think, probably, Andy, you read this.

They've done a new study about the bacteria in meercat bottoms.

Yeah.

And they've found that it's the bacteria that makes up this,

the different smells, which means they can kind of say whose anal paste it is.

Yeah, it's so the smell comes not from the meerkat, it comes from the bacteria.

But the meerkats use the bacteria to judge, yeah, what's going on.

And so they swabbed these anal pouches, didn't they?

And to get the bacteria.

And I read an article in Popular Science, and they were talking about these guys who were doing the swabbing, and they said, These pouches are wide open.

They're almost asking to be swabbed.

So meerkats are kind of bastards, aren't they?

Sure.

Famously.

Yeah, they really are.

They actually did a study recently looking at the most murderous mammals, and meerkats came out on top, and they're looking at how many of their deaths are caused by members of their own species.

And with meerkats, it's 20%.

So 20% of meerkat deaths are caused by other meerkats, which is amazing.

They're always killing each other.

They kill their own babies.

They kill their mates' babies.

Wow.

Love killing babies.

I read that study as well.

And it also said that sea lions are more murderous than actual lions.

lions.

Oh, wow.

That's quite a good fact, isn't it?

And humans are not very murderous, are we?

According to what we should be.

Apparently, we should be about 200 times more murderous than we actually are.

Should be according to the rules laid out 100 million years ago, pinned to a tree.

That's really nice that we've kind of mastered our worst instincts.

Yeah, it kind of goes off a few times when there's wars and shit.

Sometimes, though, when they're fighting, they latch on to their enemies.

So I think basically the tension in meerkat colonies is caused by the fact that they'll have colonies of up to 50 meerkats and there's basically one mating couple, isn't there?

And no one else is really allowed to have kids.

And if someone else has kids, then the lead couple kills those kids.

And also

who's the dominant couple, it's all decided on based on the size and their weight and their age.

And so everyone's always looking at each other and working out who's gonna be bigger, who's gonna be the next in line.

and they are literally as one article pointed out all the meerkats are comparing the meerkats that's what they're doing

that's very good constantly just on compare the meerkat um did you know that in 2010 remember um the lead meerkat olav um yeah sure he released an autobiography that year do you remember it was like it was like no i don't remember no you you should have because it was one of the biggest selling books of that year that was the year uh that Tony Blair released his memoirs.

Oh, I do remember that one.

Yeah, there were more pre-orders on the Meerkatz book than there were on Tony Blair's memoirs, Russell Brand's book, on David Beckham's book, than Cheryl Cole's book.

This guy outsold everyone.

Yeah.

Did you have any big reveals?

No.

The fortune.

He started the Iraq War.

Yes, yeah.

I knew it.

But no, actually, I read, here's one odd reveal.

It's not in the book, but The Voice of The Meerkat is, and this is very niche, but this is for anyone who's watched

Alan Partridge, the second series of Alan Partridge when he's staying in the hotel.

It's the guy who fixes everything.

You know that guy?

Michael?

Yeah.

Michael is the voice.

Michael, the Geordie exalted.

Yes, yeah.

He's the voice of...

I was watching Alan Partridge this afternoon, so I'm very...

This is an amazing fact for me.

You were saying about comparing the meerkats.

This study, I think, you were talking about, it's a guy called Clutton Brock.

And he did these experiments where they fed extra food to some of the meerkats that weren't the main meerkats.

And when they got fatter, the main meerkats got fatter as well.

And so they found that basically when you're comparing with the other meerkats, if someone gets bigger than you, you immediately eat a load of pizza or whatever they eat and then just try and get bigger than them because you always want to be the biggest one because it's the biggest one who's the most important.

So you're always looking around and it's going, oh, he's looking, you know, Barry's looking a bit fat today.

I think someone compared it to something something that goby fish do, which is almost the opposite, but it's quite interesting, is that gobifish go on diets.

And it's for the same kind of peer pressure reasons.

Like the biggest goby fish is the one who's dominant, and they don't want to cause conflict.

And so if they see a big goby fish, they make themselves less big.

They eat a bit less, because they're like, oh, I don't want to start a fight with that guy.

I'll just go on a little diet, be small, which is quite sweet, isn't it?

That's good.

But meerkats are much more like up in your face, if you're going to get big, I'm going to get big.

I'll race you to the top kind of attitude.

Yep, true.

And meerkats, when they sleep, it's quite interesting what they do.

They pile on top of one another to keep warm.

Adorable.

Yeah, so like when this in summer, when it's hotter, they kind of spread out a lot.

And in winter, when it's cold, they kind of grab another meerkat on top and kind of snuggle in.

Quickly murder them.

They all have meerkat rugs in their homes.

I have some stuff on anuses.

If that's.

Yes.

So this fact is about they can turn their bottoms inside out.

I didn't realize, I was reading a BBC article.

Apparently, to chart the evolution and history of anuses is really hard because a lot of species have a bum and then they suddenly don't have a bum and then they have a bum again.

And so there's this like missing link of anuses that

you can't through the fossils chart it properly because suddenly it's just out of nowhere, no bum.

And then thousands of years later, suddenly there's a bum again.

That's so odd.

Do we have examples of

bummed then unbummed creatures?

I can't remember any, but there is a thing called having a transient anus.

A transient anus, yes.

Yeah.

But I think that might be in the lifetime of an individual.

You have a bum, and then you don't have a bum.

Exactly.

No, so that's a very short-term example of the long-term thing I was mentioning.

So we've covered the sea cucumber before.

Oh, yeah.

Which is a little, it's not a cucumber, but it does live in the sea.

It's a kind of, what is it?

It's a kind of fishy uh organism.

It's not a fish.

They're really weird.

Um they look like odd cucumbers underwater.

But we've co we've said before, they can um

self-eviscerate when they're threatened by a predator.

They distract the predator by squirting their own intestines out of themselves.

And that distracts the predator because he thinks, what's this?

And then

they slowly leave.

But the other incredible thing is, um, they can turn solid or mushy on command on self-command so they can turn their body into a mush and then climb through a tiny crack and then re-solidify into lumps so they can't be got out through the crack by a predator.

Whoa.

They're nuts.

They're so nuts.

And then it's not only for self-defense that they self-eviscerate.

It's a seasonal thing.

In autumn...

They just reabsorb all their intestines into their body and they just become a solid lump of flesh, basically.

So fishermen in the Caribbean, they harvest them in October because they know they're not going to have to gut them because they have no guts anymore.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

And then in spring, they regrow all their organs and they continue like that.

That's insane.

They're so weird.

The one thing I know about the anus of a sea cucumber

is that there's a fish that lives in there, isn't there?

It's called a slender pearl fish.

It lives inside the anus of a sea cucumber.

And the funny thing about them is whenever they want to go into a sea cucumber's anus, they kind of do a little knock on the anus and the anus opens up.

Oh my god.

Like they're entering a German trench or something.

Really?

And is it a secret knock or is it just a normal...

Oh, you think it's like...

Yeah.

It's the pearlfish again.

What a slang term for the anus, by the way, the German trench that we've kind of just over there.

Guys, we need to wrap up.

Do you have anything before we do?

The dragonfly larvae eats via its anus.

What they do, this is really cool, they draw water in through the anus, they clench, and then they compress their abdomen and the muscles in the thorax against the water filled in their rectum, and then they can raise the pressure in their body, and it fires out their mouth, and then they can eat.

What?

Isn't that cool?

You're drawing water in, you're squeezing, and then your mouth comes out and you eat.

Wow.

That's so awesome.

What?

I'm glad I don't do that.

But I'm happy that someone else has found the opportunity to do that.

Was that on Blue Planet?

It It was on Brown Planet, actually.

Okay, that's 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 during the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Schreiberland.

Andy.

At Andrew Hunter M.

James.

At James Harkin.

And Czechinsky.

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 thingasoffish.com, where we we have all of our previous episodes we have a link as well to our book which is out now and guys at the end of the show we're gonna be out there we've got a bunch of copies so if you want to buy a copy and say hi uh we can sign it for you for christmas or whatever um and we have pre-signed copies as well if you can't be up asked to line up or if you don't want to speak to us if you actively dislike us or you can just go home you can just go home you don't need to we can't force you um yeah and um we're gonna end this show aren't we with a fact yes we have a fact that you guys sent in at the beginning of the show and we're going to give away one of our books to one of you and anna you have that fact yep so this is our favorite fact that you guys sent in and it's from uh i don't know if i can read my own writing but victor jegger nathan are you in you in

such a good fact so this fact is that uh guide runners for sight impaired runners can't use elasticated tethers at the paralympics anymore after the chinese started catapulting their runners across the finish line at the last minute

That's amazing.

Awesome.

We'll be out the back, guys.

Thank you so much for coming.

We'll see you later, Let's say.

Goodbye.