174: No Such Thing As A Manta Ray

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Hey, everyone. Before we begin this episode of Fish, we just want to let you know that we're starting a whole new thing.

Yes, and that thing is Facebook Live, and it's going to be every Monday at 5 in the afternoon British time.

And we're going to be on Facebook. We're going to be streaming a video of ourselves at facebook.com/slash no such thing as a fish, where we talk about the past week's episode.
That's the idea.

We always, when we put these episodes out, get lots of emails, lots of tweets, lots of people in the streets running up to us and shouting that we got things right, we got things wrong, they want to add things.

And we thought, why don't we turn it into a sort of post-episode book club where we talk about the previous week's episode?

So come there, armed with your facts, with your questions, with your complaints. You know, if you think someone says something stupid, it dans at another fact that wasn't true.

If you think we missed a joke, we quite often get tweets or emails saying, I can't believe you didn't make this joke.

Yeah, maybe don't bring the abuse bit about my facts, but everything else, absolutely. Yeah, so we'll be there 5 p.m.
British time. It's facebook.com/slash no such thing as a fish.

And we hope to see you there. So, yeah.
On with the show.

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

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, James Harkin.

Okay, my fact this week is that Guinness World Records have entries for most mousetraps released on the tongue, most matchsticks extinguished by the tongue, and most fan blades stopped by the tongue.

Wow. Is it all the same guy? No, different guys.
Most mousetraps released on the tongue. And does it mean the mousetrap is on the tongue, or does the tongue made its way into the mousetrap?

It wouldn't be very impressive, would it? If you just balanced a mousetrap on your tongue and then it snapped against air in your mouth. Yeah.
It's really not that.

It's literally getting a mousetrap, sticking your tongue in it and it just going snap. Wow.

What is the record? What's the most...

The record is 53

and it was done by a guy called whose surname is Casey. I can't remember his first name.
And weirdly, he did it at the Maryland Renaissance Festival

where

they reenact things that happened during the Renaissance. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That famous. Yeah, I think that was under Louis XIV, wasn't it? There's a tongue record that's missing from your list there.
Yeah, gorgeous. Yeah, this is my favourite one.

The most blowtorches extinguished with a tongue in one minute. So I want to compare matches to blowtorches then.
Yeah. How many blowtorches? 48 in one minute.
In one minute. In one minute.

It's this Australian guy from Byron Bay called Shane, that's spelled C-H, Shane Holtgren. He had a blowtorch in each hand, and he was putting them out with his tongue, and he did 48 in one minute.

Did you know that Chane Hulkren is married to Zoe Ellis, who holds a record for most mousetraps released on the tongue in one minute? Open brackets, female, closed brackets.

Yeah, so they have a talented tongue standard. Did they meet at that

convention or whatever? And he said,

why?

Why did they marry?

Why do they do this stuff? Because they want to get in the Guinness Book of Records.

So, for instance, the guy who did the most matchsticks extinguished is a guy called Ashrita Furman. And he holds a record for the most Guinness World Records.

And basically, he just tries to beat as many world records as he can. Wow.
So, he also has records like Pogo Stick Jumping Underwater, longest duration. Underwater, okay.

Much easier underwater, really. I think that trivialises the good name of the stopping a fan blade with your tongue on Guinness World Records.
I think so.

Hopscotch, most games in one hour. How many do you think that is?

Four? Twenty.

Well, I don't know how long a game of hopscotch takes, really. Me neither.
I can't remember how it starts or finishes. 3,600 seconds in an hour.
How long does it take to play a game of hopscotch?

Well, surely you can have unlimited people playing hopscotch, in which case it could take forever. But if there's just one of you, then you could do a game every minute.

Well, I think if you're trying to beat the record, you probably don't want an infinite number of people playing.

He probably did it on his own.

I'm going to say it takes 20 seconds to play a game of hopscotch.

Do you know the rules of hopscotch? I think we've ascertained I don't.

So I think what you do, if my memory serves, is you throw a little stone onto the number one, and then you hop scotch it around, and then you come and pick it up, and then you throw it onto the two, and then you hop scotch round, and then you do three, four, five, six, seven, eight.

Is that right, Anna? That is correct. Why do you have to throw a stone to get onto the...

Well, that's the game. It's just the game, because if you don't know what's going on.
Why do I have to hit this tennis ball over the net? What's even the point? It just keeps coming back.

But if you missed, do you have to throw again? If you miss. If you missed the one, if I'm throwing my

one.

If you're playing against another person, say you and I were playing, and you missed the two, then it would be my turn to aim for the one.

And it would be whoever completes it first. I think I can see why tennis took off in a bigger way, to be honest.
I think if you're missing the one, you're not made for that game anymore.

All right. It's true.
It's one of those, it gets progressively harder because the ten is further away from the one.

All right, the only thing it takes five minutes to play again with Hotscott, so I think he did 12 in an hour. He did 33.
33? I said 40? Did I say? You said 20. Great.

This is pretty good. That's pretty good.
But this guy, Furman, is quite good because he invents new things to beat records in.

And so he invented a thing called land rowing, where you basically get an indoor rowing machine, you put wheels on it, and then you try and go as far as possible or as quick as possible.

And he got the record in that because he invented it.

But De Guinness accept his invented new criteria, this biggest weirdo in the playground who keeps on making up new records to break. Don't they decide? Yeah, you would think that.

He must have friends on the inside, right? Yeah. I think he's broken so many records they kind of like him and they accept some of his more unusual.

Because they must see his number come up on the Guinness phone system in the office and go, oh no, what's he thought of this time? It's like most phone calls to Guinness.

But are there rules about what you can do in terms of

because they haven't got the record for the fastest anyone's chopped their own hand off? Yep. So where does it stop?

Because you can put out a blowtorch on your tongue, which I presume is quite painful. Yeah.
So they tend to accept quite a lot of things until someone says, no, this is dangerous.

So, for instance, they stopped obese animals quite recently, right? Oh, yeah. Because there was always people saying, My cat is, you know, the fattest cat ever.

And then they said, well, actually, it's not very good to feed your cat Mars bars all the time, so maybe we shouldn't have this record anymore.

With the record for stopping fan blades, are we talking ceiling fan?

Or one of those fans where you'd have to put your tongue in between the bits of caging in order to get that. It sure is a little handheld fan.

I have a feeling it isn't. I've seen a photo of it, but

my visual memory isn't good enough to remember what it looked like, but I have a feeling it was quite a big fan. Right.
Like a big sort of one that you would get in a warehouse.

Imagine you're at a rave and they have it's getting really hot in there and so they get some kind of industrial fans to put in the corner.

Yeah, it was implausible from when you said imagine you're at a rave. Unless I'm there in an administrative capacity.

The only rave I ever went to, I got kicked out of for sleeping on the floor.

And I was the one who got in trouble. I woke up.
Everyone was doing drugs around me and they're like, hey, you can't do that in here.

Have you heard about the record for the longest tongue? This is another Guinness record.

Okay, so the average tongue, The average person's tongue is 10 centimeters from the back of the throat, right? The point, it's called the oropharynx. It's where it joins the back of your mouth.

The man with the world's longest tongue, as of 2015, was a guy called Nick Sterbel, and he has a tongue which, when his mouth is closed, extends 10 centimetres out of his mouth.

So it's like he's got an entire whole normal tongue outside his mouth. But not when his mouth is closed, because when his mouth is closed, it will be inside his mouth.

You mean when his mouth is closed around his tongue?

He can put it back in his mouth. He doesn't put it back in his mouth.
Does he roll it up like a party? No, he doesn't roll it up like a thing. He's missing a trick then.
He actually says, fits it in.

Well, he says it's perfectly comfortable, doesn't he? I would have thought that would be really uncomfortable. He doesn't know any different, does he?

That's a really good point. Do you know what he uses his tongue for?

He's a respectable man.

He advertises on it.

Like little banners. Yeah, that would be great.
That would be cool. Does he pretend to have a

party popper? You know, those things you blow, but he doesn't. It's just his tongue.
That's not what he does, no. Does he use it to point directions to strangers when he he has both his hands full?

Yeah.

He doesn't. You're one letter off with pointing, though.

He paints with it.

So he said that he made the good argument that a gift is something that you're born with, you get given, but to turn it into a talent, you have to use it in the best way you can, is his philosophy.

So he's taken to painting with his tongue. And he calls it licking.
So if he did, in fact, say licking it. How did he come up with that? That's really good.

Did you say it again? Licking. Yeah, so he'll say, I licked his favourite animal as a beaver, he claimed to

I know, because he's got a sense of humour, this guy.

So he'll say, you know, I just licked a beaver, and that'll be he just painted a beaver.

But we have a word for painting things. Not with the tongue, though.
This guy can call it whatever he likes. He's the one doing it.
Yeah, but but licking is is taken. It's done.

That's not how it works with words. But

he does have to wrap his tongue in cling film before he dips it in the paint.

That makes sense. Because the paint is acrylic or it m who knows, it might be lead-based paint that he uses.

Either way, he then has to lick the canvas with a paint, cling film-covered, paint-covered tongue.

Because he was inspired by someone he saw on YouTube, an Indian man who painted with his tongue, but who also got quite bad toxic fume poisoning, so he decided to avoid that.

But do you know who he says his favourite artist is when he was asked who his favourite artist was?

His second favourite is Picasso. Licasso?

Yeah.

Can you give us a clue?

Someone like Picasso. Is it one of those elephants? Oh, that's unbelievably close.
My clue is that Dan's really close.

The The monkey, Bubbles. Coco, the gorilla.
So, yeah.

Yeah, very good. On tongues,

there's a job which is a baby food taster. And I was reading, I think it was in The Guardian, a woman called Beth Anderson wrote a piece about what it's like being a baby food taster.

So she's a super taster, which we've talked about before, which is people who have many times more taste buds on their tongues than normal people.

And she's just, her company has just insured her tongue for a million pounds. Wow.
So valuable is her tasting ability.

So that if she accidentally is is looking near the skirting board and there's a mousetrap down there.

And she dives into it tongue first.

But she says she really tries to get into the mindset of a baby when she tastes it.

Wow. Wearing a nappy, throwing up on a mum.

Sucking on people's nipples.

She just says she makes a real effort to get into the mindset of a baby. So each time she puts a spoonful of pureed shepherd's pie in her mouth, she tries to remember being six months old again.

Just about like skillful tongues,

there's a guy called Gliniecki. I can't remember his first name either, but he is one of the record holders in tying a cherry stem with his tongue.
Do you know this kind of trick that people do?

Yeah, yeah.

So, his, the first time he ever tried it was in a bar in Florida, and it took him 20 minutes to do just one of them.

And now, his record is 679 stems in an hour.

Wow, 679 stems in an hour. Yeah, that's

well way. No way.
Wow. That's one every six seconds.
That's good, isn't it? But then apparently, he says,

if you try it, you'll get faster with practice. But if you master the skill, be prepared for relentless sexual subtext that comes with it.
Oh, poor guy. I bet he's really hating that.
Yeah.

Did he invent that practice? No, he didn't. As in this reasonably common thing, I've remembered hearing about it when I was a kid.
Me too, yeah.

Apparently, you put it in your mouth, you fold it over by folding your tongue over, you know, like folding it backwards, and then you somehow manipulate the ends so that it goes into a loop. Yeah.

This is what, so my brother does it, and then he's like, it's really easy. You just fold it backwards with your tongue, and then you're like, yeah, I've got that bit.

And then you go, and then you just weave one bit through the other.

What am I using to do that? Yeah. My epiglottis.

Knock it in with that.

If you are a sommelier,

do you know what you should be doing with your tongue to keep it match fit? Okay, so we're talking wine tasting here, are we? We are.

You should dip it in olive oil once a day. That's nice.
Should you hang it out of your mouth as often as possible so it gets aired?

Yeah, maybe.

Is it that you rub it with something or you treat it with something? Sort of, yeah.

You don't know, Dan. Well, I know the one that I've got on the paper, but you might have all suggested correct answers as well.
I phrased that really badly. I'm not informed on what you shouldn't do.

The answer is that you should lick rocks. Oh, come on.
Yeah, what does that do? Sommelios, it just

to train their palate. So I guess it clears them, it roughs it up, maybe it releases certain things, but that's what they recommend.

It's this new book that's come out called Cork Dork, and that's what you call obsessive sommeliers. Cork dorks.
Cork dorks, that's great. Yeah, so the cork dorks, they lick rocks.

They do tasting sessions at 10 a.m., which they call tongue cardio. What? 10 a.m.

Tongue, the magic elf. The tongue.
Tongue cardio, yeah.

Can I just say one thing about tongue prints?

I read an article, this was in a scientific journal, about how tongue prints might be a good thing to use instead of fingerprints. Oh, wow.

And they said it's good because you can stick it out of your mouth for inspection. Otherwise, it's well protected in your mouth.
So, you know, you keep it protected, but then you can stick it out.

It's difficult to forge, according to them.

According to them, the act of physically reaching or thrusting it out is a convincing proof for liveness in a person as well. That makes sense.

I've always said that.

Whereas if what you mean if you're sort of in a passport queue and you're holding the person you've just murdered by the arc, you can shove their finger onto the print thing and no one will be any the wiser.

Exactly.

Does it not suffer though from remember there's that fact about how people in pineapple factories were losing their fingerprints because of the acidic quality of the pineapple?

There's an enzyme in it, yeah. Yeah, and so and isn't there another fact that pineapples kind of eat our tongues as we're eating it.

So, wouldn't you be altering your fingerprints every time you had a pineapple? Yeah, but then it's the same problem with the fingerprints, so it's no more problems than you already had.

Kinda, except all of us don't work in a pineapple factory. But all of us don't eat pineapples constantly either.

Presumably, you're touching pineapples with your fingers as much as you're eating them, unless people are feeding you pineapples whenever you eat them.

I just I would hate to like lose a case because the guy who robbed my house has a big love of pineapples.

Why would he have left his tongue print unless unless you had a collection of rocks that he loved? And he was a cevele, maybe he did some painting at my house.

What are you going to dust for tongue print? Worst look if you're a cevele. You decide to rob a geologist's house.

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Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that Pope John Paul II's Pope Mobile can be hired out for stag dos and hen do's

So this is the one that was built when he visited Ireland in 1979 and it was built by these two guys who were given a brief to build it They weren't given too much money to build it So some of the things that well it's it was a problem because some of the things that are attached to the modern popemobile that Pope Francis uses, i.e.

bulletproof glass,

was not affordable for the one because no one was willing to pay for it. It cost like £200,000.

They asked the government for the money, didn't they? But it never made it into their account. Yep, exactly.
So instead, they used shatter-proof glass.

And one of the builders said, so, you know, if a fellow threw a stone at the vehicle, the glass wouldn't break.

That was the level of protection that the Irish Popemobile was giving. But so, yeah, so

once he left, the Potemobile remained in Ireland and it went to a museum. There were two of them.
And they decided that it would be fun to rent them out for stag do's and hen parties.

And that's what's done. And it still includes the original chair that the Pope sat on inside the actual

column. What does it look like? Is it like the.
Because I think of the Potmobile as being basically a bubble.

So, yeah, you're thinking of like the golf buggy version of the Pope. There's many versions, like the Batmobile.
There are many, many different versions of the Pope.

There's only one version of the Batmobile. No, there's plenty.
You've got the Adam West Batmobile. You have the Chris Blackboard.
They all look the same, don't they? They look nothing like each other.

They're not black. No, they are.
They're not. They're basically the same.
Guys, they're not. Look at photos.
I can't believe we're having this chat. They are completely different.

How do you know it's a Batmobile then? Because Batman's in it. There are two.

Does any car become a Batmobile? Yeah, for the purposes of he's. So if I gave him a lift in my mini, you have to become a Batmobile.

If he has to get a train to a crime, does that become the Bat Train? It's still mobile, so it would be a mobile.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. He has a Batcopter, the helicopter.
Right. Yeah.
So there's, but you just put Batman in it and it belongs to it. So same with the Pope.
Same deal with the Pope.

You put Pope in any car, any car. It's a Pope Mobile.
Yeah. So what do these stag and handies? Because surely it can only fit one person in it.
No, it's a pretty boring stag do.

You put the stag in it and that everyone else stands either side of it kind of throws rocks at it for anyone.

So what it had was a sort of a truck-like area where 15 people could sit inside, including the Pope.

And then it had a balcony of sorts where the Pope came out to on the front to wave to people with a hand railing to make sure he didn't fall.

That's why it can be lent out to stag do's, because up to 15 people or 16 people can be inside of it. But it cost 300 euros an hour to rent, wasn't it? Yes.

And they kind of suss out what kind of stag do you're going to be, because obviously they've won a bit of respect in the Pope's chair.

Yeah, you were told. Yeah, they said we'll be selective about who we choose.
Will they? I don't know how selective you can be with stag do's. Anything that's marketing itself as a stag do.

Oh, I don't know. I've been on some pretty respectful stag do's.

You were only invited for the admin, though, weren't you?

I did the accounts and the billing stuff in the corner.

Oh, dear.

But Pope John Paul said he didn't even like the name Popemobile. He asked the media not to use the word potemobile because he thought it was undignified.

So imagine if he could have found out what would happen to it after that.

And same with Pope Francis and the modern one. They all hate the word potemobile because they think it sounds, as you say, a bit sort of.
Actually, Pope Francis

doesn't like it at all, does he? He's very modest and he thinks that you shouldn't be rolling around in this grand thing, thing, especially for you.

And he mostly just uses the vehicles that the Vatican has. It's got like a bunch of vehicles you can rent out.
He drives himself around town on his own.

He prefers to be out in the open, so he has an open top because there was an assassination attempt. And so since then, they were often bulletproof and stuff.

But he's like, no, I want to feel closer to my people. So he just stands in an open top car.
He told reporters. It's true, anything could happen.

But let's face it, at my age, I don't have much to lose. Yeah.
So a very relaxed affirmation.

And he, so the current one that he has, you always see it going at about 10 miles an hour. But if it needs to make a sudden escape, it can go up to 160 miles per hour.

Yeah, it could just jet away at 160. I think that was the last post, wasn't it? The golf buggy type one.
Oh, yeah, yeah.

No way that that's a good idea. No way that something that unaerodynamic could get up to 160.
Yeah, 160. Yeah.

It's impossible. I think wings come out the side and it just balances it.
But he's not driving it, so he'll just sit in the box. No, no, no, it doesn't drive the Permobile.
I thought you said

you're mixing up Batman.

You said he drives himself around. Do you mean in his little car? I said that, and that's the latest one drives himself around, just in the rental car.
Just rental car.

It's Vatican, special Vatican cars that they have. And they have their own license plates, don't they? They all have a special Vatican City license plate

C V1, which stands for Stato della Citta del Vaticano, which just means Vatican City, basically. But the locals, the local joke in Rome, is that it stands for Se Cristo Vedese.

Hang on, James.

Let me explain. You don't need to explain the joke.
You're right, let's move on. But can you explain it, please? It just means, Se Cristo Vedes, it just means if only Christ could see this.

It's a joke about the Pope being flash. No, I get it.
Oh, God. Okay, move on.

These two guys who built this original potemobile that we were talking about, they owned this company called OBAM.

And they were the biggest vehicle builders in the country at the time. They claimed to be the first people to make refrigerated trucks in Ireland.
And this is the origin story of the company.

They were in town one day having a pint. When they got a bus home, they noticed there were trucks going up and down the road and said, Wait, we should start doing a business making trucks.

And then they became the biggest truck makers in Ireland

and made the potmobile. Awesome origin story.

And the other thing about this potemobile, the original one that we were talking about, is there is a place to keep a gun.

and that was because US Archbishop Pale Marcinkus was with the Pope at the time, and he always carried a gun with him wherever he went. I love the sound of this guy.

And this guy, a deranged priest, attacked him once with a bayonet.

And so he always kept a gun by his side.

The Pope.

He was going for the Pope. A deranged priest, beautiful words, ran at the Pope with a bayonet.
And this guy,

Marcinkus, managed to thwart him

with his gun. No, with his bare fists.
And then from then on, when they built the Popemobile, they built this little pouch underneath Marcinkis' seat so that he could have his gun in there.

The last time that there was an assassination attempt on the Pope, it was this guy called Mehmet Ali Adche,

and it was in 1981.

He'd actually escaped from prison in Turkey for another murder. But he tried to kill the Pope and he went to prison, and he's been let out now, and he's done a bunch of things.

First of all, he said he wants to meet the current pope.

Bring him over.

No, but he feels really bad. Do you think the other pope who retired as well?

Can they get that open-roof car that they loved getting in?

He's seen the area of his way, so he also wants to convert to Catholicism.

And one of the first things he did was he went and laid some roses at John Paul II's tomb, who is the guy that he tried to assassinate.

But he's also said, in 2010, he said, by the way, guys, I'm up for killing Osama bin Laden, if you guys want me to. He made the the mistake.
Dress him as the Pope.

I think you're all being really cynical about this recently reformed man. He's also approached Darn Brown because he wants to write a book with him.
What?

Yeah, he wants to write a book of his life and adventures as a potential Pope assassin. But yeah, so I quite like that all these countries around the world have popemobiles waiting to go.

Occasionally they bring a Pope Mobile in a plane if the Pope is visiting a country. So like the Beast, like how the American president has the big beast car that gets taken overseas and in the planes.

They do that, but most countries, like Ireland, have one. Well, Ireland used to have one ready.
I don't think they'll be using that one. Pope Lawrence's next visit.
Just wipe it down, it'll be coming.

Okay, we need to have it returned, Pope, by seven, because there's a stag dupe for Mickey going on.

Okay,

it's time for fact number three, and that is Andy. My fact is that there is no such thing as a manta ray.
Okay, so just to clarify what a manta ray is before I blow your minds. It's a type of fish

of which there is no such thing.

Yes. And this is another thing, which is already part of a no-such thing thing, which is also a no-such thing.
Exactly. Yes.
It's become kind of an anti-matter podcast, hasn't it? Dark matter podcast.

So there is a new paper out about these things, manta rays. And you'll you'll know what I mean when I say manta ray, the absolutely massive sail-shaped fish that swim through the water.

They're really huge. Sometimes you'll see it on the sidebar of the internet with one behind a lady in a bikini.
Yes, it's a very popular meme.

It's a photo that was taken where three people were having the photo in the ocean and suddenly behind them a manta ray rises up and is photo bombing them. Oh, that's very nice.

Okay, well, those things don't exist, basically.

So there's a new study in the Zoological Journal of the Linnaean Society, and there are two species of manta ray, and there are nine species of mobular ray.

And this paper is arguing that manta rays have basically been miscategorized and that they actually all fit into mobula.

They're saying basically that they're all the same thing, but because mobulas were named first,

that everything has to be called mobular because you're always named after the first thing that gets named. Yeah, and these are not different enough basically to be their own genus.

But the problem is, mobula is not a very common word, whereas manta ray is a relatively common word.

So so people are just going to carry on calling them manta rays even though they're not really called that yeah i think even i may do despite the fact this is my fact this week no i think we should start the campaign mobula's a funnier word i think yeah mobula mobulae yeah mobula's a bit onomatopic as well i bet they make a sound a little bit like mobula in the water do you think they do

you think they name themselves yeah i assume isn't that what all fish do

you ask them what they're called they tell you then you kill them and put them in a museum yeah unless you name them alfred which is what the reef uh mantra is called what what what it's called alfred it's called manta alfredi oh that's cool

it's named after batman's butler that's right yes

um no it's named after queen victoria's son oh alfred who was the first british royal to visit australia so they were so excited about getting a proper royal over that uh they named a mantra after him we actually got an email about this a couple of weeks ago from a guy called rich horner who works out in bali at the exact spot where they were doing all these channels.

You mean he works out in Bali, or he works out in Bali? He works out in Bali, and between gym sessions, he wrote us an email.

So he wrote us an email saying he's been dying to tell us this for ages because he listens to our podcast and it's been known for a while.

So he said, News just in, there's no such thing as a manta ray. They've just been reclassified as big devil rays, brackets, mobular rays, after a DNA study of them.

I work in Bali on Noosa Lembungen, which which I believe is an area. That's pronounced differently,

where we work with the Marine Megafauna Foundation team to ID the manta rays here, creating a database of them all.

We thought we had 30 to 40 of them 10 years ago, but by using their unique spot patterns on their chest and belly, we worked out that there were over 600 individuals here on our island.

So the project was set up there by Andrea Marshall. Andrea Marshall was the subject of a natural history documentary called Andrea Queen of the Mantis.

And she was visiting the other day, giving us an update, presentation on her current research, and then dropped the bombshell that her geneticist colleagues were writing a paper describing them as just big devil rays.

I've been itching to tell you guys this for ages. There we go.

Yeah. And he's offered that if we want to go swimming with these new mobular rays, we're more than welcome to in Bali.
Yes. Yes, please, please.
Please, please.

Do you think, was there a huge gasp in the conference where she announced that actually manta rays were just devil rays? I reckon some people starmed out. I think you're right.
A few fainted, maybe.

It is big news. It's huge.
You study giraffes and you find out that they're actually just big deer. Yeah.
That is huge. That's what this is like.

But there must be like people who study mobulas and people who study mantas.

And now there's only one job for those two people. Yeah.

Yeah.

Sacking Zahoy.

Do you know they mate in a train? In a train? In a train of manta rays. So like a conga line.
In a conga line.

Yeah.

God, you've been to some pretty spicy parties, haven't you, Tan?

If they're mating in a train, doesn't that mean you're always mating with someone who's actually mating with someone else, who's actually mating with someone else?

And is there always some poor mobby laure at the front who's not getting any action? Unless they do it in a ring. Yes, unless it's a ring.
Is it a ring? But that wouldn't be a train.

That'd be a weird train. It would be like a monorail.
Yeah.

I've got the answer here.

We'll take it. So, no, it's up to 30 males follow around one female, right? And she leads them on a dance and she tests their endurance to see if they're fit enough to breed with her.

And eventually, she selects one. She does a load of cool, swooshy moves through the water.
So, it is supposed to be a bit like the conga, isn't it? It is a bit like

the person at the front sets challenges. Yeah, but they do a dance, don't they? Yeah, you follow when the lego.

Oh, yeah, yeah, you go. And if you stay until the end, you get to have sex with someone.

That's how it works. I love the conga.

And eventually, the female at the front of the conga selects a single male and they mate. But that's cool.
They they are very social and they hang out sort of in groups together, don't they?

So they eat socially like like humans a bit,

sort of, in that they do what's called stacking.

So there's one manta ray that will be at the front and that's the one who's doing most of the feeding and then he'll eat a lot or she will eat a lot of the plankton and then the other plankton will be whipped around his body and then will feed into the gaping mouths of the people behind him and they switch round who's at the front.

So they just take it in turns who get to be the prime fever. That's very nice.
It's really sweet. Yeah.
Not if you're a plankton. No, that's true.
No one ever thinks about the plankton.

If you think you've got past one of them, you're like, thank God for that. And then another one comes along.

There is an article called How Do You Stick a Camera on a Manta Ray that I read.

Do you know how you do that? No.

Glue super glue? Oh, I mean, I read that they're naturally incredibly mucusy. So wouldn't it just.

They're coated in mucus? You lure them with a handkerchief, is what you do.

No, is it that you just pop it on them and the mucus? No, well,

that's one of the problems. So, if you they usually put things on fish like with a suction cup, but the skin of the manta ray doesn't really allow for that, it falls off quite quickly.

And so, there were some scientists and they had some peanut butter with them, and so they decided to smear peanut butter on the camera on the suction pad, and it worked miles better.

And they stay on for like four or five hours now. Wow.
That is amazing. Yeah.
That's cool. Why designers have peanut butter but not an adhesive, a scientific kind of glue? Crunchy or smooth?

Well,

that's the real question. Sorry, answer Dan's.

I'll start with Anna's question.

I think with proper adhesive, it might be difficult because it might be toxic, I suppose, or you don't want it to stay on forever. It's quite good that it comes off after a few hours.
Yeah. All right.

I'll allow it. I've forgotten what Dan's question was.
It's still smooth.

I'd actually deliberately forgotten about it. Oh, sorry.
Sorry.

It must be smooth, right? Yeah.

There is one amazing website called Elasmo-research.something.

And it just has a QA section about manta rays. It reads like it was written by a manta ray, basically.

It's just complete nonsense.

It says, is it true manta rays have rescued fishermen? And the answer is probably not.

If, apart from breeding season, manta rays are not terribly interested in one another, they're probably not interested in hapless fishermen either.

I know.

They can recognize themselves in a mirror, we think. We think.
We're not sure. But if that is true, that is massive, because no fish has ever been shown to recognize itself in a mirror.

How did so, when you say we think?

It's about how they act in front of the mirror as opposed to acting in front of another manta ray. So for instance, if I was to put a spot, I've got a marker in my hand.

If I was to put a spot on your forehead and then showed you a mirror, you would likely, because you're an intelligent human, kind of... try and wipe it off.
Got it.

And so if you did it to an animal, if you did it to, let's say,

a shrew and put a dot on the head, they wouldn't recognise that it's their head with the dot on it, so they wouldn't try and wipe it off. And if you did it to some primates, they would.

If you did it to an elephant, they would. And I think what you're saying is manta ray would as well.
Well, although the way they tested it with the manta rays this time.

excuse me, you've just got a little bit of um

was nothing as advanced as that.

They said that they put a mirror in front of the manta rays, and they noticed that the manta rays, first of all, they didn't seem to try and attack or interact with the thing in the mirror, which implied that they knew it wasn't another manta ray, right?

And second of all, they blew bubbles and made odd body movements as if they were showing off their own bodies in front of the mirror. Wow, I believe it, I completely dig it.

And I think they do save fishermen, actually.

I think they were very sweet.

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

My fact is that the former mayor of Bogota once hired 420 mime artists to make fun of traffic violators because he believed Colombians fear ridicule more than they fear punishment.

And what was he called? He's called Antanus Mokus. I call him Ant Anus Mokus.
I bet you do. Yeah.
It's not his name. Oh my god, he's called Moccus, and he hired people to make fun of other people.

It's perfect, isn't it? You think next, he's going to get Antanus's.

It's not his name.

Anyway, this guy, Antonus Mokus, is such an awesome guy. And so he was married a number of times and he changed Bogota in so many good ways.
So this policy really worked.

He fired all the traffic police because they were known for being very corrupt and taking lots of bribes. And he, at first, he replaced them with just 20 mime artists.

And they would do things like they'd if a pedestrian crossed the road at the wrong time or if someone's waiting in traffic and is about to skip a red light the mime artist sort of chase them or go up to their window and like make mocking gestures at them and they found that it really worked and it reduced reckless driving and reckless pedestrianing and so he added 400 more but if you hired mimes to replace your traffic cops I think of traffic cops as basically mimes yeah they are they're just sort of doing the gesturing like come on or no you stop over here when they're doing stop it's like they're in a tiny invisible box Yeah, exactly.

If you can fail the mime exams do you bump down and become a traffic cop? Yeah, that's how it goes.

The other thing about that is if you like mimes, I don't think that many people do like mimes, but if you like them maybe you would deliberately break the rules so that they came over and you know when you're driving and there's like an electronic sign and if you're going over 30 miles an hour it does a little sad face.

Yeah.

And I deliberately go at 31 miles an hour so that I get the sad face, it might be like that because you like sad faces yeah yeah but it does a happy face if you go under yeah who wants a happy face that yeah no wonder my text messages from you are so has

see you later on frown

yeah he is an amazing character isn't he

He used to go around in the streets wearing a Superman outfit,

claiming to be a character called Super Citizen.

He's just one of those crazy cool guys. He did, I mean, he didn't just do that for no reason.
He did that while cleaning up the streets. Yeah, it's cleaning up the streets of crime.

He would like, well, I think it was rubbish.

That is a crime, though, dropping rubbish.

But that's not what Batman means when he says he's cleaning the streets. That's Batman's day job, actually.
That's how he made all those billions.

He was recycling old bottles.

You know what's on as you can bring mugs back when you've drunk your mould wine, you get two pounds back. That's how he makes his money.
So the bad bottle bin.

Yeah, so he did that. He also did a really cool thing, which is he launched this idea, which was called a night for women.

And the idea was that all the city's men stayed at home in the evening caring for the children, and the city's 700,000 women would go out

and him would be dressed as supervision.

Wow. He's just an interesting interesting character, isn't he?

And the idea being that women felt uncomfortable sometimes because some people thought some parts of Bogota were dangerous at the time, and they feel much more comfortable if they go out and they don't see any men around, which I can tell you guys.

I'm so glad you're here to actually qualify the things I've said.

I've just gone for the headline.

And it really worked. So he cut homicide rates by 70% and he cut traffic fatalities by 50%.

And he was actually a mathematician.

So the reason people, part of the reason people liked him was that he was a maths professor who actually was sort of fired from sort of had to quit his job in 1993 because he was giving a lecture and the students in his lecture theatre weren't listening very hard.

And so he dropped his trousers and mooned them all. And shortly afterwards, resigned from the post of maths professor at the university and instead became mayor.

He said when they asked him about that, he said, innovative behavior can be useful when you run out of words. There you go.
And that was his thing.

He was saying, no one's listening to me no matter what I say, so I'm going to show them my ass and maybe they'll listen. And that's, like Anna says, that's how he became famous.

And then once he became famous, then he started going into politics. But hiring the mime sounds like he's also run out of words there.
Yeah.

You know, he's hiring people who aren't using words to solve another problem. He's a man of action.
Yeah.

He sounds amazing. Yeah.
He is awesome. He brought the amount of money that was earned for the city way up, didn't he? Yeah, taxation.
He said people could have a voluntary tax. That's it.

Volunteered to pay 10% more tax and thousands of people did. Yeah.

So another thing he did is that he asked people to call his office if they came across a very honest taxi driver because he wanted to...

150 people called and he organized to meet them all and he came up with a group name for them which was the Knights of the Zebra and the idea was that they were just giving good impressions of good taxi drivers who exist on the beat and if you were good you might then become a Knight of the Zebra.

Yeah. That's quite good.

which is a seriously cool title which you definitely would try to be if i was called a knight of the zebra i would be better at my job than i am um i was reading a bit about mimes for this fact oh

um did you know that uh marcel marceau but pretty much the only mime anyone can ever name

um

he once released an album called the best of marcel marceau no he didn't no as well it's a well i'm getting to that dan okay there was once an album released called the best of marcel marceau which was 19 minutes of silence and then one minute of applause.

And then the other side was exactly the same. That's very good.
But it was produced as a joke by MGM.

And his name was slightly misspelt on it, so we think it wasn't him. But, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, he once, this is true, could not perform because the sound system failed.

Really? Yeah. He was doing a sketch in a show in America in 1980, and it was accompanied by music, but then the music didn't work, so he said, this isn't going to work at all.

So he just bowed, and the curtains closed.

Yeah.

I just have one more creative thing people are doing to stop traffic violations. Oh, yeah.

So in Shenzhen, in China, they have a problem with traffic violations, and they've tried all these creative ways of stopping them.

So one of the things is that if you're caught jaywalking, then you're punished by being turned into a traffic warden, and you have to

catch the next jaywalker, and they make you wear this.

That's a brilliant idea. That's a good idea.
That's a great game.

And you have to wear a green hat because apparently, saying you're wearing a green hat in China is offensive, so you have to mean the fluorescent green.

Exactly, because it means cockled, so it's offensive.

Would this be immediately on the spot? It's on the spot, yeah. And you just have to take over the job of the current traffic warden? Yep, if you're in a rush to get to work, too bad.

You've got to put on your fluorescent green. So they get your job.

But another thing they're doing, as well as that, is they are stopping people from leaving their lights on high beam by when when the police see someone with the lights on high beam, they pull the car over and they make the person get out of the car and stand facing their own car with their eyes straight into the high beam lights and stare at the bright lights of their car for five minutes.

Wouldn't that send you blind?

No, it's just a bit annoying. No,

I mean, it would, in the short term, you would have lights in front of your eyes when you close your eyes, but you wouldn't go blind.

It would make you an extremely dangerous driver as soon as you set off again in your car. That's true.

But it's like to punish you for drink driving, you've got to damn this bottle of whiskey.

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 over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Schreiberland.

James at Egg Shaped. Andy at Andrew Hunter M.
And Jaczynski. You can email podcast at qi.com.
That's right. We can also be reached on our group account, which is at qipodcast.

And you can go to our website, no such thingasofish.com, that has all of our previous episodes. It has a link to our upcoming tour in October and November.

It's also got a link to our book that's coming out in November, the book of the year. So please pre-order that now if you can.

And also, if you like this episode and you want to discuss this episode, you want to bring in your own facts, you've got things to add, every Monday from now on, we are going to be doing a Facebook Live in which we deconstruct all the things that I got wrong in each episode, as well as adding facts we didn't manage to get in on time, new information we found out, as well as answering any of the questions you guys might want to ask us about that week's episode.

So, tune in, we're going to be doing it at 5 p.m. on a Monday.
We'll put a link up on our Facebook page and on our Twitter to confirm the time. But why not join us? It's going to be awesome.

Okay, we'll see you there. Goodbye.

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